Summary Of The New York Draft Riots And The Great Hanging At Gainesville

In its long and illustrious history, New York City (NYC) has gone through tremendous change. From a small trading post on the tip of Manhattan Island, to the greatest metropolis in the world, NYC has continued to evolve over time. One period in particular that had more degrees of change than many others, was 1860 to 1865. The lives of the residents of the great port city would be completely changed forever.

By the outset of 1864, after three years of war, the Union had mobilized its resources for the ongoing struggle on a massive scale. The government had overseen the construction of new railroad lines and for the first time used standardized rail tracks that allowed the North to move men and materials with greater ease. The North’s economy had shifted to a wartime model. The Confederacy also mobilized, perhaps to a greater degree than the Union, its efforts to secure independence and maintain slavery. Yet the Confederacy experienced ever-greater hardships after years of war. Without the population of the North, it faced a shortage of manpower. The lack of industry, compared to the North, undercut the ability to sustain and wage war. Rampant inflation as well as food shortages in the South lowered morale.

The Civil War is something almost everyone has a general idea about. It is more than a huge part of America’s history and is the central event in America 's historical consciousness. This war, unlike the American Revolution which created the first American states, determined what kind of nation it would be. Though there are many reasons for the cause of the American Civil War, one of the main reasons is the different attitudes the North and the South had toward slavery. In January of 1863, The Emancipation Proclamation was

With the Civil War in full swing in 1863, President Lincoln was grappling with a nation divided. Long-standing racial turmoils had finally boiled over in 1861 with the battle of Fort Sumter. The country had been thrown headfirst into bloody battles, culminating most recently with the infamous Battle of Antietam. Antietam allowed the president to issue the most important document of his career with a narrow Union “victory”and an attempt to boost low spirits. As a result, the North secured an advantage when Lincoln announced his intent to free all Confederate slaves with the shocking Emancipation Proclamation. Determined on securing and protecting the Union, Lincoln took a pragmatic approach in issuing the controversial document. A defining moment in American history, it is essential to investigates the reasons and acts leading up to it, the responses it elicited from the nation and the world, and its effects on the country.

Slavery was a complicated issue for Northern whites. As pointed out by historian Kevin M. Schultz (2011), Northerners were generally in agreement that slavery was wrong, yet they were very uneasy with the idea of creating a large, free black population in the U.S. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a step toward that idea. The Proclamation did not free all slaves, since the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware were exempted, as were Tennessee and areas of Virginia and Louisiana already under Union occupation (Schultz, 2011, p. 265). An important provision, however, was that black Americans would now be allowed to join the military. In the two years following the Emancipation Proclamation, 180,000 black men enlisted (Schultz, p. 265). They were poorly treated but eager to fight for a cause in which they had a high stake. Their numbers and their passion for the cause made African-American soldiers a powerful asset to the Union.

On July 4, 1865 in Savannah, Georgia, the 22nd Iowa mustered out of federal service after a reading of the Declaration of Independence and Emancipation Proclamation. That afternoon, in the aftermath of this explicitly patriotic commemoration of the new improved United States: the encapsulation of the Republican ideal of the conflict as a struggle to reassert the promise of the Revolution, Taylor Peirce, the fervent abolitionist, watched as a mob of townspeople and drunken Union soldiers, some of them perhaps his own comrades, assault the city’s black fire brigade as it paraded in celebration of the nation’s triumph. Once hopeful for his dream of a new South,

The Civil War marked a monumental period in United States History. President Lincoln found himself attempting to preserve the union, while the Confederates from the south were fighting to create their own separate country. This war was primarily caused by one issue: slavery. The northerners did not expect the power of the South; it was not the quick war that they had expected. Both sides had their fair share of victories and losses. From the beginning of the war the Confederacy had a strong advantage of military leadership. After turning points in the war such as the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam the power shifted to the Union, eventually leading to the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House. During the war, Lincoln was able to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. The freeing of the slaves resulted in a tremendous change in the lifestyle of southerners, both black and white. White southerners no longer had free labor, and black southerners were free to start their own lives. However, many of these free blacks did not know what to do with themselves after they were freed (McPherson 105). They did not have any land or money, and the majority were not educated. They were promised land from the union, but they never received this land (PBS 1). Without land it was nearly impossible to gain money in the southern economy at this time. These blacks were technically free citizens, but they were nowhere

In the midst of the Civil War, people within the Union states were feeling a lot of unrest and unsteadiness for a variety of reasons. One reason was the fact that the war had dragged on a lot longer than was anticipated by the country and its leaders. As the war raged on, more people were dying as well as getting injured which meant a call for more soldiers was happening. The

With no navy to mount a defense, the Southern government was forced to control production of cotton and raise taxes, which only furthered the disillusionment of its population (Perman, 224). Poor Southerners in particular began to see the war as benefiting a section of society that did not include them, as they were not slave owners. They were the very people forced to make the most sacrifices for the war and the government's control of their ability to produce led to bread riots (Perman, 219). Moreover, as enlistment numbers in the Confederate army dwindled, the government had no option but to turn to forced conscription and impressments of slaves, which Southerners viewed as the impounding of personal property (Perman, 221). The realities of war created a conflict that Southerners did not foresee when they had created an aloof central government.

For four years, Americans fought against one another on the battlefield. This war would come to make up the bloodiest war in American history. Over the four years, over 620,000 soldiers died in the conflict. This war became one the most traumatic event in American History. Since the beginning of colonization to the 1860’s, the people in this country were slowly being divided. From 1850 to 1861, it was apparent that the union was separating into the North and the South and battle was soon to follow. With this division, peace could not continue amongst the country, for the country was filled with problems that affected the common Americans. With the events that led up to the war, the South felt like they had every reason to secede from the

The South vs. The South by William Freehling is a narrative that focuses on the civil war that affected a vast number of Southerners who opposed the Confederacy regardless of whether they were white or black. These “anti-Confederates,” as termed by Freehling comprised Slaves and Boarder state whites who together formed half the southern population and were significant to the Union victory. By weakening the Confederacy military, contributing manpower and resources to the Union and dividing the southern home front, the anti-Confederates made a critical contribution to the Union war efforts that hastened the end of the war leading to the Union’s victory. The U.S was not the only house that was divided; Divisions between pro-and anti-Confederates, white and black, and the loyalty of both upper and lower states to slavery contributed a lot to the downfall of the confederates. “Divisions within the South helped pave the path toward war. The same divisions behind army lines helped turn the war against the slaveholders.”(p.10). William Freehling argues that more than 450,000 Union troops from the South, especially southern blacks and border state whites, helped in the defeat of the confederates. Further, when the southern Border States rejected the Confederacy, more than a half of the South’s capacity swelled the North’s advantage.

In the film, the motivation for rebellion was in line with the events that caused soldiers in the 1860’s to leave and go against the confederacy. Jones county was a region of poor farmers as evident by the population of slaves only making up about 12% (Kelly, n.d.). In 1862, the Twenty Negro Law, which states that anyone who owns twenty or more slaves is exempt from serving in the war, gets passed (Civil War On The Western Border, n.d.) and many people begin to realize just how bias the fight is. The residents there couldn’t afford slaves so many of

To go into more detail, the New York draft riots were a law that was passed that made any male between ages 20-40 liable to be drafted into the army without a choice. What caused the law was the fact that there wasn’t any people in the army to fight. So they drafted normal civilians to do that. “In 1863, in the midst of the American Civil War, Congress passed a conscription law,” ( A&E Television Networks, 2009, 1)

The American Civil War is still referred to by historians as one of the bloodiest stains on the nation’s sociopolitical landscape. From beginning to end, the normal fanfare of atrocities that any war brings such as poverty, starvation, and bloodshed were made more gruesome by the reality that neighbors were fighting neighbors and brothers raising arms against one another. Caught between both sides was an entire race of people; though there were many political ideologies involved, the issue of slavery and the rights of African Americans lit the fuse and kept the fire burning. Incidents involving the terrorizing of black Americans were numerous throughout the course of the Civil War, though none was more controversial than the Confederate

A renewed militancy among southern blacks emboldened by the rhetoric of the war and by their participation in the struggle for democracy, the increased voting strength of northern blacks, and a wave of racial violence that rolled across the nation during the war years and after made national accommodation to southern sensibilities increasingly difficult. The combination of Supreme Court decisions and executive orders, working in tandem with grassroots efforts, once again threw southern conservatives on the defensive.