• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8142 0

Wood to present himself as the protector of the true Democrat, the workingman, and the immigrant, against the “kid glove, scented, silk stocking, poodle-headed, degenerate aristocracy.” Republicans tried to fuse with Tammany, but the deal fell through and they ran their own candidate, George Opdyke, a wealthy importer. Wood blistered the Republicans for interfering with home rule in New York City and for threatening to estrange the South. “The South is our best customer,” Wood declared. “She pays the best prices, and pays promptly.” When the Times raised the old charge of excessive ambition—Wood wanted to become “Our Municipal Emperor,” Raymond said—the ex-mayor retorted: “Better have an iron rule than no rule at all, as is now.” When Wood won (with 38.3 percent to Havemeyer’s 34.6 percent and Opdyke’s 27.4 percent), his victory was hailed in the South by such organs as the Richmond Examiner.

All things considered, it was not altogether inappropriate that what would become the South’s national anthem had its premiere in New York City that year. Dan Emmett’s “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” was first aired at the April 4, 1859, performance of Bryant’s Minstrels in Mechanics Hall. It was then published by the New York firm of Firth, Pond and Co. and later made its way down south. (In a further irony, Emmett may have drawn upon the work of the Snowden Family Band—an African-American touring group—in composing the song.)

JOHN BROWN’S BODY

The metropolis was committed to the status quo. As ever, however, the status quo refused to stand still. On October 16, 1859, convinced that “the crimes of this guilty land, will never be purged away, but with Blood,” John Brown struck at Harper’s Ferry.

Some New Yorkers had known of Brown’s plan. He had appealed to Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass for help, but African-American abolitionists had decided against participating in what seemed a suicidal exercise. When Douglass met with Brown just before the raid, however, he did pass along a contribution of twentyfive dollars from Elizabeth and James Gloucester (pastor of Brooklyn’s Siloam Presbyterian Church) and their letter of support urging Brown “to do battle to that ugly foe of slavery.”

New York’s white abolitionists, adhering to their nonviolent principles, had also backed away from John Brown. “Would not one Uncle Tom do more good by his pious submission to God,” Lewis Tappan had said to Brown’s request for arms, “than a score or a hundred men who should act exactly opposite?”

But from the moment news of Brown’s raid and capture arrived in New York on October 18, and through the ensuing weeks of his trial, the black and white abolitionist community was alive with prayer and sympathy meetings. Thomas Hamilton, editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, staunchly defended Brown’s right of insurrection, and “the colored women of Brooklyn” wrote Brown in his Virginia jail cell that we “recognize in you a Saviour commissioned to redeem us, the American people, from the great National sin of Slavery.” When Brown was hanged, on December 2, Henry Highland Garnet’s Shiloh Church held a large memorial meeting, and the colored women of Brooklyn and New York sent donations to the martyr’s widow and to the wife of his black compatriot, Lewis Leary. At the Broadway Tabernacle Church, Henry Ward Beecher produced the chains that had bound Brown to the scaffold, threw them to floor, stomped them with his heel, and cried, “The fate of the slaver states!”

Mainstream reaction was something else again. Businessmen denounced Brown as a madman. Bennett’s Herald said the “lawless violence” tolerated by Republicans on the Kansas frontier had come back east to haunt them. Fernando Wood excoriated Brown as a “fiend” and his “fanaticism” as a threat to the Union. The Democratic Vigilant Association called the raid a logical outgrowth of Sewardism and urged the business community to show the South they repudiated Republicanism’s pernicious principles.

The South didn’t bother waiting. New York drummers were expelled from several states. Many firms canceled