At the close of the Civil War, Americans found themselves drawn into a new conflict, one in which the basic shape of the nation's government had to be rethought and new rules for the democratic game had to be established. In this superb new study, David Quigley argues that New York City's politics and politicians lay at the heart of Reconstruction's intense, conflicted drama. In ways that we understand all too well today, New York history became national history.

The establishment of a postwar interracial democracy required the tearing down and rebuilding of many basic tenets of American government, yet, as Quigley shows in dramatic detail, the white supremacist traditions of the nation's leading city militated against a genuine revision of America's racial order, for New York politicians placed limits on the possibilities of true Reconstruction at every turn. Still, change did occur and a new America did take shape. Ironically, it was in New York City that new languages and practices for public life were developing which left an indelible mark on progressive national politics. Quigley's signal accomplishment is to show that the innovative work of New York's black activists, Tammany Democrats, bourgeois reformers, suffragettes, liberal publicists, and trade unionists resulted in a radical redefinition of reform in urban America.

Feeling that I might have already taken on more than my fair share of life's challenges, the enterprise of writing a biography, or any sort of book, for the first time, did seem quite an unusual thing to find myself doing in my mid-fifties. Though it has been a thoroughly rewarding new experience and one which I would like to try to develop in future years, it's always a difficult question being asked where my writing influences come from, because an ailing family business permanently suspended me from scholarly life at the age of sixteen, and limited my academic background to a very ordinary level public school education. While I hope my writing shows, that even this may still have been a great benefit for me to have had, I have little doubt that my Irish-Italian extraction also played a part in planting an imagination in my consciousness, long before my writing days began to dawn.