page_title: African Burial Ground National Monument
section_title: Post-Revolutionary War
hierarchical_section_title: African Burial Ground National Monument / Africans and African Americans in New York City / Post-Revolutionary War
caption_attribution_description: Venerable Pierre Toussaint, philanthropist
context_page_description: African Burial Ground National Monument is a monument at Duane Street and African Burial Ground Way in the Civic Center section of Lower Manhattan, New York City. Its main building is the Ted Weiss Federal Building at 290 Broadway. The site contains the remains of more than 419 Africans buried during the late 17th and 18th centuries in a portion of what was the largest colonial-era cemetery for people of African descent, some free, most enslaved. Historians estimate there may have been as many as 10,000–20,000 burials in what was called the "Negroes Burial Ground" in the 1700s. The five to six acre site's excavation and study was called "the most important historic urban archaeological project in the United States." The Burial Ground site is New York's earliest known African-American "cemetery"; studies show an estimated 15,000 African American people were buried here.
  The discovery highlighted the forgotten history of enslaved Africans in colonial and federal New York City, who were integral to its development. By the American Revolutionary War, they constituted nearly a quarter of the population in the city.
context_section_description: During the Revolutionary War, the British occupied New York City in the summer of 1776 and they kept control until after the war ended and they departed on Evacuation Day: November 25, 1783. As in the other rebellious American colonies, the British had offered freedom to slaves who left rebel masters; this was done in part to cause economic damage to the rebel Americans. These individuals were listed in the Book of Negroes. This promise of freedom attracted thousands of slaves to the city who escaped to British lines. In 1781 the New York legislature offered a financial incentive to slaveholders who assigned their slaves to military service, and promised freedom at war's end for the slaves.
  By 1780 the African and African-descendant community swelled to about 10,000 in British-occupied New York City, which became the center of free blacks in North America. Among those who escaped to New York were Deborah Squash and her husband Harvey, who fled from George Washington's plantation in Virginia. After the end of the war, according to provisions concerning property in the Treaty of Paris, the Americans demanded the return of all former slaves under British control. The British refused the American request and evacuated 3,000 freedmen with their troops in 1783 for resettlement in Nova Scotia, other British colonies, and England. Other freedmen scattered from the city to evade slave catchers.
  Aided by individual manumissions after war's end, by 1790 about one-third of the blacks in the city were free. The total city population was 33,131, according to the first national census.
  In 1799 the state legislature passed "An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery" with little opposition. Similar to Pennsylvania's law, it provided for gradual manumission of slaves. Children born to slave mothers after July 4, 1799, were considered legally free, but had to serve as indentured servants to their mother's master, until age 28 for men and 25 for women, before gaining social freedom. Until reaching age 21, they were considered the property of the mother's master. All slaves already in bondage before July 4, 1799, remained slaves for life, although they were reclassified as "indentured servants."
  In 1817, the New York legislature granted freedom to all children born to slaves after July 4, 1799, with total abolition of slavery to take effect on July 4, 1827. On this date, known as Emancipation Day, more than 10,000 slaves were freed in New York State with no financial compensation to their former owners. Blacks paraded in New York City to celebrate.
  Under the 1777 New York constitution, all free men had to satisfy a property requirement to vote, which eliminated poorer men from voting, both blacks and whites. A new constitution in 1821 eliminated the property requirement for white men, but kept it for blacks, effectively continuing to disfranchise them. This lasted until passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.
  The early history of free blacks and slaves in New York City became overshadowed by the waves of mid- to late nineteenth century immigration from Europe, which dramatically expanded the population and added to the ethnic diversity. In addition, most of the ancestors of today's African-American population in the city arrived from the South in the Great Migration of the first half of the twentieth century. In a rapidly changing city, the early colonial and federal history of African Americans was lost.
caption: Pierre Toussaint was born into slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and was emancipated in New York City.
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