Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [686]
One merchant spelled out the implications to Samuel J. May, a prominent abolitionist: “Mr. May, we are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a great evil, a great wrong. But a great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under its sanction; and the business of the North, as well as of the South, has become adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and mechanics alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principles with us. It is a matter of business necessity,” he concluded: “We mean, sir, to put you abolitionists down, by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.”
May’s correspondent perhaps overstressed the cynicism of the prosouthern commitment. Many businessmen had close personal as well as commercial ties to southern planters and refused to stereotype them as barbarian slaveocrats. New York merchants vacationed with planters at Saratoga and other watering spots, intermarried with them, and, for all their official republican disapproval of aristocratic manners, were themselves often closet cavaliers. In October 1860, when the nineteen-year-old Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and a retinue of British peers paid the city a visit, the elite fell all over itself to do him honor. Shops closed down. Business was paralyzed. A huge crowd turned out to acclaim the procession of the resplendent prince and his party up Broadway (with the notable exception of Colonel Michael Corcoran’s Sixty-ninth Irish Regiment, which refused to join the line of march). At a grand ball next evening at the Academy of Music, a glittering crush of nabobs gathered to jostle and squeeze the royal person—so many that a section of the floor collapsed.
But interests remained fundamental to the alliance, including some quite nasty ones. From January of 1859 to August 1860, nearly one hundred vessels left New York harbor on slave trade business. Many had been built here, as shipbuilders hurt by the panic turned to the production of slavers. The profits could be enormous—$175,000 on a single voyage—as steamers could carry many more slaves than had the old sailing vessels.
While it was commonly held that some of biggest merchants in the city were in the trade, it was hard to pin this down. Merchants were unwilling to admit to their own participation in the illegal trade. Transactions were carried out through Cuban gobetweens, and captains used Spanish or Portuguese crews. But merchants were not reticent when it came to opposing all efforts—such as Seward’s in the Senate—to get more effective control over the trade. At the annual meeting (in May 1860) of so pious an organization as the American Tract Society, Daniel Lord and Hiram Ketchum led a large group of merchants in shouting down a resolution condemning the slave trade. And the Day-Book was indignantly amazed that anyone could find fault “simply because somebody takes a few niggers from the jungles of Africa to Cuba.”
Given this matrix of interest and ideology, most New York City merchants worked through the decade to banish the slavery issue from politics. The Kansas controversy did provoke a temporary outcry, in large measure because it seemed southerners were not keeping faith with the sectional truce, but for most the militancy didn’t last. The rise of the Republican Party seemed a far deadlier