A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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rather than the Caribbean islands, believing that slaves taken directly from the continent would speak different languages than those who had lived for years in the Caribbean. Perhaps more importantly, those African slaves would have no knowledge of the Caribbean slave revolts.
The tremendous profits (upwards of 100 percent of an investment for a single voyage) of slaving voyages were a temptation that proved too hard to resist to many New York merchants who had expertise with sailing and shipping. Estimates range as high as one third of the city’s merchants being engaged in the slave trade by 1750.
From 1732 through 1754 more than 35 percent of the city’s new immigrants were listed as slaves. Since it was a common practice for many slavers to off-load their cargoes on Long Island in order to avoid the colony’s tax collectors who were waiting at the official port of entry, it is possible that up to one half of the colony’s immigrants in the mid-eighteenth century were slaves.
Slave owners in New England and New York differed from Southern slave owners in their use of slaves. Southern slaveholders looked on slaves as a permanent workforce, a resource to be used until they were too old to work. When that happened, the slaves became house servants. Southern slave women were encouraged to have children who would be born into slavery and eventually grow old enough to work.
While around five hundred thousand slaves landed in all the English American colonies in the 180 years before the slave trade was officially outlawed in 1808, more than 4 million slaves lived in the American South in 1861. Almost all of those were native-born Americans with a tiny fraction arriving from Africa, landed by slavers willing to take the chance on being detected by the United States Navy.
New Yorkers thought of slaves as a disposable commodity. In the late 1990s, Howard University in Washington, D.C., conducted an exhaustive study of the bones found in the African Burial Ground west of Manhattan’s City Hall, the traditional burial ground for the city’s slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The bones revealed that both men and women had lifted heavy weights most of their adult lives, leading to severe bone stresses. That fact indicated to researchers that New York City’s slave owners believed the slave population could always be replenished with the arrival of another slave ship as “slaveholders showed no desire to possess young Africans or to ‘breed’ their captives. They only needed them to keep the market’s products and profits flowing.”
So many New York slavers got into the slaving business and so many voyages were successful that supply eventually overran demand and the wholesale price of slaves dropped by more than 50 percent by the end of the 1750s. But instead of lessening the demand for slaves, the lower cost encouraged more potential New York owners to make purchases. New York became an even more popular port of call, trailing only Charleston, South Carolina, for the volume of imported slaves.
As the eighteenth century faded and the nineteenth century dawned, so did the senses of lawmakers who questioned the need for domestic slavery and the international slave trade on religious, legal, and economic grounds. The Northern states had begun considering the thorny questions of abolishing slavery within their borders in the mid-eighteenth century, even as they allowed the international trade between Africa, Cuba, and the Caribbean to continue from their seaports. New York State passed a law abolishing slavery in 1799 with provisions that allowed owners to free or sell their slaves slowly so that they would not lose their investment.
Most slaves seemed to have been sold. According to the U.S. Census, the percentage of slaves in New York State in 1790 dropped by more than two thirds by the 1830 Census, indicating a huge transfer of bodies to places where slavery was still legal.
Congress finally passed a law abolishing the slave trade after 1808. Passing the law was one thing; enforcing it was another, particularly since most of the trade had shifted from importing slaves into the United States to selling them to Caribbean countries. In 1810, President James Madison observed: “It appears that American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equal in violation of the laws of humanity, and in defiance of those of their own country.” Madison had no idea how New York would expand that traffic over the next fifty years.
Chapter 3
“A Great Distribution Point for Cotton”
Had it not been for a free-spending Southern agricultural economy, New York City’s mercantile and shipping economy might never have taken off in the nineteenth century.
At first, the South did not need the North. For more than 180 years since 1612 when John Rolfe of the Jamestown colony in Virginia successfully crossbred a native strain of tobacco with a strain the Spanish had developed in the Bahamas, the South’s prosperity had been linked to tobacco. Grown, dried, packed in barrels, and then shipped back across the Atlantic from Jamestown, tobacco proved wildly popular with the nicotine-addicted customers in England. More than ten tons of tobacco was shipped to England in 1619.
At the same time Jamestown was thriving with its tobacco exports, the Dutch West India Company in New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island was still figuring out how to secure a steady supply of beaver pelts from the western frontier of their fledgling colony.
Jamestown, which only ten years earlier had almost been starved into oblivion, was proving to be a magnificent investment, whereas the future of the Dutch colony on Manhattan was uncertain.
While tobacco was the crop that made Virginians successful, another plant grew well in the South that had the potential to surpass tobacco in demand among all of Western civilization, not just the smokers. That was cotton, an easy-to-grow fiber that had been spun into thread, woven into cloth, and then cut and sewn into garments since biblical times. The major problem with cotton, however, was removing the seeds embedded in the fiber.
For years English importers had bought bales of cotton from countries like Egypt, broke it up into hundreds of lots, and then delivered the lots to the homes of contract workers who picked out the seeds and then spun the fibers into thread. This “cottage industry” worked, but the huge investment in time of removing the seeds meant cotton was a fiber that only the rich could afford to have made into clothes. Then along came a Connecticut Yankee.
On a visit to a Southern plantation in 1793, Eli Whitney noticed the slaves laboriously picking out the cotton seeds one seed at a time. He watched for a while, grabbed some cotton for himself, and then retired to a workshop. Within months he had developed what he called a cotton engine, a drum studded with metal teeth that easily removed the seeds from the cotton fibers. The work of thousands of fingers that had cleaned the picked cotton of seeds had been eliminated. Those same fingers were now free to pick the cotton from the fields.
At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the American South was poised to introduce itself to the world’s economy as the largest supplier of cotton. This introduction came quickly. Cotton exports from the United States climbed dramatically with eight times the volume of cotton heading for England in 1804 compared with 1796, just three years after the invention of the cotton gin. In 1793, cotton clothes were worn by just 4 percent of the population in Europe and the United States. Over the next one hundred years, that figure jumped to 73 percent.
Sailing directly from the four major cotton ports of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans to the two major English cotton-milling ports of Manchester and Liverpool would have made the most sense for cotton growers. But that is not how the trade developed. New York may have been far from the Southern cotton fields, but early in the cotton trade in the late 1700s until the 1850s, it became the major port from which Southern cotton made its way across the Atlantic.
All the Southern ports had water deep enough to handle most of the oceangoing ships that could have made it to England safely, but New York had some important, nonnautical advantages over any Southern ports.
Most important of all, the city had financial infrastructure. New York’s banks had been dealing with the British textile manufacturers and their system of bills of exchange for fifty years. The city was home base to cotton brokers who visited the South to negotiate both the selling and the buying ends of a cotton transaction. These brokers ingratiated themselves with growers, convincing them there was no need for them