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By Root 8092 0

critics of slavery grew stronger, its defenders grew weaker. Resistance to emancipation still ran highest among the Dutch inhabitants of Kings, Queens, and other rural counties where the system remained economically vital. In 1800 nearly 60 percent of the white households in Kings County owned at least one slave, more than had done so in 1700. In towns outside of Brooklyn, between 70 and 80 percent of households held slaves (three out of every four in New Utrecht, for instance). The political influence of Dutch farmers had nonetheless declined because the bulk of farm commodities sent to Manhattan—certainly those destined for export—now came from upstate communities settled by New Englanders, old opponents of slavery, and a reapportionment of the legislature in 1796 gave them greater political clout.

Encouraged by John Jay’s election as governor at the end of 1795, the Manumission Society had in the meantime decided to make another attempt to get a gradual emancipation act through the legislature. A bill to that effect was introduced early in 1796, and after three years of intense public debate and parliamentary maneuvering, the legislature adopted a gradual emancipation plan in January 1799 (approval by the Council of Revision followed in March). In both the Assembly and Senate, delegates from New York City joined forces with their upstate counterparts to overcome opposition by Dutch legislators from Long Island and elsewhere. As Senator Erastus Root recalled, the Dutchmen “raved and swore by dunder and blixen that we were robbing them of their property. We told them that they had none and could hold none in human flesh. . . and we passed the law.”

But this was gradual emancipation, carefully designed to minimize the cost to slaveowners. Not one slave was freed by the new law: all who were currently slaves would remain so for life, and while any of their children born after July 4 of that year would be technically free, they were required to remain in service to their mother’s master until reaching the age of twenty-five (if female) or twenty-eight (if male). Furthermore, masters had five years to turn over ill or elderly slaves to the local overseers of poor without incurring the usual financial obligations for their support. They were likewise allowed to jettison without penalty all slave children over the age of one, a provision that proved popular in the lower six counties of the state, where hundreds of infants were abandoned.

Assured now of slavery’s eventual demise, owners hastened to cut their losses. Many put their slaves on the market at once, and in spite of the ban on out-of-state sales it was soon being reported that the exportation of slaves to the West Indies had increased “to an alarming magnitude,” often under “circumstances of great barbarity.” Other masters allowed slaves to negotiate self-purchase arrangements or promised them early emancipation in exchange for a commitment to trouble-free service for a fixed number of years.

After the passage of the gradual emancipation act, therefore, slavery disintegrated with unexpected speed. Between 1800 and 1810 the number of officially recorded manumissions in the city jumped to 260 while the total number of slaves shrank by 43 percent to just under fifteen hundred. The free black population meanwhile climbed to some seventy-five hundred. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, 84 percent of nearly nine thousand New York blacks were free, as against 33 percent in 1790.

PROGRESS AND POVERTY

Freedom had decided drawbacks. African Americans found themselves pitched into the new wage-labor market, but on unequal terms that ensured they would occupy the bottom of the city’s occupational hierarchy. Some black women, perhaps one out of twenty, were able to secure positions as shopkeepers, fruiterers, bakers, boardinghouse keepers, or hawkers selling buttermilk or hot corn in the city’s streets and markets. Some took in washing as independent entrepreneurs. But the vast majority continued to perform the same heavy domestic work, albeit for wages,