New Amsterdam
Nieu Amsterdam / Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs
The European figures that dominate the foreground and the enslaved Africans laboring in the middle ground appeared in several engravings depicting various parts of the New World. This engraving on copper is probably the second oldest extant view of New Amsterdam.
Maps
Note - “F”- Quarter of the Blacks, the Company’s slaves
Note - farms of “half-free” men of color aka “Negroes Causeway” along Minetta Stream including: Simon Congo (Varick St. & Houston St. and area by 5th Av. & 16th St.); Paulo D’Angola (West 3rd St. & Sullivan St.); Anthony Portuguese (Washington Square); Antony Congo (Bowery & Rivington St.); Anthony Domingo (Bayard St. & Mott St.) For more information consult The Iconography of Manhattan Island v.6 p.73-74.
A plan of the City of New York, reduced from an actual survey / T. Maerschalck (1763)
Note - “Negroes Burial Ground”
Introduction
" Little Africa, name given to several black communities in NYC. It was first applied to what became the Five Points, an area composed of land grants made to Africans in [1644 and] 1659 by the Dutch West India Company. This area adjacent to the Collect [Pond], was also known as Stagg Town and remained a mostly African American area until the mid-nineteenth century...The African Burial Grounds was a part of this community.
Encyclopedia of New York / Kenneth Jackson
"Through the language of “half-freedom” Dutch officials sought to exercise a degree of hold on the men and their families, but it was the eventual acquisition of land, stretching from lower Manhattan to midtown, that contributed significantly to the relative autonomy of the African community. Specifically, it is the original lots and farms owned by Africans in the vicinity of Collect Pond --also referred to as Kolchhook or Fresh Water -- northeast of the burial ground; those situated in Chinatown; along the Bowery and in Greenwich Village...The proximity of Africans’ farms to the unguarded perimeters of the [colonial New Amsterdam] settlement provided a buffer between the Dutch and Native American population...Early ground briefs also confirm that Africans farmed the land some time prior to official tenancy as outlined in the 1644 grant of half-freedom.
The African Burial Ground / essay by Emilyn Brown
"In the case of the half-free blacks, the land grants also provided the basis for a relatively independent community. They lived together in families with their wives, if not always with their [enslaved] children. The land they held, near the Fresh Water Pond, was the first geographically designated black community in New York. Other black men and women, freed by the company or by individual slave owners under similar arrangements, joined the original eleven near the Fresh Water Pond so that by 1664 there were at least thirty black landowners on Manhattan Island."
In the Shadow of Slaver / Leslie M. Harris
Books
The Encyclopedia of New York City by
A newly updated, expanded edition of the most comprehensive one-volume reference work on New York City ever compiled Covering an exhaustive range of information about Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, the first edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City was a success by every measure, earning worldwide acclaim and several awards for reference excellence, and selling out its first printing before it was officially published. But much has changed since the volume first appeared in 1995: the World Trade Center no longer dominates the skyline, a billionaire businessman became an unlikely three-term mayor, and urban regeneration--Chelsea Piers, the High Line, DUMBO, Williamsburg, the South Bronx, the Lower East Side--has become commonplace. To reflect such innovation and change, this definitive, one-volume resource on the city has been completely revised and expanded. The revised edition includes 800 new entries that help complete the story of New York: from Air Train to E-ZPass, from September 11 to public order. The new material includes broader coverage of subject areas previously underserved as well as new maps and illustrations. Virtually all existing entries--spanning architecture, politics, business, sports, the arts, and more--have been updated to reflect the impact of the past two decades. The more than 5,000 alphabetical entries and 700 illustrations of the second edition of The Encyclopedia of New York Cityconvey the richness and diversity of its subject in great breadth and detail, and will continue to serve as an indispensable tool for everyone who has even a passing interest in the American metropolis.
In the Shadow of Slavery by
"The black experience in the antebellum South has been thoroughly documented. But histories set in the North are few. In the Shadow of Slavery, then, is a big and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class in New York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought more than two centuries of African American history back to life in this illuminating new work."--David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks from City Hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble, lay the remains of an eighteenth-century "Negro Burial Ground." Closed in 1790 and covered over by roads and buildings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the site turned out to be the largest such find in North America, containing the remains of as many as 20,000 African Americans. The graves revealed to New Yorkers and the nation an aspect of American history long hidden: the vast number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's largest city. In the Shadow of Slavery lays bare this history of African Americans in New York City, starting with the arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through the turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in one of the most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Drawing on extensive travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and organizational records, Leslie M. Harris extends beyond prior studies of racial discrimination by tracing the undeniable impact of African Americans on class, politics, and community formation and by offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers. Written with clarity and grace, In the Shadow of Slavery is an ambitious new work that will prove indispensable to historians of the African American experience, as well as anyone interested in the history of New York City.
The Burghers of New Amsterdam and the Freemen of New York 1675-1866 by
Contents: I. The burgher right of New Amsterdam -- II. Roll of freemen of New York City, 1675-1866 -- III. Appendix to Roll of freemen, 1695-1774 -- IV. Indentures of apprenticeship, 1694-1708.
The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909 by
This sweeping survey, originally published over the span 1915 to 1928, is divided into two parts, with volumes one and two comprising the first. These initial volumes present historical summaries, followed by exquisite plates and thorough plate descriptions. Part two repeats this pattern in volume three; presents a detailed chronology of historical events and personages in volumes four and five; and concludes with an addenda, bibliography, and index to the entire work in volume six. Interspersed throughout are the maps, documents, photographs, engravings, illustrations, etc. that Stokes and his assistants assembled from countless original sources. The quality and scope of visual representations truly befits its vast subject, Manhattan. Those concerned with the legal aspects of colonial and New York history will be particularly interested in the wealth of material from original sources to be found throughout these six volumes. The historical chronologies and detailed descriptions are enhanced by the facsimile plates which portray records and documents showing charters, ordinances and proclamations, etc.; handbills, broadsides, surveys, plans, portraits and numerous illustrations relating to the legal history of New York from the "period of discovery" through the Dutch and English settlements and the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, reconstruction, industrialization through to the year 1909: - the establishment of the municipal government and the New York legislature; - court houses and public buildings; - abolitionist clubs, meetings and riots; - prisons, criminal punishments and court appeals; - bank, insurance and financial institutions; - various commissions and associations; - bills of exchange and credit; - the British and Continental Army; - the Continental and U.S. Congress; - Indian treaties, international treaties; - ferry and water rights; - laws, duties and licenses relating to gambling, liquor, and the lottery; as well as taxes, patents, trade and shipping; - an extensive section covering original land grants an
