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led by eighteen bands paced its way from City Hall up Broadway to 14th Street, across Union Square to Fifth Avenue, and north to the Hudson River Railroad Depot. At the rear walked a small group of “freedmen.” This human postscript represented a last-minute compromise. The Common Council had excluded blacks from participating in the march at all, and they had organized their own ceremonies, featuring Frederick Douglass, at Cooper Institute. But the Union League Club protested. Interceding with Stanton and the local police, they got permission for a token representation to bring up the rear.

At four P.M., the train pulled out of the station for Albany. The Civil War in New York City was over.

Lincoln’s funeral cortege turning up Broadway, April 25, 1865. To the right, a huge banner draped across the front of Ciry Hall reads: “The Nation Mourns.” It was said that a million people watched the procession. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

51

Westward, Ho!

With the guns silenced, New York’s exporters, importers, shippers, and bankers set out to repair their severed southern connections. Cotton might no longer be king, but as the country’s leading export it remained, the Times noted, “a magnate of the very first rank.” To restore the antebellum status quo as quickly as possible, New York businessmen overwhelmingly supported President Andrew Johnson’s policies. They applauded the president’s grant of amnesty to most ex-Confederates, accepted a quick return of southern representatives to Congress, and raised no objections when state legislatures passed “Black Codes” imposing virtual peonage on freed slaves.

Less than a year after the fighting ended, though, leniency had reaped few rewards. When New York City’s Chamber of Commerce commissioned an envoy, Thomas N. Conway, to canvass the old Confederacy for prospects and to let former rebels know that “money in vast quantities was awaiting a chance of safe and profitable investment,” Conway turned in a gloomy assessment. There were, he reported, planters desperate for funds to restart operations, merchants eager to hook up with old trading partners, and would-be southern industrialists who needed northern capital to build railroads, erect textile mills, and exploit mineral resources. But enthusiasm from the few was offset by hatred from the many. There was no way, Conway reported, that New Yorkers “could live and safely conduct business in any section of the South.” Nor were serious profits likely. Whites were obsessed with subordinating the newly freed blacks, and looming racial turmoil would make southern labor unproductive and unreliable.

Conway’s predictions were quickly confirmed. In May 1866 Memphis whites fired and pillaged hundreds of black homes, churches, and schools, gang-raped black women on the streets, and murdered dozens of black men. In July a massacre in New Orleans left thirty-eight dead and 146 wounded. These events shocked and angered many New York businessmen. So did the decision by “reconstructed” states to send Confederate congressmen, Confederate generals—even the Confederacy’s vice-president!—to represent them in Washington. Presidential reconstruction, it seemed, was letting southerners win back politically what they had lost on the battlefield.

These developments strengthened the radical wing of the Republican Party, which had been arguing for much tougher treatment of the South. Freedmen, radicals argued, should be granted political and civil rights, and former Confederate leaders should be disfranchised. The most militant radicals called for expropriating ex-slaveholders’ lands and dividing them up among poor whites and blacks. Radicalism had attracted few New Yorkers outside the Union League Club or the city’s African-American community, but the appalling news out of the South enhanced the appeal of harsher measures.

Riding the surge of resentment, Radical Republicans swept to national triumph in the fall 1866 elections, capturing two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress. In 1867 they imposed military rule on the