The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Unkinking his lanky frame, Lincoln stood up, tucked his left hand under a coat lapel, smiled wanly, and waited until the noise subsided. At last he began in a falsetto voice: “Mr. Cheerman—” There were titters from the audience. Lincoln gulped, his Adam’s apple riding up and down. Again he began in his Kentucky drawl, his voice still cracked with stage fright, speaking too softly to be heard in the back of the room. People yelled, “Louder!” Steeling himself, Lincoln went on to plod more deeply into his well-researched and well-reasoned speech, gaining confidence, his voice deepening in pitch and growing in volume. As he forgot his audience and concentrated on his message, Lincoln seemed transformed. His fixed gaze became hypnotic, and for the next hour and a half he held the breathless attention of the sophisticated New Yorkers. He said:

  Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. . . . Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to be spread into the national territories, and to overrun us here in these free states? . . . Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have the faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.

  Lincoln’s New York speech that evening of February 27, 1860, was received by his audience with prolonged cheers. The next morning four New York newspapers ran the full text. It was also published in pamphlets and distributed by the tens of thousands across the land, together with reproductions of Brady’s photograph depicting a statesmanlike Lincoln. Republicans were so impressed that Seward lost much of his early support, and three months later Lincoln won the Republican Presidential nomination. Lincoln always remembered New York with special fondness, saying, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President.”

  As election day neared, Southerners spoke ever more menacingly about seceding from the Union. The New York Evening Post met this talk with what it called “the following choice lines of Mother Goose. ‘Says Aaron to Moses, let us cut off our noses; Says Moses to Aaron, it’s the fashion to wear’em.’ ” Then, in a serious vein, the Post declared, “If a State secedes, it is revolution, and the seceders are traitors.”

  Lincoln’s election as President on November 6 was the signal for overt action by South Carolina, the proudest and most aristocratic of all Southern states. Its legislature called a state convention, whose delegates at 1:15 P.M. on December 20, 1860, declared that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

  In the White House, President James Buchanan dolorously told John Cochrane of New York he believed that he was the last President of the United States. The New York Herald jibed that just as Lincoln had once split rails, so was he now splitting the Union. Alexander T. Stewart, a New York department store magnate, wrote that “the refusal at Washington to concede costs us millions daily.” New York bankers and merchants—anxious about the $150,000,000 or so they had advanced to Southerners in long-term crop loans—told Congress that the federal government would be left penniless if it did not allow South Carolina to go its own way.

  Southern agents shipped increasing quantities of muskets from New York to states south of the Mason and Dixon line. The New York Journal of Commerce said ominously, “There are a million and a half mouths to be fed daily in this city and its dependencies; and they will not consent to be starved by any man’s policies. They will sooner set up for themselves against the whole world.” Mayor Fernando Wood agreed. On January 7, 1861, in the most extraordinary message ever received by the city council, the mayor recommended that New York secede from the Union and become a free city.

  He believed that dissolution of the Federal Union was inevitable. He felt that the city should not jeopardize its profitable trade with the South by taking an anti-Southern stand. He hoped to free the city from domination by the state legislature. He schemed to capture the rich customs duties now pouring into the city and being absorbed by the federal government. “If the confederacy is broken up,” Wood argued, “the government is dissolved, and it behooves every distinct community, as well as every individual, to take care of themselves.”

  The mayor’s proposal did not win favor even among members of his own Democratic party. Greeley blasted him: “Fernando Wood evidently wants to be a traitor; it is lack of courage only that makes him content with being a blackguard.” The Evening Post scoffed that it never suspected Wood of being a fool, regardless of whatever else he might be, and archly asked if the seceding city should take along Long Island Sound, the New York Central Railroad, and the Erie Canal. When Lincoln heard the news in Springfield, he grinned and told a New Yorker, “I reckon it will be some time before the Front Door sets up housekeeping on its own account.” In the nation’s capital Secretary of the Treasury John A. Dix, a New York Democrat, issued this order: “If anyone attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on sight.”

  No flag came down, but none went up over City Hall on the day Lincoln was inaugurated as President of the United States. Flouting city tradition, Mayor Wood refused to let the Stars and Stripes wave above the seat of government of the nation’s most powerful city.

  On April 12, 1861, the first shot of the Civil War was fired by a Southerner at Fort Sumter, in Charleston, South Carolina. Poet-editor Walt Whitman wrote:

  News of the attack on fort Sumter and the flag at Charleston Harbor, S.C., was receiv’d in New York city late at night and was immediately sent out in extras of the newspapers. I had been to the opera in Fourteenth street that night, and after the performance was walking down Broadway toward twelve o’clock, on my way to Brooklyn, when I heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys, who came presently tearing and yelling up the street, rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual. I bought an extra and cross’d to the Metropolitan hotel where the great lamps were still brightly blazing, and, with a crowd of others, who gather’d impromptu, read the news, which was evidently authentic. For the benefit of some who had no papers, one of us read the telegram aloud, while all listen’d silently and attentively. No remark was made by any of the crowd, which had increas’d to thirty or forty, but all stood a minute or two, I remember, before they dispers’d. I can almost see them there now, under the lamps at midnight again.

  From the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a rosy-cheeked follower of the Prince of Peace, came this shrill cry: “Give me war redder than blood and fiercer than fire!”

  Chapter 24

  THE DRAFT RIOTS

  A FORMER New York policeman, named Peter Hart, helped save the American flag at Fort Sumter in that first battle of the Civil War. In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Southerners opened fire on the federal-held stronghold in Charleston Harbor and kept up the bombardment for thirty-four hours. The second afternoon, a few minutes before one o’clock, an enemy ball shot off the tip of the fort’s flagpole. Down fluttered Old Glory. Peter Hart, then a sergeant in the United States army, dashed out onto the Uttered parapet, carrying a long pole. A captain and two lieutenants ran to his aid. Amid a tempest of shot and shell the four soldiers fastened the pole to a gun carriage and raised the colors once more.

  In New York during the opening days of the war a famous widow sat in her home making American flags. Her husband had been Captain James Lawrence, the naval officer who had won immortality during the War of 1812 by shouting, “Don’t give up the ship!” He had died of his wounds and lay buried in Trinity Churchyard.

  As newspapers issued one extra after another, Mrs. Lawrence showed her little granddaughter how to scrape lint
with a carving knife. A visitor, a flip young man known as “Poke” Wright, dropped by. He made an insulting remark about the American flag. The old woman looked up in astonishment and then cried, “No one can speak with disrespect in my house of the banner under which my husband fought and died!” Pulling her frail body out of a chair, she charged the rascal with her knife, driving him out onto the street. Her shrill anger attracted pedestrians, who grabbed Wright, forced him to his knees, and made him cheer the flag.

  This symbolized the changed attitude of most New Yorkers upon the fall of Fort Sumter. A merchant wrote: “There is but one feeling here now, and that is to sustain our flag and the government at all costs.” A Charleston man who ordered flour from another New York merchant got this reply: “Eat your cotton, God damn ye!” The Planters Hotel at Albany and Greenwich streets, long popular with Southerners, quickly closed. Tammany Hall had opposed war with the South, but now, sniffing public opinion, it issued a loyalty proclamation and sent a regiment to the front.

  Mayor Fernando Wood issued his own bland proclamation, urging everybody to obey the laws of the land. Remembering that only four months earlier the mayor had suggested that the city secede from the Union, G. T. Strong wrote in his diary: “The cunning scoundrel sees which way the cat is jumping and puts himself right on the record in a vague general way, giving the least possible offense to his allies of the Southern democracy.” A mob chased Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett up the street and insisted that an American flag be displayed from his building; Bennett had to send out an office boy to find one. The supply of bunting ran short as nearly every private and public building flew Old Glory.

  The previous year work had ceased on the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral for lack of money. Now a halt was called to the landscaping of Central Park, and Frederick Law Olmsted went to Washington as general secretary of the Sanitary Commission. The city took on a military appearance, as camps were set up in City Hall Park, at the Battery, on Staten Island, on Rikers Island, and at Atlantic and Flat-bush avenues in Brooklyn. Cannon ringed the new Croton Fountain in City Hall Park. Private houses and public buildings were taken over by the army for offices and recruiting stations. The Brooklyn Navy Yard hired more men.

  President Lincoln called for 75,000 three-month volunteers on April 15, and within 10 days 8,000 well-equipped men from this city left for the front. For days afterward the slap and scuffle of marching feet resounded in streets as volunteers from upper New York State and from New England flowed through the city en route to threatened Washington. The local Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, and Scots organized their own regiments. Firemen banded together into regiments of Zouaves. In their drill and dress they imitated Algerian light infantry of this name. Their gaudy uniforms consisted of baggy trousers, gaiters, open jackets, and turbans or fezzes. Oddly clad, too, were members of the Seventy-ninth New York Highlanders. On ceremonial occasions the officers wore kilts, while the men donned pantaloons of the Cameron tartan in honor of their colonel, James Cameron.

  A physics professor left Columbia College to join the new Confederate army. A few Columbia students enlisted and fought, but they did not enroll en masse, as did Harvard boys, and war fever never gripped Columbia, as it did, say, the University of Wisconsin.

  Free Negroes tried to enlist, but they were rejected at first. New York was still a segregated city. In 1860 voters had defeated a bill giving Negroes the right to vote without meeting property qualifications. Black men persisted in their clamor to bear arms against the South. Visiting here was a South Carolina white woman, who cried, “Just think how infamous it is that our gentlemen should have to go out and fight niggers, and that every nigger they shoot is a thousand dollars out of their own pockets!” The first local company of colored soldiers was mustered on February 9, 1864. All told, 200,000 American Negroes served in the Union army.

  The New York Sabbath Committee declared it would be unholy of soldiers to fight on Sunday. The Reverend Stephen H. Tyng, of St. George’s Episcopal Church on Broadway, said that it was a historic fact that “the party who attacks in war on Sunday has invariably been defeated.” General Robert E. Lee, who had spent five years in New York strengthening local forts, took command of all Southern forces. Tiffany’s began making swords, medals, corps badges, and other military insignia. Brooks Brothers turned out uniforms for generals Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Hooker and for thousands of their men.

  The largest mass meeting in the city’s history was held in Union Square to pledge loyalty to the Union cause. Crowd estimates vary from 100,000 to 250,000 persons. Whatever the exact number, the multitude was so vast that speeches were made from 5 different stands erected in the square. Fernando Wood presided because he was mayor, but scowling men muttered that they might run him out of office unless he took a strong pro-Union stand. This warning was echoed by a boy perched in a tree: “Now, Fernandy, mind what you say! You’ve got to stick to it this time!” People laughed, and Wood spoke as ordered. The rabid patriotism of New Yorkers galled Southerners, who felt betrayed by the one group of Northerners they had considered their friends. The Richmond Dispatch editorialized: “New York will be remembered with special hatred by the South for all time.”

  The Rebels, with superior leadership, won the first two engagements of the war. After the First Battle of Bull Run, demoralization spread throughout the North, and Greeley wanted an armistice. In the Tribune he wrote: “The gloom in this city is funereal—for our dead at Bull Run were many, and they lie unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair.” Spirits drooped even lower after the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Then came incredible news of how some New York units had conducted themselves on the field.

  At Bull Run the First New York Fire Zouaves distinguished themselves. However, another group of Zouaves panicked their first time under fire. Basically brave men, they were such individualists that they defied discipline. Then too, the Seventy-ninth New York Highlanders, who had volunteered for three years of service, mutinied when three-month volunteers left the front.

  Early victory faded from sight, and defeatism corroded the North. A Confederate major from Mississippi rashly made his way to New York, swaggered from one Broadway saloon to another, and boasted how he had chewed up Union soldiers at Bull Run. He was clapped into prison, but people shuddered at his words. August Belmont, a Rothschild agent in New York, wrote that thousands of people were sorry they had voted for Abraham Lincoln. Bennett of the Herald roared, “The business community demands that the war shall be short; and the more vigorously it is prosecuted, the more speedily it will be closed. Business men can stand a temporary reverse. They can easily make arrangements for six months or a year. But they cannot endure a long, uncertain and tedious contest.”

  Greeley, who blew hot and cold about the Lincoln administration, first used the word “Copperhead” in the Tribune on July 20, 1861. Copperheads were Northern Democrats who opposed the war policies of the Republican President and favored a negotiated peace. New York became the nest of these snake-named conspirators. According to A Short History of New York State: “The peace faction was particularly strong in New York City, which from the elections of 1860 to Appomattox provided more moral support to the Confederacy and more opposition to the war than any other important section of the North.”

  The first two war years the Union’s fighting men consisted of four grades of troops—regular army, state militia, three-month volunteers, and three-year volunteers. Most were volunteers, since this was a people’s war fought by amateurs, rather than by professional soldiers. In April, 1862, the Confederacy began drafting men, and the following July New York State passed a weak draft law. Lincoln’s first call for 75,000 three-month volunteers proved inadequate, so he asked again and again for various quotas to serve various periods of time. Not enough men stepped forward to replace battle losses and the thinning of ranks because of illness. On March 3, 1863, the first federal American draft went into effect. All able-bodied Northern white males betwe
en the ages of twenty and forty-five became liable for military service.

  The draft was “profoundly repugnant to the American mind,” according to the New York World, controlled by Fernando Wood and August Belmont. Wood’s brother, Benjamin, headed the Daily News, which said, “The people are notified that one out of about two and a half of our citizens are to be brought into Messrs. Lincoln & Company’s charnelhouse. God forbid!” The proslavery Journal of Commerce snarled that the war itself had become the work of “evil-minded men to accomplish their aims.”

  Even though his own state had already passed a draft act, Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour challenged the federal government’s right to conscript citizens. By protesting the quota assigned to New York State, he postponed the first local draft lottery. On July 4, in New York City, the governor made one of the most inflammatory speeches ever uttered by a public official. Seymour shouted, “Remember this! Remember this! The bloody, treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government!”

  His words fell like sparks on a city rotten with crime and ripe for revolt. In 1862 nearly one-tenth of the population had been arrested on one charge or another, and between 70,000 and 80,000 criminals infested the town. Wages were low, and prices high; coal, for example, cost more than $10 a ton. A draftee could buy exemption from service by paying the federal government $300, but few unskilled workers had this much money. They muttered that it was a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight. It was known that John Jacob Astor, grandson and namesake of the late multimillionaire, was a colonel on General McClellan’s staff and lived by himself at headquarters in a rented house with a valet, chef, and steward.