When the Draft Act was enforced throughout the North just after Gettysburg, disorders occurred in widely scattered centers; and it was inevitable that they should be gravest in New York. Not merely did the city contain many half disloyal Americans of native birth. It was full of a class of Irishmen who had proved especially responsive to the demagogues opposing the war. Clashes between the Irish and negroes had been common for a decade. In August, 1862, a mob in Brooklyn attacked a factory in which blacks were working, and tried to set it afire with the negroes inside. Similar riots, the _Post_ remarked, had disgraced several Western cities. “In every case Irish laborers have been incited to take part in these lawless attempts; and the cunning ringleaders and originators of these mutinies, who are not Irishmen, have thus sought to kill two birds with one stone--to excite a strong popular prejudice against the Irish, while they used them to wreak their spite against the blacks.” The copperhead press in the early July days preceding the first drawing of draft numbers was filled with abuse of conscription. The _Herald_, to be sure, which professed neutrality between the “niggerhead” press (the _Evening Post_, _Times_, and _Tribune_) and the copperhead papers, advocated the draft as a means of hastening Union victory, though it abused Lincoln as a nincompoop. But the _World_ spoke of Lincoln’s “wanton exercise of arbitrary powers,” and predicted that if the war was carried on to enforce the emancipation proclamation a million men, not three hundred thousand, would have to be conscripted. “A measure,” it said of the Draft act, “which could not have been ventured upon in England even in those dark days when the press-gang filled the English ships of war with slaves ... was thrust into the statute books, as one might say, almost by force.” The _Daily News_ applauded the speeches at a city peace meeting on July 9, where one orator had declared: “The Administration now feels itself in want of more men to replace those it has slaughtered, and to aid it in upholding its despotism, and for this purpose has ordered the conscription.”