User:Socrates1987/sandbox

Between 1711 and 1762 a slave market was operated at the corner of Wall Street and Pearl Street (then named Queen Street). It had several names including the Exchange, the Meal Market, the Old Slave Market and the Wall Street Market. Several forces led to its creation including a petition by local residents, a municipal desire to collect taxes on the buying and selling of slaves and a general need to regulate slave trading in the city which had up to that time been practiced informally in homes and in coffeehouses.

Slavery before the construction of the market

While the first slaves to appear in Manhattan were brought by the Dutch in 1611, the practice continued as the colony of New Amsterdam grew. The seizure of the New York colony by the English led to a gradual change in how slaves were treated and the economics of their situation. Indentured servitude and slavery were widespread in all of the English and Dutch colonies but in the English colonies slavery gradually became a major profit center and economic engine. While the intial number of slaves in New York and neighboring regions was small (1 in 10) by 1740's it grew to 40% in Manhattan.