Introduction

Manhunt

A warr.^t for M.^r Stuyvesants 4 Negroe serv.^ts lost. Oct. 6.^th Whereas Complaint is made by M.^r Peter Stuyvesant, that hee hath lost 4 Negroes (men Servants) These are therefore to desire you to bee ayding and assisting to the bearer or bearers hereof in the apprehending the said Negroes and to cause them to bee brought with safety to New Yorke upon the Manhatans, where they shall receive full satisfaction for their labour and charge, Given under my hand this 6.^th day of Oct. 1664 At ffort James in New Yorke. &c.

R. Nicolls

To all Governo.^rs, Deputy Governo.^rs Magistrates and other office.^s whatsoever, in any of his Ma.^tyes Colonyes in America, & all others to whom these presents shall come.

Four men escaped bondage together in 1664. The society they fled had counted the enslaved among them since the earliest decades of the seventeenth century. Slave ships docked in the settlements’ main harbors and public auctions were held in its towns. Every bordering colony threatened reenslavement, and while local Native groups might offer shelter, they might also recapture those who ran from enslavement. The men were not escaping bondage in the South, but in the newly conquered and rechristened colony of New York. They set off as a group, leveraging collective action to escape and remain out of reach. They had enough political knowledge to choose their timing well. Enslaved people from New York had been traded throughout the region for decades, and there always were colonists willing to clandestinely trade with the enslaved. Like others who had gone before them, these men might have been running toward family and the possibility of connection.1 Their former enslaver, Petrus Stuyvesant, would use those same human impulses—family, community, and connectedness—to attempt to retain his mastery.2

Despite the tumult of the moment, and that he had been recently deposed as leader of the colony, Petrus took time out for a manhunt. It depended on the cooperation of Richard Nicolls, the English governor who had usurped Petrus’s position in the colony. Nonetheless, Petrus was issued a warrant for the men, which was posted on October 6, 1664.3 At first glance, such priorities seem strange. But for all that divided them, colonists like Petrus and Richard were linked in a shared commitment to human bondage. Bound by Bondage argues that early Dutch slavery and its successor Anglo-Dutch slave culture were central to the cultural development of the North. What follows is a reconceptualization of the narrative of early Northeastern slavery that centers New Netherland and Dutch regions of settlement as not merely locally important to the development of slaveholding, but regionally crucial to any understanding of the foundations and development of that culture. By integrating familiar sources, such as colonial diaries and narratives, with new English translations of Dutch archival materials, Bound by Bondage examines slavery as a central facet of Northeastern cultural development.

Family networks, rather than shifting colonial borders, bound together a slaveholding Northeast.4 Beginning in the seventeenth century, notions of mastery and conceptions of status entwined enslaved and enslaver across two centuries as a regional slaveholding culture emerged. Slavery was a vital component of familial networks of power during the period of Dutch rule that spread across colonies as these families traded, bought land, and expanded their reach into new territories that ranged from the Chesapeake to New England. Most modern histories assume that slaveholding existed across the Americas but, with the exception of studies that focus on the Native slave trade from the Northeast southward, few have analyzed how early slaveholding societies north of the Chesapeake influenced the spread of slaveholding networks southward. Familial and reputational networks reified connections within and across colonies, and provided avenues along which to conduct trade and grow wealth. Notions of mastery rooted in this shared Anglo-Dutch heritage formed the basis of their ideas of elite identity stretching from the seventeenth century to the final decades of the colonial period.5 But enslaved people developed their own networks in parallel with the elites who held their bonds. They built, maintained, and utilized alliances across the Northeast. Like the four men escaping Petrus, many set out across a landscape spotted by taverns, farms, and sites of trade alongside waterways, woods, and rival powers. Language proficiency, trade skills, and shared cultural touchpoints would shape a world of connectedness, even as systems of bondage severed ties.

The four men had toiled in a settlement at the edge of a global Dutch empire and were members of an enslaved community that was growing in number. While official figures of those enslaved in New Netherland do not exist, the colony in 1664 has been estimated as having as few as 250 to as high as 500 enslaved people, augmented by 290 people who arrived on the slave ship Gideon just before the colony’s fall, as well as between 70 and 75 free Black families.6 The colony was bordered by the Mahican to the North, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to the Northwest, the several Munsee-speaking groups including the Esopus in the fertile Mahicannituck River valley (that would be subsequently named for Henry Hudson) and the Lenape to the south. If the knowledge and behaviors of these four were similar to other escapees, then they would have followed what were, by the time they ran, well-trod escape routes through New England toward French territory and would have leveraged a knowledge of multiple languages, including European, Bantu, and Native North American tongues. The enslaved community hailed from the various colonies across the Caribbean, Brazil, Spanish South America, and Atlantic Africa. They were four out of the estimated total 700,000 African men, women, and children enslaved in the Americas during the seventeenth century.7

Dutch slavery in the Northeast predated the settlement of New Netherland, beginning with the capture and enslavement of two Indigenous boys by Adriaen Block and Hendrick Christiaensen, who were subsequently brought back to the Dutch Republic.8 European settlers began to take up residence on the island of Manhattan in 1624 and the first recorded slave ship carrying African captives, Bruynvisch, arrived just three years later.9 Slavery grew and evolved with the colony. Enslaved people directly owned by the West India Company (WIC) were put to work in agriculture, construction, maintenance, and defense capacities. Private ownership augmented the ranks of the enslaved. Enslavers traveled throughout the colonies and brought their enslaved people and notions of mastery with them wherever they went. New Netherland–style slavery was exported to settlements along the Delaware River with the Dutch takeover of New Sweden in 1655.10 Trade with New England led to a common understanding of slavery and mastery that only grew after the English conquered New Netherland in 1664 and renamed it New York. Wealthy merchant families took a particular interest in the plantations and transshipment locations of the Caribbean. Common laws inscribing codes of behavior to govern slavery were introduced throughout the colonies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, regulating the movement, trade, and social lives of the enslaved. Slavery lasted in New York until 1827, fifty years after the thirteen colonies declared their independence and two hundred years after it began, leaving in its wake a wide-ranging web of connections that spread throughout North America.

Earlier generations of historians drew a stark line, representing slavery in the North as much milder than what was practiced in the South. Scholars have since assailed those assumptions, aiming analyses at uncovering the importance of Northern slavery. Beginning in the late nineties and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, historians such as A. J. Williams-Myers, Ira Berlin, Graham Russell Hodges, Thelma Wills Foote, Craig Steven Wilder, Leslie Harris, Jill Lepore, and others began to reexamine the classic split, and led the charge reinterpreting slavery in the North. The last ten years have seen an increase in works focusing on enslaved people and slavery in the North. Historians like Jeroen Dewulf, Wendy Warren, Christy Clark-Pujara, Michael Groth, Jared Ross Hardesty, and Allegra di Bonaventura, just to name a few, have centered the stories of those held in bondage as the focus of their narratives. Others have begun to build on the work of Saidiya Hartman, who challenged archival discourses and questioned the narratives of voyeuristic subjection that distorted the lives and experiences of enslaved people. Marisa Fuentes offered scholars a powerful spatial framework and archival critique in her study centered on enslaved women in colonial Bridgetown, Barbados, and Andrea Mosterman uncovered important new insights about Dutch American slavery using spatial analysis.11

Notwithstanding, the debate about enslavement in New Netherland remains framed around assumptions that it was minor, diffuse, and quite peculiar—because enslaved people were allowed certain liberties such as the ability to testify in court, access to baptism, and even freedom itself. Such notions rest on the axiom that the Dutch period was exceptional, and it was only until after the fall of New Netherland to the English that the colony fully entered the broader slaveholding Atlantic.12 But those theories could not explain what I began finding in the archives: a stalwart and ultimately generational commitment to enslavement in the region among New Netherland’s elites that radiated out from the Dutch colony along family lines across the Atlantic world. For a group assumed to be minor players, they were slave trading, expressing developed racist sensibilities, and showing up in some of the most “major” places in the history of slavery at quite pivotal times.

Northeastern slaveholders were united by a dialectical and actual engagement with slavery, which formed a common language and experience.13 English and Scottish dissidents took refuge in the Dutch Republic, while many among the second generation of such refugees became fluent in Dutch language and culture, frequently departing from the ministerial background of their parents to pursue business careers in the colonies.14 Anglo and Dutch elites maintained connections in Europe during the heyday of the Dutch Republic.15 Throughout the founding decades of New Netherland, Dutch elite families held robust Caribbean connections that were also cross-colonial.16 Such networks expanded into the Chesapeake as well. The Stuyvesant-Bayard families form the first generation of Dutch elites under examination. These families immigrated to New Netherland, laying the foundation for subsequent slaveholding generations in these areas as well as in the Caribbean and southern colonies. The Livingston and Van Horne families intermarried, augmenting the eighteenth-century cohort, whose slaveholding branches in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware shaped Northeastern colonial legal, social, and religious history. These families were not the only slaveholders in the colonial Northeast, nor were they the largest. They resided, however, at the center of elite Northeastern culture.17 Tracing the ways they established and maintained the slaveholding networks they built over nearly two centuries offers insight into how slavery became a vital part of Northern culture.

Across their networks, elites established surveillance and legal regimes to monitor the activities of enslaved people and enforce adherence to their codes of conduct. Legal constructs, enforcement regimes, and channels for disseminating information were built on the back of kinship and trading connections to reinforce notions of mastery and expectations of subservience. We do not know what happened to these four men, but we do know that, in later generations, stories like theirs proliferated in colonial newspapers throughout the Northeast as the wealthy subscribers used their wide reach to mobilize their contacts. Indeed, while many historians will read the lives of the enslaved into runaway slave ads, the attributes and networks of enslavers are also made legible in their descriptions of “last seen” locales and former sites of captivity.

FIGURE 1. Bayard, Stuyvesant, and Livingston family trees showing marriage interconnections.

Mastery was a way of life for Northeastern elites and aspirants. Controlling the lives and actions of enslaved people became a marker of exclusivity and served as a common language to communicate power to others within their network, even among merchants whose business ventures relied most heavily on a mixed white labor regime. Gifting an enslaved worker with an old gentleman’s hat or coat turned that person into a sort of walking coat of arms for the family, on display for others in the elite’s network. Manning a sloop with a skilled enslaved pilot created a moveable representation of the wealth and power of those who held them in bondage. But enslaved people created alternate meanings out of these trappings and assignments. As other scholars have noted, waterways were sites and avenues of freedom, whether freedom of movement and freedom from observation, or launching points for escape.18 Clothing could denote either status or a commodity to be traded, and markings, piercings, or hair styles could communicate a sense of belonging or kinship to others who were in positions to provide support. My book seeks to foreground the experiences of such captive peoples and, in so doing, reevaluate the legacies and narratives of Northeastern elites.

Despite the cross-colonial lives of elite slaveholding families, the slave systems that emerged in the middle colonies differed from their counterparts in New England, but each family’s slaveholding actions within such societies were as much in keeping with family identities as they were with different colonial environments. When I first became interested in Northern slavery I was captivated by New England, not New Netherland. From passing the first slave law in its Body of Liberties, to the mass enslavement of Indigenous peoples following the Pequot War and King Phillip’s War, to the slave ship Desire’s early and pivotal role in the entwined Native and African slave trades, New England felt like the epicenter of the story of Northeastern enslavement. New Netherland, by contrast, did not.19 The Dutch colony has frequently been posited as a unique outpost, interesting but ultimately tangential. Such claims have echoed even more loudly when examining the emergence of enslavement in the colony during the Dutch period. Where New England’s seventeenth-century slaveholders are linked to Providence Island, Barbados, and beyond, New Netherland’s slaveholders have been positioned as cash-strapped, inconsequential players.20 At the beginning of this project, I entered the archives with those assumptions firmly in place. But the evidence eroded my preconceptions with one dogged question: Why were New Netherland elites and their family members seemingly appearing all over the slaveholding Atlantic and at key moments of transition?

Because of the emphasis on the relatively small numbers of slaves in the Northeast scholars deploy several alternate arguments to display the brutality of the northern variant of American slavery, none more emphasized than the social isolation of the North. The prevalent narrative posits that enslaved people were not able to forge family bonds like their counterparts in the South, a contention that both highlights brutality but also erases the connections that many people have to the past. While writing this book I spoke with many African-descended people with family histories that reached back to the colonial period in the Northeast and learned stories of my own family ties to Elmira. I admittedly became engrossed with finding families, networks, and communities of enslaved people, and along the way discovered violence and separation, but also names passed down from mother to daughter, memories of place and family and community. Such discoveries found me returning to the portrait painted by W.E.B Du Bois, a descendant of New Netherland and the Northeast: of a “rollicking boyhood” and the “hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosace and Tahkanic to the sea.”21

In chapter 1, I foreground the narratives of enslaved people within the colony of New Netherland and argue that, despite the ostensibly small population of enslaved people, race and slavery were crucial to shaping social status and hierarchies among key New Netherland elites from the very start of their colonial lives, because the Dutch colony’s leadership was deeply embedded in and fully engaged with the wider Atlantic project of enslavement. Centralizing a close reading of personal and administrative correspondence of early elite settlers, this chapter highlights the importance of centering the daily lives and circumstances of enslaved people. Such reconstructed narratives offer wider context for enslavement in the colony, and exposes the emergence of racial sensibilities among white colonists, their direct connections to centers of enslavement in South America and the Caribbean, and the broad influence of their local and ultimately regional power.

Studies have emphasized the interpenetration of seventeenth-century Dutch and Anglo-Dutch networks in the Chesapeake, the Caribbean, South America, and Atlantic Africa, but such approaches, with the exception of a few, have rarely emphasized the importance of family connections. They have also, by in large, downplayed these migrants’ actions as slaveholders. Most highlight the ways in which Dutch transplants were swept along by the prevailing winds of whatever imperium tangentially controlled the colonies within which they found themselves. If slaveholding was a part of the culture, it was one imposed on such émigrés from foreign powers.22 But I was shocked by how crucial personal and corporate slaveholding was to New Netherlanders’ emigration patterns. Indeed, by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, slaveholding remained a key component of regional connections between elites across the Northeast, during a time of imperial enmity. In chapter 2 I argue that it was a central ingredient to the survival of regional Anglo-Dutch elite networks after the fall of New Netherland.

Susanah Shaw Romney’s compelling argument about New Netherland specifically, as well as the Dutch Republic and Dutch Empire more broadly, is that it was built by intimate ties.23 Relationships mattered and understanding them exposes a diverse world of people engaged in sometimes contradictory but ultimately intertwined efforts at connection. For a core group of elite families, such networks of connection endured because of a sustained generational commitment to slaveholding, slave trading, and slave investments. Enslaved human beings were crucial to how some of the region’s most influential Dutch-descended families built their wealth, standing, and regional power. Indeed, family prestige and patrician status depended in large degree on claiming hereditary membership in this seventeenth-century slaveholding network, even as mixed labor regimes had always far eclipsed slave labor in the middle colonies and across New England.

Bound by Bondage focuses on the relationships between enslaved people and the forced connections they shared with enslavers to highlight the personal circumstances at the heart of major historical moments during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I consciously situate the individual lives and family stories of enslaved Northeasterners within Vincent Brown’s “archipelago of insurrection stretching throughout the North Atlantic Americas,” and likewise seek to read Northeastern moments not normally analyzed using this framework such as the fallout from the 1690 attack on Schenectady and the pressures surrounding Leisler’s Rebellion.24 What did it mean to run away during such moments? For many Northeastern elite enslavers, it was clearly sedition, with very real political stakes. It also foregrounds the expansiveness of enslaved connections. Such moments have been featured in scholarly works, creating a more nuanced portrait of religious, social, and ethnic tensions in the region, but such events and locales barely register in studies of North American enslavement.25 But they are crucial to understanding how slaveholding and racial power underwrote the social, cultural, and political ties of regional elites, despite cultural disparities, warfare, and political divisions.

In chapter 3, I examine how the same local and family connections that built dynasties of power among some white colonists were used to criminalize, constrain, mutilate, and marginalize enslaved people, as they struggled to make and maintain connection. Opening with the early business exploits of two men, Tom and Robert, this chapter highlights the wider currents that entwined but ultimately caused their life stories to diverge. Although both men traded within the same wider world and were heavily influenced by connections to Albany’s female networks, Tom, a Black man enslaved to Robert Livingston, was ultimately criminalized by such associations, while Robert gained entrance into Albany’s Dutch merchant and slaveholding elite through his wife, Alida. Chapter 4 extends that argument by following the business, social, and family connections forged by slavery that bound elites in New York to their counterparts in New England. The seeds planted during the seventeenth century under Dutch rule served to influence and guide the codification of slave laws, culture, and society under the English, as well as grow and expand family slave-holding networks into New England. Although the colony’s fall challenged the social power structure, New Netherland’s elite class found purchase and social cohesion under English rule by claiming human beings as property. At the same time, other New Yorkers were solidifying both domestic and regional power through racial and gendered claims to the land and enslaved people.26

My first experience in an archive was when, as a teenager, I took a road trip down the expanse of the United States. Along the way, I, my parents, and grandparents stopped at small regional archives searching for traces of family in the past. That formative trip also included places outside the archives—visits to physical sites that held vestiges of a traumatic family past that did not show up in vital records. That process has changed dramatically with the onset of digital archives, DNA mapping, and genealogical companies promising to take customers’ DNA back a thousand generations, but the impulse for memory and connection with the past remains the same. For historians of Dutch American slavery, such family papers and physical places are vital and are relatively unexplored due to the language barrier, although recent works are changing this trend.27 Carolyn Steedman wrote of the uncanny ability of archived documents to deflect “outrage.” It is in their “folders and bundles” where “the neatest demonstration of how state power has operated” emerges, “through ledgers and lists and indictments, and through what is missing from them.”28 Family power, rather than state (or at times acting in concert) comes through in the neatly bundled and now largely digitized collections used for this work.

Chapter 5 was constructed out of the family papers of the Livingstons, a clan that has inspired multiple works and theories about the emergence of elite society in New York.29 But the world that jumped off of the weathered pages was one animated by the family stories of many people, including those of enslaved people. The everyday Dutch idioms preserved in the papers connect the eighteenth-century world of enslaved people in the upper Hudson Valley to the seventeenth-century world conjured by elites, like Jeremias van Rennselaer. In recent years, exquisitely conceived work has exposed the interconnected lives of enslaver and enslaved in colonial New England and offered an intimate history of events from Salem to the Boston Massacre.30 This chapter argues that, despite being a small portion of those who lived on Hudson Valley estates like Manor Livingston, enslaved people’s personal and familial struggles impacted regional and local histories. The ambitions and grievances of nonelite white residents of Manor Livingston were likewise bound up with the wider slave culture. I have centralized the stories of those enslaved by the Livingstons to show the human cost of an “expansive slaveholding Northeast,” to unpack the personal motives behind a culture of fear that united Northeastern elite enslavers in the wake of Queen Anne’s War and the 1712 Slave Revolt, as well as to highlight the political, social, and personal ties of enslaved Early Americans.

Bound by Bondage ends in the mid-eighteenth century. Such a chronology had as much to do with the emergence of developed and expansive Northeastern enslaved networks as it had with the first salvos toward rupture with the colonial past. It is here that New York as the center of a slave-holding Northeastern world feels most familiar, but Bound by Bondage examines this as part of an expansive slaveholding past rather than as the first decades of a new era whose slave-trading excess would fuel the later debates on liberty and slavery, as it is most commonly presented. The eighteenth-century world of the final two chapters is constructed from sources well known—and much used—by scholars of slavery: runaway slave advertisements, slave-for-sale notices, slave ship documents, and English-language family papers. Such documents have been used to great effect to uncover a slaveholding Northeastern world that influenced every sector of society, from the docks, to print culture, to academia.31 Such familiar worlds are deepened when examined against centuries-old networks of surveillance by slaveholding elites with connections to New Netherland’s leading families. Chapter 6 argues that elites like the Livingstons expanded their portfolios while including vital and visceral connections to their family’s slaveholding Dutch past. These identities infused their global ambitions for trade and family empire. Northeastern places, and family and regional elites, graced the names of slave ships, and family members’ regional footprint in the Chesapeake, South Carolina, and the Caribbean grew alongside increasing Northeastern influence. Chapter 7 highlights the expansive networks of enslaved people that also knit the region together, offering an alternative approach with which to imagine the regions’ connections. Although disconnections between enslaved people in the Northeast have long been emphasized, this chapter highlights the networks of connection between diverse enslaved, bonded, and free peoples.

Historians of slavery in the Northeast face a paradox: an archive both prolific and sparse, and every work devoted to the subject, no matter how exhaustive, is, as one scholar has observed, littered with the adverbs “perhaps” or “might.”32 This is in contrast to studies dedicated to the trading ventures, the political machinations, the military campaigns, or the social development of elite European Northeasterners. Those works stand on the certainties of unqualified speech, the identities of familiar actors presented as concretely as if they breathed anew. This is not to say that historians have failed to draw very different portraits based on similar evidence, but rather, that most have never stopped to wonder what all the fragmentary evidence says about the mountain of material drawn on to create the past. It seems logical that enslavers would be suspect when giving an account of the lives of marginalized peoples. But why have scholars not taken the next step and questioned whether or not the gaps in historical knowledge about the enslaved and marginalized call into question the conclusions that can be reached about those “familiar actors” for whom and about whom the archive was intended?

This work seeks to highlight the importance of the choices and daily experiences of early Americans. I have consciously embraced reading evidence against the grain and used a methodology in line with scholars who use critical fabulation in scholarly historical study to excavate the lives of marginalized groups.33 I believe that such measures are necessary to fully articulate an accounting of the past that does justice to the documents and the lives of historically marginalized people. To support that goal, I am deploying several narrative strategies. First, I am using Dutch words for a number of my chapter titles to symbolically illustrate the survival of the Dutch language in the sources that I use and the outsized influence of Dutch and Dutch-infused culture to the development of the Northern gentry. Second, in most instances where clarity permits, I use first names to refer to both enslaved and enslaver. This is a break from what has become standard historical practice of referring to past actors by their family names. Such a standard has served to buttress systems of oppression and silences. I am consciously choosing to break with this tradition in my use of first names for all historical characters in my book. It must be said, however, that naming itself was an act of colonization and violence directed toward enslaved peoples, but as my narrative will explain, passing down such first names became vital ways for enslaved people to mark their family bonds in the face of separation and sale.

Because of the long colonial history of the word Iroquois, I use Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse) throughout this work unless directly quoting from the documents. I also use the term Dutch to refer to the European families and peoples folded into the Dutch Republic as permanent residents at the time of Dutch rule of New Netherland, but this was a heterogeneous group hailing from Scandinavia, Germany, and French speaking regions of Europe, among other places. The terms wildt and wilden are most accurately translated as “savage” and “savages.” Other scholars have likewise translated the term neger as “nigger,” although this is less common.34 These Dutch terms recur many times throughout my text, and I have translated them as Indian and Negro respectively. I made this choice deliberately, to limit the continual violence such terms enact on the minds and hearts of Black and Indigenous people reading my work.

Bound by Bondage reconstructs the names and struggles of those enslaved to offer a multigenerational, and oftentimes migrational, portrait of enslaved families and individuals who loved, lived, negotiated, resisted, and died due to the conscious actions and ambitions of their enslavers. Local geographies stand out in runaway slave advertisements that offer some of the richest archival sources with which to examine the lives of enslaved people and the social experience of slavery.35 These sources have been mined and counted to uncover a myriad of perspectives—from the development of racial categorization to shifts in literary expectation.36 Despite the obvious enslaver bias of advertisements, court cases, and letters, such sources offer a way to reinterpret the analytical framework of the colonial Northeast. While elite family histories and archival sources have formed a large amount of the source base for Bound by Bondage, recent studies have challenged the archival bias and historical narrative that privileges such elites as actors.37 What follows emphasizes the ways that Northeastern slave networks affected and were directed by the actions of nonelite actors as well as how the “Northern gentry” was a contested and imagined community that was built on the subjugation of others as much as it was business partnerships and strategic marriages. Such Dutch-descended and Anglo-Dutch enslavers lived lives intertwined with the enslaved.

FIGURE 2. Runaway slave advertisement in search of Primus, Syphax, and Scipio, posted by Petrus Stuyvesant in The New-York Gazette, October 11, 1777. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

More than one hundred years after the flight of the four men, three men would escape the grasp of another Petrus Stuyvesant.38 Primus, Syphax, and Scipio too would choose a time of tumult and change to make their escape. New York City, which had recently fallen to the British during the American Revolution, offered the possibility of sanctuary, but also peril. They, however, did not run together—a year separates Primus’s and Scipio’s escapes. That they were advertised together highlights that their enslaver believed them to be connected enough to be found together. Their pursuer was the great-grandson of Director General Petrus Stuyvesant. He was a wealthy slave-holder, owned a Georgian mansion in town, and was the last private owner of the entirety of his family’s large Manhattan bouwerij (farm). He was a New York merchant working on behalf of an expansive network of slaveholding cousins and would augment his own power through the landed wealth and slaves he had inherited, emerging as the largest New York City slaveholder on the first US Census of 1790. Primus, Syphax, and Scipio had been bequeathed to Petrus in his father Gerardus’s will, along with two enslaved women.39 Like his ancestor had, this Petrus would turn first to racial identifiers, describing the men as “three negro fellows,” but the first Petrus worded his notice carefully, denying agency to the men in their flight by eschewing the active verb “run away” for the passive “lost.” He had been used to operating within a system of violent vagaries deployed to claim control over enslaved people as needed, while his great-grandson inherited a culture shaped by over a century of human bondage. Unlike the first Petrus’s warrant, this notice, ran in a regional newspaper and trained the public’s ears toward apprehending the escapees. A would-be slave catcher would have had to linger long enough to be regaled by Primus’s “civil and mild” conversation, have heard the “broken English”—perhaps accented by Dutch—that Petrus used to differentiate Syphax, and have caught the “stammer” in his speech to identify Scipio.

The notices that open and close this introduction bookend a period that witnessed the establishment and growth of some of the most powerful dynasties in American history. They represent different end points during the development of what would become an expansive Northeastern slave-holding gentry. The first Petrus existed at the foundation of these networks that were built on the back of kinship, trade, and slave activities. The second Petrus lived at a time when these networks were already established, at the end of the colonial period. This book explores the time between these two points. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century when New York was still New Netherland and controlled by the Dutch and continuing up to the end of the colonial period, I examine the emergence of an interconnected Northeastern gentry bound by bondage.