In the Shadow of Slavery: African-Americans in New York City, 1625-1863 (review)

Leslie M. Harris' In the Shadow of Slavery: African-Americans in New York City, 1625-1863 propounds a simple yet perceptive thesis: that class was integral to the development of the black community in New York City from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Harris, fittingly the winner of the 2004 Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History, thus returns to the emphasis of the first generation of black historians, an emphasis that Harris herself acknowledges in her introduction. A generation's worth of scholarship focused on southern slavery and the creation of racial identity, she maintains, has rendered "a static picture of class relations, rather than a dynamic description of the growth of class divisions within the black community."¹ (p 4) Drawing upon a plethora of sources, including institutional records, newspapers, cartoons, and even crime narratives, Harris' In the Shadow of Slavery offers that "dynamic description," correcting what has emerged as monolithic interpretations of antebellum labor history, and the antebellum black urban experience.

In the early national and antebellum periods, where Harris concentrates the bulk of her study, white New Yorkers believed that the experience of slavery had so degraded blacks that the latter had to be prevented from exercising social and political power. Thus, gradual emancipation laws and the 1821 suffrage law that disfranchised black voters were political mechanisms intended to forestall black influence on public affairs. By 1827, the year of slavery's demise in New York State, the city's blacks were "a separate, dependent, and unequal group" in the city.² (p 5) Yet, in spite of these restrictions, Harris observes, African-Americans were initially able to sustain a unified community in New York City through celebrations (such as that commemorating the end of international slave trade in 1806), mutual-aid societies and churches (such as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the African Society), and eateries, taverns and dance halls (such as Thomas Downing's Oyster Bar on Broad Street).

In the wake of the patriotic fervor and economic dislocations of the War of 1812, however, this unified black community began to splinter. Pressure came from within and without the black community itself. From without, white working-class males—facing a tighter, less-skilled job market and fearing their replacement by urban blacks—began to transform the republicanism of the Founders, which located "public political virtue" in "economic independence," into an ideology that celebrated citizenship in terms of those "who performed 'honest' work with their hands" (and thus, presaging Jacksonian white herrenvolk democracy, and the "free-labor" ideology of mid-century Republicans). Such a conception precluded New York's blacks, as their "prior enslavement devalued them in the eyes of whites."³ (pp. 97-8) From within, blacks themselves began to divide over this changed political and social environment. The black middle class, largely ministers and educators such as Peter Williams, Jr. and Samuel Cornish, clinging to older institutions, such as the co-racial New York Manumission Society (founded in 1785), aimed to eradicate older, boisterous black traditions such as the Emancipation Day parade, and to encourage black school attendance—efforts that they believe would yield racial uplift, and efforts that black working-class often opposed.

Turning away from the Manumission Society's support for colonization in the 1820s and 1830s, middle-class blacks embraced the moral perfectionism of white radical abolitionists, a move that further highlighted emerging class differences. The black working class was more responsive to the practical efforts of the Quakers, themselves one-time colonizationists, which aimed at job training and employment. The most successful of these efforts was the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, which opened the Colored Orphan Asylum in 1836. This institution did not, however, simply impose white or middle-class ideals on the black experience; rather, blacks used the institution to serve their needs, and in the process, altered the Quaker founders' own...