Perhaps Martin Scorsese intended that his Gangs of New York would become New York City’s Gone With the Wind. Like that famous 1939 effort to whitewash slavery and the Confederate cause, Scorsese’s effort to turn a vengeance tale featuring Leonard Di Caprio into an epic has fallen on its own sword, and for the same reasons. Despite incredible production values, Gangs of New York shows no more interest in dealing honestly with the tens of thousands of African Americans who helped shape the Civil War in New York and the North, than did the 1939 saga for the millions of enslaved African Americans who shook the Confederacy to its foundations. In Scorsese’s colorful panorama few Black New York figures have audible lines though they lived alongside Irish and other Americans. Gangs of New York gives no hint that a Frederick Douglass thundered against slavery at protest meetings, a Harriet Tubman regularly passed through the city with her precious cargo of escapees from the southeastern states, or a tall, gaunt former slave, Sojourner Truth, rose to excoriate slaveholders.

Omissions overwhelm Gangs of New York. From its colonial origins New York City was a major slave center, and by the Civil War its leading politicians were "Copperheads" in the economic hold of the ruling slaveholder elite. New York’s political coloration was a grim gray. Republican Senator William Seward called Africans "a foreign and feeble element like the Indian . . . a pitiful exotic unwisely and unnecessarily transplanted in our fields." President Abraham Lincoln failed to carry the city by 30,000 votes.

In 1861 as eleven southern states moved toward secession Copperheads such as Governor Horatio Seymore and Mayor Fernando Wood, disrupted the war effort. Wood proposed to the City Council that he lead New York City out of the Union into the Confederacy and picked the name "Tri-Insula" for his flamboyant act of treason. His brother, Benjamin Wood, owned the Daily News which he used to warn white workers their jobs were imperiled by emancipation. There is little hint of these provocations by leading authorities in Gangs of New York, so when massive violence erupts in 1863 the audience stares in shocked wonderment at a violent carnival that has no origins or head.

Gangs of New York also fails to note that when Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter in April, 1861 three city African Americans regiments notified the governor they were ready for combat. They promised to furnish their own arms, clothing, provisions and equipment but officials told them this was "a white man's war." When African Americans began military drills in a private hall, the chief of police stopped them, saying he "could not protect them from popular indignation and assault".

At times the film offers ill-informed imagination. When white workers in the Five Points neighborhood rise in rebellion, Gangs of New York shows US Navy ships opening fire. This did not happen! Given the complex political climate and a President Lincoln who favored a small muted federal presence in New York City, it could not happen.

In the first week of July, 1863 as Union armies inflicted fatal blows on Confederate armies at Gettysburg, Gangs of New York does show how New York City exploded in the worst urban violence in this country’s history. This upheaval of largely Irish immigrants was triggered by a draft law that allowed the wealthy to hire substitutes for $300. Grover Cleveland, later President of the United States, was able to hire a substitute, but not a poor immigrant. Governor Seymore and Benjamin Wood helped guide a class war against injustice into a racial nightmare designed to wreck the war effort. The Daily News warned the draft "would compel the white laborer to leave his family destitute and unprotected while he goes forth to free the negro, who being free, will compete with him in labor".

Anti-draft mobs as large as 10,000 tore along sixth and seventh avenues in carnivals of distruction, the first day targeting draft boards, police, soldiers and rich stores and homes. After Governor Seymore arrived in the city and warned that revolution "can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government," his fiery call led to mob rule. Seymore left for vacation in southern New Jersey, two hours away and returned in a few days to three times address rioters as "my friends."

By the third day rioters focused on Black people and whites who opposed slavery or favored Lincoln. Police and troops closed off wealthy neighborhoods, so crowds began to march on African Americans in Greenwich Village. A Black community on Thompson street was burned to the ground. A Black men's club at 7th Avenue South and Clarkson street was besieged and a resident hanged from a lamppost. One mob burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue and 43rd street, but the 1200 children were miraculously led to safety largely by Irish firemen.

After four days of distruction estimates placed the dead and injured from 1,200 people to triple that number. No accurate count was ever made since bodies were burned, cast into mass graves or never found. Gangs of New York takes a powerful tale of how evil authorities redirected a massive revolt of workers along racial paths to spike emancipation. Scorsese used this as a backdrop to Leonardo Di Caprio’s plan to wreak revenge on the man who killed his father.

The US Army should have raced after General Lee’s forces at Gettysburg, but instead had to deploy 43 divisions to end New York City’s four days of rioting. The most costly and painful US war—with 600,000 casualties—did not end in July, 1863 but in April, 1865.

When central casting drops entire races from its script this may simplify a movie’s story line but plays havoc with history. Gangs of New York gives no hint that 200,000 African Americans fought in 449 engagements and 39 major Civil War battles. Black men made up a fourth of the Union Navy, a tenth of the army, earned 22 Medals of Honor and saved the day for the Union. Yet not until 60,000 white soldiers were killed or wounded each day, a loss equal to 27 regiments a year, the Union suffered repeated defeats, morale had sunk and desertions soared to tens of thousands, did the Lincoln Administration recruit Black men.

Once African Americans marched into battle, Union victory was assured. They helped liberate Petersburg, Charleston and Richmond and their commander in chief in the White House said that without his black soldiers he would be compelled to abandon the battlefield "in three weeks."

A great film of early New Yorkers, Irish Americans, African Americans, "Copperheads", class and racial conflicts and the tragic Draft Riot of 1863, awaits its producer.