In her day, Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a national figure. Born in Maine in 1806, she and her family moved to New York City in the late 1830s, where she joined literary circles and emerged as a prominent feminist essayist, lecturer, and poet. By the 1850s, she was living with her family on Long Island. The forces of the Civil War, however, led to her downfall. In 1861, her favorite son, Appleton Oaksmith, was arrested for outfitting old whaling ships for the slave trade. After spending several weeks imprisoned at Fort Lafayette in New York and Fort Warren in Boston, Oaksmith was transferred over to civil authorities and convicted in the federal court in Boston in the summer of 1862. Before he could be sentenced, though, he escaped from jail and exiled himself in Havana, Cuba, where he became a Confederate blockade-runner.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith spent the war years seeking a presidential pardon for her son. She wrote to Abraham Lincoln and met with Secretary of State William H. Seward, but nothing ever came of her efforts. As the war continued, she became increasingly embittered toward the Union and believed that Appleton was the victim of a malevolent administration in Washington, D.C. Although she had shown sympathy for African Americans and abolitionism before the war, her Democratic politics became increasingly evident in her diary by the midpoint of the war. She grew to especially hate Seward.
In the summer of 1863, Oakes Smith experienced one of the greatest terrors of her life—the New York City Draft Riots. For several days in mid-July, working-class men, women, and children—mostly Irish Democrats—lashed out against Lincoln’s conscription and emancipation policies. At least 105 people died during the five days of rioting, many of whom were African Americans who were viciously targeted by the mob. During this ordeal, Oakes Smith saw a dense crowd
