The Kidnapping Club
Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Winner of a 2020-2021 New York City Book Award
In a rapidly changing New York, two forces battled for the city's soul: the pro-slavery New Yorkers who kept the illegal slave trade alive and well, and the abolitionists fighting for freedom.
We often think of slavery as a southern phenomenon, far removed from the booming cities of the North. But even though slavery had been outlawed in Gotham by the 1830s, Black New Yorkers were not safe. Not only was the city built on the backs of slaves; it was essential in keeping slavery and the slave trade alive.
In The Kidnapping Club, historian Jonathan Daniel Wells tells the story of the powerful network of judges, lawyers, and police officers who circumvented anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. Nicknamed "The New York Kidnapping Club," the group had the tacit support of institutions from Wall Street to Tammany Hall whose wealth depended on the Southern slave and cotton trade. But a small cohort of abolitionists, including Black journalist David Ruggles, organized tirelessly for the rights of Black New Yorkers, often risking their lives in the process.
Taking readers into the bustling streets and ports of America's great Northern metropolis, The Kidnapping Club is a dramatic account of the ties between slavery and capitalism, the deeply corrupt roots of policing, and the strength of Black activism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Michigan history professor Wells (Blind No More) describes 19th-century New York City as "the most potent proslavery and pro-South city north of the Mason-Dixon Line" in this richly detailed account. Wells highlights links between Wall Street and the cotton trade, and reveals how city leaders worked to preserve that relationship by "using the Fugitive Slave Clause as a subterfuge to terrorize black New Yorkers." The spark, according to Wells, was the flight, in 1832, of 17 slaves from Norfolk, Va., to New York in a stolen whaleboat. Police officer Tobias Boudinot was granted "a wholesale right to arrest anyone he could even remotely accuse of being a runaway," an authority he and his fellow officers, with cooperation from City Recorder Richard Riker and local judges and lawyers, wielded to capture free Blacks and sell them into slavery. Wells also details how Tammany Hall political bosses stoked racial animus between Irish immigrants and Blacks, and interweaves throughout African-American abolitionist David Ruggles's fight against these forces. Lively prose and vivid scenes of New York street life complement the meticulous research. The result is a revealing look at a little-known chapter in the history of racial injustice.
