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

2. The Decline of Slavery in New York City, 1790–1810

The Decline of Slavery in New York City, 1790-1810 THE NEW YORK that William Strickland observed in 1794 had already begun the dramatic growth that would soon make it the most important city in the United States. With its splendid harbor (open, unlike Philadelphia's, for virtually all of the year), a rapidly developing agricultural hinterland, and easy access to the increasingly important upstate frontier, the city had begun to outstrip both Boston and Philadelphia, its main eighteenth-century rivals. The state's speedily growing population—up 356 percent between 1780 and 1810 compared with Pennsylvania's rise of 148 percent—continually boosted the amount of trade passing through its major commercial center. Scarcely a traveler who visited New York in these years could refrain from commenting, as had Strickland, on the volume of shipping in the harbor and the busy activity on the wharves. In the late 17908 the city nosed ahead of its competitors in the value of exports and imports passing through its port; by the early years of the nineteenth century it had achieved clear economic primacy. For the period 1803-1810 exports leaving Philadelphia, previously the most important port in America, were worth only 68 percent of those leaving New York.In the quarter-century after the British evacuation the city handled fully one-third of the new nation's foreign commerce.1 This sharp rise in the volume of trade brought with it a fundamental restructuring of the New York economy, a process that 2 The Decline of Slavery 25 Thomas Cochran has called the "business revolution." As the scale of mercantile operations increased, business became more specialized . The New York Stock Exchange was founded and the Bank of New York incorporated in the 17905. Investment bankers, brokers, and lawyers who specialized in various aspects of the increasingly complex financial transactions began to appear.2 This tendency toward more specialization wasnot confined to the mercantile community . Related changes in the methods of production in the last years of the eighteenth century were ushering in the process that Sean Wilentz has labeled "metropolitan industrialization." Driven by the imperatives of expanding local and national markets, merchants and some of the more entrepreneurially minded craftsmen were initiating changes in the methods of production that, over the following half-century, would see the traditional world of artisan labor replaced by the new capitalist order of sweated labor and laborsaving machinery.3 These changes occurred in a halting and uneven fashion and varied from trade to trade, but collectively they signaled the ascendancy of the capitalist mode of production. In the half-century after the Revolution, to put the matter more crudely, New York City made the quantum leap from a premodern to a modern economy. These economic changes quicklyaltered the landscape of the city and the lives of its people. Large numbers of migrants, of internal as well as external origin, crowded into the metropolis whose population between 1790 and 1810 almost trebled to more than ninety thousand inhabitants(see table4).The growth of Boston and Philadelphia, New York's main eighteenth-century rivals, barely matched that of the nation as a whole, but New York doubled the national rate. Such a rapid expansion in both numbers and size greatly strained the city's infrastructure. In these years municipal officials adopted a new system of street numbering, with the odds on one side and the evens on the other, and David Longworth commenced the annual publication of city directories, measures that demonstrated both the practical problems of this newfound magnitude and the increasing obsolescence of the old ways of the "walking city."4 As migrants continued to arrive, housing became more and more difficult to find and the numbers of the poor and the destitute, dependent for their survival in Manhattan's unforgivingwinters on the meager resources of charitable institutions and the municipal 26 Whites TABLE 4 New York City Population, 1790-1810 Year 1790 1800 1810 Free Blacks 1,036 3,333 7,470 Slaves 2,056 2,534 1,446 Total Black Population 3,092 5,867 8,916 Enslaved % of Black Population 66.5 43.2 16.2 Total Population 31,225 57,663 91,659 Black % of Total Population 9.9 10.2 9.7 Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790: New York (Washington...