The Epic of New York City (49 page)
Read The Epic of New York City Online
Authors: Edward Robb Ellis
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.
Cheer
manâ” 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. âSays 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 âThe 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 merchantsâanxious about the $150,000,000 or so they had advanced to Southerners in long-term crop loansâtold 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!”
A
FORMER
New York policeman, named Peter Hart, helped save the American flag at Fort Sumter in that first battle of the Civil War. In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Southerners opened fire on the federal-held stronghold in Charleston Harbor and kept up the bombardment for thirty-four hours. The second afternoon, a few minutes before one o'clock, an enemy ball shot off the tip of the fort's flagpole. Down fluttered Old Glory. Peter Hart, then a sergeant in the United States army, dashed out onto the Uttered parapet, carrying a long pole. A captain and two lieutenants ran to his aid. Amid a tempest of shot and shell the four soldiers fastened the pole to a gun carriage and raised the colors once more.
In New York during the opening days of the war a famous widow sat in her home making American flags. Her husband had been Captain James Lawrence, the naval officer who had won immortality during the War of 1812 by shouting, “Don't give up the ship!” He had died of his wounds and lay buried in Trinity Churchyard.
As newspapers issued one extra after another, Mrs. Lawrence showed her little granddaughter how to scrape lint with a carving knife. A visitor, a flip young man known as “Poke” Wright, dropped by. He made an insulting remark about the American flag. The old woman looked up in astonishment and then cried, “No one can speak with disrespect in
my
house of the banner under which my husband fought and died!” Pulling her frail body out of a chair, she charged the rascal with her knife, driving him out onto the street. Her shrill anger attracted pedestrians, who grabbed Wright, forced him to his knees, and made him cheer the flag.
This symbolized the changed attitude of most New Yorkers upon the fall of Fort Sumter. A merchant wrote: “There is but one feeling here now, and that is to sustain our flag and the government at all costs.” A Charleston man who ordered flour from another New York merchant got this reply: “Eat your
cotton,
God damn ye!” The Planters Hotel at Albany and Greenwich streets, long popular with Southerners, quickly closed. Tammany Hall had opposed war with the South, but now, sniffing public opinion, it issued a loyalty proclamation and sent a regiment to the front.
Mayor Fernando Wood issued his own bland proclamation, urging everybody to obey the laws of the land. Remembering that only four months earlier the mayor had suggested that the city secede from the Union, G. T. Strong wrote in his diary: “The cunning scoundrel sees which way the cat is jumping and puts himself right on the record in a vague general way, giving the least possible offense to his allies of the Southern democracy.” A mob chased
Herald
publisher James Gordon Bennett up the street and insisted that an American flag be displayed from his building; Bennett had to send out an office boy to find one. The supply of bunting ran short as nearly every private and public building flew Old Glory.
The previous year work had ceased on the new St. Patrick's Cathedral for lack of money. Now a halt was called to the landscaping of Central Park, and Frederick Law Olmsted went to Washington as general secretary of the Sanitary Commission. The city took on a military appearance, as camps were set up in City Hall Park, at the
Battery, on Staten Island, on Rikers Island, and at Atlantic and Flat-bush avenues in Brooklyn. Cannon ringed the new Croton Fountain in City Hall Park. Private houses and public buildings were taken over by the army for offices and recruiting stations. The Brooklyn Navy Yard hired more men.
President Lincoln called for 75,000 three-month volunteers on April 15, and within 10 days 8,000 well-equipped men from this city left for the front. For days afterward the slap and scuffle of marching feet resounded in streets as volunteers from upper New York State and from New England flowed through the city en route to threatened Washington. The local Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, and Scots organized their own regiments. Firemen banded together into regiments of Zouaves. In their drill and dress they imitated Algerian light infantry of this name. Their gaudy uniforms consisted of baggy trousers, gaiters, open jackets, and turbans or fezzes. Oddly clad, too, were members of the Seventy-ninth New York Highlanders. On ceremonial occasions the officers wore kilts, while the men donned pantaloons of the Cameron tartan in honor of their colonel, James Cameron.
A physics professor left Columbia College to join the new Confederate army. A few Columbia students enlisted and fought, but they did not enroll en masse, as did Harvard boys, and war fever never gripped Columbia, as it did, say, the University of Wisconsin.