~~                                   THE “ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS” REPORT


In August 1863 the “Illustrated London News” carried a report on the “Serious Riots in New York” as part of its ongoing coverage of the American Civil War, and this report included, as part of the periodicals stock-in-trade, some dramatic engravings that tried to capture the dynamism of real life in that age of essentially ‘still-life’ photography.


One picture shows the lifeless body of a black man, stripped down to his shirt, hanging from the low bough of a tree, suspended by a rope that is still being held tight by a couple of men standing below. They are just part of an animated crowd of the young and old of both sexes, many of them carrying sticks, some waving their hats in the air, while some women had shopping baskets. The other scene features the flaming inferno as the four-storey blocks of Coloured Orphans Asylum send smoke billowing out to further darken the night sky, forming a back-drop for the flames that are shooting up out of the windows. The buildings are set back from the road by a high wall, but one of the rioters is sitting on the wall and communicating with the crowds out in the street, while another is passing some bedding or a mattress over the wall into the street, which is littered with bedding and furniture that rioters are carrying away as best they can. Others are standing around waving torches or sticks or hats in the air, while one in the foreground takes some refreshment from a bottle, while another takes advantage of a comfortable chair, and, somewhat incongruously, a kid, of the animal kind, stands in the foreground just looking around at the spectacle.


The accompanying article, under the heading “Serious Riots in New York”, tells the reader that “The attempt to enforce the conscription in New York has either provoked, or been made the excuse for, formidable riots. That city was for three days in the hands of a mob, which commenced with stopping the draughting, destroying the building in which it was going on, and assaulting the officers.”


"Balloting" for the draft had started on a Saturday 11th July 1863 when 2000 names were drawn. But on the Monday 13 July a mob of c15000 people assembled before the Provost Marshall’s office, where the ballot was being organised, and they broke into the offices, destroyed the ballot boxes and then set fire to the building. The fire also spread to neighbouring houses which were destroyed because the firemen refused to put out the flames. The mob was said to have been headed by a Virginian named Andrews, with about 300 other leaders, and dispersed throughout the city targeting various places and populations, including black people and the quarters where they tended live like Brooklyn, though, according to the London Illustrated News report, there were "few" murders because most black people had fled from the city.


But "The Coloured Orphans Asylum" was a sitting target. The few policemen protecting the building were overpowered by the mob, several being seriously or fatally injured, while some of those "less evil-disposed" advised the inmates to get out. In fact the sight of the orphans getting out while they could did stay the evil of the mob for a while. But then the building was looted and gutted by fire, with many eyewitnesses describing Irish women "staggering under burdens of bedding and clothing".

Towards the evening, however, one black man got into an argument with a white man. And, possibly feeling intimidated by the hostile group that was assembling he pulled out a pistol and shot into the crowd. One of the men fell down as if dead, and the black man ran away "with all possible speed", only to be over-taken and severely beaten. Then he was stripped of all of his clothes except for his shirt, and people started calling for a rope. One was obtained from a local store and he was hanged from a tree. Subsequently his shirt was set on fire.


Over the next few days troops were deployed, but business and normality continued to be disrupted for several days. By the 18th, however, the New York papers claimed that the riots had almost subsided. But then the most disturbed wards were being patrolled by large military forces which were "entirely unmolested": and post-mortems were trying to work out just why such rioting had occurred: “The Republican press argue that the riots in New York are really part and parcel of the Southern rebellion, while the Democratic press assert the obnoxious conditions of the draught to be the sole cause. But Americans would gladly escape the principal blame and lay it on the Irish”.


CONSCRIPTION AND THE DRAFT


Obviously the draft was at least the “trigger” or the “explosive charge” that set off the riots: but not just because of its “obnoxious conditions”. Two years into the war Abraham Lincoln as President of the Union and leader of the unionist cause faced the daunting challenge of seeking to impose the will of “the North” over “the South”, which gave the Confederate cause the advantage of being thrown on the defensive against “foreign” interference: and Lincoln needed to escalate the Union war effort. And from the history of the French Revolution he could hope that his Emancipation Proclamation would bring black volunteers flocking to the Union cause, much as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man had thrown up armies of liberation in Haiti and even  ‘Black Napoleon’ in Toussaint l’Ouverture. Lincoln also looked back to the American militia of the age of George Washington and hoped to be able to call upon such formidable soldiers as the old “minutemen”. But, right from the days of the Anglo-Saxon ‘fyrd’, such citizen-soldiers could only be called upon to defend the sanctity of their lands from foreign attack, whereas in this case the purpose of the Northern cause was to attack, conquer and impose its will on the South. This was no job for the militia: and so Lincoln introduced the idea of citizens being compulsory drafted into military service.


But this too raised important issues for citizens brought up in the English/American tradition, as well as those from other traditions who had been attracted to a “land of the free”, where the people were not subjected to heavy-handed centralist state-control. This is what drove the American colonies to rebel in 1776 and to fight a War of Independence, during which many English people had a great deal of sympathy for their ‘fellow countrymen’ who’s King was actually making war upon them. In the midst of that war the House of Commons had passed Dunning’s resolution “This House believes that the power of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished”: and that same year of 1780 saw the greatest ever riots in the City of London, the Gordon Riots, when the mob took over London for five days. And it was in order to avoid such excessive central power that the United States constitution was built very much along lines of the ‘checks and balances’ principles advocated by Montesquieu, ones that still mean that the President of the United States, ostensibly ‘the most powerful man in the world’, can still be a ‘lame duck’.


So all attempts to introduce an element of compulsion into military service were almost inevitably going to be scrutinised with some hostility, and the prescribed method which turned it all into a lottery was obviously going to be regarded as objectionable, given the fact that by 1863 it was already apparent that war on an industrial scale, in an industrial age, was going to be lethal, or, perhaps even worse, crippling. Of course in these days the idea of the Secret Ballot was just coming in with the older idea that a man should be “man enough” to stand up in public and declare himself openly before the world.


But a “ballot” was a modern version of ‘drawing lots’ in which names were written on pieces of paper that were then all placed in a tumbler, which was tumbled and then the “winners” or “losers” would be drawn out. The acceptance of the “lottery of life” principal, however, depends a great deal on trust in the honesty and fairness of those handling the whole process, and also on the whole question of just who should or should not be classed as liable. One notorious clause in the draft ballot was that anyone whose name was selected could excuse themselves by paying 300$, the equivalent of approximately one year’s wages for a New York working man. And one of the crucial considerations at the initial outbreak of the New York Riot of 1863 was whether or not the men of the New York Fire Service should have been considered as eligible.


Given the rather depleted and overstretched policing and military resources available to the authorities it was decided to organise the “ballot” precinct by precinct. But, in a way that just made the process more clearly focussed on the human dimension: and among the 2000 names drawn on the first day were a number of men from the local fire service. It seems that it was this “band of brothers” group that thought that took the lead on 13 July, breaking into the offices, burning the ballot boxes, setting fire to the buildings and refusing to put out the fires in the neighbouring properties.


“THE CLASS WAR”


For proponents of “the class war” the whole question of the $300 dollar ‘release clause’ serves as evidence of the “eternal class struggle” and the injustices on an unequal society: and there is clear evidence in New York in 1863 of the problems of adjustment to violent change that have been a feature of Western history since the re-emergence of a “world” of towns, trade and cities during the Middle Ages, most particularly with the “working class” struggles that can be perceived in the aftermath of the Black Death of 1348-51, when the death of an estimated one third of the population impacted dramatically on European markets both for Labour and for goods of all kinds. And increasingly over the hundred years before 1863 any major war had involved serious economic disruption, adjustment and adaptation, with Napoleon Bonaparte having invented the whole idea of “Economic Warfare” in order to bankrupt that “English” “Nation of shopkeepers”, though Napoleon may well have been inspired by the chief tactic of the Great Royal Navy in wars against France, which was to blockade the ports of France and her allies and control the vessels going in and out.


During the American Civil War “the North” blockaded the great cotton ports of “the South” denying the Confederacy the vital “lifeblood” of the revenue it earned from producing the main global raw material for the greatest power-house industry of the industrial revolution – cotton. The “South” commissioned special “blockade runners” ships from British shipbuilders on the Clyde, where the great Paisley cotton industry suffered much the same conditions of “Cotton Famine” as the rest of “King Cotton” in Lancashire. But this modern industrial war threw up new war time opportunities for profitable enterprise as well as hard times for those better adapted to peaceful conditions, those profits often being associated with the special and exceptional demands not only of munitions with which to wage war, but also those supplies that were necessary to support hundreds of thousands of men withdrawn from the peace-time economy who all needed to be fed, clothed etc. And New Yorkers were suffering, as people almost invariably do in modern warfare, from price inflation, which brought a decline in real wages for those in regular employment, while the casually employed, which was commonly the case for the large “armies” of labourers needed to handle the cargoes brought to  the thriving ports of an oceanic trading system: and with massive industrial depression in Lancashire and consequent inactivity in Liverpool there must have been an impact on the work available in the New York Docks.


It seems that in July 1863 some of the New York dockworkers were on strike and there was some question of the ‘bosses’ bringing in black workers as an alternative ‘blackleg’ labour force, though this seems to have been only one of many disputes involving workers who wanted better pay or terms. By and large, however, these purely “industrial” disputes seem to have been settled quite quickly as various groups, having dealt with the question of the draft, then got down to their own business. New York German community settled down long before the end of the riots, and the rioting and disorder never seems to have disturbed New York’s “Red Light district”. War time and widespread military “national service” is always “good for business” with so many young men uprooted from their normal lives and treated as ‘special ones’ entitled to just “live for the moment”, and given the wherewithal to amuse themselves. As the riots went on and more military units were rushed into New York those forces who “kept order” in the “underworld” of the modern city made sure that, at least one section of “working women” and others associated with some of the oldest professions were able to work under boom conditions.  Fifty five years later the USA was to launch itself into the “Prohibition Era” in order to try to wean Americans off of prostitution, gambling and alcohol after more years of a “war economy”. 


AN IRISH CIVIL WAR?


A recent researcher, however, has suggested that the New York Riots could be seen not just as very much an Irish affair, as was suggested at the time, but even as an “Irish Civil War”.

Two of the New York “establishment” figures who perished from the violence of the mob were a Mr. Kennedy and a Mr. O’Brien: and at that time 20% of the city’s police force was of Irish birth, with possibly an equal number others of an Irish descent. Moreover those (a) who were most likely to be looking for basic furniture and household equipment, (b) were most likely to be the victims of any turn down in trade and casual employment, and (c) had most to fear from competition in the labour market from emancipated black people coming up from the South were those desperate Irish immigrants who had fled across the Atlantic in the great Irish potato famines of the 1840s.


In fifty years the population of New York had gone up from 500,000 to 800,000 with the massive Irish influx the most dramatic and most desperate of all the immigrant populations: and the events of July 1863 had a very recognisable character to anyone at all familiar with British history. In fact has Frederick Engels and Karl Marx not been German revolutionaries living in British exile safely out of the reach of Metternich’s secret police and spies, they would have realised that the new “industrial proletariat” that Engels chronicled in his study of the condition of the working classes in England in the 1830s, that was not actually published until a German version was printed and published in Germany in the late 1860s was not new at all, but the adaptation of well-established Irish way of life to conditions within the British mainland.


As the great leader of the Northern Working Class and editor of the radical journal “The Northern Star”, Feargus O’Connor, said often enough in the 1830s, what the poor English working class needed was to ally themselves with such men as himself, by rights someone who could claim the title of “King of Ireland”, to lead a great force that would combine them with “the warlike Scots” and “the warlike Irish”, and make one great united working class that could use its “physical force” to impose its will on the government. So it was quite “normal” that while the six days of the Gordon Riots resulted in a dozen or so people losing their lives, mostly by accident or misadventure, because the London Mob was mostly famously harmless and playful rather than vicious, during the New York Riots the death toll was placed officially at 105, with many more injured, though 119 seems a more likely figure, and even then that may still be conservative.


But the majority of the dead (80 in all) were killed by the forces of “law and order”, with soldiers coming out from ‘the Front’ to deal with an enemy in their rear, having no qualms about shooting to kill, or deploying canon, in one incident killing a couple of children, who thought that they were ‘safely out of it’, looking  down from the top of a building, when some shot was fired over the heads of the crowd no doubt  with the intention of repeating Napoleon’s “whiff of grapeshot”. It all smacks very much of the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s and General MacArthur “clearing” the Bonus Marchers from their encampments in Washington by means or armoured cars and flame throwers. “Thank God someone still knows how to handle a rabble!”


Other “Irish”, Liverpool and Lancashire dynamics that could well have impacted on the riots were:

(a) Sunday 12 July was the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, the battle that established Protestant supremacy in Ireland and condemned the Roman Catholic majority to lives that would eternally be limited to being “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, while the “Orangemen” and the “Orange Order” would become the basic instruments of the administration of Ireland as a “Crown Colony”. Habitually the 12 July is the start of “the marching season”, and much inter-Irish hostility.

(b) By this time the Lancashire Irish ‘peers’ and relatives of the New York Irish would be planning what they would be doing in their “Wakes Week” because with the industrial revolution the Lancashire mill owners had come to terms with the fact that from about the third week-end in July many of their workers would just not turn up for work, because of the “Holy Days” or wakes that had been observed for centuries. So, in order to accommodate the desire to travel around and/or meet up with extended family the northern mill-towns had taken to closing down economic activity for a whole week in a rolling tradition that carried on through August and into September. A good case for a week’s break could be made for both those New York businesses that were booming and making good wartime profits and those that had hardly any work and could hardly afford to pay their workers. As the most popular twentieth century song put it “Summer time and the living is easy”. From the mid-1860s Summer time was always a popular time for workers to go on strike.

(c) As another Illustrated London News article highlighted the Lancashire “working class” were being hailed as heroes for the way that they put up with the Cotton Famine, with the ordinary Poor Law entitlements being supplemented by soup kitchens all in recognition of a great and heroic county and its people, all making sacrifices in a “higher cause".


THE WAY OF THE NEW WORLD


Perhaps it is because in the end the riots were brought under control by a brutal assertion of martial superiority that no-one was prosecuted for the misdemeanours that had been committed in those crucial days in July 1863.


As Governor O’Dwyer was to say in 1919 of the protest movements in the Punjab, and the “hartal” “Holy Day” or “general strike called by Mahatma Gandhi as an exercise in “Soul Force”, the authorities had “fist force”:  and, though the British did have an official enquiry into the Jallianwallah Bagh Massacre at Amritsar, there are government papers that have never been released and endless speculation. But it is very obvious that General Dyer was sent to Amritsar in the aftermath of rioting there in with specific instructions to “teach the locals a lesson” after five British men had been killed and a missionary, Miss Sherwood, had been gang-raped and left for dead.


Nevertheless, it was only in the aftermath of the official enquiry into the Amritsar Massacre and the action, or lack of it, that was taken to hold the Punjab authorities responsible that Mahatma Gandhi launched the “Quit India” campaign intended to render the whole Indian sub-continent ungovernable within the British Empire. So perhaps it was just as well that in 1863 the “North” focused on the main task of winning the war and then in victory on trying to build a new United States of America.


Jawaharlal Nehru said in 1947, when a sub-divided India became independent the “new nation” that came into being had not achieved its independence “not in full measure, but very substantially”: and much the same could be said of the new United States of America that had emerged out of a struggle fought between 1776 and 1783 to secure for “Americans” the “inalienable rights” bestowed on all men by their Creator, the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. 


But, one thing that the Draft Riots did show, was that this was not the best way to raise an army in “the land of the free”: and the Emancipation Proclamation showed the power of volunteering for 180,000 African-Americans volunteered to serve in black regiments in order to fight for the cause of freedom and to prove themselves within a Western Civilization that was adapting to Darwinism and the whole idea that life was a process of evolutionary progress based on the “survival of the fittest”, and the new industrial warfare that was victorious in the American Civil War was actually totally transforming the “Old World” now that the Teutonic spirit was once more a force in the world, with a new triumvirate of great militaristic Teutonic powers emerging- Great Britain, Germany and the USA.


War was the new way of the world: and the “warlike Irish” too volunteered to serve in the Union Army, especially in the Irish Brigade, which could lead once more to thoughts of the united Irish Nationalism of eighteenth century, a time of rebellions and uprisings prompted variously by the American War of Independence and then the French Revolution with its creation of a tricolour nationalist republic.