Slavery in New York

"In the same vein as New York Burning, our exhibition and this book look at the history of enslavement in New York City. Few people at the time of the exhibition, which was 2004, identified New York with slavery. Yet, there were nearly as many enslaved people in New York City as in Charleston, South Carolina. Although we did not have plantations in New York City, one out of every five inhabitants of New York in the colonial period was enslaved. So, a huge number of enslaved people were part of the population of New York City; we dealt with that in the exhibition. Slavery ended in New York in 1827, but leading up to the Civil War , New York City continued to be heavily implicated in slavery. The book also goes well beyond slavery in New York to a different period, which we also followed with a follow-on exhibition called “New York Divided.” The cotton produced in the South was sent to New York. To some extent, there was fabrication of cotton goods in New York, but for the most part, it was shipped overseas. New York companies took enslaved people as collateral. So, New York continued to be heavily involved in the slave economy up through the beginning of the Civil War. It was only after the attack on Fort Sumter that New York began to see itself as a northern city with union sympathies. In fact, Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City just before the Civil War, suggested seceding on the grounds that in the absence of slavery “the grass would grow on Broadway.” “We were New Amsterdam before we were New York” In our exhibition, we also looked at how much of what we have come to associate with New York City, in the cultural arena, originated in the early Black population of the city. In many respects, there was a lasting positive benefit, in terms of the culture that was bequeathed to us by people who were brought to this country unwillingly and who lived in horrific conditions, but nevertheless achieved culturally, perhaps, as much as other immigrants. That’s a long story, but a large part of the answer is that because New York has always been welcoming to immigrants, the city has been able to capture and package the kinds of entertainment that delights people but did not necessarily originate here. For instance, many of the authors of American musicals had immigrant roots in Eastern Europe, many of them were Jewish refugees who came here and created great music that was celebratory of the nation where they found the opportunity to fulfill their artistic abilities."