Slavery in New York has a long and sad history. Here, Richard Bluttal provides an in depth history of the subject from the 17th to the 19th century, from the Atlantic slave trade era to the end of slavery and beyond.
A depiction of an early slave auction in New York (then New Amsterdam). By Howard Pyle.
First Slaves Arrive in New World in 1619
Twenty Africans, carried on a Dutch ship, are brought to Jamestown, Virginia, to be sold as indentured servants, not slaves, a fine distinction that probably escaped their notice.
Jamestown had exported 10 tons of tobacco to Europe and was a boomtown. The export business was going so well the colonists were able to afford two imports which would greatly contribute to their productivity and quality of life. 20 Blacks from Africa and 90 women from England. The Africans were paid for in food; each woman cost 120 pounds of tobacco. The Blacks were bought as indentured servants from a passing Dutch ship low on food, and the women were supplied by a private English company. Those who married the women had to pay their passage--120 pounds of tobacco.
With the success of tobacco planting, African Slavery was legalized in Virginia and Maryland, becoming the foundation of the Southern agrarian economy. Very important when cotton becomes the main source of the economy by time of the cotton gin 1793.
Atlantic Slave Trade and the Middle Passage
Both Maryland and Virginia were in need of a more permanent source of labor: slaves. Although Massachusetts was the first colony to recognize slavery, Maryland and Virginia soon followed, with both colonies legalizing slavery during the 1660s.
Since some African chiefs or kings could increase their wealth by working closely with slave traders, one tribe might capture the warriors of another tribe and then sell their prisoners of war into slavery. Astonishingly, hundreds of thousands torn from their villages and homes survived degradation and deprivation to become the almost 4 million people held in slavery in 1860, at the eve of the Civil War.
Triangular Trade receives its name from the shipping routes that connected Europe, Africa, the West Indies, and North America in the transatlantic commerce of slaves and manufactured goods. These routes began in England, where goods were shipped to Africa. Nearly one-third of all slave voyages were outfitted in Liverpool, London, Bristol, and other ports in Britain. French vessels from such ports as La Rochelle, Le Havre, Bordeaux, and Nantes made up another 13 percent.
In Africa, the goods were then traded for slaves bound for the Americas. Known as the Middle Passage, the forced voyage from the freedom of Africa to the auction blocks of the Americas was a physical and psychological nightmare that lasted several weeks or months. Having unloaded their cargoes in the colonies, the ships returned to England laden with tobacco, sugar, cotton, rum, and other slave-produced items. This trade pattern continued with some modifications into the early nineteenth century.
In order to maximize profits and offset any losses, most captains packed as many Africans as possible into the holds of their ships. During the late 1600s and throughout the 1700s, most English ships that sailed directly from Africa to the colonies carried about 200 enslaved Africans. Later slave ships could carry as many as 400 slaves with a crew of 47.
Slaves were chained in pairs (the right arm and leg of one chained to the left leg and arm of another), and men and women were separated from each other. All of them were forced to lie naked on wooden planks below deck in extremely hot quarters. At times, small groups of slaves were allowed to come on deck for exercise; some of them were forced to dance. Women and children could occasionally roam the deck, but men were allowed on deck for only a short while. Heat, limited sanitary facilities (sometimes buckets for human waste were not emptied for long periods of time), and epidemics from diseases such as smallpox and dysentery together produced an unbearable stench onboard. An outbreak of disease could devastate an entire cargo of enslaved Africans, and an estimated 15 to 20 percent of slaves probably died on route to the colonies, primarily from diseases resulting from overcrowding, spoiled food, and contaminated.
Many also died of starvation and thirst. Yet captains most feared slave mutinies, 250 of which scholars estimate took place. As a result, those slaves who were disruptive or likely to cause a mutiny were thrown overboard.
Because of the stench and disease, many slave ships had to be abandoned after about five years. Eventually ships were built especially for human cargo, with shackling irons, nets, and ropes as standard equipment. During this process slaves were frequently and harshly flogged, sometimes with a paddle but more often with a whip that had a lead ball sewn on its end. They were also forced to learn how to speak a new language, eat new foods, and obey White masters.
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano':
At last, when the ship we were in, had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. ...The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome....The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died -- thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.
Dr Alexander Falconbridge describes the middle passage:
The slaves lie on bare planks. The surgeon, upon going between decks, in the morning, to examine the situation, frequently finds several dead. These dead slaves are thrown to the sharks.
It often happens that those who are placed at a distance from the latrine buckets, in trying to get to them, tumble over their companions, as a result of being shackled. This situation is added to by the tubs being too small and only emptied once every day.
Fever - Alexander Falconbridge (a ship's doctor), An Account of the Slave Trade (1788)
Some wet and blowing weather having caused the port-holes to be shut, fluxes and fevers among the negroes followed. I frequently went down among them, till at length their apartments became so excessively hot as to be only bearable for a very short time...
The floor of their rooms was so covered in the blood and mucus which had come from them because of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house.
New York’s Involvement
Some of New York’s merchants and bankers profited directly by financing and participating in the Atlantic Slave trade. In memoirs published in 1864, Captain James Smith, a convicted slave trader, claimed that in 1859 85 ships capable of carrying between 30 and 60,000 enslaved Africans were outfitted in the port of NY to serve the slave markets of Cuba. “ I can go down to South Street, and go into a number of houses that help fit out ships for the business.” The trade was so profitable that on one voyage, a ship that cost $13,000 to fit her out completely, “ delivered a human cargo worth $220,000 to Cuba.
Major Dutch families such as Philipses were involved, others had commercial ties with the British Caribbean colonies. By the mid-eighteenth century this family held over 52,000 acres in Westchester County and had one of the largest slave holdings.
By 1720 half the ships leaving New York were engaged in Caribbean slave trade. Slave auctions were held weekly and sometimes daily at the Wall Street slave market. Advertisements regularly appeared in newspapers- note Slave ads.
African Burial Ground
During the construction of the federal office tower in downtown Manhattan, the skeletal remains of over 400 slaves were discovered in graves. Of the 400 skeletons taken about 40 per cent were children under 15 years of age, the most common cause of the death was malnutrition, how? From examination of decayed teeth. The adult skeletons showed that many of these people died of unrelenting hard labor. Strain on the muscles and ligaments was so extreme that muscle attachments were commonly ripped away from the skeleton-taking chunks of bone with them-leaving the body in perpetual pain.
Showed that “colonial New York was just as dependent on slavery as many Southern cities, and in some cases ever more so.”
Slavery in Dutch New Amsterdam
The first Dutch agent of African ancestry who can be documented in the New York region was Jan Rodriguez in 1609. The first permanent European settlement in 1625 began when the Dutch West Indian Company established the village of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. From the start the Dutch had a labor shortage, the solution to merchants already engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was to employ enslaved Africans clear the land, plant and harvest crops, and, to build houses, roads, fortifications and bridges. In 1626 a WIC ship brought eleven enslaved male Africans to the colony. Based on their names they were probably Africans from the southwest coast of Africa who were captured or purchased from the Portuguese.
Unlike the legal system in other slave colonies, Dutch laws did not mandate racial discrimination in New Amsterdam. Africans in the Dutch New Netherland colony could meet in groups, walk around the town without passes and own property. People of African ancestry could appeal to the Dutch courts for redress of grievances and even testify against Whites.
The “Land of the Blacks,” as it was known, covered the area that stretches from Greenwich Village north to Herald Square in midtown Manhattan today. In exchange for their freedom and land, each family agreed to pay taxes to WIC in corn, wheat and hogs every year.
Under Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s direction, a number of enslaved Africans became skilled caulkers, blacksmith, bricklayers and masons. In some cases, they were granted half-freedom , which meant they were still obligated to provide the WIC with labor when needed and that their children were not born free. Fort New Amsterdam was completed in 1635. Slaves built roads, cut timber and firewood, cleared land and burned limestone and oyster shells to make the lime used in outhouses and in burying the dead.
The enslaved Africans in the colony had a very ambiguous legal status. Dutch laws did not mandate racial discrimination in the colony. Africans could meet in groups, walk around town without passes and own property. People of African ancestry could appeal to the Dutch courts for appeal of grievances and even testify against Whites. In the portion of the colony beyond the wall stood a tract of land called “Land of the Blacks.” In exchange for their freedom and land, each family allowed to live there agreed to pay taxes to WIC in wheat, corn and hogs every year.
By 1654 the Dutch West India Company began to ship slaves to New Amsterdam more consistently, in larger numbers, and directly from Africa in an effort to develop New Amsterdam in a major North American slave port.
The variety of rights and privileges enjoyed by African slaves in New Amsterdam, relatively kind masters, good opportunities to form families, and access to courts and some forms of property-did not mitigate the fundamental facts of enslavement for Africans: involuntary, largely unpaid, life long servitude and ultimate lack of control over one’s individual and family life
Slave Auctions in Dutch New Amsterdam and Colonial America
Slave auctions took place regularly at a market on Wall Street. Between 1700 and 1774, over 7,000 slaves were imported into New York, most of them destined for sale to surrounding rural areas. This figure was dwarfed by the more than 200,000 brought into the southern colonies in these years.
Slave Auctions were advertised when it was known that a slave ship was due to arrive. Ads were placed in local newspapers advertising arrival of ships and slaves for
When the slave ship docked, the slaves would be taken off the ship and placed in a pen. There they would be washed and their skin covered with grease, or sometimes tar, to make them look more healthy. This was done so that they would fetch as much money as possible. They would also be branded with a hot iron to identify them as slaves. There is a folder labeled Slave Auction that includes images. There are two types of Slave auctions. Later on in 1711 the municipal government established a Meal Market on the east side of New York where enslaved Blacks were auctioned to new owners or hired out for a period of time.
British Takeover of New Amsterdam 1664 and policies towards slaves
In 1664 Colonel Richard Nicolls, commanding four British ships and several hundred soldiers, sailed into New Amsterdam harbor. A surprised Governor Stuyvesant surrendered without firing a shot. It was estimated that in 1664 about eight thousand Whites and seven hundred Africans lived in New Amsterdam. To the dismay of Africans the English soon began to replace the Dutch lenient “half-slavery” with their own profit-driven, mean spirited bondage. Africans in Manhattan faced new hardships and challenges as they pressed their search for liberty and justice. In the British takeover folder are materials including a power point we will examine. Different from the Dutch ownership of slaves in British New York spread widely among the White population.
Some Restrictions on Slaves:
In 1677 a New York court stated that any person of color brought to trial was presumed to be a slave.
Slaves had to carry a pass and could not leave their owners’ homes on Sundays.
One city ordinance prohibited more than four Africans and Native Americans from meeting together.
Slavery in New York prior to the American Revolution and the resistance movement
Europeans employed slave men in skilled occupations such as carpentry, tailoring, blacksmithing, shoemaking, baking and butchering. Large numbers of male slaves were employed on the docks. Slave women, usually no more than one per household, aided White women with cooking, cleaning, and childcare.
Most Manhattan slave owners actively discouraged their slaves from marrying or having children.
New York lawmakers attempted to limit interactions among slaves in the city. Through regulations, New York lawmakers sought to control the cultural, social, and political independence of slaves.
The biggest fear of masters was that education and conversion to Christianity would encourage slaves to seek freedom. Records show that in New Amsterdam enslaved Africans collectively petitioned for wages as early as 1635 and used incessant colonial warfare. As slavery became more restrictive under the British, slaves expressed their discontent through various forms of resistance during the 18th century. Slaves stole more cash, clothing, and food from masters’ households and ran away more frequently than they had under the Dutch. frightening to which than such small acts of resistance was the threat of slave revolt.
An important theme during the 18th century in New York is the increasing resistance to bondage by enslaved Africans in the colonies.
Organized physical violence was one aspect of resistance, however, that organized, armed violence was a relatively rare occurrence during the 350-year history of slavery in the United States. Why were armed rebellions so infrequent? Slave masters monopolized armed power, severely restricting slaves’ access to weapons. Slave masters also closely monitored their slaves’ activities, limiting their movement and freedom of association. Under these circumstances, organization and planning were next to impossible. On those rare occasions when the enslaved escaped their masters’ purview, they faced yet other mechanisms of White control—militias, local patrols, and vigilantes. Rebels who avoided the net of surveillance and enacted their conspiracies were always dealt with in brutal fashion.
Hard usage” motivated two dozen slaves to stage an uprising in 1712 in which they set fires on the outskirts of the city and murdered the first Whites to respond. There followed a series of sadistic public executions, with some conspirators burned to death or broken on the wheel. The colonial Assembly quickly enacted a draconian series of laws governing slavery. These measures established separate courts for slaves and restricted private manumissions by requiring masters to post substantial bonds to cover the cost of public assistance in the event that a freed slave required it. The discovery of a “Great Negro Plot” in 1741, whose contours remain a matter of dispute among historians, led to more executions and further tightening of the laws governing slavery. As a result, few Black New Yorkers achieved freedom through legal means before the era of the Revolution.
Public hangings and decapitation were common punishments. Other rebels were gibbeted alive, burned alive, or broken on the wheel. In all of these instances, punishment was meant to demonstrate the totalizing effects of White supremacy, terrorizing those who remained enslaved. Remarkably, some slaves still embarked on what they must have known were suicide missions. Were the men and women who confronted their masters with violence so desperate that they preferred death to living in slavery? Or, did they really believe that they could be the exception and overthrow White supremacy? These are important questions to consider.
During the American Revolution resistance also meant joining British forces.
In the South, by the nineteenth century, running away to the North offered the virtue of a tenuous freedom; however, failed runaways also met with serious reprisals. Most did not try to escape. For those who remained enslaved, resistance took on more familiar everyday forms.
Of all the Black activists engaged in the struggle to end slavery and secure equal rights for African-Americans the most prominent with Frederick Douglas of Rochester, New York.
Ownership of slaves was widespread. Most worked as domestic laborers, on the docks, in artisan shops, or on small farms in the city’s rural hinterland. In modern-day Brooklyn, then a collection of farms and small villages, one-third of the population in 1771 consisted of slaves.
On the eve of the American Revolution, the city’s population of 19,000 included nearly 3,000 slaves, and some 20,000 slaves lived within 50 miles of Manhattan island.
Our Founding Fathers and Slavery
The existence of Slavery in the US was taken for granted by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787; there was little or no discussion of abolishing it. The Slave trade, however, was very much in contention.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 provided that an owner of his agent could seize a runaway and bring him or her before any judge or magistrate with “proof” of slave status, whereupon the official would issue a certificate of removal. Any person who interfered with the process became liable to a lawsuit by the owner.
The market for slaves was about to explode in volume and everyone knew it.
Prohibiting the African trade, as the New England delegation wanted to do, would create a grand bonanza for Virginia slaveholders-at the expense of South Carolina.
Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution reads: The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight.
Jefferson framed ending importation of persons as humanitarian act. Ending the African slave trade was protectionism on behalf of Virginia. It kept out the cheaper African imports so as to keep the price of domestically raised people high.
The Great Awakening in New York 1740s through the American Revolution
Beginning in the 1740s, a time of religious revival led New York City Whites and Blacks to reconsider the morality of slavery. National, state and local conventions of Black activists became important weapons in the battle against slavery.
The struggle for freedom and equality required the development of African-American community institutions and indigenous leadership. Quakers began to call upon their members to free their slaves.
Remember the New York economy relied too heavily on slavery for Whites to give up the system so easily. However, the influence of the Great Awakening convinced New York City slaves, and a few Whites more strongly of African-American’s rights to freedom.
The first emancipation proclamation in American history preceded Abraham Lincoln’s by nearly ninety years. Its author was the Earl of Dunmore, the royal governor of colonial Virginia, who in November 1775 promised freedom “all indentured servants, negroes, or others” belonging to rebels if they enlisted in the army.
Gouverneur Morris 1777
“The rights of human nature and the principles of our holy religion call up us to depense the blessings of freedom to all mankind…….It is therefore recommended to the legislatures of New York to take measures consistent with the public safety for abolishing domestic slavery. “
The founding of the New York Manumission Society in 1785 led by group of influential White New York City men gave enslaved Black people new allies in the struggle against slavery. The society offered legal assistance to Blacks seeking freedom, worked strenuously to oppose kidnapping of free Blacks and slave catching in the city, brought to court captains engaged illegally in the African slave trade, and sponsored antislavery lectures and literature.
In 1787 the society founded the first of several African Free Schools for free Black and enslaved children in New York Segments of the New York press also played an active role in the battle to end slavery in the United States.
In 1799, New York’s legislature finally adopted a measure for gradual abolition. It freed slave children born after July 4, 1799, but after they had served “apprenticeships” of twenty-eight years for men and twenty-five for women.
By 1816, the American Colonization Society was founded by American Whites, including many abolitionists. The society directed its efforts toward removing from the country Blacks already free. A number of abolitionists believed that racism was so deeply embedded in American life that Blacks could never enjoy freedom except by emigrating. The Black mobilization against colonization became a key catalyst for the rise of new, militant abolitionism in the 1830’s.
In 1817, the legislature decreed that all slaves who had been living at the time of 1799 act would be emancipated on July 4, 1827. WHILE SLAVERY NO LONGER EXISTED, NEW YORK’S PROSPERITY INCREASINGLY DEPENDED ON ITS RELATIONS WITH THE SLAVE SOUTH. AS THE COTTON KINGDOM FLOURISHED, SO DID ITS ECONOMIC CONNECTIONS WITH NEW YORK.
The economy of Brooklyn was very 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 1850’s sugar refining was Brooklyn’s largest industry.
During the American Revolution, slaves that sided with the British found employment reconstructing the damaged parts of the city and working for the British army as servants, cooks, and laundresses. For the first time in their lives, they received wages and were effectively treated as free. When the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, moreB refugees arrived.
When the British sailed out of New York harbor in 1783, they carried not only tens of thousands of White soldiers, sailors, and loyalists, but over 3,000 Blacks most of whom had been freed in accordance with British proclamations. They ended up in Nova Scotia, England and Sierra Leone, a colony established by British abolitionists on the west coast of Africa later in the decade.
By 1830, more than a dozen Black congregations rented or owned buildings in lower Manhattan alone, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church, The Demeter Presbyterian Church and the First Colored Presbyterian Church. In 1832 the New York City Anti-Slavery Society was formed.
New York’s African American community supported the first Black newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal.
Horace Greeley, the founder and an editor of the New York Tribune, took a strong moral position favoring the abolition of slavery.
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was a leading opponent of slavery. Beecher raised money in his Brooklyn church, Plymouth Church, to purchase the freedom of slaves in symbolic protests against the institution.
The battle for social equality in New York led to civil disobedience. African-Americans even when legally free, were continually at risk. In an 1836 letter to the New York Sun, David Ruggles described the kidnapping of a free Black on the streets of New York.The presence of the 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. Quickly Black institutions emerged-fraternal societies, literary clubs, and 10 Black churches. New York City replaced Philadelphia as the “capital” of free Black America. Africans can now been seen all over New York, many lived near the docks or in the 5 points.
The Underground Railroad in New York
New York City was a crucial way station to the metropolitan corridor through which fugitive slaves made their way from the Upper South through Philadelphia and on the upstate New York, New England and Canada.
Women were important conductors on the UGRR. One important station in New York City was the Colored Sailors’ Home, where Mary Marshall Lyons, the owner’s wife, fed and disguised more than one thousand refugees.
The unique socioeconomic structure of Weeksville, a Black township, offered a safety net for fugitives, while Brooklyn itself was [a] Mecca of abolitionist culture, home to several notable antislavery pastors, authors, activists and others who were key to the call for freedom.
Profiting from Slavery
Documents found at the New-York Historical Society shown that the founders of Brown Bros. Harriman, based in New York City, built the bank by lending millions of dollars to Southern planters and arranging for the shipment and sale of slave-grown cotton in New England and Great Britain.
Economic historian Douglas North found that the North provided “not only the services to finance, transport, insure, and market the South’s cotton, but also supplied the South with manufactured goods.
Despite the efforts of Whites, in New York, the slave system supported the development of New York as a commercial and financial center, by 1860 it was one of the world’s major metropolises.
Nautilus Insurance company, wrote over 300 life insurance policies on enslaves Africans in the American South. Aetna
uncovered 7 life insurance policies taken out by plantation owners for enslaved Africans.
As a result of the cotton trade, the port of the New York exceeded the combined shipping of its two major American business rivals, Boston and Philadelphia, in both volume and the value of goods being processed.
Commercial ties between North and South also provided New York City merchants with other economic benefits. Southern merchants and their families made annual pilgrimages to the city, ordering imported and domestic luxury goods and patronizing hotels, restaurants and resorts.
Many New York merchants championed conciliation with the South and compromise with slavery even after the Southern states started to secede.
The economic ties between the Southern planters and New York merchants were so strong that at the end of the Civil War, prewar commercial arrangements were quickly reestablished.
When the Civil War came to New York
Of course, New York’s role in the Civil War was critical to the Union’s success. New York contributed more soldiers, sustained more casualties, and also contributed more war materiel and financial support for the war than any other state. Remember, New York was arguably the most pro-South, pro-slavery city in the North because it had a very long and deep involvement in the international cotton trade. Even though many New Yorkers were pro-slavery and opposed the Civil War, once it happened, being New Yorkers, they figured out how to make a profit out of it. The banks lent great amounts of money to the Union's war effort, and much of that money was spent right back in New York on uniforms and horses and food and other supplies.
While the Civil War pitted North against South, some locations confounded that stark regional split. New York was one of those places, a city of divided loyalties and complex class, racial, and economic interests. While most New Yorkers supported the war at its outset, significant forces urged conciliation with the Confederacy. From Wall Street financiers, to commercial shippers, to merchants selling manufactured goods to a South that produced little of its own, the New York City economy depended heavily on southern cotton.
When the Civil War began in 1861, large numbers of New York City’s White workers did not embrace the fight to preserve the Union. Many resented the war effort, which brought economic hardship and increasing unemployment to working-class neighborhoods. *Competition for jobs between Irish and Black workers, already intense before the war, increased dramatically, and racial tensions mounted in work places and in working-class neighborhoods throughout the city.
The National Conscription Act exacerbated long-simmering class tensions and the deprivations brought on by wartime inflation; it was especially unpopular among the city’s immigrant White working class. When it was enacted on July 11, 1863 (Draft Riots ), it touched off the worst rioting Americans had ever seen. People and buildings representing Protestant missionaries, Republican draft officials, war production, wealthy businessmen, and African Americans suffered the worst of the crowds’ wrath, and after four days more than 119 New Yorkers were dead. Soon after the riots were quelled by federal troops, the northern war effort finally started to bear fruit and the city’s economy rebounded (aided by the re-legalization of the cotton trade with the rebel states).
Nearly three-quarters of the Black men of eligible age volunteered for the Union army. Because White soldiers did not trust them in actual combat, most Black soldiers were assigned to support roles, though they sometimes engaged with the enemy. New York registered 4,125 soldiers in its three Black regiments, the 20th, 26th, and 31st United States Colored Troops. Trained at Riker's and Hart's islands in the East River in early 1864, they were dispatched to Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas, respectively. The 31st was at Appomattox Court House when Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his army.
Almost all the commissioned officers in U.S. Colored Troops regiments were White. David J. Pilsworth (1841-1895) enlisted as a private, suffered wounds in 1862, and was promoted to a captain of the 20th USCT after his recovery.
On June 17, 1864, Ellen Anderson, a respectable-looking widow, was ordered to leave the "Whites only" car of the 8th Avenue Railroad. "I said I was sick and wished to ride up home. I said I had lost my husband in the war. The conductor said 'he did not care for me, or my husband either,' and he and the police officer threw me off the car." She sued the railroad company and won. By July, all the streetcars in New York were open to Blacks.
Until the secretary of war intervened, city authorities forbade Blacks from marching behind Abraham Lincoln's body from City Hall to the Hudson River docks. Two thousand Blacks brought up the end of the march, carrying a banner that read "Abraham Lincoln, Our Emancipator." By that time, the body had already left the city.
For Black people, the years after the draft riots and the Civil War meant an increasingly fragmented community scattered through northern New Jersey, Westchester, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, but these distinctive neighborhoods developed their own civic, religious, and social organizations.
In New York, one final battle remained to preserve inequality and prevent Black suffrage. In April 1869, the state legislature ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to the federal constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote to Black men. But a New York State constitutional amendment for equal rights was voted down in November 1869, losing by 70-30% in New York City. In January, the new Democratic majority in Albany repealed the federal ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment by a vote of 69-55.
Despite New York's reversal, enough states did approve the Fifteenth Amendment, which was certified on March 30, 1870. Black Americans took the opportunity to celebrate a momentous victory.
On a self-titled album in 1969, the rock group The Band released “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” a song depicting the final days of the Confederacy in 1865.
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Now read Richard’s piece on the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe here.
