New York's Grand Emancipation Jubilee

Essays on Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, Teaching, and Historical Memory

Alan J. Singer

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438469720
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique de l'éducation

In this book Alan J. Singer discusses the history of race and racism in the United States, emphasizing the continuing significance of slavery's past in shaping our present. Each chapter addresses a different theme in the history of slavery and the abolitionist struggle in the United States, with a focus on events and debates in New York State. Chapters examine the founders of the new nation and their views on slavery and equality; African American resistance; how abolitionists moved from the margins to the center of political debate; key players in the anti-slavery struggle such as David Ruggles, Solomon Northup, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William Seward, and Abraham Lincoln; celebrations of freedom; as well as ongoing racism. Interspersed throughout the text are teaching notes that explore primary source documents and resources. The book draws on the latest scholarship to address and correct historical myths about both New York State before, during, and after the American Civil War, especially the pro-slavery, anti-civil rights stance of New York Copperhead Democrats in Congress, and the crucial role of Black and White abolitionists in ending slavery in the United States and challenging racial injustice. New York's Grand Emancipation Jubilee is not only an effort to include more African Americans as historical actors and celebrate their activism and achievements, but to provide an opportunity to analyze historical moments for change, explore their dynamic, and discover the conditions that make some of them successful.

1

MOST OF THE “FOUNDERS” WERE NOT ABOLITIONISTS, BUT SOME FROM NEW YORK WERE

CRISES AND CONTROVERSIES INVITE HISTORICAL ANALOGIES. THE CONTEMPORARY Tea Party movement fancies itself operating in the tradition of antitax protesters who dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 in defiance of British authority. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos for ABC News, congressional Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a Tea Party movement stalwart and a candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination for president, claimed that the founders of the nation “worked tirelessly” to end slavery. She explained what was “marvelous is that in this country and under our constitution, we have the ability when we recognize that something is wrong to change it. And that’s what we did in our country. We changed it. We no longer have slavery” (Stephanopoulos 2011; Singer 2011b).

David Barton, a conservative Texas Republican aligned with the Christian Right made similar points. In “The Founding Fathers and Slavery” (2011), Barton argued that “the historical fact is that slavery was not the product of, nor was it an evil introduced by, the Founding Fathers,” and that “[t]he Revolution was the turning point in the national attitude [toward slavery]—and it was the Founding Fathers who contributed greatly to that change.” He quoted Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to support his case. However, he did not mention that at some point in their lives, each of them was a slaveholder. Laurens, president of the Second Continental Congress from 1777 to 1778, was a partner in the largest slave-trading company in the British colonies and personally “owned” three hundred enslaved Africans who worked on his rice plantation on the Cooper River near Charleston, South Carolina (SCNHC 2014). Historian Paul Finkelman (1994, 193–228) dismissed similar claims about the nation’s “founders” and their antislavery stance in an article, “Thomas Jefferson and Antislavery: The Myth Goes On,” in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

The “founders” were a curious and inconsistent bunch, who like Jefferson, sometimes bemoaned an institution, slavery, that was the basis for their wealth and authority. Patrick Henry, for example, argued for independence from Britain because of British violation of the colonists’ personal liberties, yet he enslaved between seventy and eighty Africans on his plantation. In one of the best-known speeches in United States history delivered in 1775 in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Henry declared that the issue of independence was “nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery” and warned Virginians that “there is no retreat but in submission and slavery!” This was the same Patrick Henry who wrote, “Would any one believe that I am master of slaves by my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I cannot justify it, however culpable my conduct” (Basker 2012, n.p.).

THE DELETED PASSAGE (1776)

QUESTION TO CONSIDER

Why was this passage deleted?

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another (Jefferson 2010, 210–11).

The commitment of patriot-aligned Southern planters, at least philosophically, to liberty, combined with their reliance on an enslaved African workforce, coupled with the profit from slave trading and the trade in slave-produced commodities for Northern merchants and financiers, meant that the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were left intentionally vague on the future of slavery in the new country, a vagueness that set the stage for later sectional conflict.

During debate over the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, the “Founders” removed a clause from the document that denounced King George for promoting the transatlantic slave trade.

During the War for Independence, George Washington refused to enlist enslaved Africans who wanted to secure their freedom by joining the Revolutionary army, and at the end of the war he sent a letter to British commanders demanding that they return runaway slaves as wartime contraband. When Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, was president, he refused to recognize the newly independent government of Haiti because Africans, who had fought a bloody war to end enslavement, governed the former French colony. In letters, Jefferson described Toussaint Louverture and his followers as “cannibals of the terrible republic” (Blackburn 2011, 242).

On the other hand, Representative Bachmann was not entirely wrong, although when asked, she could not provide evidence to support her position. Many founders from New York State were opponents of slavery and did work to bring it to an end. They included Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War, a member of the convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution, and later the secretary of the treasury of the United States. During the War for Independence, Hamilton argued that Africans had the same natural abilities as Europeans and they should be recruited as soldiers and given “their freedom with their muskets” (Chernow 2005, 122). While Washington and the Continental Congress were reluctant to offer freedom to enslaved Africans, New York State passed legislation promising emancipation in exchange for three years of military service, however enlistment did require permission from enslavers, who were compensated with public land (McManus 1966, 157–58).

Prominent opponents of slavery included John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and an early governor of New York State, Aaron Burr, United States senator from New York and vice-president of the United States, and Gouverneur Morris and Thomas Tredwell, members of New York’s Revolutionary Congress who helped draft the state’s first Constitution. Jay, Morris, and Tredwell came from families that owned significant estates and large numbers of enslaved Africans. However, each worked to end slavery in New York State and the United States.

In 1777, Gouverneur Morris proposed a motion, which was defeated, at the state’s Constitutional Convention recommending that the Legislatures of the State of New York “take measures consistent with the public safety for abolishing domestic slavery” (McManus 1966, 161). Morris later relocated to Philadelphia, and he represented Pennsylvania at the Federal Constitutional Convention where he opposed constitutional protection for slavery, the slave trade, and the three-fifths compromise. In 1780, while representing the rebelling colonies in Spain, Jay wrote praising Pennsylvania’s newly enacted gradual manumission law and declared, “Till America comes into this Measure [abolition], her prayers to Heaven for Liberty will be impious. … Were I in [the] Legislature I would prepare a bill for the Purpose with great Care, and I would never cease moving it till it became a Law or I ceased to be a member. I believe God governs this world, and I believe it to be a Maxim in his as in our Court that those who ask for Equity ought to do it” (Flanders 1855, 216).

In 1785, the New York State Legislature debated, but ultimately refused to approve, either immediate or gradual emancipation. During debate in the State Assembly, Aaron Burr, much maligned in the Broadway musical Hamilton for never stating or standing on principles, headed the faction demanding the immediate end of slavery in New York (Miranda 2015). Historian Edgar McManus attributes the failure of these bills to opposition from white New Yorkers to the possibility that emancipation would lead to civil and legal equality, especially the right to vote (McManus 1966, 163–64).

After the American Revolution, New York Manumission Society was headed by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton (McManus 1966, 168–72). It purchased the freedom of persons held in bondage and founded the African Free School. Jay and Hamilton also helped win dozens of legal cases in defense of the freedom of black New Yorkers threatened with kidnapping and being sent to the South as slaves. In 1788, in his capacity as president of the Manumission Society, Jay wrote British abolitionists, “That they who know the value of liberty, and are blessed with the enjoyment of it, ought not to subject others to slavery. … The United States are far from being irreproachable in this respect. It undoubtedly is very inconsistent with their declarations on the subject of human rights to permit a single slave to be found within their jurisdiction.” Although disappointed that “local interests, and in some measure local prejudices” prevented the new Constitution from addressing the issue of slavery, Jay was hopeful that “a disposition favourable to our views and wishes prevails more and more, and that it has already had an influence on our laws” (Jay 1833, 234).

ALEXANDER HAMILTON TO JOHN JAY, PRESIDENT OF THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS (1779)

QUESTION TO CONSIDER

Why was Hamilton’s advice rejected?

I frequently hear it objected to the scheme of embodying negroes that they are too stupid to make soldiers. This is so far from appearing to me a valid objection that I think their want of cultivation (for their natural faculties are probably as good as ours) joined to that habit of subordination which they acquire from a life of servitude, will make them sooner become soldiers than our White inhabitants. I foresee that this project will have to combat much opposition from prejudice and self-interest. The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience; and an unwillingness to part with property of so valuable a kind will furnish a thousand arguments to show the impracticability or pernicious tendency of a scheme which requires such a sacrifice. But it should be considered, that if we do not make use of them in this way, the enemy probably will; and that the best way to counteract the temptations they will hold out will be to offer them ourselves. An essential part of the plan is to give them their freedom with their muskets. This will secure their fidelity, animate their courage, and I believe will have a good influence upon those who remain, by opening a door to their emancipation (quoted in Lanning 2005, 68).

Between 1799 and 1827 the legal status of blacks in the State of New York changed radically. In 1799, as governor, John Jay signed a gradual emancipation law providing that from July 4 of that year onward, all children born to slave parents in New York State would be free upon reaching adulthood, and in 1801 the law was amended to prevent the export of enslaved Africans out of the state. In 1809, New York laws permitted marriage between people who were still enslaved, prohibited the separation of spouses, and recognized the right of enslaved people to own and transfer property. An 1813 law ended the prohibition on blacks testifying against whites and ensured enslaved Africans the right to a jury trial when accused of a crime. The final blow to slavery in New York was an 1817 act that declared every enslaved person in the state would be freed on July 4, 1827 (McManus 1966, 178–79).

REJECTED MOTION AT THE NEW YORK STATE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION(1777)

QUESTION TO CONSIDER

Why was the Morris motion rejected?

And whereas a regard to the rights of human nature and the principles of our holy religion, loudly call upon us to dispense the blessings of freedom to all mankind: and inasmuch as it would at present be productive of great dangers to liberate the slaves within this State: It is, therefore most earnestly recommended to the future Legislatures of the State of New-York, to take the most effectual measures consistent with the public safety, and the private property of individuals, for abolishing domestic slavery within the same, so that in future ages, every human being who breathes the air of this State, shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman (Kirschke 2005, 62).

Thomas Tredwell was an Anti-Federalist who opposed adoption of the United States Constitution by New York State because of its complicity with the slave system. In 1794, Tredwell relocated his family from Suffolk County to the North Country where he emancipated the people his family had enslaved and established them as free farmers on their own land.

The reality is that the founders, when they wrote the Constitution and created the nation, left the issue of slavery unresolved because they could not agree on the future of Africans in the United States. John Jay, who supported adoption of the Constitution, recognized this when he wrote, “When it is considered how many of the legislators in the different States are proprietors of slaves, and what opinions and prejudices they have imbibed on the subject from their infancy, a sudden and total stop to this species of oppression is not to be expected” (Jay 1833, 234).

AN ACT FOR THE GRADUAL ABOLITION OF SLAVERY (1799)

QUESTION TO CONSIDER

Why did New York State enact gradual rather than immediate emancipation?

Be it enacted … That any child born of a slave within this state after the fourth day of July next shall be deemed and adjudged to be born free: Provided nevertheless. That such child shall be the servant of the legal proprietor of his or her mother until such servant, if a male, shall arrive at the age of twenty-eight years, and if a female, at the age of twenty-five years (Gellman and Quigley 2003, 53).

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, slavery gradually withered away in the northern United States as it lost its economic viability and waves of European immigrants provided for an expanding workforce. New York’s gradual emancipation act, passed in 1799 and amended in 1817, finally went into full effect in 1827. On July 4, 1827, Emancipation Day, William Hamilton, a founder of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, spoke at the African Zion Church in lower Manhattan. Hamilton declared, “This day we stand redeemed from a bitter thraldom. Of us it may be truly said, ‘the last agony is o’er,’ THE AFRICANS ARE RESTORED! No more shall the accursed name of the slave be attached to us—no more shall negro and slave be synonymous.” But it was not only Africans who were freed from slavery. “This day has the state of NEW-YORK regenerated herself—this day has she been cleansed of a most foul, poisonous and damnable stain” (Gellman and Quigley 2003, 221–22).

The next day two thousand members of New York’s African American community paraded through the streets celebrating the end of slavery in New York State. Dr. James McCune Smith, an African American physician who studied medicine in Glasgow, attended the parade as a teenager and later described the procession:

A splendid looking black man, mounted on a milk-white steed, then his aids on horseback, dashing up and down the line; then the orator of the day, also mounted, with a handsome scroll, appearing like a baton in his right hand, then in due order, splendidly dressed in scarfs of silk with gold-edgings, and with colored bands of music and their banners appropriately lettered and painted, followed, the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, the Wilberforce Benevolent Society, and the Clarkson Benevolent Society; then the people five or six abreast from grown men to small boys. The sidewalks were crowded with wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of the celebrants, representing every state in...