The Forgotten History of New York: The Slave Trade and the Making of American Politics
Most people think of New York City as part of the liberal northeast, a region of the United States defined by its espousal of leftist politics. This myth is not without its truth. During the nineteenth century, for example, the city was one of several prominent centers of the abolitionist movement. Abolitionists held that slavery was a fundamentally corrupt institution, and sought to bring it to an end by various and sometimes risky means, including political lobbying, holding anti-slavery gatherings, and harboring and abetting enslaved fugitives. Runaway slaves often found haven in New York homes upon fleeing the South. New Yorkers helped formerly enslaved people find jobs, escape slave catchers, and share their stories.
But historically, New York hasn’t been as liberal as it’s cracked up to be. Less people know that New York was also a prominent hub of the Atlantic slave trade. As early as 1896, in a book called The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, black historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois noted that during the decade of 1850 to 1860, New York became the global center for illegal international traffic in human chattel.
The Atlantic slave trade was formally abolished by the United States Congress in 1808. But for many people, including slave traders, kidnappers, ship captains, venture capitalists, financiers, plantation owners, small farmers, and others, the end of the slave trade meant financial loss. The expansion of Northern industry had been accomplished through the exploitation of enslaved labor in the South. Southerners had learned to rely on the constant resupply of enslaved labor to produce commodities that garnered high prices on the international market, such as tobacco, sugar, and cotton.
The abolition of the slave trade led to a split at the national level between political and economic forces. The legal and political suppression of the slave trade proceeded on moral grounds at the same time many people kept it going for economic reasons. Du Bois argues in his book that slave owners often found it more profitable “to work a slave to death in a few years, and buy a new one” than to require less work and keep the enslaved person alive longer. The economy, in other words, was defined by the ongoing need for black labor. What resulted was the flourishing of an illegal trade in slaves to such an extent that Du Bois says it could be called a “re-opening” of the transatlantic exchange in human chattel.
Of course, it should not be forgotten that it was completely legal to buy and sell slaves internally, within the United States, and that with the slave trade’s abolition, masters increasingly turned to enslaved reproduction as a means of renewing their labor force. Feminist scholars like Angela Davis, Deborah Gray White, Alys Weinbaum, Jennifer Morgan, and Sasha Turner have masterfully documented the ways in which enslaved women were considered “breeders,” valued and exploited for their capacity to bear children. Du Bois himself knew of this strategy and wrote in Black Reconstruction (1935) that where the importation of enslaved labor was not possible, “it paid to conserve the slave and let him multiply.”
But the point I want to emphasize here is that when we think about New York, we often forget a part of its history that is just as important yet not so popular as its involvement in abolition and its purportedly progressive political stance. In the middle of the nineteenth century, while some New Yorkers were hiding fugitives, others were building slave ships, brokering deals with traders on African coasts, and selling newly imported Africans to South Carolina, New Orleans, Cuba, and Brazil.
A writer for the inaugural issue of the Continental Monthly, a national, anti-slavery magazine published in New York during the Civil War, summarized the situation like this:
“The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.”
A key observation in this passage is that the capital extracted from the illegal slave trade constituted a large portion of political funding in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only did the buying and selling of Africans help build New York and make it wealthy, it also played a significant role in politics. It comes as no surprise that slave dealers did not fit the stereotype of the abolitionist New Yorker, but when we realize that many New Yorkers were slave dealers who invested money in proslavery candidates and causes, the realization should make us rethink the popular narrative of the liberal northeast.
When Du Bois writes in Black Reconstruction that the kernel of the problem with US democracy is that it is founded on the “exploitation of the dark proletariat” he refers not just to the contradiction between American promises of liberty for all and the reality of exploitation and dispossession for millions on the basis of race. He captures too, what we might see in a more concrete way, as the connection between the economic and the political, the ways in which capital, however gained, determines who has the power to make laws and occupy positions of political authority. He asks us, in a perhaps indirect way, to reconsider the celebratory narrative we have of the history of New York liberal politics.
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