1863 New York City Draft Riots: The Black Joke Company and the Orphanage

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By the 1860s New York City's merchants and bankers depended on Southern cotton, Mayor Fernando Wood had proposed in January 1861 that the city declare independence, and Tammany Hall was fast-tracking new Irish and German immigrants into citizenship. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 created the first national draft, with a $300 commutation fee roughly equal to a year's wages for a dockworker. This episode explains how labor fears sharpened by the Emancipation Proclamation, including an attack on about 200 Black dockworkers that March, set the stage for the riots of July 1863.

The draft began quietly on Saturday, July 11, but after names appeared in Sunday papers, a crowd led by volunteer fire company Engine 33, the Black Joke, burned the draft office at Third Avenue and 47th Street on Monday morning. Rioters cut telegraph lines, nearly killed Police Superintendent John Kennedy, and turned on Black New Yorkers, burning the Colored Orphan Asylum and lynching at least 11 Black men and boys. Governor Horatio Seymour's appeal failed, and more than 4,000 federal troops, some fresh from Gettysburg, restored order by Thursday. Official deaths numbered about 119 to 120, with some estimates far higher.

By 1822 nearly half of New York City's exports were cotton shipments.
Police and the asylum superintendent got about 230 children out the back of the orphanage as it was looted and burned.
The mob wrecked James McCune Smith's pharmacy, believed to be the first owned by a Black man in the United States.
New York Times founder Henry Jarvis Raymond set up Gatling guns in the paper's windows.
In March 1864 the 20th U.S. Colored Infantry paraded through the city before about 100,000 spectators.

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