July 15, 2023 Letters from an American
July 15, 2023, Letters from an American, Prof Heather Cox Richardson
[Warning: the 13th paragraph of this piece, beginning “They did,” graphically describes racial violence.]
July 16 marks the 160th anniversary of the most destructive riot in U.S. history. On July 13, 1863, certain Democrats in New York City rose up against the Lincoln administration. Four days later, at least 119 people were dead, another 2,000 wounded. Rioters destroyed between $1 and $5 million in property including about fifty buildings, two churches, and an asylum for orphaned Black children. In today’s dollars, that would be between $20 million and about $96 million in damage.
While the Republican and Democratic parties swapped ideologies almost exactly 100 years after the New York City draft riots, the questions of state and federal power, race, and political narratives, and how those things came together in the United States are still with us.
The story of the draft riots began years before 1863. As soon as South Carolina’s leaders announced in late December 1860 that the state was seceding from the Union, New York City’s Democratic leaders made it clear they sympathized with those white southerners who opposed the idea that the federal government had the power to stop the spread of enslavement. In early January 1861, just days after South Carolina announced it was leaving the Union, before any other state joined it, and months before Republican Abraham Lincoln took office, New York City Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that New York City should secede from the Union, too.
By 1858 the city was at the center of the cotton trade (the roots of the Lehman Brothers financial services firm, which collapsed spectacularly in 2008, were in pre–Civil War cotton trading), its harbor full of ships carrying cotton and the products it enabled enslavers to buy from Europe. Democrats, organized as Tammany Hall, controlled New York City thanks to the votes of workingmen, especially Irish immigrants.
By 1860, Democrats were losing ground to the Republicans, who rose rapidly to national power after 1854. Republicans believed that the Constitution protected slavery in the South but that Congress could stop the institution from moving to newly acquired lands in the West. Republicans controlled New York state.
In his address to the Common Council of the city calling for it to create a “Free City” of New York, Wood declared that “a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable” and claimed the city had “friendly relations and a common sympathy” with the “Slave States.” But his call was not only about the South. He complained bitterly about the government of New York state. He opposed the taxes the Republican legislature had levied, claiming it was plundering the city to “enrich their speculators, lobby agents, and Abolition politicians.” Wood claimed that New York City had lost the right of self-government. If it broke off from the United States, he argued, the city could “live free from taxes, and have cheap goods….”
Wood’s call didn’t get much traction on its own, but for the next two or three months it did prompt New Yorkers to argue about how much the federal government should offer to the southern states to induce them to return. That all changed when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard fired on federal Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. New Yorkers rushed to support the United States. In the largest public meeting held until that point in U.S. history, more than 100,000 people rallied in Union Square, a spot historian of Union Square Michael Shapiro notes they chose in part because of its name.
Growing Republican strength created a problem for Democrats. Republicans were attracting workingmen by promising to keep the West free for folks like them rather than hand it over to a few wealthy enslavers. And now the city was rallying behind the Republican war effort.
To hold on to their voters and thus to their power in New York City, Democratic leaders hammered on the idea that the Republicans intended to set Black Americans up over white men. In September 1862, Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation, issued at a time when Black men were prohibited from service in the army, enabled Democrats to argue that the Republicans were sending white men to their deaths for Black people.
Their racist argument worked: Lincoln’s Republicans got shellacked in the 1862 midterm elections, in part because of the Union’s terrible losses on the battlefields that year, but also because of the relentless racist campaign of the Democrats. Nonetheless, Lincoln went forward with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Furious, Democrats harped on the devastating news from the battlefields, where men were dying in firefights and of disease.
Then, in March, Congress passed a federal draft that took enrollment of soldiers away from the states and included all male citizens from ages 20 to 35 and all unmarried men between 35 and 45 in a lottery for military service. Because the Supreme Court had decided in 1857 that Black men were not citizens, they were not included in the draft. New York City’s Democratic leaders, led now by Mayor George Opdyke, railed against the federal government and its willingness to slaughter white men for Black people.
The Republican New York Times, in contrast, called the draft a “national blessing” that would settle, once and for all, whether the government was strong enough to compel men to fight for it. As for the Democrats threatening to stop the government’s enrollment of soldiers, the editor of the New York Times scoffed: “Let them do their worst.”
They did. The first lottery was held on July 11, and on the morning of July 13, Democrats attacked federal draft officers with rocks and clubs. Rioters then spread through the city, burning the homes and businesses of prominent Republicans. Storm clouds rolled up in the afternoon, mingling with the smoke to turn everything dark. Late in the day, the rioters turned their wrath onto the city’s Black residents. After burning the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children, they hunted down individual Black men, beating 12 to death before attacking a cart driver who stumbled into their path after putting up his horses. Symbolically killing him three times, several hundred men and boys beat him to death, then hanged him, then set fire to the body.
The rioters had thought they represented the will of the American people, only to find themselves confronted by U.S soldiers, including a number from New York. The soldiers had come straight from the battlefields to help put down the riots.
In fact, the tide of the war had abruptly turned just before the draft riots. At the Battle of Gettysburg in early July, U.S. soldiers wiped out a third of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s fighting force. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to General U.S. Grant, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and cutting the Confederacy in half, making it difficult for the Confederacy to move food, goods, and troops. The rioters seemed to be attacking the government just as it started to win.
And then, just two days after the draft riots ended, on July 18 the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment took heavy losses in an assault against Battery Wagner protecting Charleston Harbor. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was one of the nation’s first Black regiments, raised after the Emancipation Proclamation permitted Black men to join the army. It suffered 42% casualties in the battle, losing more than 270 of the 650 soldiers who fought there. “The splendid 54th is cut to pieces,” wrote Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis, a soldier of the regiment. “The grape and canister shell and Minnie swept us down like chaff…but still our men went on and on.”
The contrast between white mobs railing against the government and murdering their Black neighbors while Black soldiers fought and died to defend the United States was stark. No fair-minded person could miss it.
Unrelated perhaps, but dangeously important.
With a Centrist Manifesto, No Labels Pushes Its Presidential Bid Forward
NY Times – July 15
The bipartisan group, facing enormous opposition from Democrats, hopes a new policy document will advance its political cause — and possible third-party White House run.
A new political platform focused on cooperative governance by the bipartisan group No Labels has something for everyone to embrace — and just as much for both sides to reject.
For example, the government must stop “releasing” undocumented migrants into the country, it maintains. But the government must also broaden legal immigration channels and offer a path to citizenship to those brought to the country as children.
Or this one: The constitutional right to bear arms is inviolable but must be tempered with universal background checks and age restrictions on the purchase of military-style semiautomatic rifles.
Then there is this: A woman must have a right to control her reproductive health, but that right has to be balanced with society’s obligation to safeguard human life.
No Labels’ possible third-party challenge for the presidency next year has drawn fire from liberals, centrists and even some members of Congress who support the group’s principles but fear that their efforts — based on the seemingly high-minded ideals of national unity — could greatly damage President Biden’s re-election campaign and hand the White House back to Donald J. Trump. …
(This is dangerous. Third party voting is always dangerous in presidential elections. So is this…)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Covid Remarks Raise Questions of Antisemitism
NY Times – July 15
The long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has a history of embracing conspiracy theories.
The Kennedys Really Hate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Slate – June 11
Fred:
Bit more of an opinion by you. I know you can do it.
More opinion? See below. I have written on this board many times that (although I am a centrist Dem, registered), I am certain that third-party voting in Presidential elections is ALWAYS a very bad idea. It is always a con intended to push the election decision into the House of Reps.
Wherein, even when there is a Dem majority, each state gets one vote, and that vote is determined by the makeup of each state’s delegation. 30 states have GOP-majority delegations in the House.
The 10 states with the largest populations control enough electoral votes to elect a president, if they all voted the same way. Several of these most-populous states are with the GOP, so that doesn’t happen, but it does gave the populous Blue states an electoral vote advantage.
However, thirty of the States have GOP-majority delegations in the House of Reps, and when there’s no electoral-vote majority (which to date has happened very rarely), the rules change. Each state gets one vote, and those 30 votes will elect a GOP president, inevitably.
No Labels Exposed: Here’s a List of Donors Funding Its Effort To Disrupt the 2024 Race
Mother Jones – June 23
(Almst exclusively GOP mega-donors.)
No Labels snags Senator Joe Manchin for N.H. event, stoking talk of presidential run
Washington Post – July 12
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) plans to headline an event in New Hampshire next week sponsored by the bipartisan group No Labels, a move that has stoked speculation that he could mount a third-party presidential bid in 2024 that Democrats fear could be damaging to President Biden.
Manchin is scheduled to appear Monday at the group’s “Common Sense” town hall at St. Anselm College alongside former Utah governor Jon Huntsman (R). No Labels is eying a potential “unity” ticket in 2024, though organizers say no decision has been made. …
These days, third-party presidential runs are designed, at best, to produce a no-majority result in the Electoral College that will push the presidential selection into the House of Representatives, which will guarantee a GOP president in January 2025.
In fact, if the calculations I made some months back are correct, if (as expected) Arizona & Georgia vote for Trump this time, and are joined by one other state (Wisconsin, perhaps) with a sizeable electoral vote, the Electoral College will be tied, the presidential decision will be left to the House and Trump will return to office. Any more flipping and Trump will have an Electoral Vote majority.
A Third Party Soft Launches, but Its Politicians Disagree on Details
NY Times – July 17
Senator Joe Manchin III and former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. stressed that they were not a third-party presidential ticket — yet. And on issues like climate and guns, they debated their views.
As the ostensibly bipartisan interest group No Labels discovered on Monday, consensus campaigning and governance is all well and good until it comes time for the details.
At an event at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., the group had something of a soft launch of its potential third-party bid for the presidency when Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Republican governor of Utah, formally released No Labels’ policy manifesto for political compromise.
The two men took pains to say they were not the bipartisan presidential ticket of a No Labels candidacy, and that no such ticket would be formed if the Republican and Democratic nominees for 2024 would just embrace their moderation — “that won’t happen if they’re not threatened,” Mr. Manchin said threateningly.
On the lofty matter of cooperation and compromise, both men were all in, as were their introducers, Joseph I. Lieberman, a former Democratic senator turned independent, Benjamin Chavis, a civil rights leader and Democrat, and Pat McCrory, a former Republican governor of North Carolina. …
“The common-sense majority has no voice in this country,” Mr. Huntsman said. “They just watch the three-ring circus play out.”
But the dream unity ticket seemed anything but unified when it came down to the nuts and bolts.
One questioner from the audience raised her concerns about worsening climate change, the extreme weather that was drenching New England and Mr. Manchin’s securing of a new natural gas pipeline in his home state.
To that, Mr. Manchin fell back on his personal preference, promoted in No Labels’ manifesto, for an “all of the above” energy policy that embraced renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, as well as continued production of climate-warming fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
Mr. Huntsman jumped in to propose putting “a price on carbon,” something usually done through fossil fuel emissions taxes, to curb oil, gas and coal use, proposals that Mr. Manchin, hailing from a coal and gas state, roundly rejected.
Asked about gun control, the two could not even seem to agree on the relatively modest proposals in the No Labels plan: universal background checks on firearms purchases and raising the buying age for military-style semiautomatic weapons to 21 from 18. …
Ah, those were the days …
We (heart) Huntsman
GQ – Dec 15, 2011
…Or at least his daughters. Mary Anne, Liddy, and Abby may not be able to save Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign, but their Funny or Die-style videos, planking photos, and @Jon2012girls Twitter (what’s a Mormon girl have to do to land a date with Tagg Romney, anyway?) are the most entertaining commentary on an outrageous election season. …
In early November, the Jon2012 girls were in New York City getting their hair and makeup done for a karaoke-themed photo shoot at a Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side. Mary Anne, Abby, and Liddy Huntsman are the twentysomething daughters of presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr., which means that the sisters—who’ve become celebrities over the past few months for tweeting snarky updates from the campaign trail at @Jon2012girls—are sort of unofficially running for first daughters. Which makes this technically a campaign stop, even though there are no voters here and we’re in a banquet room that smells like old rice. …
I think “so-called bipartisan” would be a better description. “bipartisan” has long been a lie to cover the real power behind the so-called “conservative” party. these are people who don’t particularly give a damn about abortion, race, drugs…but are very very interested in preserving the power of big money.
Third-party strategies are impractical in presidential elections, although they may be useful in others. This is because of the Electoral College rules which strongly favor a two-party system consisting of the parties that dominate Congress.
In this instance, it may be intended to bypass Trump, or to get Trump elected.
In either case, that would be a win for the GOP. In the latter case a HUGE loss for the country.
Hopefully independents who might be susceptible had better wise up.
meanwhile, it might be wort noting that the new york “race riot” and the civil war itself was not primarily about race…except of course for the overwhelming propensity of humans to blame their troubles on the nearest persons who don’t look like them.
as the article notes without noting..Cotton was the issue that led to NY siding with secessionists. and Lincoln did not base his campaign on race (though he may have been personally far more interested in emancipation than he is given credit for by some historians with an agenda)…but on the potential of the pro slavery faction to allow slavery to spread to the north (property rights) and compete with free labor ultimately to the destruction free labor as the fundamental nature of theAmercan economy.
to cut this short…follow the money. racism is just a tool very handy for the money interests.
I recall being taught (in red update NY) that the NYC civil war riots were ostensibly DRAFT riots, because male Irish immigrants (a large portion of the city population at the time) were not all that interested in being inducted into the Union army.
The same was taught in north suburban Chicago.
It was possible to avoid the Civil War draft. Many did.
“A popular means of avoiding military service was physical disability: of almost 777,000 names drawn in four Northern drafts in 1863 and 1864, 159,400 men gained physical exemptions. Draftees could also hire a substitute or pay a commutation fee ($500 in the South, $300 in the North). …”
Cicil War Draft Resistance & Evasion
The Civil War has been said to be ‘the first modern war’.
Casualty rates were horrific. Prison camps (in the South especially) were horrific.
Andersonville Prison (also known as Camp Sumter), a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp (operaated) during the final fourteen months of the American Civil War. … The prison was created in February 1864 and served until April 1865.
The site was commanded by Captain Henry Wirz, who was tried and executed after the war for war crimes. The prison was overcrowded to four times its capacity, and had an inadequate water supply, inadequate food, and unsanitary conditions. Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter during the war, nearly 13,000 died. The chief causes of death were scurvy, diarrhea and dysentery. … (Wikipedia)
i forgot to note that the rioters were not rioting because of racism. Their racism drove the form of their “protest,” but they were rioting because of the draft.
a lot of liberals have forgotten what we thought about the draft in the 1960’s, some even suggesting we need to restore the draft “so the rich will be afraid of getting killed and not start more wars.”
so much for learning from history.
As a youngster, it seemed to me that workers of the North resented the slaves of the South (or the Slave Owners?) because slaves were ‘working for free’ even if not free themselves.
The Irish immigrants of NYC in the Civil War era (instead) probably felt that they had no part in the institution of slavery and didn’t wish to ‘participate’ in ending it.