When a kidnapping ring targeted New York City’s Black children
In 1833, Black children began to vanish from the streets of New York City.
Frances Shields, age 12, with cropped hair and a scar over her right eye, was last seen walking to school wearing a purpleandwhite dress. John Dickerson, 11, disappeared while running an errand for his parents. Jane Green, 11, was speaking to a stranger before she went missing. Or so it was believed; none of the children were heard from again.
More children began disappearing — more than one a week. The police refused to investigate the cases, and the mayor ignored the community’s pleas for help. Black parents searched on their own, scouring orphanages, prisons, poorhouses. It was whispered that supernatural forces were involved; what malign spirit was hunting these children?
Not a spirit — a club, of sorts.
In “The Kidnapping Club,” 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.
Under the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause, states were required to return anyone fleeing bondage to their enslavers. Some New York police officers, like the notorious Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash — central members of the club — used the mandate to target the Black population of New York, with the assistance of judges, like the city recorder Richard Riker, who would swiftly draw up a certificate of removal. There were no trials. The slaves were not even permitted to testify on their own behalf.
Some really were fugitives from the South; others were free people — seized off the street, or from their homes in the middle of the night, and sold for a handsome fee. Boudinot bragged that he could “send any Black to the South.”
David Ruggles, an indefatigable journalist and a leader in the city’s Black anti- slavery organizations, gave the group the sobriquet. He was early to sound the alarm about the missing children, and helped to found the New
York Committee of Vigilance, which sheltered runaways and led protests against the abductions.
Ruggles anchored the movement, and he anchors this book. He was a brilliant and frustrating figure, equally nettlesome to his enemies and his comrades. Possessed of unfathomable energy, the man appeared to be everywhere at once — protesting at City Hall, editing his journal, The Mirror of Liberty, needling officials. While members of the Kidnapping Club stalked Black men and women as they walked alone along the desolate wharves, Ruggles stalked them in return.
Slavery had been outlawed in New York by 1827, but the city remained profoundly dependent on the institution. “New York was the most potent pro- slavery and pro- South city north of the Mason- Dixon Line,” Wells writes. Slavery had given shape to the city from its earliest days, when enslaved Africans cleared the forests and plowed the farms. By the late 1600s, New York was the largest slaving port in North America. In its infancy, Wall Street had hosted slave auctions, and now it extended credit to the cotton mills of the South. Insurance companies insured slave ships and took on the enslaved as collateral.
Wells conjures the pungent atmosphere of Manhattan
in the early 19th century — the crooked streets and smokechoked skies, the reek of manure, the Dutch village feel. During the 30year span covered by this book, however, the city boomed. The streets were lit and paved. Railroads connected neighborhoods, and after the fire of 1835 devastated Lower Manhattan, the city sprang out of its own ashes in mere months, grander than ever. Real estate prices soared.
That expansion, Wells writes, “had been built on the backs of Southern slaves who picked cotton for hundreds of thousands of cotton bales every year, a crop that was financed by Wall Street banks and exported to New England and British textile mills via New York brokers, businesses and financiers.”
New York was beholden to the South, enriched by it and dependent on it — never mind the frenzy of the Kidnapping Club and the children who kept vanishing.
Protesters flooded courtrooms, and under the public glare, the members of the Kidnapping Club began to quail.
This is history read with a sense of vertigo, suffused with the present: a rash of child abductions met with official complacency, stories about Black men and women attacked while sleeping in their homes and praying at church.