Bond
Forging an Anglo-Dutch Slaveholding Northeast (1690s–1710s)
When traveling from New England to Albany for treaty negotiations with the Five Nations in August 1694, Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth of Cambridge described the route as a “hidious, howling wilderness.”1 He was not alone. Along with him for the journey was a coterie of New England elites, including Colonel John Pynchon of Springfield, John Allyn of Hartford, and Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston. The group “met a negro coming from Albany” who they determined was “very suspicious” so they immediately detained and “pinion’d” the man.2 The accosted traveler, who maintained he was a former soldier from the fort at Albany, was able to break free of the bonds and escape. Benjamin admitted that “tho we saw him no more, yet we thought of him.” Upon arriving at Albany, they encountered a bevy of regional elites amassed for the diplomatic conference including Governor Benjamin Fletcher, his close ally Nicolaes Bayard, as well as Albanian Peter Schuyler and colony secretary Robert Livingston. Benjamin Wadsworth continued to gather information on the Black man, and ultimately “understood yt this negro had been a souldier there and had run away from thence.” Despite hailing from very different colonies, the group displayed a unity of purpose in policing the actions of a “suspicious” Black man and a dogged desire to establish his status as a runaway.
The men continued their journey to the “very stately farm of Mr. Levistone’s.” The Livingstons had not yet built their manor house, and the property had only a few tenants, but Benjamin Wadsworth described being “Baited, and refreshed horse and man.”3 Passive constructions erased the identities of the people who served the elite group, but the Livingstons’ typical manor laborer was a debtor or unfree. Nonetheless, the Livingstons used enslaved people to project power in a way that land, commodities, and investments could not, because they were a form of movable property that could be moved. Enslaved people were traded to forge alliances and tighter cultural touchstones that were legible across colonies and even oceans, and also to demonstrate dominion. Legal frameworks enacted by interconnected kin centralized control through the surveillance and criminalization of the enslaved. The bonds that knit together a diverse yet interconnected Northeastern slaveholding elite during the final decades of the seventeenth century would tighten around the enslaved like a vice, and be used to naturalize legal, social, and racial notions of mastery that were deeply gendered.
Pirates and Businessmen
Northeastern elites used enslaved people as a kind of currency that under-wrote their power and connections, and knit their diffuse network together across a wide area. When three enslaved children—two boys and one girl—disembarked from the San Antonio in the summer of 1699 bound for Gardiner’s Island, a privately held island situated just on the east end of Long Island Sound, they had little idea of what the future might hold.4 Their journey thus far would have been eventful; they were not only captives on Captain William Kidd’s sloop, but they were also earmarked as William’s personal plunder.5 The haul included buried treasure intended to buy William’s way out of a piracy charge, a charge that would ultimately lead to his formal conviction as a pirate and his execution in 1701.6 The children were handed over to John Gardiner, the proprietor of the island, a man who resided in a large manor house and whose family wealth descended from his grandfather Lion’s purchase of the island sixty years earlier after the Pequot War.7 In the end, their fates were not only entwined with William Kidd’s and John Gardiner’s but also bound together with those of Robert Livingston and his Boston-based business partner Duncan Campbell.
Robert had put up a bail of ten thousand pounds for William, a man that he had had business dealings with in the past, and in exchange William promised one of the enslaved children along with “a forty pound bag of gold” that he had kept secretly hidden until he could determine the severity of his social predicament.8 Duncan, likewise, received one of the captive children plus other gifts in exchange for helping William secure a pardon. Enslaved children were the currency on which William hung his prospects. Their lives were co-opted to weave an intricate tapestry of obligation connecting Robert, William, and John.9 These ledgerless transactions implied a distinct hint of complicity in piracy, at least to some government officials, and although John, Robert, and Duncan were deeply involved with privateering activities, they managed to escape the moniker of pirate that was attached to William by denying that they knew that the payment was ill-gotten.
Robert Livingston had spent the better part of three decades networking among the colonial elite of Albany, New York, Massachusetts, and the Caribbean, creating a bulwark of families and associates linked by marriage and by slaveholding ties. In 1692, Robert bought a house from William Kidd, a fellow Scotsman and longtime friend. The property was on New York’s Dock Street, a center for business and slavery.10 Enslaved workers manned the marina, building and maintaining ships, some of which would be engaged in trading people who, like them, were captured into the vice of slavery.11 In 1693, Robert, charged with smuggling, faced a grand jury of which William was the court foreman. Robert was acquitted of that charge likely owing to his networking ability.12 Robert’s friendship with William netted him a long-term real estate foothold where he could profit from proximity to slavery. Ten years after Robert’s purchase of William’s Dock Street property, 25 percent of the Dock Street Ward, which was bounded by the East River, Burgher’s Path, Broad Street, and Prince Street, were listed as enslaved.13 Robert maintained trading links to Curaçao—New York’s former southern Caribbean region and slave depot—for four decades, a relationship that his son Philip continued. Stephanus van Cortlandt, Robert Livingston’s business partner, enslaver, and trader, as well as the former brother-in-law of Robert’s wife Alida, maintained connections in St. Christopher, Nevis, and Curaçao that had been forged during Dutch rule.14
But the tension evident during several diplomatic meetings with the Onondaga recorded by Robert evidences that the use of racial slavery in regional patois dating back to the Dutch era had wide-ranging consequences. During peace negotiations between the French allied nations and New York on February 3, 1699, the influential Onondaga Sachem and diplomat Teganissorens relayed the experiences of a community member named Cohensiowanne who encountered the French diplomat Maricour (known as “Stow Stow” due to his adoption by the Onondaga), while traveling to Canada to visit family. Stow Stow reportedly told Cohensiowanne that when Robert’s brother-in-law, Captain Johannes Schuyler, was last in Canada, he had greatly disrespected the Five Nations. He called them “disobedient” and, when asked “why the Sachims of the 5 Nations did not come to Canada,” Johannes purportedly replied “here is the 5 Nations, and pointed to a negroe he had with him.” The New York delegation took immediate umbrage to such a characterization, and reconvened three days later “upon the request of Capt. Johanns Schuyler” to publicly insist that they were “scandalous and malitious faleshoods.”15 In January 1699, New York governor Richard Coote, the first Earl Bellomont, received correspondence from the Lords of Trade eager to know the results of the talks with the Onondagas in order to retain “them in their subjection to the Crown of England” as well as to declare William Kidd a pirate, a decision which imperiled Richard’s own position as one of William’s original investors.16
When Robert Livingston and William Kidd met in Boston, they pledged their continued fealty through the exchange of hard money and enslaved children, a currency that had bound the region since the mid-seventeenth century. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Boston still had only a small enslaved population, especially when compared to the bustling slave port of New York.17 Nevertheless, the elite maintained a commitment to slavery and slaveholding that they had forged throughout the seventeenth century. Robert’s American migration had begun in New England, under the direction of Springfield-based John Pynchon and in concert with his nephew, Elizur Holyoke. He had served as John’s factor at a time when the Springfield merchant became ever more invested in both Caribbean and local slavery.18 John’s model of such regional slave diversification also became the model that Robert followed.
By the time that Robert was embroiled in the William Kidd affair, slavery had infused the cultural fabric of Massachusetts’s elites. Massachusetts minister, Cotton Mather hotly defended his father’s threatened position as president of Harvard College by directly referencing the slavery that had come to shape how he too encountered the world. The object of his rage, Judge Samuel Sewall, recorded the scene and the charges the incensed Cotton made against him, in the margins of his diary: “Mr. Cotton Mather came to Mr. Wilkins’s shop, and there talked very sharply against me as if I had used his father worse than a Neger; spake so loud that people in the street might hear him. Then went and told Sam, That one pleaded much for Negros, and he had used his father worse than a Negro.”19
Just as Jeremias van Rensselaer’s contempt for the enslaved spilled out as superscripts and strikethroughs, Samuel’s annoyance bleeds off of the main page and into the margins allowing modern readers to encounter the sights and sounds of the day. Cotton Mather stormed into the shop of Richard Wilkins who was the Boston bookseller to whom Samuel Sewall’s twenty-three-year-old eldest son and namesake Sam was apprenticed, shouting so loudly that his voice carried into the street.20 The incensed Cotton did not bring his argument to the elder Sewall but rather “went and told Sam”: a move, no doubt intended to shame Samuel Sr. in front of his son’s master. Wilkins had sold Samuel’s published work in the past, but the jurist had decided to circulate his antislavery tract, The Selling of Joseph, privately, perhaps worried that the subject matter might cost him the bookseller’s continued favor. The elder Samuel transcribed the scene as Cotton screaming the Dutch pronunciation of “neger” in public. It was only indoors, after he confronted Samuel’s son, that Cotton reverted to using the English “Negro.”
This slaveholding culture would be translated and disseminated to a wider public through the proliferation of the newspaper. John Campbell, a fellow Scottish émigré, was appointed Boston’s deputy postmaster general in 1693 after the post had been taken over by royal administration. His brother, Duncan Campbell, who was embroiled alongside Robert Livingston in the William Kidd affair, was Robert’s close friend and business associate. In 1704, John would go on to found the Boston News-Letter, the first newspaper established in the colonies.21 In it, advertisements assessing the value of Black men women and children would appear alongside those that tracked their flights away from slavery across the expanse of the Northeast. If, as one historian has argued, “slavery and the newspaper grew up together in Massachusetts,” it was a relationship forged on the back of friendships and contacts across the Northeast between colonists like Robert, Duncan, and John.22
Both Robert and Alida had instilled the values of profit and mastery into their children, a shared culture that entwined the business lives of his two eldest children, John and Margaret. By April 1701, a then married John, and his brother-in-law Samuel Vetch, Margaret’s husband, partnered with Boston merchant John Saffin in the trading ship Mary (likely named for John Livingston’s new bride, Mary Winthrop), which traded illegally in Quebec.23 John Saffin was heavily invested in the Chesapeake as well as in the Atlantic slave trade; markets exploited a generation earlier as an interpenetration of Dutch and English ventures.24 A month before the Mary set sail, Adam, a man enslaved to John Saffin, sued for his freedom. John had promised to free Adam on New Year’s Day 1699 after he had worked on his farm in western Massachusetts, but had reneged on the deal. The case was heard several times, first before Samuel Sewall, then subsequently in a court where John Saffin assumed the roles of judge and jury in addition to defendant. Samuel Sewall protested the biased court and intimated it was stacked by John.25 Enraged at Adam’s audacity, and the support of justice Samuel Sewall for Adam’s cause, John published his A Brief and Candid Answer to a late Printed Sheet Entitled the Selling of Joseph in 1701.26 In it, he answered Samuel’s The Selling of Joseph with the same anger that impelled Cotton Mather to scream into a Boston Street that Samuel had treated his father, Increase, “worse than a Neger.” An acclaimed poet, John communicated his hatred in verse:
Cowardly and cruel are those Blacks Innate,
Prone to Revenge, Imp of inveterate hate.
He that exasperates them, soon espies
Mischief and Murder in their very eyes.
Libidinous, Deceitful, False and Rude,
The Spume Issue of Ingratitutde.
The Premises consider’d, all may tell,
How near good Joseph they are Parallel.27
The court found in Adam’s favor. As John Saffin’s hold on Adam crumbled, his joint investment in the Mary tanked. The Mary was discovered, and her hold of illegally traded goods was seized. John Livingston bore the brunt of the failure and was plunged into crippling debt.28 In the ensuing years, his attempts to rebound from his imprudent investments would tear an enslaved Connecticut family asunder. Ten years after the loss of the Mary, John Livingston represented New London enslaver Samuel Beebe’s claim to a mixed-race woman named Joan and her children against the counterclaim of her free Black husband, John Jackson. Victorious, John Livingston was awarded ownership over the Jacksons.29
The Livingston family’s far-flung connections and business deals were tied together through slavery. Enslaved children served as currency across regional boundaries and the family’s dual identities—Dutch and Scottish—were shaped by enslavement. Robert’s transatlantic family correspondence at the turn of the eighteenth century shows how the language of slavery infused the family’s transatlantic communications. In December 1699, after only narrowly having escaped implication in the William Kidd affair, Robert received a letter from his business associate John Borland in Boston. In it, John solicited funding for Caledonia, an attempted Scottish colony established on the Isthmus of Panama.30 John Borland was a fellow Scottish refugee whom Robert had met in Amsterdam two decades earlier.31 The Scotland-based Livingston family supported the scheme, which was vigorously opposed by the English who did not support Scottish competition so near Jamaica.32 Robert’s nephews, James and Andrew, immigrated to the colony, only to be captured by the Spanish authorities. On January 4, 1700, James Livingston wrote his younger brother from Edinburgh detailing the two Livingstons’ desperate fortunes: there was no word from John (James’s son), though Andrew had written that summer “from the prison of Carthagina” describing himself as being “worse treated then their slaves.”33 This description disturbed James, who relayed the following to Robert: “[Andrew’s letter] gives me just cause to judge that if my son John be on life he is in the same condition amongst thos people that [are] worse then savages our collonie in Darien [Panama] their deserting has been [a] matter of great Greift in this Countrie.”34
James feared that if his son John was alive, he was being treated—like his cousin Andrew described—as worse than “their slaves” by Europeans who had descended to a state described as “worse than savages.” Such language shows that the Edinburgh-based James imagined a colonial world defined by bondage and savagery. While the dire condition of the Darien refugees inspired such florid language from the Scotland-based Livingstons, it reflected the tenor of their American cousins’ correspondence. Also, these Scottish Livingstons were not insulated from slavery, as the enslaved were brought to Edinburgh to labor under bondage that was not officially recognized by British law.35 If James had been an avid reader of the Edinburgh Gazette or any number of the active newspapers out of London that reprinted their news and advertisements in Scotland, he would have found runaway slave notices that advertised the abuses slaves endured as identifying marks to aid in capture.36 The distant, though none the less desperate, father employed the language of savagery to demean the characters of the Spanish officials, imagining them as “worse than savages” imagery that had been deployed a century before by Nicholas De Meyer and Jeremias van Rennselaer in conceptualizing their own difficulties. Slavery and the savagery of bondage framed the way that the Livingston family made sense of Andrew and John’s experiences.
Margaret’s husband Samuel Vetch had survived the Darien misadventure to create a truly Northeastern network. In 1704, the town of Deerfield in Massachusetts was attacked; Samuel Vetch networked with Massachusetts governor Joseph Dudley, volunteering to travel with the French governor Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil and Dudley’s son Paul to quell regional tensions, and enticing him with the prospect of profits. Although the governor signed off on the scheme, many in the Puritan guard were not as solicitous. By ingratiating himself with Dudley, Samuel had made an enemy of the Mathers who still smarted over Dudley’s decision to place John Leverett in charge of Harvard College. Therefore, when he arrived back in Boston, Samuel was thrown in jail. Although he managed to secure release, he was tried for illegally trading in Canada. Samuel fled to London, where he appealed his case and won by promising to defeat the French-occupied territory and bring it under the control of Queen Anne in a circulated paper entitled “Canada Survey’d.”37 He would organize and helm an invasion force, augmented by Indigenous fighters to enact this plan.38 Samuel would continue to expand his network of power across the region to achieve his dream of English territorial expansion, relying on the regional Anglo-Dutch connections of his in-laws, while destructively laying claim to the lives of enslaved human beings.
Old and New Networks
Rather than being an imposed English legal innovation, slavery was reconceived by a core group of elites with roots to the Dutch period through their own shifting notions of mastery. Although the cohort had figured as collaborators or anglicizers, their connections forged during the Dutch period remained crucially important throughout the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century. Tightening slave laws during the English period emerged as much out of the will of these enslavers as from their English overlords. On April 9, 1700, when his wife Margaretta van Cortlandt was just one month away from giving birth, Samuel Bayard attended the meeting of the common council in New York City. He served as an assistant to the aldermen, who included Jacobus van Cortlandt, his father-in-law; the merchant Brandt Schuyler; and David Provoost, the mayor who had been a longtime business associate of the Bayards. As part of the regular business of the council, the group passed a law meant to constrain the lives of their enslaved people.39 Meeting time brought enslaved people of all walks of life together to mingle not just among themselves but to enlarge their networks. Court records indicate that during the “time of divine service,” the enslaved had expanded trade with colonials, both women and men, engaged in leisure activities, and strengthened social ties. The surveillance and criminality placed on such activities had been a top priority of colonial elites even as they strengthened their networks through legal and extralegal means. By limiting the group number to less than three, the colonial councilors were forbidding not just potential conspiracy but the meeting of families.
The councilors, whose roots dated back to the Dutch period, and their families, were the heirs of a militaristic ethos and planned empire-building that fueled Dutch Atlantic pursuits before the early 1670s.40 Their larger overseas empire had fallen, and its metropolitan directors turned to a smaller model of conquest, but the families who had ventured out during the heyday of Dutch rise still held onto grand visions of empire.41 Indeed, many of the colonists were lured away from the burgeoning economy of the Dutch metropole only by the dream of building their personal empires abroad.42 Thus, a subsequent generation in the later decades of the seventeenth century enacted strict control over dependent populations: with none more draconian than those passed against the enslaved. The enslaved represented a group against whom experiments of control could be trialed throughout generations, with the contingency of mastery serving to uncover avenues of protest the system allowed. With each challenge, the elite adapted to erect a series of legal and economic levers that ensured the survival of their system of control. Holding fast to the power and importance of ever-expanding kin groupings, elites such as the Stuyvesants, Bayards, the Van Cortlandts, and the multiethnic Livingstons systematically sought to strip the dispossessed of access to family and social networks.
Thus, by the time that Samuel began his tenure on the council, his uncles Balthazar Bayard and Nicolaes Varlet along with fellow Dutch elites who had been brought up in New Netherland, set up the legal apparatus of slavery in the new colony named for the Duke of York. If indeed those who assembled sought to harden the murky lines of legal slavery that had existed under Dutch rule, such strictures were not a forced adaptation to English authority but were conceived and enacted by a group that was overwhelmingly made up of members of the Dutch elite. Such legal strategies were also focused on the further dispossession of Native peoples and free Black people at the turn of the eighteenth century. The Bayard-Varlets focused on building up family landholdings in New Jersey and New York City. Atlantic slavery was a vital component of that effort. Nicolaes had been granted the “Patent of Hobocken” by Petrus Stuyvesant in 1663.43 Eight years later, he and Balthazar were given a grant of land in Bergen County, where Balthazar served as schepen in 1663 and 1664, and as a representative to the General Assembly of New Jersey in 1668.44 Balthazar, removing to New York to take up primary residence in the city alongside his brothers and sister, served as schepen in 1673 during the brief recapture of the colony by the Dutch and as alderman in 1691.45 In 1686, during Balthazar’s term as a council assessor, an ordinance was passed that “noe Negroe or Slave be Suffered to worke the bridge as a Porter about any goods either Exported or imported from or into this Citty,” one that specifically singled out race as a criterion.46
By the close of the seventeenth century, Samuel’s father, Nicolaes Bayard, was busy buying up land on the bowery, including lands that had been formerly owned by free Black families.47 The Bayards lived in neighborhoods surrounded by other elite slaveholders as well as the individuals and families that they enslaved. The laws they worked to pass against the enslaved were motivated by a history of insurgency. A generation earlier those enslaved to the Bayard family had posed a direct threat, one that arguably lingered in the minds of the Bayard brothers as they sought to pass laws to contain the enslaved population. In 1669 an enslaved man named Emanuel was suspected of having attempted to burn his master and slave trader Nicolaes Varlet’s home to the ground. On March 15, 1669/70, Emanuel was brought before the “Justice and Magistrates of Bergen,” which included Nicolaes Varlet as well as his new brother-in-law, Nicolaes Bayard.48 Such attempts to curtail domestic insurrections were passed down along lines of kin over years of increasing influence, economic gain, and legal precedent.
For lineal slaveholders like the Bayards the political was frighteningly personal. On April 25, 1691, Balthazar Bayard, alongside fellow aldermen Willem Beeckman (who had arrived in the colony aboard the Prinses Amelia with the Stuyvesants), Brandt Schuyler, Willem Merrett, Johannes Kipp, and the other members of the council “ORDERED that no Inhabitant of this Citty Shall Sell to any Indians any Rumme or other Strong Liquors under the Quantity of fifteen Gallons” and that no settler “harbor Entertaine or Countenance any Negro or Indian Slave in thier house or otherwise or Sell or Deliver to he any Wine, Rumm or other Strong Liquor without leave from thier Master.”49 Legal restrictions were personal, targeting an enslaved population that was, to a large extent, in the hands of such elites. On April 29 they met again to pass more regulations to control the lives of Black people:
ORDERED that Every Male Negro in the Citty with Wheele barrows and Spades perfume one dayes Worke about Said lotts as they Shall bee ordered by Mr. Schuyler and Mr. Clarke On fayler of any Negroes Working as afore the Mr. of Said Negroe so neglecting to worke Shall forfeite one Shilling & Six pence to the Use of the Citty.50
Unlike the earlier laws, this order demanded action, rather than prohibited it, but the effect was similar—by constraining the amount of free time that was available, the number of activities that free and enslaved Black people could engage in decreased. Lineal slaveholders trained such laws at their own enslaved population. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Bayards lived in Dock Ward and East Ward and owned twelve enslaved people in the city between all siblings with the family name. When in-laws and cousins are taken into account that number increases, including such slaveholders as the Van Cortlandts (14) and the Stuyvesants (11), and encompassing the Out, West, Dock and East Wards. The legal restrictions created by these slaveholding families targeted an enslaved population that was already largely in their families’ control. These laws, therefore, should be seen not as separate constructs, but as extensions of household mastery.
The intimacies of that history of legal action against the enslaved population perpetrated by such elites is apparent in the language of the law passed by the New Jersey council “Regulating Negro, Indian and Mallatto Slaves.”51 It called for castration for an enslaved man suspected of sexual violence against a white woman, a clause that was rejected by Lord Dartmouth and Whitehall as “one that inflicts inhumane penalties on Negroes &c not fit to be Confirmed by Your Majesty.” Ultimately, “the said Act be repealed.”52 Despite the repeal, the elites who conceived of the law were keen on maintaining their power and conceived of that power in terms of lineage and race. At its core, the law revealed the discomfort that interracial sex would pose to the passing on of power. New Jersey’s castration statute showed that there was a considerable amount of unease about a free population of African and African-descended people. Such unease about the growth of free Black groups was not peculiar, as such communities consistently challenged the racial boundaries erected within colonial societies.53 What was unique was that Dutch-descended elites, such as the Bayards, who had previously seen a benefit in contributing to older free Black communities, were committed to closing the possibilities of such future communities with violent force.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, the colony of New York passed some of the strictest slave laws in the region while elite families solidified their grip on colonial power. Unlike the Livingston-Schuyler alliance, the Bayard family was not a newly created dynasty but a generation old, and even though members such as Nicholas Bayard had sought to adopt anglicized identities to retain their power, they remained ethnically Dutch. Like other families in the region, the Bayards continued to expand power that was both local and Atlantic. Although they had enjoyed power during Dutch rule, they had to weather the transition to English, a feat that was not without difficulty. They had done not only that but had built a network of connections that provided others with the ability to expand their fortunes—which were made in concert with the growing regional slave market. For example, Adolph Philipse’s fortunes as a slave trader and landowner did not merely emerge from the grist of shrewd business dealings but an earlier grafting into the orbit of elite family networks: his father had begun as a carpenter on Stuyvesant’s bowery.54 Slave trading from Madagascar to New York was likewise booming in the city at the turn of the century due to the shortages caused by King William’s War, and the same conditions that created the circumstances encountered by a group of enslaved children traded between Robert Livingston, William Kidd, and John Gardner as collateral fueled the profits of elite slave networks.55
Neighborhoods
Control over enslaved people was central to the masculine identity that was emerging as a key component of elite family identities. When Elizabeth Stuyvesant recalled her embattled marriage to English captain George Sydenham, she characterized her existence bluntly: “I lived in hell” (leefd ick in hell). She testified that in 1704 George forged her name, forcing her to rent out the bouwerij to Christopher Rousby for a nine-year period agreeing to an annual rent of £102.2. The agreement included the forced labor of two men named John and Samson alongside “10 milch cows, 8 working horses, 10 young cattle, 170 sheep, 1 sow & her pigs, 16 geese & other cows, 2 waggons, 1 plow, 1 harrow, 1 wood sleigh”56 The horror that John, Samson, and the other enslaved people endured at George’s hands survives in Elisabeth’s testimony. In 1703, the Sydenhams were listed as having ten enslaved people, four men, two women, two little boys, and two little girls.57 Elisabeth recounted that George would torture them to exert his control: he “tied the negroes up and whipped them for nothing” (bondt de negers op en geselt ze voor niemendal). The verb geselen which translates into English not only as to whip, but to flog or even to horsewhip, conveys the violence of his assaults. George sadistically used their pain to demonstrate his dominion over his household and such abuse would have been etched into the memories of the four men, two women, two little boys and two little girls held captive in that household. Additionally, George withheld food from Elisabeth’s children by her first husband, and Petrus Stuyvesant’s youngest son, Nicolaes Willem, requiring her to hide rations “in the cellar under the tub” because George “locked the cupboard that contained the food, yes not so much as a drink of beer for myself or for the children.” Elisabeth testified that he “threatened to cut the tongue from my throat if I said anything against him; his wife was his own as long as he did not beat her to death.”58
George’s abuse was targeted against those he deemed dependents in specifically gendered ways that reflected not only his personal designs at mastery but also a regional shift in notions of power. George sought to exert control over land—specifically properties that tied Elisabeth to New Netherland’s ruling Dutch elite—as well as wrested Native land and enslaved people. While historians have long pointed to shifting legal realities to explain the cultural and gendered shift from the Dutch to the English period, the story of the lives of individuals bound together in abuse on the bouwerij illuminates the importance of racial mastery to that region’s gendered transitions. In Nicolaes Willem Stuyvesant’s 1698 will he passed “all estate, both real and personal, lying in the Bowery in New York,” to his wife Elisabeth, and for his “eldest son Petrus, one Negro boy over and above his third” part of the estate that Nicolaes Willem expected Petrus would divide with his two other siblings.59 With the gesture of a pen, Nicolaes Willem ensured that both land and slavery would become a crucial part of the Stuyvesant legacy into the eighteenth century. But widowhood presented Elisabeth the challenges of running the massive bouwerij by herself as well as raising three young children. Just two months after Nicolaes Willem’s will was proved, on November 4, 1698, Elisabeth applied for a marriage license with an English officer named George Sydenham and, sometime thereafter the couple, Elisabeth’s children by Nicolaes Willem, and their enslaved people resided together on the Stuyvesant family properties in Manhattan at the bouwerij.60 It was a decision that she would live to regret.
Elisabeth had been born in Albany and grew up in the Van Slichtenhorst home. She was the daughter of Albany trader Gerrit van Slichtenhorst whose father had been the director of Rensselaerswyck and, in addition to Nicolaes Willem’s bequest, she had inherited “60 morgen” of land “lying at” Claverack, the lower manor of Rensselaerswyck, land that had been purchased from the Mohawk leader Red Hawk and other members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (van de wilden gekocht; rodthasvik [Rode Havik] de wilt en andere meer).61 She had grown up in a household with enslaved people and her father had sold enslaved people on several occasions.62 By the time that she wed Nicolaes Willem in 1681, she was living in her family’s house along the Hudson in Esopus, which, during the Dutch period, had been a site of warfare, death, and ultimately dispossession for the Munsee. In less than two decades, these Dutch families claimed the land by planting a burgeoning farming community with a growing enslaved population.63 Nicolaes Willem’s older brother Balthazar had also owned a bowery in Esopus, and when the two wed the record noted that they held ceremonies in the Hudson Valley and Manhattan. Nonetheless, Elisabeth left that life behind for a new one on the bouwerij.
Nicolaes Willem, by then a widower, had been previously married to Maria Beeckman, whose father had conspired with Petrus to keep a large portion of the enslaved captives of the Den Gideon at Fort Altena. The bouwerij’s landscape of orchards, meadows, and marshes would have connected it to the world of Nicolaes Willem’s childhood, and its retinue of villagers included enslaved people.64 Their marriage had symbolically mended the rift that had opened between Petrus and her grandfather Brandt over the relationship between Rensselaerswyck and New Netherland, but her father’s will included the clause that “the land left to his daughter, Elizabeth, wife of Nicholas William Stuyvesant, is not to be estranged or alienated by her husband or anyone else without her free will,” showing that full reconciliation required the surety of law.65 The will itself was witnessed on the bowery. The clause gave Elisabeth considerable control over her own land, which was itself contested due to differing notions of land-rights between the Mohawk and the Dutch. So, during the tumult of King William’s War, Elisabeth sought to protect not only her own but her sisters’ claims. In testimony given years later during her trial against George, she detailed that she bought three more parcels after her sister Bata was forced to flee, another sister Alyda’s holdings were burned twice, and yet another sister Hillegont was in financial straits. With the aid of her first cousin’s husband, Robert Livingston, and without Nicolaes Willem’s knowledge she purchased her sisters’ lands, giving Elisabeth an additional 120 acres at Claverack. She explained she had Robert acting in his capacity as secretary forge the transaction in Nicolaes Willem’s name (en had Robber [t] Lifvenston [Livingston] wie de secretaris was in Stuyvesants naam het schrijf) but without his knowledge (sonder‘t weten van Stuyvesant).66 She ultimately confessed her secret purchase to Nicolaes Willem on his deathbed. He confirmed his intention that Elisabeth should retain control of Claverack in his will, writing “all that tract or parcel of land lying situate and being up Hudson River commonly called or known by the name of Clavarack . . . which land I have always held and enjoyed in right of my said wife and it is but just and lawful that unto her and her heirs forever I should return it.”67 Upon Elisabeth’s death their three children, Petrus, Gerardus, and Anna stood to inherit an equal part of the family lands.
Elisabeth’s life with Nicolaes Willem on the bouwerij had been a multiracial one. A year after their marriage, two free Black neighbors, Pieter van Kampen and a woman recorded only as the widow of Lovijs Angola (wede. van Lovijs Angola) were married on the bouwerij.68 In 1689, another neighbor, Manuel Pieters, wed Maijken d’Angola, on the bouwerij.69 In 1691 Pieter Lucaszen and Marijken Jans, a free Black couple were married on the bouwerij.70 The community of free Black people had survived the English transition but were steadily being eroded by a suite of ever more stringent laws passed by councils filled with members whose own families also dated back to the Dutch period. These same white neighbors were the ones who in 1671 made “diverse complaints” that two free Black residents “Domingo and Manuel Angola” did “from time to time” entertain “sundry of the servants and negroes belonging to the Burghers and inhabitants of the City to the great damage of the owners.”71 At the fall of the colony, Petrus held both direct and indirect sway over the greatest number of enslaved people in the region. By the turn of the eighteenth century, his wider family network still owned twenty-three enslaved people, or 3 percent of the total population. The Out Ward, where the Stuyvesant bouwerij stood, counted seventy-two enslaved people, with ten living on the bouwerij, the third largest number of enslaved people held privately in the city.72
Elisabeth’s broader family connections and new marriage to Captain George Sydenham quickly unraveled. In 1702, Elisabeth and George sued her sister Hillegont for gifts that they had exchanged throughout the years, as well as a continued shadow over the land title that Hillegont had sold to Elisabeth under Nicolaes Willem’s forged name.73 The rancor had actually gone so far that on the eve of Nicolaes Willem’s death, Hillegont was briefly jailed.74 A few years following Elisabeth’s marriage to George Sydenham, another suit by the Beeckmans (Nicolaes Willem’s first wife’s family) against Nicolaes Willem’s estate also commenced.75 Throughout the varied litigious affairs, Elisabeth had a dreadful secret, she was being physically and emotionally abused by George. It would take ten years for Elisabeth to make her abuse claims public.
George Sydenham had his sights trained on Claverack. He and his friend Paroculus Parmyter compelled Elisabeth during a fit of delirium induced by a difficult pregnancy to sign the title of her lands over to him. When she still refused to ascent, George adopted ever more violent tactics that targeted enslaved people and the Manhattan holdings Elizabeth had brought into her marriage. He ultimately had her imprisoned in jail after she attempted to retake the bouwerij. After being in the “Comon Goale of this City about Eight months,” Elisabeth was assumed in one family history to have taken refuge with her adult widowed daughter, Anna Stuyvesant Pritchard, in New Jersey.76 The enslaved people had no such outlet. Even after the proceedings the abusive George retained their lives and labor. Due to English marriage laws, he also held title to the lands in Claverack, though the bouwerij passed to Gerardus Stuyvesant, Elizabeth’s remaining living son by Nicolaes Willem. In November 1713, George sent his enslaved man from Claverack to Robert Livingston’s mill “with corn to grind.” He expected that Robert would send the man back with various goods, including “pease,” “gunpowder,” and “pidgeon.” George included a veiled threat to his erstwhile cousin by marriage, compelling him to “comply with this . . . otherwise” he would “go to Albany” and take his business with him.77 What fate befell the ten enslaved people on the bouwerij remains unknown. Gender and masculinity were becoming more entwined with mastery in the early eighteenth century, with the rights afforded white women as propertied land and slaveholders during the previous Dutch era increasingly under attack.78 While Robert Livingston engaged his female family members as crucial members of an expansive trading network, and even helped Elisabeth secure her property rights during Nicolaes’s convalescence, George sought to consolidate power to himself and his male supporters, using brutality against both family members and enslaved people as enforcement.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, an expansive Northeast navigable by ties of enslavement had come into existence. Networks forged between kin-traders were central to the creation of an elite culture that such slave-holders navigated with ease. Enslaved men, women, and children served as the surety on loans and even clandestine transfers of power, just as they were passed along with rental properties and as inheritances. Northeastern elites shared a cultural expectation for racial surveillance and deployed a shared language of dishonor that linked blackness with degradation in personal and political negotiations. These expanding networks were not the result of the fall of Dutch rule, but rather were a continuance of older networks. The maintenance of Dutch ties and the active prevalence of Dutch legislators steered the legal trajectory of New York City during the last decades of the seventeenth century, in contrast to the prevalent notion that such laws were English transplants that arrived with the final downfall of Dutch rule. Elites made it their business to erect a favorable legal environment that created a foundation for expansion in local enslavement as well. They would call on their social, religious, and economic connections to nourish and expand their power, which was in every place they settled tied to slavery.
But, in the final decades of the seventeenth century, the ethnic characters of such family groupings changed. The networks became more Anglo-Dutch than Dutch in identity, and their approach to the control of the enslaved reflected this shift. Shifting gendered notions fed into the emergence of racial strictures and codes that had not existed at midcentury. Nevertheless, one crucial strategy for dominance facilitated the melding (if at times uneasily) of the English and Dutch imperial projects: the importance of family networks. Even as the Dutch lost official power at the end of the seventeenth century and did not dominate the slave market in the numbers that the English did, they did offer critical inroads into markets that were controlled by family networks. Marriage was the way into such networks and served to expand the influence of the subsequently blended family networks toward the creation of a coherent slave system. Although such families worked to shore up their power, they were not the only engine of empires. During the eighteenth century, emigration continued to offer a diverse ethnic population and a community of free workers whose desires drove the direction of policy and whose lives surrounded and intersected those of the elite. Slave policy, networks, and slaveholding became a way to create connections within families and across ethnic, political, religious, and social borders.