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In New York, on December 15, over two thousand panicky city merchants crowded into a Pine Street establishment to draft a resolution of conciliation and reassurance to southern leaders, stressing their racial solidarity: one merchant declared that “if ever a conflict arises between races, the people of the city of New York will stand by their brethren, the white race.” They vowed to defend slaveowner rights in the Union but declared that if southerners chose secession they should be allowed to depart in peace.

GRASS IN THE STREETS?

On the day before Christmas South Carolina swept out of the Union. Other Deep South states followed over the ensuing weeks. By early February the rebels had formed a government, the Confederate States of America.

One of the first rebel projects was to repudiate debts owed the North, with Manhattan’s businessmen the principal target. Southern nationalists remembered that New Yorkers, with their charges for credit, commodities, insurance, shipping, and storage, had creamed off forty cents of every dollar Europeans paid for southern cotton. As the Vicksburg Daily Whig put it, New York “sends out her long arms to the extreme South; and with avidity rarely equalled, grasps our gains and transfers them to herself—taxing us at every step and depleting us as extensively as possible without actually destroying us.” Now revenge was at hand. “What would New York be without slavery?” James Dunmore De Bow asked, and answered gleefully: “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 of the past.”

Southern secessionists, in calculating whether they could win a military test of strength with the North, factored in what they believed to be the inherent contradictions and structural weaknesses of capitalism. These included Wall Street’s financial instability—vividly witnessed in the 1857 panic—and the class and ethnic conflicts evident in New York City.

During the 1860 campaign, militant secessionist Edmund Ruffin concocted an eerily prescient fantasy he called Anticipations of the Future to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time. “When the Civil War began,” Ruffin’s narrator-in-the-future recalled, “loss of the lucrative southern trade caused massive unemployment in the industrial cities of the North.” The jobless organized vast demonstrations, which turned into riots. At first these were put down by police and militia, with heavy loss of life. But “with the northern forces suffering military defeat and the northern government floundering in financial difficulties, the number of unemployed rose and the price of food spiraled.” The city of New York “broke into open rebellion. Banks were broken open and their vaults robbed. Churches were looted. The avenues were filled with terrified refugees, struggling to escape the mob. . . . Drunk and gorged with plunder, the mob set the city on fire. A high wind whipped the flames into a hurricane of fire, and when morning came New York was a blackened, charred ruin.” In the end, riots in other towns forced the northern government to abandon its efforts to conquer the South.

Ruffin’s first predicted catastrophe arrived as if on cue. Triggered by the interruption of southern commerce, a panic struck New York City in 1861 that in some respects was more severe than that of 1857. Southern debts went unpaid, ruining northern creditors. Merchandise went unordered, and newspapers filled with ads from merchants frantically trying to sell goods originally destined for southern ports. Prices of commodities dropped steadily. Money dried up despite cooperative efforts by bankers to halt the panic. The Herald computed northern losses at $478 million. President Buchanan tried to reassure the city’s capitalists and bankers by appointing one of their own, John A. Dix, as secretary of the treasury. But the crisis worsened. Some, like the Rev. Henry Bellows, feared secession was triggering social breakdown,