Think of slavery and the first image that comes to mind is a 19th-century Southern cotton plantation. However, by the 1630s, slavery already existed in all 13 colonies with the first enslaved Africans arriving in New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1626, brought there by the Dutch West Indies Company.

By 1650, approximately 25% of the New York colony’s population (not counting Native Americans) was comprised of enslaved people. The English took control of New York in 1664, and by 1700, chattel slavery (wherein slaves were legally bought and sold like any other commodity) was almost exclusively comprised of Black Africans. Enslaved people often attempted to free themselves by escaping and seeking refuge with Native Americans, purchasing their freedom, fleeing to another colony or passing as white.

The slave trade increased dramatically in New York City with an official slave market opening on Wall Street (between Pearl and Water streets) in 1711. By 1730, approximately 42% of white households owned one or more slaves, a higher percentage than any other colonial city with the exception of Charleston, South Carolina.

The economics of slavery has been defined as a cyclical or triangular trade system. Slave traders imported Africans to the North American colonies. In turn, colonists exported slave generated raw materials such as lumber, tobacco, cotton and sugar to Great Britain where these materials were turned into clothing and a variety of luxury items. Merchants traded these goods along the African coast for more Black slaves bound for the colonies.

Over a three week period in 1741, a series of arson fires consumed numerous NYC buildings. A group of white “ringleaders” was plotting to overthrow the local government and promised freedom to slaves who assisted them. Approximately 170 people were arrested in connection with these fires, 150 Blacks (both enslaved and free) and at least 20 whites. As a consequence of flimsy evidence, forced confessions and lying witnesses, 17 Black people were hanged and 13 burned at the stake. Two white men and two white women were hanged.

When the British occupied NYC during the American Revolution, many enslaved people escaped to their lines and fought for the Crown as they were promised freedom in exchange for military service. In 1781, New York state offered slaveholders a financial incentive if they allowed their enslaved men to join the military and fight for the Americans. Enslaved men were promised freedom after three years of military service.

In 1785, the New York State Legislature passed a law stating that children born to enslaved women after that year would be emancipated. However, these children would remain “indentured” (forced to work by state law) to their former slave owners — females until they were 22 years-old, males to age 25. Legislation was passed in 1799 freeing all children born to enslaved mothers after July 4,1799. Once again, there was a caveat with now “free” females indentured to their former owners until age 25, and men to age 28.

Yet another law was passed in 1817 that emancipated slaves born before July 4, 1799, with this law taking affect July 4, 1827. However, children born to enslaved women before July 4, 1827, would be indentured until they were 21. With these laws, New York state took the moral high ground by ostensibly abolishing chattel slavery while keeping an entire generation of Black Africans legally bound (via mandated servitude) to their former masters.

In 1991, an African burial ground containing thousands of bodies dating to the 18th century was discovered in lower Manhattan. Based on bone pathologies, anthropologists concluded that some slaves were literally “worked to death.”

Speaking of their documentary film “People Not Property: Exploring the Legacy of Slavery in New York’s Hudson Valley,” Elizabeth Bradley and Michael Lord write the “slave trade was as important to New York’s economic foundations as slave labor” was to the Southern economy. “Some of NYC’s most important institutions were founded by families who derived their wealth directly or indirectly from the slave trade.”

A number of NYC’s most well known financial institutions and businesses profited handsomely from the slave trade including Aetna, JPMorgan Chase & Company, Citibank, Brown Brothers Harriman (clothing) and Tiffany & Company. In 2005, JP Morgan Chase reported that two of its current subsidiary banks (Citizens’ Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana) did business with plantation owners from 1830 until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

These banks accepted approximately 13,000 slaves as collateral, and when some loans were not repaid, eventually owned about 1,250 enslaved people. To recoup debts owed by borrowers, banks in the North and South sold their human collateral at slave auctions. No doubt countless families were torn apart via these auctions.

In January 1861, three months before the Civil War began, NYC Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that Manhattan, Long Island and Staten Island secede from the Union, become a sovereign city-state, and continue its lucrative cotton trade with the Confederacy. Wood stated: “With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States, we have friendly relations and a common sympathy.”

In his book “The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations,” economic journalist David Montero writes that in 1855 Mississippi plantation owner Stephen Duncan (who enslaved as many as 2,200 Black people) instructed his banker to ship the year’s crops north and sell the cotton for cash. These proceeds were invested in northern companies and real estate, including already-prized Manhattan property. According to the Mississippi Encyclopedia, in 1860, Duncan was worth at least $3.5 million ($133 million today), about half of his wealth in slaves.

By some estimates, New York received approximately 40% of the nation’s cotton revenue through banks, insurance companies and the shipping industry. Montero writes that between 1851 and 1860, enslaved people in the South produced cotton worth about $1.5 billion ($54 billion today). “And that’s just one crop in one decade.”

Montero writes that although wealth generated by Black slaves throughout the “life of the Republic” prior to emancipation is “difficult to precisely detail,” it most likely “amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars then, likely trillions today.”

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George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale and is retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego. A list of sources accompanies this commentary online.

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Sources

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“African Burial Ground” (accessed 2025) New York Preservation Archive Project, www.nypap.org

“African Descended Soldiers at Fort Schuyler & in the Mohawk Valley” (accessed 2025) Fort Stnawix National Monument. National Parks Service, www.nps.gov

Battle, P. (2024) “No, New York wasn’t the anti-slavery hero you thought it was,” June 16, City and State of New York, www.cityandstateny.com

Benton, N. (accessed 2024) “Dating the start and end of slavery in New York” https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu

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https://time.com

Montero, D. (2018) “The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case For Reparations,” Legacy Lit: New York

“The New York Conspiracy of 1741” (accessed 2025) The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, www.gilderlehrman.org

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“People not property: Exploring the legacy of slavery in New York’s Hudson Valley” (2020) July 24, Humanities New York, www.humantitiesnewyork.org

Reifowitz, I. (2017) “NYC & the Civil War: It’s Complicated,” November, New York Lifestyle Magazine, https://newyorklifestylemagazine.com

“Stephen Duncan” (accessed 2025) Mississippi Encyclopedia, https://mississippiencyclopedia.org

Teather, D. (2005) “Bank admits it owned slaves,” January 21, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com

“The Forgotten History of Slavery in New York” (accessed 2025) Cornell University Press,

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu

Thomas, Z. (2019) “The Hidden Links Between Slavery and Wall Street,” August 28, BBC Business Reporter, www.bbc.com

Vanatta, S. (accessed 2025) “Review of Banking and Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States by Sharon Murphy,” Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation, University of Pennsylania, https://wilpr.wharton.upenn.edu