Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [35]
Blacks were hardly considered equals, to be sure. Adulterous intercourse with “heathens, blacks, or other persons” was banned by a 1638 ordinance. Whites convicted of serious crimes were made to work in chains next to the blacks, while company policy excluded slaves from employment in skilled trades, avoiding possible conflict with white labor. Similarly, punishments meted out to blacks were calculated less to maintain racial supremacy than to ensure a tractable labor force. In 1641 eight slaves confessed “without torture or shackles” to murdering a ninth. Plainly reluctant to hang all eight, the court decided to hang one, chosen by lot. The choice fell on Manuel of Gerrit de Reus, but when the executioner pushed him off the ladder with “two good ropes” around his neck, both ropes broke and the bystanders “very earnestly” called for mercy. The court thereupon pardoned him and the other slaves “on promise of good behavior and willing service”—which was doubtless what they were most concerned about anyway.
All nine of the slaves involved in the 1641 incident—including Big Manuel, Little Manuel, Simon Congo, Paulo d’Angola, and Anthony Portuguese—were among those who received something called “half-freedom” in 1644. They had petitioned the company for emancipation, and Kieft thought it was a good idea, observing that they “are burthened with many children so that it is impossible for them to support their wives and children, as they have been accustomed to do, if they must continue in the Company’s service.” He therefore granted the men “and their wives” their liberty and gave or leased them land on which to support themselves. They weren’t completely free, however. Kieft required them to pay an annual tribute of “thirty skepels of Maize or Wheat, Pease or Beans, and one Fat hog” or forfeit their freedom; they had to work for the company, for wages, whenever it called on them; and their children remained in bondage.1
Half-freedom for slaves offered the company manifold practical advantages. It lifted the burden of providing for those who were older and less productive—some of the 1644 petitioners had already served for eighteen or nineteen years—while allowing the company to employ their labor as needed. Allowing manumitted slaves to take up land was also expedient, for “the Negroes’ Farms,” as they became known, were situated on the outskirts of town where their presence would help alert New Amsterdam to the danger of an Indian attack. Some lay just north of the present site of City Hall, near a former Lenape encampment on the pond that the Dutch called Kalch-hook (meaning “lime-shell point,” from the shell-covered promontory above it). Others lay above what is now Houston Street, between Lafayette Street and the Bowery. A third group was concentrated in what is now Greenwich Village. Domingo Anthony’s plot occupied the southwest corner of today’s Washington Square Park; most ran along the marshy banks of Minetta Creek, with Paulo d’Angola’s lying between Minetta Lane and Thompson Street.
Not on this roster of New Amsterdam’s personnel and chattel were the “free inhabitants” who lived outside the company’s authority. Some Walloons still raised cattle and wheat on the outskirts of New Amsterdam, staying to themselves except when they came in to trade at the company store. There were also various independent merchants and their families, a few widows, and a handful of former (or part-time) company servants who, like Hudde and Gerritsen, had