Making Of Urban America Summary

5. Slavery in New York City, 1731 ALAW For Regulating Negroes and Slaves in the Night Time

Harris, Leslie M. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.

There has been many historians and theorists who have tackled colonial slavery. One of them is Ira Berlin whose book Many Thousands Gone is his take on slavery diversity in American history and how slavery is at the epicenter of economic production, amongst other things. He separates the book into three generations: charter, plantation and revolutionary, across four geographic areas: Chesapeake, New England, the Lower country and the lower Mississippi valley. In this paper, I will discuss the differences between the charter and plantation generations, the changes in work and living conditions, resistance, free blacks and changes in manumission.

Following the Civil War, America was in shambles. There were many groups with strong, conflicting ideas of how things should be. However, most groups had one idea in common: reducing the rights of African Americans as much as possible. Freed slaves had very little freedom under the law, were treated like a lesser species by those around them, and faced dangerous environments everywhere they went. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation may have legally freed slaves, but African Americans were barely more than paid slaves.

The Civil War was fought over the “race problem,” to determine the place of African-Americans in America. The Union won the war and freed the slaves. However, when President Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation, a hopeful promise for freedom from oppression and slavery for African-Americans, he refrained from announcing the decades of hardship that would follow to obtaining the new won “freedom”. Over the course of nearly a century, African-Americans would be deprived and face adversity to their rights. They faced something perhaps worse than slavery; plagued with the threat of being lynched or beat for walking at the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite the addition of the 14th and

In The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, Berlin draws attention to various parts of anti-slavery resistance that often escape consideration. He emphasizes the efforts of African Americans themselves. Berlin brings together main ideas, events, and people who made slave emancipation in the U.S. possible and that American freedom as a complex, disputed process. The author is not focused on speeches, written arguments, and petitions against slavery but with how slaves and free blacks took steps to permanently pull apart forced servitude in the face of crushing hostility. Author Glenn David Brasher of The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom zooms in and focuses

to which the president of the United States has signed his name,” (Dudley 181). Just by demanding that all slavery be abolished in certain areas, this considerably changed the ways of the African American people. With this new feeling of freedom, many African Americans began to fight for other rights to accompany this. (Dudley 180-183)

It was not until recently, through studying remains found at the African Burial Ground site, that we discovered a significant African presence in early New York. Virtually all of these people were enslaved. “It is not generally understood that 40% of the original Dutch colony and up to 20% of the English colony were enslaved Africans” (Brunius 16). In 1626, slaves were brought to New York, the city that had been inhabited two years prior by the Dutch and named New Amsterdam. At one point in colonial times, New York was guilty of working more slaves than any other colony with the exception of

It is commonly believed that after the onset of the Civil War, Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was the key driver to freeing the slaves of the south. After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional amendments were passed which aided newly freed slaves in being equally treated under the law, or so the story goes. The fact of the matter is that even after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the amendments, slavery in the United States was still “legal” and not only that, but it took on a much different form. The institution of slavery changed from having the direct enslavement of blacks, to the United States legal and prison system enslaving blacks. Yet, the enslavement itself was changed as black convicts

According to Matthew Mason’s academic journal “A Missed Opportunity? The Founding, Postcolonial Realities, And The Abolition Of Slavery,” African Americans have been enslaved in America since the early 17th century.” The first slaves were brought by the Dutch to the colony of Jamestown, Virginia to help harvest tobacco. The institution of slavery was practiced in America through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery helped to build the economic foundation of the United States. When the Emancipation Proclamation was passed by Abraham Lincoln in the year 1893 it changed the lives of over three million slaves who were reclassified as “slave” to “free.” Former slaves struggled to find their place within this new world of freedom which they had not yet known before. However, African Americans still faced problems such as discrimination, lack of opportunity, stereotyping, and mortality. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois both confronted these issues. These two men advocated for the advancement of Black people within society, however in this essay I argue that Du Bois was more effective than Booker T. Washington because of his idea that African Americans should have the same possibility to achieve the same rights as any other race in the United States.

The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful that the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. (Douglass,

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The Proclamation declared that all persons held as slaves within the rebellion states are and hence forward shall be free. In this paper I will specify how civil right and domestic policy correspond. The Emancipation Proclamation was a result of the 4 year civil war that was started by numerous unfair and brutal treatment to what was considered labor workers. Though all were not African American personnel that was bought and sold, all were freed when this policy was enforced.

In hindsight, it is difficult to think about how long it actually took for emancipation laws to be enacted and enforced because it has been around for so long, it is difficult to draw connections to the historical process. New Jersey proved to be far less concerned with protecting African Americans interest and more so, with weak enforcement and penalties for lawbreakers. For example, the text mentions how the penalties for continuing to import African American slaves was very weak that it proved ineffective because many lawbreakers would either pay the fine or fail to be held accountable, that it would just happen

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, a Lincoln Prize winner, was written by Allen C. Guelzo and published in 2004. In the book, he makes a case that President Abraham Lincoln, through the utilization of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, was efficacious in liberating the slaves. His argument varies from others that have visually examined the argument pertaining to the Emancipation Proclamation and whether it did, or did not, efficaciously emancipate slaves during the Civil War. On the antithesis side of his argument are those who do not visually perceive Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator” and argue that the executive order did not genuinely free the slaves in the broadest term but only those who lived in states that were declared in revolt. Therefore, those slave states that were not formally in revolt to the United States did not have to liberate their slaves because of the Proclamation leaving millions of them in involuntary servitude. Because of the differing viewpoint of others, Guelzo offers a consequential contribution to the field of study pertaining to Lincoln, slavery, and the Civil War.

"Two months after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one abolitionist wrote that 'to make the proclamation a success, we must make freedom a blessing to the freed.' The question of how to do so would long outlive Lincoln and the Civil War" (Epilogue, p. 361).