New York City Draft Riots

“Shelling and the shooting of New York City’s citizens during July 1863 may have been an appropriate use of force to suppress chaotic rioting. Or was this action a means to enforce a very unpopular draft policy and may have been an unjustified use of force. The riots caused major violence to occur and was the force used to stop them justified or not.”
New York City during the week of July 13, 1863 was a city under chaos.   It was a city not being attacked by Confederate forces, but by its own people.   The angry rioters burned draft offices, ripped up railroad tracks and telegraph lines, and hunted down police, soldiers, and African Americans. During the summer of 1863 the city was very tense and angry and about to boil over. Lincoln had not made the situation better when before he had passed the Emancipation Proclamation in January. As said by the New York Times and Governor Horatio Seymour:
“Emancipation Proclamation was ridiculed as a pope’s bull against the comet, liberating slaves where federal authority could not reach and keeping them in bondage where it did extend.” Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, “clearly impolitic, unjust, and unconstitutional and… calculated to create so many barriers to the restoration of the Union.”
The living conditions for most of the cities poorest residents were terrible.   They lived in overcrowded tenements with the largest disease and crime rate in the western world.   The large increase in inflation at the start of the war in 1860 and insufficient wage increases versus inflation, caused life to be intolerable. The standard of living in New York City’s poorest immigrant groups, the largest which was the Irish, was hugely reduced. New York’s blacks also got angry and rioted on April 12th, 1837 because blacks had rescued a runaway slave, but the slave was eventually recaptured. The blacks were then attacked and persecuted.   The police force was also in shambles because it was full of political favoritism and was...