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Preface IN THEBEGINNING this was to be a study of the end of slaveryin the North. After a couple of years I realized that I had bitten off more than I could satisfactorily chew and the topic was cut back to the end of slavery in the Middle Atlantic states. A while later Pennsylvania got the chop. Then large areas of New York and New Jersey began to go the way of an ever-increasing proportion ofAmerican territory. This book is presented now in its current form—an analysis of the end of slavery in a loosely defined New York City—before it degenerates to the point where it is little more than an account of slavery on Wall Street on a dark night in November 1789. Perhaps it was inevitable that I should end up concentrating on New York City. I am a city lad. The countryside unsettles me. I know from experience that cows, given the chance, will walk over me. In fact animals of any sort, even very little animals, sensing my tenseness, will bail me up. After two days in the country I have to stick my head near the exhaust pipe of a car to get a breath of real air. In short, few would describe me as being at one with nature. On the other hand I feel comfortable in a city. Probably I had fallen for New York City before I sawit; the reality, once I arrived , was even better. After being reluctantly ejected from libraries and archives each afternoon and having no desire to return to the dump financial exigency forced me to sleep in, I walked all over Manhattan, often until the early hours of the morning. On my first night in New York, without sleep for forty hours and a trifle disoriented , I made my way to the southern tip of the island. There, while drinking a cup of coffee and idly consulting a 1789 street map, I was approached by a gentleman who had definitely seen better xiv Preface days. He informed me that, in an earlier incarnation, he had lived in eighteenth-century New York, and for the price of a few cigarettes he was prepared to divulge all. What putative historian could resist such an opportunity? Where else but in New York could it have occurred? Yet no matter how congenial I may have found New York City, this history clearly has been written by an outsider. I am not black and I am not American. I traveled to America twice while researching this book—once for about nine weeks and a second time forfive days (predictably, the latter was the more productive trip). Since then I have been back twice, but only for brief, jet-lagged visits to attend conferences. Distance from America has probably affected my interpretation of slavery and of blacks in New York, but that, in the end, is for others to judge. Here, I would like to mention briefly the impact that distance has had on the sources employed in this book. Although my quick but extraordinarily expensive raids on manuscript collections have yielded much useful material, particularly from the District Attorney's Indictment Papers in the Municipal Archives, for the most part this work is based on sources such as the census, newspapers, the Early American Imprint Series that have been microfilmed (or unfortunatelymicrocarded) and are readily availablein Australia. For more years than I care to remember I have read enormous quantities of such sources, carding every reference to blacks or slavery: a small-meshed seine was, in effect, dragged through a considerable body of water, and although the yield was seldom large, index cards gradually accumulated. Geography may have imposed constraints on the material used, but it also forced me to try and tease out the meaning from what often appeared to be very unpromising sources. Ayear's solid work in the archives in America might well have allowed me to finish a book on the end of slavery in New York City within a more reasonable time span, but the resulting work would, I believe, have differed considerably. My primary interest was always in the lives of the blacks themselves . Strongly influenced by the flowering of black history in the 19705, I tried to sketch in an answer to the question: what did it mean to be black and living in New York City at the end of the eighteenth century? I quickly discovered, however, that such an endeavor...

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