"It Happened Here": Slavery on the Hudson

Abstract

In right-hand foreground of William Rollinsons 1796 drawing of Government House in Manhattan two men are positioned, one on each side of a horse drawn cart (fig. 1). One man appears to be unloading objects from cart, while other man holds horse's reins. The objects in wagon bed are unrecognizable, and so too is relationship between two men. Are they working together? Or is laboring man, black man unloading cart, property of man holding horse's reins? Moreover, why in a drawing of Government House did Rollinson depict a scene seemingly unrelated to building figured in background? According to a caption underneath Rollinsons sketch, one of a host of objects on display at NewYork Historical Society (NYHS) s ambitious Slavery in New York exhibition, drawing contains the earliest pictured image of a black New Yorker. Even though Africans were among Manhattans earliest non-Native settlers, not a single image of black New Yorkers survives for their first 170 years in city. Intentionally or not, Rollinson's sketch juxtaposes a nameless African American laborer against backdrop of a symbol of New York's promise, a building intended as a presidential mansion for George Washington. Like exhibition in which it is housed, sketch offers viewers chance to think about relationship between rise of New York as a cultural, political, and economic power and labor of countless, and all too often nameless, enslaved Africans who labored to make that ascension possible. In 1991 workers excavating a new federal office building in Manhattan made a startling discovery: interred under twenty feet of dirt, concrete, and