Читать книгу A Vast and Fiendish Plot: - Clint Johnson - Страница 15

Nothing irritated New York’s leading citizens more in the 1850s than abolitionists. In 1850, the New York Herald urged that abolitionists be barred from holding meetings in New York City—something merchants had been trying to do for more than fifteen years since the first major abolitionist meeting in the city was shut down in 1834 using the threat of violence against its organizers.

The editor, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., wrote:

The merchants, men of business, and men of property in this city, should frown down upon the meetings of these madmen…. What right have all the religious fanatics of the free States to gather in this commercial city for the purposes, which, if carried out, would ruin and destroy its prosperity? Will the men of sense allow meetings to be held in this city, which are calculated to make our country the arena of blood and murder, and render our city the object of horror to the whole South?

Bennett was reacting to an upsurge of abolitionist protests after Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts suggested in a Senate speech that some permanent compromise be reached with the South over the future of slavery.

Within a week of Webster’s speech, New York’s merchants were raising money to reprint the speech and gleefully quoting it to each other as they met in the streets, banks, and stock exchange. They felt Webster’s speech was evidence that few in Congress wanted to rock the boat when it came to the question of Southerners owning slaves or, for that matter, Northerners transporting slaves.

The New Yorkers underestimated the determination of abolitionists to make the holding of slaves on the American continent unpalatable to the average American. Webster’s speech did not deter the abolitionist movement in the least. Nor did it stop other politicians, who may well have respected Webster’s efforts, from thinking about how they could end slavery and the slave trade in all its forms.

In August 1858, William H. Seward, one of the U.S. senators from New York and, at that time, the supposed frontrunner for the 1860 presidential nomination for the Republicans, bitterly complained that his efforts in the Congress to control the slave trade had been regularly thwarted by his own constituents.

“The root of the evil is in the great commercial cities, and I frankly admit, in the City of New York. I can say also that the objection I found to that bill came not so much from the Slave States as from the commercial interests of New York,” said Seward.

Seward’s homegrown problem was that the acceptance of slavery had been ingrained in the city’s culture since its creation as a Dutch colony two hundred years earlier. Between January 1859 and August 1860, at least eighty-five slaving voyages originated from New York’s harbor transporting between 30,000 and 60,000 slaves from Africa to Cuba.

The city’s newspaper editors were not all like the Herald. Some tried to shame the city’s business leaders into ending their association with slavery.

The August 10, 1859, New York Times, apparently bored with describing how slavers were outfitting in its home city, used a correspondent to track down two slavers that were being outfitted in faraway Portland and Salem, Maine.

“The business is so very dangerous a one, and has been organized so long in the lesser New England seaports, whether by merchants resident, or by a skillful use of the facilities of those ports for the purposes of New York houses, that it is difficult to track the guilty parties. The Government treats the whole matter with indifference,” wrote the Times correspondent.

The Journal of Commerce, founded by the abolitionist Tappan brothers, Arthur and Lewis, and their partner Samuel F. B. Morse, railed in 1857, “[D]owntown merchants of wealth and respectability are extensively engaged in buying and selling African Negroes, and have been, with comparative little interruption, for an indefinite number of years.”

Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune complained, “The most successful of the Merchant Princes; those who show the most courage in mercantile venture, those who best succeed in the speedy acquisition of wealth, are those who supply the markets of the world with slaves.”

New York City’s most influential businessmen were shrewd enough to keep secret any direct interests they had in the slave trade, but some of these men must have been the subject of whispers.

Jacob Westervelt, the city’s mayor from 1853 to 1855, was a partner with his brother in building fine sailing ships that crossed the oceans. While his name and ships were not mentioned in contemporary newspaper accounts as being slavers, one of his relatives, Minthorne Westervelt, was tried in 1862 for being third mate on a captured slaver. His first trial ended in a hung jury, and the judge released him with the remark that he was “too good a man to be kept in confinement with criminals.”

William Havemeyer, who served as mayor of New York City from 1845 to 1846 and then again from 1848 to 1849 (and then again from 1873 to 1874) was a sugar refiner who purchased hundreds of tons of Cuban and Southern grown sugarcane that depended on slave labor. Slaves working in sugarcane had much worse working conditions than the average slave on a cotton plantation did. Sugarcane slaves could cut themselves on the cane itself or with the knives used to slash the cane. Snakes that lived in the same wet, boggy conditions in which the cane grew could bite the slaves. Finally, the slaves had to work in hot, humid conditions caused by the tall cane stalks stopping the breezes from reaching the workers.

Moses Taylor was one of the busiest men in all of New York. He acted as a sugar broker for the sugarcane coming into the city’s ports, so he was a supplier to Havemeyer, the sugar refiner. Taylor was also a board member of the City Bank of New York (predecessor to Citibank). His role as banker allowed him to give loans to sugar growers in Cuba to expand their slave labor force. Taylor was so tied to the Cuban sugar growers that he offered to help their children find internships in the city so that they could learn more about how to run the family businesses.

One of New York’s elite was caught red-handed not only supporting the South but also trying to arm it when war was imminent. He was Gazaway Bugg Lamar, a Georgia native who understandably went by his initials of G. B., who founded the Bank of the Republic in New York City, in the 1840s in a prime location on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street. When the Confederacy was still forming early in 1861, Lamar was in New York writing his political contacts in the South urging them to adopt a free trade policy. Lamar believed Mayor Fernando Wood’s suggestion of setting up New York as a “free city” was still possible even though the Common Council had initially rejected the idea.

Lamar said:

The difference between the rates of the tariffs North and South are creating great discontent already at the North, and they will in the North have to call an extra Congress to repeal their Morrill tariff…. With free trade at the South, all the imports would be diverted to the Southern ports until New York City could redress herself either by dissolving the relations she holds to the Union and adopting free trade or by bringing all of the other states to do it.

Lamar, staying true to his home state of Georgia, which seceded from the Union, would eventually be forced to leave the city in 1861 when he was caught trying to ship a load of muskets to the governor of Georgia. Earlier Lamar had used some New York City printers to print bonds for the Confederate government. Those beautifully detailed certificates successfully made their way south before the Union confiscated the printing plates in New York City less than two weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.

Not withstanding the occasional man in their midst like Lamar who let his ties to the South become too well known, New York City’s businessmen knew how to use public relations to try preempting any separation of North and South. One successful method was publishing economic predictions on the disaster that would occur if the Union split. In 1856, Thomas Kettell, a New York City economist and magazine editor with ties to the New York business community, published a book called Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, As Exhibited by Statistical Facts and Official Figures: Showing the Necessity of the Union to the Future Prosperity and Welfare of the Republic.

By page two of the preface, Kettell made it clear what he thought of “agitators,” his name for abolitionists:

The national prosperity, the domestic peace, the safety of life and property, the very existence of the nation, are jeopardized by an idea that is admitted by the agitators to be fruitless. The agitation at the North has no practical application whatsoever while at the South it has in the background servile insurrection, bloodshed and annihilation of person and property, involving ultimately the ruin of the North.

On page seven of the 143-page book, Kettell laid out how New York depended on the South: “All the profitable branches of freighting, brokering, selling, banking, insurance, etc., that grow out of the Southern product are enjoyed in New York.”

Though the language is dense and the charts comparing crop yields even denser, Kettell finally ends his book with a warning of dire economic consequences if the South is forced to free its slaves: “The depreciation of property which would follow at the North is a matter for serious contemplation, and it well behooves those who are interested to guard against it.”

Despite such efforts to show the South that New York’s merchants were behind them, increasing numbers of Southerners were beginning to associate the abolitionist movement with all of the North—including New York. Some Southern newspapers lumped the Northern abolitionist activities together with long-held animosities about how much money New Yorkers skimmed off the top of cotton sales forced through the city’s ports and banks. The editors knew how Southern trade kept the city afloat during the panic of 1857, and they took offense that New York was not more appreciative, even though New Yorkers had often expressed appreciation in print and by action such as sending money south during such disasters as yellow fever epidemics.

In October 1857, the Charleston Mercury asked:

Why does the South allow itself to be tattered and torn by the dissensions and death struggles of New York money changers? Why not trade directly with our customers? What need is there of this going between to convey to the markets of our world our rich products, for which the consumers stand ready, gold in hand, to pay the full value?

In December 1857, the New Orleans Crescent lashed out with a startling description of her Atlantic port rival:

New York with her rotten bankruptcies permeating and injuring almost every solvent community in the Union. New York, the centre of reckless speculation, unflinching fraud and downright robbery. New York, the prime cause of four-fifths of the insolvencies of the country; New York, carrying on an enormous trade with capital mostly furnished with other communities.

If they were not subscribers of the Louisiana newspaper, New York merchants might have missed the editorial, but the Herald reprinted it.

New York’s merchants might have been fuming at the verbal and written attacks from their supposed Southern friends, but most of them bit their lips and did not respond. They did not want to anger their best customers any further, particularly now that it appeared that the South had entered its own recession in the summer of 1860 after years of steady buying, including right through the Panic of 1857. Newspapers speculated that Southern purchases from New York merchants in 1860 were between one third and one half of what they had been in 1859. The merchants were already nervously eyeing 1861 because they expected the Morrill Tariff to pass and take effect the following year.

Designed to protect the Northeast’s manufacturing industry and force the rest of the nation to buy American by putting European goods out of reach, the Morrill Tariff, introduced in Congress by Vermont representative Justin Morrill, was born out of the Panic of 1857 when some Northern economists blamed free trade for causing the deep recession. The Republicans, eager to establish themselves as a force in the Congress, championed the bill because it would protect virtually every American industry from iron to textiles by increasing the tariffs on similar imported goods by as much as 100 percent.

The House of Representatives passed the bill in May 1860 with nearly 90 percent of the North’s representatives supporting it and only one Southern representative supporting it. The bill was tabled in the Senate until after the presidential election of 1860, allowing Lincoln to use its future passage as a campaign tool in states where manufacturing was important, such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Lincoln muted his support for the bill when he visited New York City because he knew the merchants opposed it.

Lincoln’s dual campaign strategy did not really fool anyone. Both Southern consumers of imported goods and the New York City merchants who imported those goods knew that Lincoln would sign the bill once it passed the Senate.

Southerners, who often exchanged their cotton in England for everything from cloth to plows, were outraged that the U.S. government was promising to double the cost of those goods.

On November 19, 1860, U.S. senator Robert Toombs from Georgia made a speech where he incorrectly lumped together all Northerners as being in favor of the Morrill Tariff, charging that the “free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists. The result of this coalition was…the robber and the incendiary struck hands, and are united in joint raid against the South.”

Robert Barnwell Rhett, a Charleston newspaper editor who had been pushing for the South to secede for years and to form a “Confederacy of slave holding states” made a speech to South Carolinians where he charged: “For the last forty years, the taxes laid by Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue—to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the production of their mines and manufacturers.”

New York City’s merchants shared the South’s anger at what the bill would do to New York’s import and export business. With Southern trade already off by 50 percent with New York due to the Southern recession, the city’s merchants feared the Morrill Tariff could send New York into the same recession early in 1861.

The Journal of Commerce laid out in print what most of the merchants were thinking, “The merchants are waking up to the fact that a tariff bill is hanging over them and likely to prove disastrous to their trade.”

“The passage of the Bill in its present shape will bring ruin and disaster upon a very large class of merchants,” wrote an importer in the Herald.

Already too late with their protests since the bill had overwhelming support among the legislators in New England and the western states (today’s Midwest), New York’s merchants vainly explained to anyone who would listen that the Morrill bill would be bad for New York. It would double the cost of some goods coming into the port, which meant customers would stop buying imported goods from New York merchants. It would be complicated and time-consuming to enforce, as separate items in an entire shipment would be taxed at varying rates. Just sorting through what tariff rates applied to which goods would take days to accomplish, which meant ships would be backed up in the harbor waiting to unload on the city’s wharves.

The New York City Chamber of Commerce predicted that “the commerce of the City of New York would shrink into one-tenth of its present compass…. This measure is known to be obnoxious to the Southern States. To pass it when a part of them are not represented in Congress could scarcely fail to widen the existing breach and present a new and serious obstacle to reconciliation.”

After Lincoln was elected, the entire delegation of Southern senators (with the exception of Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee) and representatives walked out of Congress early in 1861. With a Senate made up entirely of Northerners, the Morrill Tariff sailed through with no opposition. Ironically, the bill was signed into law, not by Republican Lincoln who had made signing it a campaign promise, but by outgoing Democrat James Buchanan, whose Pennsylvania congressional delegation had been strong supporters.

As important as the problem of the impending Morrill Tariff was for New York City’s merchants, it paled beside the election of Abraham Lincoln as president.