The Draft
Were coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more
We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore
Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree;
We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.
-"Song of the Conscripts"; a song circulated in 1863 in New York and other cities. (Via Howard Zinn's " A People's History of the United States.")

Carla and I went with friends last night to see "Gangs of New York." As a history buff, I sat through the movie in awe. Never before have I seen a movie protray the darker sides of American history so accurately. Last night and this morning I went through some of my books and did some internet searching to try and find out how accurately they protrayed one of the events of the movie, the New York Draft Riots of 1863. I've found a few minor inaccuracies in the movie, but for the most part this movie was dead on. (For those of you who have seen the movie, the battle between the Bowry Boys and Dead Rabbits occured in the 1850's not the 1840's so it couldn't have been 16 years later, but since this was a completely fictional story with just the backdrop of real history, I think we can let them slide on that.)

While searching on the internet, I found this page on the legality of the drafts and how to legally decline service. I don't know how accurate it is, but I think it is of interest, especially if any of you know draft-eligible young men who could someday find themselves called to fight an unjust war.

Now....for those of you have seen the movie...let me explain something that they did not make clear enough in the movie. The Civil War was not about freeing the slaves. It, like most wars, was about money. Do you really think the capitalists that funded the war gave a lick about slavery? These are the same people that worked people to death in their factories while paying them next to nothing.

What they cared about was expanding their influence into the southern states and the markets that the southern economy had and of course they did not want to compete with the plantation owners who in effect had free labour. They needed the south and they needed the war so they went to Lincoln, who spent much of his career fighting for the capitalists both as a politician and as a lawyer. Lincoln did declare the emancipation proclamation, but he did so at the pressure of the abolitionists after the southern states had already seceded from the union. The emancipation proclamation carried no weight at all towards freeing the slaves, but it did quiet the other half of the Republicans political base. Meanwhile, the government did just as it was shown in the movie, they forced the poor to fight a war that would benefit the rich.

The saddest thing about the anti-draft riots was the fact that the rioters, mostly poor irishmen, turned much of their anger towards the growing black community. Conditions were already bad in New York before the war started. Irishmen were the working poor and would work 18 hour days for pennies and now to make things worse their were black refugees flocking to the northern cities taking many of the jobs that striking employees had left in an attempt to better their conditions. Unemployment in those days was a death sentence in a way it is hard for us to understand now. There were no soup kitchens or government programs to help the poor. There was only starvation. So there was a deep anger in the Irish towards the blacks that was completely misplaced. They were both exploited and used by rich Americans wether they were the Northern capitalists or the Southern plantation owners. They should have been marching through the streets together, but instead the Irish used them as a convenient target for their anger. The illusion that the war was about freeing the blacks divided the two groups. The working class of New York, wether they were Irish Catholics or German Protestants, resented being asked to fight and die for a war that was not theirs. They chanted saying such as "Fight for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Sambo!" The blacks wanted a new beginning and a chance for the one thing that the white working class of the north had that they did not, the illusion of freedom and they had come to New York seeking it. At least in New York they could have the hope of better tomorrows.