The Lost Museum Archive

An Irish longshoreman tells a black worker seeking employment on New York's waterfront: "Well, ye may be a man and a brother, sure enough; but it's little hospitality ye'll get out of yer relations on this dock, me ould buck!" This cartoon from the weekily satirical magazine Vanity Fair comments on the sharp competition for unskilled jobs between Irish immigrants and free African Americans in New York, which contributed to the July, 1863, draft riot. During the three days of violence more than 100 New Yorkers were killed and many African Americans were attacked and murdered by the largely Irish rioters.