An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War
New York State Museum
Through Sept. 22, 2013
'An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War" illuminates an unsung hero in the battle for the nation's soul: New York. Its title derives from a prescient October 1858 speech that New York's Sen. William Seward, the future U.S. secretary of state, delivered in Rochester, N.Y., on the subject of slavery and the imminent moral clash between North and South. "It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces," he said, "and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labor nation."
While it lacks a multimedia presence that can compete with a film like "Lincoln," the 7,000-square-foot exhibition at the New York State Museum in Albany, in collaboration with the State Archives and Library, boasts more than 200 artifacts from more than 25 institutions, including the New York State Military Museum, Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway and various county historical societies.
Organized in chronological order from 1861 to 1865, and bookended by sections devoted to the antebellum and postwar periods, the exhibition opens with the pulpit from Troy's Holy Cross Church from which abolitionist preachers condemned the immorality of slavery. In a copy of Putnam's Monthly from March 1855, a writer described New York as "greater than Paris or Constantinople, and will evidently be hereafter greater than London." But the rising abolitionist movement had to reconcile progress derived from man-made innovation like the Erie Canal with the complicit role that state residents continued to play in the scourge of slavery even after it was abolished in New York in 1827; the state remained a major trading partner with the South, purchasing raw materials, such as cotton, that required slave labor.
New York was home to a who's who of abolitionists. What may be the earliest portrait of Frederick Douglass, a handsome full-plate daguerreotype (c. 1845) courtesy of the Onondaga Historical Association, is on display. So are some cartes de visite of celebrities of the age, which Sojourner Truth sold to raise money for the cause. The New York-based American Anti-Slavery Society's pamphlet used to teach children about the horrors of slavery through the alphabet that begins, "A is an Abolitionist . . . B is a Brother with a skin of somewhat darker hue . . . C is the cotton-field, to which this injured brother's driven. . ."
When war called, 448,850 New Yorkers enlisted in the Union army and 53,000 died in service—the most of any state. New York soldiers accounted for 16% of all Union troops and 11% of the state's total population. Historians believe that New York financed about one-third of the cost of the Civil War. The West Point Foundry provided 27% of the U.S. supply of artillery and projectiles; Burden Iron Works of Troy, 85% of the horseshoes.
While no battles were fought in the Empire State, depots readied regiments of soldiers in Buffalo, Elmira and New York. A photograph from the Library of Congress shows the Irish Catholic Forty-Eighters—one of the 23 ethnic regiments of Union soldiers—at Mass. Thirty percent of New York's soldiers were foreign born.
Compelling objects in the exhibition include a restraining chain from the Elmira Prison Camp where rebel soldiers were detained, a ledger book for the 43rd New York volunteers, a military medical kit with dried blood, and cross-stitched potholders celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation.
The conclusion to the show, like its antebellum introduction, commands attention. Ulysses S. Grant, who tried to enforce civil-rights laws as president, moved to Manhattan in 1881 and died in rural Saratoga County in 1885.
On display is the wicker chair from the Wakefield Rattan Co. that he used while working on his memoirs just days before his death. And the postwar block has a small low-tech monitor flashing images of the 400 or so monuments across the state dedicated to Civil War heroes. Among the 