In 1991, excavators for a new federal office building in Manhattan unearthed the remains of more than 400 Africans stacked in wooden boxes 16 to 28 feet below street level. The cemetery dated back to the 17th and 18th centuries, and its discovery ignited an effort by many Northerners to uncover the history of the institutional complicity with slavery. The discovery of the slave cemetery began a process through which New Yorkers have begun to learn that slavery was central — not peripheral — to New York’s history. Much of that history is explored in the book, “Slavery in New York” by Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris.
The Slave Population Was Large
For portions of the 17th and 18th centuries, New York City housed the largest urban slave population in mainland North America, with more enslaved people than any other city on the continent. During those years, enslaved Africans composed more than one-quarter of the labor force in the city and perhaps as much as one-half of the workers in many of its outlying districts. Enslaved people could be found in New York into the fifth decade of the 19th century.
Women Were the Face of Slavery in New York City
By their numbers alone, enslaved women — cooking and cleaning for whites, suckling their infants, raising their children and succoring their aged — were ubiquitous in the households of New York’s elite and common among the white families of the middling sort. The men worked outside the house, laboring on the docks and in warehouses, loading and unloading ships and drays — performing the heavy, backbreaking work necessary to keep the New York economy moving.
Men Were the Face of Slavery in the Rural Regions Outside the City
Most enslaved Black people — like most residents of New York state — lived outside New York City and worked as agricultural laborers. Farmers in the richest agricultural regions of New York’s hinterland — the Hudson Valley, Long Island and northern New Jersey — were equally dependent on enslaved labor. There, the face of slavery was male and often African, and women were in short supply.
Owners Discouraged Families Among Their Enslaved
The sexual imbalance in both city and countryside played havoc with Black family life. The multigenerational families established by Atlantic Creoles during the 17th century withered under British rule. Men and women had difficulty finding mates. If they did, they rarely lived together as husband and wife in the same household. The cramped quarters in which urban whites resided gave slave owners little incentive to encourage family formation among their enslaved. Many actively discouraged it, and masters regularly sold enslaved women at the first sign of pregnancy. The inability of New York enslaved Blacks to reproduce themselves made New York increasingly dependent upon the slave trade, which, in turn, enlarged the proportion of New York enslaved people who had been born in Africa and increased the mortality rates of the enslaved population. The vicious cycle made New York into a death factory for Black people.
In the 1700s, a Large Percentage of the Enslaved in New York Came from Jamaica
Between 1700 and 1774, the British imported between 6,800 and 7,400 Africans to the colony of New York. It was cheaper for New York slave traders to import directly from Africa than to buy enslaved Africans from elsewhere. Despite this deep discount, less than 30 percent of the enslaved imported to New York before 1741 came directly from Africa. Nearly all of the rest came from the English sugar islands of Barbados, Antigua and, most of all, Jamaica, from which 30 percent of all New York’s enslaved Blacks came. Another 35 percent came from elsewhere in the West Indies, while less than 3 percent came from South Carolina.
Life Was Extremely Hard for Enslaved Women in the Early 1700s
Most enslaved women were dead by age 40, and their mortality rates peaked between ages 30 and 34; they died of disease or complications of childbirth, exacerbated by poor nutrition and years of toil. Some were simply driven mad. In 1749, a “Negro Girl of about 15 Years of Age,” who “had been for sometime disordered in her Sences,” fell, or more likely, jumped “out of a garret window three story, of which unhappy fall she was so bruised, that she dyed in a few hours.” One owner sold his enslaved female in 1756 “because she breeds too fast for her owner to put up with such inconvenience.” Infant mortality was high, and infanticide not uncommon, although it is unclear who was committing infanticide — mothers or masters.
Enslaved Men and Women Who Were Married Often Spent the Evenings Together
Because the island of Manhattan was so small, a man might live just doors away from his wife (or a mother just blocks from her growing children), or perhaps not far away in Westchester or New Jersey or Long Island. In these circumstances, some spouses belonging to different owners managed to come together after the workday ended. On Sundays, while most whites went to church or stayed at home with their families, enslaved Blacks spent their day of rest traversing the city to see family and friends. Especially in the summer, Black men and women went “frolicking in the fields,” a wide swath of land north of the Negroes Burial Ground.
Many Enslaved People in New York Could Read and Write
A sizable number of Black New Yorkers could read and write, a skill that was often mentioned in advertisements seeking the return of runaways, some of whom forged passes. Few Black New Yorkers had to wear shackles. Compared to the enslaved men and women in many other parts of the British colonies, they had an exceptional degree of mobility. Most were able to move throughout the city at will.
New York City Held Tight Onto Slavery Longer Than Surrounding Areas
After the Revolutionary War, New York City became a haven for slavery. Of all the major northeastern cities, it alone remained committed to forced labor. In 1790, Philadelphia counted only 300 enslaved African-Americans; even Baltimore, the rapidly expanding Southern port city, listed only 1,300. In contrast, over 2,300 resided in New York. The very complexity of New York’s thriving urban economy permitted a profitable sanctuary for slavery.
Many Were Burned at the Stake in the 1741 Slave Conspiracy
The conspiracy was a central event in the history of slavery in New York City. After an unusually cold winter, 10 fires blazed in the city over three short weeks in March and April. In early April, four fires erupted in a single day. A grand jury called by the Supreme Court quickly concluded that the fires were the work of Black arsonists, acting as part of a vast conspiracy that seemed to involve just about every enslaved person in the city. More than 100 Black men and handful of Black women and whites were soon arrested and thrown into jail in the basement of City Hall. Convicted of conspiring to burn New York City and murder its inhabitants, 13 Africans were burned at the stake in the spring and summer of 1741; 17 more were hanged; 70 others were sold into yet more miserable, bone-crushing slavery in the Caribbean. Four whites, the alleged ringleaders of the plot, were hanged, one in chains. But before the trials ended, critics accused New Yorkers of imagining a plot that had never existed.
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