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for the institution and followed the “radical” lead of Greeley’s New York Tribune in opposing it and welcoming Lincoln’s commitment to ending it. For the bulk of the old Whigs who had belatedly clambered aboard the Republican Party and nested in its “conservative” wing, where they took their political cues from Henry Raymond’s editorial page, the war had little to do with slavery. As the Times argued: “The issue is between anarchy and order,—between Government and lawlessness,—between the authority of the Constitution and the reckless will of those who seek its destruction.” Still, most conservative Republicans went along with the president on emancipation, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or distaste, accepting it as a necessary wartime measure that would expedite restoration of the Union.

Democrats were more thoroughly divided, much as they had been before the fighting broke out. “War Democrats”—who included prominent businessmen and the bulk of Tammany Hall politicians, among them Tweed—favored fighting on to victory but opposed partisan Republican legislation and the Lincoln administration’s erosion of civil rights. “Peace Democrats,” rooted in Fernando Wood’s Mozart Hall, wanted to restore the Union as it had existed before the war, with slavery intact, though a more extreme wing was prepared to accept peace without reunion. These divisions had already cost their party the mayoralty in 1861, when Tammany’s C. Godfrey Gunther and Mozart’s Wood divided the Democratic vote, allowing Republican George Opdyke—a wealthy dry-goods importer, banker, and broker and a leader in the Union Defense Committee—to capture City Hall with barely more than one-third of the vote. This had led to various overtures looking toward restoration of party unity.

But emancipation appalled the Peace Democrats, who saw it as a fundamental alteration of war aims. They now hoisted a militantly antiwar banner, under which gathered old Democrats unhappy with wartime Republican domination, merchants and financiers disturbed at the increasing power of the national state, and considerable numbers of white working-class people angry at wartime inequities.

Emancipation also alienated the Catholic Church hierarchy. Up till then Archbishop Hughes had been friendly with the administration, especially Seward, his old ally on the education issue. Hughes had even served as Lincoln’s semiofficial envoy to the Vatican and to France (he met with Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie), where he pleaded the Union cause and urged nonrecognition of the Confederacy. But emancipation alarmed conservative men who had long argued slavery was an evil to be borne, that abolitionism smacked of a revolutionary violation of property rights, and that the antislavery movement was inextricably linked to militant nativist Protestants.

In the fall 1862 elections, after the Preliminary Proclamation, Peace Democrats bid for power. In the city, ex-mayor Wood and his supporters denounced the administration as “fanatical, imbecile, and corrupt” and openly urged resistance to emancipation. At the state level, Peace Democrat Horatio Seymour (allied to New York Central Railroad interests) adopted a similar stance, favoring restoration of the Union by granting all possible concessions to the South. Both resorted to a shrill racism, protesting that emancipation substituted “niggerism for nationality.” In the context of growing unhappiness with the costs of the war, Democrats carried every ward in the city, Wood won a congressional seat, and Seymour captured the governorship.

The peace movement continued to build after the full Proclamation was issued. On February 6, 1863, at Delmonico’s, a group of Democratic and ex-nativist businessmen led by financier August Belmont launched the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge. Other luminaries included the venerable Samuel F. B. Morse (president), Governor Seymour, and corporate attorney Samuel J. Tilden. The organization published antiwar and antiemancipation tracts in which they suggested that freeing the slaves would ruin the South