Book Review/Heather Seggel

Capitalism’s Strange Fruit

There are shocking stories throughout “The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War” (Bold Type Books). Historian Jonathan Daniel Wells describes an urban center reliant on Southern slave labor for its prosperity, so much so that kidnapping fugitive slaves was yet another form of big business. That dependency ran so deep that, as states began to secede from the Union, a tri-city portion of New York readied itself to secede from the state to ensure their financial future. The book offers new insight into the turbulent times that led to the Civil War, and some striking parallels to our current era.

Northern US states had outlawed slavery in 1827, but New York City’s bustling new industries provided cover for the kidnapping of men, women, and even young children, who were then sold into slavery in the American South, South America, and the Caribbean. The titular “Club” behind this illegal business was made up of judges, lawyers, police officers, and bankers, a network that could skirt the law because they also made and enforced it. Wells describes children under 10 years old being pulled from classrooms while fellow students cried; they often sat in adult jails waiting to either be rescued or shipped out. The cruelty was breathtaking and ghoulish.

A young Black journalist named David Ruggles worked to the point of exhaustion and ill health to draw attention to the cause. He risked lynching and kidnap himself, while trying to save others. His passion did succeed in bringing awareness to the cause, but he did not work well with others and alienated many potential allies; failing vision and overall health sent him into retirement as a relatively young man, and the activists, who stepped into the space he left, were better able to build coalitions and work together.

Wells relates this all in clear language that lets the horror speak for itself. A tendency to set up scenes to come with dramatic language (“The arrest … would rock the black community and scar the city for decades to come”), unfortunately oversells stories that keep coming one after the other; it has the unintended effect of blunting the impact of these atrocities in what is already a page-turner, albeit a very disturbing one.

While much of this story is upsetting, it serves to reframe our understanding of the Civil War as something much more complex than a North/South rivalry. New York reaped the fruits of slave labor, while its citizens were able to decry the practice, but on the precipice of war enough of them essentially admitted that capitalism trumped human lives when they threatened to secede. Wall Street’s greed and police persecution of Black people are modern grievances, whose roots stretch back to the origins of those institutions.

The stories of resistance and activism woven into this narrative are a needed counterpoint; Abolitionists continually pressed the country to live by the values it espoused, and they are heroic in ways large and small. David Ruggles helped to hide people, to raise money to purchase their freedom, and also wrote and reported on injustice wherever he saw it so that others might be informed and join the cause. Classmates of a seven-year-old, who was pulled directly from school, raised money themselves to secure his release from jail, despite being terrorized by the experience. The drive to right so many wrongs and enlist the help of others balances the despair that can well up while reading.

Having favorably reviewed more than one Rebecca Solnit book here, hopefully my credentials as a person who believes in hope and possibility are established. However, the volatility of our current moment has exhausted me, and I found it hard to engage with the up-side of this story while still sheltering in place from a virus we’ve failed to control and flinching at the sound of sirens in a never-ending fire season. There is so much to worry or at minimum be very concerned about right this minute that looking back at deeply shameful history, ripe with problems we still have yet to solve, just feels like too much to ask sometimes. I add this because “The Kidnapping Club” is a very good book; it adds to our understanding of history in ways that are needed. But you may want to postpone reading it for a while if you’re feeling overwhelmed. It’s worth waiting until you can give it your full attention.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2020

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