March 3, 1863 – First Wartime Conscription Act by United States Signed into Law During the Civil War

On March 3, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, the first wartime conscription law was passed by the United States Congress. The Enrollment Act, 12 Stat. 731, required the participation of every male citizen and immigrants who had filed for citizenship between ages of twenty and forty-five by April 1. It also included a controversial clause allowing a person to pay $300 to avoid military service, a feature greatly resented by workingmen. Blacks, who were not considered citizens, were exempt from the draft.

Unfortunately, because Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1 of 1863, many now saw the war as a fight to free Black slaves, a cause for which they were unwilling to risk their lives. Roiling the waters, Democratic politicians and newspapers alleged that emancipation would result in free Black men moving north, who would then take the jobs of whites, and ravish their daughters.

In addition, New York had many pro-South and pro-Slavery proponents. The state had an economy dependent on cotton and slavery. As explained in an article in the online magazine, “The Observer”:

New York banks financed the spread of cotton plantations across the Deep South. New York merchants sold plantation owners their supplies. New York City’s mayor in 1863, George Opdyke, had made a fortune selling them cheap clothing they provided slaves. Cotton accounted for a whopping 40 percent of the shipping in New York harbor. The city’s hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues filled up every summer with Southern visitors.”

(Lincoln readily acknowledged the role of the North in helping to perpetuate slavery, as with his 1864 statement: “If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”)

New York Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour promised to challenge the draft law in court and goaded on the mobs at a mass meeting on July 4, warning, “the bloody and treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by government.”

Image from New York Public Library Digital Collections

On July 13, anti-draft violence erupted in New York City, resulting in four days of rioting, looting, and bloodshed, in what is still considered the deadliest rioting in American history. As The Observer reports:

Mobs rampaged through most of the week in an orgy of savage murder, arson and looting. They hung black men from lampposts and dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets. They beat and murdered the pitifully small squads of policemen and soldiers the city initially mustered—and grotesquely defiled their corpses as well. It took federal troops to start restoring order to burning, rubble-strewn Manhattan that Thursday. The published death count was 119, but many New Yorkers believed the actual toll was hundreds more.”

The riot was also notable for the attack by whites on the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. The four-story orphanage housed over two hundred children. As Leslie M. Harris wrote in the book In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863:

…an infuriated mob, consisting of several thousand men, women and children, armed with clubs, brick bats etc. advanced upon the Institution. The crowd took as much of the bedding, clothing, food, and other transportable articles as they could and set fire to the building. . . . Miraculously, the mob refrained from assaulting the children. . . . The children made their way to the Thirty-Fifth Street Police Station, where they remained for three days and nights before moving to the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island . . ..”

Eventually the orphanage was rebuilt in Harlem.

In all, rioters lynched eleven Black men over the course of five days, and forced hundreds of Blacks to leave the city. By 1865, the city’s Black population was just under 10,000, the lowest it had been since 1820.