The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

At a breakfast gathering of New York editors he encountered such influential men as Charles A. Dana of the Republican-leaning New York Tribune and Henry Raymond of the New-York Times; Frederick Law Olmsted was present as well. At these sessions, conversation inevitably veered toward the secession crisis, but often with an unexpected inflection: Despite being far north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the city was an island of pro-South sentiment. Its banks, merchants, and shipping companies maintained close commercial ties with Southern planters and routinely issued credit secured by the planters’ holdings of enslaved Blacks. At a dinner hosted by a city banker, Russell heard the persistent view that the federal government had no authority to suppress secession; a former New York governor, Horatio Seymour, unabashedly declared that secession was a right. The proslavery New York Herald openly mocked Lincoln, Russell noted in his diary. “The Herald keeps up the courage and spirit of its Southern friends by giving the most florid accounts of their prospects and making continual attacks on Mr. Lincoln and his Government.”