In the early hours of a September morning in 1794, the Fair American drifted gently on the tide into New York harbor. Awakened by unaccustomed sounds and eager for his first glimpse of America, William Strickland, an English gentleman farmer, hurried on deck. His first reaction was one of disappointment. He had expected to be intrigued by the unfamiliar sights of a New World city. Instead, he beheld “a forest of masts, some hundreds of vessels surrounding,” just as one might expect to see “on the Thames below London bridge.” As Strickland poked inquisitively around the city during the next...

The New York that William Strickland observed in 1794 had already begun the dramatic growth that would soon make it the most important city in the United States. With its splendid harbor (open, unlike Philadelphia’s, for virtually all of the year), a rapidly developing agricultural hinterland, and easy access to the increasingly important upstate frontier, the city had begun to outstrip both Boston and Philadelphia, its main eighteenth-century rivals. The state’s speedily growing population—up 356 percent between 1780 and 1810 compared with Pennsylvania’s rise of 148 percent—continually boosted the amount of trade passing through its major commercial center....

In a letter to Egbert Benson in 1780, John Jay asserted that unless America introduced a gradual abolition measure “her Prayers to Heaven for Liberty will be impious.” It was a maxim in God’s court as well as in the new nation’s own “that those who ask for Equity ought to do it.”¹ The seeming paradox of a nation fighting to throw off the “slavery” of England while still holding several hundred thousand blacks in bondage, which had troubled John Jay, continued to perplex many of his contemporaries. The speculation and soul-searching it produced were important factors in the surge...

In the 1830s Alexander Coventry, who spent much of his life in the lower Hudson River valley, set down the impressions he had formed in the 1780s and 1790s of the conditions of blacks in that region. Though these blacks were then enslaved the writer felt “warranted in asserting that the laboring class in no country lived more easy, were better clothed and fed, or had more of life.”¹ The assessment may have been tinged with nostalgia, but Coventry’s judgment merely echoed those of other observers of slavery in New York, and indeed in the North as a whole. Half...

In early July 1787 two Schenectady slaves fetching their master’s cows came upon a pocket book lying on the ground. Later, another black was able to identify the five notes inside the pocket book as ten-pound bills, but the three were given little time to enjoy their good fortune. Before long they had been charged with passing counterfeit notes and committed to jail in nearby Albany.

Newspapers throughout the state reported the incident, in part because forged currency was a matter of concern to the business community, but also because the story provided ground for risible speculation concerning black behavior....

In August 1814, as the British naval blockade of New York tightened, the “free people of color” called a public meeting and resolved to offer their services to the city’s Committee of Defense. To this end, a notice was inserted in the New York Evening Post instructing the blacks to assemble in the Park at five o’clock on Monday morning and then to proceed to Brooklyn Heights to assist in erecting fortifications. The subsequent labors of this group were of little practical value, as the expected attack did not materialize; later that week the British forces sailed up the Potomac...

As Elihu Smith, a young physician, and William Dunlap, his dramatist friend, strolled through the streets of New York on an October day in 1795, their attention was attracted to the appearance of a black passerby. The man, Smith recorded that evening in his diary, had been “very flippantly drest … with legs like two semicircles.” The fellow was, Dunlap had quipped, “a very great beau (bow)—about the legs.”¹ Smith’s description and Dunlap’s pun suggest that the black’s appearance was alien and comic. Something—not just the shape of the man’s legs, but his clothes, their colors, or the...