Civil War
According to the 1860 census, on the verge of the American Civil War, 49,005 free colored lived in New York state, out of a total population of 3,880,735. The state's population had been transformed by extensive immigration from the 1840s on, particularly from Ireland and Germany. Shortly before the Civil War, 25 percent of New York City's population was born in Germany.
The 1863 New York Draft Riots were caused chiefly by Irish immigrants and their descendants, who attacked African Americans and their property in New York City. They killed 100 blacks and burned many buildings to the ground, including the Colored Orphans Asylum at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue. The children escaped harm, aided by Union troops in the city. The Irish resented being drafted for the American Civil War when wealthier men could pay for substitutes. They resented having to fight, as they saw it, on behalf of people with whom they competed daily for wages in low-skilled jobs. Many African Americans from New York enlisted to serve with the Union Army to defeat the Confederacy.
By 1870, the African-American population in New York had increased slightly, to 52,081. The state's population had grown markedly to 4,382,759, of which more than one million, nearly one quarter, were foreign born. Many of the new immigrants settled in and around New York City, their port of entry and a place with a variety of jobs.
Read more about this topic: History Of Slavery In New York
Famous quotes by civil war:
“One of the greatest difficulties in civil war is, that more art is required to know what should be concealed from our friends, than what ought to be done against our enemies.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“To the cry of ‘follow Mormons and prairie dogs and find good land,’ Civil War veterans flocked into Nebraska, joining a vast stampede of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and European immigrants.”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)