To whom were politicians appealing in antebellum New York: Who were the “freemen” and “mechanics,” the “hard-working masses” and “dangerous classes,” the “best men,” “speculators,” “stock-jobbers” and “merchants”? What sense can be made of notions like the “commercial emporium,” the “industrial interest,” the fear of English capital, and the “credit system”? This chapter offers an initial view of New York's fellow citizens, examining the city as a social and more particularly economic community, and describing the transformation in social structure that was simultaneous with the ideological transformation just described.

New York was a contradictory sort of place in the antebellum years. It was, on the one hand, the entry point for European capital and goods to the markets of a capital-scarce and undeveloped country – a country, moreover, that sensed its experiment in republicanism as a threat to the aristocratic and authoritarian world powers. From this perspective, New Yorkers, like Americans elsewhere, expressed a fearful and defensive nationalism. On the other hand, New York was the commercial, financial, and by 1860 the industrial center of the union, extending its tentacles of trade over its continental hinterland and in the process becoming the economic center of a fledgling world power. This role provided New York's dominant and more confident vision, the vision of a thriving republican city that both Democrats and Whigs emphasized in their competing claims about the best path to prosperity.