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1 Labor, Law, and Resistance in the Eighteenth Century For some, freedom arrived as a murmur rather than a shout. On November 17, 1783, Rachel Willis, her husband Samuel, and their three young children gathered aboard the Nesbit, joining 150 other Americans of African descent. The ship prepared to weigh anchor for Nova Scotia as part of the nearly complete British evacuation of New York City. Two years after Cornwallis’s surrender to Washington at Yorktown and two months after the signing of the Peace of Paris, the war between the United States and Britain was over. For Rachel Willis of Long Island, New York, a new era of independence and freedom beckoned in Canada. She and her fellow passengers did not wish to tarry in order to see whether the rights successfully claimed by white former colonists would extend to black Americans as well.1 A range of possibilities existed for African Americans as American independence finally dawned in New York City. On the same newspaper page that announced the mustering of the Nesbit’s passengers, Col. Frederick Weissenfels offered a five-dollar reward for Dina, “a strong and well built” teenage slave who had fled her home on Fair Street. Weissenfels knew Dina well enough to describe her petticoat, her hat, and her hair, dyed a “reddish cast.” The colonel issued the customary warning to ship captains and “other persons” not to aid Dina, who, like thousands of African Americans before and after her in New York, was chattel, the legally held property of a white master. Just below the reward offered for fifteen-year-old Dina, another advertisement indicated the tenuous alternatives to flight or bondage. “wanted” was “a Cook . . . white or black; a good recommendation . . . required.”2 The future did not preclude mobility and choice and did not necessarily, at least at the bottom of the social hierarchy, prescribe roles on strictly racial lines. But even such a circumscribed version of freedom remained a chimera in November 1783. With the occupation of its major port finally at an end, New Yorkers had an agenda freighted with unfinished business. Translating revolutionary ideals into postcolonial realities was but one of many priorities. New Yorkers sought to rebuild an economy, not only resuming in earnest the ordinary business of getting and spending, but doing so amid the wreckage of fire and neglect in Manhattan and without access to the West Indian mar- 16 Emancipating New York kets upon which provincial commerce had relied. New Yorkers also had to find out how a political system designed in the crucible of civil war between patriots and loyalists, masters and slaves, British officials and colonial subjects , would function in a time of peace and confederation.3 Dina and Rachel Willis, along with thousands like them, could expect at best incremental change, despite the bold pronouncements about human equality borrowed from the Declaration of Independence and incorporated in the new state’s constitution.4 To be sure, the long conflict between American colonies and the British mother country gave rise to rhetoric that highlighted slavery’s injustice, and the chaos of war provided opportunities for slaves to intensify their resistance to their condition as human property. But the economic, social, and geographic roots for continued enslavement of New Yorkers of African descent had spread widely during the eighteenth century. Even the flood of revolutionary ideology did not have the force to dislodge slavery after a century and a half of growth and development. Understanding the debate over abolition in New York state requires a consideration not only of the ideas and events of the American Revolution but also a look at the structure and distinguishing characteristics of slavery in various corners of the fractious mid-eighteenth-century English colony. New York, according to the leading historian of colonial American slavery, had taken significant steps toward becoming a “slave society” by the middle of the eighteenth century. As New Yorkers unsuspectingly lurched into a continental showdown with British authority, black bondage remained a deeply ingrained aspect of the world whites sought to defend from what they deemed to be British infringements on colonial rights. Mid-eighteenthcentury New York bore the distinct characteristics of other New World slave societies. Individually and in gangs, blacks labored on docks and farms, worked as artisans, and catered to the personal needs of the rich. Dutch slave owners found their annual Pinkster holiday gatherings punctuated by the rhythms and musical styles of their black slaves...

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