New York Burning by Jill Lepore

Author:Jill Lepore [Lepore, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307427007
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T13:00:00+00:00

“WHAT NEWS?” Jack asked Ben, hauling his keg to the tea-water pump. “What News?” he asked Cato on “the Night that Hilton’s House burnt . . . for he had heard that there had been a Fire at that End of the Town.” Jack was, above all, a collector and a reporter of news. Zenger and Bradford printed their newspapers weekly, and filled their pages with slow-traveling letters from foreign correspondents. White New Yorkers who wanted to find out what happened in Amsterdam two months ago could read the Weekly Journal at the end of the week. Or they could meet in coffeehouses and taverns, to read newspapers from other cities. 29 Black New Yorkers who wanted to find out what happened in the city all day, and overnight, could find out at Jack’s before the sun rose.

In a small, crowded, bustling metropolis, then as now, most people spend a good deal of time walking the streets, conducting errands, picking up bits of news. But in eighteenth-century New York, people who were enslaved walked greater distances, conducted more errands, and picked up news earlier in the morning and later at night. Unlike the conditions in large rural slave plantations, where slaves lived with their families in slave quarters, well apart from whites, city slaves slept in the attics and cellars of their owners’ houses, or in “Negro kitchens,” and worked all day alongside whites—servants, artisans, laborers. In New York, whites and blacks lived, literally, on top of one another. If slaves lacked separate quarters, they did have different hours: slaves woke up earlier than anyone else (servants woke up next), and stayed up later (servants went to bed just before them). And, since the very first and the very last chore slaves did every day was fetching water, which meant meeting friends and neighbors at pumps, they heard the news first.30

If there were nothing else to be learned from the confessions extracted in New York City in the spring and summer of 1741, there would be this: while slaves in Manhattan lived and worked alongside whites, they sought out other slaves, for news, for companionship, for love, and they found it, all over the city. Forever conducting errands, fetching water, visiting friends and family scattered across the city, slaves circulated, even more than free whites, who lived in the same houses as their husbands, wives, and children. Most enslaved New Yorkers lived in households where there were only one or two other slaves. A lucky few found mates in the same household, like Robin and Cuba, the married couple owned by attorney John Chambers; but even then, they were likely to be separated, eventually, by sale. James Alexander and Cadwallader Colden congratulated themselves on their own happy marriages (“I agree with you in the Commendations of the married State & believe where it hits right it yields the greatest Satisfaction in this Life,” Alexander wrote to Colden in 1730) even as they attempted to sever romantic attachments among their slaves:

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