New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  The Democratic Party leaders and voters who dominated the city’s political life accepted and endorsed New York’s links to slavery. Emboldened by the national party’s strong base among slaveholders, the New York “Democracy” was an avowed bastion of white supremacy and of resistance to any effort by antislavery activists to sever the salutary bond between North and South. This ideology united Wall Street patricians like the banker August Belmont and the attorney Samuel Barlow, who bankrolled the national party, with the masses of working-class European emigrants, most of them Irish and German, who gave the local party its electoral majorities.

  Although New York State went for Lincoln in 1860, the city delivered a resounding twenty-four-thousand vote majority to his Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas. As the Southern states seceded from the Union over the winter of 1860–1861 in outrage at Lincoln’s election, Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that the city declare itself an independent free port in order to sustain friendly trade with the Confederacy. (“I reckon that it will be some time before the front door sets up housekeeping on its own terms,” Lincoln responded.) When the president-elect passed through town on his way to Washington in February, ship riggers on the East River welcomed him by hanging him in effigy from a mast, alongside a banner reading “Abe Lincoln, the Union Breaker.” As Lincoln greeted well-wishers outside the Astor House on lower Broadway, Walt Whitman feared for the Rail Splitter’s life: “Many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurked in hip or breast-pocket there, ready as soon as break and riot came.”8

  The firing on Sumter had—momentarily—quelled the enmity toward the president, bringing New York’s Southern-oriented businessmen and Democrats into patriotic alignment with Lincoln Republicans. Merchants who had previously argued for appeasement to keep the South from seceding now pressed for a swift war to restore the Union. A short war would reestablish the status quo without disrupting slavery in the Southern states, pleasing Democrats. But bipartisan harmony remained superficial, for it compelled the city’s Republican minority to work with a Democratic majority whose values and many of whose leaders they despised. For decades, men who disliked the Democratic Party’s pro-Southern policies, embrace of workers and Catholic immigrants, and local reputation for corruption—usually native-born Protestant merchants, professionals, and artisans of middling or elite status—had flocked into opposition parties, the latest version of which was the Republicans.

  Lincoln’s party was opposed to the expansion of slavery, but only a minority of Republicans in New York were radicals bent on abolishing the South’s “peculiar institution.” A typical Republican was George Templeton Strong, who joined the local party organization in 1856. Proud scion of a family with deep roots in colonial New York and New England, owner of an elegant Gramercy Park townhouse, Strong embodied the conservatism of New York’s Protestant elite. He joined the Republicans in outrage at what he perceived as “the reckless, insolent brutality of our Southern aristocrats.” Of far less concern to Strong were the rights of black people, whom he persistently described as “niggers” in his diary, or the arguments of abolitionists, “who would sacrifice the union to their own one idea.” By 1859, however, disgusted by what he viewed as Southern domination of the federal government, Strong was convinced that “the growing, vigorous North must sooner or later assert its right to equality with the stagnant, semi-barbarous South. . . . It must come.”9

  The only group who disgusted Strong as much as did Southern aristocrats was the city’s mass of poor Irish Catholics, “those infatuated, pig-headed Celts.” Disdain and fear of the Irish were shared by many native-born Republicans. “The most miserable and ignorant of other countries are shot into New York like rubbish,” the Republican Harper’s Weekly editorialized during the war. “ . . . They are led by the demagogues who depend upon their votes for success.” These tensions, pitting the Republican elite against the Democratic masses, embodied fissures of class, ethnicity, and religion that had permeated the city’s political and social life by the onset of war.10

  George Templeton Strong, patrician lawyer, diarist, and participant in many of New York’s key Civil War events. Illustration from The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 71367. COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

  The majority of New York’s Irish emigrants lived in a very different city from that inhabited by Strong. New York had an Irish Catholic community by the 1820s; tens of thousands more, driven across the Atlantic by the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, landed in New York without money to take them farther. By 1855, one-quarter of the city’s population—two hundred thousand people—had been born in Ireland. Most were crammed into festering slums on the east side of lower Manhattan and into shanties and tenements on the city’s northern outskirts, often only a stone’s throw from blocks of new row houses built for affluent families. The Irish performed the city’s lowest-paying wage work, toiling as day laborers, longshoremen, drivers, laundresses, seamstresses, and servants. By the 1840s, bloody riots between gangs of Irish Catholics and native Protestants—and by both groups against constables and state militia—were commonplace. In the worst slums, a reform group would report in 1865, tens of thousands of immigrants were “literally submerged in filth and half stifled in an atmosphere charged with all the elements of death.” The mortality rate in slum areas was more than twice that in the townhouses of the upper-middle-class Murray Hill district.11

  While other Europeans were often welcomed into the social fabric of New York (German emigrants, for instance, the era’s other large group of newcomers, gained a reputation for being “respectable” and steady), the Irish were stereotyped as primitive and brutish for their boisterous drinking culture, the crime and violence that beset some of their neighborhoods, and the Catholicism that led them to defy the anglophile Protestant elite. They embraced the Democratic Party, the only powerful institution in the city (apart from the growing Catholic Church) that welcomed them with open arms. They also shared in a brotherhood that exalted them for their white skin and made them equals at the ballot box with New York’s richest bankers and merchants. Republicans, thundered Democratic journalist James Brooks, were bent on “the negation of the white race and the elevation of the negro.” Such rhetoric posited the Irish as far superior to the African Americans with whom they competed for the city’s worst jobs and housing, even superior to the Republicans who lived in mansions. Thousands of New York Irishmen enlisted and marched off to war in 1861, passionate in their patriotism and proud to affirm their American citizenship. But the war they entered was emphatically one to restore the Union, not to free slaves.12

  While New York’s Irish population was growing, the city’s black community was a small but visible presence, its members numbering under 13,000 in 1860. New York State had only fully abolished slavery in 1827, and a rigid racial hierarchy continued to dictate the terms of daily life in the city. A small middle class of clergymen and tradesmen provided leadership, but the majority toiled in poverty as laborers, petty vendors, waiters, servants, and laundresses. Increasingly they had been displaced from many jobs by the influx of poor Irish. Although not isolated in a distinct ghetto, and in some districts intermingling and even intermarrying with their Irish neighbors, most lived in scattered, segregated pockets—an all-black tenement here, a row of shanties there.

  While some elite white New Yorkers sympathized with the plight of their black fellow Protestants, most shunned meaningful contact. “I have an antipathy to Negroes physically and don’t like them near me,” Maria Lydig Daly confided to her diary a few days after Bull Run. Streetcars and steamboat lines were racially segregated, and any number of businesses were off limits to black consumers. New York’s state constitution placed prohibitively high property qualifications on black voters; the electorate rejected the elimination of this racist disenfranchisement in 1860, nowhere more decisively than at the Manhattan polls. Wherever they looked, New York’s blacks encountered a city that denied them anything resembling equal rights a
nd opportunities. The physician James McCune Smith, one of the city’s most distinguished black residents, characterized such racism as the “damning thralldom that grinds to dust the colored inhabitants.”13

  In the face of such discouragement, New York’s black men and women fought back, plunging ardently into the antislavery movement and into efforts to improve their own lot. The city was home to black congregations like Reverend H. H. Garnet’s Shiloh Presbyterian Church on Prince Street, a bastion of militant abolitionism and race pride. Black abolitionists Albro and Mary Lyons turned their waterfront boardinghouse into a station for hundreds of fugitives fleeing the South along the Underground Railroad. When James Hamlet, a fugitive slave, was seized on the street and spirited back to Maryland under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, abolitionists raised $800 to buy his freedom, and a triumphant, largely African American crowd welcomed him home to a reception in City Hall Park.14

  Black New Yorkers were aided in their struggle for equality by a small group of white abolitionists. John Street in lower Manhattan was the headquarters of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, funded by the brothers and wealthy dry goods importers Lewis and Arthur Tappan. So enraged were Southerners by the antislavery propaganda issuing from New York that Louisianans put a $50,000 price tag on Arthur Tappan’s head. Radicals also had to stand the storm aroused in New York by their message of immediate abolition. In 1834, a white mob had rampaged to prevent an interracial meeting of abolitionists in a downtown chapel, and the violence escalated into several days of attacks on blacks and the homes and stores of white antislavery activists.15

  The emancipationists, black and white, persevered. With war now upon the nation, they persisted in viewing New York as a center for something more sweeping, more transcendent than a mere conflict to restore the Union. At the same time, they were as aware as anyone that the tensions dividing their city—separating Republicans from Democrats, rich from poor, natives from immigrants, Protestants from Catholics, blacks from whites—represented a tinderbox the war might ignite.

  While the war’s outbreak did little to quell the city’s underlying frictions, it invigorated the city’s economy. New York rapidly became the money city of the Northern war effort. After the Bull Run defeat, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase borrowed $150 million from Wall Street bankers to pay the war’s mounting bills. Over the next four years, New York financiers underwrote a dizzying expansion of the federal government’s budget, enriching themselves in the process. A healthy portion of the funds loaned to the government, moreover, came back to the city in the form of military contracts. New York’s merchants and manufacturers were able to think and deal on a scale that suited an institution like the US Army, which expanded almost overnight from 16,000 to over half a million men. The army’s Department of the East, headquartered on Bleecker Street, became the point from which federal funds were dispensed into Manhattan pockets and bank accounts. Thousands of workers toiled in foundries and shipyards lining the Hudson and East River waterfronts, churning out huge engines and boilers for the navy. Raw materials and finished goods—bread, pork, medicines, uniforms, shoes, blankets, gun carriages—continually flowed out the Union’s “front door” to the troops in the field. New York was awash in war money. “Look at her seated between two noble rivers forested with masts,” the Journal of Commerce boasted after half a year of war. “She has learned how to prosper without the South.”16

  War prosperity, however, quickly revealed another side, one that inflamed rather than reduced the city’s social tensions. Wages for workers rose, but not as fast as prices did. The cost of coal, flour, potatoes, beef, and milk doubled in the face of shortages and an inflationary paper currency, eroding family budgets. Skilled machinists could at least negotiate, and sometimes strike successfully, for wage hikes. Less skilled workers were not so fortunate. Thousands of the city’s women and girls, a New York Times reporter charged in 1864, “whose husbands, fathers, and brothers have fallen on the battle field, are making army shirts at six cents apiece.” To load military transports, employers replaced striking Irish longshoremen with prisoners of war (mostly Union army deserters), German immigrants, and, to the bitter fury of strikers in the spring of 1863, free blacks.17

  In truth, the war increasingly came home to the families of poorer enlistees in the form of calamity: a husband killed, a father disabled—a wage earner who would never again help to support his family. The city government provided benefits to the families of soldiers away at the front and to war widows and orphans, but the funds did not reach everyone, and the money often arrived late, prompting public protests by working wives and mothers. “You have got me men into the soldiers, and now you have to keep us from starving,” a woman implored officials during a rally in Tompkins Square late in 1862.18

  Hardship at the bottom seemed unmatched by any pervasive suffering at the top. War contractors stood to make “killings” if they played their cards right. Some sought quick and easy profits by selling inferior or spoiled merchandise—“shoddy,” as it was called—to a government too distracted to inspect every lot of goods or to purchasing agents who might get a kickback if they looked the other way. Honorable or not, war contracting sustained the city’s lopsided distribution of wealth, as well as the widely held conviction that a small class of profiteers was enjoying luxuries beyond the reach of the urban masses. “Our importers of silk goods and our leading jewelers are selling their finest goods at the highest prices,” the Herald noted in October 1862. War-generated ostentation pleased members of the established elite as little as it did the working poor. Complaining of a saddler’s wife seen buying pearls and diamonds at Tiffany’s, Maria Lydig Daly sniffed at magnificent carriages filled with “the commonest kind of humanity. Old women who might be apple-sellers or fruit-carriers are dressed in velvet and satins.”19

  Late May 1862 found Corporal Thomas Southwick far from New York, trying to climb a Virginia hill “thick with glutinous blood, causing me to slip and almost tread upon one whose life had gushed out of an ugly wound behind his ear.” Long gone were the fantasies of seizing rebel flags or rescuing generals. So were the illusions of most New Yorkers, whether at the front or at home. The newspaper casualty lists with their grisly shorthand (“Thomas McGuire, Co. A., leg amp; . . . H. Mcilainy, Co. I, forehead, severe”) arrived now with a numbing regularity—numbing except to the families who learned from them of a brother wounded, a husband killed. With one son dead and another missing an arm, Columbia College law professor Francis Lieber and his wife, Matilda, came to scan the daily papers with “drained and feverish eyes” for news of their third son (who survived the war physically unscathed).20

  Many of the surviving volunteers, like Thomas Southwick, had had enough. “Will this war ever cease? I cannot find a satisfactory answer,” he wrote in his diary. Rather than stay in the army at the end of his two-year enlistment, he returned to work as a car painter at the Third Avenue Railway in May 1863, bearing memories of Gaines’s Mill, Malvern Hill, and Fredericksburg that would last him a lifetime. If bullets and camp fever took the lives of rich boys as well as poor ones, it was in Thomas Southwick’s New York—a city of working-class neighborhoods, workshops, and saloons—that a bitter phrase increasingly fell from the lips of veterans and noncombatants alike: “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”21

  Several hundred miles to the south, Confederates had their own understanding of New York City’s role in the conflict engulfing them. Dependent for decades on New York’s resources to finance the cotton economy, resentful of the profits New Yorkers made from the cotton trade, secessionists concocted vengeful fantasies. Edmund Ruffin, a Virginian honored by being allowed to fire one of the first cannonballs against Fort Sumter, brooded frequently about Manhattan. Ruffin filled his diary with dark musings on the apocalyptic strife he predicted would befall the city once its Southern sources of wealth disappeared and its underlying decadence surfaced. In 1860 the Charleston Mercury had serialized Ruff
in’s novel, Anticipations of the Future, written as a retrospective “history” of the coming struggle between North and South. Faced with the loss of Southern trade, spiraling food prices, and an unruly mass of unemployed workers, “the city of New York broke into open rebellion. Thousands of rioters raided the gun stores and plundered the liquor shops. The police were helpless. . . . Banks were broken open and their vaults robbed. Churches were looted. . . . Drunk and gorged with plunder, the mob set the city on fire. A high wind whipped the flames into a hurricane of fire, and when morning came New York was a blackened, charred ruin.”22

  Ruffin’s vision represented more than merely a fantasy of Southern triumph. It was the start of a tradition in which its enemies would perceive New York not just as a narrowly defined military objective, but also as an encompassing symbol of moral and cultural evil. The city became a target for attack in sweeping and emotionally urgent terms. In previous wars, belligerents had targeted New York as the administrative center of a colonial hinterland, as the key to the Hudson River, and as one of several major coastal ports. Now, as the North’s capital of commerce, finance, industry, and intellectual opinion, New York represented something larger to Southerners. Boston might be the citadel of abolitionism, and Philadelphia might be filled with meddlesome antislavery Quakers. But New York was the true Sodom, the place that exemplified and reveled in everything that was rotten about the North: the disorder of “free labor,” capitalist greed and arrogance, social chaos and conflict. Of course, it was precisely because so many Southerners were familiar with New York, tied into its web of cotton financing and enticed by the charms of its goods and services, that the wartime renunciation had to be so vehement. The seductions of the place, as well as its power and conceit, needed to be checked. As large as it was, New York in the eyes of its enemies became even larger, the embodiment of everything the Confederacy was fighting against.