During this decade, the city exploded in three days of rioting. Still considered the greatest urban insurrection in U.S. history, the Draft Riots took place in July of 1863 and paralyzed the city. 119 deaths have been verified, but historians generally believe that as many as 1000 perished during the chaotic days of rampage and during the aftermath when order was restored by the military. (Five regiments of the Union Army were rushed to the city from the battlefield at Gettysburg.)
ALSO DURING THIS DECADE:
1860--The population of Manhattan now exceeds 800,000.
1860--Henry Ward Beecher holds his most famous slave auction at Plymouth Church when he brings a nine-year-old named Pinky in front of his congregation and implores them to buy her freedom. He then places a ring on her finger and "weds thee to freedom."
1861--The Civil War breaks out. With so much of the city's economy tied to southern exports, there is talk of the city's secession and the creation of Tri-Insula.
1861--Brooks Brothers receives their first contract for 12,000 Union uniforms.
1862--The Monitor, the Union's first ironclad, designed by John Ericsson, is launched. Parts of the ship are built in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and in Manhattan where Thirteenth Street meets the Hudson River.
1865--Abraham Lincoln is assassinated within a week of the end of the Civil War. He is honored in New York with a massive funeral procession up Broadway.
1865--A municipal fire-fighting system replaces the gangs of volunteer companies.
1866--Henry Bergh establishes the ASPCA.
1866--The rest of Manhattan is incorporated into the grid. (The 1811 Plan only reached 155th Street.)
1867--Prospect Park in Brooklyn opens.
1867--The stock ticker is patented. Brokerage houses proliferate.
1868--Andrew Green proposes consolidation for the first time. Thirty years later, five separate cities will become the five boroughs of Greater New York.
1868--The first elevated railroad is erected in the city, running up Greenwich from the Battery to Cortlandt Street. (You might as well walk.)
1869--Fisk and Gould corner the gold market. For the first time in American history, the federal government, (i.e., President Grant) intervenes on a large scale to bring stability to the marketplace.
1869--Mary Mason Jones and her sister move from Wavery Place to a lot WAY uptown--the northeast corner of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth. Other wealthy citizens will follow north, "keeping up with the Joneses."
Sources: Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; Manhattan in Maps by Robert T. Augustyn and Paul E. Cohen; The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; New York: An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades; The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson.
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