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NARRATOR: When the Civil War erupted, eager young men on both sides volunteered for service. But as the war dragged on, both sides found themselves short-handed and had to institute a draft. In the North, Congress passed the first federal conscription law, a law that enacted a draft. But mostly the poor went to war because the rich could buy their way out.

ERIC FONER: You could get out of the draft in certain ways. One was by paying. If you paid $300, you just were exempted from the draft. Now $300 was a lot of money back then. Or you could provide a substitute. If you were drafted, you could pay someone else to go for you. And in fact, many immigrants fought in the war as substitutes.

STEVEN HAHN: This created a great deal of resentment all over the place because it dramatized the fact that not only were the burdens of the war being unequally shared, but in some ways poor people were fighting for the goals of wealthier ones.

NARRATOR: In June of 1863, the resentment boiled over into violent protests called the draft riots.

STEVEN HAHN: Which, in terms of the destruction and the people involved, still ranks as the second largest insurrection in American history. The Civil War being the largest.

NARRATOR: Thousands of rioters rampaged through the streets of New York City over four days in July of 1863. Ransacking or destroying buildings and clashing with police and federal troops. More than 100 civilians were killed and hundreds more injured before the anger over the draft was contained.

Like the North, the South adopted its own form of a draft. Since the population was smaller, boys as young as 15 and men as old as 50 were called to serve. But as up North, rich men could also buy their way out.

ERIC FONER: In the South too. The most controversial exemption there was that for every 20 blacks on a plantation, a white person would be exempted from the draft. So in other words, the son of a farmer had to go in. But the son of a plantation owner was exempted because someone needed to be there to supervise the slaves. So that was another example of the class inequality built into the draft. The phrase, both North and South, at that time was "it's a rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

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