A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [279]
Their father was looking forward to the summer recess: though the year had begun disastrously, none of it now seemed to matter. “The great causes of our apprehension have died away,” he wrote. “The cotton famine and Lancashire distress have not proved such serious troubles as we had feared.”20 Newspapers no longer carried alarming reports of protest meetings and “disturbances” in the mill towns. The Earl of Derby’s Central Committee was efficiently distributing almost £500,000 worth of charity, and the Poor Law Board was overseeing a £2 million public works program in Lancashire, paying the unemployed cotton workers to build sewers, pave roads, and create public parks and recreation grounds.21 Some mills were using cotton from India, even though it was of inferior quality to Southern cotton, which had almost doubled imports from 536,000 bales in 1861 to over a million in 1863. Moreover, there were plenty of opportunities for workers who were willing to move away from the cotton districts. The British linen and woolen industries were enjoying a renaissance, for example, the profits from blockade running were swilling around Liverpool, and the armaments industry was having its best year ever.22 The latest figures showed that even with the dragging effects of the Morrill Tariff, the value of British trade was rising and would top £444 million for 1863. All of these developments were an encouraging counterbalance to the troubles of the cotton industry.
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The legation was settling into its usual summer routine when Benjamin Moran noticed something strange. He wrote on July 27: “The steamer this week brought no Despatches whatever. This never occurred before in my time.”23
The abrupt silence had been caused by the complete breakdown of civic order in New York. For five days, between July 13 and 17, the city lay at the mercy of fifty thousand rioters who exacted gruesome revenge on the two classes of persons they considered most responsible for the war: Negroes and those who defended them. There had been signs of working-class resentment ever since the Draft Act became law on March 3, 1863. In theory, it provided Washington with more than 3 million potential new soldiers; in practice, it netted about 100,000 reluctant conscripts and 70,000 substitutes. The draft applied to all able-bodied white males between the ages of twenty and forty-five, but the exemptions for particular family circumstances, such as only sons with widowed mothers to support, as well as the provision that allowed a man to purchase a substitute for $300, mostly benefited the middle class and native-born Americans.24 For immigrant laborers earning an average of 85 cents a day, the sum of $300 was a cruel joke. Nowhere was the resentment greater than among the 200,000 Irish immigrants of New York, many of whom felt that they had been enticed into emigrating so that they could provide “food for [gun]powder.” The editor of the Freeman’s Journal, a popular Irish newspaper in New York, demanded to know why the Irish were expected “to go and carry on a war for the nigger.”25
Although aliens were specifically excluded from the draft, the State Department had recently tightened the rules and increased the burden of proof required from resident foreigners. Consul Archibald was struggling to keep pace with the demand for his help. There had been a sharp increase since the spring in the number of “crimpings”—kidnappings and illegal conscriptions of British subjects. The latest complaint to reach the consulate involved three Caribbean sailors who had disappeared from the Mary Harris only to reappear as unwilling seamen on board USS Tulip. Archibald wondered whether the recent strike by Irish dockworkers had something to do with the Tulip case; the shipyard owners had brought in contrabands