About this item
Although slavery was outlawed in the northern states in 1827, the illegal slave trade continued in the one place modern readers would least expect, the streets and ports of America's great northern metropolis: New York City. In The Kidnapping Club, historian Jonathan Daniel Wells takes readers to a rapidly changing city rife with contradiction, where social hierarchy clashed with a rising middle class, Black citizens jostled for an equal voice in politics and culture, and women of all races eagerly sought roles outside the home. It is during this time that the city witnessed an alarming trend: a number of free and fugitive Black men, women, and children were being kidnapped into slavery. The group responsible, known as the Kidnapping Club, was a frighteningly effective network of judges, lawyers, police officers, and bankers who circumvented northern anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free Black Americans-selling them into markets in the South, South America, and the Caribbean, for vast sums of wealth.
About the Author
Jonathan Daniel Wells, Ph.D., is Professor of History in the Departments of Afroamerican and African Studies and History, and Director of the Residential College, at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of ten books, including The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: 1820-1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) ; Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge University Press, 2011) ; The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (LSU Press, 2011) ; The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America (2017) and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America (second ed., Routledge, 2016) in addition to articles in academic journals and chapters in books. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.
