BOOK REVIEW
BY JAMES P . PROUT
The Kidnapping Club : Wall Street , Slavery , and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
By Jonathan Daniel Wells
Bold Type Books , 2020 354 pages with notes and index $ 30.00
Much has been written about slavery as a business . But many times , the discussion is oblique or obscure , buried in the dusty account books of brokers , insurance companies , shipping companies and the like , which have long since ceased to exist . The human side of slavery ’ s connection to New York City and Wall Street is less well known .
In The Kidnapping Club : Wall Street , Slavery , and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War , Professor Jonathan Daniel Wells seeks to change that , with a painful story of New York City from 1830 to 1860 . It is a tale of a dirty city , in the thrall of slave money and the slave trade . From the streets to the state house , New York energetically aided and abetted organized gangs who relentlessly snatched Black men , women and children from their homes and the streets , and sold them back into enslavement .
Wells begins with slaves , alone and in groups , fleeing the South , some heading for New York City . By 1830 , the city had a vibrant and sizeable Black population . Escapees found it a conducive place to hide among the large number of free Blacks . This situation did not go unnoticed in the South ’ s market for humans . The ostensible banning of the slave trade in 1808 had only increased the asset value of Black slave labor . As a result , a thriving and sinister business arose : white New York City freebooters saw the “ arbitrage ” between Blacks living openly in the city versus their enslaved value in the South . The profits were irresistible .
Hall introduces readers to David Ruggles , a free Black man living in New York City . Ruggles is energetic , educated and angry . He exposes the ring of kidnappers over and over throughout the 1830s and 1840s . Through publications , speeches and direct confrontation , he calls out who they are — most prominently Daniel Nash and Tobias Boudinot — and how they operate . He attends and makes public the largely rubber stamp legal procedures which rush the kidnapped Blacks to ships waiting in the harbor .
Ruggles and his allies , both Black and white , weren ’ t fighting just the street level thugs of an unpoliced , raw New York . From Governor William Marcy ( as in Mt . Marcy , New York ’ s highest peak ) to Judge Richard Riker ( as in the jail island ), officialdom was happy to encourage and protect the flow of humans back to slavery . New York City , after all , was the middleman , the insurer and financier of the South ’ s cotton industry , and slave labor was crucial to the cotton industry ’ s health . Official New York bent over backwards to assuage southern business interests . Underpinning this commercial loyalty was visceral hatred and bigotry expressed in newspaper editorials , political campaigns and civic policy .
As the country moved towards the Civil War in the late 1840s and 1850s , Wells wrote , New York became the supplier to the illicit — but very active — slave trade . Ships were illegally re-fitted in New York to sail to Africa , purchase slaves and transport them for sale to ports in North and South America . The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 , another compromise to southern slave interests , amped up the game , requiring law-enforcement officials in the North to capture slaves .
The final sad chapter in this tale takes place around the election of 1860 . Abraham Lincoln won in New York State , but lost in the city . Mayor Fernando Wood , conscious of the danger from southern loan defaults , led an effort for New York City to secede and arrange its own relationship with the Confederacy . Even when New York City backed the Union effort after the Fort Sumter attack , Blacks were made the enemy with scores murdered during the awful “ Draft Riots ” in 1863 .
Disturbing as it may be , The Kidnapping Club is a good read . There is some wobbly writing in the early chapters , including paragraphs that move between decades without a clear narrative . More particulars ( firms , amounts , etc .) on New York City ’ s financial support for cotton interests would have filled out the picture . But the book starkly evokes a New York of filth , both figuratively and literally . The narrative is propelled by the plight of innocent humans caught in an inhuman system .
Some would say it is easy to be righteous from a 190-year perspective : slavery was legal in the US South during this period and protected by the US Constitution . Most whites , and many Blacks , could not conceive of racial equality . But the facts are that slavery had been argued about since the founding of the United States , and the slave trade was outlawed in 1808 . Britain and Mexico had banned slavery well before this period , and New York had banned slavery in 1827 . And , yet , Blacks in New York City , runaway and free , were snatched from the streets and hustled back to enslavement . As a reader , one hopes that if living at the time , morality would have triumphed over commerciality .
James P . Prout is a lawyer with more than 30 years of capital market experience . He is now a consultant to some of the world ’ s biggest corporations . He can be reached at jpprout @ gmail . com .
38 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Winter 2021 | www . MoAF . org