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WEEKS of December 19 & 26, 2005 |
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Middle Schoolers Confront the Legacy of Slavery in New York by Jeffrey Stanley Lifesize, three-dimensional wire-frame models depicted laboring slaves—men, women and children. They were chopping, plowing, and moving earth. Muscles were flexed and backs held firm. “Imagine that you’re working and carrying all of this equipment barefooted,” a tour guide suggests to the students. “Do you think this is the first time they’ve done this?” she asks. “Why?” Seventh and eighth grade history students took a break from their planned curriculum this fall in order to take advantage of the New-York Historical Society’s landmark multimedia exhibition, Slavery In New York. The exhibit chronicles the slave trade in New York City starting with the Dutch colonization in the early 1600s and ending with the slaves’ gradual emancipation in the early 19th century.
The students were given a moment to examine the sculptures up close before moving along to more concrete illustrations in the exhibit, including maps, images and centuries-old ship’s trading books, bills of sale and Dutch government records. Accompanying video kiosks provided interactive English translations of some of the documents. One painfully apparent fact about the collection was the lack of artifacts coming directly from the slaves themselves, slaves with names like Pegg, Jan Premero, Lysbeth. An explanation was attempted: “As the property of others, enslaved New Yorkers could leave behind few objects of their own, no images and only indirect accounts of their lives,” read one placard. For the most part all that remains of this sad history are the facts and figures of the slave trade but they reveal much if one reads between the lines. The first person of African ancestry, Jan Rodrigues, arrived in Manhattan in 1613. By 1624 the proprietary colony of New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony built by slaves in lower Manhattan, was thriving. “There would be no New Amsterdam and hence no New York City without slavery,” the guide tells the students. “In 1624 there was no way to build a city ‘on the spot’ without slavery.” SLAVES AS PROPERTY The colony was a business enterprise. The slaves were not officially the property of individual Dutch citizens but were owned by the West India Company, which had obtained permission from the Dutch government to settle here. Some slaves were fortunate enough, if it could be called that, to earn “half freedom” from the West India Company by helping defend the colony against Native American attacks. These half free men were allowed to settle with their families on small plots just north of the colony in and around what is now Washington Square Park and the New York University campus.
“What do you see when you see paintings of colonial New York?” asks the guide. “A bunch of old white men,” answers one frank seventh grader. The guide nods. “That’s what we see but that’s not the reality of it.” A nearby display illustrates the fact that by 1664 when the British took over, 800 slaves lived in Manhattan, outnumbering even those working on the tobacco plantations of colonial Virginia. By the 1700s, one-fifth of Manhattan’s population were slaves. In 1712 an Anglican priest reported seeing the “heathenish rituals” going on at the African burial grounds of lower Manhattan, evidence that the slaves were still practicing their own religion. That same year saw the first recorded slave revolt in New York City history. It failed but the exhibit made clear that resistance efforts never stopped and that laws were passed to help prevent it; primarily, slaves were not allowed to congregate in groups of more than three. On Sundays they were given the dubious privilege of meeting in groups of four. Slaves who violated these laws were punished with forty lashes of the whip. Within a few decades white paranoia about a slave insurrection culminated in the conspiracy theory called the Great Negro Plot of 1741. Was the plot a fact or a concoction of frightened slave owners? The alleged plan called for all slaves to rise up in unison, kill their masters and take over New York City. Although the allegations were never satisfactorily proven at trial, the case ended in the execution of 30 blacks and four whites. Even then, some appalled whites compared the case to the Salem witch hysteria of the previous century. IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE A FAMILY Given the colony’s urban environment, a slave’s life in New York was very different from a slave’s life on a plantation in the South where large numbers of slaves lived and worked together on the same property. A typical slave in New York would be the only slave a family owned and would thus be separated from a spouse who might live with a family in another part of town. Having children was discouraged—a slave who became pregnant could easily find herself being sold to a plantation in the South where a slave owner would find the additional labor of a child to be a valuable commodity instead of an economic hardship. “It was almost impossible to have a family,” said the guide. By the Revolutionary War, the guide explains, many runaway slaves from throughout the colonies had come to New York because, just like today, it was a really good place to get lost if you didn’t want to be found. “During the war, if you were a slave who do you think you would have fought for?” the guide asks the group. Hands shoot up. The answers are split between fighting for the Americans and fighting for the British. “They fought on both sides,” explains the guide, “because both sides promised them freedom.” After the Americans won, one of the terms of the peace settlement was that all properties seized by the British during the war would be returned to their rightful American owners. That included slaves, who were considered property—so much for the promises of freedom. Still, the British held somewhat true to their word and decreed that 3,000 New York slaves who had fought for the British would be freed and allowed to relocate their families to a free colony that had been established in Nova Scotia, Canada. However, distinguishing between authentic New York slaves and runaways who had settled here proved difficult.
One of those 3,000 slaves freed was Deborah Squash, who had escaped from none other than General George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate in Virginia. She had fled to New York at the age of 20 before the war began. When Washington found out she had been freed by the British he became furious and went to great lengths to have her recaptured and returned to his estate. Fortunately for Squash he was too late—she was already on a ship bound for Canada. Washington was incensed. How did this history get left out of the textbooks? Why are so many Northerners unaware of their own communities’ involvement with slavery? One explanation offered on the exhibit’s companion website is that during the Civil war the media’s simplified geographical distinction between the proslavery South and the antislavery North became a part of pop culture. As a result many Northerners found comfort in believing their states had always been free. Seventh grade teacher Tony Soll decided to hold a Slavery Exhibit debriefing in his class the next day. He explained that the Historical Society faced some controversy in that the exhibit’s main sponsor, JP Morgan Chase, is a direct descendant of banks that directly benefited from the New York slave trade. “Don’t they feel guilty sponsoring it?” a student asked. “A ha! A lot of people think they should,” said Soll. “But some say on the other hand that they could be doing something else with their money instead of sponsoring an exhibit like this.” Perhaps it’s better that they’re facing the truth, he suggested. “The exhibit was to most people something they didn’t know at all, and the guides kept emphasizing that,” he reminded them. “The cliché is, ‘it’s not in the textbooks.’ Well, it’s in your textbooks and we’ll get there.” Some students complained that there was much to see but not enough time. “I didn’t like that they didn’t let us look around. They just made us focus on one thing.” Tony nodded. “It would be a good idea to go back if you could. Talk to your parents about that.” The exhibit ends March 5, 2006 |
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