In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.

In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. By Leslie M. Harris. Historical Studies of Urban America. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 380. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-226-31773-1; cloth, $42.50, ISBN 978-0-226-31774-8.)

In this sweeping study of the experiences of Africans and African Americans--as slaves and as free people--for more than two centuries in New York City, Leslie M. Harris has mined a variety of sources to restore to historical memory a largely forgotten people. Building on the work of Joyce Goodfriend, Graham Russell Hodges, Shane White, Edgar J. McManus, Thomas Davis, Oliver Rink, and others, Harris has made his own special mark by studying class formation among free blacks as they labored to construct the ligaments of black community life. In the first two chapters, which cover the first 150 years of black life on Manhattan Island, Harris replows the fields tilled by the historians mentioned above. The heart of the book, where he makes his most important contribution, covers the period from about 1820 to the draft riots of 1863.

The contours of post-Revolutionary free-black life in New York closely resembled that in other northern cities in four respects. First, as elsewhere, freedpeople were frozen out of many upwardly mobile jobs but developed a small middle class that served their own people. Second, churches and schools became the alpha and omega of community building, nourishing self-respect and providing religious and intellectual rewards. Third, New York was a magnet attracting free blacks from the hinterlands, the vast majority of whom came to reject the American Colonization Society's hopes to repatriate free African Americans to West Africa. Fourth, free-black life had to be carried out in the midst of heightening racial animosity and white-precipitated violence in the 1830s. Black New Yorkers, like black urban dwellers in other cities, faced staggering odds in their attempts to become deserving citizens of the new nation.

The most rewarding part of this worthy study is the careful analysis of black political activism after radical abolitionists began striding onto the stage in 1829-1830. The outlines of this story have been firmly etched by other historians, but Harris adds much new detail. In particular, he portrays the frustrated efforts of mostly middle-class black reformers who hoped that education and moral perfection would dissolve white hostility and discrimination. Harris highlights the retreat of black reformers from cross-racial political activism after white abolitionists, frightened by the terrible race riots of 1834 up and down the East Coast, abandoned the hope of improving conditions for free blacks in the North.

The rise of militancy within the black working class--to halt kidnapping, regain the vote, and find remedies for chronic unemployment or underemployment--was the work of the 1840s and 1850s. Leaders such as Henry Highland Garnet, James W. C. Pennington, and Frederick Douglass, disillusioned with the efficacy of moral reform and education to secure black rights, made black labor a central issue. However, Harris delivers less than he promises in his introduction about the agency of the black masses themselves.

Harris's last two chapters highlight how, in the nation's largest city, the hopes of free African Americans for lives of equality and respectability were all but dashed. His story is a familiar one: how the Irish immigrants crowded free blacks out of artisanal work and displaced them at the lowest echelons of labor. Political misfortune accompanied economic crisis, carried forward by the segregation of transit facilities and adverse court decisions. It is possible that New York City was the worst place for free black Americans by the eve of the Civil War. Out of frustration and a will to survive, African Americans began quitting the city. Amid spiraling growth of the white population, black New Yorkers declined from over sixteen thousand in 1840 to less than twelve thousand in 1855. The ghastly draft riots of 1863 put a final touch on what must be regarded as the most vicious and inhumane chapter of Gotham City's history.

GARY B. NASH 

University of California, Los Angeles