Manhattan's landscape contains few material reminders of its colonial past. Traces of the Native Americans who frequented the island, the Dutch who planted New Amsterdam at its tip and the various European and African peoples who populated the city renamed New York by the English in 1664 are few and far between. Though the obliteration of the tangible remains of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century city dwellers speeded the transformation of Manhattan into a vibrant twentieth-century metropolis, the dearth of visible signs of this era has complicated historians' efforts to fabricate enduring images of the men and women of this early urban society. Their stories, though dutifully rehearsed by schoolbook writers and museum curators, have rarely become etched in memory.

In the case of the thousands of enslaved Africans who laboured on Manhattan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the silence has been total. While the founding members of prominent EuroAmerican families have been memorialized in portraits, inscriptions on silver, tributes by patriotic societies and even street names, those who toiled in their kitchens and shops and on their wharves day after day were virtually forgotten. That is until 1991, when skeletons of hundreds of people of African origin were uncovered beneath the streets of lower Manhattan.Footnote ¹ Suddenly and dramatically, New York City's African past, figuratively lost for so long, had literally intruded into its present.

The revelation of a ‘Negro Burial Ground’ dating back to the seventeenth century set in motion a scramble to amend the narrative of New York's history to reflect the stamp of enslaved men, women and children on the city. African Americans as well as New Yorkers of other backgrounds, their curiosity whetted about the city's racial past, ventured to interpret the significance of the find and in the process spawned a contentious, and arguably therapeutic, public conversation on historical memory.Footnote ² African Americans raised their voices regarding the conduct of archeological investigations of the site, the disposition of the graves and the consecration of the ground, as city, state and federal agencies sparred over who should be the proper custodians of the city's history. Ultimately, in a move geared toward reconciliation, the New York Historical Society in 2005 mounted an electrifying exhibit that signalled official recognition of the integral part played by people of African descent in the history of New York City from its beginnings.Footnote ³ Hailed as public history at its finest and viewed by a large audience, this retelling of the story of the city's Africans in the era of slavery coincided with the reburial of the remains and the consecration of the ground.

Wide reporting of the unearthing of New York City's ‘Negro Burial Ground’ not only aroused public interest in setting the record straight but turned attention to existing historical scholarship on the colonial city's African slaves. What curious readers discovered was that academics had been engaged in researching New York's variation of American slavery since the 1960s, when pioneering investigations first began to reveal the magnitude and centrality of bond labour in the city. In chilling detail, a 1961 article based on archival court records meticulously reconstructed the details of a 1712 slave rebellion that resulted in the deaths of nine white New Yorkers and the wounding of six more.Footnote ⁴ By 1966, a comprehensive study of slavery in New York had charted the extent of the city's reliance on slave labour and documented the increasingly harsh legal measures designed to regulate the lives of those in bondage.Footnote ⁵

During the heyday of black history in the 1960s and 1970s, when cries for justice in the streets reverberated in the academy, scholars were inspired to imagine a more inclusive version of New York's early history that inserted the city's numerous slaves and free blacks into accounts of its development. Against the backdrop of urban uprisings and escalating tension between blacks and whites, this impulse was channelled toward investigating eighteenth-century New York's most egregious example of racial conflict, the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741. In addition to a spate of articles on the subject of slaves' collective resistance to white oppression, a modern edition of the fundamental text associated with this episode – Judge Daniel Horsmanden's journal – was published in 1971 by Thomas. J. Davis, author of a pioneering dissertation on slavery in New York City.Footnote ⁶

As the pressure to find parallels between the urban explosions of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries subsided, historians embarked on a broad-scale recovery operation designed to redress the centuries-long erasure of African Americans from the city's annals. A new channel was cut in the historical stream, one that flowed through unmapped precincts and tapped hidden reservoirs of lived experience unknown outside the city's embattled African American community. Focusing the lens tightly on New York's African peoples enmeshed in slavery, first done in an influential 1985 dissertation called ‘Born to run: the slave family in early New York, 1626 to1827’, revealed the covert ways in which they struggled for autonomy.Footnote ⁷ By the 1990s, major books by Ira Berlin and Graham Hodges took as axiomatic the fact that enslaved blacks were historical actors endowed with humanity and agency. Berlin's recasting of New Amsterdam's slaves as resourceful Atlantic creoles and Hodges' sweeping study of the New York–New Jersey region's enslaved Africans and free blacks lifted historical work on early New York City's African Americans to a new plateau just as the ongoing archaeological work at lower Manhattan's ‘African Burial Ground’ site was sparking interest in African funerary customs and, by extension, the African cultural roots of the city's slaves.Footnote ⁸

An important strand of research surfaced on cultural links between Africa and New York. Convinced that the African prehistory of enslaved New Yorkers was a vital influence on their behaviour in this urban milieu, Craig Steven Wilder, Sterling Stuckey, Walter Rucker and Edna Greene Medford used interdisciplinary methods to build the case that colonial New York City's slaves were empowered by African values and practices previously undetected or caricatured as outlandish.Footnote ⁹ Not deterred by fragmentary evidence or by the necessity of arguing by analogy, these scholars painstakingly documented parallels between West African and African American ways of viewing the world, compelling us to recognize that resistance to slavery in New York City must be seen as a cultural as well as a political phenomeonon. Their findings, especially when viewed in conjunction with the literature on African Americans' appropriation of the regionally significant Dutch holiday of Pinkster, should kindle interest among historians of acculturation in New York City.Footnote ¹⁰

The confluence of historical and archaeological scholarship on African Americans in New York set the stage for comprehensive accounts of the city's encounter with slavery. Leslie Harris' In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City 1626–1863 and Slavery in New York, a volume of essays edited by Harris and Ira Berlin to complement the New York Historical Society exhibit, cover the entire period during which the institution of slavery defined the lives of the city's people of African descent – from the beginnings of New Amsterdam in the 1620s through the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. But their primary focus is the period after 1776, when African American New Yorkers pushed slowly, but inexorably, toward freedom. Though Harris grounds her analysis of the various points of view represented in the city's mid-nineteenth-century African American community in the writings of contemporaries, her treatment of the experiences of the city's enslaved people under Dutch and British rule relies heavily on existing scholarship. In Slavery in New York, Harris and her co-editor Ira Berlin underscore the significance of the patterns set in the colonial city for the subsequent history of enslaved New Yorkers. Christopher Moore's essay distills the history of slavery in New Amsterdam, but falls short of situating the institution in its Dutch context, while Jill Lepore's essay presents a lucid overview of the key features of slavery in British New York City.

In a sense, these important books form the culminating layer of a quarter century of research dedicated to documenting the experiences of the many colonial New Yorkers trapped in the confines of slavery as well as the few who managed to extract themselves from the institution, but not from the racism coupled to it. Yet this dramatic expansion of our fund of knowledge about the lives of enslaved New Yorkers has left the dominant narrative of the city's early centuries relatively intact. Or to put it more precisely, the literature on colonial New York continued to flow in separate streams throughout the twentieth century. Though this bifurcation of scholarship is traceable in large part to the perceived need to compensate for the centuries-long neglect of black history, it also stemmed from the distinctive course of colonial New York historiography. In 1971, the same year that Thomas J. Davis brought to light New York City's horrific racial past with his edition of Horsmanden's account of the 1741 Negro conspiracy, another book appeared that set the parameters of research on colonial New York for more than a generation.Footnote ¹¹ Patricia Bonomi's A Factious People, a compelling account of New York's political gyrations from the late seventeenth century unti1 the American Revolution, acknowledged the salience of ethnic diversity in shaping the city and colony's history, but it confined itself to chronicling the transactions of various groups of elite white men as they parried the thrusts of governors sent from England and lesser white men intent on improving their condition.Footnote ¹² The scholarship on the city's African American population remained in the wings, an invisible sidebar to the main plot.

In 1992, in Before the Melting Pot, I endeavoured to steer the course of colonial New York's history beyond the political narrative that had governed it for so long by making a case for the centrality of pluralism as a motif in the city's development.Footnote ¹³ Though I specified that New York was a biracial society, I compartmentalized the story of the city's African Americans in a separate chapter, in effect subordinating the interplay of blacks and whites to the template of ethnic diversity among Europeans that I had chosen to feature. By 1999, when Gotham, a massive history of New York City through the nineteenth century, was published, multiculturalism had become entrenched in the academy.Footnote ¹⁴ In the pages devoted to the colonial years, African Americans, women and poor people shared the spotlight with the star players, the members of New York's elite. Far from being expunged from the record, the institution of slavery was featured at several points, including ample discussions of the 1712 rebellion and the 1741 conspiracy. To the extent possible in a broad-scale chronological narrative, the experiences of blacks and whites were interwoven.

The challenge of integrating the histories of blacks and whites in early New York City has been addressed most fully on the conceptual level by historians Thelma Wills Foote and Jill Lepore. In creative and complementary ways, Foote's Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City and Lepore's New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan experiment with how to meld the stories of black and white New Yorkers in a unitary framework. Neither book fits the mould of a conventional history. Foote's title Black and White Manhattan proclaims her intention of doing away with ‘apartheid history’. Lepore's pairing of the words liberty and slavery in her subtitle encapsulates her understanding of the symbiotic relationship between whites and blacks in eighteenth-century New York City in more abstract terms.

Yet these are very different books in compass and concept. It is clear from the outset that Foote is not writing about slavery per se, but rather about the critical part that enslavement played in the transformation of Africans and their offspring into racial ‘others’. It is the elements in this process that fascinate her, not the distinctive course of New York City's evolution from a Dutch outpost to a British city. Foote situates this fledgling urban society in an international context, availing herself of concepts honed by experts in post-colonial studies to produce what amounts to a case study of colonialism and racialization.

Are there benefits to filtering the city's early history through a theoretical prism etched in the shadow of worldwide decolonization in the twentieth century? Absolutely. Posing questions about race and power in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York that are not obvious from the documentary record forces us to reconsider the all too prevalent image of urban slavery in early America as a relatively benign institution. Still, caution must be the watchword because of Foote's tendency to use empirical evidence in service of abstract formulations. Though she dutifully marshals an array of details about the city's African and European populations to support her propositions, the almost mechanical insertion of this material into an argument originating in the logic of a theory leaves one wondering how much the particulars of New York City history matter to her. More than a few misattributions of quotations and factual errors also heighten concerns about the author's fidelity to the historical record. Though these shortcomings blunt the force of Foote's case, they do not invalidate her endeavour to reorient New York City's colonial history on a global plane.

Foote's macrocosmic approach to slavery in colonial New York City runs counter to that of Jill Lepore, who embraces an almost opposite method to explicate the dilemmas engendered by the rooting of slavery in early New York City. Lepore zeroes in on the microcosm, boldly choosing to take the pulse of the city at the ultimate flashpoint – 1741 – when the population was thrown into turmoil by whites' frantic allegations of a conspiracy by slaves. New York Burning is awash in the minutiae of everyday urban life, as the author crafts a finely textured picture of the intersecting worlds of whites and blacks in this port society. Yet this is far from being a still life. Though calibrated by the events of 1741, the book ranges backward and forward in time, across geographical boundaries and through the discursive labyrinth of contemporary Anglo-American thought. Lepore ponders the legacy of New York's singular past, weighing, for example, the possible connections between the 1712 slave rebellion and the events of 1741. She approaches the tale of John Peter Zenger's freedom of the press case from a new slant, emphasizing its role in stirring influential New Yorkers to stand up for political liberty, and she follows the career of Judge Daniel Horsmanden, the man who more than any other shaped historical memory of the 1741 conspiracy, from its inauspicious beginnings in England to its heartrending denoument on the eve of the American Revolution.

Through their wide-ranging research, Lepore and Foote enrich the existing literature on myriad aspects of colonial New York City's slave system, but the self-defined task of these scholars is of far greater magnitude, nothing less than reinventing the storyline of the city's early history to expose how fundamental slavery was in its evolution. They opt for dissimilar ways of interlocking the stories of black and white New Yorkers. Foote's inquiry is anchored in the domain of race. Lepore's overarching question emerges from the juncture of local and imperial concerns, as she probes the paradoxical relationship of liberty and slavery in the mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-American world.

The essentializing of New Yorkers of African heritage as blacks is taken for granted by Lepore, who prefers to illustrate the dominant position of Europeans in colonial New York on a more concrete plane, singling out the distinctive features of the setting, the nuances of vocabulary and the contrasting perspectives that emanated from the life experiences of slaves and slaveowners. Sensitive to the contingencies that shape events, Lepore keeps her eye on the particular, ultimately constructing a multifaceted explanation of the most puzzling event in colonial New York's history that discredits much of Horsmanden's case against the accused slaves, but affirms that blacks had cause to conspire to harm whites and struggle to be free. Foote, on the other hand, dismisses the alleged slave plot as a fiction of the white imagination, foreclosing the possibility that the oppressed Africans could seize power from those who controlled them. This position is consistent with her propensity to minimize the agency of New York's slaves, even as she supplies evidence of the various ways they contrived to circumvent the restrictions imposed on them.

With scholars now in agreement that slavery was thoroughly embedded in the urban society that developed on Manhattan in the colonial era, it remains to be seen whether historians will be content to continue stitching new panels into the quilt that currently portrays the city's slave centuries or whether they will push for a totally new design premised on the notion that the story of white city dwellers can no longer be told in isolation from that of black city dwellers and vice versa. If the latter tack is taken, following the lead of Foote and Lepore, then the most pressing task facing researchers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York City is finding methods to fuse the stories of enslaved and enslavers.

Since scholarship on the city's African American slaves has taken a quantum leap in recent years, it may now be time to shift our gaze to the anatomy of white privilege in this urban society with slaves as a prelude to recasting the overall narrative. Stipulating white New Yorkers' acquiescence to the inherent brutality of enslaving human beings is not enough. Understanding their frame of mind in all its complexity requires disaggregating the city's white population in order to ascertain how ethnic identity, religious affiliation, family and social standing might have affected racial attitudes.

As a port city with a cosmopolitan population, New York wove slavery into its fabric in ways that reflected its historical evolution. It was the heterogeneous society of New Amsterdam that first experimented with the possibilities of slave labour and the equally diverse society of English New York that worked to refine the racial ordering of the population. Yet potential links between the city's ethnic and religious diversity and its institutionalization of slavery remain largely unexplored. In New York Burning, Lepore scrupulously designates city dwellers by ethnic identity, but ethnicity holds no explanatory power in her analysis of the conspiracy crisis. Foote reviews the history of the city's different ethno-religious communities, only to argue that ethnic and denominational differences declined in salience in the face of racialization. It may well be that the experience of commanding people of African origin gave European Protestants of all stripes a stake in New York City's racially based system of unfree labour, but this does not mean that the practice of slavery was identical in Dutch, English French, German and Jewish families.

The family was the conduit through which slavery was reproduced in the city and so the particulars of family culture, whether traceable to ethnic or religious traditions or the consequence of attitudes refined in the crucible of domestic life over the years, are critical to explaining variations in how European New Yorkers related to the Africans in their orbit. Bonds forged between white and black childhood playmates, adult partners in clandestine interracial sexual liaisons, or widows and trusted domestic workers must be considered in accounting for whites' bequests of special slaves to certain family members or provisions for their manumission. How family ethnic and religious background mediated decisions regarding African slaves is a question worth asking of all city dwellers of European origin, and perhaps none more so than Dutch New Yorkers, whose ancestors introduced slavery to Manhattan in the early seventeenth century and who remained stalwart supporters of the institution into the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵ Decoding the inner workings of Dutch families would help explain why the city's Dutch slaveowners insisted that the men and women who served them over the generations learn the Dutch language, yet failed to make a concerted effort to expose them to the doctrines and rituals of the Dutch Reformed faith, and, for the most part, excluded them from their congregation. In part, they were responding to cues from Dutch clergymen who, after initially allowing Africans to be baptized and wed in the Reformed church abruptly foreclosed these options in the 1650s, thus setting the church on the track to becoming, arguably, the city denomination least receptive to Christianizing people of African descent. Nevertheless, African Americans living among the Dutch absorbed elements of Dutch religious culture, since they came to celebrate the Dutch religious holiday of Pinkster and eventually shaped it to their own ends.

The interpenetration of Dutch and African cultures began in the family circle and it is there we need to turn to find the reasons why white New Yorkers differed in their attitudes toward the Christianization of slaves. Much has been written about famed Huguenot schoolteacher Elias Neau, who selflessly taught slaves and free blacks in catechism classes sponsored by the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the early eighteenth century, but we still need to probe further to find out why some city families allowed their slaves to attend, while others refused to grant permission.Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, why did some New Yorkers prove receptive to the overtures of Moravian and Methodist missionaries who promoted the spiritual equality of blacks and whites, while the majority remained sceptical of these endeavours?Footnote ¹⁷ Cracking the enigma of colonial New York City as a pluralistic slaveholding society is a high priority.

The experiences of the many city residents of European descent who grew up in households where slaves were not present are also vitally important for understanding the city's engagement with slavery. If the racial divide transcended all other social partitions in New York, as Foote contends, then it is imperative to examine how nonslaveowners were indoctrinated into the values of the emerging racial order. Instruction about race began in the city's newspapers, which brimmed with graphic notices for runaway slaves and advertisements of slaves for sale as well as long accounts of incidents involving slaves in distant places. But it was personal experience that drove home the lessons disseminated in print culture.

Though they did not have a direct economic stake in slavery, non-slaveowners were obviously not exempt from the process of racial sorting that underpinned New York society. Their associations with slaves and free blacks in both work and social settings led to friction as well as collaboration. Instead of assuming that white people at the lower levels of the social spectrum unthinkingly co-operated in the subjugation of the city's slaves, we need to scrutinize more fully the interactions of servants and slaves in elite households, white and black skilled labourers in artisans' shops, white and black marinersFootnote ¹⁸ aboard sailing vessels and whites and free men of colour in the volunteer military companies the city raised to fight the French and Indians. Simon Middleton has linked the acquisition of rights by the city's white workers to the consolidation of racial thinking, but others have argued that in certain situations alliances to further a political goal might have opened chinks in the racial barrier.Footnote ¹⁹ At the least, we need to explain the prevalence of racial mixing on the social level in underground drinking places and in the netherworld of criminal activity frequented by labourers, sailors and prostitutes. Such interchanges suggest that racial boundaries in the city were more porous than the notion of a transcendent racial divide suggests. When educated men wrote contemptuously of the apprentices and blacks at the fringes of large crowds, their abhorrence of these detested members of the urban scene blinded them to the import of the conversations that might have transpired across racial lines.

Finding common ground may have been possible for peoples on the lower rungs of the social scale, but it was improbable at the pinnacle of New York City society, where merchants and government officials habitually lorded it over the enslaved members of their households. Groomed to exercise authority over inferiors, they readily conceived of slaves as property and even as cargo. The involvement of perhaps a quarter of New York's merchants in slave trading, and some of them in large-scale shipping ventures to Africa, supplies an ideal context for probing the mentality of respected white New Yorkers who chose to engage in the traffic in human beings. Recent research on what has been called the microhistory of New York's slave trade, using ship captains' log books and related materials, offers an avenue for capturing critical moments in the reaffirmation of slavery in New York.Footnote ²⁰ Merchants' ledgers and letter books primarily document business operations, but clues to the urban elite's views on race emerge from the merchants' discursive treatment of blacks.

Modern-day historians, repelled by the barbarity displayed in New York City in 1741, have tried to fathom the state of mind of the white New Yorkers who condoned the gruesome punishments meted out to the alleged black conspirators. Jill Lepore considers the most apposite case to be the 1692 Salem witchcraft episode in which zealous townspeople approved the killing of suspected witches on flimsy evidence. But one can legitimately ask now, after so many inquiries into the 1741 crisis, if it might not be more rewarding to dissect the routine subordination and effacement of blacks that would be the enduring legacy of New York's encounter with slavery.Footnote ²¹ Exposing the myriad of daily transactions that underlay the application of racial terminology would deepen our understanding of the reluctance of many New Yorkers to banish slavery long after the founding of the new republic.Footnote ²²

Far from ending with emancipation in 1827, white New Yorkers' sway over their black neighbours extended to the realms of remembrance, as the historical memory of the city's two centuries-long connection with slavery was shaped by men and women whose ancestors had an affinity for slavery. Long after personal recollections of the slave era had faded, the genteel authors who edified New York's public on the course of Manhattan's early history fabricated a narrative that exalted the Dutch, English and French settlers, while expunging virtually all traces of the enslaved Africans whose labour had in large measure formed the basis of the colonial city's prosperity.Footnote ²³ These self-appointed arbiters of what was historically significant provided the intellectual armament for historical commemorations such as the Hudson–Fulton celebration of 1909, even as New York's first families stocked the city's museums and historical societies with portraits and memorobilia of their illustrious ancestors, and hereditary associations sponsored the erection of statues of colonial dignitaries.

The one concession these genteel custodians of the past made to the impress of slavery on the colonial city was the recounting of the 1741 plot, an incident so sensational that it could not be papered over. At a remove of more than a century, it was possible to look more impartially at this blot on New York City's record and conceive of the accused blacks as victims. When speaking of ‘these unfortunate slaves’ in his 1853 history of the city, David Valentine concluded that ‘the want of education and utter ignorance of these infatuated wretches, easily made them the victims of craft and imposition’.Footnote ²⁴ Portraying colonial slaves as dupes of unscrupulous whites hardly heralded recognition of the role of black actors in the city's history. Some whites with more finely honed sensibilities may have been touched in retrospect by the travails of the enslaved African Americans who endured the wrath of white vengeance during those frenetic months. An obscure poem of the 1850s pivoting on the theme of memories of old New York suggests that white New Yorkers of ancient lineage may have been haunted by images of the gruesome public executions of 1741, ‘when the negroes at the stake in direful accents wail'd’.Footnote ²⁵ Poet Walt Whitman, himself a descendant of slaveholders, writing in 1857, came closest to summoning New Yorkers to heed the lessons of their history.

But it would be going too far to say that the scions of New York's old families were troubled by the miscarriage of justice. There never was any suggestion of making amends to the victims' kin, as was the case for the Salem witches' families.

The long-standing monopoly of history writing by white New Yorkers, most with pedigrees stretching back to the colonial era, was fractured only in 1930, when Harlem Renaissance great James Weldon Johnson penned Black Manhattan, the first African American-centred chronicle of the city.Footnote ²⁷ Blocked until then from inscribing their story into the city's historical annals, African American New Yorkers had already suffered a grievous setback in their efforts to honour their ancestors when their primary place of memory – the Negro Burying Ground in the Commons – was closed in the 1790s. White New Yorkers, consumed with dreams of urban progress, signed off on the obliteration of this hallowed ground, thereby consigning the last visible traces of the lives of countless seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slaves to what they thought would be oblivion. For two centuries, African American New Yorkers would be hard pressed to evoke the struggles and aspirations of the enslaved men and women who came before them. With the resurrection of this sacred place, the ensuing proliferation of scholarship on the city's African men and women and the transformation of the location into a permanent monument to people of African cultural heritage, the pendulum of New York City's racial history at last began to swing in the direction of equilibrium.

When A. Judd Northrup compiled one of the first outlines of the history of slavery in New Netherland and New York in 1900, the cost the nation had paid for slavery in the Civil War was very much on his mind. Deliberately singling out the flawed behaviour of the Dutch and English colonists who stood silent as the institution was engrafted on the city and colony, he declared that ‘the early records . . . exhibit a curious, if not appalling insensibility as to the moral questions involved in the slave trade and slaveholding’.Footnote ²⁸ Northrup's outrage echoes in the twenty-first century, as we set about inventing new ways to illuminate the imprint of slavery on urban life in colonial New York. As a work of historical research, Northrup's pioneering study has been superseded, but as a manifesto for historical candour it still stands as a beacon to today's urban historians, alerting them never to lose sight of the human tragedy at the core of New York City's history.