Compounding the issue, Black men were exempt from the draft, as they were not considered citizens. Though all eligible men were entered into a lottery, they could buy their way out of harm’s way by hiring a substitute or paying $300 to the government (roughly $5,800 today).Īt the time, that sum was the yearly salary for the average American worker, making avoiding the draft impossible for all but the wealthiest of men. In September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation (which would take effect early the following year), confirming the workers’ worst fears.Īt the time, Lincoln’s decision for emancipation sparked protests among workers in the city, as well as soldiers and officers in New York regiments who had signed up to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery.įacing a dire shortage of manpower in early 1863, Lincoln’s government passed a strict new conscription law, which made all male citizens between 20 and 35 and all unmarried men between 35 and 45 subject to military duty. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, there was even talk of New York seceding from the Union itself, so entwined were the city’s business interests with the Confederate States.Īs the war progressed, New York’s anti-war politicians and newspapers kept warning its working-class white citizens, many of them Irish or German immigrants, that emancipation would mean their replacement in the labor force by thousands of freed enslaved people from the South. And long after the slavery trade was made illegal in 1808, the city’s underground market in enslaved people continued to thrive. ![]() As the business capital of the nation, New York City had not welcomed the onset of the Civil War, as it meant losing the South as an important trading partner.Ĭotton was an extremely valuable product for New York’s merchants: Before the Civil War, cotton represented 40 percent of all the goods shipped out of the city’s port.
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