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Review
| Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy, by David Quigley. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xv + 238 pages. $14.00, paper.
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| This narrative of New York City's influence on state and national politics in the decades after the 1863 Draft Riots touches upon three major lines of historical inquiry. The most dramatic issue relates to how politics and political culture within the North contributed to northern abandonment of southern Reconstruction, an obviously crucial question that has attracted recent scholars such as Heather Cox Richardson, as well as Quigley. The book also aims at "a reassessment of New York's place in national politics" (xv). Quigley gamely accepts the challenge of attempting to define how and in what measure the country's largest city exerted influence in the United States overall, difficult questions with which such fine historians as Thomas Bender, Sean Wilentz, and Sven Beckert have struggled inconclusively. Finally, Second Founding serves as a case study of how the principles and ambitions unleashed by the Civil War played out within the North, a matter that has attracted inadequate attention since a small group of case studies by James C. Mohr and others in the 1970s. |
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As Quigley recounts, New York's political influence stemmed to a great degree from its status as "the largest Democratic city in the Union," as a Tammany Hall banner proclaimed during the 1876 Democratic convention (133). Tammany at that point sought to block the presidential nomination of New York governor Samuel Tilden. Yet until the 1871 crusade against the Tweed Ring drove a wedge between the city's most prominent Democrat and its most powerful political organization, Tammany and Tilden had cooperated—along with such New York Democrats as Horatio Seymour—on a strategy of asserting the party's loyalty to the Union while insisting upon, as Tilden himself emphasized, "condemnation and reversal of negro supremacy" (63). This strategy allowed New York Democrats to distance themselves from the reputation for Copperheadism and mob violence that adhered to the party after the Draft Riots, while playing to the popular racism that the riots gruesomely illustrated. The commitment of New York Democrats to race-based citizenship meant during the Liberal Republican revolt against U.S. Grant's reelection bid in 1872, that the Republicans bolters found themselves in a perverse alliance with a Democracy imbued with bigotries against which leading Liberal Republicans, including candidate Horace Greeley himself, had fought most of their lives. However reckless and deplorable, the New Yorkers' strategy helped catalyze the Democratic resurgence of the mid-1870s while insuring that as the party rebuilt its national position, it owed no practical or rhetorical commitment to black civil rights. |
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Quigley also examines influence that stemmed from New York's role as a center of journalism and publishing. Activists such as African-American editor T. Thomas Fortune and labor editor John Swinton articulated an expansive notion of liberty, democracy and social obligation that competed throughout the late nineteenth century with the narrow, race-based citizenship promulgated by New York's Democratic Party. Quigley devotes much attention to another version of liberty articulated in the New York press, the anxious, property-and-order outlook identified with the genteel liberals around E.L. Godkin and his Nation magazine. Second Founding continues a line of analysis that runs through works such as John G. Sproat's The Best Men (1968) and Nancy Cohen's Reconstruction of American Liberalism (2002) in tying the liberals' disenchantment with democracy to the riotous, motley environment of New York and other cities from the Draft Riots through the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Quigley follows Godkin's persistent, failed attempts to turn New York into an experimental ground for patrician government and suffrage restriction, as well as the liberals' revulsion from Radical Republicanism and their turn to Tilden in his post-Tweed Ring incarnation as haughty reformer contemptuous of the downtrodden. |
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Despite a spirited effort, Quigley falls short of his goal of establishing that New York was distinctly influential in determining "the course of Reconstruction nationally" (xv). Resistance in southern cities such as New Orleans and Memphis contributed at least as much to Reconstruction's collapse as hostility and disenchantment in New York. At times the author stretches to describe events centered in Washington as extensions of New York politics. The Draft Riots at the beginning of Quigley's story did have implications that pervaded the Union, but the Great Railroad Strike near the story's end meant more to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Chicago than to New York. Quigley's book succeeds best as a solid case study of Reconstruction-era politics and political culture in the North. It would fit well into that niche in upper-level classes on the Civil War Era or the Gilded Age. |
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| Illinois State University |
Alan Lessoff |
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