by Jonathan Daniel Wells
(Public Affairs Books, £25)
SLAVERY was formally abolished in New York State in 1827 but the slave trade lived on in the city until the civil war and in this important book Jonathan Daniel Wells argues that the slave trade persisted in New York City in this period because it was the capital of the Southern slave economy.
The city’s business community of major banks, insurance companies and the shipping industry financed and facilitated the cotton trade. Many of the leaders of this community played a decisive role in city social life and politics, including control over the powerful Democratic Party.
, by Jonathan Daniel Wells (Bold Type Books). This history of eighteen-thirties New York probes the cityâs entanglement with the slave economy, which made it âthe most potent proslavery and pro-South city north of the Mason-Dixon Line.â Despite the stateâs emancipation law of 1817, police marshals and bounty hunters began terrorizing Black communities, abducting several hundred people and selling them into bondage. Alliances between Southern plantation owners and New York bankers, judges, and politicians fostered a system âconstructed to cheapen Black lives.â Wells details how the funding of the cotton trade fuelled a nascent Wall Street and admiringly portrays David Ruggles, a Black abolitionist who gave the Kidnapping Club its name and organized to resist it.