The Eighteen Sixty-Three Draft Riots: Four Days That Exposed the Union

The Battle of Gettysburg ended on July third, eighteen sixty-three. Ten days later, New York City exploded.

The federal government had instituted the first military draft in American history, and it contained a provision that Irish working-class men on the Lower East Side found intolerable: a wealthy man could pay three hundred dollars to send a substitute in his place. Three hundred dollars was a year's wages for a laborer. The draft was, in their view, a system designed to send poor men to die in a war being fought to free Black men who would then come north and compete for their jobs. The logic was ugly. It was also widely held.

On July thirteenth, a mob gathered at the draft office on Third Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street and burned it to the ground. Then the mob turned toward Black New Yorkers.

Over four days, rioters burned the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue at Forty-Third Street, which housed two hundred thirty-three children. The children escaped through a rear exit. No child died, though the building was destroyed. Rioters lynched at least eleven Black men from lampposts and trees across the city. They burned a Black church, a Black school, and the homes of prominent abolitionists. They attacked the neighborhood around Weeksville in Brooklyn, where a free Black community had existed since the eighteen thirties; the Weeksville residents survived by hiding in neighbors' homes. Federal troops had to be diverted from the Gettysburg front to suppress the fighting.

The official death toll was one hundred nineteen. Historians believe the actual number was several hundred, with the majority of the dead being Black New Yorkers. No comprehensive accounting exists. The bodies of Black men killed by mobs were not always reported, not always identified, not always counted.

What the riots accomplished: they drove Black New Yorkers from many neighborhoods they had occupied and erased a decade of modest community-building in Manhattan. The Black population of the city dropped sharply in the eighteen sixties and did not recover to pre-riot levels for a generation.

Foley Square, where federal courts now stand, sits on land near the center of the violence. The draft lottery resumed here seventeen days after the riots ended. The wealthy paid their three hundred dollars and stayed home.