July 1863 was the turning point of the American civil Avar. Prospects of ultimate victory for the north improved greatly that month, when General Lee's thrust into Pennsylvania was repulsed at the battle of Gettysburg, and Vicksburg, last confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, fell after a long siege. Yet during the sultry week of 12 July 1863 the most violent race riots of American history took place in the streets of New York, touched off by enforcement of a conscription act which congress had passed four months earlier How many negroes were lynched by white rioters and their bodies borne away on the waters surrounding Manhattan Island can never be known. But between twelve and fifteen hundred white persons died in this civil war within a civil war, most of them slain by police and soldiers charged with quelling the upheaval.
If newspaper accounts, official reports, and other sources of information agree upon any point about the draft disorders, it is that almost all the participants were Irish. ‘The immediate actors in the late riots in this city, got up to resist the draft and to create a diversion in favor of the southern rebellion, were almost exclusively Irishmen and catholics’ , wrote Orestes A. Brownson, America's leading convert to the Catholic Church.