The Civil War Draft Riots

Our class on Thursday began to discuss the different factors that motivate mass social violence by examining the 1863 Civil War Draft Riots. We learned about the riots from the PBS "New York" (2004) DVD "Order and Disorder," and we also looked at a few scenes from Martin Scorsese's The Gangs of New York (2003). Besides observing that New York in the 1850s and into the Civil War was generally a violent place, we also noted that many of the issues that make the United States a place called "America" also arose in the film - namely, the US is a place where the fiction of the American Dream rises and falls against a tide of immigrant and "native" expectations and feelings.

In the Draft Riots, for example, the overwhelming participation of the Irish working class wasn't coincidental. Even though new Irish immigrants had taken jobs from African-Americans in the preceding decades, as the PBS documentary points out, they were afraid that free African Americans - and newly freed slaves in particular -- were going to take their jobs. Democrat politicians like Mayor Fernando Wood helped activate those fears through excited warnings about the dangers of free black Americans.

The class was quick to point out, however, that Irish fears about their economic security and about work competition also took place in the context of virulent white supremacist culture. The Irish wanted to be white, and not just because of the advantages it conferred. Status as white individuals - as white men, in particular -- would mean that the Irish could gain an easier path to economic and political "rights" (indeed, one point that the PBS film makes clear is that the Irish were taken much more seriously as a political class after the riots).

The Draft Riots also allowed the class to reach back into the founding documents of American national identity: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. We spent some time unpacking just what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" meant, and how that final idea, happiness, may have had something to do with the aforementioned American Dream. We also noted that the Declaration of Independence moves from an assertion of natural rights from God in the first paragraph to an assertion of rights as "people" in the second paragraph. In short, power moves from a higher power than a King to a power justified by the desires of a collective group. This change transforms once more in Article One, Section Two of the Constitution, which introduces the idea of "free persons" as another category of citizenship for American nationality. As Anibal pointed out, two documents that he thought were positive, celebratory texts also contain the ideas that sustained different forms of civil violence in the US. The Constitution, with its 3/5 clause for counting slaves, embedded the idea of racial inequality into US legal identity. The groundwork for the Civil War thus appears there -- just as the immigrant-oriented American Dream appears in the Declaration of Independence, even though the document also appears to invent a general theory of rebellion against all forms of power. 

Declaration photo from archives.gov