Slavery in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

One of the indelible moments in the season of rebirth of The New York Sun was the weekend we retreated to our study to read the combined edition of the Frederick Douglass’s narrative of his life and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Although we had read them years ago, they sprang to life again for us at a time when we were thinking about the history of New York and the history of the newspaper whose flag we were preparing to pick up and the ideas of its greatest editor, Charles Dana, who had been fired as managing editor of Horace Greeley’s Tribune because he was positively eager to fight a war to defeat slavery and preserve the union.
How hungry Charles Dana would have been for the exhibition – “Slavery In New York” – opening today at the New-York Historical Society. The narratives of Jacobs and Douglass had given us a sense of the terror that existed in the city even for slaves who had made it to “freedom” here. The city was crawling with slave catchers. Harriet Jacobs account is particularly harrowing. All the more illuminating it is to gain through this new exhibit a sense of the broader story. Visitors to the exhibition will learn that New York’s connection to the slave trade went far beyond supporting slavery elsewhere.
For about 200 years – from New York’s formative time as a Dutch and British colony until 1827 when slavery was abolished – the slave trade was a major part of city life. In 1776 there were more slaves in New York than in any other city in the country except Charleston, South Carolina. The multimedia exhibition counters the “Gone With the Wind” image of slavery as only a southern institution. Visitors can see laws the city’s Common Council passed against blacks, such as a prohibiting them from owning property. Ads for runaway slaves, receipts of sales, and household items built by slaves are among the items on exhibit that tell the story of how slaves helped build the city and how they eventually got their freedom. Slaves, for instance, built many of the city’s famous landmarks such as Trinity Church and Fort Amsterdam in Battery Park.
The exhibit is also a reminder of the rays of hope that came from New York, which was simultaneously at the forefront of the battle against slavery. Some of the city’s great men, such as John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, formed the New York Manumission Society in 1785 pressing for abolition. Yet slavery came to an end only gradually in New York. By 1790 one in three blacks in New York was free, by 1800 56% were free, and by 1810 84% were free. In 1817 a law was passed delaying the end of slavery until 1827. By then, when abolition became the law, most slaves were already free.
The historical society’s curatorial director, Lynda Kaplan, told the Sun the exhibition has been put on because the story of slavery in New York had “never really been told before” and because “the more we know about the past” can “open up a dialogue for what’s happening today.” Her point is exceptionally apt, because in learning about their past New Yorkers will inevitably reflect on the many imperfections that remain. Slavery may have ended but we are still dealing with the enormous impact of its evil.
More broadly the exhibit serves as a lesson to those who question President Bush’s championing of freedom around the world and the universal appeal of liberty. The Charles Dana who agitated for war against the confederacy was the Paul Wolfowitz of his day. If the city that was once a capital of the slave trade can become “The World’s Second Home” and a symbol of freedom to people across the world, there is no reason any other city in the world, and any other people, cannot similarly change their course. Slavery is still practiced today in Sudan and other African states. Red China, Cuba, and North Korea practice another form of human slavery: communism. And from the theocrats in Tehran to the princes in Riyadh, across the globe people remain enslaved to taskmasters in different forms.The exhibition is a ray of hope for all who cherish freedom.