The New York Historical Society has spent a grip of money on what could have been a meaningful, dynamic and far reaching exhibit titled “Slavery in New York”. The exhibit could have told the story of how the chattel slave trade allowed America to usurp the position of world power from the British by exploiting a base of free labor for the over 300 hundred years that it was in place. The exhibit could have told the story of the slaves that constructed the wall in lower Manhattan that was designed to fend off pirates and Indians. That location would later be known as Wall Street.
The story of Slavery in America has been opened by scholars before but I was excited to see a discussion of the subject as it was related to Early New Yorker’s mercantile successes.
Everyone likes to think of slavery as a phenomenon exclusive to the American South. And while it is true that the majority of the slave population existed in the South, the difference between North and South was probably less than the percentage by which Bush stole the election.
In fact, New York was the largest slave-holding state in the North. Brooklyn? Plantation city. Ditto for Queens, Long Island and Upper Manhattan. Funny thing is, not that much has changed. Only the jig masters now go by North Face and Starbucks instead of Hamilton and Lefferts.
The letdown for me with what could have been a powerful exhibit was the fact that so many names were withheld. Where are the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the DuPonts? For crissakes, where the hell are the Rockerfellers?!? No one controls more New York jigs today than the Rockerfeller family.
ROC-A-FELLA y’all.