The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910

The Rebellion in the South

Lincoln's funeral procession ended the Civil War in New York City the same way it started: in a rare moment of unity. As the 1860s began, New York was a tense, fractured metropolis. Economic expansion in the 1840s and 1850s, fueled by huge waves of cheap labor in the form of German and Irish immigrants, made the Empire City the nation's capital of commerce and industry. About eight hundred thousand people called Manhattan home. Omnibuses ferried residents to and from new brick and brownstone neighborhoods past Union and Madison Squares to the commercial districts that fanned out from Lower Broadway.

Then the Panic of 1857 ushered in the worst economic downturn in a generation. Factories and businesses closed; thousands were out of work. Recovery had arrived by 1860, yet city officials feared that Southern secession would cripple New York's economy. Cotton was America's leading export. Though it grew in the soil of Southern states, city insurers, brokers, and cargo companies financed and shipped millions of dollars' worth to European textile-mill cities such as Manchester, England. Southern businessmen also regularly visited the metropolis, filling the coffers of hotels, restaurants, and fine-goods shops.

The South and New York City each made a fortune off the international cotton trade. If that collusive relationship fell apart, New Orleans publisher James Dunmore De Bow predicted, "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."

New York City in 1860 was a bustling metropolis of capital and commerce on the rise again after a recession hit in 1857. Streetcar and ferry lines fed into downtown Manhattan, the center of business and government.

On the eve of the 1860 presidential election, abolitionists and conservative Protestants supported the antislavery Republicans. The merchant class and working class, joined by poor immigrants and the city's political establishment, sided with the proslavery Democrats. On Election Day, city residents delivered almost twice as many ballots to Lincoln's opponents as to Lincoln. But the state gave its electoral votes to Lincoln.

As South Carolina became the first state to leave the Union in December 1860, Mayor Fernando Wood—elected on a pro-Southern platform in 1859—made a last-ditch effort to maintain trade with the South by proposing that the city secede and form its own country. "Amid the gloom which the present and prospective condition of things must cast over the country, New York, as a Free City, may shed the only light and hope of a future reconstruction of our once blessed Confederacy," he told the Common Council (the city's governing body) on January 7, 1861. Wood's cronies on the council loved the idea.

Four months later, however, all sympathy for the South evaporated. On April 12, the Confederate bombing of Fort Sumter launched the Civil War. City residents united behind Lincoln's fight to preserve the Union. "President Lincoln's proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand men in order to suppress the Rebellion at the South, and to cause the laws to be duly executed, waked up the people to a realizing sense of their duty, as well as of the danger impending over them," wrote the New-York Tribune on April 16, 1861. "Knots and groups of men have been seen during the day standing in front of prominent buildings on Broadway and other public thoroughfares, discussing the call for men, and among them all but one sentiment appeared to prevail, and that was to 'fight in support of the American flag, and in defense of the American Union.'"

Thousands of New Yorkers signed up for the military, including fifty thousand Irish immigrants, who vied to be part of the famous Sixty-Ninth New York Regiment ("gentle when stroked, fierce when provoked" was their motto). Many of the Irish hoped that putting their lives on the line for their country would earn them the respect and dignity they had yet to secure in the city. Tens of thousands of German immigrants also volunteered for military duty, as did two thousand African Americans. In total, nearly 150,000 New York City residents would fight for the Union over the next four years.

Citywide support for the North hit its peak on April 20. An estimated quarter of a million residents gathered in what came to be known as the Great Sumter Rally in Union Square. "The excitement that prevailed is altogether unparalleled," wrote the New York Herald on April 21, 1861, noting the streamers that fluttered from windows, rooftops, and steeples. A giant American flag from Fort Sumter had been draped over a statue of George Washington. "Of the five stands erected for the accommodation of the public, and more especially of the orators of the occasion, each one was filled to overflowing, and the living cordon that surrounded them was packed as closely as human beings could exist amassed together."

George Templeton Strong observed the rally. In his diary that day, he wrote: "The Union mass-meeting was an event.… The crowd, or some of them, and the ladies and gentlemen who occupied the windows and lined the housetops all round Union Square, sang 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' and the people generally hurrahed a voluntary after each verse."

Before the bombardment of Fort Sumter launched the Civil War in April 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood, New York's Confederacy-sympathizing mayor, proposed a fantastical idea: that New York become an independent nation so trade with the South wouldn't be interrupted by war. The bombardment of Fort Sumter ended his plan.

A City Embraces "War Fever"

The giddy patriotism that seized the city continued through the spring and summer of 1861. The Stars and Stripes waved from tenement windows, store rooftops, men's hats and lapels, and even wagons, stagecoaches, and ship masts. Recruitment offices popped up block by block, and broadsides tacked to poles and fence posts urged young men to enlist.

"Respond to your country's call," one poster, for Company I in Brooklyn, beckoned, advertising $23 pay per month. Another, for the New York State Light Artillery, lured men with a promise of easy work—echoing the prevailing wisdom at the time that it would take mere weeks for the Union to crush the South. (Even Secretary of State William Seward was predicting that victory would take sixty days.) "No musket drill! No trenches to dig!" the poster read, directing potential enlistees to a recruiting station on Hudson Street.

Men in military regalia occupied city streets, saloons, and parks, as they trained and waited for orders to head south. Tent cities and barracks to house them sprang up in City Hall Park, the Battery, even newly opened yet still unfinished Central Park. Troops on their way to war would march up Broadway, to the cheers of thousands. "The aspect of Broadway was very gay indeed," reported the New York Times on April 20. "Minus the firing of pistols and the explosion of Chinese crackers, it was many Fourth-of-Julys rolled into one.… Evidently, all political partisanship was [cast] aside." New Yorkers heeded the call to war so enthusiastically that almost half of the sixteen thousand troops sent to protect Washington, D.C., in those early weeks came from Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Recruitment station posters advertising hefty cash bonuses helped convince thousands of men to enlist in the military, but more were needed—and in 1863, the nation instituted its first wartime draft.