A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
Читать онлайн книгу.
July 1861, Professor Jackson would win the nickname of Stonewall at the Battle of Manassas, Virginia.
Business interests occasionally sent New Yorkers south where they, too, felt welcome. Scotsman Archibald Gracie settled in New York in 1784 where he first found employment as a merchant. Later, he saw the value of New York’s harbor and launched a shipping line. Gracie’s son, Archibald II, moved to Mobile, Alabama, in order to feed the cotton better from the South to his father’s shipping line in New York. His son, Archibald III, continued in the family business of raising and shipping cotton.
The Gracie family made so much money in the cotton trade that they built a large mansion overlooking the East River. In 1942 the City of New York bought the Gracie Mansion that cotton built and made it the official residence of the mayor of New York City.
The business instincts of New Yorkers wanting to please long-term customers came into play whenever there was trouble in the South. When hot climate diseases such as malaria or yellow fever swept through Southern cities that were close to their cotton customers, New Yorkers organized relief missions or sent money. Those gestures were recognized and honored by Southerners who could curse greedy New Yorkers one year and praise the generosity of those same New Yorkers the next year. When yellow fever struck New Orleans in 1853, New York merchants sent money, resulting in a New Orleans city resolution saying, “We thank you for those generous exertions which have enabled us to comfort our sick and bury our dead. May you never need a return of our sympathy, but rest assured our hearts are throbbing with gratitude, and will ever be open to the call of humanity.”
It was during the Panic of 1857 that New Yorkers realized how important the South was to the city. A mild nationwide recession in 1856 turned into a nasty and deep recession in 1857. The international causes included a drop in American grain prices when England and Russia reentered the market after ending the Crimean War. Another cause was England pulling most of its cash investments out of U.S. banks to pay its war debts. Domestically, American banks and railroads failed after a rash of land speculation on future rail routes. The final straw came in September when the SS Central America, a ship loaded with more than three tons of gold coins, sank off the coast of North Carolina. The loss of that gold, which had been on its way to New York City banks, cast doubt in the minds of investors and merchants that the United States could back up its paper money with hard assets.
Within weeks of the start of the panic, every region of the country was affected except the South. Businesses and banks were failing all over the nation, but cotton prices on the world market remained stable, so the South’s economy remained solidly in the black. Southerners continued buying from New York merchants and dealing with New York banks and cotton brokers as if nothing was happening in the economy that could affect their spending.
The successful cotton planters essentially sat out the short-lived severe recession. That meant that the steady infusion of Southern cash kept New York City’s merchants and port workers employed, successfully weathering the losses 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