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American Quarterly 58.2 (2006) 455-466


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"It Happened Here":

Slavery on the Hudson

Duncan Faherty

Slavery in New York. Produced by Louise Mirrer, Richard Rabinowitz (curator and writer), and James Oliver Horton (chief historian), New-York Historical Society, New York, October 7, 2005–March 26, 2006.
Slavery in New York. Edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris. New York: New Press, 2005. 403 pages. $25.00 (paper).

In the right-hand foreground of William Rollinson's 1796 drawing of the Government House in Manhattan two men are positioned, one on each side of a horse drawn cart (fig. 1). One man appears to be unloading objects from the cart, while the other man holds the horse's reins. The objects in the wagon bed are unrecognizable, and so too is the relationship between the two men. Are they working together? Or is the laboring man, the black man unloading the cart, the property of the man holding the horse's reins? Moreover, why in a drawing of the Government House did Rollinson depict a scene seemingly unrelated to the building figured in the background? According to a caption underneath Rollinson's sketch, one of a host of objects on display at the New-York Historical Society (NYHS)'s ambitious Slavery in New York exhibition, the drawing contains "the earliest pictured image of a black New Yorker." Even though Africans were among Manhattan's earliest non-Native settlers, "not a single image of black New Yorkers survives for their first 170 years in the city." Intentionally or not, Rollinson's sketch juxtaposes a nameless African American laborer against the backdrop of a symbol of New York's promise, a building "intended as a presidential mansion for George Washington." Like the exhibition in which it is housed, the sketch offers viewers the chance to think about the relationship between the rise of New York as a cultural, political, and economic power and the labor of countless, and all too often nameless, enslaved Africans who labored to make that ascension possible.

In 1991 workers excavating a new federal office building in Manhattan made a startling discovery: interred under twenty feet of dirt, concrete, and [End Page 455]


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
William Rollinson, Custom House, NYC, ca. 1796; pen and ink with wash on paper. Courtesy Collection of New-York Historical Society, accession #1910.39.

rubble were the remains of more than four hundred people of African descent. The area intended to be the footprint of a skyscraper was in fact a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cemetery. Public outcry halted construction, and the African Burial Ground has been a source of academic inquiry and public memorial ever since. In their introduction to the collection Slavery in New York, Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris figure the recovery of the African Burial Ground as a watershed moment in New York history, suggesting that "until that moment, most New Yorkers knew little of their city's deep association with slavery" (3). New York's collective amnesia concerning the history of slavery in the city is symptomatic of a larger cultural suppression that reconstructs slavery as a largely southern institution. This misconception stems from reductive representations of slavery as simply linked to agricultural systems rendered obsolete by the emergence of industrialization. Unfortunately, many Americans still imagine the enslavement of Africans as having happened only in the South. This inadequate, but popular, sense of the past liberates the North from having to examine its own participation in slavery, effectively positing that the Mason-Dixon line divided the United States into an abolitionist North and a proslavery South. Such an oversimplification of American history is precisely what both the New-York Historical Society's Slavery in New York exhibition and the companion volume edited by Berlin and Harris seek to redress. The aim of Slavery in New York is, [End Page 456] as the advertising broadsides plastered across the city declare, to display the manner in which "It Happened Here."1

In attempting to explicate New York's neglected history of slavery, the New-York Historical Society...

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