It is difficult to discuss the influence of any national stock on American history without being involved in the larger question of which is the more important, environment or heredity. Naturally, to the American historian, environment is all important, and in the concept of the frontier developed by F. J Turner and others, the pioneer was wholly a child of the American continent. This view of the pioneer, however, originates less in history than in the eighteenth-century idea of a natural man. The real frontiersman was himself an immigrant or the child of immigrant parents, practising a European religion, and attempting to realize European ideals in a new country.

The Scotch-Irish were the dominant strain in the frontier population in all the colonies south of New York. Emigration from Ulster was as much a feature of American history in the eighteenth century as Irish catholic emigration in the next and had a much greater effect on the development of the country. From 1718, they had poured into America, mainly through Philadelphia, at the rate of about 4,000 a year. From there they made their way to the frontier and then down the lateral valleys of the Appalachians into the Valley of Virginia and piedmont North and South Carolina.

July 1863 was the turning point of the American civil Avar. Prospects of ultimate victory for the north improved greatly that month, when General Lee's thrust into Pennsylvania was repulsed at the battle of Gettysburg, and Vicksburg, last confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, fell after a long siege. Yet during the sultry week of 12 July 1863 the most violent race riots of American history took place in the streets of New York, touched off by enforcement of a conscription act which congress had passed four months earlier How many negroes were lynched by white rioters and their bodies borne away on the waters surrounding Manhattan Island can never be known. But between twelve and fifteen hundred white persons died in this civil war within a civil war, most of them slain by police and soldiers charged with quelling the upheaval.

If newspaper accounts, official reports, and other sources of information agree upon any point about the draft disorders, it is that almost all the participants were Irish. ‘The immediate actors in the late riots in this city, got up to resist the draft and to create a diversion in favor of the southern rebellion, were almost exclusively Irishmen and catholics’ , wrote Orestes A. Brownson, America's leading convert to the Catholic Church.