• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7282 0

distributed, to the army and civilians alike, nine hundred thousand copies of ninety pamphlets (in German and French as well as English). Fierce nationalists, the club members argued that only a strong central state could win the war and establish continental prosperity. In 1863 Olmsted proposed establishing a magazine to spread this gospel, to be called, appropriately enough, the Nation. For the moment, however, it relied on Harper’s Weekly, which George William Curtis took over in 1863 and brought into the Republican camp. Locally, the Union League Club established the Loyal National League, which organized committees in each ward to mobilize mass support and held rallies at Cooper Institute or in Union and Madison squares.

THE DRAFT

In mid-1863, with the city rancorously divided, Confederates invaded the North. On June 27 Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia moved up the Shenandoah Valley, crushed the Union garrison at Winchester, and crossed over the Potomac, and by June 29 it was within ten miles of Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. Thousands of troops poured out of New York City to join General George Meade’s army, which, on July 1, engaged Lee at the town of Gettysburg.

The emergency left the city virtually stripped of defenses. General John Wool, commander of the army’s Department of the East, reported to Governor Seymour that he had only 550 men in eight forts and almost no military vessels in the harbor. The city was wide open to invasion by southern ironclads. If Lee eluded Meade he could be in Jersey City, and at New York’s throat, in a matter of days.

To make matters worse—far worse—it was at just this moment that the federal government’s new draft law was to go into effect. Back in March, reacting to heavy losses, dwindling recruitment, and soaring desertion rates, Congress had passed the National Conscription Act. The legislation authorized government agents to go houseto-house, enrolling all men aged twenty to thirty-five (and all unmarried men thirty-five to forty-five), and then hold a lottery to choose draftees from this pool. The law also created federal provost marshals in each congressional district and gave them unprecedented power to summarily arrest draft evaders, draft resisters, and deserters. Finally, in a crude assertion of class privilege, the law provided that draftees could provide a substitute to fight in their place or pay three hundred dollars—a prohibitive sum for working people—for the government to use as a recruiting bounty. In short order an advertisement, appearing daily in New York City newspapers, announced that “gentlemen will be furnished promptly with substitutes by forwarding their orders to the office of the Merchants, Bankers and General Volunteer Association.”

This was not a popular law in New York. It represented, together with emancipation and the new tariff and banking laws, yet another massive increase in the intrusion of the federal government into the city’s communities, workplaces, even households. It did not go unnoted that the three-thousand-dollar shawl A. T. Stewart had imported for Secretary Chase’s daughter now represented the price of ten men’s lives. The argument advanced by Republican organs like the Times and Harper’s—that businessmen had to stay home and run production—failed to convince many Boweryites.

The enrollment process proceeded peaceably enough in May and June, in part because leading Democrats like Governor Seymour vowed to initiate legal challenges to the act’s constitutionality. Seymour also argued, correctly as it turned out, that Republicans had set unfairly high quotas for the heavily Democratic metropolis. Other voices counseled harsher tactics. The editor of the Catholic Metropolitan Record, John Mullaly, encouraged armed resistance. Even Seymour, at a mass protest meeting on July 4 at the Academy of Music, used words he would later regret, telling the crowd: “Remember this—that the bloody and treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government.” On July 4 news of the Union