CHAPTER 18

War! War!! War!!!

Good soldiers, brave men, hard fighting, will do more toward quiet than all the compromises and empty, wagging tongues in the world.

—Henry Ward Beecher

Telegraphed news of the Sumter bombardment began to reach New York late Friday afternoon. A thoughtful crowd gathered in Printing House Square, where the Herald and other papers posted the latest ripped-from-the-wires news on message boards outside their offices.

But as anxious and preoccupied as the city had been for weeks, it was still the start of a spring weekend and people went out that evening for some fun. Edwin Booth was starring at the Winter Garden (the Metropolitan, renamed), hailed as “the sensation of the city” by Harper’s. Across the street, Laura Keene was starring in another grand success. For the 1860–61 season she followed Our American Cousin with The Seven Sisters, a musical “burletta” very loosely about the diabolical daughters of Pluto, king of the underworld, wherein one of them comes to New York and falls in love at Coney Island. The sketch of a plot was just an excuse for a spectacle that managed to be both patriotic and titillating, extolling the values of national unity just as the country was falling apart, with flag-waving chorus girls in gauzy outfits singing and dancing their way through historical tableaux. Among the songs in the show was “Dixie.” Keene was pioneering the sort of gaudy leg show Flo Ziegfeld would supercharge in the next century. The Seven Sisters ran from the fall of 1860 straight through to the summer of 1861, 250 consecutive nights, selling some four hundred thousand tickets. She would reopen it in the fall and tour a road-show production from Boston to Washington.

Farther down Broadway, Nixon’s Circus was at Niblo’s Garden at Prince Street. At the American Concert Hall, a variety theater at 444 Broadway near Canal Street—known colloquially as “The 444”—a young song-and-dance man named Tony Pastor was amusing an audience of mostly working-class men. Admission was fifteen cents and vendors hawked cigars; historian Mark Caldwell notes that “even the violinists in the orchestra could be seen smoking cigars, cigarettes and pipes as they played.” Born around 1837 in a small house on the future site of the World Trade Center, Pastor by the age of nine had performed as a child prodigy in blackface at Barnum’s American Museum, and at ten he had hit the road, touring with a minstrel troupe and then with a circus, first as a clown, then as ringmaster at age fifteen. Now he did all types of ethnic novelty songs—Irish and Cockney character songs, Dutch songs like “The Goot Lager Beer,” minstrel songs. As the war got under way he would cleverly start loading his act with patriotic material like “The Star-Spangled Banner”—he’s thought to be the first performer to sing it on a variety stage.

At the Academy of Music up on 14th Street, the soprano Clara Louise Kellogg was singing the lead in Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix. Kellogg was nineteen and had just made her debut at the Academy in February. Although she’d been living and training in New York for several years, she was born and spent her first few years, as it happens, in South Carolina. In her Memoirs of an American Prima Donna, published in 1913, she recalled that she had “a negro mammy to take care of me, one of the real old-fashioned kind, of a type now almost gone. She used to hold me in her arms and rock me back and forth, and as she rocked she sang.” The family soon moved north, where Clara’s ongoing love of Negro spirituals and minstrel songs “horrified” her father, and she was quite probably the only opera diva who could pluck a banjo. She would become good friends with a dashing Civil War cavalry officer, George Armstrong Custer.

Walt Whitman, who loved opera, caught her performance that night. Afterward, near midnight, he was strolling down Broadway when he encountered the newsies hawking the Sumter news. He walked into the Metropolitan Hotel at Broadway and Prince Street, “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.” As someone read aloud, “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.” Whitman continued on his way downtown to the Brooklyn ferry slip at Fulton Market, which Caldwell describes as “always alive all night, with passengers boarding and leaving the ferryboats, pickpockets preying on them, and rows of 24-hour oyster restaurants.”

Businessmen “devoted to the interests of the South” had planned a rally in City Hall Park for the following Monday, where they intended to call on Lincoln yet again to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the secessionists. They now scuttled those plans as obsolete.

That night, up in Portland, Maine, Edwin Booth’s brother John was ending a successful monthlong run. From there he’d go to Albany, where his barroom rants in favor of the Confederacy would anger some locals. They demanded that he be banned from the stage for his “treasonous statements,” but his fans would prevail.

The shelling of Fort Sumter continued without cease through Friday night and Saturday morning, until Major Anderson finally surrendered at 2:30 on Saturday afternoon. He and his men were allowed to evacuate aboard the Baltic. They brought the fort’s large, tattered American flag with them as the Baltic steamed for New York City on Sunday.

By that Sunday morning the news of Fort Sumter’s fall had galvanized and transformed Brooklyn and New York. A huge crowd filled Printing House Square, ravenous for the latest news from the wires. The Herald printed 135,000 papers that day, the largest print run in American history to then.

For all their pro-South and anti-Lincoln inclinations, New York and Brooklyn reacted to the news with an explosion of patriotic outrage. The bluster would fade as they tasted the actual horrors of war, but for a brief time men of the metropolis were as gung-ho as anyone in the North.

Beecher preached an abolitionist war sermon that roused a packed Plymouth Church to thunderous cheers. “I hold that it is ten thousand times better to have war than to have slavery.… Let every man that lives and owns himself an American take the side of true American principles.” For the next two years Beecher would express impatience with Lincoln’s conduct of the war and his reluctance to move on slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation would finally mollify him.

American flags appeared on windowsills and rooftops all around Manhattan. Banners hung along Broadway with sayings like “Trust in God, and keep your powder dry” and “Jeff. Davis, Jeff. Davis, beware of the day / When the Seventh shall meet thee in battle array.” Large crowds of men and boys wandered the streets and massed hooting and jeering in front of any building that did not display a flag. Mayor Wood called out the Metropolitans to protect his home and Benjamin’s Daily News offices from angry crowds. A crowd gathered in Printing House Square noticed that no flag flew from the Herald building. Bennett had hammered away at Lincoln right up to the weekend. He warned that “only by conciliation and compromise” could Lincoln avoid “a civil war of five, ten or twenty years’ duration.” But he doubted that Lincoln was statesman enough to keep the peace, so he argued that “our only hope now… seems to lie in the overthrow of the demoralizing, disorganizing, and destructive” Republican Party, “of which ‘Honest Abe Lincoln’ is the pliant instrument.”

Worried about the Herald’s influence in Europe, Lincoln summoned Thurlow Weed to the White House and asked him to meet with Bennett on his behalf, to try to woo His Satanic Majesty again. Weed and Bennett had known and intensely disliked each other since the 1820s, but he went to have dinner with Bennett in his mansion in Washington Heights and delivered Lincoln’s message. In his autobiography, Weed recalled that “Mr. Bennett replied that the abolitionists… had provoked a war, of the danger of which he had been warning the country for years, and that now, when they were reaping what they had sown, they had no right to call upon him to help them out of a difficulty that they had deliberately brought upon themselves.”

Now the crowd demanded to know why no flag was flying from the Herald building. Bennett sent an office boy out a back door to run over to Broadway and buy one. It was hung from a window and the crowd dispersed. Still, Bennett bought a supply of rifles to keep in the office just in case.

The day after the mob’s visit, Bennett asked Henry Villard to come dine with him at Washington Heights. He had now rethought his position on the war and had two messages for Villard to convey to Lincoln. First, he’d decided “that the Herald would hereafter be unconditionally for the radical suppression of the Rebellion by force of arms, and in the shortest possible time, and would advocate and support any ‘war measures’ by the Government and Congress,” Villard wrote in his memoir. Second, he offered the treasury the use of his son James Jr.’s sailing yacht the Henrietta as a revenue cutter, if Junior could be commissioned as an officer. With Lincoln’s blessing, the yacht was equipped with a few guns, and James Jr. spent a year serving as a third lieutenant aboard it, patrolling from Long Island down to the Carolinas.

John Dix and other prominent men hastily organized a patriotic “monster meeting” to be held the following Saturday in Union Square. The square was not yet the popular gathering place it would become. But it was a big space and the name seemed propitious, even though it was so called because it was the union of two streets, Bloomingdale (now Broadway) and the Bowery (now Fourth Avenue). It also featured an equestrian statue of George Washington, which seemed appropriate.

The Baltic reached New York and anchored off the Battery at one o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, April 19, one week after the shelling of Sumter began. News of its arrival “created great excitement in the streets,” the Times reported, and “a large concourse of people rushed toward the Battery.” An estimated hundred thousand New Yorkers thronged Union Square that Saturday for Dix’s monster rally. The Times called it the “largest meeting, without exception, that was ever held on this continent.” An exhausted-looking Major Anderson was the rally’s guest of honor, and his tattered flag fluttered from Washington’s statue. The very long list of notables who addressed the cheering multitude included both Republicans, like Henry Raymond, and Democrats, like the Brooklyn state senator and commissioner of New York harbor Francis B. Spinola. He sounded a familiar theme of nonpartisan patriotism when he said, “Truly, my fellow-citizens, this is no time for words. We must act. Act now, act together, or we are lost.” Tammany Hall came out foursquare for the war. Even Mayor Wood put his finger to the gale-force wind and changed his tack. Greeted with a mix of cheers and boos, he actually draped himself in his own American flag as he told the crowd, “I am with you in this contest. We know no party now.”

The headline of the next day’s Sunday Mercury hollered “WAR! WAR!! WAR!!!” Orpheus C. Kerr added a poem that summed up his scathing opinion of Southerners:

’Neath a ragged palmetto a Southerner sat,

A-twisting the band of his Panama hat,

And trying to lighten his mind of a load

By humming the words of the following ode:

“Oh! for a nigger, and oh! for a whip;

Oh! for a cocktail, and oh! for a nip;

Oh! for a shot at old Greeley and Beecher;

Oh! for a crack at a Yankee school-teacher;

Oh! for a captain, and oh! for a ship;

Oh! for a cargo of niggers each trip.”

And so he kept oh-ing for all he had not,

Not contented with owing for all that he’d got.

Southern businessmen who until this time had always treated New York as their second home now felt ill at ease on its streets. Gazaway Bugg Lamar would leave the city in May, claiming that his life “had been repeatedly threatened by mobs.” Back in Savannah, he would become a major stockholder in the Importing and Exporting Company of Georgia, set up to run Union blockades. He would buy and warehouse a huge cache of cotton, predicting that the price would soar as war drastically reduced production and shipping.

Recalling the martial fever in Brooklyn and New York in these first weeks of the war, Whitman later wrote:

Even after the bombardment of Sumter… the gravity of the revolt, and the power and will of the slave States for a strong and continued military resistance to national authority, were not at all realized at the North, except by a few. Nine-tenths of the people of the free States look’d upon the rebellion, as started in South Carolina, from a feeling one-half of contempt, and the other half composed of anger and incredulity.… A great and cautious national official predicted that it would blow over “in sixty days,” and folks generally believ’d the prediction. I remember talking about it on a Fulton ferryboat with the Brooklyn mayor, who said he only “hoped the Southern fire-eaters would commit some overt act of resistance, as they would then be at once so effectually squelch’d, we would never hear of secession again—but he was afraid they never would have the pluck to really do anything.”

He also remembered Brooklyn volunteers who “were all provided with pieces of rope, conspicuously tied to their musket-barrels, with which to bring back each man a prisoner from the audacious South, to be led in a noose, on our men’s early and triumphant return!”

There were dissenters from all the patriotic brio. The coming of war created a schism among Northern Democrats. The majority of Democrats in the North, like Dix and Spinola, grudgingly agreed with Lincoln that the United States must be preserved and the secessionists put down. They came to be known as War Democrats. The antiwar Democrats were a minority, but a highly vocal and visible one. They opposed every aspect of the war effort from the start to the finish. Some simply spoke out against it in speeches and in newsprint. Others went all the way to committing acts of treason. This antiwar faction was politely known as Peace Democrats, less courteously as Copperheads, as in deadly snakes in the grass. The epithet may have derived from a story in the New York Times that ran two days before the firing on Fort Sumter. When postal workers in Washington opened a mailbag from the South, “a box fell out and was broken open, from which two copperheads, one four and a half and the other three feet long, crawled out. The larger one was benumbed and easily killed; the other was very lively and venomous, and was dispatched with some difficulty and danger. What are we to think of a people who resort to such weapons of warfare.” By 1862, Peace Democrats were calling themselves Copperheads, but with a different meaning. “Copperhead” was slang for a penny, which had an image of Lady Liberty on it. Copperheads took to wearing pennies as pins, signifying that they were the true defenders of liberty.

In New York, one of the most outspoken Copperheads was Benjamin Wood. Through the spring and summer of 1861, his editorials would render the Daily News one of the most vehemently and persistently antiwar papers in the North. He blamed radical abolitionists for having goaded Lincoln into the “insane strife.” For engaging in the war, he accused Lincoln of “high treason, and for similar conduct Charles I of England lost his head.”

James McMaster begged to differ as well. Prior to the fall of Sumter, Freeman’s Journal had been a relatively moderate, mainstream platform of conservative dissent. His editorials had come out for popular sovereignty in Kansas and for states’ rights in the South. He had blamed radical abolitionists for making “African slavery” a national issue. He endorsed Douglas in 1860 and warned that if Lincoln and the Republicans took the White House, Southern secession would surely follow. None of this stood out much from what most other Democratic editors were writing, or from the opinions of many of New York’s business, civic, and religious leaders, including Archbishop Hughes. McMaster was a dissident but not disloyal. When Lincoln was elected, he wrote, “Whoever talks of resisting his inauguration is a traitor, and if he attempts resistance, ought to be hanged.” As Southern states began seceding that December, many of the other editors in New York City—Greeley, Raymond, Bennett, Wood—wrote that they should be allowed to go in peace. McMaster argued that secession should not be countenanced. Putting the issue in terms he thought his Catholic readers would best understand, he wrote, “The Union is a solemn marriage of the states, and death—death political and social—alone can dissolve the Union.”

The coming of war radicalized him. Now he charged that Lincoln and the Republicans had sacrificed Sumter in a conspiracy to force the Confederacy into war. Like Benjamin Wood, through the spring and summer of 1861 he would denounce every war action Lincoln took as unconstitutional and tyrannical. Both he and Wood would pay for their opinions.

The war created a different kind of factional split among Republicans. The moderate majority, like Henry Raymond, backed the Lincoln administration in most things, though many would have doubts about the wisdom of his Emancipation Proclamation and his suspending of habeas corpus and other civil rights. Extremists, known as Radical Republicans, came from the abolitionist movement and believed from the start—well before Lincoln or most anyone else in the Union did—that the chief purpose of the war was to end slavery, as well as to punish the South and destroy its culture. In their own way they were as critical of the administration as the Copperheads were. Radicals like Charles Sumner would hound Lincoln and his generals for not prosecuting the war fast or fiercely enough.