Race & class warfare in New York

“The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America,” Barnet Schecter (Walker & Company, 2005)

Toward the end of Martin Scorsese’s film, “Gangs of New York,” the petty squabbles and turf wars of two gangs are put into perspective as a much larger, real-life battle breaks out on the streets of New York City, reminding the viewer that the events webeen watching are taking place during the U.S. Civil War.

New York City, the main conduit for the export of slave-grown cotton, had strong economic ties to secessionist elements in the South. Run by the Southern-sympathetic Democratic Party, the city was filled with anti-Black and anti-Civil War rhetoric. Racist demagogy trumpeted from the pages of reactionary newspapers, the halls of Con gress, and on street corners by political operatives to manipulate class anger of poor and exploited Irish and German immigrants against the city’s small, super-oppressed African-American community.

When President Abraham Lincoln, faced with growing losses on the battlefield, recruitment problems, and restricted by laws preventing the use of state militias for more than nine months, considered starting a federal military-conscription draft, New York’s slums exploded in a violent uprising called the Draft Riots. On July 13, 1863, people who lived in the most squalid conditions raged through the city, turning into a roving lynch mob that attacked and murdered African Ameri cans, burned the “Colored Orphan Asylum,” sacked one of the draft offices, took weapons from the state armory and caused massive property damage throughout the city.

Barnet Schecter’s “The Devil’s Own Work” is an important and well-researched view of this great disaster. The author does an admirable job showing the conditions that led to the Draft Riots. He brings readers from the battlefields of the Civil War, through the Five Points slum teeming with Irish immigrants who had fled the Great Famine, and into the inner workings of the various political parties. We learn about the smoky-rooms deals of the corrupt Tam many Hall Democrats and the political wrangling in New York and Washington.

It may surprise readers to know that at the time of the Civil War, a great debate arose over the constitutionality of a federal-conscription draft when most states controlled their own militias. However, the provision in the Draft Law allowed a man to avoid military service for a $300 fee. An idea seen in Washington as a great income-gathering device made certain that the only poor men would be drafted. At the time a worker might earn $300 only after a years-worth of work.

The rebellion continued for three days before the federal government recalled troops from the historic victory at Gettys burg, Pa., to control the city. By July 17, after multiple deadly battles between protesters and troops, New York was mostly quiet. In the wake of the uprising, thousands of people, both African-Ameri can and wealthy, had fled the city for New Jersey and Westchester. While the rich were ultimately compensated for losses and the draftees given state money to purchase their buyouts, the African-American population didn’t recover for decades.

While “The Devil’s Own Work” is extremely sympathetic to the plight of the Black population of the U.S., it fails to view either the enslaved Africans or free Blacks as a social force in their own right. For that readers must go to other books that show that the enslaved population was constantly active in resistance and in attempting to end slavery. One book can never cover all aspects of a social struggle as large as slavery’s end-days, but this flaw is one that weakens the in-depth view Schecter has brought to the other aspects of the period.

To supplement this book, read W.E.B. Du Bois’s transcendent work, “Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880.” Here the most oppressed are shown in their actual role as part of the great social revolution that was the Civil War and Reconstruction. To understand the depth of the struggle waged by the enslaved Africans since their kidnapping and bondage in the Western hemisphere, see “American Negro Slave Revolts” by Herbert Aptheker. Having culled from newspapers, private diaries and slave narratives, the writer brought the constant battle for freedom to life.

A beautiful novel—which takes place during the Draft Riots and interweaves the stories of Black New Yorkers, Irish immigrants, newspaper reporters and uprising participants—is “Paradise Alley” by Kevin Baker. By following the events from several perspectives and using many real-life incidents from the riots, Baker creates an overview that is both moving and cinematic.

While the period is loosely covered in director Martin Scorsese’s film “Gangs of New York,” a short, vivid description is provided in Herbert Asbury’s book of the same title. True to its subtitle, “An Informal History of the Underworld,” Asbury’s tawdry narrative, dubiously billed as “non-fiction,” provides a ripping good read.

For those seeking information about this period, particularly as it played out in New York City, “The Devil’s Own Work” provides both historical accuracy and a good entertaining overview, two attributes most non-fiction writers strive for.