New York’s Municipal Slave Market

On Wall Street between Pearl and Water Streets, a market for auctioning enslaved people of African ancestry was established by a Common Council law on November 30, 1711, and remained in use until 1762. Slave owners who wanted to hire out their enslaved workers, including people of Native American ancestry, as day laborers were required to do so there as well. In 1726, the structure was renamed the Meal Market because corn, grain, and meal were also traded there exclusively. Slavery was introduced to Manhattan in 1626, and by the mid-18th century about one in five people living in New York City was enslaved and almost half of Manhattan households included at least one slave. Although New York State abolished slavery in 1827, complete abolition did not come until 1841, when the state ended the right of non-residents to keep slaves in New York for up to nine months. Before and after the Civil War, New York’s economy depended on slave labor elsewhere to produce raw materials such as sugar and cotton. Enslaved people also cleared forest land for the construction of Broadway, were among the workers who built the wall for which Wall Street is named, and helped build the first Trinity Church. Within months of the market’s construction, New York’s first slave uprising took place a few blocks away on Maiden Lane, led by enslaved people from Coromantee and Pawpaw people of Ghana.

New York, New York · United States