The New York City Council has joined its San Francisco counterpart in proposing potential financial reparations for the descendants of enslaved Americans.
The year-long, $1.5 million task force would consider “the impact of slavery and past injustices for African Americans in New York city and reparations for such injustices.”
A similar commission to study the possibility has already been established for the state as a whole, by Gov. Hochul.
The Council is not wrong to bring attention to the fact that slavery was a fact of life in the city from the colonial period until its abolition here in 1827.
But the prospect of financial reparations for descendants raises the possibility of a new injustice.
It would do so by imposing costs on taxpayers as a whole — including both descendants of those who came to the city long after the end of slavery but even those resident during the slavery era, the vast majority of whom, historic records show, did not own slaves even when slavery was legal.
We can learn a great deal about the extent of New York slavery thanks to the fact that the federal Census takers recorded not only the number of “free white males and females” but that of slaves in every household.
In 1800, the city’s population of 59,000 included 2,800 slaves (Brooklyn, then not formally part of New York City, however, had a far larger percentage of enslaved residents).
It’s important to note, though, that even at its peak, a relatively small minority of households owned slaves.
Census records for one of the city’s most populous neighborhoods in 1800 — lower Manhattan — show that, although 417 of 4320 residents were slaves, 76% of households did not include any slaves.
In Flushing — then an agricultural area in which most farms were small but larger ones were worked by slave labor — 12% of the population was enslaved but 72 percent of households had no slave.
To be clear, there’s no doubt that large city households and farms could prosper by not paying for labor.
In 1790, for instance, per property sale records, “one Negro girl, Peg” was sold for $50 to Westchester County resident Nathaniel Merritt — from a family which owned 12 slaves altogether.
Historical records, compiled by the University of Missouri, indicate that wages for free, female labor at the time was $10 per month.
This was not like Deep South plantation slavery, to be sure; census records show it was most common that, even for those households that did own slaves, to own only one.
It’s important to note that in contrast to the plantation owners of the South — whose estates were ruined by the Civil War and Sherman’s “march to the sea”— the owners of large Queens, Brooklyn and Westchester farms — such as the Van Wyck family of Flushing, which owned 10 slaves in 1800 — were in a position to prosper even after New York law ended slavery by 1827.
Slave labor made it possible to profitably buy and work large landholdings, for households with the means to buy slaves in the first place.
Post-slavery, real estate development put them in a position to cash in on their holdings.
In Westchester County, for instance — part of the purview of the Hochul reparations commission — large former slave-worked estates were broken up for railroad rights of way and housing subdivisions.
An 1881 sale of a portion of one owned by the Halstead property netted $14,000 — or $426,000 today (furnishings from their grand estate are in the Met today.)
But even some of those owning the most slaves had early misgivings.
The family of John Jay — who would become governor of New York and later the first US chief justice — owned 12 slaves, but Jay himself founded the New York Manumission Society, which played a key role in the passage of the 1799 state “gradual abolition law” (which Jay signed) and defended “free people of color” in danger of being sold South.
What’s more, the fact that a few prospered disproportionately from slavery does not build a case for reparations paid through public funds.
We must hope that the City Council’s reparations commission looks closely at the historical record and appreciates its nuances.
While it’s true that New York countenanced slavery, the vast majority of those who swelled its population came to the city in the post-slavery era; many were themselves freeing oppression (eastern European Jews) or abject poverty (southern Italians) and were drawn into harsh manual labor and sweatshops.
The issue is complex even when we consider New Yorkers of color.
Many come from immigrant families from the Caribbean, whose brutal sugar colonies (Jamaica and Haiti, for instance) were owned by English or French families.
The city is in no position to track down their descendants and demand reparations.
Nor is it imaginable, as a legal matter, to track down the individual descendants of the Van Wycks or Merritts and insist they pay for the sins of their ancestors.
So, too, many African-Americans trace their lineage to the Deep South, rather than to New York.
It’s been almost 200 years since slavery was legal in New York.
Its history is simply too complex to reduce to a check, signed by taxpayers.
Howard Husock is an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow
https://nypost.com/2024/09/28/opinion/nys-reparations-push-denies-complicated-history/
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