On this day in New York · July 4, 1827
Slavery Ends in New York
New York freed its last enslaved residents on July 4, 1827, and the next morning thousands turned out for a march down Broadway that said what the Fourth of July still couldn't.
The facts
- Date of final emancipation
- July 4, 1827
- People freed
- Roughly 4,600 (11% of New York's Black population)
- Marchers in New York City on July 5
- 2,000 to 4,000
- Law that set the date
- New York legislature act of March 31, 1817
New York's 1817 legislature set July 4, 1827 as the day final emancipation would take effect, making New York the first state to legislate the total abolition of slavery. When the date arrived, roughly 4,600 people were freed, about 11 percent of the state's Black population. Black New Yorkers chose not to celebrate on the Fourth: the national holiday wasn't theirs, and mixing with celebrating white crowds risked violence. On July 5, between 2,000 and 4,000 people gathered at St. John's Park in Lower Manhattan, marched down Broadway under marshal Samuel Hardenburgh, and ended at Zion Church on Church Street, where orator William Hamilton declared slavery's end from the pulpit.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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no more shall negro and slave be synonymous
William Hamilton, orator at Zion Church, New York City, July 4, 1827
Source: Fifth of July (New York), Wikipedia -
Resolved, That whereas the 4th day of July is the day that the National Independence of this country is recognized by white citizens, we deem it proper to celebrate the 5th
Resolution passed at a preparatory meeting of Black New Yorkers, spring 1827
Source: Fifth of July (New York), Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The Fifth of July set a template Black Americans returned to for generations: mark liberation on your own terms, separate from a holiday that hadn't kept its promise. The tradition that started here in 1827 anticipated Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' by a quarter century.
Sources
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