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����� During the third week of July 1863, as mobs of draft rioters roamed the streets of New York City, another potentially disastrous confrontation was brewing 250 miles to the north, in Boston. This affair had a less tragic conclusion, perhaps explaining why historians have devoted less attention to it. In Boston, quick, decisive action by city and state authorities, coupled with prompt cooperation from the Catholic community, kept loss of life and destruction of property to a minimum. Likewise a further examination of the Boston riot uncovers other significant differences between the two disturbances. Just as in New York City, the Irish had a prominent part in the Boston riot. With a total population in 1863 of about 182,000, the city's Irish numbered well over fifty thousand,1 and the North End, where the riot occurred, was one of the two largest Irish enclaves. Since coming to the North End in great numbers beginning in the late 1840s, the Irish had lived in a state of poverty and degradation that shocked most Bostonians. Packed into squalid tenements that lined dark and filthy streets, they attempted to scrape out a meager existence as dock hands, construction laborers, or domestic servants. Their poverty, with its attendant crime, disease, and idleness, placed a heavy and unwelcome burden on the city's resources.2 Yet the Boston Irish were proud of the part they had played in defending the Union. The state contributed two entire Irish regiments, and in 1 City of Boston, Report by the Registrar of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in the City ofBostonfor the Year i862, City Document No. 34, p. 13; Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Abstract of the Census of Massachusetts i860, from the Eighth U.S. Census with Remarks on the Same (Boston: Wright & Potter, State Printers, 1863), table 4, 124. In 1860 the Irish population of Suffolk County was 48,095. 2 For example, in Ward One in the North End, the City of Boston spent nine times more money for the relief of foreigners than for natives. In neighboring Ward Three, the amount was six times greater. City of Boston, Report of the Committee on the Communication of the Overseers of the Poor, 1863, City Document No. 55, p. 10; see also Paula Todisco, Boston's First Neighborhood: The North End (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1976), 19-27. |
