A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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affairs.”
The Common Council members started to listen more closely to understand just what Mayor Wood was proposing:
With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States, we have friendly relations and a common sympathy. We have not participated in the warfare upon their constitutional rights or their domestic institutions. While other portions of our State have unfortunately been imbued with the fanatical spirit which actuates a portion of the people of New England, the city of New York has unfalteringly preserved the integrity of its principles of adherence to the compromises of the Constitution and the equal rights of the people of all States.
Having just heard the mayor insult upstate New York and New England, the Common Council members wondered what Wood was going to say next. They were shocked to hear him say that if the South were to leave the Union, so too would California “and her sisters of the Pacific” and the “western states” (the midwest).
Wood continued:
Then it may be said, why should not New York City, instead of supporting by her contributions in revenue two-thirds of the expenses of the United States, become also equally independent? As a free city, with but nominal duty on imports, her local Government could be supported without taxation upon her people. Thus we could live free from taxes, and have cheap goods nearly duty free. In this she would have the whole and united support of the Southern States, as well as all the Other States to whose interests and rights under the Constitution she has always been true….
[If]…the Government is dissolved, and it behooves every distinct community, as well as every individual, to take care of themselves.
When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master—to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her commerce, taken away the power of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy [meaning the Union] of which she was the proud Empire City? Amid the gloom which the present and prospective condition of things must cast over the country, New York as a Free City, may shed the only light and hope of a future reconstruction of our once blessed Confederacy [Union].
Wood then told the Common Council how much tax money the city had contributed to the state but for which the city had gotten little in return. He ended his speech by reiterating something he had said earlier. He insisted that he was not suggesting that people use “violence” to free the city itself from New York State and the Union. Instead, he hoped that the people of New York State would allow New York City to go peacefully.
Wood had not pledged the city’s allegiance to the Southern states, which would soon name itself the Confederate States of America and the Confederacy. Instead, Wood had suggested that New York City itself secede from the state of New York and the Union. The mayor imagined that if New York City were “free,” it would be able to trade with the Union and the South, as well as all the other countries in the world.
The Common Council did not vote on the mayor’s idea, and some newspapers criticized him with the New York Sun writing: “Mayor Wood’s secessionist Message has sounded the bathos of absurdity.”
After the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Wood objected to the seizing of a shipment of muskets destined for Georgia. It was then that some citizens began to think of him as a traitor to the Union.
Wood had misjudged the mood of the average person in the street when it came to what they thought of the South.
But behind the scenes and without publicly defending their mayor, the wealthy merchants and industrialists of New York City still were looking for a way for the North to avoid going to war with the South. If that happened, they feared, the warning that “grass would grow in Broadway and Wall Street,” would come true.
Chapter 5
“The Meetings of These Madmen”
Nothing irritated New York’s leading citizens more in the 1850s than abolitionists. In 1850, the New York Herald urged that abolitionists be barred from holding meetings in New York City—something merchants had been trying to do for more than fifteen years since the first major abolitionist meeting in the city was shut down in 1834 using the threat of violence against its organizers.
The editor, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., wrote:
The merchants, men of business, and men of property in this city, should frown down upon the meetings of these madmen…. What right have all the religious fanatics of the free States to gather in this commercial city for the purposes, which, if carried out, would ruin and destroy its prosperity? Will the men of sense allow meetings to be held in this city, which are calculated to make our country the arena of blood and murder, and render our city the object of horror to the whole South?
Bennett was reacting to an upsurge of abolitionist protests after Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts suggested in a Senate speech that some permanent compromise be reached with the South over the future of slavery.
Within a week of Webster’s speech, New York’s merchants were raising money to reprint the speech and gleefully quoting it to each other as they met in the streets, banks, and stock exchange. They felt Webster’s speech was evidence that few in Congress wanted to rock the boat when it came to the question of Southerners owning slaves or, for that matter, Northerners transporting slaves.
The New Yorkers underestimated the determination of abolitionists to make the holding of slaves on the American continent unpalatable to the average American. Webster’s speech did not deter the abolitionist movement in the least. Nor did it stop other politicians, who may well have respected Webster’s efforts, from thinking about how they could end slavery and the slave trade in all its forms.
In August 1858, William H. Seward, one of the U.S. senators from New York and, at that time, the supposed frontrunner for the 1860 presidential nomination for the Republicans, bitterly complained that his efforts in the Congress to control the slave trade had been regularly thwarted by his own constituents.
“The root of the evil is in the great commercial cities, and I frankly admit, in the City of New York. I can say also that the objection I found to that bill came not so much from the Slave States as from the commercial interests of New York,” said Seward.
Seward’s homegrown problem was that the acceptance of slavery had been ingrained in the city’s culture since its creation as a Dutch colony two hundred years earlier. Between January 1859 and August 1860, at least eighty-five slaving voyages originated from New York’s harbor transporting between 30,000 and 60,000 slaves from Africa to Cuba.
The city’s newspaper editors were not all like the Herald. Some tried to shame the city’s business leaders into ending their association with slavery.
The August 10, 1859, New York Times, apparently bored with describing how slavers were outfitting in its home city, used a correspondent to track down two slavers that were being outfitted in faraway Portland and Salem, Maine.
“The business is so very dangerous a one, and has been organized so long in the lesser New England seaports, whether by merchants resident, or by a skillful use of the facilities of those ports for the purposes of New York houses, that it is difficult to track the guilty parties. The Government treats the whole matter with indifference,” wrote the Times correspondent.
The Journal of Commerce, founded by the abolitionist Tappan brothers, Arthur and Lewis, and their partner Samuel F. B. Morse, railed in 1857, “[D]owntown merchants of wealth and respectability are extensively engaged in buying and selling African Negroes, and have been, with comparative little interruption, for an indefinite number of years.”
Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune complained, “The most successful of the Merchant Princes; those who show the most courage in mercantile venture, those who best succeed in the speedy acquisition of wealth, are those who supply the markets of the world with slaves.”
New York City’s most influential businessmen were shrewd enough to keep secret any direct interests they had in the slave trade, but some of these men must have been the subject of whispers.