Flight to Freedom: Slavery Era Questions

• In the summer of 1832, a group of enslaved people in Norfolk, Virginia, risked their lives to escape slavery.
• Despite the quiet streets, they remained silent to avoid detection.
• The heavy, humid air, thick with the smell of salt water, amplified the importance of their silence.
• The slightest sound could cost them everything, as they would face severe consequences if caught.
• They had pretended to sleep after working in hot cotton fields since sunrise, conserving energy for their escape.
• The danger and excitement renewed their energy as they crept through the town's alleyways.
• Although history has obscured their personal details, their names are known: Ben, Caleb, Southey, Ann, George Carter, Joe, John Carter, Southard, James, Charles, Jack Cooley, Severn, Michael, Slack, Isaac, Ben, and Henry.

Escape to Freedom

• Their goal was to reach freedom, defying the laws of a country that demanded their enslavement.
• It likely was long after midnight when they approached the water, guided by the light of the midsummer moon.
• The outline of shops (cabinetmakers, printers, blacksmiths, etc) lined the streets.
• Every sound made them halt, attuned to danger.
• The prospect of escaping slavery fueled their courage, offering the hope of living without the threat of violence, working for themselves, and raising families free from control.
• Days before, Ben had spotted a thirty-foot whaleboat tied up along Norfolk's coast near the US Navy port.
• Ben had escaped before, but had been arrested as a runaway and was returned to slavery.
• The Fugitive Slave Clause required free states to return escaped slaves like Ben.
• The plan involved sailing north to New York, staying within sight of land but out of view of passing ships, navigating through islands and peninsulas.
• Virginia had recently passed a law expelling free Black residents.
• Some of those African Americans fled to New York, hoping for a welcoming community.

New York's Response

• New York's city government responded to the influx of refugees by devising new ways to keep Black Virginians out.
• Ben and his group, thinking discrimination in New York was better than bondage in Norfolk, risked everything to confiscate the whaleboat and head for Gotham.
• They landed on a small island off the southern tip of New Jersey within days.
• The group cautiously made its way to New York City with a combination of fear and excitement.
• They likely saw the city's loftiest structure, the two-hundred-foot-tall steeple of Trinity Church, and visitors would have first seen it as they entered the harbor.
• Trinity was known as the place George Washington and Alexander Hamilton had worshipped.
• Coming from Virginia, the fugitives would never have seen anything like Trinity or the crowded streets of New York City.
• By the time the group arrived, the city had emerged as an important port.
• The city already had major financial institutions grouped together on Wall Street.
• About 10 percent of the population was African American in the early 1800s.
• The city had several churches for people of African descent, a few Catholic churches (which would balloon in number during the next decade as a wave of Irish immigrants arrived), and about a dozen Baptist churches.
• In the same summer as the Virginia runaways disembarked from the whaleboat, the city was rocked by a deadly cholera outbreak.
• By the early 1830s New York was becoming a modern metropolis.

New York in the Early 1800s

• New York in the early 1800s was a mere town.
• After the Revolution, only twelve thousand people called the city home.
• Most structures in Lower Manhattan had been hastily built of wood.
• Little central planning went into the rapid growth of the town or its deepwater port, and so alongside the chaotic alleys that carved through Manhattan sat residential neighborhoods intermingled with artisan workshops and warehouses, taverns and teahouses, horse barns and hotels.
• Three ferries but no bridges provided links to Brooklyn, and the lack of clean water was a source of consternation.
• Most streets were muddy and unpaved.
• Gaslights were only beginning to be installed on major thoroughfares like Broadway.
• Omnibuses, horse-drawn carts, remained the main form of public transportation.
• Central Park, which wiped out the lively Black community known as Seneca Village, was two decades in the future.
• New York was still heavily and noticeably marked by a Dutch past that had dominated the first two centuries of European settlement in Manhattan.
• There were seventeen Van Winkles in the city directory in 1832.

Transformation of New York

• Over the next thirty years, until the Civil War broke out in 1861, New York underwent a dramatic transformation.
• It built skyscrapers, paved and lit its streets, connected via the telegraph, and became a financial titan equaling London.
• Railroads connected Lower Manhattan to Harlem.
• After a fire destroyed much it in 1835, the municipality embarked on a physical transformation.
• New marble and stone edifices were erected, including the columns of the New York Exchange.
• Croton Reservoir finally brought fresh water to homes and businesses.
• The wealthy began moving to the more bucolic areas north of Houston Street.
• Railcars replaced horse-drawn omnibuses, and city boosters turned newfound wealth into magnificent opera houses, theaters, and museums.
• New York was becoming an economic and political powerhouse.

Costs of Growth

• The city's growth had been built on the backs of southern slaves.
• Slave masters depended on New York insurance companies to protect their investments in bondage.
• As the dependence of Wall Street on slave-grown cotton became apparent, New York's rise to prominence harbored a somber and sinister side, one that rendered the city a dangerous place for vulnerable people, especially African Americans.
• The city seemed more interested in reassuring slaveholders than in protecting Black residents' basic human rights.
• The city's Black community faced seemingly insurmountable forces.
• African Americans were up against a pervasive racism that suffused the city's Democratic Party and its political machine based in Tammany Hall.
• The faced a police force that violated Black civil rights at every turn, Wall Street financiers, and a legal system that at best proved indifferent to the claims of Black folks.
• The federal government made it easy to ignore the calls for protecting Black civil rights.
• Conservative Democrats running the Tammany Hall political machine were happy to comply with the law.

Factors Against

• The explosion of Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine greatly empowered the Democratic Party.
• Leading Democrats told the Irish they were to blame for their economic and social ills, as African Americans hustled for jobs in the city's businesses and along the docks.
• At the other end of the economic ladder, support for Democratic policies could be found in the business community around the Stock Exchange.
• Wall Street was shorthand for everything about the business/financial world.
• The exchange was still in its infancy in the early 1800s, and Wall Street was an open-air market and a shorthand for the nascent business world of antebellum Manhattan.
• Even before the Civil War, Wall Street stood for the dramatic expansion of banking and credit systems, the vast and lucrative cotton trade with the South, the humming wharves along the southern shores of Manhattan, and the thousands of merchants whose shops sold everything from apples and silk garments to furniture and sewing machines.
• New York was the most potent proslavery and pro-South city north of the Mason-Dixon Line, due in large part to the lucrative trade between Manhattan banks and insurance companies and the slaveholders of the cotton South.
• The city council, the board of aldermen, the mayor, the police department, the legal system, and other city agencies seldom acted without consulting the business community.
• Mentioning the abolition of slavery earned the scorn of those on Wall Street and in the Democratic Party.
• Wall Street and Democratic politicians could count on support in the city's newspapers.

Hostile Legal System

• The federal courts made it very difficult to prosecute slave traders who used the Port of New York to build ships designed for the illegal transatlantic slave trade.
• City police officers collected reward money for returning runaways, essentially serving as a patrol force for southern masters.
• The true extent of the kidnapping of African Americans is only now coming to light.
• A battle over the soul of New York was made, generating daily struggles that rocked Gotham in the decades before the war.
• Wealth and power did not go unchallenged and relentless African American activists risked their lives to protect human rights.
• David Ruggles fought back vigorously, leading a determined public.

The New York Kidnapping Club

• Ruggles labeled this enemy the New York Kidnapping Club.
• It was a powerful and far-reaching collection of police officers, political authorities, judges, lawyers, and slave traders who terrorized town citizens.
• The city's business community cheered on, so that peace with South remained intact.
• At the apex of the New York Kidnapping Club stood two police officers named Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash.
• Boudinot used the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause as a subterfuge.
• They were soon joined by powerful white men like City Recorder Richard Riker, judges on the federal bench like Samuel R. Betts, and lawyers like Fontaine H. Pettis and the legal firm of Beebe, Dean, and Donohue.
• Ruggles battled them so much and so often over Black civil rights that his health began to fail.

Summary

• Such close proximity meant that the battle for the future of New York was destined to be a huge crisis.
• The summer of 1832 may have seemed a distant and minor event.
• The effects would be far-reaching. That had happened helped to create the New York Kidnapping Club, but also rendered freedom highly precarious for Black residents all the way to the Civil War.
• The desire to be able to work, love, and raise children to free themselves from the violent scourge of slaveholding, would shake the foundations of liberty.
• The story of New York during that period, is about a metropolis proved tragically indifferent.