Incarcerated Cosmopolitans in Newgate Penitentiary, 1797–1828

Between 1797 and 1828, the abolition of slavery in New York coincided with the advent of its first state prison, Newgate Penitentiary.  At the precise moment that New York initiated a process of gradual emancipation, black men and women were being subjected to new modes of structural confinement in the form of incarceration.  Locked inside Newgate, their movement was curtailed and their labor unpaid. Historians have documented the advent of racialized systems of incarceration in the rural South and in the urban North during the century following the Civil War; my paper, by contrast, analyzes the relationship between emancipation and prison in New York during the early republic.

I argue that early reformers viewed prisons as institutions that complimented processes of emancipation. My paper traces the concurrent development of emancipation and incarceration, highlighting the overlap of penal reform and early abolitionism, demonstrating that prison was central to reformers’ vision of a free-labor society, and suggesting that historical understandings of black freedom in the early republic need to incorporate structural unfreedoms such as the penitentiary that accompanied abolition in New York.  I then discuss the broader New York context in which white European immigration and the policing of black communities conspired to institutionalize black economic marginality and widespread incarceration.  Finally, I compare the denial of mobility inherent in incarceration with diasporic geographies discernable in the lives of Newgate’s black inmates. The presence of black cosmopolitans from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, Canada, and the U.S. South suggests that black New Yorkers’ understanding of freedom was more sophisticated and diasporic than is generally understood. In closing, I ask whether “freedom,” as we have come to understand and theorize this term, adequately characterizes the exigencies of black mobility, political identity, and the complicated transition from slavery to a free-labor society.