Family
Kinship, Ambition, and Fear in a Time of Rebellions (1710s–20s)
Sometime during the second half of 1713, a little girl named Isabel was sent away from her family in the Hudson Valley to Boston. Her mother Diana worked in the Livingstons’ manor house, and her father, Ben, traversed the Hudson on the Livingstons’ bark, lumbered, and operated the gristmill with other enslaved men, in addition to serving as the Livingstons’ personal attendant.1 She had at least two other sisters named Eva and Gritta, and one half-brother named Caesar who was mixed race.2 Her forced relocation destroyed her family and set a series of events in motion that devastated the enslaved community on Livingston Manor. One year earlier, in 1712, Margaret Livingston Vetch—Robert and Alida’s eldest daughter—moved with her husband Samuel Vetch, daughter Alida, and son to a property located on the corner of Tremont and Winter Street in Boston, overlooking Boston Common and the public granary.3 In the same year, Benjamin Wadsworth’s The Well-Ordered Family was published.4 Very little of the Vetches’ household would meet Benjamin’s standards for order to “dwell together as constantly, as their necessary affairs will permit.”5 They frequently lived in Albany, New York City, spent some time in Nova Scotia, where Samuel was governor, and finally Boston. Samuel Vetch was chronically financially overextended, constantly away chasing investments, military schemes, and shady business deals throughout the Atlantic world. But their destructive claim on a young girl’s life fit neatly within Benjamin’s expectations for household management (he only urged enslavers to allow “Food, Raiment, Sleep ” and “careful rendance in case of Sickness”), as it did the worldview of those within his wider network of elite slaveholders. Nonetheless Margaret’s domestic expectations swept Isabel in its wake, shattering the young girl’s home life.6
Enslaved people and their families also shaped the social, cultural, and political development of the Northeast during the early decades of the eighteenth century. When reconstructed as part of an integrated history, their personal circumstances are as potent as the generalized tableau marshaled by many scholars to describe the tightening vice of enslavement across the Northeast during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Isabel’s family connections emerge across various documents of the Livingston correspondence, through a kinship web anchored by her mother Diana. Other Black kin networks and families likewise emerge connected to Black women enslaved on the Manor, though some, as in the case of Isabel include male kin relationships. Diana and Ben worked on the manor; Diana’s daughter, Isabel, as well as several other children, were bequeathed to various Livingston family members. And in 1728, Diana’s grandson, Daniel, was bequeathed to Philip Livingston, as was a miller named Joe and his son Hannibal, Jak Piet, Piet blak, and a woman named Saar.7 Some of them would live and die on the manor, while others would be sent to New England or as far as Madeira. Their lives and severed connections made possible the Livingstons’ slave-holding web built on networks of kin.
FIGURE 7. Chart showing an enslaved family separated by the Livingstons.
Domestic Troubles
By the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Livingston estate fifty miles south of Albany had become the family’s locus of trade and daily life. The manor was a community filled with varied people from across the world, including local families displaced by the violence on the northern borderland, white indentured servants, Indigenous neighbors, and a contingent of enslaved Black and Native people. The manor was not primarily a slave operation. But it was shaped and defined by slavery nonetheless. It was one of the four manorial estates in the region that included Rensselaerswyck, Philipsburg Manor, and Cortlandt Manor. Such enterprises produced myriad products, including grain and corn destined for the slave markets in the Caribbean, and were a center for Black life in the Hudson Valley.8 Before Isabel’s departure tore a family and community asunder, the clash between the domestic struggles of the enslaved and the will of their enslavers fed a network of fear that bound elites together. Scholars have begun to examine the central place of borderland conflict in shaping colonial events like the Salem Witchcraft crisis.9 What has not been fully understood is the wider regional context of the 1712 New York Slave revolt. By centralizing the actions of enslaved people in the upper Hudson Valley during the borderland conflicts of the early eighteenth century, the brutal reaction to 1712 emerges as one part of a regional white culture of fear stoked by the domestic narratives and political actions of bonded people.
Diana’s archived story, like those of countless enslaved women across the Atlantic world, is jarringly brief, disjointed, and filled with violence. She neither speaks with her own voice, nor writes in her own hand. Her name never comes up in the hundreds of pages of Livingston personal correspondence. She remains, like Saidiya Hartman’s Venus, frozen in death, on a document meant to be unsealed upon the death of her enslaver. To approach the fragments that bear Diana’s name is as Hartman warns “to enter a mortuary.”10 What follows, consciously wrestles with the constructs used to conjure narratives of the past. Tropes of home, family, resistance, and mastery all emerge from archival remnants, to create a framework within which the past becomes somewhat more accessible. They are familiar tools used to conjure the worlds of northern elites, to understand the political, social, and cultural context of bygone eras. Few temporal signposts place Diana or her children in time, making one line in the 1721 version of Robert’s will distinctive: “I do give and bequeath to my son Robert and his heirs and assigns a molatto Boy called Cesar about 17 or 18 years of age son of Diana.”11 Robert’s numerous wills preserved Diana’s motherhood as a commodity, one borne quite bluntly of rape and coercion. Bondage, not nativity mark the scant evidence of Diana’s daughters—Isabel, Gritta, and Eva—who were parceled out to Alida’s daughters, Margaret and Joanna. Robert carefully mapped her and other captive people’s location “at the manor” to conjure the expanse of Livingston holdings and construct an ideal of home.
On October 18, 1710, Robert closed his letter to Alida noting that an enslaved man named Tam had been to visit his family (zijn volk), but returned “home” (thuijs [thuis]) to the manor.12 Tam, who clearly had familial ties to the wider community, could have been the same man that he sued for theft and was ordered whipped in 1683, or perhaps he was his son who visited his parents still enslaved in Albany. Both Tam’s journey and Robert’s possessive claim to notions of home and family, were legible across the slaveholding Atlantic world.
Ben’s fatherhood and relationship to Isabel emerges, not on a baptismal ledger but within the court record of an attempted murder case, where his lament that his daughter was sent out of the colony to serve within the household of Robert’s eldest daughter Margaret, was coerced out of another man enslaved on the manor.13 The Livingstons commanded a large enough workforce to put several girls through the intensive training required to be a lady’s maid. Indeed, Isabel’s two sisters may have been vetted in this way, and there was at least one other enslaved family named in Robert Livingston’s 1721 will, who would have had girls eligible for such training. In the decades of childhood, such service could have kept Diana’s daughters close for a time.
Discounting a brief time in New York City at the beginning of their marriage, Samuel’s frequent absences kept Margaret in in the Hudson Valley, surrounded by family, where she occasionally conducted trade.14 In 1708, while Samuel was away in England, news reports of the gruesome deaths of the Hallett family on Long Island led to fear of a wider conspiracy. They had been slain by an enslaved couple—an Indian man named Sam and a Black woman—who hacked all five of them to death with a hatchet. In response, the enslaved people were put to gruesome deaths: the woman was burned alive, while the man was forced to straddle a “sharp iron” in a gibbet until he died of blood loss and exposure.15 Other enslaved people, branded as confederates were subsequently tried and executed. The regional tensions of war and dispossession coupled with the violence of domestic slavery filled the hearts of Northeastern enslavers with a common terror.
Such stories also reflected the seventeenth-century family and slave-holding roots that bound New England and New Netherland. The Halletts descended from Anne Winthrop, John Winthrop’s niece who, in the seventeenth century, had been banished to New Netherland due to a marriage her community deemed bigamist. She and her new family had ultimately settled at the Hellegat (Hell Hole, also commonly referred to as Hell Gate)—a tidal area of the river between Manhattan and Long Island—after being granted refuge in New Netherland by Petrus Stuyvesant. They had enjoyed financial success, which translated into a household with a number of enslaved people.16 The slain Halletts were distant cousins to the Livingstons (through John Livingston’s marriage to Mary Winthrop) and would have lived a life familiar to Margaret. The murder itself was over domestic concerns—the enslaved couple was not allowed to go to abroad during Sunday services, an attempt to prevent them from intermingling with others. They attacked the family while they were sleeping, during the hours of the night when enslaved domestics were compelled to remain in a state of watchfulness lest their enslavers need them in the night. Neither the pregnant woman nor her children were spared. The dramatic story of the Halletts’ deaths percolated into Boston’s News-Letter through networks of New Yorkers such as paper editor Benjamin Coleman’s friends, the Livingstons, and would no doubt have influenced how Margaret approached her own enslaved household staff. An enslaved maid that the Vetches had purchased from the New York merchant Thomas Wenham on Robert Sr.’s account in 1707 toiled for Margaret.17 Per haps latent fears of domestic rebellion stirred up by sensational news stories, influenced Margaret’s desire to request a young enslaved lady’s maid from the manor, someone she knew, whose parents were known and had grown up around Margaret.
By 1709 she moved with her family to Boston. In 1710, Margaret gave birth to a little boy whom she nicknamed Billy, and whom Samuel presented for baptism at the Brattle Street Church.18 Despite Margaret’s new arrival, her father Robert did not explicitly leave her family enslaved laborers in a will he drew up in 1710.19 He did bequeath Isabel’s sisters, Eva and Gritta, to her younger sister Joanna, who had yet to wed, ensuring that, at least for the short term, Isabel’s family would remain intact. Isabel and Caesar were unnamed in the 1710 will. Thus, they remained with Ben and Diana, with the portion of the estate that passed to Margaret’s mother, the elder, Alida. These concessions, which kept their family together, may have been won because of Diana or Ben’s negotiations, considering their access to the Livingston family. But that world was tenuous, continually threatened by marriage and family as much as by border warfare, disease, and internal rebellion.
In 1710 the population of the manor dramatically increased when thousands of refugees from the German Palatine were settled on adjacent lands purchased by New York Governor William Hunter.20 The massive resettlement ratcheted up regional tension with the Mohawk, who saw the population explosion as a very real threat that would further erode their holdings.21 Robert, who had hoped to profit from the massive resettlement, instead became financially overextended. He passed the fallout to Alida and, ultimately, enslaved workers when, on July 21, 1711, he instructed Alida to stop baking bread for the Palatines because they were underwater on their settlement investment due to a shortage of labor. The shortage was caused because of the loss of Palatine labor due to conscription for Queen Anne’s War, with Robert noting “300 Palatines must go to Canada” (Moet 300 Palatijns naar Canada). The Livingston operation baked bread to supply the troops in Boston and Albany. Robert’s baking instructions were meant for the hands of three enslaved bakers: “Henrick and Thomas and Dego.” Robert insisted that they continue to bake “hard bread” (hart broot [hard brood]).22 Robert had been given a victualing contract by the crown to provision the new arrivals with beer and bread, a task that fell to Henrick, Thomas and Dego, and it was they who would have to face an increasingly disgruntled population when Robert pulled back promised supplies in a bid to save money.23
Such news was not taken lightly by the Palatine tenants who violently protested the reduction in their rations.24 Adding to the tension on the manor, Robert viewed their labor in tandem with those he enslaved when he instructed Alida on September 21, 1711, to “let the negroes or Palatines be employed in” winterizing the manor’s mill pump, emphasizing that “it is very important”25 Alida responded to Robert: “Our negroes have no time” (onse neggers hebben geen tijt) to winterize the mill pump, because they had to harvest corn and wheat “and cut wood for the brewery” (hackt het hondt [hout] voor de brouwerij).26 The Palatines were tasked with sapping the trees on Livingstons’ property to provide pitch and timber for the crown. Unhappy with being settled on the less fertile Livingston lands, instead of the promised Schoharie tract that had formerly been claimed by Nicholas Bayard, but remained firmly within the control of the Mohawk, the Palatines were frequently at odds with the Livingstons, a simmering resentment that would break out into a tense armed standoff.27
Additionally, Alida wrote that she received a report from an Indigenous man that “8 Indians” were “shot to death” in local skirmishes during Queen Anne’s War. By then, the Livingstons had an inflow of news from Native informants for at least two decades, as in 1692 when Alida mentioned “our Indians” (onse wilde) bringing war news. Such phrasing bandied in private correspondence reflected the possessive and bondage-evoking way that elites like the Livingstons began to refer to their Mohawk and Onondaga allies, although some Indigenous people living among the Livingstons were enslaved.28 At the turn of the first decade of the eighteenth century, the manor and its environs had suddenly become a small society of its own. The transformation caused enough chaos to allow for an opening of escape for two enslaved people on Livingston Manor, who networked with a local Native contact—perhaps one of the myriad of people listed as dropping by the manor in the Livingstons correspondence—and escaped to French territory.
During the late fall of 1711, several people enslaved by the Livingston family ran away from the Hudson Valley toward Montreal.29 Their escape would have been particularly perilous: they were setting out during Queen Anne’s War, and if caught, they would be killed. An act passed by the New York Council six years earlier had proscribed death to self-emancipated people found more than “forty Miles above the Citty of Albany or above a Certain place called Sarachtoge” in order to ensure that “no Intelligence be Carryed from the said City and County to the French at Cannada.”30 Thus, when they set off away from New York, they understood that it would be either liberty or death. They were also facing the dense network of contacts at the Livingstons’ disposal. Robert Livingston held family and business contacts that ranged from the Caribbean to New France, but the war limited the ability of those contacts to apprehend runaways using their usual means. By the time that a member of the Livingston family managed to locate them, they had reached their destination in New France and understood the power that they held as a result. Philip, the second oldest son who was managing the family’s trade connections in Montreal, communicated as much to his mother, Alida, in a letter dated October 23, 1713, saying that he “could not convince our Negroes there to go home, they said they would rather stay there, & as long as they say that there is no likelihood of getting them from there except having the Indians steal them which will cost a great deal the Indians are quite afraid of the French.”31 Although Philip entertained the possibility of kidnapping as an option for forcing back into slavery the newly self-emancipated people he referred to possessively as “our Negroes,” his first strategy was to convince them to go “home.”
Philip Livingston, in his letter, written in Dutch, employs the verb bewilligen, which can be rendered as to convince or to persuade.32 This was not the only choice at his disposal. He might have used the word consenteerden (to consent), which appears four times in 1581 in the Dutch Act of Abjuration (Plakkaat van Verlatinghe), whose structure and appeal to the consent of the Dutch people under the rule of the Spanish king, later inspired the writers of the American Declaration of Independence (one of which would be Philip’s own great-nephew Robert R. Livingston).33 Philip’s choice of “bewilligen” rather than “consenteerden” reflects the power that he still felt over the lives of the self-emancipated people. But no matter what meaning of the verb Philip conjured, the two newly minted denizens of New France held most of the cards. They had left Manor Livingston armed with a savvy knowledge of the Native-French alliances and political landscape. An abortive invasion of Quebec helmed by Samuel Vetch, a month before their escape, left the Livingstons allies and all of the bordering northern colonies on high alert of impending attack.34 The self-emancipated people confederated with a “River Indian” to enact their escape, likely a local Mahican. Upon arriving in Canada, one sought asylum with the governor of Montreal, Claude de Ramezay. The escapees from Livingston Manor traded information for sanctuary. Robert was informed they “told ye french yt there was 8 more negroes from whence they Run upon wch ye french had sent” thirteen Indians to this “Place in Particular to take ye negroes.” Robert was desperate enough to forget the threat of insurrection he had faced from the Palatines the year before and arm a troop of “20 Palantines” to “keep guard” on the manor for “5 or 6 Days” expecting imminent attack. But the liberation party was sent to Albany instead.35 The enslaved people had escaped, not just for themselves, but so that more people might be liberated.
If in his private communication to his mother, Philip admitted that persuading the enslaved would be easier (or at least more economical) than brute force, his father made public steps to ensure that the choices for other enslaved people so inclined would be severely limited. Robert sent his letter noting the political maneuvering of his formerly enslaved people just four days before the outbreak of a series of fires in New York City set by enslaved people keen to revenge themselves on their white captors. One and a half years later, Robert Sr., in his capacity as the representative from Livingston Manor to the state council, passed an act that would “revive” and “continue” the earlier law that deemed running to New France a capital offense, despite an end to the hostilities between England and France.36 Across the Northeast, slaveholders like the Livingstons shared a constant fear of rebellion and anxiety over the growing numbers of enslaved people that they bound to lifelong heritable service, a terror that was legible and popularized by print culture. It would ignite with the New York Revolt of 1712 and the public and draconian response to that event, but continue to smolder for years later. From Long Island to Manor Livingston, the first few decades of the eighteenth century brimmed with social and political unrest that was amplified by the anxieties caused by the daily insurgencies of slavery played out against the backdrop Queen Anne’s War.
Insurrections
Networks of fear bound the region’s slaveholding elites and fractured enslaved families. Sometime in the intervening tumultuous years, Robert Sr. sent Isabel to Boston. What could have caused such a devastating decision? The choice to send Isabel, a punishing blow to Ben, Diana, and their family, might have been a reaction to the 1712 New York Slave Revolt and a public power play to establish dominance over his slave population. In April 1712, a mixed group of enslaved New Yorkers from the Gold Coast and others whose Indigenous identities had been flattened under the term “Spanish Indian,” enacted a secret rebellion by setting fire to a dwelling in the East Ward. When white men came to put out the flames, the enslaved attacked, killing nine and wounding seven. Of the thirty-nine enslaved people accused of participating in the 1712 slave revolt, twenty-five received the death sentence. Three of those were burned to death, with one man tormented over a slow fire for “eight to ten hours until dead and consumed to ashes,” while another man named Robin was gibbeted until he succumbed to starvation and the elements. The rest were hanged. Nevertheless, sixteen men were pardoned by Governor Hunter, and others were let go on the promise of testifying against others.37 Scholars have offered in-depth readings of the revolt’s wider relevance, uncovering the importance of Gold Coast identities, Obeah, the racialization of enslaved “Spanish Indians,” and the regional legal fallout of the events that unfolded during the spring of 1712.38 But the domestic circumstances of slave owners and those they held in bondage can uncover how the event both united and destroyed families, and remained alive in the lingering fear of domestic unrest and regional borderland violence.
According to the Livingstons’ correspondence, Philip narrowly escaped the violence. By April 1712, Samuel Vetch and Margaret Livingston entertained John Borland, a family business associate at their home in Boston, who brought news of the slave revolt. John relayed his meeting to Philip, writing that Samuel and Margaret “are all aware & much concerned for ye sadd acct of such a villainous Murther by ye Negroes & Indiens att York as are many of our people are yet [to] hear it I am Glad your Self & my [&] yr acquaintance escaped.”39 Slave revolt information first spread regionally within elite slaveholding networks before being disseminated in the newspapers they controlled.
News of Philip’s narrow escape of the April 6 slave revolt traveled in just one week to Margaret and Samuel’s household in Boston. From there, the heightened fear and suspicion caused by the event radiated to “many of our people” in Boston, which certainly would have included the Colemans, the Livingstons’ contacts at the News-Letter. Two weeks later, the harrowing details appeared on page two of the News-Letter along with a description of the investigation and punishments. The article noted “about 70 Negro’s in Custody,” most of whom “knew of the Late Conspiracy to Murder the Christians.” Six committed suicide, three were executed brutally—“one burnt, a second broke upon the wheel, and a third hung up alive”—and “nine more of the Murdering Negroe’s are to be Executed tomorrow.”40 Such fear would have reverberated in Boston’s slaveholding households who looked out and saw increasing numbers of enslaved African arrivals within the city.41 In an atmosphere like that, what might Isabel have faced upon arriving in the Vetch household? A month later, when George Vane, a military engineer, sent an official appeal to London, he described Samuel’s style of governing Nova Scotia as treating the inhabitants “more like slaves than anything else.”42 Robert Sr. was instrumental in passing the 1712 “act for preventing suppressing and punishing the conspiracy and insurrection of Negroes and other slaves,” which allowed enslavers latitude in slave punishment just short of death.43 Regional tensions influenced the style of mastery adopted by elites in both their domestic and public lives.
Insurgencies arose out of the domestic violence attached to enslavers family dramas, and the external pressures of epidemic disease. The choice to send Isabel to Boston might have also been solely borne out of need. In September 1712, Margaret became pregnant with her third child, but the nine months of her pregnancy were tumultuous. Sometime during 1712, Margaret’s elder brother John began a relationship with a local Boston woman named Elizabeth Knight while his wife Mary was dying of breast cancer, an action that sent shock waves throughout Margaret’s family.44 Margaret’s sister Joanna moved to Connecticut to care for Mary, who had just returned to New London after having undergone several surgeries in New York to fight her breast cancer—including the earliest recorded mastectomy in colonial America.45 Joanna evidently traveled with one of her ladies maids—Eva or Gritta—Isabel’s sisters, a blow that Diana would have felt keenly. In July 1713, Joanna complained that Boston was too expensive and she was “forst to sence Clod my neger gurel from top to Botham [forced to since clothe my neger girl from top to bottom].”46 While she was in New London, Joanna would have also been served by the Jacksons, an enslaved family that toiled for the Winthrops. A then-pregnant Joan Jackson likely completed the dirtiest tasks, such as changing Mary’s bandages or soiled linens. Mary’s death in January 1713 did not send Joanna home, which would have reunited one of Isabel’s sisters with their mother Diana, but rather on to Boston to help her sister Margaret whose baby was due during the summer of 1713.47 Upon arrival, though, Joanna fell ill, her sickness coinciding with a measles epidemic that tore through New England, killing a considerable number of people. Against the background of this outbreak, Joanna reminded her mother of her promise to send a “negro maide” to attend Margaret’s little Alida.48 The request would have put Isabel directly in harm’s way, as the measles epidemic disproportionately ravaged the enslaved population.49 On August 2, Margaret’s child named Mary was baptized in Brattle Street Church. Her death shortly thereafter could have been a result of measles, as both Alida and Billy came down with the illness.50
Joanna’s request would have traveled along the New England postal route to Albany, likely passing through enslaved hands on its way to Manor Livingston. Perhaps Ben himself delivered the parchment, which held the future of his family in a hastily scrawled sentence.51 Just two years earlier, on October 26, 1711, Alida wrote: “I could not get our Negro Ben to Tachkanick he is so scared and I am also very scared when the night comes but I hope God will keep and protect us” (Ick kon ^onse negger ben niet naar tachkannick kryghen soo bangh is hij en ick ben ook heel bangh als de nacht aan komt doch ick hoop Godt zal ons bewaren en beschermen).52 Despite Ben’s fear, his ability to refuse Alida’s request also emerges from the interchange. He lived his life in daily proximity to the Livingston family and enjoyed some direct influence on them. But Joanna’s request would change Ben and Diana’s lives forever.
A culture of public violence against enslaved Black and Native people arose out of elite attempts to reconcile and control the small fractious diverse societies of laborers that worked in Northeastern households and lived on manorial estates. The Livingstons were inundated with the fear of violence. Tenant protests, war, and 1712’s slave uprising had placed them on particular alert. So, when in the winter of 1714, Tom, a man enslaved on Manor Livingston, stood accused of attempting to kill his enslaver, Johannes Dijkeman, a tenant living on Robert Livingston’s vast estate, Robert feared a deeper conspiracy. The constable brought Tom to be interrogated by Robert who did not question the captured man about the reasons he had attacked Johannes. Instead, he wondered “whether his Negro Ben or any other of his Negro’s were Privy to this barbarous murder.”53 With that, the focus of the court fell on the domestic unrest within the Livingstons’ household.
FIGURE 8. Map of Livingston Manor. Based on the John Beatty Map of 1714 and the John Wyman Map of 1798. From The New York Public Library.
Robert feared a secret slave conspiracy stretching from the manor house to the tenant’s residences, a fear that was influenced by Diana and Ben’s personal loss, the events of 1712, the political instabilities with Indigenous groups in the area, and slaveholding among white nonelite tenants on Manor Livingston. The enslaved population on the manor was a mix of people from the Caribbean, the Gold Coast, enslaved Native peoples from various regions and others who likely descended from older regional populations. The previous spring, several tenants on the manor purchased enslaved people from the Livingstons. Robert scoured New York City’s slave market, searching for people to send up the Hudson, but complained to Alida on April 21, 1714, that he could not fill the requests of his tenants Jeremie and Japick: “No negroes procurable who are worth a penny; perhaps they will come through.”54 Seven days later, he revised his assessment: “They are such beautiful negroes (schoune [schoon] negers) as I have ever seen & do not sell them for less than 50£, please, for they are worth it. One, the oldest, speaks good English, has been a sheep herder, was born in Jamaika; the other was born in his land, knows nothing but negro.”55 A month later the lives of the two enslaved people, whose names Robert did not note because they would be overwritten by whatever suited the fancy of their new enslavers, were in the hands of two of Manor Livingston’s tenants, with another human being on order for a third. Alida wrote Robert: “Jeremie got the negro boy who knows English for 50£ he shall pay us when you come and the other was too small [for] Japick. Roelef has the small one for 50£ to be paid in winter so that for Japick you should send up a big one like Jeremie’s.”56 By the winter three new captive people would, like Tom, toil for manor tenants.
Although he owned Tom, Johannes Dijkeman could not claim membership among the elite enslaved gathered to decide the fate of his enslaved man. He was a refugee, a tenant attempting to rebuild his life after escaping the Schenectady massacre three decades earlier. The census of 1714 indicated that Tom was the only enslaved person living in his household, a group that included Johannes Jr., one other man, and two women.57 He was likely the only labor that Johannes could afford after rent and the supplies necessary to farm and lumber his plot located on Robert Livingston’s estate.58 Tom also probably lived with Johannes next to the falls of the Roeloff Jansen’s Kill [present-day Roeliff Jansen Kill]. Johannes might have saved money by taking on an indentured servant or paying for temporary labor, but he opted instead to buy an enslaved man, a decision that likely also represented his social aspirations.
Johannes descended from a family who had immigrated to the colony from Amsterdam during the seventeenth century, while it was under Dutch control.59 His father had been an official of the Dutch West India Company posted as the constable in Beverwijck before he had lost his position after suffering what was most likely a stroke.60 After his father’s death, Johannes’s family was listed at Beverwijck’s poor house and Johannes was indentured to his older half-brother Cornelius.61 By 1688 he was married and had moved to Schenectady, starting out his life on a small plot of land given to him by his father-in-law, Cornelis Cornelissen Viele, who owned the local tavern.62
With old Dutch roots in the area, land, and a well-connected new family, Johannes Jr. was poised to begin his life with a solid start. With his relocation to Schenectady, he found himself in a new, primarily Dutch settlement. Its location placed it along central trade routes into Iroquoia. Several of its most extensive landowners had households with enslaved people and, though Johannes’s was not among them, he would have come into daily contact with the enslaved.63 That life was destroyed in the winter of 1690 when a group of French allied with Indigenous groups came down from Quebec, launching a coordinated attack that had been planned for Albany. At nightfall, as heavy snow was falling, the group did not follow their plan but, instead, shortly before midnight attacked Schenectady. Johannes benefited from the fact that his small plot of land lay slightly outside of town.64 He and his wife Jannetje were part of a group of residents that escaped Schenectady with their lives, although the majority of Jannetje’s family were killed during the attack. Among the sixty dead were eleven enslaved people.65 Of those who survived, twenty-seven former denizens of Schenectady were taken captive, including five enslaved people. The story circulated throughout the English Atlantic world: from New England to Barbados alongside tales of slave conspiracies emanating from the British Caribbean.66
Johannes and Jannetje escaped with only the clothes on their back in the dead of winter. In the days that followed, the former young landowner appeared on a list of rations given to the refugees.67 The haggard escapees had fled to Albany, over twenty miles away in snow that was described as knee-deep. It was perhaps in Albany that Johannes met Robert Livingston. Little detail of Johannes’s life after the massacre remains, except that he was given a farm to tend at the border of Robert Livingston’s property, but he was no longer an owner, he was a tenant. In 1715 he was also listed as being a captain in the militia.68 As such, he would have had a crucial role to play as protection detail for Robert’s property and would have been deployed for border defense against guerrilla fighters that made periodic sweeps of the area.69
Johannes Dijkeman was one of Robert’s longest-term tenants with a prominent place in controlling the community of the manor. After the successful escape of some of the manor’s enslaved population, and the 1712 slave revolt, Robert was out to set an example. Was there a slave revolt brewing on Manor Livingston? Perhaps. There was a plot on manor Livingston—at least in Robert’s mind—and it hewed too close to the details of what had occurred in the city. Like the 1712 rebellion, this imagined action was sealed with a blood oath. This one did not follow the African brotherhood rights, but rather was the oath between father and daughter, a bond that mattered to Robert, and one that he fundamentally understood. Some of Manor Livingston’s enslaved population—from the new people that Robert and Alida had procured for their tenants to the veterans of the Livingstons’ slave ships—doubtless held African ethnic identities in common with the rebels in New York City. The popular named used to describe one such people “Coromantee” was as Walter Rucker demonstrates, not only the name of a Fante settlement but also of the trading Fort Kromantine on the Gold Coast that had been erected by the Dutch, and then taken by the English, much like New York. When the Dutch took it back again, Rucker notes, they renamed it “Fort New Amsterdam,” evoking the connection directly.70 Hudson Valley enslavers and slave ship owners like Robert enjoyed the profits of trade in human beings from the Gold Coast and the Caribbean, inroads such networked elites had followed since the Dutch era. In Robert’s case, embedding himself in his wife’s Dutch network had offered him entrée into the world of mastery and rule he so assiduously cultivated in Albany and on the Manor. The violence on the Manor had, like 1712, been trained against a nonelite slaveowner, and it would not have taken much of a mental leap for Robert to wonder if upon escalation the true targets would emerge as himself and his family. Robert need not think too hard to remember the confederates he formerly enslaved, who had made their own alliances with Indigenous peoples, to successfully seize freedom. Their ultimate designs had been for mass escape of several of Albany’s captive people.
After interrogation, which included torture if it followed the patterns of other such ordeals throughout the Atlantic world, Tom gave up intimate details that reflected his relationship with or at least knowledge of Ben’s domestic troubles. He maintained that neither “Ben nor any other of Mr. Livingston’s Negro’s knew nothing of his design of killing his Masters or any other Person but that he had done it alone and that Ben had never said anything but that he was sorry his Master had sent his Daughter to Mr. Vetch.”71 His testimony reveals the tension that simmered on Manor Livingston: the pain of an enslaved father, grieving the loss of a daughter who had been sent away, the fact that elites like Robert understood that breaking the familial ties of captive human beings could come with deadly consequences. It also reveals how little we can know of the events that unfolded in the final days of January. Forced to confess before his aggrieved enslaver and a room packed with white members of the community, Tom faced a prejudiced court but resolutely refrained from naming any coconspirators. Perhaps Tom’s actions saved Ben’s life and those of the other members of the enslaved community living on Livingston Manor. But Robert’s punishment was severe. Tom was burned at the stake. The execution would have been a public affair intended to terrorize the manor’s enslaved population, witnessed by men, women and children. Robert had an executioner brought up from Kingston for the occasion. Ben was never mentioned again in the Livingstons’ correspondence, after Tom’s trial and execution.72
After the opaque reference to Isabel’s fate in Tom’s testimony, she was last directly referenced in Robert Livingston’s 1721 will. He wrote: “I do give and bequeathe to my Daughter Margaret wife of Coll Samuel Vetch & Their heirs and assigns a negro girl called Isabel Daughter of Diana.”73 By the time of this official recording, Isabel had lived away from her family for nearly a decade. In Boston, Isabel would have labored for little Alida: waking her in the morning, and attending her at the toilette, at social functions, and when her dress needed mending. She would have been required to maintain a neat appearance that advertised the Livingstons’ status and would have been versed in the vagaries of decorum.74 She was there as a servant and as a lesson, intended to teach young Alida the ways of slaveholding and how to properly be a Livingston. She would have accompanied the Vetches to Boston’s Brattle Street Church and encountered an entirely different community of free and enslaved Black people, some of whom were baptized members of the congregation.75
Several clues within the historical record hint at more of Isabel’s travail after the last explicit mention of her name in 1721. In 1717, Margaret decided to relocate to England and join Samuel, after enduring a prolonged separation following his departure in 1714 for London to get back his appointment as governor. She sold off most of her Boston assets to finance the trip and, although she brought Billy along, she left Alida behind with her family in New York. Samuel Vetch was mired in debt, and Robert continually hounded him for repayment of the funds he and Alida used to support their granddaughter. One ready way many northern colonials used to gain access to quick cash was the sale of human beings. Robert had planned to leave Isabel to Margaret as an inheritance and might well have sold her to square accounts. Joanna (nicknamed Naetye) informed her mother about the progress of just such a sale of an enslaved woman to the merchant James Bradish whose family had resident ties to Long Island and did business with Robert Livingston.76 On June 7, 1722, the younger Alida (nicknamed Veets) was placed in charge of the woman’s sale but was hampered by the enslaved woman’s efforts: “Bradis said that the negro woman said she was always ill and he asked Veets about that. And she sent for the negro woman and he said he wanted to buy her; and she set a price for her, but the negro woman said she did not want to be sold and said what illness she had.”77 Was the woman Isabel? One detail in Samuel Vetch’s account supports such a reading. Two months later, on August 1, Robert Livingston noted that he charged Samuel Vetch for: “1 negro girl of 5 years of age called Dina,” who was given to Alida Vetch.78 The little girl wore Isabel’s mother’s name and her age means she was born in 1717, while Isabel toiled for the Vetches in Boston, and at a time of financial stress. Isabel’s fecundity may have marked her as salable, as it did so many other Northeastern enslaved women. If so, then Isabel fought hard against being sold away from the little girl that bore her lost mother’s name. But, ultimately, like her mother, she was forced to suffer the violence of a child’s loss to serve the Livingstons’ needs.
In Robert’s final will, Isabel’s family was parceled out among several different households of Livingstons: her sister Grita (or Margarit) ended up with Gilbert; her half-brother Caesar, now a father of a boy named Daniel, was passed to Philip. Isabel, along with her mother, Diana, and sister, Eva, were unmentioned. Instead, Robert willed to Margaret “a negro man calld Toby and a negro Boy calld Calender, and also ye Time of a Palatin girl calld Anna Cogh wh I have by Indinsure till she attain to nineteen years of age.”79 Born in the Hudson Valley, Isabel’s archived story ends in Boston, willed to serve people who were familiar but who had effectively destroyed her family.
Defiance
Such tragedies made Manor Livingston a cauldron of turmoil. The tightening vise of enslavement during the eighteenth century reflected a culture of mixed-descent elite families in New York who celebrated their Dutchness by maintaining trading connections from the Dutch era, using the Dutch language and marrying within the group. These were not changes, then, that were at odds with traditions developed in the Dutch era, but rather were extensions of them. While Robert was away creating policy, which would shape the life, death, and surveillance of enslaved people, Alida, her sons, and the manor overseers were the ones who were engaged with daily managing manor Livingston’s enslaved, indentured, and tenant population. Their names appear most frequently on the cover pages and throughout the family correspondence, joined by those of the major tenants who owed debts to the Livingstons and who served as overseers and workers. Such people have formed the bedrock of inquiries into the everyday working of Manor Livingston and the interethnic and class realities of the large estate. But another group of names also emerges from the family correspondence and wills: enslaved men, women, and children whose production was essential to the output of Manor Livingston and whose resistance served as a constant tension.80 Some even held Livingston family first names or shortened forms. Flora toiled in the household, and her children Rose and Callender were listed as gifts in Robert’s 1721 will. A valet named Dego and his daughter Alida toiled for the Livingstons, as did Joe (alternately spelled Syoo or Sjo or Jos), who worked as the miller, and Jupiter, Minck, Trebie, and Wynant.
FIGURE 9. Reconstruction of Black families on Manor Livingston.
On May 3, 1717, Alida gave Robert a report that presented an environment full of stress and disorder. Alida recounted the fears their Native ally and neighbor Katerickseet and his brother expressed of reprisals due to an Indigenous man that Alida and Robert’s youngest son Gilbert held in bondage (de wilt dat ghysbert has) and would not sell back. A Native man had already come to Manor Livingston and girdled two trees, making deep circular trunk cuts that would kill them, and sending a powerful threat to the enslavers. Alida also complained about the state of “Minck’s packages” and that Trebie’s barrels were “too small,” apparent sabotage that forced Alida to purchase bigger barrels from an outside vender, and delay the shipment.81 These enslaved laborers from different stages of the production process worked together to resist by attacking the Livingstons’ business. Enraged, Robert replied: “Joe, Mink, and Wynant are godless gits on earth” (Jos mink & wynant zynd godtloos guyts op aarde). According to Robert, the enslaved men had gone beyond slowing down work by purposely packing the flour in packages that were too small, but they had also included “coarse bran” with the corn so that the Livingstons would need to incur an additional expense to have it rebolted (resifted). Although Robert assessed their result as due to “merely slackness” (alleen slattigheijt), his choice to describe the three as “godless gits” (godtloos guyts) evidence that he certainly understood the purposeful intention of their actions. As for the flour, despite Alida’s attempts to countermand the sabotage, they were still “2 barrels short.”82 While the enslaved turned to sabotage and work slowdowns to express themselves, Robert, like Jeremias before him, turned to early modern portrayals of the enslaved as lesser beings, characterizing them as “ungodly gits,” childish tricksters who were firmly outside the church, and thus below Christians.
Such dehumanizing treatment marked the Livingstons’ dealings with another enslaved couple. Joe “the miller” recurred in the Livingstons’ correspondence beyond the mention of his actions in sabotaging the flour and corn. Documented family events do not frame the narrative of his life as they do the lives of his elite enslavers, although he was the only enslaved person listed as having a wife in Robert’s many wills. His wife was Alida’s lady’s maid, Mary, and they had a son named Hannibal. Instead of being constructed out of the family events of marriage, birth, and everyday life, his life emerges as a list of problems posed to the Livingstons. On November 5, 1720, Alida included a report of Joe’s illness to Robert.83 Two years later his ill health was in her correspondence to Robert again, and on June 13, 1722, Alida reported that he was “so out of order” (soo niet order) for nearly a week. She explained that a tenant named Leendert Konijn carried Joe out of the forest “purely mad” (puur dol). She detailed her remedy, saying that she treated by administering a “vomit drink” (spugen drank) bloodletting and purging him.84 With Joe sidelined, Alida put Wynant to the task of milling. Alida’s practice of herbal medicine was a vital part of her daily routine, and the vomit drink may have been a famous Winthrop recipe called rubilia (salt peter mixed with antimony) that she received from her friendship with Fitz-John.85 She frequently used such cures to self-treat illnesses, as for example, earlier in the letter she expressed her aversion for pills, opting instead to treat her swollen feet with sour buttermilk.86 Mary, Joe’s wife, would have been tasked with attending Alida’s increasingly numerous ailments, for it was Mary who lived in closest proximity to Alida. Mary spoke fluent Dutch and could sew. Her first duty would have not been to Hannibal or Joe, but rather to Alida, and Mary would have had to weather an increasing degree of hostility from her enslaver.
Mary, whose job it was to always be near Alida, would not have been far when the herbal remedy was applied to Joe, a cure that was just as likely also a punishment. Alida did not describe Joe as sick but instead observed that he was “out of order” for “6 days,” a condition that—despite his previous record of illness—she interpreted as “trouble” (trobbel). Such wording betrayed that Alida believed Joe might be feigning his illness and Robert’s response, “I am sorry to hear that Joe has become so cunning (so slim),” supports that Alida was acting with a good measure of punishment when administering the “vomit drink.”87 This treatment would have racked Joe’s whole body as unrelentingly as a flogging, and the bloodletting and purging would have drained his strength.88 Such torture could have indeed made him come “to his sense somewhat” in Alida’s mind. After ten days, she had clearly decided that Joe was sick and not resisting, when she closed her letter, “Sjo is reasonably healthy.”89 Bloodletting, purging and administering emetics to a “cunning” and “ungodly git” in the presence of his wife, was most likely a tailored response to perceived resistance.
Defiance could take many forms and some enslaved people augmented work slowdowns and disobedience by exploiting the physical revulsion that some elites felt toward the enslaved. While Joe labored in the saw and grist mills, an enslaved man named Tam ferried the bolted corn, flour, timber, and other goods for the Livingstons.90 Tam utilized his physicality to directly resist not only Alida’s management but the social identity of the family that she so assiduously cultivated. In the same letter where she described Joe’s illness, Alida wrote that “Tam does not do anything and does not want to do anything and is fat and slick (vet en gladt). He wants to keep his letter himself, he said, or he will do evil. I am afraid he will do something evil—set something on fire.” Alida looked externally for support, turning to a “High Dutch woman” on the manor who “has had him for 4 days, and she did not get it sorted. She says additionally that he might be willfully doing it in order to get away. Have him sold or sent away.”91 Tam was not the only member of the enslaved community at Manor Livingston to offer resistance, a fact that Alida alluded to when she said that she was having “trouble enough here with our people” (hier trobbel genoeg met ons volck), but his was the only anecdote that she chose to include in her correspondence with Robert. She used the word “gladt,” which has been translated as greasy by other scholars, but also carries the dual meaning that he was slick, or sly, someone who could not be trusted. It must be noted that Tam’s actions were filtered to Robert through not only Alida’s perception but also that of the “High Dutch woman,” a woman (likely a Palatine) who lived either on the estate or nearby to whom Alida outsourced Tam’s surveillance. She also had a vested interest in projecting a particular image of the manor operations. Alida wanted Robert to sell Tam or have him sent away, but regardless, a year later, Tam was still enslaved on the manor tasked with ferrying goods such as lumber, rum, and gunpowder up and down the river and, according to Alida, still resisting. By 1722 he was likely sold away (or had even died), because his name was crossed out in Robert’s will.92
One man who attempted to escape from the manor was met with violent death. On April 22, 1721, Alida wrote Robert in Albany from New York City while she and her granddaughter were visiting. Alida still received a steady stream of news from the manor, which she had left in Gilbert’s hands, a decision she likely regretted as things had already begun to fall apart. Gilbert allowed neighbor Tobias ten Broeck to accompany the land surveyor without Robert’s express consent—a significant breach in the protocol as nothing was more important to Robert than maintaining his massive landholdings.93 He had also lost an enslaved man: “Our Gysbert’s negro had run away. Yet they caught him again [and] beat him very much, and in 10 days [he] died from disorder” (onze gysbert negher was wegh gheloopen doch ze hem weer kreghen sloeg hem heb’n heel veel en in 10 docghen uijt beordigheit gestorven). The man’s harrowing death, which Alida noted only because Gilbert “then suffered so much damage by it” (en he toen soo veel schod [schade] door), was at the hands of the patrol—whose captain, Johannes Dyckman, still resided on Manor Livingston—and in direct compliance with the law passed by Robert, which made running away a capital offense.94
Some enslaved people turned to mitigation and everyday survival to endure the perils of enslavement. Out of all those enslaved by the Livingstons, Dego’s name appears with most frequency and for the longest duration. Although he was described as laboring in the bakehouse with Palatines in 1711, by 1717 he piloted the Livingstons’ sloop down the Hudson. On November 16, 1717, Alida notified Robert that Dego was waylaid by a day-long rainstorm, which caused him to reroute to the Esopus (Kingston) where he was waiting to find transport down to the city.95 Several weeks later, Dego was on the move again, sent down to New York to toil for Robert.96 By 1721 he was listed in Robert’s will as being a father to a little girl named Alida.97 Was her name a choice, an appeal to make her sale a little harder, or was it compelled by the Livingstons as a show of fealty or even complete mastery? That same year, the elder Alida wrote to Robert: “Give Deko your old hat if it is outdated.”98 The reason for the gift is unclear. While enslaved domestics were often clothed in the old apparel of their enslavers, it arguably could have been a gift given to commemorate years of service as a valet. The gift also communicated Dego’s place in the world, for the hat was not new, but old, not his own, but his enslaver’s. In August 1722, Dego was aboard a ship that transported the governor, William Burnett, with whom Robert was actively trying to curry favor.99 Dego’s duties afforded him considerable freedom of movement.
Even those who did not defy their enslavers could be subjected to abuse and limitations. After that mention, Dego’s name abruptly disappears from the Livingstons’ correspondence for four years, save for one letter. On March 10, 1724, Joanna’s husband, Cornelius van Horne wrote his father-in-law Robert Livingston a letter which, uncharacteristically briefly covered the family’s intricate trade dealing, though he did offer space to mention that “only two or three vessels arrived from Curaçao and St. Thomas” and that returns for Robert’s flour, corn and butter were down.100 The rest of his letter concerned Robert’s claim on Dego. A Londoner, named Thomas Cardle claimed that he owned Dego. Thomas recently returned to Long Island, after a between “15 and 16 years” stay in England. In the intervening time, he claimed to have loaned Dego to Mr. Falconer who then subsequently sold Dego to Robert because he was in “want of money.” Cornelius believed Thomas’s claim to be strong enough to council his father-in-law to “Ceap him Home as Much as possible,” a change of mobility that would have drastically altered Dego’s life. Cornelius was highly motivated to support his father-inlaw’s claim to Dego, as he stood to inherit both Dego and his daughter upon Robert’s death. Dego was effectively subjected to house arrest.
Dego’s life of ports and waterways changed suddenly with the threat of capture by Thomas Cardle. Robert’s granddaughter, Alida Vetch, wed Stephen Bayard on March 12, 1724, in New York, just two days after Cornelius warned Robert of Thomas’s claim on Dego.101 The chaos of wedding preparations was arguably just the sort of opportunity that Thomas was hoping for “to send up a cupple of men by Land in order to Decoy and Delude” Dego “away from” Robert or to “take him by force when at a Distance from home.” There would have certainly been opportunity. After the nuptials, Alida Vetch moved into the Dock Street house her grandfather offered as her dowery (the same one he had purchased from his betrayed friend William Kidd) with her new husband, who was the grandson of Nicholas Bayard and Judith Varlet and great grand-nephew of Petrus Stuyvesant. The marriage united the Livingston and Stuyvesant-Bayard dynasties. Little Diana would have traveled along with her as part of Alida’s dowry. Dego would have normally piloted the sloop on such an occasion. Cornelius believed that even the close family associate Rip van Dam, of New York, might use the opportunity to capture Dego, but he promised to “Inquire further In the Matter” and then to “advise” Robert “by the first opertunity or as soon as I knew the certenty.”
Thus, shut away, Dego’s world shrank to the Dock Ward property. Stephen, whose family had forged slaveholding ties throughout the Atlantic world, was quickly incorporated into the Livingston family’s slave dealings. By November 1725, just one year after becoming Robert’s son-in-law, Stephen informed Robert of the death of half of the enslaved people on the ship Onckell Philips. The slave ship’s name Onckell evoked the double meaning of onkelijc or “bountiful,” conjuring a Dutch linguistic heritage and the more familiar and family-evoking onkel, or “uncle” to English-speaking ears. Stephen blamed a shortage of food and provisions for the human losses and because they went “trough the fatigue of a 17 weeks Voyage obliged to Divide their bread 14 Days—before they came in; Each man then having 12 Bisketts for their share & Just so much meath Lft as served them the Day they came in.”102 Dego, always in close proximity to his enslavers but now unable to travel as he once could, would have likely had to suffer the angry conversations of his enslavers who mourned the loss of profits rather than human beings.
Meanwhile on the manor, while the captive people on the Onckell Philips were dying in the middle of the Atlantic, Alida demanded that Robert sell her ladies’ maid Mary. He responded: “I am not minded to sell Mary under 70 pounds—and [for] cash. I do not know yet how to get a negro woman who is able to do housework and who has command for the language (Ick niet gein negrin noch to kopen die huys werk kan doen en die Taaal heft). Let us first try to get another, else we might be in want.”103 Hannibal and Joe were listed alone in Robert’s final will, evidence of the violence and forced loss of a mother, wife, and lover. They were not the only ones. Flora and Diana only appeared in relation to their parceled-out children, and not as part of the bequests of the Livingston households. Dego’s daughter, Alida, was also missing from the final will, her loss a death, whether to sale or the grave.
Dego remained with the Livingstons, as Thomas Cardle, consumed by debts, eventually committed suicide in prison—“in the hole” (in’t gat) is written the lower right margin of the letter.104 With their remaining years on earth, the Livingstons would mark the passage of Dego’s life by the labor they could extract. On May 17, 1726, Robert wrote to Alida that he expected Dego would bring a weathered saddle to be repaired in New York.105 A few months later, Alida tasked Dego with taking their broken buccaneer gun down to Robert in New York to get it fixed (Deko heft[heft] de boeka [-] nier om te laete maken).106 But such proximity to the Livingstons invited censure as well. On May 20, 1726, Robert wrote to Alida complaining in the left margin of the letter’s first page that those enslaved on Manor Livingston were still sabotaging the flour and called them “our mischievous people” (onse ondeugende volk). He assigned Joe the task of overseeing these laborers, expecting the enslaved miller would do this after his own work was completed; Robert instructed Alida to “let Jos see to it afterwards” (laat Jos daarna bekijken). He reserved his outrage against Dego for the main body of his letter. Robert grumbled that Dego “bought a leg of mutton for 3 sh. (shillings) 9d. (pence), without order, in the place of some ox-meat,” continuing “had there been no ox-meat, I could have bought him a ham for the same amount of money. And now I must also buy him a ham.”107 Still upset, he scrawled in the right margin of the letter’s third page, “I have not bought Dego a ham for I cannot spare 6d (pence) for a pound of ham for a negro. He can eat butter and bread until he comes home.”108 Despite years of unrelenting service, Dego was worth neither “a leg of mutton” (een Shaps Beit [schaapbeen]) nor “a pound of ham” (een Pond ham) in Robert’s estimation. One wonders what awaited Dego when he arrived “home” at Manor Livingston.
The last mention Robert made of Dego in his correspondence was scathing. After asking Alida to send a “Spanish chair” from their own collection to give to Cornelius for his writing desk, he complained that he had not received news of their creditors or progress reports from Albany about his political efforts. Chafing at living so far away from the political center of the colony, Robert asked both their vendor and Dego for the intelligence but ended his discussion derisively, writing: “The shipper and the dumb negro Dego do not know anything and say nothing” (Het Shipper ende Domms Negir Dego Wedten nirgens oft, en zeggen niets).109 “Dumb negro”—the same phrase Jeremias van Rensselaer applied to his despised enslaved laborer was joined by “cunning” (slim), “godless gits” (godtloos guyts), and “slick” (gladt) to form a constellation of pejoratives that elites like the Livingstons, locked into a cold war with their enslaved people, regularly used. But Jeremias, who dwelled on the individual slights of enslaved people, never used group language, possessive or otherwise, uncovering that much had changed in nearly a century. The Hudson Valley’s enslaved populace were politically savvy and used the instabilities of the borderlands, mitigation, work slowdowns, sabotage, escape, and their own physicality to challenge their captors. The Livingstons never used the term family (gezin or familie) when referring to the enslaved in their correspondence or wills, although they did for themselves and their local coterie of friends. Instead, they used the term our folk (onse volk) for the enslaved, substituted their households as “home” (thuis), allowed enslaved people access to their own families only on sanctioned excursions. They possessively referred to those they held in bondage as “our negros” (onse negers) or obliquely evoked dependence with “our Indians” (onse wilde). Violence on the manor, however, was both public and intimate—directed at enslaved people and their closest kin.
Dego’s voice remains silenced. No known account of his life exists written in his own hand. No towns or monuments wear his name. His daughter Alida’s life likewise disappears into the tissue of the past, a stark contrast to the narratives of those who held them in bondage. The Livingstons cultivated their image and maintained their trading networks by beating, burning, trading, and bequeathing the lives of those enslaved among them. The violence of that rupture remains.
The stories of the enslaved offer an alternate portrait of the Northeastern merchant families. Robert’s final will ensured through entail that the manor would descend to Philip and “the male heirs of his body carefully begottin in Free Tail for ever, not to be by him or his heirs sold or alienated in part or in whole.”110 But in the preceding paragraph, even before ensuring the future of the estate lands, Robert gifted Philip “Ceaser and his Son Daniel,” passing down the third generation of Diana’s children. While Robert’s family was centered on the upper Hudson Valley, it was cross-colonial in nature, with members shifting locales throughout the Northeast to support growth in trade or kinship. The people whom they held in bondage were caught up in these transitions. Caesar and Daniel may have remained in the Hudson Valley with Philip, but Isabel was forced to relocate to Boston with Margaret, and other enslaved people were sent to far corners of the Livingstons’ familial empire.
Insurrections exacerbated this trend, with elites increasingly viewing “onze neggers” with suspicion after the 1712 New York Slave Revolt. Tenants and other nonelite whites were caught in the middle of such tension—not elite themselves, but still attempting to carve out mastery over their own lives, environment, and enslaved people. Elites seeking to send a message of dominance to the community used their legal power to make examples of the enslaved of nonelites—as Robert did to Tom earlier in this chapter. Nonelites, like Johannes Dyckman, could then find their own efforts at mastery overwritten, though they remained a crucial force of daily enforcement and control. Throughout the first decades of the long eighteenth century, elite families like the Livingstons traded, married, and grew across the Northeast in pursuit of their ambitions, but were themselves hounded by fears of violence, rebellion, and insurrection, and these compounding forces upended the lives of those they held in bondage.