Freedom: Then What?

James Williams was an 18-year-old slave on the Ichabod Brush estate in Huntington when his owner died in 1809. In his will, Brush freed Williams and willed him $200. Despite the ex-slave's many attempts to get his legacy, Brush's executors refused to give it to him, claiming he was a drunkard and unable to manage his affairs.

Williams moved to New York City, but he never forgot his legacy. In 1817, when he was 26, he hired a lawyer and sued the executors, denying their claims and asking for his $200. The former slave won, receiving not only the $200, but interest of $103.16.

By fleeing the Island to seek a new life in the city, Williams did what a number of freed Long Island slaves had done. New York City by 1810 had the largest concentration of free blacks in America: At 8,137, they outnumbered slaves in the city by a 5-1 ratio. Williams said in court papers he would use the money to return home to his friends and relatives in Demerara, a coastal river settlement in South America that later would became part of Guyana.

As two centuries of slavery slowly ended in New York State in the first three decades of the 1800s, the lives of formerly enslaved black men, women and children changed drastically. Some, like Williams, fared better than others. Several became landowners. Many freed slaves came together to form communities and to found black churches. Many others, however, became outcasts, gathering in bleak shantytown poverty, depending on charity to survive.

Whites, too, were adjusting to a new reality. While the majority of whites supported emancipation of blacks from slavery, many had reservations about former slaves participating fully in white society. Northern states began passing laws that restricted free blacks, especially in politics. ``Everywhere in the North the condition of the free Negro worsened as slavery passed from the scene,'' writes Edgar J. McManus in ``A History of Negro Slavery in New York.''

Former slaves were now citizens, and, for the adult males, at least, they had the potential to become voters. In New York, the Democratic-Republicans (the forerunner of today's Democratic Party) in power did not have the support of free black voters. The result was a series of voting restrictions on free blacks that culminated in changes in the state Constitution at the 1821 constitutional convention.

``New Yorkers meeting in 1821 to rewrite their state's constitution swept away most of the restrictions to the white male franchise,'' Northwestern University historian David Gellman wrote in his recent doctoral dissertation. ``At the same time, the delegates imposed property requirements on potential black voters which excluded most African Americans otherwise eligible.''

The law that freed all slaves as of 1827 perpetuated one great affront against black children. Although the children of slaves born on or after July 4, 1799, were legally free, the new law continued to require them to serve their mother's owner as indentured servants. This meant that although slavery was banned after 1827, blacks could be kept in servitude until as late as 1848: They were never slaves, but neither were they free. An example of this was Pyrrhus Concer, a black man born in Southampton in 1814 who historians and his own gravestone have said was a slave. He was not a slave, but was required to work for the Pelletreau family. At age 18, he was released and began going to sea on whaling ships.

The black slave woman Isabella who became the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, born in Ulster County about 1797, bore five children who were indentured under this law. One of them was Peter, born in 1821. Taking only an infant daughter with her, Isabella walked out on her owner, John Dumont, in the fall of 1826. Within a few weeks Dumont sold Peter, who was 5 years old, to one of his in-laws. Young Peter was resold, and resold again, the last time illegally out of state to an Alabama planter, where the child was enslaved. It took a lawsuit, paid for by Ulster County Quakers, to retrieve Peter from Alabama and return him home in 1828.

Many ex-slaves found themselves unable to do anything but stay right where they were, on white men's farms. They continued to work for their former owners, probably doing the same jobs, for minimal pay. Indebtedness to the former owners for the staples of food and clothing was common.

``Pervasive white racism, almost universal on Nineteenth century Long Island, forced African-Americans into low-wage work and made it extremely difficult for them to accumulate capital and obtain land or other productive property,'' writes Grania Marcus in ``Discovering the African-American Experience in Suffolk County: 1620-1860.'' ``Ex-slaves' often marginal economic and social status meant that they sometimes became the financial responsibility of the town in which they resided.''

An Englishman named Marshall Field wrote about the poverty-stricken remnants of slavery on Long Island after an 1854 visit to the United States:

I must mention that in Flushing and Jamaica, both in Long Island, there are two colonies of Free Africans, of about three hundred and two hundred respectively, left by the abolition of slavery. They are in the most degraded and wretched condition, living on a few clams (oysters) gathered by the shore, and by begging. They are ignorant, wragged, forlorn and ready to famish in the midst of surrounding abundance for the want of the necessaries and comforts of life.

While widely dispersed as slaves on individual farms, freed blacks often came together as a form of solidarity. In her new book, ``Making a Way to Freedom: A History of African Americans on Long Island,'' Lynda Day, professor of African studies at Brooklyn College, says that in the first half of the 19th Century, black people formed communities in Huntington, Bellport, East Hampton, Mastic, Greenport, Westbury, Jamaica and Eastville in Sag Harbor. Also, in Success (now Lake Success), Smithville (North Bellmore) and Newtown (Elmhurst).

``As slavery began to die out on Long Island, African-Americans established their own settlements, self-help organizations and churches,'' writes Day. ``Though life was precarious in many ways for the freedmen, they still built stable families and communities in Kings, Queens and Suffolk Counties.''

No longer tied by the slave code to an owner who did as he pleased with them, former slaves worked out new arrangements to earn their bread and raise their families. As the century progressed, jobs opened up in the whaling and fishing industries, as well as in the fast-growing business of brickmaking.

Gradually, then, slavery ended in New York State, and the focus of the abolitionist debate shifted to the South. There, it would take the Civil War and the 13th Amendment to end slavery, immediately and for good.