North American Cities
Urban slavery existed in North America as well. Enslaved people labored in Montreal in present-day Canada during the French and British rules.42 Enslaved workers also toiled in New York City, where the Dutch West India Company introduced the first enslaved Africans in Manhattan in the early seventeenth century.
The Dutch West India Company owned most enslaved laborers during the Dutch rule. But starting in 1665, when the English controlled the colony, slave ownership became widespread, with nearly 40 percent of European households owning enslaved people. The city continued to import enslaved people during the eighteenth century as well.43 Like in other cities of the Americas, enslaved Africans and their descendants performed many activities alongside white workers, until the abolition of slavery in the state of New York in 1827. Bondsmen worked in markets, artisan workshops, and also in retail and trade businesses as tailors, shoemakers, bakers, butchers, carpenters, and dockers, whereas enslaved women worked as domestic servants cooking, cleaning, and providing childcare.44 Urban slavery was prominent in New Orleans as well. As early as in the mid-eighteenth century, during French colonial rule in Louisiana, slave owners of New Orleans had benefited from a hiring system in which “craftsmen, such as carpenters, pastry-cooks, carters, domestics and wet nurses, could be rented out for a given task or for a certain period of time, ranging from a month to a year.”45After the thirteen British colonies gained their independence, slavery expanded in the urban centers of the United States. In 1790, Washington, DC, became the capital of the young independent country. In charge of planning the new city, French architect Pierre L’Enfant leased enslaved workers from their owners to construct the new United States Capitol and the White House.46 Although the role of dozens of bondsmen played in the construction of these buildings has been recognized only recently (figure 8.4), without them these two major national landmarks would not exist.
Enslaved people cleared the land, transported construction materials, and sawed lumber, while others worked as carpenters, masons, brickmakers, and bricklayers to erect the two new imposing buildings. Enslaved people, including bondswomen, worked in a variety of roles in the White House as well.47
Figure 8.4. Plaque on the construction of the White House, Lafayette Square, Washington, DC, United States. Photograph by Ana Lucia Araujo, 2021.
In Baltimore, Maryland, a growing number of bondspeople worked in various industries, including iron manufacturing and shipbuilding, as well as mining by the end of the eighteenth century. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as the city’s enslaved population started to gradually decline, slave owners increasingly hired out their enslaved property. Therefore, enslaved laborers often worked side by side with white wage workers.48 Nonetheless, the growing development of industrial capitalism in the North of the United States was not incompatible with the persistence and expansion of plantation and urban slavery. In the first six decades of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the “second slavery” propelled by the cotton production in the US South, the number of enslaved people increased in cities such as Richmond, Virginia. As it had in Baltimore, a system also emerged in Richmond wherein, to minimize costs, businesses (especially tobacco factories) rented enslaved workers from their actual owners for limited periods instead of purchasing them.49
Cities like those located near tobacco and cotton plantations offered opportunities for enslaved men who were trusted by their slave owners to venture into the city. For example, bondspeople who worked in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia, could obtain passes to go sell vegetables and other produce in Charlottesville after completing their tasks during the weekend.50 Occasionally, skilled enslaved workers such as blacksmiths sold the products of their specialized services to loyal urban customers who commissioned their work.
Enslaved people knew the opportunities offered by the city. They could meet comrades, develop new skills, and encounter free Black workers and freedpeople. In their urban interactions, they built new networks that could eventually help them purchase their freedom or simply escape bondage by running away.But in Virginia, unlike Bahia, enslaved and freed or free Black individuals were not the majority of the population. Hence, although to different degrees, slave owners and public authorities imposed huge restraints on enslaved people who lived, worked, and circulated in the cities. Such restrictions varied over time and, as we will discuss in chapter 14, could dramatically worsen in periods following slave insurrections. In Virginia, enslaved people venturing into the cities had to carry a written pass showing permission from their owners to travel to the city. As in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, slave owners in cities such as New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston put their enslaved property to work in the streets in order to make profits from their income. Municipalities attempted to discourage this system by issuing codes that regulated this practice and forced slave owners to pay a registration fee to allow their human property to work in the city.
Figure 8.5. Slave badge, copper, Charleston, 1818. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from the Liljenquist Family Collection, Object number 2016.166.27. Courtesy of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, United States.
Already at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Charleston, South Carolina, required freedpeople to wear identification badges to prove their free status.51 Starting in 1808, enslaved people who hired out their services in the streets of New Orleans had to wear a brass badge with a registration number as well.52 By 1818, similar municipal regulations required enslaved people hired out by their owners in Charleston to either carry a ticket or to visibly wear a metal badge to monitor their urban activities.53 In a variety of sizes and shapes, but more usually in the format of squares, circles, and diamonds, Charleston’s copper alloy badges are the only surviving items of this kind. Today these slave badges can be found in several museums in the United States, and dozens of them bearing words such as “porter,” “mechanic,” or “servant” that identified the professions of enslaved persons are housed in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC (e.g., figure 8.5).