Читать книгу A Vast and Fiendish Plot: - Clint Johnson - Страница 12

New York City’s acceptance of Southern slavery and its close economic ties with the South came naturally from its own history of being a slave-owning, slave-trading city.

The first black people on Manhattan Island arrived in 1625, just one year before Peter Minuet bought the island from the natives and just five years after the first blacks in America had come ashore in Jamestown, Virginia.

The status of the Africans who landed in Jamestown and Manhattan were different. The twenty-four Angolans who landed at Jamestown, Virginia, were not slaves, whereas those who landed on Manhattan were.

The Jamestown Africans disembarked on the continent with the legal understanding from the white settlers who needed their services that these blacks had the same rights as white English indentured servants who were arriving at the same time. Jamestown settlers paid the Dutch ship captain for the Angolans’ passage from Africa in exchange for seven years of service, after which they would have the rights granted to all settlers.

There was no racial color barrier between white and black in 1625 Jamestown. The barriers were social—between master and employee. One of those first black settlers in Virginia, Anthony the Angolan, who later changed his name to Anthony Johnson, worked his way out of his seven years of servitude to become Virginia’s first wealthy black man, acquiring as much land as his white neighbors.

While Johnson’s white neighbors initially treated him socially as just another landowner, he also infuriated them by his constant use of the courts to sue them over minor disputes. One of Johnson’s suits would forever seal the fate of future slaves brought to the continent.

In 1654, Johnson sued his white neighbor, Robert Parker, who Johnson charged was illegally keeping a man named John Castor who Johnson insisted was his slave. Castor insisted he was a former indentured servant who had long ago worked off Johnson’s claim on his labor. Castor had gone to the neighbor Parker for protection from Johnson. After a lengthy trial, the colonial court ruled that Castor was Johnson’s property, and he could not claim refuge with the neighbor.

For the first time in American history, a court of law had ruled that one man had the legal right to own another man. The court in Jamestown did not find it ironic or even remarkable that the slave owner had once been an indentured servant himself. Nor did it make a difference to the judges that Johnson and Castor were both black.

All the black men who landed on Manhattan Island were owned outright by the Dutch West India Company and their purpose for the past thirty years had been singular—to prepare the colony of New Netherland island and its primary town of New Amsterdam on the southern end of Manhattan Island for more white settlers and more black slaves. The slaves cut timber, built houses and fortifications, and constructed wharves along the Hudson River from which the furs and timber that had first attracted the company to the area could be shipped back to Europe.

In 1653, the colony’s slaves were ordered to build a wall around New Amsterdam to protect the development from increasingly irritated and dangerous native tribes who had grown resentful of the encroachment of the white men through the Hudson Valley. Later the slaves would build a road that would run along that wall. History would not remember the names of the black men who built both the wall to protect what would become New York City and Wall Street.

The Dutch view on slavery was liberal, almost an extension of the indentured servitude. The Dutch trusted their slaves to help defend the colony. They set up economic models in which the slaves could work their way into freedom, which, in turn, allowed them to own property, a right that was unheard of in most other civilizations with the exception of Jamestown.

By 1664, Charles II of England had designs on expanding his territories in the New World south of Connecticut. The Dutch West India Company, which had pioneered and financed New Netherland as a colony and New Amsterdam as its capital on Manhattan Island, was caught off guard by the sudden aggressive stance of England.

The company had spent most of its time building relationships with trappers and natives—not in building military fortifications to protect the colony from a seaborne invasion from undetermined enemies. When four British warships appeared in the harbor in the summer of 1664, Peter Stuyvesant, then the governor of the colony, readily capitulated because he had no trained soldiers or enough weapons to fight the British.

One of the first things the new British owners of the colony did was rename it New York. What had been a Dutch outpost in the New World shipping beaver pelts to Europe was now a full-fledged English colony. Among the colonists in New York were about 150 black people, most of whom had not yet worked their way into freedom and likely had no illusions that their state in life would change under new management.

Over the next one hundred years, the British kept the remaining Dutch colonists and the newly arriving British settlers supplied with a steady flow of Africans who were purchased to act as laborers on small farms outside the city and inside the city as trained artisans, craftsmen, and house servants. According to census records, the percentages of blacks to whites in the city crept steadily upward from 14 percent in 1698 to 21 percent by 1756.

While the population of slaves on Manhattan Island steadily increased as the British imported them from Africa, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, the freedoms that slaves had enjoyed under Dutch rule gradually decreased. A 1730 law passed in New York made it illegal for three or more slaves to meet each other under penalty of getting forty lashes on a bare back. Another law, passed the following year, made it illegal for slaves to make noise on a public street. A law passed in 1740 made it illegal for slaves to buy or sell fruit.

What frightened white New Yorkers of the early eighteenth century was the distinct possibility that growing numbers of black slaves in the city and the Hudson River Valley would organize themselves into a formidable armed force. There fears were realized when the first successful slave revolt on the continent occurred on Manhattan in 1712.

On the night of April 6, up to fifty black men and women armed themselves with guns, knives, and hatchets stolen from their masters and then set fire to a farm building on Maiden Lane off Broadway. They lay in the darkness for the white settlers to rush to the scene of the fire. At least nine white settlers were killed in the ensuing melee. Apparently surprised at their easy success, the slaves retreated into the surrounding woods and barns rather than flee the island during the ensuing confusion and terror that now gripped the white community.

The next morning, the colonial militia rounded up virtually all the slaves on Manhattan and arrested and brought to trial more than seventy of them. New York’s governor Robert Hunter was sympathetic to what he perceived to be the slaves’ main grievances: that some masters had subjected them to “hard use,” but he also realized that if he did not punish the blacks, he would have a white revolt on his hands.

Twenty-five slaves were convicted of revolt and executed with twenty being mercifully hanged while three were slow roasted by fire and one was broken on a wheel. So many slaves were executed in such a cruel fashion that Hunter protested that most other civilized societies picked out only the ringleaders of slave revolts and executed them as an example to other slaves. The slave owners ignored their governor’s suggestion. They executed all the convicted.

When the slave owners ignored his advice to be lenient, Hunter observed that the only way to prevent future slave revolts in the colony was to stop importing slaves and start building a free white workforce.

That suggestion, intended for both white New Yorkers and New Englanders either who needed free labor or who enjoyed the status symbol of household slaves, was also ignored. Over the next thirty years, the number of slaves in New York City doubled until the slave population made up 20 percent of the population of the city.

Within thirty years, New York City would see—or at least the citizens would think they saw—another slave revolt.

In 1741, New Yorkers who were old enough to remember the events of 1712 must have recognized the similarities of what started happening during March and April. Over those weeks, nearly a dozen fires broke out in the occupied southern portion of the island, including one fire intended to burn the wooden palisades of Fort George (built on the site of today’s Battery Park).

White New Yorkers needed little persuasion to believe that the city’s slaves were up to their old arson tricks. Some of the fires were being set on the anniversaries of the 1712 fires.

Also fresh on the minds of New Yorkers were terrible stories still told of the 1739 Stono Rebellion near Charlestown (now Charleston), South Carolina. Down south, a mob of fifty rebelling slaves systematically hunted down and killed at least twenty-five whites, some of whom did not even own slaves.

Until the Stono attack, the white slave owners of South Carolina had trusted their slaves so much that they ignored government edicts that forbade the gathering of slaves or allowing them to grow their own food. The trigger for the rebellion was an impending crackdown on slave freedoms because slaves were hearing that the Spanish were granting freedom to any slaves from English Carolina who could make it to their colony in Florida.

Fear of more fires so concerned New York’s Common Council that they issued a secret order to search the entire city for “latent Enemies.” On Monday, April 13, 1741, the entire city was searched for evidence of fire-making materials or stolen goods. Every citizen (perhaps ten thousand people, both black and white) was accounted for to make sure that no foreign strangers had slipped into New York with the intention of burning it down.

When no strangers were found on whom to blame the fires, that left the people who had been the prime suspects all along—the black slaves. The militia had already rounded up a number of slaves before the search, including some who were the children of slaves who had been executed for the 1712 fires.

During a court inquest, some of the slaves testified that other slaves told them that if they burned down their masters’ homes, they would be set free. One of the court’s star witnesses was a white indentured servant, Mary Burton, who testified that the fires were the result of a joint conspiracy between black slaves and poor whites to burn down the city and kill the landowning whites so that the poor could inherit what was left.

The chief judge of the panel hearing the cases, Daniel Horsmanden, began to question other prisoners about a conspiracy. Soon the prisoners began to inform on each other and accuse others, white and black, about being part of the conspiracy. Judge Horsmanden accused a newly arrived schoolteacher, John Ury, with being a Spanish spy and the mastermind behind the slave revolt.

Horsmanden did not even wait for everyone accused to be tried before he started executing people. At least thirty blacks were hanged or burned alive. Four whites were hanged. More might have been executed but Horsmanden stopped the trial when his star witness, Mary Burton, began accusing family members of the judges of being in on the conspiracy.

The slave executions demonstrated that white New Yorkers were growing increasingly nervous about the intentions of the black people living among them. While the revolting slaves in 1712 had killed some whites, no white lives were lost at all in this latest conspiracy—if a conspiracy existed at all. The only evidence of a conspiracy were the fires set around the city and the word of Mary Burton, who eventually accused virtually everyone she knew of being behind a plot to burn down the city.

New York governor Hunter’s 1712 prediction that using slave labor would only create more slave rebellions had been proven true just thirty years later. Still, that did not lead to the abandonment of the slave trade. In fact, the importation of slaves into New York increased in numbers, but the source of those slaves changed. Three quarters of the slaves imported into the city before 1741 had been from the Bahamas and Jamaica.

Starting after 1741, slave importers increasingly used Africa as a source for slaves rather than the Caribbean islands, believing that slaves taken directly from the continent would speak different languages than those who had lived for years in the Caribbean. Perhaps more importantly, those African slaves would have no knowledge of the Caribbean slave revolts.

The tremendous profits (upwards of 100 percent of an investment for a single voyage) of slaving voyages were a temptation that proved too hard to resist to many New York merchants who had expertise with sailing and shipping. Estimates range as high as one third of the city’s merchants being engaged in the slave trade by 1750.

From 1732 through 1754 more than 35 percent of the city’s new immigrants were listed as slaves. Since it was a common practice for many slavers to off-load their cargoes on Long Island in order to avoid the colony’s tax collectors who were waiting at the official port of entry, it is possible that up to one half of the colony’s immigrants in the mid-eighteenth century were slaves.

Slave owners in New England and New York differed from Southern slave owners in their use of slaves. Southern slaveholders looked on slaves as a permanent workforce, a resource to be used until they were too old to work. When that happened, the slaves became house servants. Southern slave women were encouraged to have children who would be born into slavery and eventually grow old enough to work.

While around five hundred thousand slaves landed in all the English American colonies in the 180 years before the slave trade was officially outlawed in 1808, more than 4 million slaves lived in the American South in 1861. Almost all of those were native-born Americans with a tiny fraction arriving from Africa, landed by slavers willing to take the chance on being detected by the United States Navy.

New Yorkers thought of slaves as a disposable commodity. In the late 1990s, Howard University in Washington, D.C., conducted an exhaustive study of the bones found in the African Burial Ground west of Manhattan’s City Hall, the traditional burial ground for the city’s slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The bones revealed that both men and women had lifted heavy weights most of their adult lives, leading to severe bone stresses. That fact indicated to researchers that New York City’s slave owners believed the slave population could always be replenished with the arrival of another slave ship as “slaveholders showed no desire to possess young Africans or to ‘breed’ their captives. They only needed them to keep the market’s products and profits flowing.”

So many New York slavers got into the slaving business and so many voyages were successful that supply eventually overran demand and the wholesale price of slaves dropped by more than 50 percent by the end of the 1750s. But instead of lessening the demand for slaves, the lower cost encouraged more potential New York owners to make purchases. New York became an even more popular port of call, trailing only Charleston, South Carolina, for the volume of imported slaves.

As the eighteenth century faded and the nineteenth century dawned, so did the senses of lawmakers who questioned the need for domestic slavery and the international slave trade on religious, legal, and economic grounds. The Northern states had begun considering the thorny questions of abolishing slavery within their borders in the mid-eighteenth century, even as they allowed the international trade between Africa, Cuba, and the Caribbean to continue from their seaports. New York State passed a law abolishing slavery in 1799 with provisions that allowed owners to free or sell their slaves slowly so that they would not lose their investment.

Most slaves seemed to have been sold. According to the U.S. Census, the percentage of slaves in New York State in 1790 dropped by more than two thirds by the 1830 Census, indicating a huge transfer of bodies to places where slavery was still legal.

Congress finally passed a law abolishing the slave trade after 1808. Passing the law was one thing; enforcing it was another, particularly since most of the trade had shifted from importing slaves into the United States to selling them to Caribbean countries. In 1810, President James Madison observed: “It appears that American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equal in violation of the laws of humanity, and in defiance of those of their own country.” Madison had no idea how New York would expand that traffic over the next fifty years.