City of Sedition: New York City and the American Civil War

No city in the Union was more of a help to Abraham Lincoln and his war effort, or more of a hindrance. No city raised more men, money, and materiel for the war, or raised more hell against it. In this course, we'll see how New York was a city of patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists, but simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance, and sedition. We'll talk about how the city's involvement in the massive international cotton trade tied it to the slave-owning South. New Yorkers reacted to Lincoln's wartime policies with the deadliest rioting in American history. New York newspapers were among the most vilely racist and vehemently antiwar in the country. Some editors called on their readers to revolt and commit treason; a few New Yorkers answered that call. They assisted Confederate terrorists in an attempt to burn their own city down, and even colluded with Lincoln's assassin.

In addition to reliving key events, in this course we'll meet a gallery of New Yorkers who made the city the mesmerizing cauldron of contention it was, the likes of poet Walt Whitman, murderous Congressman turned disastrous general Dan Sickles, abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, seditious Mayor Fernando Wood, and Thomas "Boston" Corbett, who assassinated Lincoln's assassin.

Wednesdays, 5:30-7:00 PM
September 6-27, 2023
$150 (4 sessions)

Meet your instructor

John Strausbaugh

Author and journalist John Strausbaugh has been called "a particularly gifted chronicler of New Yorkiana" (Atlantic Monthly) and New York City's "best biographer" (Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Monahan). City of Sedition, his history of Civil War New York, won 2016 best book awards from both the Civil War Round Table of New York and the New York Military Affairs Symposium. The Village, his epic history of Greenwich Village, was one of Kirkus Reviews' best books of 2013. For the New York Times he wrote and hosted the Weekend Explorer series of history articles and videos, and through the 1990s he edited New York Press, the now legendary weekly. His other books include Victory City, about New York during World War II, and, with Clayton Patterson, Offbeats: Lower East Side Portraits.