Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810

Introduction

Introduction OVER RECENT YEARS historians of black Americans have demonstrated a high level of historical consciousness about their own field. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, relying on scores of interviews with practitioners, have documented its rise from a Jim Crow specialty ignored by nearly all to its present status as one of the liveliest and most important areas in the profession. Black History and the Historical Profession, i9i$-i<)8o is a veritable who's who of specialists in the field, providing brief biographical snippets about every major historian of black Americans and many minor ones as well.1 Other historians have attended learned symposiaand contributed historiographical articles assessing the significance of the flood of scholarly work published on the subject. At a conference sponsored by the American Historical Association in 1983 prominent scholars ruminated over the "current state" of blackhistory and suggested several areas deserving of future attention. The quantity and length of the footnotes in these pieces attest to the current vigor of the genre.2 If in all of this there is a hint of the celebratory it is not without good reason. It is only about twenty-fiveyears ago that Leon Litwack , currently one of the more prominent specialists, wasurged by a senior professor at Berkeleyto turn to another area lest hedamage his career.3 Now, however, practitioners of blackhistory hold influential positions in the profession, and books and articles on their area of expertise have probably won more than their fair share of the numerous prizes that are nowadays on offer. It wasthe realization that blackswere not passiveciphers but had a history and a highly developed culture of their own, a revelation largely spurred by the concerns of the 19605 and given substance by xx Introduction the publication of the federal Works Project Administration interviews , that prompted the vigorous reassessment of the black experience .4 Yet this reassessment has proceeded unevenly. Of course the task of writing blacks back into American history is a large one, but surprisingly there are still significant lacunae,areas where there has been little interest and where the intellectual vigor that has characterized the reinterpretation of the slave South has not been in evidence. One such area is the study of slavery and its demise in New York and New Jersey. The neglect of this area is surprising. Throughout the eighteenth century New York and New Jersey were more reliant on slave labor than were any other regions in the North, and slaves constituted more than 20percent of the total population in parts of these colonies . In 1790, when the first national census was taken, every third inhabitant of Kings County on the western end of Long Island was black and almost six in every ten white households owned slaves. In the town of New Utrecht, 38 percent of the population was black and three out of every four households owned slaves.As late as 1810, more than 60 percent of white households in Flatbush, another town in Kings, contained slaves.Yet in spite of these quite striking figures and the obvious importance of the topic, there have been few attempts to analyzeslavery in New York and New Jersey. Moreover, the issues considered by those who have ventured into the field have generally remained within parameters set by the studies written at the turn of the century. Those early monographs reflected the dominance of political and institutional history and, in each case, concentrated on the operation of slavery within one colony or state.5 Relying heavily on colonial statutes and legal cases, historians were concerned not with blacksbut with the effect of slavery on white institutions. Their studies followed a set pattern : a discussion of when the first black entered the colony and how slavery was established, followed by a consideration of slavery couched in the negative terms of what colonial laws forbade, followed by a history of the opposition to slavery,from early attempts to limit the importation of slaves to the emergence of antislavery groups in the second half of the eighteenth century. At their best, as with Edmund Raymond Turner's The Negro in Pennsylvania, these accounts provided well-researched institutional histories of their respective states. A. Judd Northrup's history of New York, on the Introduction xxi other hand, contained little more than undigested slabs of primary material strung together with a few words of facile commentary. Henry S. Cooley's A Study of Slavery in New Jersey was more useful, but hardly distinguished. Though a few articles were published in the next seventy years, there wasno full-length study of slaveryuntil Edgar McManus published two rather similarvolumes, A History of Negro Slavery in New York in 1966 and Black Bondage in the North in I973-6 Both these works are institutional histories, and although McManus assumed a harsher view of slavery and emphasized slave resistance, his framework differed little from that of earlier studies. Chapters on early settlement and the establishment of a system of bondage led to an analysis, based on colonial laws, of the nature of the institution and finally to accounts of slavery's demise. McManus's purpose, as he explained in the preface to Black Bondage in the North, was to tell his story "with a minimum of generalization or interpretation" and, in particular, to avoid "imposing a conceptual framework on the study."7 Although no satisfactory general account of slavery in either New York or New Jersey yet exists, historians have extensively covered two aspects of the institution.8 Slave rebellions, in particular the well-known slave conspiracy of 1741, have attracted a considerable amount of interest.9 Paradoxically, however, the abundance of material on the latter appears to have stymied a broad consideration of the nature of black resistance. On the face of it the conspiracy would appear to have almost endless possibilities as a point of entry into the world of the slaves. Instead, detailed narrative accounts of the complex events that led up to the trial of those involved have been preferred to sustained attempts to analyze the meaning and significance of the conspiracy itself. Further, concentration on this dramatic episode has inhibited investigation of the more typical (and more successful) forms of everyday black resistance.10 We are left with little more than the inadequatelysubstantiated conclusion of Edgar McManus, who, writing of the entire North, declared that black resistance to slavery "turned the racial hegemony of the whites into a regime of mutual terror and repression."11 The second aspect of New York and New Jersey slavery that has received a good deal of attention is its eventual end. In their seminal works David Brion Davis and Winthrop Jordan have placed xxii Introduction the emergence of antislavery thought in the wider perspective of European and American intellectual history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.12 At a less ambitious level, the history of the passage of the gradual manumission laws has also been treated at length.13 But again, accounts of antislavery societies and legislative proceedings have taken the place of a considered analysis of the impact of the end of slavery either on slaveholders or, even more noticeably, on blacks. The 1741 conspiracy and the legislativeend of slavery are important topics, but concentration on them has skewed our understanding of slavery in New York and New Jersey. Generally, the existing historiography gives the impression that slavery was solely a political , social, and moral problem of the white elite. Blacks are either relegated to the role of grateful and usually invisiblebeneficiariesof white philanthropy or depicted simplistically asincipient Nat Turners , threatening the white order. Detailed analysis of the writings and activities of antislavery advocates, or even close examination of slave codes, may reveal much about the fears and expectations of white society; it can tell us virtually nothing about the region's blacks.14 The historiography of slavery in New York and New Jersey prompts a series of questions that have not satisfactorily been answered . How extensive wasslavery?Who were the slaveholders and to what uses did they put their slaves? What was the effect of the end of slavery on the slaveholders? Neither has there been any sustained attempt to consider the slaves themselves. Though methods used over the past two decades by historiansof southern slavery, and questions raised by them, have had some impact on newer studies of New York and New Jersey, it is still the case that little is known of slave culture, of the influence on these slaves of the African past, or of the impact on them of the end of slavery.15 One indication of the lackluster and limited nature of the historiography is the way in which other scholars working on New York and New Jersey have virtually ignored it. Often, in studies of these colonies or states, slavery has been completely omitted or dismissed in a few lines. The extent and importance of the institution in some parts of New York and New Jersey are simply not recognized. In an examination of Newtown on Long Island, modeled on the New England town studies, slavery is mentioned on fewer than 20 of its Introduction xxiii 270 pages.16 Even this paltry figure overstates the relative weight the author gives to the institution, for many of these pages contain only the most fleeting references. Nowhere is there an account of the establishment and rise of slavery or a detailed assessment of the role the institution played in the town's scheme of things, let alone any consideration of the blacks. Yet at the time of the 1790 census about 25 percent of Newtown's inhabitants were black and slightly in excess of one in every two white households contained slaves. Admittedly the author ends her account in 1775, but from the scanty population figures that appear in her book, it would appear that blacks had constituted a similar proportion of the population for much of the eighteenth century. To all intents and purposes Newtown, with every other household owning blacks, was a slave society, yet only the most perceptive reader could have drawn such a conclusion from the text of this book. It is not easy to account for the scholarly neglect of slavery in New York and New Jersey. No doubt the refractory and unyielding nature of the sources is partly to blame. Interestingly, the historiography is most comprehensive in the areas where there are easily exploitable sources. Antislavery leaders were nothing if not highly articulate and literate, and they have left much material for historians in tracts, magazine arid newspaper pieces, and correspondence. Similarly, Daniel Horsmanden, the presiding judge at the 1741 conspiracy trial, left a lengthy and readily available account of the proceedings , including the testimony of many of the accused slaves.17 But for the most part sources on black life in and around New York City are hard to come by. Blacks were a minority of the population, were for the most part illiterate, and left few obvious traces on the historical record. These comments are also applicableto Pennsylvania , and yet historians writing about that state, most notably Gary Nash, have imaginatively exploited materialwith similar limitations to produce some excellent studies of slaveryand blacks.18 This book, which examines the last years of slavery in New York City and its surrounds,19 is a further contribution toward a reassessment of black life and slavery in the North.20 This, then, is in the first place a book about slavery. The "peculiar institution" is most commonly associated with the South, but thousands of blacks were also enslaved in New York and elsewhere in the North. The record of their plight—and in spite of complacent xxiv Introduction assertions about the mildness of northern slavery this is the correct word —and of the way in which they adapted to the exigencies of their situation should be written back into American history. Yet more is involved than some liberal attempt to redress the imbalance of history, although this too is a factor. As we shall see, New York City provides a strikingly different ground on which to investigate the creation of black culture, offering a new perspective that can contribute to an overall understanding of the complex process of acculturation. This is also a book about freedom. I have sought, among other things, to outline the impact of the end of slavery on both the white and black populations of the city and to make a contribution to the field of "emancipation studies," which Armstead Robinson has asserted are already at the cutting edge of scholarly inquiry into the black experience.21 Although there has been a commendable comparative dimension to the many studies of the impact of freedom on southern blacks, historians have used the Caribbean, or even Russia, as a basis for their analyses.22 They have not so far looked to the North. Yet emancipation (and indeed slavery) in New York City may provide an equally useful perspective on the experience in the South. Finally, this is a book about New York City. I do not claim that New York is America writ small: the city is idiosyncratic, probably representative only of itself. But by the earlyyears of the nineteenth century it was rapidly emerging as the most important and vital urban center in the new nation, and the lives and activities of its inhabitants have continued to be a focus of interest for historians, particularly in recent years.23 Sean Wilentz has written about class formation, Christine Stansell about gender relations, and Paul Gilje about popular disorder and violence. The following account of the end of slavery is a contribution to the historiography of slavery and freedom; it should also reveal something new about New York City itself. ...