The Kidnapping Club Wall Street Slavery And Resistance On The Eve Of The Civil War Jonathan Daniel Wells by Jonathan Daniel Wells B084MDYQ4W instant download after payment.

In a rapidly changing New York, two forces battled for the city's soul: the pro-slavery New Yorkers who kept the illegal slave trade alive & well, & the abolitionists fighting for freedom.

We often think of slavery as a southern phenomenon, far removed from the booming cities of the North. But even though slavery had been outlawed in Gotham by the 1830s, Black New Yorkers were not safe. Not only was the city built on the backs of slaves; it was essential in keeping slavery & the slave trade alive.

In The Kidnapping Club, historian Jonathan Daniel Wells tells the story of the powerful network of judges, lawyers, & police officers who circumvented anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free & fugitive African Americans. Nicknamed "The New York Kidnapping Club," the group had the tacit support of institutions from Wall Street to Tammany Hall whose wealth depended on the Southern slave & cotton trade. But a small cohort of abolitionists, including Black journalist David Ruggles, organized tirelessly for the rights of Black New Yorkers, often risking their lives in the process. 

Taking readers into the bustling streets and ports of America's great Northern metropolis, The Kidnapping Club is a dramatic account of the ties between slavery & capitalism, the deeply corrupt roots of policing, & the strength of Black activism.

Jonathan Daniel Wells is a social, cultural, & intellectual historian & a Professor of History in the Departments of Afroamerican & African Studies at the University of Michigan. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge. His published works include The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, Women Writers & Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South, & A House Divided: The Civil War & Nineteenth-Century America. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.