Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [108]
In the city itself, where cheap labor was always in short supply, the economic advantages of slaveowning became harder to overlook as greater availability brought down costs. By the early eighteenth century, the price of a prime slave was roughly equivalent to the annual wages of a skilled craftsman, and direct imports began to soar. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, twenty-four hundred slaves would be legally imported into New York, with another five thousand to follow over the next fifty years (maybe six hundred or so of whom would be smuggled in): seventy-four hundred in all, greater than the entire population of the city in 1700. More blacks came involuntarily to New York in the eighteenth century, in other words, than whites came voluntarily in the seventeenth.
The proportion and distribution of slaves in the city’s population increased accordingly. In 1712 nearly a thousand of New York’s sixty-four hundred inhabitants—somewhat over 15 percent—were black, and better than 40 percent of its households owned a slave. By 1746 African Americans comprised about 21 percent of the city’s residents—more than 2,440 in a total population of nearly 11,720. This was the highest concentration of slaves north of Virginia. At least half the city’s households now contained one or more slaves.
Merchants bought slaves to fill out their crews and toil on their docks. Shipbuilders put them to work in the bustling East River yards. Coopers, butchers, carpenters, blacksmiths, tinners, and other artisans prospered by training them up in the mysteries of their crafts. In 1715 Governor Hunter remarked on the manumission of a butcher’s slave, “who by his faithful and diligent service, had helpt to gain most part of his masters Wealth.” Tradesmen unable to afford slaves found themselves at a competitive disadvantage, and in 1737 the provincial assembly received a report of widespread opposition to the “pernicious custom of breeding slaves to trades,” which “reduced [whites] to poverty for want of employ.”
Wealthy New Yorkers began to utilize slaves as domestic servants. (“Please to buy mee two negro men about eighteen years of age,” Cadwallader Golden instructed his commercial agent in 1721. “I design them for Labour & would have them strong & well made. Please likewise to buy mee a negro Girl of about thirteen years old my wife has told you that she designes her Cheifly to keep the children & to sow”) And if ever there wasn’t enough work to do, owners could hire their slaves out at half the going rate of free labor—enough, as a rule, to bring an annual return of between 10 and 30 percent on the initial investment. This business was already so brisk by 1711 that the Common Council designated the Meal Market at the foot of Wall Street as the authorized site for the purchase, sale, and hire of slaves. From time to time the council itself appropriated funds to hire slaves for construction and cleanup projects around town.
From New York Weekly Journal, April 15, 1784. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Across the East River, in Kings and Queens counties, slaves did almost everything. They worked for merchants, grocers, physicians, attorneys, tallow chandlers, coachmakers, ropemakers. Samuel Hallet’s slave piloted ships on the river. But the bulk of rural slave labor was employed in agriculture. Bondsmen and bondswomen cut, hauled, and split firewood; carted dung, mended fences, thatched roofs, and repaired farm buildings; raised vegetables, fruits, animals; plowed fields, mowed meadow grasses, harvested potatoes, cut and