Chapter 5 addresses a major demographic puzzle concerning thousands of New York slaves who seem to have gone missing in the transition from slavery to freedom, and the chapter questions how and if slaves were sold South. The keys to solving this puzzle include estimates of common death rates, census undercounting, changing gender ratios in the New York black population, and, most importantly, a proper interpretation of the 1799 emancipation law and its effects on how the children of slaves were counted in the census. Given an extensive analysis of census data, with various demographic techniques for understanding how populations change over time, I conclude that a large number of New York slaves (between 1,000 and 5,000) were sold South, but not likely as many as some previous historians have suggested. A disproportionate number of these sold slaves came from Long Island and Manhattan.

Chapter 1 establishes the context and extent of Dutch culture in New York to demonstrate that Dutch slavery in New York was distinct and extensive. This chapter provides a demographic argument for the importance of Dutch slaves in the history of New York slavery. This chapter combines an argument drawn from census data with anthropological observations about the nature of violence and mobility in Dutch New York slavery.

Chapter 3 establishes that the Dutch had economic incentives to continue holding slaves. Slavery in Dutch New York was not just a cultural choice, but was reinforced by economic considerations. From archival sources and published secondary sources, I have compiled a unique dataset of prices for over 3,350 slaves bought, sold, assessed for value, or advertised for sale in New York and New Jersey. This data has been coded by sex, age, county, price, and type of record, among other categories. It is as far as I know the only slave price database for slaves in the Northern states yet assembled. Regression analysis allows us to compute the average price of Northern slaves over time, the relative price difference between male and female slaves, the price trend relative to known prices in the American South, and other variables such as the price differential between New York City slaves and slaves in other counties in the state. Slave prices in New York and New Jersey appear relatively stable over time, but declined in the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that slaveholders in Dutch New York were motivated by profit, and they sought strength and youth in purchasing slaves.

Chapter 2 is a history of the connection between wheat cultivation and the spread of slavery in areas of Dutch control, primarily focusing on Kings County (Brooklyn) and the Hudson Valley. This chapter pushes back against the “staple interpretation” of slavery, the idea that slavery flourished when and where it did primarily because of the advantages of geography and soil that allowed for cash crops such as tobacco and cotton. Historians have failed to explain why farmers who grew wheat would prefer slaves to short-term hired hands. The chapter argues that New York’s slave-owning farmers found slaves to be economically valuable in helping to solve the “peak-labor problem” – the difficulty of finding extra laborers during the busy wheat-harvest season in August. By ensuring a ready supply of enslaved laborers at hand, a wheat farmer could be more confident in planting more wheat, knowing that he would have sufficient labor to harvest it. From the first Dutch settlement in the 1620s until roughly 1820, eastern New York was a grain-producing region that focused first and foremost on raising wheat. In these years, it was also a society of slaveholders.

The danger to democratic norms aside, this chapter demonstrates that state government is also a needless source of additional regulation, additional taxation, and inefficient duplication of functions – in short, a waste of taxpayer money and a pointless burden on the citizenry. Yet, many of the specific functions currently performed by state governments are essential. The abolition of state government would therefore require the redistribution of those necessary functions between the national government and the local governments. This chapter demonstrates that such a redistribution would be administratively workable. To show this, it formulates general criteria for deciding which functions should go where and offers illustrations of how those criteria might be applied to specific functions in practice.

This chapter discusses the many counter-majoritarian actions of state legislatures and state executive branch officials and elaborates the profound impact of those actions on the functioning of US democracy. These include gerrymandering, nine common voter suppression strategies, and various other less-publicized manipulations of the electoral process. Too often, it will be seen, state governments have purposely targeted African American and other minority voters, threatening to undo decades of social progress.

Abolishing states would not be the end of the matter; the country’s leaders would have to make a number of fundamental secondary decisions. Someone would ultimately have to decide which of the essential functions currently performed by state government should be nationalized, which ones should be localized, and, as to the latter, how the various local functions are to be further distributed among the many different species of local governments – municipalities, counties, townships, special purpose districts, and unincorporated areas. Who should select the decision-maker? Decisions would also be needed as to the processes and responsibilities for replacing the states’ current roles in national elections, in supplying the bulk of the country’s judges, and in the constitutional amendment process. This chapter considers the options for filling those voids. In the process, it offers a portrait of what a unitary American republic might look like without state government.

This introductory chapter articulates the main thesis and summarizes the arguments that support it. It lays out the reasons that the thesis is important, describes what the book adds to the existing literature, explains some critical terms and concepts, and adds necessary disclaimers.

Unlike the preceding chapters, which focus on the democratic and fiscal costs of state government, Chapter 5 addresses the offsetting direct benefits that states and/or federalism have been claimed to bring. The two most popular such defenses tend to be the diffusion of government power and the ability of states to tailor laws and policies to the demands of their respective populations, but there are several others as well. The discussion here evaluates those defenses. It concludes that, despite their facial appeal, the various defenses turn out to be either very minor or, while significant, replicable at least as well by the national government in some cases and local governments or inter-government partnerships in others.

Chapter 6 is a history of emancipation in New York that stresses the combined importance of economic and legal pressures on slavery in areas of Dutch control. The gradual legal freedoms slaves gained after the Revolution served as a foot in the door towards eventual emancipation. When slaves were routinely given the ability to choose new masters, to seek work on their own, and to make money on their own (with some repayment to the slave owners), they made a crucial first step into a world of freedom. Voluntary slave manumission and self-purchase emancipations were the result of a process of negotiating the terms of slavery’s demise one person at a time. This dispersed, on-the-ground struggle was shaped by statutory law, as others have recognized, but, arguably, it was the common law that demonstrated and determined New Yorkers’ changing attitudes about slaveholding. Courtroom decisions about interpreting the states’ laws on slavery guaranteed that the freedoms won through slaves’ negotiations with their enslavers would be protected by the courts.

The Introduction summarizes some relevant works on the topic of Dutch American slavery and presents the main argument of the book. It contends that slavery in New York was primarily rural, that it was profitable, and that the slave population grew mainly on account of its own domestic growth. It will show that New York’s slaves were controlled, bullied, and punished severely, but many were also given a surprising latitude to move around on their own, especially after the American Revolution, when New York’s slaves gradually gained legal freedoms and negotiated, through their own initiative, more room to operate.