NYT, Dec. 20, 2020
Enslaved, Terrorized, Disenfranchised: Black Americans Still Found Ways
to Change America
By Kerri Greenidge
Nov. 16, 2020
SOUTH TO FREEDOM
Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War
By Alice L. Baumgartner
THE KIDNAPPING CLUB
Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
By Jonathan Daniel Wells
One night in May 1861, mere weeks after the Confederate attack on Fort
Sumter, S.C., three enslaved men rowed a skiff across the James River in
Virginia toward Fort Monroe, a military post near the mouth of
Chesapeake Bay. The men — Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James
Townsend — were field hands, forced by the Confederacy to build an
artillery emplacement at Sewell’s Point. As they worked, the blue flag
of the 115th Virginia Military blew in the wind above them, its motto an
ironic appropriation of another Virginia slaveholder’s dramatic call,
“Give me liberty or give me death.”
After learning that the rebel colonel Charles Mallory planned to send
them further south, away from family and kin, to build additional
fortifications in North Carolina, the men decided to flee. Fort Monroe,
the last federal military stronghold in Virginia, provided sanctuary,
but only after Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, the fort’s commander, met with
Colonel Mallory’s agent, who refused to denounce Mallory’s allegiance to
the Confederate States of America.
Butler, a conservative Democrat until South Carolina seceded from the
Union five months before, was no abolitionist. Nevertheless, he agreed
not to send Baker, Mallory and Townsend back to slavery under the
Fugitive Slave Act, which provided federal protection for “absconded”
property. Butler reasoned that, because Colonel Mallory intended to use
the men to support further insurrection against the United States, he
had the right to confiscate them and their labor in service to the Union
Army.
Historians have argued that Butler’s so-called contraband of war policy
did not concern itself with the Black men’s humanity. Regardless, the
actions taken by the three men — the fact that they compelled the
racially apathetic Butler to alter the Union Army’s fugitive slave
policy — changed the course of the Civil War. By engaging in what W. E.
B. Du Bois referred to as “the slaves’ general strike,” Baker, Mallory
and Townsend joined a defiant stream of enslaved migrants who used the
chaos and uncertainty of war to define freedom on their own terms.
These “contrabands,” like centuries of enslaved people before them,
challenged the pro-slavery federal government to confront the political
reality wrought by its peculiar institution. In response to Butler’s
decision, and the steady flow of fugitives flooding Union strongholds
across the South, Congress passed a series of Confiscation Acts that
effectively dismantled more than 200 years of slavery in North America.
Unwilling to wait for emancipation from a government built on their
degradation, enslaved people walked, rowed and ran to freedom.
The story of how Black people in a slaveholding society affected federal
policy by their movements, by their defiance and by their very existence
has been told before. But rarely has this story been told as
compassionately, or rendered as beautifully, as it is in two new books,
“South to Freedom” and “The Kidnapping Club,” by the historians Alice L.
Baumgartner and Jonathan Daniel Wells, respectively. Du Bois’s “Black
Reconstruction in America” (1935) acknowledged the radical effect that
enslaved people had on the Civil War and Reconstruction. And
20th-century Black scholars like John Hope Franklin showed enslaved
people as “rebels on the plantation” who challenged white America’s
notion of Southern bondage as, in the words of the award-winning scholar
Ulrich B. Phillips, “perhaps a chapel of ease.” Similarly, “A Nation
Under Our Feet,” Steven Hahn’s 2003 account of Black nation-building
during and immediately after the Civil War, forced historians to reckon
with the formerly enslaved as actors on their own behalf.
Baumgartner and Wells place the constant push of enslaved Black people
against the nation-state at the center of antebellum politics.
Significantly, both authors take the long tradition of Black resistance
as a given; their books are not studies of racial exceptionalism, but of
Black political agency as a persistent current. In “The Kidnapping
Club,” Wells shows how the “booming and prosperous metropolis” of
antebellum New York City profited from the rendition to the South of
escaped slaves who sought freedom in the North. In “South to Freedom,”
Baumgartner traces the journey of enslaved people to New Spain and
Mexico, even as white planters, emboldened by federal law, spread their
cotton kingdom west. Both books are masterfully researched, yet their
greatest contribution lies in the radical implications of their
respective theses: that 19th-century American politics were shaped as
much by Black resistance to enslavement as by the institution of slavery
itself.
When Baker, Mallory and Townsend rowed their stolen skiff across the
James River in 1861, nearly 90 percent of African-Americans were
enslaved, and most of the nearly quarter million who resided in Northern
“quasi freedom” were disenfranchised. Yet, as both Baumgartner and Wells
show, Black movement against the laws and institutions that enslaved
them affected American politics far more than any ballot cast or
Electoral College vote.
The United States’ early-19th-century border with New Spain — a vast
expanse of diverse climate and varying geography spreading from
present-day Florida to California and south through the Gulf Coast and
Yucatán Peninsula — was a particularly porous boundary between slavery
and freedom. Relying on Mexican and American archives, including
congressional records and letters from the period of the
Mexican-American War (1846-48), Baumgartner demonstrates how enslaved
people fled to Mexico, where they invoked the republic’s contested
antislavery laws to claim their freedom and, in doing so, contributed to
the political wrangling over slavery’s future in the United States.
New Spain provided legal protections for the fugitives, despite a long
history of African and Indigenous enslavement throughout the Spanish
empire. Siete Partidas, a 13th-century legal code that protected
enslaved people from mistreatment, was grounds for African-American
sanctuary in the face of slaveholding America’s most brutal forms of
control: branding, maiming, starvation. In the hands of a less
meticulous scholar, the notion that fugitive slaves invoked Siete
Partidas when they arrived in New Spain after fleeing the horrors of
Louisiana or Mississippi could come across as matter-of-fact. Yet there
is nothing matter-of-fact, Baumgartner argues, about the conflict
between white plantation owners, perpetually hungry for fresh cotton
land in the Southwest, and the antislavery laws of the Mexican republic.
To show this, she enlists the heartbreaking and carefully researched
stories of escaped slaves themselves.
In 1820, when Moses Austin, the owner of a lead mine near St. Louis,
petitioned Spanish authorities for permission to settle 300 Americans in
the New Spanish province of Téjas, he was accompanied, for part of his
journey, by a Louisiana slave owner, James Kirkham. Kirkham carried his
own petition to the provincial capital of San Antonio de Béxar for the
return of three enslaved people who had escaped from his plantation the
year before.
Other scholars have framed Austin’s journey as the starting point for
Anglo settlement in Téjas, a prelude to the supposedly exceptional story
of Austin’s more celebrated son, Stephen Fuller Austin, known as “the
Father of Texas,” who carried out his father’s mission, and to the two
decades of political conflict that led to the annexation of Texas by the
United States. But Baumgartner situates this first step in the incursion
into Mexico of norteamericanos within the 1819 escape of the enslaved
people: Martin, Fivi and Richard, from Kirkham’s plantation, and Samuel,
from a neighboring one, who together fled more than 100 miles west to
Nacogdoches. One of the fugitives had attempted escape before, and bore
the terrifying brand “R” (for runaway) on his cheek, a detail that
Baumgartner renders with the same novelistic flair that she does the
slaves’ harrowing journey on to Monterrey, 600 miles south, where the
military commander in Nacogdoches, reluctant to emancipate them himself,
sent them to plead their case before a judge. In Monterrey, they invoked
the Siete Partidas and were eventually freed.
Baumgartner’s placement of fugitive slaves at the center of this story
is not merely cosmetic. The fact that the commander in Nacogdoches
wrestled with whether to grant them freedom, despite the legal precedent
for doing so, shows how slavery, emancipation and empire were constantly
renegotiated based on enslaved people’s movements across geographical
and political boundaries. The commander’s hesitation arose from fear of
American reprisals: Spain had failed to stop the United States’ violent
incursions into Florida under the leadership of the future president
Andrew Jackson, who, in 1816, attacked the so-called Negro Fort on the
Apalachicola River. Like the rest of New Spain, Florida had long been a
refuge for enslaved Africans; Spanish law protected them at the Negro
Fort as surely as it shielded Kirkham’s slaves in Monterrey. But Jackson
and his soldiers, determined to remand the Negroes on the Apalachicola
River and subdue the Seminole Indians with whom they were allied,
continued to occupy Florida as the Spanish empire collapsed from
Venezuela to New Grenada.
Thus, Baumgartner argues, the four fugitives’ arrival in Nacogdoches,
and their successful petition for freedom in Monterrey, had a
significant effect on relations between the slaveholding United States
and what eventually became antislavery Mexico. James Kirkham returned to
Louisiana without his slaves, and Moses Austin died in Missouri soon
after he was granted permission to bring Anglo settlers to Téjas. Yet
his plan was eventually fulfilled by his son and other white Americans,
many of whom brought slaves with them, with the result that political
crisis characterized Mexican-American diplomacy every time Black people
crossed the border.
Baumgartner’s important conclusion is that we must reconceive the impact
of the supposedly powerless on the economically and politically
powerful: “We cannot understand the coming of the Civil War without
taking into account Mexico and the slaves who reached its soil,” she
writes. “‘American’ histories of slavery and sectional controversy are,
in fact, Mexican histories too.”
Constant resistance by the politically powerless against a white racial
establishment is a motif as well in Wells’s analysis of New York City’s
19th-century “kidnapping club.” His narrative dissects the tragic
effects of an organized group of local police officers, merchants and
Democratic politicians who supported Southern slave catchers unleashed
upon the city’s Black community by federal fugitive slave law. And yet,
much in the way that enslaved people crossing the Southern border
changed the political relationship between America and Mexico, Black New
Yorkers challenged the city’s pro-slavery ruling class by building their
own network — through the press, through Black abolitionist leaders and
under the protection of the newly formed New York Vigilance Committee.
The city’s economic expansion in the decades after the American
Revolution was made possible by Southern slaves and the hundreds of
thousands of cotton bales that they produced every year. Wall Street
financed cotton production, which bloated the coffers of textile mills
in New England and Britain; cotton plantations, in turn, relied on New
York City brokers, financiers and businesses. Insurance companies grew
rich protecting the Southern plantocracy’s slave investments, and banks
extended credit to plantations as they spread to the south and west. The
fact that America’s largest city was so intimately entwined with the
cotton kingdom meant that New York’s political class, controlled by
Democrats in Tammany Hall, used the press, law enforcement and elected
officials to appease Southern slaveholders rather than to protect its
Black residents. Gradual emancipation made New York a free state, but
Wells shows that white New Yorkers, like other whites across the North,
had a vested interest in preserving slavery through a lucrative
kidnapping industry.
The city’s so-called kidnapping club, established by two police officers
in the early 1830s, relied on the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause
to corral law firms, the city recorder and district court judges into a
sustained campaign against Black residents, who were abducted and sold
to slave catchers, whether or not they had previously been enslaved.
Readers familiar with “Twelve Years a Slave,” the film based on Solomon
Northup’s 1853 slave narrative, might recognize the horror of free Black
people forced into Southern enslavement in Wells’s harrowing account of
men and women abducted by police officers as they walked the crowded
streets of Lower Manhattan.
Yet one of Wells’s greatest contributions is his reminder that there
were many Solomon Northups, and that some of them were children. In
1834, 7-year-old Henry Scott was kidnapped from his desk at Manhattan’s
African Free School as his classmates and teacher looked on, one of many
scenes of racialized terror that Wells describes in detail. His larger
story, woven from court records, newspaper archives and historical
monographs, is particularly unsettling for what it reveals about the
deep roots of anti-Blackness in New York City’s law enforcement
divisions. “Part of the story we learn from the New York Kidnapping
Club,” Wells concludes, “is that the relationships between the Black
community and the police have long been fraught.”
Because the kidnapping club was “a microcosm of the much broader and
more widespread disregard for Black lives that pervaded the city,”
militant Black resistance, rather than white evangelical philanthropy,
defined New York City’s antislavery politics in the decades before the
Civil War, even as the club’s collusion with Southern slaveholders
shaped the state’s conservative Unionism during the war. Wells’s
protagonist, the Black abolitionist David Ruggles, helped to found the
city’s Vigilance Committee to protect Black citizens from police
officers acting on the Southerners’ behalf. The book’s first chapter
opens with Ruggles returning to Manhattan by train from an abolitionist
meeting in Pittsburgh and provoking his white fellow passengers to think
about their complicity in Southern slavery. Ruggles coined the term
“kidnapping club” to describe what Wells calls “a true Goliath, a
potent, systemic enemy that believed Black bodies were cheap and
expendable.”
Black New Yorkers might have faced an insurmountable Goliath in the
white political establishment, but by challenging the kidnapping club in
court and on the streets, they were not entirely powerless.
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