Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (7 page)

The Manumission Society operated within the law. It did not countenance direct action against those seeking to retrieve fugitives in the city. Although it offered legal assistance to accused runaways, many members pledged to abide by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Nonetheless, the society’s activities encountered strong resistance in a city where slavery remained widespread. For their part, blacks quickly realized that despite its elitism, the society was willing to listen to and act on their grievances. They did not hesitate to seek its help.
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In 1788, the Manumission Society persuaded the legislature to enact a law barring the importation of slaves into the state and their removal for sale elsewhere. However, the first federal census, in 1790, revealed that although the Revolution had led to an increase in the free black population, slavery remained well entrenched in New York. Slaves still far outnumbered free African Americans. The state’s population of 340,000 included over 21,000 slaves, along with 4,600 free blacks. The city recorded a black population of 3,100, two-thirds of them slaves. Twenty percent of the city’s households, including merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and sea captains, owned at least one slave. In the immediate rural hinterland, including today’s Brooklyn, the proportion of slaves to the overall population stood at four in ten—the same as in Virginia.
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Even though New York City’s free black population more than tripled during the 1790s, reaching 3,500 by 1800, the number of slaves also grew, to nearly 2,900. The buying and selling of slaves continued—a majority of the slaveholders in 1800 had not owned a slave a decade earlier. Bills for abolition came before the legislature several times, but without result. Resistance was strongest among slaveholding Dutch farmers in Brooklyn and elsewhere. “The respect due to
property
,” a French visitor noted in 1796, constituted the greatest obstacle to abolition. In that year, following John Jay’s election as governor, a legislative committee proposed a plan for gradual emancipation, with owners to be compensated by the state. But most legislators did not wish to burden the government with this expense.
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Meanwhile, slaves took matters into their own hands. Now that Pennsylvania and the New England states had provided for abolition, the number of free blacks in those states was increasing, providing more places of refuge. At the same time, the city’s growing population of free blacks, many of whom proved willing to harbor or otherwise assist runaways, made it an attractive destination for slaves from nearby rural areas. The number of fugitive slave ads in New York newspapers had declined sharply in the mid-1780s, possibly because slaves expected action to abolish the institution. When this was not forthcoming, the number rose dramatically. The growing frequency of running away during the 1790s helped to propel a reluctant legislature down the road to abolition. So did the declining economic importance of slavery as the white population expanded and employers of all kinds relied increasingly on free labor.
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In 1799, New York’s legislature finally adopted a measure for gradual abolition, becoming the next-to-last northern state to do so (New Jersey delayed until 1804). The law sought to make abolition as orderly as possible. It applied to no living slave. It freed slave children born after July 4, 1799, but only after they had served “apprenticeships” of twenty-eight years for men and twenty-five for women (far longer than traditional apprenticeships, designed to teach a young person a craft), thus compensating owners for the future loss of their property. While the law guaranteed that slavery in New York would eventually come to an end, its death came slowly and not without efforts at evasion. For slaves alive when it was passed, hopes for freedom rested on their ability to escape—and running away soon became “epidemic”—or the voluntary actions of their owners. Immediately after its passage, the Manumission Society noted an alarming rise in the illegal export of blacks from the state. But after 1800, because of manumissions, the number of slaves in New York City fell precipitously. Nonetheless, 1,446 slaves remained in the city in 1810 and 518 as late as 1820.

In 1817, the legislature decreed that all slaves who had been living at the time of the 1799 act would be emancipated on July 4, 1827. On that day, nearly 3,000 persons still held as slaves in the state gained their freedom, and slavery in New York finally came to an end. But the 1817 law also allowed southern owners to bring slaves into the state for up to nine months without their becoming free. In 1841, the legislature repealed this provision and made it illegal to introduce a slave into the state. But many southern owners ignored the new law and local authorities did little to enforce it, so for years after abolition slaves could still be seen on the city’s streets.
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While slavery no longer existed, New York City’s prosperity increasingly depended on its relations with the slave South. As the cotton kingdom flourished, so did its economic connections with New York. By the 1830s, cotton had emerged as the nation’s premier export crop, and New York merchants dominated the transatlantic trade in the “white gold.” Dozens of boat companies sprang up in the 1820s and 1830s, their vessels gathering southern cotton from Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans, and other southern ports and bringing it to New York for shipment to Europe. New York banks helped to finance the crop as well as planters’ acquisition of land and slaves; New York insurance companies offered policies that compensated owners upon the death of a slave; New York clothing manufacturers such as Brooks Brothers provided garments to clothe the slaves. New York printers produced stylized images of fugitives for use in notices circulated in the South by owners of runaway slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, J. D. B. De Bow, editor of the era’s premier southern monthly, wrote that New York City was “almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston.” The city’s businessmen advertised in
De
Bow
’
s
Review
, which was actually published in New York. The economy of Brooklyn, which by mid-century had grown to become the nation’s third largest city, was also closely tied to slavery. Warehouses along its waterfront were filled with the products of slave labor—cotton, tobacco, and especially sugar from Louisiana and Cuba. In the 1850s, sugar refining was Brooklyn’s largest industry.
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Southern businessmen and tourists became a ubiquitous presence in New York City. One journalist estimated that no fewer than 100,000 southerners, ranging from travelers seeking a cooler climate to planters and country merchants conducting business, visited New York City each summer. Local newspapers regularly praised southern society and carried advertisements by upscale shops directly addressed to southern visitors. Some companies, such as the investment bankers and merchants Brown Brothers and Co., which owned slave plantations in the South, emphasized that they had branches in southern cities. Major hotels, such as the Astor, Fifth Avenue, and Metropolitan, made special efforts to cater to southerners. Many owners brought slaves along on their visits. Hotels provided them with quarters, although they refused accommodations to free black guests.
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It was not unknown for a fugitive who had taken up residence in New York to read in a newspaper of his owner’s arrival or even to encounter him on the street. Slave catchers from the South roamed the city; as late as 1840 a group of armed law enforcement officers from Virginia boarded a ship in New York harbor, searched it without a warrant, and removed a fugitive slave. The combination of what one abolitionist called the city’s “selfish and pro-slavery spirit” and the presence of a rapidly growing free black community ready to take to the streets to try to protect fugitive slaves would make New York a key battleground in the national struggle over slavery.
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II

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, as the institution of slavery in New York withered and died, the city witnessed the emergence of the North’s largest free black community, a development that made it easier for fugitive slaves to blend into the city. By 1820, nearly 11,000 free blacks lived in New York, and by 1830 nearly 14,000. Very quickly an infrastructure of black institutions emerged—fraternal societies, literary clubs, and ten black churches, representing the major Protestant denominations. New York City replaced Philadelphia as the “capital” of free black America. It was the site of the nation’s first newspaper owned and edited by African Americans,
Freedom
’
s
Journal
, established in 1827. Others followed during the next fifteen years:
The
Rights
of
All
,
Weekly
Advocate
, and
Colored
American
.
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Despite this burgeoning community life, the living conditions of black New Yorkers deteriorated. Even as gradual abolition proceeded, racism became more entrenched in the city’s culture. Before 1821, non-racial property restrictions determined which men could vote. But in that year, while eliminating property qualifications for whites, the state’s constitutional convention imposed a prohibitive $250 requirement for blacks. By 1826, only sixteen black men in the city were able to cast a ballot. Blacks could not serve on juries or ride on the city’s streetcars. The ferries that carried passengers between New York and Brooklyn barred blacks from the comfortable “ladies” cabin (in which white men and women were allowed to travel). Black institutions became frequent targets of racial hostility. In 1815, a mysterious fire destroyed the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church at 158 Church Street, which housed the city’s largest black congregation. The parishioners quickly raised the money to rebuild.

There was no black “ghetto” in New York City before the Civil War. African Americans could be found living in every ward. But as real estate prices rose in the first decades of the nineteenth century, blacks became concentrated in small apartments in back alleys and basements in poor neighborhoods. Many lived near the docks or in the Five Points (just north of today’s City Hall), a multiethnic neighborhood notorious for crime, overcrowding, and poverty—so notorious, in fact, that it became a tourist destination, attracting visitors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln. Black men and women found themselves confined to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, working as domestic servants and unskilled laborers. Ironically, many of the occupations to which blacks were restricted—mariners, dock workers, cooks and waiters at hotels, servants in the homes of wealthy merchants—positioned them to assist fugitive slaves who arrived hidden on ships, or slaves who accompanied their owners on visits to New York and wished to claim their freedom.
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Only a tiny number of black New Yorkers were able to achieve middle-class or professional status or launch independent businesses. These, in general, were the men who founded the educational and benevolent societies. Mostly ministers and small shopkeepers, the black elite constituted less a privileged economic class than a self-proclaimed “aristocracy of character,” eager to prove themselves and their people entitled to all the rights of American citizens. Given their tiny numbers and limited economic prospects, they had frequent contact with the far larger number of lower-class black New Yorkers. Nonetheless, the elite disdained the taverns, dance halls, and gambling establishments frequented by the lower classes of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and promoted a strategy of racial uplift based on self-improvement, temperance, education, and mutual relief.
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Members of the black elite shared the moral uplift outlook of the Manumission Society, and many worked closely with it. They campaigned incessantly for equal rights, but also felt that one way to achieve recognition from white society was for lower-class blacks to behave in ways that did not reinforce racial stereotypes. African Americans’ responses to the final end of slavery on July 4, 1827, reflected these tensions. A gathering that March decided to celebrate abolition on July 5 so as not to annoy “white citizens,” who had become accustomed to holding their own festivities on Independence Day. Another faction, however, insisted on blacks’ right to a share of public space. In the end, a low-key black event took place on July 4, followed by a black parade along Broadway the next day, with bands, banners, and a public dinner.
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Although reliable statistics do not exist, it is clear that New York City in the 1820s remained a destination for fugitive slaves, or a way station as they traveled to upstate New York, New England, and Canada. In 1826, a local newspaper complained bitterly of the “increase of Negroes in this place,” lamenting that the city had become “the point of refuge to all the runaways in the Union.” Most fugitives arrived on their own, without any public recognition. On occasion, however, their exploits were dramatic enough to warrant coverage in the local press, such as in July 1829, when six black men and one woman leaped ashore from an arriving vessel and with “light hearts and nimble feet” disappeared into the city. Sometimes, free blacks took to the streets in spontaneous efforts, generally unsuccessful, to prevent the removal of slaves from the city or the recapture of fugitives. In 1801, twenty-three black New Yorkers were jailed for forcibly attempting to stop a white émigré from the revolution in Saint-Domingue from taking a group of slaves to Virginia. The Manumission Society, which had been seeking to prevent the removal, prohibited under the 1788 state law, condemned the riot. In 1819, 1826, and 1832, angry blacks tried to prevent the departure of fugitives seized by slave catchers. In 1833, a “large collection of blacks” rioted in the Five Points, having “taken umbrage at one of their own color” for providing information that led to the capture of fugitive slaves. Some of those involved in these events engaged in violent altercations with the police.
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