New York City and the Civil War
in 1863
On January
1, 1863, President
Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing
all slaves in the rebellious Confederate states. The proclamation
marked a major transformation in the North's reason for fighting
the Civil War. The war's first two years witnessed a string of Confederate
battlefield victories and a growing realization throughout the northern
states that the original war aim of preserving the Union had to
be broadened to encompass the destruction of the racial slavery
upon which the South's fortunes rested. By summer 1863, the Union
army, which had been entirely white when the war started, began
recruiting African-American soldiers, who would soon be fighting
and dying to defend the Union and to destroy the institution of
slavery.
But the North's sagging
military fortunes did not immediately change with Lincoln's issuing
of the Emancipation Proclamation and the initial recruitment of
black troops into the Union army. In late spring 1863, Confederate
forces, led by General Robert E. Lee, invaded the North through
Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Thousands of Union troops, many volunteers
from New York City, now rushed to Pennsylvania to defend the Union.
As July dawned, a titanic battle between Union and Confederate forces
loomed at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Fear swept New York City; if
the Confederate army prevailed, southern troops could potentially
invade a defenseless city within a matter of days. And fears of
a Confederate plot to incite unrest in New York City and to set
a series of fires further heightened New Yorkers' concerns about
an imminent invasion.
Though Union forces would
ultimately prevail at Gettysburg, driving the Confederate army back
into 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 to
buy their way out of the draft.
A
City Divided
|