The day New York City tried to Secede

摘要

During The First Three months of 1861, New York City boldly flirted with leaving the Union. The reasons were decades in the making, but the sentiment was never more pointed than on January 6, 1861, when New York Mayor Fernando Wood addressed the city council. "It would seem that a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable," he observed, noting the sympathy joining New York to "our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States" and suggesting that the city declare its own independence from the Union. "When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master-to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her, take away the power of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy of which she was the proud Empire City?"