[Footnote 30:  The florin has a value of forty cents.]

[Footnote 31:  This account is mainly drawn from A.J.  Northrup, “Slavery in New York,” in the New York State Library Report for 1900, pp. 246-254, and from E.B.  O’Callaghan ed., Voyages of the Slavers St. John and Arms of Amsterdam, with additional papers illustrative of the slave trade under the Dutch (Albany, 1867), pp. 99-213.]

The change of the flag was very slow in bringing any pronounced change in the colony’s general regime.  The Duke of York’s government was autocratic and pro-slavery and the inhabitants, though for some decades they bought few slaves, were nothing averse to the institution.  After the colony was converted into a royal province by the accession of James II to the English throne popular self-government was gradually introduced and a light import duty was laid upon slaves.  But increasing prosperity caused the rise of slave importations to an average of about one hundred a year in the first quarter of the eighteenth century;[32] and in spite of the rapid increase of the whites during the rest of the colonial period the proportion of the negroes was steadily maintained at about one-seventh of the whole.  They became fairly numerous in all districts except the extreme frontier, but in the counties fronting New York Harbor their ratio was somewhat above the average.[33] In 1755 a special census was taken of slaves older than fourteen years, and a large part of its detailed returns has been preserved.  These reports from some two-score scattered localities enumerate 2456 slaves, about one-third of the total negro population of the specified age; and they yield unusually definite data as to the scale of slaveholdings.  Lewis Morris of Morrisania had twenty-nine slaves above fourteen years old; Peter DeLancy of Westchester Borough had twelve; and the following had ten each:  Thomas Dongan of Staten Island, Martinus Hoffman of Dutchess County, David Jones of Oyster Bay, Rutgert Van Brunt of New Utrecht, and Isaac Willett of Westchester Borough.  Seventy-two others had from five to nine each, and 1048 had still smaller holdings.[34] The average quota was two slaves of working age, and presumably the same number of slave children.  That is to say, the typical slaveholding family had a single small family of slaves in its service.  From available data it may be confidently surmised, furthermore, that at least one household in every ten among the eighty-three thousand white inhabitants of the colony held one or more slaves.  These two features—­the multiplicity of slaveholdings and the virtually uniform pettiness of their scale—­constituted a regime never paralleled in equal volume elsewhere.  The economic interest in slave property, nowhere great, was widely diffused.  The petty masters, however, maintained so little system in the management of their slaves that the public problem of social control was relatively intense.  It was a state of affairs conducing to severe legislation, and to hysterical action in emergencies.