City of Sedition

May 30, 2016
Strausbaugh follows 2013’s The Village, an encyclopedic history of New York City’s Greenwich Village, with an expert look at the city in the tumultuous years leading up to and through the Civil War. “New York City would play a huge role in the war, but it would be a hugely confused and conflicted one,” he writes. “No city would be more of a help to Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance.” As Strausbaugh focuses on the array of colorful characters who influenced events—including newsman Horace Greeley, abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, and Tammany Hall leader William “Boss” Tweed—he spins a complex tale of a rapidly growing and changing city where immigration, slavery, and politics all had immense roles to play. This is an entertaining, informative, and educational narrative, though the density of rich detail can get the reader bogged down; Strausbaugh sometimes pays too much attention to pivotal individuals in the maelstrom of events. He ranges over the better part of a century to thoroughly and confidently capture the full scope of the story, resulting in an almost epic saga. Agent: Chris Calhoun, Chris Calhoun Agency.

June 1, 2016
A focused study of how the "biggest, wealthiest metropolis in the North" proved as much of a hindrance to the Union war effort as a help. Strausbaugh (The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village, 2013, etc.), who has been writing about New York City for 25 years, tells a gritty tale of opportunism and chutzpah involving the financial capital of the riven United States when faced with the shutting down of its two golden commodities: cotton and slaves. Around the time of the secession of the Southern states from the Union, cotton represented "a whopping 40 percent of all the goods shipped out of the port of New York." Not only did the South rely on the New York bankers to finance the expansion of King Cotton--in 1860, the U.S. exported two-thirds of the world's cotton--but the South, which deigned to develop the necessary mills, had to ship the cotton up the coast or across the Atlantic for manufacture. This allowed New Yorkers to take their cut. Moreover, despite the ban on slave-running since 1820, the practice continued illegally, to enormous profit; the author notes that by the 1850s "it was an open secret that New York was the North's major slaving port." At the outbreak of war with the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, patriotic fervor gripped the numerous penny tabloids, and the immigrant communities mobilized target companies. Yet Strausbaugh emphasizes how the struggle by poor immigrants to wrestle employment from the freed blacks led to animosity and even rioting. While this contingent would have never fought over the cause of slavery, the abolitionists and progressives were vociferous, as represented by Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. New York rebounded nicely with war profiteering, creating a whole new class of "shabby aristocracy." A narrative that smoothly and engagingly incorporates many stories of the war that have been told separately elsewhere.

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Starred review from May 1, 2016

New York played a central role in the Civil War. No other U.S. city raised more troops, money, and supplies for the conflict--and nowhere was there more opposition against it. By portraying New York as a hub for patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists, Strausbaugh (The Village) also shows that it was an arena of protest, draft evasion, and disloyalty. He writes that New Yorkers reacted to Abraham Lincoln's wartime policies with rioting; that its electorate significantly influenced the presidential campaigns of 1860 and 1864; and that its newspapers were among the most racist, nativist, and antiwar, even to the extent of inciting violence and sedition. Paradoxically, Strausbaugh notes that the same New York banks that funded the spread of the prewar South's plantation system and international slave trade would also provide the start-up capital for the Union's war machine. The inclusion of fascinating biographical cameos such as those of publisher-politician Horace Greeley, politician Boss Tweed, Gen. George McClellan, and songwriter Stephen Foster adds immeasurably to the pace of the narrative. Strausbaugh closes with Lincoln's assassination and the swindles of the Ulysses S. Grant administration. VERDICT This capstone urban study of superb scholarship is highly recommended for U.S. and regional historians, Civil War scholars, metropolitan specialists, and general readers alike.--John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2016
By the time of the Civil War, New York was already becoming a world-class city. Its economy, however, was somewhat dependent upon the cotton markets of the South, which became the Confederacy. The author of The Village (2013), a history of Greenwich Village, clearly shows the conflict affecting New Yorkers before, during, and after the war, noting that while the city provided the largest source of manpower to the Union, its sympathies were in vital respects Southern: antiwar, certainly anti-Lincoln, anti-abolitionist, and, often in extreme form, anti-black. Much of the emphasis is on a very colorful set of individuals: the Tappans, the Beecher family, the Booths, Horace Greeley, the Zouaves, and many more. Literary figures (Whitman, Melville) abound, as do politicians (Fernando Wood, Horatio Seymour). Of particular note is his revealing coverage of the anti-draft, viciously anti-black riots of 1863, which decimated the city of its black population. While at times Strausbaugh's book seems no more than an engaging collective biography, it nonetheless exposes an unsavory side of New York history unknown to many, and makes fascinating reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)