Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day July 16 16, 1863 riots are spreading throughout New York City.

They had started a couple days earlier in Lower Manhattan.

Now they had spread to Brooklyn and Staten Island, houses and businesses burning

mobs of people with bats and clubs roaming the streets, and the reason, a Civil War draft.

The Riot was in response to a new draft that had been put into place to conscript more troops

to the Northern cause.

Troop numbers were running low for the volunteered Northern Army.

But the Draft Riot quickly turned into a race riot targeting black New Yorkers in days of

some of the most bloody, destructive, and deadly protests in American history and ones that

I will say kind of scramble some preconceived notions about the North and the Civil War.

So let's talk about the 1863 draft riots.

I'm joined as always by Nicole Hammer of Columbia.

Hello Nicky. Hello, Nicki.

So I'm going to start with a really simple observation,

which is just kind of, I don't necessarily

know that in the story of the Civil War,

we really understand the role of the draft in that.

I mean, but this was a war where people were drafted and

the draft was used for the first time in US history. And so it was this new innovation and a pretty tricky I mean you can understand why this would be

tricky you're compelling people to fight on behalf of the country instead of

...