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That same year, antislavery members of the legislature—urged along by the New York Society of Friends and the Manumission Society—brought in a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery. After a ferocious fight with assemblymen from Kings, Richmond, and Ulster counties, whose predominately Dutch constituents still relied heavily on slave labor to work their farms, the bill passed. The Council of Revision promptly vetoed the measure because it denied free blacks the right to vote or hold public office.

Some weeks later, however, the council did approve a voluntary emancipation law that allowed masters to manumit slaves between twenty-one and fifty years of age without any obligation for their subsequent upkeep (a break with colonial precedents)—on condition that local overseers of the poor first certified, in writing, that the slaves would be able to provide for themselves. (Manumission of a slave over fifty still required owners to post a bond of two hundred pounds to ensure that he or she wouldn’t become a public burden.) Getting the “poor certificate” now became central to the process for obtaining liberty. In Quamio Buccau’s case, as he later recalled, his master, William Griffith, having decided to free him and his wife, Sarah, summoned the overseers of the poor to the house. The couple was called into Griffith’s office “and there we stood as if we were just married. Squire Adams asked me how I felt—and I told him ‘I feel very well. I tank you, Sir: I feel very well in my limbs.’”

Though the Manumission Society prodded other masters to free their slaves, few New Yorkers followed Griffith’s example during the next fifteen years. The society, lowering its sights, concentrated instead on publicizing cases of abuse and set up a registry to protect freedmen against reenslavement. In 1786 it won adoption of a law freeing all slaves who still remained state property as the result of the confiscation of Tory estates. (How many is unknown, though a dozen or so men and women formerly belonging to the Philipse, Axtell, Bayard, and other Tory families were being supported at public expense as late as the 1820s.)

That same year, too, the society founded an African Free School in a one-room building on Cliff Street. There, besides learning to read and write, boys could acquire the values and discipline that would keep them from “running into practices of Immorality or Sinking into Habits of Idleness.” Girls were admitted after 1792. To be accepted, however, free blacks had to stay sober, not associate with slaves, and live clean lives—by which the society meant, among other things, that they would tolerate no “Fiddling, Dancing or any noisy Entertainments in their houses.”

In 1788, having discovered that numbers of New Yorkers were selling a “very considerable” number of slaves to agents of southern planters in anticipation of further restrictions, the society persuaded the legislature to stop the sale of slaves for removal to another state and to prohibit the importation of slaves into the state. It did not, on the other hand, oppose the adoption of New York’s first comprehensive slave code since 1730—a severe setback to the antislavery cause inasmuch as it ensured that the institution would have a solid legal foundation for the foreseeable future. Nor did it press to have the port closed to ships involved in the slave trade, as other northern states had done.

By 1790 slavery had been solidly reestablished in New York. True, the percentage of blacks in Manhattan’s population had fallen to 10 percent, and roughly one-third of the 3,096 African Americans in the city were now free. Yet the absolute number of slaves was growing, and, taking the southern six counties of New York as a whole, nearly three of every four blacks were still slaves. Moreover, those 9,447 men, women, and children represented an investment of nearly one and a half million dollars, a sizable obstacle to emancipation.

The use of slave labor remained as widespread as ever. One in five white households in