Stephen Heiner

Here's something most people never learn about the Civil War: a huge number of Northerners didn't sign up to end slavery. Many flatly refused to fight for it. In 1861, the Union's goal was simple: put the country back together. That summer, Congress passed a resolution declaring the war was not being fought to interfere with slavery in the Southern states. When one Union general freed enslaved people in Missouri on his own, Lincoln overruled him. When another did it in 1862, Lincoln overruled him too. In August 1862, Lincoln wrote a famous public letter. If he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, he said, he would. Then he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and the backlash was fierce. Northern Democrats made big gains in the 1862 elections. Some soldiers wrote home that they hadn't enlisted to free slaves. Antiwar "Copperheads" grew louder. By 1863, volunteers had dried up, so Congress passed the first federal draft. There was a catch. A drafted man could pay $300 to get out of it, about a year's wages for a laborer, or hire a substitute. To working men, it looked like a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. New York held its first draft lottery on Saturday, July 11, 1863. On Monday morning, the city exploded. A volunteer fire company, angry that one of its own had been drafted, stormed the draft office and set it on fire. For four days, New York belonged to the mob. Rioters attacked police, burned buildings, and ransacked the homes of wealthy Republicans and the offices of pro-Lincoln newspapers. And they hunted Black New Yorkers. Black men were beaten and lynched in the streets. A mob burned the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. More than 200 children inside escaped through a back door just in time. The riots only ended when Union troops, some fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg two weeks earlier, marched into the city and fought the rioters street by street. At least 119 people died. Thousands of Black residents fled Manhattan and never came back. Two days after the riots ended, the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Black regiments, charged the walls of Fort Wagner in South Carolina and lost nearly half its men. That's the contrast. While mobs in New York were killing Black civilians to avoid fighting, Black soldiers were dying for the Union. By the end of the war, around 180,000 Black men had served in the Union Army. Union soldiers voted overwhelmingly to re-elect Lincoln in 1864, and in 1865 slavery was abolished for good. The North didn't start the war to end slavery. But that's where it ended up, and not everyone in the North came along willingly.