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By Root 7717 0

and aided runaways, and the number of escapees escalated sharply in the 1790s. Some fled to nearby free states, but many vanished into the city itself. Thus, in 1795, eighteen-year-old Calypso was “seen running with a bundle of cloaths and her shoes in her hand through Pearl and Cherry Streets, then turning into Oliver, then into Rutgers, and finally into Roosevelt Street on the left hand; here were lost her tracts [sic].” Even African-born slaves who could barely speak the local language found refuge there: one fifty-year-old man who “talks bad English” had run away from Flatbush and was, his master complained in the press, rumored to be living in the city, where he “pretends to be free.”

On occasion free blacks actively resisted white dominion. In 1798 Sally Gale stole some items from a store and was chased by Finch, a white man, to a cellar in Hague Street. Here, however, a “Mulatto Man Stood at the Door with some kind of weapon in his hand and Declared he would knock the said Finch’s Brains out if Offered to Come in.” Militant West Indian blacks, in particular, brought their own long experience of concerted resistance to the institution. In 1796 some “French Negroes” started several fires by throwing burning coals wrapped in oiled paper into open cellars. Soon frightening rumors were commonplace about plots to burn the city. Lewis Morris wrote that gentlemen had taken to serving on the watch every night and had succeeded in securing some suspicious blacks, while others had been “shot down owing to their not answering quick.” Even the most obdurate masters must have wondered whether owning one’s cook or butler might not be getting too difficult—too dangerous— to be worthwhile.

Politics also played a role in eroding support for slavery. When the French Revolution broke out, popular enthusiasm for liberty, equality, and fraternity more than once spilled over into demands for emancipation of the slaves—as it did in 1789, when the crowd at the John Street Theater gave a thunderous ovation to an epilogue that linked the liberation of “Afric’s sable Sons” to the cause of international republicanism:

Shall Freedom’s Sons on others put the chain!

Detested thought! soon may we hope to see,

Columbia, Europe, Asia, Afric, FREE,

One Genius reigns through all— ETERNAL LIBERTY.

In the years that followed, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, the Sailmakers Society, and other organizations representing or allied with the city’s mechanics openly endorsed abolition. The Democratic-Republican party, despite its alliance with southern slaveowners in national politics, absorbed these sentiments—along with radical refugees from Britain who strongly favored emancipation—and party papers like the Argus published antislavery articles by authors who signed themselves “A Consistent Democrat” and “An Invariable Friend to the Equal Rights of Man.” Condemning slavery became all the easier as city artisans retreated from slaveholding and the proportion of slaves in the overall population shrank, calming old anxieties about competition from new-made freemen (by 1800 slaves comprised a scant 4.5 percent of the city’s inhabitants).

Federalists as well found the dynamics of party rivalry propelling them to a more activist position on the slavery question. As anglophiles, they were well aware of the rise of abolitionism in Britain and the moral opprobrium with which transatlantic opinion increasingly regarded slaveholders. After passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, when Federalists needed to prove that they remained genuine friends of liberty, antislavery seemed an attractive and responsible reform. Given that Federalists like John Jay had been conspicuous in the Manumission Society and as advocates of gradual emancipation, it also seemed likely that freed slaves would support them at the polls. (The black vote indeed later provided a margin of victory for Federalists on at least one occasion, and it would be Democratic-Republicans who protested; in 1811, 1814, and 1815 they voted to limit black access to the ballot.)

While the