Between 1790 and 1800, as New York’s economy took off and its population leapt toward the sixty-thousand mark, the absolute number of slaves jumped by nearly 25 percent to twenty-five hundred—one of the sharpest such increases on record. After 1790, moreover, the number of white households relying upon some form of black labor more than tripled, and many of them had purchased their human property quite recently. By 1800 three-fourths of New York’s slaveholders had not owned slaves ten years before.
