Federal Conscription and the New York Draft Riots of 1863

July 13, the draft office at Third and Forty-sixth was set fire by a mob of angry draftees. "Instead of putting out the fire, a fire brigade, angry that their jobs no longer entitled them to an official exemption [from the draft], joined the mob" (Davis, 1996, p. 316). For four days the angry New Yorkers, mostly immigrants, rampaged through the streets targeting the chief of police and the office of Horace Greeley, an outspoken abolitionist.

The primary target of the riots, however, was the city's black population. Screaming the words "burn the niggers' nest," the mob attacked an orphanage of some 237 black children, all under the age of twelve. Though the children escaped, the building was burned to the ground (Jackson, 1985). All through the city, gangs of men, as well as young boys caught up in the frenzy, assaulted blacks wherever they were encountered. Following is a description of the racist rioting as given by Jackson (1985):

One William Jones was walking home in Greenwich Village when he was spotted by a band of rioters. They grabbed the hapless man and hanged him from a tree, then lit a bonfire under his corpse. Peter Heuston, a Mohawk Indian who had served in the Mexican War, was taken for a black and beaten so badly that he later died in Bellevue Hospital. More than 700 blacks eventually took refuge at police headquarters, while others fled to Long Island, New Jersey, and upper Manhattan. Many stores that employed blacks were forced to close. One store that remained open hung out a sign to appease the crowd: "No Niggers in the Rear" (p. 108).

And Davis (1996) provides this gruesome description:

A crippled black coachman was lynched, and his body burned after his fingers and toes had been hacked off. A sixteen-year-old Irish boy then dragged the corpse through the streets by the genitals. Small boys threw stones at the windows of black families to mark them. In a grim foretaste of the scene witnessed by television viewers when truck driver Reginald Denny was assaulted in Los Angeles in 1992, a black sailor was attacked by a mob of longshoremen. He was struck with cobblestones and stabbed; men jumping on his prostrate body as each member of the gang walked up and committed some atrocity. He died soon after (p. 316).

That Monday night militia units and veterans of the Army of the Potomac, who were

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