Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. The date marks June 19, 1865, when the last enslaved people in Texas were freed by the Union Army under the Emancipation Proclamation. However, it was not until the following December, when the 13th Amendment was ratified, that all enslaved people in the United States were freed.
Town of Flatlands Slaves: Birth Register, Manumissions; Records of Personal Mortgages, 1799-1838, volume 4054, page 16. Kings County Old Town Records Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.
For 200 years, from 1627 (when the Dutch West India Company warship Bruynvisch arrived in Manhattan carrying 22 enslaved Africans), until 1827, slavery was very much a fact of life in New York. By the 1790s, New York City’s population of enslaved people was second only to Charleston, South Carolina. New York had the largest number of enslaved people of any state in the North and was the second-to-last to abolish slavery (New Jersey was the last state). Even after slavery ended in New York, free Blacks were not safe on its streets. Runaways from the south and even born-free New Yorkers could be kidnapped by marshals and sent to a slave state using the Fugitive Slave Clause as cover.
Not only do Municipal Archives records document this dark history, the Hall of Records (now the Surrogate’s Courthouse and DORIS headquarters) was built on the edge of what was the African Burial Ground. After rediscovery of the Burial Ground in 1891 during construction of a new federal office building, New York City’s Percent for Art program commissioned artist Lorenzo Pace’s monument “Triumph of the Human Spirit” in Foley Square. The Mayor’s Office of Communications recently interviewed Pace about the project in this short film that includes references to the Municipal Archives’ records.
Lorenzo Pace: Triumph of the Human Spirit. NYC Mayor’s Office.
For more information on the records of enslavement in the Municipal Archives, see: