As I'm interested in genealogy and history, I get Colonial Williamsburg Magazine. The current Winter issue has quite a bit about slavery in it - terribly interesting! I had always assumed that Crispus Attucks was a free black man, and it says that he was a runaway slave. It also discusses who of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, and who emancipated theirs.
Since we of GreekChat seem to discuss racism, slavery, and the themes they present, and since PBS is presenting a decent series on slaves & their descendants, I thought I'd post a few links:
The magazine:
http://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/...06/slavery.cfm
"Finding Slaves in Unexpected Places
Keeping Blacks in Bondage Was Not a Southern Monopoly
by James Breig
AMONG THE MINUTEMEN who turned out on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, to confront the British and start the fight for American freedom was Prince Estabrook, a black man and a slave. He was wounded in the shoulder. Five years before, runaway slave Crispus Attucks was among five men slain by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, a confrontation he may have rashly initiated.
Some modern Americans might guess that Estabrook and Attucks were southern slaves visiting New England with their masters, but they were Massachusetts residents, two of the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in northern bondage during the eighteenth century. In the early 1700s, slaves were one-sixth of Philadelphia's population. A New York visitor around the time of the Revolution said that "it rather hurts an European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the street." At the time, there were as many as half a million slaves in the northern colonies, about 20 percent of the population. When the newborn United States took its first census in 1790, there were still more than 2,600 slaves in Connecticut, nearly 9,000 in Delaware, 11,000-plus in New Jersey, and almost 22,000 in New York.
The history of northern slavery almost exactly coincides with the 100 years of the eighteenth century, from an increasing reliance on slave labor as the century dawned to New York's 1799 law that set in motion the slow manumission of slaves in that state.
According to Leslie M. Harris, an Emory University history professor, the first non–Native American settler in Manhattan was a free black man: Jan Rodrigues, a sailor marooned in 1613 by a Dutch vessel. Her book, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863, tells how Rodrigues married into an Indian tribe and became a negotiator between it and Dutch traders. After Peter Minuit bought Manhattan in 1626, more settlers arrived and brought eleven slaves with them—just seven years after the first Africans landed in Virginia...."
There's much more, plus photos, in the link above.
Some Other Links:
www.slavenorth.com
www.hudsonvalley.org/slavery
www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery
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