It seems to me that the image of slavery has been portrayed in a few different ways throughout history. It was interesting to learn that not all Whites who owned slaves treated them brutally or completely unequal. In many cases, slaves were given liberties by their owners, which were not granted to all slaves. Oftentimes, slaves’ lives would be spared by their owners, in exchange for only a severe punishment after they had comitted a crime or other wrongdoing.
In the very beginning, settlers came to America looking for economic opportunity, religious freedom, and social security. After time, however, the colonies hit a sort of stand-still concerning growth. The last years under Dutch rule, there was an advancement in the growth and population of New Amsterdam. In order to continue their flourishing growth-spurt, labor needed a boost. Many of the settlers were either unwilling or just too unconcerned to pick up the slack, and instead began to use slaves as a labor source. This source never ran out or was weakened, because the slaves would mate and bring new slave babies into the picture (of course these babies didn’t start work right away).
There was much ironing out to do with this source of labor. In the beginning, there were many loopholes and not many laws ensuring the slave status of the Africans imported to the colonies. As time went on, curfews were implemented, laws were passed, and slavery became more solidified. Originally, the law that no Christian could be used for forced labor, included all Black Christians. But once the Whites realized their slaves were escaping slavery this way, a new law was soon passed, stating that the religion of Africans didn’t matter. Slaves were given basic rights, like the right to own property and the right to petition against their owners, until this too began to be used against slaveowners.
When New England and New Amsterdam joined together to create New York, slavery continued, and New York was one of the largest areas to use slavery and one of the highest black-populated areas. However, as the Binders and Reimers article points out, when the Northeastern areas created the Dominion of New England, New York City became merely an outlying city, and was no longer a main port for slave entry.
In The Shadow of Slavery, it is outlined the way that slave labor was necessary for America to grow and prosper the way it did. Without slavery, the economy of the Northeast would have fallen apart centuries ago. In Manhattan alone, 40% of all households had at least one slave. Slaves constituted the majority of New York City’s working class.
Eventually in 1827, however, slavery was finally completely abolished. But the long-lived existance of slavery is very telling of it’s influence in America’s growth and development. Without slavery in colonial times, we would, right now, still be in the midst of an undeveloped nation, living in New York City, which would still also be undeveloped, unaccepting of other cultures and religions, and unadvanced in all the ways we currently are.
