Throwing curveballs
"This mob is not the people,” declared Henry J. Raymond in his paper, the New York Times, about the Draft Riots in July 1863. Blue-collar workers in New York, mostly Irish, had begun by protesting a new conscription law, but anti-war sentiment quickly became a pretext for widespread destruction, looting and racial violence. Blacks were hunted, their homes and businesses trashed, and scores of them lynched. Raymond wanted no quarter for the rioters: “Give them grape[shot] and plenty of it.” The new musical Paradise Square imagines a “little bit of Eden” in the Five Points slum of downtown Manhattan, July 1863, where, we are told, blacks and Irish did not just coexist peacefully for a time but flourished.
