Anger over a new draft lottery, compounded by economic resentment and racism, exploded into violence across Manhattan. Rioters, many of them Irish immigrant laborers, burned draft offices, lynched Black residents, and destroyed the Colored Orphan Asylum. Union troops fresh from Gettysburg were rushed in to restore order, and estimates of the dead range from 120 to over 1,000.
The riots began just days after the Union's costly victory at Gettysburg, a bitter irony given that the very war effort New Yorkers were rioting against had just achieved its most significant turning point. The draft law allowed wealthier men to pay $300 to avoid service, a sum far beyond the reach of working-class immigrants, who saw the war as one fought by the poor to free enslaved people who might then compete for their jobs.
Mobs targeted Black neighborhoods with horrific violence, lynching at least eleven Black men and burning the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue to the ground, though the 233 children inside escaped through a rear door. Businesses associated with Black employment, including a Black-owned brothel and various tenements, were looted and torched.
General John E. Wool and later regiments diverted from the Army of the Potomac fought pitched battles in the streets before order was restored on July 16. The riots remain the largest civil insurrection in American history apart from the Civil War itself, a grim reminder of how war, race, and class fractured the Union even as it won its most crucial battle.
Key people: John E. Wool