Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

When draft rioters set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York on the night of July 13, 1863, one man in the crowd called out, “If there is a man among you with a heart within him, come and help these poor children!” Incensed, the crowd turned on him and almost dismembered him. But he had distracted them, enabling the orphans to escape.

The rioters were Irish. So was the man who sacrificed himself. And chances are good that at least some of those orphans were part Irish, too.

In the years before the Civil War, Irish immigrants to Northern cities inhabited the same slums as free blacks, worked alongside them in the worst jobs and often married them. Antebellum New York held no large, specifically black neighborhoods. Many slaves freed in New York’s gradual emancipation settled in the Sixth Ward, along with other low-income people of Irish, German and Jewish descent. Those neighborhoods were unified mainly by the kind of work residents performed: cartmen, corn sellers and prostitutes all plied their wares around the infamous Five Points. With the rapid influx of immigrants during the famine years of the 1840s, the majority of the neighborhood became Irish. But the hardscrabble, interracial lifestyle remained.

Historians disagree on the extent to which the Irish and their black neighbors clashed or cooperated. Examples can be found for both. The Irish and African-Americans lived intimately connected, boarding together and drinking in the same taverns, mingling in the streets and the dance halls. But living closely did not always mean harmoniously. A fire in June 1863, just a month before the riots, destroyed a tenement housing a liquor store, a black husband and wife and Irish immigrants. The black man and an Irish woman who lived above him argued over who started the fire — but their neighbors testified that both were drunk at the time, and equally likely suspects.

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Five Points became something of a tourist stop precisely because of its promiscuous race-mixing. Journalists and other writers toured the area under police protection. All found the same mixture of poverty and crime, and all attributed it to the evils of amalgamation. A reporter for a New York paper in the 1830s lamented the “white women, and black and yellow men, and black and yellow women, with white men, all in a state of gross intoxication, and exhibiting indecencies revolting to virtue and humanity.” Charles Dickens, in his “American Notes,” described the heavily Irish Five Points almost entirely in terms of the black men and their mulatto partners he found in the basement dance halls, while Davy Crockett, in his ghost-written account, dwelt on the infamy of “black and white, white and black, all hugemsnug together.”

Harmonious or not, most mixed-race marriages in New York were between Irish women and black men and mulatto children were common. The year 1850 saw a new racial category, mulatto, added to the census, to account for their offspring. When the draft came, during a heat wave in the bleak middle of the Civil War, the mob targeted mixed-race households, especially those containing Irish women who had children with African-American men.

Southerners used the threat of amalgamation to undermine Northern support for the war. A United States representative from a border state, arguing that Republicans favored total race equality, described “a ball held at Five Points in the city of New York, where white women and negroes mingled `in sweet confusion in the mazy dance.’” (His opponent, Francis W. Kellogg, Republican of Michigan, pointed out that Five Points was within the strongest Democratic ward in the city.)

Slide Show Seeing the New York Draft Riots A group of uncredited artists employed by the weekly pictorial newspapers followed New York’s bloody draft riots that erupted in July 1863. View slide show »

Two New York City Democrats invented the term miscegenation during the 1864 election campaign. “The present war … is a war for the negro,” argued a faked Republican pamphlet, designed to discredit Lincoln. “Let it go on until … the great truth shall be declared in our public documents and announced in the messages of our President, that it is desirable the white man should marry the black woman and the white woman the black man.” One subhead was entitled, “The Irish and Negroes First to Comingle.”

The wording was meant to incense, but it wasn’t that far from what Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in response to nativists in 1845: “In this continent — asylum of all races — the energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes — of the Africans, of the Polynesians – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages.” His Concord neighbor, Louisa May Alcott, published a short story in 1863 featuring an interracial marriage as the happy ending. Northern liberals had already thought through the implications of race equality.

Irish men’s perception that they were being asked to fight a war that would free more slaves – who would then move North and compete with them – was stoked by politicians and businessmen with ties to the South. Mayor Fernando Wood told an Irish crowd that the true purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was to “flood the North” with black mechanics, who would lower wages for whites. He further inflamed his listeners by claiming that rich Republicans believed the “African … superior to the poor white.” Irish men responded by forming trade unions that specifically excluded black men, pushing them further to the economic margins.

Related Disunion Highlights Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive. See the Highlights »

The draft riots followed years of politicians’ and middle-class reformers’ attempts to separate the two groups. Irish mothers were particularly vulnerable to the latter, for as the men enlisted or were pushed out of work, their families relied more heavily on outside aid. When a widow asked the Methodist minister Lewis M. Pease, director of the Five Points House of Industry, to take in her daughter Lizzie for a few days, until she found work, he obliged. But when she returned, Pease refused to let her have her child, because he had discovered that she lived with a black man. Despite the pleas and tears of both Lizzie and her mother, Pease put the child up for adoption, and sent her on an orphan train to Illinois.

After the riots subsided, a relief committee set up by merchants reported that white wives of black men had been “severely dealt with by the mob.” One Irish woman, the committee reported, had been driven insane by the persecution she endured. Among the mob’s victims were “colored” people with Irish names like Elizabeth Hennessy.

After the war, the organizers of the Colored Orphanage attempted to rebuild, but found themselves unwelcome in their old neighborhood. Instead they moved uptown, to an isolated area that would become Harlem. The city’s segregation had begun.

What happened to all those mixed-race children? In some cases, their ancestry has been forgotten. Working with colleagues on a large-scale DNA analysis, Mark D. Shriver, a Pennsylvania State University geneticist, has found that 30 percent of self-identified white Americans have some African ancestry — including, to his surprise, himself.

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Sources: Barnet Schecter, “The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America”; Tyler Anbinder, “Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood”; The New York Times, June 10, 1863; Charles Dickens, “American Notes for General Circulation”; Noel Ignatiev, “How the Irish Became White”; Speech of Hon. Francis W. Kellogg, of Michigan, in the House of Representatives, June 12, 1860; Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation: Making Race in America”; J. Marcus Bloch, “Miscegenation, Melaleukation and Mr. Lincoln’s Dog”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Essays and Poems”; Jerome Mushkat, “Fernando Wood: A Political Biography”; “Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, Suffering From the Late Riots in the City of New York”; Mark D. Shriver, et al., “Skin Pigmentation, Biogeographical Ancestry and Admixture Mapping,” Human Genetics, 112 (2003).

Lisa Orr is a professor of English at Utica College and the author of “Transforming American Realism: Working-Class Women Writers of the Twentieth Century” and the novel “The Adventuress,” about the daughter of a free black man and an Irish immigrant who passes as white in Civil War-era New York.