Coenties Slip

Part I: Imperial Crisis

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Here at Coenties Slip we find the heart of colonial New York, its bustling waterfront. The sculpture in the middle of the park is meant to invoke this maritime age, when diggers leveled Manhattan’s hills, and cartmen used the earth and other matter to fashion docking ports on the East River’s marshy shore. Coenties was one of a dozen such inlets, which enabled the port to surpass Boston and Philadelphia — by the mid-1700s, handling more tonnage than all New England combined.

That made it extraordinarily diverse. Strolling along New York’s waterfront, one might hear any of at least two dozen languages: workers from southern, eastern, and northern Europe;  diplomats and traders from the local eastern Algonquian nations; enslaved men from the Akan-speaking regions of today’s Ghana; even the occasional “Turk” or more distant visitor. New York was the major colonial export-import depot in Britain’s ever-growing mercantile economy, shipping dozens of raw materials, like grain and timber, to near and distant points in the Empire, while purchasing thousands of manufactures, like clothes and tableware, from English cities. Already by the mid-1700s, Europeans were astounded by what they found in wealthy neighborhoods like the Dock Ward, comparing the mansions and residents of Broad Way to London’s Bond Street, where “gentlemen” and “ladies” similarly paraded all the newest fashions and most exotic wares.

  • Many were also struck by the presence of African slaves everywhere — sold just a few blocks up the road from Coenties, at the ends of Wall St. and Maiden Lane, in auction stands on today’s Water St., the colonial shoreline. During the 1700s, Britain far surpassed the other European powers and the Islamic world in demand for enslaved labor. And colonial elites used the increase of “supply” from wars in African to counter the decline of indentured servants from Great Britain, who made up the vast bulk of the early settler work-force.

    New York quickly became the largest slave-owning city in the North. The enslaved were found on every street and in every trade, working for merchants, artisans, imperial officials, and churchmen — in two of every five homes in the metropolitan region.

    New York was thus both highly cosmopolitan, extremely diverse, and radically unequal. And it was here on the colonial waterfront that the Revolution began. While small in population, trading-posts like New York were the earliest places to see organized rebellion, because of their economic dependence on British trade and because of the political radicalism of the maritime workforce.

    The key actors in this drama were the sailors, who formed the backbone of this very profitable industry. These seamen were “so ill-paid, ill-fed, and ill-handled that it was impossible to obtain crews by free enlistment.” Press gangs frequently visited New York’s waterfront, dragging men from their homes or from the street to work on naval or merchant vessels for years or even decades, often alongside slaves.

    But sailors enjoyed an unusual degree of personal freedom because of the intense demand for their skills and labor. And they routinely challenged hierarchies of the day, leveling differences of faith, ethnicity, and race in what historians consider a proto-democratic culture. As Parliament began to restrict currency, tax imports, and prosecute illegal smuggling and settlement of Native land to finance the massive debt it had accrued building its global empire, British officials in New York and elsewhere faced the strongest and most violent resistance from these so-called Sons of Neptune.

    With the legislation of 1764-65, creditors demanded payment from merchants, who requisitioned debt from artisans, who stopped hiring. Soon the entire city was affected, New York’s debtor prison filling rapidly alongside beggars in the street. In this atmosphere, seamen and “mechanics” (artisans) formed a radical, new, independent power base, mobilized by rebel merchants and printers through mob action or vigilantism in groups like the Sons of Liberty. With its unrivaled number of taverns and freemen, New York’s waterfront became a hotbed of insurrectionary and civil war style violence.

Coenties Slip is now another “park” built on landfill, and there is no historic plaque at this location either. But you can see remnants of New York’s first city hall (Stadt Huys) and one of the many taverns which used to be here on the waterfront during the colonial era, in the walkway pictured in the center background above.

Mary Alexander

Mary Alexander was one of the richest women in New York by the time of her death. A daughter of the Spratts and de Peysters, she married into another prominent merchant family, the Provoosts.

When her first husband died, she inherited his fortune and then wed one of the most eminent lawyers in the colonies. Her son William (“Lord Stirling”) became a hero in the Battle for New York in 1776, too, and then a Major General in the Continental Army. But the men in Mary’s life were not strictly or chiefly responsible for her fortune. Mary was a leading player in the haberdashery trade, buying goods on her own account with London merchants and wholesaling to retailers in East Jersey, the Lower Hudson Valley, and New York — where she laid the “first paved sidewalk” in the city, before her store and mansion on Broad Street. Her business was so successful that she became part-owner of a sloop, importing dry goods directly and then developing realty.

  • Very few women could say as much in colonial New York. Unlike the Dutch, the English did not allow women to own and transfer property. A feme sole (woman alone) could, but most of these “she-merchants” ran taverns or small retail. Just a select few could grow, because the law of couverture passed a bride’s dowry onto grooms, making it difficult for women to attain credit or enter contracts overseas after marriage.

    But Mary was from a long line of women who found their way into the business world; her grandmother Cornelia was one of 17th c. New York’s premier traders. Mary cleverly utilized pre-nuptial agreements as well as family connections among the Dutch and British colonial elite to maintain control of her business through two marriages and widowhoods. She died a multi-millionaire in today’s dollars, her obituary recalling that “she was, for many years past, a very eminent trader.” She is buried at Trinity, cemetery of the British colony’s wealthiest and most prestigious church.