Rebecca Bratspies decided to dig into the lives behind the names of roads, bridges, and institutions in her book, “The Villains, Rogues & Heroes Behind New York’s Place Names."
History is seldom neat. Two books, one on antebellum New York and the other on 1890s Kentucky, illustrate the tension, showing despicable behavior relieved by the stalwart courage of a few. New York had a long history of slavery (abolished beginning only in 1817) but also a thriving Black community as well. Yet because of its financing of southern cotton, much of the city was pro-southern, led by the Democratic Tammany Hall political machine..
New York had a long history of slavery (abolished beginning only in 1817) but also a thriving Black community as well. Yet because of its financing of southern cotton, much of the city was pro-southern, led by the Democratic Tammany Hall political machine. The US constitution included a clause on the return of fugitive slaves.
In his new book,
The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War, Jonathan Daniel Wells quotes Harriet Jacobs describing New York in the 1830s as a âcity of kidnappersâ waiting to seize Black people, free or enslaved, and deliver them to slavery. The stories are shocking: 26 abductions in December 1837 and January 1838 alone, an arrest of a boy at his school desk, all aided by police, officials, lawyers representing slaveholders and racist judges.
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.