CHAPTER 1

My God, We Are Ruined!

The Civil War started in darkness. At 4:30 a.m. on Friday, April 12, 1861, batteries of the newly formed Confederate States of America commenced shelling the federal installation of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.

Telegraphed news of the bombardment began reaching New York City’s newspaper offices late Friday afternoon. That night, a little before midnight, Walt Whitman strolled out of the Academy of Music on 14th Street, where he’d enjoyed a performance of Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix. He was walking down Broadway, heading for Fulton Street where he would catch a ferry home 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.” They were hawking late editions. “WAR BEGUN!” the New York Tribune cried. “FORT SUMTER ATTACKED!” The Sun chimed in.

Nearby, a group of prominent businessmen were meeting. No one in the country feared a war between the states more than New York’s business community. They did a tremendous amount of trade with the South. Since the previous December, when South Carolina was the first state to secede after Lincoln’s election, they’d been “studying with intense solicitude the means of preserving the peace.” They’d held numerous meetings and rallies, petitioned their politicians, pleaded with their Southern partners. War, they knew, would not only mean the end of their highly profitable trade with the Southern states. It would leave the business leaders holding more than $150 million in Southern debt. That’s the equivalent of about $4.5 billion in today’s currency.

A messenger burst into the meeting and breathlessly delivered the news from Fort Sumter. “The persons whom he thus addressed remained a while in dead silence, looking into each other’s pale faces; then one of them, with uplifted hands, cried, in a voice of anguish, ‘My God, we are ruined!’”

That account was written by Morgan Dix, rector of the elite Trinity Church at the foot of Wall Street and son of the powerful political figure John A. Dix. He doesn’t identify his fretful gentlemen, but their names are unimportant. They were representative of a large sector of New York’s business elite at the start of the Civil War. As dismayed as they were, they could not have been startled by the Fort Sumter news. Conflicts between the North and the South had been festering for most of the century. Gloomy forecasts of ultimate disunion and civil war went back as far as the 1810s. Members of Congress had spent the entire decade of the 1850s alternately trying to bridge the widening sectional gulf and beating each other up over it. The moment the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln in the spring of 1860, angry Southern “fire-eaters” (as Northerners dubbed the most radical and vocal pro-slavers) had made it unmistakably clear that they would consider his election tantamount to an act of war. In January, five more states joined South Carolina in seceding (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana); in February, the six formed their own separate nation. Five more would soon join. Overnight, federal installations like Fort Sumter had become foreign military bases. When Confederate troops surrounded and blockaded the fort, hoping to starve the garrison into a bloodless surrender, Lincoln had picked up the gauntlet and sent supply ships steaming out of New York harbor. Neither side had blinked, and now the Civil War had begun.

North and South had disagreed over many issues, but Civil War historian James McPherson argues that only one was combustible enough to ignite a war between them: slavery. In the first half of the 1800s, as Northern states were ending slavery, it expanded mightily in the South. Although only a third of white Southerners owned slaves, many were convinced that slavery was the foundation not just of their economy but of their culture, pride, and identity. And they believed that President Lincoln wanted to force them to abolish it. He had insisted many times in many ways that he had no such intention. “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is,” he said in his career-making speech to New York Republicans in 1860. Southerners did not believe him. Through the 1850s they had watched the movement to abolish slavery gain momentum in the North. The movement’s bible, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, had sold an astounding two and a half million copies around the world in a single year, convincing Southerners that they were surrounded by enemies. The abolitionist John Brown’s attempt in 1859 to incite an armed slave rebellion had deeply alarmed them. Though Lincoln and virtually all Northern political leaders had denounced Brown as a mad fool, Northern abolitionists embraced him as a sainted martyr. The more anxious Southerners saw this as a sign that an all-out Northern attack, even military invasion, was imminent.

The truth was that to the majority of Northern whites, Southern slavery was not a pressing issue. It was certainly not one over which they would fight and die. No matter how many tears they wept reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the majority of white Americans held some version of what we’d now call a white supremacist view, on a scale from virulent to mild. They believed that blacks were at best an intellectually inferior race, or even an entirely separate species, closer to apes than to white people. This held true in the North as well as the South, among abolitionists as well as slave-owners. Stowe, whose novel did so much to stir up sympathy for the slave, nevertheless considered blacks fit only for brute labor, and she believed that if they were freed it would be best for them to “return” to Africa. Lincoln came to emancipation in slow and halting steps. He abhorred slavery on ethical and political grounds, but also favored blacks leaving the country, and doubted that blacks and whites could live as equals even as he issued his proclamation freeing them. Only a minority of New Yorkers expressed much interest in freeing slaves hundreds of miles away, and many, from those fretful businessmen to immigrant laborers, felt they had a personal stake in preserving Southern slavery. Even Whitman, whose vision of America was as all-embracing and democratic as any white man’s of his time, considered it dangerous extremism when abolitionists pressed too hard for what he called “Settlement of the Nigger Question.”

Lincoln, the majority of Northern whites, and certainly most New Yorkers did not and would not go to war to free a single slave in the South. Except for radical abolitionists, they were, as Lincoln said on many occasions, willing to let slavery remain there. The South was not. The United States went through a phase of astonishing growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, adding new territory and making new states at a ferocious clip. Ultimately, the war was not about Southern slavery but about whether or not to let slavery spread to all that new land.

The United States had begun the century an infant among the nations of the world, not yet twenty years old, still hugging the eastern coast of North America. The far frontier was the Ohio River; the Midwest was called the Northwest. Then the Louisiana Purchase in 1803—negotiated for Thomas Jefferson in part by a New Yorker, Robert Livingston—instantly doubled the country’s territory, adding an immense swath of land from the Gulf of Mexico north to the Canadian border, and from the Mississippi west to the Rockies. It was an area that would become all or part of fifteen states. By 1850 the drive from sea to shining sea was complete and the country was four times larger than it had been in 1800.

To the South it was of vital political importance to spread slavery across that new land. From the very foundation of the republic, Southern states had been concerned with maintaining a balance of power with the richer, more populous North. To that end the South forced the three-fifths rule in Article I of the Constitution, which stated that for the apportioning of tax revenues and representation in the House each slave could be counted as three-fifths of a citizen. In 1800, there were nine slave states and eight free states. Since each state of any size was allotted two senators, the South actually dominated the Senate at this point.

After the Louisiana Purchase, Southern politicians, representing what came to be known as the Slave Power, expended a great deal of time and clout on maintaining a precise numerical balance of slave states and free. So, for example, when Indiana was admitted as a free state in 1816, Mississippi was added as a slave state the following year; when the free state Illinois was added in 1818, Alabama was added as a slave state. In 1820, Congress cobbled together the Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free, but thereafter prohibiting slavery north of a line extending from Missouri’s southern border to the Pacific. The balance was maintained through the addition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and Wisconsin as a free state in 1848. That brought the total to fifteen of each.

Winning its war with Mexico in 1848 earned the United States another vast parcel of territory that would eventually become California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of other states. Californians voted to be admitted as a free state in 1850. An enormous area of western territory was still up for grabs. Through the 1850s the fighting over this territory turned ugly. The Slave Power, feeling itself increasingly hemmed in by free states and losing its hold on Washington, desperately wanted to extend slavery’s reach. That was something Northerners would not abide. Only the abolitionist minority among them opposed the extension of slavery on moral grounds. The rest resisted it not out of any sympathy for black slaves but because they believed that opening the West to slavery would ruin it for free labor. Congress passed the Compromise of 1850, a complex suite of laws meant to paste over the widening cracks by making concessions all around. It failed to please either side.

As the decade lurched on toward the precipice of war, decorum in the halls of Congress deteriorated shockingly. Fierce debate escalated into shouting matches and then physical violence. After a congressman pulled a pistol on an opponent, many came to work armed. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 turned the Kansas Territory into an actual battleground between free-state and slave forces. It came to be known as Bleeding Kansas. In 1856 a South Carolina representative took his cane to the venerable Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner over the Kansas issue, beating him so severely that he was permanently impaired. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, a reactionary Supreme Court added fuel to the fire by declaring that, according to the Constitution, blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights.”

The following year, New York senator William Seward called the battle over slavery “an irrepressible conflict,” which meant that “the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” When John Brown executed his raid on Harpers Ferry the year after that, hoping to inspire widespread slave insurrection in the South, it was almost the last straw. The last straw was Lincoln’s election in November 1860.

The slave states immediately began seceding that December and formed their own confederacy. Lincoln resolutely believed that a United States from which individual states could withdraw at will was not united at all. They had to be brought back into the fold, by force if necessary. To preserve the Union, he reluctantly provoked a war.

Lincoln knew well that if he was going to win that war he needed the help of the biggest, wealthiest metropolis in the North. What he did not know was whether he could count on that help. In fact, he had good reason to doubt it.

New York City would play a huge role in the war, but it would be a hugely confused and conflicted one. No city would be more of a help to Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance. No city raised more men, money, and matériel for the war, and no city raised more hell against it. It would be a city of patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists, and simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance, and sedition. As America fell into sectional conflict, New Yorkers fought their own civil war among themselves. It was even, in some ways, a localized clash between North and South.

From the South came cotton, far and away the city’s most important commodity in the decades preceding the war. Cotton threads tied New York to the South and to plantation slavery in a long, intimate, and co-dependent relationship. From New England came Yankee émigrés who brought abolitionism with them, and were among Lincoln’s most influential supporters.

The contest between these forces for the heart and soul of the city in the decades before the war helps explain why New York’s actions and attitudes during the war can appear so schizophrenic. The same New York banks that funded the spread of plantation slavery across the Cotton South would provide the start-up capital for the Union war machine that ended slavery. New York merchants outfitted both. The port of New York, which was a hub of both the international cotton trade and the transatlantic slave trade up to the start of the war, became the chief port of the Union navy. New York City gave the Union army some of its bravest and most gallant officers, including the first one killed in the conflict; it also sent some of the most corrupt and insubordinate, including one who came within an ace of single-handedly losing the Battle of Gettysburg.

Without his New York supporters, it’s highly unlikely Lincoln would have made it to the White House. Yet the majority of New Yorkers never voted for him and were openly hostile to him and his politics. Throughout the war New York City was a nest of antiwar “Copperheads” and a haven for deserters and draft dodgers. New Yorkers would react to Lincoln’s wartime policies with the deadliest rioting in American history. The city’s political leaders would create a bureaucracy solely devoted to helping New Yorkers evade service in Lincoln’s army. Rampant war profiteering would create an entirely new class of New York millionaires, the “shoddy aristocracy.” New York newspapers would be among the most vilely racist and vehemently antiwar in the country. Some editors would call on their readers to revolt and commit treason. A few New Yorkers would answer that call. They would assist Confederate terrorists in an attempt to burn their own city down, and collude with Lincoln’s assassin.