of Michigan. His published works include The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South, and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America.
Wells applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War, and reported the following:
Page 99 contains, I must admit, a rather depressing description of poverty in antebellum Manhattan. Part of a chapter that examines the gap between rich and poor near Wall Street, this page focuses on the violent and shoddy tenements of the Five Points District, a place so notorious for its poverty that Charles Dickens made sure to visit it on his trip to America in the early 1840s.Visit Jonathan Daniel Wells's website.
In some ways this is a good test of at least one of the book’s main objectives: to highlight the vast racial inequalities in a city famous for its booming growth and prosperity. In the midst of this economic boom, much of which depended on southern slave-grown cotton, the city proved complicit in American slavery. But not on page 99 is a discussion of the main thrust of the book, which is a sordid tale of the kidnapping of Black New Yorkers at the hands of a “club” of police officers, judges, lawyers, and slave hunters.
What an interesting exercise! I will never again look the same way at page 99 of any book I pick up or write. Thankfully, overall, that page in my book is not completely tangential to the book’s focus, but it mostly reflects the context and background of the central story rather than the topic represented in the title. The main point is that, like the 1619 Project, my book argues that while Americans see freedom at the heart of their national story, the denial of liberty is just as fundamental to the unfolding of democracy as is liberty itself.
--Marshal Zeringue
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