A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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brothers, appeared on the stage together for the first and only time. John Wilkes would eclipse his brothers’ fame when he performed a dastardly deed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington City, District of Columbia, on the night of April 14, 1865.
Most of the rest of the country did not care about New York City’s entertainment options. To citizens who needed bank loans, access to foreign markets, or imported goods and equipment, New York City was all about business. They might never visit what was then nicknamed The Emerald City, but they needed it.
If New York City had a singular focus, it was about making money. Philadelphia was a close and constant rival, but New York was the nation’s banking capital. Hundreds of banks were headquartered here. One, the First National Bank of New York City at Broadway and Wall Street, founded by a man named John Thompson, was already changing the way banks did business nationwide. New Yorker Thompson’s idea would forever mold the entire economic system of the United States.
Early in the war, Thompson realized how impractical and costly it was for the nation to continue minting metallic coins. He petitioned Lincoln to establish a single national currency based on paper money that banks and merchants would recognize and accept. Instead of putting its gold and silver into circulation, the nation would store the metals in vaults while issuing the paper money that would represent the real value of the money. Thompson believed that the people would have faith that their government could protect their accumulated wealth.
Just as important as the city’s individual banks was the New York Bank Clearing House Association at William and Wall streets. Each morning, bank clerks gathered in a large room with a stack of bank drafts drawn on other city banks they had cashed or deposited for their customers the previous day. In turn, each bank’s clerk traded the drafts with the other represented banks. Once the trading of paper drafts was completed, cash was exchanged. The process started over again the next morning.
The clearing house was a simple but vital means of making sure that each bank was paid by the end of the day. Banks in distant states established relationships with New York banks to make sure their local banking customers were paid. Southerners particularly depended on New York banks because New York sales agents bought the bulk of cotton and sometimes shipped it from East River ports.
Each night the cash and the paper records of every New York bank were put into iron safes that bank executives assumed—or at least hoped—were fireproof. No one knew for sure. Nearly thirty years earlier, most of the city’s banks as well as the Merchants Exchange had burned, but the city’s financial industry recovered. If such a fire occurred again and those safes allowed flames to lick inside, it would be devastating for the city’s financial institutions. It could take even more time to recover because the city’s financial importance had grown so much in just thirty years.
New Yorkers did not spend much time worrying about such potential disasters. They were too busy generating new ideas that made money.
Alexander T. Stewart, an Irish orphan, immigrated to New York in 1818. By 1828, Stewart had opened a small dry goods store. Stewart kept building larger stores until he realized he was confusing his customers with the sheer volume of goods he was offering. He developed an in-store separation of goods where customers could visit different sections of his stores. He called the sections departments.
Another man who moved to New York in 1858 to try his hand at making it there after failing in his native Massachusetts was a merchant named Rowland H. Macy. After examining the success of Stewart, Macy started the practice of putting price tags on merchandise, advertising those low prices in New York’s newspapers, and then promoting holiday sales by hiring Santa Claus to sit in his stores at Christmas. By his death in 1877, Macy had developed another idea, a chain of stores all bearing his name. He created a corporate symbol for his new store chain, another New York idea that had never occurred to any other store owner. Macy chose a red star based on a tattoo he had put on his forearm during his youthful days aboard a whaling ship.
The nineteenth century had been good to New York City. By its midpoint the city was flying high. Only one cloud was on the horizon. New Yorkers were not too worried about it. The same cloud had been on the same horizon for decades. It had never darkened the city’s plans for the future. That cloud was the threat of secession by the Southern, slave-holding states.
If the South left the Union, New Yorkers feared the end of good times. The city had grown wealthy trading Southern cotton and financing Southern slave purchases, not to mention buying and selling Africans on their own. What was good for the South was good for New York City.
Chapter 2
“A Traffic in Enslaved Africans”
New York City’s acceptance of Southern slavery and its close economic ties with the South came naturally from its own history of being a slave-owning, slave-trading city.
The first black people on Manhattan Island arrived in 1625, just one year before Peter Minuet bought the island from the natives and just five years after the first blacks in America had come ashore in Jamestown, Virginia.
The status of the Africans who landed in Jamestown and Manhattan were different. The twenty-four Angolans who landed at Jamestown, Virginia, were not slaves, whereas those who landed on Manhattan were.
The Jamestown Africans disembarked on the continent with the legal understanding from the white settlers who needed their services that these blacks had the same rights as white English indentured servants who were arriving at the same time. Jamestown settlers paid the Dutch ship captain for the Angolans’ passage from Africa in exchange for seven years of service, after which they would have the rights granted to all settlers.
There was no racial color barrier between white and black in 1625 Jamestown. The barriers were social—between master and employee. One of those first black settlers in Virginia, Anthony the Angolan, who later changed his name to Anthony Johnson, worked his way out of his seven years of servitude to become Virginia’s first wealthy black man, acquiring as much land as his white neighbors.
While Johnson’s white neighbors initially treated him socially as just another landowner, he also infuriated them by his constant use of the courts to sue them over minor disputes. One of Johnson’s suits would forever seal the fate of future slaves brought to the continent.
In 1654, Johnson sued his white neighbor, Robert Parker, who Johnson charged was illegally keeping a man named John Castor who Johnson insisted was his slave. Castor insisted he was a former indentured servant who had long ago worked off Johnson’s claim on his labor. Castor had gone to the neighbor Parker for protection from Johnson. After a lengthy trial, the colonial court ruled that Castor was Johnson’s property, and he could not claim refuge with the neighbor.
For the first time in American history, a court of law had ruled that one man had the legal right to own another man. The court in Jamestown did not find it ironic or even remarkable that the slave owner had once been an indentured servant himself. Nor did it make a difference to the judges that Johnson and Castor were both black.
All the black men who landed on Manhattan Island were owned outright by the Dutch West India Company and their purpose for the past thirty years had been singular—to prepare the colony of New Netherland island and its primary town of New Amsterdam on the southern end of Manhattan Island for more white settlers and more black slaves. The slaves cut timber, built houses and fortifications, and constructed wharves along the Hudson River from which the furs and timber that had first attracted the company to the area could be shipped back to Europe.
In 1653, the colony’s slaves were ordered to build a wall around New Amsterdam to protect the development from increasingly irritated and dangerous native tribes who had grown resentful of the encroachment of the white men through the Hudson Valley. Later the slaves would build a road that would run along that wall. History would not remember the names of the black men who built both the wall to protect what would become New York City and Wall Street.
The Dutch view on slavery was liberal, almost an extension of the indentured servitude. The Dutch trusted their slaves to help defend the colony. They set up economic models in which the slaves could work their way into freedom,