A Brief History

During the Revolutionary War, New Yorkers helped to win the colonies’ political freedom from a monarch. Yet during the first decade of a nation established on a Constitution defined by individual liberty, New York was one of the last Northern states to abolish slavery. “In the 1780s, New Yorkers failed to traverse the distance between denunciation of metaphorical political enslavement to the British Empire and abolition of actual slavery in their midst,” argues historian David N. Gellman.

It was only in 1799 that the state passed legislation outlawing slavery, and even then the process of formal legal freedom would take several decades to be realized. The New York legislature enacted a policy of gradual emancipation. According to the law, all enslaved New Yorkers were to remain in bondage until 1827 unless individually manumitted. However, children born to enslaved women after July 4, 1799 would be considered free. Still, those children were considered legally indentured servants until they reached the age of 25 for women and 28 for men. This was the political context in which the lands of Central New York were divided and distributed.

In 1789, ten years before gradual emancipation began, New York State began mapping traditional Hodinohsó:nih (Haudenosaunee) homelands in Central New York. Through military attacks, land purchases of questionable legality, and unequal treaties, New York state and the U.S. government had wrested this land from members of the indigenous confederacy that included the Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora nations. These 1.5-million-acre “New Military Tract” bounty lands were given to Continental Army veterans as payment for their wartime service. Few former soldiers came to settle their allotted property; most sold their allotments to speculators. By 1817, Tompkins County had been carved from the New Military Tract, encompassing much of the region surrounding the south end of Cayuga Lake, and Ithaca became its county seat.

Black Americans, both enslaved and free, came to Tompkins County beginning in 1787, when a group of white families cut hay and brought cattle, “accompanied by . . . two boys—one a negro.” According to Tompkins County Historian Carol Kammen’s analysis, the earliest official documentation enumerated 158 black residents of Tompkins County in 1826, or .4 percent of the population.

Navigating within legal limitations to their participation in the civic affairs of the new nation—as well as racial discrimination and segregation—black Ithacans set up familial, cultural, economic, and institutional practices that asserted their humanity and their rights as Americans. They founded churches and clubs, supported freedom seekers, served in the military, and secured financial independence. They sought out educational opportunities, including integrating Cornell University. Guided by founder Ezra Cornell’s principle of “any person . . . , any study,” the land-grant institution opened in 1868 promising an education to all people regardless of race, class, religion, or gender—a radical idea at the time.

The continuing fight to assure civil rights and access to economic, political, and educational attainment remains a dominant strain among the heterogenous communities of Ithaca today.