The Stolen Wealth of Slavery by David Montero & Michael Eric Dyson

Author:David Montero & Michael Eric Dyson [Montero, David and Dyson, Michael Eric & Dyson, Michael Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2024-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER 9

THE MERCHANTS’ DOME

The Merchants’ Exchange Building sat on a stretch of Wall Street between William and Hanover, a solid block of blue granite, with a dome that soared more than 120 feet in the air, and a portico of eighteen massive Ionic columns. Inside, its rotunda was vast enough to hold three thousand people, which is to say, three thousand of the city’s most elite white men. The original building had burned down in the great fire that swept New York in 1835, auguring the calamity on Wall Street that came soon afterward. Like the fortunes of the cotton kings, the Merchants’ Exchange had been rebuilt by 1843, “the most splendid public edifice in the city.”1 By 1850, it had resumed its place as the nation’s central temple of commerce, a gathering hall for its leading financiers and entrepreneurs—particularly its slavery entrepreneurs. They were among those who, with money from their reviled business, built this shrine to their own glory, at a cost of $1.5 million ($45 million today).2

Each day, these men congregated in the vast rotunda at two o’clock, a swirl of black hats and silk vests, a visual concentration of the nation’s slavery affluence and power, indulging in further speculations and schemes. Thousands of corporations were represented under the dome. Among the throng were members of the boards of Aetna Insurance and Nautilus Insurance, writing policies on the lives of enslaved people, paying premiums on Black men killed in mines; along with dozens of directors of Fulton Bank, the Mechanics Bank, and City Bank of New York, their vaults heavy, and growing, from transacting the business of southern plantations, the so-called Southern trade. Also congregating there were the heads of the nation’s shipping industry, presidents of the thriving Liverpool lines.

There had been no cotton ships of which to speak when Benjamin Marshall had arrived in this harbor half a century earlier. Now, outside the rotunda, just steps away, such ships crowded the piers of the East River abutting Wall Street, in historically greater numbers than ever; up the Hudson River, as well, they clogged the waterfront in chaotic lines, “a forest of masts,” wrote one observer, “extending far toward Harlem on either side of the town.”3 The ships carried the sugar harvests of James Brown to the city, and officers at Brown Brothers & Co. could be found almost every day at the Exchange, arranging shipments and extending credit lines. The ships carried also the plantation yields of Stephen Duncan, Francis Surget, and other Mississippi Nabobs. Charles Leverich, their banker at the Bank of New York, then carefully orchestrated the proceeds through the stock exchange.

Under the dome of the Merchants’ Exchange, these men constituted the corporate body of America, indeed, the earliest manifestation of corporate America itself. With untold riches from Black people’s enslavement, they were creating more corporations than had ever existed in the country, or anywhere else in the world. And within the dizzying emporium of their business activities, lurking behind its illustrious facade, the

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