New Directions in the Study of Urban Slavery

When workers first discovered an African Burial ground in the heart of Manhattan in 1991, most New Yorkers knew little to nothing about the history of slavery in their city. They associated slavery with southern plantations, when in fact enslaved men, women, and children had lived and labored in their very own city. Even during New York’s first decades as a Dutch settlement, enslaved Africans like Manuel de Gerrit de Reus and Maijken van Angola cultivated the land and helped build what was then New Amsterdam’s infrastructure. Enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and their descendants continued to play an integral role in the city’s development for the next two centuries. Nevertheless, their contributions were generally left out of the city’s narrative. That is until the remains of thousands of enslaved people were discovered below the busy streets of lower Manhattan.

The history of urban slavery in New York City received extensive attention in the decades following this discovery, resulting in several scholarly publications, public events, and an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society. While the wider public just started to learn about the city’s slavery past, scholars had long studied urban slavery in cities like New York. Initially, many of those studies examined urban slavery in comparison to plantation slavery. Works by, among others, Richard Wade, Claudia Dale Goldin, Frederick Bowser, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Barry Higman, Midori Takagi, and Ira Berlin examined enslaved labor in cities, where enslaved people lived, and how their experiences differed from those of their rural counterparts. ¹ Their research proved foundational to the fast-growing body of work on urban slavery in more recent years. Extending beyond the more traditional comparisons between urban and rural slavery, this new scholarship has taken the study of urban slavery into new and often interdisciplinary directions.

Slavery proved integral in all parts of early America, and sometimes in unexpected ways. The books by Tiya Miles and Paul Musselwhite examine the complex dynamics of early American urbanization and the ways in which the history of urbanization and urban areas intersected with that of slavery, slaveholders, and enslaved peoples. Whereas Miles chronicles the little-known history of slavery in Detroit, Musselwhite shows how a system of plantation slavery enabled Chesapeake’s elite planters to challenge urbanization in the region. Although these authors cover vastly different regions and topics, they both contribute to a broader understanding of slavery and urbanization in early America. Yet, their works do not necessarily fit within recent scholarship that explores the complex ways in which slavery, enslaved peoples, and the men and women who held them in bondage shaped the city or were shaped by the urban environment.

Similar to New York City’s history of slavery, that of Detroit remained largely unexplored. As Tiya Miles reveals in Dawn of Detroit, this Midwestern city, a place “we like to imagine as free,” also has a long history of slavery. Miles points out that when Detroiters celebrated the War of 1812 bicentennial and the Civil War sesquicentennial, they often reflected on the city’s role in the underground railroad, yet they rarely discussed the city’s slavery past. This omission led Miles to research the topic. She argues that slavery and enslaved peoples were integral to the city’s development, or as she writes, “Detroit was born of the forced captivity of indigenous and African people” (p. 2). In order to shed light on this past, Miles narrates the complex histories of slavery and contributions by enslaved peoples in Detroit from its founding through abolition. In part, she examines what the imperial changes from French to British and eventually to American meant for the region’s enslaved peoples. For instance, Miles demonstrates that after the passage of the Northwest Ordinance, which supposedly prohibited slavery in the territory, residents continued to practice human bondage. Even newly transplanted Americans who could not legally own people found ways to benefit from enslaved labor (p. 134).

Miles emphasizes that slavery was not always rural or southern. In fact, she points out that in New France slavery was most prevalent in urban areas. Typical of early American cities, Detroit became an important place of interaction of diverse peoples who connected the city to large geographical areas. Free and enslaved Detroiters were often remarkably diverse and transient populations who had connections throughout the Atlantic world. The city’s enslaved population originated in various parts of Africa and the Americas. Enslaved Native Americans, generally referred to in the region as Panis, were especially numerous in Detroit with indigenous women making up the majority of the city’s enslaved population. As was common in urban areas, enslaved Detroiters were forced to complete a wide variety of tasks for the city’s enslavers, which included fur production and transportation.

Paul Musselwhite shows a different side of slavery and early American urbanization in Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth. His book examines Chesapeake elite planters’ resistance to having civic and commercial control centered in cities, so that they could keep political and economic power in their own hands. Consequently, few large towns developed in the region, and when they did these planters often failed to acknowledge them. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, claimed that Virginia had “no towns of any consequence,” when the region did in fact have several substantial urban areas, including Alexandria, Norfolk, and Baltimore (p. 251). Musselwhite traces these planters’ efforts to the earliest Chesapeake settlements and shows how they continued into the eighteenth century. He argues that elite planters resisted centralized, urban power by engaging in contemporary English political-economic debates; indeed, throughout their efforts to decentralize power and commerce, “the idea of urbanity was ubiquitous and deeply influential” (p. 3). In doing so, Musselwhite argues against the more commonly held assumption that the Chesapeake had no significant urban areas due to the region’s natural environment with plenty navigable rivers and a plantation economy that promoted a decentralized plantation society.

These planters fought urbanization to maintain control over their commercial endeavors, but Musselwhite barely discusses the role slavery and enslaved people played in their accumulation of wealth and power. He suggests that “generations of historians have dismissed the fixation on urban development as a fruitless footnote to the story of tobacco and slavery,” and he states that his book challenges this narrative (p. 2). Yet, the absence of the men, women, and children whose labor allowed for this “rise of plantation society in the Chesapeake” is striking, especially since their inclusion would have added an interesting facet to this history.

Both Musselwhite and Miles provide valuable insights into the complex histories of slavery, politics, and urbanization in early America. Nevertheless, these books may not be particularly useful to scholars interested in the dynamics particular to urban slavery. Instead of discussing actual towns or slavery, Musselwhite focuses on efforts to keep Chesapeake cities small and power decentralized, in the hands of elite planters. While Miles examines slavery in a city, she does not really consider the ways in which the urban landscape influenced enslavement or how enslaved Detroiters shaped the city. Thus, these works do not fit the recent historiographical developments of histories that have implemented various methodologies to study urban slavery in new ways. Recent histories have expanded the study of urban slavery in directions that extend beyond merely establishing that urban slavery existed or investigating how it differed from plantation slavery.

Various methodologies help gain a richer understanding of urban slavery. Analysis of architecture, maps, and mapping tools can help reconstruct histories of urban slavery in new ways. In her book on the so-called New York City slave conspiracy, Jill Lepore used GIS technology to provide a more complex recounting of this remarkable event in the city’s history. ² More recently, Marisa Fuentes analyzes maps of Bridgetown to reconstruct how enslaved people would have moved through the city. Rashauna Johnson implements spatial analysis to tell a different history of slavery in New Orleans. And in her work on antebellum art and the domestic slave trade, Maurie McInnis maps Richmond’s slave pens and jails, thus revealing their prevalence in this city. Articles in the recent edited volume by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsberg titled Slavery in the City investigate the built environment to tell more complex histories of urban slavery. ³

Such histories of urban slavery show how enslavers attempted to curtail enslaved people’s mobility and enforce control over them in urban spaces. They reveal how slaveholders used the built environment to assert their supposed undisputable dominance in these spaces. Through design, planning, as well as social and cultural practices in these spaces, they signified that these urban spaces belonged to them. The central location of certain churches and design of homes and streetscapes further reinforced that they defined these communities’ social and cultural foundations. Using practice and legislation, they determined the behavioral norms in these urban spaces. Thus, within these cities, enslaved men and women were always deemed outsiders.

To further their control over the city’s public spaces, slaveholders utilized various systems of surveillance, including curfews, slave patrols or watchmen, or vigilante services, making it difficult for enslaved peoples to travel the city streets unnoticed. Through public enforcement of the various laws and prohibitions, enslavers sought to intimidate enslaved people. Barry Higman argues that it was not unusual for Caribbean towns to contain “visible symbols of public terror in the shape of workhouses, jails, cages, stocks, and treadmills.” ⁴ As Marisa Fuentes points out, in the case of Barbados architectural structures, such as the gaol, whipping post, and execution gallows, served as important symbols of power and control. ⁵ The permanent and public presence of these symbols of discipline and punishment became constant reminders of the power structure in these communities.

Research of New York City shows how the city’s enslavers used the built environment, curfews, watchmen, and pass systems to control the movements of enslaved persons. For instance, in 1713 New York City’s council passed “A Law for Regulating Negro & Indian Slaves in the Night Time,” which, among others, detailed that “it Shall and may be lawfull for any of her Majesties Subjects within the said City to Apprehend such slave or slaves not having such Lathorn and Candle.” ⁶ New York legislation encouraged white individuals to detain black men and women if their activities in the public space appeared illegitimate. In 1726, the city’s council stipulated that free, white people who reported a bondwoman or man breaking the laws should be rewarded by this person’s enslaver. Importantly, enslaved New Yorkers’ mere presence in the city’s public spaces without permission from their enslavers could be considered criminal behavior. With these methods, New York City’s enslaving class created a system that helped control, regulate, and surveil the city’s enslaved population.

While enslavers may have assumed that they sufficiently controlled the movements of the city’s bondmen, enslaved men, women, and children created alternative ways of knowing and navigating these cities to circumvent their enslavers’ surveillance. With the knowledge of their environments, enslaved people created geographies of resistance, or “rival geographies” as Stephanie Camp calls them, in which they resisted their enslavers’ control over their movements and activities. ⁷ Although slaveholders were acutely aware of the fact that their enslaved laborers developed various strategies to temporarily escape their oversight, they believed that the systems of control and surveillance they had put in place would at least curtail any prohibited behavior. As Bernard Herman noted in the case of Charleston, white people often assumed that enslaved people traversed the city in the same ways that they did; instead, enslaved men and women used their enslavers’ false confidence to navigate their communities unnoticed. ⁸

That enslaved men and women often navigated these cities differently from their white counterparts should not have been surprising to the city’s slaveholders. In New York, for instance, a 1740 law that prohibited enslaved men and women from trading corn, peaches, and other fruits detailed that enslaved New Yorkers were indeed selling produce in the public streets as well as in “houses, out houses & yards.” ⁹ Moreover, enslaved men and women often lived and worked in cellars and behind their enslavers’ living spaces, which gave them a different perspective of the city. In fact, as Bernard Herman’s work on enslaved people’s living quarters in Charleston shows, enslaved people often created some sense of privacy and control in the spaces they inhabited. ¹⁰ Similarly, Jared Hardesty found that enslaved Bostonians often used their enslaver’s kitchen to receive guests, which suggests that they may have considered these kitchens their domain. ¹¹ In New York City, free New Yorkers had very little control or oversight over the backyards and alleyways through which enslaved people moved, especially at night. Developing such alternatives to navigating the city, enslaved people circumvented the mechanisms implemented to ensure white control.

Such urban histories of slavery go beyond a mere discussion of slavery in these cities. Unlike the works reviewed here, they use various techniques to show how slaveholders and enslaved people used and navigated the urban landscape, how they shaped their environment, and how the city shaped their lives. Certainly, Miles’s research of Detroit adds an important narrative to the history of slavery in early America, a history that is still often assumed rural and southern. Just as New York City’s history of slavery was rarely acknowledged in the 1990s, Detroit’s slavery past remains unknown to most. Yet, her work does not examine how, for instance, Detroit’s architecture and layout helped enforce slavery in the city. While the works by Miles and Musselwhite provide significant contributions to the scholarship of urbanization and slavery in early America, they might be of less interest to urban historians who are interested in the ways in which slavery, enslaved peoples, and their experiences shaped and were shaped by the urban environment.