This Day in Civil War History (New York City Draft Riots)

July 13, 1863—Two days after the start of a new draft lottery and 10 days after massive bloodshed at the Battle of Gettysburg, a large mob of New York City's working class expressed their frustration over the Civil War and their economic misery by launching four days of what remains the bloodiest race riot in American history.

Throughout a dozen years of parochial school, I learned nothing about the New York City Draft Riots—nor about one of its necessary antecedents, Ireland's Potato Famine of the 1840s. It took the late, great Columbia University history professor, James Patrick Shenton, to spell out the facts behind these agonizing episodes in Irish-American history, with an actor’s sense of timing and a progressive’s identification with society’s dispossessed.

Millions were not as lucky as I was to sit in on those classes. Despite one or two terrific set pieces in Martin Scorsese's depiction of the period, Gangs of New York, film fans would have encountered a production that was a) sometimes historically inaccurate, b) at times woefully miscast (please raise your hand if you really, truly found Cameron Diaz believable as a pickpocket—then buy yourself a duncecap); and c) without well-motivated characters one could care about. (A mistake most emphatically not made about the South's side of the War Between the States in Gone With the Wind —a novel and film, incidentally, that featured an Irish-American protagonist named O'Hara!)

A magnificent corrective for my readers, for any who may not have done so, is to go out and buy Peter Quinn's historical novel, Banished Children of Eve. In a culture that has yielded to the demands of “dumbed-down” textbooks on every educational level and the distractions of the Internet by catering to shortened attention spans, some readers may feel beleaguered by a novel that not only dares to exceed 500 pages but that even follows multiple major characters. But the best writers demand as much from their readers as from themselves.

(Readers have taken to administering a drubbing to Wikipedia over the last few years for its assorted sins. Here’s one of my problems with it—its entry on the Draft Riots mentions John Jakes’ fictional portrayal of the disturbances, even Newt Gingrich’s, for Pete’s sake, but not Quinn’s. Let’s run that back again, shall we? Two potboilers get mentioned, but not a 1995 American Book Award winner. Go figure.)

Quinn exhibits the same quality as the George Orwell praised in Charles Dickens—a “generous anger”—but also an abiding sense of one of the ironies of American history: how one of the most marginalized groups in the 19th century (Irish immigrants) could turn their collective fury on another despised group (African-Americans) in an urban uprising that cost more than $1 million and the lives of at least 120 civilians and an additional 2,000 injured. (An additional irony: the tumultuous multicultural atmosphere of the early 1860s sounded more contemporary to many readers—including myself—than the relatively more quiescent early 1960s.) The riots’ suppression required Abraham Lincoln to dispatch a part of the Army of the Potomac, many of whom had just finished fighting at Gettysburg.

I could go on and on about how Quinn mastered subjects as disparate as Tammany Hall, the Roman Catholic Church, freedmen in New York, minstrel shows, Stephen Foster, the “orphan trains,” the Know-Nothing Party, the New York underworld, and even the beginnings of baseball—but this would sound as if I think you should read it because it’s Good For You. Heaven forbid! Just glory in the sharp, often comic period dialogue, the deep insight into principal characters, and an expert control of the plot strands until he gathers them up and uncoils them in the swiftly moving, shattering final chapters.

Earlier in this post, I implicitly contrasted Scorsese’s treatment of the period with Quinn’s, with the advantage decidedly in Quinn’s favor. A moment’s further reflection makes me wonder how well any film, no matter how well-intentioned, can depict the draft riots and the forces that gave rise to it. It’s not just that, following a half-year of discontent, I’ve begun to think of American cinema as hopelessly imitative and juvenile when it’s not veering toward the transgression-for-its-own-sake indie film style. No, I’ve come to think of the mini-series as a more accommodating genre for Quinn’s careful treatment of men and their motives.

True, like the long, Dickensian urban novel, the mini-series has seen better days. But, as HBO has proven with John Adams, viewers are prepared to support an entertainment medium that demands their attention and intelligence. Surely they’d be interested in a similar venture on a book that tells us many an uncomfortable truth about the American Experience?