NY Slave Revolt of April 6, 1712: Prelude To Decades of Hardship; Sojourner Truth, Dutch New York

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Mon Apr 10, 2023, 10:44 AM - Edit history (1)

- Illustration of the New York slave market in the colonial era.
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- 'The New York Slave Revolt of 1712 Was a Bloody Prelude to Decades of Hardship. Smithsonian Magazine, April 6, *2016. -Ed. 304 years ago today, a group of black slaves rose up against white colonists in New York.

New York City may have a reputation for being a socially progressive place to live, but during the 18th century, it was a major hub for the North American slave trade, with thousands of men, women and children passing through the slave market that operated in the heart of what is now the financial district. On the night of April 6, 1712, this came to head when a group of New York slaves took up arms and revolted against their captors. Life was wretched for the slaves brought to New York. Many of the city’s early landmarks, from City Hall to the eponymous wall of Wall Street were built using slave labor.

The city even constructed an official slave market in 1711, Jim O’Grady reported for WNYC News in 2015. "It was a city-run slave market because they wanted to collect tax revenue on every person who was bought and sold there," historian Chris Cobb told O’Grady. "And the city hired slaves to do work like building roads." Unlike the sprawling slave plantations of the south where slaves were often kept separate from free people, New Yorkers lived nearly neck-and-neck, even in the city’s early days. That meant in the densely populated NY, slaves and free people often worked & lived side-by-side. Not only did that breed resentment among the city’s slaves, but it was much easier for them to communicate with each other, as slave owners often sent their slaves out into the streets to find work, according to PBS’ Africans in America.

On the evening of April 6, the spark caught fire. That night, a group of approximately 23 slaves gathered in an orchard on Maiden Lane in the center of town. Armed with swords, knives, hatchets and guns, the group sought to inspire the city’s slaves to rise up against their masters by staging a dramatic revolt, writes Gabe Pressman for NBC New York. As Robert Hunter, the colonial governor of New York, later wrote of the revolt in a report: -- One...slave to one Vantilburgh set fire to [a shed] of his masters, and then repairing to his place where the rest were, they all sallyed out together with their arms and marched to the fire. By this time, the noise of the fire spreading through the town, the people began to flock to it. Upon the approach of several, the slaves fired and killed them. --

During the skirmish, at least 9 white slave holders were killed and another 6 wounded. Though the rebels fled to the north, local militias and soldiers from a nearby fort were quickly raised to hunt them down. In the end, 27 people were captured hiding in a swamp near modern-day Canal Street, though Hunter reported that 6 men committed suicide rather than facing trial. Though a handful of the captured slaves were spared, the majority were sentenced to brutal, public executions, including being burned alive and being hung by chains in the center of town. In the years after the slave revolt, life got harsher for enslaved New Yorkers. The city enacted strict laws preventing slaves from gathering in large groups or even holding a firearm...https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-york-slave-revolt-1712-was-bloody-prelude-decades-hardship-180958665/

https://laborhistoryin2.podbean.com/e/april-6-the-new-york-slave-revolt-of-1712-1649237264/

- New Amsterdam, Dutch New York, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Amsterdam



- Sojourner Truth, 1797-1883.

A former slave, Sojourner Truth became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the 19th century. Her Civil War work earned her an invitation to meet President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Truth was born Isabella Bomfree, a slave in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York in 1797. She was bought and sold 4 times, and subjected to harsh physical labor and violent punishments. In her teens, she was united with another slave with whom she had 5 children, beginning in 1815.

In 1827—a year before New York’s law freeing slaves was to take effect—Truth ran away with her infant Sophia to a nearby abolitionist family, the Van Wageners. The family bought her freedom for 20 dollars and helped Truth successfully sue for the return of her 5-year-old-son Peter, who was illegally sold into slavery in Alabama. Truth moved to New York City in 1828, where she worked for a local minister. By the early 1830s, she participated in the religious revivals that were sweeping the state and became a charismatic speaker. In 1843, she declared that the Spirit called on her to preach the truth, renaming herself Sojourner Truth. As an itinerant preacher, Truth met abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison & Frederick Douglass. Garrison’s anti-slavery organization encouraged Truth to give speeches about the evils of slavery. She never learned to read or write.

In 1850, she dictated what would become her autobiography- The Narrative of Sojourner Truth -to Olive Gilbert, who assisted in its publication. Truth survived on sales of the book, which also brought her national recognition. She met women’s rights activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony, and temperance advocates- both causes she quickly championed. In 1851, Truth began a lecture tour that included a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, where she delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. In it, she challenged prevailing notions of racial & gender inferiority & inequality by reminding listeners of her combined strength (Truth was nearly 6 ft tall) and female status.

Truth ultimately split with Douglass, who believed suffrage for formerly enslaved men should come before women’s suffrage; she thought both should occur simultaneously. During the 1850’s, Truth settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where 3 of her daughters lived. She continued speaking nationally and helped slaves escape to freedom. When the Civil War started, Truth urged young men to join the Union cause and organized supplies for black troops. After the war, she was honored with an invitation to the White House and became involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau...
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sojourner-truth

- The Black Atlantic 1500 - 1800: The African Americans, Many Rivers to Cross. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., PBS 2020.

[llashram]

1. and many in this country

would gladly reinstate everything as pictured-written in AmeriKKKan slave history. Starting with their wannabe dictator in his bunker in Florida. This time would not be so easy and cut and dry as white supremacy is superior. Too many know it's just not true and a huge cauldron of racist BS

[taxi]

2. They...would gladly reinstate ...

AND meanwhile, here at the same time they are fighting to their last breath against anything they can call CRT.

[llashram]

5. the truth can't

be handled with the CRT crowd. The white nationalists have been fighting against equality and for total submission of ALL American citizens to white nationalist racism and slavery of Africans since before the First Battle of Bull Run 1861 and the Confederacy signing the Article of Defeat at Appomattox Courthouse 1865.

[appalachiablue]

3. Slavery/*FORCED LABOR, 1865- 1960s: PBS, *Slavery By Another Name*

Last edited Sun Apr 10, 2022, 12:29 PM - Edit history (1)

- PBS, Slavery By Another Name - Excerpts/Trailer. 'Legal' Debt Bondage, Peonage in the US, 1860s- 1960s.

- Slavery by Another Name (PBS) “resets” our national clock with a singular astonishing fact: Slavery in America didn’t end 150 years ago, with Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Based on Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the film illuminates how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, persisting until the onset of World War II. The film, shot on location in both Birmingham and Atlanta, is built on Blackmon’s extensive research, as well as interviews with scholars and experts about this historic period. It also incorporates interviews with people living today, including several African American “descendants” of victims of forced labor who discovered their connection to this history after reading Blackmon’s book.

“As I’ve traveled, discussing the book and meeting readers, a stream of African-Americans have related to me how the book made them reassess their own family histories,” said Blackmon. “So many people tell me they were uncertain about accounts passed down by forebears which seemed to suggest that families were still being held as neo-slaves in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Then they read the book and realized that in fact the old stories are very likely to be true–that thousands of people were living in a state of involuntary servitude well into the lives of millions of Americans who are still alive today.”...https://www.pbs.org/show/slavery-another-name/

- DEBT BONDAGE/MODERN SLAVERY, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage
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- The Guardian, '400 YEARS OF SLAVERY: TIMELINE. In 1619, a ship with 20 captives landed at Point Comfort in Virginia, ushering in the era of American slavery. Aug. 16, 2019.

Many Americans’ introduction to US history is the arrival of 102 passengers on the Mayflower in 1620. But a year earlier, 20 enslaved Africans were brought to the British colonies against their will. As John Rolfe noted in a letter in 1619, “20 and odd negroes” were brought by a Dutch ship to the nascent British colonies, arriving at what is now Fort Hampton, then Point Comfort, in Va. Though enslaved Africans had been part of Portuguese, Spanish, French and British history across the Americas since the 16th century, the captives who landed in Virginia were probably the first slaves to arrive into what would become the United States 150 years later.

Four hundred years on, the captives’ arrival has informed nearly every major moment in American history, even if that history has been framed around anyone but Africans and African Americans. “Historians, elected political figures [and] community leaders would prefer to sort of imagine the United States as a kind of mythic, Anglo-Saxon Christian place,” says Michael Guasco, an early American history professor at Davidson College. In 1992, Toni Morrison told the Guardian: “In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/aug/15/400-years-since-slavery-timeline
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- Did African-American Slaves Rebel? by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The Root. -Ed.

One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally “docile” or “content and loyal,” thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively. Some even compare enslaved Americans to their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and Haiti, the last of whom defeated the most powerful army in the world, Napoleon’s army, becoming the first slaves in history to successfully strike a blow for their own freedom. As the historian Herbert Aptheker informs us in American Negro Slave Revolts, no one put this dishonest, nakedly pro-slavery argument more baldly than the Harvard historian James Schouler in 1882, who attributed this spurious conclusion to ” ‘the innate patience, docility, and child-like simplicity of the negro’ ” who, he felt, was an ” ‘imitator and non-moralist,’ ” learning ” ‘deceit and libertinism with facility,’ ” being ” ‘easily intimidated, incapable of deep plots’ “; in short, Negroes were ” ‘a black servile race, sensuous, stupid, brutish, obedient to the whip, children in imagination.’ ”

Consider how bizarre this was: It wasn’t enough that slaves had been subjugated under a harsh and brutal regime for 2 and a half centuries; following the collapse of Reconstruction, this school of historians — unapologetically supportive of slavery — kicked the slaves again for not rising up more frequently to kill their oppressive masters.. Rarely can I think of a colder, nastier set of claims than these about the lack of courage or “manhood” of the African-American slaves. So, did African-American slaves rebel? Of course they did. As early as 1934, our old friend Joel A. Rogers identified 33 slave revolts, including Nat Turner’s, in his 100 Amazing Facts. And nine years later, the historian Herbert Aptheker published his pioneering study, American Negro Slave Revolts, to set the record straight. Aptheker defined a slave revolt as an action involving 10 or more slaves, with “freedom as the apparent aim [and] contemporary references labeling the event as an uprising, plot, insurrection, or the equivalent of these.” In all, Aptheker says, he “has found records of approximately two hundred and fifty revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery.” Other scholars have found as many as 313.

Let’s consider the 5 greatest slave rebellions in the United States, about which Donald Yacovone and I write in the forthcoming companion book to my new PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

1. Stono Rebellion, 1739. The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave revolt ever staged in the 13 colonies. On Sunday, Sept. 9, 1739, a day free of labor, about 20 slaves under the leadership of a man named Jemmy provided whites with a painful lesson on the African desire for liberty. Many members of the group were seasoned soldiers, either from the Yamasee War or from their experience in their homes in Angola, where they were captured and sold, and had been trained in the use of weapons. They gathered at the Stono River and raided a warehouse-like store, Hutchenson’s, executing the white owners and placing their victims’ heads on the store’s front steps for all to see. They moved on to other houses in the area, killing the occupants and burning the structures, marching through the colony toward St. Augustine, Fla., where under Spanish law, they would be free...

* 2. The New York City Conspiracy of 1741. With about 1,700 blacks living in a city of some 7,000 whites appearing determined to grind every person of African descent under their heel, some form of revenge seemed inevitable. In early 1741, Fort George in New York burned to the ground. Fires erupted elsewhere in the city — 4 in one day — and in New Jersey and on Long Island. Several white people claimed they had heard slaves bragging about setting the fires and threatening worse. They concluded that a revolt had been planned by secret black societies and gangs, inspired by a conspiracy of priests and their Catholic minions — white, black, brown, free and slave... https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/

[llashram]

4. done and known, thank you