By ALBON P. MAN, JR.
JULY 1863 was a momentous month in the War between the States. At Gettysburg Union forces repulsed Lee's thrust into Pennsylvania, while Vicksburg, Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, finally fell to Grant's long siege. Immediately after these major Northern victories, during the week of July 12, 1863, the bloodiest race riots of American history took place in the streets of New York. (1)
Touched off by enforcement of the conscription law of March 3, 1863, with its inequitable $300 commutation clause and provision for hiring substitutes,(2) the New York upheaval at once became an orgy of violence against the city's Negro population.(3) And if newspapers, eye-witness accounts, official records, and other sources agree on any point connected with the disturbances, it is that practically all the rioters were Irish. ". . . The immediate actors in the late Riots in this city, got up to resist the Draft and to create a diversion in favor of the Southern Rebellion were almost exclusively Irishmen and Catholics. . . .," wrote Orestes Brownson,(4) and his testimony has ample confirmation. (5)
Fear of Negro labor competition was chiefly responsible for the eruption. Lincoln's emancipation program, it was widely believed, would result in an inundation of the North by large numbers of former slaves who would promptly deprive Irish workingmen of their jobs.(6) Indeed, Negroes had been brought in by the shipping companies of New York to break the strikes of longshoremen for higher wages in the spring of 1863.(7) With memories of those bitter labor disputes fresh in their minds, the Irish could not fail to regard the draft as a measure to effect their economic suicide: They were to be forced to fight for the freedom of potential rivals in the struggle to earn a living.
But in addition to the fear of black labor competition, an important influence upon the draft rioters was the position of the Catholic clergy and press regarding slavery, the war, and conscription. This article will attempt to state generally the opinions of leading prelates on those issues, particularly examining relevant pronouncements of Archbishop John Hughes, of New York. It will also survey the dominant attitudes of Catholic newspapers and describe the activities of the clergy in New York during the draft riots. The reader should bear in mind the significance of the Church in America to the Irish as the one institution of preeminence that they had known in the old country, whose priests, for the most part, shared their national origin - much to Brownson's disapproval.(8) To them it represented, also, a defense against the nativist prejudice that they encountered as foreigners and Catholics....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/books/albon_man/church_ny_irish/index.html>.] -- Yoshie
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