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Chapter Five Black Cargo or Crew In 1713 Stephen Domingo, an Afro-Spanish native of Carthagena in Colombia, was being held in slavery in New York City. Domingo had been sold to a New Yorker by a British privateer as part of the loot from a Spanish ship captured during Queen Anne’s War (1702–13). Domingo petitioned the New York Common Council for his freedom, claiming that as a freeborn sailor he could not legally be enslaved by Mr. Perce, the man who claimed to own him. In eighteenth-century New York enslaved men of African descent rarely achieved freedom merely by asking for it. However, Domingo had a good chance of success, for he had managed to acquire an affidavit from a formidable privateering captain named Charles Pinkethman attesting to his freedom. Pinkethman was a captain of some note in New York—the following winter the city’s government would honor him for ‘‘having done many Considerable services for this City in the late Warr as Commander of a Pirate ship of Warr called the Hunter’’—and his word would have carried a good deal of weight among the council members . A week and a half after Pinkethman gave his deposition, the New York mayor and his council ordered Perce and one Captain Mayon (probably the privateer who had captured Domingo) to respond to the charges.1 The final outcome of Domingo’s case is unknown. Moreover, this uncertainty is only one of the questions that this brief encounter in the New York council chamber raises. How did a man from Carthagena come to New York? Why did the official record refer to him as a ‘‘Spanish Negro Living with Mr. Perce’’ and not simply call him a slave? Why did a ship captain vouch for his freedom? Why did the officials of New York’s government give him a hearing at all? The brief story of Stephen Domingo offers an unusual glimpse into the problem of slave status in the imperial and commercial context of eighteenth-century New York. The shifting status of Domingo and other black sailors in New York demonstrates how the city’s involvement in the wars for trade and empire worked against other eighteenth-century ideals of fixed racial hierarchies. The fate of sailors captured by privateers Black Cargo or Crew 107 looking to profit from imperial wars varied greatly and was shaped by the close links between trade, war, and international law. Slavery was by no means the only possible outcome for a black sailor brought to New York City. For sailors captured during wartime, the implications of living on the margins of competing empires were obvious. Unlike many traders and consumers in imperial New York, black sailors experienced firsthand the actions of the imperial state. They consciously and explicitly declared their imperial identities as they proclaimed themselves French or Spanish subjects. Like New Yorkers on land, however, these sailors’ status did not derive solely from their political allegiances. Although the symbols of their status were rarely the consumer goods or elegant dances that we saw earlier, their symbols were just as closely tied to the commercial empire and its commodification of goods. For these sailors, their status derived from the British Empire’s attempts to commodify persons as slaves in the context of wars over trading routes. The freedom suits of these foreign black sailors ultimately compelled New York’s courts to rethink their understanding of the relationship between race and slavery. Nearly all of these sailors arrived in New York as the result of privateering during the continuous wars for empire. New York’s involvement in privateering is the key to understanding the commercial nature of the empire and its wars, as well as the combination of profit and war that created the black prisoner of war. Once these sailors arrived in New York, few accepted their enslavement passively. As a result, the courts were forced to redefine their justifications for enslavement . They also had to create a range of possible statuses for these foreign nationals. Although slavery was as much a system of law as of labor, black sailors did not find that the legal institutions of the state necessarily worked against their interests. Surprisingly, at times the imperial and commercial culture of New York combined with the empire’s legal apparatus to undermine the easy definitions of identity that slavery imposed elsewhere. Of course, an imperial, commercial, militarized port...

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