Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713-1783

In 1717 William Burgis completed a six-foot-wide panoramic illustration of New York's waterfront. The picture provided a vivid depiction of the central place that the maritime industry played in the city's economic and social lives. Burgis showed a harbor filled with sloops, brigantines, and schooners, as well as wharves and shipyards bustling with activity associated with New York's coastal and overseas trade. Merchants of the time saw the prominence of ships and buildings in The Burgis View as a reflection of their social status and wealth, while tradesmen, such as coopers and shipwrights, saw in Burgis's work an acknowledgment of their significance within a critical component of the city's economy. For most New Yorkers, the harbor's bustle illustrated by Burgis signified New York's increasing importance within the British Empire as the city became an important trading port. The vessels pictured in The Burgis View were likely to have come to New York from London, Charlestown, Boston, and a wide variety of West Indian ports. The city's maritime industry and trading networks depicted in Burgis's work had quite a different connotation for New York's slaves than it did for the city's merchants and tradesmen. Trading relationships between New York merchants and West Indian planters and merchants brought many of the city's slaves to New York's slave market at Wall Street.¹ The wharves, dockyards, and shorefront artisan shops in Burgis's picture were where numerous New York slaves labored as stevedores, draymen, ship carpenters, and sail makers. Thus, for New York's slaves, the maritime industry depicted by Burgis was not simply the muscular, vibrant, economic engine that most other New Yorkers understood it to be, but rather the means by which they were enslaved and kept so.

However, in the seventy-year period between the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht and the Treaty of Paris, slaves, both those living in New York and those from distant rural regions, came to see New York City's maritime industry as also being a potential portal to freedom. This perception of the city's harbor and its ships being a door to freedom for slaves was due to the size and strength of New York's maritime industry, slaves' maritime skills, and the city's large transient and multicultural population providing ample opportunities for fugitive slaves to hide themselves while they sought berths on the numerous ships docked at the wharves cluttering the East River from the Battery north to Corlears' Hook.² These opportunities for freedom through New York's harbor expanded and contracted during the eighteenth century due to factors such as economic booms and recessions, and imperial trade policies, which were beyond the control of both slaves and their masters. It was, however, the exigencies of warfare and struggles between Great Britain and its imperial enemies, with the resulting maritime labor shortages, that provided the greatest opportunities for fugitive slaves. Thus, while in the two decades following the end of Queen Anne's War a relatively small number of fugitive slaves fled enslavement by seeking berths on ships, during the wars of the mid- and late-eighteenth century—the War of Jenkin's Ear, King George's War, the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution—the number of runaway slaves who obtained, or at least attempted to find, freedom by employment on the numerous vessels berthed in New York harbor increased dramatically.

In 1712 "hard usage" of the city's slaves led to an insurrection in which two dozen of the city's slaves attempted to kill New York's whites and take control of the city. Among those participating in the uprising were three Spanish Indians—Hosey (Jose), John (Juan), and Ambrose—from New Spain