The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells Frank Towers (bio) The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War. Jonathan Daniel Wells. New York: Bold Type Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1568587523. 368 pp., cloth, $30.00. In recent years, historians have produced a wave of studies on the kidnapping and reenslavement of African Americans before the Civil War. Richard Bell, Erica Dunbar, Caleb McDaniel, Adam Rothman, and Joshua Rothman among others have shed light on the cruelty, pervasiveness, and legal complexity of kidnapping. They have also told stories of heroic resistance against the depraved pursuit of profit through stealing Northern Blacks from their homes to sell them in Southern slave markets. Adding to this scholarship, Jonathan Wells’s gripping history of kidnapping in 1830s New York exposes the proslavery underbelly of America’s largest city. At its core, The Kidnapping Club is a story of the battle for freedom in the ante-bellum North, a section that despite its ban on slavery denied African Americans basic civil liberties. Led by “the indomitable” Black activist David Ruggles, Black New Yorkers waged a long struggle against kidnappers and their powerful allies in local government. Wells argues that white New York’s complicity in kidnapping went beyond a few corrupt cops and judges. Wall Street financiers facilitated kidnapping to appease Southern slave owners, whose cotton comprised one of the most valuable commodities traded through New York. Because of this obeisance to the South, “it sometimes seemed that the entire city, knowing that its richness and supremacy depended on Southern slavery, was more interested in reassuring slaveholders than in protecting the basic human rights of its Black residents” (5). The Kidnapping Club begins by backgrounding the growth of New York as a gathering place for African Americans as well as the center of American finance and commerce, which drew much of its capital from trading slave-produced cotton. Black New Yorkers lived under a system of “strict racial segregation” that affected “nearly every aspect” of their lives (27). To thrive in a city that tried to [End Page 106] suppress them, they built their own businesses and institutions such as schools, churches, orphanages, and newspapers such as Freedom’s Journal, which exposed racial injustices. Preying on this growing community was a ring of kidnappers whose key players included police marshal and notorious Democratic Party brawler Isaiah Rynders, who worked with Southern slave traders to identify suspected fugitives; police officers Tobias Boudinot and Daniel Nash, who arrested suspected freedom seekers from the South; and City Recorder Richard Riker, who routinely ruled in favor of slave catchers in cases of alleged fugitives. These officials abused their authority by condemning Black defendants to enslavement despite compelling evidence to the contrary brought by Ruggles and his allies. The kidnappers had close ties to Tammany Hall—the informal name for the city’s branch of the Democratic Party—which relied on patronage from Wall Street businessmen to fund its campaigns. Helping Southern slave traders not only earned these men cash bribes and bounties, it also “cemented the economic relationship between cotton growers and Manhattan brokers” (45). To combat these powerful foes, Ruggles worked with other abolitionists to organize the New York Committee of Vigilance in 1835. The committee spread word when slave catchers were in town, gave sanctuary for freedom seekers, provided legal defense for accused fugitives, and waged a public pressure campaign against the kidnappers. Leading these efforts, Ruggles routinely risked his personal safety to confront police and rescue victims. This outspoken leadership made Ruggles a target of the kidnappers who physically assaulted him and tried to frame him for a crime. Meanwhile, Ruggles’s combativeness made him enemies within the Committee of Vigilance. Losing his eyesight and exhausted by fighting friends as well as foes, Ruggles left New York in 1841. Around this time, the kidnapping club went into decline. An 1840 law requiring jury trials in fugitive cases took away corrupt judges’ power to convict. Two years later, Riker died and Boudinot declared bankruptcy. Instead of ending the story at this point, Wells moves to the...