Slavery ended in New York State in 1827, yet this victory did not sever the city's connections to enslaved labor. New York City capitalized on the expanding trade in southern cotton and sugar to become the leading American port, a global financial center, and a hotbed of pro-slavery politics.At the same time, it nurtured a determined anti-slavery movement. In less than half a century, abolitionists convinced many northerners that American slavery could not be reconciled with American freedom. Conflict between the two sides, one favorable to slavery and one opposed, was all but inevitable.
New York Divided, the second of two major exhibits, draws from the New-York Historical Society's rich collection to explore the turbulent half-century of the city's history with southern slavery.

The debate over the United States Constitution in New York in 1787–1788 was an extraordinary combination of great political argument and skilled political practice, and it engaged critical issues that are relevant even today.

The statewide public debate culminated in a county-by-county election of delegates to the New York Ratifying Convention, an election in which there were no property qualifications for voters or delegates and which may be considered among the first truly democratic elections in the modern sense.

This online exhibition features documents, contemporary newspapers and broadsides, portraits and objects illuminating the hard-fought advocacy and courage to compromise that characterized this debate.

Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn is the first exhibition to relate the American, French and Haitian revolutions as a single, global narrative. Spanning decades of enormous political and cultural changes, from the triumph of British imperial power in 1763 to the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, Revolution! traces how an ideal of popular sovereignty, introduced through the American fight for independence, soon sparked more radical calls for a recognition of universal human rights, and set off attacks on both sides of the Atlantic against hereditary privilege and slavery. It also recounts the famed careers of such revolutionaries as Thomas Paine, Jean-Baptiste Belley and Dominique Toussaint L’Overture.

Christian Köhler’s Germania (The Awakening of Germania in the Year 1848), 1849 (1882.154) is installed on the second to third floor stairwell. It was first exhibited in New York in 1850 and was immediately recognized as one of the most important paintings in the United States. An allegory of the German people’s struggle for democracy, it was thought to have a safer resting place in New York than in Germany after the failed revolutions of 1848.