If you managed somehow to clamber up onto the base of a beleaguered lamppost and emerge for a moment above the hats and bonnets of the multitude, you might glimpse what was propped up on the monument in the center of the square: cradled in General Washington’s bronze arms, a torn and soot- stained flag on a splintered staff. No fewer than five separate speakers’ platforms had been hastily erected there, and every so often, above the ceaseless din, you could catch a phrase or two: “that handful of loyal men. The one flag that everyone wanted to see - needed to see- was in Union Square itself, the unattainable point toward which all the shoving and sweating and jostling bodies strove. The national ensign even fl uttered, in miniature, on the heads of the horses straining to pull overloaded omnibuses through the throngs on Fifth Avenue. Barnum, not to be outdone, especially when he sensed an opportunity for attention, had strung an entire panoply of oversize banners across the thoroughfare.

The Stars and Stripes flew above the doors of department stores and town houses, from Bowery taverns and from the spire of Trinity Church, while Broadway, the New York Herald reported, “was almost hidden in a cloud of flaggery.” P.

If you were there among them that day, the thing that you would never forget- not even if you lived to see the next century- was the flags. Half a million people, or so the newspapers would report, crowded the streets between Battery Park and Fourteenth Street. It was a day unlike any the city had known before. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu

1861 the civil war awakening