No Shelter from the Storm: Slavery and Freedom in Early New York City

On November 10, 1786, Jupiter Hammon completed a poem entitled “An Essay on Slavery.” The Queens author explored the roots of enslavement and the moral and religious imperatives that ought to produce emancipation in New York. Hammon emphasized that he was voicing the collective story of an African people. The poem begins with the declaration, “Our forefathers came from africa/tost over the raging main”; the operative pronouns throughout the poem are “we” and “us.” The journey from Africa to America should rightfully conclude in freedom, not in bondage. He ends stanza 6 with the word “Liberty”; stanzas 17 and 21 end, respectively, with the phrases “Tis Slavery no more” and “That Slavery is no more”; stanza 18 notes that God “can fill our hearts with things divine/And give us freedom two.” The spelling t-w-o draws attention to two kinds of freedom, earthly and heavenly. Hammon asserts that his fellow descendants of Africa will remain on this “Christian shore” and suggests that religious faithfulness will liberate them in this world and the next. In newly independent New York, masters and Euro-Americans bore responsibility for fixing the earthbound problem. However, having brought Africans to the “Christian shore,” whites, in Hammon’s telling, had no role to play in determining the eternal fate of their bondspeople.¹

Jupiter Hammon has been known to scholars for many decades as the first enslaved person in the British mainland colonies to publish a poem (1760), but literary specialists Cedrick May and Julie McCown only recently unveiled the welcome archival discovery of “An Essay on Slavery.”² Hammon’s poem sets forth key themes around which historians of New York City can now organize the narrative of the 163 years spanning from the English seizure of Manhattan in 1664 to the implementation of the final emancipation law in 1827. Like Hammon, scholars ought to foreground connections and cultural continuities between Africa, New York, and other parts of the diaspora. Hammon’s poem raises implicit ideological confrontations, but we would do well to attend to crucial—and more overt— moments of violence and repression raised in the historical record as well. An overlapping theme is cooperation: alliances among Blacks, as well those between Blacks and whites, shaped day-to-day life and various forms of resistance to the standing order.

A useful way to provide narrative continuity for a discussion of enslavement, resistance, and emancipation is to focus on a prominent New York family—that of Founding Father John Jay. The Jay family’s interaction across four generations with the individuals they enslaved over that time helps to underscore the shifting, longue durée structures of power within and against which Black people operated. The role of slavery and abolition in the Jays’ rise and influence is interesting in and of itself.³ A “decentering” narrative, however, shifts the emphasis to the Black people who shaped identities, tested boundaries, and claimed freedoms in a colonial, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary New York.

The story of Hammon’s Black New York as told from the perspective of those in and around households like the Jays developed out of broad structural constraints. Yet Black people made their own calculations and developed their own shifting networks that shaped their fraught experiences and eternal destinies. New York’s Black history challenges long-standing narratives of the city’s pluralist ethos and white people’s assimilation into a politically fractious and economically vigorous urban space.⁴ Slavery fractures narratives of New York City’s Anglocentric development and commitment to liberty and produces “jagged edges”—to borrow a phrase from historian Stephanie Smallwood.⁵ As long as Black bondage had a significance presence, no center could hold.

________

An entry in New York City merchant Peter Jay’s ledger from the mid-1720s recorded a transaction involving “a Negro Boy from Jamaica.” A few years later, Peter Jay facilitated the sale of “a Negro girl” to a Martin Hoffman in Esopus, a town up the Hudson River in Ulster County. Such exchanges fit into fruitful dealings in the...