The View from Park Row

"Streetcars on Park Row, circa 1860," reads the caption accompanying this photo on the New York Times web site. "The large building in the background is the headquarters of The New York Times." It was a new building then, built just for the Times, and first occupied just two years before...

Having heard from those who for months prior to the 1860 elections were anticipating (perhaps even preparing for) secession and civil war - it's appropriate to acknowledge that theirs wasn't a universal view. There are other historical records supporting Haswell's recollection (his Reminiscences was published in 1896) of the mood of the day:

Initially, many Republicans scoffed at Democratic warnings that Lincoln's election would lead to secession of the South. As late as November 29, 1860, William Cullen Bryant, poet and owner-editor of the Evening Post, declared that "nobody but a few silly people expect it will happen."

In this case silly proved to be the opposite of wrong - but Bryant was no fool. He may have acquired a New Yorker's definition of everybody and nobody, but his lifetime's experience - throughout which he stayed true to his progressive political views - can be seen as a travel guide through the changing political landscape of the decades immediately prior to the Civil War. He was an original free soil Democrat, and had introduced Abraham Lincoln to the crowd at Cooper Union in February, 1860. By then his Evening Post could rightly be called one of three influential Republican-leaning papers in New York City. (The others were Greeley's Tribune and a relative newcomer on the scene: the New York Times, a paper founded by former Tribune man Henry Jarvis Raymond in 1851.)

If the people generally refused to believe in the likelihood of secession and civil war that's attributable at least in part to desire - people generally don't want war. Unfortunately that's a part of the human condition that (depending on its manifestation) has led to as many wars as any of the less desirable (greed, for example) human traits have through history. Two nations often go to war when only one wants to - if the other is sufficiently "non-militaristic." (A truth to which older citizens of Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Holland, and a host of other European nations can attest.) But that one-sided aggressiveness wasn't the case in the American Civil War. Remarkably - if Haswell is correct in his next line, too - the South didn't want war either: "In short, it was almost universally held in the North that the South never would secede, just as the South believed that in case of secession the North would not fight for the Union."

The history of the United States to 1860 had already been one of fractious, sometimes bloody political battles. But if that everything will be just fine delusion was somehow rampant among specially those of Republican politics, it may be because those who saw their own anti-slavery stance as a moral campaign conducted under the blessing of God (one would be hard-pressed to identify a cause in American history more worthy of the claim) didn't realize the full nature of the contribution slave labor made to the wealth of so many of their fellow citizens (the sort of wealth that can buy any number of moral justifications for any argument, or at least assuage any excessive feelings of guilt) and vastly underestimated the degree (beyond murderous) of hatred and contempt in which thus-threatened Democrats subsequently held them. If so, (at least, if one accepts deeds as more indicative of feelings than words) the feelings would be mutual soon enough.

But if the Times' day-after-the-elections coverage is any example of the mood of Republicans in 1860, Haswell was right and Bryant wasn't kidding - they really didn't see it coming.

We searched in vain for some one that could tell us of the feelings of the defeated. Every one declared himself a Lincoln man, or else said nothing... At length passing through Nassau-street we met an acquaintance, -- one whom we had heard during the campaign expressing his predilections for DOUGLAS, and his blissful anticipations of Arcadian Winters in office at Washington under the Douglas dynasty. We hailed him; he was in a great hurry and couldn't stop, -- bank just closing, -- all that sort of thing. We took him by the button; that is the shot across the bows that will always bring one to. He stopped, and, after a moment's attention to our inquiries. "My dear Sir," he said, "I'm a Lincoln man, and always was!'' We pursued our investigations in that direction no further. In all seriousness, we heard less about Disunion yesterday than we have heard any day in a month past ... and we learned nothing that would lead us to suppose that the people of the fairly beaten parties will acquiesce now in the expressed, will of the people a whit less gracefully than the Republicans submitted when they were overborne four years ago.
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One of our wandering reporters in a ramble around town, tried to find out some discordant element in the popular sentiment, and to that end visited the chief hotels, especially those which Southerners do most approve; also the restaurants, the public places of resort, and (but it was only as a matter of duty) the drinking saloons. Thus the New-York Hotel, the Lafarge, the Metropolitan and the St. Nicholas were approached with the very best results. Although a large number of Southern gentlemen and families were residing at each of these popular establishments, there were no symptoms of revolt, of dissatisfaction even, or of anything else than a disposition for enjoyment. Nothing whatever was there to indicate that the Government would change hands on the 4th of March next, and, after that, according to YANCEY, WISE and other equally good authorities, "the deluge." ...Human nature is a singular compound of contradictions. We readily accept to-day, especially when we cannot help it, what we denied and defied yesterday. Thus it was, that some "fire-eaters," Northern and Southern, whom our wandering reporter met on Monday, rampant for BRECKINRIDGE, DOUGLAS, BELL, LANE -- anybody but LINCOLN -- and secession, with absolute ruin to the country, if he was elected -- were discovered yesterday to be as mild as newly-weaned lambs.

"That any calamity threatened the Union," they added for good measure, "seemed as far from everybody's thoughts, as the idea that a volcano might break out in the Central Park, and by its eruption convert our Empire City into another Pompeii..."

Less than six weeks later, South Carolina seceded from the Union. ("A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery," read the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. "On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government...") Of course, no one in New York City was surprised.

Postscript

Charles Haynes Haswell's Reminiscences offers wonderful insight into a bygone era. Not intended as a history, it's a chronological series of brief descriptions of life in New York City during first half of his.

In its pages he captured an era of great and small changes in the city, like this one from 1856:

May 25, the last services were held in the old "Brick Church," which yielded its site to the Times building, the purchase having been made, despite the assertion that a condition of the gift to the church of the site, was that it should ever be occupied for a church.

Next: The End of Edmund Ruffin