It’s not every day that a Brooklyn allergy doctor is alerted by his receptionist that a stranger is standing in his waiting room claiming that a Cuban-born spy named Sanchez once lived in the building. But it happened to Dr. Norman Horace Greeley a few weeks ago in his home office at 140 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights. “I thought he might’ve been a nut case,” Dr. Greeley recalled, “and basically I turned him away.”
But the visitor, the historian John Harris, tried one last bid to get a tour of the 1850s townhouse: He left the doctor a copy of his book, “The Last Slave Ships,” along with a hastily scrawled note intimating that a famous ancestor of the doctor was linked to Emilio Sanchez y Dolz, the 19th-century spy whose biography Mr. Harris is writing for Yale University Press.
Though Mr. Harris had arrived on the building’s doorstep knowing nothing of its current occupant, he had immediately been intrigued by Dr. Greeley’s name and by a portrait in the waiting room of Horace Greeley, who was the renowned founding editor of The New-York Tribune and an 1872 presidential candidate.
“It was mysterious and tantalizing,” Mr. Harris said of the portrait. “I’m working with an obscure figure” — Mr. Sanchez — “who deserves to be as famous as Greeley, and here he is connected to” Greeley himself, “a much greater figure from the period.”
Five minutes later, as Mr. Harris sat on the steps of a church across the street, Dr. Greeley called him, bursting with curiosity. He was indeed a descendant of the Tribune editor, he told Mr. Harris, and the house had been continuously occupied by Greeleys since the early 1900s. What’s more, one of the doctor’s sons, Matthew Greeley, was shooting a short-form documentary about the famously antislavery family patriarch.
For his part, the historian told the doctor that Mr. Sanchez, an undercover agent for Britain whom Mr. Harris considers “the most important informant in slave trade history,” had lived at 140 Clinton in the 1870s and 1880s.
Both Mr. Harris and Dr. Greeley were intrigued by what their newly combined knowledge revealed about the building: By improbable coincidence, the three-story, Italianate-style house connects two of the most relentless opponents of the illegal slave trade in New York City in the 1850s.
In the 1850s, a quarter century after slavery was banned in New York State, the city grimly developed into a thriving center of trans-Atlantic human trafficking, with slave ships regularly being outfitted in Lower Manhattan and sent to West Africa. There, imprisoned Africans were forced aboard and shipped to Cuba for a life of servitude.
Mr. Sanchez, who was a commission merchant and ship broker in New York, sought to destroy this trade by secretly identifying and tracking slave ships leaving the city so British naval vessels could intercept them off the African coast. During the same period, Horace Greeley was the editor of the New York paper that most vigorously denounced the illegal slave trade in an era when it was rampant and few stood against it.
Matthew Greeley, the filmmaker, called the revelation that an antislavery spy lived at 140 Clinton “absolutely thrilling.”
“Just when we thought this house wasn’t interesting enough, we have another whole chapter in this house that is obviously connected to our family’s early history in New York,” he said.
Built around 1854 for William Evans, a merchant tailor, 140 Clinton is one of just two houses remaining from an original group of five known as Honeymoon Row. Evans lived nearby and primarily rented out the row, according to research by Jeremy Lechtzin, president of the Brooklyn Heights Association. The surviving pair are eye-catching, their white stucco facades presenting a smart contrast to the black cast iron of their elaborate Italianate lintels and zigzag, neo-Gothic cornice.
An 1874 rental ad in The Brooklyn Eagle, placed not long before Mr. Sanchez moved in with his wife, describes No. 140 as “the centre house of the very desirable row opposite St. Ann’s Church.”
Mr. Sanchez was born in Havana in 1821 and immigrated to the United States as a child, becoming an American citizen in New Orleans at 22. In 1849, he moved to New York, where he ran a ship brokerage at 187 Pearl Street. Other midcentury arrivals in the city’s shipping district, according to “The Last Slave Ships,” were about a dozen illegal slave traders, collectively known as the Portuguese Company, who moved their base of operations there in the 1850s after Brazil effectively sealed its shores to human trafficking.
New York “was the nerve center of the trade in terms of financing, outfitting and networking,” said Manuel Barcia, who is a scholar of the slave trade and a pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Bath in England.
Although Congress had banned American involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, the laws were rarely enforced in the 1850s when it came to vessels sent from U.S. ports to take enslaved Africans aboard and ship them to Cuba.
In the 1850s and early 1860s, Mr. Harris said, around 90 percent of trans-Atlantic slave-trading voyages “used U.S. ships and the U.S. flag, and the vast majority of voyages originated in U.S. ports, especially New York.”
Flying an American flag gave slavers a large measure of freedom on the high seas because the British, who served as global policemen of the slave trade in the 19th century, did not have the right to search American vessels.
From 1859 to 1862, Mr. Sanchez spied for the British consul in New York, who forwarded his dispatches to the Foreign Office in London. By stalking South Street wharves, coaxing information from slave crews and investors, and tracking ships as they were cleared for departure by the U.S. Custom House on Wall Street, he provided intelligence that “probably led to the termination of around 30 voyages and kept at least 20,880 people” from being shipped to Cuba in chains, according to Mr. Harris’s research.
While Mr. Sanchez fought the slave trade in the shadows, Horace Greeley decried it loudly to the more than 200,000 readers of the various editions of his newspaper. Indeed, the British consul, Mr. Sanchez’s “handler,” observed that The Tribune was “a paper more particularly opposed to the prosecution of the African slave trade than any of its class in this city.” Additionally, Tribune articles were among the local newspaper clippings that Mr. Sanchez included in his intelligence dispatches.
Whether Horace Greeley ever published information on the slave trade leaked to him by Mr. Sanchez is not known. But the interplay of the two men can be seen in the case of the slave ship Orion, Mr. Harris said.
Flying the U.S. flag, the Orion sailed out of New York Harbor in 1859. Mr. Sanchez denounced the vessel as a slaver to the British consul, who sent that intelligence to the West African coast. There, several months later, a British cruiser seized the Orion before it could take on its human cargo. The British then turned the ship over to a U.S. cruiser, which sent it back to America for adjudication. The Tribune covered the story, applauding the American commander for accepting British assistance, a fairly radical position at a time when most Americans opposed the British detention of American ships.
Horace Greeley died in 1872 and never lived at 140 Clinton Street, where Mr. Sanchez took up residence about three years later. But his grandson Dr. Horace Greeley II moved into the house around 1912, the year The Brooklyn Citizen reported that he and his sisters had won legal title to an undeveloped gold mine in Virginia. Dr. Greeley told the paper that the mine had come into his family’s possession after a $10,000 loan from his grandfather went unpaid.
In 1921, Dr. Horace Greeley II’s wife, Ida Fitzgerald Greeley, bought the house from the Evans estate for $14,000. The place has been a hive of Greeleys ever since, as four generations have either lived there, worked there or both. A disproportionate number have been physicians because of what Dr. Norman Horace Greeley called “my father’s obsession with everyone becoming a doctor.”
Dr. Horace Greeley II lived with his family on the top two stories, and on the first he operated a laboratory, where he produced allergy vaccines.
His son, Dr. Horace Greeley III, grew up in the house and later joined his father’s laboratory. In the 1950s, after his father died, he converted the top two floors into rental apartments.
Jeanne Grant Hernandez began her time in the building as Dr. Horace Greeley II’s secretary, before marrying his son, Dr. Horace Greeley III, and raising two future Dr. Greeleys with him. Ultimately, she too obtained her medical degree, and she practiced for more than two decades at 140 Clinton with her two sons, Grant and Norman. For a time, Norman’s first wife, then named Dr. Sadhis Rivas Greeley, also practiced medicine there.
Around 1990, after the couple’s divorce, Dr. Norman Horace Greeley moved into the third-floor apartment, where his two sons, Matthew and Horace V, known as Tim, lived with him part-time. Later, he recombined the top two stories into a single residence, just as it had been when Mr. Sanchez lived there.
Today, like his grandfather, Dr. Norman Horace Greeley lives above the store, commuting downstairs to his allergy practice. Although offers to buy the place come in all the time, he refuses to sell, citing a sense of “heritage.”
Out front, that heritage is captured by an old sign bearing the nameplates of four Dr. Greeleys.
“My mother made the sign because she was proud of both sons being doctors,” he said. “One says, Norman Horace Greeley. One says, Grant Horace Greeley. My brother’s dead. My father’s sign is still up. He’s dead. My mother’s sign is still up. She’s dead. I’m the only one alive now.”
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