The Power Of The Black Vote Has ALWAYS Scared The Elite

America has always been afraid of the political power of its oppressed people. In the early 1800s, African American voters were an exceptionally powerful consituency. This scared the elites of the time, including Martin van Buren.

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Emma Vigeland: You also mentioned New York. Because of the incredible amount of black influence there. You seem to posture that it was the most influential black voting bloc in the country or something to that effect. There was an incredible story about how spooked Martin van Buren got about black enfranchisement. Talk a little bit about what took us through that history in the early 19th century.

Well greater New York City then was just New York county, Manhattan the five boroughs that are today in New York City. Meeting all of eastern Long Island the counties up the Hudson and even the northeastern counties of New Jersey is one of the largest operating enslaved labor using places in the country. Most of the Dutch farmers, whether in Brooklyn or what is today Bergen County where to study Nassau County, which is the Ulster of all of those counties at one point or another. This is not my work, this is the work of a terrific historian named Craig Stephen Wilder. Those Dutch farmers and they're a very powerful ethnic class. They either bought or hired enslaved labor for their big farms. So there were lots of black men all over that region. Many of whom claimed freedom during the revolution when the British came in and there are several decades there where the best thing to put in kind of the best thing an enslaved person could see is you know a British ship in the harbor. Because that means that you have a chance at freedom and that was true during the War of 1812. So right up through you know when Washington marches into New York finally in 1783 the British general refusing to give him back his property they watched the British ships leave with thousands of informally enslaved people. But there are thousands left there and so there's the basis for extremely active and militant politics. Because the British had actually, in many ways, liberated them. A lot of black men had been guerrilla fighters for the British occupying the blockhouses on the Hudson. So they've got a lot of numbers and they're fired up they're not like the Philadelphians. They're not cautious. They're a fired-up constituency. They start voting really early. Even though there were 4,000 enslaved people in 1827. Sojourner Truth was born a slave in 1814 up the Hudson. So you've got all these enslaved people and then all these people who got their freedom or run away and change their name. It's a very dynamic environment. By the early 1800s they are in new york city and in Brooklyn what is today brooklyn a pretty mobilized constituency. They control certain trades, notably chimney sweeping which is a dirty dangerous job, and they use small children it's pretty exploitative. They are being courted by both parties and they reach a peak of influence in sort of 1810 1813 when black men in new york have enough votes to swing the entire city's assembly delegation. This is a complicated story, but it's really something and if you swing the new york city assembly delegation you could control the whole assembly. And if you control the assembly you're pretty close to controlling the entire patronage pot of new york. Fifteen thousand jobs. The assembly will name every officer in the state, the mayor of new york city will be named by the state legislator. That's fifteen thousand jobs at a time when the entire federal patronage pool is three thousand. So this is big time politics and the black votes really crucial. So once again what will later be Democrats Martin van Buren's Bucktail Republicans, which are really the basis for the national democratic party in the 1820s, they mobilized to get rid of this big empowered black vote