Lower Manhattan Marks Juneteenth
Lower Manhattan boasts a historical connection to slavery both proud and melancholy. Enslaved Africans first arrived in what was then called New Amsterdam in the 1620s. By 1741, they comprised nearly one-fourth of New York’s population, and the City’s headcount of Black men and women in bondage was second only to that of Charleston, South Carolina. In that year, a rash of fires was ascribed to an alleged plot among slaves and impoverished white residents. For good measure, British colonial administrators also charged that both the cabal and the fires were inspired by secret allegiance to the Vatican. By the time the hysteria had subsided, dozens of supposed conspirators had been burned at the stake or hanged.
Once the site of a slave market, the palisade for which Wall Street is named was built partially with the labor of enslaved persons. Then, as now, a financial center of the world, Lower Manhattan was the home to banks that issued individual loans, property insurance policies, and even mass-market bonds that financed the trade behind “the peculiar institution.”
New York began to change in 1799, when the State legislature ratified the Gradual Emancipation Act, requiring that children born into slavery after that year be freed, but only after working as indentured servants until their mid-20s. In 1817, lawmakers decided that everyone not covered by this law (those born before 1799) would be freed a decade later. In 1827, the last 10,000 African-Americans held in bondage were legally emancipated. In an early version of Juneteenth, they celebrated their liberty on July 5 (the day after they were freed), because of well-founded fear that white crowds gathered for Independence Day festivities might form lynch mobs.
In 1838, the brilliant abolitionist leader and writer Frederick Douglass first arrived in New York. Freshly escaped from slavery in Maryland, he is believed to have landed at a now-vanished dock near what is today Stuyvesant High School. Douglass later wrote, “the flight was a bold and perilous one; but here I am, in the great city of New York, safe and sound, without loss of blood and bone. In less than a week after leaving Baltimore, I was walking amid the hurrying throng, and gazing upon the dazzling wonders of Broadway. The dreams of my childhood and the purposes of my manhood were now fulfilled.”
But, Douglass noted, New York was an intimidating new world: “A man, homeless, shelterless, breadless, friendless, and moneyless, is not in a condition to assume a very proud or joyous tone; and in just this condition was I, while wandering about the streets of New York City, and lodging, at least one night, among the barrels on one of its wharves. I was not only free from slavery, but I was free from home, as well.”
Douglass rose to fame in the decades that followed, and lived to witness the Civil War, during which he evolved from a critic, to an ally, and finally a friend of Abraham Lincoln. The president deputized the former slave to lead recruiting efforts to enlist Black soldiers in the Union Army. Douglass attended Lincoln’s second inaugural as a guest of the newly reelected president, who said of the two sides arrayed on the battlefield, “both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish…. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.”
Afterward, Lincoln asked the wordsmith what he thought of the speech. Douglass pronounced it, “a sacred effort.”
A few weeks later, back in New York, Douglass was called upon to deliver a eulogy for the recently slain Lincoln. He said, “it was my privilege to know Abraham Lincoln and to know him well. I saw and conversed with him at different times during his administration, and upon two occasions at least by his special invitation. He was the first American President, who thus rose above the prejudices of his times, and country.”
Shortly after Douglass’s eulogy in New York, General Gordon Granger marched into Galveston, Texas (the last remaining state of the Confederacy to come under Union control) on June 19, 1865. On the day we now celebrate as Juneteenth, standing at the head of a column of 2,000 Union troops, he read the following announcement: “the people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
What Granger, Douglass, and Lincoln might have found difficult to imagine is that this moment—which appeared to be the end of a tragic narrative—was merely the prologue of a different, longer story, which continues to be written.