New York, 1860

“Year of meteors! brooding year!” wrote Walt Whitman about the year 1860. New York City was a tinderbox. As the country’s trading capital, the city was caught in an unholy alliance with slave-owning cotton planters. Southern sympathizers—the mayor among them—shared the streets with abolitionists like Henry Ward Beecher. Abraham Lincoln began his unlikely march to the presidency in a speech at Cooper Union, and torch-bearing militiamen marched for him while merchants and secessionists organi...