Free Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City by Carla L. Peterson

marshland created by its many outlets, and surrounded by wooded hills. A later account of the burial ground published in
Valentine’s Manual
in 1847 described its location as a “desolate, unappropriated spot, descending with a gentle declivity toward a ravine which led to the Kalkhook pond. … Though within convenient distance from the city, the locality was unattractive and desolate, so that by permission the slave population were allowed to inter their dead there.” 23
    Destroyed and built over, the burial ground was rediscovered in 1991; a mere fraction of the skeletal remains buried there have been retrieved. To date, there is a dearth of information concerning it. Black families who used the Negroes Burial Ground throughout the eighteenth century have left us no written documents. Whites have provided a few accounts, although none are contemporaneous. The cemetery’s archive resides in the bones themselves and the occasional artifacts found with them. They need to be unearthed, read, and interpreted.

    Lower Manhattan, 1836–1850 (Courtesy John Norton)
     
    Here’s some of what we do know. The
Valentine’s Manual
account briefly notes that many early black inhabitants “were native Africans, imported hither in slave ships, and retaining their native superstitions and burial customs, among which was that of burying by night, with various mummeries and outcries.” Official documents of the time record that the city prohibited night burials and limited the number of mourners to twelve out of fear of insurrection. Anthropologists currently studying the site have produced additional information. During excavation, they discovered more than two hundred cowrie shells, thought to symbolize the sea and thus the return of the dead across the Atlantic to Africa or the afterlife. Other evidence suggests that the deceased were wrapped in shrouds held together by straight brass pins and buried in plain wood coffins. On the lid of one of the coffins ninety-two nails were found hammered in a heart-shaped design, perhaps a Sankofa symbol representing a turning of the “head toward the past in order to build the future.” Finally, all the bodies were placed with their heads toward the east, suggesting that when the dead awoke, they would face the rising sun and their African motherland. What the bones and artifacts do not, cannot, yield, however, is any information about the “mummeries and outcries” that accompanied the nighttime burials. 24
    But the cemetery also memorialized the violence repeatedly meted out to New York’s black population. In both the Maiden Lane insurrection of 1712 and the Negro Plot of 1741, blacks accused of conspiracy were publicly executed on the Commons adjacent to the burial ground—hanged or burned at the stake. In 1741, two of the dead bodies were chained to posts on a hill overlooking the ground. The conspirators were then buried in the cemetery. Thus, the burial ground served as a cautionary reminder of the punishment awaiting blacks who ran afoul of those who so rigidly controlled their lives. Writing at the end of thenineteenth century, white historian Frank Moss understood with amazing sensitivity just how this spot embodied the city’s collective memories of racial violence (although he erroneously insisted that such violence was a thing of the past): “The imagination need not be excessively vivid, when, in going through this district, amid its present scenes of wretchedness and misery, we almost hear the death cries of the culprits and the horrible imprecations of the spectators, who gathered in large numbers to witness the tortures of the condemned wretches.” 25
    Later incidents of violence further undermined the sacred nature of the Negroes Burial Ground. In 1788, black families were obliged to petition city authorities to stop medical students from stealing corpses from the graves of loved ones and carrying away bodies “without respect to age or sex, mangle their flesh out