At 6 p.m. on the hot evening of July 13, 1863, William Jones, an African-American cartman, left his Clarkson Street home to buy a loaf of bread.
He couldn’t have known that a vicious mob enraged by the Civil War had begun a five-day rampage known as the Draft Riots. And Jones was right in their path.
The rioters were mostly working-class Irish immigrants. They were angry about a federal draft law that conscripted poor men while allowing their wealthier counterparts to buy their way out of the army. And they feared newly freed blacks would come to New York and take their jobs.
That morning, after destroying a draft office at Third Avenue and 47th Street, crowds of rioters dispersed around Manhattan.
They burned the homes of draft supporters, destroyed train tracks, beat wealthy residents, torched and looted the Brooks Brothers store, and attacked police and soldiers.
Their rage was directed especially toward black New Yorkers: they set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street, killed a black coachman on West 27th Street, and chased three black men who happened to be walking down Varick Street.
Those three got away. That’s when the mob targeted Jones.
“A crowd of rioters in Clarkson Street . . . met an inoffensive colored man returning from a bakery with a loaf of bread under his arm,” states an 1863 police report about the Draft Riots.
“They instantly set upon and beat him, and after nearly killing him, hung him to a lamp-post. His body was left suspended for several hours. A fire was made underneath him, and he was literally roasted as he hung, the mob reveling in their demonic act.”
A total of 119 people were killed; an estimated 11 of those were black. Finally on July 16, 6,000 soldiers hit the streets, and things went back to normal.
The city’s black residents did not. Twenty percent left the city for good.
[above: an illustration from the NYPL]
Tags: African Americans in New York City, Civil War New York City, Clarkson Street view, Draft Riots Lynching, Draft Riots NYC, Draft Riots violence, famous riots New York City, Greenwich Village 1860s, Irish Immigrants New York City, Lynching in New York City, Riots in New York City
Ephemeral New York 
January 14, 2013 at 12:53 am |
Excellent post on one of the uglier episodes in New York City history. Interestingly, some of the troops that arrived to restore order were Union troops had fought at the Battle of Gettysburg two weeks earlier.
January 14, 2013 at 3:05 am |
I did some research on this a few years ago. So sad. What an ugly mob that was. After burning the orphanage, they beat a little black girl to death. The newspaper building had to hold off the crowds with a Gatling gun too. The first lady of Medicine, Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, was caught up in this. She worked in a hospital and it was chaos for 3 days. She and a few other doctors served all patients, black and white, and they had to make sure the mob stayed out. Nurses covered the eyes of the patients because they were terrified of all the smoke and fire. I shudder to imagine a scene like that happening in Manhattan these days.
January 14, 2013 at 4:00 am |
Ugly is the right word.
January 14, 2013 at 4:45 pm |
Gangs of NY was on last night and featured, with much cinematic dramatization, these riots. The movie features ships firing canon into the five points in an effort to quell the riots. I’m not sure if that actually happened but it makes for a good movie about bad times. As innacurate as the movie is, the plug uglies weren’t even a gang in NYC but rather baltimore, it helps younger generations remember that times like this were real and how fortunate we are today.
January 14, 2013 at 9:27 pm |
wow! What a cruel time!
January 27, 2013 at 3:38 am |
Look at that police report that is linked and you will see this selfsame “William Jones” had just shot some white people (here called “rowdies,” but presumably unarmed since they didn’t shoot back). Most of the “lynchings” of blacks at this time followed the same pattern. Blacks with firearms, alone and in groups, were shooting white people along Sixth Avenue, Varick, Carmine, Clarkson, Bleecker, and Charlton Streets. Some got caught and beaten, some were hanged, some escaped after wounding or killing their victims.
Read the daily newspapers of July 13-18, 1863 for more details (but avoid the NY Tribune and the NY Times, which did little first-hand reporting, and were mainly concerned with aiding the Radical Republicans’ effort to turn a legitimate protest into a “riot”).
July 26, 2013 at 5:28 pm |
Wow so the NYT has always race baited huh
January 27, 2013 at 5:52 pm |
I believe William Jones shot at the “rowdies” in self-defense, after they came after him first.
July 13, 2014 at 10:06 am |
[…] A lynching on a Greenwich Village street in 1863 […]
August 15, 2019 at 7:41 pm |
just when l thought the South were the bad guys when it was the Yankees all along!
November 25, 2019 at 8:13 am |
[…] the asylum’s longtime home, on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street, was burned down during the terrible Draft Riots that rocked New York for days in July […]
February 11, 2021 at 3:56 pm |
The irony lies in the fact that the original inhabitants being the indigenous people were all but wiped out through the white settlers systematic genocide. In truth other than the Dutch, African Americans were the second people to inhabit what would become New York. They were here long before the Irish. The utter paradox is the fact that when the Irish first arrived in large numbers to escape famine in Ireland, they actually began taking the jobs that the African Americans held for years. The Irish felt that just because of their white skin they were better than the African Americans.
One of the the first buildings the Irish burned was a haven for African American children less than 12 years old. The children barely escaped. The rioters still managed to beat one child to death. I ask you. Who are the true savages?