Slavery on Wall Street
by Bettye Kearse
The oral history of my family says that I am a descendant of Coreen, an enslaved cook, and her owner, President James Madison. In 1992, when I realized I knew a lot about how the president had lived his life but little about how Coreen had lived hers, I took my first trip to Montpelier, Madison’s former Virginia plantation. I toured the mansion, the Madison family cemetery, and an excavated kitchen where it is likely Coreen had worked. But I elected not to see the slave cemetery. I was afraid my forebears in death, as in life, had been dishonored.
A few months later, when I learned that the African Burial Ground had been discovered in New York City, I began to follow and research the story. In October 1991, the excavation crew for a new $275 million federal building on lower Broadway unearthed 419 human skeletons, the remains of a small fraction of the slaves who had built much of the city, including the wall that once defined Wall Street. In the 17th- and 18th-centuries, that site had been part of a cemetery where the bodies of more than 15,000 black people rested.
Image via Flicker https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/burial-ground-excavations.jpg provided by Bettye Kearse
Until the excavation, few New Yorkers knew that from 1711 to 1762, just two streets away from the current New York Stock Exchange, there had been a busy and profitable market where African men, women and children were bought and sold.
Every American colony had slaves. Stolen Africans were brought not only to grow cotton, sugar and tobacco in the South, but also to perform much of the hard labor needed to build towns, cities and railways. Raw crops produced in the South were transported to the North, or to Europe, to be turned into finished products, the sale of which was used to fund more trips to Africa for the capture and purchase of more slaves who were then trafficked to America. This triangular trade route was astonishingly lucrative.
New York City became so rich through the “peculiar institution” that in January 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Mayor Fernando Wood proposed secession from the Union rather than lose cotton trade with the South.
Early in 1992, when the city’s African American community learned of the discovery and the damage to skeletal remains caused by the excavation, the group held a televised meeting. One of the speakers, Rev. Herbert Daughtry reminded America: “Had it not been for the bodies and the bone, the body and the labor of those people who rest yonder—our ancestors—there would not have been a United States of America…”
Many of the nation’s black citizens were enraged that their government would construct a building on top of their ancestors’ final resting place, resulting in night vigils, organized rallies, spontaneous demonstrations, and petitions and meetings. The cause became a cry for human rights worldwide.
In October 1992, Congress agreed to alter the building’s design in order to preserve the archeological site and appropriated three million dollars for a museum and research center. That year, the African Burial Ground was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in April 1993, it became a National Historic Landmark. The House Subcommittee on Public Works agreed to transfer the exhumed skeletons to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Michael Blakey, an African American physical anthropologist, and his team studied the bones, teeth and hair of the buried individuals. The researchers discovered almost half had been less than 12 years old when they died and more than half of these children had not reached their second birthdays. The children, like the adults, had suffered from malnutrition, injury, infectious disease, lead, and overwork.
The remains also told another story. Denied human dignity in life, the deceased were found meticulously swaddled in winding sheets secured with shroud pins and lying supine in individual coffins. Among the bones were many artifacts, including coins, buttons, bracelets, cufflinks and beads, to be used in the next world. In one coffin, a woman lay with her newborn infant nestled in the bend of her elbow.
In October 2007, the African Burial Ground was dedicated as a National Monument. Eight years later, in July 2015, the city itself recognized the existence of its slaves and their descendants by installing a plaque a short walk away from where the 18th-century slave market once stood. The imagery of the city’s, and the nation’s, vast and powerful financial center sitting on top of the burial sites of its enslaved inhabitants projects an ironic view of persistent racial inequalities in wealth and legal rights.
After learning about the burial practices of New York City’s enslaved people, I returned to Montpelier. As I walked along the dirt road that curved down from the mansion, I didn’t know what to expect. So, when I reached the slave cemetery, the bright blue periwinkles covering the floor of a small woods took me by surprise. I stepped in, and the ground, blanketed with fallen leaves and cradling the hidden remains, was soft underfoot. Crude quartz headstones had been placed on the west end of the graves, allowing, according to ancient West African beliefs, the souls resting below to follow the sun as it rose on the morning of life beyond death.
Standing in a kingdom of many trees, I felt one of them call to me. A stone the color of raw flesh, its uneven surface shiny and smooth, nestled at the base. I envisioned one of my enslaved ancestors lying there, wrapped in white muslin secured with a shroud pin. I knelt down and placed my hand on the rock, assured my ancestor had been buried with dignity.