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By the time the British took over New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1641 and named it New York, 10 percent of the population was black; by 1737, one in five people in the growing metropolis was black. For much of the eighteenth century, the city was second only to Charleston in the ratio of enslaved to white in an urban setting. For the British, enslavement was a hemispheric social order with no distinction between northern and southern (Caribbean) colonies. In addition to trading with the mother country, England, there was a lively north-south trade with ships plying the Atlantic coast maintaining the colonial commercial connections. The northern ones sent livestock, horses, and wood (for barrels) to the plantations of the Caribbean colonies, which returned the barrels filled with molasses to be transformed into rum for the Guinea trade, which bartered molasses, beads, and other goods in exchange for more Africans to be enslaved on the plantations and in the towns north and south. Foodstuffs took the journey as well: flour, dried fish, corn, potatoes, onions, and cattle produced and bred in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey made the journey from those colonies to the Caribbean to provision plantations there. Wethersfield, Connecticut, became famous for its onions and as late as 1800 sent ten thousand five-pound ropes of the slave-grown globes to the West Indies. Rhode Island developed plantations in the Narragansett area to supply the West Indian trade, and in the area that would become the Bronx, Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had a nineteen-hundred-acre plantation producing wheat, corn, and livestock for the trade to the islands. As did Morris, so did the Van Cort-landts and numerous other large and small landholders in Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey.

The slave system tightened its hold, and the colonies developed ways of housing and handling the forced laborers. Initially, there were more male slaves than female, and on large landholdings the enslaved were housed in barracks, where families were billeted together without regard for kinship. Later, as more women arrived, individual housing of some sort became more common. The plantation system, initially developed in Brazil and fine-tuned in the Caribbean, became the way of the land for large landholders. On plantations north and south, slaves labored under an unrelenting annual round of chores and duties. Tasks were divided between those who worked in the Big House and those who worked in the fields and on the farms.

Those who worked in the fields had more liberty of their thoughts, if not their actions or deeds, but they were subjected to a seasonal round of tasks that kept the plantation productive. In winter the men and women killed the hogs, hauled the grain, filled the icehouse, worked the new ground, threshed the wheat and rye, shelled the corn, and beat out hominy. Spring and summer would find them plowing and harrowing, digging holes for fence poles, making hills for sweet potatoes, and sowing carrots, cabbage, wheat, and flax. There were melons to be planted and fields to be fertilized. Fall brought harvest and its chores: gathering in the crops, preserving them, and preparing the land for the upcoming winter. None were too young or too decrepit to have a task. Some children and older women weeded gardens and gathered cornstalks; others saved seeds and wove clothing. The year was a never-ending round of seasonal agrarian activities.

Those who worked in the Big House were tasked with the daily maintenance of the house and caring for the creature comforts of its inhabitants. The relentless chores went from morning—including drawing and heating water for ablutions, preparing breakfast, aiding with dressing, emptying chamber pots, and making beds—right through until the master and family were bedded down for the night, and then began anew the next day. In some cases the house slaves even slept in the master