[In the following interview, Quinn and Emerson discuss the New York Draft Riots of 1863.]

[Emerson]: A hundred and thirty years ago tomorrow, a mob of New Yorkers, mostly Irish, hung a black man from a lamppost and cheered for Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. After the cops cut the corpse down, it was dragged by the genitals through the streets of New York. How could this have happened?

[Quinn]: Well, the first thing to notice is the date: July 13, the day after Orangeman's Day, when the Protestants in Ireland celebrated—and still do—William of Orange's victory at the Boyne. It has often been a time of sectarian violence in Ireland, and that tradition was carried undiluted to New York. The bloodiest single day in New York City history is July 12, 1871, when there was a riot between the Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics on Eighth Avenue. The militia opened up and killed 41.

That's part of the text of the Draft Riots of 1863: this agrarian, this Irish resentment, and this explosion from below.

How long did the Draft Riots last?

They started on Monday the thirteenth, and by Friday the army had regained control.

How many people had been killed by then?

They can identify 119 people. There was an armory on Second Avenue that blew up and burned down. How many bodies were not recovered? I would say the northern figure [for riot fatalities] would be 150.

Were these the deadliest riots in American history?

Yes.

Why are they called the Draft Riots?

In the spring of 1863, a lot of the two-year enlistments were coming up and casualties were such that the government didn't think they could fill the ranks with volunteers anymore. There would have to be a military draft. They put in a provision that you could either hire a substitute (which had always been true; it was true in the Revolutionary War) or you could pay $300 to get out of that round of the draft. Those alternatives were not accessible to working people or the poor—and 99 percent of the Irish were in that class. It was a race riot because class and race in America have always been intertwined, but it was also class warfare.

Then how come so many of the mobs' targets were blacks, even lower on the economic ladder?

The rich neighborhoods were less accessible. The blacks lived intermingled with the Irish, so you could serendipitously grab a black man and take out your resentment on him. Also, in April, 1863, there was a longshoremen's strike on the East Side where they brought in black strike-breakers—which seemed to some people like a deliberate provocation.

But rich white men were assaulted. They were forced to kneel before Irish workmen. This humiliation would never leave the consciousness of the upper classes.

Do you think this reinforced prejudice against the Irish?

It confirmed every impression of the Irish as rowdy, unreliable, drunken, violent. Like all stereotypes, it contains a grain of truth, but it substitutes a fraction of the truth for the whole. And [it contributed] to our vocabulary of "paddy wagons," "hooligans" and "Irish confetti" (which used to be what came off the rooftops when the police came in to any neighborhood).

Were African-Americans a real economic threat to the Irish?

There were newspapers that said, "Emancipation is going to bring the blacks north and take your jobs." But in reality blacks had occupied most of the servant and waiter positions in New York, and when the Irish flooded in after the Potato Famine, they took those jobs away from the blacks.

Why weren't New Yorkers rallying around the flag and Abe Lincoln?

The war enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the beginning, but the casualty lists and the reality of modern warfare dragged on. The war started inflation, the most punishing thing the poor can suffer. And the draft seemed to add to this. However central the struggle to end slavery is to American history, to a working person on the Lower East Side in the 1860s it was pretty distant.

How did the rioting affect relations between New York's Irish and African Americans?

It's not just New York. The same struggle was going on in Boston in the 1970s with busing. The Irish were the working class left in Boston, and they were fighting blacks. Race has often had that effect on the United States: Working-class groups who should get together don't because the most important thing is race rather than class.

In fact, a lot of Anglo-Americans would not have counted the Irish as white. Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's Aid Society, in 1863 wrote a book in which he says that the Irish brain is halfway between that of an Englishman and Ethiopian. Every tester of intelligence from that time on has always proved that the poor are stupid, that the poor are poor not out of any fault in the system, but because of the fault of the poor. It makes it a lot easier for the rich to believe that.

I've read that a lot of the things we think of as the great achievements of New York—Central Park, for instance,—were largely the creations of white Republicans—and before that, Whigs—who were terrified of the teeming Irish masses and trying to create some kind of safety valve.

There's a real strain in American history: Americans don't like cities, and they don't trust them. That comes from Thomas Jefferson, and it goes through Frederick Law Olmsted [co-creator of Central Park] to Robert Moses. We do not have the same attitude to our cities Europeans have to theirs. We regard them as repositories of things that are foreign and dangerous. We're a suburban country in mentality.

Two of the people who had the greatest influence on New York—Olmsted and Moses—loathed cities?

They regarded them as dangerous places in which the job of the upper classes and government was to order people's conduct. The idea of Central Park was that they'd let the lower classes mingle with the upper classes, see their betters, and they'd learn how to behave. Moses had that attitude, too: Best to get people out of the cities.

As a student of a riot that took place 130 years ago, what do you think when you consider L.A. or Crown Heights, and racial tensions today?

In a weird way it makes you kind of optimistic. If you look back at what New York was in the 1860s—the sanitation, the poverty, the highest death rate of any city in the Western world—you might throw up your hands. But, you know, the struggle goes on. And if you look at New York in the 1990s, in some ways it's more a 19th-Century city than it was 50 years ago—the public squalor and decay of institutions. But I think you have a right to be hopeful. This is a process. Once a people arrive in the United States, there's a struggle to [become included]. Maybe Los Angeles is a hopeful sign. People have woken up.

There are many parallels between the Irish and the blacks. Maybe that's why they've had such difficulty—in a lot of ways they're alike. In their almost total transfer from the land to the cities in a very short time. That has happened with blacks since the Second World War. Of course, the Irish enjoyed a great advantage: they're white. But if any group of white ethnics should have a sense of what it is to be an outsider and underdog, it should be the Irish. The closer they come in contact with their own history, the more they can serve as a kind of a bridge between groups.