Читать книгу A Vast and Fiendish Plot: - Clint Johnson - Страница 14

Throughout most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, New York’s political leaders knew that the cotton enriching the city was directly linked to Southern slavery. They praised the crop and the city’s ability to turn it into cash, while trying their best to ignore the working conditions of the labor force that produced it.

Philip Hone, the city’s mayor from 1826 to 1827, kept a detailed diary from 1828 to 1851, the year of his death, noting the daily social and economic conditions of the city. On October 3, 1833, Hone noted that he was irritated to find out that Clinton Hall, the location of the fledgling New York University, had been rented out to a meeting of some abolitionists.

“I expressed great dissatisfaction that the hall should be let without my approbation for any purposes not immediately connected with the objects of the institution, and my decided opposition to its being used for the agitation of this most mischievous question,” Hone wrote.

When other concerned New Yorkers wanted to hold a meeting to decide what to do about the abolition movement that was moving into New York, Hone noted that he would attend because “I am desirous that persons of character should be present in the greatest possible numbers, with the twofold object of convincing the people of the South that the incendiaries constitute an inconsiderable portion of our citizens.”

On April 9, 1835, Hone noted that “money is plenty, business is brisk; the staple commodity of the country [cotton] has enriched all whose hands it has passed. The merchant, mechanic and proprietor all rejoice in the result of last year’s operations.”

During the recession of 1837 on July 4, Hone noted that “with the aid of one or two cotton crops, and the realization of the present glorious prospects for the harvest, we shall not only get right, but the character of our merchants will stand higher than ever among the nations of the earth.”

Hone was an instinctive politician who recognized that big issues often led to big problems. On November 17, 1837, he made a prediction about the future of abolition that he had earlier described as “the enemy of mankind”: “The terrible abolition question is fated to destroy the Union of the states, and to destroy the peace and happiness of our western world.”

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, New York’s mayors and the city’s Common Council representing the city’s wards remained concerned about the growing abolition movement. The mayors were concerned because they were almost all merchants or industrialists whose businesses could be affected if their Southern customers grew irritated.

In October 1833, Democratic mayor Gideon Lee and other prominent business leaders of the city gathered at Tammany Hall before rushing off to break up the antislavery meeting mentioned by former Mayor Hone. The Democrats, led by editor James Watson Webb, ran into the abolitionist meeting shouting that a reward of $10,000 would be given for anyone who harmed Arthur Tappan, the editor of the Journal of Commerce, who had organized the meeting. Tappan and most of the other abolitionists had wisely left out a back door when they heard the mob was approaching.

Mayor Lee organized a meeting later that same week denouncing abolitionists. One of the speakers at the meeting was U.S. senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey who told the assembled crowd of businessmen that the abolitionists were trying to “dissolve the Union” and, besides, “nine-tenths of the horrors of slavery are imaginary.”

On July 4, 1834, when Lee was still mayor of New York City, several days of antiabolitionist riots were staged with mobs attacking the abolitionists in their homes. The city’s police force, under control of the mayor, did little to prevent the violence.

At the same time that New York’s public officials and politicians were struggling to deal with abolitionist organizing, Southerners were shrewdly instituting an informal public relations campaign to show Northerners that slavery was not as bad as they may have heard. The August 29, 1854, New York Times republished an article from the Mobile (Alabama) Tribune, supposedly written by a slave describing his recent trip to New York City with his master.

“In my strolls of three days in that city [New York], I saw more evidences of destitution—more ragged, half-clad, miserable, beggaredly looking people than in all of Virginia and Alabama. I met beggars and loafers at every corner and a cent is as gladly received by these poor creatures as a dollar would be by any servant in Mobile,” wrote the supposed slave. Even the Times did not question how a slave could write such a vivid description of the city when it was against the law in all Southern states to teach slaves to read and write.

Even those Northerners who had freed their own slaves decades earlier and who were now sympathetic to abolitionists had to admit to themselves that slavery still played a large role in the economy of their region.

The outfitting and home port docking of slave ships in New England and New York ports was openly practiced for more than fifty years after Congress officially abolished the slave trade in 1808. The only true change that slavers made to their routine after the supposed abolition of the American slave trade was to change their final ports of call from Southern ports to those in the Caribbean, principally Havana, Cuba. New York’s mayors, aldermen, police, marshals, state and federal prosecutors, and state and federal judges all knew which New York City–based ships were slavers. They just chose to ignore them.

Remarkably, even known criminals and gang leaders could wrangle appointments as U.S. Marshals who had the responsibility to enforce federal laws against slaving. Such was the case with Isaiah Rynders, a former leader of the Five Points street gang, who had a history of roughing up abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips when they came to visit New York’s abolitionist societies. In 1857, President James Buchanan appointed Rynders U.S. Marshal, the perfect position from which to continue to collect protection money and to ignore rumors of slave outfitting. Rynders employed his nephew as an assistant marshal. When the nephew was accused of taking a bribe of $1,000 to let a slaver leave port, he vigorously insisted that the accusation was wrong. The bribe was, in fact $1,500.

If the men entrusted with enforcing U.S. law in New York City were not inclined to stop slavers, neither was the U.S. judiciary. Of 125 slave traders tried for slave trading in the city’s courts from 1837 to 1861, just twenty were given prison sentences of two years, even though they had been caught with slaves in the holds of their ships on the open seas by the United States Navy. While the men in jail for two years might have considered that just punishment, federal law provided for the execution of slavers. The federal judiciary in New York City was not about to stop the slave trade.

In 1848, the crew of the ship Mary Ann, operating out of New York City, mutinied off the coast of Africa when they realized that their captain intended to take on a cargo of slaves rather than goods. The crew sailed the ship back to New York City, confident that they would be hailed as heroes for foiling at least one slaving voyage. They sued the ship’s owner for the weeks of wages that they had been promised for what they had been told would be a legitimate voyage.

The crew of the Mary Ann went before federal judge Samuel Rossiter Betts, who shared the Southern District of New York bench with Judge Samuel Nelson. Betts, who was often called the father of Admiralty Law and who one biography claims was never overruled on appeal, ruled that the crew of the Mary Ann were not entitled to the wages that they had expected for a legitimate voyage, and that “by absconding with the vessel and bringing her to the United States from the coast of Africa, they have been guilty of a violation of their duty to the ship and to the owner, and deprived themselves of all rightful claim to wages for any portion of the time they were connected to her.”

Instead of awarding the men wages from the owner, Betts ordered them to pay the slave ship owner for the costs of the unsuccessful voyage to Africa.

In another case the Catherine was boarded by suspicious U.S. Marshals in New York harbor before even reaching the Atlantic Ocean. Even though the Marshals found items on board that clearly demonstrated that it was intended to be a slave ship, such as a large cooking pot, a huge cistern of water, and hundreds of wooden spoons, Betts ruled that no outfitting could be considered suspicious unless a crew member was willing to testify once the ship was captured with slaves aboard that the outfitting was used in slaving.

For years the city’s newspaper editors were all well aware that the city’s politicians and its marshals and judges were allowing the slave trade to operate out of New York City. But these men were not crusading journalists. Perhaps out of fear for their lives, the newspaper editors only made vague protests about what they knew was happening.

“It is known that there are in this City several mercantile houses extensively engaged in the slave trade, and that half a dozen vessels have recently left this and other American ports, for the African Coast…. Our Authorities would do well to exercise more than ordinary vigilance in regard to vessels clearing for Cuban ports,” intoned the New York Times.

The next year the Times wrote:

This City and Baltimore are now, and have been for years, the great headquarters of the African Slave-trade. In the face of our laws, in defiance of our treaty stipulations and in contempt of armed cruisers and men-of-war, that piratical traffic is largely carried on by ships fitted out in American ports, and under the protection of the American flag. If the authorities plead that they cannot stop this, they simply confess their own imbecility. If they will not do it, the moral guilt they incur is scarcely less than that of the Slave-traders themselves.

None of the daily newspapers ever had the nerve to name names, even though they were accusing public officials of corruption, as opined by the New York Daily News: “The price for the clearance of a slaver [from the port of New York] is as well-known to those in the trade as the price of a barrel of pork.”

Horace Greeley of the New York Daily Tribune wrote:

The traders engaged in this traffic are known; the men who supply their vessels with stores, who fit them with sails, who provide them with sailors, are known also. That knowledge, and much other that is curious and interesting in relation to this subject, awaits the Government, whenever the Government chooses to seek for it. It does not seek for it. It does not choose to have it. It will not thank us even for hinting that it can be had, or for providing any portion of it.

Not only were New York City’s politicians unwilling to stop the slave trade operating out of their port, but they were even willing to increase the number of slave states. In March 1859, the Democrats of the Tammany Hall political machine, including Samuel Tilden, the future New York gubernatorial and presidential candidate, voted for a resolution calling on the United States to buy Cuba and annex it into the nation as a slave state. Among the big proponents of that idea were New York’s sugar refiners, who believed that the slave labor cutting the sugarcane in Cuba would continue to do so if it became a state. They were very interested in lowering and stabilizing the price of sugar.

New York’s public officials and political leaders did not want to offend the South in any way. It was not about hurt feelings. It was about money. By 1860, on the eve of the war, the spinning mills of New England produced nearly 75 percent of the nation’s cloth, including the rough-textured mix of wool and cotton called negro cloth that plantation owners bought to clothe their slaves.

Even on the eve of war, New York’s officials turned a blind eye to the slave traders heading out from New York City to Africa. On December 1, 1860, within three weeks of South Carolina seceding from the Union, the New York Times listed eight different ships that had been seized in the port of New York on suspicion of being bound for a slave voyage. All the ships would be released by the court to their owners.

As war became inevitable, some cracks began to show in the North’s wall of resistance on dealing with its own slave trade issues. On December 26, 1860, Judge David A. Smalley convened a grand jury in New York in the same Southern District that was home to judges Betts and Nelson, the two judges known to be lenient with slave ship outfitters, captains, and owners.

Smalley apparently did not consult with his fellow judges because he charged the jurors that it was their duty to “investigate infractions of the laws for the suppression of the slave trade.”

Later in the charge, Smalley told the jurors:

That the laws for the suppression of the Slave trade have been often grossly violated in this port, and in other places within the Federal Courts in this District, is a fact too notorious to admit of dispute or question. That this unchristian [sic] and inhumane traffic has greatly increased within the last few years, and is still increasing, and that principally from vessels fitted in and cleared from this port, does not admit of a doubt…. It has at home and abroad, become a stigma and reproach upon this, the great commercial and maritime metropolis of the Western Continent, that this has been permitted. The laws against it are sufficiently plain, explicit and severe to put a speedy end to it, if vigorously and vigilantly enforced.

The next day, the New York Times reacted with:

Such an announcement as this, and from such a source, cannot fail to cause a wholesome terror amongst those commercial houses whose names are invariably found connected, in some mysterious manner, with the fitting out and clearance of vessels subsequently arrested in the Slave-trade, or known to be burned on the coast of Cuba, after having made a successful voyage…. If we understand Judge Smalley rightly, he means not to rest satisfied with the trial and punishment of the poor, ignorant seamen who are actually engaged on board the slave-ships; but will also do his utmost, within the limits of his office, toward directing the attention and action of the Grand Jury against the millionaires and wealthy merchants who have accumulated, and are still trying to increase their fortunes in this unholy business.

Smalley’s grand jury was apparently dissolved early in 1861 without rendering any opinions. The judge’s name, though praised so highly by the New York Times’ editors, does not appear in the newspaper’s columns after March 1861.

One explanation for why Smalley’s bold charge to his grand jury never resulted in any bolder indictments may be that New York City’s mayor might have stepped into the breach. The South had many powerful political friends in the North in the nineteenth century, but none of them were as bold as Mayor Fernando Wood.

Had Wood had his way, New York City would have left the Union just after South Carolina and maybe even before Mississippi and Florida, the second and third states to secede from the Union.

Born in Philadelphia in 1812, Wood moved to New York City at nineteen years old and found work as a salesman and bartender. Tall and handsome and anxious to get involved with the local political bosses, he soon gained the attention of Tammany Hall’s political machine. He rose so quickly that other Tammany Hall Democrats disliked him as a rival. Another future mayor, sugar merchant William F. Havemeyer, said that Wood was “without character or consequence, yet shrewd & Subtle, a cunning politician.”

In 1841, Wood was elected to the U.S. Congress but served only two years. He came back in 1854 to be elected mayor of the city with the help of the working classes and new immigrants who recognized that he did not come from money.

Even though he fell out of favor with the Tammany Hall machine, Wood was reelected in 1857. His term was marred by the constant clashing of two different police forces, the New York Municipal Police (which had been authorized by the New York State legislature) and the Metropolitan Police (who were aligned with Wood). The two police forces often fought each other in open riots, much to the glee of the street criminals and the gangs who took the opportunity to steal from citizens while the police force was in disarray.

Wood was out of office for one term and then returned to run for mayor in 1859 for a two-year term running from 1860 to 1862. He ran on a platform of standing up for the working class and for accommodation with the South. That second campaign plank pleased the merchants.

“The South is our best customer. She pays the best prices and pays promptly,” Wood said at one campaign rally. He easily won, the first man in New York history to serve two nonconsecutive terms as mayor.

Starting almost as soon as he was inaugurated early in 1860, Wood plunged himself into national politics by giving speeches around the Northeast calling for the nation to elect Democrats because the election of a Republican president in 1860 would lead to disunion. He tried to appeal to the average voter by warning them that freeing the slaves would mean blacks would compete for their jobs. His speeches so pleased Southern power brokers that they began to mention his name as a potential vice president. That Wood dream, however, ended when the Democratic Party split into Northern and Southern factions and put up two different presidential candidates. Taking advantage of the split vote, Abraham Lincoln was elected in November 1860.

Still convinced that states rights were preferable over national power and still convinced that abolitionists were pushing the nation closer to war, perhaps being pushed by the city’s merchants, Wood kept his Southern sympathies.

On January 6, 1861, three weeks after South Carolina had seceded from the Union, but before all the other ten states that would eventually make up the Confederacy had even voted themselves out of the Union, Wood launched into a lengthy speech to the Common Council on the state of the city. Within the first few paragraphs, Wood addressed the national crisis.

“It would seem that a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable” was the opening line of the second paragraph. Wood then went on to say that if a separation of states did occur, “momentous considerations will be presented to the corporate authorities of this city. We must provide for the new relations which will necessarily grow out of the new condition of public affairs.”

The Common Council members started to listen more closely to understand just what Mayor Wood was proposing:

With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States, we have friendly relations and a common sympathy. We have not participated in the warfare upon their constitutional rights or their domestic institutions. While other portions of our State have unfortunately been imbued with the fanatical spirit which actuates a portion of the people of New England, the city of New York has unfalteringly preserved the integrity of its principles of adherence to the compromises of the Constitution and the equal rights of the people of all States.

Having just heard the mayor insult upstate New York and New England, the Common Council members wondered what Wood was going to say next. They were shocked to hear him say that if the South were to leave the Union, so too would California “and her sisters of the Pacific” and the “western states” (the midwest).

Wood continued:

Then it may be said, why should not New York City, instead of supporting by her contributions in revenue two-thirds of the expenses of the United States, become also equally independent? As a free city, with but nominal duty on imports, her local Government could be supported without taxation upon her people. Thus we could live free from taxes, and have cheap goods nearly duty free. In this she would have the whole and united support of the Southern States, as well as all the Other States to whose interests and rights under the Constitution she has always been true….

[If]…the Government is dissolved, and it behooves every distinct community, as well as every individual, to take care of themselves.

When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master—to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her commerce, taken away the power of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy [meaning the Union] of which she was the proud Empire City? Amid the gloom which the present and prospective condition of things must cast over the country, New York as a Free City, may shed the only light and hope of a future reconstruction of our once blessed Confederacy [Union].

Wood then told the Common Council how much tax money the city had contributed to the state but for which the city had gotten little in return. He ended his speech by reiterating something he had said earlier. He insisted that he was not suggesting that people use “violence” to free the city itself from New York State and the Union. Instead, he hoped that the people of New York State would allow New York City to go peacefully.

Wood had not pledged the city’s allegiance to the Southern states, which would soon name itself the Confederate States of America and the Confederacy. Instead, Wood had suggested that New York City itself secede from the state of New York and the Union. The mayor imagined that if New York City were “free,” it would be able to trade with the Union and the South, as well as all the other countries in the world.

The Common Council did not vote on the mayor’s idea, and some newspapers criticized him with the New York Sun writing: “Mayor Wood’s secessionist Message has sounded the bathos of absurdity.”

After the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Wood objected to the seizing of a shipment of muskets destined for Georgia. It was then that some citizens began to think of him as a traitor to the Union.

Wood had misjudged the mood of the average person in the street when it came to what they thought of the South.

But behind the scenes and without publicly defending their mayor, the wealthy merchants and industrialists of New York City still were looking for a way for the North to avoid going to war with the South. If that happened, they feared, the warning that “grass would grow in Broadway and Wall Street,” would come true.