During the American civil war Why were the poorest people forced to enlist in the army and how did this cause tension in NYC?

The New York Draft Riots occurred in July 1863, when the anger of working-class New Yorkers over a new federal draft law during the Civil War sparked five days of some of the bloodiest and most destructive rioting in U.S. history. Hundreds of people were killed, many more seriously injured, and African-Americans were often the target of the rioters’ violence.

A CITY DIVIDED

As the business capital of the nation, New York City had not welcomed the onset of the Civil War, as it meant losing the South as a trading partner.

Cotton was an extremely valuable product for New York’s merchants: Before the Civil War, cotton represented 40 percent of all the goods shipped out of the city’s port. And long after the slave trade was made illegal in 1808, the city’s illicit slave market thrived.

When the war broke out in 1861, there was even talk of New York seceding from the Union itself, so entwined were the city’s business interests with the Confederate States.

As the war progressed, New York’s anti-war politicians and newspapers kept warning its working-class white citizens, many of them Irish or German immigrants, that emancipation would mean their replacement in the labor force by thousands of freed black slaves from the South.

In September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation (which would take effect early the following year), confirming the workers’ worst fears.

Explanation:

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