Author: Brent Staples
Publication: The New York Times
Date: December 15, 2005
Americans typically grow up believing that
slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North
was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all
over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like
New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable.
The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with
more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible
exception of Charleston, S.C.
The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan
has set out to make all this clear in its pathbreaking "Slavery in New
York," which ends in March. It is being described as the first exhibition
by a major museum that focuses on the long-neglected issue of slavery in the
North.
New York's central position in the slave trade
was partially exposed back in 1991, when workers excavating for an office
tower in Lower Manhattan uncovered a long-forgotten burial ground that may
have originally spread for as much as a mile. It served as the final resting
place for thousands of enslaved New Yorkers.
Among the bodies exhumed and examined, about
40 percent were of children under the age of 15; the most common cause of
death was malnutrition. Some enslaved mothers appear to have committed infanticide,
rather than bringing their children into what was clearly a hellish environment.
Adults typically died of hard labor, dumped into their graves by owners who
simply went out and bought more slaves.
Slavery was no less brutal in New York than
in the South - and just as pervasive. At one point, about four in 10 New York
households owned human beings. The free human labor that ran the city's most
gracious homes also helped to build its early infrastructure and supplied
the muscle needed by the beef, grain and shipping interests, which forestalled
emancipation until 1827 - making New York among the last Northern states to
abolish slavery.
Judging from the videotaped responses of visitors
to the historical society, people who thought they knew New York's history
well have been badly shaken to learn about the depth and breadth of human
bondage in the city. As one distraught patron put it, "The ground we
touch, every institution, is affected by slavery."
Historians who had expected to find early
18th century slavemasters agonizing over the moral questions associated with
slavery were surprised in a different way. One researcher said the record
before the Revolutionary War contained not a single scrap of paper to support
the notion of guilt among the slaveholding classes.
By conveniently "forgetting" slavery,
Northerners have historically absolved themselves of complicity while heaping
blame onto the shoulders of the plantation South. This cultural amnesia will
no longer be plausible after the country absorbs the New-York Historical Society's
eye-opening exhibition, which vigorously debunks the myth of the "free"
North.