A City Divided
The National Conscription
Act, which was to be enforced initially in New York City on Saturday,
July 11, exacerbated long-simmering class tensions in the city.
The act proved especially unpopular among New York City's white
working class, many of whom were recent immigrants from Germany
and Ireland.
New York City at mid-century had become an important destination
for Irish immigrants, especially after the devastating Irish famine
in the 1840s. By 1860, one of every four of New York City's 800,000
residents was an Irish-born immigrant. While many labored in several
of the city's skilled trades, the vast majority of Irish immigrants
worked as unskilled laborers on the docks, as ditch diggers and
street pavers, and as cartmen and coal heavers. In several of these
occupations they competed directly with the city's African-American
workers.
African Americans
had lived and worked in New York City-- some as slaves, some
as free people-- since well before the Revolutionary War. The
city's African-American community grew during the first four decades
of the nineteenth century, establishing and sustaining churches,
newspapers, literary societies, and free schools. Black workers
lived in close proximity to white workers in racially mixed communities
that dotted the lower half of Manhattan. Increased immigration from
Europe after 1840 diminished employment opportunities for black
New Yorkers. Working-class African Americans competed directly with
immigrants, especially newly arrived Irish, for unskilled jobs,
a competition that often turned ugly and violent in the years before
the war.
When
the Civil War began in 1861, large numbers of New York City's white
workers did not embrace the fight to preserve the Union. Many resented
the war effort, which brought economic hardship and increasing unemployment
to the city's working-class neighborhoods, especially following
a sharp economic downturn in the war's first year. Competition for
jobs between Irish and black workers, already intense before the
war, increased dramatically in the conflict's early years and racial
tensions mounted in work places and in working-class neighborhoods
throughout the city. Even the return of wartime prosperity in 1862
did not lessen these tensions, as living costs rose faster than
wages, further undercutting working-class living standards. In spring
1863, in the midst of a strike of Irish dock workers, strikers attacked
and beat African-American strike-breakers before federal troops
arrived to protect the black workers.
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