York Kidnapping News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

History is seldom neat. Two books, one on antebellum New York and the other on 1890s Kentucky, illustrate the tension, showing despicable behavior relieved by the stalwart courage of a few. New York had a long history of slavery (abolished beginning only in 1817) but also a thriving Black community as well. Yet because of its financing of southern cotton, much of the city was pro-southern, led by the Democratic Tammany Hall political machine....

New York had a long history of slavery (abolished beginning only in 1817) but also a thriving Black community as well. Yet because of its financing of southern cotton, much of the city was pro-southern, led by the Democratic Tammany Hall political machine. The US constitution included a clause on the return of fugitive slaves. In his new book, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War, Jonathan Daniel Wells quotes Harriet Jacobs describing New York in the 1830s as a “city of kidnappers” waiting to seize Black people, free or enslaved, and ...