Cooper Street at North Margin Street, North End, Boston
A hostile crowd of 500-1,000 individuals—many of them women and children—amassed outside the armory on Cooper Street on the evening of July 14, 1863.
Tearing up bricks from the street, they hurled them at the building, smashing windows and splintering pieces off of the large double doors. Some of the rioters bore firearms, in addition to clubs and other homemade weapons. Fearful that the mob would break down the door, the officer commanding the militia members inside had one of the armory’s two cannons filled with grapeshot, wheeled to the entrance, and fired through the doors at the crowd in the street outside. The result was the killing of at least eight to fourteen people, and the wounding of many more.
There is uncertainty as to what precisely motivated individuals in what is known as the Boston Draft Riot. However, it was the culmination of a day of violent unrest in the North End and its environs. It began in the morning when women in a residential building on Prince Street rebuffed two provost marshals trying to deliver draft notices and one of the officials threatened to arrest a woman who had assaulted him. It was also a time when much more violent anti-draft riots were taking place in New York City, of which North Enders were certainly cognizant, the local air rife with predictions that Boston would experience similar unrest.
By 1863, more than 50,000 Irish immigrants lived in Boston (out of a total population of approximately 182,000), with the North End being one of the two largest enclaves. Despite living in often impoverished and squalid quarters and experiencing heavy discrimination from the Yankee establishment, Irish Bostonians played a big role in the Union war effort. They comprised a large portion of two entirely Irish regiments from Massachusetts and a significant part of a third one from the state. Yet, while the Irish supported the war, they did so in the name of the Union’s preservation, not for enslaved people’s freedom. Indeed, most were strongly opposed to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, fearful that it would prolong the war and result in large-scale black migration to the North, hurting the economic prospects of Irish laborers in the process. At the same time, the Irish and the Catholic establishment were unsympathetic to abolitionists’ egalitarian claims. The Pilot, Boston’s Catholic weekly newspaper, for example, railed against “negrophilists” and “nigger-worshippers” trying to convince whites of the equality of blacks.
Such sentiment combined with the class-based inequities contained in the conscription law passed by Congress in 1863 (it allowed the wealthy to buy their way out of the draft) made the draft very unpopular. Meanwhile, high casualty rates among Boston Irish families, income loss due to the absence of male wage-earners, and war-related price increases in many basic foodstuffs greatly heightened the hardships faced by North End women, making them—and many others in the neighborhood—ripe for rebellion against federal and local authorities.
While New York City’s draft riots unfolded over three days, Boston’s unrest was relatively short-lived. High-profile deployment of the police and military and efforts by Catholic clergy to calm restive youth and men helped bring an end to the violence.
The armory was located in what was the former Endicott School. Sometime after the Civil War, by the mid-1880s, the building became a school again—St. Mary’s Catholic School. At some point in the mid-1900s, the building, which sat on the southwest corner of Cooper and North Margin streets, was demolished. It is now a parking lot.
Getting there: Green or Blue Line to Haymarket Station. 0.2 mile (four-minute) walk.
Nearby points of interest:
Paul Revere House, 19 North Square.
Old North Church, 193 Salem Street.
Bova’s Bakery (open 24 hours, 7 days). 134 Salem St. and Parziale’s Bakery, 80 Prince St. (two of the oldest and best known Italian bakeries in Boston).
To learn more:
- Giesberg, Judith Ann. “’Lawless and Unprincipled’: Women in Boston’s Civil War Draft Riot,” James M. O’Toole and David Quigleey (eds.), Boston’s Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004: 71-91.
- Hanna, William F. “The Boston Draft Riot,” Civil War History 36, no. 3, (1990): 262-273. O’Connor, Thomas H. South Boston, My Home Town: The History of an Ethnic Neighborhood, Boston : Quinlan Press, 1988.
Image: Endicott School, undated. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library.