Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [104]
The net result was the economic triangulation of three strikingly different systems of production: the small-farm hinterlands of northern seaports, the slave-labor plantations of the Caribbean, and the wage-labor workshops of early industrial England. New York now lived by feeding the slaves who made the sugar that fed the workers who made the clothes and other finished wares that New Yorkers didn’t make for themselves. Along the way, they closed in on their old objective of breaking Boston’s grip on the economies of southern New England. Lying a week closer to Barbados and ten days closer to Jamaica, the city enjoyed a natural advantage over Boston in competition for the lucrative West Indian markets. Inexorably, pressed by Philadelphia’s domination of the mid-Atlantic region, New York merchants took control of the New England coasting trade. Commercially becalmed, Boston sank into a depression from which it wouldn’t recover for years. After 1750 New York ranked second only to Philadelphia in wealth and population.
THE TOWN THAT TRADE BUILT
By 1720, if not earlier, the economy of New York advanced and receded throughout the year in a seasonal rhythm that was unmistakably West Indian in origin. Between November and January, the East River waterfront buzzed with activity as merchants and captains rushed to get down to the islands in time to take delivery of the new sugar crop, usually ready soon after the first of the year. The pace slackened in the early spring, then picked up again between April and June as the ships raced back to escape hot-weather diseases and hurricanes. Another brief lull was followed, in the high summer, by the arrival of additional vessels from other mainland ports (usually Boston) and, in the fall, from Britain.
The effects of the West Indian connection were visible as well in the expansion of commercial agriculture around the city. On innumerable small and medium-size plots, ranging from a few dozen to a few score acres in extent, the rural populations of Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Westchester—many relying heavily on slave labor—produced an ever-growing volume of foodstuffs for the Caribbean market. Bigger and richer landowners like Lewis Morris, nephew and heir of Colonel Lewis Morris, built productive complexes that combined elements of slave plantations and industrial villages. From Morrisania, his nineteen-hundred-acre estate in what is now the southwest corner of the Bronx, he and his workforce—which in 1691 included one of the area’s largest concentrations of slaves (twenty-two men, eleven women, six boys, two girls)—sent corn, wheat, barley, oats, lumber, and a variety of livestock to Manhattan for export to the West Indies. (The Morris property ran west from the Harlem River to Intervale Avenue, with the manor house near the junction of 132nd Street and Cypress Avenue, overlooking Long Island Sound.) Morris ground the grain in his own gristmill and cut the lumber in his own sawmill. He kept his own sloop, and even operated an ironworks at Tintern, New Jersey. His products—as was the case with all lumber, grain, flour, meat, and leather exported to the West Indies—were carefully scrutinized by government inspectors as to size, weight, and quality and labeled accordingly. All exported butter, for example, was packed in firkins branded “N.Y.”
Shipbuilding grew rapidly to meet the demand for the single-masted sloops and two-masted brigs needed for Caribbean and coastal commerce. In 1728, having made a fortune in the West Indies, “Boss” William Walton founded a shipyard on the East River at the foot of Catherine Street (just north of the Brooklyn Bridge, about where the Alfred E. Smith Houses now stand), and another five were soon in operation nearby. Sail lofts and ropewalks (the enlongated workshops that made rigging and lines for ships) likewise enjoyed unprecedented prosperity—as did millers, cartmen, chandlers, and other trades heavily dependent on oceangoing commerce. Coopers worked hard