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July 27 - November 9, 2022
It became so profitable to raise sugar that West Indian planters, preferring to cover their land in cane rather than waste it growing food or raising stock, turned to New England and the Middle Colonies for essential supplies.
But in the opening years of the eighteenth century the West Indian market became a cornerstone of the city’s economy. By 1720 or so half the ships entering or leaving the port were on their way to or from the Caribbean; another one-quarter to one-third were on their way to or from other North American colonies, moving goods often as not destined for reexport to the Caribbean. Outward
Success was never a foregone conclusion. Pirates ceased to plague the Caribbean after a British expedition ran down Edward Teach (“Blackbeard”) in 1718. Even so, untimely gluts or shortages, bad weather, poor judgment by a master or supercargo, an unexpected outbreak of war—any one of them could doom a voyage and bring its sponsors to ruin.
What Beekman and men like him almost never did was invest their profits in plantations. Trade, not production, was the New Yorkers’ forte, and they tended to think of the West Indian plutocracy as wildly dissolute and irresponsible. Nor did more than a handful of them engage in direct trade with England. Local products alone couldn’t fetch high enough prices in the mother country to pay for imported manufactures. Also, because the prevailing winds blew out of the west, getting back to New York from, say, Bristol or Liverpool was a hazardous and time-consuming proposition. Ships outward bound
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Trade, not production, was the New Yorkers’ forte, and they tended to think of the West Indian plutocracy as wildly dissolute and irresponsible. Nor did more than a handful of them engage in direct trade with England. Local products alone couldn’t fetch high enough prices in the mother country to pay for imported manufactures. Also, because the prevailing winds blew out of the west, getting back to New York from, say, Bristol or Liverpool was a hazardous and time-consuming proposition. Ships outward bound from British ports usually took tropical routes to the New World, dropping down to
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The net result was the economic triangulation of three strikingly different systems of production: the small-farm hinterlands of northern seaports, the slave-labor plantations of the Caribbean, and the wage-labor workshops of early industrial England. New York now lived by feeding the slaves who made the sugar that fed the workers who made the clothes and other finished wares that New Yorkers didn’t make for themselves.
New York now lived by feeding the slaves who made the sugar that fed the workers who made the clothes and other finished wares that New Yorkers didn’t make for themselves.
Finally, New York’s developing connection to the West Indies brought a sharply higher frequency of epidemic disease. A ship from the islands was blamed for a major outbreak of smallpox in 1690, and after the turn of the century malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical scourges became an all too familiar part of life in the city.
In the city itself, where cheap labor was always in short supply, the economic advantages of slaveowning became harder to overlook as greater availability brought down costs. By the early eighteenth century, the price of a prime slave was roughly equivalent to the annual wages of a skilled craftsman, and direct imports began to soar. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, twenty-four hundred slaves would be legally imported into New York, with another five thousand to follow over the next fifty years (maybe six hundred or so of whom would be smuggled in):
By 1746 African Americans comprised about 21 percent of the city’s residents—more than 2,440 in a total population of nearly 11,720. This was the highest concentration of slaves north of Virginia. At least half the city’s households now contained one or more slaves.
The same demand for labor that led New Yorkers to purchase slaves in record numbers stimulated an upsurge of immigration from Europe in the early decades of the eighteenth century. First to arrive were the Palatine Germans. Mostly Lutherans and Calvinists, they had barely recovered from the terrible devastation of the Thirty Years War when they were overrun, again and again, by the armies of Louis XIV during Queen Anne’s War.
By the end of 1709 at least thirteen thousand German refugees had already crowded into London, and thousands more were said to be on the way.
Roughly two out of three were the so-called Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish, the descendants of hundreds of thousands of Scottish Presbyterians driven by chronic poverty and religious persecution to settle Ireland’s northern counties during the seventeenth century.
After 1720 Dutch was almost exclusively reserved for private communication or worship. Subsequent attempts to provide Dutch-language schooling for the young invariably failed, and by the early 1740s even bilingualism was a thing of the past.
Dutchess, Orange, and Ulster counties remained predominately Dutch for years; Albany was almost exclusively Dutch, and would long remain so. Overall, nevertheless, the Dutch now constituted a clearly dwindling minority of the colony’s population, and Dutch settlements outside the city were becoming more clannishly isolated from the rest of the world.
According to the 1730 census, New York’s population stood at 8,622: 7,045 whites and 1,577 blacks. That same year, a comprehensive property assessment revealed that the richest 10 percent of the city’s taxable population, some 140 merchants and landowners, held almost half its taxable wealth. By contrast, 49 percent of white taxables held property worth ten pounds or less—a pathetically meager sum, indicating that around one-third of all whites were more or less destitute. On the assumption that virtually all blacks were no better off, nearly three-fifths of the city’s inhabitants thus lived
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By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the comparatively broad rights enjoyed by slaves under Dutch rule—to hold property, to carry a weapon, to serve in the militia, to sue in court, to obtain half-freedom—had all been whittled down or stripped away. New York’s first comprehensive slave code, adopted in 1702, underscored the association of slavery with black skin by banning the enslavement of Indians and defining indentured servitude as a condition for whites only.
At the height of the hysteria, nearly half the city’s male slaves over sixteen years of age were in jail.
By 1756 an envious Benjamin Franklin observed “that New York is growing immensely rich, by Money brought into it from all Quarters for the Pay and Subsistence of the Troops.”
All told, between 1739 and 1763 legalized plunder poured something like two million pounds into the pockets of two hundred or so investors—an immense accession of wealth at a time when, as Gerard G. Beekman observed, an income of three hundred pounds a year was sufficient to live “Like a Gentleman” in New York. Not all of this was profit, of course. As a rule, the crew of a privateer signed on for 60 percent of the value of prizes taken. An experienced captain received an extra two to three hundred pounds for a voyage of nine or twelve months.
By midcentury roughly half of all British shipping was engaged in trade with the American colonies, and the colonies were buying nine hundred thousand pounds’ worth of British products annually—around 25 percent of all Britain’s exports and 50 percent of all manufactures other than woolens. By the early 1760s that figure had soared to over two million pounds. (Because the Navigation Acts prohibited direct imports from other European countries, 80 percent of the finished wares shipped to New York from British ports were of British origin.)
Most privateers came home empty-handed, however, and in nearly two decades of war the average tar probably received no more than eleven pounds for his troubles. Assuming he came home at all, that is: one out of every two or three was killed, captured by the enemy, or injured.
Outraged by the Boston Tea Party, the government in London had meanwhile resolved to make an example of Massachusetts. From its point of view, it could do no less. Ten years of American defiance had upset a trading empire worth thirty million pounds a year in combined imports and exports. Besides, when perhaps only one in thirty Englishmen could vote, and at a time of ballooning internal disorder, American theories of representation struck at the very heart of Britain’s political and social order.
George III himself declared: “The colonists must be reduced to absolute obedience, if need be, by the ruthless use of force.” (Otherwise, he would later say, India, Ireland, and the rest of England’s possessions would go their own way as well, and “this Island, reduced to itself, would be a poor Island indeed.”)
It was the largest force ever assembled in the colonies and the largest British expeditionary force in history thus far, marshaling better than 40 percent of all men and ships on active duty in the Royal Navy.
During the next half-dozen years, additional thousands of slaves from Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Westchester County ran off—a revolution-within-a-revolution that dwarfed the events of 1712 and 1741.
Merchants lost patience with the maddeningly arbitrary system of restrictions, passes, and permits; it didn’t help that the wharves and warehouses of loyal traders were often summarily commandeered for military use, or that the Royal Navy routinely harassed privateers on the grounds that they lured away too many of His Majesty’s sailors. Merchants and seamen alike railed against the press gangs that periodically scoured the city to fill out crews.
White New Yorkers of all classes disapproved of the city’s increasingly conspicuous population of free blacks and runaway slaves.
With blocks of scorched and crumbling ruins at their backs, civilians and military personnel waged prolonged, sometimes violent struggles for the possession of anything with four walls and a roof. Rents rose 400 percent in the first year of the occupation alone.
Food and fuel were as hard to come by as fresh air. Within one year of the British takeover, driven by the combination of military and civilian demand, the cost of food in the city jumped 800 percent.
Some years after the war, on his way to the gallows for forgery, Cunningham confessed to murdering as many as two thousand American prisoners by starvation, hanging, or poisoning their flour rations with arsenic.
All told, the British employed at least twenty of these ships in the course of the war, using them first for captives taken during the Battle of Long Island and then exclusively for seamen taken on the high seas. The conditions on board were atrocious—hundreds of men packed together in squalid, reeking holds without adequate food or water and brutalized by their guards.
British orders in council of July and December 1783 opened the British Isles to American trade but banned American meat, fish, and dairy products from the British West Indies and restricted trade in all other goods to British ships—a tremendous blow to the livelihood of every merchant and artisan in town, not to mention commercial farmers and stockmen in the city’s hinterland.
It didn’t improve matters that Spain and France, having opened their West Indian possessions to American trade during the war, promptly closed them again with the return of peace.
In fact, New York became the first state to officially disfranchise women when the constitution of 1777 specifically defined the electorate as male.
At the Poughkeepsie convention, New York Federalists had more or less promised that the federal government would remain in New York if the Constitution were ratified. Now, shocked and embarrassed by this latest turn of events, they geared up for a fight to keep the federal government in the city as long as possible (or, failing that, to locate the federal district along, say, the Susquehanna, or even in Baltimore).
Manhattan lacked the water power necessary for mills and factories. City real estate was already very expensive, almost prohibitively so for high-risk ventures that might take years to show a profit. Inexperienced management, the lack of up-to-date technology, and competition from low-cost British imports compounded the problem.
The consequences for New York were astounding. Between the early 1790s and 1807, the value of imports through the city rose from $1.4 million to $7.6 million. By the later 1790s New York had pulled decisively ahead of Philadelphia as the leading port of entry in the United States.
More striking still was the jump in exports through New York, which went from around $2.5 million in 1790 to $26 million in 1806, a tenfold increase. By 1799 the port handled nearly one-third the nation’s overseas trade; almost one-fourth its coasting trade also moved through the East River waterfront.
That New York possessed one of the best harbors in the world—deep, directly accessible to the open sea, and rarely blocked by ice, even in the depths of winter—was an old story. But those assets counted for relatively little until the final decade of the eighteenth century, when merchants began to employ big, deep-draft vessels—brigs, barks, and ships—that could make Philadelphia, one hundred miles from the mouth of Delaware Bay, only on a flood tide.
All told, between 1790 and 1800 the population of New York State rose from 340,000 to 589,000—the great majority of the increase attributable to the rapid occupation of the frontier. By 1810 the state had 959,000 inhabitants, nearly three times as many as when Washington was first inaugurated.
By 1798 cotton already accounted for half of the city’s domestic exports; a decade later one-fourth of the cotton reaching Liverpool from the United States came through the East River waterfront. Eventually, New York superintended so great a share of the South’s output that forty cents of every dollar paid for southern cotton allegedly wound up in the pockets of city merchants.
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.
Once it was a safe assumption that virtually any African American in New York was enslaved. By 1800 well over half the city’s black residents were free, and the impact of this shift on the city’s racial dynamics was profound.
And not only did African Americans receive equal pay for equal work, but maritime custom and the rough egalitarianism of deep-sea tars helped insulate skilled black seamen from white antagonism and broke down racial barriers. Black and white sailors not only lived, worked, and ate together, they often looked alike, wearing their hair in queues secured with eelskin and tattooing themselves with a similar array of anchors, mermaids, and crucifixes.
In 1800 one in ten merchants or professionals listed separate houses and workplaces in city directories. By 1810 better than half did so.
Burr, who had pronounced Wollstonecraft’s Vindication “a work of genius” and vowed to read it aloud to his wife, had their daughter, Theodosia, tutored in Latin and Greek; at the age of nine she was reading two hundred lines of Homer and half a dozen pages of Lucian every day.
Similarly, emancipated men and women quickly abandoned the surnames of their former Dutch or English masters, choosing replacements that affirmed their release from bondage (Freeman) or advertised their artisanal skills (Cooper, Mason, Carpenter).
When the popular actor John Hodgkinson appeared in the red coat of a British officer, hecklers wouldn’t allow him to continue until he had explained, at length, that he was merely playing the part of an unworthy character.
In a single stroke, moreover, the embargo brought a decade of unprecedented American prosperity to a dead stop. Exports tumbled 80 percent in 1808. Imports fell 60 percent.
