In the rush to judgment against Mayor Adams these last few weeks, a slew of respected columnists, political scientists, and historians have aptly regurgitated the sorry legacies of our past corrupt, or corruption-blind, New York mayors. Back in the headlines, decades, even centuries after their falls from grace, are Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, and even “Elegant Oakey” Hall, the dandily dressed, Tammany-tarnished mayor spared from sharing prison with his patron, Boss Tweed, only by the grace of a mistrial and a hung jury. We’ve even been reminded how Mayor Ed Koch blinded himself to municipal corruption late in his mayoralty, and how Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg sidestepped newly established term limits by seeking third terms — in Bloomberg’s case, successfully. As the list of alleged bad guys widens and the criteria for condemnation expands absurdly, it is astonishing that the biggest mayoral miscreant of all has been given a free pass. Only one of our mayors, after all, was a traitor. At the dawn of the Civil War, New York City was led by Fernando Wood, a Kentucky-born, pro-slavery, onetime Tammany Hall Democrat recently remarried to a 16-year-old. Entering his third, non-consecutive two-year term, Wood not only commanded affection among voters (some of whom he rewarded with cushy political jobs), he enjoyed a constant stream of support from the Daily News — no, not this Daily News, but an earlier iteration of the paper edited by the mayor’s own brother, Benjamin. In the fall of 1860, not surprisingly, both the Wood brothers worked hard to prevent the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln as president: Ben with tough editorials, Fernando with precinct-by-precinct organizing. Only with a huge Democratic (translation: Irish) turnout Downstate could Lincoln be blocked from securing New York State’s 35 electoral votes (the richest prize in the nation). The mayor did his part. Lincoln lost Manhattan and the Bronx (the other boroughs had yet to join the city) by more than 2-to-1. But by amassing large majorities north of what is now I-287, Republicans carried the state comfortably, and Lincoln sailed to victory nationwide. What was a bitterly disappointed mayor to do? Especially one presiding over a commercial city whose seaport relied on slave-picked cotton as its most profitable cargo, whose banks helped finance the Southern slave empire, and whose hotels relied on wealthy Southern tourists for income? Wood’s answer was to champion an extraordinary — and clearly illegal — remedy. After Lincoln’s victory provoked seven Southern slave states to secede from the Union in just eight weeks, Wood unashamedly proposed that New York City secede, too. Not the last mayor to squabble with Albany, Wood relished the idea of separating from the state as well. Wood’s plan was simple, if somewhat unhinged. New York would declare itself an international city-state open to free trade — making it a continued haven and jumping-off point for slave-made Southern products. As the mayor quaintly put it, his plan would guarantee “a continuance of uninterrupted intercourse with every section.” Wood even devised a name for his new kingdom: “The Free City of Tri-Insula” — Latin for “three islands.” Evidently, Wood intended not only to withdraw from the United States but to annex Staten Island and Long Island in the bargain. GettyMayor Fernando Wood is pictured in 1860. (Getty) On Jan. 6, 1861, the mayor brought his case before the Common Council (precursor to the modern City Council) but got little encouragement even when he guaranteed that his new city-state would rake in huge wads of cash by collecting tariffs that now went to the federal government. Opponents smelled an opportunity for massive graft. Undaunted, Wood ordered his proposal printed up (in 1861, emails and iPhones could not be seized for evidence) — likely published by his brother Ben on the steam presses of the Daily News. Then he arranged to circulate copies to Southern governors before they made new arrangements for transporting their cotton to Europe. To demonstrate his good will, and treachery, Wood permitted a shipment of arms to flow South through New York. The situation grew especially awkward when it was announced that president-elect Lincoln would stop in Manhattan during his February 1861 inaugural journey to Washington. He arrived to a rather muted welcome on Feb. 19, taking up residence at the long-gone Astor House, just west of City Hall Park. Then Wood sought the upper hand by organizing a reception in Lincoln’s honor. On Feb. 20, the tall Illinoisan made his way across Broadway to attend the crowded City Hall levee and meet the mischievous chief magistrate. There, in the second floor “Governor’s Room,” Wood stood defiantly behind a desk once used by George Washington and welcomed his guest by publicly urging him to return the country “to its former harmonious, consolidated and prosperous condition.” As Wood bluntly put it, New York’s “commercial greatness” was being “endangered” by a crisis that belonged squarely at the incoming president’s feet. If Lincoln was taken off guard by this insult, he did not show it, even face to face with the far handsomer, and nearly-as-tall mayor. “There is nothing,” he calmly told the assembled throng (and Wood), “that can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union, under which not only the commercial city of New York, but the while country has achieved its greatness.” Seizing on New York’s maritime preeminence for a metaphor, he added: “I understand a ship to be made for the carrying and preservation of the cargo, and so long as the ship can be saved, with the cargo, it should never be abandoned.” We might have no surviving transcript of this exchange, since the mayor had barred the press from the reception, but for one correspondent who forced his way inside, shouting, “Reporters aren’t among the nobodies, you know!” GettyMayor Fernando Wood. (Getty) Following the chilly exchange with his hostile host, Lincoln stepped through one of the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, braced himself on the narrow balcony outside, and told a cheering crowd gathered in the plaza below: “Assuming that you are all for the Constitution, the Union, and the perpetual liberties of the people, I bid you farewell.” Privately, Lincoln adopted yet another metaphor to make certain that Wood and his co-conspirators grasped his unbreakable opposition to municipal secession: “I reckon that it will be some time before the front door sets up housekeeping on its own terms.” It never did. In the end, the nation’s front door — New York City — remained in the Union, though local “Copperhead” Democrats like the Wood brothers continued to oppose Lincoln and the Civil War. Unpunished, Fernando Wood’s mayoral term ended in January 1862, but he won election to the House of Representatives (where he had served earlier). Though Wood spent much of the Civil War in Washington, the repercussions from his provocative defiance in New York erupted with the 1863 Draft Riots. GettyThe 1863 Draft Riots in New York. (Getty) It was no surprise that his brother’s Daily News had urged readers to resist military conscription, labeling it “an outrage upon all decency and fairness” and stirring up violence by reporting a “wide-spread inclination” to give the draft “a harsh greeting.” By 1865, Fernando Wood became one of the most vocal opponents of the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery and one of the most reliable votes against Reconstruction bills extending voting and civil rights to the formerly enslaved. Later forgotten, Wood re-emerged (courtesy of actor Lee Pace) as the snarling villain of Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film, “Lincoln.” The real Wood rests permanently just across City Hall: in the Trinity Church graveyard. The mayor’s incendiary baby brother Ben, who by war’s end joined Fernando in Congress, kept control of the Daily News for the rest of the century — except for the period in 1861 that the federal government shut down the paper for alleged treason. Outraged by Lincoln administration censorship of the opposition press, Ben wrote a novel about life inside the onetime coastal fortress off Bay Ridge to which several of his fellow Copperhead editors were banished: “Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession.” As for Lincoln, he returned to the second floor of City Hall four years later — in death — lying in state there in April 1865, just outside the very room where a pro-slavery New York mayor had once threatened to secede from the Union. Holzer, the director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House, is the author, most recently, of “Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration.”