FERNANDO WOOD was elected mayor for the third time in 1859. Openly hostile toward Negroes, he denounced them as inferior creatures and declared that “the profits, luxuries, the necessities—nay, even the physical existence depend upon the products only to be obtained by continuance of slave labor and the prosperity of the slave master!”
The issue of slavery in all its ramifications—moral, religious, economic, political, and sociological—towered above other issues, such as fear of foreigners, anti-Catholicism, women’s rights, and temperance. Since 1808 the importation of slaves into the United States from Africa or the West Indies had been prohibited by federal law. At first Congress did little to enforce the law. After 1820, however, when slave running was made a capital crime, an agency was set up to suppress this trade. Even so, not a single person was executed under the act until the outbreak of the Civil War. With an increase in the price of slaves in the 1850’s, New York experienced a boom in slave trading. Horace Greeley called the city “the nest of slave pirates.”
Between 1852 and 1862 a total of 26 schooners and brigs belonging to the port of New York were charged by the federal government with engaging in the slave trade. Men who smuggled in slaves were called blackbirders, while the Negroes themselves were referred to as black ivory. The favorite New York rendezvous of the blackbirders was Sweet’s Restaurant, at Fulton and South streets, where many a nefarious deal was plotted. One successful slave-trading ship was a beautiful 95-foot yacht, the Wanderer, which sailed under colors of the New York Yacht Club. Her skipper and part owner was W. C. Corrie, who fronted for a syndicate of Southerners but was elected to the local club because of the quality of his craft. The Wanderer picked up more than 400 Congo Negroes and landed them on one of the Sea Islands of Georgia. When this act of piracy was disclosed, Corrie was merely expelled from the New York Yacht Club.
The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who turned to every breeze, said, “My earnest desire is that slavery may be destroyed by the manifest power of Christianity. If it were given me to choose whether it should be destroyed in fifty years by selfish commercial influences, or, standing for seventy-five years, be then the spirit and trophy of God, I had rather let it linger twenty-five years more, that God may be honored, and not mammon, in the destruction of it.” This pious remark vexed Horace Greeley, who suggested in the Tribune that he would “wish to take the sense of those in bondage before agreeing to the twenty-five years’ postponement for the glory of Christianity.” Frederick Douglass, the former slave, growled, “With a good cowhide, I could take all of that out of Mr. Beecher in five minutes!”
From the time the first horse-drawn streetcars began running in New York, Negroes had been barred from riding them. In 1855 a court affirmed their right to ride in all public conveyances, but transit companies paid no attention to the ruling. One Sunday a Negro minister, the Reverend James C. W. Pennington, urged his parishioners to stand up for their rights. He boarded a Sixth Avenue car and, in a display of passive resistance, refused to get off at the request of the conductor. He was forcibly ejected.
The financial panic that wracked the city and the nation in 1857 provoked Southern resentment of Northern control of the cotton trade. Until the outbreak of the Civil War—when the South owed $200,000,000 to the North—the money manipulators of New York dominated every phase of this business, from plantation to market.
The New York Evening Post declared that “the city of New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North.” James D. B. De Bow, a New Orleans magazine editor, proclaimed New York “almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston itself.” When the London Times asked De Bow what he thought New York would be like without slavery, he replied, “The ships would rot at her docks; grass would grow in Wall Street and Broadway, and the glory of New York, like that of Babylon and Rome, would be numbered with the things of the past.”
This was what Northern businessmen feared. As trade with the West declined during the panic, these hardheaded traders reassured Southerners of their continuing friendship. It disturbed them when eighteen firms and individuals in Columbus, Georgia, pledged themselves not to trade with any New York firm hostile to the South. Deeper grew the cleavage between Northerners and Southerners, and louder their voices.
In Illinois a senatorial candidate, named Abraham Lincoln, said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” The New York Tribune sent a correspondent to cover the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and Lincoln kept a special pigeonhole in the desk of his Springfield office for letters from Horace Greeley. When members of the American Antislavery Society met again in New York in 1859, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald sneered: “They are down upon everybody and everything except their own little set of crazy demagogues and fanatics.” Henry J. Raymond’s Times explained attendance at abolitionist sessions this way: “People go to hear them just as they would go to a bull-baiting or rat-killing match, if these were respectable.”
The afternoon of Saturday, February 25, 1860, an odd and ugly man stepped ashore from a ferry at Cortlandt Street. His furrowed face and weatherworn look and his ungainly clothes and loose-jointed gait seemed to mark him as a Westerner. Topping his six-foot four-inch height was a tall beaver hat that made him appear even taller. Wisps of black hair stuck out from the rim of this hat. His ill-fitting suit hung in wrinkles on his badly proportioned figure, with its scraggy neck, narrow chest, and long arms. In one big bony hand he carried an old-fashioned carpetbag. Set deeply within the gaunt clean-shaven face, the gray eyes of Abraham Lincoln gazed for the first time on New York.
No one was at the dock to meet him. A New York lecture agent had invited Lincoln to the city in behalf of the young men of Henry Ward Beecher’s church. However, because of a conflict in dates, his engagement was now sponsored by the Young Men’s Republican Union of New York City. This group hoped to prevent the nomination of Senator William Henry Seward as Presidential candidate of the new Republican party. Aware that Seward was the front-runner, Lincoln was gratified to read a friendly story about himself in Greeley’s Tribune. Still alone, he checked into the Astor House, where gentlemen were requested to park their pistols in the cloakroom.
The next morning Lincoln crossed over to Brooklyn to hear a sermon by Beecher, whom he considered “the greatest orator since St. Paul.” Sunday afternoon an Illinois Congressman took Lincoln slumming through the notorious Five Points—always a must for out-of-town visitors.
A cold rain was falling on Monday when some young Republicans called for Lincoln at the Astor House. When he said that he wanted to buy a new hat, they drove him to Knox’s Great Hat and Cap Establishment at Broadway and Fulton Street. Because Knox made a hobby of collecting politicians’ hats, he gave Lincoln a new silk topper in exchange for his beaver hat. Back on the street, noticing that the rain was turning into a wet snow, Lincoln may have wondered if bad weather would reduce attendance at Cooper Union that evening. He stared at Broadway horsecars, their sides gay with pictures painted by well-known artists, and then drew up in front of 643 Broadway, where Mathew B. Brady ran a photo studio. In the reception room Lincoln met George Bancroft, the eminent American historian. Then Brady ushered Lincoln into an inner room and posed him standing erect, his left hand resting on a book on a small table. Lincoln looked directly into the lens of the camera, his gaze soft and gentle, his lips somewhat melancholy. The photographic session over, Lincoln was driven to his hotel to dress for the evening.
Thickening snow gummed the streets as Lincoln struggled into the new suit he had brought along for this, his first appearance before an Eastern audience. It was a black broadcloth frock coat, much too small and badly wrinkled from confinement in his carpetbag. His low collar exposed his thin neck, and the right side of the collar wouldn’t stay down. Onto his big feet he pulled new boots so tight that he limped all evening. As Lincoln later confessed, he was ashamed of his appearance.
Despite the traffic-snarling snowstorm, 1,500 persons paid 25 cents each to hear this strange man from the West. Although Lincoln had lost the senatorial race to Stephen A. Douglas, he had written to a disheartened friend: “Quit that. You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again.” Already there was talk of Abraham Lincoln as a dark horse candidate for the Presidency.
Gathered in Cooper Union that night, as Greeley said, was the “intellect and moral culture” of the city of New York. Ticket holders strolled into the Great Hall and sat down in revolving chairs upholstered in red leather. About 8 P.M. Lincoln was led past the thick white pillars, under the glass chandeliers with their hissing gas jets, and onto the stage, where he sat down. One man staring at the seated Lincoln felt that there was something strange about his posture, and soon he understood what it was: Although Lincoln’s long legs were crossed, both feet were flat on the floor of the platform. Then bearded William Cullen Bryant arose and introduced Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Applause sounded like rain on a tin roof.
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!”