When I mention the Trinity Church cemetery in Manhattan, most New Yorkers will tell me about visiting there as a child, typically to see the grave of Alexander Hamilton. Trinity Church is the old Episcopal Church on Wall Street where many notables of the colonial and Early Republican New York City are buried. However, there are much larger burial plots Uptown in the Hamilton Heights area. The Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum is located between 153rd and 155th Streets with Broadway running right through the middle of it! There are two graves connected to the Civil War here.
To get there, I took the 1 Line of the New York City Subway to 157th Street. I walked south on Broadway and I entered the cemetery through the gate on 155th Street, right next to the Episcopal Church of the Intersession. Below, you can see the courtyard of the church.
When you go in, you are immediately confronted by a very large grave that was put up long after its inhabitant’s death. This is the grave of John James Audubon whose paintings of birds made him famous. The cross was erected by the New York Academy of Sciences. Audubon lived nearby and the adjoining neighborhood is called Audubon Terrace.
Audubon was known as an artist whose subjects included the natural world.
By the way, it was raining when I arrived at the cemetery with the temperature in the high 30s. Luckily it stopped raining when I got to Audubon’s gravesite.
Although his grave is in Manhattan, it looks like an old English country cemetery.
While Audubon’s Birds are what we remember Audubon for, the cross depicts a variety of wildlife he depicted.
Here is a close-up of the dedication.
This side shows Audubon as an explorer of the frontier.
After I passed Audubon’s grave I moved towards the right (Southwest) to the next large memorial. This is where New York City’s Mayor Fernando Wood’s grave sits. Fernando Wood was a Democratic politician who was incredibly sympathetic to the South during the years before the Civil War started. Although he rose in politics in the 1830s as a Tammany Man, and was elected to Congress in 1840 on a Tammany ticket, he formed a rival political machine, the Mozart Hall organization (after which the Union Army’s Mozart Regiment got its name). Wood was elected mayor of New York beginning in 1855.
This large monument with its funerial urn on top towers over the 19th Century tombstones nearby. In 1860 he was a powerful voice against Abolition. He was identified with the white working class in New York and he used his populist push to condemn those looking to free Black slaves in the South. He said that “until we have provided and cared for the oppressed laboring man in our own midst, we should not extend our sympathy to the laboring men of other States.” This not only appealed to white workers, it also won him support from merchants and bankers dependent on sugar and cotton from the South. As the Civil War approached, Wood wanted New York to be a sort of “Free City” allowing it to trade with both the United States and the Confederate States. As his sympathy for the Confederates became more apparent, many Democrats joined the War Democrats and abandoned Wood, but he still could mold public opinion and his rhetoric helped spur the 1863 Draft Riots.
Fernando Wood was a Copperhead and an avowed racist. While he used populist blandishments, his pre-war and Civil War policies were allied with finance and the import-export portion of New York’s elite.
Fernando Wood is played by Lee Pace in the movie Lincoln in which he is shown as the nemesis of Congressman Thaddeus Stevens in opposing the 13th Amendment. He served in Congress before he became mayor and he served after until 1881. How powerful was he? He was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee making him one of the most important men in Washington.
Wood joined the establishment Episcopal Church after his entry into politics.
Wood is buried with his wife, actually his third wife. Alice was the sixteen year old daughter of financier Drake Mills. Wood was forty-eight when he married Alice. His second wife is also buried at this site.
Nearby are some Civil War veterans including Nathaniel Jenks, a musician with the 5th New York Infantry Regiment. The unit known as Duryée’s Zouaves fought from the Peninsula Campaign to Chancellorsville. Jenks would have been 14 years old when the regiment formed in 1861.
I left the east side of the cemetery, crossed Broadway to enter the west side at 153rd St. where I passed an earlier historic landmark.
This cemetery was a key spot during the 1776 Battle of Washington Heights in which the American army was pushed out of Manhattan. The bluffs here were fortified by Washington.
Here is the historic marker on the walls of the cemetery from the Sons of the American Revolution.
On 153rd St. about mid-block I entered the cemetery and followed a pave road in and I saw these old tombstones marking the place where Union General John Adams Dix and his family are laid to rest. Unfortunately, the inscriptions on the stones have largely been eroded away.
Dix was born in 1798 and he enlisted in the army in 1813, during the War of 1812, when he was fifteen years old. He served until 1828 when he retired as a captain. He married the daughter of a New York Congressman and he moved to Cooperstown to manage his father-in-law’s extensive property. He also practiced law. In 1830 he became Adjutant General of the New York State Militia and moved to Albany. In the three decades before the Civil War, Dix held a number of offices with New York State and the Federal government including New York Assemblyman, New York Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Up until 1861, Dix’s public service was as a Democrat, although he was a Barburner and Free Soil Democrat. When the Civil War broke out, Dix sent his Treasury agents in New Orleans this order; “If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot.” Dix’s order did not result in any shootings, but he was declared a hero by the Northern newspapers.
The Lincoln administration was happy to have a prominent Democrat on its side and Dix was appointed as a Major General of the Union Army. Dix was 63 years old when he re-entered the army.
In his first months of the war, he commanded the Department of Maryland and he arrested six legislators from the state who were behind efforts to have Maryland secede. In 1862 he assumed command of the Department of Virginia. He and Confederate General D.H. Hill negotiated a treaty that regularized the exchange of prisoners of war called the Dix-Hill Cartel that lasted for a year. The cartel was paused when Confederate forces refused to treat Black Union soldiers as prisoners of war beginning in 1863.
In June of 1863, with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia invading Pennsylvania, Dix’s small army of 20,000 men began to probe Confederate defenses around Richmond, keeping Rebel forces there preoccupied. After Gettysburg, Dix went to New York City to quell the Draft Riots, although by the time he got to the city most disturbances had been repressed.
After the war, Dix was the president of the Union Pacific during its construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. In 1872, he ran for governor of New York as a Republican and won, event hough he was then in his seventies. He died in 1879 at the age of eighty.
You can in the photo below, there is a steep decline in the bluff that leads down to the Hudson River.
Here you can see the Hudson River from Dix’s grave. Across the river is New Jersey.
All color photos were taken by Pat Young. To see more sites Pat visited CLICK HERE for Google Earth view.
Here are maps of the western and eastern sides of the cemetery. Below, at “10” is where Dix’s grave is located.
Below you can see the eastern side with the huge cross marking Audubon’s grave and the monument in front of it representing Fernando Wood’s grave.
