From a prize-winning historian, the story of the powerful men who kept the illegal slave trade alive and well in antebellum New York City -- showing how slavery and corruption built modern New York.

Although slavery was outlawed in the northern states in 1827, the illegal slave trade continued in the one place modern readers would least expect, the streets and ports of America's great northern metropolis: New York City.

In The Kidnapping Club, historian Jonathan Daniel Wells takes readers to a rapidly changing city rife with contradiction, where social hierarchy clashed with a rising middle class, Black citizens jostled for an equal voice in politics and culture, and women of all races eagerly sought roles outside the home. It is during this time that the city witnessed an alarming trend: a number of free and fugitive Black men, women, and children were being kidnapped into slavery.

The group responsible, known as the Kidnapping Club, was a frighteningly effective network of judges, lawyers, police officers, and bankers who circumvented northern anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free Black Americans-selling them into markets in the South, South America, and the Caribbean, for vast sums of wealth. David Ruggles, a Black journalist and abolitionist, worked tirelessly to bring their injustices to light-risking his own freedom in the process and ultimately exposing the vast system of corruption that made New York City rich.

A searing and dramatic history, The Kidnapping Club upends the myth of an abolitionist North at odds with a slavery-loving South. It is a powerful and resonant account of the ties between slavery and capitalism, the deeply corrupt roots of policing in America, and the strength of Black activism.

 

You can order THE KIDNAPPING CLUB here:
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About Jonathan Daniel Wells

Jonathan Daniel Wells

Jon Wells is a social, cultural, and intellectual historian interested in the literary, cultural, and political evolution of nineteenth-century America. He is the author or editor of ten books and has been invited to present his work to audiences across the US and internationally. He delivered the 2017 Lamar Lectures at Mercer University on the coming of the Civil War.

Wells’s first book, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (UNC Press, 2004), examined the fluid movement of ideas, literature, and people back and forth across the Mason-Dixon Line, a previously unexplored facet of early America that facilitated the emergence of a professional and merchant class amidst slavery. This monograph, the first to challenge the notion that class divisions and capitalism defined the South only after slavery had been abolished, shifted a long-standing paradigm in the history of antebellum America. This interest in the relationship between slavery and capitalism has led Wells to a new and exciting book project on self-emancipated African Americans (and the slavecatchers who pursued them) who straddled the thin line between slavery and freedom in the antebellum North. Titled The New York Kidnapping Club, this new book will explore the complicated ways in which ideas about enslavement and freedom competed for public support in northern communities like New York, debates that profoundly shaped politics and culture in the North and the coming of the Civil War. Finally Wells is also the previous editor of The Journal of the Early Republic, and has served a range of colleges and universities in administrative capacities.

For the 2019-2020 academic year, Jon will be a visiting scholar at Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge in the UK.