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A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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isbn 9780806533889
Автор произведения Clint Johnson
Издательство Ingram
None of the daily newspapers ever had the nerve to name names, even though they were accusing public officials of corruption, as opined by the New York Daily News: “The price for the clearance of a slaver [from the port of New York] is as well-known to those in the trade as the price of a barrel of pork.”
Horace Greeley of the New York Daily Tribune wrote:
The traders engaged in this traffic are known; the men who supply their vessels with stores, who fit them with sails, who provide them with sailors, are known also. That knowledge, and much other that is curious and interesting in relation to this subject, awaits the Government, whenever the Government chooses to seek for it. It does not seek for it. It does not choose to have it. It will not thank us even for hinting that it can be had, or for providing any portion of it.
Not only were New York City’s politicians unwilling to stop the slave trade operating out of their port, but they were even willing to increase the number of slave states. In March 1859, the Democrats of the Tammany Hall political machine, including Samuel Tilden, the future New York gubernatorial and presidential candidate, voted for a resolution calling on the United States to buy Cuba and annex it into the nation as a slave state. Among the big proponents of that idea were New York’s sugar refiners, who believed that the slave labor cutting the sugarcane in Cuba would continue to do so if it became a state. They were very interested in lowering and stabilizing the price of sugar.
New York’s public officials and political leaders did not want to offend the South in any way. It was not about hurt feelings. It was about money. By 1860, on the eve of the war, the spinning mills of New England produced nearly 75 percent of the nation’s cloth, including the rough-textured mix of wool and cotton called negro cloth that plantation owners bought to clothe their slaves.
Even on the eve of war, New York’s officials turned a blind eye to the slave traders heading out from New York City to Africa. On December 1, 1860, within three weeks of South Carolina seceding from the Union, the New York Times listed eight different ships that had been seized in the port of New York on suspicion of being bound for a slave voyage. All the ships would be released by the court to their owners.
As war became inevitable, some cracks began to show in the North’s wall of resistance on dealing with its own slave trade issues. On December 26, 1860, Judge David A. Smalley convened a grand jury in New York in the same Southern District that was home to judges Betts and Nelson, the two judges known to be lenient with slave ship outfitters, captains, and owners.
Smalley apparently did not consult with his fellow judges because he charged the jurors that it was their duty to “investigate infractions of the laws for the suppression of the slave trade.”
Later in the charge, Smalley told the jurors:
That the laws for the suppression of the Slave trade have been often grossly violated in this port, and in other places within the Federal Courts in this District, is a fact too notorious to admit of dispute or question. That this unchristian [sic] and inhumane traffic has greatly increased within the last few years, and is still increasing, and that principally from vessels fitted in and cleared from this port, does not admit of a doubt…. It has at home and abroad, become a stigma and reproach upon this, the great commercial and maritime metropolis of the Western Continent, that this has been permitted. The laws against it are sufficiently plain, explicit and severe to put a speedy end to it, if vigorously and vigilantly enforced.
The next day, the New York Times reacted with:
Such an announcement as this, and from such a source, cannot fail to cause a wholesome terror amongst those commercial houses whose names are invariably found connected, in some mysterious manner, with the fitting out and clearance of vessels subsequently arrested in the Slave-trade, or known to be burned on the coast of Cuba, after having made a successful voyage…. If we understand Judge Smalley rightly, he means not to rest satisfied with the trial and punishment of the poor, ignorant seamen who are actually engaged on board the slave-ships; but will also do his utmost, within the limits of his office, toward directing the attention and action of the Grand Jury against the millionaires and wealthy merchants who have accumulated, and are still trying to increase their fortunes in this unholy business.
Smalley’s grand jury was apparently dissolved early in 1861 without rendering any opinions. The judge’s name, though praised so highly by the New York Times’ editors, does not appear in the newspaper’s columns after March 1861.
One explanation for why Smalley’s bold charge to his grand jury never resulted in any bolder indictments may be that New York City’s mayor might have stepped into the breach. The South had many powerful political friends in the North in the nineteenth century, but none of them were as bold as Mayor Fernando Wood.
Had Wood had his way, New York City would have left the Union just after South Carolina and maybe even before Mississippi and Florida, the second and third states to secede from the Union.
Born in Philadelphia in 1812, Wood moved to New York City at nineteen years old and found work as a salesman and bartender. Tall and handsome and anxious to get involved with the local political bosses, he soon gained the attention of Tammany Hall’s political machine. He rose so quickly that other Tammany Hall Democrats disliked him as a rival. Another future mayor, sugar merchant William F. Havemeyer, said that Wood was “without character or consequence, yet shrewd & Subtle, a cunning politician.”
In 1841, Wood was elected to the U.S. Congress but served only two years. He came back in 1854 to be elected mayor of the city with the help of the working classes and new immigrants who recognized that he did not come from money.
Even though he fell out of favor with the Tammany Hall machine, Wood was reelected in 1857. His term was marred by the constant clashing of two different police forces, the New York Municipal Police (which had been authorized by the New York State legislature) and the Metropolitan Police (who were aligned with Wood). The two police forces often fought each other in open riots, much to the glee of the street criminals and the gangs who took the opportunity to steal from citizens while the police force was in disarray.
Wood was out of office for one term and then returned to run for mayor in 1859 for a two-year term running from 1860 to 1862. He ran on a platform of standing up for the working class and for accommodation with the South. That second campaign plank pleased the merchants.
“The South is our best customer. She pays the best prices and pays promptly,” Wood said at one campaign rally. He easily won, the first man in New York history to serve two nonconsecutive terms as mayor.
Starting almost as soon as he was inaugurated early in 1860, Wood plunged himself into national politics by giving speeches around the Northeast calling for the nation to elect Democrats because the election of a Republican president in 1860 would lead to disunion. He tried to appeal to the average voter by warning them that freeing the slaves would mean blacks would compete for their jobs. His speeches so pleased Southern power brokers that they began to mention his name as a potential vice president. That Wood dream, however, ended when the Democratic Party split into Northern and Southern factions and put up two different presidential candidates. Taking advantage of the split vote, Abraham Lincoln was elected in November 1860.
Still convinced that states rights were preferable over national power and still convinced that abolitionists were pushing the nation closer to war, perhaps being pushed by the city’s merchants, Wood kept his Southern sympathies.
On January 6, 1861, three weeks after South Carolina had seceded from the Union, but before all the other ten states that would eventually make up the Confederacy had even voted themselves out of the Union, Wood launched into a lengthy speech to the Common Council on the state of the city. Within the first few paragraphs, Wood addressed the national crisis.
“It would seem that a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable” was the opening line of the second paragraph. Wood then went on to say that if a separation of states did occur, “momentous considerations will be presented to the corporate authorities of this city. We must