In 1741, nearly a generation after the militia put down the slave revolt of 1712, white New Yorkers trembled again in the wake of a rebellion, this one based on an even more elaborate conspiracy, and this one including some white sympathizers. Time and again white racism produced Black resistance. It is one of the longest-running plotlines in African American history.
1714–1719
THE SLAVE MARKET
Sasha Turner
In 1714 the “Meal Market” stood in the center of New York City. Located where Wall Street meets the East River, between Pearl and Water Streets, the newly designated slave market became the government-authorized site for selling the city’s enslaved people. Built by the municipal government, the Meal Market (so called because grains also were sold there) had been there for three years.
But New Yorkers had bought and sold humans for much longer than three years. As early as 1626, the Dutch had imported captive Africans into New York (then New Amsterdam), and starting in 1648 had traded for enslaved people directly with Angola. A New York census recorded settlers importing at least 209 enslaved people from Africa and 278 from the West Indies between 1700 and 1715.
Long before municipal authorities had slave markets, white New Yorkers traded enslaved people aboard ships and in merchant houses. They also traded humans on paper, through lease and mortgage agreements, wills, and private transfers. The slave market was more than a physical location. It was everywhere.
The growth of the slave market was dependent upon the belief that humans were a commodity whose only “socially relevant feature” was the price their bodies commanded. Chains and owner initials effaced tribal markings and clothing that had marked belonging, social distinction, and rank. Traders boiled the needs of these humans down to economic calculations of the cost of sustaining bare life. Investors dispensed food and medicine merely to keep laborers “wholesome,” making them “grow likely for the market.”
Just as speculators observed the changing height and size of children strictly with an eye on their labor readiness and market value, so, too, they assessed women of childbearing age based on the “possibilities of their wombs.” From the 1662 Virginia law that decreed that all children born of Black women were slaves, to wills that included enslaved people as property, Euro-Americans used the power of language to enact a new reality that a human could be a commodity. The slave market was governed by the chattel principle.
In contrast to the plantation colonies, which purchased the enslaved by the shipload from the oceanic and domestic trades, New Yorkers bought and sold enslaved people individually or in small groups at commercial houses without public notice. The comparably fickle nature of slave ownership in New York made enslaved Africans vulnerable to multiple sales. One enslaved woman named Phyllis was sold six times between owners in Long Island, New York City, and New Jersey. Jack, a boy of twelve, was sold at least ten times to buyers on both sides of the Hudson. The exchangeability of enslaved children was especially pronounced in nonplantation settings like New York that marginally relied on slave labor. Enslaved children were frequently sold to neighbors, friends, and business associates by owners who had no need for more than one enslaved person or were unwilling to pay maintenance costs for an extra enslaved person.
The slave market was a space of exchange, not just an auction block. The mobility of the slave market as determined by slave exchangeability created a nuisance for well-to-do New Yorkers and government officials. A free-range slave market permitted tax-free slave sales, cheating municipal authorities of craved revenues. By the 1710s, enslaved people parading the streets scouting buyers or renters became bothersome to New Yorkers. New York merchants’ and vessels’ growing participation in the transatlantic slave trade further increased captive presence across the city.
After arriving only in small handfuls for decades, captives landed in New York at an accelerated pace as the eighteenth century went on. Between 1715 and 1741, some four thousand Africans arrived in New York. The period between 1715 and 1718 accounted for the highest number of arrivals, approximately 40 percent of the total during that era.
Sellers relied on theatrics to create the illusion that humans were just another marketable commodity, valued at the price demanded, and that they were healthy and hardy laborers. Preparation of captives for the market began at least one week prior to opening sale. Agents refreshed them with water and food, filling out and strengthening their emaciated and exhausted bodies. To conceal the “undesired testimony [of] the violence and unsanitary conditions of the slave ships,” agents bathed, shaved, and oiled the captives. From palm oil and lard to the more generic “Negro Oyle,” traders used various forms of grease to polish captives’ skin, giving them the illusion of health and vitality. Slaves marketed locally were similarly treated to extra rations and grooming. Eliminating evidence of aging, sickness, and ill and hard usage was integral to enhancing the value of enslaved people.
Market theatrics were especially crucial to New York’s Wall Street. Enslaved people arriving in New York were mostly leftovers (called refuse slaves) from plantation colonies like Barbados and Virginia, where a handful of estates often cleared entire shipments. New Yorkers rarely bought shiploads of enslaved people, instead buying people individually or in small groups. Between 1715 and 1763, for example, only 16 out of 636 British slavers ported in New York, and then only after they had sold the majority of their cargo in the Caribbean and the American South. Captives arriving in the New York market had been twice rejected by Caribbean and Southern mainland buyers, because of perceived medical complaints, physical weakness, old age, and undesirable personal histories (infertility, rebelliousness, or criminal conviction). Traders fattened, polished, and preened refuse slaves as best they could to convince buyers their commodity held value.
Traders carefully staged the slave market to mask the humanity of people who had been turned into a commodity, making it into a theater of jollity and amusement. They plied buyers with wine and brandy while the auctioneer tickled them with jokes and antics, treating them to a lively show of the enslaved body, which was forced to be receptive to being touched and to feign happiness with their bondage. Dancing, jumping, singing, and parading the streets were commonplace “rituals of the marketplace” demonstrating slave value and, crucially, also denying emotions that would have betrayed the humanity of the enslaved.
Jollification and the threat of the lash, however, could not mask the sorrow of parting from loved ones and the revulsion at being fondled by lecherous buyers. The shame and humiliation that enslaved people suffered remained plainly visible in their tears and in the silent screams of their eyes.
1719–1724
MAROONS AND MARRONAGE
Sylviane A. Diouf
On July 16, 1720, the Ruby landed in Louisiana. After fifty-four days at sea, 127 men, women, and children from Senegal and Gambia disembarked.