A divisive presidential election threatened to destroy the Union. It was 1860, and Abraham Lincoln, on record as being morally opposed to the enslavement of human beings, had swept nearly every county in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, and lost every single one south of the Mason-Dixon line. He’d also lost every county in and around New York City, fracturing the nation’s largest state. The city’s mayor, Fernando Wood, decided to act.
Wood could see the Union was coming to an end. Expecting the breakup to be peaceful, he wanted his metropolis to seek its independence as well, ending an unhappy, two-century-long marriage between the Dutch-founded city and the New England-settled upstate New York, rival cultures that had never seen eye to eye. “While other portions of our state have unfortunately been imbued with the fanatical spirit which actuates a portion of the people of New England, the city of New York has unfalteringly preserved the integrity of its principles in adherence to the compromises of the Constitution,” he would later say. The real danger to the city, he added, wasn’t the Confederacy but hostile upstate lawmakers in Albany.
Before November 1860 was out, Wood was holding private secession planning meetings at his sprawling country estate on what’s now the Upper West Side, with invitations going out to real estate tycoon William Astor, financier August Belmont and Democratic Party honcho Samuel Tilden. Financier George Law, one of Wood’s most powerful allies, was dispatched to Washington to rally the city’s congressional delegation to support the plan, while worried officials in Albany tasked Metropolitan Police Superintendent John Kennedy with gathering intelligence on the mayor’s plans. Reporters at newspapers opposed to the mayor began receiving leaks that Wood might lead the city out of the Union.
By December 10, it was all out in the open. On that day, pro-secession Congressman Daniel Sickles delivered a fiery speech on the U.S. House floor. “Secession, although it may begin at the South, will not end at the South,” he told his colleagues. “There is no sympathy now between the city and the State of New York ... nor has there been for years.”
“When this Union is no more, we will not consent to remain the submissive appendage of a Puritan province,” Sickles added. “I tell you [our] imperial city will ... repel the hateful cabal at Albany, which has so long abused its power over her, and ... as a free city, open wide her gates to the civilization and commerce of the world.” James Buchanan, the lame-duck president, was alarmed, writing a friend that no “adequate cause exists for the extent and violence of the existing panic in New York.”