As the institutional, social, and ideological arrangements of the antebellum world gave way in the spring of 1865, bourgeois New Yorkers had to find their bearings. Though the city's well-to-do had hesitantly helped to revolutionize the nation, few had anticipated or desired the ways in which the Civil War had changed the United States. Perhaps most significantly, the war had encouraged popular claims to state power and resources – ranging from freedpeople's demand for land to workers' insistence on an eight-hour day – claims that frequently ran counter to the interests of capital-rich New Yorkers. After the dust of the victory celebrations had settled, they assessed, struggled over, and negotiated the consequences of the transformations of the past years.

Navigation of this transition was aided by the exuberant optimism that they came to share about the future of the United States and New York City's place in it, an optimism that was the direct outcome of victory. Quite typically, Horace Greeley predicted that New York was on its way to becoming “the centre [sic], as she should be, of industrial as well as commercial greatness in the New World and ultimately in the whole world.” Such hopes helped bourgeois New Yorkers to master the upheavals of the postwar years and to adjust not only to fundamental changes in the nation's political economy but also to a further revolutionizing of southern society.