Category Archives: Scribbles

The title of this fascinating work is a phony, as journalist/author Eric Calonius makes clear in his text. The truth seems to have been too much for his New York publisher to bear. That is the author’s sidebar unveiling of the little known late 1850s business offices of slave traders in New York City and their slave ships  down at the wharves of Lower Manhattan.

Calonius shows how these Yankee slave dealers gathered their capital from Northern businessmen and sent their ships to West Africa to buy African slaves low and then sell them high in Cuba and the Caribbean. Then they hosed down their Middle Passage decks and steamed home to New York.

All under the disinterested eyes of corrupt port officialdom (despite federal law making American slave-trading a crime punishable by death). The focus on the Wanderer and the thundering editorials by The New York Times against the few Southern hot-heads who took it to the mouth of the Congo River for slaves and then back to Georgia therefore seems disproportionate as well as hypocritical.

The author smartly weaves the Wanderer tale in with the 1850s politics of North and South and other events, such as the John Brown raid, that precipitated the Civil War. The tracing of the descendants of one Wanderer slave is a nice touch. Would have been better, though, to have included a few of the unwilling passengers of the more numerous New York slavers who continued to operate well into the war. You know, the war supposedly fought to free the slaves.