"Year of meteors! brooding year!" wrote Walt Whitman about the year 1860. New York City was a tinderbox. As the country's trading capital, the city was caught in an unholy alliance with slave-owning cotton planters. Southern sympathizers-the mayor among them-shared the streets with abolitionists like Henry Ward Beecher. Abraham Lincoln began his unlikely march to the presidency in a speech at Cooper Union, and torch-bearing militiamen marched for him while merchants and secessionists organized against him. The city was a place of parades, séances, human trafficking and slavecatching, quack cures, dire poverty, and political fervor, hopelessly riven by the looming presidential election.

This book is a biography of New York City in the year before the Civil War, from the moment the telegraph brought news of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in October 1859 to the first shots on Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861. Joshua K. Leon tells this story month by month through the eyes of those who lived it, weaving together the intersecting lives of the giants of the age, forgotten celebrities, and the everyday people in the city's swelling crowds: the obsessive diarist George Templeton Strong, the "Queen of Bohemia" Ada Clare, the journalist Thomas Butler Gunn as he goes undercover in the secessionist South, the showman P. T. Barnum and his American Museum in downtown Manhattan, the frustrated actor John Wilkes Booth, and many more. New York, 1860 recovers lives led in the shadow of catastrophe, capturing the dreams, romances, laughter, and fears of New Yorkers as history bore down on them. In vivid detail, this book brings their city to life in all its filth and glory.