The Kidnapping Club

August 31, 2020
University of Michigan history professor Wells (Blind No More) describes 19th-century New York City as “the most potent proslavery and pro-South city north of the Mason-Dixon Line” in this richly detailed account. Wells highlights links between Wall Street and the cotton trade, and reveals how city leaders worked to preserve that relationship by “using the Fugitive Slave Clause as a subterfuge to terrorize black New Yorkers.” The spark, according to Wells, was the flight, in 1832, of 17 slaves from Norfolk, Va., to New York in a stolen whaleboat. Police officer Tobias Boudinot was granted “a wholesale right to arrest anyone he could even remotely accuse of being a runaway,” an authority he and his fellow officers, with cooperation from City Recorder Richard Riker and local judges and lawyers, wielded to capture free Blacks and sell them into slavery. Wells also details how Tammany Hall political bosses stoked racial animus between Irish immigrants and Blacks, and interweaves throughout African-American abolitionist David Ruggles’s fight against these forces. Lively prose and vivid scenes of New York street life complement the meticulous research. The result is a revealing look at a little-known chapter in the history of racial injustice.

September 1, 2020
A tale of money and enslavement on the streets of New York. In the early 19th century, writes historian Wells, New York was the Northern city most closely aligned with the slave states and the institution of slavery, "due in large part to the lucrative trade between Manhattan banks and insurance companies and the slaveholders of the cotton South." Where many Northerners refused to follow the demands of the Fugitive Slave Act, it was big business for a group that abolitionist David Ruggles called the New York Kidnapping Club, "a powerful and far-reaching collection of police officers, political authorities, judges, lawyers, and slave traders who terrorized the city's black residents throughout the early nineteenth century." Members of the club thought nothing of dispatching freeborn Black New Yorkers to the South to be impressed into slavery. Black children in particular often disappeared from the streets only to turn up on plantations in the South--and later in Cuba and other international slave markets. The work of the kidnappers was made easier by a corrupt police department--and at one point two corrupt and competing police forces--and the fact that both sides of Manhattan were lined with wharves filled with ships that came and went. The author populates his pages with characters who are little known to history, such as the city's recorder, Richard Riker, who "for nearly thirty years on behalf of southern slaveholding claimants sent untold numbers of people into bondage." Small wonder that when he died, the newspapers of Charleston and New Orleans published obituaries. Ruggles should also be better known. The narrative suffers from a certain sluggishness and needless rhetorical flourishes--"As the train gained momentum on its tracks, Ruggles took his seat, hopeful that the momentum to end slavery was finally gaining steam among the hectic citizens of the northeast"--but it's a story that deserves to be told. A convincing demonstration of the close links between capitalism and the unconscionable trade in human beings.

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Starred review from October 1, 2020

In this latest work, Wells (Blind No More) exposes the illegal slave trade in New York in the years prior to the Civil War. Although slavery was abolished in the city in 1827, many New Yorkers had no misgivings about the institution as they profited greatly from slave-grown cotton, especially Wall Street banks that financed Southern slaveholders. In fact, Wells reveals that New York's dramatic rise into a financial powerhouse and cosmopolitan center was largely due to slavery. As a result, the city was an extremely dangerous place for Black Americans as numerous free and fugitive Black men, women, and children were targeted for kidnapping by their fellow New Yorkers. Dubbed the "Kidnapping Club" by abolitionist David Ruggles, the group responsible sanctioned the kidnapping of free Blacks in order to sell them slavery. While not an organized group, kidnappers consisted of a network of political authorities, judges, lawyers, police officers, and bankers; all of whom had something to gain at the expense of human rights. Well's lively writing style and skillful portrayal of the culture of mid-19th century America further adds to this excellent work. VERDICT This compelling work is highly recommended for those who like history and readers interested in social justice.--Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL

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