New York City

By: Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Leigh Kimmel

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

New York City

[This entry contains two subentries dealing with African Americans in New York City, from the city's establishment through 1895. The first article provides a discussion of the topic during the colonial period until 1830, while the second article continues the discussion of New York through the nineteenth century—with special focus on abolitionist activity and Frederick Douglass's involvement there.]

New York City in the Colonial Period

African Americans were an important segment of New York City's population from its beginning. In fact, the first nonindigenous resident of Manhattan Island was Jan Rodrigues, a mulatto sailor left behind by a Dutch explorer as proof of a land claim. Rodrigues was typical of the first generation of blacks in the tiny settlement. Labeled the “charter generation,” these Creoles were worldly, multilingual, skilled people able to adapt to almost any culture.

The Dutch West Indies Company established New Amsterdam in 1624, and more than a dozen Creoles arrived the following year. Captured from Spanish ships in the West Indies, they became the company's core laborers, working on building the fort and homes, clearing land, laying out streets, and harvesting grain. The Creoles came from every part of the Atlantic basin, as their names suggest: among them were Paul D'Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portuguese, and Jan de Fort Orange (possibly Rodrigues).

The Creoles were not slaves, but bonded workers (as were all the denizens of New Amsterdam). A few black residents, such as Anthony the Turk, were free workers without direct ties to the Dutch West Indies Company. Evidencing their independence, several of the bonded workers traveled to Amsterdam, Holland, to protest their low wages. The Creoles won further freedom after fighting for the Dutch against Native Americans in the Kieft War of 1639–1640. By 1643 many of them had received small plots of land along the Bowery north of the tiny village. Their land deeds were hereditary and survived the English takeover of New Netherland in 1664.

The Dutch West Indies Company searched for means to support the colony's economy. As the beaver pelt trade moved west, the company strove to attract young farmers; the paucity of labor was an obstacle. The governor Petrus Stuyvesant determined in the 1640s that New Amsterdam could be an important depot for the slave trade in North America. Soon, shiploads of Africans destined for slavery in New England, Virginia, and New Netherland arrived. By 1660 enslaved Africans outnumbered the Creoles. The Dutch managed to find ways around the theological barriers that the Dutch Reformed Church posed to the slave trade, as Stuyvesant pursued his plan. When the English took over in 1664, there were approximately 375 Africans in New Amsterdam, or about a quarter of the city's population.

New York under the British

The English renamed the town New York. Richard Nicolls, the new governor, recognized the land claims and grants of freedom of the Creoles but also confirmed the property rights of slave owners; this was the first of a series of laws that ultimately constituted a full slave code in 1714. By then the status of the Creoles had deteriorated so badly that most had moved to Brooklyn, East Jersey, or the Chesapeake region.

New Yorkers wanted to buy more slaves, but the Royal African Company, the official English monopoly in the slave trade, viewed the market as marginal. Local merchants began smuggling enslaved people from Madagascar, circumventing the company's monopoly. By 1690 the enslaved population of the city had doubled to 750; white residents increasingly relied on slave labor. Most slaves lived in the wealthiest wards, with ownership still concentrated among the Dutch. Masters bought, sold, and hired slaves at a market on the East River.

In 1703, as the governor attempted to anglicize the city, the Church of England opened a school for blacks. With Elias Neau serving as teacher, the Trinity Charity School was at first an open-admission institution. Credited by the black historian W. E. B. Du Bois as the origin of the African American Talented Tenth—the 10 percent of African Americans who were the best educated and the most creative leaders—the school was highly successful. Worried that educated slaves would be more desirous of freedom, anxious masters pressured the church to restrict Neau's methods. When William Vesey, the cleric of Trinity Church, announced that he would not support the school, angry blacks took part in the New York slave revolt of 1712. After slaves killed numerous whites, the authorities retaliated with brutal punishments, and, following some debate, a harsh slave code that practically made servitude the only possible status for blacks in New York City, a situation that would persist until the American Revolution.

In addition to defining slave status, the new laws tried to curtail African cultural practices. Slaves gathered on Sundays and holidays for dancing and music or clustered in illicit taverns, where officials suspected they traded stolen goods. Despite attempts to restrict or end them, such activities persisted over the next two decades as the enslaved population of New York City grew to over seventeen hundred, as measured in the census of 1737; within nine years the number had jumped to more than twenty-four hundred, or about one out of every five New Yorkers.

The city's growing dependence on slave labor dispersed throughout the economy. Merchants may have owned the most slaves, but tradesmen, widows, and semiskilled workers alike eagerly bought unpaid assistants. As personal freedom became unattainable, enslaved New Yorkers took refuge in the slave culture. As external events made life tougher, barroom talk became conspiratorial; blacks sought changes. In the late 1730s and early 1740s an Anglo-Spanish war, known in Britain as the War of Jenkins' Ear, rocked the city's economy; a harsh winter and soaring prices made slave life more miserable than ever. A number of “Spanish Negroes,” who were free people captured by English privateers and brought north to be sold in New York, expressed terrible anger. Soon a fusion of Spanish Negroes, hardened veterans of slave insurrections in the West Indies, gangs of thieves, and sympathetic or opportunistic whites collaborated in the New York slave conspiracy of 1741.

“The First Slave Auction in New Amsterdam, 1655,” by the influential American illustrator Howard Pyle (1853–1911). Pyle had considerable knowledge of history and created extraordinarily convincing images; the unusual perspective from which this scene is shown is typical of his work.

Granger Collection, New York.

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The conspirators allegedly planned to burn the city, kill as many whites as possible, and turn over whatever was left to the Spanish. When white authorities uncovered the plot after a series of fires in the spring, trials ensued; more than thirty blacks and four whites, two of them women, were executed, and seventy-two slaves were transported to the West Indies. Historians differ over the reality of the plot and the veracity of the immense trial record, as presented in Journal of the Conspiracy, by Daniel Horsmanden; nevertheless, the aforementioned book is filled with examples of the city's slave culture.

Even after the tragic events of 1741, white New Yorkers had an insatiable demand for slave labor. Larger population increases occurred in the hinterlands around New York, but by 1771 the number of unfree Africans in the city had risen to 3,137, or about 15 percent of the city's total populace. Direct importations of West Africans in particular increased; historians calculate that at least twenty-eight hundred of the fifty-eight hundred slaves brought into the city between 1701 and 1775 came straight from Africa.

View of Fort George and New York City from the southwest, by the painter and engraver John Carwitham, 1736.

Library of Congress.

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Throughout this time newspapers were dotted with advertisements of slave sales—and, tellingly, runaway notices. One study has printed more than eight hundred such advertisements originally posted between 1726 and 1783. These notices, in which a master or mistress offered a reward for the return of a valued fugitive slave, offer verbal snapshots of the appearances and personalities of eighteenth-century African Americans. The notices detailed clothing, facial characteristics, personalities, skills, and myriad other traits. Further information comes from records in city churches. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, an Anglican missionary organization devoted in part to converting and schooling blacks, began to produce an educated class of adherents. One observer noted in 1767 that blacks could lead Anglican services by themselves—an early portent of the African American clergy that would rise after the American Revolution.

Revolution and Afterward

As whites debated whether or not the colonies should remain loyal to the English Crown, African Americans listened carefully and made their choices when war broke out. By the summer of 1776 the English army had occupied New York City, with the British generals William Howe and Henry Clinton offering freedom and security to any enslaved black willing to join the English forces there. A flood of black refugees, skilled workers, spies, and soldiers poured into the city from all over the thirteen colonies. Whole regiments of black Loyalists fought for the English. Families formed in freedom. When the Americans and British prepared the treaty that would end the war, many white Patriots regarded blacks in the city as property while the English saw them as brave combatants who deserved the protection of the Crown. By November 1783 over three thousand African Americans had left on English ships for Nova Scotia, London, and Germany as free people; African Americans had fought on the losing side but gained personal freedom through their courage. The last British regiment to leave New York City on Evacuation Day, 25 November 1783, was the renowned Black Brigade.

The black Loyalists left behind a city and state that still favored slavery. Compared with other northern states that deemed slavery to be antithetical to Revolutionary values and quickly ended it, New York took a longer and slower road to gradual emancipation. Legal and political battles lasted until 1799, and even then any enslaved African American born before 4 July 1799 remained a slave for life. Those born enslaved after that date had to work for their master for twenty-five years if male and twenty-one years if female. Gradual emancipation was not the sole route to freedom for blacks in the city, however. Men such as the future religious leader Peter Williams Sr. struck private deals with their masters. John Jea, later known for his autobiography, claimed to have gained freedom as a result of his baptism after learning to read in a dream. Many others convinced sympathetic masters that slavery and freedom were incompatible in a republican society. Others simply ran away. The New York Manumission Society, formed to protect free blacks and help them avoid kidnappers who would sell them illegally to the South, underwent efforts to persuade masters to free their chattel. Some leading members, including the founding fathers John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, took active roles in the society despite continuing to own slaves themselves.

Free blacks formed a cohesive African American community in New York City after the Revolution, at the core of which were the churches. Moving away from parent Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopal denominations, blacks formed independent congregations and appointed their own ministers. Black clerics such as Peter Williams Jr., James Varick, William T. Hamilton, and George White were educated at the city's African Free School, a direct outgrowth of the Trinity Charity School, and became religious, political, and community leaders. Among black women, boardinghouse keepers and “hot corn women”—sellers of roasted sweet corn on the streets—became prominent.

New York also boasted a class of highly talented black tradesmen who had come out of slavery with valuable skills. Discrimination kept most of them from finding work outside of the black community, but every trade had two or three black representatives. Many joined the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, which served as a benevolent society and meetinghouse for the best among black New Yorkers. It was there that Peter Williams Jr., Joseph Sidney, William T. Hamilton, and other black orators commemorated the closure of the Atlantic slave trade or the accomplishments of black Americans with speeches that were soon put in print, forming seminal moments in the development of an African American historiography. Such black New Yorkers truly saw themselves as “African Americans”; they longed to know more about Africa, and some believed that they should travel there. Nevertheless, the community showed its patriotism during the War of 1812, when hundreds of black volunteers turned out to build fortifications while over a thousand joined the military to fight their erstwhile allies, the English.

Gradual emancipation meant slow freedom. Many blacks in the city lived in families with mixed status. For example, a husband might be free, his wife a slave for life, and their child working out time owed to a master. The 1813 census showed that of the city's 976 remaining slaves, 694, or 71 percent, were female—primarily domestics in prosperous families. Afro–New Yorkers clustered in three wards: the fifth, sixth, and seventh, where over six thousand blacks, or 48 percent of the city's total, resided. That area included the famous Five Points, where much mixed-race drinking, dancing, and loving took place. The city also boasted a black middle class. Blacks owned churches and ran businesses; over one-third of blacks listed in city directories in 1800 and 1810 were artisans. Racism and the far-reaching effects of slavery in the South would eventually decimate this middle class, but for several decades in the early nineteenth century it served as a beacon to freedom-minded people around the nation.

The black middle class had a theater and, most importantly, a newspaper: Freedom's Journal, which began publishing in 1827. That year was of great import because it saw the definitive extinction of slavery in New York State, under a law pushed through by the governor Daniel Tompkins in 1817. African Americans celebrated slavery's demise with parades and shoreline affairs. Much had been accomplished—but as Freedom's Journal reminded them, more work was necessary. The new state constitution adopted in 1821 required that any potential black voter own a freehold valued at or above $250, an onerous demand that cut the number of black voters to a handful by 1825.

Politically disenfranchised and hampered by racism both socially and economically, African Americans in New York faced enormous obstacles. Yet there emerged a superbly talented, educated class ready to do anything to fight for civil rights in the city and against slavery across the river in New Jersey and in the southern states. Many black men in New York in the late 1820s were prepared to go to battle to improve African American life, and there were signs that black women were prepared to take on leadership roles as well. The African Dorcas Society formed in 1828 to promote black education. Self-appointed female preachers, including Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth, appeared just a few years later. In the 1830s, amid the misery of poverty and racism, there would be an outpouring of black literature, journalism, and activism in New York City.

See also American Revolution; Black Brigade; Black Loyalists; Emancipation, Gradual; Episcopalians (Anglicans) and African Americans; Freedom's Journal; Hamilton, Alexander, and African Americans; Hamilton, William T.; Historiography of Early Black Life; Jay, John, on African Americans; Jea, John; Kidnapping; Neau, Elias; New York African Free Schools; New York African Society for Mutual Relief; New York Conspiracy of 1741; New York Manumission Society; New York Slave Revolt of 1712; Rodrigues, Jan; Slavery: Northeast; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; Varick, James; White, George; Williams, Peter, Jr.; and Williams, Peter, Sr.

Graham Russell Gao Hodges

Abolition and New York City

In the time of Frederick Douglass, New York City was a study in contradictions. On the one hand, slavery had remained legal in the state of New York as late as 1827; on the other hand, New York had long enjoyed a history of a vibrant culture opposed to the practice and was the home of the New York Manumission Society, established in 1787. Because of the presence of the ideological voice of this opposition, slavery in New York was not overthrown by force but was abolished by leaders who found it contradictory to the principles of a democratic society. However, internal division within the legislature prevented the state from abolishing slavery immediately; instead, the institution was phased out over several decades. During this time New York City developed a strong community of free African Americans, many of them educated. Even in a strongly racist society, many free blacks were able to enjoy material success by building businesses in fields such as personal services that whites considered beneath them. They created schools and mutual aid societies to help one another, and in 1827 Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm began publishing Freedom's Journal, the nation's first African American newspaper.

Among the most notable members of the lively abolitionist movement in New York City's African American community was James McCune Smith. He gained his freedom as the result of New York's program of gradual emancipation, but in his youth, still owing labor to his mother's master, he worked as a blacksmith. He also received an education at New York City's African Free School, where he gave a speech on the day the American Revolution war hero and French citizen Marquis de Lafayette visited the city. Among Smith's fellow students were Henry Highland Garnet and Samuel Ringgold Ward, who also became leaders among the black abolitionist community. After his complete emancipation Smith pursued an extensive education, gaining three university degrees and establishing an interracial medical practice and pharmacy. He was respected by white physicians and black abolitionists alike and ultimately became a close friend and ally of Frederick Douglass in the years leading up to the Civil War. However, Smith suffered a severe crisis of conscience after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and his role in the Civil War and Reconstruction was much reduced.

Even as New York City boasted a lively free black community complete with a strong abolitionist organization, there were other elements of New York society strongly sympathetic to slave owners and the South. Slave catchers were able to move freely throughout the city, seeking and capturing escaped slaves in order to forcibly return them to their masters. Slave catchers openly employed informers, including free African Americans willing to betray their own people for a few dollars. As a result, New York City was not an entirely safe place for African Americans, especially those who, like Frederick Douglass, had recently escaped from slavery.

The young Douglass, then known as Frederick Bailey, arrived in the city disguised as a seaman. He was supposed to take refuge with David Ruggles, who was the head of the city's vigilance committee and as a worker on the Underground Railroad conveyed and protected escaping slaves on their way north. However, Douglass dared not ask directions to Ruggles's house lest his fugitive status be discovered. Only a chance encounter with an African American sailor pointed him in the right direction. Safely in Ruggles's protection, he then made arrangements for his beloved Anna Murray to join him. Although she was born free, her parents having been manumitted prior to her birth, she did not have the necessary documentation to legally make the trip from Baltimore to New York City. “Free papers,” identifying her as a free African American woman, were obtained, such that she could travel without suspicion of being an escaped slave. Although her being illiterate made the trip more difficult, she eventually arrived safely from Baltimore. Douglass and Murray were married in New York before leaving for the relative safety of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the more firmly abolitionist New England.

Douglass maintained connections with abolitionists in New York and looked into writing editorials for the Ram's Horn, an abolitionist newspaper in New York City, in 1842. Nothing came of that inquiry, but his determination to become a newspaperman remained. In the end he became one of the founders of the North Star, his own abolitionist newspaper. Rather than basing his paper in New York City, which was still a risky place for a free African American, he decided to make Rochester, in Upstate New York, the paper's and his family's home. In December 1847 the North Star published its first issue. He also began an annual tradition of making a public address in New York City every Fourth of July. In 1862 he used his annual speech to castigate President Abraham Lincoln for not making emancipation, as opposed to the preservation of the Union, the principal aim of the war. Douglass regarded Lincoln's refusal to act in that regard as a compromise of the president's stated principle of opposition to slavery as an institution.

The following year Douglass's planned visit to New York City was disrupted by the draft riots that rocked the city. These violent outbursts of opposition to conscription were marked by attacks on free African Americans in the city, along with random vandalism and looting. Douglass had just arrived at the outskirts of the city when a friend warned him to go no farther; he then found a train home to Rochester.

After the Civil War, Douglass helped shift the focus of the various New York abolitionist organizations toward bettering the state of former slaves and equipping them for making full use of their newly won freedom. He also turned his attention to the question of the rights of women and forged connections with several suffragist leaders in New York. Although he moved away from Rochester in 1872 after arson destroyed his longtime home, he was buried there after his death in 1895.

See also Antislavery Movement; Antislavery Press; Black Press; Brown, John; Civil War; Cornish, Samuel; Douglass, Anna Murray; Douglass, Frederick; Education; Emancipation; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Garnet, Henry Highland; Harpers Ferry Raid; Lincoln, Abraham; North Star; Reconstruction; Riots and Rebellions; Rochester, New York; Ruggles, David; Russwurm, John Brown; Slavery; Smith, James McCune; Suffrage, Women's; Underground Railroad; and Ward, Samuel Ringgold.

Leigh Kimmel

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