Northern Slavery in Colonial America

We tend to think of slavery as a labor system that was confined to the American South. But it turns out that that’s not the full story. Slavery was also a fact of life in many northern colonies before the American Revolution. Northern slavery was never as widespread or as essential to the economy as it was in the south, but it was there nonetheless. What did it look like? What forms did it take? And what forms of resistance to it were possible? Quite a few, actually. In fact, in 1741, white New Yorkers thought they’d discovered a slave plot in their city—a plot to burn down Manhattan’s houses, rape its white women, and kill its white masters.

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