Julie Winch | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Julie Winch | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613–1863. By Graham Russell Hodges. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiv, 413 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2492-5. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-4778-X.)

In this exploration of 250 years of black life in New York and neighboring east Jersey, Graham Russell Hodges eloquently refutes the notion that northern slavery was more benign than its southern or Caribbean counterparts. 1

As Hodges shows, Africans were present in Manhattan even before a permanent Dutch colony was created. In the early years of settlement, the situation was a fluid one. Settlers imported slaves, but the slaves often labored alongside white servants who enjoyed little more freedom than themselves. Nor was slavery necessarily lifelong. In 1664 the English found, if not a slave society, at least a society of which slavery was an integral part. However, they also had to reckon with the presence of free creoles, members of what Ira Berlin has defined as the "charter generation" (Many Thousands Gone, 1998). . . .

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