Suffering, Grace and Redemption: How The Bronx Came to Be

Anthony Van Angola was the name of an enslaved African man in New Netherland in the seventeenth century. It’s not common to know the name of a slave from a long time ago, so repeating the name—Anthony Van Angola—is worthwhile. There were thousands of others like him in the colony. The Dutch brought enslaved men and women with them almost as soon as they landed. African slaves were in what’s now New York from 1626, the year after New Amsterdam’s founding.

When the Dutch defeated Indians in battles, they also enslaved the captives and kept or sold them or gave them away as gifts. The Dutch West India Company promised prospective settlers, as an inducement, that they would be provided with slaves. Trading slaves was a part of the company’s business. Jonas Bronck’s neighbor Pieter Schorstinaveger, after whom the Bronx is not named, farmed with Black slaves. When Richard Morris arrived from Barbados and purchased Bronk’s Land, he brought enslaved Black people with him “to help plant the fields,” as one historian puts it, understatedly.

Morrisania always had slaves. In the early 1700s, two of them, Hannibal and Samson, regularly sailed in a sloop to take the manor’s produce to sell in Manhattan. (The manor and vicinity were like a truck farm, or sloop farm, for the city.) In 1712, about 16 percent of the people residing in what’s now the Bronx were enslaved. At Lewis Morris’s death in 1762 he bequeathed forty-six slaves to his heirs. Gouverneur Morris received a special bequest from his father. Ten years old at the time, he was given “a Negroe Boy called George.”

Farming in New York generally did not use large numbers of slaves, unlike on the South’s cotton, rice, or tobacco plantations. Slave-owning families here usually had only two or three slaves, and the owners and the owned lived together in the same house. Slavery in the North is sometimes portrayed as a milder form of it, as if such a thing could be. The gradual phasing out of slavery in New York gave the slave owners time to sell their slaves south instead of having to free them. A Morrisania slave was said to be the last enslaved person freed in the state, when New York finally outlawed the institution completely in 1827.

As the writer Jamaica Kincaid has said, “Black people did not like slavery.” When Richard Morris and his wife died in 1672, their slaves rebelled, until local authority put the uprising down. More widely spread slave rebellions occurred in New York City twice in the 1700s; the colonists learned from them that rebellions against the status quo were possible. Later, white New Yorkers would follow the example set by the city’s more desperate slaves. The American Revolution was one of the first cover versions done by white people of something that Black people had done originally.

In the late 1980s, excavation for a new office building on Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, turned up a burial ground that had been covered over by nineteenth-century landfill. The site was near what had once been the city’s public commons, where executions took place, and some of the remains belonged to people who had been hanged after a slave rebellion in the city in 1741. Other burials in what was called the African Burial Ground dated from before then, some were from later. Closer examination of hundreds of skeletons dispelled any notion of the mildness of northern slavery.

The bases of some of the skulls showed ring fractures, probably caused by carrying heavy objects, such as water jugs, atop the head. On the bones, lesions revealed where muscles had been torn away by hard labor. The bones also had evidence of malnutrition, and of diseases such as yaws, rickets, syphilis, anemia, and meningitis. Some of the teeth had been filed into points or hourglass shapes, in African style.

Nutritional indicators suggested where the subjects might have come from originally. The teeth of children presumably born in America were in worse shape than the teeth of African-born adults. The varied diets in Africa had built better teeth than were found in the skulls of the children, who may have been fed mostly with corn. Some of the bodies had been interred with small objects, such as beads or pipes. Shroud pins that had fastened the burial wrappings remained, though the cloth had rotted away.

After archaeological work had been going on for a while, protesters stopped the team of white scientists who were doing it, and Black archaeologists from Howard University took over. Later, the dig and the examination of the remains were ended entirely, leaving some hundreds of bodies undisturbed where they lay, and reinterring the ones that had been exhumed. The African Burial Ground is now a national monument maintained by the U.S. Park Service.

Enslaved people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Amsterdam and New York lived with other-inflicted pain that still shows up four centuries later in their bones. Their mental pain can hardly be imagined. If unearned suffering is redemptive, as the Reverend Martin Luther King said, what redemption did these sufferers find? The African Burial Ground holds enough unearned suffering for the redemption of souls many times over. Maybe all this cemetery’s souls are in heaven, alongside their Puritan contemporaries who turned out to be right when they declared themselves predestined to go to heaven no matter what they did on earth, or whether or not they suffered.

I have said that a belief in the power of unearned grace, at a secular level, equals cool. The idea of cool became one of the country’s great discoveries, and a contribution for the ages. It took root in America, as I proposed, by way of religious beliefs held by predestinarians like Anne Hutchinson. The idea of cool is important to the Bronx because one day, young people who lived in the then-wasted borough would come up with something so original and so cool that it amazed the world. Hip-hop music, invented in the Bronx, leaped from its birthplace and spread worldwide. The height of American cool is grace and redemption, refined into art. A lightning strike of that transformation happened in the Bronx.

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Excerpted from Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough by Ian Frazier. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by Ian Frazier. All rights reserved.