NORTHERN PROFITS from SLAVERY

 http://www.slavenorth.com/profits.htm

The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England's economic structure; it created a wealthy class of slave-trading merchants, while the profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy. --Lorenzo Johnston Greene, “The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776,” p.319.

Whether it was officially encouraged, as in New York and New Jersey, or not, as in Pennsylvania, the slave trade flourished in colonial Northern ports. But New England was by far the leading slave merchant of the American colonies.The first systematic venture from New England to Africa was undertaken in 1644 by an association of Boston traders, who sent three ships in quest of gold dust and black slaves. One vessel returned the following year with a cargo of wine, salt, sugar, and tobacco, which it had picked up in Barbados in exchange for slaves. But the other two ran into European warships off the African coast and barely escaped in one piece. Their fate was a good example of why Americans stayed out of the slave trade in the 17th century. Slave voyages were profitable, but Puritan merchants lacked the resources, financial and physical, to compete with the vast, armed, quasi-independent European chartered corporations that were battling to monopolize the trade in black slaves on the west coast of Africa. The superpowers in this struggle were the Dutch West India Company and the English Royal African Company. The Boston slavers avoided this by making the longer trip to the east coast of Africa, and by 1676 the Massachusetts ships were going to Madagascar for slaves. Boston merchants were selling these slaves in Virginia by 1678. But on the whole, in the 17th century New Englanders merely dabbled in the slave trade.
Then, around 1700, the picture changed. First the British got the upper hand on the Dutch and drove them from many of their New World colonies, weakening their demand for slaves and their power to control the trade in Africa. Then the Royal African Company's monopoly on African coastal slave trade was revoked by Parliament in 1696. Finally, the Assiento and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave the British a contract to supply Spanish America with 4,800 slaves a year. This combination of events dangled slave gold in front of the New England slave traders, and they pounced. Within a few years, the famous “Triangle Trade” and its notorious “Middle Passage” were in place.
Rhode Islanders had begun including slaves among their cargo in a small way as far back as 1709. But the trade began in earnest there in the 1730s. Despite a late start, Rhode Island soon surpassed Massachusetts as the chief colonial carrier. After the Revolution, Rhode Island merchants had no serious American competitors. They controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the U.S. trade in African slaves. Rhode Island had excellent harbors, poor soil, and it lacked easy access to the Newfoundland fisheries. In slave trading, it found its natural calling. William Ellery, prominent Newport merchant, wrote in 1791, “An Ethiopian could as soon change his skin as a Newport merchant could be induced to change so lucrative a trade as that in slaves for the slow profits of any manufactory.”[1]
Boston and Newport were the chief slave ports, but nearly all the New England towns -- Salem, Providence, Middletown, New London – had a hand in it. In 1740, slaving interests in Newport owned or managed 150 vessels engaged in all manner of trading. In Rhode Island colony, as much as two-thirds of the merchant fleet and a similar fraction of sailors were engaged in slave traffic. The colonial governments of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all, at various times, derived money from the slave trade by levying duties on black imports. Tariffs on slave import in Rhode Island in 1717 and 1729 were used to repair roads and bridges.
The 1750 revocation of the Assiento dramatically changed the slave trade yet again. The system that had been set up to stock Spanish America with thousands of Africans now needed another market. Slave ships began to steer northward. From 1750 to 1770, African slaves flooded the Northern docks. Merchants from Philadelphia, New York, and Perth Amboy began to ship large lots (100 or more) in a single trip. As a result, wholesale prices of slaves in New York fell 50% in six years.
On the eve of the Revolution, the slave trade “formed the very basis of the economic life of New England.”[2] It wove itself into the entire regional economy of New England. The Massachusetts slave trade gave work to coopers, tanners, sailmakers, and ropemakers. Countless agents, insurers, lawyers, clerks, and scriveners handled the paperwork for slave merchants. Upper New England loggers, Grand Banks fishermen, and livestock farmers provided the raw materials shipped to the West Indies on that leg of the slave trade. Colonial newspapers drew much of their income from advertisements of slaves for sale or hire. New England-made rum, trinkets, and bar iron were exchanged for slaves. When the British in 1763 proposed a tax on sugar and molasses, Massachusetts merchants pointed out that these were staples of the slave trade, and the loss of that would throw 5,000 seamen out of work in the colony and idle almost 700 ships. The connection between molasses and the slave trade was rum. Millions of gallons of cheap rum, manufactured in New England, went to Africa and bought black people. Tiny Rhode Island had more than 30 distilleries, 22 of them in Newport. In Massachusetts, 63 distilleries produced 2.7 million gallons of rum in 1774. Some was for local use: rum was ubiquitous in lumber camps and on fishing ships. “But primarily rum was linked with the Negro trade, and immense quantities of the raw liquor were sent to Africa and exchanged for slaves. So important was rum on the Guinea Coast that by 1723 it had surpassed French and Holland brandy, English gin, trinkets and dry goods as a medium of barter.”[3] Slaves costing the equivalent of £4 or £5 in rum or bar iron in West Africa were sold in the West Indies in 1746 for £30 to £80. New England thrift made the rum cheaply -- production cost was as low as 5½ pence a gallon -- and the same spirit of Yankee thrift discovered that the slave ships were most economical with only 3 feet 3 inches of vertical space to a deck and 13 inches of surface area per slave, the human cargo laid in carefully like spoons in a silverware case.
A list of the leading slave merchants is almost identical with a list of the region's prominent families: the Fanueils, Royalls, and Cabots of Massachusetts; the Wantons, Browns, and Champlins of Rhode Island; the Whipples of New Hampshire; the Eastons of Connecticut; Willing & Morris of Philadelphia. To this day, it's difficult to find an old North institution of any antiquity that isn't tainted by slavery. Ezra Stiles imported slaves while president of Yale. Six slave merchants served as mayor of Philadelphia. Even a liberal bastion like Brown University has the shameful blot on its escutcheon. It is named for the Brown brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses, manufacturers and traders who shipped salt, lumber, meat -- and slaves. And like many business families of the time, the Browns had indirect connections to slavery via rum distilling. John Brown, who paid half the cost of the college's first library, became the first Rhode Islander prosecuted under the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794 and had to forfeit his slave ship. Historical evidence also indicates that slaves were used at the family's candle factory in Providence, its ironworks in Scituate, and to build Brown's University Hall.[4]
Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South. Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08, almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery. Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806. The financial base of New England's antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping. And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.
Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War. The decline of slavery in the upper South is well documented, as is the sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. But someone had to get them there, and the U.S. coastal trade was firmly in Northern hands. William Lloyd Garrison made his first mark as an anti-slavery man by printing attacks on New England merchants who shipped slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans.
Long after the U.S. slave trade officially ended, the more extensive movement of Africans to Brazil and Cuba continued. The U.S. Navy never was assiduous in hunting down slave traders. The much larger British Navy was more aggressive, and it attempted a blockade of the slave coast of Africa, but the U.S. was one of the few nations that did not permit British patrols to search its vessels, so slave traders continuing to bring human cargo to Brazil and Cuba generally did so under the U.S. flag. They also did so in ships built for the purpose by Northern shipyards, in ventures financed by Northern manufacturers.
In a notorious case, the famous schooner-yacht Wanderer, pride of the New York Yacht Club, put in to Port Jefferson Harbor in April 1858 to be fitted out for the slave trade. Everyone looked the other way -- which suggests this kind of thing was not unusual -- except the surveyor of the port, who reported his suspicions to the federal officials. The ship was seized and towed to New York, but her captain talked (and possibly bought) his way out and was allowed to sail for Charleston, S.C.
Fitting out was completed there, the Wanderer was cleared by Customs, and she sailed to Africa where she took aboard some 600 blacks. On Nov. 28, 1858, she reached Jekyll Island, Georgia, where she illegally unloaded the 465 survivors of what is generally called the last shipment of slaves to arrive in the United States.

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1. Hugh Thomas, “The Slave Trade,” N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1997, p.519.
2. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, “The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776,” N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1942, p.68-69.
3. ibid., p.26.
4. “Brown University committee examines historical ties to slavery,” Associated Press, The Boston Globe, March 5, 2004

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SLAVERY in NEW YORK

http://www.slavenorth.com/newyork.htm

Systematic use of black slaves in New Netherland began in 1626, when the first cargo of 11 Africans was unloaded by the Dutch West India Company.
The company had been founded in 1621, and it "operated both as a commercial company and as a military institution with quasi-statelike powers."[1] The company had tried its colonial experiment of New Netherland at first with agricultural laborers from Holland, but this plan went nowhere. Most of the Dutch who came to America sought to pile up money in the lucrative fur trade and then hurry back to the comforts of Holland to enjoy their wealth. So the company increasingly turned to slaves, which it already was importing in vast numbers to its Caribbean colonies.
From the 1630s to the 1650s, the WIC "was unquestionably the dominant European slave trader in Africa."[2] In 1644 alone, it bought 6,900 captives on the African coast. Most of these went to the company's colonies in the West Indies, but from its stations in Angola, the company imported slaves to New Netherland to clear the forests, lay roads, build houses and public buildings, and grow food. It was company-owned slave labor that laid the foundations of modern New York, built its fortifications, and made agriculture flourish in the colony so that later white immigrants had an incentive to turn from fur trapping to farming.
But private settlers still faced an acute shortage of agricultural labor that was retarding the colony. A company audit report noted that, "New Netherland would by slave labor be more extensively cultivated than it has hitherto been, because the agricultural laborers, who are conveyed thither at great expense to the colonists sooner or later apply themselves to trade, and neglect agriculture altogether."[3]
As a result, the West India Company relaxed its monopoly and allowed New Netherlanders to trade their produce to Angola and "to convey Negroes back home to be employed in the cultivation of their lands." The company was willing to forego profit for the sake of spreading slavery in New Netherlands and getting the colony settled. It even allowed private owners to exchange slaves they were dissatisfied with for company slaves.
But only a trickle of slaves flowed into New Netherland from Angola; the colonists found the Africans "proud and treacherous," and preferred to seek "seasoned" slaves from the West Indies, specifically Curaçao. In addition to those they bought from the West Indies, Dutch settlers bought slaves seized by privateers from Spanish ships. The steady flow from various sources allowed the colony to stabilize and, by 1640, to expand its agricultural output. "Slavery helped to prepare the way for this transition by providing the labor which made farming attractive and profitable to the settlers. Slave labor was especially important in the agricultural development of the Hudson Valley, where an acute scarcity of free workers prevailed."[4]
Between 1636 and 1646 the price of able-bodied men in New Netherland rose about 300 percent. By 1660, slaves from Angola were selling for 300 guilders and those from Curaçao for about 100 guilders more. By the time the British took over the colony in 1664, slaves sold in New Amsterdam for up to 600 guilders. This was still a discount of roughly 10 percent over what they would have brought in the plantation colonies, but the West India Company had been subsidizing slavery in New Netherland to promote its economic progress. The Hudson Valley, where the land was monopolized in huge patroon estates that discouraged free immigration, especially relied on slaves.
The purely economic status of slaves in New Netherland contrasted with the malignant and sometimes bizarre racism of the religious British citizens who followed the Dutch into the north Atlantic colonies. Free blacks in New Netherland were trusted to serve in the militias, and slaves, given arms, helped to defend the settlement during the desperate Indian war of 1641-44. They were even used to put down the Rensselaerswyck revolt of white tenants. Blacks and whites had coequal standing in the colonial courts, and free blacks were allowed to own property (Jews, however, were not). They intermarried freely with whites and in some cases owned white indentured servants.
Slaves who had worked diligently for the company for a certain length of time were granted a "half-freedom" that allowed them liberty in exchange for an annual tribute to the company and a promise to work at certain times on company projects such as fortifications or public works. Individual slaveowners, such as Director General Peter Stuyvesant, adopted this system as well, and it enabled them to be free of the cost and nuisance of owning slaves year-round that they could only use in certain seasons. For the slaves, half-freedom was better than none at all.
BRITISH RULE
The British took over in 1664, and control of the colony passed to the Duke of York, who, with his cronies, held controlling interest in the Royal African Company. The change of name from New Netherland to New York brought a crucial shift in policy. Whereas the Dutch had used slavery as part of their colonial policy, the British used the colony as a market for slaves. "The Duke's representatives in New York -- governors, councilors, and customs officials -- were instructed to promote the importation of slaves by every possible means."[5]
From 1701 to 1726, officially, some 1,570 slaves were imported from the West Indies and another 802 from Africa. As it had under the Dutch, the colony continued to import relatively few slaves from Africa directly, except occasional cargoes of children under 13. The actual numbers were much higher, because smugglers made liberal use of the long, convoluted coast of Long Island. In some years illegal shipment of slaves on a single vessel outnumbered the official imports to the whole colony.
As a result, New York soon had had the largest colonial slave population north of Maryland. From about 2,000 in 1698, the number of the colony's black slaves swelled to more than 9,000 adults by 1746 and 13,000 by 1756. Between 1732 and 1754, black slaves accounted for more than 35 percent of the total immigration through the port of New York. And that doesn't count the many illegal cargoes of Africans unloaded all along the convoluted coast of Long Island to avoid the tariff duties on slaves. In 1756, slaves made up about 25 percent of the populations of Kings, Queens, Richmond, New York, and Westchester counties.
Slaveholding concentrated in New York City, where by 1691 competition from slave labor had driven white porters out of the market houses and where by 1737 free coopers were complaining of "great numbers of Negroes" working in their trade.
The slave trade became a cornerstone of the New York economy. As with Boston and Newport, profits of the great slave traders, or of smaller merchants who specialized in small lots of skilled or seasoned slaves, radiated through a network of port agents, lawyers, clerks, scriveners, dockworkers, sailmakers, and carpenters.
The Dutch legacy left its mark on New York slavery, even after the British occupation. The British at first handled slaves in New York on the same relatively humane terms the Dutch had set. The population already was racially mixed, and slavery in New York at first was passed down not exactly by race, but by matrilineal inheritance: the child of a male slave and a free woman was free, the child of a female slave and a free man was a slave. By the 18th century, through this policy, New York had numerous visibly white persons held as slaves.
But after 1682, as the number of slaves rose (in many places more rapidly than the white population) fears of insurrection mounted, restrictions were applied, and public controls began to be enacted. By that year, it had become illegal for more than four slaves to meet together on their own time; in 1702 the number was reduced to three, and to ensure enforcement each town was required to appoint a "Negro Whipper" to flog violators. In a place where slaves were dispersed in ones and twos among city households, this law, if enforced, would have effectively prohibited slaves from social or family life.
Local ordinances restricted times or distance of travel. Slave runaways were tracked down rigorously, and ones bound for French Canada were especially feared, as they might carry information about the condition and defenses of the colony. The penalty for this was death. Slaves did run off, especially young men, but they tended to gravitate to New York city, rather than Canada. There many of them sought to escape the colony by taking passage on ships, whose captains often were not overly scrupulous about the backgrounds of their sailors.

"Others skulked along the waterfront, where they were drawn into gangs of criminal slaves infesting the docks. The most notorious gang was the Geneva Club, named after the Geneva gin its members were fond of imbibing. There were also groups known as the Free Masons, the Smith Fly Boys, the Long Bridge Boys, and many others whose names have not been recorded. Slaves belonging to such gangs were extremely clannish and often engaged in murderous feuds. Only rarely, however, did they attack white persons. The very existence of such groups nevertheless caused the whites much anxiety. The authorities regarded them as a much greater threat to the public safety than the deadlier gangs of white hoodlums on the waterfront."[6]

In 1712, some slaves in New York City rose up in a crude rebellion that could have been much more deadly, had it been better planned. As it was, it was among the most serious slave resistances in American history, and sparked a vicious backlash by the authorities. The revolt was led by African-born slaves, who decided death was preferable to life in bondage. They managed to collect a cache of muskets and other weapons and hide it in an orchard on the edge of town. On the night of April 6, twenty-four of the conspirators gathered, armed themselves, and set fire to a nearby building. They then hid among trees, and when white citizens rushed up to put out the blaze, the slaves opened fire on them, killing five and wounding six.The surviving citizens sounded the alarm. Every able-bodied man was pressed into service, and appeals were made to governors of surrounding colonies. The militia pinned down the rebels in the woods of northern Manhattan. The leaders of the uprising committed suicide, and the rest, starving, surrendered.
The death toll in the 1712 uprising doesn't seem high, but in a New York county that, at that time probably numbered some 4,800 whites, it was shocking. In considering the psychological impact on the survivors, imagine some sort of attack on modern New York, with its 8 million people, that would leave casualties of 10,000 dead.

A special court convened by the governor made short work of the rebels. Of the twenty-seven slaves brought to trial for complicity in the plot, twenty-one were convicted and put to death. Since the law authorized any degree of punishment in such cases, some unlucky slaves were executed with all the refinements of calculated barbarity. New Yorkers were treated to a round of grisly spectacles as Negroes were burned alive, racked and broken on the wheel, and gibbeted alive in chains. In his report of the affair to England, Governor Hunter praised the judges for inventing 'the most exemplary punishments that could be possibly thought of.' "[7]

As in other Northern colonies, blacks in New York faced special, severe penalties for certain crimes. An example from Poughkeepsie illustrates one of them:

A young slave, about twenty years of age, ... fired his master's barn and outbuildings, and thus destroyed much grain, together with live-stock. He was detected by the smoke issuing from his pocket, (into which he had thrust some combustibles,) imprisoned, tried, and on his confession, condemned to be burned to death. He was fastened to a stake, and when the pile was fired, the dense crowd excluded the air, so that the flames kindled but slowly, and the dreadful screams of the victim were heard at a distance of three miles. His master, who had been fond of him, wept aloud, and called to the Sheriff to put him out of his misery. This officer then drew his sword; but the master, still crying like a child, exclaimed, "Oh, don't run him through!" The Sheriff then caused the crowd to separate, so as to cause a current of air; and when the flame burst out fiercely he called to the sufferer to "swallow the blaze;" which he did, and immediately he sunk dead.[8]

Free blacks lived in New York at risk of enslavement. The colonial courts ruled that if a white person claimed his black employee was a slave, the burden was on the black person to prove he was not. Blacks on the street who could give no plausible account of their movements or proof of their freedom often were picked up by the authorities and jailed on suspicion of being runaway slaves. Local authorities had all but unlimited power in such cases. A black man was arrested in New York City in 1773 simply "because he had curious marks on his back." In such cases the suspected fugitives were held in local jails while advertisements ran in the newspapers seeking their owners. If a claimant arrived, and reimbursed the sheriff for the cost of the detention and the ads, he took the black person away after a few legal formalities. There was little incentive for the sheriff to challenge the claim of ownership in such cases. Even if no claimant came forth, the authorities sometimes then sold the black person into slavery, to cover the cost of detaining and advertising him.

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1. E.B. O'Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols., 1856-87.
2. Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.76-7.
3. Board of Audit of the West India Company, May 27, 1647.
4. Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York, Syracuse University Press, 1966, p.7.
5. ibid., p.23.
6. ibid., p.105-6.
7. ibid., p.124.
8. William J. Allinson, Memoir of Quamino Buccau, A Pious Methodist, Philadelphia: Henry Longstreth, 1851, p.4.

NORTHERN EMANCIPATION

image:  http://riseandfallofslavery.wordpress.com/readings-discussion/week-six-february-13/

The American Revolution was the death knell of Northern slavery. The rhetoric of the rebels, based on the Enlightenment doctrine of “natural rights,” immediately ran into the hypocrisy of a slave-owning people crying out for freedom. Tory Samuel Johnson twitted the Americans in 1775: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" The rebels were sensitive to the taunt. “To contend for liberty and to deny that blessing to others,” John Jay wrote, “involves an inconsistency not to be excused.” Nathaniel Niles put it succinctly: “For shame, let us either cease to enslave our fellow-men, or else let us cease to complain of those that would enslave us.” James Otis found another thread in the argument when he wrote, “It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men’s liberty, will soon care little for their own.”[1]

Britain had a large financial stake in the slave trade (between 1729 and 1750, Parliament approved more than £90,000 for maintenance of slave stations on the African coast), so New England resistance to slave importation in the years leading up to the Revolution could express anti-Crown sentiment. As so often happened, morality and economic self-interest flowed the same way, so it is difficult to distinguish them. Dr. Jeremy Belknap of Boston recalled that few in the colony had spoken publicly against slavery, “ till we began to feel the weight of oppression from 'our mother country.' ” It was probably not a coincidence that Massachusetts, where resistance to British authority was greatest, was also the hotbed of agitation against the slave trade.

Meanwhile, by 1770, slave raids had depopulated whole regions of coastal West Africa. The terms of the Assiento encouraged this by drawing off the breeding-age population: “none of the said 4,800 Negroes shall be under the age of ten years, nine parts in ten of the ... Negroes so to be furnished shall be of the age of sixteen years at least, and none of them shall exceed the age of 40 years.” During the decade before the American Revolution, the cost of slaves at the stations in Africa soared. Because of that, the flow of available slaves from the West Indies -- the traditional main source of Northern slaves -- dried up. Plantation owners there held on to their stock, realizing it could no longer easily be replaced by African imports. The combination drove many Northern slave merchants out of the trade. Slave imports to the North fell off sharply after 1770, and internal trade in blacks rose in importance. The change in the economic winds helped ease the path for the North to give up its direct involvement in expanding slavery, without disowning the fortune it already had made.

Emancipation in the North also involved a religious component. Quakers came later to abolition than many people realize. Not until 1758 did Philadelphia Yearly Meeting condemn not only the slave trade, but slavery itself. Still, the Society of Friends was the most visible of the anti-slavery sects, though somewhat marginalized during the Revolution because many Friends had been Loyalists. They brought varying degrees of pressure to bear in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and Methodists in the Chesapeake region also preached against slavery.

But the heaviest blow was dealt by the war itself, which was waged for five years all across the North. Both sides competed for the slaves, and whichever side he joined, a slave was likely to end up free. The incentives were greater on the British side, however, since the running away of an American's slave meant no financial loss to them. In Connecticut, as early as 1776, slaves were escaping to British vessels lying off New Haven. In 1775, at the outbreak of the Revolution, Virginia's Gov. John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves who would bear arms against the rebellion. Among the many who ran away from their masters and flocked to Lord Dunmore's regiments was Titus, 21, slave of New Jersey Quaker John Corlies. A year later, calling himself Colonel Tye, Titus was back in New Jersey, organizing other slaves and free blacks to fight against the Americans. For five years he led a guerilla band that terrorized northern New Jersey.

In 1779, Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in chief, offered freedom “to every Negro that shall desert the rebel standard.” Clinton's policy was as much practical as philanthropic. A British warning in the New York Weekly Mercury on July 5, 1779, notified blacks that any captured with the rebel forces would be sold into slavery, regardless of their legal status. But there does seem to have been a good deal of genuine humanitarian feeling among the British generals. Lord Cornwallis would not allow runaways to be taken from his camp, even when their owners were not rebels. And Sir Guy Carleton kept his word to fugitives at the end of the war during the evacuation of New York, even as the victorious Yankees clamored for the return of their slave property. When the British and the American Loyalists pulled out at the end of the war, some 3,000 blacks left with them.

The British offer of liberty to escaped slaves drew in thousands of them. “By the invasion of this state, and the possession the enemy obtained of this city, and neighborhood,” George Bryan of Philadelphia wrote in 1779, “[a] great part of the slaves hereabouts, were enticed away by the British army.” The large slave populations of Philadelphia and New York were permanently reduced. Henry Muhlenberg, the prominent Lutheran minister in Pennsylvania, wrote in his journal that blacks “secretly wished the British army might win, for then all Negro slaves will gain their freedom.” “The number of runaways rose so sharply after 1775 that there can be no doubt that the machinery of control no longer functioned effectively.”[2]

The Northern colonies, too, began to offer their slaves manumission or freedom in exchange for military service. Usually this came with some reimbursement to the owner (in 1782 in New York, 500 acres was given to a master for every slave who enlisted for three years with the master's consent). In the American Revolution, some 5,000 blacks, mostly from the North, fought on the American side. But likely many more went over to the British. The black population of Massachusetts declined in actual numbers during the Revolutionary years, and its ratio to the white population fell from 1:45 in 1763 to 1:80 in 1784. In Rhode Island, the black-to-white ratio had been 1:14 in 1749; in 1783 it was 1:22. In the 15 years after 1771, the white population of New York grew by about 50 percent, but the black population fell by 5 percent. Black population in Connecticut decreased by 1,045 from 1774 to 1790, a drop of better than 16 percent.

The result of this convergence of forces was that, between 1777 and 1804, the Northern colonies and states, one by one, gave up on slavery. It’s difficult to assign a relative weight in this to practical economics as opposed to political liberalism. Evidence suggests the practical was paramount. There was a good deal of anti-slavery rhetoric in the early days of the Revolution in the form of petitions and non-binding resolutions. In the North, a few of the former colonies even barred the importing of slaves. But only Vermont, where slavery was practically non-existent, went so far as to ban it outright in 1777. The war came first, most of the Northern leaders decided, and anything that could upset the struggle ought to be, in the words of the New Hampshire legislature in 1780 putting off a petition for freedom from the state's slaves, “postponed till a more convenient opportunity.”

Edgar McManus, the historian of Northern slavery, finds that “abolitionists of the 1780's belonged to the business elite which thirty years before had reaped handsome profits from the slave trade. The precipitous decline of the trade after 1770 apparently sharpened the moral sensibilities of those who had formerly profited. ... The leaders of the abolition movement were honorable men who sincerely regarded slavery as a great moral wrong. But it is also true that they embraced antislavery at a time when it entailed no economic hardship for their class.”

Northern slaves, more often than those of the colonial South or other parts of the Americas, had filled skilled positions, working as artisans, especially in the cities. They appear as bakers, tailors, weavers, goldsmiths, and woodcut illustrators. Such status allowed them a certain power to negotiate with their masters, and win certain protections. It also earned them the jealousy of white workers, who petitioned relentlessly against slave competition in Boston from 1660, New York from 1686, and Philadelphia from 1707. But with the end of slavery, the white workers who had sought these jobs for generations soon swept them clean of black incumbents. The freed slaves were excluded from the occupations that would have allowed them to make something of their freedom.

Considering New York, McManus writes, “Upper-class whites were motivated by idealism, and their attitude toward the Negro was philanthropic and paternalistic. Members of the upper class supported Negro charities and schools much more generously than they supported organizations assisting poor whites.” This idealism, however, "had no counterpart in the lower classes, among whom could be found neither sympathy for the Negro nor understanding of his problems. From its inception, slavery had been detrimental to the working class. On the one hand, the slave system excluded whites from jobs pre-empted by slaves; on the other, it often degraded them socially to the level of the slaves with whom they had to work and compete in earning a livelihood. Many whites prefered chauvinistic idleness to employment which had come to be identified with slavery. ... Whites of the working class hated slavery as an institution, but they also feared the free Negro as an economic competitor. They supported emancipation not to raise the Negro to a better life but to destroy a system which gave him a fixed place in the economy.”[3]

“Emancipation in some ways strengthened the tyranny of race by imposing on blacks new forms of subordination that better served the economic interests of the whites,” writes McManus. “The historical reality of race relations in the Americas is that whites have never altered their institutions primarily for the benefit of blacks.”[4]

Northern prejudice, and the inability of those states to assimilate their former slaves, certainly discouraged efforts toward freeing the slaves in the South. Having inadvertently freed the slaves in the state, the Massachusetts legislature voted to bar interracial marriages and expel all blacks who were not citizens. Boston authorities took action against 240 of them in 1800, most natives of Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, and the West Indies. White Philadelphians were rioting against blacks from 1805, driving them from the Fourth of July celebrations on Independence Square. Within a decade, the burning of black churches in the city had begun. A Virginia judge, observing the North in 1795, wrote, "If in Massachusetts, where the numbers are comparatively very small, this prejudice be discernable, how much stronger may it be imagined in this country ...?"[5]

Another kind of mixed message was sent south by prominent Northern critics of slavery who had difficulty freeing their own slaves. Benjamin Rush and the Rev. Francis Allison were among Pennsylvania's prominent, outspoken abolitionists who owned slaves during most of their public careers. In 1785, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and 30 other New Yorkers formed the Society for Manumission of Slaves. Hamilton, as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, reported a resolution that members begin the work by freeing their own slaves. The resolution failed. “[I]n the manner northern state governments dealt with the abolition of slavery, the South witnessed the central difficulty besetting the revolutionary generation -- how to put into practice beliefs that could be implemented only at personal cost.”[6]

By the time of the 1790 census, 94 percent of the 698,000 U.S. slaves lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. They concentrated in the tobacco-growing region in the Chesapeake basin and in the rice-growing along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Having solved its slavery problem by a very gradual emancipation, and by aggressively proscribing the rights of its free black minority, the North was content. Its ships continued to carry slaves to Southern ports, and slave-grown cotton to Europe. The North reaped the profits of the Southern plantations, and the federal government collected the tariffs. Any further effort made in the North toward resolving the slavery issue generally went into the pipe-dream of colonization and to making sure Southern blacks stayed there, or at least did not come north.

---

1. “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved”
2. Edgar J. McManus, “Black Bondage in the North,” Syracuse University Press, 1973, p.154.
3. Edgar J. McManus, “A History of Negro Slavery in New York,” Syracuse University Press, 1966, p.182-3.
4. McManus, op. cit., p.197.
5. Leon F. Litwack, “North of Slavery,” University of Chicago Press, 1961, p.15.
6. Gary B. Nash, “Race and Revolution,” Madison House, 1990, p.31.

SLAVERY in the NORTH

Image:  http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2006/03/16/books/19slavery_8.html?_r=0

http://www.slavenorth.com/nyemancip.htm

Northern slavery grew out of the paradox the new continent presented to its European masters. So much land was available, so cheaply, that no one was willing to come to America and sign on to work as a laborer. The dream that drew Europeans across the Atlantic was owning acres of land or making a fortune in a trade or a craft. It was an attainable dream. In the 1680s a landless Welsh peasant from the mountains of Montgomeryshire could bring his whole family to Pennsylvania for £10 and acquire 250 acres for another £5; placing just one son in a trade in Britain would have cost the family £7.
Yet workers were needed in the new continent to clear the land, work the soil, build the towns. Because of this acute labor shortage, all the American colonies turned to compulsory labor. In New Netherland, in the 1640s, a free European worker could be hired for 280 guilders a year, plus food and lodging. In the same time and place, experienced African slaves from the West Indies could be bought outright, for life, for 300 guilders.
“To claim that the colonies would not have survived without slaves would be a distortion," historian Edgar McManus writes, "but there can be no doubt that the development was significantly speeded by their labor. They provided the basic working force that transformed shaky outposts of empire into areas of permanent settlement.”[1] Or, to consider the situation from a broad view of the entire New World, “... export agriculture and effective colonization would not have occurred on the scale it did if enslaved Africans had not been brought to the New World. Except for precious metals, almost all major American exports to Europe were produced by Africans.”[2]
Early in the 17th century, black slave status in the British Americas was not quite absolute bondage. It was a nebulous condition similar to that of indentured servants. Some Africans brought to America were regarded as "servants" eligible for freedom a certain number of years. Slavery had been on the decline in England, and in most of Europe generally, since the Middle Ages. That may be why the legal definition of slavery as perpetual servitude for blacks and their children was not immediately established in the New World colonies. The first official legal recognition of chattel slavery as a legal institution in British North America was in Massachusetts, in 1641, with the “Body of Liberties.” Slavery was legalized in New Plymouth and Connecticut when it was incorporated into the Articles of the New England Confederation (1643). Rhode Island enacted a similar law in 1652. That means New England had formal, legal slavery a full generation before it was established in the South. Not until 1664 did Maryland declare that all blacks held in the colony, and all those imported in the future, would serve for life, as would their offspring. Virginia followed suit by the end of the decade. New York and New Jersey acquired legal slavery when they passed to English control in the 1660s. Pennsylvania, founded only in 1682, followed in 1700, with a law for regulation of servants and slaves.
Roughly speaking, slavery in the North can be divided into two regions. New England slaves numbered only about 1,000 in 1708, but that rose to more than 5,000 in 1730 and about 13,000 by 1750. New England also was the center of the slave trade in the colonies, supplying captive Africans to the South and the Caribbean island. Black slaves were a valuable shipping commodity that soon proved useful at home, both in large-scale agriculture and in ship-building. The Mid-Atlantic colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania) had been under Dutch rule before the British conquered them in 1664. African slavery in the middle colonies had been actively encouraged by the Dutch authorities, and this was continued by the British.
Both the Dutch and English colonists in the North preferred to get their slaves from other New World colonies rather than directly from Africa. Direct imports from Africa were considered too dangerous and difficult. Instead, the middle colonies sought their African slaves from Dutch Curaçao and later from British Jamaica and Barbados. “These slaves were familiar with Western customs and habits of work, qualities highly prized in a region where masters and slaves worked and lived in close proximity.”[3] Having survived one climate change already, they also adjusted better to Northern winters, which incapacitated or killed those direct from Africa. Both causes contributed to the adjective often used to advertise West Indies slaves being sold in the North: "seasoned."
By the late colonial period, the average slave-owning household in New England and the Mid-Atlantic seems to have had about 2 slaves. Estates of 50 or 60 slaves were rare, though they did exist in the Hudson Valley, eastern Connecticut, and the Narragansett region of Rhode Island. But the Northern climate set some barriers to large-scale agricultural slavery. The long winters, which brought no income on Northern farms, made slaves a burden for many months of the year unless they could be hired out to chop wood or tend livestock. In contrast to Southern plantation slavery, Northern slavery tended to be urban.

Slaveholding reflected social as well as economic standing, for in colonial times servants and retainers were visible symbols of rank and distinction. The leading families of Massachusetts and Connecticut used slaves as domestic servants, and in Rhode Island, no prominent household was complete without a large staff of black retainers. New York's rural gentry regarded the possession of black coachmen and footmen as an unmistakable sign of social standing. In Boston, Philadelphia, and New York the mercantile elite kept retinues of household slaves. Their example was followed by tradesmen and small retailers until most houses of substance had at least one or two domestics.[4]

There is argument among historians about the economic role of Northern slaves. Some maintain that New England slaves generally were held in situations where they did not do real work, such as might be done by a white laborer, and that many, if not most, of the New England slaves were held without economic justification, working as house servants or valets. Even in Pennsylvania, the mounting Pennsylvania Quaker testimony against slavery in the 1750s and '60s was in large part aimed against the luxuriousness and extravagance of the Friends who had domestic slaves. But other historians who have studied the matter in some depth (Greene, McManus, Melish) make a forceful case for slave labor being an integral part of the New England economy. And even those slaves who did the arduous work required in a colonial household freed their white owners to pursue careers in law, religion, medicine or civil service.SEX and RELIGION
The interweaving of Christianity and white supremacy is considered a defining quality of Southern slavery. Yet this also happened in the North. Not only was slavery sanctioned by the God of the Old Testament, it was a positive duty of his chosen people in the New World, because it brought the Gospel to the pagans of Africa. Thus could a Rhode Island elder rejoice, without any apparent consciousness of irony, when a slave ship coasted in to the wharf, that “an overruling Providence has been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathens to enjoy the blessings of a Gospel dispensation.”[5]
Not only was religion a justification to the Puritan slaveowner, it was an instrument of control. Cotton Mather, in "Rules for the Society of Negroes" (1693) taught the Massachusetts slaves that they were the "miserable children of Adam and Noah," and told them that part of their duty as Christians was to inform on one another.

In the catechism prepared for the slaves to memorize, Mather taught the Negroes that they were enslaved because they had sinned against God and that God, not their masters had enslaved them. Service to the master was identified with service to God and in the Ten Commandments, prepared by Mather for the slaves, submissiveness to and respect for the master were substituted for the similar deference which the owners gave to God. The Fifth Commandment ("Honor thy Father and Mother ...") was twisted to mean for the slave 'I must show all due respect unto everyone and if I have a master or mistress, I must be very dutiful unto them.' For the slave, the Tenth Commandment ("Thou Shalt not Covet, ...") was interpreted as 'I must be patient and content with such a condition as God has ordered for me.' Mather then promised the slaves that if they were 'faithful and honest servants,' they would receive 'rest from their labours' and, as a reward, God would 'prepare a mansion in Heaven for them.'[6]

Similar precepts were adopted throughout the 18th century in religious teaching to slaves by Ezra Stiles, Daniel Wadsworth, and others.Despite the Puritan strictures against sexuality (Massachusetts was one of a handful of colonies to punish what later was called "miscegenation"), free whites and black slaves had sex under a range of circumstances, and a population of mulattos began to grow. By the early 18th century, Connecticut and Massachusetts had to recognize mulattoes as a separate race classification. Exact numbers from colonial times are difficult to pinpoint, but Rhode Island did make a specific census in 1782, which found that, of 3,806 non-whites in the colony, 464 or one-eight were mulattoes. The districts with the highest number of black slaves had the fewest mulattoes, which is consistent with the pattern in the South a century later.
Strict moral and social pressure rejected any romantic attachments across race lines. Anne Grant wrote that New Yorkers believed nature had drawn a line between the races “which it was in a high degree criminal and disgraceful to pass; they considered a mixture of such distinct races with abhorrence, as a violation of her laws.”[7] Yet it happened. In the case of New England, white women outnumbered white men, while demand for slave laborers meant black adult males in Massachusetts outnumbered black adult females in 1755 by nearly 2 to 1. Instances of co-habitation and even marriage (when and where it could be legally accomplished) between black men and white women are recorded throughout New England and to a lesser extent in the middle colonies. Such activity was not without risk, however: in 1718 a Connecticut man discovered a black man and a white woman together, and in his enraged reaction he castrated the other man. The“Boston News Letter” reported this, approvingly.[8]
The situation was reversed for rural Vermonters during the 1800s, when the population of white women fell because so many had moved down to the towns to take factory work. Black women, who did not have that option, were still around and were the only other choice for wives. Vermont changed its rules about birth certificates to speed the legal assimilation of mulattoes into the white population. Certificates for first-generation children of interracial marriages were marked "negro;" second generation, "colored;" and third generation "white." To the average Vermonter, however, even after the third generation they were just "bleached niggers."
Neither were the Northern colonial mulattoes exclusively free people. Many were slaves. A sampling of New England runaways showed that one in six were advertised as mulattoes, and the proportion was similar in the middle colonies. The 1780 slave register of Chester County, Pennsylvania, shows mulattoes made up 20% of the total. The “Pennsylvania Chronicle” from 1767-73 advertised 61 fugitives, of whom about 20% had white blood in some degree. In some cases the proportion was so high that the advertisers warned the fugitive slave could pass for white and probably would attempt to do so.
The two colonies with the strongest religious foundations -- Massachusetts and Pennsylvania -- were the ones that outlawed miscegenation outright. In all places where race-based slavery thrived, mixed race persons upset the natural definitions of white and black. But in the Christian spiritual settlements of the Puritans and the Quakers, the mixing seems to have been felt as a dreadful contamination of God's elect by the blood of the very people he had especially marked for slavery. The Massachusetts law against mixed marriage or sexual relations between the races, dating to 1705, was passed “for the better preventing of a spurious and mixt issue.”[9] It subjected a black man who slept with a white woman to being sold out of the province (likely to the cruel plantations of the West Indies). Both were to be flogged, and the woman bound out to service to support any children resulting from the illicit union. In cases involving a white man and a black woman, both were to be flogged, the man fined £5 and held liable for support of any children, and the woman to be sold out of the province. In liberal Pennsylvania, meanwhile, the Quaker founders had freed marriage from the tyranny of the state and the established church, but the leadership nonetheless raised a bar against interracial marriages.
These statues were not simply about control of slave populations, because they also covered free blacks. The Massachusetts law made no distinction between freemen and slaves, and the Pennsylvania law specified that a free black who was guilty of sexual relations with a white person was to be sold as servants for seven years, and any who married a white person was to be sold as a “slave during life.” Any minister or magistrate who performed such a marriage was subject to a crushing fine of £100.
Northern slavery shared many other qualities with the better-known Southern variety. There are even cases of free blacks buying enslaved ones. The first federal census, in 1790, showed six black families in Connecticut that owned slaves. As in the South later, such cases sometimes turn out, on closer examination, to be free blacks buying loved ones in bondage, such as this contract from Boston in 1724:

Whereas Scipio, of Boston aforesaid, Free Negro Man and Laborer, purposes Marriage to Margaret, the Negro Woman Servant of the said Dorcas Marshall ... that the said Intended Marriage may take Effect, and that the said Scipio may Enjoy the said Margaret without any Interruption ... She is duly sold with her apparel for Fifty Pounds.

---

1. Edgar J. McManus, “Black Bondage in the North,” Syracuse University Press, 1973, p.17.
2. Herbert S. Klein, “The Atlantic Slave Trade,” Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.46.
3. McManus, op. cit., p.20.
4. McManus, pp.41-42.
5. quoted in Lorenzo Johnston Greene, “The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776,” N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1942, p.62.
6. ibid., p.286.
7. quoted in McManus, loc. cit., p.64.
8. ibid., p.65.
9. “Massachusetts Acts and Resolves,” I, 578.

The Many Civil War Draft Riots: Violence From 150 Years Ago, in New York and Beyond

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-young/the-many-civil-war-draft-riots_b_3575732.html

This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of some of the darkest, most violent days in New York City history.

The Civil War Draft Riots set the city aflame for an entire week, starting on July 13, 1863. The weariness of a lingering war, paired with pro-South sentiments held by some New Yorkers, ignited a conflict over a military draft that sentenced working class men -- many newly arrived immigrants -- to a grisly fate.

The Battle of Gettysburg had been fought less than two weeks before, with more than 27,000 New Yorkers upon the battlefield. Many thought the state of New York had contributed enough; thousands were already dead after two years of bleak and depressing battle.

Then there was that troublesome little exemption clause. Those chosen in the "wheel of misfortune" could pay a $300 commutation fee to find a substitute. According to the Measuring Worth inflation calculator, that's about $5,600 today. Look at your bank account. Could you afford to pay that at a moment's notice?

While the first day of lotteries in New York went by without incident, people revolted violently when the drafts resumed that Monday, July 13. Mobs fought the police throughout the week, burning property and attacking black New Yorkers, Lincoln supporters, and anybody in the wrong place at the wrong time.

New York had rarely seen such violence, fueled by stark racism, hysteria and anarchy. Several black men swung from city lampposts; black children narrowly fled a burning orphanage. Mobs nearly killed the superintendent of police, among dozens of others. Millions of dollars of property were destroyed as buildings were incinerated. Parks and streets became barricades. No place was safe.

By that Friday, July 17, the city had calmed down, but its avenues were permanently scarred. It was wretched, impossible day to imagine here.

But New York, back in 1863, meant just that city on the island of Manhattan. In fact, the Draft Riots also reached into those surrounding areas that, a few decades later, would become part of the City of Greater New York.

In the neighboring regions -- the independent city of Brooklyn and the future boroughs of Staten Island, Queens and the Bronx -- local law enforcement patrols were often better prepared to handle disruptions among their less concentrated populations. Even still, the horror of New York's draft riots did spread.

Staten Island

The homes of many black Richmond County residents were torched. According to historianRichard Bayles, "From its proximity to New York City this county could not help but feel every pulsation of popular emotion that disturbed the bosom of the city."

Mobs attacked black shopowners in Factoryville<, surrounded a black church in Stapleton and threatened its parishioners, and burned down a railroad station owned by Republican and Union supporter Cornelius Vanderbilt. A few unfortunately situated Union soldiers at a tavern near Vanderbilt's Landing were brutally attacked by the mob and left for dead.

Above: The scene on First Avenue in New York, with rioters barricaded against the military.

Queens

Residents from the Long Island village of Astoria and the farmlands of Sunnyside and Ravenswood could see New York burning across the water. But Queens County officially caught this loathsome riot fever when the draft commenced in nearby Jamaica on July 14.

Riled crowds gathered at dusk and would have torched the whole village but for the intervention of a few Democratic community leaders. The draft office in Jamaica was eventually destroyed, and a number of buildings filled with government property were vandalized.

Rioters stormed one building and stole piles of garments intended for the battlefield. According to an 1882 history of Queens County, it was an apparel Armageddon, the rioters "taking out some boxes of clothing which they broke open, piled in heaps and set on fire. The largest pile, which they derisively called 'Mount Vesuvius' was about ten feet high."

The Bronx

In Westchester County, towns along the Bronx River reacted similarly to their own draft lotteries, with rioters in Morrisania and West Farms destroying telegraph offices and yanking railroad ties from the ground.

However, other localities, like Yonkers, were successfully insulated from violence, due to the entreaties of an especially popular local leader, the Rev. Edward Lynch.  A mass gathering on July 15th in the village of Tremonteventually snuffed out violence in the region.

Brooklyn

Although it was one of the country's largest metropolises, the independent city of Brooklyn never saw the intensity of violence that New York did. Indeed, some black New Yorkers escaping violence in the city fled to the countryside in Kings County, to places like Weeksville.

However the county did see a good share of bloodshed and destruction, particularly in the Eastern District (the areas of Williamsburg and Greenpoint).

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, solidly Democratic and in quiet support of the anti-draft agitators, had this to say in a July 16 article:

"We could fill columns of the Eagle with exciting stories of anti-negro demonstrations, threatened outbreaks, etc.. So far no disturbance has occurred in Brooklyn which two or three policemen could not surprise [sic]. There has been nothing like any attempt to get up a mob, or create a riot."

That is understated, to say the least. But even through the Eagle's glossy lens, it's apparent that violence never fomented to the degree that it did in New York. This, of course, would be of cold comfort to the dozens of black Brooklynites who did have to flee their homes and businesses that week.

The most dramatic scene in Brooklyn took place before midnight on Wednesday, July 15, with the destruction of two large grain elevators in the Atlantic Basin, in Red Hook (pictured above).

The Eagle's reasoning for the blaze demonstrates the chaos that typified violence in the latter days of the riots. It had nothing to do with racism or with drafts, they claimed, but rather "[t]he fire was the work of incendiaries, supposed to be grain shovellers who recently had some trouble about a raise on wages, and who have always looked with feelings of animosity on these elevators because they dispensed with a large amount of manual labor."

The burning elevators, facing into the East River, made a grim bookend to the burning structures across the water in New York. Luckily, within 24 hours, the riots would be calmed throughout the region.

This was a recap of turbulent events around the New York region that week. If you'd like to listen to a full history of the Civil War Draft Riots, check out our free podcast on the subject. You can download it from iTunes or other podcasting services, stream it onStitcher, or get it straight from our satellite site.

You can find more pictures on this topic at our blog.

This article is a revised and greatly expanded version of one that ran on the Bowery Boys website in 2011.

Images above courtesy the New York Public Library