One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) Read Online Free PDF

day is at an end. The child is dying with measles. With half a chance it might have lived; but it had none. The dark bedroom killed it.
    For blacks, too, New York was anything but the Promised Land.
    Commerce with the West Indies had made New York a key player in the slave trade. A market for the sale of humans opened at the foot of Wall Street at the start of the eighteenth century and, finding that forced labor enhanced the quality of life, more than half of the city’s households owned slaves by the mid-eighteenth century.
    Down through the decades, subjugation produced episodes of horrific violence. In 1712, slaves gathered in an orchard to plot a murderous rebellion. One set fire to a shed. Whites who ran to fight the blaze were met by gunfire and hatchet attacks. Nine died and a half dozen were wounded. Twenty-one slaves were brought to trial and condemned. According to the official report, “Some were burnt, others were hanged, one broke on the wheele and one hung alive in ye towne.” 18
    THE UPRISING WAS well remembered twenty-nine years later when nine fires broke out in quick succession, sparking rumors that slaves were conspiring to destroy the city. A white girl reported under pressure that she had overheard blacks planning a massacre. Scores of slaves were arrested and tried without regard to legal or evidentiary standards. Eighteen were hanged and fourteen were burned alive.
    After the Revolutionary War, New York confronted the question of abolition, but it was among the last of the northern states to approve even a gradual move toward liberty. Not until 1827 did the legislature grant African Americans the benefit of full emancipation.
    In 1860, as the United States approached the Civil War, the census counted just 49,005 blacks among a statewide population of 3.9 million, a total equal to slightly more than 1 percent of all New Yorkers. 19 Still, they were resented by many whites, and all the more so after the outbreak of hostilities.
    Two years into the fighting, Congress enacted a draft that did not sit well in a city divided over the merits of forced Southern emancipation. Adding to outrage, the law permitted privileged young men to buy their way out of serving by paying $300 as a bounty to attract less-fortunate cannon fodder.
    New York was called upon to deliver two thousand conscripts, their names to be chosen in a public lottery. Before the drawing was finished, hundreds of men marched to the site, set the building ablaze, and ignited four days of violence. Rioters targeted Lincoln’s Republicans and other symbols of support for the war. Gangs pummeled blacks, ransacked businesses that blacks owned or patronized, and, yelling, “Burn the niggers’ nest,” attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum. The 237 children inside were rushed to a police stationhouse as a mob torched the building. When, finally, federal troops restored order, the death toll stood at 191.
    For decades after the war, the number of African Americans in the city remained constantly small. Blacks clustered first in the notorious Five Points section of Lower Manhattan; then they were pushed north into Greenwich Village and then further north into a rough-edged place on Manhattan’s West Side called the Tenderloin. By modern standards, it was not a ghetto. The city’s black population—counted at 60,666 in the 1900 census, less than 2 percent of the total—still lacked the heft to claim a large area. Instead, blacks lived scattered on a block here and a block there. 20
    As would long be the case, their buildings were the least well-kept and carried the highest rents. As also would be the case, blacks had few employment opportunities. The census put the number of working black men at 20,395, with well more than half holding jobs as servants, waiters, porters, or laborers. In contrast, there were but thirty-two black doctors and twenty-six black lawyers.
    An African American pioneer, William L. Bulkley, educated at Claflin, Wesleyan,