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 and well, and the abolitionists fighting for freedom.
Mr. Wells makes a significant contribution to the literature of American slavery with a powerful book ... an often harrowing narrative fueled by solid research ... If Mr. Wells does not quite prove his indictment against 'Wall Street,' he certainly demonstrates that commercial interests ignored these abuses ... Mr. Wells takes a fresh, bottom-up approach, detailing horrific, unjustified seizures that provoked little objection from Gotham’s establishment ... Mr. Wells offers wrenching case studies from two successive eras ... Mr. Wells brings the kidnapping gang to life, too ... The individual kidnapping stories retain their ability to shock ... These stories are so poignant, the outcomes so monstrous, that they require no narrative flourishes, and Mr. Wells’s workmanlike prose creates an almost clinical mood that perfectly suits what amounts to a grim forensic accounting of both abuse and acquiescence. Mr. Wells persuasively demonstrates that the inhumanity of slavery was neither restricted by geography nor restrained by law. Slavery poisoned all of American culture and exacted a devastating toll on black New Yorkers while members of the original Kidnapping Club lived out their days unmolested.
... an eye-opening history of antebellum New York. Wells...meticulously details two of New York City’s dirtiest secrets: the city’s illicit backing of the illegal transatlantic slave trade and the Kidnapping Club that helped reinforce it ... There are many villains in this thoroughly researched and fascinating history, including police officers Tobias Boudinot and Daniel Nash, Judge Richard Riker and Mayor Fernando Woods. Yet The Kidnapping Club is more than a story of villainy. It’s also a history of heroes ... Most important of all, The Kidnapping Club restores the names of the abducted: Ben, Hester Jane Carr, Isaac Wright, Frances Shields, John Dickerson and countless others whose lives were destroyed and humanity erased—until now.
In The Kidnapping Club, the historian Jonathan Daniel Wells describes the circle of slave catchers and police officers who terrorized New York’s Black population in the three decades before the Civil War. They snatched up children, as well as adults, and sold them into slavery ... Wells conjures the pungent atmosphere of Manhattan in the early 19th century ... Wells writes, one senses, not to memorialize the missing, but to reopen their cases — to make a larger argument about recompense ... This is history read with a sense of vertigo, suffused with the present...
