Naam
Race, Family, and Connection on the Borderlands (1680s–90s)
Tom and Robert were both local entrepreneurs. They traded in the same supply of materials and tapped the same community of people. They traveled the streets of Albany and understood the politics and danger of the tensions between their position and New France. Both men’s origins lay a continent away, and both stood condemned by the Albany court. Yet for all their similarities, the two men were separated by one glaring difference: Tom was enslaved by Robert. Family name (achternaam) separates the ways enslaved and enslaver are remembered, segregating them in many analyses. Such names obscure not only race but the relevance of gendered relationships in creating social circumstances. But centralizing the similarities between diverse colonials uncovers how racial difference emerged out of specific local and regional circumstances to become a crucial determinant to understandings of legitimate or illegitimate trade, mastery, and networks of belonging.
On March 30, 1682, Robert Livingston was “condemned to pay the costs of the proceedings” related to the prosecution of his enslaved man named Tom, whom he had brought before the court due to the man’s alleged “theft” of several items.1 Tom and an associate named Jack were charged with trading linens, beaver skins, clothing, and various household items to two local families, primarily on Sundays during church services, in exchange for tobacco, rum, and unmolested moments of camaraderie.2 The everyday lives and trading activities of Albany’s enslaved residents, lay embedded in court and vital records, documents that criminalize their actions and monetize their lives. Such records must be read thoughtfully, and as Marisa Fuentes contends, used in a way that, “purposely subverts the overdetermining power of colonial discourses.”3 Approached carefully, such remnants can offer insight into the enslaved community of late seventeenth century Albany and the upper Hudson Valley.
Tom was enslaved by Robert Livingston and lived on Prince Street in the patroon’s house with Robert’s wife Alida Schuyler and their two young children. Jack, his trading partner, lived in town near the stockade’s North gate and was enslaved to the fur trader Tjerk Harmense Visscher, his wife Femmetje Jans, and their children. Tom testified that he traded with another captive man named Symon, offering him one of the shirts allegedly taken from Robert Livingston. Symon was enslaved to Jacob Staets, the town surgeon who lived nearby. A man named Jan, enslaved by Alida’s father Philip Pietersz Schuyler, would have come into frequent contact with Tom as the Schuyler family home in Albany was nearby the Livingstons. He also likely spent time on the Schuyler property in the Flatts. He was stabbed to death by an Indigenous man a month after Tom’s case concluded. A mother named Mary toiled for Willem Teller and Maria Verlet, another local merchant and landowning family, embedded within the broader Stuyvesant/Bayard/Varlet network. She would face the humiliation of court censure when they sided with the white colonist whom she accused of fathering one of her children. She was far from alone, as the sexually coerced lives of two other local enslaved women—Mary and Pey—would make their way into the court record. Another man, whose name never appears in the court record, except in relation to his enslaver Jacob Casparsz, lived in Albany next to the Norman’s Kill. Two months after Tom’s case, in July 1682, he would murder two of his enslaver’s children and his enslaver’s father-in-law, Hans Dreeper, before being found dead in the woods. The manhunt for him began on Pieter Schuyler’s order, and his body was hung up to terrorize the community. A man named Barent Emanuelse, who was born in New Amsterdam before the first fall of the colony, toiled for the local minister, domine Gideon Schaets, who had likewise settled in the area when it was under Dutch control. Tom strategically timed his trading ventures to occur on Sundays when the domine ministered to his flock, a time when clandestine trades could be executed with less surveillance.4
The record of Tom’s life begins and ends with Albany’s criminal court documents; in contrast, Robert’s life story was preserved in archives across the world, but most prominently within the massive Livingston Family Papers, housed at various New York State archives. Robert’s own clandestine actions, while equally stretching the finer points of the law, have been situated as part of his wealth-building strategy. Tom’s actions were quickly censured and severely punished. Robert Livingston was born in December 1654, in Ancrum, Scotland, a few months after the conclusion of the First Anglo-Dutch War. During his childhood, northern European powers struggled over control of slave ports and increased the numbers of enslaved people brought into their American colonies. Such battles underwrote the wealth of the age and the stability of the Dutch Republic that offered his family shelter, when his minister father John Livingstone was exiled from Scotland. Robert was nine years old. Laws ensuring the heritability and violent control required to enslave would be enacted across the Atlantic World. As a teenager Robert learned to keep proper merchant accounts in Amsterdam, studying his trade within a society in which merchant families were the ultimate power brokers.5 Families, like the Amsterdam-based Van Rensselaers, were helmed not only by men but by moneyed trade savvy women.
His own family connections offered him an entrée to Boston, in 1673. In New England, he quickly became embedded within the fur trade and regional economy as part of John Pynchon’s Springfield operation. John Pynchon who had visions of wresting the fur trade from Albany, also held connections to the Caribbean economies and was an enslaver. By the autumn of 1674, Robert relocated to New York after the second and final fall of the colony to the English and was living in the city when former Dutch director Lord Anthony Colve transferred power of attorney to Nicolaes Bayard onboard the warship Suriname, so named for the South American slave colony where the Dutch had staked a claim as part of the terms that ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War.6 Robert moved to Albany, where his bilingual background embedded him within the primarily Dutch trading environment, and he became secretary to the director of Rensselaerswyck, Nicolaes van Rensselaer.7 The family operation in the Northern settlement had included bonded and enslaved labor as part of their diverse portfolio for at least three decades. Within a year, his employer would die, and Robert marry his widow, the locally connected and merchant-minded Alida Schuyler.8
Robert was able to rely on societal privilege that drew on the power of Dutch names and connections that his wife Alida brought to their relationship, ties which elevated him in society and insulated him from much of the judgment that would befall those with more limited networks. Alida was born in Beverwijck in 1656, to the fur trader Philip Pietersz Schuyler and Margaretha van Slichtenhorst.9 While the male connections through her first husband Nicolaes van Rensselaer’s family and her father’s Schuyler family were valuable, Alida’s trading network vitally leveraged a traditionally Dutch approach to ownership and the market economy wherein women enjoyed inheritance rights and could operate with autonomy.10 Her female family members and friends extended her reach throughout the colony, acting as factors and lenders, both in her name and (with the transition to English rule) her husband’s name. Her unmarried aunt, Hillegont, would function in later years as Robert’s factor in the newly renamed town of Kingston, several miles south of Rensselaerswyck on the western shore of the Hudson River.11 Alida’s mother was also a factor in business with her sisters, and her grandmother Aeltje had a reputation for tracking down people in her debt.12 Robert was a happy beneficiary.
Conversely, the bane of Tom’s existence were those same female networks leveraged against him. At the dawn of colonial New York, slavery fueled the integration of immigrant newcomers into interconnected webs of trade and slavery forged during Dutch rule, whose connections cemented the Northeast into a coherent culture of enslavement. The political instabilities of perpetual warfare created opportunities for the enslaved to expand and exploit their own networks, even as it made them the targets of tightening legal strictures and borderland violence. Members of the Stuyvesant-Bayard family network constructed a legal edifice of slavery in New York that emerged out of an earlier era of intercolonial rivalries. Engagement in the slave economy as an investor, merchant, and enslaver was a vital part of Robert Livingston’s ascent from an immigrant debtor to a well-connected merchant. The same commodities that enlivened Robert and Alida’s ventures fueled the supplies of enslaved entrepreneurs whose mobility, customers, and markets were systematically closed off by their white merchant counterparts.
Race and “Legitimate Trade”
Northeastern elites sought to control their world by establishing legal and normative constructs that would reinforce their claims to economic and social dominance, though such hegemony was never absolute. They used the courts to safeguard those claims, ensuring that those who might challenge them would be stopped in a public and exemplary manner. Three years before Tom was brought before the court, on August 29, 1679, Barent Emanuelse was condemned to “receive 30 lashes on his bare back” and “to be branded on his right cheek as an example to other rogues.”13 A courtroom full of enslavers, who sold men, women, and children at auction, and financed slaving voyages as far-flung as the Caribbean and the Gold Coast of Africa, had condemned Barent as a “rogue” and a thief.14 By 1679, elite men across the colony had spent nearly three decades of sitting on and adjudicating cases that linked the enslaved with criminality. They strengthened their networks of wealth and security through the purchase, auction, and prosecution of enslaved individuals. Conversely, enslaved people such as Barent lived lives marked by insecurity and surveillance.15 Their enslavers utilized the bonds of family to build dynasties supported by layers of unfree labor and buttressed by systems of law and practice.
People held in bondage were frequently forced into states of extralegality. Barent was no stranger to Albany’s court system. He had been charged with theft two other times. Barent stood in the courtroom, stripped of a right to a jury by his peers—indeed his only peer, the enslaved man Claes Croes, had been sentenced to “receive at the hands of the public executioner 20 lashes on his bare back.”16 Whipping alone was deemed too lenient a punishment for Barent, he needed to be made an example of for others. He was sentenced to be whipped and then branded on the face.
The man who claimed his body as property protested the verdict. His enslaver, the Dutch Reformed minister, Gideon Schaets, requested that Barent be “branded on the back instead of on the cheek,” which the court was “pleased” to honor.17 Unlike Barent, Gideon was facing not a room full of angry enslavers, but congregants. A month earlier, he had married the court secretary, twenty-two-year-old Robert Livingston, to Alida Schuyler.18 Alida’s father, Philip Pietersz, an elite Indian trader and another member of Gideon’s congregation, served as the trial foreman. Robert’s star had recently risen in Albany; just one year earlier, he had been a pariah, shunned by at least one New York woman that he pursued as being too grasping.19 The marriage had not allowed him to thoroughly shake that identity, and marrying his recently deceased employer’s much younger wife, might have been more scandalous had not Nicolaes van Rensselaer’s co-minister, Gideon Schaets, officiated at their nuptials.20 If Barent’s sentenced facial brand had been carried out, the mark would have threatened the minister’s investment, lessening Barent’s value on the slave market by advertising to prospective buyers that he was trouble. Gideon’s public reputation was granted clemency while Barent’s body was condemned to abuse. On Saturday, August 30, Barent Emanuelse was stripped from the waist up, tied to the public whipping post, and forced to endure the lash, thirty times. Afterward, his shredded back was seared with a brand.21 Barent’s torture was meant to terrorize enslaved people like Tom and disincentivize any activities that might be branded subversive. Regardless, it did not stop the engine of commerce: a month later Barent was in court again, this time charged with “stealing” several items with another enslaved man and giving them to a woman named Marietje Damen, who was a wealthy trader that lived in Schenectady, to be made into silver breeches buttons.22
Manipulating the inequalities in the legal system, and understanding the power of local female networks, was du rigor for some aspiring entrepreneurs hoping to gain entrée into the higher (and mostly Dutch-descended) echelons of Albany society. Robert Livingston trained his attention toward making himself indispensable in Albany society by becoming a local merchant and holding public office. As secretary of the colony, he witnessed loans, backed up by human beings, including “a Negro boy named Wynamus, about nine years old, together with another Negro named Bock, about twenty-one years old,” presented as surety for Jacob Jansen Gardiner’s debt to Andries Teller.23 The same debtor, put up the nine-year-old again several months later to settle with brickmaker Pieter Meesz Vrooman a transaction that Robert facilitated as secretary. Upon marriage to Alida Schuyler in 1679, Robert moved into the patroon’s house, a short relocation from his lodgings next door but an extremely symbolic leap forward in fortune. Robert was quick to begin leveraging his new wife’s network. Alida’s brother-inlaw, Jacobus van Cortlandt, who was already deeply involved in the Barbados market and had slave dealings with the Van Rensselaers, offered him an introduction to the New York merchants who controlled the docks.24 Along the journey down to New York City from Albany, Robert Livingston would have encountered enslaved men who were piloting the boats or loading and unloading the cargo from ships that had arrived from Barbados.25 Jacobus was positioning his brother-in-law Robert to reap a portion of a booming New York shipping trade that had received unprecedented growth due to the passage of a 1678 law that gave New York merchants exclusive rights to shipping.26
Legal constructs provided a robust latticework on which upwardly mobile newcomers could build and grow their social and economic networks. Robert had been contacted by English merchant James Graham who proposed that he diversify his supply markets by including the Barbadian market as the source of some of his supplies, inquiring “if any Barbados goods be proper, viz., Rhum, Maleasses, Sugar,” and continuing “I having a great Quantity of that trade.”27 This was a contact that he made several months before his marriage.28 Trade, fueled by the massive proceeds due to sugar and slavery on Barbados, had made the island a sound investment. The same currents that increased the numbers of slave ships filled with enslaved people that pulled into New York also carried Robert’s early profits. Although Robert gained status through his marriage, his networking and shipping accounts had already begun to bear fruit, allowing him to pay back several of his debts before he wed.29 Indeed in the same letter where he encouraged Robert to enter the Barbados trade, Graham sought to leverage Robert’s local connections, for advice as to his own nephew’s merchant prospects: “I should be willing to board him in your parts hoping he may better learn the Dutch Tongue.”30
Although some of his supplies streamed in from the Caribbean, Robert remained a local vendor—focusing his time on shoring up his status in the Albany community. He kept the accounts of others in the community, including one for provisioning captive white Virginia prisoners held by the Oneida.31 If Tom entered his household as part of Alida’s dowry, then his working world would have, like Andries before him, included both Albany and Rensselaerswyck. Alida appeared in court on December 31, 1678, seven months before her marriage to Robert but while he was acting as official secretary, to secure her estate.32 While the inheritance of specific enslaved people during the seventeenth century remains opaque, due to the Dutch practice of passing down the entire estate unbroken, enslaved people were a form of moveable property that conveyed status to white women and were owned by them outright.33 Tom’s extensive connections to the broader white community in Albany indicates that he had lived there for some time, and could have even been born in the community or brought there from New York, like Barent.
Tom’s language ability is unmentioned in the court record but can be implied from context. He would have needed to be conversant in Dutch—a linguistic dexterity that would have been a feature of living in a mixed culture household such as the Livingstons. The case was recorded in English, though the testimony may have been given in Dutch. Robert and Alida spoke Dutch at home, though Robert traded frequently in English. When questioned about the whereabouts of some stolen handkerchiefs, Tom answered that he took them to “Pautje’s” using the Dutch familiar diminutive to refer to Paulus Martense.34 Tom, like Robert Livingston, networked locally, choosing Jack, identified as “the Negro of Tierk Harmense” as his partner. The other Albanians named in connection to this suit were Claes Janse Stavast, who owned land between the highway and the river, “Symon, the Negro of Jochim Staets,” who appeared in the 1697 list of Albany householders as Jacob Staets, and Jack’s enslaver Dirck Harmense.35 These overlapping networks of enslaver and enslaved knitted the community together.
Just as Robert was building his business based on networks that had been laid down under Dutch rule, so too Tom benefited from a century’s-old network. The Black community of Albany dated from the first decades of Dutch settlement.36 Tom dwelt and toiled in the patroon’s house, though not the same house as Andries had nearly two decades earlier, as that one had been completely destroyed by an ice flow in 1666.37 Jack and Tom were two of the most common names given to men in English-speaking enslaved communities throughout the Atlantic World, and may have come into the Albany community through neighboring New England or from the Caribbean. Although some historians point to the prevalence of such shortened forms as evidence that white enslavers were demeaning African-descended people through diminutive names, the argument that they were anglicized forms of African names is a persuasive possibility. If this is the case, then Jack’s name could have been derived from the Akan day name Quaco for Wednesday; whose shortened form was Quack. Tom (or perhaps Tam as he was likely known in the primarily Dutch-speaking Albany), could have been a transliterated form of the Yoruban Taiwo, which translates as the “first born of twins.”38
Tom and Jack kept up a brisk, albeit clandestine local trade. The items they were accused of stealing were the same supplies that Robert and Alida were using to augment their trade networks in Albany, including beavers, rum, tobacco, and linens. Tom clearly accompanied Robert Livingston on his business trips down to New York City. Among his traded inventory were listed “four fine shirts” that Jack testified belonged to Robert Livingston, but Tom elaborated that “he had brought them from New York.”39 Tom’s testimony highlighted the illicit nature of the transactions indicating that he traded with Claes Jansz Stavast’s wife Aefje “when her husband was in church” and to Paulus Martense’ wife Catherina “when he went to fetch milk.”40 Claes Jansz and Paulus Martensz both owned property in Albany and were active in the land market that Robert Livingston sought to corner, with Paulus engaging in several local land transactions.41 Tom took beavers, empty bottles, and linen items that he obtained from the Livingston household and, using the wives as points of contact, he in exchange received tobacco and rum.42 Tom and Jack’s clandestine business was in alcohol, and the main points of contact identified during the court testimony were local married Dutch women, and an enslaved man named Symon, who was identified as “the Negro of Jochim Staets.”43 While Robert and Alida might not reach these particular buyers, Tom and Jack managed a parallel trading network in the same goods.
Tom’s ability to develop a trading business was at least in part an artifact of laws and practices that had not yet fully limited enslaved people’s movement, though those laws were rapidly tightening, as Andrea Mosterman has shown.44 Tom’s freedom of movement allowed him to ply his own business. Although he likely lived in a secluded corner of the Livingstons’ house in Albany, he held relationships and familiarity with a cross section of Albany’s population.45 On Sundays, he would walk from place to place, laden with the wares that he would trade for spirits. Such mobility was not unprecedented among enslaved people generally or in the case of the Livingstons in particular.46 Yet the legal situation for enslaved people was tightening, and entrepreneurs like Tom, as well as others, found their freedom severely curtailed. As an enslaved man serving in the house of Robert Livingston, who at least sometimes traveled with Robert down to New York City, Tom would have been issued a pass and might have been able to produce one if encountered by the authorities.47 Though the absence of this pass could have ultimately been his undoing. A year before Tom’s trial, a law was passed in New York City in 1681 (and was copied by New Jersey the next year) that prevented free inhabitants from purchasing items directly from enslaved vendors, explicitly stipulating that such people “frequently steal from their masters and others what they expose to sale at distance from their habitations.”48 The next year black codes stipulated penalties against “Negroes and Indians slaves, their frequent meetings and gathering themselves together in great numbers of the Lords Days and at other unseasonable times using and exercising severall rude and unlawful sports and pastimes to the dishonour of God.”49 This tightening legal regime served to affirm the rights of white traders, while making the actions (and even the pastimes) of enslaved people increasingly illegal.
Tom had carried on his business right under the noses of the Livingstons, though it is unlikely that either Alida or Robert were wholly ignorant of the two men’s activities. While the enslaved men received censure, the female colonists were acquitted, free to continue the clearly popular practice facilitated by enslaved traders of other neighbors. Neither the enslaved nor trading environment of the Livingstons’ household were a province manned only by Robert. Alida was the primary household manager when Robert was away, and he ensured she had full legal control of the estate when he would go on long trips, a position mirrored by other women in the colony during the years of Dutch rule.50 Alida could have offered introductions to the social and trading worlds of Albany’s female population. Alida’s marriage to Robert upset many in the Van Rensselaer family, since her status as Nicolaes’s widow effectively transferred control of Rensselaerswyck to Robert when she wed, and her personal network provided great leverage and access through members of her Schuyler and Van Slichtenhorst families, which were among the most well-connected in the colony. Tom could have even provided Alida with some remuneration for allowing the business.51 Such funds certainly would have allowed Tom to live more independently and lessened the amount that the Livingstons had to pay for his maintenance.
Tom’s trade business was deeply connected to the broader local economy that fueled the tensions between the English colonies and New France. His trading of Robert Livingston’s beavers joined him to the brisk beaver trade emanating from within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.52 His linen supply was but a small part of a much larger market for English linens that were in demand among the Haudenosaunee, a preference that gave the English both a trade and negotiating advantage over Quebec, one that the French governor Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac argued the English used to their military advantage.53 During the 1680s, Robert Livingston’s actions as commissioner for Indian affairs were purely unofficial.54 Nevertheless, his activities offered him an in-depth understanding of both the economic and political situation. He had provided his house in Albany as a refuge for the families of English-allied Haudenosaunee fighters during a flare-up of tensions between the English and French allied groups in the 1680s.55 Tom could have heard the details of the situation from countless conversations engaged in before him, or on numerous trips to New York, since Robert was frequently in New York on business, and would have understood the broader value of the items that he traded for his supply of spirits. According to Jack’s testimony, Tom denied stealing “four fine shirts” from Robert Livingston but, instead, claimed to have “brought them from New York,” demonstrating command of a long supply chain stretching the length of the Hudson.56 The harshness of the sentence carried out against him hints at the influence of the broader political situation, as the court condemned him to the more severe penalty of “39 lashes on his bare back” for his punishment and “an example to others.”57 Elites occasionally overlooked the clandestine trade of an enslaved person, but not when it had implications for the intercolonial balance of power.
Tom’s business was a satellite of Robert’s own trading in spirits.58 Robert’s diversified supply portfolio included merchant contacts with the Mahicans, the Haudenosaunee, New England, Amsterdam, and London, in addition to the Caribbean.59 His marriage contacts had offered him inroads into the beaver market by way of his brother-in-law Brandt Schuyler, a relationship that Alida actively facilitated. These relationships transformed him from a debtor into a creditor.60 Robert’s Massachusetts connections, cultivated before making inroads in Albany’s elite, were deeply embedded in New England’s slaveholding and slave-trading culture. During the 1670s, Robert’s main creditor was Springfield merchant, John Pynchon, a relationship he kept up until 1680. Robert’s early trade appears modeled after John’s, whose trade in rum and supplies along the Connecticut River made him prosperous and who also held African slaves in Massachusetts and in Antigua.61 The slave connections between the two colonial regions and the rest of the Atlantic World were not always legal. Cases of smuggling and theft of enslaved people on the borderlands did not cease after the fall of New Netherland but continued to be tried in regional courts.62
Tom was not the only vendor that Robert called to account, just merely the one with the most exposure to the full brunt of the law and the least protection under it. Cases involving enslaved participants were not the only reason that Robert frequented the court; in addition to his position as court secretary, his newfound status as a creditor made him very litigious. Between 1676 and 1685 Robert Livingston was the plaintiff in twenty-eight cases brought before the Albany courts. While some cases dealt with collecting back excise taxes, most were brought against his neighbors in relation to accounts owed or reimbursement for defective merchandise. By contrast, Robert was sued only seven times during that same period and served as a lawyer for other people’s cases ten times.63 In fact, one year earlier, Robert Livingston had sued a tavern keeper for trying to make a bit more money by evading the excise taxes.64 Despite his exuberant use of the courts, Robert’s own trade connections were not strictly legal.65 Robert’s canniness would make him a powerful (if not always respected) member of Albany’s community, the same characteristics that caused Tom and Jack to be branded malefactors.
The details of the case Robert brought against Tom uncover a broader interconnected world of gender, race, and trade in Albany. Though she was never named in the suit, Alida Livingston’s presence is crucial to understanding the broader implications of the case, as well as to social relationships within the northern settlement. Among the myriad stolen items were everyday objects and included nine marked children’s shirts—likely with a recognizable family monogram—and a child’s night cap. At the time of the case, Alida’s son, Johannes was two years old and her daughter, Margaret was an infant.66 As one of the wealthier members of the community, visibly stationed in the patroon’s house, Alida’s sartorial choices for her children were more than personal, they communicated status. Tom’s everyday duties brought him close enough to the children’s living space to take these items to trade. According to Tom’s testimony, Catharina van Kleeck and Aefje Gerrits clearly valued the items as well. These neighbors took the time to painstakingly remove the identifying marks on the children’s shirts with a needle, in exchange for rum, some of which Tom, and his partner Jack enjoyed at Catharina’s house.67
Such local transactions made up the fabric of everyday life in Albany. Understanding the primacy of women’s domestic economy within Albany uncovers the central role that women held within networks that encompassed enslaved people.68 Alida herself was embroiled in a row with Maria van Rensselaer, her former sister-in-law, over the land she had inherited from her first husband Nicolaes van Rensselaer, and though the two women expressed their involvement in the affair in correspondence sent to their male relatives, Maria trained her frustrations specifically against the Schuyler family, terming them a “bitter family” (Bittere geslacht) a jab aimed directly at Alida.69 Both sides of Alida’s family wielded local power. Alida’s father Philip Pietersz Schuyler had, eight years earlier, purchased the Flatts from Arent van Curler, land that her mother Margaretha would control in the years following his death.70 Her uncle, Gerrit, owned a considerable amount of land at Claverack, part of the lower manor of Rensselaerswyck, holdings which he would pass down and would largely fall under the control of his daughters.71 Thus, Alida’s closest family represented a considerable amount of the landed wealth in Albany. They were, likewise, enslavers.
Claverack’s connection to female slaveholding networks emerged prominently in a paternity case brought by a Black woman named Mary in 1679, who accused a local baker of fathering all three of her children. The court proceedings revealed that Mary had been questioned as to the identity of the father by the court-sworn midwife, during transition—the final and most painful part of active labor—in the presence of her enslaver, Trijntie Wessels Staets.72 Trijntie Wessels was married to Abraham Staets, and they lived on land in Claverack. The court’s use of female officials and high-status women in childbirth was not unique; what was distinctive about this case was what it revealed about the racial implications to gendered life in Albany.73 Such testimony given during the most painful part of labor was considered very persuasive, due to its connection to the life-threatening nature of the moment and the belief that the pains of childbirth were effective tools of veracity. Yet the man contested Mary’s testimony and was acquitted of the paternity charge, by highlighting that she was a heathen woman.74 Such an implication conjured the racial debate, which centered on the widely circulated view among Northern European travel writers that Black women felt childbirth pangs differently from white women because Black people sprung from a different origin than whites, who were under Eve’s curse. Such beliefs were among the myriad circulating theories of racial difference, some of which were tangentially justified by conjuring biblical precedent.75
The Dutch women implicated in the case against Tom would likewise lean on gendered and racial supports to exonerate themselves of wrong-doing. They were in real danger. As Erin Kramer has demonstrated, women’s tapping activities were viewed with unease, because of the “semiprivate” domestic setting and mixed gender an ethnic composition of such gatherings, and threat to social order. Cases involving women charged with violations of the liquor laws would often result in stiff penalties imposed on such women.76 Catharina and Aefje took shelter under English legal norms which stripped married women of a separate legal identity apart from their husband. Documented in the court record not by name but as “the wife” of their respective husbands, Catharina van Kleeck and Aefje Gerrits swore under oath that they had not carried on trade with Tom and Jack. The court believed this testimony and added defamation to the charges of theft leveled against the two enslaved men, solidifying the notion that nonwhite trade could not be legitimate.77
Mastery and Borderlands
During a time of perpetual struggle and war against Indigenous groups and other Europeans along the borderlands, the leaders of the English colonies used legal codification of free and slave categories as a way to assert ideas of mastery over both people and territory throughout the colonies. By the closing decades of the seventeenth century, some elite Dutch families managed the transition to English rule in part by wholeheartedly adopting a more stringent slave system. In October 1682, New York aldermen Frederick Philipse and Willem Beeckman gathered in court together along with a number of their elite colleagues. They convicted three Black men—Robert Seary, Mingoe, and Cane—of the crime of “Breaking Prison” and “Stealing A Boate” to “Runn Away with out of the Mould or Harbour of this Citty,” and sentenced them “to be Tyed to A Carts Arse and to Receive tenn Lashes or Strips on the Bare back att Each Corner Round the Citty And to be Branded in the forehead with the Letter R.”78 The men, if the testimony of sheriff John Collier can be believed, had run away from Virginia and Maryland, perhaps following routes of freedom that piggybacked the slaveholding networks elites used to connect their Atlantic ventures.79 Legal action provided colonial leaders with a way to reassert their mastery of these men and secure their position of dominance over their networks.
If they had actually taken the boat—Robert Seary protested his innocence—they had confidence on (and likely in) the water.80 Mingo’s name offers some insight into their shared past. If he received his name in the Caribbean, a combination of African day name traditions and a shortening of the Iberian word for Sunday, Domingo, then Mingo and his compatriots could have gained their familiarity with seafaring in the Caribbean as part of a crew or as pearl divers.81 Alternatively, if Robert, Mingo, and Cane worked the docks in the Chesapeake, then they could have carried their skills with them across the Atlantic, a treasured retention of their old lives or a secret inheritance passed down from the experiences of others.82 Nevertheless, the elite men ensured that their punishment was public and would be seen by the entire enslaved and free populous of the city. Additionally, their status as “runaway” would be branded not just on their flesh but on their faces. Such disfigurement was meant to cause horror and alienation for the rest of their lives.
Keen to control the movement of the enslaved, during that same session, the council of elites introduced “An Order Concerning Negroes and Indian Slaves,” intended to stop meetings and gatherings of enslaved peoples on Sundays and at “Other Unseasonable times using and Exercising Severall Rude and Unlawfull Sports and Pastetimes to the Dishonour of God.”83 The law has been read as a correction of the “freedom of movement allowed slaves under the Dutch,” and if so, it was a change made by men who had lived decades of their lives under the Dutch system, rather than a group of newly appointed English transplants.84 The act also came with a penalty to settlers who hoped to trade with the enslaved lacking their enslaver’s approval: they would be fined five pounds. To be a freeman was not enough to govern and engage the trade and pastimes of the enslaved—the council ensured that only moneyed slaveholders would be able to control commerce and recreation.
Elites pursued control of the slave trade along legal, commercial, and familial avenues. Aldermen Willem Beeckman and Frederick Philipse, who were shoring up their power through business deals and strategic marriages, made slaveholding a key part of their business growth strategy. By 1682, Willem was the deputy mayor of New York and the newly minted lieutenant of the militia. Just seven months after the passage of the slave act, he managed a shipment of “thirty-eight negro slaves” who had voyaged from Angola to their first port of disembarkation, Nevis, ultimately bound for London but were waylaid in New York.85 His family had long been intertwined with the slaveholding elite, arriving in the colony on board the Prinses Amelia with the Stuyvesants. His sister Maria, although dead by the time of the law’s passage, had been married to Nicolaes Stuyvesant, Petrus Stuyvesant’s youngest son.86 Frederick Philipse, who had immigrated to the colony from Friesland as an employee of the West India Company, was keen to increase the output of his mill investment in Westchester.87 Three years after the law’s passage, Frederick invested in the slave ship Charles, which brought forty enslaved people from the Kongo to New York. These people formed the core of the workforce at Philipsburg Manor, which would go on to be one of the most extensive slave manors in the region.88 The interaction of personal networks, legal protections, and commercial ambition formed the basis of elites’ power.
Maximizing power necessitated minimizing challenges to that power, so elites attempted to circumscribe the actions of nonelites. In 1683, a law was brought before the Common Council of New York and Cornelis Steenwijck, the merchant slaveholder and slave trade investor who was then mayor of New York City, that curtailed the movement of enslaved Black and Indigenous people. The text of the law included the injunction “that noe Negro or Indian Slaves, Above the Number of four, doe Assemble or meet together on the Lords Day or att Any Other tyme att any Place, from their Masters Service within [the City].”89 A peace treaty with the Haudenosaunee had just been signed in Albany during the previous fall, during which Alida Schuyler’s grandfather, Gerrit, served as interpreter.90 This ostensibly brought an end to a series of skirmishes throughout Virginia and the Chesapeake, but Steen-wijck’s desire to control the assembly of the colony’s enslaved population, whether “Negro or Indian,” likely stemmed from his personal experience as a slaveholder. A year later, New York’s General Assembly passed “A Bill Concerning Masters, Servants, Slaves Labourers and Apprentices.”91 The law set up the legal boundaries of slavery: prohibiting “no servant or slave either Male or Female” to “Give Sell or Truck any Comodity Whatsover during ye Time of their service,” “any person whatsoever” from extending “credit or trust” to “any servant or slave for Clothes Drinke or any other Comodity,” and setting up the legal justification for pursuing runaways.92 This legal edifice—in theory if never fully in practice—protected elites from any challenges to their dominance.
Notions of mastery were entwined with claims to dominance over the land. Concern about the transition to English rule weighed heavily on the landed elites of the former colony of New Netherland. Indigenous land grants were crucial to laying claim, and a reaffirmation of old grants and new ones that showed knowledge and ignorance of usage rights among the Mahican, Wappinger, other upper Hudson Valley Indigenous peoples and Haudenosaunee proliferated. The nearly one million acres of Rensselaerswyck had been under the Van Rensselaer family’s control since Kiliaen was confirmed as the patroon in 1630, and the new English governor Thomas Dongan reaffirmed the family’s patent in 1685, though he would request a portion be sectioned out for the independent town of Albany the following year.93 Robert and Alida Livingston, meanwhile, sought to carve out a similar landholding, acquiring through a series of purchases and land grants more than 160,000 acres just south of Alida’s former home between 1683 and 1686. In 1687, one of the manor’s first lessees would be Mattheus Abrahamse, whose term included “a strong Negro of 14–15 years.”94 As landholdings grew at the end of the century, so did the commitment to slave ownership.
Mastery over others was, as Danny Noorlander contents, a symbiosis between commerce and theology. The slave regime of New York was under review by Governor Thomas Dongan at the behest of the newly crowned King James II. In a 1686 report to the king, Thomas wrote that the inhabitants of New York “take no care of the conversion of their Slaves.”95 This was, in part, because of the previous belief held over from the Dutch period that baptism could lay the foundation for freedom; it had been an organizing principle for the networking of the free Black community, although that changed with the increasing demands of commercial empire.96 The former Duke of York, King James II, saw no contradiction in enslaving Christians within his former duchy, nor threat to his commercial stake. A major shareholder in the Royal Africa Company, he directed Governor Edmund Andros in April 1688 “to find out the best means to facilitate and encourage the conversion of Negros and Indians to the Christian religion,” “pass a law for the restraining of inhuman severity” used in punishing enslaved people, and asking that “the wilfull killing of Indians and Negros be punished with death.”97
At the same time that James issued this guidance through governmental channels, a few Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, began to agitate for the rights of enslaved people within their community of faith. Francis Daniel Pastorius authored a protest alongside three others, declaring “the reasons why we are against the traffik of men-body” and asking their leadership to discuss the case of slavery at their next quarterly meeting.98 This marked the first time that an organized protest against slavery by whites was conducted in North America, and contrasted with the restrictive Code Noir (Black Laws) that were drafted in 1685 to govern the institution and practice of slavery in the French colonies and was circulating throughout that empire. The year 1688 would also mark the end of King James II’s reign, as the “Glorious Revolution” forced him into exile in December of that year.
James II’s successor demonstrated a more robust commitment to the institution of slavery from the moment of his installation. An anonymously published broadside entitled A True and Exact Relation of the Prince of Orange: His Publick Entrance into Exeter featured William of Orange’s arrival in England along with “200 Blacks brought from the Plantations of the Neitherlands in Americe.” Such men were the second group described as accompanying the new monarch during his entrance into Exeter, just after “ English Gentlemen Richly Mounted on Flanders Steeds.” The Black grooms were described as clad in “Imbroyder, lined with white Fur, and plumes of white Feathers, to attend the Horse.” They enjoyed pride of place over “200 Finlanders or Lap-landers in Bear Skins taken from the Wild Beasts they had Slain,” and even a banner with the inscription “GOD and the PROTESTANT RELIGION.”99 When news of the takeover reached the colonies, the townspeople of Boston erupted into revolt, capturing Governor Andros and other members of his government in early 1689. In New York, the lieutenant governor of the Dominion of New England, Sir Francis Nicholson, faced his own rebellion, as the local militia, led by Jacob Leisler, removed him from power.
Northeastern elites were not a single, unified block, but rather a collection of individuals with competing aims and varying levels of integrations into the network. Jacob Leisler was part of a broad community of elites within New York and the wider colonial region. A German immigrant who arrived as a soldier during the last years of New Netherland, Jacob elevated himself within the colonial society through extensive fur and other trading activities, and by 1676, only Cornelis Steenwijck had amassed greater wealth within the New York City limits, based on taxable records.100 He achieved prominence and became captain of the militia, but made enemies of those who held the most elite stations during the rule of King James, a list that included the Van Rensselaers, Bayards, and Livingstons. Jacob, a staunch Calvinist, took issue with the preaching of Reverend Nicolaes van Rensselaer, who had been appointed by the future King James in 1676.101
Jacob Leisler made efforts to establish his own elite network through intercolonial trade, though this put him at odds with other networks. By the time of the rebellion, Jacob had added enslaved people to the list of his trades. He was co-owner of a vessel that delivered five enslaved people from New York to Maryland in 1677 as part of a series of trades that he executed with New York’s former South River colony.102 Marylanders may have been inspired in part by Jacob’s 1689 actions when they rebelled against the Lord Baltimore later that year. Leisler’s Rebellion itself had been infused with the language of mastery and slavery. The Anti-Leislerians, of which Robert Livingston was a prominent member, had been termed the “whites” and the pro-Leislerians, the “blacks.” Such terms had their roots in European political discourse, but by this time had come to also denote racial distinction, as Jeroen Dewulf explores, one that could not have been lost on the population of elite enslavers, some of whom had recently hailed from the slave society of Barbados.103 Tension and dissention between old and new elites permeated Leisler’s Rebellion, propagated along network connections and exploited racial stereotypes.
The unrest caused by the Glorious Revolution created an opportunity for the French and their Indigenous allies to destabilize England’s hold on its colonial possessions. On the cold and snow-covered morning of Sunday, February 9, 1690, the town of Schenectady was attacked by a joint expeditionary force of French and Indigenous forces from Canada under the command of Sieur Le Moyne de Sainte Helene and Lieutenant Daillebout de Mantet. By the end of the day, most of the houses were burned to the ground, many of the livestock were slaughtered, sixty inhabitants lay dead, and an additional twenty-seven people were captured, while only two raiders lost their lives during the assault.104 The assault heavily impacted Black people, who represented more than 20 percent of all victims, despite making up only 8 percent of the population of Albany county in 1687.105 Among those killed were thirteen enslaved or free Black people, while another five were among the captured. As the violence that would come to be known as King William’s War continued throughout 1690, attacks spread into the heart of Maine country, a central route for self-emancipated escapees from New York and New England headed toward Canada. Following Schenectady, a March attack destroyed a settlement in Salmon Falls, and in May, attacks engulfed Casco. The traumatized refugees from these sites would stream into New England towns such as Salem village, making up a significant portion of witchcraft accusers. Others would become tenants on Robert Livingston’s manor, which bordered Albany.106 This would create a new baseline from which further growth and contests for mastery and control would be waged throughout the remainder of the decade.
Running Away during Rebellion
The political economic and social worlds of powerful white colonials were shaped by notions of mastery and networks of influence. But enslaved people held their own networks, even though they emerge in the written record as anonymous or devoid of family name. Scholars have approached the era of Leislerian Rebellion from various perspectives yet none have done so from the point of view of the enslaved. The borderland violence that erupted served as a crucial moment of resistance and change for the enslaved and was understood in racially inflected ways by enslavers. One man took advantage of this moment to make a dramatic change. His act endures in the archival record as a few lines in a letter written in the spring of 1692 between Hartford-based John Allyn and Robert Livingston: “I received Mrs. Schuyler’s [Alida Livingston] Letter & have made the best inquiry I can for her Negroe but find him not. I can hear nothing of him there was one last year as soon as I heard of him I did take him to be a run away & sent a warrant to the constable to secure him but before the constable had y warrant he was runn from there & so I could not come at him.”107 Once the hunted man stepped away from the Connecticut house that he determined to be his last place of captivity, to turn back would have meant severe reprisals. He was a fugitive now, a runaway. His first name would be lost to history, replaced forever by “runaway,” the title meant to criminalize his status but one that also challenged Alida’s claim on his body.108 It was a decision that would survive for centuries in the correspondence of those who pursued him, a lasting epitaph to the feat. He started his journey away from his captors, the Livingstons, sometime during the eight months between August 1690 and March 1691, when the family had been forced away from Albany into exile in Connecticut. His position in the household was not recorded, but that he had been Alida Schuyler’s enslaved man, offers clues to his origins. This suggests that he toiled on their house in Prince Street, or Rensselaerswyck and entered the Livingston household as part of Alida’s marriage dowry. If that were so, he could have left family in the Hudson Valley, people whose connections he utilized to aid his escape. He certainly either knew or acquired a broad enough knowledge of the countryside that he had managed to evade capture for one year. His networks, like those of many who escaped slavery, provided him with support and cover as he pursued his flight.
Networks of enslaved people came into conflict with networks of elite enslavers at the moment of evasion and escape. A successful escape required an understanding of the obstacles that stood in the path to freedom, as well as more than a little luck. The white inhabitants of the colony, who were connected by friendship or family ties to his enslaver, constituted the severest obstacle. In March of 1690, Robert had been forced into exile by Jacob Leisler’s authorities, who were determined to arrest him for his vocal opposition to Jacob’s government and refusal to allow his officials into the city of Albany. After a few months of separation, while Alida, her children, and those she enslaved remained in a deserted Albany bracing for attack from without and enduring a virtual house arrest under Jacob’s supporters from within, Robert returned to the city under the protection of his friend, Fitz-John Winthrop.109 Fitz-John was the grandson of Massachusetts first governor, John Winthrop, who had maintained a mutual relationship with Petrus Stuyvesant, and who had enslaved and traded Pequot captives to Barbados for the first “parcel of negros” brought into Massachusetts aboard the slave ship Desire.110 Fitz-John had been recently appointed by a regional committee to defend vulnerable settlements against joint French and Indian attack, after the destruction of Schenectady. Thus, able to leave unmolested by Jacob’s supporters, the Livingston family sheltered in Fairfield, Connecticut.111 Their correspondence, nevertheless, reflects the vast networks they held across the colony—from New London to Hartford. John Allyn, their main contact in Hartford, had made his money as a mariner, even stopping in Curaçao to receive enslaved people on credit from Matthias Beck. He cultivated ties with Petrus Stuyvesant, as one of his New England contacts. After the fall of New Netherland, John maintained his relations with the Dutch population of New York.112 Those networks would have created a formidable challenge to the escaped man.
Elite networks represented challenging obstacles that escapees must navigate, turning to their own social resources as a sort of compass or guide. Upon arriving in Hartford, the self-emancipated man would first have had to get past John Allyn, whose house was situated along the banks of the Connecticut River and was the point of disembarking for ferries that sailed the waterway.113 He was directly involved with the river traffic and was compensated “4d ye horse & 2d ye man” for each fare that crossed the river.114 It is clear that John knew Alida as well, in that he referred to her following the Dutch convention using her maiden name as “Mrs. Schuyler,” even though Alida herself signed her personal correspondence “Alida Livingston.”115
The Livingstons and Allyns also shared another cultural similarity: they were slaveholders. The son of Matthew Allyn, one of Hartford’s founders, John grew up in a community that included slaves. His father, Matthew, bought the estate of William Holmes of New Plymouth in 1638, including “all the lands, houses, servants, goods, and chattels of the Town of Windsor.”116 William’s “servants” could have included some Pequot war captives.117 Acting as secretary of the colony in 1650, John Allyn estimated that Connecticut’s enslaved population consisted of thirty captive people who had been purchased from Barbados.118 He was also a slaveholder in his own right. John was Petrus Stuyvesant’s contact in Connecticut and a mariner who captained the “ketch named Rebecca” to Curaçao in the spring of 1661. While on the island, he purchased on credit from Matthias Beck “twenty horses and five Negroes.”119
John Allyn was deeply embedded in New England’s slaveholding networks. He was related to John Pynchon through marriage, as his wife Ann was John Pynchon’s niece.120 Had Alida’s enslaved man tried to smuggle his way across the river, he would have had to devise a way to not only evade John Allyn but also the passengers that took the ferry willing to give up information about a suspicious-looking runaway. That may have been how John received the report in 1691 that a Black man fitting the description of Alida’s escaped man was in Hartford. Regardless of who he actually was, the man was able to elude John’s grasp and escape. The man successfully navigated the landscape of elite networks in his bid for escape.
The self-emancipated man exercised new connections that he had made in Connecticut to successfully run away, taking advantage of the brief instability of the Livingstons’ situation. Any escape was a risk, as slave catchers and a network of slaveholders stood between each potential escapee and their chosen destination.121 But had fortune favored the formerly enslaved man long enough to spirit him past the reach of the Livingstons, he would have had to then contend with an active war zone. Jacob Leisler’s seizure of New York’s government, which had caused Robert to flee or be thrown in jail, coincided with the outbreak of King William’s War.122 When the French and their Mohawk, Algonquian, and Onondaga allies attacked the village of Schenectady, killing more than one hundred people, including eleven enslaved people, Robert protested Jacob’s sluggish reaction taking his grievances in person to Connecticut and Boston, and in writing, across the ocean to England.123 This event would have featured in conversations throughout the region.124 The man who determined to run away from the Livingstons could have had family members among the fallen or had others who were carried into captivity. Some, such as the enslaved laborers of slain Schenectady minister Peter Tessemaaker, also used the moment to escape.125
When Alida Livingston’s escaped man was brought to Connecticut with the family, he would have entered a colony containing some free African-descended people. By the late 1680s, Hartford and the surrounding area had a small but growing free Black community. One man, named Tony, owned ten acres of land in and around Norwich. In 1689 Tony was bequeathed his freedom from John Olmsted in Norwich as well as “3 acres in the little plain, 3 acres in the Great plain and 4 acres at Wequetequock.” Philip and Ruth Moore owned farmland and woodland in Hockanum, near Hartford, and lived there along with their children, Philip and Susannah, son-in-law Cato Sessions, who was indentured to the Reverend Timothy Woodbridge, and their grandchildren. Sampson lived in Farmington, just six miles from Hartford. Mareah was newly freed from her service to Alexander Pygan and living in New London. Alida’s escaped man could have sought shelter among Connecticut’s free Black community. Such sheltering was enough to occasion New York’s 1692 law which fined free Black people for entertaining enslaved people.126 He might well have been offered shelter by white inhabitants of the region, a reality that as Graham Russell Hodges noted, was reflected in the runaway notices that warned against people harboring escapees.127
The connections between the Livingstons and Fitz-John Winthrop’s family would have occasioned interactions between their enslaved people.128 For the duration of the time that the entire Livingston family was in Connecticut, Fitz-John himself was in Quebec trying (but ultimately not succeeding) to win an offensive against New France. His daughter, Mary, remained in New London, but she would have not been alone.129 A household that included indentured servants and enslaved people toiled for the Winthrops and would have come into frequent contact with the domestic slaves that arrived with the Livingstons, on their visits to their friends’ household.130 Robert Livingston’s father, the Reverend John Livingstone, had been friends with the elder Winthrop, and those ties were the basis on which Robert started up a new friendship with Fitz-John.131 The enslaved people who were forced to follow would create their own networks.
Likewise, the enslaved communities within Connecticut held links to those of New York. When Hartford was part of New Netherland, enslaved denizens of New Amsterdam could find themselves traded across the colony.132 Yet these enslaved communities remained, and despite the capriciousness of sale and bequest, as well as the smaller sizes of Black and mixed-race families, enslaved people made connections with one another, relationships that they maintained, if only in memory, despite separation.133 When Ali da’s enslaved man arrived in Connecticut, he could have been reunited with family or have been following the family connections of other members of enslaved household laborers. In 1690 the entire enslaved population of African descent in Connecticut totaled about two hundred people, a number that more than doubled in ten years.134 Demand from elites like Robert would fuel the importation of enslaved people into the region. The man’s flight coincided with a time when Robert Livingston was directly investing in the slave trade: in 1690 he invested in the slave ship Margriet (also the name of his nine-year-old-eldest daughter) with his brother-in-law Jacobus van Cortlandt.135 Such newly arrived enslaved people would have been brought into the community by seasoned enslaved people like the escaped man, a pattern that occurred elsewhere in the Atlantic world.
Enslaved messengers and pilots gained familiarity with travel—even routes across contested territory—knowledge they could use for their own purposes. The Livingstons rarely traveled the countryside without a Black groom or sloop pilot. Tom traveled with Robert to New York, as evidenced by the trial testimony.136 Later in the decade, in 1698, Alida referenced “ons Hendricken,” an enslaved man who, according to Alida, had duties ferrying goods on the river so she placed him on the boat to New York. But he was not fully in charge of piloting the yacht, as she expressed annoyance that among the group of other men that Robert had sent up to assist the job not one of them had expertise piloting, because Hendricken “could not do it” (de neger kon niet doen). She fumed, “It is a wonder that there was not one man with them who understands the river” (het is wonder dat er zijn niet een man bij had die de ravier verstaet [verstaat]).137 By March 1700, Alida sent Robert a letter giving an account of her experiences managing local vendors and moving inventory up and down the Hudson. She made sure to specify that when she visited Robert in New York she would not be alone, writing that in two weeks she and “the negroes” (de neghers) would bring “shirts and other clothing” (hemde [hemden] en andre kledings) to ensure that Robert and her son John represented the family with the proper accouterments.138 If the man formerly enslaved to Alida transported her throughout the region, he would have continued to perform that duty while in Connecticut. He could have known Jan, a man enslaved by Alida’s father, who was stabbed “in the belly, under the short ribs” during a scuffle with two Indian men who had insulted Philip Schuyler and harmed his horse.139 If his circle were wide enough, he would also have known the two Native men who labored for the Livingstons, such as “Jan de wilt,” or “Jan the Indian,” and a man Alida referred to only as “de oude wilt,” or the “old Indian.”140 Jan was a husband and father, a local Mahican, who traded in Albany and appears in merchant Evert Wendell’s account book, alongside his son Waskaemp. Presumably, the other man was also a local Mahican man as well. Mahican people held hunting and fishing rights to the manor as part of the agreement they made with Robert in 1683. Jan’s family relationships appear in the account book in relation to his wife, and although unnamed, her presence is crucial: his son Waskaemp is referenced as “the son of Jan’s wife” and Evert notes sister in the same manner.141 Such responsibilities and diverse workforce, linked by their own kin relationships would have quickly offered the formerly enslaved man a working map of the area.142
The community of enslaved people that populated Connecticut and New York’s settlements would have held numerous commonalities. They would have spoken similar languages, as the populations of the area had been formed from captive Black people hailing from Caribbean locales such as Curaçao and Barbados, two islands that had been connected in the slave trade and gained population from West Central Africa and increasing numbers of people from the Gold Coast.143 Slave depots in the Caribbean were never so walled off as the navigation acts should have made them, and the enslaved community of the Northeast reflected the colonists’ local business deals that skirted the letter of the law.144 The community would have had similar holiday celebrations.145 The multiethnic population included individuals conversant in Indigenous languages and geographies, a knowledge that would have aided any person seeking to survive their flight.146 They would have also been constrained by a Black Code that was passed in 1690.147 These commonalities would have served to unify the broader enslaved population of these cities.
In his flight, the man joined his struggle with other bonded people who set off away from their enslavers, a daunting task that could just as likely end in failure. Robert’s correspondence with John Allyn intended to track down Alida’s escaped formerly enslaved man was not the only cross-colonial runaway search conducted that year between the Livingstons and their Connecticut contacts. In September 1692 Hartford-based William Pitkin sent a letter including thanks for all of Robert’s efforts in trying to track down his runaway servant named Edward Blake.148 The interconnection of Blake and the unnamed Black self-emancipated man’s stories shows the intercolonial reach and prevalence of bonded unfree labor as highlighted by Jared Ross Hardesty, to building hierarchical networks of influence in the early modern world. For all that can be reconstructed about those who set away from bondage, most can never be known. The man’s name, his personal history, where he hoped to go, and all he hoped to accomplish are lost to time. Yet, the effort to repopulate the canvas of what can be known about such narratives, highlights an early Northeast connected by hidden networks and escape routes of captive peoples.
News of Jacob Leisler’s arrest sent the Livingstons back to New York, without one son and one enslaved man. They left their eldest son, John with Fitz-John to be educated in Connecticut. In the years that followed, their houses in Albany and Manor Livingston became Alida’s base of operations. There she managed a household with a diverse workforce, one that was served by a large contingent of enslaved domestics.
“Slavery and popery” was a pro-Leislerian faction touchstone, though arguments about the former predated the events of the 1690s. Jacob had lost a protracted fight with Nicolaes’s brother, Balthazar, over the lower Manhattan estate of his father-in-law, Govert Loockermans, one that included some enslaved people. When Maria Sr., Govert’s widow, drafted her will, she made provisions for the eventual emancipation of two enslaved boys, Francis and Manual. She cut her stepdaughter Maria Loockermans out of her will, an omission that led to a fifteen-year court battle between Jacob Leisler and Balthazar Bayard.149 In 1702, his followers got their revenge by pronouncing his rival Nicolaes Bayard, Petrus Stuyvesant’s great-nephew, as part of a more massive conspiracy to establish “popery and slavery” in the colony.150 Although the phrase is used as part of stock constellations of appellations against tyranny, it would have held a more immediate local resonance for their intended audience. Nicolaes had inherited a considerable amount of land from the estate of his elite ancestors, which included the north side of Wall Street, which had formerly been designated for Black residents. He and his wife, Anne, were also slaveholders. While not decrying the real practice of enslavement, such words could easily be read as condemnations of Nicolaes’s disordered mastery.151 Popery and slavery were inexorably linked with the enslaved population of New York.
To elites, slaveholding was a crucial avenue toward building their networks of power and mastery. When Robert returned to New York, he quickly set about conferring with his business associates about his trading empire, none more important than Stephanus van Cortlandt. On November 15, 1691, Stephanus updated Robert on the trade dealing that he had in Albany, which included the exchange of “small beer” and other supplies with his nephew Kiliaen van Rensselaer, for which the later purchased the life of an enslaved boy to square accounts.152 Robert’s relationship with Stephanus van Cortlandt had temporarily soured relations between Stephanus and his sister Maria, who amid the fight had nothing but disdainful words for her brother.153 The fight was distant enough for Stephanus and Kiliaen that they were trading supplies and the life of one enslaved boy. Stephanus’s letter also included the debts owed to him by local community members, including a widow, who owed him money for an enslaved man that she had purchased from him.154
The time of revolution, rebellion, and warfare during the late 1680s and early 1690s provided an opportunity for enslavers to at once reinforce and benefit from their elite networks within and across colonial boundaries. Utilizing pathways and connections established during the period of divided rule that began with the separate Dutch, Swedish, and English colonies, northern elites could expand their locus of control over the land and the lives of enslaved people beyond their own personal and immediate environment. These networks provided trading opportunities, aided in the capture of runaways, and served as a bulwark or shelter in the event of physical or political attacks, uniting disparate colonies and locales more effectively than Andros’s Dominion of New England ever could. These elite networks, built on the names, honor, and reputations of the wealthiest and most well-connected families of the region, established cross-colonial bonds that provided the basis for future, continued growth.