A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.”

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