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) was coming apart in the 1850s; the issue of slavery expansion into the territories essentially destroyed the Whig Party in the 1852 presidential election, although it lingered until its official dissolution in 1860. • Disgust with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which destroyed the Compromise of 1850, leads to the creation of a new northern-based party, the Republican Party, that year. 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 and the 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 Tribune joined 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 Vigilant 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 was defeated by a narrow margin 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. • New York’s elite Seventh Regiment was comprised of many professionals: bankers, lawyers, merchants, etc.

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. Confederate raiders inflicted wounds from which the city’s merchant marine never truly recovered.

20. 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.

21. THE CIVIL WAR ERA A.T. Stewart’s “New Store” • An emblem of the city’s wartime prosperity was A.T. Stewart’s “New Store” across the from Astor Place and the Copper Union, replacing the older “Marble Palace,” and opening on Nov. 10, 1862. It was six stories, had a cast-iron façade, and was the largest retail store in the world at the time and the first “true” department store. The upper floors had a large garment workshop and extensive administrative offices, including a mail-order operation. • The store employed nearly 1,000 people, it had steam-heated floors, powered sewing machines, and was illuminated by gaslight chandeliers at night.

22. THE CIVIL WAR ERA A.T. Stewart’s “New Store” at Broadway and Tenth St. near Astor Place

23. THE CIVIL WAR ERA The U.S. Sanitary Commission • Those embracing the reformist impulse before the war had crusaded for public health and welfare in city government; this group now targeted the Union Army through the instrument of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, founded in June 1861 to support the sick and wounded. • The commission was a means for elite women to get involved in the war effort; they initially got together to sew bandages for the wounded, raise funds, and other such efforts under the auspices of smaller benevolent organizations. The Commission was founded to coordinate these activities and provide professional male supervision of “scientific methods” in preventing the spread of disease among the wounded. • The commission also investigated medical conditions in hospitals and developed elaborate systems of battlefield relief.

24. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Draft Riots • The working-classes of the city mostly did not share in the wartime prosperity that the middle and upper classes enjoyed • Workers renewed labor agitation to try to obtain a bigger share; most notably Irish longshoremen struck to obtain better wages to keep up with the inflated cost of living; scarcity of labor due to the war strengthened their position over time. • Employers often would bring in strikebreakers, often blacks, as in the case of the longshoremen’s strike. • The city also had a dearth of affordable housing. • The Emancipation Proclamation angered working-class whites and the Catholic Church hierarchy; laborers saw freed blacks as future economic competition. The Peace Democrats abhorred emancipation, seeing it as encouraging race amalgamation. • Elite Republicans launch the Union League in Feb. 1863 to fight the Peace Democrats’ rising popularity.

25. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Draft Riots • National Conscription Act was passed in March 1863 as volunteers were dropping off. All men between 20 and 35 were enrolled, and a strong mechanism to arrest draft evaders was created. This was the first time the U.S. government had drafted men in such an extensive way. • The law allowed the wealthy to get their sons out of the draft by obtaining a substitute or paying a $300 fee. • Massively unpopular in New York, seen as a deep federal intrusion into people’s lives. Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour threatens to challenge the law in court. • The draft proceeds peaceably at first, but when the names of draftees are published over the weekend, the stage is set for violence on Monday.

26. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Draft Riots • Riots break out July 13-16, 1865. The violence may have been first initiated by members of the Black Joke Fire Co., who sought to destroy evidence at the draft office of any of their members being drafted. • Policemen are overwhelmed quickly; Police Superintendant Kennedy is nearly beaten to death by a mob. • Prominent Republican figures and institutions are targeted: government offices, Fifth Avenue mansions of Republicans, Greeley’s Tribune and Raymond’s Times buildings (although Raymond had Gatling guns at the ready), even men wearing fancy suits, etc. Businesses like Brooks Brothers, who were seen as war profiteers with the manufacture of “shoddy.”

27. THE CIVIL WAR ERA Draft Riots • Blacks are targeted: the Negro Orphan Asylum is set ablaze but 237 children are saved, but many blacks are lynched. • Telegraph lines are cut and ferry slips and railroads broken up to keep reinforcements from coming in. • Tammany leaders William Tweed and A. Oakey Hall try to convince the crowd to stop the violence, but their words fall on deaf ears. • At noon on Tuesday, Republican Mayor Opdyke requested federal troops from Secretary of War Stanton. • Order is not restored until federal troops returning from the Battle of Gettysburg make it to the city. • In the aftermath, and “Exemption Committee” is set up that paid the $300 fee to excuse poor men from the draft in hardship cases; William Tweed sat on this committee. • The Republicans made big gains in elections after the riots, and the Peace Democrats become non-entities.