WHERE THE ACTION WAS IN 1863

...For labor had still more to be sore about...

...Their effect can scarcely have been major in any quarter, but they did make their effect felt in many directions...

...On-the-spot news stories were as simplistic and partial as the Nast drawings...

...As for specific organizing and igniting, it is questionable that either was needed...

...Officials escaped, the building was wrecked and fired, and fire companies were driven back when they tried to save nearby apartments to which the fire was spreading...

...Negroes who were lynched in one paper were seen only taking to their heels in another...

...If the ordinary people happened to be laborers and Democrats they were, in the phrase of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, "wrought to exasperation...

...by WILLIAM BRANDON though at the cost of much drumbeat-ing, but it was clear that the next time around the Government would go whole hog for conscription...

...But its leader, Fernando Wood, one of the more malicious footnote-figures in American history, had not the slightest desire to prevent anything whatever that might embarrass the Lincoln Administration...

...Waterfront labor troubles had been endemic since the mid-1850s...

...The well-fanned public indignation was some small help to the Lincoln Administration in keeping its precarious balance between surrendering on the one hand to a division of the Union or on the other hand to a military dictatorship—an alternative gravely discussed by more than one concerned citizen during the black days at the end of 1862...

...The draft offered a big new target among such issues...

...The Draft and the Riots where the Action was in 1863 When President Lincoln called for 300,000 additional volunteers in 1862, he was answered with a new song, We Are Coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 More (written by the financial editor of William Cullen Bryant's New York Evening Post) .• But singers were so slow in responding that after several months Lincoln ordered the states to fill out their quotas with a special draft from the militia...

...The ultimate effect of the riots in furthering the cause of the Negro by exciting stiffer support of the war and the revolutionary shape it was assuming was only subordinate but nevertheless real...

...But it was as a Negro pogrom that the riots scored their most vivid successes...

...black boys were mocked, mutilated, and hanged with jesting signs around their broken necks and cigars stuck in their dead mouths...

...The riots themselves, as distilled in the Republican press, provided plenty of high-proof stimulation for enlistments and soldierly spirit: "Hang the leaders . . . hang them, damn them, hang them...

...The number of people killed by the rioters has ranged from fantastically high estimates down to the seventy-four deaths Governor Seymour's biographer can admit after a careful study of the evidence...

...And here lay the main strength of the Democratic clubs or "halls," centers of some of the most uproariously dirty politics of the century...

...Most of all, labor—strongly anti-Negro, anti-abolitionist, and yet a weighty force in the pre-war struggles to keep new states free rather than slave (free states were free of slave competition in the labor market) -—was outraged by the recently proclaimed Emancipation Proclamation...

...Greeley of the Tribune succeeded only in getting in a dig at the Irish by referring to Negroes as "native-born Americans" who had as much right to a job as anyone else...

...The notion of a draft itself was anathema to many, particularly to Democrats and anti-Administration factions among the Republicans...

...The New York City Council made efforts to vote funds to buy commutation for every citizen drafted...

...But the tremors can be ascertained here and there and traced in the thinnest of fineline cracks...

...a universal military draft, and a rigorous one, was already in operation in the Confederacy, but the more populous North had hoped, as the governor of New Jersey put it, to "defend the nation by the heroic volunteer...

...In New York City the bugbear fear of Negro competition had a special basis...

...Particularly it was too much for the short-fused shanty Irish of New York City's Lower East Side...

...This was far more cash than the average man had loose, a half-year's income for a man in a skilled trade, such as a carpenter, and an amount not to be dreamed of by the poor...

...Squads of police and soldiers of the Invalid Corps (the city's militia companies were all away at Gettysburg) were dispersed, chased down one by one, and savagely beaten if not slain...

...The market place having been' thus installed in Old Glory's temple it was only fair that military service should be open all the way to free bargaining—that is, that a man should be free to hire a substitute, and so it was...

...The effect of the riots in reversing the Democratic trend before the next election and in counterbalancing the issue of invaded civil rights, while not great, was nevertheless present...

...Bounties bothered the veteran soldiers who had volunteered before patriotism became so profitable...

...But labor, while also decently shocked by such prospects, saw emancipation chiefly as unlocking a vast new cheap labor force to inundate the Northern cities and scramble for any job for any pay...

...Certainly the riots, no matter how terrible, were only a tiny cadenza in the grand fandango of the war...

...These two traditions had already caused notable mischief, in the form of professional bounty-jumpers and professional substitute-procurers...

...Lincoln argued that the whole idea of the nation and its Constitution was in peril and that a limb might be sacrificed to save a life but the life never sacrificed to save the limb...

...and turbulent waterfront strikes had been almost continuous since then, with strikers occasionally ganging up on blacks any place they could be found in lower New York, as well as on the docks...

...The draft got under way in New York on Saturday, July 11 (the week after the battle of Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicksburg), with a drawing of names, and by Monday the fight was on...

...The superintendent of police, who appeared in his carriage to investigate, was set upon and left with serious injuries...

...Charles Eliot Norton, the celebrated scholar who was a founder of The Nation, concluded a year later, "The New York riots were almost as great a help to us as a victory...

...The clumsiest of these in immediate effect was the practice of raising new regiments rather than mingling recruits with veterans in existing units...

...New York merchants had cut stevedore wages, already low, by one-fourth in January 1863...

...The draft raised enough dissent among free-born Americans (those who did not have $300) to bring out the troops, or official pleas for them in many places—in Copperhead strongholds in Indiana and Illinois, German strongholds in Wisconsin, Democratic strongholds in Newark and Albany, American strongholds in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and mining areas in Pennsylvania where a year earlier Irish miners had lynched a few Welsh and English bosses...

...Negroes were searched out and slaughtered...

...The volunteer system, Lincoln said, was "palpably" inadequate—especially with desertions at the time running to one-fourth the number of new enlistments...

...There were black bodies in the North River...

...The Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street was looted and burned (the children escaped unharmed under protection of a group identified as Paddy McCaffrey and friends...

...The small community of Northampton, Massachusetts, for example, raised the sum of $30,000 for extra added volunteer bonuses, to escape' the stigma of having any men conscripted from the township...

...Its constitutionality was widely questioned even among its proponents...

...By midday rioting mobs were roaming almost at will through the city...

...Undoubtedly the Democratic machine could have prevented the violence...

...There remained some truth in William Lloyd Garrison's denunciation of May, 1863, that the Irish Catholics "have been as a mass, priests and people, political leaders and followers, the very bitterest enemies of the anti-slavery cause...

...Census figures show a drop in Negro population in the city between 1860 and 1865 of twenty per cent, 12,472 to 9,945...

...Eighty-five per cent of the dead, said the city inspector in his annual report, were Irish...

...Republican spokesmen were not too convincing in their replies...

...Senator, wrote home after three years' soldiering, "You tell me that Lunner ag Bjorn Torsen have just enlisted and will receive 500 dols Bonties each...

...Pro-slavery propaganda and politicians had clanged away on this point until labor was deaf to anything else...

...The law permitted few exceptions but clung to some volunteer-stimulating provisions that had unfortunate results...

...The anti-Lincoln Democratic Sunday newspapers made much of the fact that practically all Saturday's conscripts really stuck with their conscription were "mechanics and laborers," and the Republican press made much of claims that Democratic ward-heelers and Southern agents and Tammany booze all went into action Sunday and into high gear Monday, when the riots began...

...The earthquake set in motion by the draft and the riots was all but imperceptible in the great upheavals of the time...

...That there was now coupled to the guilt-laden black hobgoblin an unjust military draft...

...How I would like to stand by a gun and mow them down," wrote a- New York soldier on reading the news, and surely he spoke the reaction of many...

...Why could not such big strapping fellows have gone to fight for their Country before now...

...Police estimates of rioters killed ran from 1,200 to 1,500, with military estimates conveniently in the middle at 1,300, and these estimates too have been attacked as roundly inflated...

...There is reason to believe the exultation was somewhat justified, and that for a time Negroes found slimmer pickings in jobs than before...

...The real intent of Lincoln's order was to stimulate volunteering and that it did, for any fool could plainly see the advantage in volunteering—choosing your own regiment and collecting the small fortune in bounties offered— as against the bountyless shame of being dragged away by conscription...

...It declared all able-bodied male citizens between twenty and forty-five liable to compulsory military service...

...The rioters also were anti-rich...

...Its principal usefulness remained as a spur to volunteering...

...The draft itself (never tested for constitutionality until Wilson's Administration, when the Supreme Court upheld it unanimously) furnished only a small fraction of the total enlistments throughout all the rest of the war...

...At present he is working on a history of the Santa Fe Trail...

...Regiments were suited up rather like bowling teams, New York City fielding not only the Irish Brigade and the Corcoran Zouaves, but such as the Doubleday Artillery and the Produce Exchange Regiment...

...He followed with the pitch that the Irish should be pleased at the thought of Negroes relieving them of the bottom social rung, and that every worthless menial task a Negro took over freed a bright Irish lad for better things...

...James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald said in the campaign of 1862, "The Irish and German immigrants, to say nothing of native laborers of the white race, must feel enraptured at the prospect of hordes of darkeys overrunning the Northern States and working for half wages, and thus ousting them from employment...

...The next time around came early in 1863, when Congress enacted the first general military conscription law in the history of the United States...

...Cannon on First Avenue cut down men, women, and children by "scores...

...black strikebreakers had been used off and on ever since 1854...

...It was precisely these civil rights issues that had helped elect Governor Seymour and had contributed handily to other Democratic victories throughout much of the North in the elections of 1862...

...The sum fixed was $300, the price therefore by which anyone, without having to resort to substitutes, could purchase exemption...

...Although the venerated Archbishop John J. Hughes of New York had been maneuvered into public support of Lincoln's policies, the Catholic clergy was generally anti-abolitionist...

...There seems to be general agreement that the mobs, made up of men, women, and children, were mostly Irish, and mostly drunk...

...Depending on which paper you read, the three days of rioting constituted an orgy of blood and terror without equal since the sack of Rome, or they were only neighborhood disorders caused by a few of the boys getting out of hand (and didn't they have reason enough, God knows...

...Young Knute Nelson, later to be governor of Minnesota and U.S...

...there were an unknown number of murders and lynchings...

...The "leaders and principal actors," said Harper's Weekly, "were boys . . . beardless youths of fifteen to eighteen . . ." who began each action by throwing stones...

...One of them, a history of American Indians, was published as the text of "The American Heritage Book of Indians...

...Numbers of opulent town houses were sacked and burned...

...Conscription, in anti-Lincolnian opinion, was another big step in the onset of despotism that had already been marked by arbitrary political arrests and the suspension in some regions of habeas corpus...

...able wages) that later came to be thought of as typical Irish occupations (often at uncomfortable wages): such jobs as longshoreman, hod-carrier, brickmaker, domestic, among others...

...The goal of 300,000 more soldiers was eventually oversubscribed, alWILLIAM BRANDON is a free lance writer whose articles and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, The American West, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Massachusetts Review...

...Longshoremen were much in evidence, and the general action became anti-Negro more enthusiastically than it had been anti-draft...

...it has at least secured possession of the labor of the city...

...Violence in itself, whether a war or a riot, contains a life of its own as unique as a fingerprint, as unpredictable as any earthquake, and always much more far-reaching than its begetters can foresee...

...This was a revolutionary step in the direction of conscription...

...But the money-commutation option in the draft, so gross in its grant of privilege to the moneyed, angered ordinary people everywhere much more than did the draft itself...

...The money-commutation provision in the draft law was abolished the following year except for conscientious objectors, although the policy of substitution remained...

...A good man beaten to death in a Republican paper was a notorious scoundrel given a sound thrashing in a Democratic paper...

...The riots began Monday morning with bricks tossed through the windows of the provost marshal's offices at 46th Street and Third Avenue, where the drawing of names had been resumed...

...Until that time the police (also largely Irish, even then) confined their limited strength to protecting various arsenals which were the objectives of several concentrated attacks, city buildings, banks, and such bastions of Republicanism as Horace Greeley's Tribune building at City Hall Park...

...The mob was anti-authority in general—except, of course, for the authority of their own leaders...

...Harper's Weekly said at the time of the draft riots, "It will take time to make the people understand that every government must, for its own protection, enjoy the power of compelling its citizens to perform military service...

...Clearly this argument could be speciously applied in some wicked future to justify the use of American conscripts for any kind of warfare, even foreign conquest...

...As Allan Nevins has noted, "No measure of the war was a more stunning disappointment than this Draft Act of 1863...

...The question was, and it had its political importance, how terrible...

...The truth of the dimensions of the riots became an instant issue and has remained so ever since...

...Last year he was a visiting lecturer in English at the University of Massachusetts...

...The worst provisions in their lasting effect stemmed from the bounty tradition, by which a Federal bounty of $100 given to each volunteer was augmented in many cases by a state bounty and perhaps also by a local bounty...

...But the new law cleverly met this latter evil by taking Horace Greeley's advice and setting a sum of money which the Government would accept in place of a substitute...

...and that poor laboring men were to be forced to die for this while the bosses who were to profit from the stolen serfs stayed home—all this was too much to bear...

...This statement, which the Herald had been repeating for more than two years, was cool beside the flaming pronunciamentos of Bowery politicians...

...Prices in the wartime inflation were keeping well ahead of wages, in the usual way of such matters: The real-wage index cited by Civil War historian David Donald pegs real wages in mid-1863 at fourteen per cent below real wages of 1860, and by the end of 1864 at thirty-three per cent below...

...At the Tribune several hundred police drove off several thousand rioters while young Thomas Nast stood by and sketched the scene for Harper's Weekly...

...He has written several books dealing with history...

...Violations of civil rights were mild in comparison with the record of the Wilson Administration some fifty years later, but to the bluntly democratic American of the 1860s they were quite intolerable...

...But in New York City the draft set off riots worthy of Mexico City or Paris, the most flamboyant the United States had ever seen...

...Does it not look as though they enlisted for money rather than because they loved the Country...

...Much of the looting and burning crackling away in one paper was derided in another as ex post facto fabrication designed to collect damages from the city—nearly two thousand damage claims were presented, totaling more than one and a half million dollars...

...Albon P. Man, Jr., who has made a detailed study of this subject, has demonstrated that before the Irish famine migrations of the 1840s and 1850s many jobs in New York were traditionally Negro (often at comfort"Here, in these alleys and slums, was real poverty, the poverty of the 'mudsill foundations' of the Northern cities Southern orators have orated about, poverty that bred viciousness and brutality and ugliness unlimited...

...The effect of the riots in harming the cause of labor by encouraging public support for stringent right-to-work laws such as the "La Salle Black Laws" of Illinois, and encouraging wide use of black strikebreakers, was probably not decisive but was evident...

...Nast drew gorilla-whiskered bog-trotters mouthing dark oaths while clean-limbed police officers belabored them with truncheons...

...Abolitionism, further, was equated by many with Protestantism, because some rabid Abolitionists were also rabid anti-Catholics...

...Horatio Seymour, just-elected Democratic governor of New York, made a Fourth of July speech in which he declared the draft unconstitutional and demanded that preparations to enforce the law be halted until it could be tested in the courts...

...This "bloody, barbarous, revolutionary" policy, in Governor Seymour's words, would result in "the butchery of women and children . . . lust and rapine . . . arson and murder...

...that the purpose of this murderous war was now not merely to maintain the Union, but to free these four million rapacious blacks...

...then adults moved in for the more serious work...

...Here, in these alleys and slums, was real poverty, the poverty of the "mudsill foundations" of the Northern cities Southern orators had orated about, poverty that bred viciousness and brutality and ugliness unlimited...

...Violence continued for three days, until troops enough could be rushed home from Pennsylvania to clear the streets and quiet the city...

...Whether or not the riots were fomented by ward-heeler Bully Boy Galligan or by secessionist John Andrews, or whether the volunteer fire companies, convivial political groups in which the illustrious William M. Tweed was then busily carving his plinth, organized the kick-off riot are points of only academic interest...

...Without question the riots were real and terrible, with both good men and notorious characters beaten to jelly...

...A merchants' committee formed to relieve riot victims made stout ahems relative to fair employment regardless of race, religion, or color, but Greeley wrote, "The mob exults in the belief that...