Chapter V (a work in progress)
Profiteering from the Illegal African Slave Trade
Unsurprisingly, unscrupulous business practice on Wall Street has a history much
older than the current crisis; older even than the Great Depression (1929-1941) or the
Panics of 1907, 1857, and 1837. In fact, the wealth of the nation before the Civil War was
largely founded on profits garnered from the African slave trade, conducted legally or
otherwise between1808 and 1860.
After Appomattox, the assassination of the Great Emancipator was a harbinger of
devastation for the vanquished Confederate states, their utter destitution allowing for the
Northern industrial and banking sector to capitalize on their defeat. The North recouped
their losses from the end of an illegal African slave trade that they had principally
controlled, while forcing the beaten South to repay their pre-war debts with interest to the
North. The nature of these debts, and the manner in which Manhattan banks administered
credit lines to the South during a rising tide of abolitionist politics, leaves intriguing
questions about socio-economic factors that led the country to war.
The sabotage of the American Dream, collapsing Wall Street firms and the
consequential economic disaster now playing out around the world remind us of the same
blatant disregard for laws and human decency that marked the motivations of Manhattan
opportunists who launched business careers and generated tremendous capital provided
by the sale of illegally obtained and transported African slaves. Exactly how and why
Manhattan financiers were forced to abandon their interests in the ante-bellum South
remains a rarely discussed subject. The bullet-ridden body of assassin John Wilkes
1
Booth, and the hangman's victim John Brown both represent diametrically opposed
ideals, attenuated somewhat in the relieving breeze of a concluding war, still remain
seeds for the extremist opinions prevalent in racial politics today. Yet, overshadowing
this was a coterie of northern industrial capitalists that emerged immediately after the
Civil War--many had been contractors for the Union Army--and allied themselves with
Democrats and Republicans conciliatory towards the former Confederacy (most of the
Manhattan capitalists who went on to become Tammany cohorts, ore and mineral
kingpins, and railroad barons disapproved of the Radical Republicans and their politics of
punishment). Together these elements forged the keystone for American capitalism after
the war, a moment in U.S. history just as significant as Emancipation.
(Curti, 1926; Dunning, 1910)
A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bear Stearns, etc., are
vilified household names nowadays. Partisan rage and indignation shriek from today’s
headlines over these financial companies’ disastrous business models and how they led
the world economy into a downward spiral, often fatal for those on the lower rungs of the
social ladder. The culture of exploitation created by these companies has its roots in the
early 19th century and Wall Street was its focal point. A direct ancestor company of AIG
once issued premiums to over two hundred Southern slaveholders who had bought
insurance on their African slaves, policies that compensated plantation owners for
runaways and accidental deaths. J.P. Morgan Chase predecessor banks were behind a
consortium that raised money for lobbyists to prolong slavery. Brown Brothers and
Harriman lent millions of dollars to Southern planters and brokered slave-grown cotton in
turn earning commissions for arranging cotton shipments from Southern ports to New
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England mills. The company also repossessed Southern plantations in arrears, using their
own agents to manage the slaves working there. Both what we call Lehman Brothers and
today’s Citigroup had their not-so-humble origins in procuring slaves for the trades they
were invested in; principally cotton and sugar. Manhattan clothing factories such as
Brooks Brothers, under contract with the former companies, mass-produced cheap
garments--coarse canvas one-pieces dubbed “Negro Cloth”--and horse-hide shoes for
plantation slaves. Wares for the slaves often traveled to Southern ports and to Cuba on
private subsidiary fleets owned by cotton and sugar shipping merchants in Manhattan. All
of these institutions were and remain based in the Wall Street financial district of
Manhattan.
(Singer, pp 89-98, 2008; Farmer-Paellman, pp. 7, 76-77, 2003/2004; Cade, pg 298. 1935)
While today’s corporate villains are thrust into the media glare, the upper-crust
New York businessmen from yesteryear who enabled and encouraged the slave trade
after it became a federal crime in 1808, are inscrutable. A rogue’s gallery of bow-tied,
top-hatted, frock-coated Northern aristocrats from the past--staring safely indistinct out of
commissioned paintings or caught in the blurred infancy of slow-exposed photography-have left financial legacies of enormous socio-economic consequence for survivors of the
American empire now cast adrift on a sea of geo-political failure. It has been posited by
historians such as Eric Eustace Williams, prompted by Marx, that the institution of
African slavery produced the capital to finance England's Industrial Revolution at the end
18th century. The Caribbean coffee and sugar trades provided the impetus. Since then, the
bulwarks of 21st century capitalism have been wrought upon this Hobbesian frame, a
rusty Leviathan exemplified by behemoth banking institutions amassing tremendous
3
wealth by way of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the five decades before the
American Civil War.
The culprits remain stubbornly aloof from their ancestral crimes because
successive generations of historians have argued against the existence of any significant
illegal slave importation into the Southern states. In recent years it is becoming more
accepted that illegal slave trafficking occurred between 1808 and the Civil War, and that
Americans were deeply involved. However, linking that trade to the unexampled
population of African slaves in the American South seems to be a feat of sacrilege few
are willing to undertake. A tradition of professional concealment allows for a number of
convenient national mythologies to persist in the dialogue of mainstream America:
slavery was essentially a southern problem, emancipation was at the forefront of
Northern priorities, and the incredible population boom of African-Americans before the
Civil War was due to exceptionally prolific birth rates, often but not exclusively ascribed
to the kindness and benevolence of their masters. Explaining the unprecedented
proliferation of slaves in the U.S. with the latter thesis is a fallacy in dire need of remedy,
the correction of which promises to deconstruct other myths.
The illegal nature of slave trafficking in the 19th century obviously deprives
historians of direct evidence. Yet, details of Northern control of the slave trade have
emerged in fine contrast to the hazy moral heroism diffused by the Emancipation
Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Depending on political and
academic fealty, those who set the course of post-bellum historiography have consistently
whittled down the role of American slave traffickers in assessing the African-American
population explosion in the fifty years leading up to the Civil War. Historians and
4
professors at Yankee-endowed Ivy League universities, writing after Reconstruction,
commiserated with the South about the evils of that era while reinforcing the popularly
held belief that African-Americans were inferior and unworthy of their new found
freedoms. Control over historiography practiced by these self-same Northern academic
authorities, was sanctioned by publishing houses in New England and New York, whose
awareness of their owners and clients’ culpability resulted in a convenient ignorance of
the illegal slave trade into the United States from Cuba. In other words, aside from
thoroughly researched publications by W.E.B. DuBois that clearly illustrate the existence
of an illegal slave trade, there were few if any academics willing to support evidence of
the fact until the latter half of the twentieth century. (Macpherson, 2008; Brown, 2006)
Barring staunch anti-slavery advocacy on the part of John Adams Sr. and Jr., and
the abstention of both the Whig Millard Fillmore (himself virtually a slave as a child) and
Franklin Pierce (a Yankee born after slavery had been abolished in the New England
states), all U.S. presidents from Washington to James Buchanan were slave-owners
sometimes engaged directly, though peripherally, in the slave trade to some degree.
Abraham Lincoln does not solidly represent a clean break with the presidential slaveholding tradition, as his successors were also former slave-owners, former Union General
Ulysses S. Grant included. Political subterfuge propped up by a slave-holding federal
government -a “slavocracy” as Charles Beard termed it- obscured a matrix of slavery that
became the true combustible engine driving the American Industrial Revolution
beginning in earnest during the 1820’s. While textile mills sprang up on New England
riverbanks, endless bales of slave-picked cotton flowed northward (well over a billion
pounds from1802 to1860), setting a pattern that established the U.S. as a provider for
5
over half the world’s cotton by the 1850’s. In these years the American monopoly on the
cotton trade faced growing competition from planters in Egypt, Brazil, and the East
Indies. Faced with a shortage of African slaves and an emerging influx of white
immigrant free laborers, Southern planters and Northern financiers spurred on their slave
trafficking operations with renewed vigor.
(Wish, pg 572, 1941; Farrow, et al., 2004)
A bureaucracy that descended varyingly from the President, his cabinet, members
of Congress, Navy officials, judges, sheriffs, law firms, consular and customs officials,
trickling down to warehouse and dockworkers; all hid their connivance in trafficking
slaves from West Africa, mostly to Cuba where they were “broken” and “seasoned” to
serve as cane laborers on the island or be re-exported into the plantation states along our
Gulf Coast (slaver captains and elements of piracy also involved in the trade often times
bypassed Cuba and imported the slaves directly to the U.S.). This network of bribery
conducted by informal agents within the slave trafficking bureaucracy was shielded from
incrimination.
A prestigious Wall Street maritime law firm comprised of former judges, Beebe,
Dean and Donahue, consistently defended those apprehended for slave smuggling and
almost without exception won their cases from 1848 until the start of the war. Out of one
hundred twenty-three arraignments for slave trafficking brought before Manhattan courts,
only ten were convicted and sentenced. Of these ten, a few served light prison sentences
while most were fined and later pardoned. Only one man, Captain Nathaniel Gordon, was
executed for the crime in 1862. President Abraham Lincoln refused to pardon him after
dozens of appeals and some speculate the fate of the young ship captain resulted from
political expediency directed from a much larger platform than the one fitted with a
6
trapdoor from which Gordon fell through to his death. Even so, one man hung from the
neck until dead in lieu of a quarter million enslaved Africans seems a trite statement in
retrospect.
(Jaffe, 2005; Soodalter, 2006)
These valiant attorneys who so ably defended accused slave traffickers were also
legal representatives for the “Portuguese Company”, a cabal of Manhattan-based Spanish,
Portuguese, and Cuban businessmen directly involved in the management of slaving
expeditions. They were later dubbed the “Spanish Company” in the 1850’s, after the
former group’s ranks thinned since Portugal had bowed out of the transatlantic slave
trade in 1836. The group was directly linked with the Portuguese Consulate and
employed overseers in Angola for the transacting of captured Africans to ships headed
for Cuba. Affiliates of the Portuguese and Spanish Companies in Cuba, primarily in
Havana, corresponded with their offices in Manhattan for the brokering of ships and
hiring of captains for slaving enterprises. Native New Yorkers were an active component
of this criminal pantheon but local merchants preferred to conduct business under the
umbrella of the Portuguese and Spanish Companies as a legal technicality--often used by
the likes of Beebe, Dean, and Donahue, among others--protected the naturalized
merchants from prosecution because jurisdiction did not extend to them. New York
newspapers often printed articles about the shameless manner in which slave trade
commerce was openly conducted, but ultimately shied away from naming slave
merchants by name for fear of libel suits. Thus, their affairs remain shadowy even in the
full light of overwhelming incriminating evidence. However, documents from the 19th
century slave trade are still scattering down to us in ready supply, unearthed daily by
scholars, antiquarians, and historical enthusiasts throughout our vast media-fascinated
7
republic and the world. Census data, insurance claims, shipping inventories, bills of sale,
auction lists, newspaper advertisements, and personal correspondence continue to
disentangle the gnarled roots of historiography that serve to divorce mutual interests
between North and South in a time that saw a conterminous relationship between African
slave smuggling across the Atlantic to Cuba, and the explosion of American cotton
exports.
Records indicate at least fifty-six ships were purchased for the transport of slaves
in the South Street port of New York between 1857 and 1860. Over eighty-five ships
sailed from Manhattan ports to Africa between 1859 and 1860 alone. Several of these
vessels were apprehended with slave cargoes off our own coastlines: Virginia, the
Carolinas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Some crews were caught
in the act of attempting to disembark on shore with their human contraband. Others slaver
captains were more successful, building barracoons for corralled slaves that lay hidden in
the swamps and shoals of the Gulf Coast; the Florida territories were barely settled and
the Keys were centrally important for slave traffic from Cuba; the Bay of Mobile all the
way to Lake Ponchartrain was also scarcely populated except for a few intrepid
entrepreneurs--land speculators, cotton farmers, sugar planters, cattle ranchers, and slave
dealers. Almost a thousand miles of coastline lay bare for the surreptitious unloading of
Africans, many of who had been already accustomed to life on sugar plantations in Cuba.
The British Navy sometimes intercepted slave-ships, but only a fraction of these were
bothered by the ridiculously tiny fleet that represented an American naval presence off
the African Coast. Captains procured by merchants for slave expeditions felt little if any
8
compunction or fear of apprehension. In 1854, a Captain Driscoll reassured his mates
saying,
“[Y]ou don’t have to worry about facing trial in New York…Let the
cruisers take you if they will. I can get anyone off in New York for $1000. All you have
to do is to get some straw bail, and you’ll be free as birds.”
(Shufeldt, pg. 234,1861;Thomas, pg. 675, 1997)
An apparent unconcern for legal reprisal is clearly illustrated by the memoirs of
slave-ship Captain James Smith, who wrote with great enthusiasm about the potential of
the New York slave-trade market in 1859,
“New York is the chief port in the world for the Slave Trade. It is the
greatest place in the universe for it. Neither in Cuba, nor in the Brazils is it carried on so
extensively. Ships that convey Slaves to the West Indies and South America are fitted out
in New York…I can go down to South Street and go into a number of houses that help fit
out ships for the business.”
(Singer, pg 95, 2008)
However attractive the relationship appeared to be at the start, it was the
merchants of New York who eventually aggrandized themselves grossly at the expense of
both the African slave and the Southern planter. In fact, even with vociferous
abolitionism mounting, New York has escaped post-bellum judgment because of their
sudden rejection of political alliances with the South after Beauregard’s cannons boomed
across Charleston Harbor at Fort Sumter. Until then, Manhattan’s finance community had
been in constant uproar over the secession of Southern states, a great many of the city’s
merchants in sympathy for their cause.
In the decade leading up to war, a significant number of Manhattan-based
newspapers hostile to the abolitionism movement were widely distributed throughout the
city, parrying daily and weekly with the anti-slavery publications. At least twelve of these
pro-slavery papers, most conspicuously the New York Herald, New York Day Book, and
9
New York Journal of Commerce, were funded by liaisons of commercial interest in the
cotton and sugar trades, and by proxy the illegal slave trade. In the same time frame, New
England could only boast two or three pro-slavery newspapers, Washington D.C. had a
few, and Philadelphia only one. In the Northern states, only in Manhattan was support for
keeping slavery an institution so fervently broadcast in print.
(Perkins, pp 501-533, 1943)
As the clouds of war began to darken, it was not Southern military aggression that
was foremost in the thoughts of the merchants and bankers on Wall Street. Manhattan’s
banking elite realized too late that they had overestimated their relationship with
Southern planters. After South Carolina seceded from the Union in December of 1860,
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Virginia, and Tennessee
followed suit. By late spring of 1861, eminent Manhattan lobbyists for conciliation and
compromise with the South had not fully recognized the gravity of their dilemma until
the Confederate States of America washed their hands of any and all debts owed to the
North, especially to Manhattan. This was a loss of $200,000,000, adjusted in terms of
today’s Consumer Price Index rate at nearly fifty billion dollars. The situation seemed
near apocalyptic to financiers of markets dependent on slavery. Indeed, the sudden
stoppage of commerce in New York City was disastrous. In the seventy odd years since
signing the Constitution, New York merchants charging for shipping, storage, and
insurance, had pocketed at least 40 cents of every dollar of Southern cotton sold overseas.
A Wall Street panic ensued and was felt throughout the city in its shops, docks and
warehouses; an economic crisis of critical importance since the same lords of commerce
so previously committed to defending the South were now forced to cut their losses and
side with Lincoln’s Republicans in preserving the Union and destroying slavery once and
10
for all. This became a marriage of convenience for a few reasons of which the most
important in logistical terms was the Confederacy’s lack of a navy or sea-borne allies. A
blockade of Union Navy ships guaranteed a halt to the slave trade, an intolerable profit
loss.
(Singer, 2008)
Some thirty years before the war began, when the presence of Abolitionist
societies were making themselves heard in New York, a Manhattan merchant leveled
with New England anti-slavery figurehead Samuel J. May,
“Mr. May, we are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a great evil,
a great wrong. But…a great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under
its sanction; and the business of the North, as well as the South, has become adjusted to
it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and
mechanics of the city alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture
between the North and the South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates
endeavor to overthrow slavery.”
(Hirsch, pg.47, 1931)
It is clear where the finance community of New York stood before Southern
secession. In fact, in January of 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood, a progenitor of the
Tammany Machine and ardent proponent of slavery, advocated secession for the island of
Manhattan itself from the Union. The new free republic of Tri-Insula, consisting of
Staten, Long, and Manhattan Islands would have maintained their commercial alliances
with the South, ignoring the abolitionist ethics of Republican New England. New York’s
city council approved this measure, but it never saw a vote. Mayor Wood and the council
reluctantly retracted their position after the cannons fired on Fort Sumter three months
later.
(Hirsch, pg 472, 1931)
11
If history can possess the quality of elegy without the trappings of religion or
nationalism, it is because sometimes the synchronicity of events seems to enshrine human
dignity and confer an awareness of purpose to our existence. In this we may find a
transcendent ambition reminiscent of Hegel and Jung, a force of thought applicable to
what some might describe as striving towards a more decent humanity. Such dialectical
suggestion as applied to history invariably shines through a political lens through which
one’s vision is either overly rose-colored or so piercingly transparent that the reality of
the present moment entirely overwhelms the preponderance of historiography—erasing
our impartial distance from historical figures and events by the assumption that nothing
intrinsically has changed. Nonetheless, we find in 1791, that President James Madison
guaranteed individual rights, signing the Bill of Rights that officially recognize the first
ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Simultaneously, In England, Wilberforce
introduced the first anti-slavery measure in Parliament. Also in the same year, the only
successful slave rebellion known to history took place in the Caribbean. As Madison put
pen to paper and Wilberforce stood to speak, the Haitian Revolution, ignited by voodoo
priests, was erupting on the island of St. Domingue. The U.S. had traded with this French
colony after victory in the Revolutionary War resulted in closure of British-held
Caribbean ports to American ships. Napoleon’s failure to retake St. Dominigue in 1804 is
crucially important in the development of the transatlantic slave trade thereafter. The
island that became Haiti had been France’s colonial jewel of the Caribbean, generating
the largess of her sugar cane profits. Predictably, the 13-year war for Haitian
independence disrupted the sugar trade immensely. The island’s production trickled
down to nothing after 1804 and a later renewal never attained the numbers from before
12
the revolution. Sugar planters who fled from St. Domingue set their African slaves to
plowing new fields on the neighboring island of Cuba. In the lag period that followed,
Caribbean supply of sugar fell while rise in international demand surged. As the price of
sugar also rose, it became the dominant cash crop in the early part of the 19th century and
New York’s financial elite quickly profited not only from the crop itself, but also from
the slave trade that fueled the industry. Cuba would provide about 31% of the world’s
sugar needs until after the Civil War. Cuba became both a major exporter of sugar and a
re-exporter, through American ships, of African slaves to the American mainland.
(Deerr, 1950)
At this juncture, in 1807, the upswell of British abolitionism culminated in the
Wilberforce coalition’s victorious passage of the Slave Trade Act, affixed with the
signature of King George III. No small irony that the British King put the royal seal on
ending slavery while his upstart former subjects across the pond still owned slaves
despite the revolutionary claims of his former subjects for the “inalienable rights” of all.
Parliament had succeeded in abolishing the British slave trade. The professed altruism of
their auxiliaries in London and Liverpool must also have seemed ironic to 19th century
American merchants based in New York who had entangled the Southern states and Cuba
in credit debt; eerily reminiscent of British creditors who had done the same thing to the
18th century Fathers of the American Revolution, especially Washington and Jefferson. A
suspicion of moral paradox must have been felt by in 1776 by King George III, whose
pained analysis of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence likely provoked rolling eyes
in St. James Palace. Ultimately, the British left their American colonies alone, the
military supremacy of His Majesty’s empire humbled by Washington’s French-supported
Continental Army. The Crown was more worried about losing their sugar industries on
13
the Caribbean islands to the French or Spanish, and therefore put a stop to draining
resources on their American problem.
Early British attempts to stop the slave trade generated cynicism on the part of
their European rivals. Charges that the British Navy were merely thieving slaves from
their competition to install in their own Caribbean ventures were true to an extent at first,
but as time passed their motives warranted less credulity. As the British stepped up their
enforcement on the high seas, transatlantic shippers and merchants dealing in Southern
cotton and Caribbean sugar became steadily more anxious. Market unrest peaked in the
1850’s as demand for sugar was high, cotton was booming, but supply of African slaves
dwindled on account of increasingly vigilant British naval patrols apprehending slave
traffickers off the West African coast, in Caribbean ports and American harbors. Earlier
in the century, outrage in Washington D.C. over the issue of British boarding and
impressments was righteous enough, but it overshadowed the same intensity of
indignation caused by British meddling in the slave trade. Both situations were factors
that led to another war with Great Britain.
After the War of 1812, New York supplanted Boston and Philadelphia as the
wealthiest port city in the United States. During the war’s denouement, the embattled
cash-strapped former mother country unloaded its long-embargoed trade wares on
Manhattan docks at drastically lowered prices. Simultaneous improvements in the auction
system along with establishment of regular shipping service between New York and
Liverpool-dubbed the Black Ball Line- sent Manhattan smoothly sailing to the head of
the mercantile race. After the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, allowing for easier
access for goods to reach the American West, the South Street waterfront of Manhattan
14
became a Mecca for merchants and New York City’s dominance in the economy of the
nation, and later the world, was assured.
(Farrow,etal.,2004)
In the first two decades of the 19th century over half of the American export
market depended primarily on Southern produce: tobacco, rice, indigo and cotton.
Meanwhile, the sparsely populated territory of Louisiana only yielded barely one third of
America’s consumer need for sugar. While cotton later rose to become “King” of
American exports in the 1830’s, in the early part of the century sugar became the focus of
mercantile interdependence between the United States and Spanish Cuba. Manhattan’s
investment in Cuban sugar converged with a need to commandeer a distinct flow of slave
labor from the transatlantic slave trade to ensure a work force for the sugar plantations on
the island--and to further supply Southern plantation states with slaves--this in violation
of the 1808 law that prohibited any slave dealing except domestically within the United
States. Here a pattern of usury on the part of Manhattan creditors emerged both in Cuba
and the South. Imports to and exports from Cuba were transported almost exclusively on
American ships, an indication that U.S. interests on the island were thoroughly
entrenched. Northern cities amassed a steadily growing collection of textile mills, giant
spools and looms threading a river of fabric attended by mostly destitute Irish immigrant
girls in dark, fetid factories owned by New England cloth barons who were keen on
maintaining a locus of African slave labor essential for reaping bonanza profits from
agricultural goods grown in the Southern states and Cuba. The banker-merchants of early
19th century Manhattan weren’t slow in ensnaring both their Southern brethren and
Cuban planters alike in debt from short-term loans.
(Ely, pg.458, 1964)
15
A few years before assuming control of City Bank of New York in 1837, (then
failing after years of Jacksonian economic turbulence and an inflation crisis), an
impassive and prescient merchant named Moses Taylor cornered the Cuban sugar
exchange market and controlled over one fifth of its business to become one of
Manhattan’s first and greatest corporate luminaries. Taylor was a magnate of the first
order and pioneer of a new brand of capitalism that made 19th century New York City the
economic nucleus of the nation. He died in 1882, personally worth between forty and
fifty million dollars- a modest fortune than those later accrued by Rockefeller, Carnegie,
and Vanderbilt- but still one of the wealthiest men of the age. He was a self-styled
hardscrabble Horatio Alger type, diligently saving all his meager earnings, eventually
rising from obscurity to cut a fat wedge of the American pie for himself. This
disingenuous fable takes the spotlight off of Taylor’s illicit affairs and the responsibility
of New York City financiers in general for perpetuating the slave trade after 1807.
Taylor may have hid his silver spoon to humor himself in his old age but he was
even more skillfully adept at cloaking his transactions a half century earlier in 1832,
when he opened his own commission and shipping business between 44 South Street and
Havana, Cuba. 1832 was an auspicious year for American investors in the trade as
Caribbean-produced sugar prices bottomed out at about 23 shillings per 100lbs (dropping
from 49 shillings at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815). Spanish Cuba’s
involvement with Moses Taylor marked the beginning of American economic dominance
over the island,
“Without the merchant-bankers of Havana …very little sugar would have been
produced on the island… [t]heir credit lines provided the life-blood of the entire Cuban
sugar industry. Deprived of occasional large loans and annual advances against their
16
crops, few hacendados (planters) would have been able to obtain food and clothing for
their labor force or to purchase [their] Negro slaves in a rising market.”
(Deerr, pg. 531, 1950; Ely)
Through his intermediaries in Cuba, Moses Taylor corresponded regularly with
those engaged in the “illegal but highly profitable illegal slave trade”, and colluded with
the latter in “ploughing the proceeds into some of his more legitimate mercantile
activities, particularly financing crops for planters, which would have enabled [them] to
direct their produce to [Taylor].”
(Ely, pg. 469, 1964)
By 1895 Taylor’s City Bank had become the wealthiest in America and would
soon morph into the monolithic colossus of international finance now known as
Citigroup. At this writing Taylor’s Citigroup is the largest financial institution in world
history. The Obama Administration is pressuring Citigroup to alter mortage rates and renegotiate credit card agreements in favor of homeowners and debtors. Meanwhile a debtbesieged national treasury props up the bank with rapidly devaluing taxpayer money.
Since the Reagan years, the U.S. Congress, leeched by lobbyists and PACs, have aided
and abetted banking institutions in their predatory lending schemes by easing regulations
in market trading of financial products; a scene easily transferable to that of profit-hungry
19th century sugar and cotton merchants in Manhattan relying on their lobbyists in
Washington D.C to keep the machinery of slavery well-oiled.
New York City has a long history of slavery and of abetting the slave trade. The
Dutch were the first to open the transatlantic slave trade in America. It began in
Manhattan in 1626, seven years after Virginia’s accidental and minor influx of Angolan
captives stolen by British pirates from a Portuguese ship. Lower Manhattan was a hub for
slavery before Virginia and New England became slave markets. Proximity to the slave
17
trade, via Manhattan’s lucrative ports, proved integral to the city’s eventual overlordship
of American commerce. Wall Street gets its name from wooden pallisades constructed
by African slaves-per order of their Dutch overseers- for colonial defense against the
Iroquois tribes.
(Rein, 2006)
In 1664, a ship returning from the Congo docked in Manhattan with about 300
Africans captive in its hold. The presence of the Gideon complicated matters for Dutch
colony leader Petrus Stuyvesant, as disruption of maritime commerce caused by
encroaching British invasion forces prolonged detainment of the sick, starving Africans
onboard. Tensions occurred when Stuyvesant was faced with providing for the Africans
on the Gideon while struggling to ration the city’s food supply during the British siege.
The situation provoked a wary agreement among Dutch merchants concerned about the
volatility of their markets in an atmosphere of war. The well-to-do of New Amsterdam
cultivated docility towards their new British masters with expected obligation on the part
of the latter to respect the capital ventures of the former. Thus, the slave trade to New
York continued unabated until hostilities between the American colonies and Great
Britain began.
It may be recalled that New York, solely represented by the Federalist
Alexander Hamilton at the Philadelphia Convention (after his Anti-Federalist delegate
colleagues refused to participate), was home to an agitated popular controversy over
ratification of the Constitution. The economic implications for the abolition of slavery
were a major cause of dissension. Thus propaganda in the form of the Federalist Papers
began to appear in print to court public opinion. The economic advantages for
maintaining slavery were commandeered by Northern profiteers even before delegates at
18
the Philadelphia Convention agreed upon the tenets of the Constitution. At issue
specifically was a motion put forth by northern mercantile interests to tax exports, an
anathema to Southern planters who would see no profit from a tax that raised prices while
subsidizing Northern shipping costs. Georgia and the Carolinas had already been placated
by the 3/5ths Clause, designating the apportionment of slaves in the population for the
purpose of congressional representation in slave-holding states. To see this through,
Northern delegates forced a compromise that allowed them to impose navigation taxes in
exchange for the ability of the Lower South to continue legally importing slaves. This
right was extended until 1808, whereby Thomas Jefferson officially ended the
importation of African slaves, though half a century would lapse before it was actually
enforced.
Domestic slave trading was still legal of course, and both Jefferson and Madison’s
home state of Virginia hoped fervently to profit from it as the population of slaves there
exceeded the rest of the southern states. The recalcitrance of those who signed the
Constitution and their attitude towards slavery is remarkable in light of the seeming
economic anachronism posed by the existence of slavery at the time. It was not until the
invention of the cotton gin a few years later when the clamor for slaves would reach its
maximum volume. Thus, even while slavery seemed to be dying out, Northern profiteers
ably colluded with the minority of pro-slavery interests in the South to eke out a
compromise ignoring the consequence of any moral or ethical stain on the conscience of
a new nation.
Even after the British surrender at Yorktown, the city and state of New York
presented an anomaly compared to the rest of the North regarding slavery. In 1785, New
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York legislators quashed a measure calling for the gradual abolition of slaves, a decision
reached at a time when slaves had already been freed in all of the New England states,
except New Jersey. New York was home to the largest population of slaves in the North.
The abolition of slavery in New York began in 1799, but wasn’t completed until 1827.
Technically it was the greatest emancipation yet known, about 319,000 slaves, 6% of the
total population of New York. However, the Gradual Emancipation act only freed slaves
born after July 4th, 1799 and the stipulation of the law mandated a period of
apprenticeship for the children of slaves to their parents’ owners; males until the age of
28, females until 25. Therefore, the children of the enslaved, after laboring as an
“apprentice” through their most productive years, were to be freed in the distant future,
while their parents remained bound to their masters. This extended bondage fractured the
families of Africans and many slaves escaped to New England. While a few hundred
slaves negotiated the terms of their freedom with owners involved in manumission
societies and abolitionist groups, New York City had the distinction of maintaining a high
level of domestic slavery even when agrarian slavery in the countryside of New York was
very much on the wane. Only in 1817, did legislation pass that decreed freedom for
slaves born before July 4th, 1799, a final emancipation that took place a decade later in
1827. The landed gentry of New York retained their retinue of black servants on hand
well into the Civil War years and after.
(Rael, pp.114-133, 2005)
As the dignity of 19th century Manhattan aristocracy grew exponentially along
with their wealth, during the 1850’s the American political party system fractured over
the slavery issue. Whigs, Free-Soilers and Know Nothings gradually formed the
Republican Party, winning their first election in opposition to the Democrats in 1860. In
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the last decade of the ante-bellum era, a political movement at the other end of the
ideological spectrum, echoing the turbulent idealism of Revolutionary 1840’s Europe,
emerged in New York, sifted out from the coalition of Northern Copperhead Democrats
and Southern Secession Democrats. The political platform of the influential Young
America movement might today be recognized as a particularly virulent streak of neoconservatism. Young America began as an earnest literary vehicle helmed by John
O’Sullivan, inventor of the term “Manifest Destiny”, and whose editorship of the
Manhattan-based Democratic Review in the 1840’s introduced the writings of
Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman to new and larger audiences. Indeed, Young America
galvanized the political sensibilities of these authors. However, the literary aspirations of
Young America were corrupted by political activists who sought to use their influence to
militarily interfere in European conflagrations, annex Cuba, and defend slavery in the
South. Moses Taylor, August Belmont of the Rothschildes, and other vested interests in
plantation slavery were among the most important subscribers to the vision of Young
America and openly encouraged the circle of inflammatory writers who espoused the
cause (though Hawthorne and Melville had by the late 1840’s largely abandoned Young
America). This brash group of bankers and merchants were openly white-supremacist in
philosophy and strident expansionists in policy. Through their vehement oratory,
ideological publications, and subversive propaganda, Young America unwittingly
wrecked Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas’ chances in the 1852 presidential election
against Franklin Pierce. Douglas had been Young America’s chosen nominee and the
appointed savior of their plans for territorial aggrandizement in the American West, and
Cuba. A series of diplomatic disasters ensued after President Pierce appeased populist
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radicalism by installing Young America activists as ambassadors to Spain, France, and
England. Most of them were recalled after it was realized by the horrified governments of
Europe that these hot-headed reactionaries representing the United States were arming
republican revolts in their midst with smuggled caches of firearms intended for sale to
European revolutionaries that could afford them. Had their infantile ad hominem
outpourings in the Democratic Review been more contained, one of their most desired
aims may have been realized; the re-opening of the transatlantic slave trade to America.
Stephen Douglas, Democrat presidential candidate in 1852 and 1860, was an ardent
proponent for the annexation of Cuba, a prospect of great interest to Manhattan
merchants and bankers dependent on plantation slaves and the proceeds from cotton and
sugar sales. Abraham Lincoln denounced the hyper-capitalist influence of Young
America in an 1859 speech,
“Young America owns a large part of the world, by right of possessing it; and all
the rest by right of wanting it, and intending to have it. He is a great friend of humanity;
and his desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom.
He is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided,
always, they have land."
( Curtis, 1926; Foner, 2007)
We have demonstrated the primacy of New York’s role in controlling and
perpetuating the illegal slave trade. New York’s slave trafficking activity in the years
1808-1862 greatly eclipsed that of New England ports. Many slave-ships that embarked
from Manhattan actually succeeded in transporting African slaves directly to the
mainland of the United States. As we have already shown, the price of slaves in America
made these voyages extremely profitable. Even so, the illegal smuggling of slaves into
the Southern states was just one component of the slave-trafficking profit scheme. When
slaves were sold directly to Southern planters, who knowingly received these slaves as
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illegal contraband, the merchants of New York profited in other ways besides the price
tag on their human chattel; the supplemental labor provided by more slaves improved
cotton production, which invariably called for piling on more loans for the planter already
indebted to Manhattan creditors. The attention given to the emancipation of African
slaves, assuredly warranted, has nevertheless misaligned the causes of the Civil War, and
obscured the avarice of Manhattan merchants. From the same vantage point, will we
clearly see from a two hundred year distance the true factors that led us into the War On
Terror? Will the incorrigible fusion of corporate America on Wall Street with the
political establishment in Washington D.C. be as transparent then as the motives of 19th
century Manhattan financiers appear to us now?
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