With the city’s enslaved population increasing exponentially, harsher restrictions were imposed, and these measures, much like those in the South, only intensified the growing anger and discontent. Slave codes in New York forbade enslaved Africans to assemble in groups larger than three; any slave who broke the law was punished by forty lashes on the naked back; and slaveholders could punish enslaved people for any misdeed in any way they chose except killing them or cutting off their limbs. And any slave who plotted with others to murder his or her enslaver was tortured and killed.
But that did not stop the rebels in 1712.
Anglican chaplain Anthony Sharpe reported that the majority of the rebels were un-Christian “Koramantines and Pawpaws from the Akan-Asante society of the Gold Coast—probably imported within the previous year or two (so much for the assumption that newcomers from Africa were more docile).” Another account said the plotters tied “themselves to secrecy by sucking ye blood of each other’s hand and reassuring themselves by accepting a charm from a free Negro.”
Two Native Americans were among the rebels who set fire to a building and, armed with a few guns, clubs, and knives, waited for the whites to approach. “Several did, and were then attacked by the slaves who killed about nine men and seriously wounded five or six others.”
Alarmed by the uprising and the deaths, Governor Hunter invoked martial law. The rebels hastily retreated into the woods. The next day the governor and his soldiers sealed off the island of Manhattan to prevent the rebels from escaping. “Hunted down,” stated one report, “six of the conspirators cut their own throats (one man killing his wife and himself) rather than be captured.”
While only about twenty-five enslaved people were involved in the rebellion, more than seventy others were arrested and brought to trial before a special court convened by the governor. Twenty-three were convicted of murder and two of attempted murder. Twenty were hanged outright, and others experienced excruciating forms of death, including being roasted, slow-turning, on a fire or broken on a wheel. Another had every bone of his body smashed by a man wielding a crowbar until he was dead. Six of them, however, including a pregnant woman, were pardoned. The means of punishment and modes of execution, lawmakers claimed, were consistent with the slave codes of 1708, since the rebels had conspired and wantonly killed members of the community.
After the trials and executions, even more stringent laws were enforced, and the Common Council ordered that no slave could travel about the city after dark without a lantern. The assembly enacted a new law that made manumission or emancipation prohibitively expensive for enslavers and stipulated that no freed slave could thenceforth own a house or land in the colony.
The new laws were so restrictive that a free Black person became rare in Manhattan. “The real legacy of the 1712 uprising was a new era of routinized brutality and official cynicism toward slaves,” said one observer. “Crowds of townsfolk often gathered to watch slaves hanged or burned to death for one offense or another.”
Soon enslaved people were not allowed even to speak adversely to a white person, lest they be publicly flogged at a whipping post, as was the fate of one audaciously outspoken Black woman. She was tied to a wagon, dragged through the streets, and subsequently transported to another colony.
That woman, Robin, was just one of many Black New Yorkers who lived in fear, waiting for the next knock on the door, or who watched helplessly as a loved one was snatched from their loving grasp and taken away. If these tragic acts were visited upon African Americans in the North, it’s no wonder that even more massive and deadly insurrections occurred in the South.
Things would get worse before they got better, and the hostility vented on the Black population, slave or otherwise, was relentless and vindictive. As such, it was only a matter of time before another band of enslaved and outraged men and women would decide they could no longer endure in silence the obdurate oppression, the lashes of hatred and racism.
In 1741, nearly a generation after the militia put down the slave revolt of 1712, white New Yorkers trembled again in the wake of a rebellion, this one based on an even more elaborate conspiracy, and this one including some white sympathizers. Time and again white racism produced Black resistance. It is one of the longest-running plotlines in African American history.
1714–1719
THE SLAVE MARKET
Sasha Turner
In 1714 the “Meal Market” stood in the center of New York City. Located where Wall Street meets the East River, between Pearl and Water Streets, the newly designated slave market became the government-authorized site for selling the city’s enslaved people. Built by the municipal government, the Meal Market (so called because grains also were sold there) had been there for three years.
But New Yorkers had bought and sold humans for much longer than three years. As early as 1626, the Dutch had imported captive Africans into New York (then New Amsterdam), and starting in 1648 had traded for enslaved people directly with Angola. A New York census recorded settlers importing at least 209 enslaved people from Africa and 278 from the West Indies between 1700 and 1715.
Long before municipal authorities had slave markets, white New Yorkers traded enslaved people aboard ships and in merchant houses. They also traded humans on paper, through lease and mortgage agreements, wills, and private transfers. The slave market was more than a physical location. It was everywhere.
The growth of the slave market was dependent upon the belief that humans were a commodity whose only “socially relevant feature” was the price their bodies commanded. Chains and owner initials effaced tribal markings and clothing that had marked belonging, social distinction, and rank. Traders boiled the needs of these humans down to economic calculations of the cost of sustaining bare life. Investors dispensed food and medicine merely to keep laborers “wholesome,” making them “grow likely for the market.”
Just as speculators observed the changing height and size of children strictly with an eye on their labor readiness and market value, so, too, they assessed women of childbearing age based on the “possibilities of their wombs.” From the 1662 Virginia law that decreed that all children born of Black women were slaves, to wills that included enslaved people as property, Euro-Americans used the power of language to enact a new reality that a human could be a commodity. The slave market was governed by the chattel principle.
In contrast to the plantation colonies, which purchased the enslaved by the shipload from the oceanic and domestic trades, New Yorkers bought and sold enslaved people individually or in small groups at commercial houses without public notice. The comparably fickle nature of slave ownership in New York made enslaved Africans vulnerable to multiple sales. One enslaved woman named Phyllis was sold six times between owners in Long Island, New York City, and New Jersey. Jack, a boy of twelve, was sold at least ten times to buyers on both sides of the Hudson. The exchangeability of enslaved children was especially pronounced in nonplantation settings like New York that marginally relied on slave labor. Enslaved children were frequently sold to neighbors, friends, and business associates by owners who had no need for more than one enslaved person or were unwilling to pay maintenance costs for an extra enslaved person.
The slave market was a space of exchange, not just an auction block. The mobility of the slave market as determined by slave exchangeability created a nuisance for well-to-do New Yorkers and government officials. A free-range slave market permitted tax-free slave sales, cheating municipal authorities of craved revenues. By the 1710s, enslaved people parading the streets scouting buyers or renters became bothersome to New Yorkers. New York merchants’ and vessels’ growing participation in the transatlantic slave trade further increased captive presence across the city.
After arriving only in small handfuls for decades, captives landed in New York at an accelerated pace as the eighteenth century went on. Between 1715 and 1741, some four thousand Africans arr
ived in New York. The period between 1715 and 1718 accounted for the highest number of arrivals, approximately 40 percent of the total during that era.
Sellers relied on theatrics to create the illusion that humans were just another marketable commodity, valued at the price demanded, and that they were healthy and hardy laborers. Preparation of captives for the market began at least one week prior to opening sale. Agents refreshed them with water and food, filling out and strengthening their emaciated and exhausted bodies. To conceal the “undesired testimony [of] the violence and unsanitary conditions of the slave ships,” agents bathed, shaved, and oiled the captives. From palm oil and lard to the more generic “Negro Oyle,” traders used various forms of grease to polish captives’ skin, giving them the illusion of health and vitality. Slaves marketed locally were similarly treated to extra rations and grooming. Eliminating evidence of aging, sickness, and ill and hard usage was integral to enhancing the value of enslaved people.
Market theatrics were especially crucial to New York’s Wall Street. Enslaved people arriving in New York were mostly leftovers (called refuse slaves) from plantation colonies like Barbados and Virginia, where a handful of estates often cleared entire shipments. New Yorkers rarely bought shiploads of enslaved people, instead buying people individually or in small groups. Between 1715 and 1763, for example, only 16 out of 636 British slavers ported in New York, and then only after they had sold the majority of their cargo in the Caribbean and the American South. Captives arriving in the New York market had been twice rejected by Caribbean and Southern mainland buyers, because of perceived medical complaints, physical weakness, old age, and undesirable personal histories (infertility, rebelliousness, or criminal conviction). Traders fattened, polished, and preened refuse slaves as best they could to convince buyers their commodity held value.
Traders carefully staged the slave market to mask the humanity of people who had been turned into a commodity, making it into a theater of jollity and amusement. They plied buyers with wine and brandy while the auctioneer tickled them with jokes and antics, treating them to a lively show of the enslaved body, which was forced to be receptive to being touched and to feign happiness with their bondage. Dancing, jumping, singing, and parading the streets were commonplace “rituals of the marketplace” demonstrating slave value and, crucially, also denying emotions that would have betrayed the humanity of the enslaved.
Jollification and the threat of the lash, however, could not mask the sorrow of parting from loved ones and the revulsion at being fondled by lecherous buyers. The shame and humiliation that enslaved people suffered remained plainly visible in their tears and in the silent screams of their eyes.
1719–1724
MAROONS AND MARRONAGE
Sylviane A. Diouf
On July 16, 1720, the Ruby landed in Louisiana. After fifty-four days at sea, 127 men, women, and children from Senegal and Gambia disembarked.
Naturalist Antoine Le Page du Pratz received “two good ones, which had fallen to me by lot. One was a young Negro about twenty, with his wife of the same age.” After six months, the couple ran away. Native Americans captured them sixty miles away, and soon the husband “died of a defluxion on the breast, which he catched [sic] by running away into the woods.”
To du Pratz, the couple had run away because they were lazy. The man’s “youth and want of experience made him believe he might live without the toils of slavery,” he said. In fact, the young Senegambians had chosen marronage over enslavement—emblematic of the fierce African resistance of the early 1700s.
Between 1700 and 1724, marronage, revolts, and more than fifty insurrections aboard slave ships caused much alarm throughout the British colonies. In the thirteen North American colonies, maroons—“runaways who hid[e] and lurk in obscure places,” also called outliers—drew attention for the potential threat they posed.
In 1721 Virginia lieutenant governor Alexander Spotswood feared it would be difficult to apprehend “Negroes” who had settled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Should their number increase, he thought they would endanger the frontier settlers and threaten the peace of the colony. Virginians and Marylanders knew maroon communities were well established in Jamaica, and to prevent a similar development, they instituted a policy of divide and conquer, offering Native Americans two guns and blankets or coats as a reward for each maroon they captured.
William Byrd II, the founder of Richmond, went so far as to recommend ending the slave trade, “lest [Africans] prove as troublesome and dangerous everywhere, as they have been lately in Jamaica….We have mountains in Virginia too, to which they may retire as safely, and do as much mischief as they do in Jamaica.” Lieutenant Governor William Bull of South Carolina warned that if the Cherokees were run out of the mountains, their land would become a “refuge to the runaway negroes…who might be more troublesome and more difficult to reduce than the Negroes in the mountains of Jamaica.”
The specter of Jamaica continued to be used whenever it was convenient, but unlike Jamaican maroons, most maroons in the colonies did not live in distant communities; they melted into their surroundings at the borderland of populated areas. They typically lived in underground, human-made caves, or dens as they called them, dug several feet underground and closed by well-camouflaged traps. Families, mothers with children, and friends could remain hidden there for years. They hunted, fished, and gathered fruit. They received food from friends and relatives and helped themselves to the pantries of plantation owners. They acquired clothes, salt, firearms, and ammunition through trade with free and enslaved Blacks and with poor whites. In the hinterland, maroon communities—comprising from twenty to eighty people—raised crops, poultry, and pigs. They, too, traded and appropriated what they could not produce.
Maroon communities remained a constant threat to slaveholding colonies. In the early 1700s, a North Carolina act deplored that “many Times Slaves run away and lie out hid and lurking in the Swamps, Woods and other Obscure Places, killing Cattle and Hogs, and committing other Injuries to the Inhabitants.” Newspapers regularly reported on their numerous “depredations.” Petitions to legislatures denounced the damage they caused to livestock, crops, and stores, as well as to the citizens’ sense of safety, all the more because they traveled well armed. They encouraged desertion and often organized the liberation of loved ones.
In their “obscure places”—and more than any other population—maroons were attuned to the natural world. They found sustenance and protection in the environment; knowing it intimately was paramount to their survival. The popular image of the wilderness as dangerous and savage served them well. They built a parallel reputation as ferocious people who could measure up against wild beasts. But to them, danger and savagery lay in the slavers’ world. “I felt safer among the alligators than among the white men,” the maroon Tom Wilson once said.
Maroons’ autonomy shattered the racist view of Black people as incapable of taking care of themselves. Besides, their very existence underlined the limits of the terror system used to control the enslaved population. Cornelia Carney—whose father and cousin and their friend were maroons—expressed a common sentiment when she said Black people were too smart for white people to catch them. Of course, that view was exaggerated. Maroons were captured and as a deterrent were tortured or gruesomely executed. Some gave up and returned to slavery. Some died in the woods.
But they had enough success stories to be an inspiration. The maroon Pattin, his wife, and their fifteen children lived underground for fifteen years and emerged only after the Civil War. In the Great Dismal Swamp, a Union soldier encountered children who had never seen a white man. Some maroons did not even know there had been a war.
In the end, the 1720s prediction that warring outliers would descend from the mountains did not materialize. Maroons did launch numerous assaults. Whenever they were outgunned and outnumbered, which was often, they employed the guerrilla tactic of disapp
earing. But American maroons were not antislavery insurrectionists. Individuals, families, and communities were the norm. They never had the numbers to lead a successful slave revolt. More than anything, they wanted to be left alone. When some plots were discovered, and during Nat Turner’s revolt, they were suspected, but nothing could ever be substantiated.
Tenacious. Creative. Self-confident. Fearless. Resilient. They displayed all these qualities and more to their enslaved admirers. Maroons became folk heroes. In the 1930s, formerly enslaved men and women recalled their hard-won and defiant freedom. Maroons created an alternative to life in servitude, a free life in a slave society, a free life in a free state. Free Blacks and runaways were still subjected to white supremacy; only maroons were self-ruled. For three years, the maroon Essex endured hunger, frostbite, and the bites of hounds, but all these hardships were well worth it. When captured, he simply said, “I taste how it is to be free, en I didn’ come back.”
Soon, though, maroons disappeared from popular consciousness and scholarly research. But not the essence of marronage: self-determination and freedom outside of white hegemony. The heart of the maroon beat in the establishment of Black towns, the emigration to Black nations, movements for Black power, and Black institution building yesterday and today. Marronage outlived the maroons.
1724–1729
THE SPIRITUALS
Corey D. B. Walker
And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.
Four Hundred Souls Page 9