The Enrollment Act, which authorized conscription in the North, outraged many working-class city dwellers. In New York City, whites—including native-born whites and Irish and German immigrants—rioted for four days in July 1863. At least 120 people died, and 11 black men were lynched by the mob. In the following testimony, collected by a group of merchants who investigated the riots, an African American woman named Mrs. Statts provides a firsthand account of the violence.

At 3 o’clock of that day the mob arrived and immediately commenced an attack with terrific yells, and a shower of stones and bricks, upon the house. In the next room to where I was sitting was a poor woman, who had been confined with a child on Sunday, three days previous. Some of the rioters broke through the front door with pickaxes, and came rushing into the room where this poor woman lay, and commenced to pull the clothes from off her. Knowing that their rage was chiefly directed against men, I hid my son behind me and ran with him through the back door, down the basement. In a little while I saw the innocent babe, of three days old, come crashing down into the yard; some of the rioters had dashed it out of the back window, killing it instantly. In a few minutes streams of water came pouring down into the basement, the mob had cut the Croton water-pipes with their axes. Fearing we should be drowned in the cellar, (there were ten of us, mostly women and children, there) I took my boy and flew past the dead body of the babe, out to the rear of the yard, hoping to escape with him through an open lot into Twenty-ninth-street; but here, to our horror and dismay, we met the mob again; I, with my son, had climbed the fence, but the sight of those maddened demons so affected me that I fell back, fainting, into the yard; my son jumped down from the fence to pick me up, and a dozen of the rioters came leaping over the fence after him. As they surrounded us, my son exclaimed, “Save my mother; gentlemen, if you kill me.” “Well, we will kill you,” they answered; and with that two ruffians seized him, each taking hold of an arm, while a third, armed with a crow-bar, calling upon them to stand and hold his arms apart, deliberately struck him a heavy blow over the head, felling him, like a bullock, to the ground. (He died in the New-York Hospital two days after.) I believe if I were to live a hundred years I would never forget that scene, or cease to hear the horrid voices of that demoniacal mob resounding in my ears.

They then drove me over the fence, and as I was passing over one of the mob seized a pocket-book, which he saw in my bosom, and in his eagerness to get it tore the dress off my shoulders.

I, with several others, then ran to the Twenty-ninth-street Station-house, but we were here refused admittance, and told by the Captain that we were frightened without cause. A gentleman accompanied us who told the Captain of the facts, but we were all turned away.

I then went down to my husband’s, in Broome-street, and there I encountered another mob, who, before I could escape, commenced stoning me. They beat me severely.

I reached the house but found my husband had left for Rahway. Scarcely knowing what I did, I then wandered, bewildered and sick, in the direction he had taken, and toward Philadelphia, and reached Jersey City, where a kind, Christian gentleman, Mr. ARTHUR LYNCH, found me and took me to his house, where his good wife nursed me for over two weeks, While I was very sick.

I am a member of the Baptist Church, and if it were not for my trust in Christ I do not know how I could have endured it.

Source: Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, Suffering from the Late Riots in the City of New York (New York: George A. Whitehorne, 1863).