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“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 organized against him. The city was a place of parades, séances, human trafficking and slavecatching, quack cures, dire poverty, and political fervor, hopelessly riven by the looming presidential election.
This book is a biography of New York City in the year before the Civil War, from the moment the telegraph brought news of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in October 1859 to the first shots on Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861. Joshua K. Leon tells this story month by month through the eyes of those who lived it, weaving together the intersecting lives of the giants of the age, forgotten celebrities, and the everyday people in the city’s swelling crowds: the obsessive diarist George Templeton Strong, the “Queen of Bohemia” Ada Clare, the journalist Thomas Butler Gunn as he goes undercover in the secessionist South, the showman P. T. Barnum and his American Museum in downtown Manhattan, the frustrated actor John Wilkes Booth, and many more. New York, 1860 recovers lives led in the shadow of catastrophe, capturing the dreams, romances, laughter, and fears of New Yorkers as history bore down on them. In vivid detail, this book brings their city to life in all its filth and glory.
— David N. Gellman, author of Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York
Across fifteen beautifully crafted and meticulously researched chapters, Leon reveals untold but vitally important stories about a stunning range of city residents, from iconic figures such as Walt Whitman and infamous mayor Fernando Wood to lesser-remembered figures like activist Elizabeth Jennings and actress Adah Isaacs Menken. Along the way, hundreds of other New Yorkers join the ensemble and, in Leon’s hands, they spring to life to recreate a long-forgotten world.
— Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
In the months just before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, New York City was already at war with itself. Democratic politicians openly advocated secession should a Republican capture the White House. Others packed the seats at Cooper Union to hear Abraham Lincoln, while nearby the city’s Black community organized against slave catchers and lobbied for voting rights. With a novelist’s eye for illuminating detail, Joshua K. Leon brings these turbulent months to life. A rich and lively account of the men and women, Black and white, affluent and poor, who called Manhattan their home.
— Douglas R. Egerton, author of A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Josh Leon's New York, 1860 is as multifaceted, dynamic, and compelling as the city it portrays. Through remarkably detailed research, Leon immerses readers into the daily lives of a wide variety of New Yorkers, each navigating the complexity and cacophony of a city undergoing tremendous upheaval and on the precipice of war.
— Alexander Manevitz, author of Seneca Village: A Story of Black Freedom and Manhattan Real Estate