From, SLAVERY IN NEW YORK (the publication of the current New York Historical Society exhibition):

“New York remained committed to slavery. The majority of New York’s Founding Fathers–signatories of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution–held slaves…. At first, slavery hardly budged. New York’s lawmakers took some small steps–loosening the rules for manumission, for example–but no act of emancipation emerged from the legislative deliberations immediately following the war…. In some parts of New York, the number of slaves, and even the proportion of black people enslaved, increased.
“The Gradual Emancipation law freed not a single New York slave. It promised to free their children, but not until after they had served a long apprenticeship, until age twenty-eight for men and twenty-five for women…. No slave needed to be freed under the law until well into the third decade of the nineteenth century, and slavery–in the person of those who were slaves in 1799–could conceivably survive until the brink of the twentieth century. Moreover, as the law went into effect, slaveholders developed new subterfuges to retain black men and women in bondage….
“The 1799 law, in short, did not end slavery but rather initiated a new struggle for freedom . . . in 1817, at the urging of Governor Daniel Tompkins, the legislature agreed that on July 4, 1827, all those promised freedom by the Gradual Emancipation Law would be free. Still, those black men and women not covered by the 1799 law remained in bondage, and slavery survived in New York for another two decades . . . until 1850, nearly three quarters of a century after the Declaration of Independence declared equality the common condition of mankind.”

Tompkins Park in the East Village is named after this governor.

Via: Peri Hupsous

Filed under: Photos , History, Tompkins Square Park by gamma