Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

New York may have been the largest city in the Union during the Civil War, but most of its inhabitants were strongly opposed to the conflict – if not downright hostile to the Union’s war aims. During the secession crisis of 1861, the pro-Confederate mayor Fernando Wood even proposed seceding from the Union and establishing itself as an independent city-state, neither for nor against the North or the South.

The antiwar sentiment was mostly commercial in motive: Most people in the city felt that conducting a war against the Southern states would prove to be bad for business. Southerners owed tens of millions of dollars to New York banks, New York shipowners provided Southern cotton producers with the means to get their products to markets and poor New Yorkers believed that the abolition of slavery would flood the city with cheap black labor, putting newly arrived immigrants out of work.

These feelings only grew during the war, and came to a head during the 1864 presidential race. Indeed, few people today realize that Abraham Lincoln was not the popular choice of the people of New York City in either of his presidential runs. He not only failed to carry the city in either election, but in fact lost by landslides. It was only due to his strong Republican support from upstate New York voters that Lincoln managed to carry the state’s 33 electoral votes. In 1860 the city’s choice for president was Senator Stephen A. Douglas, and in 1864, during the height of the war, it was Gen. George B. McClellan.

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Until Lincoln removed him after the Battle of Antietam, McClellan was the Union’s highest field officer, and a general beloved by hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But he was also overly cautious, and drove Lincoln to fits with his inaction. His removal was a painful blow to his substantial ego, and he immediately set about finding a new way to scale the country’s elite heights.

Although McClellan was born and raised in Pennsylvania, his career as a politician began in New York City after his demotion. He had moved there to prepare his final reports from his leadership of the Army of the Potomac, living in the elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel, at the time located on the northwest corner of 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, overlooking Madison Square. He spent most of his time with wealthy businessmen and Democratic Party supporters like William Aspinwall, John Jacob Astor, August Belmont, William B. Duncan, and Manton Marble. Those well-heeled friends gave the general a beautiful furnished townhouse at 22 West 31st St. in appreciation of his service to the country. (Unfortunately neither the hotel nor the house exist today.) These men were known for their outspoken criticism of Lincoln and his conduct of the war, and McClellan’s association with them most likely made Lincoln reluctant to give the general a new command.

With that door closed, he began to look toward a political career. At the encouragement of two old friends, Samuel Barlow and Representative Samuel S. Cox, McClellan decided to take on Lincoln in the upcoming presidential election. (Barlow was making a name for himself as a young lawyer on Wall Street when he became McClellan’s chief adviser, and Cox was the speaker of the House of Representatives. Cox is memorialized by a statue now located in Tompkins Square Park in New York.) McClellan would run as an expert critic of the president’s prosecution of the war, both his strategy and his goals; his supporters hoped that McClellan’s reputation as a general and strong support of his former troops would ensure his victory. In August 1864, McClellan was nominated by the Democratic Party at its Chicago convention.

He immediately set up headquarters for his campaign in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. As it was not the practice at the time for candidates to make their own speeches, Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts, a former speaker of the House himself, addressed an enormous crowd in Union Square on McClellan’s behalf. McClellan made only two speeches during the entire campaign, one of which he delivered from the balcony of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

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McClellan seemed a great choice for the campaign, but several factors hampered his bid. Recent victories by the Union armies in the South, including the fall of Atlanta to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman the day after McClellan’s nomination, indicated that the end of the war was finally in sight. There were also disputes between McClellan and the party: He did not agree with the parts of its platform that stated that all hostilities should cease immediately, and that the South should be allowed to remain separate if that was their wish. In fact, during the campaign McClellan repudiated the party’s platform and declared that the war should be prosecuted to the very end. That caused a split among his own supporters and made it appear that McClellan wasn’t in control of his campaign. At the time the Democratic Party was filled with Southern sympathizers, or “Copperheads,” and McClellan’s association with them made many voters suspect that he was less than fully committed to a Union victory.

But New York remained McClellan’s town. On Election Day, he more than doubled Lincoln’s votes in the city, 73,716 to 36,687. But his metropolitan support wasn’t enough, and Lincoln carried both the state and the nation. The most disheartening thing about the voter turnout for McClellan was the fact that his former soldiers did not support him at the polls. Lincoln won the military vote by a margin of 76 percent to the general’s 23 percent.

After the ballots were counted, McClellan left New York for a four-year trip to Europe. But he wasn’t done with politics, or New York: When he returned in 1868, he was cheered by thousands of war veterans who crowded into Madison Square opposite his quarters in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. From the balcony he addressed the enormous crowd of well-wishers just as he had done during the campaign. Although he had promised not to seek public office again after his failed bid for the presidency, he was elected governor of New Jersey in 1877. McClellan lived the rest of his life in New York City and Maywood, N.J., and passed away in the nearby town of Orange in 1885.

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Bill Morgan is the author of “The Civil War Lover’s Guide to New York City.”