Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy

262 Pages·2004·8.764 MB·English

by  David Quigley

SECOND FOUNDING

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Hill and Wang
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 2004 by David Quigley
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Quigley, David, 1966-
Second founding : New York City, Reconstruction, and the making of
American democracy / by David Quigley.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 0-8090-8514-3 (alk. paper)
1. Reconstruction—New York (State)—New York. 2. New York
(N.Y.)—History—1865-1898. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Politics and govern­
ment—To 1898. 4. Democracy—New York (State)—New York—His­
tory—19th century. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Race relations. I. Title.
F128.47.Q54 2004
974.7'1041—dc21
2003012610
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
www.fsgbooks.com
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
PART ONE: DEMOCRATIC VISTAS (1863-1866)
1. After the Riots 3
2. Black Founders 15
3. Toward Reconstruction 27
PART TWO: A NEW POLITICS (1866-1874)
4. An Age of Conventions 47
5. Acts of Enforcement 71
6. Liberty and the Postwar City 91
PART THREE: THE ENDS OF RECONSTRUCTION (1874-1880)
7. Tilden’s America 111
8. “The proud name of ‘Citizen’ has sunk” 137
9. New York Reconstructed 161
Epilogue: Grant’s Tomb 175
Notes 187
Bibliography 215
Acknowledgments 225
Index 229

PREFACE
The unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the
American mind to grasp its real significance, its national and world­
wide implications. —W. E. B. Du Bois1
This is a book about modern America at its founding moment,
the years after the Civil War. Reconstruction, more than any
other event in the nation’s past, determined just what kind of
politics Americans would have. Back in 1787, America’s first
founding had produced a constitution profoundly skeptical of
democracy. James Madison and his coauthors in Philadelphia
left undecided fundamental questions of slavery and free­
dom. All that would change in the 1860s and 1870s. Decided
at this second founding were the rules of the democratic
game. Though lasting only a few short years, Reconstruction
involved countless Americans fighting over who would be
able to play in that game, and on whose terms. A century and
a quarter later, the democracy that emerged at Reconstruc­
tion’s end remains our inheritance.2
X PREFACE
To be sure, the post-Civil War era stands as a most pecu­
liar founding. It was as much about renouncing the slave re­
public’s legacies as it was an attempt to establish that rare
polity, an interracial democracy. This dialectic of tearing down
and rebuilding lies at the conflicted heart of Reconstruction.
Slavery had been driven off the American stage, and North
and South, East and West, Americans for the first time strug­
gled over the establishment of a democracy open to all races.
Adding to the modernity of this project was the fact that the
term democracy itself was no longer anathema, as it had been a
century earlier. By 1865, democracy stood as both national
ideal and the nation’s institutional arrangements most in need
of reconstruction.
The second founding, with its lack of a clearly defined cen­
ter and its heterogeneous character, marks the advent of the
modern age in American politics. Early national illustrations
of the Philadelphia Convention—depicting elite white men
meeting in one city, neatly tucked away from public view—
capture well the homogeneity of America’s first founders. Four
score years later, Reconstruction could not be similarly con­
tained; the debate over the second founding raged in the ur­
ban North, the rural South, and on to the frontiers of the West.
And the second founders reflected the ascendant pluralistic
America of the late nineteenth century. Frederick Douglass
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were but two of the leading pub­
lic figures of the day. The reconstruction of democracy occa­
sioned an unprecedentedly expansive conversation, reflecting
an inclusiveness unthinkable in Madison’s day.
Decentered, pluralistic, and deeply divided, the second
founding speaks directly to contemporary Americans and our
politics. In the 1860s and 1870s, this nation for the first time
struggled over the substance of an industrializing, urbaniz-