Northern Slaves

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Recommended: Slavery and the economy in America

The Slaves of New Amsterdam
When asked to describe slavery’s most common image, descriptions of a large Southern plantation, teeming with respectful black slaves is the description many would offer, and what Hollywood has portrayed. It is common knowledge the South depended on the slaves and the slave trade to plant, grow, and harvest the sugar, tobacco, and most importantly, the cotton crops. Whereas the post-Civil War myths portray the North as condemning slavery as immoral, the facts of history tell a different story. Despite the colonies rampant use of slaves as seeming hypocritical to its own desires for freedom, without them, New York would likely never have become the powerhouse city it is today.
Slaves Worth in New Amsterdam
Although historians have long argued about the economic role of Northern Slaves, there are many ways that slaves contributed to the economic and political capital for New England residents. For instance, in the late colonial period, most New England households had a small number of slaves, but many estates had upward of 50, particularly in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut, and the Narragansett area of Rhode Island (Harper, 2003). This was important as slaveholding equated to a household’s social and economic standing. Harper (2003) wrote that no prominent household was complete without the requisite large staff of slaves, and that New York’s social climbers regarded the possession of slaves as an unmistakable sign of social standing. Although most slaves were used domestically, this allowed their masters to pursue lucrative careers in law and medicine.Interestingly, the Quakers outrage over this practice was not so much of the moral implications of possessing slaves, but instead pointed to the ostentatio...

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...s not a stretch to consider the worldview of New York City might be very different or non-existent, had it not been built on the backs of slaves.

Works Cited

DeWolf-Perry, J., & Browne, K. (2011, April 12). Civil war's dirty secret about slavery. Retrieved from CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/12/perry.browne.civil.war/index.html
Harper, D. (2003). Slavery in the North. Retrieved from Slave North: http://slavenorth.com/slavenorth.htm
New York Historical Society. (2005). White New Yorkers in slave times. Retrieved from Slavery in New York: http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/PDFs/White_New_Yorkers.pdf
Woods, F. (2009). Mayor Wood's recommendation for secession of New York City. Primary source document. New York, New York, United States: Great Neck Publishing. Retrieved February 15, 2014, from http://0-web.a.ebscohost.com.catalog.sjlibrary.org/ehost/detail

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