Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [123]
Vagrants and beggars—the undeserving poor, men and women deemed unwilling to work by the authorities—got no pity. In 1699 Governor Bellomont proposed the construction of a workhouse to “employ the poor and also vagabonds,” but the Assembly rejected the idea. “They smiled at it because indeed there is no such thing as a beggar in this town or country,” Bellomont wrote. Just one year later, the Common Council nevertheless adopted legislation for removing the “Vagabonds & Idle Persons that are a Nuisance & Common Grievance of the Inhabitants.” (Perhaps two dozen individuals and their families were actually expelled from Manhattan in the first half of the century.) For those worthy of sterner treatment, “a Cage, Whipping post, pillory and Stocks” were erected in front of the new City Hall on Broad Street. Subsequent legislation authorized thirty-five lashes for anyone returning to town after deportation and required all citizens to report the presence of strangers to the authorities.
“A TERROR TO OTHERS”
When the Montgomerie Charter went into effect, some sixteen hundred of the city’s residents, roughly 18 percent of the total population, were black slaves. Prominent officials were beginning to wonder if the presence of so many slaves didn’t discourage white immigration, and working people had already complained on numerous occasions that the increasing employment of blacks in the trades was costing them jobs. None doubted, though, that preserving order among this large servile labor force had become one of the corporation’s most pressing challenges.
Legally, there was no longer any doubt as to the subordinate and dependent status of blacks. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the comparatively broad rights enjoyed by slaves under Dutch rule—to hold property, to carry a weapon, to serve in the militia, to sue in court, to obtain half-freedom—had all been whittled down or stripped away. New York’s first comprehensive slave code, adopted in 1702, underscored the association of slavery with black skin by banning the enslavement of Indians and defining indentured servitude as a condition for whites only. It granted masters nearly unlimited powers of correction, set up special tribunals to try slaves accused of crimes, and authorized a Common Whipper for the city. Subsequent enactments by either the legislature or Common Council confirmed that slavery was heritable through the female line, prohibited more than three slaves gathering together at a time (twelve for funerals), restricted the movement of slaves after nightfall, banned slaves from selling food or other goods in the streets (a practice known as “huckstering”), and eliminated conversion to Christianity as grounds for manumission. Innkeepers couldn’t sell liquor to slaves, and severe penalties were decreed for whites who helped slaves break the law or failed to take appropriate action when they did. In 1738 Elizabeth Martin was “Reputed a Common Whore as with Negro Slaves as to others and a great Disturber of the Peace.” Declared a “very Low Notorious Wicked Woman,” she was ordered out of city. When she refused to go, she received thirty-one lashes and was chased out.
It proved next to impossible to enforce such laws. Slaves moved about the city almost at will in the course of their work and were often unsupervised by their masters for extended periods of time, even at night. Despite the profusion of statutes, therefore, municipal authorities were inundated year after year with demands to stop slaves from illegally congregating, brawling, breaking curfew, playing in the streets on Sundays, and drinking at “bawdy houses” whose white proprietors were suspected of keeping prostitutes and fencing stolen goods. Their brazen defiance of whites was notorious. In 1696 Mayor William Merritt ordered a group of noisy slaves to disperse and got punched in the face; half a dozen years later Governor Cornbury expressed alarm at the “great insolency” of slaves in the city. Everybody complained about runaways, especially as it became known that fugitives could find refuge with