Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 333 - The New York City Draft Riot

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Grab tickets to our live show in Belfast: https://www.universe.com/events/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-belfast-tickets-83V5QD Can't make it to Belfast? We're streaming it! Get your stream tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-live-in-belfast-tickets-1008166803047?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=1 Check out our merch store: https://www.LLBDmerch.com A riot against the Civil War draft quickly turned into something much darker, and soldiers were recalled from the battlefield to put it down. Sources: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html&title=The+New+York+City+Draft+Riots+of+1863&desc Beard, Rick. City Under Siege: The New York Draft Riots https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/draft-riots https://history.nycourts.gov/case/court-cases-related-to-the-new-york-city-draft-riots-1863/ Dupree, A. Hunter and Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. "An Eyewitness Account of the New York Draft Riots, July, 1863" Anbinder, Tyler. "Which Poor Man’s Fight?: Immigrants and the Federal Conscription of 1863."

Hey everybody! Lion's Head by Donkeys is live in Belfast at the Oye Music Center Saturday, 26th October. Tickets are still available and if you can't make it to Belfast, good news, we are live streaming it and tickets are still available for that as well. You can find both of the links for either of those tickets, or both, in our show notes, So click on those and get your tickets. Our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live shows, specific merch, and wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store, LLBDmerch.com.

So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if you want something something get your order in. Once again that is LLBDMerch.com and the link will also be in the show notes. Thank you. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Lines of By Donkeys podcast. With me is Tom, and we're getting off a boat in New York City. Neither of us speak English quite yet. We've come from the faraway lands of Ireland and Armenia to strike it out in the United States. Tom has been contracted to build the new Irish pub while I hope to start

a kebab stand because I'm a few generations early to be a used car salesman in Glendale. Do I not factor into this fucking script? Oh, you're covered. Don't worry, buddy. As we step off the ship, we're immediately confronted by Nate, dressed in Union blues, clipboard in hand. He quickly thrusts an enlistment contract in front of our faces that we can't read, though he begins talking loudly and slowly and explains that he could pay us and get us food. We decide this sounds like a pretty good deal, because we don't know if it's his wild ginger hair or deep piercing fuck me eyes, but we feel like he's trustworthy. That's right boys, we're talking about the New York draft riots

of 1863. All I gotta say is that boat with me and you on it definitely smells real weird. It's like Irish people who've never encountered a spice in their entire generational existence, encountering kebabs made on a boat. An ever increasing waft of Drakkar noir, which somehow has been invented. Look, I mean, I'll be real with you. I feel as though you can make fun of it as much as you want, but I did not realize just how pungent continental Europe can be in weird ways. It's just been so long since I've lived here. And you know, it's not, it's not weird in the sense of like, Oh, people don't wear deodorant because they do. And they didn't in 18, 1860, but they, they do now. What you don't expect is like, is that the cheese rind smell on the tram at 9.25 in the morning? Yes, it is. I don't know where the fuck it's from.

But there it is. Yeah, the 19th century deodorant was just a German selling you half an onion to rub on your armpits. I have to say, we don't get many weird smells, at least where I live in the Netherlands. I don't live in Amsterdam, that's a different beast entirely. But I was on the tram the other day and someone had bought an incredible amount of raw herring. Such a Dutch sentence. It fucking stinks so bad. I got off a stop early because I just couldn't put up with it anymore.

Yeah, that doesn't sound good at all. It's the Netherlands, so everybody's very blunt and someone just loudly says in Dutch, like, damn, that smells like shit. People have always talked about this as like a curiosity when traveling, but I don't know if you've ever seen the signs, pictures on the internet of the signs in Singapore that are like no smoking, no loud music, no dogs or, you know, pets, and then no durians. There's like, just don't, don't you can't know the durian on the

trip. Now I love durian, but I get it. Cause one time I bought durian in Korea, frozen, and I heated it up in the microwave like an asshole in my fucking barracks room. And my next door neighbor came and knocked on the door and was like, yo man, you smell a gas leak? You heated up durian fruit in the microwave?

Yeah, I goddamn right I did. Cause you know what? I don't take any fucking prisoners when it comes to weird food. I love it. I love durian so much, man. It's so funny. I saw recently that New York City has introduced wheelie bins and they're like ecstatic over it. It's like, well, you've gotten technology from like the 1950s.

This is why you have rats the size of dogs only in New York, baby. There are some places in the city where that was normal, but obviously most places in America just have those. But in New York, because there aren't alleyways, unlike cities like Chicago, for example, I don't know why, but for the longest time, because there aren't alleyways, you would just drop off your trash three times a week by putting all of the black bags, like the bin liner bags or what we just call trash bags, outside, and then the garbagemen come and pick it up. And so yeah, as you could imagine in hot summer weather, the street becomes a landfill. And in winter, when sanitation workers are too busy, you know, cleaning up all the fucking snow,

you just get trash mountain, frozen trash mountain, next to frozen snow mountain that immediately becomes a pastiche of different colors of dog piss. People are out walking their dogs. Yeah, I lived in New York for four years. So, you know, I'm just saying like, we're going to talk about the super pungent days of New York. But yeah, even now, man, wow. The super pungent days of New York before like every cast member of this show was considered white. Fuck, that's correct.

Draft, conscription, shaying, highing, armed slavery, whatever it is you want to call it, I think it's safe to say it's somewhat unpopular. Many countries in the world have a long history of what you could consider a conscription, which makes sense as massive armies were needed for colonial enterprise. First to take whatever it is they wanted and then to hold whatever it is they wanted to hold on to long enough to steal. But in a lot of cases, it goes back even further than that to feudal lords levying peasants, giving them a sharpened stick and shoving them into some horrible killing field.

One place that doesn't have much of a history of conscription is actually the United States, which explains why each time it is implemented, people were not so happy about it. Which brings us to our topic here today, the New York Draft Riots of 1863, where class, race, and draft injustices all boiled together to create a maelstrom of violence in the streets of New York City during the American Civil War. I'm so excited for to do an episode where the Irish guys are the bad guys. You found it. I mean, there were some where they were the executioners for Hong Christ. So I mean, like, I don't know if that counts as bad.

I was going to say if that was good or bad. I do have to say, you know, we have a series on the first Boer War coming up and during the second Boer War, there is a lot of the first Boer war coming up and during the second to Boer war, there is a lot of Irish people who end up on the sides of the Boers, but that is a topic for the future. They keep popping up, baby. We're entering the arc of the podcast where the Irish are the villains. Now conscription in the history of the United States is kind of interesting because until the episode we're going to talk about today, it was not really much of a thing. The reason for that is in short, the early American state didn't need it or simply couldn't

pull it off due to a lack of authority and organization. In the early days, there's something of a draft you could say. All able-bodied men were required to take part in the local militias, get some training and then serve in times of whatever was considered an emergency. However, this is normally for a very, very short amount of time and only locally. Yeah, it was because indigenous raids were happening and they were like, hey guys, go grab your rifles or you're going to get scalped and your shit's getting burned down. Yeah, you were fighting in your own backyard effectively.

Yes. Well, someone else's backyard that you stole. Yeah, I was going to say the last of the Mohicans kind of dramatizes this if you're interested in seeing it. It also explains that, yeah, it was definitely someone else's backyard before a bunch of dudes with, well, English and Irish and Ulster Protestant last names showed up. Fun fact, when I was in school, I didn't have a friend. It was a guy in one of my classes who was a very, very weird goth guy who was into like the worst bands on earth and dressed like someone out of the Helena music video from

My Chemical Romance. His dad was a native reenactor and he played a native child in the last of the Mohicans movie. And I need to point out here, this man is as white as snow and his last name is Smith. His dad is not native at all. So he's like, um, Oh, what was the, is Elizabeth Warren? The Elizabeth Warren claimed to have Cherokee ancestry and then it was determined this was in fact not the case. And she tried to be like, well, yeah, but you know, it's what everyone told me growing up. And it feels right.

That story is very common in the US. But then when you go back and look, like she absolutely made it a point to point out her Cherokee ancestry when applying for jobs at places like being on the faculty of Harvard. And there was apparently a family cookbook of notionally Native American inspired recipes

called pow wow chow that she had put together. So yeah, needless to say, it's like there's the whole sort of, oh, we, how could we have known we didn't know any better? And then it's like, you go back and find press clippings from like 1984. It's like, well, Harvard recently hired a Native American professor named Elizabeth Warren. It's like, oh, that's what you'd, oh, right. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Outstanding. Just a white person showing up dressed entirely in turquoise, like a blue version of camera. That's either a German tourist or a lesbian from New Mexico who's not native.

So it sounds like we are entering into a phase where we need bodies to fill uniforms, to hold places, to get shot at in file while standing completely in ranks. Kind of. Yeah.. During the American Revolution, this changed somewhat, as the Continental Congress was allowed to pull men from state and local militias into the Continental Army, the Central Army, so to speak, effectively drafting them for federal service.

However, this and other conscription efforts were uneven, to say the least. The government hardly functioned, states and people were suspicious of a strong central government that had the ability to tell anyone what to do at any time and said government's ability to actually carry out any of its orders were pretty limited. It also didn't help matters that there was no real punishment for avoiding malicious service so you could just not show up for work. The first real attempt to create a national draft as we would know one today was during

the War of 1812 when the president and his secretary of war attempted to draft 40,000 men for service against the British. However, still this idea was seen as like an affront to the very virtues of America because a strong central government with the power of armed tyranny was hypothetically what America rebelled against. And an army, a centralized, drafted army was like the biggest red flag possible. However, I should point out again,

this did not count for the Navy, because they were kidnapping motherfuckers left, right, and center for service, which is still technically a draft and everybody was fine with it. Also that attempt during the War of 1812 did not work. Then we get to the first real emergency that could possibly lead to the destruction of the United States as we know it during that time, the US Civil War. When the Civil War kicked off after the Confederates bombed a Union fort on April 12 1861 there were no shortage of willing volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of men flooded recruitment

stations across the Union to sign up for short-term contracts, ranging anywhere from a year to a few months. Which I have to say, as someone whose first enlistment contract was four years, I am jealous. contract was four years, I am jealous. I am a guy who signed a contract for seven years while still in college and hadn't spent a day on active duty yet. So I know all about being a fucking idiot. And yeah, I think a couple of months would have definitely given me a little taste of what active duty life was like. Now granted, I wasn't going to be getting shot with fucking musket balls, but still. There was a guy when I went to OSAT, because I did one station unit training to be a tank

crewman at Fort Knox when I was still there. Also from Michigan, but he was from the Upper Peninsula in the middle of nowhere, so much so he had to go to a different state to be inducted into the military because that office was closer. But he was allowed to sign a 13 month long contract. And like two months into our OSIT he was like man this is fucking stupid I am not realistic I can't believe they let me sign a contract so short. Everybody hated him. But that was apparently the norm for the Civil War era. Nobody had any idea they were about to

march off into what would become the bloodiest war in American history with a smile on their face. By 1863, everything had changed. The war had been going on for years and caused so many casualties for the Union and the Confederacy as well, but who gives a fuck about them, that it must be considered like apocalyptic in the context of American history up until that point. In just the first major battle, the first battle of Bull Run, over 2,000 Union soldiers died, making it the bloodiest day in American military history up until that point, and it would be broken by virtually every other battle afterwards during the war. Tens of thousands of Union men were dead in places like Shiloh, New Orleans, Antietam, and a horrific meat grinder at Fredericksburg, which alone killed or wounded

over 12,000 soldiers. These are casualties that Americans couldn't even comprehend. Yeah, Jesus, like that level of casualty, like at that time is insane. Especially in the context of American military history, which is composed of what you could consider small scale wars and genocides against the Native population and fighting the British. They were never hemorrhaging thousands of people at once. So by 1863 all of that enthusiasm and the lines of volunteers for the war were gone. The Union government was panicking because due to the way contracts worked between May and June of 1863, 300,000 Union soldiers time in uniforms would be up and they correctly assumed that the vast majority

of them would not be realistic. I wonder why. Yeah, you're not really excited about getting ye olde trench fort. Getting your insides turned into outsides by a cannonball being shot by like Jebediah Springfield the Sixth. So I got to say, I want to tell a quick story. We don't have anything comparable in modern history in terms of what the Civil War carnage was like.

The Civil War is even as of now, 2024, the deadliest war in American history. I mean, for the obvious reason that the only people who died in the war, aside from a few things here and there involving Canadians, were American citizens and observers from foreign militaries were American citizens. So, you know, you think about survivability and the casualty rates, etc. The vast amount of disease die off. Disease, gangrene, sepsis, we didn't have sterilization yet, like none of that. So the one thing I would say is that towards the kind of worst phase of the Iraq war, when basically all of the people who had enlisted for three or four years right after 9-11's

enlistments had run out, they did start pulling people from the individual ready reserve. And I know this because I saw formation of IRR callbacks getting marched around Fort Benning and they were the unhappiest looking motherfuckers I have ever seen in my life. And I didn't know what it was, because I was like, why is, these guys look like Joes, but they have long hair

and some of them are out of shape, being marched around by drill sergeants and they look fucking miserable. And one of my friends was a officer candidate school graduate who had been a drill sergeant on Sand Hill at Fort Benning right before. And he was like, Oh yeah, those guys are IRR callbacks. They didn't realize that eight years of fucking four years of IRR on their contract. It applies. They're all getting sent to the CONUS replacement center and they're getting sent to be replacements for units in Iraq.

I would have done anything to get out of that personally, but... Become uncontactable fucking do Into the Wild 2. You can't find me. I'm dying of easily preventable starvation in a bus in Alaska bitches. Now during a time when the war was not going particularly great for the Union, they were about to run smack dab into that massive manpower shortage if they didn't do something and do something quick. This was not helped by a little thing called the Emancipation Proclamation, which took place on January 1st of 1863. While we all know that fighting a war to free the slaves was a right and just thing to do,

it was not overwhelmingly popular in many segments of not only the North, but the entire country, for obvious reasons. Obviously, this is because of racism. Despite slavery not exactly being in widespread use anymore throughout the North at this point, it did not mean that white people saw black people as their equals or really even as people at all. Remember, at the time, even the most high-valued thought of abolitionists were still racist as fuck, but they simply saw the institution of slavery as largely immoral for religious reasons. Many of them still do not see black people as equals. Some did, but they were

a fucking minority. The other segment of the population who objected, and we have talked about this on the show before, were the lower working and immigrant classes of northern cities. And that was because they knew the newly freed population of men and women would be competing with them over the same exact jobs in the same exact fields where life was already not fucking easy. Yep. And this is where we bring in how the Irish became white. Obviously there was this thing that happened called the famine, which caused like hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants to move to the U S. Um, at At the time a lot of them were based in Eastern cities working in manufacturing jobs and like working on docks. So like, think

of like Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Chicago. That was like generally like the first wave of a lot of like quite Irish artisans who were working in stuff like linen mills, et cetera, et cetera. And then as you had more peasants who were pushed out of like, literally you are going to starve to death or you can go toants who were pushed out of like, literally you are going to starve to death or you can go to America, were encouraged to stay in Eastern cities rather than going further West in terms of to pursue stuff like farming because it was very, very different farming in Ireland than farming in, you know, bumfuck Iowa. Yeah.

The exception to this is of course Chicago, because by this point the Erie Canal has been completed and so you could actually travel up the Hudson through Lake Erie and then through the Great Lakes and come to Chicago. Most of the Midwest at that time that wasn't settled by like full on Daniel Boone style people in the woods coming down the Ohio River, which is why Southern Indiana and Northern Kentucky for example are very, very culturally Southern and different than the Great Lakes parts of the Midwest. For this reason, basically, you could get on a boat from Europe, get to New York City, get through, come north up the river, and then go to the Midwest. And it was kind of settled downward.

The same is true to a lesser extent of Minneapolis of people traveling up the Mississippi But Chicago has a very large Irish population and a lot of them either during the this this period you're talking about or later on The the end of the 19th century came that way but other than that Yeah, and it's not and obviously because of the Civil War they're not exactly in a lot of southern cities For obvious reasons there were some Irish in the Confederacy, but not many, and they were supportive for the exact same reason. And that anger would only get worse as the Northern government passed the Enrollment Act of 1863. Knowing that previous attempts at an American Conscription Act failed due to the government's lack of ability to enforce it, the Lincoln administration created the Office of the Provost Marshal under the command of

James Fry who was in for one hell of a job. It's 1863, nobody's ever done this before, and in places like New York City, no one actually knew how many men of military age even live there. He would have to go and find out just in order to enroll them and make the draft possible in the first place. I just want to point out as well as like when the war broke out, quite large numbers of Irish people did volunteer and did fight. No, of course.

But it was like after that point, you know, their contract ran out. They're like, Oh, I just escaped, escaped, you know, eating grass so I don't starve. And now I'm like getting bowel diseases, not unseen by like fucking HP Lovecraft. It's the same reason why Americans, Irish Americans, Americans already here, Italian Americans, you name it. It was like they flooded the recruitment offices to the point that the union could not give them boots at first. German immigrants were a huge part of it, like we talked about during our Hague live show, but after your first enlistment contract comes up, you've managed to not shit yourself to death or

get your head turned into a canoe by a cannonball. You're like, I'm going the fuck home. And like two points as well, is like the communication networks between Irish people in North America and back home was so strong. So like a lot of people would say have family that have moved over and then they would raise the funds to then buy you a ticket on the back of those tickets. It would be like information of like, go here, go to this bar or this doc and ask for this person. They'll help you find board and work. But in how the Irish become white by Noel Ignatyev, a hundred percent Rita. It's like the foundational text of like about like Irish identity abroad. There is a letter from a Irish soldier fighting for the union. And this is from the field. And he wrote, it has turned out to be an abolition war and 99 soldiers out of a hundred that say if abolitionists

are going to have to carry on this war, they will have to get a new army. They say they came out here to fight for the union and not for a pack of, uh, I can't say that word. Yep. Yeah. That sounds about right. I mean, that was a very common sentiment to have. People were not fucking happy about the emancipcipation Proclamation. Mm-hmm. I think that's really useful context, Tom. And I have a really dumb joke thinking about the Irish communication network between the diaspora and back to Ireland and families and so forth. And all I could think of was the Raffy song, but changed slightly to go ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, potato phone. But like it's also as well like, should be said that like the Catholic Church was like

super integral in this communication network and also the Catholic Church. It's the 19th century. Super fucking racist. Yeah. Yeah. Not surprising. Yeah. Brian his office would need the power to actually carry out this mission and they would all be granted the status of federal agent with the broad powers under the law that would force people to have to talk to them and give them information. That doesn't really sound like anything crazy to us in 2024. We have to give out our information to various agents of the government at all times. But in 1863, it was the very definition of tyranny to many people within the United States. So who was Frye

and his office enrolling? This is from this article City Under Siege, quote, the new bill called all male citizens between the ages of 20 and 45 to be enrolled in two classes. The first included single men between the ages of 20 and 45 and married men between the ages of 20 and 35, while the second included married men between the ages of 35 and 35, while the second included married men between the ages of 35 and 45. The second class would only be called up after the first class had been exhausted.

Exhausted in this context means dead. Come on. At the time, immigration to the United States was shockingly easy, and when it came to New York, the center of today's episode, huge segments of the population were either recent immigrants or children of them. Over a quarter of the city was either from Germany or Ireland, and the vast majority of them did not speak English. Becoming a citizen back then was

virtually as simple as showing up in the country and asking if you wanted to be an American. Asterix here, depending on where you were from. But for Germans and asking if you wanted to be an American. Asterix here, depending on where you were from. But for Germans and Irish, you could just rock up to New York City and be like, one America, please. And they'd be like, welcome. People talk a lot about Ellis Island and people being rejected on medical grounds. That was later. So what's happening here, as Joe was was describing effectively, they weren't too hot on Catholics, but they were more or less okay with, if I remember correctly, and correct me if I'm wrong here, people from pretty much the entirety of Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Western

Europe, and to some extent, West Asia, you have like, I, I, this term wouldn't have applied at the time, but kind of like lighter skinned Middle Eastern people like Syrians, but it's not in a large number that comes later. But as Joe is saying, this also kind of puts lie to this argument that you'll hear a lot in the United States about like, oh, well, my ancestors came here the legal way. It's like, yeah, they crossed the ocean and they were American, but that was it. That's all you had to do. And this becomes a thing you see later on in the United States.

Bear in mind that at this point you don't yet have the 13th and 14th amendments. So there isn't the definition of Americans being anyone born in America. It's more vague. And that doesn't necessarily mean shit because quite frankly, later on you'll see those amendments and the definition of American birthright citizenship completely ignored when it comes to, for example, Chinese immigrants on the Pacific coast later on. But at this time, as Joe was saying, yeah, correct. If you survived the boat, you were an American. That was pretty much like they would show up and get their shiny new

American citizenship and nationality, whatever so quickly that they were not even informed of what that entailed. So when the draft hit, they were told, hey, you have to go fight in a war. And they're like, what are you talking about? Like, no, you see, because you accepted citizenship, you are subject to conscription. Nobody had told them that could be part of the deal before they accepted American citizenship. And even if they did, it probably would have been told to them in English, a language they do not speak or understand. they did, it probably would have been told to them in English, a language they do not speak or understand. This will repeat in a kind of refracted way in 1918 in Puerto Rico, or 1917 rather, when

Puerto Rico gets annexed and becomes a US territory and all Puerto Ricans are subject to conscription to go fight in World War I. Surprise! Whoops! Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of kind of Americaology here in terms of like talking about how the Irish became white, but also like how the definition of whiteness

and also like Americanness is mutable and changeable based on circumstances. And let's just say you get to, Uncle Sam's got a really, really open mind as long as you can get fucking drafted and put in the meat grinder. The great American melting pot or else. Now in case you're wondering how thousands of people became citizens without really understanding how anything within that process even worked.

Well, you have the New York City political machine to thank for that. Democrats, the 1800s version of Democrats, I should point out, had built a system to funnel new immigrants through the citizenship process in exchange for votes and party bosses were given bonuses for enrolling as many immigrants as possible and they were given kickbacks. So people were made incredibly wealthy, shying, high-ing immigrants into the Democratic Party and then giving them citizenship in exchange for it. The immigrants were also given, like they were promised cash, jobs, and housing if they

voted loyally, despite the fact that many of them had no idea what any of this meant. And once the party got their paperwork to the right people, many of these people were not even told they were illegally citizens. I would also say it's not historically accurate, but if you want to get like a decent vibes assessment, I will say Gangs of New York is a film that portrays this. Those gangs come up later. It's not historically accurate because no Hollywood film is going to be, but in terms of like boss tweet and his minions being like, you know, give the immigrants free liquor so they vote for Democrats in New York. That

is true. It didn't have a hundred percent happen. Yeah. They were given jobs and housing like, Hey, if you vote loyally, you'll get this shitty tenement flat with like 18 other Irish people, but you'll have a roof over your head. You know, I think it's important to point out as well, like at this time there was like a growing emancipation movement in Ireland, spearheaded mainly by the guy called the great liberator Daniel O'Connell. And like, he was like super opposed to like annexation of Texas and then like loads of like Irish unions in Philadelphia like wrote to him and was like, well we owe our allegiance

to the country that adopted us. So like there, like the tone that's going on in Ireland, where people who are like connected to what's going on in the US is like, ehhhh, this is not good. Yeah, and there were some people who didn't have American citizenship. It had been offered to them and they're like, really, what does that give give me you don't deport anybody anyway Yeah, fuck off, so they were hit with a stipulation either accept American citizenship within 60 days and remember how funny it is you can get American citizenship within 60 days back then and immediately become eligible for the draft or be deported immediately So like star-spangled banner. I guess I'm American now, where's

my paperwork? Am I going to get shot at Gettysburg or am I going to starve on the side of the road at my little hovel plot in Ireland? Black Americans were completely exempt from the draft because, drum roll please, they could be free, but they could not be citizens. America, the emancipation proclamation, all men are credit equal. Not you though. No, no, no. Something that I feel like is very instructive in this regard is because there's a lot of kind of lost cause mythologizing about the Confederacy from Confederate sympathizers

today. And I think something that's really useful is if you go back and you read the constitution, the state constitutions and the declarations of secession from the states that did secede to form the Confederacy, they are very, very, very fucking clear. They have basically plagiarized the Declaration of Independence, but said white men. That's what it was about. They wanted to codify. We've read the Confederate vice president's cornerstone speech on the show before where he says one of the foundations

of the CSA is the domination of white men over black men. Yeah. I mean, we got to understand that like this was the case and there were tons and tons and tons of free black volunteers in the Civil War to fight for the union. And I think it's just very, it's difficult for people to conceive of this, but yeah, like it was genuinely that binary that if you were white, you could be a citizen instantaneously. Once you took one step and, you know, saw the fucking arrival, the port harbor, et cetera, of New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, any of these places, although actually Baltimore was, I think Maryland was a Confederate state. I'm not good at history and my brain is melted.

That being said, like if you were black, it didn't matter. You could have been a fourth, fifth, sixth generation freed slave, you know, notional citizen, free black resident, because you weren't a citizen yet, of the United States. It did not matter. And there were those people in northern states. I should point out Maryland did not secede from the union, though they did love slaves. Yeah. Okay. I was going to say, I couldn't remember if Maryland was a Confederate state or not, but I knew that Maryland did have slavery. It's just Baltimore, if I remember correctly, was just one of those ports that yeah. Uh, and obviously DC didn't really exist. I mean it did, but not really.

I mean, while you had like Irish Stringer bail in Baltimore, it's not like put the word out. We back up. We're back. Yeah, exactly. There were other exemptions for the draft as well, more and says like, put the word out, we back up. We're back up. Pretty much. Yeah, exactly. There were other exemptions for the draft as well, though I don't know if you can consider race a draft exemption that's just discrimination, but there were exemptions such as being the sole supporter of a family, being the supporter of a widow, being the supporter of your parents, a single parent, however many kids you had only counted for

an exemption if the mother was dead. So you could be like, no, I support my entire family alone. But is the mother alive? Yeah, well get the fuck in the uniform. Do a radio play version of Tigerland set in the civil war where like Colin Farrell's characters played by Tom and he's going around finding all the ways he can get his buddy's exemptions to get out of fighting in the civil war. She'll be pointing out as well that like the methods of immigration at this time from

your particularly like among Germans, Italians and Irish people was the father goes first gets enough money. Everyone else comes after. Yeah. So it's like you have a lot of a, and the fucking Irish fascists love this phrase, military aged men. I think every fascist in Europe loves that saying these days. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Irish far right are so stupid because like one, like their beliefs are like so a historical and you had a, Oh, Justin Watts's face. Who's

like the leader of the national party. Who's like five foot two and loves dressing up in Hitler cosplay with like guys who are in like gym, can King hoodies and balaclavas pocket Hitler as we call them littler. Oh, that's good. Justin Barrett. That's his name. Then there was the real kicker that pissed everyone off. You could pay your way out of conscription. For the price of 300 whole US dollars, you could be exempted from the draft. Now, almost immediately, everyone was furious. On the government side of things, people saw the act as a gross overstep of government power and infringement of their individual and civil freedoms. On the individual level, they saw it as a giant boot coming down on their heads and civil freedoms. On the individual level, they saw it as a giant boot

coming down on their heads and crushing them. Men would have to leave their jobs with no government promise. They'd be waiting for them for whenever their stint in the army was done. And in exchange for a soldier's paycheck, that was less than they were making at their job. Then the people they already hated,

i.e. the rich and black people, could sit out the war. Also, their previous fears of freed slaves coming in and stealing their jobs was made worse by the fact that the government was now taking their jobs away from them, forcing them in uniform and not conscripting freedmen. I would say this is how you create 1860s Storm front, but they didn't have a concept of meteorology yet. Yeah, I mean, like I'm not saying I agree with them, obviously. I'm saying, and also their fears were not realized because as discriminatory and bigoted

as these conscription men were, the people who employed them were even more so and they were not going to employ black people. So like the whole idea is like stupid on its face, but no one ever accused racists of being rational. This is not the fault of freed slaves, but outside of the obvious racism at play, the government was obviously at fault for not understanding how their own population thought or more likely they didn't care. And these same people could never afford to buy out their conscription obligation for $300 because the average New York City laborer at the time made $6 per week. Of course, the government framed this as well. The rich can stay home and keep the wartime economy running with all their big business

brains. You see, like, you know, they're so smart, they have to stay at home. The draft was so unpopular, even the governor of New York, Horatio Seymour, again, we're at the peak of American names here, refused to implement the draft. He believed that the quota put on New York for conscripts is far too high, given the fact that his state had already sent so many volunteers. Seymour fell into what was called the Copperheads, also known as Peace Democrats. They wanted an end to the war with a peace agreement with the Confederacy, and depending on which Copperhead you talk to,

recognition of their sovereignty as an independent nation. They got this nickname Copperhead as an insult because in case people don't know, a Copperhead is a venomous snake. Yep. One of the most dangerous snakes in North America, if I'm not mistaken. And they're water snakes too. So like if you're out around stuff,

doing work in the water, they just love to come and bite you and fuck your whole day up and or kill you. I also was laughing about name alert because somebody who was involved at the time, who was at one point a New York state Democrat was a guy named Fernando Wood and he was not in any way Spanish. His mom just read a book about, called The Three Spaniards and was like, that's a cool name. So yes. I mean, that's what people do now. It's, it said their kids being named Fernando and,

and you're from like Utah or whatever. Your mom named you Khaleesi cause she watched HBO for a couple of years, a few years back. Ah. You know, side note about this, there was a whole generation of French kids named Kevin because their moms really liked Kevin Costner in the early 90s,

and it's not a name that really exists in the French language. So like, there's a stereotype, Kevin is like the French Kyle in terms of sort of like, there's a stereotype, but instead of it being like, you punch walls and drink Monster, I can't really explain what it is, but yes, Kevin has a given name as a stereotype because yeah, it was

a kind of a fad name at the time. That's fucking hilarious. Depending on which copperhead you talk to, they span the political spectrum of ideas when it came to dealing with the Confederates. Some of them were fine with the war, but were terrified of the growing power of the Union government, which you know what, kind of fair. Lincoln was wildly overstepping presidential authority, which we all are thankful for now, but back then was probably terrifying. They put newspaper editors in prison for sedition like Lincoln was really not fucking around and when you look at the situation In America, it makes sense

But I think in the modern context of things like you can get away with a lot more now in terms of political Dissent that you could back then yeah I mean we're existing in a time now where like some of our families will Nate's family specifically live through an era We're like, you where FDR was president for life until he died with massive amounts of power. And now we live through the Patriot Act and government spying on our phones and shit. Government overreach as an American now is just the normal everyday part of your life where the 1800s is like the president was a guy you barely even cared about because

he had no power at all and now Lincoln is effectively a tyrant which again in this situation was necessary it was a necessary evil and I'm glad Lincoln did it because fuck the Confederacy but four people in the north at the time they were kind of afraid that Lincoln would become president for life or some serious form of dictator. Other people were against the waste of the war. They were worried that the Union could fucking lose. So like there was a lot of copperheads that believed in different things when it came to the Confederacy. But despite all these complaints, valid or otherwise, the draft went ahead. The provost marshal in charge of carrying out the draft

in Manhattan was a guy named Colonel Robert Nugent, who was a lot of big Irish union gangs, pretty much, some would say gangs of New York, who not only attacked Dutch workers, German workers, also attacked each other. Yeah, of course. They always will in the end. Along different community lines, so there was a case where 700 workers from Longford attacked 300 workers from Cork. Nugent knew how deeply unpopular the draft was going to be, so he held the first draft away from the city's most populated wards, and he decided to pick people's names at random from a large spinning drum, like

a lottery, which is why the draft in the American mind to this day is still known as the draft lottery. Because this system still largely remains in place, mostly unchanged, and is used every time the US would dip its toes in a conscription with a, you know, a little bit of different flavors here and there. People nicknamed the drum, the wheel of misfortune, which is kind of great. Yeah, that's that kind of whips. I was also laughing at Robert Nugent being the guy involved in and then thinking about no one with the last name Nugent will ever have any controversy about military conscription in America ever again.

Nugent's first draft lottery went out without any problems. However, that would soon change. Nugent held his first draft on the weekend, giving everyone a taste of what it would look like. And more importantly, they had a lot of time to watch the draft lottery and then have time off of work afterwards to get good and drunk while plotting what to do during the next lottery which came on Monday, July 13th, 1863. I really hope he was doing like the bingo announcer voice when he was pulling out. So I was like, two fat ladies, 88, you're going to die.

I'm just imagining one of the conscript, the would be conscripts being like, actually, I'm too ill to be conscripted because I was doing my normal menial labor job cleaning up trash and got scratched by a stray cat and I'm now too ill. I've got cat scratch fever. Fucking pedophile. He's such a piece of shit. It's not even funny. Fucking Ted Nugent. Rest. I cannot wait for the I'm saying it. I'm writing it down in the book. Ted Nug. Fucking Ted Nugent. Rest, I cannot wait for the, I'm saying it. I'm writing it down in the book. Ted Nugent.

Ted Nugent. It's going in the death note. Like, it's going in the lines in my donkey's death note. There is so many, like, points of critique you could level at, like, Ted Nugent. Like, he's been insane for decades. Yeah. He's never been sane. At 4am that morning,

men were already streaming through the streets of New York City, and in the most American moments of the greater unifying theory of fuck that guy energy that's ever happened, the Germans, the Italians, and the Irish, all of who who hated one another, came together to know that the draft was about to fuck them all over. So all I gotta say is I wish Ted Nugent was on that bus and not the fucking Allman Brothers.

But you can never escape him, you know? You can never escape Ted Nugent. It's almost like he's got you in a stranglehold. Boo! But his kid rocked just the modern day. Yeah, yeah, he's kind of like the watered down backwash Ted Nugent you know you know because of the both of them existing I believe Michigan was a mistake yeah yeah I've said this before but Kid Rock is the perfect encapsulation of Westland Michigan where he's from everybody in Michigan calls it wasteland for a reason Kid Rock is your Wario Joe he is and you

know what? Unfortunately, he'll probably outlive me somehow. Yeah. Then, with all of these immigrant groups that hate one another coming together, the non-immigrant working class came out to join them from trades and factory jobs and in numbers that would like force them to shut the shops down for the day. By 10 a.m., a crowd gathered that a journalist numbered close to 10,000 people and they gathered in front of the 9th district provost marshal's office on 47th

street and 3rd avenue. Now first everything was peaceful. Everybody gathered around to listen to speeches and protests and nothing seemed to be going sideways. Then a group of people you probably would expect showed up and turned this all violent. And I'll give both of you one guess on who it was. You probably are not going to get it. Okay. So we're talking about Midtown East before it was Midtown East, 47th and 3rd. A group shows up to fuck with some people, causes problems.

I should point out that this group showing up supports the protest, supports the protests. I'm going to, I'm going to say it's the NYPD. They come up later, but not in this situation. Okay. Oh, can I change my answer really fast? 53rd and third is a song about being a gay hustler. It's a song by the Ramones. So I'm gonna guess that it's a, it's an extremely anti-conscription gang of, I don't know, 19th century rent boys. And they're like, if you take away all of our clients, AKA all of the single and also married,

but in the closet men in the city, then we'll be out of a job. The local dick sucking union has rallied to the cause. This whole situation is just about wage protectionism. Tom what do you got? Ohhhh okay so I'm trying to think who's the least likely people to show up. Awwww. I'm gonna guess Russians?

Nope. NYPD bells in five. When they got orders for get to for conscription, they all just all moved to Canada. Probably judging from recent history, protests aren't really the thing. They all just moved to Georgia. Okay. Who was it? The firefighters. I was going to guess the fire. Yeah, that was going to be my next guess. See as a moment that almost made me proud to have once been a firefighter

They all showed up and properly turned to a group of violent psychopaths But it's not for any good reason what you could say is they had the mantra that you could in fact look for answers But that ain't fun and instead you need to get in the pit and try and love someone Wait, did we did we shift from Ted Nugent to Kid Rock? We sure as hell did. God damn it. So I love that they are like international cadre of firefighters are all employing the techniques of like Edo and Meiji restoration firefighters in Japan, who like were essentially drunken mobs that would show up and chop your house

down if it was on fire. They would do that. But the reason why that they were suddenly against the draft is because before this firefighters had always gotten exemption from state militia service. But because the new bill was federal, that protection was gone. I do feel as though that's kind of a fucking dumb move to be like, what if we draft all of our firefighters? Yeah. We have this enormous city built of wood and we haven't invented electric

cooking. So but the police were exempt because of course they were. So engine company number 33 under the command of Peter Masterson showed up on scene immediately get to throw rocks the provost marshal's office and began cheering down with the rich Richmond. The draft officials got the hell out of there just in time for the firefighters to, of course, set the office on fire. Which probably spread throughout the surrounding buildings because obviously no one was going to put the fucking fire out since the firefighters were the ones who started the thing. Firefighter Waluigi showing up who's setting fires. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, I love that Nate is like lying on the couch like a loose French salon painting. I'm going to draw him like one of my French Swiss women. I have nowhere else to sit where you wouldn't here. Throughout the window. Hey, listen, like I said on the discord recently, it was a bring it back to Metal Gear. And I said, Hideo Kojima writes scripts the way bisexuals sit on chairs.

And like everyone was like, I can't explain it, but I know that's true. I'm just putting this in another vault where I just silently nod my head and pretend I know what the fuck you're talking about. Now, soon, draft protesters began to run inside the office and begin to loot it, while surrounding buildings were still set on fire. And that is where the city of New York realized, we have a bit of a problem. Now with the protests, they kind of assumed that was going to happen, but rather, they had not prepared any kind of response to them, largely because they couldn't. Now we all know today the NYPD is a

small army of knuckle-dragging violent psychopaths but back then, then known as the Metropolitan Police, was you know not a paramilitary death squad like we know them today. Anything that grew out of control was not supposed to be handled by the Metropolitan Police, but rather the state militia. They would call the state militia, you know, like today you'd call the National Guard for giant protests. However, the entire 20,000 man state militia had been called away for a little thing called the Battle of Gettysburg. So they were not in New York. Now the only thing the city had to respond to the protest heard firefighter fueled riot was a 500 strong detachment

known as the invalid core. Oh no. So effectively it all comes full circle. The four F's, the Ted's Nugent of the Civil War. They have to defend the city with bitching guitar chords. You know? I hate the idea of the Ted's Nugent. What is enough? What is too many? Just fucking an entire battalion deployed of people's large nephews that you got a job

in the police because they like, if you send them to work in a factory, they'd cut off their own thumbs. So the invalid corps was a group of recovering wounded men or others not fit for frontline duty under the command of Major General John Woll, who I need to point out here was too old to serve himself. He was a veteran of the War of 1812 and was like 80 fucking years old at the time, which made him not only the oldest general on either side of the war, but one of the oldest men in the country. Also like that's not exactly an attaboy job to be like, hey, you're a major general, we're putting you in charge of a battalion minus.

We definitely think you're really competent, definitely think you can handle this. But then again, they probably didn't anticipate this, did they? The reason why they stuck him there was because he was a very qualified and good general. So in the beginning of the Civil War, there's only four generals in the entire Union Army. He was by far the best, other than say like, you know, Winfield Scott. The only problem he had was he was just too old. He was like Joe Biden. No, because he was competent. And as far as I'm aware,

General Wold never supported any genocide. Also being 85 in 1863 is like being 250 years old now. Yeah. So you'd have to have like three Joe Biden's combined. Three Joe Biden's in a Union Army trench coat. He's showing up like the end in Metal Gear Solid 3. If you just wait long enough, he'll die. Getting your standing orders from this Methuselah looking ass general, he's the oldest man on the planet. There was also this thing, in the beginning stages of the war, he was considered one of the best

generals in the Union, because, because this is true unlike Winfield Scott He could still physically climb onto a horse despite the fact he's old as shit But people kind of noticed he was slipping So he was given this command because his superiors thought he needed a less demanding assignment Less he literally die in the saddle though I should point out general wool demanded he be allowed to die in the saddle and it was not allowed. So now he was facing down thousands of riders with 500 soldiers put there because they couldn't fight and the what I'll just call the Metropolitan Police the NYPD for simplicity sake and

the NYPD which were even more corrupt and incompetent than they are now. His soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Abel Reed were immediately overwhelmed when they arrived on scene. They eventually opened fire like dumbasses and the rioters began to promptly beat several soldiers to death. The Commissioner of the NYPD, and I promise you neither of you are going to be surprised by the name I'm about to speak, John Kennedy, which surprised the son of Irish immigrants, was on scene with his cops and despite him being out of uniform, everyone knew who he was. He was nearly beaten to death along with his men, who were chased

away with many of them being fucking stabbed. Kennedy was only saved after one man in the crowd recognized him, decided he didn't want to be the guy to kill the commissioner of the NYPD, stop comments there before we get in trouble, and chucked his body into a wagon to make a quick getaway. Thomas Acton was in charge as acting commander of the NYPD with Kennedy punched full of speed holes and sidelined, Acton was by all accounts insane. He fits in more with the NYPD today, let's say. He was a hardline unionist and a huge fan of Lincoln, which isn't a bad thing, but

he was also known for prizing violence as a problem-solving tool, making him the perfect New York City cop. So like he was using Blodinum as pre-workout, he definitely had like a fucking tap-out banner on the back of his wagon. Whatever the 18th century version of an affliction tattoo, he's got that. They could have taken out all of these cops if they just like unleashed a plume of ye old fentanyl. It's like pocket sand.

Taking a hot coal and dumping liquid opium onto it. Kennedy, I mean fuck him he's a cop, but people said that he was less likely to resort to violence. He would try to get to know people and talk them down before ordering his cops to beat their skulls in with batons? Well, Acton was the opposite of that. He believed talking to people was some wuss-ass shit, and anybody who challenged the cops

should be dealt with via being beaten to death or shot. And as things kept getting more and more spicy, Nugent, not Ted, ordered six of the draft offices closed and transferred all of their records to Governor's Island for safekeeping so they didn't get burned. To make matters worse, none of the different police precincts could actually talk to one another as their standard procedure was to telegraph headquarters, at which point headquarters would then pass on to each precinct, which became impossible when riders began tearing up telegraph wires.

Yeah, they couldn't just like, you know, share pictures of like dead bodies on WhatsApp with each other, so it was like, it was much harder to communicate back then. Yeah, exactly. Then the mayor of the city pointed out that he needed help and demanded the militia be sent in. Mayor George Updike screamed at the militia commander Major General Charles Stanford to do something. Stanford then pointed out, I don't take orders from the mayor of New York City, but rather the governor of New York. There was also the small detail that he had no fucking soldiers in New York anyway. When that failed, Updike turned to General Wolfe for help, who

completely lost it from either old age or panic and became so confused that people just wrote him off. That left the federal commander of the naval forts in New York Harbor, Brigadier General Harvey Brown, in command by default. He was ordered to send his soldiers in but correctly came to the conclusion that that's not my job and also sending armed soldiers into that mess would only make things worse. So he decided that he would only do it if he was given complete control over all federal troops in New York, which was Wool's job. Pissed, Wool had, I guess you'd call it a moment of clarity, and fired him for effectively

trying to coup him, only to bring him back because Uptight pointed out that, this is not a great time to be firing people, is it? Nope. It was agreed that Stanford should be in charge of the city's response since he was the militia commander and the federal should fall under him. Brown just ignored him because he didn't see him as a real officer because he was in the militia and not the federal military. However all of this is pointless anyway, because they were arguing over commanding

of troops when there were no troops to go around. So they just settled on the idea that, look, let's just guard the city's armories, so the rioting mob didn't suddenly raid one of them and become very well armed. Let's just do that. After all of this, the riot was continuing to spread and become, let's say, less directed. What started as a riot against the draft turned to a confused mass of undirected violence as people joined in to burn, fight, and loot. At one point, a group of riders showed up to a bar to demand drinks for free, and they were turned down, so they burnt the bar down.

They attacked police stations, which fine, and anything that surrounded them, less fine, as they went. The crowd also began to get better armed. They had stolen pistols and knives, but they'd also began ripping up rail lines and fashioned them into clubs and spears. We had the New York City Phalanx. It's just a guy wielding like a railway sleeper, like fucking guts from Berserk. I was just thinking, cause I had to look it up, Governor's Island still does not have a road or tunnel

or any kind of connection. It's all only by ferry. So I imagine the guys who's like the really most lucked out fucking poke detail of guarding the draft records on the Island that only can be reached by boat and just watching like comical Captain Planet villain shit happening in New York City across the water. Tom, you said, I can't wait for a part about the Irish being the villains. Well, Irish Catholic writers quickly began to target Protestant charities,

such as burning down the Magdalen Asylum and Five Points mission. So others took time to settle petty grievances between one another. Oh, I could never imagine Irish people doing that. At one point the Irish raided an armory and then set it on fire, trapping ten of their own riders inside as it burned to the ground. Oh, but like this is, this is my thing that I feel like when Irish people move away from Ireland, it's like our mana pool drains and it's like, you need to return home periodically

to replenish it or else you turn into like Brendan O'Neill or like these people is like the further down the generational line, it's like a spiritual Habsburg is just become spiritually and mentally deformed. And then you, and then you just become president. Yeah. Yeah. You just become part of the Kennedy family and a worm dies in your brain. The writers then entered what is called newspaper Row. Now this is a street that headquartered many of the largest newspapers of the day, including the New York Times and stuff like that. The staff of the New York Times watched as the mob attacked the offices of the New York Tribune, a well-known pro-Lincoln progressive and abolitionist newspaper. It was nearly

burnt to the ground but was stopped at the last second after rioters were chased off by a group of cops. The New York Times decided, that shit is not going to happen to us. The owner of the New York Times had somehow procured three Gatling guns and countless rifles. Now this is impressive because, and this is true, there were fewer than 12 Gatling guns in the entire United States at the time and he managed to buy three of them and put them in his office. I'm just imagining like 19th century Marine Dowd getting pulled off the columnist desk and told like, okay, you're going to set up for some emphalating fire when you see a column

of micks coming down the road. So when the mob turned toward the times, they were confronted with a fortified blockhouse bristling with rifles and I need to repeat here, three fucking gatling guns, one of which was on the roof and could easily annihilate everything walking down the street. The mob quickly backed down and continued their rampage in different directions. This kind of feels like when the video game is supposed to be free choice, but it's very obvious you're supposed to do a different mission first. And you just walk up upon this and you're like, oh, okay, you're supposed to turn around. The Irish are like, we need to grind more to have a higher level to fight the New York Times. Yeah, it's fucking 19th century Saints Row that they have yet to secure the Irish version of Knights of the Round. They can't do it yet

So you're saying the New York Times has possession of emerald weapon? The Irish are definitely coveting that one I Should point out here that to this day Nobody's entirely sure how the Times managed to have so many guns in the office so many years, especially Gatling guns, so many years before the army would even buy them. It's also been argued that they only had one Gatling gun, which I would argue is still one more Gatling gun than you would expect the New York Times to own at any point of

time. I mean, I'm trying to think of something that's that, you know, sort of most casualty producing weapon status nowadays and that rare in terms of armaments. And it's like the best thing I'm coming up with when I think about it is like, what if the New York times had an AC 130 that just the government DARPA has created 12 models of a nuclear armed walking battle tank called Metal Gear and the New York Times happens to have three of them for some reason. That's our news gunship. Don't worry about it. We've weaponized Metal Gear against the Irish. Oliver Cromwell is somewhere in hell wishing that was him. From there, the mob

went towards Mayor Updike's home, even though he had been out of there as soon as shit went sideways. Now under the command of Acton, the NYPD would go on the attack, and he ordered Inspector Daniel C. Carpenter to command around 100 cops to go there and stop the writers from destroying the mayor's house. Carpenter ordered, quote, I'll go, I'll win this fight or Daniel Carpenter will never come back alive. Which is very funny to me that he was referring to himself in the third person, but also a big NYPD move.

Yeah. I was gonna say, this is also a little bit of Hideo Kojima dialogue. Let's be real. His real name is like instead of action, his name is just action hard man. Yeah. Yeah. Daniel Carpenter is like, all right, listen for this next phase, unplug the controller from port one and plug it into port two and start mashing the X button as quickly as possible. You'll never get out alive. You just have to fight cop cop man. And he shows up and there's like an hour and a half cut scene before any game play. Acton also told him that no arrests were to be made, meaning he had greenlighted a literal NYPD death squad. The cops charged in and within seconds Carpenter had beaten one man to death personally.

The cops quickly surrounded the rioters, which is now made up of not only men, but also women and even some children, and began beating them to a bloody mess, killing several and forcing the rest to flee. Carpenter turning away hundreds of riders, combined with an emergency order to postpone the draft, sent many of the most politically and practically driven riders home. They were pissed because of the draft. They postponed the draft. Fuck it, we won. Also, the cops are now murdering people. This is getting too spicy for us. Let's go home. Right? However, the more, let's say, chaotically aligned writers weren't there for those reasons.

So they didn't. Many of the writers who had just been beating cops and soldiers to death allied with them in order to stop the chaotic writers, in order to possibly also, you know, stop the city from burning down, including the same firefighters who had just started literally all of this in the first place. The same workers who had closed their shops down to go out and protest were returning to their workplaces armed and aiming to protect them from being burned down and losing their jobs.

So the New York City firefighters of the 1860s were basically the closest equivalent America has to Ronin Wondering firefighters with just a length of hose tied around their waist looking to find a new feudal fire commissioner lord wielding two axes like a fucking naga kiba Many of the men who continued riding were infamous gangs that you may have seen in gangs of New York, like the Pug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, and others. While others were nativists in their anger, and they were, let's say, just wanting to target anybody of color.

There were racist newspapers like The World who were constantly pumping out inflammatory front pages to give them and make things worse. They were also telling them to turn their anger towards business owners who were crushing them, underpaying them and firing them and saying, for instance, The World newspaper specifically was saying, they're all going to hire black laborers to replace you. The implication is clear. You can't replace us if we kill them. Once again, something that it'll never happen again and is not happening right now in Ireland

on telegram and in the Irish independent. Yeah. I would also say that, uh, I don't know if you're familiar with Richard Wright, the black American author, but in his memoir black boy, he mentions like one of his first jobs as a kid was selling newspapers or delivering newspapers and it wasn't until someone pulled him aside and was like, do you realize you're working for the Klan approved racism newspaper? That he kind of had a change of heart about. Because this stuff absolutely continued on well into the 20th century. Oh yeah. I mean it still does. It's called everything Rupert Murdoch has ever touched. But it was

full on A Wyatt Mann style shit back then. It's insane as well because like 18 years like before this like Frederick Douglass was like touring around Ireland giving speeches about like the importance of emancipation and like Irish people almost universally were like, this is a good thing. Once again, the manna pool was depleted. They were there for too long. The mob turned on black and abolitionist owned institutions and businesses. One of them was the Colored Orphan Asylum, which is what it was called back then, home to over 200 kids. It was attacked and set on fire and the children were just barely able to escape before being

burned alive. On the Lower East Side, riders looted and burned these places called Homes for Black Sailors, which were operated by William Powell and alive. On the Lower East Side, riders looted and burned these places called homes for black sailors, which were operated by William Powell and Albro Lyons, which acted as a stop and kind of like a jobs program along the Underground Railroad. The mob went for prominent black individuals and businesses and activists that were known to them. Many of these people were able to run before the mobs closed in, but they didn't stop the anger from just being turned on any black person they happened to see, including one man, William Jones, who was just out grocery shopping.

They lynched him and burned his corpse in the street. White dock workers who objected to working with black men who their bosses had hired went on a rampage, burning anything that cared to black people in their area. They also stripped, tarred, and feathered anyone who dared employ black laborers. One black man managed to defend himself, shooting an attacker dead only to be overwhelmed by pure numbers, and lynched in the streets a short time later. As the first day of the riots ended, the government was still in a total loss as to what to do to control them. Half demanded an order of martial law, while others argued that they would just make things worse. But then they got worse anyway. Thousands of rioters attacked the Union's steamworks, which is producing

thousands of guns for the Union war effort. This led the NYPD to form battle lines in front of it trying to stop the NYPD to form battle lines in front of it trying to stop the rampaging hate crime mob overtaking the city and you know becoming a better armed death squad than they already were. Over 200 cops fought hundreds if not thousands of rioters in bloody savage hand-to-hand combat over the Steamworks while non-riding workers labored to empty the building of any and all weapons to secure them because the cops knew they were not going to be able to hold the building of any and all weapons to secure them because the cops knew they were not gonna be able to hold the building for long. Eventually the police withdrew under a hail of rocks and bricks as the riots finally breached the building and took it over and found it empty. So they set on fire. Some elements of the New York militia finally did make it to the scene.

About 150 soldiers armed with rifles and cannons under the command of Colonel H.T. O'Brien took up positions. O'Brien first ordered his cannons to fire blanks at the riders to scare them, but that didn't work. So he ordered his gunners to fire a warning shot, a live cannon round over their head to show them that they meant business. Remember they're in New York City. You can't just fire a cannon shot over someone's head so when they did they just blew up several buildings just Fired a warning shot directly to some motherfuckers front like living room Yeah, they killed seven people who were inside their own apartments O'Brien did succeed in breaking up that particular attack, but later that evening when he went

home he was recognized and beaten to death by women over the course of hours. His corpse was described as quote, terribly mangled, his body almost naked and covered with gore. Eww. Cause he fired a warning shot with cannons into a city. I feel like I would have just fired a warning shot into the crowd. They're like, fuck it, there's more. Yeah, at least then you're hitting the right people I guess not just like shelling someone's fucking bathroom for the funsies

I mean, I feel like when you're at the point when they're like, hey We're really mad and we're gonna do a race riot and kill every single person who's not white or anyone who supports emancipation Or even just employing black people and then they're also attacking the thing that produces armaments for the war You're kind of at the point where like hey like, hey guys, I'm going to go full Kazakhstan on your ass. Like that's just the way that it's going to happen. Get to give you the whiff of the grape shot. You know, I read about this in a book. Yeah, they could have absolutely achieved a unionist Nirvana by literally being up to their knees in Fenian blood.

Now the chaos of the city needs to be reinforced here for a minute. The commander of the police, Acton, isn't speaking to anyone or taking directions from the civilian or military leadership as those cops roved around and killed protesters. The military lacks men and resources to do anything of note and the government can't agree on asking for federal help because they're worried it'd make things worse. And their military commander is mostly drooling on himself and unable to get out of bed at this point. While maraudering groups of violent gangs, right wing political activists, and racist death squads, I understand those are all the same thing, stalked the city killing, looting, and burning. Neighborhoods were

being reinforced with barricades by various different factions within them from mobs to gangs to nationalists to different ethnicities. Didn't matter. Even political parties, as different groups of Republicans and Democrats shut themselves off and began attacking one another. Finally, on Thursday, the mayor appealed to the Secretary of War, Edward Stanton, to send federal soldiers to the city as they were clearly in a state of insurrection. Thousands of federal and state troops, fresh from the killing fields of Gettysburg,

were forced to march all the way back to New York City, and they began to arrive there that night and fanned out across the area, fortifying businesses, streets, and federal buildings. However, rioters still launched attacks on black-affiliated businesses and any black people they found outside.

And multiple occasions this turned into full pitched battles with the Union military as soldiers ran to defend the city's black population. A population they also fucking hated, it should be pointed out. But orders are orders, I guess. I feel like, yeah, you're really kind of like pushing your luck as a racist shithead if you're like, you know what, it's day two into day three of this. I'm going to go and pick a fight with the guys who just did pick its charge. Right. Yeah. Like these guys, you know what?

I could probably take them. They're probably tired, you know? They couldn't possibly just be turned into unfeeling murdering automatons at this point. What they didn't realize was that Abraham Lincoln had done the Gettysburg Address and had fired off his fucking limit break. I realized that chronologically that doesn't make sense, but the idea of that being Abraham Lincoln's limit break is just too good for me. I'm sorry. I want to see like a Final Fantasy seven style battle of Lincoln versus Jefferson Davis and

the final battle when you get night to the round no matter what. He starts playing the super spooky music when you fight the head of the rioters. Confederate one-winged angel? Yeah his limit break is fucking called bog ape. Confederate one-winged angel is just played on fiddles and jugs. Oh god this is entertaining. Gulley does now the rioting and pitched battles against the Union military only

ended when the Union soldiers again fresh from Gettysburg decided to begin blowing them up with fucking howitzers. Look, I mean, at a certain point, like, you know, small arms aren't working. They're going to use the bigger stuff. You Look, I mean, at a certain point, like, you know, if small arms aren't working, they're gonna use the bigger stuff. You know what I mean? Like, they do have them. And you get to the point where it's like, look, y'all don't wanna calm down.

They are gonna bring out the, you know, the make the ground explode cannon. You know, you're lucky they don't have the naval guns. But I mean, it's just like, at a certain point, like, what do you think's gonna happen? But I mean, you know, 19th century liquor certain point, like, what do you think's going to happen? But, I mean, you know, 19th century liquor was probably had like full on DMT level tripping because of how badly it was made.

So you know. Yeah. They're like, man, I don't know what's up with these Union soldiers. They look like fucking lizards. Hey, if you want to learn more about that, listen to the Civil War of Drunks episode that's either come out right before this or right afterwards. By Friday morning the riots were all over because the Union army had effectively occupied the city. The draft would begin again within a few weeks and New York was under military occupation or to stop a second anti-draft riot turned white supremacist massacre from

unfolding. To this day nobody's entirely sure how many people died during the riots, but it's thought to be as high as 1,200 people. Though the real damage was felt in the New York City black community. Around a quarter lost their homes. 20% of the community simply left. After the war, when many returned to their old neighborhoods, including, you know, black organizations like the Homes for Orphans, they were refused and had to move. And they moved into what would be Harlem today. Also a lot of people are not aware of this, but the process of creating Central Park on the island of Manhattan involved more or less neighborhood destruction of lots of the black

community that has existed on the island of Manhattan. Now, great, Manhattan was very different back then than it is today. It was very, very rural. New York City's got a horrible history with this stuff that gets swept under the carpet quite a bit. Now, despite promises of harsh punishments, nobody was ever really held accountable for the mass violence. A few people got prison terms, but they did less than six months. And then to make matters worse, the remembrance of the event centered around the opposition to the draft rather than the mass outpouring of violent racism wearing the trappings of a draft riot.

The end. I wanna tell you something just because some people, they won't make it through the 1200 odd pages that you have to read to get to in The Power Broker, which is a very, very, very good book by a guy named Robert Caro about a guy named Robert Moses, who is sort of like the reason New York City in the modern day is the way that it is.

And I wanna give you a little- The king of the red line, yeah. The king of the red line, the guy who cut the Bronx in half, the guy who wanted to be like more highways for everyone also make sure that the bridges and overpasses and tunnels to get to Jones Beach can't accommodate buses so that no one can get there on public transit. Horrible, horrible human being. However, there's a detail that Moses was finally pressured to build a city park in Harlem after spending basically when he was park commissioner, building

nothing in communities that were served by, you know, the communities where non-white people live or where black people lived. And when he finally caved to pressure and built the park, he had his famous decorative flourishes and touches on some of like the fence decorations and grills and things like that. And they were nothing but motifs of monkeys. Jesus Christ.

Yes, I'm dead fucking serious. Like you have to understand that it doesn't surprise me at all that New York City, in terms of how this event would be remembered in the contemporary period would center on that as opposed to The the kind of like just inherent racism there and it sucks. It really fucking sucks I mean, I'm not trying to make a joke out of it. It's just York New York's terrible I mean, it's the only place that feels like home in America for me

But I'm not gonna pretend it's not a racist and insanely segregated city even to this day fellas We do a thing on this show called questions from the Legion If you'd like to ask us a question Legion support the show on patreon at any level You can ask us a question in our patreon DMS You can enter into the discord community Which you'll also have access to if you support the show and you can ask us there We have a whole channel for it and we will answer it on air. Today's question is pretty simple. Tell me a funny travel story.

Ooh, I have one. This happened to me this year. I, as everybody is aware that listens to the show, I spent some time back on the caucuses after I moved to the Netherlands for paperwork reasons. And I ended up in Georgia, in the Caucasus, not Atlanta or whatever. And I decided to go snowboarding, but I don't have a snowboard. I have everything other than a snowboard. Like I have a helmet, I have winter jackets,

so I had to rent one. I do not speak Georgian. And outside of Tbilisi, people who speak English is a very low in number. I don't speak Russian, but you also really don't wanna speak Russian in Georgia. They're not a huge fan of that anymore. And not that many people in Georgia speak Armenian, So I'm kind of fucked, right? So

I go into a place to rent a snowboard and I find a guy and I asked him like, English? He says, yes. I'm like, outstanding to rent the snowboard. And then quickly he's trying to make sure I get a snowboard that fits me because I'm quite large. You know, I'm a tall lanky guy. Georgians really aren't. So it's hard to find a snowboard that fits me. And I realized the only thing he knows how to say in English is, yeah bro, let's go. I was like, oh, I need a bigger snowboard. Yeah, bro, let's go. And he goes into the back room, gets me another snowboard, gives it to me. It says, yeah, bro, let's go. And I put it on, it fits. And he looks at me with a blank. He obviously doesn't know what it means, what I said. So I just give him a thumbs up. He smacks me on the shoulder, yeah, bro, let's go. As the only thing he knew how

to say, which is a very interesting thing to learn in English and nothing else. But I applaud you strange Georgian man whose name I forget. If we had a recording of this encounter, it would be like getting it translated. It would be like actually watching Akira with correct subtitles. As if you grew up with the shitty dub and you can be the guy going like saying that to you. And then mainly going in the back and be like, Hey, do we have that novelty oversized snowboard that we built for the gandahar giant as a joke? Yeah. Like, Oh, I remember years ago I was in Romania and I was in the north in a kind of like, like mid-sized town, like not overly big. And I went for a North in a kind of like, like mid sized town, like not overly big.

And I went for a hike in the hills, like nearby. And it was like, Oh, it was grand. Really nice. Looked at some castles, got home. And then the next day, like my legs were just covered in these massive blisters. And both my calves had just swollen up so much to the point of like, they were like, essentially like egg yolks on my leg. Oh, it's disgusting. And I was like, what the fuck? I was in so much pain and then like had to go to a Romanian emergency room in the middle of a thunderstorm and like

try to explain to them like what had happened and like got put through triage and then just like lying on this table while they rub like iodine on my legs and then like fucking inject me with them antihistamines and they were just like, you'll be fine. I like could not walk for like two days to this day. I've no idea what it was that I brushed off my legs, but it turns out I am so fucking allergic to it. You had surprise surprise leg eggs. Yeah. When that happens.

I'm trying to think of something like, uh, like maybe Romania is actually the source of the potato blight. Actually, I have another funny one as well. I was in Amsterdam years ago and, uh, was, uh, sitting outside this gay bar and I was having a beer and it was just like talking to the bouncer and he was asked asking like, Oh, where am I from? And I was like, Oh, I'm from Ireland. And his just face was just so blank. And I was like Ireland, you know, like shamrocks, leprechauns. And it was like 20, 21 maybe. And I was like, Oh, you know, like Conor McGregor

at the MMA fighter. And I was like, he was just like looking at me completely blank. And then I was like, Oh, okay. Like whatever. He was from Utrecht and then there's just like a dawning realization on his face. And he was like, Oh Ireland, Robbie Keane, Robbie Keane, the terrible football player. So I'll give you my story. I was thinking, cause I have, I've, I've done some weird travels and typically to visit friends, like I always try to take advantage of an opportunity if I know someone in a country that I wouldn't otherwise visit. And that's led me to places like the United Arab Emirates, which sucks, and Nepal and

Indonesia but not Bali, rather Jakarta. But the story I'll give you actually is, so I had a friend from home who taught in a bilingual school in the Dominican Republic in Santiago and I went and visited him on a four-day weekend while I was stationed in Alaska which is an interesting trip to make and something I wouldn't try now because it was Anchorage to Minneapolis to Miami to Santiago and then on the way back it was like Santiago to San Juan to Miami to Salt Lake City to Anchorage So on a four-day weekend Stupid decision, but I did it anyway. I had fun.

I got like two days and some change there. He was dating a girl there and I met one of her friends and like this girl wound up, she wound up kissing me right before I left and being a lieutenant, single lieutenant in the army and being like, well, I'm never getting a date in fucking Anchorage, Alaska. I was like, we stayed in touch, but I didn't speak Spanish. Anyway, I went back for a friend's wedding in Punta Cana and managed to escape to get out to Santiago, but it was not easy because there's not really public transit to speak of there.

And it was like multiple cab rides. So went and saw her hung out, but like she was seeing another guy and there was a language barrier. I had a great time, but like got to do this like all night long fucking like drunken parade in Santiago. But obviously the hookup didn't happen. Shame, but that's how life goes sometimes. That being said, on the way back,

I got to Santo Domingo and I was like, okay, I took a bus from Santiago, but I didn't know how to get back to Punta Cana. And cab driver came up to me and he was like, where are you going? I'm like, I'm trying to get to Punta Cana, but I don't know how. And I did not speak Spanish at the time.

And so the guy calls his wife and is like, hey, like I'm gonna be late today. And we talked about price and he's like, you pay me like however much, it was like $120. He's like, I'll literally just drive you in my cab. No, this is a six hour drive from San Domingo to Punta Cana. And so this guy drives me in a shitty old Toyota Corolla that's been converted to run on natural gas. And we drive playing the Fuji's to the score in a shitty old Toyota Corolla that's been converted to run on natural gas.

And we drive playing the Fuji's the score on infinite repeat. And he's telling me stories in Spanish about how even if you don't have a rectal dysfunction, if you take Viagra, you can fuck for hours and stuff like that. My Spanish improved so much on that trip. And it was the wildest thing because one of my soldiers was from Ige, which is this this not particularly tourist attractive city in the the far eastern part of the DR and I was like I was in Igue like last week he's like what the fuck were you doing there bro I have such a story to tell you but yes I have traversed pretty much the entirely of that side of the island of Hispaniola

I've never been to Haiti but this this was in early 2009, right before I deployed. And yeah, so the score, banger album, front to back, strongly recommend it. Even better when you're whipping through the DR in a natural gas powered fucking Toyota Corolla, where you have to step out of it because it looks like it's got an oil drum welded in the trunk and that's how you fill it up. You're like the patron saint of terrible travel stories. I had a blast, dude. I had a fucking great... I don't mean like the story itself. I mean like how you got there over a four-day weekend and then like a seven-hour cab ride and a bomb with wheels. It's like incredible, incredible

stuff. You want to experience a country for real, man. I mean, that's a way of doing it. Another way is getting horrible fucking some kind of bacterial infection food poisoning from untreated water in Jakarta. And then being generally how I do and then being in Nepal and having your Airbnb host take you to a doctor on the back of a motorcycle through Kathmandu while you're trying to not shit yourself. And then the doctor who was trained abroad listens to your stomach with a stethoscope and says in flawless American English, holy shit You know now that I'm 36, I really hope I never ever ever pull off a Nate travel story

Stories bro, I'm done with that shit. Yeah, I'm over it Well, I hope that the rest of mine are very, very normal. My last one really wasn't, but fingers crossed. That is a podcast, fellas. You have other podcasts, plug your other podcasts. Listen to Trash Future, a podcast about what the tech industry is extremely dumb, but also funny unintentionally. Listen to Kill James Bond, a film podcast hosted by three incredibly funny people.

Listen to What a Hell of a Way to Dad, a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military, and also about being a dad. And that's pretty much it. I guess listen to No Gods No Mayors when it debuts, a new show that's being put through the development process about weird local government hosted by Riley Quinn, November Kelly and Mattie Lubchanski. I've heard the first episode, it's extremely funny. I bet you y'all are gonna like it.

So just check that out. Uh, listen to beneath skin show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and listen to glue factory, a video comedy podcast that has no theme, just riffs and I excruciatingly have to edit, uh, all of the, the cut bits out of this is the only show that I host. Uh, but if you like what we do here consider supporting us on patreon Just five dollars a month gets you access to years worth of bonus content gets you access to discord gets you ebooks audiobooks it gets you first dibs on

Live show tickets and merch it gets you a lock of Tom's hair since before long He'll be the only one of us that still has hair Natural baby and of Tom's hair since before long he will be the only one of us that still has hair. All natural baby. And make sure to leave us a review on wherever it is. You listen to podcasts. It helps us immensely when it comes to securing live show venues for the future and until next time, blow up racist moths with howitzers. I don't know if I could say that. You gotta howitzer use it for its intended purpose or use it in direct fire mode either of which is acceptable.