The point Hawkins makes on “how integral the institution of slavery was in the development of New York City” is correct. Not only about its physical building and infrastructure but also its development as a commercial center trading slaves, slave-grown cotton, and the outfitting of slave-running ships. In January 1861, on the very cusp of the Civil War, the mayor of New York City proposed that the city secede from the United States because cutting off ties to the southern states would financially ruin it. More than a few “princes of commerce” were sympathetic to this view.

So although slavery in New York was abolished in 1827 activity covering all aspects of that trade, legal and illegal, played a central role in the city’s economy right up to the war.

Dean Hazlewood
Los Angeles, California  
 
‘Slavery in New York’ II
I agree that “Slavery in New York” exposes a side of northern history ignored or unknown. But the exhibit’s overall tone is self-congratulatory. The message of its corporate sponsors is that the “peculiar institution” came to an end in New York decades before it did in the South, because of the actions of enlightened elites.

Such a misrepresentation of reality explains why at the end of the exhibit there is only brief mention of the fact that at the same time slavery was being officially phased out, the 1820s, the franchise was taken away from Black men in New York. Commercial capital there consolidated its alliance with the slave owners in the South.

Only with the revolutionary outcome of the Civil War, however, did Black people in New York, as elsewhere, become, until the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction, real citizens of the United States for the first time. Masses of toilers in arms, both Black and white, were decisive in the actual overthrow of slavery—not what the exhibit would like viewers to recognize.

August Nimtz
Minneapolis, Minnesota  
 
 
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