When Honest Abe Met This Querulous Metropolis
When Abraham Lincoln visited New York in February 1861, Walt Whitman noticed that an “ominous silence” greeted the president-elect as he arrived at the Astor House hotel. There was no overt hostility or shouted insult, Whitman wrote, but the “silence of the crowd was very significant,” compared with the “wild, tumultuous hurrahs” that typically greeted distinguished personages.
Harold Holzer, the chief historian for the compellingly informative exhibition “Lincoln and New York,” opening on Friday at the New-York Historical Society, explains in the equally incisive companion catalog that when Lincoln attended a performance of Verdi’s new opera “Un Ballo in Maschera” on that visit, he received a thundering ovation from the audience at the Academy of Music. But he left before the final scene in which the governor of Colonial Boston is assassinated by conspirators. That might have been because of fatigue, Mr. Holzer suggests, but The New-York Herald reported that the police had received notice of a plot to kill Lincoln at the same moment as the onstage murder.
These fragments of history are powerful not just because of their ominous foreshadowing of the conspiracies and hatreds that Lincoln would later inspire, but also because they shock our contemporary complacency about how we make sense of our city and its past. We New Yorkers tend to be almost provincial in our pride, as if we could prove that the city had always been on the right side of history, or at least at its very center.
But look more closely, as the Historical Society has been doing under the presidency of Louise Mirrer, and matters become more complicated. Richard Rabinowitz, a historian and the president of the American History Workshop, a Brooklyn company that designs museum exhibitions, was the curator of two major shows in recent years that focused on New York’s relationship to slavery and the Civil War. Much of the city’s commerce depended on the Southern slave trade, those exhibitions pointed out, and while New York had a “determined antislavery movement” in the mid-19th century, it was also a “hotbed of pro-slavery politics.”
In the new show Mr. Rabinowitz again makes it impossible to be too sanguine about New York’s past, demonstrating that however beloved Lincoln became, it was not until after his assassination, when 150,000 mourners stretched almost a mile up Broadway to see him lie in state at City Hall, that there was anything resembling a hallowed consensus in New York. Lincoln lost presidential elections in the city by substantial margins in 1860 and 1864; the 1862 midterm state elections also served as a rebuke, making a fervent opponent, the Democrat Horatio Seymour, New York’s governor...
Read entire article at NYT
Harold Holzer, the chief historian for the compellingly informative exhibition “Lincoln and New York,” opening on Friday at the New-York Historical Society, explains in the equally incisive companion catalog that when Lincoln attended a performance of Verdi’s new opera “Un Ballo in Maschera” on that visit, he received a thundering ovation from the audience at the Academy of Music. But he left before the final scene in which the governor of Colonial Boston is assassinated by conspirators. That might have been because of fatigue, Mr. Holzer suggests, but The New-York Herald reported that the police had received notice of a plot to kill Lincoln at the same moment as the onstage murder.
These fragments of history are powerful not just because of their ominous foreshadowing of the conspiracies and hatreds that Lincoln would later inspire, but also because they shock our contemporary complacency about how we make sense of our city and its past. We New Yorkers tend to be almost provincial in our pride, as if we could prove that the city had always been on the right side of history, or at least at its very center.
But look more closely, as the Historical Society has been doing under the presidency of Louise Mirrer, and matters become more complicated. Richard Rabinowitz, a historian and the president of the American History Workshop, a Brooklyn company that designs museum exhibitions, was the curator of two major shows in recent years that focused on New York’s relationship to slavery and the Civil War. Much of the city’s commerce depended on the Southern slave trade, those exhibitions pointed out, and while New York had a “determined antislavery movement” in the mid-19th century, it was also a “hotbed of pro-slavery politics.”
In the new show Mr. Rabinowitz again makes it impossible to be too sanguine about New York’s past, demonstrating that however beloved Lincoln became, it was not until after his assassination, when 150,000 mourners stretched almost a mile up Broadway to see him lie in state at City Hall, that there was anything resembling a hallowed consensus in New York. Lincoln lost presidential elections in the city by substantial margins in 1860 and 1864; the 1862 midterm state elections also served as a rebuke, making a fervent opponent, the Democrat Horatio Seymour, New York’s governor...