“Our Brooklyn Correspondent”: William J. Wilson Writes the City
By Britt Rusert
William J. Wilson may very well have been New York’s first Black culture critic. A self-stylized flâneur, cultural aesthete, and frequent contributor to Black periodicals throughout the 1840s and 50s, he wrote under the name “Ethiop” and as “Brooklyn Correspondent” for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In these columns, he provided readers across the nation with on-the-ground reports of New York’s people, places, and happenings based on his frequent “ramblings” around the city. Wilson was particularly interested in the sights and sounds of Broadway as it emerged as a hub of culture, entertainment, and conspicuous consumption in the middle of the century. Wilson would make his own contribution to the city’s cultural scene in 1859 with his publication of the Afric-American Picture Gallery, an experimental text that imagines the first museum of Black Art in the United States
Free from the Stain: New York’s Free Produce Stores
By Charline Jao
American proponents of free produce saw clearly the connection between commercial consumption and the institution of slavery, seeking to overthrow what Frances Harper called slavery’s “commercial throne.” Not only did they refuse to buy items that came from southern plantations, they also sought to create new networks of trade, labor, and production. Ruggles, for instance, did not only secure “free” butter from Goshen, New York for his customers, he also employed formerly enslaved men like Samuel Ringgold Ward and Isaiah Harper Ward. Advocates of free produce set out on expeditions to find alternatives to sugar, reached out to farmers and merchants, did speaking tours in England, and opened stores where they could proudly state – as Elizabeth Kent in Pennsylvania did – that they had “EVERYTHING FOR SALE EXCEPTS PRINCIPLES!!”
The Eight tells the story of the Lemmon slave case, a dramatic legal battle over the freedom of eight enslaved people who were brought to New York City while sailing from Virginia to Texas, at which point New York abolitionists initiated a freedom suit on their behalf. The eight-year legal saga that followed reflected escalating political tensions over the fate of American slavery and highlighted the legal contradictions that complicated a half-slave, half-free nation.
Black Loyalists in the Evacuation of New York City, 1783
By L. Goulet and Mary Tsaltas-Ottomanelli
From 1776, the city stood as the stronghold of British operations in the thirteen colonies. The last British officials departed on November 25, ending their seven-year occupation of the city. We remember this event today as Evacuation Day. It was once a celebrated holiday but has since been largely forgotten by the public. Public commemorations primarily concentrated on the return of Patriot forces. It is crucial to move beyond the narrow focus and highlight the importance of expanding public memory to include the experiences of Loyalists who evacuated and the thousands of Black Loyalists who sought their freedom.
Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City
Review by Emily Holloway
In 1788… a mere 62 bales were shipped to Europe via New York, compared to 153,757 less than thirty years later (2)….Despite the lengthy and arduous journey, tourists, planters, and writers flocked to the city... During their visits, these elite southerners – many of whom owned cotton plantations -- were rubbing elbows with New York’s mercantile and financial leaders,… The close social ties that developed between these classes built on their intimate financial connections through cotton… southern writers remarked critically on the vast economic inequality on display throughout the rapidly growing city, a characteristic they frequently tied to the machinations of industrial capitalism. This critique was frequently deployed as a reaction to northern abolitionist sentiments, a false equivalence between the ravages of industrial “wage slavery” and the racist violence of plantation slavery.
Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry
Review by Emily Holloway
Maskiell argues that both social groups – the enslavers and the enslaved – built, maintained, and challenged their respective terms of community and belonging, whether through diplomacy or corporate mergers disguised as marriage arrangements or by sustaining regional networks of contacts to foment rebellion and resistance. The text at times navigates a vast geographic scale, but successfully keeps the narrative grounded in the roots of elite Dutch society in seventeenth century New Netherlands…The overall book project seeks to illuminate the incremental and cumulative changes along with the continuities linking Dutch colonial practices to English colonial institutions in the transition from New Netherlands to New York.
The Pirate’s Wife: the Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd
Review by Kevin McDonald
…[S]he has produced a lively and entertaining biography of Sarah Kidd, from her arrival to the city through her multiple marriages and business dealings, with the book’s main focus on her relationship with William and the aftermath of his notorious demise. The narrative hits full sail when the privateer-turned-pirate returns from the Indian Ocean and Sarah becomes his accomplice in crime. Overall, the book is a stirring and fast paced yarn that helps reveal another layer of the Kidd saga, and more broadly suggests that the old axiom, “behind every great man is a great woman,” might be true even when dealing with pirates.
Sojourner Truth: How the Enslaved Woman of a Dutch-New York Family Became an Icon of America’s Black Liberation Movement
By Jerome Dewulf
…[A]ssisting in the recruitment of Black troops for the Union Army… she had an audience with President Lincoln in 1864… in Washington, D.C., Truth challenged the de facto segregation in the city’s transportation system by insisting on her right to take a seat on streetcars. With her decision to use civil disobedience as a strategy to challenge segregation in public transportation, Truth anticipated Rosa Parks by almost a century. However, Truth could also be an uncomfortable voice within her own community. For instance, when Douglass defended the use of violence in the fight for racial justice at a meeting in 1852, she interrupted him with the words “Frederick, is God gone?” and, in 1867, she provocatively stated that “if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs... the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
Dutch-American Stories: The Tale of the White Horse: The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland
By Dennis J. Maika
The first direct shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in New Amsterdam in 1655. The voyage of the White Horse came in the wake of significant changes in the Dutch Atlantic. In this blog, American historian Dennis Maika outlines how family and business connections shaped the development of a slave-trading center in Manhattan.
Being Black in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam vs. New Amsterdam
By Jeroen Dewulf
Due to a paucity of original sources, many questions regarding the social and religious behavior of New Amsterdam’s Black population have remained unanswered. One way of approaching the existing scholarship with new insights is by using a comparative methodology. Naturally, the observation that similarities in behavior existed in more than one place does not automatically imply that the origin and historical development of one corresponds to that of the other. However, since it is unlikely that many new sources about Manhattan’s earliest Black inhabitants will still be uncovered in the coming decades, a comparative perspective is probably the best strategy to shed new light on this historically marginalized community.
