The appeal made by Newburghers to President Lincoln in February 1865.
By Mary McTamaney
In February of 1865, a group of Newburgh businessmen got together and discussed the state of the nation. Late winter of 1865 was, like today, a perilous time for America with military and economic conflict raging at home and abroad and great anxiety for the future. Worse than today, America was embroiled in total civil war with the states no longer united and their residents divided into two opposing armies battling out their disputes.
The populations in every state were both grieving and seething over four years of loss and destruction. Yet there was an end in sight for the terrible Civil War. Everyone could see the fighting was slowly subsiding and, despite wartime habits of suspicion, they began to dream of homecomings.
Newburgh was a nineteenth century industrial center in downstate New York producing many of the products that supplied the Civil War such as gun carriages (the frames and wheels that moved cannons) and woolen blankets. This city was also a banking center for the Hudson Valley before, during and after the war. When new ideas were financed, it was usually Newburgh bankers who were asked to review and support those new enterprises. Indeed, as I have written in these pages, the Bank Of Newburgh contributed $50,000 for the War of 1812. So, it was habit for local bankers to be thinking about a likely shift that would come from a wartime to a peacetime economy.
Board members of the different Newburgh Banks talked over how a post-war economy would settle out and how it would require a stable currency. To pay for the huge costs of war, the nation had printed lots of money – paper “greenbacks” – bills not backed by the traditional old gold standard.
Newburgh bankers knew that for the transition to a post-war economy it was essential to have experienced hands on the nation’s till. They had successfully joined in the lobbying efforts to get a federal Comptroller of the Currency in 1863 and the man selected and appointed by Congress was financier Hugh McCulloch, head of the Bank of Indiana. In his new role, he produced long-term success with the creation of The National Banking Act, which still stands.
Two years later, in 1865, President Lincoln needed a new Secretary of the Treasury when his previous Treasury chief, William Fessenden, ran for and returned to his old Senate seat. Eight Newburghers got together and started another round of lobbying.
They wrote a letter to the President imploring him to appoint his Comptroller, Hugh McCulloch, whom they had carefully watched. Lincoln agreed. Indeed, Secretary McCulloch became a trusted advisor in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet in the difficult final weeks of the Civil War. McCulloch was one of the last to see the President before he and Mrs. Lincoln left for an evening performance at Ford’s Theater.
McCullough described Lincoln that day as “cheerful and happy...The burden which had been weighing upon him for four long years, and which he had borne with heroic fortitude, had been lifted; the war had been practically ended; the Union was safe.” Hours later it was Hugh McCulloch who sat with Lincoln’s family and inner circle at his bedside as he died from an assassin’s bullet.
McCulloch’s biographer wrote two decades later that the Secretary and the President also had this conversation that fateful April day: President Lincoln stopped McCulloch as he was leaving the White House and reminded him that “We must soon look to you for the money to pay off the soldiers.” The Secretary is quoted as replying, “I shall look to the people. They have not failed us thus far and I don’t think they will now.”
That attitude may sum up why eight Newburgh men sat down in the troubled times of February 1865 and wrote an appeal to Abraham Lincoln. The original letter is in the manuscript collection of the Library of Congress bearing the confident signatures of David Moore, Francis Scott, Moses Belknap, Isaac Oakley, James Biglar, William Mailler, N. J. Kelsey and H. L. Clark.