The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (review)

356civil war history to little more than a holding operation, especially following the Union victory at Pea Ridge in northwest Arkansas in March 1862. At the time the Federals appeared to have solidified their control of Missouri and materially threatened Confederate positions in Arkansas and Louisiana— the natural buffer zone between, in the author's words, "the enemy and Texas." The major strengths of this work lie in the expert and incisive descriptions of battles fought, in the finely-drawn sketches of Parsons and his fellow Texans, and in the graphic portrayals of the lives of ordinary soldiers as they prepared for battle with the enemy and with the elements. In a manner of speaking, her study is what might be termed "microhistory ." But, unless such history contributes to an understanding of the larger war at a given point in its course, can it amount to much more than a compilation of discrete facts that have little relevance to anything beyond its boundaries? Furthermore, the texture of the work is uneven. There are broad brush strokes in which critical campaigns—such as Grant's against Vicksburg— bulk large, but the reader is then abruptly returned to Colonel Parsons and his 12th Texas with little indication as to how the two are related. Finally, some highly questionable generalizations as to the fighting qualities of the southern soldier appear in the Epilogue (205). Still, the research is impressive; the writing is lucid and often moving; and the illustrations, maps, and appendix augment the quality of this study of the Civil War in a region which merits far more attention than it has hitherto received. Kenneth B. Shover The University of Texas at El Paso The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significancefor American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War. By Iver Bernstein. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii, 363. $29.95.) In this stimulating book, Iver Bernstein examines the economic and political history of New York City from 1850 to 1872 through the prism of the draft riots of July 1863. The years before 1863 are treated as prologue and those after as reactions and resolutions to the issues and fissures exposed by the riots. The opening chapters describe the riots themselves: the first summarizes the activities of various groups of rioters while the second considers the response of a deeply divided elite. The riots began on Monday, July 13, with seemingly spontaneous popular demonstrations against a biased conscription law; over the next two days looting and anti-black violence took precedence over political protest. Thereupon some of Monday's demonstrators—German workers, for example—became preservers of book reviews357 law and order by Tuesday or Wednesday. Among the elite a major point ofdebate was whether or not to invoke martial law. No unit ofgovernment did so, which allowed authorities to concentrate police and troops in "infected districts" and made possible resolutions of the crisis that did not permanently embitter workers or hamper prosecution of the war. The next three chapters explain who did what during the riots by analyzing the history of various groups in the 1850s and early 1860s. While Bernstein does not altogether ignore religion or race (he knows that black-hating Irish Catholics were the most numerous, persistent, and violent of the rioters), he stresses class analysis as the best approach to political history. He categorizes workers as artisans, industrial workers, or laborers and links these groups' changing position within the New York economy to the extent and nature of their participation in the riots. Workers in the sweated ready-made garment and shoe industries did not take to the streets; workers who had more control over their lives did take action. In similar fashion he divides the elite into established merchants and arriviste industrialists with the former further subdivided into Democrats led by August Belmont and Republican organizers of the Union League Club. Club stalwarts George Templeton Strong and Frederick Law Olmsted were the most ardent proponents of the imposition of martial law. Democrats believed in free trade, the elimination of social ills through territorial and commençai expansion, white supremacy, and letting people, including workers and slaveholders, make their own...