Casey wrote, “The public began to associate Irish nationality and Catholicism even though Protestant Irish emigrants continued to settle in the city. By the time of the Civil War, New York City was the largest Irish community outside of Dublin. By 1860, 47% – almost half – of New Yorkers were foreign-born, and most of them were Irish. By 1855, more than a quarter of the population of both Manhattan and Brooklyn was Irish-born. It was also among the poorest and most class-ridden. New York was not just the biggest city in the country, but in the entire Western Hemisphere.Ħth Ave Looking South from Waverly St (1860) In the 1860 census, New York had a population of about 814,000 Philadelphia was the country’s second-largest city with about 565,000 Brooklyn, at that time a city in its own right, was third with about 267,000, while Cleveland, with about 43,000, was only the 21st-biggest U.S. Its population doubled, on average, every twenty years before the Civil War. The city was growing fast, but it was not growing better. The Civil War was a particularly troubled time for New York City. Definite strategy may be seen in the efforts to cut off approaches to the city, to sever communications, to capture forts, to seize armories and munitions works with all their weapons and ammunition, and to plunder banks and Federal treasury vaults.” Carl Sandburg wrote, “Never before in an American metropolis had the police, merchants, bankers, and forces of law and order had their power wrenched loose by mobs so skillfully led.” Kunhardt Jr., “at being conscripted into a war dedicated to freeing slaves.” In Ellis’s view, “The infamous Draft Riots… were so well led that they constituted an organized insurrection, rather than a spontaneous mob uprising. “They were furious,” wrote historian Philip B. The great majority of them had welcomed neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the draft. The riots began because of attempts to enforce the first Federal conscription act, and because of the economic hardships, political ideology and social pathologies of the city’s large Irish immigrant underclass.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |