The New York Draft Riots

[Pogue]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Draft_Riots

I only just heard about these through watching Gangs of New York. I hadn't heard of them before. I was shocked to hear about what happened and quite upset really. The film does the events justice, I think. Basically, this started out as anger coming from the working class directed against the rich and the government because of the fact they were being drafted to fight for the Union whereas the rich could pay 300 dollars to avoid being conscripted. Police stations and government offices were burned. However this quickly turned into something of a pogrom as African-Americans were targetted as scapegoats, being seen as the cause of the war by some and just as an easy target by an angry crowd. This upset me because form seeing it portrayed in film I thought I was watching an early proletarian revolt against the rich I hadn't seen before but it was distressing to hear that black people, even children were targetted. This clear evidence of a historical distortion of working class anger is saddening. I have even read that police had to stop rioters from attacking a black orphanage at one point.

I was also wondering what you do in such a situation, where people were angry at the rich and the state but it was being violently directed in the wrong direction, and the problem and anger that would cause, as working class people were targetting other working class people and not the police, rich and state, the common enemy.

Thoughts?

[Random Precision]

I only just heard about these through watching Gangs of New York. I hadn't heard of them before. I was shocked to hear about what happened and quite upset really. The film does the events justice, I think

So a Wikipedia article is the basis for judging whether a heavily romanticized movie is telling the truth about this historical event? I mean, not only does it insist on romanticizing the Irish gangs, but one of them in the film actually has a black member. And this is what you're saying "does justice" to the events? :laugh:

The Draft Riots were far from "an early proletarian revolt". Neither is the film's picture of the working-class Irishman stepping off the boat from Ireland and promptly being sent out to fight for the rich industrialists while they praised Lincoln to the skies accurate in any way. The reality was that very few people were actually drafted, in New York or anywhere else. Like in New York, many people were able to get Tammany Hall to pay their substitution fee. So in this way the purpose of the draft was actually more of a one-time flat tax to pay for the war effort than an actual conscription policy

And of course we have to consider the nature of the conflict. Civil War-era United States was not a place where proletarian revolution was on the table. The order of the day was the completion of bourgeois-democratic tasks. For the ruling class this meant solidifying industrial capital's control over the economy of the agricultural South (and thus over the nation) and a single national market, and the further development of the productive forces. The flip side of this was that with the end of slavery, the struggle could begin for a unified American working class: "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black skin it is branded"- Marx, Capital Vol. 1 Ch. 10

So in light of this an abstentionist attitude toward the war is at best a sign of historical ignorance and at worst telling of "colorblind" workerism

EDIT: Before anyone thinks of saying that the Civil War "wasn't really about slavery", please think about how bad I'd feel to have to track you down and light you on fire because of it. :)

[khad]

I'll repost what I said in the OI draft riot thread.

The typical leftist interpretations of this event ignore much of the broader political context. I have a hard time believing that there was a genuine proletarian uprising in this or that this could have developed into something with liberatory potential.

The draft fees must be viewed in conjunction with the institution of draft fees in general, which includes the American South. In fact, what is left out of the typical historical narrative is that some 90%+ of those who could not pay the draft fee had their draft fees paid through various political machines. This was particularly true with Tammany Hall in NYC and the Irish community.

What the $300 fee did in effect was to put a cap on substitution costs (since finding someone to take one's place was such a common practice back then). It also restricted mercenary activity somewhat. This is contrasted with what happened with the Confederate Army, where people were being paid 2000 or 3000 dollars to stand in for someone else. Given this alternative, what the Union did was incredibly astute. Instead of enriching mercenaries, exemption fees would go directly to the government, and, as it turned out, those who really didn't want to go didn't have to because those fees would have been paid by their political representatives. Tammany had deep, deep pockets.

As for the riot itself, I think it would be informative to take a somewhat "long view" of American urban violence. In many ways it was a continuation of the epidemic of brutal race riots that swept through American cities like Philadelphia throughout the 1830s and 40s, which resulted in the suppression of the public life of free blacks in the North.