New York Manumission Society

John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States as well as statesman Alexander Hamilton and the lexicographer Noah Webster, along with many slave holders among its founders.

The members were motivated in part by the rampant kidnapping of free blacks from the streets of New York, who were then sold into slavery.

[1] Robert Troup presided over the first meeting,[4] which was held on January 25, 1785, at the home of John Simmons, who had space for the nineteen men in attendance since he kept an inn.

[2][3] The Society formed a ways-and-means committee to deal with the difficulty that more than half of the members, including Troup and Jay, owned slaves (mostly a few domestic servants per household).

[3] John Jay had been a prominent leader in the antislavery cause since 1777, when he drafted a state law to abolish slavery in New York.

Jay brought prominent political leaders into the Society, and also worked closely with Aaron Burr, later head of the Democratic-Republicans in New York.

[5] The Society organized boycotts against New York merchants and newspaper owners involved in the slave trade.

The Society had a special committee of militants who visited newspaper offices to warn publishers against accepting advertisements for the purchase or sale of slaves.

[12] In 1801, under a New York law that prohibited the transportation of slaves through the state, the Society sought to prevent a slave-holding household from disembarking on a sloop for Virginia.

However, after city wardens broke up a free-black crowd outside the household's residence, in what press reported as a riot, the Society failed to pursue the freedom suit.

[13] Greater success attended the Society in the courts after it was joined and represented by two exiled United Irishmen, newly admitted to the New York bar, Thomas Addis Emmet and William Sampson.

He obtained a writ forbidding departure of a ship bound for Africa laden with cargo of rum and other spirits intended for the purchase of slaves.

[12][14] Further success attended proceedings in 1806 to prevent a sloop leaving for the south with three free blacks on board, who had been seized to be sold as enslaved.

neither philosophy nor religion have forbade such mixtures.’’[16] In Amos and Demis Broad (1809), Sampson succeeded in having a sadistically abused mother and her 3-year-old daughter, manumitted.

Considerable opposition came from the Dutch areas upstate (where slavery was still popular),[19] as well as from the many businessmen in New York who profited from the slave trade.

Every member of the New York legislature but one voted for some form of gradual emancipation, but no agreement could be reached on the civil rights of freedmen afterwards.