Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - No Draft Riots!
In Philadelphia, draft enrollment officers and provost marshals encountered minor resistance during the 1st draft of July 1863, and none of the four periods of drafts erupted into major episodes of violence. James Gallman found this surprising given Philadelphia’s history of ethnic and labor violence. Gallman also observed that political divisions should have been a factor in triggering more draft resistance. In Philadelphia, only half of the city had voted for Lincoln, and the community had strong economic and sociocultural ties to the southern states. Only one person was killed as a result of political unrest during the Civil War. In October of 1864, one person was struck in the head with a rock and was killed during a Democrat torchlight procession. Gallman credits the maintenance of relative peace in Philadelphia to several factors. He argued that decisive speeches and published statements by Mayor Alexander Henry regularly assuaged the community from violence. Gallman further argues that Mayor Henry decisively deployed sufficient forces of the military and police to suppress crowd gatherings. He also argued that patriotic public demonstrations in support of the war effectively dissuaded dissenters from gaining traction in Philadelphia. Additionally, Gallman observed that excessively vocal rabble rousers were arrested and inflammatory newspapers were shut down. The Philadephia government, argued Gallman, effectively suppressed citizen's rights to free speech and freedom of the press. Instead of catalytic events erupting the underlying, existing social tensions, Gallman argued that the effective use of social order measures prevented escalation.[1]
[1] James Gallman, “Preserving the Peace, Order and Disorder in Civil War Philadelphia,” (Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 55, no. 4, October 1988), 201-215.