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Vol. 71/No. 9      March 5, 2007

 
‘N.Y. Divided: Slavery and the Civil War’:
another informative exhibit on par with part 1
(In Review column)
 
BY DAN FEIN  
NEW YORK—Chattel slavery was ended in New York State in 1827. Passing that law, however, did not end New York City’s critical role in the system of slave labor in the South.

The New York Historical Society’s popular exhibit last year, “Slavery in New York,” documented the building of New York by slave labor up to 1827.

A follow-up exhibition, “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War,” covers the period from 1827 until the end of the U.S. Civil War. The current exhibit opened last November and lasts until September 3. It is every bit informative as part one.

For those who missed the first part, there are a few panels and an excellent video on the fourth floor of the Historical Society’s building (170 Central Park West, at 77th Street, in Manhattan) reviewing the previous exhibit.

Cotton was King for most, if not all, of the 19th century. The cotton gin was invented in the 1790s, mechanizing the separating of seeds from the cotton. The textile industry in England had mechanized spinning and weaving, and was the most important part of English industry. The industrial revolution was further advanced in Britain than anywhere else in the world.

How did the raw cotton, planted and harvested by slave labor in the South, get to England? Through New York. Finished goods were shipped from Europe to New York, the commercial center of the United States at the time. The return ships were filled with bales of cotton. New York merchants became middlemen between the planters in the South and the cloth-making mills of Britain and France.

The exhibit shows the Counting Houses in southern Manhattan, where five-story buildings were the offices of merchants, shippers, and maritime suppliers. Two of the primary destinations of the ships loaded with cotton were Liverpool, England, and Le Havre, France.

Plantation owners often visited New York to escape the heat. They were greeted as kin by New York’s commercial capitalists. They bought fancy imported goods not found in southern stores. They often brought their slaves. In New York at the time, slaves held longer than nine months were legally free. But many visiting southern whites stayed much longer, and the law was often overlooked.

A photo display and audio presentation through a telephone give the story of David Ruggles, a free Black who cofounded the Committee of Vigilance in 1835. The committee liberated visiting slaves and also tried to prevent kidnappers from capturing freed slaves off the streets of New York and taking them south to be sold.

There are a couple of displays on the pseudoscientific lectures and performances during the 1830s and ’40s stressing the inherent inferiority of non-white people.

Many abolitionist books, newspapers, and pamphlets circulated during this period are also on display. Examples include the first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, and William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.

The mass-circulation newspapers were filled with racist and pro-slavery ideology and denounced the abolitionists’ activity. A visual display gives numerous examples filled with racial epithets and threats.

The “Riots of 1834” display notes, “Across the North, many ‘gentlemen of property and standing’—lawyers, editors, merchants —responded furiously to the abolitionist campaign. Mob violence exploded in hundreds of cities and towns, targeting antislavery societies and black Americans.” In New York, on July 9, 1834, a mob attacked the homes of abolitionists and antislavery churches.

A weakness of the exhibit is the absence of information on the rise of the manufacturing capitalists in the North whose system was based on free labor. This put them at odds with the economic system in the South—plantations based on slave labor.

The use of steam power brought about the factory. More railroads made the distribution of commodities cheaper. In the decade or two before the Civil War manufacturing ceased to be an adjunct to merchant capitalism and large amounts of merchant capital were transferred into manufacturing. This put industrial capitalism in the north on a collision course with the southern slavocracy.

This was the source of a new political party, the Republicans, which represented industrial capitalists and Midwest farmers.

Up until the 1860 presidential election when Abraham Lincoln won on the Republican ticket (although he lost New York City), the slavocracy held control of the federal government through the Democratic Party.

The final section of the exhibit covers what’s known as the “Draft Riots” of 1863.

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. In January 1863, Lincoln implemented the Emancipation Proclamation and followed it with a plan to institute the military draft. The wealthy could buy their way out of the draft for $300.

The Daily News opposed abolishing slavery and the war effort of the North and printed articles to foster fear and prejudice, especially among the recent immigrants. The day before the four days of rioting, the Daily News said, “It is a strange perversion of the laws of self-preservation which would compel the white laborer to leave his family destitute and unprotected while he goes forth to free the negro, who, being free, will compete with him in labor.”

The first target of the rioters, many of whom were impoverished Irish immigrants, was the draft office. Another target was the wealthy—the Brooks building was ransacked; Brooks Brothers was one of the largest clothing manufacturers. Third, and not least, Blacks were targeted, including the torching of the Colored Orphan Asylum and the lynching of Abraham Franklin, an African American whose body was cut down and dragged through the streets. More than 100 Black women, children, and men were killed in the draft riots.

I found that, whatever the limitations, part two of the exhibit, just like the first part last year, provides much needed information absent by and large from the schoolbooks I’ve studied and many others.
 
 
Related articles:
Capitalism and slavery: a Marxist appraisal  
 
 
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