New York City Draft Riots
New York Times Article July 15, 1863
The following article is transcribed from the New York Times, dated July 15, 1863:
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The Conscription Must be Enforced
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Not only must this infamous and dastardly mob be put down, but it must be balked in the object for which it was gotten up. It was ostensibly to defeat the enforcement of the Conscription. The Conscription is a necessity; the Conscription is a law; the Conscription is just. It is demanded for the suppression of the Southern rebellion; it is needed to fill up our heroic but shattered regiments; the country called for it, and acquiesced in its passage; the army is a unit in urging its enforcement. It is the justest mode of raising an army -- just to the people of every class and condition, poor and rich, black and white. No class or order of citizens is exempt from its operation -- even poor clergymen, if drafted, being compelled to shoulder their musket.
This mob should in no way be allowed to interfere with its enforcement. If a few hundred desperadoes, backed up by a few thousand misguided and deceived men, may violently nullify a law of such grand and wide-spread scope and value as this -- if they are permitted to nullify and violently overthrow any law of the land, then all law everywhere and finally is at an end. We have not only no Union, but no Government, no society, no civil order. We have anarchy in its most frightful form. We have the condition of things which this great City has suffered from for the last two days made permanent. We shall have faction giving battle to faction, class warring upon class, sect fighting sect, interest contending with interest, knavery with honesty, lawlessness with legality -- not in the old arenas, not on the forum and through the Press, with the weapons of reason and justice, but with ball, bayonet, bowie-knife and slung-shot, amid blood, carnage and rapine.
We cannot afford to yield the Conscription to this mob. The mob is an additional argument for its enforcement. The Government cannot afford to suspend a general law, intended to apply to the whole country, because of a local riot sprang by a few bad schemers in this City. The Conscription has already been enforced in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut; and it is in the order of enforcement in every State of the Union. Can a scheme so extensive as this, so generally accepted everywhere, be thwarted by such a mob as has disgraced this City for two days?
We are astonished that GOV. SEYMOUR should hold out hopes that this will be the case. We are grieved that he should so far justify the mob as to admit that it will prove successful in its lawless object. In each of his three short speeches in the City yesterday he put forth that this would be the case. GOV. SEYMOUR is false to his responsibilities, to his duties, and to his office, in paltering with the mob in this way. He is false to the country of which he is a citizen, to the laws of which he is the constituted upholder, to public order of which he is the guardian. Such talk is an encouragement to this mob; it is an encouragement to all mobs. Coming from a man in his position, it foretokens no good to the City or the country. His duty is to enforce law, and especially when there are organized attempts to overthrow it by violence.
The conscription, we repeat, cannot be abrogated in this City because of the mob. Its temporary suspense for a few days, until order is restored, is, of course, necessary. But, on the restoration of order, its execution must here be proceeded with at all hazards, as it has been successfully executed elsewhere.
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