Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1884 — SLAVERY IN NEW YORK. [ARTICLE]

SLAVERY IN NEW YORK.

rhe Old Slave Market in Wall Street—The Negro Blot of 1741. [London Telegraph. I The slavery abolished -in New York in 1827 had played an important part, not so much in the history Of the State itself as in that of the Empire city. The diabolical trade was brought into the colony of the New Netherlands by the Dutch West India Company, and very soon ufter its introduction became a lucrative branch of the shipping interest. A “prime negro” was valued at from $l2O to $150; and below this price he could not profitably be purchased from Africa or the West Indies. As far back as 1628 slaves had formed a considerable proportion of the population of* New Amsterdam, as New York was called under the “Knickerbocker” dispensation, and to such an extent had the traffic in human flesh increased in 1709. when the province had been for more than forty years a British colony, that a slave market was erected at the foot of Wall street, where all negroes for sale or hire were paraded for the Convenience of bidders. The worship of Mammon has superseded that of Moloch in Wall street; yet it is questionable whether the modern “operators” there are much more soft-hearted than the traffickers of “prime negroes” were in the days of Queen Anne. At the lastnamed period the importation of slaves from America averaged 500 head of human merchandise a year; but in 1718 the importation began to fall off, the demand being amply met by home slave-breeding. Still the Wall street market was as brisk as ever. The colonists naturally preferred home-raised slaves to the raw material brought from the Gold coast, since the former had some slight inkling of civilized ways, whereas the latter were simply savages who were unfit for domestic work. The enemies of slavery will learn with gratification that, throughout the first-half of the eighteenth century, the free whites were subject to intermittent fits of abject terror lest their negroes should rebel and, choosing the most desperate of the white transports and “indented servants”—who were little better than slaves—as leaders, murder their masters and plunder and burn New Y®rk. Rumors of an intended negro insurrection were rife in 1712, but the nervous apprehensions of the slave-owners culminated in the real or imaginary “negro plot” of 1741. New York at the time contained something like 10,000 inhabitants, one-fifth of whom belonged to what is elegantly known as “the black seed of Cain.” They were subject to hideous oppression. If three of them were found together, each of the three was liable to receive thirty [ashes; and the same penalty accrued to them if they were discovered bearing a stick outside their masters’ premises and without a permit. Two justices could orderrthe jnflictipmof: any punishment, even of amputation or death, for any blow or assault by a slave upon a white man. “The History of the Plot,” with all its episode and frenzied fear and suspicion, reads like an absurd echo of Manzom’s “Colonna Infame.” A negro had been heard to utter, with violent gesticulations—very possibly due to the stimulus of rum—some unintelligent jargon in which the words “fire, fire, scorch, scorch 1” were articulated or supposed to be. Forthwith the white citizens jumped at the conclusion that a stupendous act of arson was contemplated by their bondsmen, and, a universal panic being diffused, reason and argument, common sense and common humanity, lost all influence over the whites. A Titus Oates was soon found in a silly servant-maid in a boardinghouse, one Mary Burton, and this wench deposed that she had heard certain negroes discussing a project for setting New York on fire. Of course, emboldened by the attention paid' to her story, she proceeded to denounce whites as well as blacks, and declared that her master and mistress, together with a fellow female servant and a Roman Catholic named Ury, were all privy to the “plot.” The jails were crammed with prisoners? white and black, juries convicted and judges sentenced prisoners to death on preposterously insufficient evidence and when at length, as in the case of the popish plot and the witchcraft prosecutions at Salem, the fury of-fanaticism was assuaged and the magistrates paused for shame in their bloody that thirteen negroes had been burned at the stake, eighteen hanged and seventy transported.