"New York City would play a huge role in the war, but it would be a confused and conflicted one. No city would be more of a help to Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance. It would be a city of patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists, and simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance and sedition." The city was home to the nation's largest port, its greatest emporium, the continent's banking houses and was the source of the vast majority of the country's revenue. NY was also inextricably linked to the South, as its primary financier and a major cotton exporter. "It was estimated that on the eve of the Civil War the South was pouring at least $200 million a year into the city's economy. Because of cotton, no city in the North was more pro-South, anti-abolition, or anti-Lincoln." At the bottom of the booming city's economy were the 12,000 free blacks and the eventual hundreds of thousands of famine Irish, vehemently competing for the same menial jobs and developing an intrinsic hatred for each other.
The speech Abraham Lincoln made in February of 1860 at Cooper Union propelled him to the front of the ranks of Republican candidates and endeared him to Horace Greeley, the most profound influencer of opinion in the country. Yet, in the city and Brooklyn, he was outvoted 2:1 and after his election, there was public discussion of the city declaring itself 'free' and in sympathy to the South. After Sumter though, most rallied around the cause. German immigrants, many of whom had come over after the failed revolutions of 1848, enthusiastically supported the Union. The Irish were somewhat less committed, but their leaders, particularly Archbishop Hughes, thought it was an opportunity to show that they were true Americans. When a third of the North's casualties at Bull Run were NY'ers, the flag-waving abated a bit. A year later, the Irish Brigade, consisting of NY'ers and men from Massachusetts, took heavy casualties at Antietam. In March of 1863 as the war ground on and the Union lost battle after battle, Lincoln signed a bill establishing a federal draft. A week after Gettysburg, the first drafts took place in the city, which had been wracked by violence on the docks, particularly against free blacks. Within days of the first names' announced, an angry mob attacked* and destroyed the offices with the draft lists. The mobs grew, overwhelmed the police and lit fires throughout the city. "The city was under siege from its own citizens." A week long rampage that destroyed fifty or sixty buildings and killed many blacks** only ended when four thousand federal troops came to New York.
"Unhappy Northerners would resist the draft through evasion rather than draft riots. The specific combination of conditions that caused the rioting - long standing Southern sympathies, racial hatred, class conflict and extreme labor unrest - seemed peculiar to New York City." The following year, the city again gave Lincoln about a third of its votes. In the following spring, 160,000 NY'ers would pass by his casket and half a million would take to the streets to stand on the procession route. The war had been a boon for the city, as it had been the arsenal of democracy, the shipbuilder extraordinaire, and the clothier and financier of the war. Those earnings propelled NYC into the Gilded Age. The nation, and in particular the city, moved on. This has been a wonderful book that I've thoroughly enjoyed. As a native NY'er, I'd have preferred more on the city and less on the general background. That said, this is an excellent and, thankfully, only a 372-page read.
*I first learned of the draft riots from Ken Burn's 'Civil War' and later read of them in a novel by Kevin Baker. I thus concluded that my Irish-American predecessors in NYC had little enthusiasm for their role in the great conflagration. I've since learned that my great-grandfather, David Barry, joined (or perhaps was drafted to) the Union cause in 1863. I suspect his ardor may have been limited.
**The official death count was 119, but most historians believe the number to be significantly understated.
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