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The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 allowed New York to expand massively as a port. The Great Lakes were suddenly opened to New York, and with them the rest of the country; goods manufactured in the city could be sent easily and cheaply to the American heartland. It was because of this transportation network, and the mass of cheap labour that flooded in throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that New York - and to an extent the nation - became wealthy. The first waves of immigrants , mainly German and Irish , began to arrive in the mid-nineteenth century, the latter forced out by the potato famine of 1846, the former by the failed revolutions of 1848-49. The city could not handle people arriving in such great numbers and epidemics of yellow fever and cholera were common, exacerbated by poor water supplies, unsanitary conditions and the poverty of most of the newcomers. Despite this, in the 1880s large-scale Italian immigration began, while at the same time refugees from Eastern Europe started to arrive - many of them Jewish. The two communities shared a home on the Lower East Side , which became one of the worst slum areas of its day. On the eve of the Civil War (1861-65) the majority of New York's 750,000 population were immigrants; in 1890 one in four of the city's inhabitants was Irish.
When the Civil War broke out, caused by growing differences between the northern and southern states, notably on the issues of slavery and trade. New York sided with the Union (North) against the Confederates (South), but none of the actual hand-to-hand fighting that ravaged the rest of the country took place near the city itself. It did, however, form a focus for much of the radical thinking behind the war, particularly with Abraham Lincoln 's influential "Might makes Right" speech from the Cooper Union Building in 1860. In 1863 a conscription law was passed that allowed the rich to buy themselves out of military service. Not surprisingly this was deeply unpopular, and New Yorkers rioted, burning buildings and looting shops: more than a thousand people were killed in these Draft Riots .
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