slavery in newyork

Slavery in New York
Slavery in New York was instituted when the New Amsterdam fur trading-post developed into a farming colony, and persisted until the culmination of an early 19th century program of gradual abolition, on July 4, 1827.
From 1701 to 1726, officially, some 1,570 slaves were imported from the West Indies and another 802 from Africa. As it had under the Dutch, the colony continued to import relatively few slaves from Africa directly, except occasional cargoes of children under 13. The actual numbers were much higher, because smugglers made liberal use of the long, convoluted coast of Long Island. In some years illegal shipment of slaves on a single vessel outnumbered the official imports to the whole colony.

As a result, New York soon had had the largest colonial slave population north of Maryland. From about 2,000 in 1698, the number of the colony's black slaves swelled to more than 9,000 adults by 1746 and 13,000 by 1756. Between 1732 and 1754, black slaves accounted for more than 35 percent of the total immigration through the port of New York.
The slave trade became a cornerstone of the New York economy. As with Boston and Newport, profits of the great slave traders, or of smaller merchants who specialized in small lots of skilled or seasoned slaves, radiated through a network of port agents, lawyers, clerks, scriveners, dockworkers, sailmakers, and carpenters.



American Revolution


African Americans fought on both sides in the American Revolution. Many chose to fight for the British as they were promised freedom in exchange. After the British occupied New York City in 1776, slaves escaped to their lines for freedom. The black population in New York grew to 10,000 and the city became a center of their community. The Treaty of Paris (1783) required that all American property including slaves be left in place, but a joint board of enquiry at Fraunces Tavern failed to find evidence of enslavement for most of the Negroes who had fought in the King's cause. 3,000 Black Loyalists left with the British in 1783. Some traveled to England; others resettled in Nova Scotia which then comprised the modern Maritime Canada or to Sierra Leone where their descendants became the Sierra Leone Creole people, or the Caribbean.==>wikipedia

Civil war

On the verge of American Civil War, according to the 1860 census, there were 49,005 free colored in the state of New York, out of a total population of 3,880,735. New York was being rapidly transformed by waves of new European immigrants from the 1840s on, including the Irish.

The 1863 New York Draft Riots consisted mostly of Irish immigrants and their descendants attacking African Americans. The Irish resented being drafted, and did not want to fight in the war on behalf of people with whom they were competing for wages in low-skilled jobs. African Americans from New York also served with the Union Army to defeat the Confederacy.

By 1870, the African American population in New York had increased slightly, to 52,081. The state's population had grown markedly to 4,382,759, of which more than one million were foreign-born. Many of the new immigrants were concentrated in and around New York City.