HIST 3480: The History of NYC

1. THE CIVIL WAR ERA HIST 3480: The History of NYC

2. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Fractured Political System • The Second Party System (Whig and Democratic parties) is coming apart in the 1850s; the issue of slavery expansion into the territories essentially destroys the Whig Party in the 1852 presidential election, although it lingers until its official dissolution in 1860. • Disgust with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which destroys the Compromise of 1850, leads to the creation of a new northern-based party, the Republican Party, that yea. Many former Whigs in the North join the party. It does not call for the abolition of slavery, but for forbidding its westward expansion and reserving the West for the free labor of whites, a position known as “Free Soil”: small white farmers rather than the large cotton plantation of the “Slave Power.”

3. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Fractured Political System • Political success of the nativist Know-Nothings in the 1854 elections add to the political chaos. • Republicans run John C. Fremont for president in the 1856 election; he loses, but his campaign brings many influential figures into the party, including former N.Y. governor and current U.S. senator, William Seward, who by 1858 viewed an “irrepressible conflict” was at hand. • The Panic of 1857 exacerbates fears and anxieties on both sides. • Southern Democrats in Congress hold hostage legislation Northerners want: a protective tariff, a homestead bill, and a northern transcontinental railroad route. • The 1857 Dred Scott decision—allowing slaves to be transported North—makes many northerners think it is the first step in the Slave Power’s conspiracy to reintroduce everywhere in the U.S.

4. THE CIVIL WAR ERA New York City’s Black Community • 1860: 12,574 blacks in NYC, but with no real geographical concentration (no Harlem yet): kicked out of Five Points, but along the East River, Greenwich Village, Sixth Avenue between 23rd and 40th, and Seneca Village (now within Central Park). • Brooklyn: Weeksville and Carville (where Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, and Brownsville converge) was first established as a free black community in 1838; by the 1850s, roughly 500 black lived there. A black community also developed in Fort Greene. • Queens: Small black communities existed in Flushing, Newtown (now Corona), and Jamaica.

5. THE CIVIL WAR ERA New York City’s Black Community • Work opportunities contracting in the 1850s: Irish push black men out of longshoremen positions, construction, and carting. Domestic service jobs get harder for black women to get because of Irish competition. • For men, some work options were farm labor in Queens and Brooklyn, going to sea, working with white oystermen, etc. • Colored Orphan Asylum: Three Quaker women found this institution in 1836 since almost no charitable institutions accepted blacks. • Public transportation—mainly omnibuses—was segregated. • Over 100 years before Rosa Parks, black schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings, refused to wait for a “colored car” at the corner of Pearl and Chatham Streets, and I beaten when she gets on. She and her father sue the company and win in 1855, deciding that the company was a common carrier and thus have to carry all passengers.

6. THE CIVIL WAR ERA 1861 illustration shows an omnibus in the lower right-hand corner

7. THE CIVIL WAR ERA New York City’s Black Community • New York’s Vigilance Committee its black community contributed much to Underground Railroad efforts and combating the Fugitive Slave Law. • Black minister Henry Highland Garnett (1815-1882) started a colonization society, the African Civilization Society, in 1858, but many prominent black New Yorkers, including Dr. James McCune Smith, opposed colonization. • Smith (1813-1865) was for twenty years the doctor of the Colored Orphan Asylum and a prominent public intellectual. He obtained his medical degree from the University of Glasgow in 1837, the first African American to do so. He was an ardent abolitionist, and an early advocate of blacks voting Republican.

8. THE CIVIL WAR ERA White New Yorkers and “Black” Republicanism • Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903): Even before his fame for his design of Central Park, he was a well known commentator on the South, criticizing slavery not for it cruelty to African Americans, but for its economic inefficiency. • Horace Greeley (1811-1872) of the Tribunejoined the Republicans since he saw slavery as barbarous and contrary to Christian civilization, and also condemned New York City’s economic ties to the slave system. • White abolitionist Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Frederick Douglass had begun addressing anti-slavery meetings at the Broadway Tabernacle in the latter 1840s.After the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Beecher ran “mock slave auctions” at his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights. He advocated that Free Soilers going to “Bleeding Kansas” (1854-1861) bring Sharpe’s rifles, which became known as “Beecher’s Bibles.” • Several prominent city merchants joined the Republican cause: clothing manufacturer George Opdyke, sugar and coffee importer Edwin Morgan, ship owner Moses H. Grinnell, etc.

9. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Pro-South New Yorkers • Some New York shipbuilders went so far as to turn to the production of slave smuggling ships during the post-1857 crash. • Prominent Democratic merchants and financiers like August Belmont, Moses Taylor, William F. Havemeyer, and attorney Samuel J. Tilden organized the Democratic Vigiliant Society in Oct. 1859. • Most laboring people in the city did not care for the Republicans; they, like the merchants, believed the Southern connection was important for the city’s prosperity, and by extension, their jobs. • Lincoln argued that wage work was incompatible with true freedom, but that it did offer the opportunity to step up economically. • Working-class racism had become quite prevalent by the 1850s, leading workers to denounce “Black” Republicanism, in part because blacks often were used as strike breakers.

10. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Pro-South New Yorkers • Fernando Wood (1812-1881) • Powerful Tammany sachem who rose from relative poverty to become a successful merchant, albeit one with a shady reputation. • Elected to Congress in 1841, and then mayor of New York in 1854. He was known as “model mayor” in the first part of his term (1855-56), but then feuded with the New York State legislature, which shortened his term by a year, and created a Metropolitan Police District in 1857 to replace the Municipal Police loyal to Wood, resulting in the Great Police Riot of June 1857. The Municipals refused to surrender until a court decision later in the year. • Wood narrowly is defeated for reelection in 1858.

11. THE CIVIL WAR ERA The Great Police Riot of June 1857

12. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Pro-South New Yorkers • Fernando Wood (1812-1881) • In 1857, Wood has a falling out with Tammany, and creates his own political machine, Mozart Hall. • He is reelected as mayor in 1859; Tammany and the Republicans tried to fuse their tickets, but the deal fell through and Wood won the three way race between himself, Republican George Opdyke, and Democrat William Havemeyer. • “The South is our best customer,” says Wood. He excoriates John Brown after Harper’s Ferry as a “fiend” and danger to the Union.

13. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Selling Republicanism in New York • Lincoln’s famed Cooper Union Speech on Feb. 27, 1860, portrayed the Republican position as a conservative one, denouncing abolitionism and John Brown, and basing the Republican demand of no slave expansion on the principles of the founders. • Some Republicans tried to convince New Yorkers that the West would make a better economic partner than the South. • Lincoln argued that wage work was incompatible with true freedom, but that it did offer the opportunity to step up economically. • Working-class racism had become quite prevalent by the 1850s, leading workers to denounce “Black” Republicanism, in part because blacks often were used as strike breakers. • Nonetheless, New York City overwhelmingly voted for a fusion ticket of three Democrats running against Lincoln. “Mercantile and Capitalist” classes got behind the Democratic Union ticket and encouraged their employees to vote for it. • The Democratic Union ticket’s victory in the city was negated by Republican landslides upstate, so the Electoral College votes of New York went to Lincoln, putting him over the top.

14. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Lincoln’s Victory, Secession, and Sumter • With Lincoln’s victory secure, southern states began to secede: South Carolina on Dec. 20, Mississippi on Jan. 9, Florida on Jan. 10, Alabama on Jan. 11. etc. • On Jan. 6, Mayor Wood proposes to the Common Council that New York City become “a free City of itself” after the language of the Dongan Charter. • Wood’s proposal is publicly denounced, but many in the business establishment gave it some consideration, ultimately deciding that seceding would create too many tariff walls around the city. • By February, the seceded states had formed the “Confederate States of America.”

15. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Lincoln’s Victory, Secession, and Sumter • Southern states sought to repudiate their debts to New York banks, causing a panic in early 1861 that in some ways was worse than 1857. The merchants’ woes were exacerbated by the high Morrill Tariff passed in March 1861. New York banks referred to issue credit, so Congress threatened to finance the war by selling bonds directly to the people, cutting Wall Street out of the process. • In March 1861, the Confederacy announced very low tariff rates that undercut the Port of New York’s viability. • When the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, word quickly got to New York, and most of the wealthy and powerful in the city fell in line behind the war effort.

16. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Lincoln’s Victory, Secession, and Sumter • On Saturday, April 20, between 100,000 and 250,000 flooded Union Square participated in the “Great Union Meeting.” A bipartisan “Union Defense Committee” (UDC) was approved. • The UDC placed sixty-six New York regiments in the field by the end of 1861. • The city’s varied ethnic communities responded to the call, forming a great many of the regiments: Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, etc. Irish New York regiments were especially numerous, most famously “The Fighting Sixty-Ninth” under Michael Corcoran. • Also notorious was the New York Eleventh, the Fire Zouaves, comprised of hard-drinking and brawling fire laddies.

17. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Manufacturing and Industry • Southern predictions that New York’s economy would come screeching to halt when ties were broken with the South were initially true: nearly 30,000 workers were unemployed by the summer of 1861. Iron works and shipyards lay at standstill, as were shoe manufacturers. • By the fall of 1861, the city’s economy began to recover as new ties to the West were organized, helped by an crop failure in Europe in 1861, leading to huge wheat exports through the city, revivifying the Erie Canal. Western cattle was also making its way into the city, as was lumber and even more sugar, with huge refining plants in Brooklyn. • New Yorkers’ played an important role in the federal incorporation of the Union Pacific in 1862.

18. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Manufacturing and Industry • Oil refineries and chemical factories began springing up along Newtown Creek in Williamsburg, where the new illuminant called “kerosene” was being produced. Almost a half a million barrels of petroleum products were being exported from the New York area by 1863. • Shipbuilding was renewed by wartime contracts, and four thousand men alone were employed in the Navy Yard. • The Continental Ironworks in Greenpoint pumped out metal gun carriages, but also experimented with an ironclad warship that eventually became the Monitor, launched in January 1862. • Brooklyn’s Squibb Company started manufacturing medicines and medical supplies.

19. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Manufacturing and Industry • Brooks Brothers, having run out of regular cloth, experimented with “shoddy” fabric, made from shredded rags for Union soldier’s uniforms. This poor material sometimes disintegrated in the rain. • Rich war profiteers who became wealthy from selling inferior projects on government contracts became known as the “shoddy aristocracy.” • The war did practically kill the city’s merchant marine. The Confederate steam-powered “commerce raider,” Alabama, seized sixty-four merchants ships, many hailing from New York.

20. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Prosperity and the Sanitary Commission • An emblem of the city’s wartime prosperity was A.T. Stewart’s “New Store” across the from Astor Place, replacing the older “Marble Palace.” In many ways, it was the first modern department store. • Many elite women in the city became involved in the war effort through the U.S. Sanitary Commission in organizing its fairs.

21. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Draft Riots • National Conscription Act was passed in March 1863 as volunteers were dropping off. Allowed the wealthy to get their sons out by paying for a substitute. • Riots break out July 13-16, 1865, over conscription. Prominent Republican figures are targeted, the Negro Orphan Asylum, and many blacks are lynched. • Order is not restored until federal troops returning from the Battle of Gettysburg make it to the city.

22. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Greenbacks • In July 1861, the Union was nearly broke, so a consortium of bankers meet and agree to lend the government $150 million, charging a high 7.3 interest rate. The Feds took the loan in gold, which helped to dry up the circulation of “specie”: hard currency. • In Feb. 1862, Congress authorized the Treasury to print money, known as “greenbacks.” By March 1863, the government had authorized $450 million worth of paper money. This is the first time the U.S. had a national currency. • This financing permanently affixed the city’s financial elite to the federal government and its fortunes.