On the brink of the Civil War, New York City’s mayor led a movement to secede from the New England-settled Upstate to become its own country
Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard has a feature in the current print issue of Smithsonian Magazine on the time New York City tried to secede from the United States and become its own country, and the many times it sought to escape the Empire State to become a separate state thereafter.
On the eve of the Civil War — when it appeared the Deep Southern states would peacefully secede from the Union — mayor Fernando Wood spearheaded the effort to have New York City become an independent city-state. The effort – backed by at least two of the city’s Congressmen and three of its daily newspapers – wasn’t geared at joining the Confederacy, but rather at escaping their “venal and corrupt master,” the New England-settled Upstate of New York, which at the time had more people and, thus, controlled the state government and governor’s mansion.
Woodard, author of American Nations, describes the underlying tension between the Dutch-founded area around New York City and the post-Puritan Yankee Upstate, with very different ideas about politics, morality, and diversity. These same tensions that nearly made Gotham its own country in 1860 would lead Gothamites to start movements to become their own state in 1919, 1959, 1966, 1971, and beyond.
The story, entitled “The Time When New York City Seriously Considered Seceding From the United States,” appears in the January/February 2026 issue of the magazine, and is freely available online. Smithsonian claims 2.1 million print and 6.2 million digital readers each month on a print circulation of just under one million copies. Woodard has previously written for the magazine about the Bosnian pyramids hoax, the life of Blackbeard the pirate, the pitfalls of America’s founding myths, and how Frederick Jackson Turner cooled on his own “Frontier Thesis” as he realized the lasting power of the separate Euro-American settlement projects.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.