Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [707]
In addition, in his capacity as Democratic Party national chairman, Belmont began grooming the cashiered General George McClellan to challenge Lincoln in 1864. After being fired, McClellan moved to New York City and began working with Chairman Belmont on building a presidential candidacy. He took with him as his aide Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer, who now received his first introduction to the financial, political, and journalistic elite of the metropolis.
While the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge took the (relatively) high road, the popular press launched a gloves-off campaign that mixed racism, solidarity with labor, attacks on war profiteers, and, increasingly, calls for peace. At various points the Lincoln administration banned “Copperhead” papers from the mails. Republican infringements of civil liberties generated more support for Peace Democrats. The Lincoln administration suspended habeas corpus and arrested or detained hundreds. In New York City political prisoners were housed in Fort Lafayette, just off the Brooklyn shore from Fort Hamilton. When Ohio Democrat Clement L. Vallandigham was indicted for seditious oratory, Fernando Wood chaired a meeting at Cooper Institute in his support.
June 1863 was the high point of antiwar activism in the city. Wood held a massive Peace Convention at Cooper Union on June 3—of which James Gordon Bennett’s Her-ald approved, auguring a new respectability—and orators pounded home the ideas that the war was a rich man’s fight, that it was undermining the Constitution, and that it would flood the North with southern blacks.
Few of New York’s wealthy backed Wood’s movement. Nor, despite the Peace Democrats’ intensive efforts at wooing urban workmen, did any laboring organizations or leaders “go Coppery.” Rather the surging peace movement alarmed and galvanized prowar activists. “Two years ago,” one wrote, “you could walk the entire length of Broadway without stepping on a snake,” whereas now “New York swarms with Copperheads” engaged in the “slimy errand” of helping rebellion. Three Sanitary Commission leaders—Strong the lawyer, Olmsted the intellectual, and Bellows the minister—called for a hard-line organization to combat Copperheadism. They were worried that Wood and Belmont’s operations might mislead Europeans into assuming the wealth and culture of the American metropolis were arrayed with the rebellion. Strong wanted to show France and England that the war was “not waged by the rabble of the North, or by politicians, but that the intelligent, cultured, gentlemanly caste sustains it.”
Dismissing Belmont and his crowd as “vulgar parvenus,” Olmsted and friends set out to form a club of “descendants and almsbearers of the old dukes of our land.” Launched on February 24, 1863, the new Union League Club included pedigreed New Yorkers, leading literati, and sixty-six of the business elite, among them Robert Minturn, the city’s top shipping merchant, who became the club’s first president. By May it had 350 members, including (in Strong’s words) the leading “representatives of capital and commerce.” By war’s end the Union League Club embraced eight hundred of the city’s most wealthy and well established merchants, lawyers, bankers, and professionals. The club leased, redecorated, and strung telegraph lines into an elegant house on Broadway and 17th Street, facing Union Square. It quickly became the place to banquet visiting dignitaries and meet to run the war effort.
The Union League Club quickly took on the Peace Democrats, setting up a Loyal Publication Society. Over the next two years, it