City of Sedition: The History of New York City during the Civil War

[Tom Bogar]

I finally got time to read City of Sedition and want to share some thoughts with members of this board, since I’m not sure it’s something that will merit your buying it. For one thing, despite its subtitle, “The History of New York City During the Civil War,” the shelling of Ft. Sumter does not occur until page 154. The preceding 17(!) chapters cover four decades of everything that happened in the city, and across the wider nation, in a dog’s breakfast of background information that seems aimed for a general reader who knows little or nothing about the events leading up to, and causing, the Civil War (e.g., the Mexican-American War, the Missouri Compromise, John Brown, etc., etc.) Some statements are head-scratchers, such as the mention of a PA regiment attacked in Baltimore on April 18, 1861, yet none made of the 6th MA in the Pratt St. riot the following day. There’s considerable info about the Booths (Junius Sr. at boozy length), but nothing new, again, for members of this board (and I have to take issue with the author’s assertion that Laura Keene had a torrid affair with Edwin Booth—something that has never been proven). Nearly all of the book’s material is an amalgam of secondary sources. On the back end, it goes well past the CW, into the 1880s. I’m not sure if this panoramic scope was an authorial or an editorial choice, but I rather think members of this board will learn little from it. As for the intervening chapters—those actually during the war, there are countless figures introduced with three-paragraph bios who had little connection with the city other than having been born there, or had some business there, or were related to someone there. Rather than staying (psychologically) in NY, and perceiving how that city felt and processed the war, we jet off to Bull Run, to the Peninsular Campaign, in fact all major battles on land and sea. My humble take? Move along folks, nothing new to see here.