Traffic in Enslaved Africans”
New York City’s acceptance of Southern slavery and its close economic ties with the South came naturally from its own history of being a slave-owning, slave-trading city.
The first black people on Manhattan Island arrived in 1625, just one year before Peter Minuet bought the island from the natives and just five years after the first blacks in America had come ashore in Jamestown, Virginia.
The status of the Africans who landed in Jamestown and Manhattan were different. The twenty-four Angolans who landed at Jamestown, Virginia, were not slaves, whereas those who landed on Manhattan were.
The Jamestown Africans disembarked on the continent with the legal understanding from the white settlers who needed their services that these blacks had the same rights as white English indentured servants who were arriving at the same time. Jamestown settlers paid the Dutch ship captain for the Angolans’ passage from Africa in exchange for seven years of service, after which they would have the rights granted to all settlers.
There was no racial color barrier between white and black in 1625 Jamestown. The barriers were social—between master and employee. One of those first black settlers in Virginia, Anthony the Angolan, who later changed his name to Anthony Johnson, worked his way out of his seven years of servitude to become Virginia’s first wealthy black man, acquiring as much land as his white neighbors.
While Johnson’s white neighbors initially treated him socially as just another landowner, he also infuriated them by his constant use of the courts to sue them over minor disputes. One of Johnson’s suits would forever seal the fate of future slaves brought to the continent.
In 1654, Johnson sued his white neighbor, Robert Parker, who Johnson charged was illegally keeping a man named John Castor who Johnson insisted was his slave. Castor insisted he was a former indentured servant who had long ago worked off Johnson’s claim on his labor. Castor had gone to the neighbor Parker for protection from Johnson. After a lengthy trial, the colonial court ruled that Castor was Johnson’s property, and he could not claim refuge with the neighbor.
For the first time in American history, a court of law had ruled that one man had the legal right to own another man. The court in Jamestown did not find it ironic or even remarkable that the slave owner had once been an indentured servant himself. Nor did it make a difference to the judges that Johnson and Castor were both black.
All the black men who landed on Manhattan Island were owned outright by the Dutch West India Company and their purpose for the past thirty years had been singular—to prepare the colony of New Netherland island and its primary town of New Amsterdam on the southern end of Manhattan Island for more white settlers and more black slaves. The slaves cut timber, built houses and fortifications, and constructed wharves along the Hudson River from which the furs and timber that had first attracted the company to the area could be shipped back to Europe.
In 1653, the colony’s slaves were ordered to build a wall around New Amsterdam to protect the development from increasingly irritated and dangerous native tribes who had grown resentful of the encroachment of the white men through the Hudson Valley. Later the slaves would build a road that would run along that wall. History would not remember the names of the black men who built both the wall to protect what would become New York City and Wall Street.
The Dutch view on slavery was liberal, almost an extension of the indentured servitude. The Dutch trusted their slaves to help defend the colony. They set up economic models in which the slaves could work their way into freedom, which, in turn, allowed them to own property, a right that was unheard of in most other civilizations with the exception of Jamestown.
By 1664, Charles II of England had designs on expanding his territories in the New World south of Connecticut. The Dutch West India Company, which had pioneered and financed New Netherland as a colony and New Amsterdam as its capital on Manhattan Island, was caught off guard by the sudden aggressive stance of England.
The company had spent most of its time building relationships with trappers and natives—not in building military fortifications to protect the colony from a seaborne invasion from undetermined enemies. When four British warships appeared in the harbor in the summer of 1664, Peter Stuyvesant, then the governor of the colony, readily capitulated because he had no trained soldiers or enough weapons to fight the British.
One of the first things the new British owners of the colony did was rename it New York. What had been a Dutch outpost in the New World shipping beaver pelts to Europe was now a full-fledged English colony. Among the colonists in New York were about 150 black people, most of whom had not yet worked their way into freedom and likely had no illusions that their state in life would change under new management.
Over the next one hundred years, the British kept the remaining Dutch colonists and the newly arriving British settlers supplied with a steady flow of Africans who were purchased to act as laborers on small farms outside the city and inside the city as trained artisans, craftsmen, and house servants. According to census records, the percentages of blacks to whites in the city crept steadily upward from 14 percent in 1698 to 21 percent by 1756.
While the population of slaves on Manhattan Island steadily increased as the British imported them from Africa, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, the freedoms that slaves had enjoyed under Dutch rule gradually decreased. A 1730 law passed in New York made it illegal for three or more slaves to meet each other under penalty of getting forty lashes on a bare back. Another law, passed the following year, made it illegal for slaves to make noise on a public street. A law passed in 1740 made it illegal for slaves to buy or sell fruit.
What frightened white New Yorkers of the early eighteenth century was the distinct possibility that growing numbers of black slaves in the city and the Hudson River Valley would organize themselves into a formidable armed force. There fears were realized when the first successful slave revolt on the continent occurred on Manhattan in 1712.
On the night of April 6, up to fifty black men and women armed themselves with guns, knives, and hatchets stolen from their masters and then set fire to a farm building on Maiden Lane off Broadway. They lay in the darkness for the white settlers to rush to the scene of the fire. At least nine white settlers were killed in the ensuing melee. Apparently surprised at their easy success, the slaves retreated into the surrounding woods and barns rather than flee the island during the ensuing confusion and terror that now gripped the white community.
The next morning, the colonial militia rounded up virtually all the slaves on Manhattan and arrested and brought to trial more than seventy of them. New York’s governor Robert Hunter was sympathetic to what he perceived to be the slaves’ main grievances: that some masters had subjected them to “hard use,” but he also realized that if he did not punish the blacks, he would have a white revolt on his hands.
Twenty-five slaves were convicted of revolt and executed with twenty being mercifully hanged while three were slow roasted by fire and one was broken on a wheel. So many slaves were executed in such a cruel fashion that Hunter protested that most other civilized societies picked out only the ringleaders of slave revolts and executed them as an example to other slaves. The slave owners ignored their governor’s suggestion. They executed all the convicted.
When the slave owners ignored his advice to be lenient, Hunter observed that the only way to prevent future slave revolts in the colony was to stop importing slaves and start building a free white workforce.
That suggestion, intended for both white New Yorkers and New Englanders either who needed free labor or who enjoyed the status symbol of household slaves, was also ignored. Over the next thirty years, the number of slaves in New York City doubled until the slave population made up 20 percent of the population of the city.
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