Barlow was allied with Democratic National Committee chairman August Belmont, who represented the Rothschild family and attracted European capital to New York, helping drive the city's growth and industrialization. Samuel Tilden, a powerful corporate lawyer and master political organizer, was also a Swallowtail. They wanted more influence over the party they funded, which was dominated in the city by the scandalously corrupt machine politicians of Tammany and Mozart. With Manton Marble in their camp, the Swallowtails suddenly had a greater voice in the city.64
Marble sold large stakes in the World to Barlow and three other Democrats—including Fernando Wood and George Barnard, a Tammany judge—which caused many of his employees and friends to accuse him of selling out. The arrangement paid off Marble's debts and gave him a cash cushion, while allowing him to stay on as editor at a handsome salary of $3,500 a year. Former governor Horatio Seymour, along with other party leaders, attended strategy sessions at the World's offices, and Belmont sponsored Marble's application for membership in the elite Century Club. A contemplative, cerebral seminarian who had once seemed destined for a career as a poet and literary scholar, Marble rapidly became a key player in Democratic politics.65
Salving his conscience, Marble asserted that he had remained true to his own convictions, and that conservative Republicans like himself would raise the tone of the Democratic party. He played down the fact that he had actively courted the Democrats for an emergency loan and attributed his crossing of party lines to the nomination of an abolitionist for governor at the Republican state convention in the fall of 1862. The appearance of opportunism was merely coincidence, Marble insisted. "The hour struck, the opportunity came. I seized it . . . interest seemed to me for once to coincide with duty."66
The Swallowtails' immediate goal was not so much to curb the petty ward politicians they disdained, but to hammer away at the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and spur party unity. Democratic newspapers assailed the administration without restraint, saying Lincoln was influenced by "insane radicals," who had once promised they only wanted to stop the spread of slavery. Marble wrote that the president was "fully adrift on the current of radical fanaticism." With Democratic backing and a new, strident message, the Worlds circulation jumped dramatically.67
Manton Marble
Attempting to minimize and suppress the peace faction, Marble proclaimed the Democrats' unity and legitimacy as an opposition party, vital to the two-party system. At the same time, he was developing a refrain he would repeat often in the coming year: If anyone was a danger to the government, it was not the Copperheads and Peace Democrats, but rather the radical Republicans, who were hounding Lincoln to end slavery and overturn white supremacy in America.68
At New York's Republican convention that fall, Greeley and his allies had managed to nominate an abolitionist, General James Wadsworth, for governor, but at the cost of further dividing the party, while spurring Democrats to coalesce around Horatio Seymour as the standard-bearer of anti-emancipation and messiah of the northern white workingman. Seymour had been elected governor a decade earlier, but his stand against prohibition in large part had cost him a second term. In 1862, his opposition to temperance became an asset, as did his racism and denunciations of Lincoln's policies. Greeley saw defeat coming and lamented to abolitionist Gerrit Smith that "the Rum-sellers, the Irish and the Slavery idolaters make a big crowd and they are fiendish in their vote against the president's proclamation of freedom."69
On Greeley's list of fiends was Fernando Wood, who, after three terms as mayor of New York, was once again running for a seat in Congress.* In a campaign speech that fall, pandering to Irish and German immigrants, Wood crystallized his message of class warfare and racial hatred, claiming that the rich "amassed their wealth from the products of the other classes," and the poor, whose sons were at the front, shouldered the burden of the war while the rich stayed home.
Emancipation, he asserted, was another attempt to exploit poor whites by deluging the North with cheap black laborers, "many of them mechanics," meaning skilled artisans who could compete for good jobs. Whites would no longer be paid "at customary wages," and in their effort to promote "the African" above the white laborer, abolitionists planned to integrate the public schools at taxpayers' expense while putting their own children in private academies.70
Frustration with a year and a half of Union losses on the battlefield, opposition to emancipation, and fear of British intervention in the war all fueled conservatism in the North and helped the Democrats. In New York, Tammany and Mozart submerged their differences over the issue of war and peace, which helped send both Ben and Fernando Wood to Congress, and Seymour won the governor's race. Greeley was furious and declared that the state had abandoned the Union cause.71
The Democrats also picked up numerous House seats in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, as well as on Lincoln's home turf, Illinois. However, the Republicans still had a majority in the House and an even firmer grip on the Senate. The elections had vented voters' displeasure with Republican handling of the war and the prospect of emancipation, but showed they were willing to stay the course and give Lincoln and his party another chance. Nonetheless, the Democrats had successfully exploited public fear of abolition to unite the party and celebrated their victories across the North. A popular Democratic song declared that abolition "has died before it was weaned, weaned, weaned; it has died before it was weaned."72
Virginia's Edmund Ruffin was also encouraged by the election results, particularly in the large and important state of New York. Noting that Democrats had already challenged the federal militia draft of 1862 as unconstitutional, Ruffin hoped further opposition by Wood and Seymour in New York would lead to riots followed by a clash of federal and state authorities that would bring down the government in Washington: "If this [legal challenge to the draft] is made in N.Y. & supported by a triumphant & violent majority of the people, the Supreme Court of that very corrupt state will readily confirm the popular construction, & so make it the duty of the Governor to prevent the draft. And if the powerful state of New York is placed in full opposition to the Federal Government, the latter will not be able to bear up under such an addition to its previous difficulties."73
Elsewhere in the South, the knowledge that the Emancipation Proclamation would probably go into effect in a matter of days triggered not only fear but gruesome retribution. At Christmas, George Templeton Strong heard of nineteen black slaves being hanged in Charleston, presumably because they had grown unmanageable in the expectation of being declared free on New Year's Day. Expressing the polar opposite, antislavery view, Strong asked himself if the president would indeed affirm the proclamation as promised: "Will Lincoln's backbone carry him through the work he is pledged them to do? . . . If he come out fair and square, he will do the 'biggest thing' an Illinois jury-lawyer has ever had a chance of doing, and take high place among the men who have controlled the destinies of nations. If he postpone or dilute his action, his name will be a byword and a hissing till the annals of the nineteenth century are forgotten."74
*Some thirty thousand Irish fought on the Confederate side. They too saw the war as a training ground for the liberation of Ireland, and believed the Confederacy's struggle for independence was as valid as their own.
*Without using the word slave, the Constitution originally stipulated that three-fifths of each state's slaves would be counted as part of its total population when apportioning representatives; the slave trade was permitted to continue for more than twenty years, until 1808; and fugitive slaves did not become free by escaping to free states. They had to be returned when claimed by their masters.
*The Regency's Albany Argus, edited by Dean Richmond, and Tammany Hall's New York Leader, edited by John Clancy, were the War Democrats' main newspapers for voicing the party line.
*Halleck's nickname reflected his status as a West Point intellectual.
*Wood was elected mayor in 1854, 1856, and 1859. The mayoral race was moved
to odd years in 1857.
CHAPTER 6
Emancipation and Its Enemies
The first indication of ill feeling, on the part of the Irish mob, against us was at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation," on New Year's Day 1863, Lucy Gibbons recalled of her youth. "We were so rejoiced by the proclamation that my sister and I pinned sheets of red, white and blue tissue paper on the second and third story windows, and, in the evening, lit the gas." After festooning and illuminating their house, one in a "long row of houses with pretty courtyards in front" on Manhattan's West Twenty-ninth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, Lucy, then a teenager, and her older sister Julia went out with their father, James. Author of the recruiting poem "We Are Coming, Father Abraham" and a well-known white abolitionist, he and his wife had made their home a haven for runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad.
"When we returned late and entered our courtyard, we trod on something sticky," Lucy recalled. "It was pitch, smeared over the pavement, up the steps and on our front door. Father had the steps and pavement cleaned, but as testimony against the vandals he left the pitch, which nearly covered the door, for several weeks."1
A friend wrote to their mother, Abby, from Boston, "The damage, I suppose, is not considerable, and the mortification nothing; but it is a serious thing, considered as revealing the temper of the times." Applying Abraham Lincoln's biblical description of the whole country to the North alone, the friend continued, "There can no longer be any doubt, that what are called the Loyal States make up a house divided against itself."2
Quakers from the Philadelphia area, James and Abby Gibbons had moved to New York City in 1836, at the height of the reform movement inspired by the Second Great Awakening. At a time when many middle- and upper-class Protestant families were active in promoting social change through volunteer work, Abby's energy and leadership made her exceptional. She and her colleagues raised money through "Anti-Slavery Fairs"; promoted prison reform and visited inmates at the city jail known as the Tombs; counseled women in a halfway house; and worked with orphans on Blackwell's Island. Abby also started an industrial school for homeless German children and served as headmistress for twelve years. She tirelessly lobbied elected officials to secure support for these charities, including grants of city-owned land.3*
Abby adored her only son, Willie, and his teachers predicted greatness in his future. "And my daughters would be his equals, but alas for woman!" she lamented, society deprived them of the same opportunities.4 Willie received the best education, and Abby fostered his social conscience. "He was in the habit of visiting, with his grandfather or his mother, the cells of the Tombs and other places where were confined the victims of sin and misery, and in this way his sympathy for the poor and suffering was developed," a Harvard classmate wrote of Willie.5 Willie's sudden death in 1855, after he tripped and fell on his way back to campus on a dark night, had been a severe blow to the entire family, and they kept his possessions along with a sculpted bust of him as a shrine to his memory. Over Willie's coffin Abby had cried, "The light of our home—gone out!"
She kept her grief at bay by plunging deeper into her many charitable activities.6 When the war broke out, Abby promptly answered the army's plea for nurses in its camps and hospitals, taking her eldest daughter, Sally, with her on a prolonged and dangerous mission to the front.7
"Sound the timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea, Jehova has triumphed, his people are free," sang a black minister and his congregation in Boston's Tremont Temple on January 1, 1863.8 While African Americans rejoiced over the Emancipation Proclamation, the document promised freedom but not equality. The proclamation allowed blacks to serve in the Union army, but they would be enlisted in separate all-black units under white commanders and would be paid less, often for more dangerous duty.9
Nonetheless, in New York, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet urged black men to enlist, to liberate their own race and disprove the "slanderous myth" that blacks were cowardly.10Garnet had been pastor of Shiloh Presbyterian Church on Prince Street and Broadway for nearly a decade and had made the church a destination for the city's middle-class blacks, who overflowed into the aisles. Garnet's sermons and opinions on events were written up in the African American daily press.11
Abraham Lincoln
Born a slave in Maryland in 1815, he escaped with his family when they fled north after pretending to attend a funeral at a neighboring estate. In his late teens, Garnet received a classical education at the new High School for Colored Youth in New York and found a mentor in the Reverend Theodore Wright, who groomed him for the ministry. Garnet's extraordinary skill as a debater and orator emerged, and he found heroic role models in Greek and Roman literature that inspired him to lead his people in the fight against slavery.
He was also proud of his own heritage, the Mandingo chiefs and warriors in Africa. Garnet was very dark skinned, defying the stereotype of eloquent blacks needing some white lineage to account for their ability. The warrior ancestry may also have accounted for his defiant attitude and tenacity. At an integrated academy in New Hampshire where Wright had sent him, Garnet and two black classmates were attacked in their dormitory by a white mob. Garnet, who had been lamed by a knee injury earlier in life, managed to fire several rounds from a double-barreled shotgun as he limped away, saving the lives of his friends along with his own.12
Garnet designed recruiting posters full of martial ardor: "Fail Now and Our Race Is Doomed . . . Rather Die Free Men Than Live as Slaves . . . Rise Now and Fly to Arms!" However, his entreaties to "join the armies of John Brown" by "marching through the heart of the rebellion" fell flat, like those of other black leaders in New York, since black men knew the inequality they would face in the army The militant Garnet thought they should go anyway: Once blacks were armed and trained, the white government would not be able to renege on its promise of freedom—"not without a good fight" at least.13
A major obstacle to Garnet's efforts, as well as a discouragement to potential black volunteers, was the fact that the new governor, Horatio Seymour, would not approve the formation of black regiments in New York State, and President Lincoln was unwilling to pressure him on the matter, despite appeals from Garnet, Horace Greeley, and other prominent New Yorkers.14 In Massachusetts, by contrast, Governor John Andrew was raising the North's first black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, and had enlisted Garnet and other black leaders to recruit African Americans from all over the country to fill its ranks. Even with blacks leaving to enlist in Massachusetts— when they could have helped New York fulfill its quota of volunteers and forestall the militia draft—Seymour would not change his policy.15
"We did not cause this war, [but] vast numbers of our people have perished in it," Boston's Irish Catholic Pilot lamented. While Republican abolitionists like the Gibbons family celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation along with African Americans, the reaction throughout most Irish American communities was one of anger and dread. Having sacrificed for the Union, the Irish saw that they would now be fighting to liberate blacks, who would compete with them not only for jobs but—once enrolled as soldiers and citizens—for glory on the battlefield and acceptance in American society. The elevation of blacks to equality with whites lowered the status of the Irish worker, New York's Weekly Day-Book declared; he was "degraded to a level with negroes."16
Reflecting the crisis that Irish Americans had reached by 1863, the Pilot announced that "the Irish spirit for the war is dead! . . . Our fighters are-dead." With the Irish Brigade's terrible losses, particularly at Fredericksburg in December, nationalists despaired that the army they had hoped to train for Irish liberation was being wiped out instead. While many blamed Thomas Francis Meagher's recklessness for the decimation of the brigade, he and his defenders pointed out that the War Department would not grant the unit leave so it could recuperate and recruit new members. This deepened Irish suspicion that their men were being used as cannon fodder by the Lincoln administration. The Emancipation Proclamation made the
brutal war even more painful. As Archbishop Hughes had warned from the outset, the Irish would lay down their lives for the Union but "turn away in disgust" if asked to fight for abolition. 17
Hughes had been a strong advocate of the war, serving as Lincoln's unofficial envoy to the Vatican and to France, but the emancipation issue had since created a rift between the administration and the Catholic Church, which viewed abolition as a cause championed by its worst enemies—Protestant Republicans—and a violation of slaveholders' property rights.18In January the Irish-American responded to a public slur against the Irish poor by a prominent Unitarian minister, calling him a "fanatical vender of the gospel of Abolitionism." Such prejudice and discrimination and "the triumph of Abolition policy" had devalued the Irish-born laborer, making it harder for him to feed and clothe his family, the editorial declared. Denouncing abolitionists as "Nigger propagandists," the paper concluded: "We have no words to express the loathing and contempt we feel for the besotted fanatics."19
While Governor Seymour stood firmly against the enlistment of black regiments, in a confrontation with Republicans over New York City's police force, he decided to back down. In 1857, when Republican state legislators replaced Fernando Wood's loyal Municipals with their own Metropolitan police force, they installed a new board of commissioners—Thomas Acton, as president, along with two others. The commissioners in turn appointed John Kennedy as superintendent. The arrival of the Metropolitans had sparked deadly rioting, and tensions in the largely Democratic city had continued to simmer over the next six years.
The Devil's Own Work Page 14
