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I n 1852, Walt Whitman wrote an antislavery leader about the prospects of converting New York City’s workers to the cause. “In all of them burns,” Whitman wrote,“almost with a fierceness, the divine fire which more or less, during all the ages, has only waited a chance to leap forth and confound the calculations of tyrants, hunkers, and all their tribe. At this moment, New York is the most radical city in America.” Whitman correctly gauged the fierceness of democratic aspiration in the city. But most of the city’s workers remained immune to the antislavery virus.1 The chaos of a competitive market, not slavery, provided the focus of debate in New York City during the 1850s. As “dishonorable competition” and “uninterrupted individualism” threatened to tear society apart, the established parties ignored the issue. Creating dozens of new organizations, working people filled the vacuum.Through cooperatives and trade unions, congresses and conventions, they politicized social conflicts, secured a hearing for popular conceptions of justice, and produced a blueprint for participatory democracy. A mechanic “can do anything , if he will try,”a New York City artisan proclaimed in 1850.“He can change the law by political action, and he can make new laws as well as any lawyer.”2 Even as the city’s workers mobilized, the antislavery Republican majority arose in the small towns and rural areas of the Northern states. Two great manifestations of nineteenth-century democracy advanced on a collision course. The Republican Party represented the most powerful organized expression of the democratic public. New York City enjoyed the most fully developed public realm, a dense infrastructure of political groups, public meetings, journals and newspapers , voluntary associations, ethnic organizations, and trade unions. But most Republicans saw in New York City the concentrated wealth, degrading poverty, CHAPTER 5 The Democratic Public Discredited B The New York City Draft Riots and Urban Reconstruction, 1850–1872 THE DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC DISCREDITED • 99 and proslavery politics that undercut everything they stood for. The city’s workers saw in the Republican Party, including its small contingent in the city, only an intrusive elite determined to transform their culture and control their lives.3 The Republican Party’s confrontation with urban disloyalty, as well as Southern rebellion, called into question the virtue and viability of democratic government. Even as President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party mobilized Northern energy in defense of popular government, a long and brutal war threatened to destroy what they fought for. Offering persuasion as an alternative to violence in building an antislavery majority and winning the election of 1860, Lincoln and the Republicans reaped stupendous violence, not only on the battlefield but behind Union lines in the Republic’s largest cities.4 The Union survived and, in putting down rebellion and emancipating slaves, the formal powers of the state strengthened. But violence tragically derailed the development of the democratic public.As the war approached, however, abolitionists still staked their hopes on the democratic public rather than the state. A month before Lincoln’s election, the Boston abolitionist and editor James Russell Lowell warned that only constant agitation could keep alive the“vital and formative principle ” behind the Republican Party. In May 1863, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips agreed that only the public could push the Lincoln administration to make emancipation a reality. Our“government is not at Washington,”Phillips insisted, and we can rely on“neither the brains nor the vigor of Washington.”Only the public could “save the Union by doing justice and securing liberty to all.”5 Those skeptical of democracy, however, greeted the war as an opportunity to overturn the faith in the public and instill greater respect for established institutions and authorities. Secession brought forth a conservative demand for “strong government” through which “democracy and equality and various other phantoms will be dispersed and dissipated and will disappear forever.” In the dark days following disastrous Union defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville in the winter of 1862–1863, conservatives ridiculed popular sovereignty and demanded “unconditional loyalty” to “the sacred cause of government” on the basis of “divine right.”6 Rebellion and the horrors of war secured a respectful hearing for such views. Lincoln’s defense of emancipation on the limited grounds of military necessity confronted antislavery radicals with the choice of endorsing a halfhearted measure or continuing to defend their vital and formative principle. In supporting Lincoln, one-time radicals pushed aside moral and humanitarian discussions of slavery and endorsed something close to the conservatives...

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