July 13th, 1863 New York City

Diary, 

President Lincoln just made a law where all men from 20 to 45 have to enter to fight in the civil war, or you can pay $300 dollars to not enter but “yours truly” does not have that kind of many laying around. I’m on the train currently headed to the draft office in New York city so I can enter my name and hopefully not get selected to fight in the civil war. I will be approaching the train station shortly and I am thinking about how I will feel as I walk to the draft office to register, this moment feels almost surreal to me. 

I just arrived, there’s already a crowd of Irish men who reek of whiskey and are spewing slurred curses at the men in charge of the draft offices. Next thing I know is that the small crowd of Irish men with their slurred curse words turns into thousands in what felt like a matter of minutes. All I can hear is screaming and crashing window panes all around me. There are even children witnessing this horrifying scene of anger. A man has just yelled “I want you to find any black person you can and make them regret ever coming to our home of New York.” Almost every single man, woman and child instantly sprints towards the first black person they see.

I start to see the mob grab a black man, who doesn’t look like he’s old enough to enter the draft, as he’s crying begging for his life  nobody listens. I stand there as they grab the scrawny teenage boy and hang him on the tree, I am watching mesmerized. Is there something wrong with me? I’m making attempts to fathom what just happened. The crowd pulls out their torches and proceeds to burn the boy after he was already killed. Why on earth would someone cause this much suffering to someone who didn’t do anything to them? But this crowd isn’t the stopping kind they move from just killing black people to interaccial couples, white abolitionists, they even burned the local deli I go to and hung the owner for employing black people. This horrifying mob of people are multiplying. But they finally stopped at..

New York City’s colored orphanage, I’m thinking at a million miles a minute trying to stop this group from doing it but. There’s nothing I can do, as this disgusting group of people keep yelling slurs at the children in this building like it wronged them in any way. I just saw a man break the window and throw a torch, another one hits the building. It starts to catch on fire, after 20 minutes the entire building collapses and the crowd cheers in joy after the horrible and completely appalling acts. I feel like what I just witnessed was a fever dream, if I die now then all I want is for this to never happen again.