Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris | Slavery in New York [catalogue for an exhibition at the New York Historical Society 2005-2006]

at the roots

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris Slavery in New York [catalogue to the two-part art show of November 2005 and 2006], with essays by Christopher Moore, Jill Lepore, Graham Russell, Gao Hodges, Patrick Rael, Shane White, Carla L. Peterson, Craig Steven Wilder, Manisha Sinha, David Quigley, Iver Bernstein, and Marcy S. Sacks (New York: The New Press, 2005)

 

In November 2005 I attended the exhibition of Slavery in New York at the New York Historical Society. The show was certainly not dazzling in terms of its presentation; the over-crowded rooms, each containing only a few objects but numerous exhibits of tapes and films, made for a kind of cacophony in the high-ceilinged, dark quarters of the Society that made it difficult even to concentrate.

     The heart of the show, however, was its information; and in that respect it was one of those fascinating shows where the catalogue may tell you as much as the actual museum experience. The extensiveness and continuance of slavery, in a city whose citizenry today are so diverse and cosmopolitan that it is often easy to forget, is at the heart of this show. Already in 1737, one in five New Yorkers was black, nearly all of those men, women and children being enslaved, meaning that outside of Charleston, South Carolina—the center of Southern slavery—New York had the largest urban population of slaves. As a Scottish visitor is quoted: “It rather hurts a Europian eye to see so many negro slaves upon the streets.”

     Slavery was seen in New York almost as an economic necessity. As a columnist of the day wrote: “…the want of hands and the Dearness of the Wages of hired Servants makes Slaves at this Time, necessary.” Even though it was cheaper for New York slave traders to import the slaves directly from Africa, most the imported slaves of New York in the early days came from the West Indies: Barbados, Antigua, Jamaica, St. Thomas, Curaçao, Bermuda, and St. Kitts. Only a very small percentage came from South Carolina.

     Clearly, the treatment of these human beings was inhumane—if for no other reason than they were forced workers with absolutely no rights. But unlike the rural slaves, who most often lived in separate quarters from the families for whom they worked, in New York slaves slept in their owners’ attics and cellars, working during the day alongside whites as servants, artisans, and laborers. Black slaves kept different hours—they arose earlier and went to bed later—than white servants, but that also allowed them time for communication throughout the city. Accordingly, slaves were the early bearers of news and, in their extensive city travels, often had a fuller outstanding of events throughout the city than the families for whom they worked. Their activities as messengers and shoppers also meant that they could gather with one another, discussing their conditions. On March 25, 1712, such a group gathered to plan a rebellion, determining to destroy the city and “murder every white person.” On April 6, 1712 a group of 25-50 individuals set fire to an outhouse in the East Ward, and when whites came to put it out, the slaves fired upon and killed them. The night ended with nine whites being killed and six wounded. The next day the militias swept the city, capturing several rebels, while others killed themselves. The white New Yorkers were convinced that had there not been a garrison the city would have been destroyed.

     Such events resulted in a series of so-called Slave Codes, consolidated in 1730 with a provision that it was illegal for more than three slaves to meet anywhere unless it was “in some servile employment for their Master or Mistress.” Even religious services were seen as dangerous events where Blacks could foment revolution. The rising number of slave baptisms and the accompanying instructions into the faith from 1712 to 1727—resulting in a kind of rudimentary education—made slave owners nervous. In 1740 and 1741 the English evangelist George Whitefield visited New York, preaching to five or six thousands of mixed whites and blacks, which resulted in a kind of hysteria among slave owners. For soon after Whitefield’s visit fires began to break out throughout the city at the rate of three or four a day. The whites quickly blamed blacks as being the arsonists and arrested more than one hundred black men and women, convicting many of them and burning thirteen Africans at the stake, hanging nineteen others, some in chains. Seventy more individuals were sold into slavery in the Caribbean and four whites, accused of being ringleaders of the plot, were also hanged. There is little evidence, it appears, that any of those killed were actually involved in setting the fires. It is no wonder that these events, taking place over several weeks, have been compared with the Salem, Massachusetts Witchcraft trials of 1692. But as Jill Lepore observes in her catalogue essay, the New York incidents were far worse; in Salem over one hundred and fifty were accused of being witches, with only nineteen people being executed (although others died in jail), while in New York nearly two-hundred conspirators ultimately were named and tried, ending in far more deaths.

       Extremist events such as these against the slaves may also explain, in part, why it took New York longer than many other parts of the nation to fully emancipate its slaves. As author Patrick Rael points out, we usually think of emancipation as being a single event, centered upon Lincoln’s document of January 1, 1863. But, in an understatement that is almost humorous, Rael observes that New York “surrendered the institution with great reluctance.” It took nearly a half century for full emancipation to take place. Although the New York State legislature passed a sweeping emancipation measure as early 1799, slavery ac-tually increased in the city of New York. As Rael writes, “Of all the major northeastern cities, it alone remained committed to forced labor.” Baltimore, for example, listed only 1,300 slaves, Philadelphia 300, while in New York 2,300 slaves lived. The Gradual Emancipation Act legally mandated the liberation of most slaves by 1827, yet New Yorkers were much slower to give it up.

        Even with the 1817 legislation that freed any African-Americans born before July 4, 1799 by the year 1827, children born to slave mothers before July of that same year could still be apprenticed to the age of twenty-one, which meant that they would remain unfreed until 1848.

     Yet as Rael also points out, the very fact that Blacks remained in slavery brought them closer together in New York, forming a community that forged other economic possibilities and self-educational projects that doomed the institution of slavery itself—the final result of which is represented, perhaps, in the Harlem Renaissance.

    With the final death of slavery, so the catalogue claims, black and white relations in the city sharply declined by the early 20th century. One wonders, however, if this show, accordingly, reveals in some part why by mid-century race relationships in general throughout New York City had so deteriorated that the vast areas of war-zones portrayed in theater works such as West Side Story (see my essay “Three Bernstein New Yorks” in My Year 2004) had become the reality. As we observe through this show, the roots were there as early as 1712.

      This exhibition also provided those who attended an opportunity to tape their reactions. Some of those tapes on display were quite revealing: a black man speaking in great praise of the show for discovering facts which he’d never known, a white woman, dressed like a card-carrying member of the D.A.R. in hat and gloves, reporting her utter astonishment and appreciation for discovering the information the show provided. Slavery in New York was, obviously, a necessary and important event.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2006

 

 

*

The second installation of the New York Historical Society show on the African-American presence in the city, was titled “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War,” focusing on the period after the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827 through the Civil War. What became even more apparent in this second show is that New York City not only was not ready to give up slavery, for social and economic reasons, but, as museum historian James Horton suggests, “The North’s denial of equal rights to black New Yorkers was a handbook or tutorial for what the South would do during the Jim Crow period.”

     When South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, New York Mayor Fernando Wood suggested that New York should do the same. Recognizing that conscription would draw away for military service many of the young working laborers who had put him in power, Wood argued for protests against conscription and the continuance of the war, reiterating what would later become a cry throughout the South even up until the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s:

 

“It is a strange perversion of the laws of self-preservation which would compel the white laborer to leave his family destitute and unprotected while he goes forth to free the negro, who, being free, will compete with him in labor. Let the laboring populations assemble peaceably in mass meetings, and express their views upon the subject….”

 

     Almost immediately, the New York City Draft Riots of July 1863 began, the first battle on the very day in which Wood’s article was published. That day a mob of over 10,000 protestors swept down the East Side, destroying telegraph lines and railroad tracks. By that afternoon mobs attempted to wrest weapons from police control at the State Armory at 2nd Avenue and 21st Street. Numerous Blacks throughout the city—in tenement houses, on the streets, and in restaurant—were attacked. Others hid from the mobs in police protection.

     Battles continued on the West Side during the second day as mobs constructed barricades along 9th Avenue in midtown. By nighttime the Union Steam Works was set afire, and Blacks throughout the city, even those in hospitals such as the Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, spent the night in terror. Looting, particularly at the Brooks Brothers clothing manufacturer on Cherry Street, was reported. By the third day, July 15, 1983, the riots had escalated into the lynchings of black citizens James Costello and Abraham Franklin on the West Side. Franklin’s murder was particularly gruesome: a crippled coachman, Franklin was lynched at 27th Street and 7th Avenue, after which his body was cut down and dragged through the streets. News reports of the day suggested that the riots had spread to other cities such as Boston, Hartford, Newark, Jersey City, Hastings, Tarrytown, and Rye. Throughout the War New York City itself was contested ground, its many industries supporting slavery despite the fact that the State provided the largest numbers of troops and the greatest amounts of arms and food for the Northern cause.

     This revelatory show, moreover, also represented the rising numbers of abolitionists and leaders, both black and white, who would help show the City a way out of its endgame—individuals from radical abolitionists such as Lewis and Arthur Tappan to forward-looking figures such as James McCune Smith, Abram S. Hewitt, Philip A. White, Sylvester A. Murphy, and Adolph G. Schmager who worked with Blacks and other immigrant groups to forge new cultural communities and opportunities for their constituencies that would heal the divisions of the City during the War.

     If nothing else, these two significant historical shows should force Northern whites to reevaluate their sometimes complacent and smug attitudes toward their Southern kin. Slavery, these shows make clear, was a national issue, not simply a regional one.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2006

Reprinted from My Year 2006: Serving (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009)