Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

My family has deep roots in New York City, and a number of my relatives kept written accounts of the events and people around them. My great-grand-aunt Maritcha Lyons, for example, reminisced in her memoir about a particularly popular meeting place for politically active blacks in the 19th century. “The store had a back room which was a rallying center,” she wrote, “it had a library and in there were held discussions and debates on all the topics of the day. The visitors had public spirit which had much to do in bringing about a more favorable state of things affecting the colored people of the state.”

Collection of the New-York Historical Society

The store in question was the medical office and pharmacy of James McCune Smith, located at 93 West Broadway in what is now the Tribeca neighborhood. Overshadowed today by Frederick Douglass, Smith was the most important black leader in antebellum New York City. Born a slave to a slave woman and a white man, he gained his freedom with the state’s 1827 Emancipation Act. Smith attended the New York’s Manumission Society Mulberry Street School, where he was a star student; after graduation, he left for Europe to attend the University of Glasgow medical school, finishing at the top of his class. He returned to New York in the late 1830s, set up shop on West Broadway, and plunged into political activism.

The decades leading up to the Civil War provided New York’s black leaders with a severe schooling in political activism: they moved from local to national politics, from establishing all-black organizations to participating in interracial societies, from avoidance of party politics to full involvement. When the Civil War broke out, they were ready to make their voices heard.

Although unfamiliar to many of us today, the men who crowded into Smith’s backroom were significant political actors in mid-19th-century New York. Among them were restaurateurs Thomas Downing and his son George; reverends Henry Highland Garnet and James Pennington; William Powell and Maritcha’s father Albro Lyons, co-owners of the Colored Sailors’ Home; newspaper editor Charles Ray; and the two Reason brothers, Patrick, an engraver, and Charles, a teacher.

Their long conversations centered on two goals. The first, close to home, was the restitution of black male suffrage, severely restricted by the 1821 New York state constitution, which had raised the property requirement for black voters to $250. The second was the abolition of the southern slave system. True, the South was a faraway place, but slavery in New York was a recent memory and its legacy had a stranglehold on the city. Throughout the antebellum years, leaders constantly worried about the precarious legal position of members of the black community. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, they banded together to prevent escaped slaves from being kidnapped and remanded into slavery. Following the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, they mounted an all-out campaign in support of the 1860 state amendment repealing the property qualification (not surprisingly, the referendum failed).

Collection of the New-York Historical Society

It was strategy, not goals, that were debated in Smith’s back room, concerns that would continue to reverberate for decades after the war. “So far as we think it good policy to have separate institutions,” one man insisted, “we can, and we intend to support our moral, literary, and domestic establishments.” A second good policy was participation in broader and better-financed interracial organizations, especially the American Anti-Slavery Society, run by William Lloyd Garrison, the white abolitionist.

Smith’s back room witnessed a gradual shift in these positions. Many black leaders became increasingly disenchanted with Garrison’s aims. They accused his society of limiting its activism to the antislavery cause while ignoring the ultimate goal of full social equality; men like Garnet challenged Garrison’s principle of non-violence; Smith and others took issue with his stance that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document and hence that party politics should be avoided at all costs.

It was only a matter of time before black leaders in New York and elsewhere recognized the necessity of moving beyond theoretical positions and engaging in electoral politics, in part to gain influence but also as an assertion of citizenship, or what they called “manhood rights.” Early on, a number of prominent New York blacks affiliated with the Whig party, created in the early 1830s in opposition to Jacksonian Democrats. In Illinois, the party gained the support of young Abraham Lincoln; in New York, it attracted descendants of old Federalist families and Manumission Society members. As tradesmen aspiring to professional status, black leaders were drawn to the old-fashioned Whig values of austerity and virtue as well as to the party’s more recent liberal ideas of individualism and capitalism and its pro-business orientation.

By 1850, however, slavery had split Whigs along sectional lines. Lincoln withdrew. Black leaders began looking elsewhere too. Many had already abandoned the American Anti-Slavery Society to affiliate with Arthur and Lewis Tappans’ American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty Party — which, in dramatic contrast to Garrison, held that the Constitution was an antislavery document and electoral politics a necessity. In addition to white abolitionists like the Tappans and Gerrit Smith, the Liberty Party drew black men like Henry Highland Garnet, Samuel Ward and Frederick Douglass.

James McCune Smith, however, withheld his support. He was suspicious of the party’s commitment to blacks as well as of its presidential nominees, especially James Birney, a former slaveholder from Kentucky. But when a group of white and black abolitionists split off from the Liberty Party to form the Radical Abolition Party, he quickly joined up. Their radicalism lay in a vision of a new, inclusive American nation, and they insisted on revising the Constitution’s meaning of “men” to include all men, demanded immediate emancipation and acknowledged the necessity of violent action (John Brown was a party member). Anticipating 20th-century rainbow coalitions, in 1856 the Radical Abolitionists nominated Gerrit Smith as their presidential candidate and James McCune Smith as his running mate, the first black man on a national ticket.

New York Public Library

Health problems curtailed McCune Smith’s activism in the late 1850s. His place was taken by Henry Highland Garnet, a Presbyterian minister whose family had fled slavery in Maryland and come to New York in the mid-1820s. The two men had been friends since their days at the Mulberry Street School. Unlike Smith, however, Garnet was inconsistent in his politics. He was an early and fervent supporter of the Liberty Party, yet in the mid-1850s he was absent from Smith’s back room and apparently never attended Radical Abolitionist meetings. Garnet, it seemed, had abandoned hope of black Americans ever achieving full citizenship. He formed the African Civilization Society to promote emigration to other countries of the diaspora, notably Haiti and Liberia; he himself left for Jamaica to work as a missionary. Yet on the eve of the Civil War, he was back in the city ready to assume a leadership role.

New York’s political scene was an ugly place. It was dominated by Peace Democrats, wealthy white men with last names like Astor, Havemeyer, Belmont and Tilden, who, recognizing where their economic interests lay, lined up solidly behind the South. They preached conciliation but insisted that if conflict was inevitable they would side with their race. They hailed Fernando Wood’s election as mayor in 1859, as well as his proposal for New York to secede from the state and country and become an independent city-state.

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On the other end of the spectrum, New York’s white liberals were a more varied lot, many of them refugees from defunct political parties. Some, like Henry Ward Beecher, had been Free Soilers and had become early, enthusiastic supporters of Lincoln. Others, like New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, were cautious former Whigs. Although conservative whites deemed Greeley a firebrand radical, black New Yorkers were dubious: Greeley, they knew, had steered clear of the abolitionist agitation of the Tappans, equivocated on the Fugitive Slave Law, dragged his heels on the issue of slavery and endorsed conservative Whigs for president. Holding back, he pronounced for Lincoln only after the Illinoisan won the Republican presidential nomination.

With the rapid deterioration of national political conditions in the late 1850s, black leaders needed to decide which party to support. They were skeptical of Democrats and Republicans alike. Democrats, they knew, were unabashed proslavery men. But summing up the opinion of many, Thomas Hamilton, editor of the Anglo-African Magazine, argued that Republicans were not much better and in fact might be worse because they were hypocritical and cowardly. “Their opposition to slavery,” he asserted, “means opposition to the black man — nothing else. Where it is clearly in their power to do anything for the oppressed colored man, why then they are too nice, too conservative, to do it.” Lincoln was not exempt from such criticism: blacks were well aware that he had refused to condemn the Fugitive Slave Law, avoided defending John Brown’s raid, speculated that southern slavery could wither away without conflict and suggested that it would be best for all if blacks left the country and colonized themselves in South America.

Once Lincoln declared war, however, black New Yorkers threw him their full support. And when the president issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, they were jubilant. Accompanied by white activists, they came by the thousands to a mass meeting in the great hall of the Cooper Institute. Garnet presided over the gathering and, after reading the Proclamation aloud, addressed the assembly. “With his eyes set on the God of Justice,” he proclaimed, “the President had now fulfilled his promise of emancipation.” The men from Smith’s back room now had a new challenge: convincing the Lincoln administration to allow blacks to fight in the Civil War, and thus to prove their loyalty to the nation, their courage, their capacity for citizenship, their manhood.

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Carla L. Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of the forthcoming book “Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City.”