History of slavery in New York (state)

The trafficking of enslaved Africans to what became New York began as part of the Dutch slave trade. The Dutch West India Company trafficked eleven enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam in 1626, with the first slave auction held in New Amsterdam in 1655.^[1] With the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies (after Charleston, South Carolina), more than 42% of New York City households enslaved African people by 1703, often as domestic servants and laborers.^[2] Others worked as artisans or in shipping and various trades in the city. Enslaved Africans were also used in farming on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, as well as the Mohawk Valley region.

During the American Revolutionary War, the British troops occupied New York City in 1776. The Philipsburg Proclamation promised freedom to enslaved persons who left rebel masters, and thousands moved to the city for refuge with the British. By 1780, 10,000 Black people lived in New York. Many had escaped from their enslavers who lived in both northern and southern colonies. After the war, the British evacuated about 3,000 enslaved people from New York, taking most of them to resettle as free people in Nova Scotia, where they are known as Black Loyalists.

Of the Northern states, New York was next to last in abolishing slavery. (In New Jersey, mandatory, unpaid "apprenticeships" did not end until the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, in 1865.)^[3]: 44

After the American Revolution, the New York Manumission Society was founded in 1785 to work for the abolition of slavery and to aid free Black people. The state passed a 1799 law for gradual abolition, a law which freed no living slave. After that date, children born to enslaved mothers were required to work for the mother's enslaver as indentured servants until age 28 (men) and 25 (women). The last enslaved persons were freed of this obligation on July 4, 1827 (28 years after 1799).^[1] African Americans celebrated with a parade.

Upstate New York, in contrast with New York City, was an anti-slavery leader. The first meeting of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society opened in Utica, although local hostility caused the meeting to be moved to the home of Gerrit Smith, in nearby Peterboro. The Oneida Institute, near Utica, briefly the center of American abolitionism, accepted both Black and white male enrollees on an equal basis, as did for women the Young Ladies' Domestic Seminary in nearby Clinton. New-York Central College, near Cortland, was an abolitionist institution of higher learning founded by Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor, that accepted all students without prejudice: male and female, white, Black, and Native American, the first college in the United States to do so from the day its doors opened. It was also the first college to have Black professors teaching white students. However, when a Black male faculty member, William G. Allen, married a white student, they had to flee the country for England, never to return.