When we think of slavery, we usually think of the American South. However, it is important to remember that slavery existed in all 13 British North American colony. The fact that slavery was more common in the South should not obscure the fact that African Americans were enslaved in both the mid-Atlantic and New England colonies as well. In the North, slavery was most prominent in major port cities such as New York and Philadelphia. Slaves performed a variety of types of labor in the north including working on the docks and working as artisans. Slavery was abolished in the northern states several decades before it was abolished in the southern states. Quakers in Pennsylvania were among the first to advocate for the abolition of slavery. The American Revolution stimulated reconsideration of the issue of slavery in the north. Many northern political leaders believed that slavery was inconsistent with the ideals of the American Revolution. In the early republic, all northern states adopted plans for either immediate or, more commonly, gradual emancipation. By 1835, slavery had been abolished in the northern states.
Northern Slavery
By 1775, Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were the five largest cities in British North America. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston had populations of approximately 40,000; 25,000; 16,000; and 12,000 people, respectively. Urban society was highly stratified. At the base of the social ladder were the laboring classes, which included both enslaved and free persons ranging from apprentices to master craftsmen. Next came the middling sort: shopkeepers, artisans, and skilled mariners. Above them stood the merchant elites who tended to be actively involved in the city’s social and political affairs, as well as in the buying, selling, and trading of goods. Enslaved men and women had a visible presence in both northern and southern cities.
In port cities, slaves often worked as domestic servants and in skilled trades: distilleries, shipyards, lumberyards, and ropewalks. Between 1725 and 1775, slavery became increasingly significant in the northern colonies as urban residents sought greater participation in the maritime economy. Massachusetts was the first slave-holding colony in New England. New York traced its connections to slavery and the slave trade back to the Dutch settlers of New Netherland in the seventeenth century. Philadelphia also became an active site of the Atlantic slave trade, and slaves accounted for nearly 8% of the city’s population in 1770.
Slavery was an important institution in the mid-Atlantic colonies. While New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania never developed plantation economies, slaves were often employed on larger farms growing cereal grains. Enslaved Africans worked alongside European tenant farmers on New York’s Hudson Valley “patroonships,” huge tracts of land granted to a few early Dutch families. As previously mentioned, slaves were also a common sight in Philadelphia, New York City, and other ports where they worked in the maritime trades and domestic service. New York City’s economy was so reliant on slavery that over 40% of its population was enslaved by 1700, while 15-20% of Pennsylvania’s colonial population was enslaved by 1750. In New York, the high density of slaves and a particularly diverse European population increased the threat of rebellion. A 1712 slave rebellion in New York City resulted in the deaths of 9 white colonists. In retribution, 21 slaves were executed and 6 others committed suicide before they could be burned alive. In 1741, authorities uncovered another planned rebellion by African slaves, free blacks, and poor whites. Panic unleashing a witch-hunt that only stopped after 32 slaves and free blacks and 5 poor whites were executed. Another 70 slaves were deported, likely to the sugar cane fields of the West Indies.
Increasingly uneasy about the growth of slavery in the region, Quakers were the first group to turn against slavery. Quaker beliefs in radical non-violence and the fundamental equality of all human souls made slavery hard to justify. Most commentators argued that slavery originated in war, where captives were enslaved rather than executed. To pacifist Quakers, then, the very foundation of slavery was illegitimate. Furthermore Quaker belief in the equality of souls challenged the racial basis of slavery. By 1758, Quakers in Pennsylvania disowned members who engaged in the slave trade, and by 1772 slave-owning Quakers could be expelled from their meetings. These local activities in Pennsylvania had broad implications as the decision to ban slavery and slave trading was debated in Quaker meetings throughout the English-speaking world. The free black population in Philadelphia and other northern cities also continually agitated against slavery.
Slavery as a system of labor never took off in Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Hampshire, though it was legal throughout the region. The absence of cash crops like tobacco or rice minimized the economic use of slavery. In Massachusetts, only about 2% of the population was enslaved as late as the 1760s. The few slaves in the colony were concentrated in Boston along with a sizeable free black community that made up about 10% of the city’s population. While slavery itself never really took root in New England, the slave trade was a central element of the region’s economy. Every major port in the region participated to some extent in the transatlantic trade – Newport, Rhode Island alone had at least 150 ships active in the trade by 1740 – and New England also provided foodstuffs and manufactured goods to West Indian plantations.
The fight for liberty in the American Revolution led some Americans to manumit their slaves, and most of the new northern states soon passed gradual emancipation laws. The Revolution’s rhetoric of equality created a “revolutionary generation” of slaves and free black Americans that would eventually encourage the antislavery movement. Slave revolts began to incorporate claims for freedom based on revolutionary ideals.
By the early-nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish slavery. Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution. Pennsylvania’s emancipation act of 1780 stipulated that freed children serve an indenture term of twenty-eight years. Gradualism brought emancipation while also defending the interests of Northern masters and controlling still another generation of black Americans. In 1804 New Jersey became the last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of jubilee, as many Northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers. Such laws also stipulated that such children remain in indentured servitude to their mother’s master in order to compensate the slaveholder’s loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this system in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him bound to his mother’s master until age twenty five.
Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by masters. But escape was dangerous and voluntary manumission rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a fugitive slave a federal crime as early as 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer, as few Northern slaveholders emancipated their own slaves. Roughly one-fifth of the white families in New York City owned slaves, and fewer than 80 slaveholders in the city voluntarily manumitted slaves between 1783 and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North. Elderly Connecticut slaves remained in bondage as late as 1848, and in New Jersey slavery endured until after the Civil War.
Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free black population of fewer than 60,000 in 1790 increased to more than 186,000 by 1810. Growing free black communities fought for their civil rights. In a number of New England locales, free African Americans could vote and send their children to public schools. Most northern states granted black citizens property rights and trial by jury. African Americans owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, established churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.
Nationally, however, the slave population continued to grow, from less than 700,000 in 1790 to more than 1.5 million by 1820. The growth of abolition in the North and the acceleration of slavery in the South created growing divisions. Cotton drove the process more than any other crop.
Source: The American Yawp. A Free and Online, Collaboratively Built American History Textbook, 2017-2018 Edition.
Northern Slavery
No northern or middle colony was without its slaves. From Puritan Massachusetts to Quaker Pennsylvania, Africans lived in bondage. Economics and geography did not promote the need for slave importation like the plantation South. Consequently, the slave population remained small compared to their southern neighbors. While laws throughout the region recognized the existence of slavery, it was far less systematized. Slaves were more frequently granted their freedom, and opposition to the institution was more common, especially in Pennsylvania.
Source: The Growth of Slavery. U.S. History.org. Retrieved from http://www.ushistory.org/us/6c.asp
Slavery was legal and practiced in each of the Thirteen Colonies. Organized political and social movements to end slavery began in the mid-18th century. The desire for freedom from Britain, expressed in the American Revolutionary War, caused many black Americans to join the revolution in hopes they would be freed also. Others joined the British Army, encouraged by British promises of freedom in exchange for military service. After the British lost the war, none of their promises were kept.
In the 1770s, blacks throughout New England began sending petitions to northern legislatures demanding freedom. At the Constitutional Convention many slavery issues were debated and for a time slavery was a major obstacle to passage of the new constitution. As a compromise the institution of slavery was acknowledged although never mentioned directly in the constitution. An example is the Fugitive Slave Clause. By 1789, five of the Northern states had policies that started to gradually abolish slavery: Pennsylvania (1780), New Hampshire and Massachusetts (1783), Connecticut and Rhode Island (1784). Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, while it was still independent. When it joined the United States as the 14th state in 1791, it was the first state to join that had no slavery. By 1804 all of the northern states had abolished slavery or had plans in place to gradually reduce it.
Source: Slave and Free states. Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_and_free_states
Summary
In the seventeenth century and eighteenth century, slavery existed in all of the British North American colonies. In the north, slavery was particularly prevalent in northern port cities such as New York City and Philadelphia. In 1700, approximately forty percent of the population of New York City was enslaved. In the 1760s, approximately 2 percent of the population of Massachusetts was enslaved, with most residing in Boston. By the mid-eighteenth century, opposition to slavery did emerge in northern states. The Quakers were among the first outspoken opponents of slavery. The American Revolution greatly intensified northern opposition to slavery. Slavery seemed inconsistent with the ideals of liberty expressed in revolutionary texts such as the declaration of independent. Between 1777 and 1804, every northern state adopted plans for immediate or, more commonly, gradual emancipation. Vermont became the first state to abolish slavery in 1777. New Jersey was the last northern state to adopt a gradual abolition policy in 1804.
