Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [689]
Thoroughly alarmed, several thousand metropolitan businessmen gathered at the Academy of Music on December 19 to denounce Brown’s crimes and Seward’s ideas. Leading merchants thronged the speaker’s platform. The night rang with vigorous defenses of slavery as a positive good, ordained by nature.
49
Civil Wars
The atmosphere in New York was still poisonous when Abraham Lincoln came to town two months later. Lincoln, having emerged as a serious contender for the 1860 Republican nomination, had attracted the attention of Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, on the lookout for a candidate to block Seward. The Young Men’s Central Republican Union of New York City (a group run by such youngsters as Bryant and Greeley) originally intended to have him speak at Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn but shifted the venue to the more overtly political Cooper Union in New York. Lincoln’s run through the celebrity production mill also included a stop at Mathew Brady’s studio for an official campaign portrait.
In his talk at Cooper Union Lincoln disavowed Brown, struck a conciliatory pose toward the South, and denied the Republican Party was a sectional organization. But he also remained adamant on the need to stop the expansion of slavery, emphasized there were overarching moral issues at the crux of the sectional confrontation, and displayed oratorical gifts—“Let us have faith that right makes might”—that thrilled his audience. By the time he boarded a train for New England, Lincoln had demonstrated that a western man had appeal in the East, a crucial step toward his triumph at the Chicago convention.
In the ensuing campaign, most Republicans wrote off New York City as a lost cause and indeed boasted of their antiurban animosity in a bid for rural support. Campaigning in the West, Seward reminded audiences that “there is no virtue in Pearl Street, in Wall Street.” Greeley’s Tribune said the “moneybags of Wall Street” feared Lincoln because the “rich Jews and other money lenders,” along with the “great dry goods and other commercial houses,” were in league with slaveholders.
Some Republican politicians did try to make headway in the metropolis itself. They argued that the West—finally recovered from the 1857-59 recession—might be a better market, and political partner, than the South. They emphasized Republican support for internal improvements and tariffs, positions that won over some industrialists.
Still, most leading businessmen worked for Lincoln’s defeat. The richest bankers and largest merchants forced contending Democratic candidates to fuse into a joint Union ticket, then promoted it vigorously. One group of dirty tricksters rigged a stock market panic, hoping to scare the country into thinking a Republican victory would create financial chaos. Anti-Lincoln editors escalated their racist rhetoric. The New York Daily News, edited by Fernando Wood’s brother, Benjamin, said that if Republicans won, “we shall find negroes among us thicker than blackberries swarming everywhere,” and Bennett warned workingmen that “if Lincoln is elected you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.”
On election day thousands of stores closed and hung out signs urging patrons to vote the Union (Democratic) ticket. Many businesses circularized their employees, saying that if Lincoln were elected “the South will withdraw its custom from us and you will get little work and bad prices.” New Yorkers gave the Union ticket a majority of thirty thousand and cast 62 percent of their votes for candidates other than Lincoln. The Republican Tribune blamed the showing on the “very general enlistment of the Mercantile and Capitalist classes in the Fusion cause.”
But once again, success in the city was negated by Republican landslides upstate, which in turn helped put Lincoln over the top nationwide. Southerners read the Republican triumph as undermining their ability to veto federal threats