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3 1785 The Road Not Taken In March 1784, New York City’s Common Council passed “A Law Regulating Negro and Mulatto Slaves,” which required slaves to carry lanterns at night, banned gaming, required daytime burial of deceased slaves, and prohibited the “disorderly” riding of horses. Violators of all but the daytime burial provision could suffer a public flogging, unless their masters paid a fine. The next month the New-York Journal published a letter from Pennsylvania ridiculing the racial distinctions drawn by the regulations. The Pennsylvanian wondered whether “it would not wound the feelings of a parent so severely, to have its child’s skull broke by the hoofs of a freeman’s horse, as by those of a” slave. The writer marveled that “intelligent citizens, surrounded by the full blaze of liberty . . . [would] dream of such intollerant” practices as those that slavery produced. The correspondent even foresaw that someday there would emerge a standard of justice treating blacks and whites equally.1 The city ordinance and the letter from Pennsylvania were indicative of the countervailing pressures weighing on masters and political leaders as the state of New York emerged from the Revolutionary War. The nearly nineteen thousand African Americans remaining in bondage represented a signi ficant amount of property and labor power, a source of wealth but also of potentially ongoing disruption for white New Yorkers. Imposing order upon slaves would require resolve and coercion by whites. Slaves themselves were unlikely to forget the freedom that some African Americans had seized during the conflict or their masters’ recent vulnerability.2 Meanwhile, challenges mounted to the long-term commitment of white New Yorkers to slavery. Although egalitarian wartime rhetoric had failed to liberate New York’s slaves, nearby states’ actions to begin dismantling slavery bore the impress of revolutionary logic. In 1784, the legislatures of Rhode Island and Connecticut joined Pennsylvania in instituting gradual emancipation schemes. That same year the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) reorganized itself; antislavery advocates in New York’s neighbor to the south sought to enforce the broadest possible interpretation of their state’s abolition law. The letter to the New-York Journal portended a brisk cross-border commerce in antislavery principles and plans. 46 Emancipating New York The effort to import other states’ gradual emancipation procedures in the years immediately following the final British departure from New York revealed the political weaknesses and strengths of its slave system. If the actions of New York’s legislators in 1785 can be taken as an indication of wider public attitudes, then gradual emancipation enjoyed broad but shallow support. A Pennsylvania and southern New England–style gradual abolition law failed in 1785 amid deep-seated concerns about the relationship between race and freedom. Despite the pronounced gradualism of such laws, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, these schemes appeared to some to have threateningly egalitarian implications. The political complications of upsetting New York’s long-established, racially defined social order in the name of libertarian principles thus proved insurmountable for the time being. I. As victorious patriots sought to reassert their control over New York City after the British evacuation, so too did white leaders seek to reassert authority over the city’s two thousand slaves. The ambiguity introduced into master-slave relations by wartime resistance and pro-fugitive British policies threatened a social order already frayed by the disruption of war and occupation . Aside from regulating slave behavior, the Common Council passed ordinances encouraging Sabbath observance, monitoring the arrival of “strangers ” to the city, fire prevention, and local commerce.3 The reimposition of social order was harmful to the 9 percent of city residents who were black.4 Municipal regulation of slaves had three interrelated goals: to ensure renewed public calm, to limit dangers stemming from slave autonomy, and to hold masters accountable for their slaves’ transgressions. The city’s ordinance monitoring Sabbath observance explicitly applied to slaves, while additionally limiting slave gatherings to three people on Sundays and enjoining slaves from recreation as well as work. A slave’s violation of the general provisions of the law could lead to a brief stay in prison; violation of the slave-specific provisions triggered a public whipping unless the master was willing to pay a fine. The Common Council also governed slave participation in the commercial economy, prohibiting “any negro or other slave” from selling items outside officially sanctioned city markets.5 Much like the colonial-era law of slavery, which remained in...

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