Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [692]
THE REPUBLIC OF NEW YORK?
Stymied by Lincoln’s intransigence, some New Yorkers argued that if the Union could not be preserved, the southern states should be allowed to depart in peace, and the city should follow them out the door.
Back in January Mayor Wood had proposed to the Common Council that if the Union dissolved, New York should consider declaring—in the words of the Dongan Charter—-that “New York be, and from henceforth forever hereafter shall be and remain, a free city of itself.” Wood considered the national Republican assault on southern institutions, and the state Republican dismantling of metropolitan home rule back in 1857, to be co-evil assaults on local self-government. A declaration of independence by Manhattanites would liberate them from the meddling and plundering of upstate Puritans and free them as well from federal-dictated tariffs. By making theirs a dutyfree port—apart from a nominal levy on imports that would cover the cost of local government and allow the abolition of local taxes—New Yorkers would retain an “uninterrupted intercourse with every section,” including “our aggrieved brethren of the slave states,” and rise to new heights of prosperity.
While Wood’s idea was denounced publicly, it was debated privately in business circles. It had its appealing points. Some cited Hamburg, Lubec, Bremen, and Frankfurt as models. Rumors spread that some merchants were moving beyond contemplation to action. John Forsyth, a Confederate commissioner, wrote Confederate President Jefferson Davis that influential and wealthy men planned to seize the federal government’s Navy Yard, warships, and forts.
Nothing of the sort materialized. Most businessmen calculated that New York’s departure would simply trigger a further round of secessions, and the city would soon find itself cut off from West and South alike by tariff walls. Besides, the city hadn’t the material base to sustain independence. As Lincoln dryly remarked, it would be “some time before the front door sets up house-keeping on its own account.”
Wood’s fantasy died abruptly in March 1861 when the provisional government of the Confederacy announced its tariff policy. After April 1 duties on imports arriving via New Orleans, Charleston, or Savannah would be lowered to half the rates federal law required New York City to impose. It would soon be cheaper for St. Louis or Cincinnati to import European goods through southern ports. The certain result, wrote a horrified New York Times, would be that “we shall not only cease to see marble palaces rising along Broadway, but reduced from a national to a merely financial metropolis, our shipping will rot at the wharves, and grass will grow in the streets.” Worse still, the Confederacy abrogated federal coastal trading laws, thus expanding foreign access to southern ports, allowing the new nation (as the Charleston Mercury put it) to bypass the “New York money changers” and “trade directly with our customers.”
Faced with the specter of the South’s appending itself to the British Empire, the repudiation of millions in outstanding debts, and the disruption of trading and financial networks built up over a century, New York’s bourgeoisie, virtually overnight, opted for war.
BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS!
At 4:30 A.M., before dawn on the morning of April 12, 1861, Edmund Ruffin pulled the lanyard on one of the shore batteries aimed at federal troops occupying Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Twenty hours later and eight hundred miles to the north, Walt Whitman heard the report. At midnight, walking down Broadway after leaving a performance of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, he bought a paper from newsboys crying an extra and stopped to read the story under the gaslights outside the Metropolitan Hotel. Civil war had begun.
On Monday, April 15, Lincoln declared that an “insurrection” existed in the South and called on seventy-five thousand men to volunteer for three months to put it down. That very evening a group of “the