“If the cotton states unitedly and earnestly wish to withdraw peacefully from the Union, we think they should and would be allowed to do so. Any attempt to compel them by force to remain, would be contrary to the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence-contrary to the fundamental ideas on which human liberty is based”.
New York merchants agreed with this editorial. State census data had shown that annually that city merchants had sold merchandise to the five cotton states valued at $131,000,000, and that the total business with the five states was above $200,000,000 annually.
New York City did not welcome conflict for several reasons, including an indifference to slavery. Oddly enough, New York City was the headquarters of the abolitionist press, while also being a strong copperhead town at the same time. Two of the major anti-war Democrats in New York were Mayor Fernando Wood and a well-known painter, whose name adorns a world-famous code - Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse had formed the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge and served as its president. He believed that fanatics would cause war, and he trumpeted the Peace Democrats’ anti-Administration line.
New York City’s business establishment, that annually underwrote Southern agriculture, had concern with accounts receivable. If conflict arose, New York City, America’s leading industrial powerhouse, would lose some of its most-important trading partners. Only New Orleans and Mobile shipped more cotton than New York, and the city manufactured much of the clothing worn down South. If war came, the South might just repudiate the millions of dollars that it owed to New York merchants.
Thank you for posting an excellent analysis of New Yorkers' views in early 1861.
I think you hit that nail on its head.
It wasn’t just the New York bankers who were concerned about the money they were making off of the south. The owners of the textile mills in New England needed the cotton from the south and didn’t want that cotton going to England.
There is a club in Massachusetts called the Somerset Club. It is located directly across from the Boston Common and down the street from the State House. Their members were people with money, many of them mill owners, and they depended on southern cotton.
The Somerset members were definitely in support of the cotton growers. No surprise, northern mill owners had children working 12 hours a day in their mills. Tradition has it that the servants in the Somerset Club were required to close the velvet drapes at the Club whenever the Union Army recruits were marching on the Boston Common. That way the members didn’t have to be reminded of the war.