It’s weird trying to think of New York in the colonial era. For our whole lives we’ve known N.Y.C. as an overcrowded metropolis with huge buildings and bustling streets. It’s hard to imagine Manhattan as a small log cabin, farming community run on slave labor. We all know Colonial Americans kept slaves in this time period but just from studying the Civil War and segregation we generally associate slavery with the south. But it does make sense considering the heavy Dutch population in early New York, being that the Dutch were a huge factor in expanding the “triangle trade” that brought a huge amount of slaves here from Africa and the Caribbean. Also I remember learning in High school about how the north was against the consideration of slaves as people because they didn’t want the south to dominate political contests where population was a factor. That only added to this idea of the slave population being inferior to the European colonists.
It’s hard to tell where America would be if it wasn’t for slave labor. Sadly, slave labor has been a huge part of many cultures. Would the Roman Empire or Ancient Egypt have expanded like they did without slaves? It’s impossible to say. In America, slavery was a huge force pushing the early colonial economy along. Therefore it can be said that New York wouldn’t be the same today without slaves because it would not have been able to sustain itself financially. It seems intolerance was not regionally specific. The north could be just as intolerant as the south because the white Europeans held a belief that African American’s were the only ones fit to be slaves. By seeming to be more “lenient”, northern slave owners were not being less cruel, they were just being cruel in a different way. They were made to believe they had it better than other slaves even though they were still viewed as property. Northern slave owners awarded no special opportunities and did their best to squash any attempt at freedom African Americans tried to take. They were hardly different from southern slave owners. It is horrible how colonists treated African Americans, however America only became “The Land of Opportunity”, because those who didn’t have any opportunities were the driving force behind the expansion of the American economy.
