No Shelter from the Storm: Slavery and Freedom in Early New York City

Slavery embedded New York City in the forces that shaped the Atlantic World. Incorporating Manhattan’s enslaved population problematizes longstanding narratives of the city’s pluralist ethos and the assimilation of white workers and elites into a politically fractious and economically fertile urban site. Reappraising early New York City’s history requires engagement with African and African-descended peoples, as well as the structures of slavery. Connections to the Atlantic’s plantation and slave-trading complex played a crucial role in the mid-Atlantic port city’s economic growth, while slave labor shaped domestic and seafront spaces. Enslaved people provoked or participated in some of city’s most violent, potentially revolutionary disjunctures. Emancipation in New York City produced unstable cross-racial alliances that tied New York to international antislavery networks, while also placing New York in a precarious tension with the new nation in whose consolidation the city played a vital role.

This paper interrogates the growing literature on black life and slavery in Manhattan from the English seizure of the colony in 1664 to the formal end of slavery in 1827. Cresting at almost 20% by the mid-eighteenth century, the black presence remained significant throughout this span. I proffer a new narrative of the city’s early history in which the enslaved and formerly enslaved challenged the power structures that their labor played a crucial role in constructing. Retentions of African cultural forms, creative cultural appropriations, and alliances, however attenuated, with whites, sustained distinctive forms of resistance and assertions of freedom across generations. Periodic public episodes of violence and repression, encompassing two possible slave revolts, the American Revolution, and attempts by the city’s free blacks to assert their freedom in the early nineteenth century, clarifies key elements of African American experience. Slavery gives narratives of New York City’s progress a jagged edge.