The surging mass of armed men stopped the train full of Union recruits and herded the passengers out of their cars. The bold move occurred in Pennsylvania, sending shock waves across the Keystone State. Governor Andrew Curtin dashed off a telegram to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton alerting him of the “formidable” hostile presence in his state. But Curtain wasn’t concerned about Confederate troops during the Gettysburg Campaign; it was October 1862 and he was fretting about one of the first concerted efforts by Northerners to oppose the Union’s war effort during the war, a series of riots that took place on the western edge of Schuylkill County in Pennsylvania’s turbulent coal region. These small-scale riots lasting less than a week proved to be a harbinger of much bloodier, more violent uprisings against the draft in 1863.
In late October 1862, Irish mineworkers from the county’s mining districts took up arms against the state and federal government and the prospect of a draft to fill the ranks of a U.S. Army depleted by bloody campaigns in the summer of 1862. Resistance to the war effort came most strongly from Cass Township, a community northwest of Minersville in Schuylkill County. The township had been named for Lewis Cass, the
