Draft Riots Erupt: New York's Deadliest Uprising

Five days of murderous rage turned Manhattan into a war zone as working-class mobs protesting Civil War conscription unleashed the deadliest urban uprising in American history. The New York City Draft Riots began on July 13, 1863, when crowds attacked the Provost Marshal's office on Third Avenue and East 46th Street, destroying draft records and setting the building ablaze. What started as opposition to the new Enrollment Act rapidly devolved into a racial pogrom targeting Black New Yorkers. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 infuriated working-class whites, particularly Irish immigrants, because it allowed wealthy men to buy their way out of service for $300, roughly a year's wages for a laborer. The provision confirmed what many already believed: that they were being sent to die in a war to free Black people who would then compete for their jobs. Democratic politicians and sympathetic newspapers had stoked these resentments for months before the first names were drawn. By Monday afternoon, mobs numbering in the thousands controlled large sections of Manhattan. They burned the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, forcing 233 children to flee through a back exit. Black men were hunted through the streets, beaten, and lynched. William Jones, a Black man, was hanged from a lamppost and his body burned while a crowd cheered. Rioters also attacked wealthy Republican homes, the offices of Horace Greeley's Tribune, and any symbol of the war effort. Police Superintendent John Kennedy was beaten nearly to death when he tried to intervene. Federal troops, some pulled directly from the Gettysburg battlefield, arrived on Wednesday and Thursday. Artillery was deployed on city streets, and soldiers fired into crowds. By the time order was restored on July 17, an estimated 120 to 2,000 people were dead, with modern historians favoring the lower range. Property damage exceeded $5 million. The riots exposed the explosive intersection of class, race, and war that defined Northern society, and the city quietly resumed the draft in August under heavy military guard.