The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York

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THE SLOW DEATH OF SLAVERY IN DUTCH NEW YORK

Original and deeply researched, this book provides a new interpretation of Dutch American slavery which challenges many of the traditional assumptions about slavery in New York. With an emphasis on demography and economics, Michael J. Douma shows that slavery in eighteenth-century New York was mostly rural, heavily Dutch, and generally profitable through the cultivation of wheat. Slavery in Dutch New York ultimately died a political death in the nineteenth century, while resistance from enslaved persons, and a gradual turn against slavery in society and in the courts, encouraged its destruction. This important study will reshape the historiography of slavery in the American North.  .  is Associate Professor at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University. He is also the director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. An interdisciplinary historian, his particular focuses include nineteenth-century US history, the Dutch world, historical methods, and historical philosophy and methodology.

THE SLOW DEATH OF SLAVERY IN DUTCH NEW YORK A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, –

MICHAEL J. DOUMA Georgetown University

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #-/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Michael J. Douma  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. When citing this work, please include a reference to the DOI ./ First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Douma, Michael J., author. : The slow death of slavery in Dutch New York : a cultural, economic, and demographic history, – / Michael J. Douma. : Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   (print) |   (ebook) |   (hardback) |   (paperback) |   (ebook) : : Slavery–New York (State)–History. | African Americans–New York (State)–History. | Dutch Americans–New York (State)–History. | Slavery–Economic aspects–New York (State)–History. | Antislavery movements–New York (State)–History. | New York (State)–History–-. :  .   (print) |  . (ebook) |  ./–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This is one of the most methodologically innovative studies on the history of slavery in America. In seven brilliantly researched chapters, Douma analyzes the size of Dutch New York slavery, the importance of wheat production, prices of enslaved workers, and the pathway to emancipation. Its conclusions make important corrections to previous studies. Jeroen Dewulf, University of California, Berkeley A remarkably insightful analysis of slavery in Dutch New York. Focusing on the demographic history of the enslaved, Douma’s research dispels many myths, including the thesis that slavery under the Dutch was somehow “mild.” This much-needed antidote will be indispensable to historians of slavery and Dutch New York alike. Jaap Jacobs, author of The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America With meticulous research and compelling analysis, Michael Douma boldly places New York’s Dutch communities at the center of slavery in the North. This book challenges long-held assumptions about slavery in New York and unveils the enduring legacy of the Dutch language within enslaved communities. Nicole S. Maskiell, author of Bound by Bondage Brilliantly researched, well-written, and fascinating, Michael Douma tells a new story about slavery in the North. It is a must read for anyone interested in the history of New York. Shane White, author of Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments

page viii x xi

Introduction





The Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery





The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex





The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey, –





Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey





Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York





Dutch Resistance to Emancipation and the Negotiations to End Slavery in New York





Making Sense of the Mild Thesis and the End of Dutch New York Slavery

   

Appendices Works Cited Index

vii

Figures

. Total black population (free and enslaved) and slave population in New York Colony/State, –. page  . New York City enslaved population as a percent of the statewide number of enslaved persons.  . New York City total black population and slave population, –.  . Long Island and Staten Island black and slave population, –.  . Hudson Valley total black and slave population, –.  . New York State black population, free and slave combined, –.  .  slave census, Dutch versus English.  . An early use of the Dutch word baas (boss) at the Schuyler estate from the Occom journal, .  . Two versions of a painting of the James Ryder van Brunt Homestead.  . Eighteenth-century payments made in “schepels” of wheat, Ulster County.  . The salary of Minister Weeksteen paid in wheat in Kingston, New York.  . Wheat prices per bushel and flour prices per barrel, in New York City, –, in dollars (with conversions from pounds).  . US annual exports of wheat (in bushels) and flour (in barrels), –.  . A painting titled “Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields on the Approach of the British” by Emanuel Leutze.  . Values of enslaved persons by age, relative to quadratic fit.  . Actual versus regression estimated prices of enslaved persons.  . Dutch language abilities among runaways by decade.  viii

List of Figures . Dutch-speaking runaway slaves by region and decade. . An advertisement for a runaway slave named Harre, by Philip Schuyler, . . Percent decline of slaves relative to total population by county, –. . A glass photograph of Rosanna Vosburgh of Albany, New York. . An image of a formerly enslaved man, John Wynkoop, . . Demographic table of deaths among black people in New York, –. . “Ghost Tallies” in the  national census for New York. . More false entries in the  census. . Jeffre Johnson, former slave of the Rapalje family, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April , . A. Ratio of the price of a barrel of flour to a bushel of wheat, on the New York City market, –. A. Estimated percent of New York slaves who were not born in New York, –.

ix           

Tables

. Estimated values of enslaved persons in New York and New Jersey by sex and age. page . Estimated values of enslaved persons, controlling for time and location. . Estimated values of enslaved persons, without controlling for time and location. . Estimated values of enslaved persons, Manhattan, New York State, and New Jersey. . Estimated values of enslaved persons, complete values by time and location. . Minimum reported Dutch-speaking slave advertisements in New York, average per year (by decade). . New York State census figures, free blacks and enslaved, – (adjusted). . New York State census figures, blacks, – (adjusted). . New York State census figures, free blacks and slaves (adjusted by estimated undercount). . Effects of estimated death rates on total number of New York slaves manumitted or sold South, –. . Estimated number of enslaved persons by county (with adjustments), –. . Estimated black population of six-county area, with applied death rates, –. . Six-county slave population rate of decline and numbers missing from  to . . Gender ratios of New York City free blacks and slaves, –. . New York City black population (free and enslaved, by sex, –) in city, state, and federal censuses. x

              

Acknowledgments

In , the New Netherland Institute graciously provided a grant that allowed me to visit the Rutgers University archives to begin archival work on this project. Georgetown University’s business school, my academic home for the past eight years, has provided me the space, time, and independence necessary for research. I received no other outside financial support for this project. Many friends and colleagues provided feedback on drafts or advice on finding source materials. For conversations and advice that helped in the research for this book, I thank Travis Bowman, Taylor Bruck, Jeroen Dewulf, David Hibbeln, Andrea Mosterman, Jeroen van den Hurk, Cho-Chien Feng, Steve McErleane, Jan de Vries, Derek Tharp, Tricia Barbagallo, Debra Bruno, Leendert van der Valk, Gavin Wright, Jonathan Olly, Beatriz Peña Núñez, Claire Bellerjeau, Timothy Hack, Helen van Rossum, Jeffrey Hummel, Nicole Maskiell, Claudia Goldin, Candace Gray, and Paul Finkelman. Jaap Jacobs, Dennis Maika, Dirk Mouw, Richard Bell, Graham Hodges, and Shane White all read an early version of the book and provided comments and criticisms that helped shaped the direction of the final work. J. David Hacker, a brilliant demographer, spoke with me at length and provided exceptional feedback on my demographic analysis that informs Chapter . Michael Makovi, an assistant professor of economics at Northwood University, is my coauthor in Chapter . Michael taught me everything I know about Stata and most of what I know about winter tires. Without his help, my cliometric analysis would have been much weaker. I presented parts of this work for an annual conference of the Omohundro Institute and for conferences of the New Netherland Institute and the Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies, where I served as president from  to . I gave an invited xi

xii

Acknowledgments

presentation about slave resistance for the Netherland-America Foundation and an invited presentation about slave demography for the Schenectady Historical Society. I presented this work to a class of students at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I also presented Chapter  for the History Group at the Hoover Foundation, where Niall Ferguson, Manuel Rincon Cruz, and Matthew Lowenstein welcomed and encouraged me. My trusted and true mentor, Bob Swierenga, read a full draft and provided comments on content, editing, and style. The cover image was gratuitously provided by Len Tantillo. I would also like to thank the many archivists and librarians who helped me, virtually and in person – they are too many to name individually. In the time when I was conducting research for this book, archival practice and everyday life was turned upside down by the Covid- pandemic. My graduate-school pal Christopher Griffin produced the Index. I would like to thank my editor at Cambridge University Press, Cecelia Cancellaro, and her assistant, Victoria Phillips, for their attentiveness and professionalism. I could not ask for a better team to work with. Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Cecilia, for encouraging me during this project. I dedicate this book to her.

Introduction

In , New York had the fifth largest slave population in the thirteen American colonies. In , there were more enslaved persons in New York than in the province of Georgia, and in , New York City had more slaves than any other city in the nation besides Charleston. These kinds of comparisons help us to see that slavery in the latter-day “free state” of New York was more than a historical curiosity, but a central part of its history. New York was by far the largest slaveholding state in the North, and slavery lasted longer there than in any other Northern state except New Jersey. Unlike plantation owners in the South, slaveholders in New York tended, with few exceptions, to own only a handful of bonded laborers. Slaveholding was widespread, not just in New York City but also in the fields of Long Island and on the farmlands of the Hudson Valley. Because slaves were frequently traded and rented out to neighbors, the number of New Yorkers holding slaves and using slave labor was greater than statistics would suggest. Slavery in New York was peculiar not only because of its size and duration but also because of the substantial role the Dutch played in shaping the institution. Slavery in New Netherland began in the s, soon after the first enslaved persons had arrived in Virginia. In , the English took over New Netherland, and historians of New York have been apt to talk about “the Dutch period” and “the English period” as if political control of the colony completely shaped its cultural environment, as if, overnight, Dutchmen became Englishmen, and Dutch slavery became English slavery. 

Recent books have successfully challenged this divide and stress social and cultural continuity among New York slaveholding practices in this period. Anne-Claire Faucquez, De la Nouvelle-Néerlande à New York: La Naissance d’une société esclavagiste (–) (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, ); Andrea Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); and Nicole Saffold Maskiell, Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ).





Introduction

But the Dutch in New York persisted as a cultural group long past . In fact, in , roughly half of the province’s population was still Dutch. While the population of New York City gradually turned to the English language, Dutch speakers controlled large parts of Brooklyn, most of Staten Island, and much of the Hudson Valley throughout the eighteenth century. And even in the nineteenth century, many New York slaves spoke Dutch and lived in cultural communities where Dutch religion, culture, and ideas predominated. Until the very end of slavery in the state, Dutch-descent New Yorkers remained overrepresented among slaveholders, especially in the rural areas, where families held slaves for generations. The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York points to the important influence of the Dutch and Dutch-descent Americans in developing and maintaining slavery in the state. It argues, in short, that to understand the history of slavery in New York, we need to recognize it as more Dutch, more profitable, more rural, and more enduring than has been previously recognized. It argues, further, that the Dutch played an outsized role in New York’s slave economy and in the resistance to abolitionism and emancipation. Dutch attitudes about the utility and morality of slavery presented a major roadblock in attempts to end slavery in the state via gradual abolition. The profit accruing to Dutch farmers, particularly from the cultivation of wheat, demonstrated that slavery was profitable and compatible with the needs of New York farmers. Although Dutch New Yorkers were sometimes married to Anglo-Americans, and although there was significant trade and cultural interaction between Dutch-descent New Yorkers and their English-speaking neighbors, there was still a distinct Dutch type of slavery in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New York that is demonstrable culturally, economically, and demographically. This was among the largest non-English-speaking forms of slavery in American history. For most of the eighteenth century, there were more Dutch-speaking slaves in New York alone (not even counting an additional  percent more Dutch-speaking slaves in New Jersey) than there were French-speaking slaves in Louisiana, and while this latter population certainly grew in the nineteenth century, its ultimate size has not been established. In the two decades following the start of the Haitian 



And yet, many studies on slavery in the North ignore the Dutch altogether; for example, one of the pioneering works on slavery in the North: Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Demographic data on the Louisiana creoles is not nearly as robust as it is for New York’s enslaved population. The population of Louisiana, of course, was not captured in the national censuses of

Introduction



Revolution in , thousands of French-speaking slaveholders moved to the United States with their slaves. Slavery was engrained in the culture of Dutch New York. In many ways, Dutch slaveholding patterns in New York resembled those of their Anglo neighbors, and many Dutch families and Dutch-speaking slaves lived in a mixed, bilingual Dutch–English environment. Yet Dutch slavery had its distinguishing elements. The Dutch saw slaveholding as an economic investment for the family. Slave holdings were divisible property that could be bequeathed to children. Dutch children were often presented with their own slave, in attempts to create a lifelong bond between child and slave. Language, religion, and patterns of the calendar year, coinciding with farming seasons and holidays, shaped the social grouping of Dutch slaves. From Brooklyn, Dutch slaves traveled in groups to Manhattan to sell oysters and farm products grown on their own initiative. In the Hudson Valley, Dutch slaves were famous for knowing the routes to and from villages, and for maintaining farms and carting slaveholders to and from church and other assemblies, and for operating Hudson River ferries. In contrast to the urban, mostly English-speaking slaves of New York City, Dutch slaves were rural laborers who knew how to sow, reap, and mill grain, and to tend horses and cattle. They were not all members of the Dutch Reformed Church, but they were generally acquainted with that form of Protestantism. Dutch New York slaveholding culture resisted the political and legal changes that ultimately brought about the end of slavery in the state in . After , children of slaves remained bound in service despite their status as legally freed. In many cases, Dutch-descent New Yorkers legally bought, sold, and owned these children well past slavery’s legal demise. Dutch slaveholders also kept their enslaved persons longer and  or , as the United States did not acquire Louisiana as a territory until . The population of slaves in Louisiana in  was ,, but how many spoke French is unclear. Gwendolyn Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, ) gives a total of , creole slaves in Louisiana by . The total number of blacks in French settlements in Louisiana in  was ,. The black population in New Orleans and environments in  was ,. Thomas N. Ingersoll suggests that perhaps  percent of these slaves were creoles. Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association : (Spring ), –. Din gives an estimate of , slaves in Louisiana in  and , in , with about , “at the end of the French period.” Most of these, he argues, were the result of natural increase, not imports, suggesting then that many would have learned French or Spanish. Gilbert C. Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, – (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, ), .



Introduction

condemned the practice less than did English New Yorkers and most others in the North. In Dutch New York, slavery died an agonizingly slow death. An anonymous reviewer of one of my articles in a peer-reviewed journal explicitly voiced a concern that the use of the term “Dutch” was “problematic” for late eighteenth-century New York, and said that “to call these people ‘Dutch’ because of their heritage is as if we would call black Americans ‘Africans.’” “This is not acceptable,” they added. I respectfully but adamantly disagree. A significant aim of this book is to convince readers that there were a distinct people in New York who identified as Dutch, who spoke Dutch, and who held slaves who spoke Dutch. It is appropriate to call the Dutch-speaking descendants of seventeenth-century New Netherland “the Dutch” because that is what they called themselves and indeed that is what others called them as well. Naturally, in time, the New York Dutch became a different people from their ancestors and cousins in the Netherlands. The New York Dutch invented their own traditions, used American words, and developed their own stories and ways of looking at the world. Although there were some regional differences, the New York Dutch were well connected with the New Jersey Dutch, whom Peter O. Wacker calls “a distinct cultural group by .” The Dutch in this region, as Wacker notes, were not all from Holland, but were of “Flemish, Huguenot, Walloon, German, Scandinavian, Polish, and even Hungarian and Italian origin.” Historian Dirk Mouw relates that there were even families among them with nonDutch surnames like the Zabriskies who explicitly thought of themselves as Dutch, even as they distanced themselves from inhabitants of the Netherlands. When new immigrants from the Netherlands arrived in New Jersey in the nineteenth century, Everett Zabriskie “distinguished himself from the immigrants and their descendants” by calling them “damned Frisians” and insisting that he and his family were truly Dutch. Netherlands historian Willem Frijhoff reminds us that Dutch  



Peter O. Wacker, Land and People: A Cultural Geography of Preindustrial New Jersey: Origins and Settlement Patterns (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . Wacker, Land and People, . These people “came to live among Dutch settlers and they stated to speak Dutch and often become culturally Dutch” writes Eric Nooter, Between Heaven and Earth: Church and Society in Pre-Revolutionary Flatbush, Long Island (PhD dissertation, Vrij Universiteit, ), . A study of the European origins of the New Netherlanders showing these mixed backgrounds is David Steven Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?” New York History : (January ), –. Dirk Mouw, Moederkerk and Vaderland: Religion and Ethnic Identity in the Middle Colonies, – (PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, ), .

Introduction



culture in the mid Atlantic was “not a faithful copy of Dutch culture in the Netherlands,” but that a different kind of Dutch ethnic culture was “invented” and coalesced after the Leisler rebellion of , while various forms of “ethnic memory . . . exploded in the nineteenth century.” Historians Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie have expressed a similar and even stronger view about the “emergence of a self-conscious Dutch identity at odds with mainstream English values” in colonial New York and New Jersey. Klooster and Oostindie explain that “[e]ven though the ratio of ethnically Dutch men and women shrank compared to the overall population, these men and women emphasized their Dutch ways more emphatically in the eighteenth century than their forbears had done.” To the Yankees and Yorkers of the early nineteenth century, Dutch knickerbockers were a distinct people, with their own religion, language, architecture, furniture, folklore, ghostlore, festivals, and farming patterns. These New York Dutch also had their own unique H-framed barns, jambless fireplaces in their houses, and cabinet beds. Dutch wagons built in New York were constructed in a manner different from the Yankee ones. There were Dutch almanacs printed in significant numbers in New York through to the American Revolution. In religious worldview, even in their mannerisms, New York Dutch were a distinct cultural group in the process of mixing with Anglo New Yorkers and becoming Americans. A recent set of books by Jeroen Dewulf, Anne-Claire Faucquez, Andrea Mosterman, and Nicole Maskiell have revived interest in Dutch slavery in New York and have drawn the contours of the social history of Dutch New York slaveholders primarily in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but the authors disagree about whether to call these people



 



Willem Frijhoff, “Dutchness in Fact and Fiction,” in Joyce D. Goodfried, Benjamin Schmid, and Annette Stott, eds., Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, – (Leiden: Brill, ), –. Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie, Realm between Empires: The Second Dutch Atlantic, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –. Roderic Blackburn, “Transforming Old World Dutch Culture in a New World Environment: Processes of Material Adaptation,” in Roderic Blackburn and Nancy Kelly, eds., New World Dutch Studies: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, – (Albany, NY: Albany Institute of History and Art, ), –. Judith Richardson, “The Ghosting of the Hudson Valley Dutch,” in Going Dutch, Goodfriend, et al. editors (); Clifford W. Zink, “Dutch Framed Houses in New York and New Jersey,” Winterthur Portfolio : (), –. An English traveler in  said these were “of a simple construction, the body is like a long shallow box, the sides straight, and about a foot high; they are worked by a pole and pair of light hardy horses.” John Palmer, Journal of travels in the United States of North America, and in Lower Canada, performed in the year  (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, ), .



Introduction

Dutch, Dutch-Americans, or Anglo-Dutch. In a review of these recent works, I explained that the term “Dutch Americans” did not become popular until the twentieth century, and then it was most commonly applied to the new waves of Dutch immigrants in the United States, and not typically to the descendants of the Dutch of New York. From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, the Dutch in New York and New Jersey generally called themselves “Dutch” or were occasionally labeled “Hollanders” but they neither called themselves nor were they called “Dutch Americans.”

The term Anglo-Dutch also seems out of place. “Historically, ‘AngloDutch’ has been a descriptor of the four wars fought between the Dutch and the English, or it served as an adjective for joint ventures between the English and the Dutch.” “Anglo-Dutch” was not a term used by anyone in eighteenth-century New York to describe themselves. David Steven Cohen supported the term “Afro-Dutch” for the Dutch-speaking slaves of New York and New Jersey. But this term did not stick, and may have been too general, or confused with other “black Dutch” in Suriname or South Africa, for example. Historical knowledge proceeds in stages, and no work of this kind could be possible without the insights of earlier historians. Yet it is clear that some major obstacles have prevented historians from telling the history of Dutch slavery in New York in more than an incomplete and superficial way. One major problem has been in locating sources. Our well-known and oft-repeated national histories are frequently pasted together from the official printed records of the government, from well-known microfilm collections, and from papers cataloged and available in accessible archives. But sources on the history of slaves in Dutch New York are difficult to 

 

Michael J. Douma, “Taking Control of Slavery in Dutch New York,” Journal of Early American History : – (Dec. ) –. Review of Faucquez, De la Nouvelle-Néerlande à New York; Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement; and Maskiell, Bound by Bondage. They were called Dutch and identified as Dutch, sometimes as “Low Dutch” to distinguish them from their German or “High Dutch” Palatine neighbors who also settled in the Hudson Valley. The term “colonial Dutch” applies to some degree, except that of course it was not used in the eighteenth century, has generally been a term of significance in architecture, and does not apply to the Dutch in the United States after the American Revolution. David Steven Cohen, Folk Legacies Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). The closest to a general account is Vivienne Kruger, Born to Run: The New York Slave Family from  to  (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, ). While extensive, and marshaling an impressing amount of data, it lacks analysis and overview, and is far from consistently readable. Graham Russell Hodges’s history of African Americans in New York and New Jersey is the most up-to-date synthesis, replacing in a number of ways earlier work by Edgar McManus. Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ).

Introduction



locate, and especially so outside of the papers of elites, that is, from archival documents not from families named Livingston, Philipse, or Rensselaer. It is natural for historians to follow the paper trail where the sources are most plentiful, but such an approach can lead them to focus inordinately on certain topics like the  and  slave revolts, or the nineteenthcentury white abolitionist movement in New York, when these events and processes form only a small part of the full story of slavery in the state. Relevant documents for the study of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Dutch New York slavery have not been brought together in one convenient collection as are many of the papers of seventeenth-century New Netherland. Records of Dutch slaves must be hunted down in dozens of state, regional, and local archives. Some of these records are in Dutch, and have not been dutifully cataloged, for lack of archivists who understand their contents. The organization and accessibility of archival documents in New York is far from ideal. There has also been a problem of preserving and reproducing data. In preparing this book, I contacted about five or six historians who had compiled and used quantitative data in their studies of slaves in New York and New Jersey. Nearly everyone I contacted responded in kind, but none, save Middlesex College history professor Timothy Hack, were able to provide me the raw data they used in their studies. Many noted the loss of data after publishing their work. Another exception, whom I did not contact, was Harvard historian Jill Lepore, who conveniently posted the data for her book on the  New York City slave revolt for download on the Harvard dataverse. Similarly, and in this spirit, I have published the data for Chapter  and  in digital format at the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. Most problematic of all for the study of New York Dutch slavery is that there is little we can learn from the Dutch-speaking slaves themselves. Few, if any, could write, and even if some could, their writings have not survived, so we cannot read them in their own words. Linguists have attempted to piece together the New York “Negro Dutch” tongue from 



Replication data for Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in EighteenthCentury Manhattan (), https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:./ , Harvard Dataverse, V, accessed December , . Michael J. Douma, “Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in Early American Newspaper Advertisements, –,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation : (), –, https:// jsdp.enslaved.org/fullDataArticle/volume-issue-dutch-speaking-runaway-slaves/, accessed March , . Data for Chapter  has been published as Michael J. Douma, “Prices of Enslaved Persons in New York and New Jersey,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation :  (): –, https:// doi.org/./n-r, accessed March , .



Introduction

whatever scraps can be found, but there is little to go on, other than a few lines recorded in court cases and some observations of travelers passing through the Hudson Valley, filtered through English-speaking ears. Slavery in New York died out just as the country saw a tremendous growth of newspapers and other printed media in a period often called the Market Revolution. Then, in the antebellum years, a deluge of printed abolitionist materials across the country focused on Southern slavery and positioned New York as one of the free states, oftentimes obscuring its slaveholding past. Instead of producing a mere chronicle of government records, personal letters, and descriptions of encounters with Dutch slaves and slaveholders, The Slow Death of Slavery makes a serious attempt to get at the crucial numbers, particularly the demographic and economic data of the story. Sometimes simple-sounding historical questions are the most difficult to answer, yet they can be essential for the story. For example, suppose one wants to know how many Dutch-speaking slaves there were in New York. Before a peer-reviewed article I wrote on the topic in , only the vaguest guesses at this number had been proffered. In my article, I presented demographic evidence that in the eighteenth century alone there were between , and , Dutch-speaking slaves in New York – that is, up to  percent of New York’s slaves spoke at least basic Dutch. Thousands more Dutch-speaking slaves could be found in northern New Jersey, with others scattered in New England. Some New York Dutch moved with their slaves to Bucks County, PA, Berkeley County, VA, and even to Kentucky. 

 

Here, I allude to the frequent references to the Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton and to the published travel remarks of Peter Kalm, both of which are difficult to interpret, say very little regarding the Dutch language, yet are cited frequently on this topic. There is frequent confusion over the term “Negro Dutch,” as it applies separately to a now extinct language in the Danish West Indies, and sometimes to Africans in Dutch Suriname or Dutch South Africa. Michael J. Douma, “Estimating the Size of the Dutch-Speaking Slave Population of New York in the th Century,” Journal of Early American History : (), –. The Van Meter family moved from Ulster County to Somerset County in New Jersey’s Raritan Valley around , and then in the s and s, they pushed further South into the Northern Neck of Virginia, where they became large landholders on the frontier and, for generations, large slaveholders as well. Dutch slaveholders looking for land to farm pushed out of New Jersey into Bucks County, Pennsylvania, then to Shepherdstown, Virginia, and finally to Kentucky, where, in the s, a “low Dutch Company” was established. The settlers there retained the name “low Dutch” to distinguish them from Pennsylvania Germans. Among this migration were several slaveholders. One example was Garret Terhune, who drowned in . His inventory in Mercer County lists four enslaved persons, three horses, a scythe, and a cradle, among other items. Carrie E. Allen, A Record of the Family of Isaac Van Nuys (or Vannice) or Harrodsburg, Kentucky, Son of Isaac Van Nuys of Millstone, New Jersey (Unknown publisher, ), . This presaged migration out of the Hudson Valley to the western reaches of New York State.

Introduction



Although it is perhaps counterintuitive, the number of Dutch-speaking slaves in New York likely increased throughout the eighteenth century. This owes partly to the steady increase of the slave population in the state, but also to the surprising stability of the Dutch language, and to widespread bilingualism and trilingualism. The persistence of the Dutch language in the United States in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century has always been a problem for those who wish for clear dates of its demise, or for clear geographical bounds of its spread. The Dutch language in New York and New Jersey was gradually replaced by English in the eighteenth century, but it held on in many places, with a generation of children still learning the language as a mother tongue as late as the s and s. Both blacks and whites in New York continued to speak Dutch in some places until the mid nineteenth century, when a new wave of Dutch immigrants arrived. Numbers are important in history and historians ought to embrace quantitative data, even when dealing with sensitive topics like slavery. It is my view that we best honor people in the past, and best recognize historical wrongs, by being honest about historical data and approaching it directly. By incorporating the economic debates on American slavery, The Slow Death of Slavery engages with and revives the cliometric tradition that first emerged in the s and s. The insights from this literature have not been brought to bear on the study of Northern slavery in any way, even as new waves of historians investigate the economics of antebellum slavery in the South. Economic studies of Southern slavery are common and contentious, and there is potentially much at stake in offering a new kind of American slavery for economic historians to prod and dissect. Particularly, there is the age-old question of slavery’s profitability – never for the slave, who obviously was imperiled by an immoral system – but for particular slaveholders, and for slave societies more generally. Unfortunately, economic data for eighteenth-century New York is sparse. As far as I know, there are no comprehensive output figures or export tallies from its colonial era. There are no account books listing slave production totals on a New York farm. Besides, New York’s slave economy was diverse, so we cannot measure productivity of slave labor in this case as historians have done for slave colonies that focused on single products like cotton, 

A classic study by Arthur Zilversmit makes a few economic arguments about slavery in the North, but has little data to back them up. Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).



Introduction

sugar, or tobacco. We need other ways to measure slavery’s economic impact, including studying slave prices over time and population changes. One mistake about the economics of slavery is particularly recurrent in the history of New York. Namely, historians have repeated a view that the Dutch in New Netherland and the colonial New Yorkers imported slaves because there was a shortage of labor in the colony. On the surface, this may appear to be plausible. It also echoes the views of elite New Yorkers of the period, who frequently complained of the shortage of workers. The shortage of labor trope was at least as old as , when Cadwallader Colden wrote: It is true that it were better for the Country if there were no Negroes in it, and that all could be carried on by Freemen, who have a greater Interest in promoting the Good of a Country, and who strengthen it more than any Number of Slaves can do: But the Want of Hands and the Dearness of the Wages of hired Servants, makes Slaves at this Time necessary; and seeing they are necessary, nothing that is necessary is to be discouraged.

As Colden recognized, the chief limiting factor in the North American colonial economy was labor. Naturally, powerful landowners, patricians, and colonial administrators wanted more people to do work for them. But what does it mean to have a shortage of labor at the colony level? Does it mean that labor prices are exceptionally high, or that colonial administrators, functioning as mercantilists, simply want a larger population and a more developed economy? Furthermore, all colonies were typically short of workers, but only some turned to slaves to solve the problem.





At times, this appears as a normative statement, almost an excuse for why they had slaves, as if they could do no other and had no choice. But considered only as a descriptive statement, it still has plenty of support in the historiography. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Boston: Harvard University Press, ), . Berlin argues that disruption of the flow of indenture servants, particularly because of war, and especially during the Seven Years’ War, created higher demand for slaves. But, in fact the years of the greatest number of slave imports to New York were before the Seven Years’ War. Michael E. Groth echoes this idea that there was a “chronic shortage of labor” in colonial New York that led producers in the Hudson Valley to turn to slaves instead of indentured servants. Michael E. Groth, Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), –. Cadwallader Colden, The Interest of the County, in Laying Duties, or a Discourse, shewing how Duties on some Sorts of Merchandize may make the Province of New-York richer than it would be without them (New York: J. Peter Zenger, ). This pamphlet was also published in New York City in Dutch as Het Voordel Van Het Land in de Oplegginge van Tollen: Of Een Redeneering, aanwyseende, hoe Tollen op eenige Koopmanschappen de Provincie van Nieuw-York konnen Ryker maken, als de sal zyn sonder de selve (New York: J. Peter Zenger, ).

Introduction



A shortage of something requires that there is a demand for that thing, and there is always demand for labor or goods at a low enough price. It is therefore not strictly true that New Yorkers sought slaves because they could not find free laborers; it is rather that they could not get free laborers at a certain price, and that instead of offering sufficient incentives to free laborers to come to the colony, they preferred to take on slaves at some, perhaps lower, price instead. It is crucial to recognize that slaveholding in New York, like elsewhere, depended on rational calculation and (im)moral choice. The historian Edgar McManus added to the confusion when he wrote “[t]he rapid progress of the economy [of New York] after  created a demand for slaves that was usually greater than the supply.” But it would be better to write that the quantity supplied was unable to meet the quantity demanded, at going prices, because prices were too low. McManus again misses out on the crucial role of prices when he writes: “So intense was the competition for slaves that neither the company [the West India Company] nor private traders could fill the demand.” This is a strange statement indeed. If the competition for slaves was so intense, then buyers would have driven up the price of slaves. At a certain price, it would have been profitable for Virginian slave owners to sell slaves to New Yorkers, or for other slave traders in the Caribbean and in Africa to step in to fill the demand. But since demand, reflected in prices, was never that high, the flow of enslaved persons to New York was never as great as it was to Virginia or the Caribbean. McManus should have written that the company and the private traders chose not to fulfill the demand for slaves at the prices New Yorkers were willing to pay. The crux of the matter is that for hundreds of years, New Yorkers often found it profitable and preferable to invest in slave labor instead of free labor. This was a deliberate moral and financial choice, not a strict consequence of labor conditions at the time. 





There are many potential reasons why New York in particular had difficulty recruiting free laborers from Europe, but a full investigation of this would take us too far afield. Factors may have included the lack of good land not claimed as manorial estates, the threat of French or Indian attack, or the better reputation of the soil, climate, and society of other colonies. Edgar McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ), . This language also appears in A. J. Myers-Williams, Longhammering: Essays on the Forging of an African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley to the Early Twentieth Century (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, ), . Myers-Williams writes: “Unwilling to invest in the cost of bringing servants to New Netherlands [sic], whose supply by no means ever equaled the demand, the Dutch as early as  found it cheaper and more convenient to import African slaves.” McManus, Black Bondage, .



Introduction

In the process of telling the story of New York Dutch slavery, this book challenges and seeks to overturn many other key assumptions about the history of slavery in New York, namely: () () () () () () () ()

That slavery in New York was primarily an urban phenomenon. That slavery in New York was generally unprofitable. That the growth of New York’s slave population was driven mostly by imported slaves and not by domestic growth. That New Yorkers routinely discouraged enslaved women from having children, and that they often tried to sell enslaved women who bore too many children. That there was always an increasing control over New York slaves over time. That tens of thousands of New York slaves were sold South in the period of New York’s emancipation. That there were , slaves freed in New York in . That there were still some slaves held in New York State, according to the  and  censuses.

This book deals with each of these and other questionable assumptions in turn. 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. Largely because of the resistance from the Dutch, gradual emancipation in New York took decades. To understand how this happened, The Slow Death of Slavery synthesizes economic history with demographic data, a combined method that the historian Laird W. Bergad has fruitfully employed in the study of slavery in Brazil and Cuba. He concluded that demographic and economic analysis “provide an essential empirical framework for understanding how the institution of slavery was transformed through time.” He states further that “[w]ithout knowledge of the most elementary and constantly changing demographic realties of slavery . . . it is absolutely impossible to understand the dynamics of the slave experience without a great deal of, shall we say, imagination and speculation.” 

Laird W. Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), xxv.

Introduction



Similarly, I contend that economic and demographic analysis, now largely missing in the histories of slavery in New York, and of slavery in the North more generally, is essential for drawing the contours of this system of labor. The Slow Death of Slavery therefore reorients the story of New York slavery to consider demographic and economic factors, while emphasizing the sizable and significant role of the Dutch. The earliest histories of slavery in the North were largely institutional histories, focusing on the state laws about slavery and the political work of the antislavery movement, which is now quite well known. The professional history of slavery in New York began with books by Edgar McManus, who laid out a useful, general history of the topic, even if his pioneering work was more a chronicle than an analysis. Following McManus was a stream of dissertations on slavery written by students at New York universities. These dissertations tended to look at slavery in particular counties or cities in New York, but they were often derivative and uncritical and most remain unpublished. The best general histories of slavery in New York give little attention to the Dutch or simply restate the views of earlier secondary sources when discussing the Dutch. Focused on urban history and city archives, historians have spent significant time studying slavery in New York City, while neglecting slavery elsewhere in the state. More recently, the focus has turned towards social history, and even more so to the investigation of categories of race and citizenship. This literature is of mixed quality, generally strong on social history but absent any economic arguments, and often resembling collections of strungtogether anecdotes.  





Edgar McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ); and McManus, Black Bondage in the North. Examples include: Richard Shannon Moss, Slavery on Long Island: Its Rise and Decline during the Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries (PhD dissertation, St. John’s University, ); John William McLaughlin, Dutch Rural New York: Community, Economy, and Family in Colonial Flatbush (Columbia University Dissertation, ); Richard E. Bond, Ebb and Flow: Free Blacks and Urban Slavery in Eighteenth-Century New York (PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, ). Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Eric W. Plaag, “New York’s  Slave Conspiracy in a Climate of Fear and Anxiety,” New York History : (Summer ), –. Leslie Alexander, African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, – (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, ). Lorenzo Johnson Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Columbia University Press, ). General overviews of Northern slavery continue in this tradition and largely repeat the same ideas. For example, James Horton and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, – (New York: Oxford University Press, );



Introduction

The Slow Death of Slavery has seven chapters. Chapter  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. Chapter  is a history of the connection between wheat cultivation and the spread of slavery in areas of Dutch control, focusing primarily on King’s 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 over short-term hired hands. I argue that New York’s slaveowning 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-harvesting 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 s, until roughly , 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. Chapter  is an analysis of slave price data for New York, and the Northern states more generally. More than two decades ago, the historian Bernard Bailyn noted that numbers cannot answer all historical questions. But he said “[n]umbers, simple quantities, matter . . . The accurate recording of them, he wrote, corrects false assumptions, establishes realistic parameters, and sets some of the basic terms of comprehension.” For many, slave prices are a morally fraught subject. How could we value

 

Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, ). William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, ); Jared Ross Hardesty, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (Amherst, MA: Bright Leaf, ); Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, – (New York: Penguin Press, ). This chapter is based, in part, on my previously published article, Douma, “Estimating the Size of the Dutch-Speaking Slave Population.” Bernard Bailyn, “Considering the Slave Trade: History and Memory,” The William and Mary Quarterly, :, New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade (January ), –.

Introduction



human beings in such ways? How can we treat them as numbers? It is my contention that historians who study slave prices are not, as a rule, treating enslaved persons in such ways. They are, instead, trying to understand how others in the past assigned values to enslaved persons. This is a crucial distinction. To understand history, especially the sensitive history of immoral subjects, we must not avoid using any tools at our disposal. My study of slave prices establishes that the Dutch had economic incentives to continue holding slaves. In other words, 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 , 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 when purchasing slaves. Chapter  is an extensive study of runaway slave advertisements that mention that a slave speaks Dutch. For this chapter, I have compiled a database of  enslaved persons, coded by year of flight, name, age, Dutch language ability, name of master, county, and original source. I demonstrate that runaway slave advertisements in New York City and environs plateaued in the period – but peaked later in the Hudson Valley, with exceptional growth in the s and s. The data provide evidence for the persistence of the Dutch language in New York and New Jersey and contribute to a picture of Dutch-speaking slaves presenting a sharp economic challenge to the institution of slavery. By the s, Dutch-speaking slaves were running away at a rate of at least  per  per year. While this might not seem like much, this was an exceptional rate of runaway activity, higher than what was seen in any slave state 

This chapter was previously published in an earlier version as: Michael J. Douma, “Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey,” New York History : (Winter –), –.



Introduction

(except Delaware) at any time in the nineteenth century. For Dutch slave owners, this meant a significant loss of capital and, moreover, a risk on their remaining slave capital. Runaway slaves tended to be prime workingage males, and the loss of the best field workers frustrated New York Dutch farmers. The pressure of runaway activity also lowered the value of retained slaves and made New York slavery more costly in general. Runaways put pressure on slaveholders to manumit their slaves, extracting the most labor possible from them before agreeing to let them go. Chapter  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. One of the best historians of New York City, Shane White, has concluded that “it is difficult to work out the extent to which New York blacks were kidnapped or sold illegally to the South” and stated further that “it is impossible to even guess how many blacks were affected.” 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  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 many New York slaves (between , and ,) 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. The transition from slavery to freedom occurred at dramatically different rates in different parts of the state. The reason for this seems to be partially cultural; that Dutch-descent slaveholders were more reluctant to free their slaves than others were. But the answer is also in part economic, as rural areas in the Hudson Valley found slavery was still profitable, but slaves in urban areas were in less demand. Chapter  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 

Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, – (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), , fn. .

Introduction



remuneration 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 truly 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. Chapters – try to focus on the enslaved persons themselves, to argue that their actions, and not merely the actions of white abolitionists, were crucial in bringing slavery in New York to an end. This reflects my belief that historians have focused too often on the wrong people, on the wellknown characters like Sojourner Truth, Alexander Hamilton, or the elite Hudson Valley patrician families. James C. Scott notes that “[t]he rare, heroic, and foredoomed gestures of a Nat Turner or a John Brown are simply not the places to look for the struggle between slaves and their owners. One must look rather at the constant, grinding conflict over work, food, autonomy, ritual – at everyday forms of resistance.” As much as possible, the history of Dutch slavery in New York needs to consider the everyday, common, on-the-ground actions of slaves and slaveholders. This perspective makes the enslaved agents, rather than objects of emancipation. Chapter  provides a conclusion to this story, focusing in part on the “mild thesis,” the idea that slavery in Dutch New York was less harsh than slavery elsewhere. While the mild thesis formerly had a powerful and persuasive influence in the historiography, historians in recent years have rejected it, while highlighting the violent aspects of slavery in New York. This chapter is the first to explain why the mild thesis came about and why arguments about it are more complicated than historians have recognized. Slavery in New York was violent, particularly in the early and mid eighteenth century. But when the histories of the state’s involvement in slavery were written in the nineteenth century, the memory of slavery’s worst elements had faded. Situating this story within the national narrative about slavery, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York argues that slavery remained



James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), xvi.



Introduction

economically viable in New York until its very end, and that it held on longest in areas of Dutch control. It argues, furthermore, if slavery had not been snuffed out by political decree, it would have spread west, with the construction of the Erie Canal, out of Dutch cultural pockets in the Hudson Valley and into western New York and states beyond, all linked to national and international markets. Slaves in New Netherland served the West India Company by building forts, but also by harvesting wheat. Slaves in New York were still cutting, threshing, and sifting wheat in the nineteenth century. Some recent works on American slavery refer always to “enslaved persons” and never to slaves. One of the claims here is that using the term “slave” denies personhood or suggests that slavery is a metaphysical condition, the essence of someone’s being. But in American history, slaves were routinely defined as persons, and enslavement was their condition, their status, not their being. Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of  defined a slave as “a Person in the absolute Power of a Master.” Webster’s dictionary of  defined a slave as “a person who is wholly subject to the will of another.” And Article , Section II of the US Constitution, the “three-fifths cause,” has been consistently interpreted to mean that slaves were part of the phrase “all other persons.” By not calling these persons “slaves,” historians run the risk of diminishing the terrible conditions they faced. In some places I use the presentist and sometimes anachronistic term “enslaved person” as a near synonym for slave, but I less commonly use the term “enslaver” for the more traditional “slaveholder” or “master.” To my ears, an “enslaver” sounds like the person who makes another a slave, not one who keeps them in that condition, for example, a slaveholder. In the history of New York, and across the country, there were instances of people who inherited slaves and kept them somewhat reluctantly because of the social, political, and financial costs of manumission. In New York, slaveholders were routinely responsible for maintaining elderly slaves who could no longer work. Such persons can hardly be called “enslavers.” Using new language also runs the risk of linguistic complexity and distancing ourselves from the sources, from the history. For example, I use the term “runaway slave” instead of some alternative like “formerly enslaved person” because the former term is what the sources use and because it is clearly understood today, even if it unfairly treats a person as a slave first, or even 

In addition, the third section of the fourth article declares that “no person held to service of labor.”

Introduction



as a “fugitive slave” for committing no injury to others, no crime except to seek their own freedom. It is my hope that this book will provide a useful foundation, both in subject matter and in method, for further studies of Northern slave populations. 

The discussion about the proper terms in Dutch is grammatically more complicated. See Michiel van Kempen, “On the use of Dutch ‘slaaf’ and ‘totslaagemaakte,’” https://werkgroepcaraibischeletteren .nl/on-the-use-of-dutch-slaaf-and-totslaafgemaakte/, accessed July , .

 

The Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

In , a raiding party moving through Upstate New York attacked the homestead of Frederick Fisher (Visscher in Dutch), a patriot and colonel in the Tryon County militia. Fisher was scalped and left for dead on a pile of grain, while his house was set ablaze and his property, including two slaves, carried away. But Fisher did not die, and the first person to reach him was Tom Zielie, a man enslaved to Fisher’s neighbor Adam Zielie. Tom wanted to aid the wounded man, but before he could, another neighbor, Joseph Clement, arrived on the scene. Clement was a Tory and cared little for Fisher’s life. In the tense moment of Clement’s arrival, Tom sought instruction for what he should do with Fisher. Clement responded in Dutch, “Laat de vervlukten rabble starven!” (“Let the cursed rebel die!”). Since Clement’s comment came down to historians about sixty-five years later, one might be tempted to discount it, but if such a phrase was indeed spoken, it would be illustrative of the strength of the Dutch language then in the Mohawk Valley. Clement had come to New York as a boy, probably from England. He was a native speaker of English, but that he spoke to Tom directly in Dutch showed that the two men knew each other, and that Dutch was their common language of discourse. It also demonstrated that Clement had learned some Dutch from his neighbors. And, if we might speculate further, it may demonstrate that Tom spoke little English. 



Jeptha Root Simms, History of Schoharie County, and border wars of New York (Albany, NY: Munsell & Tanner, ), . Translation is from the original by Simms. The story is repeated in Jeptha Root Simms, The Frontiersmen of New York: Showing Customs of the Indians, Vicissitudes of the Pioneer Settlers, and Border Strife in Two Wars, Vol.  (Albany, N.Y.: Geo. C. Riggs, ), –. George Simon Roberts, Old Schenectady (Schenectady, NY: Robson & Adee, ), , reports that Tom was given his freedom for this act. The Second Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario, . Transcribed from Library of Congress MSS , Vol. XX MSS. – in Second Report, .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



To many a historian’s ear, such a scene sounds like an anomaly: a man born in England speaking Dutch to a slave in New York in ! Historians of early America know that abolitionist Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) grew up in the Hudson Valley, speaking Dutch. But she was just one of many Dutch-speaking slaves in New York in the nineteenth century. Dutch culture and language in New York was widespread. For over two centuries, the Dutch in New York and New Jersey conversed in their native tongue. In this Dutch culture, slavery was a crucial and enduring element, and by no means in decline before the year . Demographic data, in addition to sources from Dutch New York religious and cultural history, demonstrate that Dutch-speaking slaves were a large and identifiable group, that they were mobile despite legal restrictions, that they were united in language and culture, and that they grew in number primarily from natural births rather than imports. Historians have wondered how many Dutch-speaking slaves there were in New York. Several write of “some” Dutch-speaking slaves; others of “many,” but none have been precise because they relied on published aggregated census figures. So, in an article published in , I took a more critical and rigorous approach to the question about the number of Dutch-speaking slaves in New York, and I arrived at an answer that might be as surprising as it is enlightening. By using demographic analysis of birth and death rates and statistics on slave imports and exports, I concluded that in the eighteenth century, between  and  percent of New York slaves spoke Dutch. In numbers, this was between , and , persons. I found that the total number of slaves who lived in New York during the eighteenth century was probably around ,. To estimate when and where the Dutch language was spoken among these slaves, I analyzed the regional distributions of slaves over time and made informed estimates of language use based on qualitative and quantitative sources. The percent of New York’s slaves who spoke Dutch remained quite consistent over time, even to the end of the eighteenth century. Dutch-speaking slaves in New York were not an occasional curiosity, but a commonplace. 



Some of these sources are comprehensive in their attempts to gather data, but do little to analyze it critically. In particular, Thomas J. Davis, “New York’s Long Black Line: A Note on the Growing Slave Population, –,” Afro-American in New York Life and History : (), . Michael J. Douma, “Estimating the Size of the Dutch-Speaking Slave Population of New York in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Early American History  (), –.



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

50,000 45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0 1689 1703 1723 1731 1737 1746 1749 1756 1771 1786 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 Blacks

Figure .

Slaves

Total black population (free and enslaved) and slave population in New York Colony/State, –.

30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1680

1700

1720

1740

1760

1780

1800

1820

1840

Figure . New York City enslaved population as a percent of the statewide number of enslaved persons.

Figure ., based on colonial and early federal census data, shows the estimated population of blacks and slaves in New York State from  to . Further insight comes by breaking the numbers down by regions: New York City, Long Island (including the counties of Kings, Queens, Richmond, and Suffolk), and the Hudson Valley (including all counties from Westchester to Washington). By analyzing these three regions independently, clear patterns of Dutch slave ownership emerge. The first region, New York City, has been the focus of most historical study of the role of slavery in the state. But the percent of slaves in the city was never greater than  percent of the statewide totals (Figure .). And

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



the number steadily declined to less than  percent by the end of the eighteenth century. New York City in this period was never a place of concentration of Dutch slavery, except perhaps in the earliest years of the century. In , roughly half of the inhabitants of New York City were of Dutch extraction. Analyzing the  census for New York City, Joyce Goodfriend found that out of  of the city’s slaves,  ( percent) were own by Dutch families. Since Dutch had been the dominant language in the city in the seventeenth century, most of these slaves probably spoke some Dutch, in addition to English, French, Portuguese, or other languages. Through at least , as the city’s slave population reached , persons, Dutch remained the dominant language in the city. Of the  slaves accused in the  “uprising” in New York City,  belonged to Dutch families. By the s, English had clearly replaced Dutch. But as Joyce Goodfriend has argued, the “actual record of Dutch speakers and readers” in eighteenth-century New York City has been “drowned out” by a “discourse of decline.” The decline of Dutch in Manhattan was slow. Dutch churches in New York City introduced English services only in the s, and Dutch could be heard in the pulpit as late as . Throughout the eighteenth century, as Dutch speakers gradually shifted to English, the Dutch language survived in neighborhoods in the north and west wards of Manhattan. Runaway-slave advertisements indicate that Dutch-speaking slaves were living in Manhattan in the s and s. As late as , a seventeenyear-old Dutch-and-English-speaking slave named Sarah ran away from William Van Wyck on  Front Street, Manhattan. Two years earlier, in , the bilingual Sarah had fled from  Broadway. Dutch-speaking runaways coming to the city from other parts of New York and New Jersey added to the stable number of free Dutch-speaking blacks in the city at 

    

Ira Berlin emphasized the “continuing affinity for slavery and urban life in the colonial North,” comparing Philadelphia (which held  percent of Pennsylvania’s enslaved population) with New York. See Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, –. Likewise, Groth writes, “Slavery in the northern colonies was largely an urban phenomenon, but the Hudson River Valley presented a notable exception.” Groth, Slavery and Freedom, xviii. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), –. Replication data for Lepore, New York Burning. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Who Should Rule at Home? Confronting the Elite in British New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –. New York Gazette, April , . New York Gazette, April , . For additional examples, see: Loudon’s Register, July , ; Greenleaf’s, April , ; Daily Advertiser, June , ; American Citizen, November , .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

that time. Slave sale advertisements provide evidence of additional Dutchspeaking slaves in New York City. These sources are not always easy to interpret, and the location of the person for sale was often omitted. It is difficult to say, for example, if a twenty-three-year-old Dutch-speaking enslaved woman in a  advertisement in the New York Morning Post lived in the city or elsewhere. Concerning an enslaved woman for sale in a  newspaper account, we learn that she was born in Jamaica, New York, and could speak both Dutch and English, but there is no information as to where she lived at the time of the advertisement. Nevertheless, even by the end of the century, – percent of city slaves could speak Dutch. Slave growth patterns suggest that for the entire century, perhaps – percent of enslaved persons in New York City spoke Dutch. Dutch slavery was numerically stronger in Long Island than it was in New York City, in the eighteenth century, but the percentage of Long Island slaves who spoke Dutch varied significantly depending on their location. For example, only a small percent in Queens and Suffolk spoke Dutch. But those in Richmond and Kings were mostly Dutch-speaking or bilingual, even to the end of the century. Richmond and Kings held about  percent of Long Island’s slaves in ,  percent in ,  percent in ,  percent in ,  percent in , and  percent in . The proportional rise in slaves in Dutch areas indicates that the Dutch Long Islanders held onto their slaves longer than families in areas of dominant English descent. Given these considerations, one might estimate conservatively that – percent of slaves on Long Island spoke Dutch in the eighteenth century. The true center of Dutch slavery in eighteenth-century New York, however, was the Hudson Valley. The combined populations of  



New York Morning Post, September , . New York Daily Gazette, August , . Similarly (and this is perhaps the same person), a nineyear-old girl, who speaks low Dutch, high Dutch, English, and French, was for sale in the Daily Advertiser, August , . For the purposes of this chapter, I have defined the Hudson Valley as consisting of Albany, Orange, Ulster, Westchester, and Dutchess Counties. After , new counties were carved out of Albany County (and from pieces of other counties). To retain some geographical consistency for the data from  forward, my analysis includes data of slave and free black populations from Hudson Valley counties, including Columbia (formed in  from Albany), Greene ( from Albany and Ulster), Rensselaer ( from Albany), Saratoga ( from Albany), Schoharie ( from Albany), and Schenectady ( from Albany). In addition, I have included data from Sullivan County, which was carved from Ulster in , and Putnam County, which came out of Dutchess County in . Shane White, “Slavery in New York State in the Early Republic,” Australasian Journal of American Studies : (December ), , notes that the total number of slaveholding

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1703 1712 1723 1731 1749 1756 1771 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 Total Blacks

Slaves

Figure . New York City total black population and slave population, –.

Dutch-speaking enslaved persons there was much larger than in New York City and Long Island. The Dutch language also held on longer in the Hudson Valley than elsewhere in New York. In Claverack, for example, Dutch was still the common language in . Dutch church services continued in Poughkeepsie until , in East Greenbush (Rensselaer County) until , and in Schenectady until . In Ulster County, Dutch services continued until as late as . Dutch was spoken in an ever-shrinking and changing geographical pocket, or rather in several enclaves, as described in The American Gazetteer in : “The English language is generally spoken throughout the State, but is not a little corrupted by the Dutch dialect, which is still spoken in some counties, particularly in Kings, Ulster, Albany, and that part of Orange which lies S. of the mountains.” Figures .–. demonstrate the size of these slave populations by region over time. The largest population of slaves in the Hudson Valley was always found in Albany County, where the Dutch language was dominant the longest. Most slaves in Albany County probably spoke Dutch until at least the s. Heavy concentrations of Dutch speakers in Ulster, Orange, and

 



families is not available for Albany County for . Nevertheless, the total population of slaves for the county is available. F. N. Zabriskie, History of the Reformed P.D. Church of Claverack: A Centennial Address (Hudson, NY: S. B. Miller, ),  and . See, for example, P. Theo. Pockman, History of the Reformed church, at East Greenbush, Rensselaer County, New York (New Brunswick, NJ: J. Heidingsfeld, ), , –; William Elliot Grifis and Jonathan Pearson, Two hundredth anniversary of the First Reformed Protestant church, of Schenectady, NY,  (Daily and Weekly Union Steam Printing House, ), –; and David Sutphen, Historical discourse: delivered on the th of October, , at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Reformed Dutch Church of New Utrecht, LI (New York, ), . Jedidiah Morse, The American Gazetteer (Boston, ), entry for New York, no page number used.



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1703 1712 1723 1731 1749 1756 1771 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 Total Blacks

Figure .

Slaves

Long Island and Staten Island black and slave population, –.

18,000 16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1703 1712 1723 1731 1749 1756 1771 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 Total Blacks

Figure .

Slaves

Hudson Valley total black and slave population, –.

Dutchess County lend credence to the assumption that  percent of Hudson Valley slaves could speak Dutch around , and  percent or more by the year . All told, nearly half of all slaves in the Hudson Valley in the eighteenth century probably spoke Dutch. Figure . shows the regional slave populations in comparison and demonstrates how the Hudson Valley slave population overtook that of other regions. A large part of the black population of New York lived in these three regions, but the sum of these three population lines is not coequal with the state totals for slave and free blacks, since this does not include slaves in the counties of western New York. Dutch last names among slaveholders in the incomplete  census and the more complete  census provide further evidence of the extent of Dutch slavery. A few caveats are in order, however. Not all families with

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



18,000 16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1703 1712 1723 1731 1749 1756 1771 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 New York City

Long Island/ Staten Island

Hudson Valley

Figure . New York State black population, free and slave combined, –.

Dutch last names were still speaking Dutch at home at the end of the eighteenth century. This would be especially true for Dutch families in New York City. But enslaved persons were often bought and sold, and hired out to neighbors, meaning that some New York slaves belonging to non-Dutch families were likely to have grown up in Dutch families, or at least spent some time working for them, suggesting that the number of Dutch-speaking slaves may have been greater than the number of slaves owned by families of primarily Dutch ancestry. In , district captains of the state’s militia, presumably acting as a security measure during the French and Indian War, took a census of slaves above fourteen years of age. The census takers were far from consistent. Some wrote down the names of the slaves, others just tallied their number. But all of the census takers gave their masters’ names and the number of male and female slaves. The  slave census is of limited value. Not only is it missing a count of children under fourteen, but it also omits New York City and Albany entirely. There may also be other sampling errors. However, because the  census includes the last names of all recorded slave owners, it is useful for estimating the percent of Englishand Dutch-owned slaves in that year (see Figure .). In total, about , of the , (or  percent) listed slaves lived with Dutch families. New York City (with a declining Dutch-speaking population) was not included 

Charles Anthon, Andrew Dickson White, and E. B. O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New-York (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons & Co. [v. III], –), –.



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery 700 600 500 400 300 200 100

Dutch

Figure .

lk ffo

en

s Su

m Ri ch

Qu e

on

d

ng s Ki

st er tc he

ss W es

Du tc he

Or an ge

Ul st er

0

English

 slave census, Dutch versus English.

in this census, and neither was Albany, where there was certainly a large pocket of Dutch-speaking slaves (, slaves according to the  census). Most of these slaves living with Dutch families in  probably spoke Dutch, as the language was still dominant in the conservative, rural Hudson Valley. The census also demonstrates a few clear pockets of Dutch cultural control such as Kings, Richmond, and Ulster counties. While Kings and Richmond (Staten Island) had both Dutch and English populations, the census indicates that the Dutch slaves may have lived in a mostly Dutch environment. The large numbers of slaves in Ulster created a sizable language community not impervious to English interlopers, but certainly with Dutch as a dominant language. A traveler going through New York State in  wrote, “I’ve found very few who are not either Dutch, or the descendants of that people, at some distance from York are able to converse in no other language.” The census of  included a category for the national origins of the white population. A  census bureau report estimated that , (or . percent) of white New Yorkers in the year  were primarily of Dutch descent and that Dutch New York families then owned a total of , slaves, roughly . percent of the state’s total. Later studies led to   

For a more detailed breakdown of the numbers of Dutch slaveholders, see my article “Estimating the Size.” John Robinson to Thomas Adams, December , . Gilder Lehrman Collection, GLC. U.S. Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth: From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, – (Washington, DC, ), p. , table , and p. , table .

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



similar estimates of a statewide Dutch-descent population of between  and  percent for . Demographic data shows the extent of Dutch New York slavery, but so do qualitative sources. In fact, in many nineteenth-century sources, the connection between Dutch New Yorkers and slavery was so well established that it was taken as self-evident. The historian Jeptha Root Simms (who was the source of the opening story about Fisher, Zielie, and Clement) wrote that slaves “accompanied the Dutch on their arrival [in Schoharie County] as part of their gear.” Some modern scholars who have focused on particular regions of New York have found a similar connection. Describing Columbia County, John L. Brooke says, “Slaves were concentrated in the older river towns, held for the most part by the Dutch, the Germans, and the Anglo-Dutch landlord elite . . .. In sharp contrast, the Yankee-settled towns along the Massachusetts border contained virtually no slaves.” These slaves of Claverack, Clermont, and Kinderhook lived in a Dutch rural milieu. They celebrated Paas (Easter) and Pinkster (Pentecost). For Saratoga County in , James E. Richmond found that all the leading slaveholding families were Dutch. Saratoga’s John Schuyler had fourteen slaves, Cornelius Van Vechten ten, Dirck Swart eight, and Janatje Van Vrankin seven. Most of these slaves were on Dutch estates along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers. The Dutch were the first waves of settlers in the county, and they took the lands near the rivers because they were prime for wheat cultivation. When waves of New England migrants arrived in the county towards the end of the eighteenth century, some brought slaves with them, but not in great numbers. Despite all this evidence, historians have found few Dutch-language sources in New York State that would confirm the persistence of the Dutch language and the geographical extent and numbers of Dutchspeaking African Americans. Why is this the case? First, it is clear that the Dutch language in eighteenth-century New York was primarily a rural, spoken language. It had faded from New York City but held on much 

  

Forrest McDonald and Ellen Shapiro McDonald, “The Ethnic Origins of the American People, ,” William and Mary Quarterly, d Ser.  (), –; Thomas L. Purvis, “The National Origins of New Yorkers in ,” New York History : (April ), –. Simms, History of Schoharie County, and border wars of New York, . John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . For more on Saratoga County, see James E. Richmond, War on the Middleline: The Founding of a Community in the Kayaderosseras Patent in the Midst of the American Revolution (Morrisville, NC: Lulu Publishers, ).



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

longer in areas where it was not recorded, where little was published, and where few letters survived. Records in Dutch tended to survive if they were written by the elite (e.g., bilingual gentlemen who conducted business in English, or ministers of the Reformed Church). Records from non-elite Dutch speakers, on the other hand, are difficult to find. Yet the switch from Dutch to English in letters and on the streets of New York City should not obscure the fact that there was a distinct Dutch culture that persisted elsewhere, in Brooklyn, Albany, the Hudson River villages, and the Mohawk Valley. In the Schenectady area, the beginning of the transition from Dutch culture to English happened during the Revolutionary War, which “had taken the simple Dutchman from his bouwery on the flat and had brought him in contact with men from all other colonies.” The Wynkoop family letters present some insight into the connection between the Dutch language and slaveholding in late eighteenth-century New York. Cornelius Wynkoop and his son of the same name were merchants. In the s, the son lived in Kingston and maintained frequent correspondence with his father in New York City. Cornelius the younger owned slaves, but how many and when he owned them is unclear. In a letter dated February , , he explained to his father that his wife and family had gone on a visit to Kinderhook and had left him “a bachelor once more.” Only a female slave remained at the house. While Cornelius wrote his father in good English, and in a clear hand, he received letters in Dutch from his sister, Lea Wynkoop. Lea’s letter dated May , , shows middling writing skills. It is in grammatical Dutch, but in a rough hand, with poor capitalization and punctuation. At the end she wrote, “het schrijven valt mij nit [sic] makkelijk” (writing is not easy for me). In , the same Lea Wynkoop wrote her brother’s wife, Henrietta, again in Dutch, to ask her to purchase for her the best, darkest, and cheapest fur available. The point is that language use and abilities varied even within a family. The more mercantile-oriented tended to use more and better English, and in this period, men tended to write more 

  

Jonathan Pearson and Junius Wilson MacMurray, History of the Schenectady Patent in the Dutch and English times: being contributions toward a history of the lower Mohawk Valley (Albany, NY: Munsell’s Sons, ), xii. Syracuse University Special Collection, Wynkoop Family Papers, Box , Folder . C. Wynkoop (Kingston) to father (New York City), February , . Syracuse University Special Collection, Wynkoop Family Papers, Box , Folder . Lea Wynkoop (New York City) to Cornelius Wynkoop (Kingston), May , . Lea Wynkoop te Henrietta Wynkoop, July , . Syracuse University Special Collections, Wynkoop Family Papers, Box , Folder .

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



letters than did women. The Wynkoop family likely spoke Dutch to each other, but the men wrote in English or Dutch, depending on the circumstance and the correspondent. Historians have been keen to refer to observations from outsiders who paint the picture of the decline of Dutch language and culture in New York State at the end of the eighteenth century, but this can create a limited or even false picture. William Strickland, riding through New Jersey from Hackensack to Hoboken in , met a people who “universally speak English to those who address them in that language, but among themselves speak only Dutch, though greatly corrupted.” Then in Poughkeepsie, New York, Strickland gave a more pessimistic vision of the Dutch language. [I]n the course of an hour or two’s conversation we collected that the Dutch, as Dutch in opposition to English, were fast wearing out in this county which a generation or two back might be said to have been entirely inhabited by such . . .. [T]he Dutch language was no longer any where taught, and little used, except among some old people chiefly residing in retired and unfrequented places; that the services of Religion was now performed here to the Dutch congregation in English, and that, more for form’s sake than any thing else, a Sermon was preached once in four or five weeks in Dutch but that this would probably be soon discontinued.

Despite this pessimism, more than thirty years later, in , the Dutch traveler Gerhardus Balthazar Bosch found that Dutch was still commonly spoken in both the Albany area and in Bergen County, New Jersey. Harm Jan Huidekoper, writing in  but reporting on his trip of  in New York, wrote that “on Long Island, in New York along the North River, at Albany, Schenectady &c the low Dutch was yet in general the common language of most of the old people, and particularly of the Negroes though in New York it had begun to be superseded by the English language.” Bosch and Huidekoper were speakers of Dutch, while Strickland was not. Visiting the Rensselaer patroonship, Francis Hall noted

   

J. E. Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, –, Rev. T. E. Strickland, ed. (New York: New York Historical Society, ), . Strickland, Journal of a Tour, . Jan Noordegraaf, “A Language Lost: The Case of Leeg Duits (‘Low Dutch’),” Academic Journal of Modern Philology  (), –. Harm Jan Huidekoper, Autobiography of Harm Jan Huidekoper (Cambridge, MA: Privately Printed, ), .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

in  that “[m]any of the neighbouring villages continue almost entirely Dutch.” Other foreign visitors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries drew the common connection between New York Dutch and slavery. Besides Bosch and Huidekoper, however, these visitors typically could not speak Dutch and they stayed on the main roads and river passages. Absence of evidence is not evidence itself, but indications of the quick death of the Dutch language appear premature. Slavery among the Dutch in the Hudson Valley appears to have been mostly a rural phenomenon, and it stands to reason that the most rural, most conservative Dutch speakers tended to hold slaves the longest. Slave advertisements in newspapers make clear that as late as the s, there were monolingual or near-monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves, not from one small enclave, but from around New Jersey and New York State. What is more, these were typically advertisements for young men, which indicates that Dutch had been the primary language of their youth. In , the slave Philip of Ulster County, for example, spoke broken English and Low Dutch very well. Jack in Schoharie in  was described with similar terms. Joe in Rensselaer County, Ben of Dutchess County, and Tom of Albany also spoke only broken English and Dutch in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves were probably less likely to run away, since they stood less of a chance of blending into the background of New York society; yet there were monolingual or nearmonolingual Dutch-speaking runaway slaves reported from across the region: Tappan, Orange County (), Staten Island (), Orangetown, Rockland County (), Trenton, Essex, New Jersey (), Dutchess County (), Helleberg, Albany County (), Shodach, Rensselaer County (), Narrows, Kings County (), Clintontown, Dutchess County (), Marbletown, Ulster County (), Rensselaerville, Rensselaer County (), Middleburgh, Schoharie County (), New Paltz, Ulster (), Ringwood, Essex, New Jersey (), Claverack, Columbia (), and Warwick, Orange (). This observation is useful in charting the history of the decline of   

Francis Hall, Travels in Canada and the United States in  and  (Boston republished from the London edition by Wells and Lilly, ), . White, “Slavery in New York State in the Early Republic,” . New York Mercury, January , ; The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury, August , ; New Jersey Gazette, August , ; Daily Advertiser, July , ; The Albany Gazette, August , ; The Albany Gazette, August , ; The Poughkeepsie Journal and Constitutional Republican, July , ; The Bee, July , ; The Bee, June , ; Albany Register,

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



Dutch in New York and New Jersey. Although the English language had conquered New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley, Dutch was alive and even dominant in many households, villages, and rural areas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, particularly in the rural regions where slaves still tilled fields and cut grain. Recognizing the persistence of the Dutch language is crucial for understanding that the Dutch in New York were a distinct ethnic group, and that their Dutch-speaking slaves formed their own culture. Evidence from across the eighteenth century suggests that Dutch was widely spoken among New York’s slave population first in New York City, for an enduring period on Long Island, and in large, growing numbers in the Hudson Valley. The United States’ Constitution was translated into Dutch before its ratification in , and political handbills were translated into Dutch and distributed in the Hudson Valley as late as . Dutch religious publications were printed in New York City until the s, but the most common type of Dutch publication in eighteenthcentury New York was probably the almanac. Dutch-language almanacs, sometimes by rival printers in the same year, appeared in New York City nearly every year from  to at least as late as . Like most commonday reading materials, however, these almanacs rarely survived the passage of time. Multiple booksellers in New York City in the s and s also imported books from the Netherlands. Another marker of the persistence of language was church services. E. T. Corwin thought Dutch held on in the rural Reformed churches until around . The churches’ departure from Dutch did not signal a halfway point from English to Dutch, nor did it mean the death of Dutch in the communities either. It did suggest, however, a point at which the older generation had yielded to the inevitable death of its language. Besides language, religion served as an important mark of cultural differences between Dutch New Yorkers and their Anglo-American



  

September , ; The Ulster Gazette, August , ; The Sentinel of Freedom (Newark, NJ), April , ; Orange County Patriot, February , ; Northern Whig (Hudson, NY), October , . Christina Mulligan, Michael J. Douma, Hans Lind, and Brian Patrick Quinn, “Founding-Era Translations of the United States Constitution,” Constitutional Commentary : (), –; Hudson Gazette, June , . Alexander James Wall, A List of New York Almanacs, – (New York: New York Public Library, ). Goodfriend, Who Should Rule at Home?, . E. T. Corwin, J. H. Hubbs, and J. T. Hamilton, A History of the Reformed Church, Dutch; the Reformed church, German and the Moravian Church in the United States (New York: Christian Literature Co., ), .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

neighbors, a point that many historians have investigated, with varying results. The Dutch Reformed Church (which dropped the word “Dutch” from its name in  to incorporate as the Reformed Church in America) neither condoned nor condemned slavery, but its members, and particularly its ministers, were fully inculcated in slavery. Slavery enabled the church specifically by helping to provide a source of support for its ministers. In fact, slaveholding ministers were common in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church. A list of slaveholding Reformed ministers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries includes but is not limited to John Megapolensis, George Mancius, Gideon Schaats, Johannes Polhemius, Lambertus De Ronde, Theodorus Frelinghuysen, Martinus Schoonmaker, Simeon Van Arsdale, Samuel Drisius, Eilardus Westerloo, Isaac Labagh, and Elias Van Bunschoten. I have been unable to find any writings about slavery by Reformed ministers during this period, but some ministers from later periods provide clues into the mindset of Dutch proslavery clerics. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer (–) was a son of the wealthy Stephen Van Rensselaer (–), a slaveholder tied by marriage to other prominent Dutch New York families. The younger Van Rensselaer was a Presbyterian minister living in Burlington, New Jersey. Van Rensselaer accepted the name of “conservative,” as Armstrong, a Presbyterian minister and 







 

It was “very possible” that Megapolensis had “one or two slaves as domestic servants” according to Gerald Francis De Jong, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America,” Church History : (December ), – (quote ). “Domyne Mansius” that is, Dominee Mancius, of Kingston is listed as having one male and one female slave each above the age of fourteen in the  New York slave census. Mancius was German-born. When he became a minister in Kingston in , he was given two years to learn Dutch so that he could be understood by his congregation. Roswell Randall Hoes, ed., Baptismal and Marriage Register of the Old Dutch Church of Kingston, Ulster County, New York, – (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co.,  [original publishing ]). Charles E. Corwin, A Manual of the Reformed Church in America –, th ed. (New York: Unionist-Gazette Association, ), . Domine Gideon Schaats’s (minister in Albany –) (sometimes spelled Schaets) slave, Black Barent. Janny Vennema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, – (Albany: State University of New York Press, ). Johannes Polhemius sold slaves and owned a sugar plantation with slaves in Brazil. De Jong, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America,” – (). He also bought a slave in New Netherland in . (Elisabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade in America, III (Carnegie Institution of Washington: Washington, DC, ), –.) Labagh owned six slaves, in Kinderhook. Brooke, Columbia Rising, . Marisa J. Fuentes and Deborah Gray White, eds., Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . William Van Benschoten, Van Bunschoten: Concerning the Van Bunschoten or Van Benshcoten Family in America (Poughkeepsie, NY: A.V. Haight Co., ), .

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



southerner, had called him. Part of his conservative view, which he repeated several times in his text, was that “[s]laveholding is not necessarily and in all circumstances sinful.” This was a position, defended on biblical and historical grounds, that he expressed as earlier as , if not earlier. “There is a slaveholding,” he wrote, “which is consistent with the Christian profession” that it “may be right or wrong, according to the conditions of its existence.” Van Rensselaer took what some at the time might have seen as a moderate view, against Armstrong’s contention that slaveholding is not sinful under any circumstance. Van Rensselaer reflected the view of many of his and his father’s generation, who defended slavery in one time and place, say New York in , yet condemned it in another place, for example, the Southern states in . Despite arguing that slaveholding was not evil per se, Van Rensselaer explained that it “is not a natural and permanent phase of civilization.” The reverend Cornelius Vander Naald, minister of a Reformed Church on Staten Island in the s and s, provided an explanation about the church’s position on slavery that harked back to some of its earlier ministers. In , he wrote: Slavery was looked upon as one of the institutions of God designed to bring the colored race under the benign influence of the Gospel and no man nor woman was found so bold as to declare that it was wrong to trade human flesh. Ministers entered as freely into the buying, selling and holding of others, and are said to have spoken sometimes in their sermons of the goodness of God in bringing the poor heathen slaves into such relations with the white people that they were offered the opportunity to have their souls saved.

Because participation in slavery among the religious Dutch varied regionally, it is difficult to draw general conclusions. In Schenectady, from the s to the s, says Thomas E. Burke, there was a “an almost total lack of black participation” in the Reformed Church and “no slaves were married at the Dutch church, none became members of the congregation, and in only three instances were slave children baptized in the church.”    

George D. Armstrong and Cortlandt Van Rensselaer, A Discussion of Slaveholding: Three Letters to a Conservative and Three Replies (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson), , , . Armstrong and Van Rensselaer, A Discussion of Slaveholding, . Cornelius Vander Naald, “History of the Reformed Church on Staten Island,” Staten Island Historian : (January–March ), . Thomas E. Burke, Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, New York, –, nd ed. (New York: Cornell University Press, ; New York: State University of New York Excelsior, ), .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

But the Dutch Reformed Church in Schraalenburgh, New Jersey, records dozens of slave baptisms in the s. In late eighteenth-century Brooklyn, meanwhile, a Reformed congregation argued about whether African Americans should be admitted as members of the church. Congregants objected that “Negroes have no souls,” are “accursed of God,” descendants of Ham, had “nauseous sweat,” and would be forebearers of a larger black population in the church that would bring poor manners and disharmony. In many New York communities, a Dutch Reformed Church served not only as an institution of social conservation and as a social center but also often exercised a virtual monopoly on moral authority. There is plenty of evidence that black slaves regularly attended the Reformed Church services, although usually marginalized. Andrea Mosterman has argued convincingly that the Reformed Church served as a bulwark of social control over enslaved persons, who were given separate spaces in the church and in church cemeteries, thereby reinforcing the social division in other domestic and public spaces. A historian of Catskill, New York, related that the minister Henry Ostrander administered communion with his own hand, first to the elders and deacons, then to the congregation, the slaves coming last from their seats in the galley. On one occasion an old colored woman, who was probably asleep, did not move with the rest. Her master, an aged elder, arose and called out in a loud voice, “Deyaan! Deyaan! de dominie roept aan u!” [Deyaan! Deyaan! The minister is calling you!]. In Bergen, New Jersey, Dominie Cornelisen alternated between Dutch and English Sundays, and also watched over the religious instruction of slaves “a number [of whom],” a historian says, “were admitted to church fellowship.” In the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, it was routine to see blacks named in Reformed Church records, sometimes even  

   

Records of the Reformed Dutch Churches of Hackensack and Schraalenburgh, New Jersey (Part II), , https://archive.org/details/collectionsholl/, accessed February , . Andrea Mosterman, “‘I Thought They Were Worthy’: A Dutch Reformed Church Minister and His Congregation Debate African American Membership in the Church,” Early American Studies : (Summer ), –. Carl Nordstrom, Frontier Elements in a Hudson River Village (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, ), . Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement. Jessie Van Vechten Vedder, Historic Catskill (Astoria, NY: J.C. and A.L. Fawcett, Inc., ), . The English translation is “Deyaan, Deyaan, the minister is calling for you!” Daniel Van Winkle, Old Bergen: History and Reminiscences with Maps and Illustrations (Jersey City, NJ: J. W. Harrison, ), .

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

Figure .



An early use of the Dutch word baas (boss) at the Schuyler estate from the Occom journal, .

listed as official church members. Nineteenth-century recollections also placed black slaves in attendance at the Reformed Church services, while also giving evidence that the slaves were sometimes waiting outside the church with a horse and wagon or sleigh to return their enslaver family home after the service. Nor did anything seem out of the ordinary when, on January , , Samson Occom, an itinerant preacher, visited Saratoga, stayed at Philip Schuyler’s house, and held a religious meeting mostly attended by Dutch people, including their slaves. Occom recorded in his journal that “the poor Negroes were Surprizd [sic] with the Texts they Chose.” It is ambiguous who “they” are in this sentence, that is, who was doing the choosing of the texts. But what it does show is that African Americans had joined in this religious meeting and had knowledge of the scriptures. Occom records that when he left the next morning, “the generals Boss ordered one of the genl’s [sic] Negroes to Carry me.” That is, one of Schuyler’s men ordered Schuyler’s slaves to carry him, likely meaning to transport by horse and wagon. Here Occom notes that “Boss” meant “overseer,” a curious note on the introduction of a Dutch word baas (boss) into the American language (Figure .). More than any other topic relating to the Reformed Church and slavery, historians have shown an interest in the history of baptism of the enslaved, often to suggest that this can be used as a proxy for indicating how well

 

G. Abeel and H. Selyns, Records of Domine Henricus Selyns of New York –, with notes and remarks by Garret Abeel written a century later, – (New York: Holland Society of New York, ), xviii. The name included in this list were Franciscus Bastiensz, Barbara Emanuels, Claes Emanuels, and Jan de Vries. Vedder, Historic Catskill, ; The Schenectady Cabinet, or Freedom’s Sentinel, August , . Samson Occom Journal, December  to January , , https://collections.dartmouth.edu/ occom/html/diplomatic/-diplomatic.html, accessed May , . What biblical texts were chosen, Occom does not say. The Occom papers have been repatriated to the Mohegan Tribe. The Dartmouth Library retains a Creative Commons license to the digital collection.



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

integrated Dutch slaves were in the Dutch cultural and religious milieu. This has proven to be difficult work and the conclusions historians have drawn are varied, and, I believe, largely in error. A major source of error is the uncritical acceptance of the writing of Charles E. Corwin, a church historian writing in the s. Corwin argues, without presenting any evidence, that Dutch Reformed ministers regarded black baptism as a matter of course. Corwin’s logic here is quite poor. He writes: “That we have so little definite knowledge of the work of Dutch Colonial pastors for the negro slaves during the English period, is proof that it [baptism] was taken for granted.” Historian Graham Russell Hodges interpreted this to mean that the church “insisted masters be responsible for slave baptism,” a statement that is more than a little ambiguous. Clarifying this somewhat, Hodges notes further that “the synod gave Reformed laity the power to choose whether household servants would be baptized.” James Gigantino went one step further, writing that the Dutch Reformed Church mandated slave baptism. To arrive at this startling conclusion, Gigantino cites Hodges’s and the work of Ira Berlin, but neither Hodges nor Berlin argued that the church made slave baptism mandatory. If one traces these citations of Gigantino, Hodges, and Berlin back to their sources, one arrives at only one source, which is an article by Charles E. Corwin from , but Corwin presents no evidence or sources for his case. A similar error occurs when Hodges asserts that the Dutch minister Lambertus De Ronde was a proponent of black baptism. But the pages Hodges cites from De Ronde’s work present no evidence to this effect. The origin of this idea is Corwin, who was writing for the Federal Writer’s Project and was confused about De Ronde’s plan for 

  

 

Charles E. Corwin, “Efforts of the Dutch Colonial Pastors for the Conversion of the Negroes,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (–), : (April ), –, . Corwin’s article is based on scant primary research and can best be seen as an early twentiethcentury mythologizing of the “mild” form of slavery among the Dutch in New York and the promotion of an ethnic pride.  Hodges, Root & Branch, . Hodges, Root & Branch, . James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, – (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), . Hodges, Root & Branch, –, –, and Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, –. Hodges’s interpretation has traveled further via Leslie Harris, who writes, “By the s the Dutch Church in New York City began baptizing larger numbers of slaves, no longer fearful that such action would lead to freedom” (Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, ), citing Hodges, Root & Branch, –. Hodges, Root & Branch, –. Hodges cites Lambertus De Ronde, A system: containing, the principles of the Christian religion, suitable to the Heidelberg Catechism (New York: H. Gaine, ), , , ,  (accessed via HathiTrust February , . Original New York Public Library).

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



writing a book in “Negro-English and Dutch,” assuming this to be related to De Ronde’s concern with slavery in New York. De Ronde had indeed planned to write such a book when he was still living in Suriname, but not in New York, and the language of the book was to be a mixture of the Surinamese Negro-English and Dutch, not American English and Dutch. Hodges abstracts from Corwin’s mistake the unevidenced supposition that De Ronde supported black baptism. It is difficult, however, to extract from the few available sources any solid understanding of De Ronde’s views on slavery. De Ronde was behind a plan for the conversion of slaves in Suriname in . But between his experience in the slave colony of Suriname in the s and the inventory of his death in , there is no other available source to demonstrate his relationship with slavery. Unfortunately, Corwin’s claim, once taken root in Hodges’s work, again spread to Gigantino. The historical truth is always messy, and historians can sometimes be forgiven for accepting a standing view without digging further into its origin. But a better position about Dutch Reformed slave baptism is that it occurred, but irregularly, and varying by place and time. Slave baptism was not mandatory, nor was it infrequent, but it might not have been common. Dick Mouw speculates, with good reason, that African American baptisms and marriages in the church often went unrecorded because fees associated with the events were unpaid and “some church clerks simply chose not to record African American baptisms at all.” Evidence of a certain stigma against slave baptisms in the church might be seen in the baptismal registers of the Old Dutch Church of Kingston. Entries for “a negro of Hendrik de Joo” named “Leonardus” on November , , “a negro of Johannes Wynkoop named Henry” on June , , a “negro child (female) of Levi Paling” named Elisabeth on December , , and a “negro child (female) of Cornelius Horenbeek” named Betty, on December ,  were all made with no witnesses to the event listed. Meanwhile, nearly all the white children whose baptisms were recorded in the book had witnesses recorded. Was there a stigma 

 

E. T. Corwin, ed., Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York, published by the State under the supervision of Hugh Hastings, State Historian, Vol. IV (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Company, ), , –. February , , Rensselaer New York Probate records, Vol. –, –, Ancestry.com. New York, Wills and Probate Records, – [database online]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., . Original data: New York County, District and Probate Courts, accessed February , . For example, James Gigantino, drawing on Hodges, states that the Dutch Reformed Church mandated slave baptism. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition, . Mouw, Moederkerk and Vaderland, .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

against being a witness for the baptism of a black child, or did the white church members just not find it important enough to be listed as a witness? One confusion that might arise is whether these baptized children were actually the offspring of the member listed. In most cases it appears not, and that “the negro child of Levi Paling,” for example, was not his genetic child, but a slave child living with him. The emphasis here on the involvement of the enslaved in the Dutch Reformed Church is part of an attempt to understand how distinctly Dutch were the slaves of the New York Dutch. If they not only spoke Dutch but also went to the Dutch church and confirmed a belief in the teaching of the church, this helps to see them as building a common but separate identity. But this is just one of many ways in which historians can determine whether there was a distinctly Dutch slave culture in New York. Early nineteenth-century sources commonly use the term “Dutch negro,” in which Dutchness can be seen as a primary or defining characteristic of a type of black person. In , the Republican Monitor spoke of “Dutch negroes along the Mohawk” as a distinct group. The term “Dutch Negro” seems to have been in use longer in the northern reaches of the Hudson Valley. A  history of the Hoosac Valley relates that “between  and  several Negro slaves of Berkshire, Albany, Saratoga, and Dutch Hoosac fled to English Hoosac and settled on the banks of Broad Brook in White Oaks Glen, Williamston.” One of these was a “yellow-haired Dutch-Negro half-breed.” The term “Dutch negro” was also used in parts of western Massachusetts and Vermont. Hiram Harwood wrote in his diary in  of a “Dutch negro called ‘Coxsackie.’” Dutch-speaking slaves could be found from Long Island to Albany, but their relative mobility and interconnectedness helped them form a common identity and culture. There is good evidence that the slave population in New York was mobile and well connected, even over long distances. In fact, the movement of slaves in New York was probably greater than in any other region, even including colonial New England.     

Baptisms in the Baptismal and marriage registers of the old Dutch church of Kingston, Ulster County, NY (New York: De Vinne Press, ).  New York American, September , , . Republican Monitor, May , . Grace Greylock Niles, The Hoosac Valley: Its Legends and History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, ), . Hiram Harwood Diaries, Bennington Museum Research Library, https://archive.org/details/ harwooddiarieshira/page/, accessed February , . Here, I find some support in the work of Ira Berlin. “Slaveholders unwittingly abetted the dissolution of the rural-urban boundary by shuttling their slaves between the city and the

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



New York’s slaves frequently carried messages, transported goods on the Hudson River, brought crops to town, ran errands for their masters, and even traveled to meet with other slaves. Account books from the Hudson Valley provide evidence that enslaved persons often picked up goods at the store on account of their masters. In a store account book from Churland, Ulster County, in  and , slaves were trusted to deliver alcohol. The records show Laurens Winnin’s enslaved man Frank bought a half gallon of rum, and Jacobus Wolfsen’s “negro Pet” bought a full gallon of rum. Peterus Meyndertje also sent a slave to get a gallon of rum, while Christian Valkenburgh sent his slave to get a pint of wine. Dutch slaves could also commonly be found as ferryboat men. Crom Wiltsie, a slave of Martin Wiltsie, sailed a pirogue out of Fishkill on the Hudson. Another source records his name as “Quam” and demonstrates that he had quite a bit of freedom of movement, even in the evening when he looked for alcohol. “The Reminisces of Catskill” recalls a black ferryman who plied between Greene and Columbia counties. “No admiral ever trod the quarter-deck with more dignity and pomposity than black Ben,” who was called “boss of the scow.” Further evidence of this mobility can be seen in the fact that slaves in New York were routinely given permission to seek new owners on their own. One surviving written pass allowed an enslaved woman named Charr to travel on her own for a few days. The note was folded multiple times, as if stuffed in a pocket. It read: “The bearer hereof a Negro Woman named Charr has our Permission to look out for a Master to be sold for Seventy-

 

   

countryside, particularly during periods of peak labor demand. The frequent sale of slaves due to an owner’s changing labor requirements, economic ambitions, or death scattered slaves and spoke to the general insecurity of slave life in the colonial North. But it also suggests that even when slaves lived beyond easy reach of the towns or lacked access to horses and mules, they knew a good deal about the geography of the North” (Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, ). Harry “went in a sloop from this place [Rhinebeck] to New York,” Daily Advertiser, November , . Examples are found in the Lansingburgh  account book and in receipts in the Peter Gansevoort Collection, New York Public Library, MssCol . In an article on slavery in the Livingston family, Barbara Singer expressed surprise at how often slaves ran errands without supervision. Roberta Singer, “The Livingston’s as Slave Owners: The ‘Peculiar Institution’ on Livingston Manor and Clermont,” in Richard T. Wiles, ed., The Livingston Legacy: Three Centuries of American History (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Bard College, ), . Benjamin Snyder Account Book, –. New York Historical Society. Edward Manning Ruttenber and Lewis H. Clark, History of Orange County, New York (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, ), . Frank Hasbrouck, The History of Dutchess County, New York (Poughkeepsie, NY: Samuel A. Matthieu, ), . James D. Pinckney and Thurlow Weed, Reminisces of Catskill: local sketches (Catskill, NY: J. B. Hall, ), .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

five Dollars she being back again by Friday Night. Shodack, Feb th, . Marte Beekman, Jacob Baurhyte, John S. Miller.” Dutch slaves away from home, on their own initiatives, appear again and again in the historical record as a casual fact, as nothing out of the ordinary. Although slaves were required to work, and they could not abscond for the long term, there were Sundays and particular holidays when they could move around. The general mobility of New York slaves defeats the idea that Dutchspeaking slaves could not form a common culture because they were isolated from each other. While the average number of slaves per household was low, movement of slaves between households, within and between communities, appears to have been fairly extensive, and had to be, considering New York’s labor demands, and the frequency with which New Yorkers bought, sold, and hired out enslaved labor. Unlike in the South, enslaved people in New York were generally not bound to a plantation and there were few hired supervisors to watch over them. Attempts to determine the percent of white New Yorkers who owned slaves always fail to incorporate the percent who also rented slaves and the turnover in slave ownership between census accounts. A much larger number of people were involved with slavery that any snapshot of a census would indicate, which gives support to the idea, recently argued by AnneClaire Faucquez that New York was truly a slave society, not a society with slaves. Runaway-slave advertisements indicate that slaves often fled to seek family members elsewhere, and that they knew the route well (see Chapter ). My demographic research on New York’s enslaved population also indicates that in the eighteenth century they maintained consistently high birth rates, which I have estimated at fifty to sixty per thousand per year. This is further evidence against the idea that slaves in New York were routinely isolated from each other. Here, my findings question  

 

New York Historical Society, Slavery Collection, –. Series X, Memoranda, , , , , and undated [memorandum regarding a slave named Charr]. John Nostrand’s slave Jack was out of the house, celebrating New Year’s. Henry A. Stoutenburgh, A Documentary History of het (the) Nederdeutsche gemeente, Dutch Congregation, of Oyster Bay, Queens County, Island of Nassau, Now Long Island (New York: Knickerbocker Press, ), . In , William Hallet, his pregnant wife, and five children were killed by “an Indian Man and a Negro Woman their own slaves.” Newspapers reported the motive of the murders was “because they were restrained from going abroad on the Sabbath days.” Boston News-Letter, February , . Faucquez, De la Nouvelle-Néerlande à New York. For more on these estimated rates, see my article, “Estimating the Size of the Dutch-Speaking Slave Population.” The biological maximum birth rate of a population is about sixty births per , people per year. However, when that population receives women of child-bearing age from the

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



propositions frequently found in the historiography of New York slavery, which I believe to be lacking solid evidence and misinterpret slave society in New York. This historiography argues that New York slaves were barred from meeting together, that slave owners in New York discouraged their female slaves from having children because it lessened their productivity, and that the enslaved population grew mostly on account of imports, not domestic births. This still dominant narrative portrays slavery in New York as dying under the weight of demographic disaster. The source of the idea that New Yorkers “prized sterility” may stem partly from the historian Edgar McManus, but he appears to take both sides on this issue. More influential is probably the work of Ira Berlin, who argued that “northern slaveholders discouraged their slaves from marrying” and women “with reputations for fecundity found few buyers.” It is true that New York City advertisements sometimes noted that a female slave was being sold on account of having children, or too many children, but this does not mean that slaveholders statewide tried to limit slaves from having children or that a majority of them found fault in fecundity. Indeed, Max Speare took the opposite position in his dissertation, arguing that “the presence of enslaved children” in some New York slave sales appears to have been an “attraction to potential buyers.” Errors in the historiography have a tendency to spread, if left unchecked. Ira Berlin accepted fertility claims for slaves in Philadelphia and then applied them broadly to all Northern slaves. Historian Marc Howard Ross then accepted Berlin’s view and explained that not only did the black population not reproduce itself, but the “continued importation of enslaved people kept it from shrinking during the colonial period.”

  

 

outside, the birth rate can be higher. See also Lee A. Craig, To Sow One Acre More: Childbearing and Farm Productivity in the Antebellum North (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . This does not apply, however, if a large portion of the population has been imported or has migrated in at prime years of fertility. There is a known relationship between available land and birth rates, and expansion onto new lands in the s and s likely encouraged births. In the colonial era, rural birth rates were as much as  percent higher than urban birth rates. McManus, Black Bondage, . Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, . A similar view is expressed in Groth, Slavery and Freedom, . In another example, there was an agreement to manumit a slave named Ruth in eight years, but one additional year was to be added to her servitude for every child she would bear, likely as an attempt to offset costs to the slaveholder. Agreement between John Peter De Lancey and Ruth Ward to manumit a slave, April , . Museum of the City of New York, Accession number ... Max Speare, Slavery, Surveillance, and Carceral Culture in Early New York City (PhD dissertation, UC Irvine, ), . Marc Howard Ross, Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

Finally, and most recently, David Hackett Fischer asserted that the New York slave population grew mostly due to slave imports. But even if the numbers Fischer cites are accurate, and we accept that an additional  percent of imported slaves were never recorded, the number of slaves imported into New York would not have eclipsed the number of domestic births, given known census figures and reasonable estimates of birth and death rates. What is more, the largest growth of the enslaved population occurred after the Revolution, when imports were probably negligible. Domestic births must have provided for the growth of this population, and balanced their gender ratios over time. The heavily skewed ratios towards men at the mid eighteenth century shifted to parity by the century’s end. The crux of the matter is that slaves in New York, despite sometimes being isolated by distance, could not have been consistently barred from meeting and procreating. Nor, by extension, were enslaved persons unable to form a common culture, even a common “Negro Dutch” culture in areas of Dutch dominance. New works by Andrea Mosterman and Nicole Maskiell have shown that Dutch enslavers in New York created systems of control and supervision for their enslaved persons, but this does not mean that some enslaved persons could not meet each other from time to time on weekends, or in village centers, or even in larger groups such as during the Pinkster festival. Nor does it follow that supervision was so tight that the enslaved population did not have the opportunity to reproduce. More typical or illustrative was the situation of Quamino, an enslaved man living near New Brunswick, New Jersey, who experienced periods of constructive family and social life, broken by slave sales and periods of isolation. As a young man, Quamino was torn away from his family to spend eight years “away” working in Poughkeepsie. But at twenty-six years old, he returned to New Jersey and married Sarah, “a slave on a neighboring place.” When Sarah was sold to another slaveholder some five miles away, Quamino was only able to visit his wife once a week, on the Sabbath. 



David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved Persons Expanded American Ideals (New York: Simon & Schuster, ), . Nor does Fischer consider that increased imports might have contributed to a concomitant rise in increased exports. James G. Lydon gives a figure of , for the period –. James G. Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade,  to ,” The William and Mary Quarterly : (April ), –. I counted this record to include ,. Jack Greene, who cites Lydon, perhaps inadvertently inverted digits, to arrive at a figure of , slaves imported into New York in the period –. Jack P. Greene, Pursuit of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . Abigail Mott, Narratives of Colored Americans (New York: William Wood & Co., ), ; Kenneth E. Marshall, “Threat of a Bondman: Political Self-Fashioning and Christian Empowerment in the Memoir of Quamino Buccau, A Pious Methodist,” Slavery and Abolition :

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



Likewise, records of the Overseers of the Poor in Poughkeepsie in the early nineteenth century indicate that many local slaves were married but lived under different houses, serving different masters, while traveling in between to visit each other. In a dissertation on colonial Flatbush in Kings County, John William McLaughlin shows from census evidence that enslaved persons in Flatbush formed conjugal pairs and lived in family units. Despite the standard antifertility thesis, there is little convincing evidence that New York slaveholders discouraged, systematically or otherwise, the fertility of their slaves. Anecdotal evidence also shows enslaved women in New York had large numbers of children. The memoirs of Anne Grant, despite their romantic image of slavery in Albany, explain that the rapid increase of the enslaved population was due to their marrying very early, and that they lived “comfortably without care.” The youngsters remained living in the house, which “swarmed like an overstocked bee-hive.” While sexual relations between enslaved persons and free whites doubtless contributed to the demographic picture, evidence here is also











(September ), –. Marshall notes that Quamino and Sarah were both sold from Hendrik Smock to John Griffith in . Quamino was born a slave in the house of the Dutch slaveholder Isaac Brokaw of Somerset County, New Jersey, and in , a year after his marriage, he refused his master’s offer to sell him to a slaveholder in Maryland. The theme of isolation of Northern slaves is also strong in Kenneth E. Marshall, Manhood Enslaved: Bondmen in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, ). Set at Liberty: Geography, Mobility and the Limits of Freedom in Poughkeepsie, New York, –, https://setatliberty.org/category/manuscript-records/overseers-of-the-poor/page//, accessed August , . McLaughlin, Dutch Rural New York, . For further support of my contention that birth rates among enslaved persons were high in the region, I point to the work of Peter O. Wacker, who gives the birth rate for New Jersey blacks for  at .. This is only a reading for a single census year, so it is difficult to make too much of it, but since birth rates are generally more stable than death rates, this would seem to indicate a consistent high birth rate. Wacker, Land and People, . Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris, Slavery in New York (New York: The New Press, ) say that New Yorkers “regularly sold slave women at the first sign of pregnancy” (p. ). I have seen no evidence for this even stronger claim. Berlin and Harris add that “[t]he inability of New York slaves to reproduce themselves made New York increasingly dependent on the slave trade.” In fact, the opposite seems to be the case, that New York became decreasingly dependent on the slave trade after the mid eighteenth century. This view of Berlin and Harris also creates a paradox, or at least an apparent contradiction, that New York’s enslaved women were having too many children, but that there was also an increasing need for imported slaves. Additionally, it is worth noting in this context that a  law made the child follow the status of the mother, not the slaveholder father. The New York Weekly Mercury of February ,  reported that an enslaved woman in New York City had twenty-three children. Caty Stevenson of Dutchess County, examined by the Dutchess County Overseers of the Poor in , had six children, https://setatliberty.org////over-examination-of-caty-stevenson-jul-–/, accessed July , . Anne Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady (New York: George Dearborn, ), .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

limited. According to documents in the Ulster County archives, in , Grietje Brass, a white woman, had a child with Robin, a black man, slave of Albert Roosa. A warrant was issued for Robin and Albert Roosa to appear before the Justice of the Peace. The biracial relationship and birth of a mixed-race child was not a crime, but it did create a situation of concern for the authorities, who sought to ensure the protection of the child. The court, with Grietje’s confirmation, declared that Albert Roosa would care for the maintenance of the child if the mother became unable. The strongest direct evidence for a separate, coherent culture of Dutch slaves comes from the reports of Pinkster, originally a Dutch festival, which became a popular African American celebration by the late eighteenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth century. According to Jeroen Dewulf, the first explicit reference of African Americans in New York celebrating Pinkster is from , although Dewulf believes it had been around much earlier. The majority of the observations of this group’s dancing, merriment, and travel for Pinkster is from the period  to , in the decades when the absolute number







One potential example is from the New York Weekly Journal, January , , which notes, “Last Week a Negro Woman in this Town was delivered of two female Children at a Birth the one white the other Black.” Groth, Slavery and Freedom, , notes a child born to Captain Nicholas Emigh, a white man, and his black female slave. In an Albany court case from , a white man was punished for threatening a slave owner who would not sell him his “negro” lover. William E. Nelson, “Legal Turmoil in a Factious Colony: New York, –,” Hofstra Law Review : (Fall ); Hofstra Law Review  (), . The case of Gelston v. Russel () involved claims to the property of a black man named Peter, born the child of a white man named James Latham and his black female slave. Gelston v. Russel,  Johns.  () New York Supreme Court, https://cite.case.law/johns///, accessed August , . Melissa Weiner provides examples of children born to free whites and their enslaved blacks in New Jersey in an article “Unfreedom: Enslaving in New Jersey through Gradual Abolition and Emancipation,” Slavery & Abolition : (), –. Unlike many other states, New York never had antimiscegenation laws. Sheryll Cashin, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in American and the Threat to White Supremacy (Boston: Beacon Press, ), , . James Varick was born in about  of a Dutchman Richard Varick and a “colored woman of very bright complexion” (B. F. Wheeler, The Varick Family (Mobile, AL, ), –. Referenced in E. Franklin Frazier, The Free Negro Family: A Study of Family Origins before the Civil War (Nashville, TN: Fisk University Press, ), ). Ulster County Archives, -, CNC , Proceedings/Justice Court/May  (May , ). Similar kinds of evidence can be extracted from statements about skin color such as the following: “A light colored Mulatto Man with grey hair and about twenty years old that both the Balls of his eyes are Bloodshot, that he was born in the Town of Kingston.” Ulster County Archives, Certificate of Manumission, Joseph Crooke, former slave of Adam Swart, April , . Collection -. Jeroen Dewulf, The Pinkster King and the King of Congo: The Forgotten History of America’s DutchOwned Slaves (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, ), .

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



of Dutch-speaking slaves reached its peak. Pinkster became one of the major holidays on the calendar of Dutch-speaking slaves. African American Pinkster was primarily a city festival, a gathering celebrated only in places with a Dutch presence such as Albany, Kingston, Hudson, Schaghticoke, Brooklyn, and Paterson and New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was also celebrated on Manhattan, where Long Island’s slaves came to sell clams and oysters, or to be hired to dance to attract a crowd to a place of business. The New York Sun recalled in  that “The old Dutch negroes, as they were called, were famous for their dancing. The veteran Long Islanders are wont to tell stories of negroes dancing for eels on a barn floor in olden times, and they say that modern minstrelsy is a tame imitation of the fun given by these old Dutch servants.” Pinkster lasted only a few days, but in Albany, it was said that the black population spent a week in preparation for the event, spending more time in the streets than usual, practicing a bit on the Guinea drum. Pinkster was a brief interlude of liberty in the coerced drudgery of a slave’s life. It also became an important element in negotiations between slaves and slave owners. In Albany, slaves coordinated the festival. Black participants in the Pinkster celebrations asked for white observers to pay “tax” before they would perform dances. Each of the celebrations had a local flavor, but typically included a procession, dancing, and the naming of a “King” for the holiday. All these examples demonstrate a common, unified Dutch slave population who were given a certain amount of leeway, allowed to travel, dance, and earn money for themselves. The Pinkster celebration also provided an opportunity for slaves to leave and not return. An advertisement in the Albany Gazette in  explains that an enslaved man named Caesar was allowed a “leave of absence from his master to join in the amusements of Pinkster Hollidays [sic], with a promise that he would come back on the Tuesday following, but he has not yet returned.”

    

Jeroen Dewulf, “Rediscovering a Hudson Valley Folklore Tradition: Traces of the ‘Pinkster’ Feast in Forgotten Books,” The Hudson River Valley Review : (Spring ), –. Thomas F. De Voe, The Market Book: Containing a Historical Account of the Public Markets in the Cities of New York (New York: No publisher given, ), . The Sun (New York), February , . The original newspaper source reads “for eels” but this could be a typo for “for reels.”  Albany Centinel, June , . Dewulf, The Pinkster King, . Advertisement of Aaron W. Slingerland of Cobleskill. Albany Gazette, June , .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

By tradition, Dutch slaves would be free on Pinkster, even if they served English-speaking masters. The account books of Simeon Button (–), a farmer and sometime Justice of the Peace for Rensselaer County at Pittstown, New York, demonstrate how a slaveholder would allow an enslaved person to celebrate Pinkster as a reward for hard work. Button recorded renting the slave Pomp in  at the rate of $ for the year. Pomp had likely been owned by Button a few years earlier, then sold and temporarily rented back. In , however, Pomp remained in Button’s service for less than four months. In April, he recorded giving Pomp  shillings on “Poss” (that is, Paas, the Dutch word for Easter). On June , Button also gave Pomp  shillings for Pinkster. Button provided this cash for Pomp despite the fact that he had been sick and had not worked much in the month of May. In fact, Pomp did not work from May  through May , and Button twice paid for a doctor to bleed Pomp and even bought him a half pint of gin, perhaps hoping the alcoholic remedy might do him some good. In April, Button purchased breeches for Pomp and in July he bought him shoes. All of these charges Button recorded as offsetting the cost of renting Pomp so that he could deduct these costs when settling with Solomon Tinsler, Pomp’s legal master. Button also recorded Pomp’s “lost time,” that is, the time in which he did not work. Pomp lost  days in April, ½ in May, ½ in June (including  for Pinkster), and then  days in the beginning of July before Pomp “went off.” On March , , Button settled with Tinsler, paying him a total of $ for Pomp’s labor during the past year. Button continued his account book for decades, but in later years apparently always hired free labor. In  and , Button also gave cash on both “Poss” and Pinkster to Peter Stalker. The status of this Peter is unclear, but it seems that he might have been a free black man who worked for Button. Explanations for the demise of Pinkster have ranged from legal restrictions on its excesses, as African Americans turned towards evangelical Protestant morality, or even the death of one particularly popular Pinkster “King” in Albany. Demographic study reinforces Dewulf’s view that “an increasing number of people no longer considered ‘Dutchness’ to be an important part of their identity.” As slaves were emancipated and Dutch-speaking slaves became bilingual or switched to English, they abandoned this common festival in the s. If Pinkster was partially or mostly celebrated because it offered a respite from slave work, and  

Simeon Button Account Book, Pittstown Historical Society, Pittstown, NY, – and . Dewulf, The Pinkster King, .

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



served as a tool of negotiation, it stands to reason that freed blacks would show less interest in the event. Pinkster celebrations coincided with the growth and decline of an explicitly Dutch group of slaves. As their Dutch identity declined, African Americans in New York gradually abandoned the celebration. The death of Pinkster, I believe, was largely tied to demographic changes. Slave numbers declined by half from  to sometime right after . As slave numbers declined, the celebrations would have been smaller, less meaningful, and, with emancipation on the horizon, less intense as an expression of temporary limited freedom. Dewulf explains that the festival continued to be celebrated much later in the nineteenth century, but in more modest scale. Finally, in understanding the nature of Dutch slavery in New York, we cannot discount entirely or dismiss fully the claims of so many Dutch slaveholding families who thought of their slaves as part of their families. Such claims are commonly found in nostalgic apologias and reminiscences of the nineteenth century. The views that the children and grandchildren of Dutch slaveholders shared might not have matched the reality of the feelings of the enslaved, but they did reflect the feeling of what certain Dutch families thought about the nature of slavery. The Dutch saw slavery as a family enterprise and slaves as members of the household. They had a custom of giving children their own personal slaves, and wills often specified which slaves a widow would receive to “serve and assist” her. Published memories in the nineteenth century spoke of a love and kindness for former slaves that was returned by the slaves, and certainly, even if this was not representative of the general picture, some of these memories were authentic representations of the past. It is said that liberated slaves in Queens County, for example, would return to their masters years after gaining their freedom, and when word would come of the death of “Old Tom,” “there would be sorrowful faces among the children.” A similar memory persisted in Somerset County, New Jersey, where, in , a community historian wrote: “[E]ven to this day old residents tell pleasant tales of the affection existing between our forefathers and the old-time family and farm servants.”

 



Dewulf, The Pinkster King, . Henry A. Stoutenburgh, A Documentary History of the Dutch Congregation of Oyster Bay, Queens County, Island of Nassau (now Long Island) “het Nederduijtsche gemeente” (New York: Knickerbocker Press, ), –. Andrew D. Mellick, The Story of an Old Farm; or, Life in New Jersey in the Eighteenth Century (Somerville, NJ: Unionist-Gazette, ), .



Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery

In many instances, Dutch slaveholders apparently tried to incorporate their slaves into the household and its activities, but this was often by force, and required violence. In this there was a certain paternalism that required surveillance. Memoirs frequently recall “loyal slaves” and “faithful servants” as the ideal type. But historical evidence shows that slaveholder– enslaved relationships in Dutch New York were often full of conflict. A fuller picture of the struggle that played out in Dutch slaveholder houses can be found in new works by Andrea Mosterman and Nicole Maskiell. Maskiell, for instance, indicates that in a number of elite Anglo-Dutch slaveholding households, there was a kind of war going on, a struggle for control. Despite (or indeed perhaps because of ) the mobility of slaves, the landscape of Dutch New York slavery was marked with violence. Slave whippings were the primary instrument for punishment and control, and often included an element of public observation. Public whippings were given at a whipping post, typically located outside either the county courthouse or the village tavern. Whippings were also applied in private. A New York law of  allowed the master or mistress to punish slaves at their discretion, provided the punishment did not destroy life or limb. In one recorded example, Jacob Van Orden, of Catskill, who could swear “pretty well in English and unsurpassably in Low Dutch,” threatened an ill slave with a severe whipping if the slave should die. A certain antiauthoritarianism in eighteenth-century New Yorkers challenged the power of the courts and effectively left the decision to punish a slave in the hands of the master. This could potentially work in the favor of the slave. Douglas Greenberg relates that when a slave named Canning, belonging to a “a Kings County Leislerian” named Myndert Courten, was sentenced to pay a fine of  shillings or receive thirteen lashes, Courten made it clear what he thought of the court, saying that “he did not value the Court’s order a fart for their power will not stand long . . . and that he would obey none of their orders.”

 





Maskiell, Bound by Bondage. “Narrative of Rev. Horace Mowlton and Testimony of Rev. William T. Allan,” in Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, eds., American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, ). The authors joked that the threat was “medicinal” and the slave recovered from his illness. James D. Pinckney and Thurlow Weed, Reminiscences of Catskill: Local Sketches (Catskill, NY: J. B. Hall, ), . Cited in Douglas Greenberg, “The Effectiveness of Law Enforcement in Eighteenth-Century New York,” American Journal of Legal History : (July ), –, specifically .

Size, Extent, and Nature of Dutch New York Slavery



A primary purpose of whippings was to reinforce restrictions on the free movement of slaves. Laws restricting movement were generally post facto, in response to what the free citizens felt was too much liberty of movement and assembly given to slaves, so they suggested not only that there was some freedom of movement among slaves, but that it also often needed to be curtailed. These laws can be read as an indication of what slaves were already doing. For example, in s, in New York City, there were laws to prevent slaves from gaming with money (i.e. gambling), walking after sunset without a lantern or candle, to not assemble in greater number than twelve persons for a funeral, and not to ride their master’s horses in a disorderly manner in the streets. To summarize, the New York Dutch were a substantial slaveholding presence in New York. In rural areas, especially in the Hudson Valley, they continued to speak Dutch in large numbers to the end of the century, and they held thousands of slaves and taught them to speak Dutch. The Dutch often viewed their enslaved persons as family members, but they were not afraid of using violence to control them. Enslaved persons in New York were often quite mobile, and they were bought and sold, and rented out many times during their lives. Dutch-speaking slaves had opportunities to meet each other and build a common culture. 

Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, January ,  to September , .

 

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

James Ryder van Brunt (–), of Brooklyn, New York, was a descendant of a Dutch slaveholding family. In the nineteenth century, he became a painter of historical Dutch New York scenes. An  version of his painting of the Van Brunt Homestead features a black man in a red shirt and white hat, sitting on a log, holding a pitchfork (Figure .). In the same scene, painted again by Van Brunt in , the man in the same location wears a shirt with red sleeves, while a white vest or coat covers his back. The man in this later painting has his face turned, and one cannot ascertain his race (Figure .). It is as if Van Brunt had subtly erased the black man from the scene. The year  was not a good year for New Yorkers to admit that they had a slaveholding past. But there was a time not long before when slavery, particularly Dutch slavery in rural areas, was commonplace in New York. “A Dutch farmer of the Minisink went to mowing, with his negroes,” begins a story of the well-known eighteenth-century French American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. From his farm in Orange County, Crèvecœur spent the s observing the American scene. He then set about becoming a farmer. Most New Yorkers at the time were farmers – a good number of them were Dutch farmers, who grew wheat and owned slaves. Indeed, the Dutch cultivation of wheat was so common and so traditional in New York that Horatio Gates Spafford referred to “Dutch farming” as synonymous with “grain farming.” From Dutch settlement until the s, for two centuries, eastern New York farmers specialized in raising wheat with slave labor. The link between Dutch wheat farming and slavery was strong. “Poor as we are,”  

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Fox, Duffield & Co.,  [original ]), . Horatio Gates Spafford, A Gazetteer of the state of New-York (Albany, NY: H.C. Southwick, ), .



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



Figure . Two versions of a painting of the James Ryder van Brunt Homestead. Painting of the Van Brunt Homestead from , http://pursuitoffreedom.org/gradualemancipation/. The version from , www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/ objects/, accessed July , . Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

Crèvecœur wrote about the farming lot, “yet we dilate our hearts as well with the simple negro fiddle.” Slavery in New York was substantially more Dutch and rural than is commonly believed, and more slaves in the history of New York lived in rural areas than in urban ones. But the rural nature of slavery was particularly true for Dutch slaves, concentrated as they were in places like Richmond, Ulster, and Orange Counties. These slaves were typically part of small Dutch households. The largest slave owners – the Van Rensselaers, Philipses, Morrises, Livingstons, for example, did not usually need slaves to grow wheat, because these manor families received plenty of wheat from tenants on their lands. Their slaves served the needs of the manor, gathering firewood, keeping the fires lit, providing transportation as coachmen, cleaning homes, waiting on visitors, mending fences, and running local errands. It was on smaller farms that Dutch families needed to raise wheat for rent payments and for cash on the market. Slaves played a large part in making this happen. This chapter highlights the Dutch-speaking slaves who worked in the wheat fields, and the Dutch farmers who found an advantage in using slave labor for harvesting wheat. It argues that slavery in New York was predominantly rural, profitable to slaveholding farmers, and integrally connected to the cultivation of wheat. All three of these statements stand in opposition to a traditional view of slavery in the North. When historians conceived of Northern slavery as mostly limited to cities and to household domestic work, it was easy to explain why slavery in the North could not spread beyond certain natural limits and why it declined when European migration brought cheap labor to Northern cities in the early nineteenth century. Historians have argued, furthermore, that Northern agriculture did not lend itself to slavery. In the traditional “staple  





R. H. Gabriel, “Crevecoeur, An Orange County Paradox,” The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association : (January ), . Stephen Van Rensselaer, for example, required tenants to pay thirteen bushels of wheat for every  acres they leased, although this was not always paid on time or in full. Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. There was an enslaved coachman at Abraham Brinkerhof (Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley before  (New York: Payson and Clarke, ), ). Isaac Van Wyck (of Fishkill, New York) as well had a “negro coachman” and a large yellow coach, which brought him to sessions of the New York legislature, when Van Wyck was a member in , , , and  (Reynolds, Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley before , ). This view stands against the impression of Shane White, who wrote that “Northern slavery was disproportionately urban, a fact that was most apparent in colonial New York City.” Shane White, “Slavery in the North,” OAH Magazine of History, April , .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



interpretation” of slavery, staple crops like tobacco, rice, and cotton determined where slavery would be successful, namely in the Southern states. Those crops required long, sustained efforts from teams of laborers, occupied around the calendar year. Slaves, the argument goes, could outperform free laborers in such work because they were forced to work longer hours and in worse conditions than free laborers were willing to. In such environments, slaves also had the productive advantage of working in teams so that slaveholders could gain from the division of labor. Wheat, the main cash crop of New York, on the other hand, has been seen as the quintessential free labor agricultural product. Unlike with cotton and tobacco, the wheat-harvesting season is short, only ten to fourteen days at most, but of high intensity. In New York, wheat harvesting typically began in early July (in a warm year) and was over by early August. A major problem in the history of New York slavery is the need to explain why farmers who grew wheat preferred slaves to short-term hired hands. Why would they purchase slaves, and clothe and feed them all year round, if their main cash crop, wheat, only required field labor for a few weeks of the year? I argue that New York’s slaveholding farmers turned to slaves to solve the “peak labor” problem, and that slavery in rural New York was profitable so long as wheat yields remained high, the price of flour held fast, and land continued to be available to absorb the demand for new farms. The economic logic behind this claim is fairly simple. Suppose a farmer can harvest so many acres of wheat in a season. A farmer working alone would not gain by clearing more land than what he and his family could personally harvest. Owning slaves would guarantee labor needed for expanding production and increasing profits, even when farm sizes remained constant, because with extra hands, fallow land could be cultivated. Because slavery in rural New York was profitable, it had the potential to spread to the West, as the state’s population spilled out of the Hudson Valley in search of new farmlands. Wheat was the first crop New York farmers planted, the main object of their attention, and the major source of cash at the market. Wheat was used as a form of currency in the colony at much greater scale and for a longer time than beaver furs or wampum. Grains grown in colonial New York also included rye, oats, buckwheat, barley, corn (maize), and a gray pea. But of these, only wheat flour could be made into soft bread, a staple 

Wheat is the “first object of farmers.” Spafford, A Gazetteer of the state of New-York, .



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

food in colonial American diets. Other grains were for local consumption and as a hedge against a poor wheat crop, but wheat flour was the main market crop, the main export, and the largest source of cash. Throughout the eighteenth century, New York’s newspapers always listed wheat first in their commodity prices section, followed by flour, bran, and various types of bread. Wheat began dominating New York’s export market at the end of the seventeenth century, overtaking the export of furs. The Surveyor General of the Province, Cadwallader Colden, reported in  that the colony had “considerable trade with Curacoa [sic]” and Jamaica, “these places taking of great quantities of Flower [sic] for the Spanish Trade.” Wheat was sent to Lisbon, but that trade was discontinued, Colden said, because merchants did not have profitable return cargoes. Like most wealthy New Yorkers, Colden was invested in the wheat export market. He owned a farm in Orange County, where in  and  he employed fourteen hired workers and slaves who together “did the plowing and harrowing and toiled on the ubiquitous manure pile.” In , the Governor of New York elaborated on his colony’s singleminded focus on wheat: “The main bent of our farmers is to raise wheat, and they are like to remain in that way until the price of it becomes so low, that necessity puts them upon some other way of cultivation.” So important was wheat for diets and as a form of currency that the authorities in New Netherland regulated the ingredients bakers could put in their bread, the size and weight of loaves, the prices that could be charged for bread, and what kinds of bread could be sold to the Indians. This pattern of regulation of wheat continued under English control of the province. When wheat supplies ran low, authorities prohibited its exportation from the entire colony (as in ) or in particular cities (as in 



 



Cathy Matson, “‘Damned Scoundrels’ and ‘Libertisme of Trade’: Freedom and Regulation in Colonial New York’s Fur and Grain Trades,” The William and Mary Quarterly : (July ), . An Account of Trade of New York, June , . Colden gave a liberal perspective on trade. He thought that not all trade should be directed to England and that the English would benefit more if the colonies themselves were prosperous and traded freely. He argued also that colonials were burdened by not being able to cut tall pines that were reserved for English ships. Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies: – (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . “Governor Cosby to the Council of Trade and Plantations. December , ,” in A. P. Newton, ed., The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies –, Vol.  (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, ), . Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –.

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



Albany in ), or seized it altogether. Albany received its taxes in wheat, and, by , the city owned its own storehouses of grain, which it sold locally and in New York City at “fair profits,” according to the author of an  city history. Jan de Vries, in his first-rate study The Price of Bread, notes that in the Netherlands, bread prices were “everywhere regulated by public authorities” unlike grain prices, “which generally reflected market conditions.” This remark would apply equally in the history of New York. A common rationale for government regulation was that the flour that came to New York City merchants was poor and mixed with other grains or fillers. A battle between country producers and New York City merchants about who could bolt (sieve) flour long endured. As a general rule in economic history, if you want to look for where fortunes are won, look first to what is being regulated. In New York, nothing was so heavily regulated as flour. In the first half of the seventeenth century, wheat was grown wherever the Dutch settled, in New Amsterdam, in Beverwijk (Albany), and in Esopus (Kingston). As early as the s, West India Company slaves were harvesting grain for the colony. By the late s, New Netherland was exporting wheat. The Dutch discovered that wheat grew best in open fields along the Hudson River that had previously been cultivated by Native Americans. The seventeenth-century Dutch and the English along the Hudson dug ditches, drained wetlands, and cleared timbered acres to create open spaces for sowing wheat seed. 

  

  

Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York Manorial Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . Kim also explains (pp. –) that powerful manors tried to regulate grain locally by demanding right of first refusal for grain and determining when and where gristmills could be built. He is incorrect to think that this could sometimes benefit producers and that manors offered a true market price for grain. The true market price could not be known so long as the right of exemption was in force, since it effectively obscured the manor’s true demand and insulated the manor from market forces. In one instance in Kim’s telling, Philip Livingston threatened the removal of tenants from his manor if they would not accept the price he offered. George Rogers Howell, Bi-centennial History of the County of Albany, – (W. W. Munsell & Company, ), . Jan de Vries, The Price of Bread (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Bonomi presents New York’s monopoly on flour bolting as part of the rivalry between Albany and New York City. Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,  []), –. Hodges, Root & Branch, . Dennis Maika, Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (PhD dissertation, New York University, ), . Jason R. Sellers, “‘Lands Fit for Use’: Native Subsistence Patterns and European Agricultural Landscaping in the Colonial Hudson Valley,” New York History :– (Summer/Fall ), –.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

New Yorkers were keenly aware of their province’s God-given advantage in wheat, and they frequently boasted of the wheat yields per acre that certain areas demonstrated. County histories from the nineteenth century seldom failed to mention wheat harvesting in the community, even if it was only a fleeting statement. For example, Sylvester’s History of Rensselaer County notes that to bring wheat to Albany on streams that were too shallow for sailboats, merchants ferried it on barges, driven by long poles. In Orange County, wheat was “carried” to Esopus, some “fifty or sixty miles – over a road a great part of which must have been in very bad order.” A Greene County historian boasts of “a single day in ” when “four thousand bushels of wheat” and “ loaded sleighs” came into Catskill from the western road. Another county history recalls that a single “spint” of wheat was carried by one man, who sowed it and reaped eighty-three “skipple” in , the first wheat crop in Schoharie. From Schoharie to Albany, a brisk trade in wheat developed with an estimated , schepels per year by the nineteenth century. Wheat culture shaped settlement patterns and ultimately the distribution of slaves, who were brought from New York City to the farms of Long Island and the Hudson Valley. Eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for land and houses in the Hudson Valley and along the Raritan in New Jersey pointed out the ease of access that certain wheat lands had to the market. In , a sale of a plantation at Tappan, Orange County, included a barn of  x  feet,  acres of wheat fields, and  fruit trees, and was situated “about  Miles from a Landing on the North River, convenient for the York Markets.” In the same year, a farm of  acres,  of which was said to be good for grass or wheat, with  or  apple trees, came up for sale “within the Mannor [sic] of Livingston, in the County of Albany, near Hudson’s river.” In , Philip Livingston was selling lands in Ulster County at  shillings per acre. He advertised the     

 

Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Rensselaer Co., New York (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, ), . Ruttenber and Clark, History of Orange County, New York, . Frank A. Gallt, Dear Old Greene County: Embracing Facts and Figures (Catskill, NY: n.p., ), . A German unit of grain measurement between two and seven liters, depending on its regional use in Germany or the Netherlands. John Matthias Brown, A brief sketch of the first settlement of the county of Schoharie (New York: Schoharie: L. Cuthbert, ), –. The author was born in  in Ulster County and wrote the introduction in a letter to DeWitt Clinton in . New-York Gazette or Weekly Post-Boy, May , . New York Evening Post, September , .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



lands as “very fit for all Sorts of Grain, especially Wheat, which is raised on the neighbouring Lands in the greatest Perfection of any in America.” It was common, as well, for contemporary observers and latter-day historians to remark on the wheat yields of certain New York soils. A report from  estimated fifteen bushels per acre on average. A well-known agricultural treatise called American Husbandry () reported that New York wheat was “equal to any in America, or indeed in the world” and noted that yields near Albany were from twenty to forty bushels per acre, with twenty to thirty as the most common. Some of these figures may have been exaggerated. After all, observers liked to highlight the extraordinary instead of the mundane, especially if they had political motivations. Like with statements about crop yields, comments about the superiority of New York wheat were often made in connection with the political goal of increased regulation of the quality of wheat grown in the state. Nineteenth-century sources could sometimes read like promotional brochures. A gazetteer from , for instance, speaks of wheat yields at twenty-five to thirty bushels per acre in “Genesee Country,” with peaks of forty to fifty bushels. But a later assessment, relying on data from the census of  (the first to include such information), shows that the Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Genesee Valley farmers yielded only thirteen to fifteen bushels, respectively. Hudson Valley farmers in that year averaged only eight bushels per acre. By , as soils became exhausted, wheat yields had fallen from their peak. Wheat grows best on virgin soils, so the high estimates given in early gazetteers might not be far off the mark. But over time, wheat yields decline considerably, and without crop rotation, some soils will not grow wheat at all if it is planted on the same field a few years in a row. Outside observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – sometimes familiar  



  

New-York Gazette or Weekly Post-Boy, March , . Representation of Messrs. Brooke and Nicoll to the Board of Trade, August , , in E. B. O’Callaghan ed., Documents relatives to the colonial history of the State of New York procured in Holland, England, and France, Vol. IV (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons and Company, ), . American Husbandry: Containing an Account of the Soil, Climate, Production and Agriculture of the British Colonies in North America and the West-Indies; with Observations on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Settling in Them, Compared with Great Britain and Ireland. By an American, Vol.  (London: J. Bew, ), . John Austin Stevens Jr., Colonial Records of the New York Chamber of Commerce, – (J. F. Trow & Co., ), . Thomas Francis Gordon, Gazetteer of the state of New York (New York: n.p., ), . Andrea Zimmerman, “Nineteenth-Century Wheat Production in Four New York State Regions,” Hudson Valley Regional Review : (September ), –.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

with husbandry manuals – routinely criticized New York wheat producers for not rotating their crops or letting a field lay fallow before replanting wheat. The paternalistic image of the wise observers and the ignorant farmer continued in twentieth-century historiography. The historian Ellis writes, The principles of rotation and the use of fertilizers were universally ignored. The abundance of land and the scarcity of labor, two of the most compelling and persistent factors determining the course of American agriculture, operated with telling force. As a result, extensive cultivation was the general practice. An almost inevitable corollary was the custom of cropping the land until it was exhausted.

Critics of New York agriculture like Ellis thought that fertilizer and proper rotation would bring higher yields. Some farmers added gypsum, marl, lime, plaster, or manure as fertilizers, but most farmers were reluctant to make the shift to such expensive, intensive cultivation. They had good reason. On some of the best virgin soils, especially along riverbanks, wheat could often be grown for ten or more years before significant reductions in yields. And when yields dropped, farmers could clear more land and plant elsewhere. The Dutch and their English neighbors in the Hudson Valley knew that it did not pay to work the land intensively when it could be plowed extensively by slave labor. None other than President George Washington came to the defense of the American style of wheat farming. An English farmer must entertain a contemptible opinion of our husbandry, or a horrid idea of our lands, when he shall be informed that not more than eight or ten bushels of wheat is the yield of an acre; but this low produce may be ascribed, and principally too, to a cause which I do not find touched by either of the gentlemen whose letters are sent to you, namely, that the aim of the farmers in this country (if they can be called farmers) is, not to make the most they can from the land, which is, or has been cheap, but the most of the labour, which is dear.

Wheat was so generally cultivated in colonial New York that landlords and provincial tax authorities could assume that everyone could grow some to pay as “quitrent” or tax on their lands. Much of this wheat was sowed and harvested by free labor, by farmers, their children, wives, extended 



David Maldwyn Ellis, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Ellis cites as his authority on this matter: William H. Smith, The History of the Late Province of New York from its Discovery to the Appointment of Governor Colden in  (New York, ), I, . George Washington to Arthur Young, December , , published in Samuel Blodget, Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America (Washington, DC: n.p., ), .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



family, and neighbors. But farmers also hired outside laborers, including slaves, to help with the wheat harvest. A glimpse of an early hired worker appears in one of the “sailing letters” captured by the British aboard a Dutch ship on the Atlantic in the seventeenth century and held for centuries in an unopened envelope at the British national archives. In this letter from October , Hendrick Meessen Vrooman writes to his brother-in-law living on the Breestraat in Leiden about his experiences plowing a field at Fort Orange (Albany). Hardly a greater contrast can be made than that between an urban street in the Netherlands and a farm field at the edge of the Dutch colonial orbit in New Netherland. But the Dutch everywhere appreciated good flour. The journal of Jaspar Dackaerts (of –) records wheat being grown further north in “Schoonechtendeel” (Schenectady). Dackaerts explained that the wheat from this place was sometimes blue in color and inferior to the wheat on sale in New York City. Dackaerts also visited the Van Rensselaer family and saw a gristmill that could grind  schepels of grain in a day. The profits from wheat grown in the Hudson Valley accrued to the hands of the powerful and politically connected manorial elite like the Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons, who required wheat payments from their tenants. At Clermont, Philip Livingston switched from trading furs to raising and trading grain in the late s. At the same time, he imported slaves from Africa, not only for his own use but also to satisfy the growing demand for laborers in the province. The Livingstons received grain payments from tenants who lived on their manorial lands, some , bushels of wheat (about  percent their total wheat crop) in a year from  tenants in . Economists like to say that the best money is that which is durable, consistent, and divisible. It must also be easily moveable. For much of the latter half of the seventeenth century, account books in the Dutch areas of the Hudson Valley were kept in schepels of wheat. The schepel was a unit of measurement for volume, essentially a large wicker basket holding technically . bushels or about sixty pounds of wheat. This was    

“Brieven als buit” [“Letters as Loot”], http://brievenalsbuit.inl.nl/zeebrieven/page/article?doc=, accessed March , . Jaspar Dackaerts and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in – (Brooklyn, NY: Long Island Historical Society, ), –. Cynthia A. Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ),  and . Another less commonly used measurement was the mudde, also spelled muid (in South African English), which was equal to about three bushels of grain. The word originated from French and ultimately the Latin word modius.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

Figure . Eighteenth-century payments made in “schepels” of wheat, Ulster County. Courtesy of the Ulster County Clerk’s Office, Kingston, New York.

“a struck bushel” of wheat, not a head of wheat still on the stem. In , in New Netherland, a court requested that one man’s half schepel be measured and stamped if it was the correct size. What was weighed in a schepel of wheat was the grain that had already been cut in the field and beaten to separate the wheat from the chaff. This was generally not yet ground or “bolted” flour. It took about one wagonload of wheat still on the stem to make a schepel of whole grains. The schepel could also be used to measure things like bran, salt, rye, tobacco, corn, or peas, while liquids were measured in gallons and fabrics in ells. In later years, the schepel was written as “schijpel,” “schijple,” or “skipple,” and abbreviated as “sch,” “scip,” or “skip.” From the s through at least the s, court fines in Ulster County could be paid in guilders or schepels of wheat (Figure .). The ratio was traditionally fixed at six guilders for one schepel and later at  schillings per schepel. Slaves were bought and sold with schepels of wheat or with the promise of future deliveries of schepels of wheat. Personal debts were owned in schepels of wheat. The ubiquity of schepels of wheat as a currency, especially in the late seventeenth century, is clear in the account book of the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston, New York. The congregation gave to   

Berthold Fenow and Walywyn Van der Veen, eds., The Minutes of the Orphanmaster of New Amsterdam,  to  (New York: F. P. Harper, ), . Christoffel Kierstede Account Book, Kingston Senate House Historic Site. Held at the Ulster County Archives.

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

Figure .



The salary of Minister Weeksteen paid in wheat in Kingston, New York. Courtesy of the Ulster County Clerk’s Office, Kingston, New York.

the church in schepels of wheat, the church debts were held in wheat, and even the minister’s salary, shown in Figure ., was paid in schepels of wheat. Although wheat paid well, it required a significant investment of labor and a few common tools. In the seventeenth century, New York farmers used both scythes and sickles to harvest wheat. In reality, the distinction between these tools was probably not always clear, as farmers made their own tools, whatever combination of a stick and a cutting edge they found worked best. The word for scythe had a similar etymology in Dutch, but the tool sometimes developed in forms different from the English equivalent. The word in early New York probably referred to a number of different styles of cutters. With a sickle – a short one-handed metal hook – a field laborer had to kneel down, grab a handful of wheat stems with one hand and then cut with the other. A longer scythe, popular in the eighteenth century, had the advantage of allowing a worker to remain standing up, and to cut more with each stroke. The sickle technique had the advantage that stems were cut and stacked together in one direction, while the scythe might leave the stems lying in different directions. A history of Orange County from







A  inventory of Brant Peelen’s farm in Rensselaerwijk includes both instruments. Dirk Mouw, trans., The Memorandum Book of Anthony de Hooges (Albany, NY: New Netherland Research Center, ), . In , Jan Reyerson at Fort Orange owned three “sithes with a mathook” [a tool similar to a pickax]. A receipt from  Kingston shows Wessel Ten Broeck had purchased three sickles and paid for them with four schepels of wheat per sickle. Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Fort Orange Records, – (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ), . David Steven Cohen also speaks of an intermediate tool, which he calls a “sith,” similar to a scythe, but without the long wooden handle. According to Cohen, the sith was used in combination with a mattock in the opposite hand. David Steven Cohen, The Dutch-American Farm (New York: New York University Press, ), . Harold B. Gill Jr., “Wheat Culture in Colonial Virginia,” Agricultural History : (July ), –.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

 claims that sickles were in common use until about , when they were replaced by scythes and cradles. The cradle scythe, with a regular scythe blade and parallel sticks or “fingers” above it, allowed the laborer to lay the wheat all in one direction, while another person followed to efficiently bind and stack the wheat. The cradle was in use by the beginning of the nineteenth century. On a trip through New York in , Richard Smith came to “two stone Farm Houses on Beekman Manor in the County of Duchess [sic]” where he found the men “absent & the Woman and children could speak no other Language than Low Dutch.” Smith saw wheat fields, homespun clothes, a “two-wheeled plow drawn by three horses,” and notably a “Scythe with a Short crooked Handle and a Kind of Hook both used to cut down Grain.” He explained that “the Sickle is not much known in Albany County or this part of Duchess.” This transition from sickles to scythes in roughly the s is also evidenced by the founding of the Harris scythe factory in Dutchess County. A county history and other sources relate that this “founder of the scythe industry” learned the art of making scythes from a “mulatto slave” sometime in the late s. Another source explains that Harris and “his slave” worked together making scythes for some time. In the s, these scythes retailed for  shillings each. The factory, with many enlargements and technical changes, continued in operation until the s. Documents of slaves working in wheat fields are not the kinds of records that a society usually produces, let alone preserves, so a bit of imaginative reconstruction is necessary to understand the extent and importance of the slave–wheat connection in Dutch New York. The use of slaves to harvest wheat can be consistently seen in Kingston, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. In , Captain Thomas Chambers of Esopus (later-day Kingston) was reported to be providing wheat for Vice Director La Montagne. But since Chambers owned at least one slave, it 



 

Ruttenber and Clark, History of Orange County, New York, . When New Paltz slaveholder Abraham Bevier died in , his estate sale included nine siths, three “mattocks,” five “sithes,” and three slaves: a man, a woman, and a boy. Historic Huguenot Street, article of vendue, Abraham Bevier, April , , https://cdm.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/hhs/id/, accessed May , . Francis W. Halsey, ed., A Tour of Four Great Rivers, The Hudson, Mohawk, Susquehanna and Delaware in , Being the Journal of Richard Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ), –. Frank Hasbrouck, The History of Dutchess County, New York (Poughkeepsie, NY: Samuel A. Matthieu, ), . Isaac Huntting, History of Little Nine Partners: Of North East Precinct, and Pine Plains, New York (Amenia, NY: Charles Walsh & Co, ), .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



is probable that he was not doing the actual harvesting work. The area around Esopus (Kingston) was an early wheat-growing region, producing significant wheat harvests by the s. Sylvester’s History of Ulster reports that “it was a colloquial saying abroad concerning Kingston that every other house was a barn, and every other white man a negro.” In the eighteenth century, the slaveholding farmers in Kingston were richer, with larger farms than their non-slaveholding neighbors who mostly bartered their products locally instead of shipping them to New York City. Thomas Wermuth calculates that farms in eighteenth-century Ulster County averaged  acres with an average of  acres for grain and an equal number for pasturage. From  to , farmers in Kingston expanded the average number of acres they had under cultivation from  to  on average. This may have been in response to declining yields and could have been enabled by slave labor. At the same time, Kingston farmers who sent grain to the merchant Abraham Hasbrouck were typically slaveholders. Long Islanders grew wheat as well, and paid it forward as quitrent, and not only in the period of Dutch rule. This extensive cultivation of wheat, especially in Kings County, has often been overlooked, probably because in the nineteenth century the region transitioned to growing garden crops to ferry across to New York City. Ever since then, it has been known as New York’s garden, not its breadbasket. The evidence of the wheat–slave connection in eighteenth-century Kings County is fairly clear, and in fact wheat was still grown on Long Island as late as the second half of the nineteenth century. Daniel Denton, in his “A brief description of new York, formerly called New Netherlands” from , says that Long Island was “most of it of a very good soyle & very natural for all sorts of English    



Berthold Fernow, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, Vol.  (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons and Company, ), . Nathanial Bartlett Sylvester, History of Ulster County, NY (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, ), . Thomas Wermuth, “New York Farmers and the Market Revolution: Economic Behavior in the Mid-Hudson Valley, –,” Journal of Social History : (Fall ), . Marc Linder and Lawrence Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, ). Typical of this view that ignored the history of wheat on Long and Staten Island was the following: “The region comprising Long Island and Staten island has been formed under the ocean and was predominantly sandy. The soils were generally deficient in lime and humus and were, therefore, not suit to general grain farming. The character of the soil and the proximity to a convenient market produced a specialized type of agriculture with vegetables as the chief product” in Russel H. Anderson, “New York Agriculture Meets the West –,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History : (December ), –, quote . Richard A. Wines, “The Nineteenth-Century Agricultural Transition in an Eastern Long Island Community,” Agricultural History : (January ), .



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

Grain; which they sowe & have very good increase of.” Other evidence comes from Nicholas Van Brunt’s probate inventory from  New Utrecht in Kings County, which included, among other things, four slaves, a wagon, plow, harrow, one “syth,”  bushels of wheat, and  bushels of rye “in the straw,” that is, unprocessed. Since the date on which the inventory was made was September , perhaps the slaves had not yet found time to thresh the grain. Traveling through New York in  and , the Frenchman John Fontaine noted that Staten Island and Long Island were chiefly Dutch, producing wheat and “all English grain in abundance.” Likewise, Nicholas Creswell, a private Englishman in New York City during the British occupation, took a “single horse-chaise” tour of Long Island to the town of Jamaica in June . In his diary, he noted that “the west part of the Island [is] stony, produces Wheat and grain of all kinds and immense quantities of apples.” He added that “[t]he inhabitants are chiefly Dutch, or the descendants of the Swedes who first settled here.” Samuel Thompson’s Journal of Daily Activities and Related Events Pertaining to Slaves, of March  to January , shows Long Island slaves plowing, cutting wheat, threshing, dressing flax, and preparing fields. Wheat was also the most important crop in nearby Flushing, New York, which in  counted a high ratio of black slaves to free whites:  to . Slaves also grew wheat on Staten Island, as per an advertisement from  for a farm sale of  acres, a stone house, and all the slaves. Wherever there were Dutch wheat farmers, there were slaves, including the northern neck of New Jersey. One example was Abraham Haring in Harrington Township, a grain farmer who owned over  acres and had eight slaves, according to his  inventory. The spread of Dutch wheat farming can be tracked by the distribution of Dutch barns, a type of barn based on a pattern from the Netherlands, 

     

Daniel Denton, A brief description of New York: formerly called New Netherlands, with the places thereunto adjoining . . .. Likewise a brief relation of the customs of the Indians there (Philadelphia, PA: Historical Society of Philadelphia,  [original ]), . James Fontaine et al., Memoirs of a Huguenot Family (G. P. Putnam & Co., ), . The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, – (New York: The Dial Press, ), . Samuel Thompson, “Journals –” at the New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts, as recorded in Moss, Slavery on Long Island. Lauren Holly Brincat, John Browne’s Flushing, Material Life on a Dutch Frontier, – (MA thesis, University of Delaware, ), . New York Mercury, March , . Firth Haring Fabend, The Yeoman Ideal: A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, – (PhD dissertation, New York University, ), .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



but adapted to American conditions. It had large doors that allowed wind to pass through a center bay, where wheat was threshed and sifted in the wind. Because these barns were tall, there was airflow, which helped to dry cereal crops in storage. Historians have generally assumed that free labor would push slave labor out of wheat cultivation, rendering a wheat–slave complex moot. If the wheat harvest was only a few weeks, why would farmers not hire outside workers for a term to help bring in the wheat? Because free laborers could not always be found, and in New York, labor was bid up in July and August. A Poughkeepsie store owner, Francis Filkin, recorded a payment of  shillings and  pence earned by his slave George for one day of “moing” [mowing] in . For other work, George earned only  or ½ shillings per day. When Filkin rented out George to Isack Hegeman for a month starting from May , , George earned only  pound  shillings, just ¼ shillings per day. Slaves need not have been more efficient workers than free laborers for wheat farmers to find a comparative advantage in using them. Indeed, there is some evidence that slave labor in the Hudson Valley was worth less per day than free labor. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, slaves were paid  shillings per day when rented out, while free laborers often earned more, particularly for skilled labor. Historian Edgar McManus found a similar pattern for the s, when free laborers demanded twice as much as slave workers. Skilled laborers, such as carpenters, for example, might earn  or  shillings per day. Women working a loom, on the other hand, were only paid  or  shillings per day. Laborers were in greater demand in July and August than at any other time. A ledger book from Oyster Bay, New York, shows both black and white workers earning anywhere between  and  shillings per day for farm work. But in the division of labor, certain tasks in certain seasons required 



  

Cohen, Dutch-American Farm, . John R. Stevens, Dutch Vernacular Architecture in North America, – (West Hurley, NY: The Society for the Preservation of Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture, ), . This has led one scholar to mistakenly conclude that there was no “large-scale chattel slavery in the Hudson Valley” and that most of the slaves were domestics in the large manor estates. Jonathan Leitner, “Transitions in the Colonial Hudson Valley: Capitalist, Bulk Goods, and Braudelian,” Journal of World-System Research : (), . Henry Booth, ed., Francis Filkin’s Account Book of a Country Store Keeper in the Eighteenth Century at Poughkeepsie (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar Brothers Institute, ). McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York, . Salley M. Schultz and Joan Hollister, “The Ledger of Ann Dewitt Bevier (–), Early American Estate Manager and Mother,” The Accounting Historians Journal : (June ), –.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

higher pay. In July , black men in Oyster Bay earned as much as  shillings each per day for “cradling rye” and  shillings for binding the rye, although the pay scale varied by individual, probably based on the strength and efficiency of the workers. By owning slaves, wheat farmers never had to worry about having extra hands for the wheat harvest. So slaves therefore reduced the risk of having too much wheat to cut relative to the number of workers a farmer could find during the peak season. Given the high seasonal demand for field labor and the relative pay for the work, capable female slaves also went to work in the fields in July and August, as did white women in free labor households in the early nineteenth-century Hudson Valley. The main point here is that New York farmers who grew wheat used slaves to help solve the “peak labor” problem, the difficulty of acquiring labor during the harvest season. A related explanation, explored by Christopher Hanes in a study of slavery nationwide, is that farmers preferred slaves in situations where they faced high turnover costs with free labor. In this view, the problem was not the supply of free labor, but its cost. The market for free laborers was thin, so it was difficult for the market to reach perfect competition. High turnover costs disincentivized hiring free labor. During a short wheat harvest of ten days, one worker, cutting one acre per day, could cut ten acres, but he would need help to gather, stack, and bind the wheat, an activity that women and children could do. With a cradle scythe, the output was approximately doubled. But the amount of grain a farmer could reap was a function of the number of scythe workers in the field, multiplied by the acres per day they could cut and stack with help from others, multiplied by the number of available working days, which could be severely impacted by weather. This is why New York wheat farmers, unless they owned more than two or three slaves, tended 

  

Account book of Robert Townsend of Oyster Bay, New York. East Hampton Library. Claire Bellerjeau and Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution (Essex, CT: Lyons Press, ). Martin Bruegel, “Work, Gender, and Authority on the Farm: The Hudson Valley Countryside, –s,” Agricultural History : (Winter ), –. Christopher Hanes, “Turnover Cost and the Distribution of Slave Labor in Anglo-America,” The Journal of Economic History : (June ), –. In an example from Herkimer County, a slave named Polly was recorded helping to bind the wheat. “John Frank, His Contemporaries and His Account Book” an address by Hon. Robert Earl of Herkimer, delivered February , , in Arthur T. Smith, compiler, Papers read before the Herkimer County Historical Society during the years , , , to July ,  (Herkimer and Ilion, NY: Citizen Publishing Co., ), .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



not to plant more than fifteen acres of wheat. If wheat was cut too fast and left to dry on the ground, it could spoil. The Dutch learned the hard way not to sow more than they could reap. In , Jeremias van Rensselaer wrote, “Everywhere there has been a good crop of wheat, for which we have to thank the Lord God, but, owing to lack of help and a wet harvest, in many places much ripe grain has been left lying in the field.” Investing in slaves, New York farmers merely needed to break even during the rest of the year, so long as they could profit from reaping a large wheat harvest. Outside of the wheat harvest, slaves were kept busy in valuable but less obviously pecuniary work. Slave labor was profitably employed to harvest wheat at other times and places in American history. Maryland’s eastern shore, and the Virginia Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley, are well-known examples. What is clear from these cases, at the very least, is that wheat and slavery were not incompatible. Wheat farmers in the mid nineteenth-century Virginia Piedmont may have even found slavery to have a productive advantage over free labor. Census records show that in  and , slave plantations in the Virginia Piedmont were much more likely to grow wheat than their free-farm counterparts. Historian James Irwin explains that the more slaves a Piedmont plantation had, the higher number of bushels of wheat per worker were reported, even while the production of corn, tobacco, and meat per slave on those plantations remained roughly the same. This relationship held true regardless of the size of the plantation. Irwin argues that Virginia slaves had an advantage in wheat cultivation because they were forced to work in a gang system that benefitted from scale effects and efficiencies in the division of labor. A team of slave workers would have included “a cradler (who cuts the wheat), a binder (who tied up cut wheat into sheaves), and stackers (followers who stacked the sheaves into shocks).” Multiple teams working under supervisors would have gained even more efficiency relative to free laborers. Farmers, if rational, would of  



Arnold J. F. Van Loon, ed., Correspondence of Jeremias van Rensselaer, – (Albany: The University of the State of New York, ), . The historian John Majewski has shown that wheat was grown by both slaves and free workers in the “Limestone” South, a region comprising the Shenandoah Valley, Kentucky’s Bluegrass Region, and Tennessee’s Nashville Basin, where soils are similar to those in the North. John Majewski, “Why Did Northerners Oppose Expansion of Slavery?: Economic Development and Education in the Limestone South,” in Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), – (quote –). James R. Irwin, “Exploring the Affinity of Wheat and Slavery in the Virginia Piedmont,” Explorations in Economic History , – (), quote from page .



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

course choose the least costly means of acquiring labor. But even if free labor was cheaper than slave labor, a farmer who already owned a slave outright might find the costs of continuing to rely on slaves to be less than the costs of switching to free labor. These “sunk costs” might explain the slow transition from slaves to free workers in upper eastern Maryland’s eighteenth-century transition from tobacco to wheat. Sunk costs also explain Dutch New Yorkers’ reluctance to emancipate their slaves. The available evidence indicates that wheat farmers in the Hudson Valley in the late eighteenth century, like Virginia farmers in the nineteenth century, increasingly turned to slave labor to harvest wheat. The reason for this was simple: Where soils were good, it was economically profitable to use slave labor to grow wheat. A free farmer, with help from family members or neighbors, could bring in enough wheat to feed his family, pay his quitrent, and, perhaps in a good year, make some money selling wheat in the market. But to grow enough wheat to sell the excess in the market, farmers needed a reliable supply of labor that they could not always find for a cheap enough price on the market. Historian Martin Bruegel calls the Hudson River Valley of the late eighteenth century “a region where only one-third of the agriculturalists produced enough to participate in the long-distance trade with New York City.” These large producers often relied on slave labor, and they did so not because it was more efficient by the hour or the day, but because it was reliable over time and helped solve problems of planning and peak labor needs. Owning a slave was not only an alternative to hiring during the busy season but was also an alternative to hiring hard-to-find farm hands on annual contracts. Unlike slaveholding Virginian farmers, Dutch New Yorkers appear not to have used gangs of slaves as labor, but relied instead on mixed teams of free and enslaved workers. In his construction of the North as a “society with slaves” and not a “slave society,” historian Ira Berlin wrote that slave labor in the North supplemented free labor, that slavery was not the primary source of labor, but one of many. Every indication is that slave labor in the Hudson Valley was flexible as to where it was put to task, and that free labor workers and slaves often worked side by side. In his diary of a year on the farm in , John Arthur of Pawling, in Dutchess County, records mowing hay with a team   

Carville V. Earle, “A Staple Interpretation of Slavery and Free Labor,” Geographical Review : (January ), –, . Martin Bruegel, “Uncertainty, Pluriactivity, and Neighborhood Exchange in the Rural Hudson Valley in the Late Eighteenth Century,” New York History : (July ), – (). Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



of up to eleven men and boys, including Arthur himself, at least two slaves, and likely some relatives and neighbors. On Staten Island, says a nineteenth-century history, “it was not unusual to see master and slave working together in the fields apparently on terms of perfect equality.” The advantage of slaves in New York wheat cultivation cannot be ascribed primarily to some extra-intensive work schedule, beyond what free laborers were willing to commit. Slave labor was useful not because it was inherently better than free labor, or because slaves would do the dirty work that free labor would not, but because for those who owned slaves, the labor was always available when called upon. My argument draws in part on the views of Gavin Wright who argues that the key to understanding slavery in the United States is not found in studying the relative productive efficiency of slavery, but rather in understanding slavery as a set of property rights. Wright explains that slaves were collateral, they were inheritable, and they could be rented out for cash to strengthen community relationships. Wright proposes a link between the value of land and slaves, wherein the best soils encouraged slaveholding. He also gives credit to the idea that turnover costs – that is, the costs of finding new laborers each season – was a real problem overcome by slavery. Wright suggests that farmers with slaves were more likely to take risks at growing wheat for the market. By diversifying crops, Dutch farmers spread out the demand for labor and kept slaves employed across the calendar year. Buckwheat, rye, and oats needed to be cut on different schedules, and there was some profit to be made from these crops, even if they only went to feed animals. Haycutting season was July and August, but corn stood in the fields into October and November. To smooth out the demand for labor over time, a farmer could have sowed wheat at different times in different fields. Fifteen acres at fifteen bushels per acre would yield  bushels of grain, which needed to be flailed, milled, and sifted to make marketable flour. All this work could keep slaves busy for months after wheat was cut. The use of slaves to help solve the peak labor problem was not the sole reason why Dutch farmers owned slaves. Slaves not only used the scythe to    

The Arthur Diary, Winterthur Library. Richard Mather Bayles, History of Richmond County (Staten Island), New York from its discovery to the present time (New York: L. E. Preston, ), . Gavin Wright, “Slavery and American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History : (Autumn ), – (Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development, , ). On milling and the wheat trade, see Matson, “‘Damned Scoundrels’ and ‘Libertisme of Trade’,” –.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

cut wheat and the flail to separate the wheat from the chaff, but they also brought grain to the mill, plowed fields, and planted seeds. In the Hudson Valley, slaves were also put to work cutting wood. The demand for firewood was high, and shingles and staves could always be cut and sent to market. Slaves tended to cattle, sheep, and horses. They repaired roads and fences. Mary Gay Humphreys, the late nineteenth-century biographer of Catherine Schuyler wrote, “For every department of the household there was a slave allotted. They hoed, drilled, shod horses, made cider, raised hemp and tobacco, looked after the horses and the garden, made and mended the shoes, spun, wove, made nets, canoes, attended to the fishing, carpentering, each household sufficient unto itself.” Similarly, in heavily Dutch Kings County, agricultural labor was also mixed. Bondsmen and bondswomen cut, hauled, and split firewood; carted dung, mended fences, thatched roofs and repaired farm building; raised vegetables, fruits, animals; plowed fields, mowed meadow grasses, harvested potatoes, cut and husked corn; butchered hogs and salted and barreled the meat; cooked, kept house, sewed, spun, knit, repaired clothing, attended table – and in their off-moments were hired or leased to others.

When William Strickland toured New York in the early s, he found many “old Dutch farmers” who had given complete management and care of the farm to their slaves, while living in “contentment and ease,” “indolence and ignorance,” as the slaves did all the work. Beyond solving the peak labor problem, slave labor had the advantage of flexibility, as slaves could work when free laborers were unavailable or unwilling. Slaves in the Hudson Valley were bought and sold between masters as labor requirements shifted during the year and through the years. Neighbors in the late eighteenth-century Hudson Valley often bartered and shared goods. This included draft animals, tools, and certainly slaves.

 

 

Mary Gay Humphreys, Catherine Schuyler (C. Scribner’s Sons, ), –. E. G. Burrows and M. Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Fogel estimates that even on a cotton plantation, only  percent of labor time of slaves was spent on cotton. Robert W. Fogel, Ralph A. Galatine, and Richard L. Manning, eds., Without Consent or Contract: Evidence and Methods (New York: W. W. Norton, ), . Strickland, Journal of a Tour, –. Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, – (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, ), –.

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



The frequent renting out or loaning out of slaves means that a greater number of people were involved with and implicated in slavery than slave ownership numbers on a census would suggest. County-level dissertations on New York slavery have come to similar conclusions about its labor flexibility. “It appears that the real value of slaves lay not in their specific skills per se, but in their versatility,” writes Michael Groth in a dissertation on Dutchess County. Richard Shannon Moss relates that some slaves on Long Island were bought and sold five or six times during their lifetimes. This also contributes to the idea that slaveholding was more widespread in New York than it might at first appear. A census snapshot will always understate the percent of free whites who owned slaves. Historians who uncritically cite census numbers rarely consider the dynamic buying and selling of slaves in between the decennial censuses. This means that a much larger number of people must have owned slaves at one time or another, in years between censuses, for example. The chances that a family ever owned slaves is significantly higher than the chances that they are listed as slave owners in the census. Slaveholders who grew wheat also had other occupations, so probate records will not always clearly identify them as wheat farmers. A good sign of a wheat farmer was his equipment. A Hudson Valley farmer who owned multiple scythes, a harrow, a plow, and a team of slaves was almost certainly growing wheat. One example was Jacob Rutsen in Ulster County in , who, at his death, had a total of twelve slaves, five of whom were rented out when Rutsen died. His inventory included, among other things, “forty-nine old harrow teeth,” a plowshare, a “fore plough,” leather harnesses, “one schepel being a dutch corn measure,” two worn-out plowshares, five “corn forks” and one “dung fork,” five regular scythes and a long scythe, three augers, a chisel, handsaw, a weeding hoe and a grubbing hoe, a broad axe, a felling axe, and an anvil. Rutsen owned horses, hogs, sheep, and a house full of personal items. In storage he had  schepels of wheat and  more standing in the field, along with  half barrels of flour.



 

Michael Groth, Forging Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley: The End of Slavery and the Formation of a Free African-American Community in Dutchess County, New York, – (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), . Moss, Slavery on Long Island, –. New York Estates Inventories and Accounts, –. www.ancestry.com/search/collections/ /



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

The inventory of Albany’s Sybrant van Schaik from  included one male slave, one female slave, and their child, and a scythe. The probate record of Johannis Staats from , in Dutchess County, included five slaves and five scythes and cradles. Staats also owned horses, cows, sheep, hogs, a plowshare, dung forks, hammers, saws, cutters, knives, hooks, among other farm implements. These records may seem anecdotal, since not everyone had an inventory made at their death, but the consistency of larger farmers growing grain with slaves was common. A probate record from  shows the Ulster farmer Cornelius Wynkoop, the owner of eight slaves (four men, four women), with cows and horses, sheep, looms, an extensive list of coffee cups, a harrow, and corn, oats, peas, and flax growing in the field. What is interesting about Wynkoop’s land is that he grew grains in a variety of different locations; not all of his wheat was in a single field. His inventory lists wheat a number of times, both in storage and in the field. He had thirty schepels of wheat growing in the field at  shillings per “shipple,” and thirty schepels of rye growing at  shillings each. Wynkoop’s slaves had probably been busy making shingles, since he had , feet of shingles. In storage, Wynkoop also had ½ bushels of good wheat,  bushels of wheat needing to be cleaned, and  bushels of “light wheat.” Additional lines of his probate record included another ninety schepels of wheat “growing next to the hill,” eighty schepels of rye “next to the land adjoining the creek,” and “six schepels of wheat in the [field] above the rye place,” forty of wheat in another spot, and fifty of rye in the same field. Wynkoop owned three scythes. Rounding himself out as a true Dutch New Yorker, his inventory included a large Dutch Bible and a beaver hat. Beyond solving the peak labor problem and adding to the flexibility of the labor market, an economic explanation for the spread of slavery in New York might be found in an insight in a classic paper by Evsey Domar, who proposes that there was a strong relationship between land and labor. The relationship is this: When labor is scarce and land is plentiful, it is owning people and not land that yields the highest rewards to the “servitors” – a term that we might use here as equal to the landowners or patroons. Because Domar’s point is important, it is worth quoting at some length:

 

A. J. F. van Laer, ed. and Jonathan Pearson, trans., Early Records of the City and County of Albany: Deeds, – (Albany: University of the State of New York, ), . Domar credits many predecessors for this discovery, but clarifies the point.

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



Assume that labor and land are the only factors of production (no capital or management), and that land of uniform quality and location is ubiquitous. No diminishing returns in the application of labor to land appear; both the average and the marginal productivities or labor are constant and equal, and if competition among employers raises wages to that level (as would be expected), no rent from land can arise, as Ricardo demonstrated some time past. In the absence of specific government action to the contrary, the country will consist of family-sized farms because hired labor, in any form, will be either unavailable or unprofitable: the wage of a hired man or the income of a tenant will have to be at least equal to what he can make on his own farm; if he receives that much, no surplus (rent) will be left to his employer . . . suppose now that the government decides to create, or at least to facilitate the creation of a non-working class of agricultural owners. As a first step, it gives the members of this class the sole right of ownership of land. The peasants will now have to work for the landowners, but so long as the workers are free to move, competition among the employers will drive the wage up to the value of the marginal product of labor . . . [and] . . . little surplus will remain.

The situation Domar describes seems quite analogous to that of New Netherland and colonial New York. In a context of extensive free land and limited labor, the government established a class of owners. If the movement of laborers was controlled, Domar argues, competition between the laborers would end, so that the landowners could appropriate the surplus of labor. Laborers in New Netherland were, in some circumstances, restricted to particular patroonships. In colonial New York, indentured servants and slaves were restricted from seeking their own employment. Free persons living in New Netherland could move and seek opportunities working for others. They could even leave the colony if they wished. But free land made labor more valuable. When free land was no longer available and the population grew in place rather than spread, free labor became less productive and slave labor less valuable. In Domar’s view, when land is abundant and labor is scarce, slavery is more likely. That is, if there is much land available but a shortage of workers, there is an incentive to use forced labor to retain the position of the landowners. A constant refrain of colonial New Yorkers was that there was a shortage of labor. This view is often accepted uncritically in   

Evsey D. Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” The Journal of Economic History : (March ), . Stanley L. Engerman, “Slavery and Emancipation in Comparative Perspective: A Look at Some Recent Debates,” The Journal of Economic History : (June ), –, specifically page . Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom,” –.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

historical accounts. Now, an economist would respond to this by noting that there was a shortage of labor only at the costs that people were willing to pay, and labor is always scarce at a low enough price. New Yorkers would have taken many more slaves than they did, if they could have gotten these slaves for free. But there was a price to pay for slaves that they were not willing to pay and probably could not justify financially. It would be more accurate to say that there was not a shortage of labor in general so much as there was a shortage of people willing to work full time for others at low wages. And a major reason for the lack of contract labor and indentured servants was that land was plentiful and relatively cheap, so it was in the realm of possibility for most free workers to eventually become landowners. New Yorkers turned to slave labor when family labor was insufficient and when free labor was expensive. Northern states in the colonial area had available land for agriculture, and there was demand for labor to help clear it, but labor costs were often too high to justify the work. This situation encouraged families to have a large number of children and to keep them at home longer, even until marriage, so that their valuable labor could go towards developing the household property. Young people also tended not to look elsewhere for apprenticeships. To meet the high demand for labor, farmers spread work through the year by cultivating different crops. What followed as a consequence was extensive population growth in the North. The resulting density of population allowed families to specialize to a small degree and buy and sell on the market. Meanwhile, slaveholding helped families ameliorate inheritance disagreements. The division of slaves through inheritance helped to provide for all of the deceased’s descendants. In other words, when land was not divisible, slave assets were. 





Thomas A. Janvier, “New York Slave-Traders,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January , –. H. Arthur Bankoff and Frederick A. Winter, “The Archaeology of Slavery at the Van Cortlandt Plantation in the Bronx, New York,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology : (December ), ; Singer, “The Livingston’s as Slave Owners,” ; Mariska Jansen, “In de beginjaren van Nieuw-Nederland gaven de kolonisten hun tot slaafgemaakten nog loon,” Trouw, November , , www.trouw.nl/verdieping/in-de-beginjaren-van-nieuw-nederland-gaven-dekolonisten-hun-tot-slaafgemaakten-nog-loon, accessed July , . Daniel Vickers, “The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society, –,” in Stanley L. Ingerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Volume I: The Colonial Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. David E. Narrett, “Preparation for Death and Provision for Living: Notes on New York Wills (–),” New York History : (October ), . Narrett explains that “[d]evices such as impartible inheritance and reciprocal agreements became necessary by the mid-eighteenth century to cope with the dwindling amount of arable land available to the average family. Farmers of Dutch and English origin overcame the limitations of nature by forging a social rule – children receiving land must compensate their brothers and sister for its worth.”

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



Curiously, there seems to be some strong parallels between the rise of slavery in colonial New York and the Cape Colony in South Africa. In both places, slavery began in an urban setting by Dutch trading companies in the seventeenth century, and in both places, surplus production became the motivation for owning field slaves in the eighteenth century. But the parallels do not end there. Cape farmers, like farmers in New York, Virginia, and Maryland, grew wheat for the market. In South Africa, wheat and wine were the two major products. Numerically, the growth of the slave populations in New York and the Cape Colony was similar, such that in any given year in the eighteenth century, there was roughly half as many slaves in the Cape Colony as there were in New York. The demographics of the Cape Colony slave population were also similar; both were highly skewed towards young adults, particularly males. By ,  percent of Cape farmers owned slaves, but most had fewer than five. Cape slaves were also frequently rented out in a mixed free and slave labor market. By diversifying crops, spreading out slave labor during the year, Cape farmers made slavery profitable. This is to suggest, again, the compatibility of slavery and wheat cultivation, so long as wheat was grown as one of a diverse set of crops that could keep slaves busy and profitable throughout much of the year. Additional insights about the persistence and growth of the slave–wheat connection in New York can be gained by taking a broader Atlantic perspective. Wheat prices in New York were strongly affected by the Revolutionary War and by political and economic developments in the Atlantic. New York’s wheat farmers suffered financially during the Revolution as trade with the outside world was temporarily cut off. They suffered also from slaves running away and from armies plundering their farms. Wheat prices had been low during the summer of , but they reached unprecedented highs by the spring of . On December , , Henry Clinton, Lieutenant General of the British forces in occupied New York City, proclaimed that a bushel of wheat (of fifty-eight pounds) should not exceed  shillings. Likewise, price ceilings were placed on rye and Indian corn at  shillings a bushel. In , Major General Jones issued a proclamation to keep this order in force, but now with new rates of  shillings for wheat, and  shillings for wheat flour. In December 



Erik Green, “The Economics of Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Cape Colony,” International Review of Social History : (April ), –; Johan Fourie and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “GDP in the Dutch Cape Colony: The National Accounts of a Slave-Based Society,” South African Journal of Economics : (December ), –. Royal Gazette, January , .



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

, farmers on Long Island and Staten Island had been ordered to bring any stores of grain beyond what was required for their family to New York City, but many farmers apparently refused these orders. To make up for the grain shortage, the British army took wheat by force. The loyalist Royal Gazette of New York City noted that in March , “all the spare wheat that could be found in the lower part of Orange County was carried down to Kings Ferry, on Hudson’s River, and from thence sent into New-England.” Despite this, or perhaps because of it, wheat prices continued to rise in New York City in . New Yorkers everywhere were aware of the high prices that continued for many years. In , near Albany, attacks from Native Americans killed seventeen, with six more missing. “Fine crops of wheat [were] left standing in the fields in those parts,” reported the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury. Meanwhile, in , wheat farmers reported lice damaging their crop. This may have been the infamous “Hessian Fly” that caused wheat farmers so much damage in the s. A late frost in the spring of  also injured wheat in northern New York. The years after the American Revolution saw wheat take a primary position in the American economy, as farmers hoped to regain the position they had lost during the war. Flour was the country’s “most valuable single export” by . In , with demand in Europe high, “runners” from New York City were spotted in Albany, competing with unhappy local buyers to secure supplies of wheat. Although the high prices for wheat in the s and s did not necessarily give farmers the idea for expansion, it did afford them the means to purchase slaves and cultivate more land. Over time, this competition led to an increasing number of acres under cultivation. High wheat prices during and after the Revolution incentivized Hudson Valley and Long Island slaveholding wheat farmers to stay invested in slavery and to oppose emancipation. The high price of wheat and demand for labor must be one reason why, despite the dislocations of war, runaway activity, and increasing manumissions, the slave population of the Hudson Valley (from Westchester to Albany) increased from , in the provincial census      

 Royal Gazette, December , . Royal Gazette, April , . New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, September , . New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, November , . New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, July , . Geoffrey Gilbert, “The Role of Breadstuffs in American Trade, –,” Explorations in Economic History  (), –. Joel Munsell, Annals of Albany (Albany, NY: Munsell & Rowland, ), Vol. , .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



of  to , in the national census of  and remained stable at , in the year . Considering the rising price of wheat, declining yields of wheat per acre, and increased acres under cultivation, New York’s slaveholding wheat farmers probably profited more in the last decade of the eighteenth century than at any other time. Data on wheat prices in New York City are consistently available in newspapers from  to , and they show a period of high wheat prices from about  to . In order to account for seasonal price fluctuations, I took readings of the price of wheat and white flour at quarterly intervals, on the first week of the months of March, July, September, and December, for each year from  to . Wheat prices were posted in pounds and shillings until , when they switched to dollars. I converted all entries for pounds to dollars at the ratio of . dollars to a pound. The chart I built from the compiled data (Figure .) demonstrates the rather stable price of wheat in New York from  to . During the American Revolution, wheat and flour prices skyrocketed, and although data from  to  is not available, it appears that both prices remained high until . From the s forward, the price of flour on the New York City market was high but also highly variable. Prices fell precipitously from . What is more remarkable is the rise in flour prices and their volatility after the Revolution. An explanation for this may be found in the evolving postwar Atlantic market conditions, characterized by increased but variable demand from Europe, whereas before the war, most exports were to the 





A previous attempt to chart New York wheat prices over time can be found in Kim, Landlord and Tenant, . Kim tracks prices from  to , but establishes this on only a handful of readings not taken at regular intervals. Using McCusker, the exchange rate of the New York pound to dollar was . in the period –, . in the period –, and . thereafter. To fill in the missing years of  to , I used the average of the two rates for the periods before and after those years, which comes to .. The . exchange was a ratio of  shillings to the dollar. Original prices from before  were in shillings, of which there are twenty in a pound. Dollars and pounds were competing currencies in New York from the s to about . New York newspapers listing of commodity prices switches from shillings to dollars in , although around the state people are using pounds, shillings, and pence for another two decades, intermingling and often converting back and forth with dollars. For an earlier attempt to compute wheat and flour prices in colonial New York, see Cathy Matson, Merchants & Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –. New York City’s first newspapers appeared in the s, but they only began printing price data on a regular basis starting in . Arthur Harrison Cole shows that wholesale prices in New York rose in the period –, and again from  to . Arthur Harrison Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, – (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), .



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

14 12 10 8 6 4

0

1735 1749 1750 1751 1753 1756 1758 1760 1763 1765 1767 1769 1772 1774 1776 1779 1781 1783 1785 1788 1790 1792 1794 1797 1799 1801 1803 1806 1808 1810 1812 1815 1817 1819 1821

2

Wheat per Bushel (in dollars)

Figure .

Flour per barrel (in dollars)

Wheat prices per bushel and flour prices per barrel, in New York City, –, in dollars (with conversions from pounds).

West Indies, where demand was stable. The price of a bushel of wheat is derived from downstream products, like milled flour or wheat beer. Relative stability in the price of wheat compared to volatility in flour suggests effects of flour production and/or distribution, but not an exceptional overall increase in demand for flour, as that would also increase demand for wheat proportionally. Americans exported both wheat and flour, but for most of the s, wheat exports were almost nonexistent. The price of flour in New York City appears to have tracked international events. It was higher during the wars of the French Revolution (–), dropped after the Peace of Amiens () and Jefferson’s Embargo Act of , rose during the War of  and then declined after the Treaty of Paris (). The ratio of the price of flour to wheat increased over time. That is to say, flour got more expensive relative to wheat after the Revolution. This might suggest increased wheat production without increased milling capacity. While farmers were able to grow enough grain to keep prices stable, they were not able to thresh and mill it quickly enough. It was the high price of flour, not the price of wheat, that encouraged new mills to come online after . The price of flour also encouraged capital investment in machinery (Figure .).  

Brooke Hunter, “Wheat, War, and the American Economy during the Age of Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series : (July ), –. I speculate on why this might be in an Appendix.

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



1791 1792 1793 1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816

1,600,000 1,400,000 1,200,000 1,000,000 800,000 600,000 400,000 200,000 0

Wheat

Flour

Figure . US annual exports of wheat (in bushels) and flour (in barrels), –. Based on the data in Timothy Pitkin, A statistical view of the commerce of the United States of America (New York: James Eastburn & Co., ), 

Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century, the price of wheat was higher than it had been before the Revolution, so farmers were encouraged to plant more wheat and invest more in harvesting it. For many, this meant a continued reliance on slave labor. Then, in the nineteenth century, falling yields in eastern New York gave wheat farmers cause for concern. A state gazetteer from  presents a good picture of New York wheat cultivation on its last legs in the East, before its move to the western part of the state. While yields declined in the Hudson Valley, farmers, slaves, and servants moved to western counties, first to Montgomery County and the Mohawk Valley, which saw a population boom in the s and s, and then further west. This change came fast in the s. But in the s, marketable wheat was still grown extensively in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island. It was grown in Gravesend, between Flatlands, Flatbush, and New Utrecht, where the soil after  was given manure, leached ashes, and “street dirt” from the urban centers. About , bushels of wheat was grown in Gravesend in . Yields that were fifteen to twenty bushels per acre in the eighteenth century fell to ten bushels after the s. To combat soil exhaustion, tenants in Columbia County expanded their farms on average from  to  acres between  and , while freeholders’ farms were  acres on  

Spafford, A Gazetteer of the state of New-York, . Thomas Wermuth, Rip Van Winkle’s Neighbors: The Transformation of Rural Society in the Hudson River Valley, – (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, ), .



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

average. With declining wheat yields per acre, farmers responded by putting more acres under cultivation. As the Hudson Valley lost control of the wheat market to western farmers in the s, the region focused more on growing hay and raising sheep. The decline of wheat as the dominant crop in the Hudson Valley in the s is probably not a consequence of the impending emancipation of slaves, which the Dutch wheat farmers opposed, but can be ascribed instead to two main factors, deteriorating soil conditions and crop yields, and competition from wheat farmers in western New York and beyond, as the Erie Canal came online. A common fact is that the Erie Canal opened in . But this was only the date when the canal was completed. Some stages of the waterway had already opened in  (to Utica) and  (to Syracuse). Meanwhile, the Champlain Canal put wheat producers in the Northern sections of New York online, and a great turnpike boom commenced in the first decade of the nineteenth century, with Albany serving as a center for the new ground transportation networks. These infrastructure improvements, along with good weather years, helped create a wheat glut on the New York market. After the American Revolution, New Englanders had streamed into and through upstate New York, either to stay for good or to move to western New York, from where there were reliable reports of cheap, good land to be had. Anticipating developments, the Holland Land Company purchased huge swaths of land in western New York. Wheat was not a pioneer crop; corn grew better between tree stumps, and where meadow lands were to be found, the soil was actually too good, and the first year’s wheat grew too tall and fell over under its own weight. But a few years after fields were cleared, wheat yields in western New York were outstanding. If slavery had not been defeated politically in New York in , there is good reason to believe that Dutch wheat farmers moving west would have taken their slaves with them to help clear land and grow grain, just as Virginia farmers in the nineteenth century left their worn-out soils behind and moved their slaves to new fertile grounds in Mississippi and Alabama. In fact, significant numbers of slaves do appear in western New York in the , , and  censuses. In , the sparsely populated western New York counties of Cayuga, Chenango, Delaware, Herkimer, Oneida,

 

Martin Bruegel, “Unrest: Manorial Society and the Market in the Hudson Valley, –,” The Journal of American History : (March ), . Ellis, Landlords and Farmers, .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



Onondaga, Ontario, Otsego, Steuben, and Tioga accounted for a total of  slaves. But by , now with Broome, Genesee, Seneca, and St. Lawrence Counties carved out of the aforementioned counties, the number of slaves west of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys increased to . In , this same region still held  slaves. Meanwhile, the same set of counties saw their free black population grow from  in  to , in  and , in . A census is of course only a snapshot of time. It is not a measure of flow. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to infer from the data that more slaves were moved into this region than the census numbers indicate. While some of the , free blacks listed in the  census had traveled west on their own – some even as fugitives – the majority, it appears, came as slaves who were then emancipated, or were children of slaves who were technically free at birth but were required to serve the master of their parents. Some slaves in this region fled to Canada. Many of the free blacks, having been emancipated, continued to work as free labor domestics and farm workers for former masters or new families. A test run for slavery’s possible expansion to western New York occurred first among the Dutch in the Mohawk Valley, where the population surplus from the Hudson Valley, hemmed in by the Catskills and the Adirondacks, found its outlet. Montgomery County, carved out of Albany County in  and known as Tryon County prior to , was the first county west of the Hudson Valley to see substantial nonindigenous settlement. For most of the eighteenth century, the Mohawk Valley had been a sparsely populated zone that served as a trading corridor between the Albany Dutch and Native Americans. But by the early nineteenth century, it was a profitable agricultural region and a corridor for slaveholders moving west from the Hudson Valley. Suggestive of the county’s focus on wheat was a scythe factory built by , and producing , scythes per year in the village of Amsterdam. The growth of a black population in Montgomery County also suggests the value of owning slaves to clear land and plant wheat on the frontier. There were  blacks (probably almost all slaves) living in Montgomery County in . In , Herkimer, Otsego, and Tioga counties formed out of Montgomery. In , Montgomery County had  slaves and eight free blacks. Its population nearly doubled in the period –,



Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in ; compiled from the original returns of the Eighth Census under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, ), xxiv.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

reaching over , people. In , the county had  slaves and  free blacks, while in  it counted  slaves and  free blacks. The narrative of an ex-slave, Rev. Thomas James, provides a rare glimpse of slavery in Montgomery County. James was born in Canajoharie in Montgomery County in  and at eight years of age sold to a family in nearby Amsterdam. James worked as a farmhand, and after being sold (not as a slave, but as a child bound to service) a few more times and treated poorly, he ran away to Canada. In the s, with the Iroquois and Seneca defeated in battle and forced out of New York, the first settlers arrived in the counties west of Montgomery. Most of the labor in those counties then was free labor, so the influence of slave labor is overshadowed in county histories. But in the final gasp of slavery in New York, it is clear that many slave owners made a push onto new ground, bringing their forced labor along. To a significant degree, the fertility of the soil for wheat cultivation shaped settlement patterns, as the region has mixed geological blessings. For example, Chenango County, which only had sixteen slaves in , thirteen in , and seven in , was not noted for its wheat yields. Hiram Clark’s History of Chenango County from  says, “We believe no wheat or other grain is prepared in the county for foreign markets: But what is manufactured is consumed at home.” Delaware County also was poor for wheat farming, as its soils were too rocky, so wheat farming was abandoned after the county could import wheat. A bit further west, however, Cayuga County was a prime wheatproducing county. One of the early settlers in that county was the slaveholder Colonel John Leonard Hardenberg, who planted wheat there already in . When wheat production was not profitable or not yet feasible, slaves and recently freed blacks in frontier counties could be kept busy clearing land to prepare for future fields of cash crops. An entry for George R. R. Ainsworth in a Steuben County history reports, “During his lifetime he cleared over one-half of the original forest from this land, assisted as he was by seven negro men whose families lived on his place.”     

Rev. Thomas James, Life of Rev. Thomas James, by Himself (Rochester, NY: Post Express Printing Company, ). Hiram Clark’s History of Chenango County (Norwich, NY: Thompson & Pratt, ), . David Murray, Delaware County, New York; history of the century, –; centennial celebration, June  and ,  (Delhi, NY: W. Clark, ), . Elliot G. Storke, History of Cayuga County (), . W. Woodford Clayton, History of Steuben County, NY (Philadelphia, PA: Lewis, Peck & Co., ), .

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



Some of the slaves arriving in the newly opened western New York had come from southern states. So, in a peculiar meeting of cultures, Dutch Hudson Valley slaveholders and Virginia slaveholders encountered each other in western New York in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when New York’s slavery question was far from settled. Matthew Jansen, a Dutch descendant, arrived in Tioga County in  with slaves. Abraham Middaugh, originally of Ulster County, owned one slave in Tioga, according to the  census. The census for Tioga County of  records a collection of slaveholding neighbors of southern extraction: three households of the Speed family of Virginia with a total of fourteen slaves, the Hyde family of North Carolina with eleven slaves, and the Marylander Augustine Boyer with his five slaves. Indeed, it is possible to imagine western New York, even with the Erie Canal, as a bastion of slaveholding wheat farmers if at the turn of the nineteenth century, New Yorkers would not have turned politically towards the antislavery ideology of their New England neighbors. Slavery was economically feasible on the frontier. Hudson Valley farmers who moved west knew the value of extra hands at work in the woods and in the fields. Southerners who settled in western New York had the same dreams. But the dominant party in western New York was Yankees, and it was the Yankee anti-slave ideology that won out in New York politics and culture. It is tempting, however, to think that slavery in New York, had it been allowed to continue, could have ended for economic reasons in the mid nineteenth century. Regardless of the state’s laws on slavery, the opening of the Erie Canal and the drop in wheat prices was coming. As Hudson Valley farmers got out of wheat and shifted to sheep and cattle, they might have lost the financial incentive to keep slaves. But, if anything, slavery in New York showed itself to be flexible, and adaptable to urban or rural conditions, Dutch or English governance, agricultural or domestic labor. Throughout the eighteenth century, rural slaves outnumbered urban slaves, and many slaves made the transition between these two environments. Slaves could be rented out, sold, or moved to new counties. Indeed,

 

William Heidt, ed., Forests to Farms in Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Dewitt Historical Society of Tompkins County, ), . John H. Selkreg, Landmarks of Tompkins County, New York, Including a History of Cornell (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason & Company, ), –.



The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex

Figure . A painting titled “Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields on the Approach of the British” by Emanuel Leutze.

had slavery not met a political death, it may have remained economically viable in parts of New York at least until the coming of the mechanical reaper and the waves of cheap European immigrant labor of the s and s. It is not clear that an invention like the mechanical reaper would have made slave labor redundant on Northern wheat farms, or if it would – like what the cotton gin did for cotton cultivation in the South – promote the expansion of wheat cultivation and encourage greater slaveholding. Slavery and wheat cultivation both largely disappeared from the Hudson Valley in the s, but the reasons for their joint demise appear to be mostly unconnected. Slavery died not because it was economically unviable in the North, nor because the Dutch wheat farmers wanted to see it end, but because it was politically and socially unpalatable at the state level. Wheat cultivation, meanwhile, moved west because of the absolute advantage of western soils in growing wheat and the new infrastructure improvements that allowed western farmers to ship their grain to the East.

The Rural Dutch Slave–Wheat Complex



A painting by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (Germany, Gmu¨nd, active United States, –) in  is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Figure .). The subject of the images is Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler (–). The most reproduced image of Dutch New York’s wheat fields, Leutze shows an enslaved African American as a helper and servant to Schuyler. 

The original title of the painting was “Mrs. Schuyler Firing Her Wheat Fields.” The painting was engraved and reprinted many times, under the name “Mrs. Schuyler Firing Her Corn Fields on the Approach of the British.”

 

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey, –

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch of New Netherland and early New York bought and sold slaves in exchange for Dutch guilders, Spanish silver, or even commodities like grain, horses, and beaver furs. For example, in , Gerret Theunissen Van Vechten bought one slave for  “skipples” of corn and another for  pieces of nooten-hout (walnut),  loads of hay, and  beavers. The next year, a slave named “Pumpkin” was sold for  schepels of wheat. These kinds of transactions, with various currencies and commodities, defy easy calculation and make an economic analysis all but impossible. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave sales were mainly transacted in pounds sterling. Analyzing the secular rise and fall of slave prices has the potential to explain much about the nature of slavery in New York and its persistence among the Dutch. The New York Dutch viewed slaveholding as natural and justified it biblically. The profit motive was also central. The market for slaves was integrated regionally, with sales frequently made between Dutch and English New Yorkers, among other cultural groups. The profits of slaveholding were reflected in the prices of slaves and these prices were fairly stable over time, declining only after the passage of New York’s emancipation act in , and even then, slave prices declined only slowly, while prices for slaves in the American South were increasing. There is a long-established view that slavery in New York was never efficient or profitable, or perhaps only marginally so, but that profitability declined in its latter years. Leo H. Hirsch, writing in , thought that slavery was “economically unnecessary in New York as in the rest of the North.” Samuel McKee, also writing in the s, argued that free labor   

Harriet C. Waite Van Buren Peckham, History of Cornelis Maessen Van Buren (New York: Tobias A. Wright, ), . Peckham, History of Cornelis Maessen Van Buren, . Leo H. Hirsch, “The Slave in New York,” Journal of Negro History : (October ), –, specifically . Hirsch quoted Northrup about New York, “where slaves were few in number, and



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



in New York ultimately made slave labor undesirable, since it was cheaper to hire workers than it was to purchase slaves and pay for their maintenance. “Moral and humanitarian principles undoubtedly provided a driving force for the movement to outlaw slavery in New York,” wrote McKee, “but the economic undesirability of it as a form of labor assured success to the crusade. Slaveholding was diminishing as a means of obtaining labor before statutes finally abolished it.” As recently as , Leslie Harris defended essentially the same position in an article in the Journal of Urban History. Even economic historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman argued that profits in slavery in the North were marginal “because no major cops lent themselves to the gang system.” The Holland Society’s J. Woodhull Beekman provided a visual image of this assumption when he wrote in  that “[t]he rural Dutch lived a quiet life. They generally had large families, and kept a number of negro slaves. The hogs would eat up the grain, the negroes would eat the hogs, and the unfortunate Dutch farmer would come out at the end of the year as poor as he started.” Yet, for  years, New Yorkers were willing to pay to acquire slaves, and pay not just for slaves to serve as household decoration but also for slaves to work for profit. Arthur Zilversmit, author of a classic work on northern emancipation, recognized as much. Zilversmit called the end of slavery in the North a “triumph for popular government,” since he believed that it was the politics of democracy that finally overrode the lure

 

 

their employment was of little pecuniary value” (Hirsch, “The Slave in New York,” , quoting Northrup, ). A similar view is found in Corwin, “Efforts of the Dutch Colonial Pastors for the Conversion of the Negroes,” –. Corwin wrote, “Negro slavery in New York and New Jersey was never economically as profitable as in the southern parts of the country. The increasing moral opposition to it therefore found few obstacles, and slavery was easily abolished by an act of the Legislature of New York in , which declared that from that time all children born of slave parents should be free” (p. ). Samuel McKee, Labor in Colonial New York, – (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Leslie M. Harris, “Slavery, Emancipation, and Class Formation in Colonial and Early National New York City,” Journal of Urban History : (March ), –. The author of a dissertation on Long Island made an even stronger claim: “For the entire province of New York the ownership of slaves was mostly a sign of social distinction and not an economic necessity. In fact, slavery was basically unprofitable because costs of food and clothing exceed the value of their labor.” Jean Peyer, Jamaica, Long Island, –: A Study of the Roots of American Urbanism (PhD dissertation, City University of New York, ), . Fogel et al., Without Consent or Contract, . John Woodhull Beekman, “Speech of J. Woodhull Beekman,” in Yearbook of the Holland Society of New York (New York: The De Vinne Press, ), .



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

of economic gains from slavery. Yet Zilversmit provided little empirical evidence for his claim that slavery in the North had been profitable. This chapter argues that slaveholders in New York and New Jersey believed slaveholding was generally profitable, and that evidence of their faith in these profits can be tracked in the prices they were willing to pay for slaves. The profit motive, moreover, explains why the Dutch in rural areas wanted to keep their slaves as late as possible. Slaveholders, and particularly farmers, valued prime aged males above all. My analysis indicates that because slaveholders valued physical strength, they were willing to pay more for male slaves than female slaves. As skeletal remains in the New York City cemetery show, enslaved black women worked hard physical jobs and had muscle development consistent with heavy lifting and physical stress. Slavery was a long-term investment in New York. Prices of slaves rose in the early eighteenth century and remained stable until the s, when they gradually began to decline. New York’s gradual emancipation law of  likely caused slave prices to fall. To demonstrate this, I turned to cliometrics, and for help, I have joined forces with an economist, a coauthor on this chapter. Cliometrics is the use of social and economic statistics to analyze serial data. Economic historians beginning in the s and s created economic models of slave profitability based on serial data like slave prices and maintenance costs. In a pioneering article in , Conrad and Meyer calculated slavery in the antebellum South as profitable. Historians soon established a useful economic definition of the price of a slave as the discounted sum of expected lifetime earnings, subtracting the costs of clothing, shelter, food, and so forth. Slave prices also played a central role in the well-known Fogel and Engerman interpretation of slavery boldly set out in Time on the Cross in . They wished to know if slavery was economically viable, or it was potentially on its way out. They also wanted to know about regional differences in slavery, and about price trends that could explain why slavery developed when and where it did. These historians were fortunate that  



Zilversmit, The First Emancipation, vii. Michael Blakey, “The New York African Burial Ground Project: An Examination of Enslaved Lives, A Construction of Ancestral Ties,” Transforming Anthropology : (), ; Michael L. Blakey and Lesley M. Rankin-Hill, eds., Skeletal Biology of the New York African Burial Ground, Part  (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, ). Fogel and Engerman give a definition of slave prices as “the expected discounted present value of the excess of the marginal value product of the slave above maintenance costs, over the balance of the slave’s life.” Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, “Philanthropy at Bargain Prices: Notes on the Economics of Gradual Emancipation,” The Journal of Legal Studies  (June ), fn.

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



data from the nineteenth century was abundant and accessible in ways that colonial-era sources could never match. The debate about slave prices, so crucial to economic history debates in the s and s, was revived with rigor in the s by eminent historians like David Eltis and Peter Mancall. Briefly, these historians analyzed slave prices to form arguments about changes in the efficiency and productivity of slavery in the Caribbean and on mainland North America, specifically South Carolina. David Eltis et al., found that slave prices in South Carolina in the eighteenth century were similar to those in the Caribbean, suggesting an open market for slaves between the two locations. Mancall et al. found slave prices in probate records and sought correlations between slave prices and the combined exports of indigo, cotton, and rice, to measure productivity trends in South Carolina slavery. In a series of articles, these two teams of scholars, like lawyers, debated the finer points of slave prices and productivity in South Carolina. It is not surprising that they found some disagreement, which is only natural in parallel, independent research. What is surprising is that they found much to agree upon. Using separate methods, they arrived at similar price series, showing gradual price increases in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Carolina. Curiously, while the debate about slave prices in the antebellum South has been a main topic of economic history, there is yet no study of slave prices in the North. Not a single peer-reviewed article or published book has even attempted to analyze in any systematic fashion the prices of Northern slaves. Yet this topic has significant potential for contributing to some of the major historiographical debates of American history, particularly those concerning the North–South divide in the unequal development of slavery. Regional differences in slave prices may be useful  

 



For example, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, “The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans,  to ,” Economic Inquiry : (), –. David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and David Richardson, “Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in the Caribbean, –,” The Economic History Review, New Series : (November ), –. Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, “Slave Prices and the South Carolina Economy, –,” The Journal of Economic History : (September ), . Much of the debate which Mancall, Eltis et al. are engaging in concerns the relative productivity of slaves over time. This includes the cost of production for sugar and rice, among other crops, the quality of these products, the rates of exchange, and the profit to slave owners when balancing slave purchase prices, input costs, and cash exports. More so, while there are thousands of pages of published work about the economics of slavery in the South, there is almost nothing on the economics of slavery in the North. This is no exaggeration,



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

in determining where slavery was most productive and profitable, how and why the domestic slave trade functioned, and, potentially, whether there were significant economic reasons why Northerners abandoned slaveholding. A study of slave prices in the North is also useful for interregional and international comparisons. The difference between prices in Africa, on the one hand, and the prices in Caribbean ports, on the other, demonstrate the profit for transatlantic slave trading. Owing to Nicholas Radburn, historians know quite a bit about the price of slaves who landed in North America in the second half of the eighteenth century. And David Eltis and David Richardson have shown that slave prices in North America were consistently lower than those in the Caribbean. From  to , the real (and not just nominal) price of slaves increased steadily in each decade, from an original cost of around  pounds sterling to  pounds sterling (inflation adjusted, based on the value of sterling in ). In , Engerman summarized one of the major findings about antebellum Southern slavery when he wrote that “slave prices rose dramatically in the nineteenth century, doubling in the s when they reached all-time peaks.” As one would expect, where slavery was growing, and where it was most profitable, the prices of slaves were increasing. In general, the price of slaves can be considered a useful measure of the expected profitability of slavery in a given place and time. Studies of slave prices in the South generally begin with data from a single major source such as New Orleans auction data or South Carolina probate records. We are aware of no similar dataset for slave prices in the North. For this reason, we had to create our own, unique dataset. To limit our study both geographically and chronologically, we collected data for

 



 

there is not a single book focused on the economics of Northern slavery, nor the economics of slavery in any Northern state. The economics of Northern slavery appears as a few sentences in books on slavery in the North, and as general assumptions of difference with Southern slavery. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, ). Nicholas Radburn, “Keeping ‘the Wheel in Motion’: Trans-Atlantic Credit Terms, Slave Prices, and the Geography of Slavery in the British Americas, –,” The Journal of Economic History : (September ), – (p. ). David Eltis and David Richardson, “Prices of African Slaves Newly Arrived in the American, –: New Evidence on Long-Run Trends and Regional Differentials,” in David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds., Slavery in the Development of the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Eltis et al., “Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in the Caribbean, –,” –, specifically . Engerman, “Slavery and Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” –, specifically .

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



slave prices in New York and New Jersey from the end of the seventeenth century to the s, when legal slavery had ended in New York and was dying out in New Jersey. Since most of New Jersey’s slaves lived in the Northern counties of the state, adjacent to New York, we assumed that prices between the two states were similar and that there had been something of a common market for slaves in the region. We were later able to test this hypothesis by comparing slave price data between the two states. The database we created consists of multiple kinds of records, primarily slave sales attested in bills of sales and slave-value assessments given in probated estate inventories. A third kind of record the database includes is newspaper advertisements listing desired sale price. Probate records have long been recognized as an important source for studying early American history and the history of slavery, but it is natural to question whether the values of slaves given in probate records (or newspaper advertisements) systematically resembled the prices recorded in slave sales agreements. In their study of South Carolina slave prices, Mancall et al. found that probate inventory prices tracked real sale prices fairly closely, indicating that those who wrote the estate inventories were well informed about the going prices of slaves. We predicted a similar close relationship for inventory and sales prices of slaves in New York and New Jersey, but found that the two diverged 



 

The legal slave trade continued between these two states until a New Jersey law against slave imports in  and a New York law against slave exports in . Various loopholes allowed some slaves to move between the two states in the following decades. The New Jersey probate data from  to  was gathered by Timothy Hack, associate professor of History at Middlesex Community College, for his dissertation on New Jersey slavery and kindly shared with me for this project. The New York probate court records are available online at ancestry.com, but they have not been transcribed, so slave data needed to be extracted from the thousands of pages of original handwritten record, some of which were in Dutch. A second dataset consists of the recorded values of  slaves entered in probates in New York between  and . This data is compiled from the New York estate inventories and accounts, –, digitized and hosted on ancestry.com. Conveniently, inventories mostly stop listing slaves in New York after the Revolution, concomitant with the introduction of the dollar. Ancestry.com. New York, Estate Inventories and Accounts, – [database online]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., . Original data: Inventories and Accounts, –. Series J–. Microfilm ( reels). New York (State), Court of Probates. New York State Archives, Albany, NY. Gloria L. Main, “Probate Records as a Source for Early American History,” William & Mary Quarterly, rd Series : (January ), –. Mancall et al., “Slave Prices and the South Carolina Economy”; Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, “Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: A Reply,” The Journal of Economic History : (December ), . Eltis agrees that probate values and slave values, particularly in South Carolina, are uncannily similar, in Eltis, Lewis, and Richardson, .



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

somewhat, as we detail. In total, we located , relevant records, accounting for the sale or value assessments of , enslaved persons in New York and New Jersey. Certainly, some of these enslaved persons were caught in the data-collecting net more than once, perhaps at the interval of many years, but we did meticulously avoid any absolute duplicate data. We coded all this data by year, name of enslaved person, age, type of valuation (sold, inventory, valued at, or self-purchase), buyer and seller, city, county, state, sex (man, woman, boy, girl, or child of unknown sex), price, and source. To ensure that outliers do not bias our estimations, we dropped all records for which the recorded price or valuation fell outside the . ∗ IQR range. This causes  records to be dropped. The resulting dataset includes , records, comprising , total slaves,  men,  women,  boys,  girls, and an additional  children whose sex was not given. In addition, there were  persons whose sex and age could not be ascertained, generally stemming from groups of slaves sold or assessed merely as “negroes.” The data was collected widely from archival sources and published records. Statistical analysis allows us to find the average of any combination of these coded categories: the average price of male slaves sold, the average price of male slaves in estate inventories, the difference in price between men sold in New York versus men sold in New Jersey, the difference in price between men and women in New York, and so on. One advantage of  



For the purposes of the database, all persons aged eighteen and above were considered adults, even if called a boy or girl in the source. This is a common and simple method of dropping outliers, that is, unrepresentative and anomalous records. IQR is the interquartile range. It is equal to the third quartile (seventy-fifth percentile) minus the first quartile (twenty-fifth percentile). The IQR is then multiplied by .. Any records whose price/value is less than the first quartile minus . ∗ IQR or more than the third quartile plus . ∗ IQR are dropped. For a simple illustration, consider human height. For an adult American male, the third quartile of height is approximately 0 00 , while the first quartile is approximately 0 00 . The IQR is therefore  inches, and . ∗ IQR is  inches. We subtract  inches from 0 00 and add  inches to 0 00 , obtaining 0 00 and 0 00 . We conclude that any man who is shorter than 0 00 or taller than 0 00 is an outlier and should not be included in a study of “normal” men. We perform a similar operation, but using the recorded prices/values of slaves. Archival collections used to find this data came from the following: Winterthur Library, Cornell University Archives, New York Public Library, New York Historical Society, Museum of the City of New York, California State Northern’s Oviatt Library, Schenectady’s Grems-Doolittle Library, Historic Huguenot Street, University of Michigan Archives, Brooklyn Historical Society Archives, East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection, Howard University, Rutgers University Archives, and Grand Valley State University Archives. Newspaper sources came primarily from Newspapers. com and ReadEx’s Early American Newspaper search engine. Records of slave sales are attested in published genealogies, dissertations, county histories, peer-reviewed articles, and books. It was impossible in all circumstances to track down the original document referenced in secondary sources.

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



our regression method is that we do not have to rely only on individual slave sales, but can calculate values from bulk sales of heterogeneous groups of slaves as well. Without regression analysis, one would be limited to analyzing records that contained only one type of slave per record. For example, if a record lists three men for $, then one can estimate the price of a man as $, which is simply the mean – the sum divided by the quantity. Similarly, if one has five records, recording a sum total of twenty men for a sum total of $,, then one can estimate the price of a man as $. But if a record contains two men, one woman, and two boys, then regression analysis becomes necessary. Using the simple mean – total price divided by total quantity – restricts one to studying homogeneous sets of slaves. By contrast, regression analysis allows us to analyze heterogeneous bundles of slaves by decomposing each record into a sum of different types of slaves, each with a different value. Each type of slave is estimated to have a single value that varies among types. The value of each type of slave is estimated to be that number which causes the estimated sum of values in each record to closely approximate the actual recorded sum in each record. Thus, regression analysis can decompose a bundle of heterogeneous slaves into separate estimates of value for each individual slave. To analyze this data, we used both the common “ordinary least squares” (OLS) regression approach and the less common “non-linear least squares” (NLLS) regression approach. With OLS, we regress price on the number of men, women, and so on, as well as variables for time and location. With this method, we find that each slave of a certain type (age, sex) is worth a certain number of dollars. The problem with this approach is that we also say that a certain time and location is worth a certain number of dollars. For example, we might estimate that a male slave is worth $, a female slave is worth $, and that sale in such and such a year or location is worth $. The problem is that this hypothetical $ premium for a certain time or location is a fixed $, not a percentage of the value of the slave. This is an unavoidable feature of OLS, which requires all variables to be added together, not multiplied. Alternatively, with OLS, we can regress the natural logarithm of the price on the number of men, women, and so on, as well as variables for time and location. Transforming the dependent variable – price – into its 

Previous studies have indicated that slaves sold in bulk might be priced differently than slaves sold as individuals. On the one hand, there is an additional value in maintaining a unit of slaves who might provide each other comfort. On the other hand, sometimes lower-priced slaves would be bundled with others because they needed care.



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

logarithm causes all variables to exert a percentage change effect rather than a fixed dollar effect. This means that time and location variables will increase the price by a percentage. But it also means that each additional man or woman also increases the price by a percentage of the sale price, not by a fixed number of dollars. But to say that each additional man or woman increases the price by a certain percent makes no sense. This makes sense for attributes of a slave – for example, each increase in height by  inch increases the sale price by a certain percentage – but it does not make sense for the whole slave. To mitigate this concern, our regressions using the logarithm of price were only based on records in which at most one slave of each age/sex is recorded. For example, we would use a record of sale for one man and one woman sold together, but not a record for two men sold together. This means that our statistical estimation procedure does not have to make the unrealistic assumption that each additional man after the first man increases the price by a certain percentage. Unfortunately, it means some of our data are not used. Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages. Using price allows us to estimate the value of each type of slave – man, woman, boy, and girl – as a certain number of dollars, with the second man being worth the same number of dollars as the first man. But this method forces us to make the unrealistic assumption that each time and location is also worth a certain number of dollars. By contrast, the logarithm makes the reasonable assumption that each time and location increases the price by a certain percentage. Unfortunately, it also assumes that each type of slave is worth a certain percentage premium or discount, rather than a certain number of dollars. This assumption could only be avoided by restricting the dataset to records in which at most one slave of each type (age/sex) was involved. Our preferred estimation procedure is nonlinear least squares. Unlike OLS, NLLS allows variables to be not only added but also multiplied. Thus, we regress price on (men + women + boys + girls) times location times time period. Each age/sex type of slave is estimated as being worth a certain number of dollars, while each time or location causes a percentage premium or discount. For example, we might estimate each man as worth $, each woman as worth $, and a certain year or location as being “worth” ., meaning that in that year or location, the price increases by  percent. The advantage of using both approaches – OLS and NLLS – is that we receive different kinds of results, which, if similar, indicate that the patterns we find are not an arbitrary consequence of randomness in the

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



data. There is always a concern of “overfitting,” meaning that a statistical procedure has been fit too closely to the data, estimating the effects of random noise and variation in the data rather than the true, average features and causes in the world. An overfit dataset performs poorly when used to extrapolate or predict outside the sample. If the results of NLLS and two forms of OLS are similar, despite making different assumptions about the functional form of the data, we can be less concerned about overfitting. Regression analysis estimates the mean value or effect of each variable, such as the mean value of a woman or the mean value of a man. It does not take into consideration the range of values of various men unless those different men can be distinguished by observable variables, such as height, strength, and so forth. Our dataset does not include any variables besides basic categories of age/sex – man, woman, boy, and girl – and time and location. Thus, our regressions will estimate the value of an average man. Some men may be much taller or stronger than average, while others may be much shorter or weaker than average. Some men will be of prime age, while others will be elderly. These men were probably sold for very different prices, but we can only estimate the average of all men. All regression analysis is therefore uncertain. Every estimate is accompanied by a standard error or p-value, which indicates uncertainty about that estimate. For example, the price of a man may be estimated as $ with a standard error of $. A convenient rule of thumb is that a normally distributed (bell-curved) variable will usually vary between plus or minus two or three standard errors of its mean. And the central limit theorem says that even if a variable itself is not normally distributed, nevertheless, the estimate of that variable will be approximately normally distributed. Thus, in this hypothetical case, we would expect most men to be sold between $ and $, or perhaps between $ and $. No statistical estimate is ever precise, and it is important to bear in mind 



The “––. rule” says that when a variable is normally distributed – that is, follows a bellshaped curve – then  percent of the data are within one standard error of the mean,  percent are within two, and . percent are within three. Thus, taking the mean and adding or subtracting two or three standard errors is a simple method of estimating the range of an estimate. This is actually not quite the correct interpretation; the correct interpretation is much more complicated. A  percent confidence interval – formed by taking the estimate and adding and subtracting approximately two standard errors – does not actually mean that the true value of the variable being estimated has a  percent chance of lying somewhere in the  percent confidence interval. Instead, the meaning of a  percent confidence interval is that if one were to repeatedly take random samples of data from the population (that is, from the full world), then statistically estimate some variable and then create a  percent confidence interval, then the true value of the variable would lie within  percent of those confidence intervals. In other words, the “ percent”



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

that two estimates may differ from one another without being statistically distinguishable. For example, if one procedure estimates a man to be worth $ while another estimates $, these two estimates may be essentially the same if the standard error – the uncertainty – is $. If sufficient data were available, it would of course be useful to study narrower categories, such as prime adult males, or age groups like “- to -year-old prime males” as did Conrad and Meyer in their pioneering article concerning slave prices in the South. Barring the discovery of a major slave trader’s journal of prices for New York, it seems unlikely that there will ever be sufficient data to create statistically significant mean values of such narrow categories of slaves in Northern states. One hurdle in the study of slave prices is the various currencies in use in the colonial era. Eltis et al. converted all slave prices to British pounds sterling. Mancall et al. presented their final analysis in dollars. Every province also had its own currency, typically denominated in pounds, sterling, and pence. For their study, Mancall et al. first converted all South Carolina currency to British pounds sterling using the exchange rates reported in McCusker, and then, in their own words, “converted these values to dollars by multiplying by ., the value suggested by McCusker.” I considered using the same method for converting New York pounds into US dollars, with British pounds as an intermediary. I believe that such a method is mistaken, however. Exchange rates are constructed by comparing the prices of a representative bundle of goods. But the goods consumed by the average person in Britain were different from those consumed by an American. The same bundle of goods cannot

 



is a statement about the probability concerning a set of estimates and a set of confidence intervals all created by a specified procedure applied repeatedly to successive random samples of a larger population, rather than a statement about the probability of any one, given confidence interval and estimate created from one, given random sample. Conventional frequentist statistics attributes probabilities to repeated events, not to individual events. Eltis et al., “Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in the Caribbean, –,” –. Farley Grubb, “Creating the U.S. Dollar Currency Union, –: A Quest for Monetary Stability or a Usurpation of State Sovereignty for Personal Gain?” The American Economic Review : (December ), –; Ronald W. Michener and Robert E. Wright, “State ‘Currencies’ and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Clarifying Some Confusions,” The American Economic Review : (June ), –; Farley Grubb, “State ‘Currencies’ and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Reply – Including a New View from Canada,” The American Economic Review  (September ), –. Mancall et al., “Slave Prices and the South Carolina Economy,” fn . The best available analyses of slave price data for Southern states focus on South Carolina and Maryland. A chart in Mancall et al. combines data from various studies to compare slave prices from South Carolina, Maryland, and the West Indies prices. For data from Maryland, Mancall et al., cites the dissertation of Alan Kulikoff. Kulikoff presents prices for prime male slaves from  to  in southern Maryland.

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



accurately approximate consumption in both countries. Therefore, a British price bundle cannot be used as an intermediary to convert prices in America. Instead, my study directly converts prices in New York and New Jersey pounds to dollars using the appropriate exchange rate and then all dollars are deflated by year using a consumer price index. In this study, I deflated all dollars to , dollars. To convert New York pounds directly into dollars, I use exchange rates provided by McCusker. These direct exchange rates are not available with the same updated frequency as are exchange rates between New York pounds and British pounds, and between British pounds and dollars. According to McCusker, the exchange rate between New York pounds and British pounds (and by extension into a later period, US dollars) fluctuated somewhat, but was relatively stable. For the period from  to ,  New York pounds was the equivalent of . US dollars; from  to ,  pounds was the equivalent of . dollars; from  to , it was the equivalent of . dollars; and from  to , it was the equivalent of . dollars. When US dollars and New York pounds were both in circulation – that is, in the s and in the first decade of the nineteenth century – the exchange rate was colloquially and consistently . dollars to the New York pounds. The federal government prohibited the issue of any state currency after , and the US Mint Act of  created the dollar as a national currency, but in New York, as elsewhere, state currencies continued to circulate for decades. To locate a point at which the US dollar became dominant in New York, one might point to , when New York City newspapers stopped giving wheat prices in New York pounds and began presenting them in US dollars instead. Slaves in New York were regularly being bought and sold with New York pounds as late as , with a few examples as late as . 



  

John J. McCusker, How Much Is that in Real Money: A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, ). The consumer price index for dollars is in Table A-, pp. –. Exchange rates between dollars and colonial pounds are in Table A-, p. . I chose  as the base year for two reasons: First, this was McCusker’s own base year, so this simplified my own calculations, although converting to another base year is quite easy. Second,  is just prior to the Civil War, making it a convenient benchmark for the study of slavery. McCusker, How Much Is that in Real Money, . Not to be confused with the exchange rate of . dollars to the British pound, given by McCusker. New York bills traded at rates, and like other colonial currencies, were decoupled from the British pound. I treated New Jersey pounds as equivalent to New York pounds. This is probably a useful approximation, but it is not perfectly accurate. Slave sales in New Jersey were sometimes made in



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

My null hypothesis – that is, the default assumption I made unless there is statistical evidence to the contrary – is that the prices of slaves varied over time and location in the same manner in which the prices of all other goods in the economy varied. All statistical methods assume some null hypothesis, that is, some default assumption against which the data are tested. Testing whether slave prices varied requires one to first specify, “varied compared to what?” In the absence of specific, better knowledge, a historian studying the unknown would be forced to make some assumptions about how prices vary over time and location, and we assume that in such a situation, preexisting price indices and exchange rates are the best guide for estimating the prices of slaves. Thus, I assume that exchange rates and price indices that accurately capture the price changes of all other goods are accurate for slaves as well unless we find statistical evidence to the contrary. Therefore, all of my statistical tests and inferences use prices that have been converted and deflated to  dollars. Researches can decide whether or not to control for time and location, depending on the purpose of the regression. Controlling for time and location can be important for at least two reasons. First, if one wishes to know the average price of a slave in a given time at a given location, such as New York City in . Second, one may wish to statistically test the ratio of slaves of one age-sex combination and another while avoiding the possibility of omitted variable bias. For example, one may wish to test whether adult males sell for more than adult females. If time and location are correlated with age and sex, then estimates will be biased. This correlation may exist if records of certain types of slaves were more likely to survive from some times and locations than others, that is, a sort of attrition bias. On the other hand, one may wish to avoid controlling for time and location if one simply wishes to know the average price of a slave of a given type in the entire sample. If not controlling for time and location, then OLS is used with a linear dependent variable, and neither logging the dependent variable nor estimating with NLLS has any justification. New York pounds and sometimes in New Jersey pounds, but the sources do not commonly state which currency was used. In the s, the New York Chamber of Commerce debated the rate at which New Jersey money should exchange for New York money. Some of the members wanted the currencies to exchange at par, but the market rate was that New Jersey bills were exchanging at a rate of  pounds for  pounds and  shillings New York money. That is, New Jersey money was exchanging for nearly  percent more than New York money. Slave sales in New Jersey rarely specify if New York or New Jersey bills were used in the sale. John Austin Stevens Jr., Colonial Records of the New York Chamber of Commerce, – (New York: Burt Franklin, ). Lawrence H. Officer, “Dollar-Sterling Mint Parity and Exchange Rates, –,” The Journal of Economic History : (September ), –.

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



Table . Estimated values of enslaved persons in New York and New Jersey by sex and age Age/sex

Estimated value

Adult man Adult woman Boy Girl

$. $. $. $.

With rates of inflation and currency exchanges factored in, and controlling for time and location, I was then able to determine average slave prices. When controlling for time and location, my omitted base case is Manhattan County, New York State, during the pre-Revolutionary period –. The best fit was found with an NLLS method. The results using the full sample – both sales and valuations, in both New York and New Jersey – in  dollars are shown in Table .. Clearly, men are more valuable than women, and adults are more valuable than children. Girls are the least valuable. For comparison, OLS results with the linear dependent variable are shown in Table .. Clearly, average prices for the entire sample are not the same as average prices in Manhattan, –, and controlling for time and location does make a difference. Nevertheless, the relative relationships between





Fit is compared using the adjusted R. R measures the percent of the variation from the mean of the dependent variable that is explained by the regression’s X variables, while adjusted R applies a penalty to an increasing number of X variables; given a certain amount of variation in Y being explained, adjusted R will prefer the model with the smallest number of X variables. The R of a logged dependent variable cannot be directly compared to that of a linear (not logged) variable because the Y variable is different, so that different variation is being explained. For the logged equation, we estimate R by converting the predicted value of ln(Y) to a predicted value of Y – where Ypredicted = exp(ln(Y)predicted) ∗ exp(. ∗ RMSE) – and then finding the correlation coefficient between Yactual and the Ypredicted. The adjusted R is equal to   (  R) ∗ (N  )/K, where N is the number of observations and K is the number of X variables. In order to compare fits of different models, we must ensure we use the same sample. Because the logged model restricts the sample, we used the same restricted sample to estimate R for OLS and NLLS linear dependent variable models. Testing whether the ratios of one price against another equals one shows that every ratio is statistically distinguishable from one except for the ratio of the price of a boy against a girl, whose p-value is .. However, the p-value of boys divided by women is . and for women divided by girls is ., indicating that adult women are more valuable than both boy and girl children. The p-value of men divided by women is ..



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey Table . Estimated values of enslaved persons, controlling for time and location Controlling for time and location

Age/sex

Yes

No

Adult man Adult woman Boy Girl

$. $. $. $.

$. $. $. $.

Table . Estimated values of enslaved persons, without controlling for time and location Age/sex

Estimated value

Adult man Adult woman Boy Girl

$. $. $. $.

different ages and sexes are estimated similarly by NLLS, OLS with controls for time and location, and OLS without controls. Using only simple means of records in which precisely one and only slave is recorded, the results are similar to those of OLS with the full sample (inclusive of bundled sales) but without controls for time and location (see Table .). Evidently, estimated average prices are similar whether we include bundled sales (which requires using regression analysis) or whether we include only sales of individuals (which restricts the sample but permits estimation using simple means). Although regression analysis is capable of decomposing bundled sales, so that we can use our entire sample, this decomposition evidently makes little difference. However, regression analysis is still necessary if one wishes to control for time and location. Clearly, the same basic pattern emerges regardless of whether time and location is controlled and whether bundled sales are included or not: Men are more valuable than women, adults are more valuable than children, and girls are least valuable. But the individual estimates themselves are quite different – especially for adult men. This indicates how important it

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



Table . Estimated values of enslaved persons, Manhattan, New York State, and New Jersey Age/sex

Location

Adult man Adult woman

Manhattan $. $.

New York State $. $.

New Jersey $. $.

is to use regression to control for variation over time and space. When controlling for time and location, OLS estimates are different from NLLS estimates, but like the NLLS estimates, they are greater than the simple means. Next, using only a sample of valuations, we compared valuations in Manhattan, New York, and New Jersey. Once again, the best fit was found with the NLLS method. The results are shown in Table .. Clearly, valuations of slaves, both men and women, were higher in Manhattan than in New York State, and higher in New York than in New Jersey. What might account for this? Certainly the demand for domestic workers in New York City could have contributed to the increased price of women there. Perhaps the competitive market of New York drove up prices while slave traders were less likely to ply their trade in New Jersey. Choo and Eid have argued that “males on average (all else equal) are more valued in the secondary slave market.” The question here, however, is what is the reach of the secondary slave market in New York? Is Manhattan the primary market, or are the alluvial fields of the Hudson Valley, or perhaps the virgin frontier? It is possible, indeed likely, that the primary market for slaves shifted over time so that at 





I omit sales because most sales are in New York; out of  sales,  are in New York while  are in New Jersey. Restricting the sample to valuations offered the most straightforward comparison among locations. I statistically tested whether the ratios equal one, that is, is the price of a man in Manhattan divided by the price of a man in New York statistically distinguishable from one? A p-value less than . is evidence of a statistically significant difference. p-Values are: man, Manhattan vs New York: .; man, New York vs New Jersey: .; woman, Manhattan vs New York: .; woman, New York vs New Jersey: .. Using OLS, the corresponding p-values are generally statistically significant when estimated with a logged dependent variable but not a linear dependent variable. I suggest this is because of model misspecification; with a linear dependent variable, the locational variables are forced to have a fixed rather than a proportional effect on price. Eugene Choo and Jean Eid, “Interregional Price Difference in the New Orleans Auctions Market for Slaves,” Journal of Business and Economic Statistics : (October ), –, quote from .



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

some periods, slave prices and demand was higher in the city, and at other periods, it was higher in rural areas. It may be possible to better understand the dynamics of New York slave prices over time and location by looking at tax valuations. In , the tax value of each New York slave between the ages of  and  and regardless of sex was $; deflated to , dollars that is $. per slave. The surviving comptroller records are incomplete, but the taxed value of New York slaves in  must have been more than $,. By comparing tax records from  and some from  with the recorded slave population of each county in the  census, it becomes clear that certain counties had a much higher percentage of their slaves that were taxable. In other words, there was a difference in labor force participation of slaves by the county. In the Hudson Valley, around – percent of slaves in each county were between  and  years of age. But in New York City, only . percent were in this category. Likewise, the percent was low in Suffolk (. percent), in Queens (. percent), and in Westchester (. percent). This suggests that in  the slave population in New York City and on Long Island was older on average and therefore less productive and less valued. Slave owners in the Hudson Valley had younger slaves, on average, and valued their slaves more on a per capita basis. This is consistent with the view that slavery was dying out in urban and English areas, while it was thriving in the rural Dutchdominated counties. Historians of slave price data have usually been content to deal solely with the price of adult males, or prime males, as a standard measure for the performance of a particular economy. When historians have made comparisons of prices for men and women in slave societies, they have generally found men to be valued more than women where both are primarily involved in fieldwork, while in an urban context, prices of female slaves sometimes rose above the price of male slaves. Regression analysis can also be useful to understand aspects of relative prices between enslaved men, women, and children. The ratio of prices of  



New York State Archives, State Comptroller Records, Collection BO, folder BF. One exception is Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, –. Berry addresses the prices of female slaves in the American South, specifically to defend the thesis that slave women were valued as breeders. Her quantitative demonstration is general and indefinite, with frequent use of the words “many,” “some,” and “not all.” Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Herbert S. Klein, and Stanley L. Engerman, “The Level and Structure of Slave Prices on Cuban Plantations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Comparative Perspectives,” American Historical Review : (), –. Page  of this article gives an age–price profile by gender for Cuban slaves.

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



men and women was also illuminating. In Manhattan, the ratio of the price of a man to a woman was .; in New York, .; and in New Jersey, . – all statistically different from one. However, the ratios of the ratios – the Manhattan ratio divided by the New York ratio, and the New York ratio divided by the New Jersey ratio – are . and ., with p-values of . and . (the null hypothesis is that the ratio of the ratios is one). Thus, the three ratios of the price of a man to a woman – in Manhattan, in New York, and in New Jersey – are statistically the same as each other. In other words, a man sold for approximately .–. times as much as a woman in all three locations, and one cannot distinguish the three ratios statistically. Thus, valuations in Manhattan were higher than in New York, and they were higher in New York than in New Jersey. But in all three locations, the ratio of a man’s value to a woman’s was the same, approximately .–.. By comparison, Kotlikoff found only a  percent premium for men sold in New Orleans in the nineteenth century, while a study of slavery on the island of Mauritius found a  percent premium for men. Fogel and Engerman found that among field workers in the South, female slaves were valued at about  percent of males. Why was the premium paid for male slaves in New York and New Jersey higher than in New Orleans? There are many possible explanations, which are difficult to test. It might be that female slaves in New York and New Jersey were not valued as much for childbearing, as were female slaves in the South. Since slaves in the North tended to live not on large plantations, but as individuals or small groups in the slaveholder’s house, the burdens of childcare might have been greater, as watching over the children took a profitable slave away from her labor. On a large plantation, meanwhile, the supervision of children would have been the responsibility

 



Similar results in all respects are obtained by OLS, whether with the linear or logged dependent variable. Kotlikoff, “The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans,  to ,” –; an econometric analysis of slave prices that shows some similarities to this current paper is Shirley Chenny, Pascal St-Amour, and Désiré Vencatachellum, “Slave Prices from Succession and Bankruptcy Sales in Mauritius, –,” Explorations in Economic History  (), –. This study looked at the sale of , slaves on the island of Mauritius, some as individual sales and some as bundles of slaves. Because they could focus on just three years, they had less to worry about with changes over time. Another recent article on slave prices in the larger Dutch world is interesting but could have been improved had it employed econometrics. Matthias van Rossum, “Towards a Global Perspective on Early Modern Slave Trade: Prices of the Enslaved in the Indian Ocean, Indonesian Archipelago and Atlantic Worlds,” Journal of Global History : (), –. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, ), –.



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

of the least profitable field workers, typically the oldest slaves. Some have argued that enslaved women in New York were often put up for sale when they had too many children, but as I argued in chapter one, there is little evidence to support this. The wide but relatively sparse distribution of slaves in the region must have also depressed the value of infirm or elderly slaves, who would frequently become the charge of a slave owner who had few available resources for caring for others. The collected data on slave sales indicates that children as young as eight years old were routinely sold in the market. Although groups of slaves, some of them potential family units, were sometimes inherited, slave families were rarely, if ever, sold as intact groups. In fact, out of  sales in both states –  in New York and  in New Jersey – most () were individual sales, and most bundled sales ( of ) were mothers with children. For this reason, it is not possible to contribute to the historiographical discussion about the possible causes of price discounts for slaves sold as bundles versus slaves sold individually. In New York and New Jersey, sellers apparently showed little concern about breaking families. Ignoring family connections meant greater flexibility in the use and relocation of slave labor. We also tested the difference between evaluative prices (inventories, newspapers advertisements, and the like) versus actual recorded sale prices in New York. The results showed that men sold for approximately . times as much as they were evaluated for, but that estimate is not statistically distinguishable from one (p = .). On the other hand, women sold for approximately . times as much as they were evaluated for, and this estimate is statistically distinguishable from one (p = .). Boys sold for . times as much, and this estimate is statistically significant (p = .). Finally, girls sold for . times as much, but this estimate is not statistically significant (p = .). Thus, the answer to the question of whether there is a difference between sale prices and evaluations depends on the age and sex. The safest answer is to conclude that there is no consistent difference between sales and evaluations.  



Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Charles W. Calomiris and Jonathan B. Pritchett, “Preserving Slave Families for Profit: Traders’ Incentives and Pricing in the New Orleans Slave Market,” The Journal of Economic History : (December ), –; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman, “Some Notes on the Apparent Aversion to the Separate Sale of Children under Age Ten in the New Orleans Slave Market,” in Fogel et al., eds., Without Consent or Contract, –. Records in New Jersey were omitted to simplify the comparison. Most sales occur in New York, so New York was chosen as the subsample for comparing sales to evaluations.

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



In other words, given unclear and conflicting results, we should fail to reject the null hypothesis, which is that evaluations tend to be consistent with sale prices. Indeed, using OLS – both linear and logged – most of the ratios of sale price to valuations, for each age and sex, are statistically indistinct from one. Finally, we tested whether prices and evaluations varied over time. Because all prices and values have already been deflated using a consumer price index, our null hypothesis is that a general index of inflation for all other goods is appropriate to use for slaves as well. Statistically, we tested if prices and values varied over time after adjusting for inflation. Unfortunately, testing variation over time is difficult because of the smallness of the sample. In the whole period –, excluding those records with slaves of unknown age or sex, we have , records. Thus, there is an average of approximately nine records per year. By contrast, a study of slave sales in Mauritius in the period –, also using regression analysis, had , records, or an average of  records per year. Because of the smallness of my our sample, we had to group years together, and estimate whether entire groups of years were associated with changes in prices. Taking the years from  to  as our baseline, inconsistent variation was found across different data subsamples. For example, see, in Table ., the percentage changes in different sets of years using the NLLS method. Keep in mind, these changes are after deflating all prices to  dollars. These numbers vary so much that it is unclear how trustworthy they are. If one did attempt an interpretation, it would be that – in deflated , dollars – sale prices from  to  were somewhere around  to  percent lower than in –; that prices from  until the end of the Revolutionary War in  probably did not vary much from their level in –, and that from the end of the war, through the adoption of the Constitution, until the death of slavery in the North, prices were somewhere around – percent lower than in –.





But since the ratios of sale price to evaluation are all estimated to be greater than one, we can say that if there is any difference between sales and evaluations, sale prices are higher than evaluations, possibly reflecting composition bias. That is to say, men who were subject to sales tended to be closer to prime working age, while male slaves evaluated in inventories represented a more general cross section of the average male slaves, including older, less-profitable men. Chenny et al., “Slave Prices from Succession and Bankruptcy Sales in Mauritius, –,” –.

Table . Estimated values of enslaved persons, complete values by time and location



Years

Full sample (valuations and sales, both states)

NY valuations and sales

NY valuations

NJ valuations

– –

.% .%

.% .%

.% .%

.% .%

–

 (no effect)

 (no effect)

 (no effect)

 (no effect)

–

 (no effect)

 (no effect)

 (no effect)

 (no effect)

– – Rev War (–) Interregnum (–) – Gradual abolition (–end)

 (no effect) baseline  (no effect)

 (no effect) baseline  (no effect)

 (no effect) baseline  (no effect)

 (no effect) baseline  (no effect)

.%

.%

.%

.% .%

.% .%

.% .%

Sales, both states

Records with only one slave per record

 (no effect)

.%  (no effect)  (no effect)  (no effect) +.% baseline  (no effect) .%

.% .%  (no effect)  (no effect) +.% baseline  (no effect) .%

 (no effect)  (no effect)

.% .%

.% .%

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



Again, these are after adjusting for inflation using the consumer price index. But it is difficult to tell whether these estimated effects are genuine, or whether our sample is so small that regression is detecting random, idiosyncratic variation rather than true, systematic variation over time. Perhaps prices were low during two periods: first, during the relative beginning of the colonial period, –, when the colonial economy was still developing, and after the Revolutionary War, from  until the s and beyond, when slavery was dying out in New York and New Jersey. During the middle of this period, –, prices reached a level that was stable after adjusting for general inflation using the consumer price index. But given that the sample is so small, and given that we were forced to group long stretches of time together in order to obtain any estimates at all, it is probably not advisable to take these estimates as much more than tentative suggestions. The data also allow for building an age-price profile. Age data for slaves was generally not kept in inventories in New York and New Jersey. Slave bills of sale frequently, but not always, provided an estimated age of the person being sold. Only  sources in our dataset provide age data, and  of them give distinct ages for individual sales – that is to say, after removing sales of mother–child pairs and others, and keeping only those records for individuals of known age. The age-price data presents a familiar curve known to historians of slavery elsewhere. Estimating a quadratic fit of price on age for men and women separately, shows that price increases with age, then peaks, and finally decreases with age. Cliometricians in the s and s produced a stack of articles to ascertain the value of slaves at different points in their life course. These historians discovered or rather confirmed a profitability curve that must have been widely known in the eighteenth century. “From observation and experience,” a book published in Boston in  says, “it seems to be an established opinion that a negro man of  æt is in value equal to a negro boy of  æt, and proportionally in their other ages upwards and downwards.”



 

A quadratic fit means we regress price on age and age squared, with no other variables. To get separate curves for men and women, we perform this regression twice, once only for men and then again for only women. Latin for “age.” William Douglas, A summary, historical and political, of the first planting, progressive improvement, and present state of the British settlements in North America (Boston, ), p. fn.



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

Figure .

Values of enslaved persons by age, relative to quadratic fit.

In general, the price of a slave in the South rose precipitously in a slave’s teenage years, and peaked in their early twenties, declined slowly from there, and dropped more quickly after forty-five or fifty years of age, the point at which a worker was considered worn out and old aged. In New York and New Jersey, slave sales appear to have occurred mainly when slaves were of prime age, specifically in the eighteen-to-twenty-five-year range. This may partly be explained by high death rates and the pyramidal distribution of the population. As in other studies of slave prices, it appears that the females hit their prime price earlier than males (see Figure .). Curiously, though, age does not seem to be the major factor in slave pricing. For any given value of age on the x-axis, there are many observed sale prices on the y-axis. For example, for x =  years, the price of a man ranges between less than $ and almost $. Something else seems to be determining prices as well. A large determining factor might have been skill. Slaves in New York and New Jersey might have been fairly heterogeneous in their abilities, skills, and strengths, relative to the field workers in 

Choo and Eid, “Interregional Price Difference in the New Orleans Auctions Market for Slaves,” .

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



the Southern slave economy. The prices of slaves of prime age might also have varied more substantially in the North because of higher rates of runaway activity. Slaves of the same age might have been priced differently if they were born in New York or New Jersey, the Caribbean, or Africa. Eighteenth-century sources indicate that the slaves who came to this region were the refused, those who could not be sold for high prices in the Caribbean or the Southern states. What was it about the nature of New York slavery that allowed for slaves of lesser value to be put to use there, when they were not needed elsewhere? The answer may be that there was demand in New York for slaves to work in small houses (not large plantations) and that some of these slaves were not required to do heavy labor, but were instead given lighter household tasks. The diversity and heterogeneity of slavery in New York allowed for slaves of different values. There were skilled country slaves and unskilled field workers, slaves to carry heavy goods through the streets of New York, and in some instances, slaves to set the dinner table and do the laundry. The importance of skill – or perhaps other unobserved differences between slaves – can be inferred from a scatter plot of the prices and estimated prices (by NLLS) of every transaction (sale and valuation) (see Figure .).

Figure .

Actual versus regression estimated prices of enslaved persons.



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

Obviously, the regression estimates lie in the middle of the actual prices, meaning that regression is estimating the means. But many actual prices lie above or below the regression estimates. This means that many slaves were sold or valued for prices greater or less than the expected average. This suggests that unobservable traits – such as skill or physical health – affected prices as well. Slave prices in nineteenth-century New York fell from their eighteenthcentury height. On the one hand, these prices may indicate that slavery in the region was still profitable, or that slave owners believed it was still profitable, into the nineteenth century, but only less so than in the previous century. The price of slaves was dragged down by runaway risk, by the expectation of the end of slavery, by the inability to legally sell slaves out of the state, and in some places, by the social pressures to manumit slaves. But upwards pressure on the price of slaves came from the declining supply of slaves, the continued demand for workers to solve the peak-labor problem (the inability to find workers in the busy wheat-harvest season), and the potential to cash out by illegally selling slaves to the South. So important was the interstate slave trade for keeping prices up in slaveexporting states that a Maryland newspaper in  believed the value of a slave in their state would drop by – percent if trade with the cotton region were ended. Since slave prices in the South were higher, and slaves could not be legally sold South, slave prices in New York should have been depressed on account of the export ban. Yet, because illegal slave sales in the South appear to have been common, the legal restrictions on exporting slaves did not affect price as much as it would have had the laws always been followed. Nevertheless, the sharp reduction in the number of available records on slave sales after , and especially after , seems to indicate that the laws against slave sales in the state were effective to some degree. After all, one would expect that, all things equal, more evidence would survive from the nineteenth century than from the eighteenth century. This is not only because as we move closer to the present, the materials have had to survive fewer years, but also because of the massive increase of paper sources over time, particularly in the early nineteenth century. Prices of slaves in New York declined in the nineteenth century, but not rapidly, and it appears that New Yorkers were confident that they would



Max Grivno, “There Slavery Cannot Dwell”: Agriculture and Labor in Northern Maryland (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, ), .

The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey



maintain possession of their slaves for some time. Unfortunately, there is almost no price data for after , when slave sales were banned entirely, and slavery was set to end in ten years. We would expect in these final years that the prices of slaves would have declined considerably, partly because of the average age of the slave cohort would have increased (as no new slaves were born in New York after ). New Yorkers did not expect to be compensated directly for emancipating their slaves, so the prices of their slaves must have dropped considerably as Emancipation Day (July , ) approached. Simply because of the relative extent of slavery, slave price data for New York and New Jersey cannot be as extensive as that for southern states. While these other studies included hundreds of price data observations per year, our current study does not even have price data for every year in question. Yet the data for New York and New Jersey seem to indicate a pattern that contrasts with the data for slave prices in the South. While prices of slaves in the nineteenth-century South grew dramatically, they declined in New York and New Jersey. Slave price differences across regions might be explained by the relative productivity of different regions. Transaction costs, namely, the cost of transporting a slave to another region, likely have a role in maintaining price differentials by region. Without transaction costs in the market, Northern slaveholders would have been incentivized to sell their slaves to the South if they could expect to earn more on the sale of the slave than what they would expect to gain in value by keeping the slave employed. If slaveholders kept slaves, knowing that they could gain more by selling them, then we could think of slaveholding as a consumption good, a luxury of paternalist farmers. The market-clearing conception of the slave market also assumes general market integration. But it is not clear that slaveholders in the Hudson Valley, for example, were always aware of slave prices in other states. In general, economists believe that as long as a good is valued positively, there is a signal that investing in that good is profitable. But beyond the general observation that slavery in New York and New Jersey was at least

 

There is one sale in , eight in , six in , and twelve sales for the entire period – – meaning some years have no sales at all. Choo and Eid, “Interregional Price Difference in the New Orleans Auctions Market for Slaves,” –; Herman Freudenberger and Jonathan B. Pritchett, “The Domestic United States Slave Trade: New Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History : (Winter ), –.



The Price of Slaves in New York and New Jersey

marginally profitable, we cannot calculate profitability for slavery in the North in the same way that historians have calculated profitability in slavery cash crop economies where slavery is the dominant form of labor, that is, by measuring outputs per slaves, prices of commodities, and the size of annual exports. Slave labor was significant in the North, but it contributed to a much smaller percent of the total labor force of the Northern states than the Southern states. The lack of large profitable plantations, however, does not render slavery unprofitable, since prices demonstrate that people in New York and New Jersey continued to value investments in slaves into the nineteenth century. This is crucial evidence in understanding that Dutch slavery in New York was motivated to a significant degree by economic reasoning.

 

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey

The Dutch in New York valued their slaves and wanted to keep them, but the stronger desire of slaves for freedom often resulted in successful breaks away from enslavement. Historians traditionally rely on sources like personal letters, government reports, and business records to tell stories about the past. But these kinds of written documents are hard to find and of limited use in this study. Another source of useful data are the hundreds of runaway slave advertisements in colonial and early American newspapers. These often mentioned the runaway slave by name, sex, and place of inhabitance, along with personal characteristics such as height, appearance, clothing, and speech. Some advertisements explicitly state whether individual slaves spoke Dutch, even in some cases whether they acquired Dutch natively or as a learned language. The combination of geographic, linguistic, sex, and age data provides an opportunity for systematic analysis to move beyond earlier attempts that used this data anecdotally. This chapter presents an analysis of  runaway slave advertisements between  and  in which the runaway is described as speaking Dutch (at least to some degree) or English with a Dutch accent. New 



An earlier version of this chapter was published as an article as Douma, “Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey,” –. A digital dataset associated with the article version of this chapter was published as Douma, “Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in Early American Newspaper Advertisements, –.” Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown, eds., “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey (New York: Garland Publishing, ). The index includes fifty-eight advertisements of Dutch-speaking slaves, twentyeight of which do not appear in Susan Stessin-Cohn and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley, – (Delmar, NY: Black Dome Press, ). This later book primarily includes advertisements concerning runaways from the Hudson Valley, irrespective of their language, and does not include advertisements for Dutchspeaking runaways from outside the Hudson Valley. Michael E. Groth, “The African American Struggle against Slavery in the Mid-Hudson Valley, –,” Hudson Valley Regional Review : (March ), –. Groth’s work gives good reason to believe that there were a lot more Dutch-speaking runaways than what have been found, since advertisements were often placed in local newspapers.



 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey digital search databases and technologies speed the search for newspapers and allow for wider geographical coverage, including, in this study, newspapers from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Maryland, for example. There are two primary takeaways from this chapter. The first is a narrow argument about the nature and extent of Dutch slavery and language in America, and the second is an argument about how the economics of the runaway slave phenomenon likely made a significant contribution to social and political change in New York. The first argument, primarily a cultural one, is that most Dutch-speaking slaves on the run were bilingual, but some monolingual or nearly monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves also fled their masters even into the nineteenth century. This indicates that as New York initiated its gradual emancipation project, there were many places in New York and New Jersey, and not just a few backwater hamlets, where slaves were still speaking primarily Dutch. The direction of the runaways – typically towards New York City – indicates a growing network of Dutch-speaking slaves moving to and hiding in the city. This chapter’s second conclusion is that the runaway phenomenon contributed to the increased expense of slavery in New York, which in turn changed the nature of the institution and ultimately hastened its demise. The increasing numbers of runaway slaves during the Revolution and following decades posed a serious social and economic problem for New Yorkers. Data about runaways printed in contemporary newspapers probably represent a small percent of the total number of runaway slaves in the period. Regardless, the number of published reports indicates a very costly problem, particularly for New York’s Dutch slaveholders. In general, as the number of runaways increased, slaveholders made concessions to their slaves. The history of runaway slaves in America has suffered from both chronological and geographical limitations. Even in the best modern works on the topic, runaway slavery is treated as a mostly nineteenth-century phenomenon, with slaves fleeing the slave South to reach the free states of the North. The relative availability of source material likely explains these conceptual biases. Printed sources on Southern slavery are voluminous. And, of course, by the s, slavery had mostly faded out north of the



Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, ); Andrew Delbanco, The War before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Penguin Press, ).

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



Mason–Dixon Line. Later, after decades of abolitionism and years of war, it was easy for Americans to forget that there were once slaves in the North, let alone runaways from Northern farms. But in the past decades, there has been an increased focus on the history of slavery in the North, and with it an interest in runaway slave advertisements. Despite recent books on slavery in New Jersey, Boston, Rhode Island, New York City, and the Canadian Maritimes, there is yet little understanding of the connections between these regions. The New York case is particularly interesting because slavery lasted longer there than elsewhere in the North except New Jersey, and because much of slavery there was rooted in Dutch culture. The  advertisements of runaway slaves who spoke Dutch are drawn from a variety of sources, including digital newspaper databases, but in no instance has information been included that cannot be verified by seeing the original primary source newspaper. It is certainly not an exhaustive list of Dutch-speaking runaways in American history, and it is not necessarily representative of the distribution of Dutch-speaking runaways over time and space. My data are neither exhaustive nor entirely representative, but they are accurate and reflect part of the larger picture. There are many good reasons to question how representative surviving runaway slave advertisements are. First, it seems that proximity to a city (like Albany) would make it easier and more worthwhile for a slave owner to post an advertisement about a runaway. Therefore, runaways from more remote areas might be underrepresented in the data. Advertisements were likely to be placed only when a slave owner valued the slave highly enough to justify the expense of the advertisement, and when the slave owner desired and expected to be able to recover the slave. During the period of 

John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantations (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Hodges and Brown (eds.), “Pretends to Be Free”; Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, ); Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, eds., Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, – (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ) , . Antonio T. Bly, “A Prince among Pretending Free Men: Runaway Slaves in Colonia New England Revisited,” Massachusetts Historical Review  (), –; Billy G. Smith, “Runaway Slaves in the Mid-Atlantic Region during the Revolutionary Era,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ); Gary Nash, “Forging Freedom: The Emancipation Experience in the Northern Seaport Cities, –,” in Ira Belin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution; Judith Van Buskirk, “Crossing the Lines: African-Americans in the New York City Region during the British Occupation, –,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies , Explorations in Early American Culture (), –.

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey gradual emancipation in New York (–), slave owners who manumitted their slaves were required to provide bond to their city or county. Some advertisements in this period were placed not because the slaveholder believed he would recover his former slave, but because he feared that he might be legally liable for the cost of the slave, if that slave should appear wandering the county. In other words, an advertisement, especially one with a low reward for the runaway, was sometimes a method of expressing publicly that a slave was no longer the concern of the master. The number of advertisements for Dutch-speaking slaves increases over time. This might be interpreted in a number of ways. This does not require, for instance, that the actual number of runaways over time increased; rather, it may indicate only that the desire and ability to look for them increased. This is indeed likely, because there were few newspapers in early eighteenth-century New York, but a large number of them by the first decade of the nineteenth century. Many of the advertisements were printed in New York City newspapers, which one might take as a sign that slave owners were looking for their slaves there, in the city. But the papers printed in New York City were circulated widely in the Hudson Valley, and in New Jersey, local Hudson Valley newspapers are less likely to have survived over time and are less likely to be found in archival search databases. For the most part, slavery died in New York before the proliferation of country newspapers. The data include runaway slave advertisements for two persons listed as indentured servants: one called a “negro indentured servant,” William Smith, who fled from his enslaver once in  and again in , and another, Isaac Cromwell, a “malatto” [sic] who ran away in . Historians recognize that African Americans in the early colonial period were more likely than their later colonial counterparts to be given the status of indentured servant rather than slave. While these indentured servants might be able to eventually gain their freedom, indentured servants of African descent were certainly coerced into this arrangement. For the purposes of this chapter, then, I consider these two men to be equivalent to slaves. The data also include a few duplicates, by which I mean runaway persons who were captured only to run away again at a later date. William Smith (mentioned previously) fled in  and , and Tom ran away in  and . Those are clearly repeat runaways. In other cases, however, it is not so clear whether a Jack, Tom, or Harry from one year is the same Jack, Tom, or Harry from another. By noting the age, master, and location of the runaways, it appears that advertisements for

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



repeat runaways were rare. Perhaps only  or  percent of the list is comprised of repeat runaways. This is consistent with the idea that slaveholders ascribed less value to runaway slaves and would spend less effort tracking down a repeat runaway. One newspaper in  recalled that “[t]he masters might pursue [runaways] and bring them back, giving them a severe flogging at the same time, which however, was seldom done, for it was almost certain that if they ran off once they would do it again, and if they did not run away, they were seldom worth having anyhow.” I have not included advertisements from Pennsylvania and Maryland that call for the return of “Dutch” slaves, as these are likely referring to German (Deutsch)-speaking slaves, except when they specifically say “Low Dutch” or if they mention that the slaves came originally from New York or New Jersey. On the other hand, I retained data for Dutch-speaking slaves in New England newspapers, where it seems less likely that there would be a confusion between Dutch and German slaves. In the midAtlantic, it was common to make a distinction between High Dutch (German) and Low Dutch; but in the American South, it appears that “Dutch” most often simply meant German. In New England, however, “Dutch” tended to refer to Hollanders, not Germans. It is unclear whether advertisements for Dutch-speaking slaves in Virginia and Louisiana were references to Dutch speakers or to German speakers, but these do not appear in large numbers. Curiously, I have found no evidence for Dutch-speaking slaves in Southern states after the end of emancipation in New York. However, we can establish that Dutch-speaking slaves born in New York and New Jersey were sometimes sold or brought out of state in the eighteenth century, and then became runaways. One speaker of “Low Dutch” appeared in Berkeley County, Virginia, in . A slave, Tom Simpson, who ran away from a master in Georgetown in , was “born



 



Williamson suggests that the value of a slave who was a known runaway decline by  percent, as much as the decline in value of a crippled slave. Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain, “Measuring Slavery in  Dollars,” www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php, accessed November , . Passaic Daily News, January , . True American, June , . Louisiana State University Special Collections, Louisiana Runaway Slave Advertisements, –. I did not include a runaway named “Manway,” a “Dutch negro” from Kentucky, because it is unclear if Dutch here referred to Dutch or German (Stewart Kentucky Herald, November , ). New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, October , .

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey in East Jersey” and could read, write, and speak Dutch. In , Pomp, a fluent Dutch speaker with limited English, ran away from a Josiah Fessenden in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In , Jack, a Dutch speaker born in Albany, ran away from George Ewing in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Sally, a Low Dutch–speaking slave arrived in Charleston by ship from New York and immediately ran away. In addition to Virginia and Massachusetts, there were Dutch-speaking slaves in mid to late eighteenth-century New Haven, Connecticut, and Newport, Rhode Island. Richard Bogardus, formerly of New York State but living near Boston, in , wrote to Abraham Huffman of Kingston to report having spotted Huffman’s former slave. Bogardus noted that he could recover this slave if Huffman was interested. He reported further that in Massachusetts, “There is a grate dele [sic] of Blacks from Albany Troy & Scodock and all around marbel town [sic] &&.” The earliest advertisement I found for a Dutch-speaking runaway dates to . There were, of course, runaway slaves in New York and New Jersey before this date. As early as , for instance, Virginia passed an act to pay New Netherlanders for the return of runaway servants and promised to provide payment when Virginia masters refused to return Dutch runaways. Reference to a warrant for the arrest of runaway slaves of Cornelius Van Borsum survives from  in the paper of Governor Edmund Andros. The Andros Papers also include a record of a “Hue and Cry after Jacob, Runaway Slave of Sweer Teunissen of Schenectady.” In English legal history, a “hue and cry” was a public call for citizens to assist in the arrest of a criminal. It was explicitly both oral and public, intending to inform the entire community. A hue and cry for a runaway slave of the Dutch minister Henricus Selinus in  also appears in the      





Pennsylvania Packet, August , . The Continental Journal and Weekly Advertiser (Boston) November , . Freeman’s Journal/North American Intelligencer, April , . City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Charleston, SC), September , . Richard Bogardus to Abraham Huffman, June , . University of North Carolina Special Collections, Collection Number -z. Act XV: An Act for the Pay of Dutch Masters Bringing in Runaway Servants, in The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia. Vol. , William Waller Hening, ed. (New York: R&W&G Bartow, ), . Matthias Nicholas to the Sheriff of New York City, September , , in Peter R. Christoph and Florence A. Christoph, eds., The Andros Papers, – Files of the Provincial Secretary of New York during the Administration of Governor Sir Edmund Andros, – (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ), . Andros Papers, . “Speaks good English and Dutch, can read dutch, he Speakes good Maquase and Mahikanders Indian Langadge.”

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



well-known record collection of O’Callaghan. In the case of Lewis Morris v. Lewis DeBois, of October , there is reference to “negroes taken by the Dutch” and sold in Esopus (Kingston), who then ran away to the defendant. Finally, Dennis Maika has written about the slave Jack, who ran away from the Philipse plantation in Westchester in . Jack appears to have made his escape via Connecticut to Rhode Island, intending to find a ship to Madagascar. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch and English in the Hudson Valley were constantly worried about slaves escaping to New France, and they even passed laws restricting slaves from wandering too far north of Albany. In , the Monsieur de Denonville guaranteed New York’s governor Donagan that a certain pair of black slaves from Schenectady who had been thought to have fled to Quebec would, if found, be “bound and manacled” and returned. As England warred with France, the threat of runaways to Quebec drew a response from the New York colonial assembly. An act of  prohibited slaves from traveling more than  miles north of Albany, out of fear that they would flee to the French. The act noted: “[T]he Number of Slaves in the Cities of New-York, and Albany, as also within the several Counties, Towns, and Mannors within this Colony, doth daily increase, and that they have been oftentimes Guilty of Confederating together in Running away, and of other ill and dangerous Practices.” The threat stretched south of Albany, as evidenced by a letter from  in which Robert Livingston complained about two of his slaves who had run away

 





 

O’Callaghan Vol. XXXVIII, p. . Selinus’s name was also spelled Selyns. “Proceedings of the General Court of Assizes, Held in the City of New York, October ,  to October , .” Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year  (New York: NewYork Historical Society, ), . Dennis J. Maika, “Encounters: Slavery and the Philipse Family, –,” in Roger Panetta, ed., Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, ), –. “Hue and cry after Jacob, a runaway Negro of Sweer Thenissee of Schenectady; speaks good English, Dutch, good Mohawk, and Mohegan,” in English MSS, Vol. XXVIII, pp. , , . Calendar of Historical MSS, part II, p. , September , . In a specific example of this, Dominie Petrus Tesschenmaeker of Schenectady complained in  that two of his slaves had gone to the French. See Burke, Mohawk Frontier, . See: “An Act to prevent the Running away of Negro Slaves out of the City and County of Albany, to the French at Canada,”  in Colonial Law of New York, I, –. Act revived in . J. R. Brodhead, B. Fernow, and E. B. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, , Vol.  (Albany, NY: Weed Parsons & Co., –), . An Act for the more Effectual preventing and punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negro, and other Slaves, for the better Regulating them, and for Repealing the Acts herein mentioned relating thereto, New York: Acts –, National Archives London, CO /.

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey to “Mont Royall” (Montreal). Later eighteenth-century advertisements for New York slaves escaping to Canada could sometimes be found in newspapers in Quebec, and it appears that in a few instances, these slaves spoke Dutch. Codified restrictions on slave movements increased over time, although the enforcement of some laws probably lapsed. Heightened fears and new regulations often emerged when the English were at war with the French, or following slave revolts such as those in New York City in  and . In an act of , New York’s free blacks were prohibited from owning land, houses, and pistols. In , it was made unlawful for a slave to “have or use any Gun, Pistol, Sword, Club, or any other Kind of Weapon whatsoever, but in the Preference or by the Direction of his, her, or their Master or Mistress.” In some sense, it is quite amazing that such laws were needed, as it implies that free blacks or slaves, prior to the passing of these laws, might have legally owned land, houses, or weapons. But this should probably be taken not as a watershed change in the freedom of New York’s blacks to own private property, but rather as a codification of previously existing sentiments that such things should not be allowed. In the  uprising in New York, about seventy black persons were arrested and punishments were severe. The Boston News-Letter reported that “[s]ix of them have been their own Executioners by Shooting and cutting their own Throats; Three have been Executed according to Law; one burnt, a second broke upon the wheel, and a third hung alive, and nine more of the Murdering Negro’s are to be Executed to morrow.” The laws of  that followed in consequence of the uprising were instrumental in establishing a system of control and punishment featuring  

 

R. Livington to Lawrence Smith, April , . O’Callaghan, Documentary History of the State of New York, Vol.  (), . Valerie Martin, “Racial Slavery and the Development of Gendered Power in the Quebec Gazette: The Role of Fugitive Slave and Slave Sale Notices, –,” Journal of Eastern Townships Studies  (Fall ), –. A few slaves in Quebec had also been purchased in Albany. Charmaine A. Nelson, “A ‘Tone of Voice Peculiar to New-England’: Fugitive Slave Advertisements and the Heterogeneity of Enslaved People of African Descent in EighteenthCentury Quebec,” Current Anthropology : (October ), –. Examples of sales of enslaved persons from New York to Quebec are listed in William Renwick Riddell, The Slave in Canada (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, ), . Riddell gives some sales in pounds, others in “louis,” and some in dollars, years before the dollar was introduced in . See also: Frank Mackey, Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, – (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ), –. “An Act for the more Effectual Preventing and Punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negro and other Slaves” (October , ) in Colonial Laws of New York, II, –. Boston News-Letter, April , .

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



public whippings. In that year, the state passed An Act for Preventing, Suppressing, and Punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negroes, and Other Slaves. This required that no more than three slaves could gather together nor be entertained at another house without the consent of their master or mistress. The law also gave the right for towns to appoint a common “whipper,” thereby ending any confusion about where punishment for civil crimes should take place. Local regulations restricted slave movements further. In , Dutchess County aimed to prevent its slave population from visiting Ulster County and ordered that no black person was to be found using a canoe on the Hudson without permission from their master. In , as the colonists warred with the French, a New York law banned all slaves above the age of fourteen from traveling a mile beyond their homes without a pass. Should a slave be found breaking the law, it would be “adjudged a felony, without benefit of clergy.” The phrase “without clergy,” suggesting that the convicted could not meet with a priest or minister before death, added a dehumanizing element to the punishment and was intended to strike extra fear. Runaway slave advertisements are “extraordinary documents,” notes Jonathan Prude in an article from . They are “[a]lmost unimaginably rich in detail, they provide brisk but arresting portraits of people drawn mainly from the anonymous ‘lower sort’ . . . from the unfree laborers who formed large contingents of American’s eighteenth-century work force.” Prude argues that such advertisements were fundamentally descriptions. What we might take from this is that advertisements mentioned things like language because language was an essential part of describing a slave. Such a reading suggests as well that readers of colonial newspapers could quickly spot a Dutch accent, distinguishing it from, say, a German accent or the English accent of a slave born in Africa. The existence of Dutch-speaking slaves was common knowledge everywhere from Virginia to Boston. The text of many advertisements is not always clear about the ability of a slave to speak Dutch, and terms like “some Dutch” or “good Dutch” are    

Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Province of New York from  to  (London: J. Baskett, ), –. Ulster County Archives, - County Clerk Minutes, Justices Meetings, July , . James Macauley, The Natural, Statistical, and Civil History of the State of New-York (New York: Gould and Banks, ), . Jonathan Prude, “To Look Upon the Lower Sort: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, –,” Journal of American History : (), –, specifically .

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey subjective and depend on the observer. Some advertisements note that the slave speaks Dutch but neglect to say whether he or she also speaks any English. Any number of other selection biases might be at work here in the data. For example, monolingual or near monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves probably had fewer connections outside of their local communities. Slaves who spoke only Dutch would have faced an added barrier to escape, the language barrier. Near-monolingual Dutch slaves may have been less likely to have an available support network to aid them in their escape. We should expect, therefore, that there were more monolingual and nearmonolingual Dutch-speaking slaves relative to Dutch–English bilingual slaves in this period than the data indicate. Nevertheless, a few things can be established quite clearly from the data. First, there were monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves in New York throughout the eighteenth century. Second, most Dutch-speaking slaves also spoke English, or at least a good deal of English. Third, these slaves must have moved around a lot, especially in the earlier period, because a good portion of them spoke French, Spanish, and “High Dutch” (German) in addition to Dutch and English. Fourth, right up until the passage of state emancipation laws, there continued to be slaves in New York and New Jersey whose primary language was Dutch. The multilingual nature of Dutch-speaking slaves is clear, especially in the earliest advertisements – those from the s through s. Johnny, listed in , could speak English, French, and Dutch. William Smith, “a negro indentured servant,” could speak English, High Dutch, and Low Dutch. In fact, all but two Dutch-speaking runaways from the period  to  appeared to speak English at least as well as Dutch. Only later were there more Dutch-speaking runaways who spoke little English. Hank (listed in ) spoke “better Dutch than English,” Cyrus () spoke Dutch and “very bad English,” Pomp () “broken English, speaks Dutch fluently,” Mink () “the English language he speaks brokenly – the Dutch fluent,” and Tom () “commonly speaks Dutch, and very bad English.” So far, none of this is an entirely novel addition to historians’ knowledge. But it is less frequently acknowledged that there was a Dutchspeaking slave population in New York and New Jersey that endured well 

A new study of the “Spanish negroes” of New York is: Beatriz Carolina Peña Núñez,  Años De Esclavitud: Juan Miranda y otros negros espanoles en la Nueva York colonial (Colombia: Editorial Universario del Rosario, ). An English translation is forthcoming with Cornell University Press.

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



17 30 –1 73 9 17 40 –1 74 9 17 50 –1 75 9 17 60 –1 76 9 17 70 –1 77 9 17 80 –1 78 9 17 90 –1 79 9 18 00 –1 80 9 18 10 –1 81 9 18 20 –1 82 7

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

Monolingual Dutch

Figure .

Mostly Dutch

Bilingual

Beer English

Dutch language abilities among runaways by decade.

beyond the end of New Netherland, and that slaves had mixed and various language abilities. What is new here is an inference that the number of runaway slaves speaking better Dutch than English increased over time, not only in real numbers but also in the percent of runaway advertisements that mention Dutch language abilities. As late as the s, there were slaves in New York and New Jersey who were primarily or exclusively Dutch speakers. This may indicate that while slavery was expanding in New York, not all Dutch-speaking regions were integrated into English language culture, society, and markets. To demonstrate this point (see Figure .), I coded the advertised runaways for their language abilities:  for monolingual Dutch,  for those who spoke more Dutch than English,  for those with equal ability in Dutch and English, and  for those who spoke better English than Dutch. This is, of course, a subjective and relative ranking, but it may serve as a useful estimate. I labeled only  slaves as Dutch monolingual (code ), while  I coded as speaking better Dutch than English (code ),  likely spoke Dutch and English at nearly the same level (code ), and  spoke English and only some Dutch (code ). Interestingly, monolingual or near-monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves were not limited to one isolated rural pocket. Instead, some of the most obvious cases of monolingual or near-monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves are, stretching across Staten Island (), in Tappan, Orange County (); Staten Island (); Cranberry, Middlesex New Jersey (); Orangetown Rockland (); Westchester (); Trenton, Essex, New

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey Jersey (); Kingston (Ulster County) (); Dutchess (); Helleberg (Albany) (); Shodach, Rensselaer County (); Narrows (Kings County) (); Clintontown, Dutchess (); Marbletown, Ulster (); Rensselaerville (); Middleburgh, Schoharie (); Hurley, Ulster (); New Paltz, Ulster (); Ringwood, Essex, New Jersey (); Claverack, Columbia (); and Warwick, Orange (). About  percent of these advertisements were for men ( out of the  who mention sex or give a typically male or female name). The average age of runaways, from  advertisements that give an age, was twenty-six years. It is clear that slaves were using the Dutch language in the places mentioned in the advertisements at least until those dates mentioned. This observation is useful in charting the history of the decline of the Dutch language in New York and New Jersey. Although the English language had conquered New York City and the Hudson Valley, Dutch was alive and even dominant in many households, villages, and rural areas in the first decades of the nineteenth century. This is in line with the observation of the Dutch traveler Gerhardus Balthazar Bosch, who visited the Hudson Valley and New Jersey in , observing that Dutch was commonly spoken in both the Albany area and in Bergen County, New Jersey. The American Gazetteer of  wrote, as well, about the widespread persistent use of Dutch: “The English language is generally spoken throughout the State, but is not a little corrupted by the Dutch dialect, which is still spoken in some counties, particularly in King’s, Ulster, Albany, and that part of Orange which lies S. of the mountains.” Reporting on his trip in New York of , although writing in , Harm Jan Huidekoper notes, “on Long Island, in New York along the North River, at Albany, Schenectady &c the low Dutch was yet in general the common language of most of the old people, and particularly of the Negroes though in New York it had begun to be superseded by the English language.” The existence of English-speaking slaves who knew a bit of Dutch indicates that there were a substantial number of slaves who grew up in English-speaking environments and then spent some time with a Dutchspeaking master or in a Dutch-speaking community. Slaves were often hired out, even between primarily English and primarily Dutch   

Jan Noordegraaf, “A Language Lost: The Case of Leeg Duits (‘Low Dutch’),” Academic Journal of Modern Philology  (), –. Jedidiah Morse, The American Gazetteer (Boston, , entry for New York, no page number used). Harm Jan Huidekoper, Autobiography of Harm Jan Huidekoper (Cambridge, MA: Crimson Printing Company, ) .

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



communities. Shades of bilingualism dominated throughout the eighteenth century, but slaves whose primary language was Dutch were common even at the end of the century. Finally, it appears that the bilingual nature of the majority of the Dutch-speaking slaves in the region may provide a clue as to why the Dutch-speaking African American population disappeared with little notice in the nineteenth century. They gradually adopted the English language, and could, upon emancipation, blend into free English-speaking African American communities. The data can also be sorted by the geographical origins of the Dutchspeaking runaway slaves. A few patterns are clear, one of which is that there is an increasing number of runaway slave advertisements over time as one looks northward up the Hudson Valley. Specifically, there is a spike in the s and s in Albany, Columbia, and Ulster counties. Meanwhile, advertisements for runaway slaves in New York City (Manhattan) fades out in the s, and the numbers in Orange, Westchester, and Richmond remain small but stable. It is possible that slaves in New York City, by the nineteenth century, could generally speak English without much of a Dutch accent, even if they could speak Dutch. Perhaps in the city, then, it became less useful to describe the runaway as a Dutch speaker if their language would not give them away. This may also indicate that it was rare for Dutch-speaking slaves, who were mostly from rural areas, to be sold to persons living in New York City. Given the slave population changes over time by county, the direction of slave sales was probably mostly out of New York City towards the Hudson Valley and New Jersey. Figure . illustrates Dutch-speaking runaways by region and decade. For the purposes of this figure, the Hudson Valley consists of all counties from Westchester to Albany. The Dutch-speaking runaways from New Jersey came from Morris, Essex, Middlesex, Bergen, Hunterdon, and Somerset counties, essentially the northern half of the state, or what was once known as East Jersey before it became part of New Jersey Proper in . More Dutch-speaking runaway slave advertisements came from the Hudson Valley than from all other regions combined. Clearly, the most dominant trend in the data is the increase in advertisements from the Hudson Valley in the s through s. In rough comparison to the census numbers for slaves, it appears that the number of Dutch-speaking runaways per region over time correlates well with the absolute number of Dutch-speaking slaves in those regions. Northeastern New Jersey seems to defy this observation, however, since runaway slave advertisements peaked in the s and then remained in the single digits per decade until fading in the s, with slave numbers

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey 120 100 80 60 40 20

17 30 –1 73 9 17 40 –1 74 9 17 50 –1 75 9 17 60 –1 76 9 17 70 –1 77 9 17 80 –1 78 9 17 90 –1 79 9 18 00 –1 80 9 18 10 –1 81 9 18 20 –1 82 7

0

Hudson Valley

NYC

New Jersey

Long Island and Staten Island

Figure . Dutch-speaking runaway slaves by region and decade.

in the state increasing all the while. Advertisements declined in the period –, and ceased after that. There are a number of possible explanations for this. As final emancipation in New York neared (a law for gradual emancipation appeared in , but complete emancipation came later in ) and manumissions increased, slaves saw freedom on the horizon and understood that the risk of running was too high. But it is more likely that masters stopped spending money to pay for advertisements to recover their slaves, as the future value of the slaves to their masters was declining. Some elderly slaves, slave children, and disabled slaves were said to have negative value, and New York required that slaves could not be manumitted without proof that they could maintain themselves. If low-valued slaves chose to run away, masters had an incentive to let them go, but they also feared that they would become legally liable if the courts determined that a slave had been freely let go instead of having run away. For this reason, there are many advertisements for runaway slaves in New York that offer paltry rewards, indicating not only the lack of desire to recover the slave but also the concern of legal protection for the slaveholder. For example, when the twenty-one-year-old slave Isaac ran away, Nicholas Lansing of Orangetown, New York, offered one dollar for his return. The numbers of runaway slaves in New York was certainly much higher than the advertisements indicate. Statewide, runaway activity probably 

The Evening Post (New York), May , .

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



peaked during the chaos of the Revolutionary War, establishing a pattern for others to follow in the decades to come. Because many slaves fled to the English forces during the Revolution, their masters did not bother with posting advertisements if they believed they could not recover their slaves. Graham Hodges has identified  slaves from New York and New Jersey who fled New York City with the British from  to . From this, he argues that “New Jersey slaveowners gave notice of only  of  or  percent of runaways during the American Revolution.” Runaways from Bergen County, New Jersey, to New York City were so common during the Revolutionary War that the British Commander in the city, Colonel Cuyler, issued an order to “prevent their crossing as they had become ‘such a burden to the town.’” There is plenty of evidence that many Dutch-speaking slaves fled their homes in the Hudson Valley during the Revolution without any corresponding runaway slave advertisements to be found in their wake. In Albany in , the Commissioners for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York warned of a slave who was “endeavouring to Stir up the minds of the Negroes against their Masters and raising Insurrections among them.” In , they wrote of a “negro man” arrested on his way to the enemy and warned that slaves at Nistageune (near Schenectady) intended to flee to Canada. The Manor of Rensselaerwyk established a curfew for slaves in  and reminded citizens of the law of , telling them to be extra vigilant because “meetings of the Negroes are more frequent of late than usual.” In Black Bondage in the North, McManus notes that slaves aimed for New York City and hoped to board ships where captains with short-man crews would take them on as sailors. This is evidenced in the New York Weekly Mercury, July , , where this is a warning to free blacks not to harbor fugitives in the city. Significant numbers of runaways could be found at the docks in New York, as they attempted to board ships as cheap



 

 

Graham Russell Hodges, “Black Revolt in New York City and the Neutral Zone: –,” in Paul A. Blije and William Pencak, eds., New York in the Age of the Constitution, – (Plainsboro Township, NJ: Associated University Press, ), –, specifically . Van Winkle, Old Bergen, . Victor H. Paltsits, ed., Minutes of the Commissioners for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York, Albany County Sessions, – (Albany: State of New York, ), :, :, . James Sullivan, ed., Minutes of the Albany Committee of Correspondence, –, Vol.  (Albany: The Division of Archives and History for the University of the State of New York, ), , . McManus, Black Bondage, –.

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey labor for captains engaged in trade or privateering on the Atlantic. New York’s black men, both free-born and self-emancipated, found work in maritime trades, not only in New York City but also in other American port cities like Philadelphia. The New York Journal and Patriotic Register of January , , advertised a slave-catching service. There was also increased runaway activity in the heavily Dutch Ulster County in the s. There, the Slave Apprehending Society of Shawangunk formed in response to the state legislature’s debates on the abolition of slavery. Most of the members of this society had Dutch last names. Yet the collected advertisements in this study mention only one runaway slave from Ulster County for the s, and ten in the s – more after the formation of the slavecatching society than before it. In  in New Paltz, citizens formed “the Society of Negroes Unsettled,” a private organization of slaveholders who came together to combine funds and pay members to engage in finding runaway slaves from their neighborhood. A year later, a group of men of New Paltz signed an agreement that if they were to apprehend the slaves of another group of New Paltz men, the first group would be able to keep a portion of the amount the slaves would be sold for. Runaway-slave activity that was not reported in the press is exceptionally difficult to track, but evidence of it can crop up in sources from the period. For example, in , Senator Martin Van Buren (later president of the United States) received a letter offering the potential return of one of his runaway slaves, who had appeared in Worchester, Massachusetts. The correspondent, Alzono Hammond, noted that the slave “quit” him (Van Buren) “some  years since,” and Hammond wondered if Van Buren would be willing to sell the slave, should Hammond be able to take him into possession. Van Buren’s response is unknown, but on the back of the envelope from Hammond, he scribbled that if Hammond “could get him

    

Charles Foy, “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, –,” Early American Studies : (Spring ), –. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ), . Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, – (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ). Historic Huguenot Street, Society of Negroes unsettled, https://cdm.contentdm.oclc.org/ digital/collection/hhs/id/, accessed December , . Bounty Hunters agreement, --. Roelof J. and Ezekiel Elting Family Papers, Historic Huguenot Stree, https://cdm.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/hhs/id/, accessed March , .

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



without violence I would take $.” The New York City abolitionist Thomas Van Rensselaer fled from slavery in Montgomery County in . A newspaper article from  says that “[h]is offended master issued hand-bills, sent messengers in all directions, and traveled himself as far as Canada” in search of his missing enslaved man. The extent of the runaway phenomenon in New York must have put significant social and economic pressure on slaveholding in the state, and indeed the region. Michael Groth calls this resistance in the Hudson Valley “the most direct means of challenging slavery” and argues that it hastened emancipation. What, however, was the cause-and-effect mechanism at work here? How did runaway slaves hasten emancipation? A likely answer is that runaways made slaveholding expensive, both for slaveholders as individuals and for a society that spent resources to enforce the slave system. Jeffrey Hummel’s Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War: The Political Economy of Slavery, Secession, and Emancipation () includes an important study of the economic effect of runaway slaves and provides points of comparison for this current study. Hummel argues that Missouri slave owners were worried about Kansas becoming a free state not only because it would upset the balance of power in Congress but also because slaves in Missouri would be able to run west to freedom, in addition to north and east. One might draw a parallel between Missouri in the s and New York at the turn of the eighteenth century. In both cases, slavery was hemmed in on multiple sides. Slaves running away from their masters in New York could head to Vermont, where slavery was abolished in ; to Pennsylvania or Connecticut, where gradual emancipation began in  and , respectively; to Canada, where slavery was recognized but not as well established; or even to Massachusetts, where slavery was fully abolished in . 

  

The Martin Van Buren Papers, Library of Congress. A. G. Hammond to Martin Van Buren, December , , Van Buren Papers: Series , General Correspondence, –, Box , Reel , www.loc.gov/resource/mss.__/?sp=&r=.,.,.,.,. Van Buren. Augustus, a man enslaved by the Van Buren family adopted the Van Buren last name. In , he was a free man who moved to Tioga County. He had worked for his own freedom for a master in Massachusetts. W. B. Gay, Historical Gazetteer of Tioga County, – (Syracuse, NY: W. B. Gay & Co., ), –. The Colored American, October , . Groth, “The African American Struggle against Slavery in the Mid-Hudson Valley, –,” –, specifically page . Jeffrey Hummel, “Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War: The Political Economy of Slavery, Secession, and Emancipation,” PhD dissertation, , http://ssrn.com/abstract= .

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey A diarist visiting traveling through New York in  remarked on this situation when he wrote: “I arrived toward  at Mr. Boon’s, who, I discovered, had left for New York to look for his Negroes, who had escaped. It is nearly impossible to keep slaves in this region, where everyone encourages them to become free, and where the woods and the people are favorable to their escaping.” Following national law, a slaveholder from New York could enter other states to attempt to reclaim his “chattel slaves,” but this could be a difficult, expensive proposition. The case Glen v. Hodges, settled at the New York Supreme Court in , relates the story of a slave from Albany who fled to Rutland, Vermont, where, after a few years, the citizens of Rutland assumed that he was a free man. This meant slaves had more directions in which to flee. In the end, however, the greatest destination for New York runaways was New York City, where they could mix with the growing free black population of the rising metropolis. The history of slavery in the Caribbean demonstrates that no island that is half-free and half-slave retains slavery for very long. Likewise, New York City acted as a magnet and safe haven for runaway slaves, threatening the slave system at the state level. The rates of runaways in New York, and in particular among Dutchspeaking slaves, appear to be very high in comparison to rates in the American South. Historian Shane White noted that between  and , an average of at least thirty-five runaways per year escaped from New York and New Jersey. White, however, excluded runaways from counties to the north and west of Ulster and Dutchess counties, where there were large Dutch-speaking slave populations. Hummel tallied the numbers of fugitives per year in the  and  censuses. The reported rates of runaways were fairly consistent across states, although higher in the border states than in the Deep South. For the year , for example, the average of runaways for all slave states combined was . percent of the slave population, or . percent of “prime males,” and in , . percent of the slave population (one of , slaves), or . percent of “prime 





Simon Desjardins and Pierre Pharoux, Castorland Journal: An Account of the Exploration and Settlement of Northern New York State by French Émigrés in the Years  to , ed. John A. Gallucci (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –. Glen v. Hodges (January ), in Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature, and in the Court for the Trial of Impeachments and the Correction of Errors, in the State of New-York, Vol. , William Johnson, ed. (Albany, NY: Gould, Blanks, ), . Also online https://cite.case.law/johns///, accessed August , . Shane White, “A Question of Style: Blacks in and around New York City in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Journal of American Folklore : (), –, specifically .

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



Table . Minimum reported Dutch-speaking slave advertisements in New York, average per year (by decade) s – s – s – s – s – s – s –

. per year . per year . per year . per year . per year . per year . per year

males.” Because runaways were predominantly prime-aged males, runaway activity struck directly at New Yorker slave pocketbooks. A standard ratio is that there was one prime-age male for every five slaves. This means that although  out of every  slaves might have run away per year, the ratio of prime males who ran away was five times greater. Of the  Dutch-speaking runaway slaves mentioned in advertisements, at least  came from New York;  from New Jersey;  from Pennsylvania;  from Massachusetts;  each from Maryland, Virginia, and Rhode Island; and  each from Connecticut, Delaware, and South Carolina. Another seven were likely from New York, but no clear geographic descriptor is available in the advertisement. Taking just the confirmed reports for New York (), we arrive at the following rates of Dutch-speaking runaway slaves per year as shown in Table .. In , New York’s slave population stood at ,. Over the next decade, it would fall to ,. If, for example,  percent of the slave population of  and  were Dutch-speaking slaves, then these Dutch speakers were running away at a minimum reported (i.e., advertised) rate of at least  per  per year in the s and  per  per year in the s. If, however, the Dutch-speaking slave population was only  percent of the state’s slave population (in line with a previous estimate by Graham Hodges), then the minimum reported rate of Dutch-speaking slave runaways during those decades would have been twice as high,  out of  per year in the s and  out of  per year in the s. The 

Jeffrey Hummel, “Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War: The Political Economy of Slavery, Secession, and Emancipation” (unpublished dissertation, ), –, http://ssrn .com/abstract=. See also: Delbanco, The War before the War. The highest rates occurred in Delaware, where in  around . percent of all slaves fled, or in , when . percent of all slaves fled. Delaware, because of its small size and small number of slaves, should be regarded as a statistical anomaly here.

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey actual rate of Dutch-speaking runaways must have been higher, but by how much is unclear. Shane White estimated that “Dutch-speaking slaveowners probably did not advertise in the press. Most of the owners of Dutch-speaking slaves in fact had non-Dutch names and had presumably purchased these slaves from owners of Dutch origin.” Nor is it a simple matter to guess a slave’s Dutch connection by their name. Some slaves of Dutch masters had Dutch names like Piet and Wouter but they also often had English or classical names. Many also retained African names, particularly Akan names following the days of the week Quash (Sunday), Cudjoe (Monday), Ebo/Kobi (Tuesday), Quack (Wednesday), Yaw (Thursday), Cuffee (Friday), and Quamino (Saturday). And names could change or be abbreviated in ways that are not obvious. Of the  runaways considered in this study, I counted just  from owners with Dutch names. Omitting the eighteen advertisements that do not give the name of the slaveholder means that in just above  percent ( out of ) of advertisements in which slaves were said to speak Dutch did their masters also have Dutch last names. Two things may explain this. First, slaves raised in Dutch families had probably been sold to English-speaking families. Second, Dutch-speaking slave owners were less likely to take out an advertisement for a runaway slave, or to mention that the slave spoke Dutch. There were certainly families with Dutch-speaking slaves who had non-Dutch names but were of Dutch ancestry on their maternal side. Also, there were examples of families like the Livingstons and Zabriskies who had non-Dutch-origin names but nevertheless learned to speak Dutch and integrate into Dutch society in New Netherland or early New York. Unfortunately, data on runaway slaves in the North is limited and suffers from a number of problems of reporting and representativeness. It is impossible to know, for example, just what percent of the actual number of runaways appear in advertisements and what percent of those advertisements have survived. For New England, for example, Antonio Bly gives rough numbers for runaways per decade. There were “at least”  runaways in the s, Bly writes. In the s and s, Bly  



White, “Question of Style,” . There were slaves named “Piet” and “Wouter” in . A. J. F. Van Laer, Early Records of the City and County of Albany and Colony of Rensselaerswyck, Vol.  (Albany: The University of the State of New York, ), p. . Shane White, “The Allure of the Advertisement: Slave Runaways in and around New York City,” Journal of the Early Republic : (Winter ), .

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



continues, there were an average of  per decade, and in the s, around . Bly gives no guesses for New England runaway numbers for later decades, when the Dutch-speaking New York numbers were on the rise. Comparing this to New York data may not be very useful because we do not know the comparative rates at which people in various Northern states posted advertisements for their runaway slaves. But by comparison, we can say that there were at least ten Dutch New York and New Jersey runaway slaves in the s, an average of thirty-two per decade in the s and s, and the same number in the s. The number of Dutch-speaking runaways peaked, however, in the decade –, at . Runaway slaves lowered the value of retained slaves and made New York slavery more costly. The primary reason for this is that, as running away became an established strategy, the risk grew of each slave absconding. Who would be willing to buy a slave if there was a high likelihood of the person running away? Price differences between South and North (more expensive for slaves farther south) were based on more than productivity or marginal revenue product; they were also affected by runaway risk. In other words, prices were lower if escape risk was high. In the later years of New York slavery, runaways put pressure on slaveholders to manumit their slaves, extracting the most amount of labor from them before agreeing to let them go. Gerald Mullin found a similar effect at play in Virginia in the s, the era of the greatest number of slave manumissions in its history coincided with a period of high rates of slave runaways. As manumissions increased, running away became easier, as there were more places for a fugitive to take shelter, more sympathetic supporters, and more safe bases to run to. New York City in particular was fertile ground for slaves pretending to be free. In the nineteenth century, observers often noted that the Dutch held slaves even when it was not financially sensible to do so. If a slave’s cost was not a function of his marginal product alone, but instead reflected the social advantage a slave provided his or her 





Antonio T. Bly, ed., A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England, – (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, ). Bly’s book is a collection of the newspaper advertisements he found for Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. It does not include New York or New Jersey. The traditional argument for the price of a slave, based on marginal revenue product, is found in Conrad and Meyer. Conor Lennon, “Slave Escape, Prices, and the Fugitive Act of ,” Journal of Law & Economics  (August ), –. Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey enslaver, then runaways might have contributed to an increase in the cost of slaves, at least in the short term. A study of slave prices in New York might help answer this question. Runaway slaves had always been a problem in Dutch New York, and the cost of recovering them would have made slaveholding a riskier financial venture. When two of Robert Livingston’s slaves ran away to Canada in , he feared that others would be lured away by the French and Indians. To prevent this, he stationed twenty Palatines at guard for nearly a week until he felt secure that the threat had passed. The state of New York does not appear to have had slave patrols, at least not consistent ones. But cities and counties still bore costs from runaways. The Overseers of the Poor needed to spend efforts certifying which free persons deserved support. The courts needed to determine which individuals were free and which were enslaved. Regional patterns also contributed to the success of runaways and the burden such movement put on the slave system. Gradual emancipation for slaves became law in Vermont (), Pennsylvania (), New Hampshire and Massachusetts (), and Connecticut and Rhode Island (). In , with the Northwest Ordinance, Congress banned slavery in the new lands to the west. The laws enabled slavery to hold on in these New England states for another generation, but by the time the New York legislature enacted a gradual emancipation act in , the state was surrounded by free-soil states. Only their neighbor to the south, New Jersey, had not yet passed emancipation legislation. Reports like the following from  show that early nineteenthcentury runaways had more options than ever before. It has been conjectured that she [Dine] has been decoyed away, and may have got on board of some vessel, and gone to New-York. Or in company, perhaps, with some black man, may have gone up the Mohawk river, where she said she had children. She once ran away from her former master and rambled into Connecticut, where she was taken up and brought back.





About  weeks ago we had an Information from Albany yt my  negroes who runn away last fall and are got to Canada by the help of a River Indian, ye one is with ye Govr of Mont Royall ye oyr with Seber yt was here yt they had told ye french yt there was  more negroes from whence they Run upon wh ye french had sent yt Indian yt brought them there &  more to this Place in Particular to take ye negroes, we had upon this  Palantines yt keep guard  or  Days & then were dismissd, hearing it was ye negroes at Albany that were to Runn away if ye french Indians come. R. Livingston to Lawrence Smith, April , . O’Callaghan, Documentary History of the State of New York, Vol.  (), . The Expositor, June , .

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



A slave catcher could not look for a runaway slave only in the city, or in the local area, but had to consider the frontier and neighboring states too. Runaway activity became part of a negotiation strategy for black slaves. Running away was always a threat when the slave faced severe mistreatment or sale to another slave owner. The case of De Fonclear v. Shottenkirk, decided at the New York State Supreme Court in , tells of a slave who ran away immediately after being sold. The slave did not like his new master, and so the seller allowed the slave to work for the purchaser on trial, to see if the situation could be tolerable. But when the new master sent the slave to town to get some tobacco, the slave fled. The chance that the slave could be recovered might be suggested in the low reward of only $ that the purchaser, De Fonclear, was willing to offer as a reward despite having paid $ to acquire the slave. The writer Daniel Van Winkle relates that many of the runaways during the Revolution returned to their masters in Bergen County, New Jersey, were taken back in, and were thereafter allowed their own private gardens, the product of which the slaves could take to New York City to sell. They were given the freedom to travel to the city by canoe, sell garden produce, use the proceeds to make purchases as they pleased, and then return to New Jersey. Here one can see some of the real negotiating power of the runaway threat. After the Revolution, especially for slave owners close to New York City, a new kind of slavery had to develop. The narratives of kind treatment of slaves recorded in so many local histories, as well as early histories of slaves in and around New York City, may be based mostly on this new social order. Advertisements for Dutch-speaking runaways indicate that there was a large, persistent population in New York and New Jersey and that this population had some monolingual Dutch speakers but consisted mostly of Dutch–English bilingual slaves. The Dutch slave population generally was never isolated from American English. However, certain Dutch-speaking slaves in certain places in New York and New Jersey were indeed isolated from English speakers. These advertisements indicate the geographical distribution of Dutch-speaking slaves, the expansion of Dutch-speaking slavery in the Hudson Valley in the mid to late eighteenth century, and its demise first in New York City and then elsewhere in the state (Figure .).

 

De Fonclear v. Shottenkirk (May ), in Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature, –. Van Winkle, Old Bergen, –.

 Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey

Figure . An advertisement for a runaway slave named Harre, by Philip Schuyler, .

The extent of runaways contributed to the need to clarify state laws on slavery. It is no coincidence that the s and s, the decades with the highest rates of runaway slaves, were also the decades in which New York passed an increasing number of laws that protected slaves and attempted to ameliorate their situation. The system of rigid control broke down during and after the Revolution, as slaves became more mobile and took flight. In addition, as antislavery sentiment was building, state laws began to turn in favor of slaves. In the s, slaves could give testimony, while for capital cases, they had the right to trial by jury. After the s, new laws regarding slavery in New York tended not to further restrict slave movement or rights but gradually chipped away at the power of masters over their slaves. The legal system shifted, therefore, from a one-sided focus on the preservation of the slave system, to an arena of negotiation between slaves and masters. The New York laws were even respected in other states. The act of  was tested in the case of Henderson v. Negro Tom, in which a New York citizen moved to



J. Kent, Commentaries on American Law, Vol.  (New York: E. B. Clayton, James Van Norden, ), –.

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey



Maryland with his slaves, including Tom, in . The case was decided in favor of Tom, who was set free. New York slaves were carriers, ferry boatmen. They moved locally on Sundays, and traveled longer distances on their own during Christmas and Pinkster. For some time, runaway activity was mitigated because of the threat of physical punishment or sale elsewhere. The economic effects did not bring about the end of slavery in New York, but increasing problems for slaveholders and decreasing profits made the loss of slaves easier for them to bear. 

Hellen Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, Vol.  (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institition of Washington, ), , https://archive.org/details/ volumejudicialcunse/page//, accessed March , .

 

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York

If there were thousands of Dutch-speaking slaves in eighteenth-century New York, and hundreds of them recorded in runaway slave advertisements from the period, why is this history of this topic not better known? Where did these Dutch-speaking slaves go in the nineteenth century? In this chapter, I argue that in New York’s age of emancipation (–), there were thousands of slaves who were sold or moved out of state, but most of these slaves who left New York came from English-speaking areas of the state. Dutch-descent slave owners tended to hold on to their slaves longer, even when the legal threat of emancipation was approaching. New York’s slave population began to decline slowly in the s by around , persons in that decade, but the effects were quite disparate across counties. In the s, New York redrew the borders of many of its counties, carving Delaware County out of Ulster County, and Greene, Schoharie, Rensselaer, and Saratoga from Albany County. In , Ulster County also lost some territory to Orange County, while Orange County ceded some land to Rockland. Setting aside counties with complicated border changes, the slave populations between  and  declined by as much as  percent in Queens,  percent in Suffolk, and  percent in Dutchess, but actually increased by  percent in Kings and  percent in New York City. The unequal decline in slavery in New York State began in earnest after the gradual emancipation law of . According to census returns, the number of slaves decreased from , in  to , in  to , in . At a glance, this appears to be an orderly, linear decline of about , slaves per decade, but a different picture emerges at the county 

In addition, slavery declined by . percent in Westchester, . percent in Richmond, and . percent in Columbia. In the combined Albany–Greene–Schoharie–Rensselaer–Saratoga region, slavery declined by . percent.



Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York 

Ne w

Yo rk Ci W ty es tc he st er Ro ck l Re and ns se la er Qu ee ns Sa ra to ga Su ffo lk Ki ng s Sc ho ha r C o ie lu m b Du i a tc he ss Ul st e Ri ch r m on d Or an ge

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Figure .

Percent decline of slaves relative to total population by county, –.

level. In New York City, for example, emancipation was dramatic. The slave population in the city dropped from , in  to , in  and  in . Similarly, the recorded slave population in Kings County dropped in the three census years from , to , to . In Queens, it fell even faster, from , to  to . In Westchester, slave numbers dropped from , in  to a mere  in . However, in some traditional Dutch locales, especially in the rural Hudson Valley, the slave population actually increased in the period –. A clearer picture emerges with county-level data that compares the slave population relative to the county’s total population. Figure . shows that between  and , slavery decreased much more quickly in places like New York City, Westchester, and Rockland than it did in Ulster, Richmond, and Orange, places of traditional Dutch dominance. The census provides only a snapshot in time, obscured by more selection biases and errors than historians often recognize. Demographic study needs to make adjustments for potential errors in the census and recognize that populations not only grow and decline on their own but also are constantly on the move, mixing with others. Many articles, books, and 

The relative decrease in slaves over time by county can be calculated as one minus the percent of slaves relative to general population in  divided by the percent of slaves relative to general population in . In addition to the counties shown, Schenectady, Greene, and Sullivan Counties formed from Albany between  and , so to measure slavery’s decline there, it is best to combine those counties’ data and measure slavery in a combined Albany–Schenectady–Sullivan–Greene County as an equivalent to the  boundaries of Albany County. From  to , that combined county region saw its total population increase from , to ,, while its slave population fell from , to . The decrease in slaves relative to the total population was . percent, similar therefore to Rockland and Westchester Counties.

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York dissertations on the history of slavery in New York do little more with the study of populations than to restate the census numbers, sometimes in the form of a chart. But they seldom display a deeper understanding about statistics, polling errors, or the dynamics of demographic change. This chapter hopes to push into new territory as the first study that takes a deeper look into the numbers of slaves in New York’s era of emancipation and the role of the Dutch in resisting slave emancipation. There is a significant demographic puzzle that historians face when studying the black population of New York in the state’s era of emancipation. The puzzle is that thousands of slaves seem to go missing in the transition from slavery to freedom. Where did they go; what happened? To make sense of the numbers, some historians have suggested that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, were sold South. But calculating the numbers of slaves who were sold South is difficult, and those who have approached the topic have left this question mostly unanswered. Historian Shane White concluded that it was “impossible” to guess how many New York blacks were kidnapped or sold illegal to the South.” But I believe it is possible to calculate a likely estimate. The keys to solving this puzzle lie in an understanding of common death rates, undercounting on the census, changing sex ratios in New York’s black population, and a proper interpretation of the  emancipation law and its effects on how the children of slaves were counted in the census. The result of an extensive analysis of census data, with various demographic techniques for understanding how populations change over time, leads me to conclude that a large number of New York slaves (something in the range of ,–,) were sold South in the period –, but that few of these came from Dutch slaveholders. Slaveholders in New York had significant economic incentives to sell their slaves South. In the early nineteenth century, slaves in New York sold at much lower rates than did slaves in Southern states. An adult male 



For example, Graham Russell Gao Hodges lists “illegal sales out of state” as one of many factors for population decrease, alongside the not entirely commensurable factors of “declining economic opportunity, worsening racism . . . and unhealthy conditions,” but he does not provide any numbers. Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . A. J. Williams-Myers, Longhammering: Essays on the Forging of an African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley to the Early Twentieth Century (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, ) writes: “[M]any slave holders were reluctant to relinquish their human property without compensation and, therefore, sought to remove their slaves clandestinely from the state to be sold in the south” (p. ). Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, – (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), .

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  slave in New York in the period –, for example, sold for about $. Meanwhile, adult male slaves in Southern states could easily sell for two or three times as much. The general view of this situation was summarized in  by historians Fogel and Engerman, who wrote that the available data strongly suggest that slaveholders in New York and New Jersey were selling their slaves to the South, especially between  and . These sales were probably motivated by the sharp rise in slave prices after the closing of the slave trade which permitted slaveowners to obtain capital gains in excess of the transaction costs involved in slave sales. Thus it is probable that, to a substantial degree, the decline of slavery in the North was due not to emancipation but to the actions of northern slaveholders who were cashing in on capital gains by selling their chattel in southern markets.

In , historian Philip Foner added that “many Massachusetts owners had sold their slaves to the South to avoid loss due to abolition.” The idea that in the era of emancipation Northerners sold their slaves wholesale to the South spread from there, and is commonly cited, despite a paucity of evidence beyond the census returns. Only a few scholars have made more specific claims about how and when New York slave sales to the South might have happened. In , in a dissertation on slavery in Long Island, Richard Shannon Moss speculated that Long Island slaves were sold South in large numbers in the two decades from  to . He reached this conclusion by comparing the non-black population growth rate on Long Island of – ( percent) and – ( percent) with the growth rate of Long Island’s black population for the same period, which was slightly negative. While Moss’s argument is not very sophisticated, the divergent growth rates he points to require explanation. One possible answer is the largescale sale of slaves to the South. However, it is easy to propose other possible explanations for this population decline, such as a large migration of free blacks from Long Island to Manhattan, or a decreased natural birth rate caused by the disruption of emancipation and the struggle of newly   



Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, “Philanthropy at Bargain Prices: Notes on the Economics of Gradual Emancipation,” The Journal of Legal Studies  (June ), . Philip S. Foner, Blacks in the American Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ), . Janet Wells Greene et al., From Forge to Fast Food: A History of Child Labor in New York State: Volume : Colonial Times through the Civil War (Troy, NY: Council for Citizenship Education, Russell Sage College, for the New York Labor Legacy Project, ),  and . Richard Shannon Moss, Slavery on Long Island: Its Rise and Decline during the Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries (PhD dissertation, St. John’s University, ), .

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York emancipated slaves to make ends meet. More work is necessary to confirm or reject Moss’s hypothesis. A second claim, made by economist Claudia Dale Goldin, in an article from  is more extreme and a bit more technical. “It is entirely possible,” she writes, “that only , New York State slaves were freed by abolition legislation, whereas , were sold to slave states farther South.” Goldin comes to this conclusion via a kind of back-of-the-envelope calculation based on census data. She writes: The Federal Census reveals that in  there were , slaves in New York State, and , in . This indicates a drop of about , slaves, if a  percent rate of net increase is allowed for during the ten-year period. This decline in the slave population was partially due to slaveowner anticipation of the  act. The decline in the slave population during the period  to  is even more dramatic. The gradual abolition bill was not actually effective in freeing slaves during this period, although it may have engendered manumission due to mounting social pressure. The  slave population in New York was ,, but the  figure is ,. Using again a  percent net rate of increase yields , slaves who were either manumitted, abandoned children, or smuggled South to slave states.

How does Goldin arrive at the number ,? This is the result of the formula (,  .) – ,, or, in other words, the  slave population increasing at  percent per decade for two decades, minus the total number of slaves in the  census. But Goldin has assumed a  percent per decade compound interest on the natural increase without accounting for the effects that removing members of the population in the first decades would have had on the population growth in the second decade. To arrive at her estimated , possible New York slaves sold South, Goldin adds , (her assumed number of slaves disappearing from  to ) to the , from the period  to . The final sentence in the foregoing quote from Goldin provides wide leeway for what might have happened to New York’s slave population: Slaves were either freed or abandoned or sold South. This is a far cry from Goldin’s earlier statement that it was “entirely possible” that , were 

Claudia Dale Goldin, “The Economics of Emancipation,” The Journal of Economic History : (March ), . Goldin’s statement about , freed and , sold South worked its way into the historiography when it was picked up by Foner, Blacks in the American Revolution, . This chapter of Foner’s book is rife with basic errors. For example, on page  he gives “,” for the slave population in New Jersey in , when it was actually ,. And on page , he confuses the slave count in New York City with that of New York State.

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  sold South. Historians must try to separate possible historical events from likely historical events. Goldin’s hypothesis could only be correct if a number of slaves equal to her entire assumed increase of the slave population were sold South. But her analysis fails to explain why, in most New York counties, from  to , the free black population grew in proportion equal to or greater than the decline of the slave population, which would seem to indicate that many former slaves became free blacks and stayed in their state and county. I believe that Goldin’s estimates are much too high. Her case fails to account for a parallel and offsetting rise of a free black population in New York State during the era of emancipation, undercounting on the census that likely masked some of the growth of the free black population and, most important by far, a statistically demonstrable negative natural rate of increase among slaves. The free black population in any of the three decades in consideration could have grown or declined from at least five factors: () a positive or negative rate of natural increase (the net effect of deaths and births), () increased manumissions of slaves, () runaway New York slaves who were de facto free, () blacks (either slave or free) who migrated to New York and claimed free status, and () kidnapping of free blacks to sell to Southern states. Meanwhile, the slave population of New York could have declined for a number of combined and various reasons, including but not necessarily limited to: () () () () ()

a negative or positive rate of natural increase, manumissions (including self-purchases), runaways, New Yorkers migrating out of state with their slaves, and illegal slave imports and sales of slaves out of state.

Logically, if kidnapping of free blacks in New York was common, or if the free black population in New York experienced a negative rate of natural increase, one would then have to explain the census data by positing an even larger number of slaves and out-of-state blacks who became free New York blacks by . It is important to recognize that while contemporary accounts suggest such sales were indeed happening, they do not give a clear indication of the numbers involved. In , the members of the New York City

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York Manumission Society expressed a general belief that “a practice has become very general of late to Ship Negroes from this to the Southern States & that from thence they are reshiped [sic] to the West Indies.” But the Society’s direct evidence for such a practice, at least in the minutes for that meeting, was one instance in which three slaves had been secretly loaded onto a schooner lying off Corlears Hook (in southeast Manhattan). Since the society’s minutes do not make a numerical claim, it is difficult to know just how extensive this “general practice” of selling slaves South had become. Do they mean  per year, , or ? Even if they were to give general estimates, it would be difficult to accept these uncritically, since the members of this antislavery society certainly could have been motivated to overstate the numbers of slaves who were being sold South. A county history from Paterson, New Jersey, , recalls the phenomenon of slave sales to the South, and while it is not specific about numbers or timing, it might give some suggestion for how the slave selling occurred. “A noted tavern-keeper and horse-dealer on Main street near Broadway,” the author says, “was wont to get together a string of horses and take them South to sell. He usually took with him several negroes to help take care of the animals. It was remarked that he never brought back either horses or negroes, and it was believed that he sold them all in the South.” Sending slaves out of state for crimes appears to have been a common affair in this period. Historian Franklin Ellis found that: In , Thomas Osterhoudt, a slave, confessed to a crime which the court certified could be properly punished only by transportation out of the State, and sentenced him to be so transported within thirty days by his master, of in defaults, the slave should be imprisoned three years. In , Nero, a slave, was convicted of petit larceny, and his master allowed a certificate to transport him from the State to a clime where the people were less fastidious as to rights of property, or where black flesh and blood commanded a quid pro quo in the market.

As late as , in the case of The People v. Alvin, A Black Man, a court convicted an enslaved man of stealing $ and allowed the slaveholder fourteen days to transport him out of state.    

New York City Manumission Society, Standing Committee Minutes, May , . William Nelson, History of the City of Paterson and the County of Passaic, New Jersey (Paterson, NJ: Press Printing and Publishing Co., ), . Franklin Ellis, History of Columbia County, New York. With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia: Everts & Ensign, ), . Putnam County Archives, Series , SV# and #, Putnam County Court of Sessions Records (–).

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  In a newspaper report, about seventy to eighty “negro convicts” from the New York State prison were shipped South in  by a speculator, who tried to sell them in New Orleans. The purchase of slaves with intent to export for sale was made illegal in New York in . A state law of  prohibited the direct export of slaves out of New York, although New Yorkers could move out of the state with their slaves in tow. In , an amendment required a slave owner to have lived in New York for ten years before being allowed to leave the state with any slaves. Records of illegal sales would likely not be kept, but I have found one record that seems to be a slave sale that was against the laws of New York. In a letter dated May , , Peter Gansevoort of Albany, New York, authorized P. Rivery of New Orleans to sell Gansevoort’s enslaved man Prince for $. The twenty-five-year-old Gansevoort, of a Dutch patrician family, was the son of another Peter Gansevoort, a former colonel in the Continental Army, who had died in . The younger Gansevoort may have inherited Prince from his father, who appears to have purchased the same Prince in  and who had been trying to recover the escaped slave in New York in . As a recent law school graduate who had been admitted to the bar in New York, Peter Gansevoort Jr. was certainly aware of the laws regarding slave sales out of state, but may have chosen to ignore them. New York–born slaves can be tracked in other records in the South, however. For example, when reporting a runaway slave, a Southern slave owner and a Southern newspaper editor might not be as careful or indeed concerned at all about mentioning the place of origin of the slaves in question. In , for example, two slaves said to have been from New York, named John Williams and Amatato or Bill Johnson, ran away from Mississippi’s John Veech. Amatato was twenty-four years old at the time, so it is possible that he came South before New York’s export laws had changed. In , Harriet, nineteen years old, a runaway in North 

   

The Evening Post [New York], January , . Nor was New York alone in creating such exceptions. Vermont’s  abolition of slavery allowed Vermonters to continue holding slaves who were under twenty-one years of age, allowing plenty of time for these slaves to be sold out of state, many potentially to New York. Harvey Amani Whitfield, The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, – (Barre: Vermont Historical Society, ), p. . Leo H. Hirsch Jr., “The Slave in New York,” The Journal of Negro History : (October ), –. Schomburg Center, MS Slavery G, Calendar #. Possibly Pedro Luís Nicolás De Rivery Fouet (–), or his father, Pierre Aquiles De Rivery (–). Alice P. Kenney, The Gansevoorts of Albany, Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ). Mississippi Republican (Natchez, March , ).

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York Carolina, was supposed to have run away to try to join her mother in New York. In , an enslaved man Thomas Jones, as well, sought to get from North Carolina to New York to join his mother. The Louisiana Slave Database, assembled by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, includes over , entries for Louisiana slaves. Of this, only thirty-one entries are for slaves born in New York. All of Hall’s data from New York comes from the period –. She lists twenty of these New York slaves as French-speaking, seven as Spanish-speaking, and four as English-speaking, but curiously, none as Dutch-speaking, further hinting at the reluctance of Dutch New Yorkers to sell their slaves South. I have located two examples, as well, of free blacks who moved to New Orleans and were subsequently forced into slavery. One, sixteen-year-old John Johnson, was born free in New York and worked as a waiter in New Orleans before being sold into slavery. Johnson was well aware of the laws in New York. Likewise, Matthias Freeman, born in Hudson, New York, worked in New Orleans and was held in prison after losing his Certificate of Freedom. Some of these enslaved persons, including John Johnson and Peter Swayze, born in New York about , filed petitions for freedom in Louisiana. Swayze’s petition appeared as late as . In addition, court cases in New York indicate other attempts to sell slaves to the South. In Aza v. Eitlinger (), the defendant was accused of attempting to export New York slaves to New Orleans. And in Hart v. Cleis (), a black man, a New York slave named Bazil Baker, was



 



 

Carolina Centinel, July , , North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements Digital Collection, http://libcdm.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id//rec/, accessed December , . Newbern Spectator and Literary Journal, November , . www.ibiblio.org/laslave/index.php www.ibiblio.org, Louisiana Slave Database, downloaded December , . This may indicate that New York–born slaves in New Orleans belonged largely to the wave of French families who had fled Haiti in the s. The size of this migration is unclear. In , about  New York City blacks petitioned for aid to emigrate to St. Domingo. Arthur Everett Peterson, Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, Vol. , – (New York City, ), . See also Carla L. Peterson, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –. New Orleans Public Library, Records of the First Judicial District Court, Case Record number ,, Microfilm Reel #A Louisiana Collection. John Johnson, born about , petitioned for his freedom in Louisiana in . Race and Slavery Petitions Project, PAR (Petition Analysis Number) . The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. New Orleans Public Library, Records of the First Judicial District Court, Document ,, Microfilm Reel #. Race and Slavery Petitions Project, PAR (Petition Analysis Number) . The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  kidnapped in Ontario County to be sold out of state. A higher profile case came in , when a brig named Fox was seized in the port of Mobile, Alabama, and was discovered to have carried a black boy from New York to Mobile with the purpose of selling him. The parties responsible were charged with violating the federal  law against importing slaves. In the case of U.S. v. Fox, the US District Court for Alabama ordered the Fox and its tackle, together valued at over $,, to be taken and sold. On July , , US president James Monroe issued a pardon on the case. We can better analyze the dynamics of New York’s black population in this period if we focus separately on three inter-census decades: the s, the s, and the s. It is relatively easier to explain New York’s black population dynamics for the s than for the following two decades. Curiously, between  and , the total (free and enslaved) black population of New York State increased from , to ,, a growth rate of  percent. The free black population, meanwhile, grew from , to ,, an astounding  percent increase. If the free black population grew at a natural increase of  percent from  to , then it would have reached only , people. This would indicate that at least , former New York slaves or blacks from other states joined New York’s free black population from  to . If those , persons were all New York slaves, and had they remained enslaved in , the rate of increase of slaves from  to  would have been  percent. Goldin reasons that many slaveholders anticipated the  legislation and sold their slaves out of state while they still could. There is some evidence for the view that slaveholders were looking to sell. In , John Bogert wrote to Peter Van Gaasbeck, who recently retired from the US House of Representatives, then living in Kingston, to ask if Van Gaasbeck could make inquiries about slaves for sale. “I suppose this Abolition Bill may Induce some to sell,” Bogert surmised. Unless the rate of natural increase among slaves was higher than  percent, or there were significant numbers of free blacks coming into the state (or a sufficient combination of the two), then the numbers of slaves   

Hart v. Cleis,  Johns  (); Aza, Daure and Zella v. Eitlinger, Ant. N.P. Case , . Westlaw. https://cite.case.law/ant-np-cas/// accessed August , . US v. Brig Fox, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/, accessed February , . John Bogert to Peter Van Gaasbeck, February , . Kingston Senate House Historic Site, file .

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York who were sold South from New York in the period – was probably not exceptional, and certainly nowhere near ,. Cross-state demographic analysis provides one potential clue to this puzzle. Between  and , the slave populations in Bergen and Essex Counties in New Jersey increased by  and  percent, respectively, while the New Jersey statewide average growth of slaves in the same period was only  percent. One possibility this suggests is that between  and , around  or more slaves were moved just across the Hudson River from New York to Essex and Bergen Counties. While it is entirely possible that slaves were sold further South in the period –, the growth in the total New York black population at  percent suggests that the decline in the slave population is adequately accounted for by the corresponding rise of the free black population, and that New York’s total black population was stable and growing. In , perhaps as a result of the slaves coming from New York, New Jersey passed a law to ban slave imports into the state. While some sales of slaves from New York to the South certainly occurred in the s, it appears that a much larger number were sold South in the next two decades. According to the traditional reading of the census, New York’s slave population dropped by  percent from  to , but the total black population in the state increased by  percent. This suggests that the disappearance of slaves in this decade might largely be explained by the concomitant rise of the free black population. It is in the period –, however, when something more suspicious occurred. In the s, the recorded slave population statewide declined by  percent (a decrease of , slaves), and the total black population in the state decreased by  percent. New York’s state census of  counted , slaves statewide. If this census was close to as accurate and thorough as the federal census (more on that later), these numbers demonstrate that slavery declined quickly from  to  and slowly from  to . From  to , a decade Goldin does not consider, the total black population in the state grew at a closer to normal  percent. If New York slaves were sold South



Many slaves from Saint-Domingue came to New York in the s, but precisely how many is not clear. Tax evaluations for Ulster in  show , taxable slaves between the ages of twelve and fifty. In , there were only ,, a drop of nearly  percent. In New York City, the taxable slave population also fell by  percent from , to  in the year  to . Other counties appear to have been more stable. This indicates exports of slaves, especially working-age slaves from these areas.

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  during the era of emancipation, the period – appears to be when the majority of these sales occurred. Goldin’s argument about New York’s slave population rests on the assumption of a positive rate of natural increase among enslaved New Yorkers in the era of emancipation. But this does not appear to have been the case; indeed the rate of growth must necessarily have been negative. As far as calculating the reproduction of the slave population in the era of emancipation, one should not assume that all children born to slaves would have automatically become slaves. In fact, the  act for the gradual abolition of slavery is quite specific. The first paragraph relating to the free status of children born to New York slaves after the passage of the act reads: That any Child born of a slave within this State after the fourth day of July next, shall be deemed and adjudge to be born free: Provided nevertheless that such Child shall be the servant of the legal proprietor of his or her mother until such servant if male shall arrive at the age of twenty-eight years, and if a female at the age of twenty-five years.

Goldin’s mistake rests on a common misunderstanding of this law – that these children were slaves until a certain date – when in fact they were not slaves at all but, in a technical and legal sense, freeborn servants bound until a certain age. Some, but certainly not all, historians writing on this topic have shown awareness of this fact. For example, Leo Hirsch in  wrote that in New York after , “old slaves were dying and no new slaves were being born to take their place.” Shane White shows this more extensively in his study of New York City. After , then, children born to female slaves in New York were technically free servants, bound to the master of their parents until twentyeight years old for a male and twenty-five for a female. This law did not apply, however, to children born of male slaves and free women, so some significant percent of children born to slaves immediately joined the rank of the free blacks, thereby nearly guaranteeing the demographic decline of



 

For examples of the complex legal status that children of New York slaves often found themselves in, see Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, “Born Free in the Master’s House: Children and Gradual Emancipation in the Early American North,” in Anna Mae Duane, ed., Child Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Hirsch Jr., “The Slave in New York,” – (). White, Somewhat More Independent, .

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York the category of slaves and their children bound to service. A law of  freed all slaves born in New York as of July , . But this date of emancipation did not apply to the children of slaves who were still bound to service. With the passage of the act of , all children of slaves born after  could only be held in service until the age of twenty-one. Therefore, a child born of slaves in New York in  could legally remain in bound service until . Whether any children were kept in bound service until such time is unclear, but there were certainly cases that approached those limits, and curiously the cases I have found all concern families with Dutch names in traditionally Dutch regions. In , three years after the legal death of slavery in New York, Isaac Schermerhorn, mayor of Schenectady, signed his consent to allow a ten-year-old boy named Robert Simmons to be a servant to Jacob Hogeland of Amsterdam, Montgomery County, until the boy reached the age of twenty-one. Six days later, a twelve-year-old “coloured” girl, Rachel Simmons (likely young Robert’s sister), was indentured for five years as a servant to Tecarius Van de Bogart of Schenectady. In Ulster County in , a twelve year-old black boy named Tom was taken from the county poorhouse and indentured to work for the farmer Peter Esterly until the boy reached twenty-one years of age. An argument in a New York court case from , concerning such







Sarah Levine-Gronningsater, Delivering Freedom: Gradual Emancipation, Black Legal Culture, and the Origins of the Sectional Crisis in New York, – (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, ). Levine-Gronningsater shows that in practice, New Yorkers sometimes confused the status of slaves and children of slaves bound to service. Enslaved persons and their children, moreover, often “maneuvered” towards freedom by learning how to use the new laws for their benefit. An Act Relative to Slaves and Servants, March , . Laws of the State of New York passed at the Thirty-Ninth assembly, http://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/hhs/id// rec/. The relevant section of the law of  reads: IV. And be it further enacted, That every child born of a slave within this state, after the fourth day of July, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine, shall be free, but shall remain the servant of the owner of his or her moth, and the executor, administrators or assigns of such owner, in the same manner as if such child had been bound to service by the Overseers of the Poor, and shall continue in such service, if a male, until the sage of twenty-three years, and if a female, until the age of twenty-five years; and that every child born of a slave within the state after the passing of this act, shall remain a servant as aforesaid until the age of twenty-one years and no longer.

  

Grems-Doolittle Library, LM . Indenture of March , . Grems-Doolittle Library, LM. Indenture of John to Peter Easterly, . Ulster County, NY Government.

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  children bound to service, might indicate the prevailing reasoning for why these children remained bound even when their parents had been liberated: The best interests in the whole, sometimes require that some shall be put under the guardianship and control of others. It is therefore by virtue of the arbitrary institutions of society, and by those alone, that one man has an interest in the services of another: property, strictly speaking, in the person of a human being cannot exist. A right of one man to the services of another, may, and, in a qualified form, does exist in every well regulated society. The parent controls the services of his child, the guardian his ward, the master his apprentice. By what right, it may be asked? I answer, by authority of law – by force of the positive institutions of civil society.

A natural response would be to question how such continued bound service could possibly be required for the benefit of civil society, when it naturally deprived part of that society of its own right of freedom. It is also possible that in some cases enslaved blacks or children bound to service stayed on as servants of their enslavers, even after gaining legal freedom to depart. In Canajoharie, New York, Joanna Hardenbergh and Ransford Welles had a “negro servant” named Margaret Staats, who remained in the family until . The couple was married in  and it is not clear if Margaret had previously been a slave in one of their families, or indeed a slave at all. An African American woman named Rosanna Vosburgh, born in , of an unclear status, came to work as a domestic in the house of Thomas Olcott in . She would remain as a live-in servant until her death in  (Figure .). Furthermore, children of slaves were often bought and sold in a manner similar to, but with important differences from, normal slave sales. In , John Ditmars of Flatlands indentured the eight-year-old Sine to Jacob Duryee of Flatbush. The indentures in these years often included provisions to be made for the indentured child. Duryee was to provide Sine with “competent and sufficient meat, drink, and apparel; lodging, washing and all other things necessary and fit for a Servant.” The agreement also indemnified Ditmars from any further charges or responsibilities. This is interesting then in at least two ways. First, it shows paternalist, perhaps humanitarian, concern for the servant. Previously, a bill of sale of a   

Griffin v. Potter,  Wend.  (). Myrtle Hardenbergh Miller, The Hardenberg Family: A Genealogical Compilation (New York: American Historical Co., ), . www.albany.edu/arce/Vosburgh.html, accessed March , .

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York

Figure .

A glass photograph of Rosanna Vosburgh of Albany, New York.

slave was like a receipt that served as legal confirmation of the sale, but it was generally devoid of expressions of concern for the enslaved. Sales of indentured servants (children of slaves), however, often had provisions to provide not only necessities but also education or religious instruction. While some of this likely stemmed from paternalist care, an additional motive, as indicated earlier, was the avoidance of legal responsibility. Because New Yorkers were not always clear about the law, they wrote these sales to cover various contingencies. For example, instead of stating a clear moment when Sine would be free (at the age of twenty-five, for instance), the indenture read that Sine shall “serve from the date of these presents until the said Negro Girl Servant shall be declared free pursuant to

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  the Statute concerning Slaves and Servants.” No mention of a sale price was given in the indenture, likely indicating that it was a transaction with no cash changing hands. Other children of slaves were exchanged without any cash involved. Born in , Mercy was indentured in  for ten years, in a transfer of ownership from Phebe Lefferts of Flatbush to Abraham Vanderveer. In Brooklyn, in , a six-year-old African American girl named Cynthia Haycorn was apprenticed to conduct “house and kitchen work” for twelve years in the house of Samuel Fleet. The Brooklyn Overseers of the Poor signed the indenture. Cynthia’s mark stands above Fleet’s signature. Children bound to service could be transferred from one master to another with no cash changing hands, but in some instances, they were actually sold. In , Samuel Magee of Catskills sold a seven-year-old boy Tom to Jacobus Bogardus for $. Further evidence indicates that for many blacks in New York, there was something of a double emancipation, first for slaves and later for the children of slaves. In , a black girl, aged three years and three months, was taken from Schenectady to Schoharie County by a Peter Van Vorst, and “voluntarily and of her own free will and accord put herself apprentice to John Carner” to serve as a housekeeper for a term of twenty-one years. Of course, no three-year-old girl could be said to “voluntary and of her own free will and accord” agree to any legally binding document. In another example, this one from , a boy of four years and eleven months was released by the Overseers of the Poor of the city of Schenectady and was indentured to be a servant to James Thomson until he (the boy) reached the age of twenty-one. Again, the indenture was supposedly “by and with the consent” of the boy. Advertisements for runaway indentured servants in the s may be further examples, but

 



 

Brooklyn Historical Society, Ditmars Collection, ., Folder  Slave bill of sale. Slave indenture between Phebe Lefferts and Abraham Vanderveer, May , ; Lefferts family papers, ARC., box , folder ; Brooklyn Historical Society, https://lefferts.brooklynhistory.org/ slave-indenture-phebe-lefferts-and-abraham-vanderveer/, accessed June , . Even the Brooklyn Historical Society calls this indentured girl a slave. Wendell, Evert Jansen, –, collector. Evert Jansen Wendell collection of contracts for the sale of slaves, –. Haycorn, Cynthia.Indenture contract as apprentice to Samuel Fleet of Brooklyn, New York: DS, July , . MS Am . (). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Manuscript Box , original records of the Brandow family, located at the Vedder Memorial Library. Indenture agreement between John Carner and Peter Van Vorst, February , . GremsDoolittle Library, D.

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York

Figure . An image of a formerly enslaved man, John Wynkoop, . From the Amy Lefevre Collection, Historic Huguenot Street, African American Presence in the Hudson Valley, https://cdm.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/hhs/id// rec/, accessed July , .

the race and origin of the servant is not always mentioned. Census records, meanwhile, showing a large number of free blacks living in slaveholding households might indicate situations where family members of slaves or bound servants remained with their former masters after their own emancipations (see Figure .). Like historians of later years, contemporaries of the era of emancipation often confused the distinction between servants and slaves. The Bancroft





Indentured servant Mary Ann Richards ran away from P. Fordham of Sag Harbor in . The Corrector, June , . Peter Jube, fourteen years old, ran from James Hendrickson of Jamaica, New York. Hendrickson offered a one cent reward. Long Island Farmer and Queens County Advertiser, June , . Eliza Hall ran from James Lawrence of Flushing, who offered a six cents reward. Long Island Farmer and Queens County Advertiser, May , . Confusion about status was common. In the s, New York slaveholders sometimes recorded children born to slaves as slaves. W. H. McIntosh, History of Monroe County, N.Y. (Philadelphia: Everts, Ensign, and Everts, ), ; Horace Clefton Taylor, Historical sketches of the town of Portland: comprising also the pioneer history of Chautaugua County, with biographical sketches of the early settlers (Fredonia, NY: W. McKinstry & Son, ), . An overview of New York slave law explained that “finally, on the th of July , slavery was in fact abolished; except, perhaps, as to the very few slaves born before th July , and subsequently lawfully introduced as slaves.” The author also uncritically accepted the count of seventy-six slaves in New York in the  census and

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  Prize–winning historian John L. Brooke falsely assumed that “these children [of New York slaves] would have been recorded as free.” But, crucially, a large number of the children of slaves were apparently counted as slaves in New York in the census of , and perhaps also on the census of . If the  law was followed accurately, and all children of slaves were legally free but bound to service until a certain age, then there should have been no native-born (native to New York) slaves in the category of “slaves under fourteen” years of age in the  census, the first to provide age category data on slaves. Yet the  census counts , male slaves under the age of fourteen, as well as , female slaves under fourteen. This means of course that unless there were some young enslaved people brought into New York after , at least , slaves counted for New York in the  census were technically not slaves, a conclusion that somehow no historian has previously noted. Moreover, since any child born in New York to an enslaved person after July ,  was legally a servant instead of a slave, any person tallied as a slave in  who was under twenty-one years of age, not just fourteen years of age, was not a slave. Unfortunately, the next age category on the  census, “fourteen to twenty-six years of age,” does not allow us to know precisely how many persons in the fourteen-to-twenty-year-old range (those born between  and ) were tallied as slaves. There were , males and , females in this category of slaves between fourteen and twenty-six years of age, for a total of ,. Assuming that half of these persons fell in the six-year range of fourteen to twenty, and half fell in the six-year range of twenty-one to twenty-six, we can calculate that roughly another , persons who were technically and legally free servants were counted as

 

four in the census of . Richard Peters, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, January Term , Vol. XV (Third Edition) (New York: The Banks Law Publishing Company, ), , https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/ hhs/id//rec/. By law, no slaves were born in New York after . The author has confused children of slaves bound to service with slaves. David Blight suggests that a child born in  in New York was a slave who was freed by state law in . There may have been various emancipations of children bound to service in this year, but the child was not legally a slave and was not required to be released in . David W. Blight, “In Search of Learning, Liberty and Self Definition: James McCune Smith and the Ordeal of the Antebellum Black Intellectual,” AfroAmericans in New York Life and History : (), . John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . Vivienne Kruger agrees that “[a]lthough technically free, these children lived in virtual slavery as salable servants until adulthood; they were therefore frequently categorized as slaves in  by census takers.” Vivienne Kruger, Born to Run: The Slave Family in Early New York,  to  (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, ), .

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York Table . New York State census figures, free blacks and enslaved, – (adjusted) Year

Free blacks

Slaves

    

, , , , ,

, , , (includes some children of slaves) , 

slaves in the  New York state census. We can conclude more broadly that this census count for slaves in  was probably around , too high and that the count of free blacks was correspondingly , persons too low. To calculate the total number of slaves who were either emancipated or sold South, we must first adjust the census figures by moving , persons labeled as slaves in  to the status of free blacks. The true statewide census figures should be as shown in Table .. But before we accept the accuracy of these numbers, we must consider another previously unrecognized factor for why the black population in New York declined (or, in this case, appeared to decline) from  to , and then grew at a slow rate from  to . This factor is undercounting on the census, and the likely different rates at which slaves and free blacks were undercounted. The United States General Accounting Office estimates that in the twentieth century, the African American population was undercounted on the federal census at a rate of between  and  percent, depending on the census. The white population, meanwhile, was undercounted at 





It is likely that for the  census, enumerators across New York counties were not consistent in whether they recorded children of slaves as slaves or as free blacks. In Westchester and Montgomery Counties, for example, the  census counted no slaves under the age of fourteen, while all other slaveholding counties of comparable size counted double- or triple-digit numbers of slaves under fourteen years old. This presents no difficulty for the calculations in this chapter, however, since I have removed the count of children of slaves from the total number of slaves. The  census for New York might actually overcount free blacks, as there is an anomaly of about , free blacks appearing suddenly in Washington County, which cannot be accounted for in the historical record or explained as anything other than an enumerator’s misunderstanding about the nature of the census category “all others, not including Indians not-taxed.” Decennial Census, Overview of Historical Census Issues, , www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/ GAOREPORTS-GGD-–/pdf/GAOREPORTS-GGD-–.pdf, accessed September , . There are various methods for estimating undercounting, including linkage studies, which compares census records to other local records.

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  between  and  percent. The reasons why people are not counted on the census are complex, but uncounted people often include those who do not have a fixed address or who live in hard-to-find dwellings, such as remote homestead cabins or quasi-hidden apartments. It is easy to omit porters, clerks, and watchmen who might live at work, such as in a room above an office building. The “floating population,” especially young men, might not live at any particular location at all, but are frequently on the move between friends, relatives, and weekly rentals. There is good reason to think that the New York slave population was easier for census takers to find than was the free black population. Slaveholders generally had fixed addresses and both they and their slaves were easy for census enumerators to locate. Free blacks, meanwhile, were often on margins of society, on the move, living in temporary and marginal housing. Runaway slaves would have good reason to avoid census takers altogether. The point is, the greater number of free blacks there were relative to slaves, the higher percent of the total black population would have been undercounted. If, for example, slaves were consistently undercounted by  percent and free blacks were undercounted by  percent, then an additional , emancipated slaves arising between censuses, with an otherwise stable population, would result in a reduction of forty black persons counted. Another way of saying this is that if the entire population of slaves became free, we would expect something like an additional  percent of them to go missing in the census. This rate is consistent with the difference between undercounting of whites and blacks in the second half of the twentieth century, which was about  percent. But if the free black population of early nineteenthcentury New York was exceptionally difficult to track, then the undercounting rate could be higher, perhaps more than  percent. At any rate, it seems likely that as New York slaves became free blacks, a certain percent of them were lost in the great federal enumeration efforts. If I am correct that free blacks were consistently undercounted at a greater rate than were slaves, then this effect might have been stronger over time, so that a greater percent of the black population was missed in  than it was in , and a greater percent in  than in , and so on. A method for demonstrating the effect of such differential undercounting must begin with the actual black population of , multiplying the slave population (,) by ., plus the free black population (,) 

J. David Hacker, “New Estimates of Census Coverage in the United States, –,” Social Science History : (Spring ), –.

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York Table . New York State census figures, blacks, – (adjusted) Year

Original

Adjusted

     And the adjusted slave population    

, , , , ,

, , , , ,

, , , ,

, , , ,

multiplied by ., giving a total of , black persons instead of the counted ,. Applying this formula to the census returns, New York’s adjusted total black population for the period – would have been as shown in Table .. The original census figures present the total black population increasing by  percent from  to , but the adjusted numbers suggest an  percent increase. If the black population would have increased by Goldin’s suggested  percent per decade, it would have grown  percent in four decades. But with this adjustment for undercounting, and the likely different rates of undercounting slaves and free blacks, there are fewer potentially missing blacks than the census numbers would indicate. By subtracting the children of slaves counted as slaves in the  census, and then adjusting for undercounting at  percent for free blacks and  percent for slaves, we arrive at Table ..

 

Additional factors may have strengthened this undercounting further. For example, perhaps some free blacks passed for white, intentionally or accidentally. I also adjusted the , miscategorized slaves by  percent and added this number to the adjusted number of free blacks for . Following the three-fifths clause of the constitution, New York’s slaves in , , , and  were counted towards apportionment of seats in the US House of Representatives. In , New York was the most populous state in the nation and it received thirty-four seats. With its , slaves counted at three-fifths of a person, the state’s apportionment population was ,,. An apportionment population of ,, would have been sufficient for thirty-four seats. The New York enslaved population of  counted at threefifths contributed , to this count. Even if every enslaved person had been freed and counted as a whole person for the purposes of apportionment, it would not have affected the apportionment for the s.

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  Table . New York State census figures, free blacks and slaves (adjusted by estimated undercount) Year

Free blacks

Slaves

    

, , , ,a ,

, , (may include children of slaves) , (may include children of slaves) , (does not include children of slaves)  (more on why the count of seventy-five for  is incorrect follows in the subsequent paragraphs)

a

(,  .) plus (,  .).

Table . shows that the original slave population of , in  fell to , in . Because no children and few imported slaves were added to this population, we can isolate it and study how it would have declined, given certain common death rates of the era. One immediately obvious result is that this population could not have declined as it did by natural decrease alone, as such a decline would have required an exceptionally high death rate of near  deaths per , persons per year. But the statewide enslaved population probably experienced a death rate of between  and  per , per year. The expected number of New York slaves either sold South or manumitted in the period – can be calculated as the adjusted New York slave population of  at a certain consistent death rate with no new births, minus the adjusted  slave population. The number for the next decade can be calculated similarly. Since we do not know the number of legally free children of slaves who were counted in the actual slave count for , it is impossible to guess the rate of decline for the – or – decades. But since we can estimate the number of legally free children miscounted as slaves in the  census, we can calculate the number of slaves either manumitted or sold South for the period –. See Table . for the number of slaves who must have been either manumitted or sold South between  and .  

For example, for decennial change from  to , and death rate of  per , per year, the calculation is (,  .) – ,. Calculated as explained previously: The expected number of slaves sold South or manumitted in the period – can be calculated as the adjusted New York slave population of  at a certain consistent death rate with no new births, minus the adjusted  slave population. This is only an

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York Table . Effects of estimated death rates on total number of New York slaves manumitted or sold South, – Considering an average death rate of (n per , per year)    

The total estimated number of New York slaves either manumitted or sold South between  and  , , , ,

The next step in calculating how many New York slaves were sold South out of the  slave population is to determine the number of manumissions in New York in this period and subtract that number from the possible total number of slaves manumitted or sold South by , as shown in Table .. While manumissions were recorded at the county level, and some of these manumission records are still available, it is unclear what percentage of people or manumitted slaves were recorded by the civil authorities. The rates of recorded manumissions to total manumissions, however, may have been fairly high, since there were potential penalties for slaveholders who manumitted slaves extra legally. There is unfortunately no perfect count of manumissions. A compilation of New York State Manumissions published in the s listed, according to my best count,  manumissions from the s,  from the s,  from the s, and  from the s. It is difficult to know how complete this data is, but if it is representative of the pattern of manumissions in the region, then we can say that  percent of total manumissions occurred in the s,  percent were in the s, while  percent of all manumissions followed in the s, while just  percent occurred in the s. This helps to give a general sense of the pattern of manumission: moderate at first, increased and steady for two decades, and minor in the s.



estimate, and technically, each enslaved person who ran away or who was sold South could not contribute to the number of enslaved New Yorkers who died while still in enslavement. For the sake of comparison, the “negro” death rate in the five boroughs of New York City in  and  was generally between  and  per ,. Joseph Adna Hill and John Cummings, Negro Population in the United States, – (New York: Arno Press, ), . A compilation of “New York State Manumissions,” compiled by Alice Eichholz and James M. Rose of Queens College was published in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in six installments in  through  (vol. , number  through vol. , number ).

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  In counting and sorting this manumissions data, I omitted entries of free-born blacks seeking legal confirmation of their status. I also omitted manumissions of infants and children not counted in the previous census. These numbers are the minimum estimate of slaves removed from the previous census by way of manumission, and added thereby to the free black population. The published compilation from which I drew this data consist of the manumissions recorded for Albany, New York City, and at least part of Richmond County. The slave populations of these counties in  comprised only about  percent of the slave population in the state. While the rate of manumission may have been greater in New York City than in other regions, there is no reason to think the combined numbers of manumission from these three particular counties would be far from a representative sample. Places like Westchester may have manumitted more slaves on average, while Ulster or Montgomery manumitted fewer. It seems reasonable then to surmise that there could have been three or four times as many total manumissions in the state as in the compilation mentioned previously, especially since the compilation makes no claims to be exhaustive even for the counties it included. If there were indeed between , and , slave manumissions in New York in the period –, and the death rate of the state’s slave population in that era was between twenty and thirty-five, as previously suggested, then we are left with a range of approximately ,–, missing slaves, who cannot be accounted for. Further data on this topic comes from an incredibly thorough researcher, Vivienne Kruger, who found , manumissions for the six counties of New York, Kings, Queens, Westchester, Richmond, and Suffolk from  to . These manumissions came through a combination of freedom given in wills after the death of the slave owner, and by legal deed of manumission. One path forward then is to focus on the slave populations in these six counties. To see the total number of slaves in this six-county region, see Table ., in which the county slave populations have been adjusted by removing the estimated number of persons under twenty-one years of age from the  census and adjusted up by a  percent assumed undercount.   

This data does not yet include Manumission for Kings County, –. Kenneth Scott, compiler, in National Genealogical Society Quarterly : (June ). Kruger, Born to Run, . Subtracting the under-fourteen population and half of the fourteen to twenty-six population from the  count for slaves.

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York Table . Estimated number of enslaved persons by county (with adjustments), –

New York Kings Queens Richmond Suffolk Westchester Combined



 (includes children of slaves)



, , ,   , ,

, ,    , ,

      ,

Table . Estimated enslaved population of six-county area, with applied death rates, – Death rate per , per year





    

, , , , ,

, , , , ,

The six-country slave population declined by  percent in two decades. Various death rates applied to this population demonstrate what decline this population might have faced from deaths alone. Since this was an urban population, the death rates might have been higher than elsewhere in the state. As the slave population aged, death rates would have increased considerably. For this latter reason, the death rate among slaves from  to  was probably greater than the death rate of slaves from  to . But assuming consistent death rates alone, the original enslaved population of this six-county area would have declined as shown in Table .. This six-county slave population, with only , manumissions factored in, and various death rates applied, reveals how many slaves are missing from the record (Table .) and were potentially sold out of the region. This is an estimate, since the greater the number of slave population that was lost to manumissions, the fewer would have been lost to deaths per year. A death rate of  per , per year, for example, must be applied to a consistently diminished population, not to the original

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  Table . Six-county slave population rate of decline and numbers missing from  to  Death rate per , per year     

Total missing slaves in   , , , ,

starting population for ten years. However, these estimates are useful to begin to approach an answer to the question of how many slaves were sold South in the period –, where they came from, and the potentially disproportionate reluctance of Dutch slaveholders to sell their slaves. For the six-county region, depending on the estimated death rates given in Table ., one would expect that between , and , slaves were sold South (or at least sold out of the six-county region, as there could potentially be a net loss of slaves from this area to other slaveholding counties in New York). If there were more manumissions than what Kruger located, there would be a corresponding decrease in the potential number of missing slaves. The changing sex ratio in the black population in this six-county region might provide us with a way to refine this range further. If the sex ratio was :, at parity, in one census year, and was at, say, .– in the next census, assuming no turnover to births and deaths, we could assume that one out of every ten men left the area. In such a scenario, that would mean that at least  percent of the population had been removed. If equal numbers of men and women were sold South, then the gender ratio would remain the same. And if a greater number of men were sold South than were women, but the corresponding surplus of women were manumitted, then the ratio would also remain the same. According to the  census, the six counties of Kings, New York, Richmond, Suffolk, Queens, and Westchester had an imbalance of . black males for every  black females (a total of , black males to , black females, both free and enslaved combined). Since sex ratios tend to reach parity over time, and must have been at parity in this region 

There is also generally a net undercount of men relative to women in a census, but as long as this effect was consistent over time, it would not make too much of a difference for the analysis here.

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York sometime in the s, the imbalance of  suggests that there were at least , black males missing and perhaps sold out of New York City and the surrounding region, or somehow missed in the census. Furthermore, the missing males came dramatically from the  to  age group (which had a sex ratio of . in ), and to a slightly lesser extent, from the  to  year category (which had a sex ratio of . in ). Obviously, these are the age categories for the most valuable males to be sold at profit in the South. While the adult black population in these six counties had a sex ratio of . in , the black population there under fourteen years of age was at nearly : parity, and the black population for the rest of New York State stood at  men to  women. Among slaves in New York, there were . men for every  women in , and among free blacks . men for every  women. For the whole state, the slave population in the  census, which included thousands of technically free black servants under  years of age, had nearly a : sex ratio, while the free black population consisted of . men for every  women. The census gives , blacks living in this six-county region in . This was close to the black population in the rest of the state: ,. If the gender ratio data is correct, and . percent of the black adult male population was missing from the six-county region in , it is very likely that black males had moved to the other regions of the state, where the sex ratio of . equated to  more black males than black females. If the six-county region had given a net balance of  men more than women to the rest of the state, it still would have lost at least , men and an additional population consisting of black men and women to retain the imbalanced sex ratio of .–. The sex ratio also helps us to understand population dynamics at the state level. The numerical difference between free black men and free black women in the  census probably approximates the converse of the 

 

Data is not available, but since the region had a surplus of male slaves in , but a strong surplus of black females in , sex ratio parity must have been reached at some point in the intervening years. For most of the eighteenth century, New York had more male slaves than female slaves, an effect of the slave trade and the preference for male workers. I recognize also that there are many potentially confounding factors here, such as free black men perhaps being more difficult for the census takers to find than free black women. The arrival of fugitives from the South who tended to be male, and runaways from the Hudson Valley, who were also mostly male, played a role. If these numbers were substantial, then an even greater number of men would have been removed from the region for the census data to fit. This precise point was made already in Fogel and Engerman, “Philanthropy at Bargain Prices,” . In , there were , male slaves and , female slaves in New York State. The free black population was , males and , females.

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  difference between the number of male and female slaves who were sold South. In other words, since there were , more free black women in New York State than there were free black men in , it is likely that at least that number of black males had either been sold South as slaves or kidnapped as free blacks and brought South between  and . If slave sales to the South or kidnappings ended or slowed down after , one would expect the total black population in New York to move back towards sex ratio parity. And indeed this is the case, as the sex ratio for blacks in New York State in  had climbed to . men for every  women. Since the sex ratio among New York slaves was at parity in , but the sex ratio of free blacks was weighted towards women, it seems likely that while equal numbers of men and women were released from slavery in New York in the period –, black women who were formerly slaves more commonly ended up in freedom, while previously enslaved black men were more likely to be moved out of state. Strong evidence for slave sales south from Manhattan in particular is to be found in the changing gender ratio in the city. In , there were just . black males for every  black females (slaves and free blacks combined). Prior to , the national census did not include information on the sex of free blacks and slaves, nor did the New York State census of . But the New York City censuses of  and  did include such information, and these provide a snapshot of a falling ratio of black men to black women. From  to , male slaves in the city disappeared at a faster rate than did female slaves, yet the free black population also trended towards a higher percent of females than males. This indicates that male slaves were being released from forced service in the city, but were not, like the emancipated women, joining the ranks of the free blacks there. The sex ratio discrepancy suggests that in this period, black women from outside the region were coming to New York City to work as domestics, or men from this region were being sold away to labor in other regions, or perhaps some combination of the two trends. While the gender ratio among slaves in the city fell from . to . from  to , the gender ratio of free blacks fell as well from . to . in the same period. Whatever the cause or causes of this gender ratio imbalance, then, both the slave and free black populations were affected (see Table .). In summary, then, it seems that changes in the slave population of New York City cannot be adequately explained by natural decrease and manumissions alone, but probably reflect sales out of state. Shane White notes that from  to , there were  recorded manumissions in New

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York Table . Gender ratios of New York City free blacks and slaves, –

    

Free blacks

Slaves

. .

.  . .

. .

York City. But the slave population in this decade (between the censuses of  and ) decreased from , to ,, the last number likely including some children of slaves born after , who should have been recorded as free. Alice Eichholz lists  slave births in New York City in the period  through , although some of these might have been legally abandoned. The death rate for the entire population of New York City in this period was consistently between  and  per , per year, but the rate that the city’s African Americans faced may have easily been over  per , per year. In his book Stories of Freedom, Shane White describes the African American community in New York City in the s and s as marked by struggle and violence, with an “edgy vitality” to black life in this difficult period of transition from slavery to freedom. New York City started recording death statistics in , but city death data by race seems to only be available starting in . John Duffy explains that from  to , blacks in the city represented – percent of the city’s annual deaths, about twice their percent of the population. “By ,” 

  



White, Somewhat More Independent, . New York City’s free black population is meticulously explored in Shane White, “‘We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings’: Free Blacks in New York City, –,” Journal of American History : (September ), –. Some sources give ,, but Shane White’s count of , is probably more accurate. From Alice Eichholz and James Rose, compilers, “Slave Births in New York County,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, : (January ), –. In addition, New York City suffered from epidemics, with outbreaks in , ,  , , , and  that were particularly severe. Matthew Livingston David, A brief account of the epidemical fever which lately prevailed in the city of New York (New York: Matthew L. Davis, ); John Duffy, History of Public Health in New York City, – (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ), ; The Spectator, November , ; Charles Farrell, “Deaths from Fever in New York City ,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record : (April ); James Hardie, An account of the yellow fever which occurred in the city of New York, in the year  (New York: Samuel Marks, ). Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York 

Figure .

Demographic table of deaths among black people in New York, –.

Duffy writes, “the death rate among Negroes appears to have been at least three times as high as among the white population.” In , Nathaniel Niles reported on the striking death rates of between  and  percent of the black population in New York per year from  through  (Figure .). Niles attributed this calamity to the “relative physical incapacity of Negroes to sustain the influence of a severe climate, and the increased effect of poverty to diminish the chances of life in cold climates.” This means that the death rate for blacks in New York City in this period might have been nearly twice the average death rate for blacks elsewhere in New York State in the previous decades. This should not be interpreted, however, to mean that the death rate for all slaves in New York State in the s was so high. Heavy migration to New York City replenished the ranks of the city’s black population, and not all these migrants were former slaves in New York State or from elsewhere. Historian Graham Hodges explains why this might have been the case. “Generally, New York City was unsafe for blacks. Much of this had to do with their miserable economic status. Blacks lived in the poorest neighborhoods, suffered most from epidemic diseases, and had shorter life expectancies.”   

Duffy, History of Public Health in New York City, –, . Nathanial Niles, Medical Statistics, or, A comparative view of the mortality in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, for a series of years (Baltimore: E. Bliss, ), . Hodges, David Ruggles, .

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York Table . New York City black population (free and enslaved, by sex, –) in city, state, and federal censusesa Free black men

Free black women



 



,

     

,

,

, ,

,

,

,

Total free , (White gives ,) , ,

,

Male slaves

Female slaves



,





 

 

Total slaves , (White gives ,) , , (White gives ,) ,   

Total black population , (White gives ,) , , (White gives ,) , , , , , ,

a Ira Rosenwaike, a demographer who studied New York City, believes that both the  and  city censuses had massive undercounts of free blacks. This chart is based in part on Ira Rosenwaike, Population History in New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ), .

Finally, applying a range of likely death rates of – per , per year to the population of , while factoring in  births and  manumissions, the slave population of New York City in  should have been between , and ,; instead, it was ,. Depending on the death rate, up to  New York City slaves went missing between  and , neither accounted for in the manumission data, census, or the reliable death rates (Table .). These findings indicate that New York slaves were sold South from New York in large numbers, but there were not nearly as many sold South as previous scholars have suggested. A reasonable estimate would be in the range of ,–, total slaves sold or carried South in the period



At a natural death rate of  per , per year alone, and no replacements, the city’s slave population of  would have dwindled to , by the year . At a lower death rate of  per  per year, the population of  would have declined to , by .

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  –. Those affected were disproportionately males, especially young males, born in the s and s, who came from the sixcounty combined region of Manhattan, Kings, Richmond, Suffolk, Queens, and Westchester. In the Dutch-dominated areas of the Hudson Valley, slaveholders tended to keep their slaves, whereas others in the state were more likely to send them away. In sum, I would estimate that between , and , enslaved New Yorkers were manumitted or purchased their own freedom during the years –. Perhaps –, more ran away from their enslavers. By far the largest number, between perhaps , and , died while still enslaved. The decade of – is only a minor mystery for the demographics of New York’s black population. The population growth in this decade was within normal bounds and there appears to have been no large migration (of white or blacks) out of the state. However, at a county level, this decade still poses some unanswered questions. The process of removing slaves from New York may have begun in the s. It probably increased in the s and early s, but then became increasingly more difficult because of the strict New York laws against interstate slave trading in  and the actions of the New York Manumission Society to find and punish such lawbreakers. Members of the Society were aware of slave sales but apparently not the extent of the activity. Most of these sales were clandestine. Higher profile cases, with large numbers of slave sales, brought public scrutiny and opposition. For example, in , when the widow Drouillard de Volunbrun attempted to move her twenty slaves from New York City to the South, the slaves filed suit, and a wave of protests against Volunbrun erupted. The number of slaves in New York declined over time primarily because slaves died and were not replaced by new slave births, even though some children of slaves were being counted as slaves in the New York census as late as . Slaves were also moving into the free black category, and free blacks in nineteenth-century New York might have had a low rate of





Loyalists fleeing with their slaves to Canada and other places in the British Empire were long gone from New York by , so this is not a factor in the New York slave population during that decade. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred Knopf, ), –. Martha S. Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York,” Law and History Review : (November ), –; White, “‘We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings’,” .

 Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York natural increase (with a relatively high death rate in New York City). Meanwhile, free blacks were being heavily undercounted in the census. Differences in the rates of slavery’s decline by county can best be explained by accounting for variable death rates, migration patterns, and manumissions. Slave sales to the South certainly occurred, but they were fewer than previously estimated. Most of these slaves sold South were young men from Long Island and Manhattan who were sold during the two decades between  and . The result was a curious pattern in which male slaves were numerically greater in periods of slavery’s growth in the eighteenth century, while female slaves predominated in the era of slavery’s demise. Generally, migration of free blacks to New York City could explain any particular county’s decrease of its black population, but not the statewide picture. The effect of sales to the South differed strongly by region. Slave dealers could more easily work on Long Island or, say, Ulster County, near the border of New Jersey, than they could up the Hudson River. Slaves were needed on the frontier, and in whatever regions of New York that were newly opening to settlement, so they were not being sold South from places like Schoharie and Montgomery Counties. Slave sales to the South out of the Hudson Valley, Mohawk Valley, and western New York were marginal, as the black populations there were rather stable until , with Manhattan as likely the main destination for those who left the region. Finally, it is a mistake to think that , slaves were freed by legal fiat in New York in . While , is a common figure often given in the literature, historians have provided estimates of between , and ,. A certain percent of the slaves listed in the  census (,), which I have adjusted to , by subtracting the children of slaves counted as slaves, must have died before the end of slavery in the state in . At an estimated death rate of  per , per year, with no other sales South or manumissions, only an estimated , remaining



Craig Landy, “When Men amongst Us, Shall Cease to Be: Emancipation of Slaves in the State of New York,” Judicial Notice  (), . Paul J. Polgar, “‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’: The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black Voting Rights in Early National New York,” American Nineteenth Century History : (March ), . Howard Dodson, Christopher Moore, and Roberta Yancey, The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., ): , wrote that the law freed more than , in . David Levine writes that “about ,” were freed in . How he comes to this number is unclear, however. David Levine, “Do You Know When New York Actually Ended Slavery,” Hudson Valley Magazine (June , ), https://hvmag.com/life-style/new-york-slavery-end/, accessed June , .

Sold South? Emancipation by the Numbers in Dutch New York  slaves would have been alive to be freed at the end of . But because some slaves had probably been freed in the intervening  years, and those who were still enslaved were now aging, the total number of slaves freed in  was probably far less, perhaps just , or ,. Some of their brothers, sisters, and children welcomed them into freedom, while others remained enslaved hundreds of miles away. Children of slaves remained bound to service much later, likely leading their parents in some circumstances to remain in service to their former enslavers.

 

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation and the Negotiations to End Slavery in New York

The story of emancipation in New York is often told from New York City, from the papers and perspective of the antislavery movement, and with a certain tinge of inevitability. But there is more of the story to tell. Emancipation was still a political struggle, waged on a battlefield of broad and varied economic motives, driven underneath by a profound clash of moral visions. “The abolition of slavery,” David Brion Davis once observed, “depended on a fundamental change in the Western moral perception of the institution of slavery.” This fundamental change came at a different speed, depending on where one stood. In a literal sense it was true that the further north one lived in the early American republic, the more likely one was to accept the new antislavery morality. Quakers on Long Island and a certain class of liberals in New York City were the avant-garde of the state’s antislavery forces. And on the opposite side of the battleground in this moral tale was arrayed a force of Dutch-descent American slaveholders, resisting the moral currents that flowed down from New England. Everywhere one looks in New York, areas of Dutch influence appear as pockets of resistance to emancipation.





As soon as a surplus supply or skilled and unskilled laborers assembled in New York, the disappearance of slavery in the state was inevitable, since the hiring of free laborers was cheaper for the employer and more desirable in many ways. Where free unemployed labor in plentiful numbers could be hired for bare subsistence wages, it was economically unsound to invest capital in slaves and then to support them during periods of both usefulness and idleness . . .. Moral and humanitarian principles undoubtedly provided a driving force for the movement to outlaw slaver in New York, but the economic undesirability of it as a form of labor assured success to the crusade. Samuel McKee, Labor in Colonial New York, – (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, ), xv–xvi.



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



It is not difficult to explain why Dutch New Yorkers opposed emancipation. Slavery was, after all, the default position of the time. But it is important to demonstrate that there was an actual and identifiable constituency of Dutch-descent New Yorkers, largely in rural areas of the state, who formed a block of resistance to slave emancipation and who held slaves until the bitter end of slavery in the state. In , in the state assembly that crafted the state’s bill of gradual emancipation, it was Dutchdescent representatives from Columbia, Ulster, Albany, and Queens who pushed for favorable terms for slaveholders. Indeed, without the proslavery Dutch bloc, the speed of New York’s emancipation might have been much quicker, following the example of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. However, the proslavery Dutch bloc in New York left no paper trail to rival that of the antislavery advocates like the members of the New York Manumission Society or other abolitionists who have been the subject of considerable research. The membership list of the New York Manumission Society, kept by Isaac T. Hooper from  to , includes over  names, but only a handful that are obviously Dutch. Sources from the turn-of-the century political scene in New York treat the Dutch proslavery constituency as a matter of fact, a commonly recognized force. A letter published in the New York Packet in , addressed “To the Humane Considerate Citizens,” is representative of the kind of evidence for this. The letter supported a petition to enact a state law to prevent slave exports. Appealing to the inhumanity of 



D. N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, – (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), –. Gellman points to proslavery political representatives from Kings, Ulster, Orange, Albany, and Montgomery Counties. Main’s political history identifies the Dutch Reformed Church as the “most anti-Negro” of New York religious groups in the s. Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; Paul J. Polgar, “‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’: The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black Voting Rights in Early National New York,” American Nineteenth Century History : (March ), –. Polgar describes the rise of a strong two-party system, with Federalists as the main antislavery force and Republican-Democrats in the opposition. Paul J. Polgar, “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic : (Summer ), –. Arthur Scherr, “Alexander Hamilton and Slavery: A Close Look at the Founder,” The Historian : (), –. David N. Gellman, Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Three Hills). A List of the Members of the New York Manumission Society. Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, SW-A, http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/compoundobject/ collection/HC_QuakSlav/id//rec/, accessed July , . The Dutch names are Peter Schuyler (joined ), Peter Hegeman (), Adrian Hegeman () Rob Bogardus (), Isaac Van Hook (), Jno. Onderdonk (), Samuel Van Wyck (), William J. Van Amringe (), and John C. Hegeman ().



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

separating people from their families, the letter read: “Slaves held by the farmers in the State, especially the Dutch, are so nearly linked to their families, who have perhaps had the chief of them born in their houses.” A key point here, I believe, is that Dutch slaveholders were, in the public mind at least, more likely to hold slaves for the long term. These were generational slaves, passed down from parents to their children. Typical of the rosy nineteenth-century county histories was this description of the connection between slavery and the Dutch family: Among the Dutch people in the days of slavery the custom prevailed of presenting the children of their female slave, at the age of three years, to some young member of the family of the same sex, and the one to whom the child was presented at once gave it a piece of money and a pair of shoes, and this event was often followed by strong and lasting attachments between these domestics and their destined owners.

Meanwhile, in New York City – the origin of most antislavery opinion pieces in the state – slaves may have been more frequently bought and sold, with little sense that they were members of the family that enslaved them. Nineteenth-century memoirs commonly spoke of the familial ties, affection, and even sense of obligation that slaves and their enslavers had for each other in Dutch families. But some contemporaries singled out the Dutch as the worst of the slaveholders. Elkanah Watson, a Massachusetts businessman who moved to Albany in , recalled: “I well remember when a boy, that the greatest punishment for negros [sic] then held in slavery in New England was to threaten to sell them among the Dutch in Albany.” Likewise, Samuel Ringgold Ward had little positive to say about Dutch slaveholders. Born a slave in Maryland in , Ward fled with his parents to New Jersey at the age of nine and later lived as a free man in New York. “The very lowest of all the early settlers of America were the Dutch,” he wrote. “These very same Dutch, as you find them now in the States of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, out-American all Americans, save those of Connecticut, in their maltreatment of the free Negro.”    

New York Packet, March , . R. M. Bayles et al., History of Suffolk Count, New York (New York: W. W. Munsell & Co., ), . Elkanah Watson, quoted in David M. Ellis, “Yankee-Dutch Confrontation in the Albany Area,” The New England Quarterly : (June ), –. Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & England (London: John Snow, ), .

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



Writing about the wealthy slaveholder Gerrit Smith, Ward noted: He is a descendant of the Dutch, who have distinguished themselves as much for their ill nature towards Negroes as for anything else. He [Smith] belonged by wealth and position to the very first circles of the old Dutch aristocracy; he was the constant and admired associate of the proudest Negro-haters on the face of the earth; he had for years been a member of that most unscrupulous band of organized, systematic, practical promulgator of Negro-hate, the Colonization Society.

Another attestation of the strong link between Dutch farmers and slavery comes from Jacques Pierre Brissot De Warville, a French Girondin and abolitionist, who travelled the US in . His  report of his travels explained that “[t]he case of the Blacks in New-York is nearly the same; yet the slaves there are more numerous. It is because the basis of the population there is Dutch; that is to say, people less disposed than any other to part with their property. But liberty is assured there to all the children of the slaves, at a certain age.” The year  also saw John Jay campaign to replace George Clinton as governor of New York. Jay, it was said, wanted “to rob every Dutchman of the property most dear to his heart, viz. his slaves.” According to historian Henry Flanders, Jay “wished further to compel them [the Dutch] to educate the children of those slaves, although they might be unable to educate their own.” In the  state gubernatorial election, Jay won the city of Hudson and Kinderhook, but he lost the rest of Columbia by a large margin, owing, in part, to the influence of Dutch slaveholding areas. In , Jabez Hammond, a former US congressman and state senator, then serving as a judge in Otsego County, recalled that “[t]he slaveholders at 

   

Gerrit Smith is recorded buying Cuff in for $ in  and then selling him for the same amount the next year. In , he also manumitted an enslaved woman named Jenny (Norman K. Dann, Peter Smith of Peterboro: Furs, Land and Anguish (Hamilton, New York: Log Cabin Press, ), ). His biographer, Norman K. Dann, writes about Peter Smith that “Peter had trouble liking people who were no like him – white, male, and Dutch.” He says further, “The only population that he showed empathy for was the Dutch” (p. ). The Smith family moved to Madison County in . This was the famous “burnt-over district” full of Yankees. Young Peter Smith was influenced by outside thought, followed the Manchester School in politics, and was a leading member of the Liberty Party. Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, . Jacques Pierre Brissot De Warville, New Travels in the United States of America (New York, ), –. Henry P. Johnston, ed. John Jay, The Correspondence and Papers of John Jay,  Vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, –). Henry Flanders, The Lives and Times of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States (Philadelphia: T.&J.W. Johnson & Co., ), .



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

that time were chiefly Dutch. They raved and swore by dunder and blitzen that we were robbing them of their property.” The proslavery forces in New York were not solely Dutch, even though they comprised a large part of it. Views of slavery were commonly split along the lines of the “Yorker” faction and the “Yankee” faction, that is, the old established New York families who were invested in slavery against the new migrants from New England who brought the antislavery ideology with them. The rural–urban divide also played a significant part in the battle over the politics of slavery in New York State. Manumissions came faster in liberal New York City and in the city of Albany than in rural New York, especially in places of Dutch influence. Manumission in the city was easier not merely because of liberal antislavery views but because slaves there had more opportunity to make additional money to purchase their own freedom and because slaves in the city had the advantage of forming connections with free blacks. The rural Dutch and their proslavery allies defended slavery as a matter of course and a matter of livelihood. At the end of the eighteenth century, there was little clue that slavery was failing economically in New York. Slave numbers were at their peak. Slave prices had risen as well. Slaves were valued for cleaning homes and carting goods, and they were as active as ever cutting wheat and taking care of all the chores of a mixed-use farm. Yet there were a number of ways in which slavery in New York became a less-profitable enterprise during the era of emancipation, and could at times even become a net burden to slaveholders. William Ingraham Kip, born in , writing in , recalled a day when his father had owned slaves, and when he had visited other slaveholding families on the Hudson. “At that time . . . the system was just going out,” Kip wrote, and “the slaves, still remaining at these old places, had become a source of care and anxiety to their owners.” New York slaveholding as Kip had witnessed it as a young man may have been only a marginally profitable enterprise, simply because of demographic changes. The international slave trade was banned in , and legal slave imports into New York from other states had effectively ended in  despite a few minor loopholes. In a few examples, New Yorkers 

 

Jabez D. Hammond, The History of Political Parties in the State of New-York, from the Ratification of the Federal Constitution to December, , th ed.,  Vols. (Albany: N. Y. Van Benthuysen, ), Vol. , . “[A]ll the leading families of Dutch extraction in the earliest settled parts of the State were slaveholders.” Ellis, History of Columbia County, New York, . Brooke, Columbia Rising, . William Ingraham Kip, The Olden Time in New York (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, ), .

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



seem to have flouted these laws. For example, Elizabeth Crommeline of New York City purchased a boy slave in  in Virginia, a female slave and her two children from North Carolina in , and a female slave from Virginia in . The law of  allowed slaveholders to bring into New York slaves that they already owned, born since , with the knowledge that these slaves would be free at age twenty-five for females and age twenty-eight for males. As a consequence of the importation restrictions, the value of working-age slaves went up, but the number of aged slaves needing support must have also increased in greater proportion. Slaves over forty-five years of age could not be emancipated without slaveholders paying a bond to the county Overseers of the Poor. Younger slaves, meanwhile, often ran away, purchased their own freedom, or resisted their enslavers in a myriad of ways. One argument at the time was that most of those still enslaved, who would be freed in , were already old and would become paupers, so that “the state would be saddled with the expense of their support,” but if they remained slaves and slavery died through natural decrease, the burden of maintaining the older slaves would fall on the slaveholders themselves. The economic case against slavery gained traction in early nineteenthcentury New York. Cadwallader David Colden (grandson of the slaveholding, eighteenth-century acting governor of New York, Cadwallader Colden) turned against the moral vision of his grandfather and became president of the New York Manumission Society. In , Colden published an important article about emancipation in The Evening Post. Colden identified three essential themes concerning the economics of slavery in the state: () that free labor was making slave labor unprofitable and unnecessary, () that slavery was no longer essential to the economy of the state, and () that some slaves were manumitted not out of moral opposition to slavery but because they had ceased to provide their masters with profit. The “final emancipation of slaves, in this state,” he wrote, “cannot, in the ordinary course of events, be far distant.” Emancipation meant a radical transformation of society in which thousands of persons who had once been owned by others and forced to labor for the benefit of their owners were free to move about, work, and enjoy their time as they saw fit. Slaveholders, however, viewed emancipation as a financial liability, especially if they were not directly compensated for their property. Who was to bear the financial burden of emancipation in New  

 Digital Collections, Library of Virginia. Norwich Journal, November , . The Evening Post (New York) January , .

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Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

York? If slaves were simply declared free, the burden of the transition would fall entirely on slave owners. If the state compensated slave owners for freeing slaves, however, the financial burden would have been shifted onto society at large; the costs of emancipation would have been socialized, as it were. Was it the slave owners who ultimately bore a financial loss because they had invested in the failing business of slavery? Was it the slaves themselves who bore the greater burden of gradual emancipation, because their best remaining years of labor were stolen from them, and in some circumstances their earned wages were required to pay for their own freedom? Or did the burden of emancipation fall more heavily on the general public, who did not directly compensate the slave owners, but did have to provide for the recently emancipated persons in their impoverishment and transition into freedom? Economic historians Fogel and Engerman argued that the burden of emancipation in the North fell almost entirely on the slaves, while “relieving nonslaveholding free northerners of almost the entire direct financial burden of emancipation.” Northern slaveholders, they argued, received close to  percent of the value of their slaves and bore little cost in the gradual emancipation. More precisely, Fogel and Engerman predicted an upper bound “capital loss” that is, the “percentage of the original capital value of the slaves” for New York slaveholders at only . percent. They reasoned that slaveholders who were forced to release the children of their slaves at twentyeight years of age for men and twenty-five years of age for women would have largely recovered the costs of raising those servants by putting them to work in their profitable years as young adults. But, as I argued in Chapter , no children of slaves in New York were in fact legally bound to service until such ages, as the law of  repealed this provision and established twenty-one years of age as the point of freedom, regardless of the gender or year in which the child bound to service had been born. This meant that children of slaves born in  were supposed to be fully emancipated by the year , for example. Had Fogel and Engerman realized this, however, they might have only marginally changed their tune, since they believed a servant held until twenty-one

 

Fogel and Engerman, “Philanthropy at Bargain Prices,” –. Fogel and Engerman, “Philanthropy at Bargain Prices,” . In New Jersey, where gradual emancipation freed slaves at only twenty-five years for men and twenty-one for women, slaveholders lost . percent of their capital.

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



years of age had by that time provided a positive or near positive net lifetime return to the slaveholder. What Fogel and Engerman’s analysis leaves out, however, is that slave owners were also relieved of some expected future earnings that they would have received from putting to work the children of slaves who received their freedom by statute. Gradual emancipation protected slave owners from bearing a direct financial loss, but it also took away from them certain expected future earnings. Emancipation laws also made it more difficult for slave owners to sell their capital investment in slaves, and required them to redirect their investments and business activities into free labor. Slave owners were only partly placated by gradual emancipation; they still wanted to squeeze every last bit of value out of their slaves. One of the problems facing New York slave owners in this period was what to do with slaves of low or zero value. Slaves were assessed as low value not only because of physical infirmities or old age but also in cases in which they were known runaways. Indicative of this is advertisements that offered paltry rewards for runway or “absconded” slaves. When the enslaved woman Margaret ran away in , her owner offered a one cent reward, demonstrating that he had little interest in recovering her. Another offered a five cents reward for a sixteen-year-old boy named Simon. The author of the advertisement even took the opportunity to denigrate his former property: “Speaks grum [sic]. Said boy is healthy, but is lazy and a sloven.” Should a person return Simon to his master, he would receive the five cents only, and no other charges. Not to be outdone, Samuel Boyd offered a one cent reward for “an indentured black girl” named Nancy Ann Evertson. A  history of Passaic County, New Jersey, relates that when runaway advertisements were published, the masters “often offered such a nominal reward as to indicate that the master simply wished to keep himself within the law, which otherwise would have held him responsible for the support of his escape slave, where he might be found.” Allowing unproductive slaves to run away, slave owners avoided paying a bond to

 



 The Evening Post, June , . Poughkeepsie Journal, April , . Poughkeepsie Journal, January , . Such rewards for runaway indentured servants were common. A reward for three cents for John Walker from Hoosick was offered in the Lansingburgh Gazette, December , . Because these advertisements did not use consistent language, as did runaway slave notices, they are more difficult to track down. Nelson, History of the City of Paterson, .

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Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

the county overseers to provide for the manumitted should they become indigent. A few examples of low-value slaves appeared as well in court cases in the period. In a court case in Dutchess County in , a certain Israel Pugsley presented evidence that the service of a young female slave he owned “was not worth more than her living.” In , the case of Overseers of the Poor of the Town of Claverack v. Overseers of the Poor of the City of Hudson concerned a slave named Sarah, who was sold by Peter Van Rensselaer of Claverack and resold multiple times until she ended up on the streets, with no one to take care of her. Although Sarah had recently been sold for $, Van Rensselaer had paid $ to get rid of her because she was “subject to fits and incapable of performing labor.” The judge in the case declared that the original sale was void, that it was a form of collusion, and that the successive owners were speculating on the slave, who was thought to have value if she could illegally be sold out of state. Children of slaves also tended to be a financial burden until around the age of ten. If a slave owner housed a family or group of slaves, he or she would hope to rely on someone else to look after an aged or infirm slave. Older slaves were also valuable beyond what they could produce. For instance, they could watch the house or keep an eye on the children. There was sufficient paternalism on both sides of the moral conflict over slavery in New York to ensure that “worn-out” slaves were generally not cast out to survive on their own. The antislavery forces and the state government wanted to see emancipated slaves provided for by the public purse so that they would not 





An additional case concerning a former slave and the Overseers of the Poor is Overseers of Germantown v. Overseers of the Poor of Livingston  Cai.  (), New York Supreme Court, https://cite.case.law/cai///. Here it was decided that the testimony of one person, that he had previously owed a slave in a particular location, was deemed insufficient for determining which Board of the Overseers was responsible for the former slave. Cook v. Sarah Husted (). Edwin Burritt Smith and Ernest Hitchcock, eds., Reports of Cases Adjudged and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature and Court of the Trail of Impeachments and Correction of Errors of the State of New York. Book V (Newark, New York, ), –, https://cite.case.law/johns///, accessed August , . Overseers of the Poor of the Town of Claverack v. Overseers of the Poor of the City of Hudson,  Johnson , August ; Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases concerning American Slavery and the Negro, Vol. IV: Cases from the Courts of New England, the Middle States, and the District of Columbia (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, ), ; “Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature of the State of New-York, in August Term, , in the Forty-Third Year of Our Independence,” Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature, and in the Court for the Trial of Impeachments and the Correction of Errors, in the State of New-York, Albany,  (), –. HeinOnline, https:// heinonline-org.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/HOL/P?h=hein.nysreports/rcaadju&i=.

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



become beggars, thieves, or insurrectionaries. In , New York passed “[a]n act to prevent aged and decrepit slaves from becoming burthensome within the colony,” which stipulated that a slaveholder would pay a fine of £ for knowingly letting a slave “go about begging of others, Victuals Cloathing or other Necessaries” [sic]. Individual slave owners, including the Dutch, encouraged by social pressures and traditions, often felt a real sense of obligation to provide for elderly slaves, even if they failed to act on this pressure in many cases. In Ulster County, in , for example, a slave named Peter survived his owner, Baltus Van Kleek, of Flushing. An inventory of Van Kleek’s estate lists Peter and assigns him no value, instead noting that he “will require maintenance.” This appears to be a case when a slave was held past his point of profitability to his owner. In , New York mandated a $ fine for “fraudulently selling an aged or infirm slave.” On the surface, this was a protection for the slave buyer against the slave seller. In practice, however, it meant that it was more difficult for a slave owner to attempt to sell older, economically undesirable slaves. Such calculations of value certainly played a role in decisions about individual manumissions. In , New York slave owners were given a year to emancipate slaves of any age or condition without cost. Prior to this, most counties in New York required a slaveholder to post a bond with their county to free a slave. The price of the bond served as a kind of barometer of the fear of free blacks in society over time and by location. In , for example, on the heels of a slave revolt in New York City, the price to manumit a slave in the state was an astounding £ up front, plus an additional £ per year. In , this was changed to an unspecific surety given to the city and country where the person to be freed lived. Only in  did it become possible to manumit a slave in the will of a deceased slave owner, with no payment to the public treasury. Instead, the “heirs, executors, and administrators” were then deemed responsible for the maintenance of the freed slave. Obviously, any such bond could serve as an economic disincentive to manumit a slave. It meant that an

    

https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/hhs/id//rec/, accessed March , . Ulster County Archives, Inventory, August ,  (-). Twenty-Fourth New York State Legislature, Laws of the State of New York: Passed at the Session of the Legislature Held in the Year , Vol.  (Albany: Weed, Parsons, ), –. Acts of Assembly, passed in the Province of New York from  to  (London: J. Baskett, ), –. New York, th Legislative Session, first meeting, , p. .



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

economically rational slaveholder, traditionally valuing a particular slave at $, for example, might lose the equivalent of $ by freeing the slave. This extralegal cost encouraged slaveholders to hold on to marginally or negatively valued slaves. With the manumission bond requirement, a slave of zero value would in effect be worth a negative price to the owner. When the state required payment for manumission, it took away that option for many, who no longer specified emancipation of their slaves in their wills. This appears to have had the effect that New Yorkers seldom emancipated slaves in their wills in the mid eighteenth century, although they had done so in the early eighteenth century and did so once again after . Much of the loss that slaveholders faced, they made up by shifting the costs of emancipation to society in general. There were significant costs of emancipation that were absorbed by New York’s non-slaveholders, largely because the state of New York socialized some of these costs. Some of these were of fairly marginal economic importance. For example, the state compensated slave owners when convicted slaves were put to death by the state’s legal system. In such a case, a slaveholder could petition the authorities to recover the costs of a slave sentenced to death by the legal system. In , a Hermannus Burgher explained that he was “a poor, aged and lame man” who “hath nothing whereby he may sustain himself but the labor of a negro man slave, named Harry, who is now under sentence of death.” Burgher was aware of an act of General Assembly to provide compensation in such a case, and he had a statement from others estimating the value of Harry at £. The Ulster County Archives hold records of the case of Tom, a man enslaved to Rebecca Freer. Tom confessed to the murder of a white woman named Anna Van Vliet. The jury of justices and freeholders who convicted Tom sentenced him to be





There are some curious logical consequences of this law. The socialized cost of slave execution may have relieved the slave owners’ worry about the verdict of the court. The law incentivized slave owners to care less about the loss of unproductive slaves. After all, the state paid the same cost for all slaves regardless of age or productivity. Then again, thirty pounds could often be understating the value of slaves of prime age. Without the law, however, slave owners would have an incentive to infer with the court’s attempt to administer the death penalty. A slave owner might rather receive cash to see a violent, disobedient slave sent away than he would see such a slave put to death, even if it would help intimidate and establish the fear that was necessary for social control. Similarly, New Jersey reimbursed slave owners at £ for an execution female slave and £ for a male slave, and even paid for the firewood when a convicted slave was burned to death. Nelson, History of the City of Paterson, ; William Alexander Linn, “Slavery in Bergen County, N.J.,” in Papers and Proceedings of the Bergen County History Society (Bergen, NJ: Press of the Evening Record, ), . De Voe, The Market Book, –.

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



hanged “by the neck till he be dead.” Tom was apprized at £, current money of New York, to be paid by the county to his owner. The state of New York also recompensed slave owners when their slaves who served in the military in the Revolution were granted freedom for their service. Slave owners were also compensated if their slaves died in military service in the Revolution. In , New York passed “[a]n Act to Authorize the Raising of Two Regiments of Men of Color.” Slaves, with permission from owners, could thereafter serve in the military, but payments for their service were to go to their master. Upon discharge from service (with no indication of or limitation on the length of service or type of discharge), the slave was to be manumitted. This was different from the laws during the Revolution, when a New York slave had to serve for three years to gain their freedom. The most obvious way in which the costs of emancipation in New York were pushed on the public was with the child abandonment programs of –. These laws allowed slaveholders to abandon the claim to service (essentially to emancipate) the children of their slaves without paying a bond to the county Overseers of the Poor. Vivienne Kruger, who investigated this topic in depth, says that it was a “disguised compensated abolition scheme [which] permitted slaveholders to abandon children and then receive them back into their homes as boarders until (and if ) they were bound out to service – for which they would receive monthly payments from local poor authorities.” At least , black children were abandoned under the program. From , a person received $. per month for each abandoned child of a slave who was maintained in a household. In , this was reduced to $ and then in  to $ per month per child. The program was ended altogether in . The state could justify the program by pointing out that it cost $ per year for the state to take care of an abandoned child.

     



Ulster County Archives, -, Proceedings, Justice Court, July . Benjamin Meyer Brink, The Early History of Saugerties, – (Kingston, NY: R. W. Anderson & Son, ), . Morris’s Memorial History of State Island, New York, Vol. , p. . See chapter  in Laws of the State of New York, passed at the th Session of the Legislature (Albany: J. Buel, ), . Vivienne Kruger, Born to Run, chapter . Michael Groth, Forging Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley: The End of Slavery and the Formation of a Free African-American Community in Dutchess County, New York, – (PhD dissertation, State University of New York Press, Binghamton, ), , fn. Kruger, Born to Run, .



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

The infant abandonment program was state-supported in that local Overseers of Poor boards were reimbursed costs by the state. In fact, this was a subsidy for the care of the children of slaves, paid almost entirely to slaveholders. This was more than a cost-shifting measure by which slave owners released slaves to be held at the expense of the state. In practice, it was a direct transfer scheme, by which slaveholders actually profited at the expense of the state. The burden of emancipation fell unequally through a process of political and personal negotiations. In the popular mind, it is common to think of slaves as almost entirely powerless to resist their enslavement. At certain times and places this was true, even in New York. But in many circumstances, slaves were able to negotiate some terms of their labor and even their sale. A primary tool of resistance was running away, or feigning sick days. After the Revolution, as a free black community developed in New York, slaves had a real opportunity to run away and seek freedom in the city. This sense of negotiation began with runaways in the Revolution, as described in Chapter . During the war, slave-owning farmers were sometimes able to enter British-controlled New York City to attempt to reclaim their “absconded property.” Hoping to entice their slaves back into service, these slave owners offered terms and conditions. The runaways, meanwhile, hopeless and fearful that their former masters would punish them severely, sometimes chose to return. Similar efforts at “escape and other forms of resistance” were used as “weapons to coerce [slave]owners into making concessions” throughout the mid-Atlantic. Hodges has called runaway activity in New York “a widespread contest between masters and slaves in the last few years of the [eighteenth] century.” Meanwhile, he notes, “[i]nside the home, blacks and whites negotiated a personal emancipation.” Negotiation between slaves and slave owners developed mainly in urban environments, as is seen in a study of slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. Negotiation between slaves and masters is a theme in Jeroen Dewulf’s history of Pinkster. Dewulf calls the Pinkster celebrations part of “cooperative resistance aimed to secure and gradually expand a set of minimal rights     

Michael E. Groth, Slavery and Freedom, –, –. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, ). Smith, “Runaway Slaves in the Mid-Atlantic Region during the Revolutionary Era,” . Hodges, Root & Branch, . T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, ).

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



and human dignity in exchange for loyalty and commitment.” Demanding to celebrate Pinkster, New York’s Dutch slaves entered into negotiation about their status. In recent years, historians have explored negotiation as a theme in the gradual transition of American slavery. As in New York, negotiation played a role in the “in-between” legal status of neither slave nor free in New Jersey’s gradual emancipation. In New Jersey, this introduced a host of legal problems about the responsibilities slaveholders, slave renters, and enslaved persons owed each other. In a similar vein, M. Scott Heerman wrote about the “perpetual reinvention” of slavery in Illinois, where slavery was abolished in  but continued when slaveholders turned slaves into indentured servants with extended contracts. In New York, protections for slaves were painstakingly few at first, but after the Revolution, they were gradually built into the law. Laws were designed not only with emancipated slaves in mind but also for society in general. The state protected slaves primarily through the local Overseers of the Poor. It was important for freed blacks to not starve to death on the streets, but it was also important for the county’s poor fund not to be overburdened. Wealth captured from loyalist estates helped support slaves manumitted from those particular properties. With a New York law of , a slave even had the right not to be sold, and the law established that all slaves brought into the state after  could not be sold, and if sold, became free by the sale, and the seller subject to financial penalty. This law was tested various times in court and was commonly upheld. This right continued with updated laws in , which prohibited the importation of slaves into the state if the slaveholders intended to settle the slaves permanently in the state, and also banned buying or selling imported slaves. Slaveholders could still travel to New York with their slaves, but they could not have permanent residency.    

  

Dewulf, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo, . Hendrik Hartog, The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery & Emancipation in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). M. Scott Heerman, The Alchemy of Slavery: Emancipation in the Illinois County, – (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). The status of a slave brought into New York by a slave owner who then died was brought into question in Sable v. Hitchcok,  Johns. Cas.  (), New York Supreme Court of Judicature, https://cite.case.law/johns-cas///, accessed August , . Link v. Beuner,  Cai.  () New York Supreme Court, https://cite.case.law/cai///, accessed August , . Jacob D. Wheeler, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Slavery (New York: A. Pollock Jr., ), . In , travelers were no longer legally permitted to carry slaves into New York for any period of time. An Act to amend the Revised Statutes in relation to persons held as slaves, May , , in



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

In principle, after , slaves imported into the state were legally free. The act “An Addition to the Act concerning slaves and servants” of  clarified that “[n]o person held as a slave shall be imported, introduced or brought into this State on any pretense whatever by any person or persons coming permanently to reside within the same.” The only way to get around this law was to move to New York, with slaves in tow, and then after nine months, when, for the purposes of the law, one was a resident of state, declare an intent to stay in New York with one’s slaves. Legal protections for New York’s slaves worked first to end the interstate slave trade. In , a steep fine of $ was established for those caught buying, selling, or attempting to export or import a slave in New York. While this law did not completely remove the threat of selling a slave to a harsh master, it did make the process considerably more difficult. In the negotiation battle between master and slave, the master lost one of his most important weapons: the threat of sale to a cruel or crueler master. A series of court cases in New York and New Jersey in the first decade of the nineteenth century demonstrated how the courts would interpret state laws and whether the two neighboring states would respect each other’s restrictions on slave imports. In Fish v. Fisher (), the court considered the case of a New Jersey slaveholder whose slave ran away to New York, was then taken by his master in New York City, and sold. The court determined in this case that there was no fraudulent attempt to circumvent the anti-importation laws, and allowed the sale. Nevertheless, the court upheld the position that a slave who runs away into New York and is retaken is to be considered imported. Likewise, Dubois v. Allen () concerned a slave who was freed in New Jersey, but not knowing she had been freed, was then indentured to a person from New York. The court determined this was an attempt at evasion of the statute of  banning slave importation. The key point is that in this decade the courts had to determine the slippery question of intent, whether an owner intended to sell a slave across borders. In a New Jersey case, The State v. Quick,  N.J.L.  (), the

 

Erasmus Peshine Smith, Laws of the States of New York, of a General nature, passed from  to , inclusive . . . (Rochester, NY: Thomas H. Hyatt, ), . But this law either never went into force or was neglected entirely, as coastwise slave manifests indicate potentially dozens of Southern slaves accompanying their enslavers to New York for the summer from the s until . Fish v. Fisher,  Johns. Cas.  (), https://cite.case.law/johns-cas///, accessed August , . Dubois v. Allen, Ant. N.P. Cas.  ().

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



attorney for the plaintiff argued that any purchase of a slave in New York and export out of state of that sale entitled the slave his freedom. But in this case, a James Jay of New York bought the slave Dick in New York, kept him as a servant in his own house, then moved to New Jersey, and kept the slave there on a farm for two years, before he decided to sell Dick for bad behavior. At question was intent, and the judge, J. Pennington, decided in the defendant’s favor, because he could not determine an intent to move the slave out of state and to sell him. Skinner v. Fleet (), concerning an enslaved man named Primus who was moved from Connecticut to New York City and then sold, upheld these earlier decisions. Harmanus Bleecker, attorney for the defendant in the case, argued that Fish v. Fisher was “in favour of personal liberty.” The case of Trongott v. Byers () affirmed that all slave sales in New York were void after . Yet slave sales occurred after  in New York. This is clear from a number of court cases, such as Livingston v. Ackeston (), which concerned the  sale of a slave. Free-born children of slaves continued to be bought and sold as well. Slaves convicted of crimes could always “be moved” (i.e., sold) out of state, but general interstate slave sales or sales of children of slaves were forbidden. A New York law of  banned kidnapping slaves to sell them out of state. A fine “not to exceed , dollars” built into the law indicates the seriousness of the state’s legal threat. Courtroom negotiations over slavery should not be seen as independent from negotiations about slavery taking place between individual slaves and 







The State v. Quick,  N.J.L.  (). Hart v. Cleis () confirmed that in a case when a slave owner attempted to export his slave, the said slave would be freed and the slave owner charged $. The court determined, however, that if another person besides the owner of slave attempted to export that slave without the slave owner’s knowledge and permission, the exporter would be fined but the enslaved person would not be freed. Hart v. Cleis,  Johns.  () New York Supreme Court, https://cite.case.law/johns///, accessed August , . In Caesar v. Peabody,  John.  () questioned a particular sale of a slave Caesar, who had been legally brought into the state of New York years prior, https://cite.case.law/johns///, accessed August , . Skinner v. Fleet,  Johns.  () New York Supreme Court, https://cite.case.law/johns// /, accessed on August , . Harmanus Bleecker, of a Dutch family from Albany, New York, was one of the few antislavery Dutch-descent New Yorkers. A Dutch speaker, he was a member of the American Colonization Society and the New York Colonization. He served as a representative in the US Congress from  to , and as chargé d’affaires to the Netherlands from  to . Esek Cown, Reports of cases argued and determined in the Supreme Court . . ., Vol.  (Albany: Gould & Banks, –), , . In , Quackenbos v. Lansing affirmed that sales of enslaved persons who are in fact free are void. Quackenbos v. Lansing,  Johns.  (). New York Supreme Court, https://cite.case.law/johns///, accessed August , . Cown, Reports of cases argued and determined in the Supreme Court, Vol. , .



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

slaveholders. A result of the changed laws regarding slavery was a changed situation for slaves, who gradually found themselves with more power of negotiation. In the following story from Dutchess County, we see the principle of slave–master negotiation at work, as well as the memory of a sympathetic relationship. Tom, an intelligent negro, made up his mind that his master could do very well without him, and besought him very earnestly, to sell him to Peter Van Benthuysen, who had expressed a wish to own him; which, after much hesitation, he finally did. Before Tom had been a fortnight on the premises of his new masters, he absconded without leaving a clue to his destination behind him. After , when New York had freed her slaves by an act of the Legislature, Tom came into the State from Massachusetts with a good team of horses and a wagon, his own property, with which he was earning his living as a teamster. He was on his way to the Hudson river for a load of merchandise, and sought out his old master, then living in the town of Milan, to tell him that when he importuned him to sell him he had fully made up his mind to run away, but preferred to do so from a new rather than his old master, to whom and his family he had become greatly attached and that he was quite as eager that he should obtain a good price for him as he was that he should sell him.

How slave–master negotiations worked out must have varied considerably from case to case, but by the year , it is clear that New York slaves had negotiated some small bit of liberty, and were not afraid to skip out on work or challenge their enslavers. An example of this can be seen in the diary of John Arthur of Pawling, in Dutchess County. The diary meticulously covers the pattern of work on a farm for the year . Arthur owned multiple slaves. Ham and Cato worked the farm, often alongside Arthur. Sometimes they worked together on one task, sometimes they worked alone, or in different combinations with free laborers. They worked six days per week when weather permitted. There were days when Arthur and others were at work, but Cato explicitly was not, but no reason was given. Arthur’s farm was diversified, with oats, rye, wheat, potatoes, pumpkins, apples, and more, but he seemed to spend the most effort on hay, which he sold to others in the area. From the beginning of March  to the end of August, Arthur’s enslaved man, Cato, worked a ½ recorded days. 



Commemorative Biographical Record of Dutchess County, New York, Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens, and Many of the Early Settled Families (Chicago: J. H. Beers, ), . The Arthur Diary, Winterthur Library.

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



In some ways, it seemed that Cato had some freedom. Except during a busy July hay season, he always had Sundays off. He took three sick days in those six months, plus he was recorded as simply “not at work” a total of seven times in those months before skipping out entirely at the end of August. There is no indication that Cato was punished for missing work. Cato often worked unsupervised, and his work varied, including shearing sheep, repairing roads, fixing fences, spreading dung, and cutting bushes. In six months, Cato focused five days of effort on firewood, nineteen and a half days on oats, nine and a half on rye, twelve days on wheat, thirty-one days on corn, and forty-seven and a half days on hay. In June, Cato spent a day grinding the scythes. Cato’s physical movements differed from day to day, but the work could be quite monotonous and repetitive. He spent nineteen days threshing grains, twenty-five and a half days swinging a scythe for hay, two days using a cradle scythe to cut wheat, and half a day cradling rye. Sawing, scything, hoeing, threshing, Cato’s back, arms, and legs were well used. This was not, however, a relationship of pure tyranny and terror. After Cato missed a week of work at the end of August, Arthur went looking for him, and on September , he paid a certain John Watts for serving a search warrant for Cato. At the same time, Arthur sold his house servants for $. On September , a B. Franklin came to give a report about Cato. September meant plowing again for winter wheat, cutting corn in the field, and harrowing. Arthur went to Staatsburg for Cato on October , found him, and sold him the next day to Major Provoost for $. Arthur’s fall season continued with making cider, pulling pumpkins, harvesting potatoes, and seeding wheat fields. The statutory laws of New York tell a clear story of gradual freedoms gained by the enslaved, and these sources have been cited by previous historians of New York slavery. Seldom considered in this story, however, is the precedent of common-law court cases, particularly cases involving the status of slavery at the New York Supreme Court in Albany. These cases helped to clarify the rough edges of the written law, but they also shaped the direction of the law towards freedom, and ensured the gains that antislavery advocates had made. In a New York case from , Counsel Griffen defended the common law as an enemy of slavery: “Why is it that slaves cannot breathe in England? Why is it that ‘they touch that country and their shackles fall?’ It is the common law which



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

strikes their fetters, it is the common law which expands them into freemen.” Courts not only heard cases about manumission and legal status, but also about slave inheritance, marriage of slaves, and support for emancipated slaves who could not provide for themselves. In the nineteenth century, unlike in the eighteenth, these cases generally defaulted to freedom for the enslaved. For example, the court decided that if a slave owner knowingly attempted to export a slave out of state, not only was he to be fined $, but the slave in question was also to be granted freedom. Likewise, if it could be proven that a slave owner had gone to Canada during the Revolution, he would be “attainted of adhering to the enemies of the country,” and should he return to New York, his slaves would be considered manumitted. In , in Oatfield v. Waring, the court decided that if two out of three joint owners of a slave wanted to manumit a slave, their wishes overruled the interest of the third. With each new law restricting slaveholders, limiting their property rights in their slaves, slavery was being pushed towards legal extinction. Enslaved persons in Dutch households must have found negotiation more difficult, if only because the market offered them fewer options in rural areas, and their rural Dutch language community did not prepare them for a life as a free person in English-speaking New York City. By tradition, New York slaves had the right to decline being sold to certain persons, even though they did not have the right to refuse to be sold altogether. In many instances, slaves in nineteenth-century New York were no longer working directly for a master, but were being rented out, with the freedom to find their own employer and the obligation to return some or all of their wages to the owner. Such arrangements were common in New York City, but they were not entirely absent in the countryside either. In Canajoharie, Montgomery County, a contract from  reads:      

People v. Melvin (),  Wheeler C.C.  (). A law of  recognized the legality of marriage of enslaved persons. Feldman, “Creating Law through Regulating Intimacy,” –. William Johnson, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature, Vol.  (New York: Banks and Brothers, ), . William Johnson, Reports of Cases . . . Vol.  (), . William Johnson, Reports of Cases . . . Vol.  (), . Samuel Sutphin, a slave in New Jersey, explicitly noted in his memoirs that he “agreed to the terms” of his own sale. Abraham Van Doren Honeyman, Somerset County Historical Quarterly,  (Vol. III – ) Somerville, New Jersey: Somerset County Historical Society) “The Revolutionary War Record of Samuel Sutphin, Slave.”

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



In trust that she will remunerate me for the same I do hereby authorize & empower my female slave named Dean the bearer, for the term of one year from the Date here-of to labour & do work for any person or persons who may be pleased to employ her, and also to receive the wages that shall be due for such labour or work – which when paid her will be accounted the same as if paid unto or received by me. In witness whereof I have hereunto subscribed my name at Canajoharie This th Day of June AD . Jn. C. Toll.

In another example, Elizabeth Ten Broeck of Albany, in , freed her slave Susannah, aged thirty-seven, with three children of ages seven, five, and three. But the manumission was made on the condition that Susannah come once a week, when requested, to do “the washing and ironing of the family and Spring and fall of every year assist in whitewashing and cleaning house and helping at killing time as is usual in the family.” These situations showed that the lines between slavery and freedom in New York could be blurred, and that the transition from one condition to the other could not be registered in binary as it was on the census. In a study of Dutchess County, Michael Groth determined that slaveholders delayed manumission as long as possible, so long as it was in their best interests. They also made “emancipation contingent upon ‘appropriate behavior’ and they continued to perceive manumission as a beneficent gift to be bestowed only upon the worthiest of slaves in recognition of long service, loyalty, and obedience.” Groth concluded from this that “[e]nlightenment thought and the ideology of Revolution hardly compelled slaveowners in Dutchess County to embrace the cause of antislavery during the Early Republic.” Slavery in nineteenth-century New York was also negotiable because slaveholders were uncertain about the day of its ultimate demise. Many slaveholders must have been worried that slavery in the state might end sooner than it did. They were glad, in some circumstances, to “cash out” by agreeing to grant manumission for a certain number of additional years of faithful service, or by contracting with the slave to allow them to purchase their own freedom. Manumission could be used as a carrot (reward) to encourage greater productivity. But if productivity was falling

  

Grems-Doolittle Library Historic Manuscripts Collection . Harry Beller Yoshpe, “Record of Slave Manumissions in Albany, –,” Journal of Negro History,  (October ), –, . Michael Groth, “Slaveholders and Manumission in Dutchess County,” New York History : (), .



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

drastically and slaves could flee service rather easily, manumission could be used as a promise simply to keep slaves. In other words, manumission might not always have been an incentive to work harder, but it was at least an incentive to work at all for a certain slave master. In , the slave Yat agreed to work for six more years for John S. and Sarah Glen, after which point he would be emancipated. In the contact, Yat agreed to three days free for Christmas, two for New Year’s, two for Easter, and three for Pinkster. He was also allowed to visit his wife “once every three weeks on Saturday and to go from Schenectady two hours before Sun Sett and to return on Monday next in the forenoon at Ten O’clock or before.” Yat also agreed not to have any additional wives, to keep his own lawful wife, and to not go fiddling without the permission of his master or mistress. The Glens also threatened that if Yat ran away and was caught, he would be sold, but without his fiddle. Yat also agreed to go to church “at least once every Four Weeks.” Isaac Mitchell, complaining about his slave Dine, who had recently run away, shows the loosening hold of slaveholders in the negotiation process. “The conduct of this servant is peculiarly ungrateful” Mitchell wrote. “I had owned her but two months during which time she had never been put to hard service, or ill treated; I had engaged to give her the privilege to look herself a new master, should she be discontented, and besides had promised to free her in six years from the time I purchased her, provided she behaved well.” Dine, Mitchell said, had been “principally brought up in Dutch families.” Part of the negotiation process was agreeing to a price at which a slave could buy their freedom or the freedom of their family members. It is worth asking whether slaves in New York paid market prices for selfpurchase manumission, or whether they paid above or below market rate. By comparison, one should note that Shawn Cole, a finance professor,

  

 Agreement of John S. Glen and Yat, his slave. Grems-Doolittle Library, Schenectady. Troy Gazette, June , . There is some indication that New York courts upheld such agreements between slaveholders and their slaves. Petry v. Christy  Johns.  () concerned a slave who had provided payment for self-purchase and manumission of himself, his wife, and a child, which the slaveholders took but did not free the slaves for another two years. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture (New London, CT: C. Holt, ) provides an example of an enslaved man on Long Island who bargained with his master to hire himself and return a portion of his wages. He cut prodigious amounts of firewood and threshed grained, and was eventually able to purchase his own freedom, freedom for his family members, and even other enslaved persons.

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



found that slaves seeking manumission in Louisiana between  and  paid a  percent premium, above their market value. In the thousands of acts of negotiation over the terms of slavery in nineteenth-century New York, legal changes in the state gradually tilted the balance of power in the direction of the slaves. Legal disputes over slavery, meanwhile, used up judicial resources at the costs of the state. New York’s statutory laws concerning slavery were not always clear, so court decisions also set a precedent. In , in Gurnee v. Dessies, the court decided that “a free black man is a competent witness to prove facts which may have happened while he was a slave.” This decision applied even in cases in which the freedom of the person was in question. Since slaves, by law, could still not give testimony against free persons, but free blacks could, this was an important step in establishing the rights of former slaves, or persons in cases in which their slave or free status was in question. Court decisions were sometimes jury decisions, such as in a case in  in New York City, when a slave owner was convicted of multiple cases of assault of his slaves and sentenced to  days in jail and a $, fine. Meanwhile, the slaveholder had manumitted his slaves, perhaps to gain the sympathy of the court. The jury, however, was quite sympathetic to the slaves. This case demonstrated, in New York City at least, a change in mentality, in which a jury recognized the humanity of slaves, allowing them to win a case that would not have even been prosecuted thirty years before. In Dunbar v. Williams, argued before the New York Supreme Court in , the court declared that a person giving urgent “medical aid or other assistance” to a slave “in a case of necessity” was entitled to compensation from the owner of the slave. This further established that enslaved persons ought to be provided such treatment. In the case of Bayley v. Bates, in , the status of a slave, brought from Maryland to Ontario County, New York, in , was in question. The slave owner who brought the slave to New York had returned to Maryland, leaving the slave at labor on the farm of another person in Ontario County. The master having not returned, the slave began hiring himself out to   



Shawn Cole, “Capitalism and Freedom: Manumissions and the Slave Market in Louisiana, –,” The Journal of Economic History : (December ), . Gurnee v. Dessies,  Johns.  (). New York Supreme Court, https://cite.case.law/johns// //, accessed August , . The Trial of Amos Broad and His Wife, on three several Indictments for Assaulting and Beating Betty, A Slaves, and her little female Child Sarah, aged three years (New York: Henry C. Southwick, ), www.loc.gov/item//, accessed August , . Dubar v. Williams,  Johns.  (), https://cite.case.law/johns///, accessed August , .



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

others. The court determined that the man was still a slave, but the very fact that they considered the enslaved man’s case demonstrated the turn in the law towards manumissions. In Albany in , the court decided that a black man, Tom, of Montgomery County, who, “by virtue of a certificate in writing,” had been promised his freedom upon the death of his master, Johannes Walradt, despite the fact that Johannes Walradt had, while still living, sold Tom to another party. For those aware of this decision, it would have made the buying and selling of slaves in New York substantially more risky, since the purchaser would assume the risk that the former slave owner had not left a promise, in writing, guaranteeing the slave’s freedom on his death. Presumably, this would apply no matter how many times the slave had been bought and sold, that somewhere in the chain of transactions, a former master had left a similar agreement. A similar problem was addressed in Kettletas v. Fleet, in , when a slave who was promised freedom after eight years of service was sold before the eight years was over. The purchaser was able to recover the interest if such an agreement existed in writing and under seal. That is, if the original owner sold the slave, fully aware of the written manumission agreement, it would be fraud to not inform the purchaser of the agreement. In this case, the slave had given the paper agreement to a third party for safekeeping, and this document was enough to secure his victory. A legal commentator summarized the judgment more succinctly: “A contract, for the sale of a slave for life, may be rescinded by the vendee, if it appears that the vendor has bound himself under seal to manumit the slave after a certain period.” Kettletas v. Fleet set a standard and was often cited in New York courtrooms. It was not the final word on the status of promises of manumission, however. In , a similar case arose concerning Nan Mickel, a slave girl who was promised her freedom in the will of her master, but was then sold before the master died. In this case, the court ruled that the sale of the slave revoked the manumission promise of the

  

Johnson, Reports of Cases, Vol. , . Johnson, Reports of Cases, Vol. , –. Johannes Gerhardt Walrath, – (name spelled with and without the h). re Tom  Johns.  () Westlaw. John Anthon, The Law of Nisi Prius: being reports of cases determined at nisi prius, in the Supreme Court of the state of New York, with notes and commentaries on each case, nd ed. (New York: Banks & Bros.,  c. ), .

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



will. In Smith v. Hoff (), the court decided that an agreement to manumit a slave by the slave paying the master need not be in writing. “The purpose of a written manumission, &c. is to avoid being answerable for the future support of the slave.” The judge in a case of Concklin v. Havens () described the combination of legal proceduralism and antislavery sympathy that shaped his opinion: “By our laws, appearing from various decisions in this Court, slaves are protected, and have many rights and privileges, yet they are considered, on question in relation to the right of property in them, as goods and chattels, and consequently, such questions must be decided by the same legal principles as are applicable to that sort of property.” But in his decision, the judge said, “I rejoice that an instance has occurred, by which the law, thus applied, will operate in favor of personal liberty.” “All presumptions ought to be made in favor of personal liberty,” noted the court reporter in an emancipation case argued at the New York Supreme Court in . In the s, slaves could give testimony, and for capital cases, they had the right to trial by jury. After the s, new laws regarding slavery in New York tended not to further restrict slave movement or rights but gradually chipped away at the power of masters over their slaves. The legal system shifted, from a one-sided focus on the preservation of the slave system, to an arena of negotiation between slaves and masters. Edwin Olson, writing in , pinned the motivating factor of this change on the liberalizing effect of the antislavery movement in the late eighteenth century. Olson notes that the slave code in New York was harsher than in any other northern states. He wrote: Indeed, from  to the end of the eighteenth century, it equaled the severity of the codes in operation below the Potomac, even though the patrol system of the South never existed in New York, nor was there ever any prohibition on the teaching of slaves to read and write. The small scale   



In re Mickel,  Johns.  (), https://cite.case.law/johns///, accessed August , . See also: John Anthon, The Law of Nisi Prius: being reports of cases determined, nd ed., . Esek Cown, Reports of cases argued and determined in the Supreme Court, Vol.  (Albany: Gould & Banks, –), , , . Smith v. Hoff,  Cow.  (). Concklin v. Havens  Johns.  () Westlaw. Silas Wood, a lawyer writing in Huntington, New York, on October , , references Conklin v. Havens to explain, “I think it may be hand down as the doctrine of our Supreme Court that all children born of a wench among her servitude belong to the owners of her at that time whether general or temporary.” Town of Southold, New York, Records, “ letter between Wood and Horton,” www.southoldtownny.gov/ DocumentCenter, accessed July , . Oatfield v. Waring,  Johns. . () Supreme Court of New York.



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation of slaveholding tended to encourage a laxness of discipline on the part of the masters, which had to be overcome by rigid control.

This system of rigid control broke down during and after the Revolution, as slaves became more mobile and took flight. In addition, as antislavery sentiment was building, state laws began to turn in favor of slaves. A massive change in the treatment and punishment of slaves in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century New York also suggests that slaves were gaining more power in negotiations. The violent, retributive nature of slave punishment in New York weakened in the late eighteenth century and was called into question in the early nineteenth century. Traditionally, there were two kinds of punishment for slaves in New York: whipping for running away or theft, and death penalty for arson, rape, attempted rape, or murder. A law of  declared that “every Negro, Indian, or other Slave that shall be found guilty of any of the above said Facts [drunkenness, cursing, swearing, or talk impudently to any Christian] shall suffer so many Stripes, at some publick Place . . . not exceeding forty.” New Yorkers decided that thirty-nine or forty lashes were sufficient for most any corporal punishment, and that any more would be excessive. This legal custom was likely derived from a law in Deuteronomy :–, stating that “the judge must not impose more than forty lashes.” But in New York slavery, there were exceptions. Thomas Quack, a slave belonging to a Mr. Tehune, received a severe whipping for theft. He was given three times thirty-nine lashes – thirty-nine lashes per day on three separate days over the course of a week. His punishment was given in stripes of fifteen, fifteen, and nine on each of the three days. The first fifteen were always administered at the courthouse, and the following sets of fifteen and nine were applied at unique locations around town, probably for the maximum effect of setting an example to other slaves in the community. A law of  declared that slaves in New York City found firing any “gun, pistol, rocket, cracker, squib or other fire work” in “place where persons frequently walk” could be punished by whipping on the naked back, not exceeding thirty-nine lashes, while freed persons were instead

  

Edwin Olson, “The Slave Code in Colonial New York,” Journal of Negro History : (April ), –. Law of New York (Laws of New-York from the Year  to , inclusive), An Act for Suppressing of Immorality (passed September , ). James M. Van Valen, History of Bergen County, New Jersey (New York: New Jersey Publishing and Engraving Company, ), –.

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



fined or sentenced to time in jail. As early as the s, black slaves who assembled on the Sabbath and at other times deemed dangerous by the court could be subject to “bee publicqly wipt” unless the slave owner was willing to pay a piece of eight for each slave in violation. In the antebellum North, reports of severe whippings in the South shocked northern audiences, who were perhaps unaware that a few generations prior such whippings had been common in New York. Stories of whipping in the South were written to invoke sympathy and abolitionist sentiment. Without a political cause to resurrect it, the terrible slave whippings in the North faded more quickly from memory. In , one John Van Zandt of New York City applied a horsewhip to his slave to such an extent that the slave died in his bed during the night after the whipping. Van Zandt was cleared of any wrongdoing. A history of Modena in Ulster County notes that “[n]ear the Terwilliger house, stands a huge, white colonial mansion, built by Col. Josiah in , a silent reminder of a former plantation whose lands stretched to the Hudson River, and where it is darkly told that a slave was whipped to death.” Thomas Morris Strong, author of a history of Flatbush, justified the practice in years past by explaining to his readers that “[t]his mode of punishment was not in that day, considered improper or cruel.” Slave whippings continued well into the nineteenth century in New York. The Staten Island whipping post stood as late as . Slave whippings continued in the Dutch areas of New Jersey at least until the s. In , recalling an event from the spring of  for readers of the Passaic Daily News, J. B. said that he saw “a black man, woman and boy tied to a post at Preakness and whipped severely on the bare back by the Constable, while the Justice counted the stripes well-laid on, according

  

  

“ lashes for slaves found carrying arms.” Laws of the State of New York, passed by the th New York State Legislature (). Kingston, New York, court records. Minutes of the Court of Common Pleas, Court of Sessions, Justices Court, – (Ulster County Archives, Collection -). George W. Edwards and Arthur Everett Peterson, New York as an Eighteenth Century Municipality (New York: Columbia University, ), . A jury determined that “the Correction given by the Master was not the Cause of his Death, but that it was by the Visitations of God.” New York Weekly Journal, January , . Kenneth E. Hasbrouck, “Modena Village Area Rich in History,” De Halve Maen : (January ), . Thomas Morris Strong, The History of the Town of Flatbush, in Kings County, Long-Island (New York: T. R. Mercein, ), . Ira K. Morris, Morris’s Memorial History of Staten Island, Vol.  (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, ), .



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

to the law.” “A few years later,” J. B. continued, “I saw an old black woman and boy tied up in the same way and whipped in front of the school near the First Church at Passaic, just as school was dismissing. Also at another time, a woman was whipped alone.” J. B. noted the public nature of the whippings – that they always took place before a crowd of people, as “many appeared to enjoy the sport.” All of the whippings J. B. recalled were for minor thefts of chickens, sausages, and the like. In eighteenth-century New York, whites and blacks were both punished by whipping. The difference in their treatment is clear, however, and should give some indication about how New Yorkers treated their slaves. Blacks, both free and enslaved, appear to have been whipped more frequently and with more severe intent. A history of Staten Island relates cases of Hessian soldiers whipped for assaulting a woman, an old white woman whipped for witchcraft, and a troublemaker named Sam (apparently a white man) who was whipped on over fifty occasions. In Otsego County, New York, in , Stephen Arnold, a white man, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for killing a white girl, Betsy Van Amberg, by whipping her excessively because she refused to read and pronounce the word “gig” properly. The convicted man claimed to have had no intent to kill – merely to “instruct.” The girl, it is said, “was partly high, and partly low Dutch” and in the record, there is no indication that she was the natural child of the convicted. While excessive whipping of white persons was criminal, similar abuses of black slaves went uncontested in court. Sources suggest, however that there was a growing aversion to corporal punishment in the region in the nineteenth century. In Passaic County, New Jersey, an “old colored woman” was punished for theft, and the constable, Garret Van Houten, drew the whip, which had “an ugly stinging lash on it.” The woman cried for mercy in Dutch: “‘Slagh nit hard, Garry’ (Do not hit hard, Garry),” and the constable “humanely laid the blows on as lightly as he could, but when he ceased, and she had resumed her upper garments, she cursed him bitterly.” That the woman could call the constable “Garry” indicates some familiarity between the two, and that she could curse him and not be punished further shows the relaxed hold of slavery over the lives of the enslaved. By the late eighteenth   

Passaic Daily News, June , . An example of a free black man whipped is in Teunis G. Bergen, Genealogy of the Lefferts Family (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, ), .  Catskill Recorder, February , . Nelson, History of the City of Paterson, .

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



century, New York slave masters could pay a fine so that their slaves would avoid a whipping. There is some indication as well that in some instances in the later years of slavery, female slaves received fewer lashes than the men. Shane White believes that runaway slave ads “suggest that in the final decade of slavery owners may have been reticent about dealing out lashes” even though physical abuse and a history of hard work was worn on the bodies of these enslaved. Coupled with the new antislavery morality, there was also a shift away from applying the death penalty to blacks convicted of major crimes. Whipping was a punishment for minor offense, but when black slaves in eighteenth-century New York committed felonies, they often received severe corporal punishment or a sentence of death. A death sentence for murderers, regardless of skin color, was common in colonial America, and indeed in colonial New York, so it was easy for nineteenth-century historians to view such punishment of slave crimes as consistent with the need for social order at the time. After all, this was not vigilante justice, but procedural. For a New York slave to be sentenced to death, he or she had to be tried and convicted by three justices of the peace and five freeholders. But the legal prohibition on slaves defending themselves in court and the kind of death sentences that slaves received for their crimes marked their treatment as different from white criminals. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dutch New York slaves who burglarized, committed arson, struck their masters, or committed or attempted rape of a white woman could expect the death penalty. The ways death was meted out to convicted slaves seem to have been most cruel in the late seventeenth through the middle of the eighteenth century. In  in Ulster County, a slave named Baltus confessed to murder. The court sentenced Baltus to have his right hand cut off. Thereafter, his legs and arms were to be broken before he was hanged at the gallows. Cruelty in punishment of criminal slaves was typical statewide, regardless of whether the judge and jury were Dutch, English, or a mixture of the two. In , a black man in New York was sentenced for murder but died a natural death before the sentence could be carried out. The court determined to carry out the punishment on his already dead body

  

Nelson, History of the City of Paterson, . Shane White, “The Allure of the Advertisement: Slave Runaways in and around New York City,” Journal of the Early Republic : (Winter ), . Ulster County Clerk, “Kingston Papers,” Deed Book , August , , .

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Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

anyway. In the slave revolt in New York City in , nine white men were killed and many more wounded. The courts gave a variety of death sentences for twenty-one slaves involved: broken on the wheel, burned at the stake, and hanged. To be burned at the stake was a common punishment used for the most severe crimes. Lesser criminals might only be hanged. For instance, in , a black woman was burned at the stake for her part in murdering an entire family in Newtown, while her male accomplice and two accessories were hanged. To add to the torture, a horn filled with water was dangled in front of the woman. Burning at the stake added an element of vengeance beyond a mere death in kind. In , Jack, a slave of Albert Pawling, was convicted of committing arson in Marbletown and was accordingly burned “to death and then to ashes” with a slave of Johannis Low serving as executioner for  shillings. The legal system acted fast in this case: Jack was killed just four days after he had “set fire to the barn and barracks of Captain Richard Brodhead.” Burning the barn was symbolic and practical. It struck directly at the capital of the farmer, his tools, grain storage, and horses. It was where slaves worked and perhaps sometimes slept. The Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswyck, and Schenectady records a slave burnt to death in , apparently for nothing other than fleeing the sexual advances of her master. The purpose of burning a slave at the stake was not only to punish the wrongdoer but also to create fear among slaves. County histories in Dutch areas of New York and New Jersey that recall a slave being burnt at the stake remember also where the event took place, so the purpose of the punishment (to leave a memory and geography of terror) was fulfilled. For an example of this, one history notes that in , Peter Kip’s slave Jack,       

Berthold Fernow and Arnold Van Laer, Calendar of Council Minutes, – (Albany: University of the State of New York, ), . Maud Wilder Goodwin, Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . George DeWan, “The Rise of Slavery,” Newsday, February , , www.newsday.com/longisland/history/long-island-our-story-slavery-.. Olson, “The Slave Code in Colonial New York,” . Roswell Randall Hoes, The Old Court Houses of Ulster County, New York, and Interesting Incidents Connected with Their History (Kingston, NY: Freeman Publishing Co., ), . Hoes, The Old Court Houses of Ulster County, . A. J. F. van Laer, ed., Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswyck, and Schenectady, –, Vol.  (Albany: University of the State of New York, ), –. A slave of Jacob Van Bunschoten was burned to death in Market Street in Poughkeepsie, probably in the year , as punishment for setting his master’s barns on fire. William Henry Van Benschoten, Concerning the Van Bunschoten or Van Benschoten Family in America: A Genealogy and Brief History (Poughkeepsie, NY: A.V. Haight Co., ), .

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



who had retaliated when Kip had struck him, was burnt alive “on the road between the court house and Hackensack.” At least four slaves were burned alive in Bergen County, New Jersey, between  and . Even where few court records of such actions remain, the shock of the event was sufficient for it to be carried in later histories. A history of Schoharie County from  recalls a “negro and his wife, who were servants in the family of Peter Vroman,” were convicted of murder and were brought to Albany where they were “placed upon a pile of fagots [sic] and burned.” The guilt of these two slaves was later called into question. Burnings at the stake peaked during periods of insecurity and social disruption. They were common throughout the eighteenth century but appeared to have ended just after the American Revolution. Legal scholar James Kent, writing in , believed the last occurrence of a slave burned at the stake in New York was in Poughkeepsie shortly before the American Revolution. Andrew Mellick, writing in , concluded that burning at the stake had ended in New Jersey by , when hangings replaced it as punishment for slaves convicted of murder. A gallows was built on Staten Island in  specifically to hang Anthony Cornish, a black man convicted of murder. Around the same time, a “farmer and his sons took the law in their own hands and executed a negro on their farm, near the Elm Tree Lighthouse, below New Drop” for the crime of killing cattle. Even burning at the stake as a symbolic punishment for an arsonist faded near the end of the eighteenth century. Slaves Pomp, Bett, and Deane were arrested for setting fire to the stables of Leonard Gansevoort in Albany, and all were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Similarly, when arson destroyed the house of the town clerk of Flushing, New York, Jeremiah Vanderbilt’s two slaves, Nellie and Sarah, were sentenced to hanging (instead of the traditional burning for such a crime). The younger Sarah was later given a reprieve because of her age.

 

   

Nelson, History of the City of Paterson, . The same appears in Linn, “Slavery in Bergen County, N.J.,” –. William E. Roscoe, History of Schoharie County, New York, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason and Co., ), . Also in Van Valen, History of Bergen County, New Jersey, –.  Kent, Commentaries on American Law, –. Mellick, The Story of an Old Farm, . Morris, Morris’s Memorial History, . George Rogers Howell and Jonathan Tenney, Bi-centennial History of Albany. History of the Country of Albany, N.Y. from  to  (New York: W. W. Munsell & Co., ), . Henry D. Waller, History of the Town of Flushing, Long Island, New York (Flushing, NY: J. H. Ridenour, ), .



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

By the late eighteenth century, then, it appears that hanging had replaced burnings at the stake. Over the next generation, the death penalty itself was gradually replaced by life imprisonment. The state of New York banned the death penalty in  for all crimes except murder and treason. In , arson was added to the list of crimes punishable by death. In Columbia County, New York, in , a black man named Guss was indicted for rape, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged. But just fifteen years later in the same county, a slave named Ben was also convicted of rape but was sentenced to life imprisonment. In the same year, , Moses, a “negro slave of Teunis Bergen, was convicted and sentenced for life to the state prison for an attempt to commit a rape in Flatlands.” In , Cazar, slave of Matthew Van Steenbergh, was found guilty of grand larceny and sent to state prison for three years and a day at hard labor. Gradual emancipation in New York was at first a scheme to release children of slaves so that slavery would age out or die out in the state. But in , with slavery to end completely in , the emancipation plan changed. This ten-year period anticipated the later British Empire plan to emancipation its slaves in , except that in the British situation, slaves were put into apprenticeships. A newspaper article from June  said that the gradual emancipation of female slaves was to end on July , and that black women could join black men in freedom. The writer was confused in a number of ways, however. Some female, not male, children of slaves born in  would have been free by law in , the first age cohort of female children bound to service to gain freedom directly in consequence of the state law and not by decision of those who held them to service. There was sufficient confusion about this matter at the time, but newspapers across the region reprinted the relevant part of the law that “children of slaves born after the th of July, , and before the st of March, , remain the servants of the owners of their mothers and their representatives, ‘in the manner as if such children had been bound to service by the overseers of the poor,’ viz: males until the age of  years and     

W. David Lewis, From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). Ellis, History of Columbia County, New York, . Teunis G. Bergen, The Bergen Family, or, the Descendants of Hansen Bergen, One of the Early Settlers of New York and Brooklyn (Albany, NY: J. Munsell, ), . The People of the State of New York vs. Cezar, Slave of Matthew Van Steenberg, Ulster County Archives, Collection -, General Sessions Court Indictment. The Long-Island Star, June , .

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



females until the age of  years,” while “children born slaves since the st day of March, , remain servants as aforesaid, until the age of  years, and no longer.” This meant that a female child born to a slave in  could still be legally bound to service until , and a male child of a slave born in  could be bound until . The latest any child of a slave could legally be held in service would be , that is, twenty-one years after their birth in . Much has been written about emancipation in New York through the lens of politics, but the economics of slavery in New York’s era of emancipation have never been well researched or understood. The standard narrative of emancipation in New York focuses on political changes brought about by antislavery advocates and economic competition to slavery from cheap immigrant labor in New York City. Free labor in the city indeed threatened slavery and likely contributed to emancipations. But in the countryside, slave labor was still important. Whether slavery was profitable or not depended on the slave owner and the age and ability of his slaves. Slaves of a certain age were kept precisely because they were valuable, while older slaves were kept reluctantly or because cultural and legal pressures made manumitting them difficult. Children of slaves were retained if the slave owner found it beneficial to do so, but were often released from service as young children because the slave owner found them to be a burden and was uncertain that the servants would remain with him for the full time promised by law. The gradual emancipation laws met resistance because they opposed the interests of the slaveholders who sought to circumvent them. Slaveholding in this environment was more expensive and less profitable than it had been; increased numbers of runaways threatened their investments. This was partially met by emancipating the least economically viable slaves, but this also included a cost both personal and social. Even if slavery was a net positive for the economy in eighteenth-century New York, it may have become a net economic drain in the nineteenth century. One variable that slaveholders could not predict was the changing laws about slavery and emancipation in New York. If a slaveholder assumed that an absolute abolition of slavery was to be announced sooner than planned, they would discount the value of their slaves accordingly. It was 



The Sentinel and Democrat [Burlington, VT], August , . The same was printed in The Troy Sentinel, July , , and similar statements made in The Geneva Gazette and General Advertiser, June , ; Onondaga Register, June , ; and The Schenectady Cabinet, June , . Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, – (New York: W.W. Norton, ); Gellman, Emancipating New York.



Dutch Resistance to Emancipation

in the best interest of slaveholders, given such uncertainty, to try to maximize the profits that they could extract from a slave in the short run. This meant, in many circumstances, allowing the slave to work to pay for their own freedom. Why did New Yorkers manumit their slaves? There were probably various motivations, political, religious, and philanthropic, but economics seems to have played a significant role as well. Manumissions may have been the result of the changing legal and economic landscape of slavery in New York. Dari-Mattiacci argues that simple tasks can be better motivated by punishment, but complex tasks tend to require rewards. When tasks are simple, such as picking a certain amount of cotton, monitoring work is easy; a supervisor can tell whether the slave has performed sufficiently and can punish the slave if his effort slacked. But the more complex the work, the worse is the signal to the supervisor, and the harder it is to tell whether a slave worked to his potential or not. Punishments and rewards both have costs. Physical punishment can injure the slaves, impairing their ability to work. Rewards were often direct payments either in cash, free time, or material goods. The relative costs of punishments and rewards determine which one the slave owner will use. If punishments are limited by law or social pressure, the slave owner has to resort more to using rewards. As the complexity of work increases, larger rewards, larger carrots are required to encourage work. According to DariMattiacci, a “master will prefer slaves . . . over free labor when the availability of large punishments and the absence of an exit option play a major role in a particular employment environment.” By , with the discussion of the Missouri Compromise, New York newspapers were commonly writing reports about “the slave-holding states,” not including their own state in category, and carrying stories about the cruelty of slave masters in the South. Moral and economic arguments against slavery abounded. New York’s gradual emancipation scheme, and the idea of setting slaves free at twenty-one years of age, influenced political discussion from New Jersey to Ohio, Illinois, and across the country. In Sterling v. Sherwood (), the New York courts heard a case concerning a charge of libel, such that a person claimed it libel

  

Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, “Slavery and Information,” The Journal of Economic History : (March ), –. Dari-Mattiacci, “Slavery and Information,” . New-York Evening Post, March , ; The Freeman’s Journal, March , .

Dutch Resistance to Emancipation



that others had said of him that he was “the friend of slavery” and had “trafficked in human flesh.” For some slave owners, the act of holding slaves was an actual financial burden, that is, a net loss. Regarding the burden of economic effects of emancipation in New York, I argue that Fogel and Engerman were on the right track, that slaves indeed carried the heaviest burden of emancipation, but that there were many diverse ways in which slave owners and society at large both also bore burdens of slave emancipation. In , several New York newspapers carried an article crediting “our most distinguished deceased patriots” and “the liberal and free principles which animated the legislators of other day” for ending slavery. Meanwhile, on July , , “the coloured population” of Albany celebrated with a parade, a band, and banner celebrating names like “Tompkins, Jay, Clarkson, Eddy, Murray, and Wilberforce.” The choice to see politics as the mechanism for abolishing slavery is obvious, but not recognizing the struggle of enslaved persons themselves to resist slavery is a mistake that historians should not repeat.   

The court did not decide whether it was indeed libelous to accuse another of buying and selling slaves (M. Sterling v. H. H. Sherwood,  Johns. ) (). Troy Sentinel, July , ; The Western Star, July , . The Western Star, July , .

 

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis and the End of Dutch New York Slavery

Slavery in Dutch New York was widespread and enduring. It was also mostly rural, and heavily invested in wheat cultivation. Dutch New Yorkers kept slaves because they believed that slaveholding was profitable. The anti-abolitionist Dutch farmers resisted the emancipation of slavery in New York, and they held on to their slaves as long as possible, even when other New Yorkers were manumitting slaves or selling them to the South. The memory and early histories of Dutch New York slavery obscured and confused the story. After the fall of slavery in New York, Dutch slaves were often remembered as foolish, nervous, ignorant, and dependent on the families they served. Washington Irving’s immensely popular History of New York (), as told by the fictitious Diedrich Knickerbocker, shaped the popular image of the Dutch New Yorkers as conservative, silly, and harmless provincials. By laughing at the silly old Dutch slaves, proud Yankee historians could gloss over the cruelties of Northern slavery. A historian wrote that when a slave of Arent Schuyler discovered a copper deposit on his master’s land, and informed him of it, he received his freedom and was allowed to ask for three wishes. After asking for a large supply of tobacco and “a dressing gown with big brass buttons,” he apparently could not think of anything else and so asked to “hab [sic] a little more baccy [bacon].” A history of Rensselaer County recounts the deed of its great white men, and one of the only appearances of a black person is “Old Tom” who, it is said, could not count higher than three. Told to count a flock of sheep, the story goes, Tom called out, “One! two! tree! Dar goes anudder! dar goes annuder! Dar goes anudder!” Jokes at the expense of slaves and former  

Van Valen, History of Bergen County, New Jersey, . Arthur James Weise, History of the Seventeen towns of Rensselaer County from the colonization of the Manor of Rensselaerwyk to the present time (Troy, NY: Francis Tucker, ), . Repeated in a different manner by Corwin, “Efforts of the Dutch Colonial Pastors for the Conversion of the Negroes,” .



Making Sense of the Mild Thesis



slaves were common in nineteenth-century Dutch New York histories. Latent in these jokes is evidence of the cruelty of former slaveholders, like in the story of a woman Charity [Gerithe] Bergen, who, in one “amusing incident,” gave a slave spirits of turpentine instead of an expected “good stiff dram.” A satirical, humorous political poem, ostensibly written by a local black man, was published in the Long Island newspaper The Corrector in . One stanza in particular gave away the Dutch background of the supposed writer: “Now blessing on St. Nicholaus, De bill’s postponed till after Paas, and Crawford’s votes shall pay the loss, of all mine bopularity.” The Newburgh Telegraph of  joked about a “Mr. Petrus Cudjo, a Dutch Negro, late from Klein Sopus, and the parts adjacent” who was to give “lectures in the art of Dancing (to the colored population of course).” Nineteenth-century New York historians had generally only witnessed the last few years of slavery in the state, when the institution had been brought to its knees, when the remaining slaves were aged, the threat of sale diminished, and protections of the law had softened slavery somewhat. The historiography of American slavery long suffered from the view that slaveholding in the Northern states was less harsh than slavery elsewhere, and that in certain circumstances it was even morally or socially justifiable. The myth of a mild Northern slavery played an important social and political function, both before and after the American Civil War, for generations of antislavery activists and historians who wrote disparagingly about slavery in the South. In its popularity and ubiquity, the argument for the mildness of Northern slavery rivaled the “lost cause” narrative of the American South. And in substance, the two shared a similar view: that for one set of American slaveholders, slavery had been mostly benign, with cruelty displayed only on rare exceptions. While an extensive professional historiography has developed to successfully counter the “lost cause” myth, historians have given much less effort to challenge the thesis of mild slavery in the North. 

  

Charity [Gerithe] Bergen, wife of Abraham Quick, who frequently allowed each of her fourteen slaves to take “a good stiff dram of the raw stuff.” Teunis G. Bergen, The Bergen Family, or, the Descendants of Hansen Bergen, One of the Early Settlers of New York and Brooklyn . . ., (Albany, NY: J. Munsell, ), . The Corrector (Sag Harbor, Long Island), April , . Newburgh Telegraph, November , . Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South,  to  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ).



Making Sense of the Mild Thesis

Nowhere is the emphasis on the mildness of Northern slavery more pronounced than in the histories of the colonial Dutch. Indeed, nineteenth-century historians were unanimous in portraying slavery under and among the Dutch as especially mild – milder even than slavery among others in the North. From a publication in  is a line typical of the view: “[T]he kind-hearted Dutch treated their Negro slaves with much humanity. Manumission of slaves for meritorious services, or prompted by justice, was quite frequent. Under this mild system the Negroes were correspondingly happy.” A convenient ambiguity of the myth of mild Dutch slavery is that the argument was sometimes premised on records of slavery in seventeenth-century New Netherland and, at other times, on memories of slavery from the last generation of Dutch slaveholders in early nineteenth-century New York. What the perspective lacked, meanwhile, was evidence from the long period of Dutch American slaveholding from the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth century. The records from New Netherland show that slaves had similar de facto legal rights to indentured servants and often enjoyed a kind of “halffreedom,” in which they labored part of the time for the West India Company, but enjoyed time to also engage in their own pursuits. These company slaves could also be granted full freedom after long service. However, these norms were more practical than paternal; slaves were given half-freedom because it absolved the West India Company of any responsibility to provide for slaves during times when there was little work to do. Full freedom came to those whose most productive years had passed. Additionally, partial freedom served a motivational purpose: half-free blacks who failed to provide a quota of crops to the company could lose this status. Racial slavery was not being phased out in this manner. Indeed, the children of the slaves in New Netherland were born slaves for life. Historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw little of this ambivalence and nuance. Edmund O’Callaghan, for example, explained: “The lot of the African under the Dutch, was not as hopeless as his situation might lead us to expect. He was ‘a chattel,’ it is true; but he could still look forward to the hour when he too might become a freeman.” In a particularly influential article from , A. Judd Northrup repeated the view that   

Norman B. Wood, The White Side of a Black Subject: Enlarged and Brought Down to Date: A Vindication of the Afro-American Race (Chicago: American Publishing House, ), . A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, ). Bailey O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland; or, New York under the Dutch (New York: D. Appleton & Company, ), .

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis



“during the Dutch period, slavery was of a milder type than during the English period.” In , the popularizer William Elliot Griffis defended this view and went so far as to state that “[t]he Dutch common people were opposed to slavery but the [West India Company] forced it upon them.” This view of a mild New Netherland slavery also found its way into histories written in the Netherlands. The stress on the mildness of slavery in New Netherland probably peaked in popularity in the Progressive Era, although it continued to appear in later works on New York slavery, carried forward in books by Edgar McManus, A. Leon Higginbotham, and others. Most of these authors drew a contrast between New Netherland slavery and slavery in English New York. Slavery, they noted, was legally recognized only under English rule, and restrictions on slave freedom grew after the Dutch relinquished control. What this line of argument generally fails to acknowledge, however, is that changes in the nature of slavery in colonial New York probably owed little to any cultural or legal necessity of Dutch or English rule, but could rather be explained as the consequences of growing state power, growing populations, and the desire to control a larger number of slaves. New Netherland never developed a slave code, but neither did Virginia prior to the s. At any rate, by the end of the nineteenth century, the mild Dutch thesis was firmly ensconced in the history of the region. A second part of this popular myth, however, derived not from stories from New Netherland (which could after all only be reconstructed when the old Dutch records had been translated), but from local and familial memories of slavery. The examples are too numerous for all to be included, but a few examples should suffice. From , we read that the Dutch had a “mild form of slavery [that] was like the system which existed under the tents of the

 

 

A. Judd Northrup, Slavery in New York: A Historical Sketch (University of the State of New York: State Library Bulletin: History No. , May ), . William Elliot Griffis, The Story of New Netherland, the Dutch in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., ), –. The view that the common Dutch in New Netherland were against slavery also appeared in the same year in the publication – The Dutch in New Netherland and the United States (New York: Netherland Chamber of Commerce in America, ), –. See, for example, Otto van Rees, Geschiedenis der Nedelandsche volkplantingen in Noord-Amerika (Tiel: H. C. A. Campagne, ), . For example of this, the size of the slave population appears to be a determining factor in the different conditions between slavery in Curacao and Suriname. Hermanus Hoetink, “Race Relations in Curacao and Surinam,” in Laura Foner and Eugene Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, ), –.



Making Sense of the Mild Thesis

patriarchs on the plains of Mamre, and there certainly never were happier people than those ‘menservants and maid-servants.’” Likewise, a historian of Brooklyn wrote in , “These slaves were, as a general thing, kindly treated and well cared for; but, after all, the institution of slavery was one that commended itself to the Dutch mind rather as a necessity than as a desirable system.” Stephen Ostrander, also writing about Brooklyn in , added the demonstrably false view that “slavery was never welcomed as an institution in this region, and never gained a firm foothold.” This kind of historical amnesia and whitewashing could be found also in a book by Bleecker Bangs from . Bangs wrote, “The Hollanders’ instinctive mind realized that Negro slavery was not only too dangerous but it was also wrong. Their strict church catechism aided toward this decision. The Dutch were a religious people but never narrow in their creed. Their slavery was voluntarily abandoned, gradually but surely.” The historical record demonstrates the opposite. The Dutch held on to slaves longer than their English neighbors. Their Calvinist religion did not lend itself to arguments for emancipation, and the Dutch in New York abandoned the practice of slaveholding only after the state passed laws that required the eventual emancipation of slaves. By reading further into the statements of the Dutch themselves, we can find hints of a more violent Dutch relationship with slavery. Many of the statements about slaves found in these reminiscences can be challenged, to highlight a grimmer side. Take, for example, the words of Jessie Van Vechten Vedder from . Vedder sets out to defend the mild thesis: A narrow stairway led to the room above where Tom, Jupiter, Claes, Hans and Dick slept – these were the seven slaves of their father Samuel, and when the sons left for other homes, each, as was the custom, was given a slave for his own. On the first floor of the smaller part was the kitchen, with its fireplace and brick oven, and in the corner next to the hall the bed of Caesar and Dinah. They were freed several years before the time required by law, but, faithful to the family and happy with the inner consciousness of freedom, were content to serve as before.     

Kip, The Olden Time in New York, . Henry Reed Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn (), –. Stephen M. Ostrander, A History of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County, Vol.  (Brooklyn, NY, ), . Bleecker Bangs, Reminiscences of Old New Utrecht and Gowanus (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Eagle Press, ), . Jessie Van Vechten Vedder, Historical Catskill (Astoria, NY: J. C. and A. L. Fawcett, Inc., ), .

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis



However, looking at this with a skeptical eye, and knowing the historical context, it does not appear so mild after all. Seven slaves were kept in one room. Upon the death of the patriarch, each slave was given to a separate member of the family. They might have even been able to choose which family member they lived with, but they did not get to choose to live apart from the family as free people. They were freed before it was required by law, but without knowing the circumstances of their emancipation. We cannot say if this was a genuinely noble act or merely a move in the best interest of the slaveholders, timed to best take advantage of the laws and the economic contributions of the slaves. The freed slaves stayed with the family after being given their freedom, but this was the only house they had known and likely they lacked the skills and capital to survive on their own. The eighteenth century was a reign of terror for New York’s slaves, including the slaves of Dutch New Yorkers. If slavery had been as mild as the descendants of the Dutch slaveholders remembered, and the slaves so content as these writers made them out to be, then there would not have been a need for a whipping post in every town, the number of slave runaways would not have been so large, and records of race-based brutality would not be as obvious as they are. Indeed, if slavery among the Dutch had been so mild, perhaps there would not have been records of slave suicides after losing all hope of freedom. It was the last generation of slavery in negotiation and demise, and more so cherry-picked examples of its least abhorrent features, that was recalled in nineteenth-century histories, first to defend the honor of local communities and families and then as a politically motivated historical thesis for Northerners to use in the rhetorical battles with the slave South. The history of Dutch slaveholding in the United States was always an embarrassment for the late nineteenth-century descendants of the colonial Dutch. In dealing with this part of their history, the latter-day Dutch people told a story that found little fault in the ancestors. Like other Northerners of Anglo-descent slaveholders, Dutch descendants in New York removed the guilt and shame of colonial slavery by explaining that slavery was necessary in New Netherland because of a shortage of labor, and that as it developed under the Dutch, slavery was “mild.” They wrote about the positive relationships between slaves and their Dutch masters. 

B. V. D. Wyckoff, John Fleming, and Solomon Rockafellow, comps., Historical Discourse and Addresses Delivered at the th Anniversary of the Reformed Church, Readington, NJ, October ,  (Somerville, NJ: Unionist-Gazette, ), –.



Making Sense of the Mild Thesis

Like the Southern “lost cause” narrative after the Civil War, New York Dutch historians told a story about the beneficence of slavery – its kindness, not its cruelty. One major difference, however, was that no one corrected this Dutch narrative as they did the southern Lost Cause. Echoes of the Dutch mild thesis remain in twentieth-century histories of Dutch New York. If this book has demonstrated anything, it is that the following statement by G. L. Vanderbilt from  was wrong on every account: In New York, Vanderbilt wrote, “There was apparently no desire on the part of slave owners for the continuation of the system, neither was there on the other hand any active combined effort on the part of the slaves to obtain manumission.” Too often, historians have treated Dutch slavery as an artifact of New Netherland; in so doing, they fail to recognize the importance of Dutchspeaking slaves after the fall of the Dutch colony to the English in . Although the Dutch lost political control of New York, they remained the colony’s major slaveholders, pushing slavery into the fields of Long Island and the Hudson Valley. Against modern conventional wisdom, slavery was generally profitable in the North, even in the countryside, where the Dutch forced slaves to plant, harvest, and process wheat and other crops. The persistence of Dutch slavery demonstrates that slavery in New York died for primarily political, not economic reasons. Nevertheless, economic impacts played an important role in shaping how slavery died in Dutch New York. An aging slave population and increased numbers of runaways diminished the economic advantages to slaveholders when slavery was on its last legs in the early nineteenth century. Demographic data from the era of emancipation in New York State (–) show that a large number of slaves were sold South, but that these disproportionately came from non-Dutch-descent areas of Long Island. Crucially, while the state of New York passed general emancipation laws, they also passed laws that benefitted slaveholders, socializing some of the costs of slavery. Dutch slaveholders shaped the economic, demographic, and political history of the institution in the state.





John A. Bogart, “Slavery Was Common in New Netherland,” Halve Maen : (January ), –. The author takes a common tact by announcing that the writing is about New Netherland, then giving examples mostly from after ; Nathan Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles: The Story of a Great American Family (New York: Knopf Doubleday, ), . G. L. Vanderbilt, “Slavery among the Dutch Settlers in New York,” The Christian Intelligencer, January , , p. .

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis



Why did slavery die out in the North? There are a number of common explanations. First, and perhaps most popular, is the view of social change, via the abolitionist movement in New England, which worked its way into New York. Gradually, New Yorkers saw the errors of their ways and sided with the abolitionists. A second common explanation is that free immigrant labor to New York made slave labor in the state comparatively less efficient. A third, less-explored explanation is that slavery was becoming less profitable as a consequence of social and political changes, even without the influence of immigrant labor. But a demographic explanation ought to be considered as well. One might ascribe the rising costs of New York slavery to a number of demographic factors, including the aging of the slave population in the state with fewer young imports and more elderly slaves and children to burden the system. There is, however, little evidence that slavery in New York was dying out economically before the politically decreed emancipation arrived. Slave prices were stable in the s. Slave numbers had been and probably still were increasing. Slaveholding farmers were increasing their acreage and expanding onto new land, and they had begun moving into western New York with their slaves. In the end, the death of slavery in New York was only partly a political decision, brought on by liberal antislavery advocates in the New York City area and opposed by conservative Dutch farmers who continued to benefit from the institution well into the nineteenth century. But politics and on-the-ground conditions were intertwined so that legal changes affected the economics and demography of slavery, just as the economics and demography of slavery affected legal and political changes. Slavery was everywhere and anywhere immoral, and the conditions of slaves in New York were routinely terrible, but we should also recognize its limits. Many historians have tried to say that slavery in New York continued after , but this is only partially correct. The state law is quite clear that “every negro, mulatto, or mustee, within this state, born before the fourth day of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine shall, from and after the fourth day of July, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, be free.” Read literally, this leaves no room for legal slave ownership by residents of New York after .



David Hackett Fischer, African Founders, . Fischer states that “a few slaves remained in bondage as late as .” This might be ascribed to a confusion between slaves and children of slaves in service, except that Fischer links this to the idea that “some masters defied the law.”



Making Sense of the Mild Thesis

Modern sources note, however, that there were seventy-five slaves in New York in , but the Abstract of the Returns of the Fifth Census (printed in ) actually gives seventy-six, divided among the following counties: New York City and county (seventeen), Putnam (four), Albany (two), Chenango (three), Montgomery (twenty-six), Oneida (fifteen), and Washington (eight). Of these, sixty-four were female and twelve were male. However, the introduction to the  New York State census claims that there were only fifty-five slaves in New York State in . All these counts appear to reflect a series of mistakes and misunderstandings. There were some slaves tallied in the New York Census of , but not as many as these sources attest. First, the census records for New York City, at the ward level, do not actually record a single slave at all in . Here, the error can be blamed directly on the enumerator, who appears to have consistently and incorrectly tallied free black females as slaves, only to move them to the free colored persons category when adding them up. In one case, the enumerator even crossed out the tallies of these enslaved woman out and wrote “free” with a circle around it, but these erroneous tallies were later counted as slaves anyway. Another likely source of errors in modern calculations of the New York slave count for  is what I will term here “ghost tallies,” essentially ink marks that have bled over from other pages, which can be verified or rejected as actual tallies by consulting the column counts at the bottom of each census page. Ghost tally errors clearly affected Carter Woodson’s  count of slaves living with free blacks in  New York. 

  



Abstract of the Returns of the Fifth Census (Washington, DC: Duff Green, ), –. Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States. In , there were three slaves in Kings County: One was under , and two between  and , while one slave in Putnam County was in the  to  age category. The source of the claim of “” is unclear, but it appears as early at  in Edwin Vernon Morgan, “Slavery in New York, With Special Reference to New York City,” Half Moon Series, Publishing in the Interest of the New York City History Club, Vol. II, No. I (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, ), gives a count of seventy-five slaves for New York in , p. . My count for Chenango County is four male slaves, not three. New York State Census for , p. xi. The  New York Census is available in its best form on ancestry.com, where one can search for households with slaves by county. The search for slaves by counties does not yield seventy-six results – which of course does not mean that these tallies might not be found elsewhere. Carter G. Woodson, Free Negro owners of slaves in the United States in , together with Absentee ownership of slaves in the United States in  (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, ), . Woodson has incorrectly read the census source regarding a slave in Washington County, and many of those listed for New York City have certainly been entered in the wrong category, as is evident from the tabulations at the bottom of the page of the original census form.

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis



This is likely the cause of many errors regarding slaves and free blacks in the  census, and it has caused problems for historians of Northern slavery more generally. Patrick Rael, for example, assumed that these marks indicated that there were seventeen slaves in New York County in , and that these were “either the property of Southern slave owners temporarily residing in the city, or the last remnant of enslaved African American apprenticed under the provisions of the abolition laws of  and .” Neither assumption is correct. The census form that year was two pages wide, the first page for free whites listed by sex and age, and the second page for slaves and “free colored persons.” On this second page, there were four blocks of columns, two for slaves by sex and age, and two for free blacks by sex and age. It was easy for an enumerator to mistakenly enter data for free blacks only into the second and third blocks of columns, labeled “females” and males” without taking notice that the “females” column was to be used to count female slaves only. The enumerator should have used the third and fourth blocks of columns instead. The imbalance of sixty-four female and twelve male slaves, mentioned earlier, might largely be explained as a consequence of falsely entering free black 



Similar errors, for example, were made in the Vermont census of  and were discovered in a census report in . The original error occurred in preparing the results for publication, when sixteen persons, returned as “Free colored,” were classified as “slave.” Francis A. Walker, The Statistics of the Population of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, ), . The error for Vermont was reproduced in Ira Berlin, Many Thousands’ Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Boston: Harvard University Press, ), . Guocun Yang’s dissertation on “From slavery to emancipation: The African Americans of Connecticut, s–s,” http://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI, accessed July , , says that there were seventeen slaves in Connecticut in , two of whom were in Fairfeld, one in Litchfield, one in Middlesex, eight in New Haven, and five in Windham. But Yang must not have looked at the census very clearly. The  census for New Haven actually gives forty-three slaves, but these were not slaves owned by the residents of Connecticut at all; they were members of the ill-fated slave ship La Amistad, who were being housed by the jailer Colonel Stanton Pendleton as they awaited their trial. There were no other slaves tallied in  in New Haven, city or county, besides these forty-three. In Windham, the enumerator totaled only one slave in his final count, not five. There were no slaves tallied on the census for Fairfield in , there is only a bleed-over ghost mark that might be mistaken for the number , but which looks more like a hyphen and is not even in the correct column or line. Christy Mikel Clark-Pujara states that there were four slaves in Rhode Island in , but, as far as I can tell, the original census actually records only two, both females, between  and  years of age. Christy Mikel ClarkPujara, Slavery, Emancipation and Black Freedom in Rhode Island (Dissertation, University of Iowa, ), . Joanne Pope Melish gives the total for Rhode Island in  as five slaves, http://library .providence.edu/encompass/rhode-island-slavery-and-the-slave-trade/rhode-island-slavery-and-theslave-trade/, accessed July , . See also David Menschel, “Abolition without Deliverance: The Law of Connecticut Slavery –,” The Yale Law Journal No.  (October ), , fn . Patrick Rael, “The Long Death of Slavery,” in Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York: New Press, ), .



Making Sense of the Mild Thesis

Figure . “Ghost Tallies” in the  national census for New York.

women as slaves. At least four persons recorded as slaves in Montgomery in  – two in Putnam County and two in Tioga County – lived in households with free blacks only. In all these situations in which slaves lived with free blacks, it was females who were slaves and black males who were free, which may be just a coincidence, or it could mean that the enumerator again entered these black women in the wrong category. Another source of errors for tallies for slaves in the  census was the continued confusion over the status of the children of slaves (Figure .). In Montgomery County, for example, at least four persons tallied as slaves in  were under ten years of age, as was one in Oneida County. In Putnam County, Joseph Townsend, a free black male, apparently lived with two female slaves, one under ten years of age and the other between 

For example, in Montgomery County, Elizabeth Cockburn, listed with only two members in the household, a free black male between  and  years, and an enslaved female under  years of age and no white persons. Harry Cockburn, an enslaved male between  and , living on his own, nearby. Canajoharie, Montgomery, the household of William Hawn, three free black males (one between  and , one between  and , and one between  and ) and one female between  and . Dian Livingston, a household of only blacks, two of whom were female slaves between  and  years of age, living with four free black men. Thomas Wilson household, two females under , and one between  and , with also one free black male between  and , and no whites. Abraham Jackson, his own household, one enslaved female under , one free black male between  and . In Tioga County, similarly, two enslaved females ( to  years of age) are listed in the household of free blacks, Tobias Rice and James Hall (both in the -to--year category), yet no slaves from Tioga County were reported in the  census abstract report.

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis



Figure . More false entries in the  census.

 and . Since New York had made the legal importation of slaves quite difficult and the sale of imported slaves illegal after , and because any children born in the state after  were not slaves, it is difficult to imagine how there could be any such young slaves at all. This suggests that at least some of these slaves were not slaves at all, but children still bound to service, technically free but bound to service and incorrectly counted as slaves (Figure .). Although each county and each case requires independent investigation and involves some speculation, it appears that even with a strict reading of the census slave count for  in New York, the totals could not be half of what was traditionally reported. The original count was based largely on enumerators placing black women in the wrong category and children of slaves incorrectly entered as slaves. Based on the aforementioned considerations alone, the slave count in the New York census for  was between thirty-eight and fifty-one. This does not obviate the very real problem that there are clearly some persons tallied as slaves who were neither in the age category of indentured children of slaves nor lived in houses with free 



The enumerator has entered a mark for one free white male between five and ten and one free white male between forty and fifty, for Townsend, before crossing out those marks, indicating further confusion on their part. Leo Hirsch counted “at least” fifty-five. Leo Hirsch, “The Slave in New York,” The Journal of Negro History : (October ), . I count for the following counties: Chenango – , Albany – , NYC – , Putnam –  to , Tioga –  to , Montgomery –  to , and Oneida –  to .



Making Sense of the Mild Thesis

blacks. The issue can likely be explained quite simply if we consider that legally there could have been no slaves living permanently in the state, but that some former slaves continued to live on with their old masters despite gaining their freedom. In a few cases, these persons were marked as slaves anyway. Hirsch, writing in , came to a similar conclusion about the one person still listed as a slave in New York in  (yes, !). “One is forced to conclude,” Hirsch wrote, “that this old Negro was not legally a slave, but continued to live with his master as a slave.” A closer examination of the census shows, however, that Hirsch had his dates mixed up. In  (not ), Alex H. Patterson of Patterson Township, Putnam County, between  and  years of age, reported that he had one male slave between  and  years of age. Hirsch’s explanation of this person’s status was probably correct. Patterson and a slave had lived together in Putnam County since at least as far back as the  census. Nevertheless, the number and extent of the errors here should give historians pause in accepting any claims of census returns for New York’s slaves, as it demonstrates the careless attitude historians have taken on this subject. By , New York’s slaveholders had almost completely relieved themselves of the legal responsibility of maintaining superannuated slaves. But in many situations, free blacks continued to live in houses with the families that had once owned them. From the point of view of whites, emancipation in New York had been a success. There had been no great social upheaval or wave of violence. Indenture agreements for children of slaves bound to service often included clauses that the child would be taught to read and write and that they would be given a Bible at the end of their service. This was more than symbolic. There was a real fear of disorder and immortality that would come with emancipation. Slaveholders had been placated, and the state had helped to cover the burden that fell on local Overseers of the Poor. But for New York’s blacks, freedom brought about a demographic disaster. The transition to wage labor forced many formerly enslaved blacks to eke out a living after emancipation. Even those who could support themselves financially seldom had resources or property to help them along. Some elderly former slaves stayed with their former enslavers, often because they had nowhere else to go. Slaveholders took advantage of  

Washington County shows four female slaves in the – age category in Cambridge and three more females in Easton Township, where one was between  and , and two between  and . Hirsch, ‘The Slave in New York,” .

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis



the laws to reject responsibility for the children of slaves. Black children ended up in almshouses. Death rates soared, especially as free blacks moved in New York City. The demographic disaster goes a long way in explaining the disappearance of Dutch-speaking blacks by the mid nineteenth century. Most Dutch-speaking slaves were bilingual, and as they gained freedom and joined the migration from country to city, they gradually switched to English. A generation after emancipation, monolingual Dutch-speaking blacks were rare. In , a periodical printed notice of the “Death of the last slave in the state of New York.” The formerly enslaved person in question was Margaret Pine, once a slave of Wynant Van Zandt. Pine had been born in  and remained a slave until at least , when she was given freedom to seek employment on her own. Like many claims of the last survivors or former slaves of great age, we ought to take this account with a heavy dose of skepticism. Demographic knowledge alone should cast doubt that the last New York slave died in , when hundreds of slaves had been born in New York only sixty years earlier. In , the Brooklyn Daily Eagle printed a story of a former New York slave named Jeffre Johnson who was  years old and still living. Jeffre had grown up as a Dutch speaker on Long Island and was commonly called “Yaf” (Figure .). The last vestiges of Dutch American slavery were not found in New York State, but in New Jersey. As late as , a generation after slavery had ended in New York, an enslaved man in New Jersey, John Van Orden, escaped to New York and the state returned this “fugitive” to New Jersey. Julia Ten Eyck of New Jersey is recorded as still enslaving three persons in Washington, DC, in , when that city passed a law to manumit slaves. Ten Eyck was one of the last Dutch-descent owners of slaves in the United States, except for those who had migrated to Virginia or Kentucky in earlier generations. While slavery died, the Dutch language persisted among small pockets of African Americans in New York and New Jersey for some time. The New York Herald reported in  that there were people yet in Dutchess County who spoke nothing but low Dutch. In the same year, the    

Little’s Living Age, September , . In the Matter of John Van Orden an Alleged Fugitive from Service: Affidavit for Certiori and Order, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/, accessed March , . Anonymous Letter to John A. Smith, Cleark of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, August , , https://catalog.archives.gov/id/, accessed March , . New York Herald, October , .



Figure .

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis

Jeffre Johnson, former slave of the Rapalje family, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April , .

Newark Daily Advertiser wrote that in New Jersey, in Somerset and Bergen counties, “It is an odd thing to a stranger to hear negroes talking LowDutch; yet this is still common.” “I suppose there is not a black man in Bergen who does not know the meaning of Pingster.” Dutch slaveholding remained strong in New Jersey, even as it faded in New York. Melissa Weiner relates that in New Jersey, “between  and ,  Dutch enslavers registered the birth of  children.”

 

Newark Daily Advertiser, December , . This was an alternative spelling of Pinkster. Weiner, “Unfreedom,” .

Making Sense of the Mild Thesis



Unfortunately, New York Dutch as spoken by blacks was recorded too little and too late to make any studies comparable to the significant amount of research on “Negerhollands” in the US Virgin Islands, for example. Dutch New York slavery had faded away before the deluge of abolitionist writings attacked slavery in the South. This left few direct sources for historians who wished to tell this important story. 

C. Van Rossem and H. van der Voort, Die Creol Taal:  Years of Negerhollands Texts (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, ); Anne Victoria Adams Graves, The Present State of the Dutch Creole of the Virgin Islands (PhD dissertation, the University of Michigan, ); D. C. Hesseling, Het Negerhoods der Deense Antillen. Bijdagen tot de geschiedenis der Nederlandse taal in Amerika (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, ).

 

Wheat

The story of Dutch New York slavery is intimately connected to the cultivation of wheat. One difficult-to-explain development in this story is the change in the ratio of wheat to flour prices in New York after the American Revolution. Why is it that the price of flour increased much faster than the price of wheat? And how would this have affected the market for slave labor? One way to explain the increase in the ratio of the price of flour to wheat is that there was a bottleneck in milling or in some stage of processing. Milling typically requires heavy capital investment, but it is not labor intensive. One of the input costs for flour was threshing, in addition to milling, but wheat sold on the market in New York City had already been threshed, so it does not appear that there was a bottleneck in labor for threshing. More wheat came online, but it was more expensive to process it, or perhaps to store it, as export demand was volatile (Figure A.). During the Revolution, mills were targets of military action by the British and the Americans. In the late s, for example, the continental troops, following an order from General Washington, removed millstones in the Delaware Valley to prevent the British from using mills. By the end of the war, merchant mills were heavily in debt. Oliver Evans’s automatic flour mill opened in Delaware in , and other mills invested in his method. Perhaps consolidation of the milling industry in the s, taking advantage of the higher prices of flour at the end of the war, pushed out competition, so they could keep prices high. New networks of merchant middlemen were needed to organize large-scale export businesses. Although wheat farmers held out for higher prices, flour merchants may have captured much of the gains of the rise of flour prices, as they dealt in bulk and controlled the movement of wheat purchased from farmers, sold 

Hunter, “Wheat, War, and the American Economy during the Age of Revolution,” –.



Appendices



7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1735 1749 1750 1752 1755 1758 1761 1764 1767 1769 1772 1775 1778 1781 1783 1786 1789 1792 1794 1797 1800 1803 1805 1808 1811 1814 1816 1819

0

Figure A. Ratio of the price of a barrel of flour to a bushel of wheat, on the New York City market, –.

to millers, and exported abroad. Competition between flour merchants in the s and s, gradually pushed flour prices closer to their prewar ratio. Inspection required discouraged individual millers. Turning wheat into flour is a “weight losing” production process, with about  percent of the weight being lost. The excess is sold as “millfeed” for animals. Since flour is the lighter, more expensive good, it makes sense to export flour instead of wheat, except when humidity or disease can affect the flour, or if milling costs are substantially lower elsewhere. The demand for wheat appears to have been elastic, meaning that farmers would always have buyers, and they could hardly overproduce it. For economically rational farmers, then, this meant expanding the number of acres under cultivation for wheat. Even for those who could not or did not expand production, higher prices for wheat and flour encouraged slaveholding farmers to keep slaves employed in wheat. It could also be the case that wheat milled on new technology made better flour, and consumers were willing to pay more for the new “superfine” flour, thereby leading to price increases because of the new demand. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the “extraction rates” – the amount of flour yielded by a given measure of wheat, changed.

 

Brooke Hunter, “The Prospect of Independent Americans: The Grain Trade and Economic Development during the s,” Explorations in Early American Culture  (), –. Michael W. Babcock, “An Empirical Locational Analysis of the Wheat Flour Milling Industry,” The Review of Regional Studies : (), .



Appendices

Whole wheat ground into flour but unbolted has an extraction rate of  percent. But when bolted to remove bran and germ, flour’s extraction rate can be between  and  percent. But the difference in price between superfine and common flour was generally no more than  percent. Speculation by flour merchants through futures markets kept wheat prices stable, while merchants held grain to wait for prices to rise. Variable export demand created opportunities for such increases in price. Speculation in flour may have disrupted the domestic market, but it brought stability to the international market. Not only were wheat prices high, relative to before the revolution, but in the s and s, the signs pointed towards these prices remaining high. It is also possible that the wheat prices represent all wheat varieties, while the flour price is more specific to the varieties of wheat that were preferred for flour. The increased price of flour relative to wheat would have encouraged wheat farmers to employ more labor, and specifically more slave labor, in the milling and bolting of wheat in flour. It also encouraged investment in machines to process wheat into flour. But in the years after the Revolution, the great mechanical mills were still a generation away. 

Speaking about the twentieth-century market for wheat, Meinken says, “Prices fluctuate widely from year to year, and wheat can be stored for relatively long periods at low cost.” Kenneth W. Meinken, The Demand and Price Structure for Wheat (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, Technical Bulletin No. , ), .

 

Native-born Enslaved Persons

Another factor in establishing a common culture among Dutch-speaking slaves was the increasing percent of New York’s native-born slave population relative to the numbers who had been born elsewhere. It is possible, using the same demographical information, to estimate the percent of slaves in New York in any given year who were not native to New York. One problem in calculating this is that we do not know what percent of slaves in the starting population, that is, , were born in New York, and what percent were born elsewhere. But, if, for example, half of the slaves in  were non-New York-born, then it is obvious that the starting population would have been ,. To then calculate the percent, in any year, who were not New York–born is an easy formula, if we assume that imported slaves died at the same rates as native-born blacks. This is of course a big assumption, but since many of New York’s imported slaves had been seasoned in the Caribbean, it is possible that they did not experience high death rates upon arrival in New York. As well, the imported slaves were probably younger, on average, than the average age of slaves already in New York, so their death rate from their difficult first years adjusting to a new climate might have been offset by their relative youth. Therefore, to calculate the non-native-born slave population for , one would take the starting population of slaves of the previous year who were not born in New York, multiplied by . (which factors in the assumed death rate), divided by the total population for the year  (as determined in the linear growth table), plus the number of imported slaves in the current year. For years after , I switch to a lower death rate of  per , per year. The result of such calculation for the century is shown in Figure A., with two lines, one representing a starting population of  percent non-native-born New York slaves and one for a starting population of only  percent non-native-born New York slaves. In either estimate, the non-native-born slave population in New York was probably under  percent by the year . By comparison, Fogel and 



Appendices

60 50 40 30 20

0

1700 1704 1708 1712 1716 1720 1724 1728 1732 1736 1740 1744 1748 1752 1756 1760 1764 1768 1772 1776 1780 1784 1788 1792 1796 1800

10

Assuming 50% in 1700

Figure A.

Assuming 30% in 1700

Estimated percent of New York slaves who were not born in New York, –.

Engerman have estimated the “foreign-born” US black population at over  percent for the year . Naturally, this graph is only an estimate, and assumptions about the size of the non-native-born population of  will change the shape of the graph, particularly for the first half of the century. This graph also does not consider that in the s and s, the death rate for non-native-born slaves would have been higher than native-born slaves, simply because the non-native-born slaves at that point would have been much older on average. A more accurate representation would likely show an even more rapid decline in the percent of non-native-born slaves at the tail end of the century. Regardless, such analysis should be fruitful for historians interested in the dynamics of New York’s slave population. The chart demonstrates that by the end of the eighteenth century, over  percent of the slaves then living in New York State had been born in the state. There are also implications here for understanding the extent of assimilation of slaves in New York. Because most slaves in the state were born there, and were born of parents who had also been born in New York, there was greater chance that they shared a common culture. 

Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, .

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Index

Adirondack Mountains,  Africa, , , , , , See also South Africa Ainsworth, George R. R.,  Alabama, ,  Albany County, , , , , , , –,  Dutch-speaking slaves, , –, –, , –, , –,  emancipation, –, , ,  manumissions, , , ,  runaway slaves, , –, , , ,  slaveholders,  wheat farming, –, , , , ,  Albany County,  Alexander Hamilton,  Amberg, Betsy Van,  American Revolution, –,  growth of slavery after,  impact on Dutch culture in New York, , ,  runaway slaves, , , –,  slave prices, – slaves’ legal freedoms after, , , –, , ,  wheat farming, –, ,  Amsterdam, NY, –,  Andros, Edmund,  Armstrong, George D., – Arsdale, Simeon Van,  Arthur, John, –, – Aza v. Eitlinger,  Baker, Bazil,  Bangs, Bleecker,  Baurhyte, Jacob,  Bayley v. Bates,  Beekman, J. Woodhull,  Beekman, Marte,  Benthuysen, Peter Van, 

Bergen, Charity [Gerithe],  Bergen, Teunis,  Berkeley County, VA, ,  Berlin, Ira, , , , , ,  Beverwijk, See Abany, NY Bleecker, Harmanus,  Bogardus, Jacobus,  Bogardus, Richard,  Bogart, Tecarius Van de,  Bogert, John,  Borsum, Cornelius Van,  Bosch, Gerhardus Balthazar, –,  Boston, , , ,  Boyer, Augustine,  Brass, Grietje,  Brazil, ,  Brissot De Warville, Jacques Pierre,  Brodhead, Richard,  Brooklyn, –, , , , , , ,  Broome County,  Brunt, James Ryder Van, – Brunt, Nicholas Van,  Bucks County, PA,  Bunschoten, Elias Van,  Burgher, Hermannus,  Burlington, NJ,  Button, Simeon,  Cambridge, MA,  Canada, –, , , , , , ,  Canajoharie, NY, , , –,  Cape Colony,  Caribbean, , , , –, , , , ,  Carner, John,  Catskill, NY, , , ,  Catskill Mountains,  Catskill, NY,  Cayuga County, ,  Chambers, Thomas, 



Index Champlain Canal,  Charleston, ,  Chenango County, , , ,  Churland, NY,  Civil War, US, ,  Claverack, NY, , , , ,  Clement, Joseph, ,  Clermont, NY, ,  Clinton, George,  Clinton, Henry,  Clintontown, NY, ,  Colden, Cadwallader D., , ,  Colonization Society,  Columbia County, , ,  Dutch-speaking slaves, , , , – emancipation, ,  runaway slaves, ,  wheat farming,  Concklin v. Havens,  Congress, US, , ,  Connecticut, –, , , –, , ,  Constitution, US, , ,  Continental Army, ,  Corlears Hook,  Cornelisen, Dominie,  Cornish, Anthony,  Corwin, Charles E., – Courten, Myndert,  Cranberry, NJ,  Creswell, Nicholas,  Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John, – Crommeline, Elizabeth,  Cromwell, Isaac,  Cuba, ,  De Fonclear v. Shottenkirk,  de Joo, Hendrik,  De Ronde, Lambertus, , – Delaware, , ,  Delaware County, , ,  Delaware Valley,  Ditmars, John,  Domar, Evsey, – Donagan, Thomas,  Drisius, Samuel,  Dubois v. Allen,  Dunbar v. Williams,  Duryee, Jacob,  Dutch Reformed Church, , , –, ,  Dutchess County, , , , ,  Dutch-speaking slaves, , ,  emancipation,  manumissions, 



runaway slaves, ,  slave codes,  wheat farming, , ,  Dutchess Dutch-speaking slaves,  Easter, See Paas Elm Tree Lighthouse,  Emancipation Day, , , , , , , , ,  Emancipation law of  (New York), , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , ,  Embargo Act of ,  Erie Canal, , ,  Esopus, –, –, See also Kingston, NY Essex, NJ, , , ,  Esterly, Peter,  Evans, Oliver,  Ewing, George,  Federal Writer’s Project,  Fessenden, Josiah,  Filkin, Francis,  First Church at Passaic,  Fish v. Fisher, – Fishkill, NY, ,  Flatbush, NY, , , , ,  Flatlands, NY, , ,  Fleet, Samuel,  Flushing, NY, , ,  Fontaine, John,  Fort Orange, ,  France, , , –,  Frederick, Fisher, ,  Freeman, Matthias,  Frelinghuysen, Theodorus,  French and Indian War, ,  French Revolution,  Gaasbeck, Peter Van,  Gansevoort, Leonard,  Gansevoort, Peter,  Gelston v. Russel,  Genesee County,  Genesee Valley,  Georgia,  Glen v. Hodges,  Glen, John S.,  Glen, Sarah,  Gravesend, NY,  Greene County, , , , – Griffis, William Elliot,  Gurnee v. Dessies,  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, 



Index

Hackensack, NJ, ,  Hall, Francis,  Hammond, Alonzo,  Hammond, Jabez,  Hardenberg, John Leonard,  Hardenbergh, Joanna,  Haring, Abraham,  Harrington Township,  Hart v. Cleis,  Hasbrouck, Abraham,  Haycorn, Cynthia,  Hegeman, Isack,  Helleberg, NY, ,  Henderson v. Negro Tom,  Herkimer County, , – Hessian Fly,  Hirsch, Leo H., , ,  Hoboken, NJ,  Hogeland, Jacob,  Holland Land Company,  Holland Society,  Hooper, Isaac T.,  Hoosac Valley,  Horenbeek, Cornelius,  Houten, Garret Van,  Hudson River, , , –, , –, , , , , , , ,  Hudson, NY,  Huffman, Abraham,  Huidekoper, Harm Jan, –,  Hurley, NY,  Illinois, ,  Indentured servitude, , –, , , –, , –, , – Iroquois,  Irving, Washington,  Jamaica, NY, , , ,  James, Thomas,  Jay, James,  Jay, John,  Jefferson, Thomas,  John Brown,  Johnson, Amatato “Bill,”  Johnson, Jeffre, – Johnson, John,  Jones, Thomas,  Kansas,  Kent, James,  Kentucky, , ,  Kettletas v. Fleet,  Kinderhook, NY, –,  Kings County, , , , 

Dutch-speaking slaves, –, , ,  emancipation, – manumissions, – slaveholders, ,  slaves sold South,  wheat farming, , – Kings Ferry,  Kingston, NY, ,  Dutch-speaking slaves, , –,  emancipation,  slaveholders, ,  wheat farming, , – Kip, Peter, – Kip, William Ingraham,  Kleek, Baltus Van,  Labagh, Isaac,  Lancaster, PA,  Lansing, Nicholas,  Lefferts, Phebe,  Leisler rebellion,  Lewis Morris v. Lewis DeBois,  Livingston family, , , , ,  Livingston v. Ackeston,  Livingston, Philip, –,  Livingston, Robert, ,  Long Island, , , , ,  Dutch-speaking slaves, –, –, , , , , ,  slave sales South, , , ,  slaveholders, , , ,  wheat farming, , –, ,  Lost Cause Myth, ,  Louisiana, , , ,  Louisiana Slave Database,  Low, Johannis,  Madagascar,  Magee, Samuel,  Mancius, George,  Manhattan, , , , , –, , , , , – Marbletown, NY, , ,  Maryland, , –, , , , , , , , , , ,  Massachusetts, , , , , –, , –, , –,  Mauritius, ,  McKee, Samuel, – Megapolensis, John,  Mellick, Andrew,  Meyndertje, Peterus,  Mickel, Nan,  Middleburgh, NY, ,  Miller, John S., 

Index Mississippi, ,  Missouri,  Missouri Compromise,  Mitchell, Isaac,  Mobile, AL,  Mohawk County,  Mohawk River, , ,  Mohawk Valley, , , , ,  Monroe, James,  Montgomery County, , –, , , , , , , , , ,  Montreal,  Naald, Cornelius Vander,  Narrows, NY, ,  Nat Turner,  Netherlands, The, –, , , , , ,  New Brunswick, NJ, ,  New France,  New Hampshire, –,  New Haven, CT, ,  New Orleans, , , , – New Paltz, NY, , , ,  New Utrecht, NY, ,  New York City Manumission Society,  New York Manumission Society, , ,  New York Supreme Court,  Newtown, NY,  Nistageune, NY,  North Carolina, , –,  Northrup, A. Judd,  Northwest Ordinance,  O’Callaghan, Edmund,  Oatfield v. Waring,  Occom, Samson,  Ohio,  Olcott, Thomas,  Olson, Edwin,  Oneida County, , ,  Onondaga County,  Ontario County, , ,  Orange County, –, , –, , , , , –, –,  Orangetown, NY, , ,  Orden, Jacob Van,  Orden, John Van,  Osterhoudt, Thomas,  Ostrander, Henry,  Otsego County, , ,  Overseers of the Poor, , , , , , , , , 



Overseers of the Poor of the Town of Claverack v. Overseers of the Poor of the City of Hudson,  Oyster Bay, NY, – Paas, , , ,  Paling, Levi, – Passaic County, , – Paterson, NJ, ,  Pawling, Albert,  Pawling, NY, ,  Peace of Amiens,  Pennsylvania, , , –, , , ,  Pentecost, See Pinkster Philadelphia, , ,  Philipse family, , ,  Pine, Margaret,  Pinkster, , , –, , –, ,  Pittstown, NY,  Polhemius, Johannes,  Poughkeepsie, NY, , , –, , – Progressive Era,  Pugsley, Israel,  Putnam County, , , – Quack, Thomas,  Quakers,  Quamino,  Quebec, – Queens County, , , , , –, , , , ,  Raritan River,  Reformed Church in America, See Dutch Reformed Church Rensselaer County, , , , , , ,  Rensselaer family, , –, ,  Rensselaer, Cortland Van, – Rensselaer, Jeremias van,  Rensselaer, Peter Van,  Rensselaer, Stephen Van, ,  Rensselaer, Thomas Van,  Rensselaerville, NY, ,  Rensselaerwijk, ,  Rensselaerswyck, , See Rensselaerwijk Rhode Island, , –, , –,  Richmond County, , , , , , –, –,  Ringwood, NJ,  Rockland County, , , – Roosa, Albert, 



Index

Rutland, VT,  Rutsen, Jacob,  Saratoga, NY, , , , ,  Schaats, Gideon,  Schaghticoke, NY,  Schaik, Sybrant van,  Schenectady, NY, –,  Dutch-speaking slaves, , ,  emancipation,  manumission, ,  manumissions,  runaway slaves, –,  wheat farming,  Schermerhorn, Isaac,  Schoharie County, , , , , , , ,  Schoonmaker, Martinus,  Schraalenburgh, NJ,  Schuyler, Arent,  Schuyler, Catherine Van Rennselaer, , – Schuyler, John,  Schuyler, Philip,  Selinus, Henricus,  Seneca,  Seneca County,  Seven Years’ War, See French and Indian War Shawangunk, NY,  Shodach, NY, ,  Simmons, Rachel,  Simmons, Robert,  Simpson, Tom,  Skinner v. Fleet,  Slave Apprehending Society,  Slave Revolt of , , ,  Slave Revolt of , , ,  Smith v. Hoff,  Smith, Gerrit,  Smith, Richard,  Smith, William, ,  Sojourner Truth, ,  Somerset County, , , , ,  South Africa, , ,  South Carolina, –, ,  Spafford, Horatio Gates,  St. Lawrence County,  Staats, Johannis,  Staats, Margaret,  Stalker, Peter,  Staten Island, , , , , , , –,  Dutch-speaking slaves, , ,  runaway slaves, ,  wheat farming, – Steenbergh, Matthew Van, 

Sterling v. Sherwood,  Steuben County, – Strickland, William, ,  Suffolk County, , , , , , , ,  Supreme Court, New York, , , ,  Suriname, , , ,  Susquehanna River,  Swart, Dirck,  Swayze, Peter,  Syracuse, NY,  Tappan, NY, , ,  Ten Broeck, Elizabeth,  Ten Eyck, Julia,  Teunissen, Sweer,  The People v. Alvin, A Black Man,  The Society of Negroes Unsettled,  The State v. Quick,  Thompson, Samuel,  Thomson, James,  Tinsler, Solomon,  Tioga County, –, , – Townsend, Joseph,  Treaty of Paris (),  Trenton, NJ, ,  Trongott v. Byers,  Tryon County, ,  US Mint Act of ,  U.S. v. Fox,  Ulster County, , , , ,  Dutch-speaking slaves, , , , , , – emancipation,  manumissions, –, , ,  miscegenation,  runaway slaves, , ,  slave codes,  slave sales South,  slaveholders, –, ,  wheat farming, , –,  Utica, NY,  Valkenburgh, Christian,  Van Buren, Martin,  Vanderbilt, G. L.,  Vanderbilt, Jeremiah,  Vanderveer, Abraham,  Vechten, Cornelius Van,  Vechten, Gerret Theunissen Van,  Vedder, Jessie Van Vechten,  Veech, John,  Vermont, , , , , ,  Virgin Islands, US, 

Index Virginia, , , , ,  Dutch-speaking slaves, , –, , ,  Piedmont,  runaway slaves, , ,  slave code,  wheat farming, –,  Vliet, Anna Van,  Volunbrun, Drouillard de,  Vorst, Peter Van,  Vosburgh, Rosanna, ,  Vrankin, Janatje Van,  Vroman, Peter,  Walradt, Johannes,  War of ,  Ward, Samuel Ringgold, – Warwick, NY, ,  Washington County, , , , – Washington, DC,  Washington, George, ,  Watson, Elkanah,  Welles, Ransford,  West India Company, , , , – West Indies, See Caribbean Westchester County, , , , 

Dutch-speaking slaves, , ,  manumissions, –, – runaway slaves, ,  slaves sold South,  wheat farming,  Westerloo, Eilardus,  Williams, John,  Wiltsie, Crom,  Wiltsie, Martin,  Winnin, Laurens,  Wolfsen, Jacobus,  Wyck, William Van,  Wynkoop, Cornelius, ,  Wynkoop, Derrick,  Wynkoop, Henrietta,  Wynkoop, Johannes,  Wynkoop, John,  Wynkoop, Lea,  Zabriskie family, ,  Zabriskie, Everett,  Zandt, John Van,  Zandt, Wynant Van,  Zielie, Adam,  Zielie, Tom, ,  Zilversmit, Arthur, , –

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