Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [685]
The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher had swung into the Free Soil camp in the mid-1840s, though he remained opposed to abolitionism and feared liberating the South’s “vast horde of undisciplined Africans.” In 1848, however, Beecher began appearing at the Broadway Tabernacle, crucible of the antislavery crusade, and speaking out with Lewis Tappan and Frederick Douglass. After 1850 he urged defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act—“We are determined to break any law that commands us to enslave or reenslave a man, and we are willing to take the penalty”—and he began holding sensational (and titillating) mock “slave auctions” at Plymouth Church, in which weeping men and women of his prosperous Brooklyn congregation heaped cash and jewels on collection plates to buy the freedom of light-skinned young women and children. Beecher also called on New Yorkers to extend the rights of citizenship to their own black citizens and refused to ride any streetcar line in Brooklyn that segregated its passengers. When Kansas became a battleground, he told northern emigrants heading there that “Sharpe’s rifles are a greater moral agency than the Bible,” and soon the Free Soilers smuggling guns to the territory took to calling them “Beecher’s Bibles.” By 1856 Plymouth was hosting the most radical abolitionists—like Wendell Phillips, who had been refused a venue by virtually every church and hall in both cities—and in that same year he became a Republican (his congregation gave him two months off to campaign for Frémont).
Republicanism made inroads in the business community too. Some Wall Streeters—particularly financiers promoting a transcontinental railroad and merchants whose trade dealings were not southern oriented—joined Beecher in attacking attempts to introduce slavery into Kansas. Such men gave financial aid to send free-state settlers to the territory or turned out for protest meetings in City Hall Park, and some entered the
Beecher Selling a Slave Girl from Plymouth Pulpit. (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
new Republican Party. These were chiefly former Whigs, like clothing manufacturer and merchant George Opdyke, sugar and coffee importer Edwin Morgan, banker Simeon Draper, and flour and tea merchant George Griswold, though Democrats too joined up, like Isaac Sherman, a millionaire involved in western trade and railroads. Others were led to the Republican fold via their religious convictions, including William Dodge and Pelatiah Perit.
In the 1856 presidential campaign, a small nucleus under the leadership of Moses H. Grinnell set out to win Wall Street converts. In addition to offering a moral and cultural critique of the South, they stressed the practical business advantages a Republican victory might bring. They invited N. P. Banks, speaker of the House of Representatives and a recent convert to Republicanism, to address a crowd of twenty thousand from the steps of the Merchants’ Exchange. Banks argued that the election of Democrat James Buchanan would hurt trade with Cuba (because a prosouthern administration would try to annex it for slavery), block a northern transcontinental rail route in favor of a southern one (diminishing New York’s chances of capturing the China trade), and slow up river and harbor improvements.
Banks’s appeal failed. The critique of the South might tug at moral and cultural heartstrings and speak to particular practical interests, but the facts of New York’s situation dictated a continuing southern alliance.
METROPOLITAN DIXIECRATS
Whatever their private views about the southern social order, the city’s key economic actors—the shipowners who hauled cotton, the bankers who