C 2008 Cambridge University Press
Urban History, 35, 3 (2008) doi:10.1017/S0963926808005749
Printed in the United Kingdom
Slavery in colonial New York
City∗
JOYCE D. GOODFRIEND
History Department, University of Denver, 2000 E. Asbury Avenue, #366,
Sturm Hall, Denver, CO 80208
Manhattan’s landscape contains few material reminders of its colonial
past. Traces of the Native Americans who frequented the island, the Dutch
who planted New Amsterdam at its tip and the various European and
African peoples who populated the city renamed New York by the English
in 1664 are few and far between. Though the obliteration of the tangible
remains of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century city dwellers speeded the
transformation of Manhattan into a vibrant twentieth-century metropolis,
the dearth of visible signs of this era has complicated historians’ efforts
to fabricate enduring images of the men and women of this early urban
society. Their stories, though dutifully rehearsed by schoolbook writers
and museum curators, have rarely become etched in memory.
In the case of the thousands of enslaved Africans who laboured on
Manhattan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the silence has
been total. While the founding members of prominent EuroAmerican
families have been memorialized in portraits, inscriptions on silver,
tributes by patriotic societies and even street names, those who toiled in
their kitchens and shops and on their wharves day after day were virtually
forgotten. That is until 1991, when skeletons of hundreds of people of
African origin were uncovered beneath the streets of lower Manhattan.1
Suddenly and dramatically, New York City’s African past, figuratively lost
for so long, had literally intruded into its present.
The revelation of a ‘Negro Burial Ground’ dating back to the seventeenth
century set in motion a scramble to amend the narrative of New York’s history to reflect the stamp of enslaved men, women and children on the city.
∗
1
Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, Slavery in New York. New York and London, The New Press,
2005. vi + 403pp. $25.00, £14.99, $29,95 CAN pbk.
Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial
New York City. New York, Oxford University Press, 2004. 334pp. 3 maps. 2 tables. 2 charts.
£19.99 pbk.
Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City 1626–1863.
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003. 387pp. 20 halftones. 7 maps. $47.50 hbk,
$25.00 pbk.
Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century
Manhattan. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. 332pp. $26.95.
For an overview of the archaeological investigation, see Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana
diZerega Wall, Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City (New Haven, 2001),
277–94.
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African Americans as well as New Yorkers of other backgrounds, their curiosity whetted about the city’s racial past, ventured to interpret the significance of the find and in the process spawned a contentious, and arguably
therapeutic, public conversation on historical memory.2 African Americans
raised their voices regarding the conduct of archeological investigations of
the site, the disposition of the graves and the consecration of the ground,
as city, state and federal agencies sparred over who should be the proper
custodians of the city’s history. Ultimately, in a move geared toward reconciliation, the New York Historical Society in 2005 mounted an electrifying
exhibit that signalled official recognition of the integral part played by people of African descent in the history of New York City from its beginnings.3
Hailed as public history at its finest and viewed by a large audience, this
retelling of the story of the city’s Africans in the era of slavery coincided
with the reburial of the remains and the consecration of the ground.
Wide reporting of the unearthing of New York City’s ‘Negro Burial
Ground’ not only aroused public interest in setting the record straight but
turned attention to existing historical scholarship on the colonial city’s
African slaves. What curious readers discovered was that academics had
been engaged in researching New York’s variation of American slavery
since the 1960s, when pioneering investigations first began to reveal the
magnitude and centrality of bond labour in the city. In chilling detail,
a 1961 article based on archival court records meticulously reconstructed the details of a 1712 slave rebellion that resulted in the deaths of
nine white New Yorkers and the wounding of six more.4 By 1966, a
comprehensive study of slavery in New York had charted the extent of
the city’s reliance on slave labour and documented the increasingly harsh
legal measures designed to regulate the lives of those in bondage.5
During the heyday of black history in the 1960s and 1970s, when cries for
justice in the streets reverberated in the academy, scholars were inspired
to imagine a more inclusive version of New York’s early history that
inserted the city’s numerous slaves and free blacks into accounts of its
development. Against the backdrop of urban uprisings and escalating
tension between blacks and whites, this impulse was channelled toward
investigating eighteenth-century New York’s most egregious example
of racial conflict, the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741. In addition to a
spate of articles on the subject of slaves’ collective resistance to white
oppression, a modern edition of the fundamental text associated with this
episode – Judge Daniel Horsmanden’s journal – was published in 1971 by
2
3
4
5
Michelle H. Bogart, ‘Public space and public memory in New York’s City Hall Park’, Journal
of Urban History, 25 (1999) 226–57.
For evaluations of the exhibit, see Duncan Faherhy, ‘“It happened here”: slavery on the
Hudson’, American Quarterly, 58 (2006), 455–66; and Laura M. Chmielewski, exhibition
review of ‘Slavery in New York’, Journal of American History, 94 (2007), 203–9.
Kenneth Scott, ‘The slave insurrection in New York in 1712’, New York Historical Society
Quarterly, 45 (1961), 43–74.
Edgar J. McManus, A History of Slavery in New York (Syracuse, NY, 1966).
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Slavery in colonial New York City
487
Thomas. J. Davis, author of a pioneering dissertation on slavery in New
York City.6
As the pressure to find parallels between the urban explosions of the
eighteenth and twentieth centuries subsided, historians embarked on a
broad-scale recovery operation designed to redress the centuries-long
erasure of African Americans from the city’s annals. A new channel was cut
in the historical stream, one that flowed through unmapped precincts and
tapped hidden reservoirs of lived experience unknown outside the city’s
embattled African American community. Focusing the lens tightly on New
York’s African peoples enmeshed in slavery, first done in an influential 1985
dissertation called ‘Born to run: the slave family in early New York, 1626
to1827’, revealed the covert ways in which they struggled for autonomy.7
By the 1990s, major books by Ira Berlin and Graham Hodges took as
axiomatic the fact that enslaved blacks were historical actors endowed with
humanity and agency. Berlin’s recasting of New Amsterdam’s slaves as
resourceful Atlantic creoles and Hodges’ sweeping study of the New York–
New Jersey region’s enslaved Africans and free blacks lifted historical
work on early New York City’s African Americans to a new plateau just
as the ongoing archaeological work at lower Manhattan’s ‘African Burial
Ground’ site was sparking interest in African funerary customs and, by
extension, the African cultural roots of the city’s slaves.8
An important strand of research surfaced on cultural links between
Africa and New York. Convinced that the African prehistory of enslaved
New Yorkers was a vital influence on their behaviour in this urban milieu,
Craig Steven Wilder, Sterling Stuckey, Walter Rucker and Edna Greene
Medford used interdisciplinary methods to build the case that colonial
New York City’s slaves were empowered by African values and practices
previously undetected or caricatured as outlandish.9 Not deterred by
fragmentary evidence or by the necessity of arguing by analogy, these
scholars painstakingly documented parallels between West African and
African American ways of viewing the world, compelling us to recognize
6
7
8
9
Daniel Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy, ed. Thomas J. Davis (Boston, MA, 1971).
Vivienne L. Kruger, ‘Born to run: the slave family in Early New York’, Columbia University,
Ph.D. dissertation, 1985.
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(Cambridge, MA, 1998); Ira Berlin, ‘From creole to African: Atlantic creoles and origins
of African-American society in mainland North America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
series, 53 (1996), 251–88; Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New
York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999). For an example of the new focus
on African Americans, see Joyce D. Goodfriend, ‘The souls of African American children:
New Amsterdam’, Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, 3 (Jul. 2003)
[www. common-place.org].
Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American
Culture in New York City (New York, 2001); Sterling Stuckey, ‘African spirituality and cultural
practice in colonial New York, 1700–1770’, in Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger
(eds.), Inequality in Early America (Hanover and London, 1999), 160–81; Walter Rucker, The
River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton
Rouge, 2006); Edna Greene Medford, The New York African Burial Ground: History Final
Report (Washington, DC, 2004).
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that resistance to slavery in New York City must be seen as a cultural as
well as a political phenomeonon. Their findings, especially when viewed
in conjunction with the literature on African Americans’ appropriation of
the regionally significant Dutch holiday of Pinkster, should kindle interest
among historians of acculturation in New York City.10
The confluence of historical and archaeological scholarship on African
Americans in New York set the stage for comprehensive accounts of
the city’s encounter with slavery. Leslie Harris’ In the Shadow of Slavery:
African Americans in New York City 1626–1863 and Slavery in New York,
a volume of essays edited by Harris and Ira Berlin to complement the
New York Historical Society exhibit, cover the entire period during which
the institution of slavery defined the lives of the city’s people of African
descent – from the beginnings of New Amsterdam in the 1620s through
the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. But their primary focus is the
period after 1776, when African American New Yorkers pushed slowly,
but inexorably, toward freedom. Though Harris grounds her analysis
of the various points of view represented in the city’s mid-nineteenthcentury African American community in the writings of contemporaries,
her treatment of the experiences of the city’s enslaved people under Dutch
and British rule relies heavily on existing scholarship. In Slavery in New
York, Harris and her co-editor Ira Berlin underscore the significance of the
patterns set in the colonial city for the subsequent history of enslaved New
Yorkers. Christopher Moore’s essay distills the history of slavery in New
Amsterdam, but falls short of situating the institution in its Dutch context,
while Jill Lepore’s essay presents a lucid overview of the key features of
slavery in British New York City.
In a sense, these important books form the culminating layer of a quarter
century of research dedicated to documenting the experiences of the many
colonial New Yorkers trapped in the confines of slavery as well as the few
who managed to extract themselves from the institution, but not from the
racism coupled to it. Yet this dramatic expansion of our fund of knowledge
about the lives of enslaved New Yorkers has left the dominant narrative
of the city’s early centuries relatively intact. Or to put it more precisely,
the literature on colonial New York continued to flow in separate streams
throughout the twentieth century. Though this bifurcation of scholarship
is traceable in large part to the perceived need to compensate for the
centuries-long neglect of black history, it also stemmed from the distinctive
course of colonial New York historiography. In 1971, the same year that
Thomas J. Davis brought to light New York City’s horrific racial past
with his edition of Horsmanden’s account of the 1741 Negro conspiracy,
another book appeared that set the parameters of research on colonial
New York for more than a generation.11 Patricia Bonomi’s A Factious
10
11
On Pinkster, see Hodges, Root and Branch, and Shane White, ‘“It was a proud day”: African
Americans, festivals, and parades in the north, 1741–1834’, Journal of American History, 81
(1994), 13–50.
Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy, ed. Davis.
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Slavery in colonial New York City
489
People, a compelling account of New York’s political gyrations from the
late seventeenth century unti1 the American Revolution, acknowledged
the salience of ethnic diversity in shaping the city and colony’s history, but
it confined itself to chronicling the transactions of various groups of elite
white men as they parried the thrusts of governors sent from England and
lesser white men intent on improving their condition.12 The scholarship on
the city’s African American population remained in the wings, an invisible
sidebar to the main plot.
In 1992, in Before the Melting Pot, I endeavoured to steer the course
of colonial New York’s history beyond the political narrative that had
governed it for so long by making a case for the centrality of pluralism
as a motif in the city’s development.13 Though I specified that New York
was a biracial society, I compartmentalized the story of the city’s African
Americans in a separate chapter, in effect subordinating the interplay of
blacks and whites to the template of ethnic diversity among Europeans that
I had chosen to feature. By 1999, when Gotham, a massive history of New
York City through the nineteenth century, was published, multiculturalism
had become entrenched in the academy.14 In the pages devoted to the
colonial years, African Americans, women and poor people shared the
spotlight with the star players, the members of New York’s elite. Far from
being expunged from the record, the institution of slavery was featured
at several points, including ample discussions of the 1712 rebellion and
the 1741 conspiracy. To the extent possible in a broad-scale chronological
narrative, the experiences of blacks and whites were interwoven.
The challenge of integrating the histories of blacks and whites in early
New York City has been addressed most fully on the conceptual level by
historians Thelma Wills Foote and Jill Lepore. In creative and complementary ways, Foote’s Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation
in Colonial New York City and Lepore’s New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and
Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan experiment with how to meld
the stories of black and white New Yorkers in a unitary framework. Neither
book fits the mould of a conventional history. Foote’s title Black and White
Manhattan proclaims her intention of doing away with ‘apartheid history’.
Lepore’s pairing of the words liberty and slavery in her subtitle encapsulates her understanding of the symbiotic relationship between whites and
blacks in eighteenth-century New York City in more abstract terms.
Yet these are very different books in compass and concept. It is clear from
the outset that Foote is not writing about slavery per se, but rather about
the critical part that enslavement played in the transformation of Africans
and their offspring into racial ‘others’. It is the elements in this process
that fascinate her, not the distinctive course of New York City’s evolution
12
13
14
Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York
and London, 1971).
Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City,
1664–1739 (Princeton, 1992).
Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of Manhattan to 1898 (New York,
1999).
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from a Dutch outpost to a British city. Foote situates this fledgling urban
society in an international context, availing herself of concepts honed by
experts in post-colonial studies to produce what amounts to a case study
of colonialism and racialization.
Are there benefits to filtering the city’s early history through a
theoretical prism etched in the shadow of worldwide decolonization in the
twentieth century? Absolutely. Posing questions about race and power in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York that are not obvious from
the documentary record forces us to reconsider the all too prevalent image
of urban slavery in early America as a relatively benign institution. Still,
caution must be the watchword because of Foote’s tendency to use empirical evidence in service of abstract formulations. Though she dutifully marshals an array of details about the city’s African and European populations
to support her propositions, the almost mechanical insertion of this material into an argument originating in the logic of a theory leaves one wondering how much the particulars of New York City history matter to her. More
than a few misattributions of quotations and factual errors also heighten
concerns about the author’s fidelity to the historical record. Though these
shortcomings blunt the force of Foote’s case, they do not invalidate her
endeavour to reorient New York City’s colonial history on a global plane.
Foote’s macrocosmic approach to slavery in colonial New York City runs
counter to that of Jill Lepore, who embraces an almost opposite method to
explicate the dilemmas engendered by the rooting of slavery in early New
York City. Lepore zeroes in on the microcosm, boldly choosing to take the
pulse of the city at the ultimate flashpoint – 1741 – when the population was
thrown into turmoil by whites’ frantic allegations of a conspiracy by slaves.
New York Burning is awash in the minutiae of everyday urban life, as the
author crafts a finely textured picture of the intersecting worlds of whites
and blacks in this port society. Yet this is far from being a still life. Though
calibrated by the events of 1741, the book ranges backward and forward in
time, across geographical boundaries and through the discursive labyrinth
of contemporary Anglo-American thought. Lepore ponders the legacy of
New York’s singular past, weighing, for example, the possible connections
between the 1712 slave rebellion and the events of 1741. She approaches
the tale of John Peter Zenger’s freedom of the press case from a new slant,
emphasizing its role in stirring influential New Yorkers to stand up for
political liberty, and she follows the career of Judge Daniel Horsmanden,
the man who more than any other shaped historical memory of the
1741 conspiracy, from its inauspicious beginnings in England to its
heartrending denoument on the eve of the American Revolution.
Through their wide-ranging research, Lepore and Foote enrich the
existing literature on myriad aspects of colonial New York City’s slave
system, but the self-defined task of these scholars is of far greater
magnitude, nothing less than reinventing the storyline of the city’s early
history to expose how fundamental slavery was in its evolution. They
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Slavery in colonial New York City
491
opt for dissimilar ways of interlocking the stories of black and white
New Yorkers. Foote’s inquiry is anchored in the domain of race. Lepore’s
overarching question emerges from the juncture of local and imperial
concerns, as she probes the paradoxical relationship of liberty and slavery
in the mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-American world.
The essentializing of New Yorkers of African heritage as blacks is taken
for granted by Lepore, who prefers to illustrate the dominant position of
Europeans in colonial New York on a more concrete plane, singling out
the distinctive features of the setting, the nuances of vocabulary and the
contrasting perspectives that emanated from the life experiences of slaves
and slaveowners. Sensitive to the contingencies that shape events, Lepore
keeps her eye on the particular, ultimately constructing a multifaceted
explanation of the most puzzling event in colonial New York’s history
that discredits much of Horsmanden’s case against the accused slaves, but
affirms that blacks had cause to conspire to harm whites and struggle to be
free. Foote, on the other hand, dismisses the alleged slave plot as a fiction
of the white imagination, foreclosing the possibility that the oppressed
Africans could seize power from those who controlled them. This position
is consistent with her propensity to minimize the agency of New York’s
slaves, even as she supplies evidence of the various ways they contrived
to circumvent the restrictions imposed on them.
With scholars now in agreement that slavery was thoroughly embedded
in the urban society that developed on Manhattan in the colonial era, it
remains to be seen whether historians will be content to continue stitching
new panels into the quilt that currently portrays the city’s slave centuries or
whether they will push for a totally new design premised on the notion that
the story of white city dwellers can no longer be told in isolation from that
of black city dwellers and vice versa. If the latter tack is taken, following the
lead of Foote and Lepore, then the most pressing task facing researchers
of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York City is finding methods
to fuse the stories of enslaved and enslavers.
Since scholarship on the city’s African American slaves has taken a
quantum leap in recent years, it may now be time to shift our gaze to
the anatomy of white privilege in this urban society with slaves as a
prelude to recasting the overall narrative. Stipulating white New Yorkers’
acquiescence to the inherent brutality of enslaving human beings is not
enough. Understanding their frame of mind in all its complexity requires
disaggregating the city’s white population in order to ascertain how
ethnic identity, religious affiliation, family and social standing might have
affected racial attitudes.
As a port city with a cosmopolitan population, New York wove slavery
into its fabric in ways that reflected its historical evolution. It was the
heterogeneous society of New Amsterdam that first experimented with
the possibilities of slave labour and the equally diverse society of English
New York that worked to refine the racial ordering of the population.
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Yet potential links between the city’s ethnic and religious diversity and
its institutionalization of slavery remain largely unexplored. In New York
Burning, Lepore scrupulously designates city dwellers by ethnic identity,
but ethnicity holds no explanatory power in her analysis of the conspiracy
crisis. Foote reviews the history of the city’s different ethno-religious
communities, only to argue that ethnic and denominational differences
declined in salience in the face of racialization. It may well be that
the experience of commanding people of African origin gave European
Protestants of all stripes a stake in New York City’s racially based system
of unfree labour, but this does not mean that the practice of slavery was
identical in Dutch, English French, German and Jewish families.
The family was the conduit through which slavery was reproduced in
the city and so the particulars of family culture, whether traceable to ethnic
or religious traditions or the consequence of attitudes refined in the crucible
of domestic life over the years, are critical to explaining variations in how
European New Yorkers related to the Africans in their orbit. Bonds forged
between white and black childhood playmates, adult partners in clandestine interracial sexual liaisons, or widows and trusted domestic workers
must be considered in accounting for whites’ bequests of special slaves to
certain family members or provisions for their manumission. How family
ethnic and religious background mediated decisions regarding African
slaves is a question worth asking of all city dwellers of European origin,
and perhaps none more so than Dutch New Yorkers, whose ancestors
introduced slavery to Manhattan in the early seventeenth century and
who remained stalwart supporters of the institution into the nineteenth
century.15 Decoding the inner workings of Dutch families would help
explain why the city’s Dutch slaveowners insisted that the men and women
who served them over the generations learn the Dutch language, yet
failed to make a concerted effort to expose them to the doctrines and
rituals of the Dutch Reformed faith, and, for the most part, excluded
them from their congregation. In part, they were responding to cues from
Dutch clergymen who, after initially allowing Africans to be baptized
and wed in the Reformed church abruptly foreclosed these options in the
1650s, thus setting the church on the track to becoming, arguably, the city
denomination least receptive to Christianizing people of African descent.
Nevertheless, African Americans living among the Dutch absorbed
elements of Dutch religious culture, since they came to celebrate the
Dutch religious holiday of Pinkster and eventually shaped it to their own
ends.
The interpenetration of Dutch and African cultures began in the family
circle and it is there we need to turn to find the reasons why white New
Yorkers differed in their attitudes toward the Christianization of slaves.
Much has been written about famed Huguenot schoolteacher Elias Neau,
15
For one Dutch family’s encounter with slavery, see H. Arthur Bankoff and Frederick
A. Winter, ‘The archaeology of slavery at the Van Cortlandt plantation in the Bronx’,
International Journal for Historical Archaeology, 9 (2005), 291–318.
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Slavery in colonial New York City
493
who selflessly taught slaves and free blacks in catechism classes sponsored
by the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts
in the early eighteenth century, but we still need to probe further to find
out why some city families allowed their slaves to attend, while others
refused to grant permission.16 Similarly, why did some New Yorkers prove
receptive to the overtures of Moravian and Methodist missionaries who
promoted the spiritual equality of blacks and whites, while the majority
remained sceptical of these endeavours?17 Cracking the enigma of colonial
New York City as a pluralistic slaveholding society is a high priority.
The experiences of the many city residents of European descent who
grew up in households where slaves were not present are also vitally
important for understanding the city’s engagement with slavery. If the
racial divide transcended all other social partitions in New York, as Foote
contends, then it is imperative to examine how nonslaveowners were
indoctrinated into the values of the emerging racial order. Instruction about
race began in the city’s newspapers, which brimmed with graphic notices
for runaway slaves and advertisements of slaves for sale as well as long
accounts of incidents involving slaves in distant places. But it was personal
experience that drove home the lessons disseminated in print culture.
Though they did not have a direct economic stake in slavery, nonslaveowners were obviously not exempt from the process of racial sorting
that underpinned New York society. Their associations with slaves and
free blacks in both work and social settings led to friction as well as
collaboration. Instead of assuming that white people at the lower levels
of the social spectrum unthinkingly co-operated in the subjugation of
the city’s slaves, we need to scrutinize more fully the interactions of
servants and slaves in elite households, white and black skilled labourers
in artisans’ shops, white and black mariners18 aboard sailing vessels and
whites and free men of colour in the volunteer military companies the city
raised to fight the French and Indians. Simon Middleton has linked the
acquisition of rights by the city’s white workers to the consolidation of
racial thinking, but others have argued that in certain situations alliances
to further a political goal might have opened chinks in the racial barrier.19
At the least, we need to explain the prevalence of racial mixing on the
social level in underground drinking places and in the netherworld of
16
17
18
19
On Neau, see Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 126–31; John Butler, The Huguenots in
America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 161–5, 168–9;
Sheldon S. Cohen, ‘Elias Neau, instructor to New York’s slaves’, New York Historical Society
Quarterly, 55 (1971), 7–27.
On the relations between German Lutherans and African American New Yorkers, see
Graham Russell Hodges, ‘The pastor and the prostitute: sexual power among African
Americans and Germans in colonial New York’, in Martha Hodes (ed.), Sex, Love, Race:
Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York, 1999), 60–71.
On New York City’s slave mariners, see Charles R. Foy, ‘Seeking freedom in the Atlantic
world’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4 (2006), 46–77.
Simon Middleton’s From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City
(Philadelphia, 2006); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,
Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA, 2001).
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criminal activity frequented by labourers, sailors and prostitutes. Such
interchanges suggest that racial boundaries in the city were more porous
than the notion of a transcendent racial divide suggests. When educated
men wrote contemptuously of the apprentices and blacks at the fringes
of large crowds, their abhorrence of these detested members of the urban
scene blinded them to the import of the conversations that might have
transpired across racial lines.
Finding common ground may have been possible for peoples on the
lower rungs of the social scale, but it was improbable at the pinnacle
of New York City society, where merchants and government officials
habitually lorded it over the enslaved members of their households.
Groomed to exercise authority over inferiors, they readily conceived of
slaves as property and even as cargo. The involvement of perhaps a quarter
of New York’s merchants in slave trading, and some of them in largescale shipping ventures to Africa, supplies an ideal context for probing
the mentality of respected white New Yorkers who chose to engage in
the traffic in human beings. Recent research on what has been called the
microhistory of New York’s slave trade, using ship captains’ log books and
related materials, offers an avenue for capturing critical moments in the
reaffirmation of slavery in New York.20 Merchants’ ledgers and letter books
primarily document business operations, but clues to the urban elite’s
views on race emerge from the merchants’ discursive treatment of blacks.
Modern-day historians, repelled by the barbarity displayed in New York
City in 1741, have tried to fathom the state of mind of the white New
Yorkers who condoned the gruesome punishments meted out to the
alleged black conspirators. Jill Lepore considers the most apposite case
to be the 1692 Salem witchcraft episode in which zealous townspeople
approved the killing of suspected witches on flimsy evidence. But one can
legitimately ask now, after so many inquiries into the 1741 crisis, if it might
not be more rewarding to dissect the routine subordination and effacement
of blacks that would be the enduring legacy of New York’s encounter with
slavery.21 Exposing the myriad of daily transactions that underlay the
application of racial terminology would deepen our understanding of the
reluctance of many New Yorkers to banish slavery long after the founding
of the new republic.22
20
21
22
Philip Misevich, ‘In pursuit of human cargo: Philip Livingston and the voyage of the Sloop
Rhode Island’, New York History, 86 (2005), 185–204; Leo Hershkowitz, ‘Anatomy of a slave
voyage, 1721’, de Halve Maen, 76 (2003), 45–51.
The first comprehensive treatment of the conspiracy was Thomas J. Davis, A Rumor of
Revolt: The ‘Great Negro Plot’ in Colonial New York (New York, 1985). Recent works on the
topic are Peter Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law
(Lawrence, KA, 2003); Serena R. Zabin (ed.), The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741 (Boston,
MA, 2004); Eric W. Plaag, ‘“Greater guilt than theirs”: New York’s 1741 slave conspiracy
in a climate of fear and anxiety’, New York History, 84 (2003), 275–99; and Richard E. Bond,
‘Shaping a conspiracy: black testimony in the 1741 New York plot’, Early American Studies:
An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5 (Spring 2007), 63–94.
David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom 1777–1827
(Baton Rouge, 2006).
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Slavery in colonial New York City
495
Far from ending with emancipation in 1827, white New Yorkers’ sway
over their black neighbours extended to the realms of remembrance, as
the historical memory of the city’s two centuries-long connection with
slavery was shaped by men and women whose ancestors had an affinity
for slavery. Long after personal recollections of the slave era had faded,
the genteel authors who edified New York’s public on the course of
Manhattan’s early history fabricated a narrative that exalted the Dutch,
English and French settlers, while expunging virtually all traces of the
enslaved Africans whose labour had in large measure formed the basis of
the colonial city’s prosperity.23 These self-appointed arbiters of what was
historically significant provided the intellectual armament for historical
commemorations such as the Hudson–Fulton celebration of 1909, even
as New York’s first families stocked the city’s museums and historical
societies with portraits and memorobilia of their illustrious ancestors,
and hereditary associations sponsored the erection of statues of colonial
dignitaries.
The one concession these genteel custodians of the past made to the
impress of slavery on the colonial city was the recounting of the 1741 plot,
an incident so sensational that it could not be papered over. At a remove
of more than a century, it was possible to look more impartially at this blot
on New York City’s record and conceive of the accused blacks as victims.
When speaking of ‘these unfortunate slaves’ in his 1853 history of the city,
David Valentine concluded that ‘the want of education and utter ignorance
of these infatuated wretches, easily made them the victims of craft and
imposition’.24 Portraying colonial slaves as dupes of unscrupulous whites
hardly heralded recognition of the role of black actors in the city’s history.
Some whites with more finely honed sensibilities may have been touched
in retrospect by the travails of the enslaved African Americans who
endured the wrath of white vengeance during those frenetic months. An
obscure poem of the 1850s pivoting on the theme of memories of old
New York suggests that white New Yorkers of ancient lineage may have
been haunted by images of the gruesome public executions of 1741, ‘when
the negroes at the stake in direful accents wail’d’.25 Poet Walt Whitman,
himself a descendant of slaveholders, writing in 1857, came closest to
summoning New Yorkers to heed the lessons of their history.
You who come down town to business in the morning! You little think of the horrid
spectacle that corner [the intersection of Wall Street] more than once exhibited! The
iron pillar – the chains – the fagots of dry wood and straw – the African negro in
23
24
25
On patrician histories of New York City, see Clifton Hood, ‘Journeying to “Old New York”:
elite New Yorkers and their invention of an idealized city history in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries’, Journal of Urban History, 28 (2002), 699–719.
David T. Valentine, History of the City of New York (New York, 1853), 276.
Henry Webb Dunshee, The Knickerbocker’s Address to the Stuyvesant Pear Tree: Respectfully
Dedicated to the Knickerbockers of Manhattan Island ([New York], [1857?]), 6.
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496
Urban History
the middle – the pile touched off – the yells and howls and agonized shrieks – the
crowd around stolid and indifferent.26
But it would be going too far to say that the scions of New York’s old
families were troubled by the miscarriage of justice. There never was any
suggestion of making amends to the victims’ kin, as was the case for the
Salem witches’ families.
The long-standing monopoly of history writing by white New Yorkers,
most with pedigrees stretching back to the colonial era, was fractured only
in 1930, when Harlem Renaissance great James Weldon Johnson penned
Black Manhattan, the first African American-centred chronicle of the city.27
Blocked until then from inscribing their story into the city’s historical
annals, African American New Yorkers had already suffered a grievous
setback in their efforts to honour their ancestors when their primary
place of memory – the Negro Burying Ground in the Commons – was
closed in the 1790s. White New Yorkers, consumed with dreams of urban
progress, signed off on the obliteration of this hallowed ground, thereby
consigning the last visible traces of the lives of countless seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century slaves to what they thought would be oblivion. For
two centuries, African American New Yorkers would be hard pressed to
evoke the struggles and aspirations of the enslaved men and women who
came before them. With the resurrection of this sacred place, the ensuing
proliferation of scholarship on the city’s African men and women and the
transformation of the location into a permanent monument to people of
African cultural heritage, the pendulum of New York City’s racial history
at last began to swing in the direction of equilibrium.
When A. Judd Northrup compiled one of the first outlines of the history
of slavery in New Netherland and New York in 1900, the cost the nation had
paid for slavery in the Civil War was very much on his mind. Deliberately
singling out the flawed behaviour of the Dutch and English colonists who
stood silent as the institution was engrafted on the city and colony, he
declared that ‘the early records . . . exhibit a curious, if not appalling
insensibility as to the moral questions involved in the slave trade and
slaveholding’.28 Northrup’s outrage echoes in the twenty-first century, as
we set about inventing new ways to illuminate the imprint of slavery
on urban life in colonial New York. As a work of historical research,
Northrup’s pioneering study has been superseded, but as a manifesto for
historical candour it still stands as a beacon to today’s urban historians,
alerting them never to lose sight of the human tragedy at the core of New
York City’s history.
26
27
28
Walt Whitman, ‘Broadway the Magnificent’, an 1857 essay, quoted in Jerome Loving, Walt
Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1999), 7.
James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930).
A. Judd Northrup, Slavery in New York: A Historical Sketch (Albany, 1900), 245.
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