Certainly there is plenty of truth in Richardson's general argument.
Critics, though, will wonder whether cherry picking bits of the past
may overstate the argument. Beyond doubt, the myth of western
individualism was used to undercut public action on behalf of the
unprivileged; unquestionably, plutocracy West and South drew race
lines for their own selfish advantage, and found plenty of support
from middling and poorer sorts. Yet one could argue just as easily
that the cult of "rugged individualism" came out of the North and
East just as forcefully in the Gilded Ages. Horatio Alger and William
Graham Sumner needed no instruction from the West. For a suffrage and
political system dominated by conservative, native-born whites, Rhode
Island's stood in a class by itself, at least until 1935.
Interesting review. I have a feeling that Richardson was bending the
stick too far in the right direction. I have a strong suspicion that she
would see the connection between Northern "progressivism" and Southern
racial capitalism as depicted here:
The Nation, OCTOBER 24, 2005
The Hidden History of Slavery in New York
Those who believe that slavery in America was strictly a "Southern
thing" will discover an eye-opening historical record on display at the
New-York Historical Society's current exhibition, "Slavery in New York."
By Adele Oltman
In 1991 excavators for a new federal office building in Manhattan
unearthed the remains of more than 400 Africans stacked in wooden boxes
sixteen to twenty-eight feet below street level. The cemetery dated back
to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its discovery ignited
an effort by many Northerners to uncover the history of the
institutional complicity with slavery. In 2000 Aetna, one of
Connecticut’s largest companies, apologized for profiting from slavery
by issuing insurance policies on slaves in the 1850s. After a four-month
investigation into its archives, Connecticut’s largest newspaper, the
Hartford Courant, apologized for selling advertisement space in its
pages for the sale of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And in 2004 Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, established the
Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to investigate “and discuss an
uncomfortable piece” of the university’s history: The construction of
the university’s first building in 1764, reads a university press
release, “involved the labor of Providence area slaves.”
Now another blue-blooded institution–the New-York Historical Society–has
joined this important public engagement with our past by mounting an
ambitious exhibition, “Slavery in New York.” To all those who think
slavery was a “Southern thing,” think again. In 1703, 42 percent of New
York’s households had slaves, much more than Philadelphia and Boston
combined. Among the colonies’ cities, only Charleston, South Carolina,
had more.
The history presented here does not offer the flabby reflection that
“slavery is bad” or that once it came to an end everyone lived happily
ever after. The Historical Society hired experts led by Richard
Rabinowitz, historian and president of the American History Workshop, to
untangle the complicated stories of slavery and provide historical
context. With more than a score of scholarly advisers weighing in, one
wonders whether there were too many cooks, each one bringing a different
feature of slavery at the expense of some themes that cry out for
explication.
Take, for example, the creation of a distinctive black community of
“half-free” New Yorkers in the middle of what is today’s downtown but
well north of the cluster of seventeenth-century houses. “Slavery in New
York” leaves the designation “half-free” dangling suggestively,
unexplored and undefined. Wasn’t slavery straightforward? How could
someone be enslaved and free? Fortunately, a book of essays titled
Slavery in New York, published in conjunction with the New-York
Historical Society, provides a valuable supplement to the exhibit (and a
worthwhile resource in its own right). The collection–co-edited by Ira
Berlin, a distinguished scholar of slavery, and Leslie M. Harris, the
author of a 2003 study of slavery in New York (The Shadow of
Slavery)–assembles a prodigious group of scholars, writing on topics
ranging from slave rebellion, slavery in the American Revolution, black
abolitionism and life after slavery.
Half-free, we learn from Berlin and Harris’s introduction, reflected the
evolving nature of slavery in the urban North. The Dutch West India
Company that governed New Amsterdam worked its chattel hard, clearing
the land, splitting logs, milling lumber and building wharves, roads and
fortifications; but slavery was so ill defined in those days that slaves
collected wages. In 1635, when wages were not forthcoming, a small group
petitioned the company for redress, and that’s when they became
“half-free.” As a condition of their half-freedom, families who
sustained themselves as farmers agreed to labor for the company when it
called on them and pay an annual tribute in furs, produce or wampum.
This arrangement provided the company with a loyal reserve force without
the responsibility for supporting its workers. It was less beneficial
for the half-free men and women. Their status was not automatically
passed down to their children, who instead remained the property of the
company. This anomalous sorting of humanity produced an ongoing struggle
over freedom, and it reflected “the ambiguous place of black men and
black women in New Netherland. Exploited, enslaved, unequal to be sure,”
write Berlin and Harris, “they were recognized as integral, if inferior,
members of the Dutch colony on the Hudson.” And their status conferred
on them a penchant to make trouble.
A map titled “Landscapes of Conspiracy” shows Hughson’s Tavern, where
black and white New Yorkers intermingled. There they “drank, divvied up
stolen goods, [and] slept together,” reads the label. Hughson’s was on
the far west side of the city, where Crown Street intersected with
today’s West Side Highway. The map details New Amsterdam in 1741, a
crucial year in the city’s history of slavery. After an especially
severe winter, ten fires blazed in the city over three short weeks. A
grand jury called by the Supreme Court quickly concluded that the fires
were the work of black arsonists, “plot Negroes” from the half-free
community. They were accused of acting as part of a vast conspiracy that
seemed to involve just about every slave in the city and was carefully
planned by John Ury, an “alleged” white priest, and John Hughson. It
seems that the Supreme Court Justice was unwilling to believe that black
people could have devised the plot themselves. In an admirable essay in
the accompanying volume, the historian Jill Lepore argues there was
little evidence to support the Ury-Hughson plot. As to the question of
whether there actually had been a plot, Lepore says the evidence is
inconclusive. What is clear, she argues, is that given a history of the
city’s slave codes (which serve as a record of the difficulty of
enslaving human beings) and the testimony of the slaves themselves,
“much evidence points to a plot hatched on street corners and in
markets, the forging of an Akan-influenced brotherhood” and “a political
order that encouraged individual acts of vengeance, of cursing whites
and setting fires, skirmishes in the daily, unwinnable war of slavery.”
One of the many strengths of “Slavery in New York” is its depiction of
American history and life that was (and is) entangled with other
histories and other lives. It puts to rest any mistaken belief that
globalization began recently with outsourcing and free-trade agreements.
The profits from the slave trade and products of slave labor, the
exhibition tells us, “fueled the world’s first industrial revolution.”
By 1800 it also fueled moral outrage against slave trading, igniting
“the first international human rights movement,” another suggestive
comment left undeveloped. It turns out this is the subject of a second
exhibition slated for next year.
On display is The Trading Book of the Sloop of Rhode Island, which left
the Port of New York in 1748 for West Africa under the direction of
Capt. Peter James. Thumbing through a virtual trading book while the
original remains safely behind glass, the visitor will see that early in
the voyage, around Sierra Leone, James distributed two New World
commodities that had come through the Port of New York: tobacco and rum,
connecting the British colonies of Virginia and Caribbean plantation
economies into an Atlantic world of inebriation and addiction. In return
he loaded up on cloth, guns and other manufactured goods from Europe.
Later, as he sailed along the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana), he traded
those goods for slaves, a few at a time.
James’s book registered the deaths of thirty-eight slaves on the journey
home. But even with the loss, the trafficking in slaves was profitable.
A table provides a graphic illustration of just how lucrative the
business was. In 1675 the average selling price of a slave in dollars in
Africa was $354.89, and in New York it was $3,792.66 (that’s a 969
percent markup, for those econometricians keeping score). A hundred
years later the trade was still profitable, although with a more modest
return of 159 percent.
“Slavery in New York” is not the last word on how the institution
evolved–and how it helped New York develop into the most powerful port
in the hemisphere in the decades after New York State’s Gradual
Emancipation Law of 1799. When you walk down a hallway at the end of the
exhibition, pause to ponder two quotes inscribed on the wall, both
written years after the abolition of slavery in all of the Americas. The
first is by U.B. Phillips, grandson of a Southern planter and a
historian who wrote favorably about slavery in 1929, and the other is by
W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar, polemicist and pan-Africanist who recognized
before anyone else that slavery, even when it was confined to the South
in the years before the Civil War, was a national phenomenon that
touched the lives of every American, black, white, slave and free. It
seems right that Du Bois should have the last word in “Slavery in New York.”
Adele OltmanAdele Oltman is a historian, journalist and author of Sacred
Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim
Crow (UGA Press, 2008).
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