Blacks had begun dressing like wealthy white men and women, particularly on Sundays—“negro day”—when the city’s free Blacks supplanted whites in promenading along the Battery. One white visitor, in a letter to his wife, described how “the negro wenches crowd the streets in the height of fashion,” their male counterparts—“the n—r bucks”—doing the same. He found it risible. “All through the week they sweat and bark in the sun with a slouch hat, shirt sleeves rolled up and on Sundays they dress up in fine clothes, wear a silk hat and gloves.” He told his wife it was “enough to make a horse
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