in their homes. The city’s police force, under control of the mayor, did little to prevent the violence.
At the same time that New York’s public officials and politicians were struggling to deal with abolitionist organizing, Southerners were shrewdly instituting an informal public relations campaign to show Northerners that slavery was not as bad as they may have heard. The August 29, 1854, New York Times republished an article from the Mobile (Alabama) Tribune, supposedly written by a slave describing his recent trip to New York City with his master.
“In my strolls of three days in that city [New York], I saw more evidences of destitution—more ragged, half-clad, miserable, beggaredly looking people than in all of Virginia and Alabama. I met beggars and loafers at every corner and a cent is as gladly received by these poor creatures as a dollar would be by any servant in Mobile,” wrote the supposed slave. Even the Times did not question how a slave could write such a vivid description of the city when it was against the law in all Southern states to teach slaves to read and write.
Even those Northerners who had freed their own slaves decades earlier and who were now sympathetic to abolitionists had to admit to themselves that slavery still played a large role in the economy of their region.
The outfitting and home port docking of slave ships in New England and New York ports was openly practiced for more than fifty years after Congress officially abolished the slave trade in 1808. The only true change that slavers made to their routine after the supposed abolition of the American slave trade was to change their final ports of call from Southern ports to those in the Caribbean, principally Havana, Cuba. New York’s mayors, aldermen, police, marshals, state and federal prosecutors, and state and federal judges all knew which New York City–based ships were slavers. They just chose to ignore them.
Remarkably, even known criminals and gang leaders could wrangle appointments as U.S. Marshals who had the responsibility to enforce federal laws against slaving. Such was the case with Isaiah Rynders, a former leader of the Five Points street gang, who had a history of roughing up abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips when they came to visit New York’s abolitionist societies. In 1857, President James Buchanan appointed Rynders U.S. Marshal, the perfect position from which to continue to collect protection money and to ignore rumors of slave outfitting. Rynders employed his nephew as an assistant marshal. When the nephew was accused of taking a bribe of $1,000 to let a slaver leave port, he vigorously insisted that the accusation was wrong. The bribe was, in fact $1,500.
If the men entrusted with enforcing U.S. law in New York City were not inclined to stop slavers, neither was the U.S. judiciary. Of 125 slave traders tried for slave trading in the city’s courts from 1837 to 1861, just twenty were given prison sentences of two years, even though they had been caught with slaves in the holds of their ships on the open seas by the United States Navy. While the men in jail for two years might have considered that just punishment, federal law provided for the execution of slavers. The federal judiciary in New York City was not about to stop the slave trade.
In 1848, the crew of the ship Mary Ann, operating out of New York City, mutinied off the coast of Africa when they realized that their captain intended to take on a cargo of slaves rather than goods. The crew sailed the ship back to New York City, confident that they would be hailed as heroes for foiling at least one slaving voyage. They sued the ship’s owner for the weeks of wages that they had been promised for what they had been told would be a legitimate voyage.
The crew of the Mary Ann went before federal judge Samuel Rossiter Betts, who shared the Southern District of New York bench with Judge Samuel Nelson. Betts, who was often called the father of Admiralty Law and who one biography claims was never overruled on appeal, ruled that the crew of the Mary Ann were not entitled to the wages that they had expected for a legitimate voyage, and that “by absconding with the vessel and bringing her to the United States from the coast of Africa, they have been guilty of a violation of their duty to the ship and to the owner, and deprived themselves of all rightful claim to wages for any portion of the time they were connected to her.”
Instead of awarding the men wages from the owner, Betts ordered them to pay the slave ship owner for the costs of the unsuccessful voyage to Africa.
In another case the Catherine was boarded by suspicious U.S. Marshals in New York harbor before even reaching the Atlantic Ocean. Even though the Marshals found items on board that clearly demonstrated that it was intended to be a slave ship, such as a large cooking pot, a huge cistern of water, and hundreds of wooden spoons, Betts ruled that no outfitting could be considered suspicious unless a crew member was willing to testify once the ship was captured with slaves aboard that the outfitting was used in slaving.
For years the city’s newspaper editors were all well aware that the city’s politicians and its marshals and judges were allowing the slave trade to operate out of New York City. But these men were not crusading journalists. Perhaps out of fear for their lives, the newspaper editors only made vague protests about what they knew was happening.
“It is known that there are in this City several mercantile houses extensively engaged in the slave trade, and that half a dozen vessels have recently left this and other American ports, for the African Coast…. Our Authorities would do well to exercise more than ordinary vigilance in regard to vessels clearing for Cuban ports,” intoned the New York Times.
The next year the Times wrote:
This City and Baltimore are now, and have been for years, the great headquarters of the African Slave-trade. In the face of our laws, in defiance of our treaty stipulations and in contempt of armed cruisers and men-of-war, that piratical traffic is largely carried on by ships fitted out in American ports, and under the protection of the American flag. If the authorities plead that they cannot stop this, they simply confess their own imbecility. If they will not do it, the moral guilt they incur is scarcely less than that of the Slave-traders themselves.
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.
