As a lifelong New Yorker, I can assure you that the rumor is true: we’re forever bellyaching about breaking away from the rest of the country—sometimes we forget to even mention the state—and just doing our own thing. The perennial threat of secession may be nothing but attitude, but we seem to come by it honestly. It turns out the city’s been indulging a secessionist streak even longer than I’ve been a New Yorker.
NYC secessionism runs deep enough that, for one striking example, in early 1861, right after South Carolina seceded from the United States, Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, asked the City Council to secede from both the state of New York and the United States, and to ally with what would become the Confederacy. Before one other southern state had joined South Carolina, that is, the mayor of New York was trying to jump on board.
His plan wasn’t as anomalous as it might seem. The city was super-South-friendly, dependent economically on both the slavery business and the businesses powered by slave labor. “New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North,” wrote one city editor; people as far away as New Orleans agreed. Wood, a dictatorial, three-term Democratic product of Tammany Hall—his reform agenda included improving piers and other public works, building parks, and reducing income inequality—had been elected on a pro-slavery, pro-South platform, with a mandate to protect the great wealth the city drew from massive cotton exports flowing through the port. Losing that kind of revenue to a civil war would be painful; at the same time, the federal government had been imposing tariffs, and the “free city” that Wood proposed would get to impose tariffs itself, instead of the feds, keeping all that income.
Many in the city’s working class, for their part, feared losing jobs to a freed black population that might migrate northward, and they didn’t feel like fighting a war anyway. Too, New York was racially segregated, both legally and extralegally; Wood himself was an up-front, flat-out racist. So his proposal made a certain kind of sense, in the oddball context of the city’s past.
I’ll relieve you of suspense. New York City didn’t join the Confederacy.
Still, the 1861 proposal points to our secessionist streak, and it didn’t begin there. The city’s earliest flirtation with secession came way back in 1788.