Harris, who teaches U.S. and African-American history, has just
been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Here she summarizes
her forthcoming book.
Few are aware of the long history of slavery in the northern states,
and particularly New York City. My first book, In the Shadow of
Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (University
of Chicago Press, 2002) calls attention to the ways in which New
York City was dependent on slavery for two centuries--from 1626
to 1827; and the ways in which that history, as well as the continuation
of southern slavery until the Civil War, affected the lives of New
York City's African-Americans. As in the South, black slave labor
was central to the day-to-day survival and the economic life of
Europeans in the colonial North, and no part of the colonial North
relied more heavily on slavery than Manhattan. By the end of the
seventeenth century, New York City had a larger black population
than any other North American city. The ratio of slaves to whites
in the total population was comparable to that in Maryland and Virginia
at the time. In the eighteenth century, New York City was second
only to Charleston and New Orleans in the number of slaves it held.
The existence of slavery in New York had an indelible effect on
the political and economic institutions of the city. In the colonial
period, slave labor was central to the growth of the city. However,
by the time of the Revolutionary War, slaves symbolized the condition
whites most feared for themselves as workers and citizens. A condition
approximating black slavery was the worst possible outcome of the
Revolutionary War with Britain. Whites' fears and critiques of their
own enslavement, based in republican ideology, did not, however,
lead them to emancipate their slaves during the war.
In 1785, the founding of the New York Manumission Society signalled
a new attention to the problem of slavery. In 1799, New Yorkers
passed their first emancipation law. However, white New Yorkers
attempted to define and contain the free black community based on
their assumptions that the experience of slavery had degraded blacks.
Through the provisions of the gradual emancipation laws, and the
1821 suffrage law that disfranchised the majority of the black community,
white New Yorkers again selectively enforced republican virtues.
They defined blacks as a special dependent category within the New
York City community. By the end of the period of emancipation in
1827, whites saw blacks as a separate and unequal group within the
In response, New York's blacks searched for ways to prove their
equality. The roots of class distinctions in the black community
lay partially in differing responses to racism. The seeds of a black
middle class were planted during the emancipation era as some black
ministers, educators and skilled workers looked to the New York
Manumission Society for guidance. This coalition's attempts to control
blacks' public displays, education, work habits and religiosity
resulted in conflict within the black community. Throughout the
antebellum period, debates over methods to achieve social, economic
and political equality both revealed and contributed to the evolution
of class distinctions, an evolution that would not be complete until
after the Civil War.
The rise of radical abolition marked another period in the evolution
of blacks' class identities in New York City. Between 1830 and 1840,
blacks turned from the tactics and ideologies of the New York Manumission
Society, which increasingly advocated colonizing free blacks in
Africa, to those of radical abolition. As part of the abolitionist
coalition of the 1830s, free blacks were crucial to whites' acceptance
of the goal of immediate emancipation of southern slaves, and the
doctrine of black equality. However, the moral perfectionism of
the abolitionist coalition again contributed to class divisions
in the black community. Some blacks, regardless of class background,
subscribed to the moral and intellectual reforms promulgated by
abolitionists as the best way to achieve economic and political
equality. But others saw in such reforms the growth of class distinctions
within the black community, and protested against the privileging
of middle-class, educated blacks and their tactics for racial improvement.
The breakup of the abolitionist coalition and the rise of a new
group of black leaders in the 1840s and 1850s led black abolitionists
to place a greater value on manual labor rather than moral perfection
as a method of racial uplift for blacks. However, black abolitonists
distinguished between meaningful skilled labor, and "degraded" occupations
such as domestic service and waiting tables. Such distinctions grew
out of a general ideology about labor in the antebellum period,
rooted in republican thought, which devalued personal service occupations
as not providing workers with sufficient independence from employers.
Among blacks, such distinctions also grew out of the experience
of slavery, in which domestic and other personal servants were more
subject to the will of their masters than other workers, and at
worst, were also subject to sexual abuse by them. However, the majority
of black women and a large proportion of black men worked in such
occupations under freedom. With noteworthy exceptions, black abolitionists
were unaware of the efforts these men and women made to retain their
Further, the occupations criticized by black abolitionists could
and did provide the basis for mutual respect between black and white
workers and an alleviation, albeit temporary, of racial tensions.
In 1853, New York's black and white waiters joined together to ask
for higher wages. Black waiters' pride in their work and resulting
belief in higher wages gained them the reluctant respect of their
fellow white waiters. But the 1853 waiters' strike was not the only
instance of cooperation and contact between black and white laboring-poor.
Black and white workers shared class-based neighborhoods throughout
the antebellum period. They participated in social and cultural
activities after work in interracial bars and dance halls, and sometimes
married. After 1834, white journalists focused on these relationships
and created a discourse of amalgamation that sexualized and criminalized
black-white interactions in the public eye.
By the beginning of the Civil War, the allure of the rich political,
social and cultural interactions that blacks could achieve in New
York City had grown thin in the face of continuing poverty and increasing
racism. After years of growth, New York's black population dropped
precipitously between 1840 and the Civil War, from a high of over
16,000 in 1840 to about 12,500 in 1860. The decrease in population
was due partially to the influx of Irish immigrants, who competed
with blacks for unskilled jobs. But it was also due to increasing
danger against blacks in the wake of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.
Blacks looked beyond the boundaries of New York City to the possibility
of farming communities in upstate New York, the West, and Canada.
Some also embraced emigration to Liberia and the West Indies, in
cooperation with the white-led American Colonization Society that
had been rejected by blacks earlier in the century.
Despite the decrease in the black population however, the rise of
the Republican Party and its limited form of anti-slavery was threatening
to white New Yorkers who were pro-slavery and against black equality.
Soon after the Civil War began, some white working-class New Yorkers
turned their backs to the limited promise of racial cooperation
and equality implied in the relationships between blacks and whites
in the waiters' strike and the Five Points. In the worst anti-black
riot of nineteenth century New York, the Civil War Draft Riots of
1863, the antebellum period ended for blacks as it had begun soon
after the War of 1812: with attempts to expunge blacks, this time
by violent means, from New York's social, cultural, political, and