Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [718]
In April 1864 employers introduced a bill in the state legislature to outlaw strikes altogether. The newly constituted Workingmen’s Union, an umbrella organization led by William Harding, an immigrant English coach painter and president of the Coachmakers Union, rallied in Tompkins Square to protest the antistrike bill. On April 7 mechanics and laborers paraded down Third Avenue with banners, flags, and transparencies, cheered by thousands on the sidewalks. Workers from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Hoboken, and Jersey City joined them in Tompkins Square, until their numbers had swelled to fifty-thousand. Under this pressure, the initiative was defeated.
The latter years of the war were heady ones for labor. For the first seven months of 1864 not a single trade-wide strike failed. And despite continuing inflation and the dreadful conditions of much of the workforce, steady employment, rising wages, soldiers’ bounties, and relief payments to families meant that thousands of New York City’s poor had more money than ever before.
THE ELECTION OF 1864
In the summer of 1864, Abraham Lincoln’s reelection was very much open to question. The war news was gloomy, the progress of Grant’s and Sherman’s armies slow and terribly costly. With Lincoln’s private approval, Horace Greeley had engaged in peace discussions with Confederate representatives at Niagara Falls. In New York City several prominent businessmen deserted the prowar coalition to support the Democratic candidate, George McClellan. Then, in September, Sherman occupied Atlanta, and Sheridan began drubbing Jubal Early’s forces in the Shenandoah Valley. At a stroke the situation changed. McClellan’s early lead was erased, and Lincoln now had an excellent chance of winning. City businessmen rallied to his campaign, which was masterminded by Thurlow Weed from the Astor House.
The impending Lincoln victory meant the war would go on until the South capitulated, and it would be Republicans who would guide the reconstruction of the postwar political order. Some desperate Confederates decided to disrupt the election process by terrorizing northern cities. The idea was to have Confederate sappers team up with disaffected Copperheads to wreak havoc. For New York City the plans were particularly grandiose. Confederate Secret Service men would infiltrate the country from Canada, make their way to the metropolis, and set off fires around town, hopefully triggering another uprising like the draft riots. Copperheads then would seize federal buildings, throw General Dix in a dungeon, raise the Confederate flag over City Hall, and take New York out of the Union and into an alliance with the Richmond government.
When rumors of the plot reached New York City, Governor Seymour poohpoohed them, insisting that New York State could handle any untoward developments. But Stanton and Seward decided to send federal troops to the metropolis to secure the electoral process. As commander they chose General Benjamin E Butler, a fantasy come true for reformers and Republicans. The no-nonsense Butler was just the man to deal with spies, rioters, Tammany bully-boys, and Peace Democrats.
On November 5 regulars from the Army of the Potomac docked in the harbor, the first of a mixed force of five thousand that included reliable New England and New York units. On the seventh the last of the volunteers disembarked in a drizzling rain and stowed their baggage in Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton or at Fort Richmond on Staten Island. Butler set up his headquarters in a twelve-room suite in the brand-new Hoffman House off Madison Square, built on the ruins of stores burned down in the draft riots. Here he established a sixty-wire telegraph center, connecting him to the War Department in Washington, to every major city in New York State,