The New York City Draft Riots, July 13–16, 1863

On the morning of Monday, July 13, 1863 — ten days after the Battle of Gettysburg ended — a crowd estimated at 500 people gathered around the federal Provost Marshal’s office at Third Avenue and 47th Street in Manhattan and set the building on fire. Inside the office, the second weekly draft lottery under the federal Enrollment Act of March 3, 1863, had been scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. The first lottery, the previous Saturday, had been conducted peacefully. The second never took place. Over the following four days, what began as a draft protest turned into the deadliest single domestic insurrection in American history apart from the Civil War itself — a sustained attack by parts of New York’s white working class on the city’s federal authority, its abolitionist elite, and, increasingly and lethally, on its Black residents.

By the time federal troops, redirected from Gettysburg, restored order on the night of July 16, at least 119 people were confirmed dead, the city’s Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue had been burned to the ground, at least eleven Black men had been lynched in the streets, and roughly half of Manhattan’s Black population had fled the city, some never to return.

The Enrollment Act and Its Provisions

By March 1863, the federal government’s volunteer recruitment system was failing. The terms of the 1861 volunteers were expiring and Confederate manpower was unexpectedly resilient. Congress passed the Enrollment Act on March 3, 1863, instituting the first federal military draft in US history. Every male citizen and every immigrant who had filed for citizenship, aged twenty to forty-five, was made liable to conscription. Local enrollment officers compiled lists; quotas were assigned by congressional district; draftees were selected by lottery.

Two provisions of the act made it explosive. Any drafted man could either pay a $300 commutation fee to the federal government to be exempted, or hire a substitute to serve in his place. Three hundred dollars was roughly a year’s wages for an unskilled labourer; a New York Irish dockworker or German tenement seamstress could not raise the sum. The law was, in the period’s working-class phrase, “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

The Black population of New York, which numbered approximately 12,500 in a city of 814,000, was specifically exempted from the draft — Black men were not classified as US citizens under the 1857 Dred Scott ruling, and the Lincoln administration had only begun to recruit Black soldiers separately for the US Colored Troops earlier the same year. To the white working-class New Yorkers facing conscription, that exemption appeared, falsely, as a privilege — and one paid for, they were told by Democratic politicians and the Copperhead press, by their own conscription into a war “to free the Negroes.” The political ground for what followed was thus already laid by July 1863.

The First Day: Monday, July 13

The first draft lottery in New York City was held on Saturday, July 11, at the Ninth District Provost Marshal’s office at Third Avenue and 47th Street. About 1,236 names were drawn and published in the Sunday papers. The second lottery was scheduled for Monday at 10:30 a.m.

By 6 a.m. Monday, groups of workmen — many from the volunteer fire company “Black Joke” Engine Company No. 33, whose members had been drafted in Saturday’s lottery — were moving uptown along Eighth and Ninth Avenues toward the Provost Marshal’s office. By 10 a.m. a crowd of several thousand had gathered around the office. At about 10:30, the moment the lottery was scheduled to start, a paving stone smashed the office window. Within minutes the building was on fire. The volunteer fire crews who arrived stood aside; some openly joined the mob.

From the Provost Marshal’s office the violence spread south and east. The New York Tribune offices at Printing House Square — Horace Greeley’s pro-war, anti-slavery paper — were attacked and partially burned. The Bull’s Head Tavern on 44th Street, where police were sheltering, was set on fire. Police Superintendent John A. Kennedy, who arrived in plainclothes to assess the situation, was recognised by the crowd and beaten so severely that he was not expected to live. (He survived but never returned to duty.)

In the late afternoon of July 13, a section of the mob moved north to the Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, a four-story brick institution that housed 233 Black children. The asylum’s matron, Jane McClellan, and her staff evacuated all of the children through a back door minutes before the mob broke in. None of the children were physically harmed; the building was looted, then burned. The image of the burning orphanage became the defining photograph of the riots.

The Targeting of Black New Yorkers

By Monday evening, the riots had transformed. What had begun as a draft protest had become a sustained attack on the city’s Black population. Mobs roamed lower Manhattan and the West Side hunting Black men, women, and children. Black-owned boarding houses, churches, and businesses were attacked. The Black district near Sullivan and Roosevelt Streets was sacked. Black workers on the Brooklyn waterfront were assaulted.

Eleven Black men are confirmed by name to have been lynched over the four days. William Jones was hanged from a tree on Clarkson Street on the evening of July 13 and his body burned. Abraham Franklin, a coachman, was hanged on West 27th Street the same evening; a sixteen-year-old white man named Patrick Butler then dragged his body through the streets by its genitals while the crowd cheered. James Costello, a Black shoemaker, was beaten to death on West 33rd Street. Peter Heuston, a sixty-three-year-old Mohawk man whom the mob assumed was Black, was beaten and killed on Roosevelt Street.

Many more Black New Yorkers escaped only because their white neighbours, employers, or landlords hid them. A significant number fled across the Hudson and East Rivers and never returned. New York’s Black population, which had been about 12,500 in 1860, fell to about 9,900 by 1865 — and many of those who remained relocated permanently to Brooklyn, which had not rioted.

The Suppression

Mayor George Opdyke, a Republican textile manufacturer, had insufficient force to control the city. The state militia regiments that would normally have suppressed disorder had been sent to Pennsylvania ahead of Gettysburg and were still in transit back. The Metropolitan Police, perhaps 1,500 men, were outnumbered and ineffective on the first day. On the night of July 13, Opdyke and Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Department of the East, requested federal troops.

On July 14 and 15, units of the Army of the Potomac began arriving in New York Harbor by sea and rail — among them the 7th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 65th, and 152nd New York regiments, the 26th Michigan, regular army artillery, and elements of the 5th and 11th US Infantry. Roughly 4,000 federal soldiers were on the streets by the evening of July 15. The fighting on July 15 and 16 was the heaviest of the four days; pitched battles between federal troops and rioters occurred on First Avenue near 19th Street and on Second Avenue in the 30s, with rioters firing from tenement windows and soldiers responding with rifle volleys and artillery. By the night of Thursday, July 16, organised rioting had ended.

The Aftermath

Confirmed dead: 119, by the count later compiled by the city’s coroner. Modern historians, beginning with Iver Bernstein’s The New York City Draft Riots (1990), have argued that the true figure was significantly higher — perhaps 500 — because many bodies of rioters were carried away by their families before the police arrived and never registered, and because deaths from injuries continued for weeks. Property damage was estimated at roughly $1.5 million (about $36 million in today’s money), much of it borne by the city under New York State’s claims law.

The federal draft resumed in New York on August 19, 1863, this time under the protection of approximately 10,000 federal troops. It produced very few actual draftees — most men named in the lottery either paid the $300 commutation, hired substitutes, or were exempted on other grounds — but the principle that the federal government could conscript was established. The Lincoln administration considered, and rejected, suspending New York’s electoral participation in 1864.

The Colored Orphan Asylum was rebuilt, partly with funds raised by the city’s white merchant elite, at 143rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The Union League Club of New York responded to the riots by raising and equipping the 20th and 26th US Colored Troops regiments, parading them publicly down Broadway in March 1864 to assert New York’s federal loyalty.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Three distortions still recur. The first is the framing of the riots as essentially Irish, or as essentially anti-draft. The Irish-American working class was disproportionately represented in the rioting — the city’s Irish population was the largest immigrant group, was concentrated in precisely the trades the draft most affected, and was politically aligned with the Democratic Party that opposed the war. But participants included native-born American workers and German immigrants, and some Irish New Yorkers — including the entire Sixty-ninth New York Volunteer Regiment, then in the field with the Army of the Potomac — were among the federal troops who eventually suppressed the riots. The line was class and politics, not ethnicity.

The second is the implication that the racial violence was incidental. It was not. From the second day onward the riots’ primary targets were Black New Yorkers, not federal property, and they followed a pattern — lynching followed by burning — that draws the riots into the longer history of American racial violence rather than the shorter history of conscription protests.

The third is the absence of New York’s draft riots from popular American memory. They were the largest civil insurrection in US history apart from the Civil War itself, killed more people than any other single American riot, and shaped New York City’s demography for a generation. They are also routinely omitted from popular Civil War narratives. The omission is part of what is being corrected by current scholarship.

Why It Still Matters

The New York Draft Riots are now the subject of a substantial modern historiography, most notably Iver Bernstein’s The New York City Draft Riots (1990), which remains the standard scholarly account, and Adrian Cook’s The Armies of the Streets (1974). The site of the burned Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street is today occupied by an office building near Bryant Park; there is no historical marker. Several of the lynching sites have similarly been unmarked. The four days of July 1863 are one of the most consequential episodes of urban violence in American history and remain, by any measure, underprocessed in the American historical imagination.

For more on related Civil War history, see our pieces on the Lost Cause and Robert Smalls.

Frequently Asked Questions

What caused the New York City Draft Riots?

The immediate trigger was the second weekly federal draft lottery scheduled for Monday, July 13, 1863, at the Ninth District Provost Marshal’s office in Manhattan. The underlying causes included the Enrollment Act of March 3, 1863, the first federal conscription law in US history; its $300 commutation fee provision, which exempted those who could pay; the resentment of New York’s white working class — disproportionately Irish — at being drafted for what Democratic politicians and the Copperhead press portrayed as a war “to free the Negroes”; and the city’s longstanding racial tensions over labour competition on the waterfront.

How many people died in the New York Draft Riots?

The confirmed death toll was 119, as later compiled by New York City’s coroner. Modern historians, beginning with Iver Bernstein in 1990, have argued the true figure may have been significantly higher — perhaps approaching 500 — because many rioters’ bodies were carried away by their families before being registered, and because deaths from injuries continued for weeks after the rioting ended.

Were the riots only about the draft?

No. The riots began as a draft protest on the morning of Monday, July 13, but transformed by that evening into a sustained attack on New York’s Black population. At least eleven Black men were lynched over the four days. Black homes, churches, businesses, and the Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street were attacked and burned. Roughly half of Manhattan’s Black population fled the city, many permanently.

What happened at the Colored Orphan Asylum?

The Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, which housed 233 Black children, was attacked by a section of the mob on the afternoon of July 13. The asylum’s matron Jane McClellan and her staff evacuated all of the children through a back door minutes before the mob broke in. The children were unharmed. The building was looted and then burned. The asylum was rebuilt after the war at 143rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, partly with funds raised by the city’s white merchant elite.

How were the riots stopped?

Order was restored by approximately 4,000 US Army troops redirected from the Army of the Potomac after the Battle of Gettysburg, arriving in New York Harbor by sea and rail on July 14 and 15. They operated under the overall command of Major General John E. Wool. Pitched street battles between federal troops and rioters occurred on July 15 and 16 along First and Second Avenues. By the night of Thursday, July 16, organised rioting had ended. The federal draft resumed peacefully in New York on August 19, 1863, this time under the protection of approximately 10,000 federal troops.

Sources

1. US National Archives — Civil War Draft Records
2. HISTORY — New York City Draft Riots
3. Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990)
4. Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (University Press of Kentucky, 1974)
5. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
6. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)
7. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (W. W. Norton, 2010)