Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [449]
Balked, southerners organized an economic campaign against Tappan’s firm—one of the first attempts to bankrupt a national business. Some called for a boycott of all New York City goods. Alarmed delegations from the Chamber of Commerce pleaded with Arthur to call off his campaign. “You demand that I shall cease my anti-slavery labors,” he responded fiercely, “I will be hungfirst!” Webb in the Courier and Enquirer seemed quite prepared to oblige him, demanding that “modern haberdashers of murderous negro tracts” be crushed like “reptilian eggs.”
By mid-August, excitement was so intense that the AASS barricaded its doors with inch-thick planks. The mayor of Brooklyn instituted sundown-to-sunup patrols in Arthur Tappan’s new neighborhood (he had moved across the East River after the riot of 1834). “I have not ventured into the city,” wrote abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. “‘Tis like the times of the French Revolution, when no man dare to trust his neighbors.”
The abolitionists were spared another dose of violence, for two reasons: city authorities wanted no repetition of the previous year’s lawlessness, and federal authorities intervened to quash the AASS outreach effort. Charleston’s postmaster had asked New York City’s postmaster, Samuel Gouveneur, to extract antislavery tracts from his southbound mail. Gouveneur agreed and informed the postmaster general that he planned to deny postal access to Tappan and his colleagues. The issue went up to Andrew Jackson, who informally authorized Gouveneur’s embargo on “offensive papers” and explicitly denounced the AASS in his Annual Message. For the moment, the abolitionists were stymied.
THE RAILROAD THAT RAN UNDERGROUND
The mercantile elite were not prepared to turn Arthur Tappan over to planter justice, no matter how much they despised his politics. But they did not yet contest the right of southern slaveocrats to reach into New York City itself when their intended targets had black skins.
Since emancipation, New York had become a haven for fugitive slaves—and slavehunters. Under the provisions of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, anyone claiming that a person residing in the North was a runaway from the South had only to appear before a local magistrate, personally or represented by counsel, and submit “proof” of ownership; an affidavit would do.
“Blackbirders”—stalkers who were not above seizing free blacks and shipping them into slavery—began prowling the city on a regular basis. Their only opposition consisted of sporadic and spontaneous riots by local African Americans. In 1819 forty blacks on Barclay Street tried and failed to rescue a man being taken by a slavecatcher and a city marshal to a Hudson River steamboat dock. In 1826 blacks bombarded a slavecatcher giving evidence at City Hall with bricks, sticks, and stones but were suppressed by the police and given severe sentences.
By the 1830s bounty hunting had become big business. One lawyer, F. H. Pettis, offered to search for and return runaway slaves for $250 a head. Blackbirders Elias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash ran an operation known as the New York Kidnapping Club, notorious for snapping up victims. Straight-out kidnapping was illegal, but if blackbirders brought a captive before City Recorder Riker and produced (paid) witnesses to swear he or she was a recent runaway, Riker usually authorized deportation.
With young girls being snatched on trips to the water pump, black parents began keeping their children off the streets after dark. Then, with white abolitionists on the defensive or concentrated on their national campaign, the city’s African Americans formally organized for their own protection. On November 20, 1835, David Ruggles led in setting up a New York Committee of Vigilance. Ruggles, a migrant from Norwich, Connecticut, had opened a bookshop and circulating library at 67 Lispenard