A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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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 riots were staged with mobs attacking the abolitionists in their homes. The city’s police force, under control of the mayor, did little to prevent the violence.
At the same time that New York’s public officials and politicians were struggling to deal with abolitionist organizing, Southerners were shrewdly instituting an informal public relations campaign to show Northerners that slavery was not as bad as they may have heard. The August 29, 1854, New York Times republished an article from the Mobile (Alabama) Tribune, supposedly written by a slave describing his recent trip to New York City with his master.
“In my strolls of three days in that city [New York], I saw more evidences of destitution—more ragged, half-clad, miserable, beggaredly looking people than in all of Virginia and Alabama. I met beggars and loafers at every corner and a cent is as gladly received by these poor creatures as a dollar would be by any servant in Mobile,” wrote the supposed slave. Even the Times did not question how a slave could write such a vivid description of the city when it was against the law in all Southern states to teach slaves to read and write.
Even those Northerners who had freed their own slaves decades earlier and who were now sympathetic to abolitionists had to admit to themselves that slavery still played a large role in the economy of their region.
The outfitting and home port docking of slave ships in New England and New York ports was openly practiced for more than fifty years after Congress officially abolished the slave trade in 1808. The only true change that slavers made to their routine after the supposed abolition of the American slave trade was to change their final ports of call from Southern ports to those in the Caribbean, principally Havana, Cuba. New York’s mayors, aldermen, police, marshals, state and federal prosecutors, and state and federal judges all knew which New York City–based ships were slavers. They just chose to ignore them.
Remarkably, even known criminals and gang leaders could wrangle appointments as U.S. Marshals who had the responsibility to enforce federal laws against slaving. Such was the case with Isaiah Rynders, a former leader of the Five Points street gang, who had a history of roughing up abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips when they came to visit New York’s abolitionist societies. In 1857, President James Buchanan appointed Rynders U.S. Marshal, the perfect position from which to continue to collect protection money and to ignore rumors of slave outfitting. Rynders employed his nephew as an assistant marshal. When the nephew was accused of taking a bribe of $1,000 to let a slaver leave port, he vigorously insisted that the accusation was wrong. The bribe was, in fact $1,500.
If the men entrusted with enforcing U.S. law in New York City were not inclined to stop slavers, neither was the U.S. judiciary. Of 125 slave traders tried for slave trading in the city’s courts from 1837 to 1861, just twenty were given prison sentences of two years, even though they had been caught with slaves in the holds of their ships on the open seas by the United States Navy. While the men in jail for two years might have considered that just punishment, federal law provided for the execution of slavers. The federal judiciary in New York City was not about to stop the slave trade.
In 1848, the crew of the ship Mary Ann, operating out of New York City, mutinied off the coast of Africa when they realized that their captain intended to take on a cargo of slaves rather than goods. The crew sailed the ship back to New York City, confident that they would be hailed as heroes for foiling at least one slaving voyage. They sued the ship’s owner for the weeks of wages that they had been promised for what they had been told would be a legitimate voyage.
The crew of the Mary Ann went before federal judge Samuel Rossiter Betts, who shared the Southern District of New York bench with Judge Samuel Nelson. Betts, who was often called the father of Admiralty Law and who one biography claims was never overruled on appeal, ruled that the crew of the Mary Ann were not entitled to the wages that they had expected for a legitimate voyage, and that “by absconding with the vessel and bringing her to the United States from the coast of Africa, they have been guilty of a violation of their duty to the ship and to the owner, and deprived themselves of all rightful claim to wages for any portion of the time they were connected to her.”
Instead of awarding the men wages from the owner, Betts ordered them to pay the slave ship owner for the costs of the unsuccessful voyage to Africa.
In another case the Catherine was boarded by suspicious U.S. Marshals in New York harbor before even reaching the Atlantic Ocean. Even though the Marshals found items on board that clearly demonstrated that it was intended to be a slave ship, such as a large cooking pot, a huge cistern of water, and hundreds of wooden spoons, Betts ruled that no outfitting could be considered suspicious unless a crew member was willing to testify once the ship was captured with slaves aboard that the outfitting was used in slaving.
For years the city’s newspaper editors were all well aware that the city’s politicians and its marshals and judges were allowing the slave trade to operate out of New York City. But these men were not crusading journalists. Perhaps out of fear for their lives, the newspaper editors only made vague protests about what they knew was happening.
“It is known that there are in this City several mercantile houses extensively engaged in the slave trade, and that half a dozen vessels have recently left this and other American ports, for the African Coast…. Our Authorities would do well to exercise more than ordinary vigilance in regard to vessels clearing for Cuban ports,” intoned the New York Times.
The next year the Times wrote:
This City and Baltimore are now, and have been for years, the great headquarters of the African Slave-trade. In the face of our laws, in defiance of our treaty stipulations and in contempt of armed cruisers and men-of-war, that piratical traffic is largely carried on by ships fitted out in American ports, and under the protection of the American flag. If