Every State that seceded from the United States was a Democratic State. Every ordinance of secession that was drawn was drawn by a Democrat. Every man that endeavored to tear the old flag from the heaven that it enriches was a Democrat. Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat.
This isn't even true, lol. Virginia and Tennessee were Whig/"Constitutional Union" (Bell) states, as were nearly North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana; several members of Jefferson Davis' cabinet were Whigs, including some of the most outspoken secessionists: Robert M. T. Hunter and Judah P. Benjamin come to mind. Robert Ingersoll, a partisan Republican of the post-war era, obviously has reasons for misrepresenting the historical reality, but this is why we distinguish between primary and secondary sources. I wonder if certain people even understand the difference, or the different uses to which they are put in serious historical writing.
As for the "New York intelligenstia" — in fact, urban centers were well known for producing Whigs and Republicans of a conservative bent in the nineteenth century; it was the rural areas of New England and the Yankee diaspora that produced the famous radicals. Not only were the conservative Old Line Whigs broadly hostile to the radicalism of these rural Republicans, but the radicals themselves considered the ex-Democrats in the Republican party more reliable allies than their big-city friends — and for good reason! The merchant classes were famously in bed with the Slave Power for most of the 1840s and earlier, and only got on board the anti-expansion train much later, when it became apparent the economic interests of the northern upper classes were endangered by the aggressive and reckless policies of the southern Democrats and the Buchanan administration. Throughout the 1860s, New York City was a hotbed for anti-war and anti-black sentiment; Boston famously welcomed William Lloyd Garrison with a noose when he visited the city decades earlier; Cincinnati experienced many and frequent race riots and was one of the last holdouts to the racially egalitarian social policies adopted by the Republican state legislature in the 1850s; and Philadelphia, despite its active abolitionist movement, was also host to an active and thriving anti-abolition presence. Myself and Yankee have both written at length about how antislavery does not necessarily equal liberalism, ditto for radical Republicanism, but if someone
did want to make that argument, you probably shouldn't put all your cards on urban intellectuals!
