This Day in History: New York City Draft Riots
- tara
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
On this day in 1863, the New York City Draft Riots come to an end. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was the first to institute an army draft at the federal level?
The Civil War was then entering its third year, and many northerners were becoming discouraged. The South was winning too many victories, as when CSS Alabama sunk USS Hatteras in January 1863 or when the Confederate Army emerged victorious at Fredericksburg in December 1862.
Likewise, some weren’t too happy with Lincoln. He’d issued an Emancipation Proclamation, but many thought it was a bit of a joke. He freed slaves in the South, where he had no power to do so, but left them enslaved in the North. What was that about?
Others worried that slaves would escape the South, move to the North, and dominate the labor market. Northerners might not support slavery, but they didn’t want to lose their jobs, either.
Given the atmosphere, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the Union Army was having difficulty recruiting soldiers. Thus, Congress passed, and Lincoln signed, the first federal draft bill ever.
People were livid.
“[C]onscription,” historian Adrian Cook explains, “was such a radical departure from the long American tradition of voluntarism and distrust of standing armies and centralized power [, which] ran so deep in the American mind that it inevitably aroused strong opposition.”
Northerners also wondered: Did the federal government really have authority to do this?
“I fear me, sir,” one Senator worried, “that this is a part and parcel of a grand scheme for the overthrow of the Union . . . Arm the Chief Magistrate with this power—and what becomes of the State Legislatures? What becomes of the local judicial tribunals? What becomes of State constitutions and State laws?”
Nevertheless, the law went into effect. In New York, the draft office began drawing names on July 11. By then, the Union Army had won a victory at Gettysburg. Was the tide turning? Would the draft proceed uneventfully?
It seemed so at first. The draft office closed its doors, peacefully, on the first day, but matters would soon take a turn for the worse. On July 12, the draft office unfortunately chose the names of some volunteer firemen from Black Joke Engine Company No. 33. These firemen were normally exempted from militia duty, so they were shocked to learn that they would not be exempt from the draft.
They decided to take matters into their own hands. They would attack the draft office, destroying all evidence that they’d ever been drafted.
Naturally, word got out, and a big crowd was assembled by the time the firemen arrived on the morning of July 13. The Black Joke men were soon sending stones through the windows of the draft office. They set the office ablaze as draft officials scrambled to escape.
The actions of the Black Joke men were like the spark that ignited the powder keg. The crowd had been watching, but now it turned into a frenzied mob.
For days, looting and violence overtook the city. At first, the main targets were governmental and military, but the riots unfortunately began to take on racial overtones. When all was said and done, more than 100 people—mostly black men—had been killed, and an orphan asylum for colored children had been attacked and torched.
Thankfully, the children survived.
The riots finally came to an end on July 16, when Union Army soldiers and state militia arrived and restored order.
The riots were “equivalent to a Confederate victory,” historian Samuel Eliot Morison concludes. Lincoln was urged to appoint an investigator, but he declined. “One rebellion at a time, is about as much as we can conveniently handle,” he famously replied.
Primary Sources:
Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (1982)
Jonathan W. White, Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (2023)
Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (2003)
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