Draft Riots Dbq

For an African-American during the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 the events that took place would be described as nothing less than horrific. This was caused when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863. This stated all slaves within any State, or designated part of a State still in rebellion shall be granted freedom. If any southern state returned to the Union between September and January, whites in that state suppositionally would not lose ownership of their slaves. Despite its limits, free blacks, slaves, and abolitionists across the country considered it as one of the most important actions on behalf of freedom in our nation's history.

Various events followed the Emancipation Proclamation, this

For months after the riots the public life of the city became a very noticeable “white domain." During the riots, landowners drove blacks from their residences, fearing the destruction of their property that had already riddled so many. After the riots, when the Colored Orphan Asylum attempted to rebuild on the site of its old building, neighboring property owners asked them to leave. By 1865, the black population had plummeted to just under ten thousand, the lowest since 1820. For the blacks who remained in the city found a somewhat recover in the aftermath of the riots. The seven-month-old Union League and the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People spearheaded relief efforts to blacks, providing forty thousand dollars to almost twenty-five hundred riot victims and finding new jobs and homes for blacks. Just under a year later, Republican elites and New York City blacks publicly celebrated their renewed alliance. In December of 1863, the secretary of war gave the Union League Club permission to raise a black regiment. The Union League Club decided to march the regiment of over one thousand black men through the streets of New York to the Hudson River, where the ship that would take them south waited. On March 5, 1864, before a crowd of one hundred thousand black and white New Yorkers, the black regiment processed, making "a fine appearance in their

These largely middle-class activists carried ideas of racial uplift first promulgated in the northeast, from creating manual labor schools to moral reform to enhancing wage labor. They encountered newly free blacks eager for educational and economic betterment, but just as certainly shaping their own definitions of independence and equality. During the Civil War and Reconstruction years, black and white people from urban and rural areas in the north and south were challenged to create new opportunities for the freed people. But New York City had never unified to overcome the problems of racism and fully embrace black freedom; neither would the