Some one has said that every generation must express itself in a new club.  The decade from 1861-1870 expressed itself in several.  To those years of New York date the Columbia Yacht (1867), the Harvard, first of the college clubs (1865), the Manhattan (1865), the New York Athletic (1868), and the Union League (1863).  The last named organization owes its birth to the doubts and complications of the darkest hour of the War of Secession.  Unite to stand behind the President with our full strength, was the slogan of the men who met in January, 1863, to form the plans for the new association.  At the beginning there was talk of adopting the name “Loyal League.”  The first work of the club was the organization of negro troops in New York City.  Despite the opposition of Governor Seymour, and the ridicule of the newspapers, who held up the idea of the negro as a soldier as a huge joke, the Leaguers persisted in their efforts, with the result that in December, 1863, the Twentieth Regiment of U.S. coloured troops was enlisted, and within a few months, two more regiments, known as the Twenty-sixth and the Thirty-first.

In those days the club-house faced Union Square, at the junction of Seventeenth Street and Broadway.  Early in 1868 the Union League moved to a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the building afterwards to be occupied in turn by the University Club and the Manhattan Club.  The structure had been erected by Mr. Jerome for the use of the Jockey Club, but was leased to the Union League for a term of ten years.  Among the early honorary members of the Union League were Abraham Lincoln, General U.S.  Grant, General W.T.  Sherman, Lieutenant-General “Phil” Sheridan, Major-Generals Burnside, Wright, and Hancock, Admiral David G. Porter, and Rear-Admiral Bailey.  The active membership of 1870 included such names as William Cullen Bryant, William M. Evarts, Whitelaw Reid, Parke Godwin, Horace Greeley, Chester A. Arthur, Thomas Nast, Joseph H. Choate, Eastman Johnson, George P. Putnam, Daniel P. Appleton, Dr. Samuel Osgood, George Griswold, E.D.  Stanton.

To the name of the Union League is inevitably linked that of the Manhattan Club, for, the Civil War once at an end, the latter became the expression of the political aims and aspirations of the Democratic Party as the former was of the Republican.  The Manhattan had its origin in the turmoil of the election of 1864, and the defeat of the Democratic candidate, General McClellan.  The first movers in its foundation were Douglass Taylor, then secretary of the Tammany society, Street Commissioner George W. McLean, S.L.M.  Barlow of the “World,” Judge Hilton, the Hon. A. Schell, A.L.  Robertson, and John T. Hoffman, later Governor of New York State from 1869 till 1872.  The earlier meetings were held in the old Delmonico’s, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, and then the Manhattan moved into its first real home at No. 96 Fifth Avenue, just a block above the famous restaurant, where many of the meetings continued to be held.  John Van Buren was the first president, with Augustus Schell first vice-president, A.L.  Robertson second vice-president, Manton Marble secretary, and W. Butler Duncan treasurer.