Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [687]
Democratic merchants continued to press hard for conciliation with a South given to ever-escalating threats of secession. In October 1859—at a mass meeting in Cooper Union attended by two thousand merchants—August Belmont, William B. Astor, Moses Taylor, William F. Havemeyer, and attorney Samuel J. Tilden organized the Democratic Vigilant Association, dedicated to battling Seward’s Republicans and convincing the South that New York merchants could still be depended on.
Republicanism found few adherents among workers, either. The artisan radicals who had been drawn to abolitionism in the 1830s had been alienated in the 1840s with its domination by upper-class evangelists, their inveterate enemies. By the 1850s few laboring groups strongly opposed slavery, apart from the Communist Club and several of the Turnvereine (whose defense squads protected antislavery meetings); fewer still joined the Republicans.
Like businessmen, workingmen believed that New York’s economy, and thus their jobs, depended on a southern connection that Republicanism endangered. There were other bases for antipathy. Many Republicans were anti-immigrant bigots. Working people were also deeply suspicious of the Republican project of creating a nationwide “free labor” regime. To the Republicans, it seemed, “freedom” meant simply self-ownership, the fact of not being a slave. A laborer was fully “free,” Republicans argued, when he was able to sell his labor, able to move from job to job in accordance with the changing demands of the marketplace.
Some Republicans—like Abraham Lincoln, a rising Republican luminary in Illinois—admitted that wage-work was incompatible with true freedom but argued that the free labor system allowed workers to climb out of their dependent and propertyless situation. This notion made sense to Lincoln’s (and Seward’s) rural and small-town constituency of farmers, craftsmen, and small businessmen; it didn’t resonate in the big city, where most workers were trapped in permanent proletarian status, and knew it.
Workers also resisted Republican doctrine that unions were despotic institutions, on a par with the Slave Power and the Catholic Church in their coercion of individuals. Workers, the new party said, like reformers of old, would do better to advance themselves individually, by adopting proper habits and values. To people who depended on collective modes of organization and action for survival, this smacked of pious hypocrisy, especially when it came from wealthy employers.
Finally, white workers rejected Republicanism because it was Black Republicanism. Working-class racism, already deeply held, was strengthened each time employers used African Americans as strikebreakers; that their own racial animus helped sustain the divisions that facilitated this practice was not an easily achieved insight.
When opponents of Republicanism looked about for a vigorous champion, the likeliest candidate—back from the political dead—appeared to be Fernando Wood. In 1858 Wood had bolted Tammany Hall and organized his own independent Democratic organization, known as Mozart Hall, after its meeting place at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway. In 1859 he ran again for mayor, with the powerful support of Bennett’s Herald.
This time it was his opponents who were divided. The monied members of the Democratic Vigilant Association, including Belmont, Tilden, and Havemeyer, demanded that Tammany nominate one of their own, on pain of withholding vital funding. The Hall selected Havemeyer, allowing