The riots did not undo the legal progress the Jennings case and subsequent campaign had made. But they serve as a reminder that legal rights and the practical ability to exercise them safely are not the same thing. The years between the Jennings verdict and the draft riots were years in which Black New Yorkers gained formal access to transit that they had previously been denied. They were also years in which the city’s white working class was building toward a moment of explosive racial violence that would remind everyone in the city of how thin the protection of formal legal rights could be.
Elizabeth and her mother moved to Monmouth County, New Jersey, after the riots. The movement of Black New Yorkers out of the city in the aftermath of the draft riots was widespread; many families who had been displaced by the violence did not immediately return. Elizabeth returned to New York sometime in the late 1860s or 1870, after her husband Charles died in New Jersey in 1867.
## Ellen Anderson and the Final Campaign
Ellen Anderson’s 1864 case — a year after the draft riots — is the last major legal milestone in the pre-statutory desegregation campaign that Elizabeth Jennings’s 1855 verdict had helped launch.
Anderson was a widow whose husband had served in the United States Colored Troops. The USCT were the segregated Black Union Army regiments that fought in the Civil War under white officers. By 1864 they had been fighting and dying in significant engagements, and the sacrifice of Black soldiers for the Union cause was a prominent part of the political argument for expanding Black civil rights in the North as well as the South.