A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ they were suffering from drops in business from other regions.

      New Yorkers knew that free-spending Southerners had saved the city, and they were willing to do just about anything to keep the symbiotic relationship between the slaveholding South and the cotton-dependent metropolis intact. That included speaking up for the rights of slaveholders.

      As the Panic of 1857 was ending, the nation was seeing a resurgence of abolitionist talk. In 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was founded in New York by a handful of black and white ministers and a tiny number of merchants either who did not cater to Southerners or who felt compelled to speak out against the immorality of slavery.

      Most of the city’s businessmen feared what could happen if the abolitionist movement took hold in New York City. According to them, freeing the Southern slaves would mean the end of civilization, at least in New York City.

      James Watson Webb, owner and editor of the Courier and Enquirer, the largest circulating newspaper in the city and the nation, raged when he heard of the formation of the AASS: “Are we tamely to look on, and see this most dangerous species of fanaticism extending itself through society?…Or shall we, by promptly and fearlessly crushing this many-headed hydra in the bud, expose the weakness as well as the folly, madness and mischief of these bold and dangerous men?”

      Despite Webb’s warnings, the AASS continued to preach against slavery. Two years after its founding, a merchant, identified only as “a partner in one of the most prominent mercantile houses in the city,” spoke candidly to abolitionist Samuel J. May at a meeting in May 1835. The man asked May to walk with him so he could quietly deliver a threat that was not even veiled:

      Mr. May, we are not such fools as to not know that slavery is a great evil, a great wrong. But a great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under its sanction; and the business of the North, as well as of the South, has become adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and merchants alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principles with us. It is a matter of business necessity…. We mean, sir, to put you abolitionists down by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.

      Twenty-five years later, attitudes had not changed. Abolitionists who had no ties to the trade in cotton or with the South were continuing to preach that slaves should be freed, even if it meant the collapse of the Southern economy. The defenders of slavery had not given in either. Even on the brink of the American Civil War, New York City’s bankers, merchants, and average citizens were still searching for ways to protect the South’s institution of slavery.

      A prominent Southern journal warned of a New York calamity in very plain language if slavery were abolished. In 1859, months before the November 1860 presidential election, Alfred A. Smith, a South Carolina–based writer for the New Orleans–based agricultural journal De Bow’s Review, predicted that the South would secede if a “Black Republican” (Lincoln) were elected president.

      In making his point that the North needed the South, Smith quoted export records that the South had exported more than 2 billion dollars’ worth of goods from 1821 to 1855 compared with only $990 million from the North. Furthermore, Smith found that the Northern textile mills consumed more than 82 percent of the cotton bales produced for domestic use. Smith then made a prediction if pressure on the South to free the slaves forced it out of the Union and into a confederacy of other Southern states:

      What would become of this interest if the supply of Southern cotton should be cut off? What would become of the immense mercantile marine of the country? What would become of the great metropolis New-York? The ships would rot at her docks; grass would grow in Wall Street and Broadway; and the glory of New York, like Babylon and Rome, would be numbered with the things that are past.

      New Yorkers were not sure if Smith’s predictions were hyperbole or not. They were not willing to take the chance. On the issue of continuing slavery in the South, New York would support the South.

      Chapter 4

      “Money Is Plenty, Business Is Brisk”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ