CHAPTER 16
The gloomy lull of the early part of the winter of 1860–1, seeming big with final disaster to our institutions.
—Herman Melville
No one doubted what the stark North-South divide in the presidential voting presaged; newspaper editors throughout the South made it painfully clear. “Devotion to the Union is treason to the South,” the Oxford Mercury thundered. “The South should arm at once,” the Augusta Constitutionalist counseled. The editor of the fire-breathing Charleston Mercury described Lincoln as “a Northern white-washed octoroon mulatto.” Correspondents for New York papers were advised to get out of the South or they might be hanged as “Lincoln spies.” Now more than ever it was especially dangerous to be identified as a reporter for Greeley’s Tribune, the Northern paper Southerners hated the most. But even the pro-South Herald and New York World (begun in 1860) had come under suspicion.
Now that secession seemed imminent, the erratic Greeley lost heart. On November 10 he editorialized, “If the cotton states shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace.” But the prospect panicked New York’s business and banking community. Commerce with Southern clients had already begun to fall off. The factors in the South were having trouble collecting on debts. Secession, they feared, would mean the cataclysmic end of the city’s hugely profitable involvement in the international cotton trade. It would also close Southern markets to their goods.
The city’s Southern partners in the trade did nothing to lighten the mood. In the May 1859 issue of De Bow’s Review, the widely read and influential journal of Southern politics and commerce, editor James De Bow had called for secession and offered dire predictions of the economic catastrophe that would strike the North if the South cut its ties. In cotton, the South “possesses a weapon more formidable than all the inventions of modern warfare,” De Bow wrote. If the cotton trade were cut off, he mused, “What would become of the great metropolis, New York? 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 that are past!”
More than a few in New York City’s business elite believed it. On December 15, Richard Lathers, one of the city’s most prosperous cotton merchants, hosted an emergency meeting of his fellow businessmen in his offices at 33 Pine Street. An Irish Protestant, Lathers had grown up in South Carolina, where he was a colonel in the state militia, and moved to New York as a cotton factor. He was, not surprisingly, a staunch pro-slavery Democrat.
Lathers and the meeting’s other organizers sent written invitations to the top two hundred of their colleagues in the city; two thousand worried businessmen showed up and spilled out onto the street. Among them were August Belmont; Erastus Corning; John Jacob Astor’s son William; A. T. Stewart; former president Millard Fillmore; and John A. Dix, a leading Democrat. In his opening remarks Lathers called on Southern planters to remember their responsibilities to “their Northern brethren whose sympathies have always been with Southern rights and against Northern aggression.”
The Southern brethren clearly weren’t listening. South Carolina seceded five days later. More states followed in the next few weeks. Early in 1861, Lathers and his wife would embark on a lonely, quixotic goodwill tour of the South, as though the two of them could personally stave off the inevitable. Meanwhile, forty thousand of the city’s businessmen and their employees signed a petition to Congress to please make peace with the South before it was too late. Congress did not respond.
Since the South could not be persuaded to remain in the Union, Mayor Wood offered New Yorkers an alternate plan. On January 7, he addressed a message to the city’s newly elected Board of Aldermen. “It would seem that a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable,” he grimly noted, and continued: “With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States we have friendly relations and a common sympathy. We have not participated in the warfare upon their constitutional rights or their domestic institutions.” If the South seceded, he asked, “why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a corrupt and venal master”—that is, Republican-run Albany, which had “plundered her revenues” and “attempted to ruin her commerce.” He concluded, “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.”
The idea of New York becoming a free and open port city was not new. Dan Sickles had argued for something similar. Privately, Belmont and other prominent Democrats in the city thought it might become necessary. As far back as 1857, when Wood was fighting to keep the Republicans in Albany from stripping him of power, his Irish and German supporters had proposed that the city cut its ties with Albany to become an independent state and “add a new star in the East to our glorious national constellation.” But to raise secession in January 1861, just a month before the Confederacy was formed, was brazenly provocative. Except for Benjamin Wood’s Daily News, most of the papers in the city howled that the notion was an “absurdity” (The Sun) and a gaggle of “miserable sophistries and puerilities” (the Times). Greeley characterized it as “treason” proposed by a “blackguard.”
In January 1861, as President Buchanan’s lame-duck cabinet members were abandoning him one by one, he appointed John A. Dix to be the replacement secretary of the treasury for the last three months of his term. It was one of several interesting roles Dix would be called on to play. Originally from New Hampshire, he’d fought in the War of 1812, then moved in the 1820s to New York State, where he became a member of the Albany Regency. He’d held a long list of state and federal positions, and was one of the grand poobahs of the Democracy in both the state and New York City, where he lived on West 21st Street.
Dix was already serving as Buchanan’s postmaster for New York City. Early in 1860, the previous postmaster, Isaac Fowler—who also happened to be Tammany’s grand sachem—had been accused of embezzling $155,000. Isaiah Rynders, still U.S. marshal for New York at the time, was ordered to arrest him. Rynders went to the New York Hotel, where Fowler had been living in grand style for some time, “but tarried at the bar and by his loud announcement of his intent, allowed word to be taken to Fowler, who forthwith escaped,” Gustavus Myers wrote in his 1917 History of Tammany Hall. “He subsequently made his way to Mexico.” Fowler’s brother John, a Surrogate Court clerk, also ran off “with $31,079.65 belonging to orphans and others.”
Although Dix’s new role as Buchanan’s treasury man was short-term, he took it very seriously. He was a conservative Democrat, and still hoped for a peaceful resolution of the secession conflict, but he was also a patriot and strong unionist. So he ordered all U.S. revenue cutters that were stationed in the South to sail north before they could be confiscated. Learning that one cutter captain had refused his order, he fired off a famous telegram instructing that the captain be treated as a mutineer, adding, “If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot.” It became a favorite Union slogan.
On January 15, Rynders and a large group of workingmen—which the Times characterized as “composed mainly, and indeed almost entirely, of the rough-spun sons of the Celtic Isle”—held a rally at Brookes’ Hall on Broome Street to protest the way Lincoln, Seward, and the other Republicans were “rushing us into the horrors of civil war.” It was the usual rowdy affair. The crowd gave three cheers for South Carolina, three groans for Horace Greeley and Reverend Beecher. Rynders was loudly cheered for declaring that the workingman would never go to war for “the damned and lying Black Republicans.… Who brought this trouble on our land? Not ourselves. We had no hand in dissolving the Union. We did all we could to avoid these troubles. But if war comes, and I have to fight, I will fight to the death for South Carolina.” A dissenter called out that Rynders was “a political demagogue.” The crowd tossed him out.
A week later, John A. Kennedy, the Republican superintendent of the Metropolitans, sent men to board the cargo steamship Monticello at Pier 12 on the Hudson. They impounded thirty-eight cartons containing twenty-five muskets each, bound for Savannah. An arms manufacturer in Troy had sold them to the state of Georgia through a New York intermediary—Gazaway Bugg Lamar, who made other such purchases in the months leading up to the war. The Georgia governor warned New York’s Governor Morgan that he’d seize all New York merchant ships in Savannah’s harbor if the shipment was not released into Lamar’s custody. It was, and the Monticello sailed. Mayor Wood apologized to Georgia for the “outrage,” noting that he had no control over the Metropolitans.
While it was highly unlikely that New York would actually declare itself a free city, just the suggestion of it was worrisome to Lincoln as the Confederate States of America voted itself into existence on February 4. Lincoln pondered all this as he remained in Springfield until February 11. At the Herald, Bennett dispatched a twenty-five-year-old named Henry Villard to cover Lincoln’s activities out there. He was born Heinrich Hilgard, the dreamy and discontented scion of a respectable Bavarian family, and had sailed away to America at the age of eighteen in 1853, arriving in New York with a new name and no English. Over the next few years he wandered around the Midwest and South, hopping from one German community to the next, picking up English, working odd jobs. Though not a citizen, he became involved in the Republican Party and the abolitionist movement, and in a few years he would marry William Lloyd Garrison’s daughter Fanny.
By 1857 he was back in New York, writing freelance for the Staats-Zeitung despite his personal quibbles with its Democratic slant. He first encountered Lincoln when the Staats-Zeitung sent him to Illinois to cover the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. Now he leapt at the opportunity to cover the president-elect in Springfield, though he was no fan of Bennett or “his shameful record as a journalist, and particularly the sneaking sympathy of his paper for the Rebellion, and its vile abuse of the Republicans for their antislavery sentiments.” He agreed to write for Bennett only on the condition that his copy would not be tinkered with, to which Bennett agreed.
Liking the young immigrant personally—and hoping to get Bennett’s support—Lincoln gave Villard more access than any other reporter. In Springfield, Villard watched as Lincoln patiently met with a daily stream of party stalwarts seeking jobs and other handouts; as one by one the Southern states seceded; as every day’s mail brought death threats and gifts of poisoned fruit; as the creases in Lincoln’s already craggy face seemed to deepen into fissures. The Herald shared Villard’s articles with the rest of the Associated Press papers, so that hundreds of thousands of Americans got to know their new president through the eyes of an immigrant who was still not a citizen. As the weeks passed, Villard warmed to Lincoln, though in his stiff Teutonic way he never did get over being scandalized by Lincoln’s barnyard parables, low country humor, or his bizarre habit of drawing his bony knees to his chin and cackling at his own jokes. Then again, many of the president’s closest advisers would be dismayed by these same antics.
Villard was among the group riding on the Lincoln Special, the train that left Springfield on Monday, February 11, and made whistle stops in five states before reaching New York City on Tuesday, February 19. He noted that Lincoln’s friend Ward Hill Lamon, a lawyer and later U.S. marshal for D.C., “brought a banjo along, and amused us with negro songs.” He also noticed that as the train drew nearer to New York City, Lincoln grew pensive and withdrawn, “his face and forehead furrowed by a thousand wrinkles, his hair unkempt… his clothes illy arranged.” When the train stopped in Albany on February 18, a man in the crowd growled, “That Negro-lover will never get to the Executive Mansion.” Another man punched and kicked the speaker senseless. John Wilkes Booth was in Albany that day, performing a monthlong run. He did not go to see Lincoln, and kept his opinions to himself.
Lincoln knew he was in effect entering enemy territory when the train arrived at the new Hudson River Railroad station between Ninth and Tenth Avenues at 30th Street. Unlike in previous cities and towns on the route, the mayor did not come to greet it. Fernando Wood would make Lincoln come to him the next day at City Hall. Instead, Metropolitan superintendent Kennedy met the train. A line of open carriages brought the entourage three and a half miles down to the Astor House. The city had declared a holiday, and large crowds lined both sides of Broadway, but the mood was not terribly festive. Kennedy had cleared the route of all other traffic and lined it with thirteen hundred cops to keep order.
There was no official reception when Lincoln stepped out of his carriage in front of the Astor House. He’d chosen to stay there not only because he had fond memories of it, but because other hotels, many of which had long thrived on Southern visitors, didn’t want him. Watching from atop an omnibus, Walt Whitman recorded an uncomfortable moment as Lincoln and the “vast and silent” crowd gazed at each other. “There were no speeches—no compliments—no welcome—as far as I could hear, not a word said,” Whitman wrote. “Still much anxiety was conceal’d in that quiet. Cautious persons had fear’d some mark’d insult or indignity to the President-elect—for he possess’d no personal popularity at all in New York city, and very little political.… The result was a sulky, unbroken silence, such as certainly never before characterized so great a New York crowd.”
The next morning, the president-elect had a private breakfast meeting with one hundred business and political leaders including Thurlow Weed, James Watson Webb, and the shipping magnate Moses Grinnell. That afternoon, while Mrs. Lincoln and the boys visited Barnum’s American Museum, Lincoln went to City Hall to meet with a cool but civil Mayor Wood and his city council. Wood used the occasion to lecture Lincoln: “Coming to office with a dismembered government to reconstruct, and a disconnected and hostile people to reconcile, it will require a high patriotism and an elevated comprehension of the whole country and its varied interests, opinions and prejudices to so conduct public affairs as to bring it back again to its former harmonious, consolidated and prosperous condition.”
“I can only say that I fully concur in the sentiments expressed by the Mayor,” Lincoln replied. “In my devotion to the Union I hope I am behind no man in the Union.… It shall be my purpose at all times to preserve it.”
That evening, the Lincolns caught Verdi’s new opera, Un ballo in maschera, at the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Some of the sophisticates in the audience smirked to see him wearing black gloves, when all the other gents wore white; a Southerner in the crowd snickered that Lincoln must be “the Undertaker of the Union.” Un ballo in maschera is about the assassination of a king who is shot by a political conspirator while attending a masked ball.
The Lincolns left the Astor House early the next morning and took the Cortlandt Street ferry over to Jersey City, where they boarded the train that took them through New Jersey to Philadelphia. From there they were to go on to Baltimore, where Lincoln was to attend a luncheon and then board another train for the last leg to Washington, or Washington City as it was commonly called at the time. But Maryland, a border slave state, was teetering on the brink of secession, and Baltimore was seething with angry pro-Southerners. Of the roughly thirty thousand votes cast in Baltimore in November, only about a thousand were for Lincoln.
In Philadelphia, Lincoln heard, from two separate investigations, reports of plots to assassinate him as he moved between trains in Baltimore. The first report was from the railroad detective Allan Pinkerton. Hired in January by the president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Rail Road to investigate secessionist plans to sabotage his lines outside Baltimore, Pinkerton and five of his detectives had gone undercover in the city and come upon credible evidence of an assassination plot.
The other report came in a letter from William Seward, brought to Philadelphia by Seward’s son Frederick. Independent of Pinkerton’s investigation, of which they were unaware, Seward and General Winfield Scott had asked John A. Kennedy back in January to send detectives from New York to Baltimore—where Kennedy, the son of immigrants, was born and grew up before moving to New York. Like Pinkerton, Kennedy had personally led some of his best operatives to Baltimore, and they too learned of the plot.
Pressed by Pinkerton, Seward, and Lamon, Lincoln reluctantly agreed to change his travel plans. He passed through Baltimore in the middle of the night and arrived in Washington, disguised under a slouch hat (given to him in New York) and shawl, at 6 a.m., with Pinkerton and Lamon at his side. The Democrat newspapers made great sport of what one called Lincoln’s “wretched and cowardly” sneaking into Washington, much to his chagrin.