Virtual New York
“Though Union forces would ultimately prevail at Gettysburg, driving the Confederate army back to the South, tensions remained high in New York City, largely as a result of the imminent enforcement by the federal government of the National Conscription Act. Passed in March 1863, the act made all single men aged twenty to forty-five and married men up to thirty-five subject to a draft lottery. In addition, the act allowed drafted men to avoid conscription entirely by supplying someone to take their place or to pay the government a three hundred-dollar exemption fee. Not surprisingly, only the wealthy could afford by buy their way out of the draft.
Leslie M. Harris
From In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863
“In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class… Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that ‘[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes.'”
Iver Bernstein
From State of the Union: New York and the Civil War
“In July 1863, at a crucial turning point in the Civil War, armed mobs halted the effort of the Lincoln administration to conduct the first federal draft and virtually took over New York City in what was to become the bloodiest urban riot in American history. At times the riots almost seemed to be a distinct battle in the war–mobs raided armories for weapons and destroyed telegraph lines, railroads, ferries and bridges… The uprising ended in a series of titanic armed confrontations on the city’s industrial Upper East Side in which Union troops, battle-weary from Gettysburg, retook poor Irish Catholic districts in the manner of war zones.”
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2024 Society Calendar - "New York Courts of Yesteryear: How we Began and Where We Are"