Symposium Spotlight: A Civil War within a Civil War: the New York City Draft Riots of 1863
Welcome back to our spotlight series, highlighting speakers and topics for our upcoming symposium. Over the coming weeks, we will continue previewing of our speaker’s presentations for the 2025 Emerging Civil War Symposium. This week we feature Evan Portman’s topic.
A Civil War within a Civil War: the New York City Draft Riots of 1863
July 1863. As the country was mired in civil war, the streets of New York City were mired in civil unrest. Thousands of rioters took to the city to protest Congress’s Conscription Act passed earlier that year. However, the draft was simply the last straw in a series of grievances held by the city’s immigrant population against the Federal government. Strong racial and ethnic divisions belied and fueled the violence during those three days in July. The smoke cleared to reveal a death toll of over 100 and thousands of injuries—as well as a war that had been transformed.
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I was at the New York Historical Society Museum yesterday and saw the lottery drum that was the match that lit the fuse of the New York draft riots. It’s a beautiful artifact, polished wood with a metal crank handle that spins it around, jumbling up the lottery numbers inside before they are plucked out to be read. Seemingly so benign.
“We have awful good news from New York…” wrote J.B. Jones, clerk in the War Department at Richmond in his diary. [See “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years – Volume 2” (1936 by Carl Sandburg) pages 360- 420.]
I’m not sure how well known it is, but I have an interesting little book about this incident, published the same year. A journalist named David M. Barnes interviewed NYPD officers and reviewed their reports and put together his account, of about 100 pages, on the riots. Such primary source material, while often flawed, is nevertheless valuable for its unfiltered content. But just imagine – had the rioters been screaming, “Free Palestine!” and “Murder Jews from the River to the Sea!” instead of screaming “No draft!” the Mayor of New York would have ordered the police to stand down and let the city be burned to the ground.