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oflife. Most whites accepted it, and did not have much use for free black people, whom they generally considered troublesome and lazy. Any suggestion that freedom should confer on black people the same fundamental rights that whites enjoyed provoked anger, derisive laughter, or simply disbelief.
    In 1664, when the British took over the colony of New Netherland from the Dutch and renamed it New York, they found themselves coping with black people who were neither enslaved nor free. This part of the Dutch legacy was something with which the British were decidedly uncomfortable. The Dutch had been as ready as any of the other European colonizers to use slave labor when they came to North America in the early 1600s. In the first generation of settlement they had shipped thousands of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean to New Netherland. Some they had employed in their households and on their farms, others they had sent to labor on the wharves in the port of New Amsterdam (today’s New York City) loading and unloading their trading vessels. By the 1640s, though, they had another use for at least some of their slaves. Violence between the colonists and the Native peoples of the Manhattan area was escalating, which led the Dutch to extend “half-freedom” to some enslaved men. Purely from motives of self-interest they settled those men on land between the white settlement of Manhattan and the Indian lands and modified the conditions of their servitude to give them an incentive to fight the Indians, rather than unite with them. The half-free lived and farmed independently and had the right to keep any money they earned. In return for their privileged position they had to make an annual payment to the ruling Dutch West India Company. These half-free men struggled to secure the freedom of their wives and, despite what the Company said about half-freedom not being hereditary, they explored every avenue to make sure their children were free.
    After New Netherland changed hands, the British not only renamed the colony but dispensed with the institution of half-freedom. They instinctively distrusted black people who occupied a position in between slavery and full freedom. They worried about the numbers claiming half-free status. The half-free were much too independent-minded and the authorities suspected that they were sheltering runaway slaves on their small farms. Step by step, the new British regime undermined the position of the half-free, especially their ownership of land. They drew lines of demarcation between themselves and both free and enslaved blacks. For example, after 1697 no person of African descent, regardless of status, could be buried in the same graveyard as whites, hence the origin of New York’s long-lost and recently rediscovered African Burial Ground. Whites did not want black people too close to them, even indeath, and they certainly did not want black mourners traipsing across their final resting places.
    Following the brutal suppression of a slave uprising in New York City in 1712, piecemeal legislation gave way to the wholesale reworking of the laws relating to black people. The new code applied to the free, the half-free, and the enslaved. It had not escaped the notice of the authorities that at least one of those accused of instigating the uprising, “Peter the Doctor,” was a free man. Under the new law, free people could not own any real estate. It also became difficult and expensive for owners to free their slaves because they now had to pay a heavy financial penalty for the privilege of doing so. Blacks in bondage had a place in the grand scheme of things, but those who were free most definitely did not.
    The situation was much the same in New Jersey. Slaves were present in appreciable numbers, especially in the eastern part of the colony, by the last decades of the seventeenth century. The growth of New York City resulted in a constant demand for food. East Jersey’s farmers