Walt Whitman called 1860 “the brooding year.” As the antebellum world died, a new world struggled to be born. New York in the months counting down to the Civil War was a center of upheavals. As with Paris in 1789 and St. Petersburg in 1917, a revolution was in progress-even if no one knew it. This was where Lincoln catapulted toward the presidency, Henry Ward Beecher staged a mock auction to buy a slave’s freedom, and Whitman joined America’s first bohemian counterculture. It was a polarized city where business leaders praised slavery, and a pro-South mayor threatened secession. How did New Yorkers navigate the fog of history in a city riven by race, class, and gender divisions?
Joshua Leon, 2022-23 Robert David Lion Gardiner Fellow at the New-York Historical Society, and Valerie Paley, Senior Vice-President and Sue Ann Weinberg Director of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, discuss this formative moment in the literary and cultural life of New York City.
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