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© 1999 by Philip Ernest Schoenberg, PhD
When Lincoln visited New York City for the first time in 1857, the new in New York City was really new. Our city was on the cutting edge of technological innovation, cultural novelty, educational change, financial modernization, transportation leadership, communication pacesetting, commercial pioneering, and cultural trailblazing. For Lincoln, New York was the future, where the rest of America was heading. In 1857, Lincoln made good on his future by collecting the biggest fee of his career in New York: five thousand dollars. In today's money, this would be half a million dollars.
New York City in the time of Lincoln included only Manhattan Island. This had been its corporate limits since its founding in 1624. When people said "New York City" or "Manhattan", they meant lower Manhattan below Forty-Second Street where more than 800,000 people lived. Broadway only extended to Twenty-third street. Fifth Avenue was becoming famous as a fashionable thoroughfare. Forty-Second Street was a wilderness area where future president Grover Cleveland taught for a year at the New York State School for the blind. Vanderbilt would build Grand Central Terminal at Forty-second Street because it was then on the outskirts of built-up part of the city. As late as 1859, Amos Eno had been called a fool for building the Fifth Avenue Hotel so far uptown on Madison Square at Twenty-third Street. The area above Fifty-ninth Street was largely farmland or unkempt wilderness where Alexander Hamilton and James Audobon had their farms.
Central Park did not exist; it was still rock and swamp. Yorkville, Manhattanville, and Harlem were sprawling suburbs. Manhattan island still consisted of hills and dales, streams and lakes, brooks and rivulets, swamps and marshes that delighted the eye and the spirit that they were being flattened or filled in as the city expanded northward. New York's real estate boom followed a state-ordained plan of 1811 which imposed a geometrically simple grid pattern of streets. New Yorkers wanted straight streets and easy grades to speed the flow of horse-drawn traffic.
When the British abandoned New York City in 1783, it was still only a small town extending north only to the site of the present City Hall. By 1860, it had become the unchallenged metropolis of America. New York had 813,669 people as the country's largest city New York City had more people than twenty of the thirty-three states on its twenty-two square miles. Visionaries were already confident that New York City would some day embrace Westchester, Long Island, and New Jersey.
New York was the nation's premier immigrant city. In 1860, the foreign-born population was now more than half of the total, at 322,460. Of these 175,735 were Irish and 95,572 German., Castle Clinton, at the tip of Manhattan Island, served as the immigrant landing depot from 1855 to 1890 before Ellis Island took its place.
They felt themselves in competition with blacks for the jobs at the bottom rung of the economic and social ladder. New York was a segregated city that would have made pre-Civil War southerners feel at home. Blacks attended separate schools, theaters, and churches. They rode segregated public transportation. Since they numbered 12,000, and difficulty in meeting the stiff property qualifications for suffrage, their political power was impotent.
In 1842 New York celebrated its greatest civic triumph with speeches, music, parades and massive public parade. After seven years of construction and an expenditure of $12,000,000 a river of fresh water had been brought through forty miles of aqueduct from the Croton Reservoir in Westchester County to Manhattan. Marked by the opening of the city hall fountain with its plume of water fifty feet high, the Croton Water System promised a new era of civic order, beauty, cleanliness, health and security.
In 1844, New York had pioneered the first professional police force to wear uniforms. In 1865, New York again pioneered the country's first professional fire fighting force. The lax street cleaning by politically assigned contractors was a perpetual problem. New York was the entertainment city. In the evening Broadway turned from merchandising to entertainment. Broadway between Seventh and Thirteenth Streets had become the theater district. Carriages drew up to theaters an music halls that dotted the avenue and let off their well-dressed patrons. In 1861, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed a visit to Barnum's Museum. Lincoln saw the new Verdi opera, A Masked Ball, at the Academy of Music.
The Bowery, ran parallel to Broadway from Chatham Square to Eighth Street, north of City Hall, contained whorehouses, pawn brokers, lottery dealers, gigantic beer gardens, and two-bit flophouses. Stepehen Foster, the author of one of Lincoln's favorite songs, "Dixie," flopped at No. 15 Bowery. Shows sometimes believed to be too indecent for more respectable theaters were popular here, but most were perfectly harmless.
The area that is called Foley Square was once known as Five Points, a mile north of city hall, was once America's worst slum. The neighborhood got its name because five streets intersected. The area was left to the very poor, the debased, and the criminal. One notorious building had one murder every day for twenty years. Mayor Fernando Wood counted the Dead Rabbits, a notorious gang, among his political allies. They issued a rate card for breaking bones, gorging out eyes, and murder. It became a notorious must-see slum for visitors that included Charles Dickens in 1842 and Abraham Lincoln in 1857.
On William Street, twenty-one, roulette, and keno were popular ways to make or more likely, lose money. The city had more than six thousand licensed taverns, one for every one hundred-fifteen people.
New York was noted for its parades. Union Square at Fourteenth Street and Bowling Green were centers for huge outdoor rallies and gatherings that could hit a quarter million people. New York had the country's first world fair, the Crystal Palace Exposition of 1853, at Bryant Park.
Many of the country's leading newspapers were published at Park Row, near City Hall. Close to fifty newspapers were published there at one time so that the area was known as "newspaper row." The New York Herald edited by James Gordon Bennet, The New York Tribune edited by Horace Greeley, The New York Post edited by William Cullen Bryant, The New York Times edited by Henry Raymond, Frank Leslie's Weekly and Harper's Weekly. The Associated Press had its headquarters nearby. Lincoln frequently jousted with Horace Greeley, the editor of The Tribune, over the issues of the day because of its potent influence.
Visitors stayed at one of the large hotels downtown such as the luxurious Astor House across from City Hall on Broadway that catered to well-healed travelers. The Lincolns stayed at the Astor House in 1857, 1860, and 1861. Its neighbors were the venerable St. Paul's Church and P. T. Barnum's American Museum. Barnum succeeded in making his museum the talk of the town with jugglers, ventriloquists, tableau, rope dancers, dioramas, Tom Thumb, and Siamese Twins. The Mercantile Library and the American Bible Society near the Astor House were also near-by and attracted people.
Trinity Church, designed by Richard Upjohn, towered over the area, was formally dedicated in 1846. Upjohn pioneered the use of brownstone. When the present Trinity Church was new, New York was a city of three, four, and five-story buildings, nestling together on tight downtown streets. At 281 feet, roughly the height of a twenty-seven story building, the spire could be seen from all over the city, and from far out in New York harbor. The church remained the tallest structure in New York until 1876 when itwas eclipsed by the towers of the still-unfinished Brooklyn bridge.
In 1857, Lincoln came to New York as an unknown to successful collect a debt. In 1860, Lincoln became a leading presidential contender after making his oratorical debut in New York. In 1861, Lincoln came to New York to get support to preserve the Union. It was New York troops that protected Washington during the early days of the Civil War. In 1865, two million people came to see Lincoln laying in state at City Hall. Lincoln nurtured a relationship with New York City that helped him to preserve the Union.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Val Ginter, Manhattan Trivia: The Ultimate Challenge (Boston: Quinlan Press, 1985).
Leo Hershkowitz, Tweed's New York (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977).
James McCague, The Second Rebellion: The Story of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (New York: The Dial Press, Inc., 1968).
Ernest A. McKay, The Civil War and New York City, (Syracuse University Press, 1990).
Henry Moscow, The Street Book (New York: Hagstrom Company, Inc., 1979).
Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
Edwin Tunis, The Young United States, 1783 to 1830, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1969.
Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman's New York: From Manhattan to Montauk (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1963), edited by Henry M. Christman.
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