Draft Riots Reading 2

As the draft riots commenced on the second and third day, the mob seemed to always have a meeting time and place even if it wasn't precisely spoken. They all new where to find each other. Once again, African Americans were the target of the mob's anger because of the chain effect mentality they held about the draft, the war, and slavery. The continuance of the riots exhibited the unfolding of the savagery in the people as well as the developing role of the lower class and working class women participating in the riots.

Often times mob behavior will take humans from civilization to barbarism, allowing the people to leave their moral compass behind and be guided by the sadistic actions of the masses. Almost every drawing which was published in newspapers depicted the rioters as savage and inhumane. The cartoons "How to escape the draft," "Looting of a Drug Store," and "Murder or Colonel O'Brien" all provide images where the attackers have lost their human qualities and have become savages, with no true reasons for attacking the people they killed or burning the houses of the innocent. The descriptions of the diagrams describe the rioters as "animalistic" and "exhibiting animal-like features" which compares to the same imagery used in other written articles and excerpts from the era including multiple works from J.T. Headley, commenting that "the spirit of hell seemed to have entered the hearts of these men" and by William O. Stoddard the idea that the protests "unchained these wolves from their dens of sloth and self-indulgence and crime." These implications of inhumane behavior demonstrate how dangerous the aggressors were to their victims as well as to the law enforcement and the government as the two worked to both protect the victims and try and negotiate terms with the lawless murderers to bring the rioting to a close.

The idea I found most intriguing in the set of second riot readings was the mentioning of the involvement of women in the riots. Women of the upper classes during the 1860s were not as involved in politics or the economy, in part because women were discriminated against by the male population for their supposed inferiority and frailness. Also, it was considered the men's duty to provide for the family. In the lower and middle classes however, the women needed to be more involved in political, economical, and social matters because often times they were forced to work to provide for their family and males and females had more equality in the lower classes. One of the depictions of the murder of colonel O'Brien includes women in the photo because "women had long participated in the rough-and-tumble politics of the streets in working-class neighborhoods." Women lived hard life styles and were not going to be sitting around while the men trashed the streets because the draft affected their families and they needed to protest too. An exert from a book by William O. Stoddard on the murder of Colonel O'Brien also proceeds to mention that when he was taken from the threshold of his home, "both males and females took part in the brutal transaction." The savage behaviors as mentioned in the paragraph above were not descriptions for only men. The women's mentality was a bloodthirsty, murderous, and thieving mindset as well as all the men. The women had just as much at stake as anyone else and would not go down without a battle.

In regards to the damage that was done and the money which was appropriated for the New York rioters, I am curious as to whether the citizens of the city had taxes placed on them afterwards to help pay for the damage they created or if the government took care of the payment by itself, possibly in fear that it could cause another uprising from the mob.