Challenged by the city's working class and its rising manufacturers, New York's merchants and bankers struggled to maintain their political power. Since the American Revolution, they had enjoyed great influence over the agenda of the national government, often in coalition with the slaveholders of the South, as well as a controlling position in municipal administration. By the 1850s, however, this once seemingly stable world had given way under the combined strains of proletarianization and elite differentiation. New interests had come to the fore. Urban workers advocated an activist local government, and the rising manufacturers demanded an end to the domination of national politics by slaveholders and their merchant allies.

As the traditional relationship between economic might on the one side and political power on the other side became ever more tenuous, all segments of the city's economic elite experimented with new forms of political mobilization. During the 1850s, they struggled over two core issues: the future shape of the nation's political economy, especially the future of slavery, and control over the city. Because upper-class New Yorkers could not agree on the former, however, moments during which common approaches to the latter could have brought them together were extremely rare. Instead, disagreements about how to respond to the ever more aggressive policies of southern slaveholders brought different groups of bourgeois New Yorkers into bitter conflict with one another.