New York City wanted to secede from the Union because their economy relied a lot on slave trade ranging from shipping to banks. Many New Yorkers were pro-South.
The Day New York Tried to Secede
http://www.historynet.com/the-day-new-york-tried-to-secede.htmDuring the first three months of 1861, New York City boldly flirted with leaving the Union. The reasons were decades in the making, but the sentiment was never more pointed than on January 6, 1861, when New York Mayor Fernando Wood addressed the city council. “It would seem that a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable,†he observed, noting the sympathy joining New York to “our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States†and suggesting that the city declare its own independence from the Union. “When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master—to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her, take away the power of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy of which she was the proud Empire City?â€
Wood was preaching to the converted. Then, as now, New York City was the nation’s financial hub, and had made its reputation—and the lion’s share of its revenues—by supplying goods and services to the slave South. Most New Yorkers were decidedly pro-Southern and for years leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s election, two scoundrels—Wood and U.S. Marshal Isaiah Rynders—nurtured pro-slavery practices, both legal and illegal, in the city.
Slavery was prospering in New York City despite slavery being banned in New York State.
New York was not only a major commercial supply hub for the South’s legal institution of slavery; it was—and had been for many years—the epicenter of America’s illegal slave trade. Although the state of New York had voted in 1827 to abolish slavery, New York City traders continued to provide slaves––first to the South, then to Brazil and Cuba––right up to and during the Civil War. Whether as investors, ship owners or captains and crews, New Yorkers promoted, enabled and carried on the traffic in humans. Of all the cities in America, New York was the most invested in the transatlantic slave trade.
By 1860, New York City’s reputation for official corruption and leniency toward slavers was unrivaled. Putting money into slaving voyages was considered a good investment—much as one would invest today in AT&T or Microsoft—and although the practice was illegal and the transgressors were widely known, no efforts were made to apprehend either the investors or the traders. Amazingly, it was generally viewed as a “victimless†crime. In fact, whenever a voice was raised to condemn the practice, New York’s businessmen were united in their opposition to change.
First South Carolina. Then New York?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/first-south-carolina-then-new-york/?_r=0In the wake of South Carolina’s vote to secession in late December 1860, Americans both North and South anxiously wondered which state would be next to leave the Union. Little did they realize that the next call for secession would come not from a Southern state, but from a Northern city — New York City.
On Jan. 7, 1861, two days before Mississippi became the second state to secede, Mayor Fernando Wood delivered a message to the Common Council, the city’s governing body, proposing that New York assert its independence as a “free city†by “disrupt[ing] the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master†— that is, the Union. Wood wanted the city, then comprised only of Manhattan Island, to become an independent city-state, akin to the seaport free cities of northern Germany. Indeed, he suggested that New York City’s founding charter — which established that “New York be, and from henceforth forever hereafter shall be and remain, a free city of itself†— already guaranteed its independence.
The North is just as guilty if not more guilty of slavery.
New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance
http://people.hofstra.edu/alan_j_singer/Docket/docket/5.2ASlaveryinNewYork.pdfMoses Taylor, a sugar merchant with offices on South Street at the East River seaport, a finance capitalist and an industrialist, as well as a banker, was another leading member of New York City’s financial community. He was a member of the Chamber of Commerce and a major stockholder, board member or officer in firms that later merged with or developed into Citibank, Con Edison, Bethlehem Steel and ATT. Taylor earned commissions for brokering the sale of Cuban sugar in the port of New York, as well as additional fees for exchanging currency and negotiating the Custom’s House. He supervised the investment of profits by the sugar planters in United States banks, gas companies, railroads, and real estate, purchased and shipped supplies and machinery to Cuba, operated six of his own boats and numerous chartered vessels in the Cuban trade, repaired and equipped other boats with goods and provisions, provided sugar planters with financing to arrange for land purchases and the acquisition of a labor force, and even supervised the planters’ children when they came to New York City as students or to serve as apprentices for mercantile firms.
As a result of his success in the sugar trade, Taylor became a member of the board of the City Bank in 1837, and served as its president from 1855 until his death in 1882. In the nineteenth century, City Bank, a predecessor of today’s Citibank, primarily issued short term credits to locally based merchants to facilitate the import-export trade. Taylor’s personal resources and role as business agent for the leading exporter of Cuban sugar to the United States proved invaluable to the bank, helping it survive financial panics in 1837 and 1857 that bankrupted many of its competitors.
The financing and operation of the Southern cotton trade and its ties with New York City merchants was detailed in an 1852 report to Congress. Cotton production in the South was a major source of profit and employment for shipping, banking, insurance and textile industries that were based in New York and other Northern cities. According to first annual report of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York in 1859, even when the Europe-bound cotton trade was not shipped through the port of New York, New York City merchants and bankers often financed the exchange. As a result of their financing of the cotton trade, Southern planters owed Northern merchants and bankers an estimated $200 million dollars at the outbreak of the Civil War.
By those people who want to remove the Confederate flag, they should go after companies involved in the slave trade like Citigroup, Con Edison, Bethlehem Steel, and ATT.
A book about it.
Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
http://www.amazon.com/Complicity-Promoted-Prolonged-Profited-Slavery/dp/0345467833
