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introduction New York, the state with the highest concentration and largest number of slaves north of Maryland, finally designated freedom as a birthright on July 5, 1799. The “Act for the gradual abolition of slavery” implemented a maddeningly indirect program of emancipation for African American New Yorkers born any time after the nation’s twenty-third birthday. The law declared the children of slave mothers to be free but obligated those children to endure a period of service to their mothers’ masters extending well into adulthood. Gradual abolition nonetheless had profound consequences for New York and the nation, for enslaved blacks as well as for free whites. New York’s emancipation act guaranteed the emergence of a historically rare and protean slaveless democracy in the half of the United States that lay north of the Mason-Dixon Line.1 Subsequently, the fast-growing Empire State would become a cornerstone of the proverbial American “house divided against itself ,” occupying a terrain contested by free blacks, abolitionists of every kind, southern apologists, and cultural innovators of “whiteness.”2 Slavery in New York collapsed during the generation following the passage of the gradual abolition law, yet how New Yorkers decided to abolish slavery at all is, at best, partially understood. The ultimate rejection of slavery within New York’s borders occurred as part of a much wider movement to abolish slavery in the Revolutionary-era North and an even broader transatlantic movement to dismantle the international slave trade and many of the assumptions upon which that trade rested. Slavery discourse in New York reflected and elaborated upon those wider discussions of liberty and humanitarianism. Because New York was one of the last northern states to act against slavery within its borders, the story of abolition there throws into particularly sharp relief the ambivalence toward slavery of Revolutionaryera white Americans.3 At stake in New York’s prolonged debate over slavery during the final two decades of the eighteenth century were fundamental propositions about citizenship, the proper dimension of the public sphere, the regional and partisan identities of New Yorkers, and the political economy of prosperity, poverty, and productivity. Moreover, emerging and highly contested ideas about race shaped and were shaped by the extended debate over slavery. 2 Emancipating New York This book explains the abolition of slavery in New York as a product of organized white opposition, of changes in the political structure, and of black resistance. But the explanation for the abolition of slavery relies even more upon an analysis of the vigorous public discourse about slavery, race, and citizenship that kept the problem of slavery before the public for the better part of two decades. Slavery became a negative reference point in measuring the presence or absence of justice in a state formulating a postindependence economic and political identity. In the process, the institution of slavery lost its legitimacy, and the public overcame racialized concerns about citizenship that had undermined the case for abolition. Some white New Yorkers even found ways to conceive of African American equality in positive terms. Caught in a web of antislavery discourse which spanned the Atlantic world, New Yorkers finally reached the inescapable conclusion that slavery comported neither with their ideals nor their interests. New Yorkers defined the contours of an American public discourse about freedom, slavery, race, and citizenship that would shape events well beyond the official end of New York slavery in 1827, a full generation after the passage of the state’s original gradual emancipation law. I. Although never a “slave society” on the order of Virginia, South Carolina, or Louisiana and by the mid-nineteenth century not even a “society with slaves,” New York state is well cast for a leading role in the history of race in America.4 Black life in New York City—which would become the nation’s first and greatest metropolis in the nineteenth century—has attracted considerable scholarly interest in recent years. Social historians of northern African American life have unearthed a wealth of data, often concentrating on Manhattan and surrounding areas before and after the commencement of gradual abolition. We now know a great deal about family formation, residential living patterns, occupational structure, and even the dress and demeanor of northern free blacks in general and of black residents of New York City in particular. Often confined to the worst housing and lowest-status jobs, New York City’s emerging free black population nonetheless founded a variety of religious and cultural...

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