The Hidden History of Slavery in New York

[XXPANTHAXX]

The Hidden History of Slavery in New York

by ADELE OLTMAN


In 1991 excavators for a new federal office building in
Manhattan unearthed the remains of more than 400 Africans
stacked in wooden boxes sixteen to twenty-eight feet below
street level. The cemetery dated back to the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and its discovery ignited an effort by
many Northerners to uncover the history of the institutional
complicity with slavery. In 2000 Aetna, one of Connecticut's
largest companies, apologized for profiting from slavery by
issuing insurance policies on slaves in the 1850s. After a
four-month investigation into its archives, Connecticut's
largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant, apologized for
selling advertisement space in its pages for the sale of
slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And in
2004 Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, established
the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to investigate
"and discuss an uncomfortable piece" of the university's
history: The construction of the university's first building
in 1764, reads a university press release,
"involved the labor of Providence area slaves."

Now another blue-blooded institution--the New-York Historical
Society--has joined this important public engagement with our
past by mounting an ambitious exhibition, "Slavery in New
York." To all those who think slavery was a "Southern thing,"
think again. In 1703, 42 percent of New York's households had
slaves, much more than Philadelphia and Boston combined.
Among the colonies' cities, only Charleston, South Carolina,
had more.

The history presented here does not offer the flabby
reflection that "slavery is bad" or that once it came to an
end everyone lived happily ever after. The Historical Society
hired experts led by Richard Rabinowitz, historian and
president of the American History Workshop, to untangle the
complicated stories of slavery and provide historical
context. With more than a score of scholarly advisers
weighing in, one wonders whether there were too many cooks,
each one bringing a different feature of slavery at the
expense of some themes that cry out for explication.

Take, for example, the creation of a distinctive black
community of "half-free" New Yorkers in the middle of what is
today's downtown but well north of the cluster of seventeenth-
century houses. "Slavery in New York" leaves the designation
"half-free" dangling suggestively, unexplored and undefined.
Wasn't slavery straightforward? How could someone be enslaved
and free? Fortunately, a book of essays titled Slavery in New
York, published in conjunction with the New-York Historical
Society, provides a valuable supplement to the exhibit (and a
worthwhile resource in its own right). The collection--co-
edited by Ira Berlin, a distinguished scholar of slavery, and
Leslie M. Harris, the author of a 2003 study of slavery in
New York (The Shadow of Slavery)--assembles a prodigious
group of scholars, writing on topics ranging from slave
rebellion, slavery in the American Revolution, black
abolitionism and life after slavery.

Half-free, we learn from Berlin and Harris's introduction,
reflected the evolving nature of slavery in the urban North.
The Dutch West India Company that governed New Amsterdam
worked its chattel hard, clearing the land, splitting logs,
milling lumber and building wharves, roads and fortifications;
but slavery was so ill defined in those days that slaves
collected wages. In 1635, when wages were not forthcoming, a
small group petitioned the company for redress, and that's
when they became "half-free." As a condition of their half-
freedom, families who sustained themselves as farmers agreed
to labor for the company when it called on them and pay an
annual tribute in furs, produce or wampum. This arrangement
provided the company with a loyal reserve force without the
responsibility for supporting its workers. It was less
beneficial for the half-free men and women. Their status was
not automatically passed down to their children, who instead
remained the property of the company. This anomalous sorting
of humanity produced an ongoing struggle over freedom, and it
reflected "the ambiguous place of black men and black women
in New Netherland. Exploited, enslaved, unequal to be sure,"
write Berlin and Harris, "they were recognized as integral,
if inferior, members of the Dutch colony on the Hudson." And
their status conferred on them a penchant to make trouble.

A map titled "Landscapes of Conspiracy" shows Hughson's
Tavern, where black and white New Yorkers intermingled. There
they "drank, divvied up stolen goods, [and] slept together,"
reads the label. Hughson's was on the far west side of the
city, where Crown Street intersected with today's West Side
Highway. The map details New Amsterdam in 1741, a crucial
year in the city's history of slavery. After an especially
severe winter, ten fires blazed in the city over three short
weeks. A grand jury called by the Supreme Court quickly
concluded that the fires were the work of black arsonists,
"plot Negroes" from the half-free community. They were
accused of acting as part of a vast conspiracy that seemed to
involve just about every slave in the city and was carefully
planned by John Ury, an "alleged" white priest, and John
Hughson. It seems that the Supreme Court Justice was
unwilling to believe that black people could have devised the
plot themselves. In an admirable essay in the accompanying
volume, the historian Jill Lepore argues there was little
evidence to support the Ury-Hughson plot. As to the question
of whether there actually had been a plot, Lepore says the
evidence is inconclusive. What is clear, she argues, is that
given a history of the city's slave codes (which serve as a
record of the difficulty of enslaving human beings) and the
testimony of the slaves themselves, "much evidence points to
a plot hatched on street corners and in markets, the forging
of an Akan-influenced brotherhood" and "a political order
that encouraged individual acts of vengeance, of cursing
whites and setting fires, skirmishes in the daily, unwinnable
war of slavery."

One of the many strengths of "Slavery in New York" is its
depiction of American history and life that was (and is)
entangled with other histories and other lives. It puts to
rest any mistaken belief that globalization began recently
with outsourcing and free-trade agreements. The profits from
the slave trade and products of slave labor, the exhibition
tells us, "fueled the world's first industrial revolution."
By 1800 it also fueled moral outrage against slave trading,
igniting "the first international human rights movement,"
another suggestive comment left undeveloped. It turns out
this is the subject of a second exhibition slated for next
year.

On display is The Trading Book of the Sloop of Rhode Island,
which left the Port of New York in 1748 for West Africa under
the direction of Capt. Peter James. Thumbing through a
virtual trading book while the original remains safely behind
glass, the visitor will see that early in the voyage, around
Sierra Leone, James distributed two New World commodities
that had come through the Port of New York: tobacco and rum,
connecting the British colonies of Virginia and Caribbean
plantation economies into an Atlantic world of inebriation
and addiction. In return he loaded up on cloth, guns and
other manufactured goods from Europe. Later, as he sailed
along the Gold Coast (today's Ghana), he traded those goods
for slaves, a few at a time.

James's book registered the deaths of thirty-eight slaves on
the journey home. But even with the loss, the trafficking in
slaves was profitable. A table provides a graphic
illustration of just how lucrative the business was. In 1675
the average selling price of a slave in dollars in Africa was
$354.89, and in New York it was $3,792.66 (that's a 969
percent markup, for those econometricians keeping score). A
hundred years later the trade was still profitable, although
with a more modest return of 159 percent.

"Slavery in New York" is not the last word on how the
institution evolved--and how it helped New York develop into
the most powerful port in the hemisphere in the decades after
New York State's Gradual Emancipation Law of 1799. When you
walk down a hallway at the end of the exhibition, pause to
ponder two quotes inscribed on the wall, both written years
after the abolition of slavery in all of the Americas. The
first is by U.B. Phillips, grandson of a Southern planter and
a historian who wrote favorably about slavery in 1929, and
the other is by W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar, polemicist and pan-
Africanist who recognized before anyone else that slavery,
even when it was confined to the South in the years before
the Civil War, was a national phenomenon that touched the
lives of every American, black, white, slave and free. It
seems right that Du Bois should have the last word
in "Slavery in New York."

[meroe]

hidden history of new york also a good book for more on our ancestry

asante sana for your research