Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [109]
The 1738 census turned up twenty-three hundred people in Kings County, of whom one in four was a slave. Brooklyn, whose 705 inhabitants made it the largest village, had 158 slaves (22 percent). Flatbush, second largest with 539 inhabitants, contained 129 slaves (24 percent). In Bushwick, population 327, there were another 78 slaves (24 percent). The 185 whites of tiny New Utrecht owned 84 slaves (an astonishing 31 percent). By contrast, the overall proportion of slaves stood at 14 percent in Queens and Suffolk counties, 18 percent in Richmond, and 13 percent in Westchester.
The highest concentrations of slaves occurred on the great Westchester and Hudson Valley estates, where slavery settled in alongside indentured servitude and tenantry. Caleb Heathcote, created lord of Scarsdale Manor in 1702, depended on dozens of slaves, indentured servants, and tenants to produce lumber, grain, cloth, and leather goods for export. By mid-century, Frederick Philipse’s son Adolph had some eleven hundred tenants and two dozen slaves on Philipsburg Manor, an agricultural-industrial complex that not only produced a variety of grains for the New York market but ground and bolted (sifted) them in its own mills, packed them in its own barrels, and shipped them downriver in its own sloops.
But these high concentrations of slaves were extremely unusual, for most New York masters owned no more than two or three slaves. Their need for slaves, their ability to purchase slaves, and their capacity to house and feed slaves were on an utterly different scale from the masters of cash-crop plantations in the southern colonies. Even so, the life of a slave in a small household could be as harsh, in its own way, as in the rice and tobacco fields of Carolina or Virginia. When an SPG catechist named Elias Neau began to baptize slaves in New York, masters resisted on the grounds that conversion imposed constraints on their property rights—even after a 1706 law, supported by Neau, affirmed that it did not. It was almost impossible, moreover, for slaves to form enduring family units because masters routinely opposed slave weddings, broke up husbands and wives to raise cash, sold off infants as well as superannuated adults, and wrote wills dividing up their chattel among their heirs. In 1717 Cadwallader Golden sold a slave woman to a purchaser on Barbados precisely because he wanted to remove her from her children. “I could have sold her here to good advantage,” he admitted, “but I have several other of her Children which I value and I know if she should stay in this country she would spoil them.”
New York slaves were divided on cultural lines as well: those imported from the West Indies and thus already “seasoned” (perhaps speaking Spanish), or those—two out of every five in these years—who arrived directly from Africa. Typically, the latter had roots in the Akan-Asante society of the continent’s west coast, a fact reflected in the large numbers named, according to Akan-Asante practice, after the days on which they were born—e.g., Quashee (Sunday), Cudjo (Monday), Quaco (Wednesday), Cuffee or Cuff (Friday), and so on.
Notwithstanding such obstacles, many slaves found common ground in practicing and perpetuating African customs, both sacred and secular. Burials were a focal point of the wider slave community, a chance to engage in traditional funerary rites. The interment ground lay north of the city, in a low-lying area that ran east from Broadway toward a deep ravine that continued to the Fresh Water Pond. It may have been used by the Africans since before the English conquest, because it lay near many of the plots granted half-freed slaves. It was certainly well established by 1713, a year after blacks were denied interment in Trinity’s graveyard. “They are buried in the Common,” wrote the Rev. John Sharpe in 1713, “by those of their country and complexion without