Market
Creating Kinship-Based Empires United by Slaveholding (1730s–50s)
By the middle of the eighteenth century, orchards and fields dotted the landscape of the Out Ward, evidence of a production cycle that began under Dutch rule a century earlier. By then, the pear tree planted during Petrus’s lifetime, would have netted nearly a hundred harvests for the bowery. The majority of the land owned by free Black people had decades earlier been swallowed up to expand elite white families’ property footprint, though a few families managed to hold onto their houses.1 But not everything had changed. Enslaved laborers still brought produce to bustling marketplaces where traders of every walk of life mingled, shouted, haggled, and bartered. Such markets could not be confined to “the lower end of the Wall Street, near the East River,” but spilled into the “houses, outhouses & yards.”2 There, such enslaved Out Warders would have seen slave traders selling human beings and encountered other enslaved people who sold “Boiled Indian Corn, Pears Peaches, Apples and other kind of fruit,” as side hustles, grasping any available opportunity to grow their meager resources.
Gerardus Stuyvesant, Petrus’s grandson, spied danger in their numbers. Not the danger of conspiracy but of contagion. On August 20, 1740, presiding over the Common Council as deputy mayor, he passed “A Law to Prohibit Negroes and Other Slaves Vending Indian Corn, Peaches or Any other Fruit within this Ceity.” Ostensibly alarmed by the “great Numbers of Negros, Indians and Molatto Slaves” who traded in the city, Gerardus and the council blamed these traders for “Encreasing if not Occasioning Many and Dangerous Fevours, and other Distempers & Diseases in the inhabitants in the Same City.”3 Lawbreakers would be subjected to whipping at the “Public Whipping post of this city at the Discretion of the Mayor, Recorder & Alderman.” Despite a veneer of concern for public health, Gerardus and his compatriots sought not to cease but to corner the trade. They excepted enslaved vendors “Coming to Markett from the County or the Outward of this City by Order of their Masters or Mistresses.”
FIGURE 10. Cross section of Stuyvesant pear tree. On August 20, 1740, while Gerardus Stuyvesant served as deputy mayor, he and the other assemblymen introduced “A Law to Prohibit Negroes and Other Slaves Vending Indian Corn, Peaches, or Any other Fruit Within this City.” The law linked such enterprise to “encreasign if not Occasioning Many and Dangerous Fevours, and other Distmpers & Diseases” in New York City. Perpetrators were ordered “publickly Whiped” at the “Public Whipping post of this city at the Discretion of the Mayor.” Image courtesy of the New York Historical Society.
For such regional elites, public displays of mastery over markets and enslaved people were crucial to their wider ambitions. Four summers before the passage of the council’s law, in the Dock Ward, two Black men toiled as part of the crew that constructed the Oswego, a ship owned by Philip Livingston and his sons. The Livingstons planned for the ship to travel the world, trading goods which included human beings. Ships like the Oswego were constructed and commissioned even as news of slave rebellion and fears of conspiracy poured into New York harbor carried by ships from across the Atlantic world. Between 1729 and 1740, Livingston-owned ships imported 238 documented people into New York.4 Slave trading and the profit gained from enslaved and bonded labor underwrote elite expansion into worldwide markets during this period. Their vessels bore monikers that traced the reach of their family’s dynastic ambitions. They actively built an Atlantic world replete with floating Oswegos and Rhode Islands that were no longer tethered to the geography of the Northeast, but rather traveled with the family as part of their evolving bid for a kinship-based empire.
Control
By the middle of the eighteenth century, many wealthy Anglo-Dutch families had publicly eschewed “Dutchness” for a generalized regional elite status. While their letters were only rarely written in Dutch, the language remained prevalent in certain areas and in the spoken language of a number of enslaved people across the region.5 Despite such changes, elite Dutch-descended families maintained some ties to the Dutch colonial past. The diversifying interests that characterized elite Anglo-Dutch families’ portfolios did not entail any lessening grip on the enslaved, but rather an increased commitment to the expansion of slavery. The Bayard and Stuyvesant families’ reach extended far beyond the island of Manhattan as they continued to be a major regional presence, maintaining their considerable landholdings in Hoboken and Kingston, areas with sizeable enslaved populations. The Bayards and the Livingstons had confederated together by marriage for a decade. Alida’s husband, Stephen, continued to promote the slave trade work he had previously done for their family when Philip took on the mantle of “Lord of the Manor” (the first of the Livingstons to consistently style himself using the title). The two men co-owned the ships Francis and Byam which traveled from Antigua to New York with sixty-one human beings between 1730 and 1731.6 Meanwhile, the Bayards’ Maryland branch benefited from a centuries-old formally Labadist network. Couple James and Susannah Bayard enlisted the slaver Joseph de la Montagne to trade in human beings between Barbados and Maryland.7 Susannah’s stepfather, Henry Sluyter was part of the Bohemia community’s leadership, a group which counted Nicholas de la Montagne, Joseph’s father and the son of Johannes de la Montagne, as well as Samuel Bayard, James’s father. Her co-ownership signaled the continuance of an active female presence in the family slave trade.8 But even as the Dutch language faded from the tongues of such moneyed colonials, they continued to intermarry those whose lineage dated back to the Dutch era and to own and traffic in human beings.
The Livingstons plied old trade routes that had been enriching the broader family network for generations. Curaçao remained a vital port of call in the Livingstons’ portfolio, and while the port’s importance as an exclusive slaving depot to the northern colony had faded with time, merchant ships would not fail to bring up several enslaved people to trade along with the tea that they purchased from the island.9 On January 30, 1739, Pedro de Wolf, the family’s Amsterdam factor, wrote to Robert Livingston, updating him on the conditions of trade in Curaçao.10 In a series of letters sent during the late summer of 1740, Philip Livingston wrote to Robert Jr.: “I hope that the Duty of Some of the Negros be savd if any become. I could sell severall young negros now.”11 Three days later, he followed up with Robert Jr, writing, “I wish you could Engage some trusty Capt who goes to Curaçao to bring some tea.”12 Smuggled Dutch tea and the trope of slavery would in later decades come to define some family member’s protest rhetoric.13
The Livingstons and other Northeastern trader families would connect their profits in human beings to the broader world market. While a portion of the grain and bread produced on Manor Livingston was earmarked for Curaçao, Jamaica would quickly emerge as their key West Indian market for luxury goods and enslaved people.14 During the summer of 1732, the Livingstons traded fifty men women and children from Jamaica to New York aboard the Katherine. Additionally, they imported goods totaling more than 76 pounds, among which included a box of China and three large bins of China Dishes.15 Another ship, named the Jamaica Packet, arrived in late October 1734 with a “cargo” that included casks of rum and three enslaved people.16 While such people were often sold out of the New York warehouse by Robert Jr., who resided in the city, the manor house was sometimes used as a staging ground for sales. On July 14, 1735, Philip complained to Dirk van Veghten Jr. that he had sent “a negro boy which Johnathan Wheelor promist [sic] to take down to the Manor, and so did Swits, but they have both deceivd me in it. I suppose we shall not gett a chapman for this boy being very Lean; he has been sick, and is on his recovery.”17 The boy likely hailed from Jamaica as Dirk was Philip’s partner in the Jamaica trade, where they “sourced” most of the human beings they intended to sell. He was likely sent up to New York by Philip with the hopes that he might have more success selling him among his neighbors or in Albany rather than New York. On November 27, 1739, Philip instructed Robert Jr.: “When you have opportunity send the remainder of my flour & bread to Jamaica Curaçao or where you think it will render the best acct meet ye quickest sale and remittances.”18 Black servers would present food on China dishes and the manor’s enslaved workforce would harvest and mill flour to provision the Caribbean.
During the 1730s Nicholas Bayard added sugar refining to the family’s trading ventures, diversifying his Out Ward–based grain exports to the Caribbean with a product whose raw form was harvested by slave labor. Other New York merchants quickly followed, including the Van Cortlandts and Livingstons.19 Such refined sugar would sweeten teas and the fruit pies made by the pears, apples, and peaches of the Out Ward, Long Island, New Jersey, and Hudson Valley orchards.20 Just as the trees themselves served as markers of claimed and colonized land, so too the products made from their bounty would evoke a cultural hearkening back to a remembered colonial past.21 Such elites made a show of brutally executing any enslaved person who targeted their profits, as was the case of the execution of a man named Jack in Ulster County, who was burned alive for “Burning a barne and a Barrack of wheat.”22 New York’s provincial elite expanded their wealth through commodities, exploitation, and death.
But New York’s most powerful families also broadened their influence through mass communication, drawing for ever-expanding audiences the social and racial tropes they had cultivated for a century. William Bradford’s New-York Gazette was founded in 1725, and its back pages ran advertisements for a myriad of products including human beings.23 On October 1, 1733, New York merchant Jacobus van Cortlandt ran an advertisement for Andrew Saxon, a man he described as “a tall lusty fellow” and “very black,” who fled from his Dock Street home with a “broad-Axe” a “two-foot rule” and a “Howell-hovel,” equipped with training as a “carpenter and a cooper.”24 Two days later, Samuel Bayard’s name appeared in a runaway slave advertisement, as the New York contact for would-be slave catchers sent on behalf of “Robert Piersen of Notinham near Tentown” to apprehend “a Negro man named Jack.” Such notices would be continued in the New York Weekly Journal, edited by Peter Zenger. Bradford’s former apprentice and onetime business partner, Peter had emigrated to New York as a child along with his widowed mother during the Palatine resettlement in 1710, before quickly being apprenticed out to the printing business. By the 1730s, he opened his own rival paper, which became a key conduit for news and controversy in the city, providing an outlet for regional information from Manor Livingston in the same way that the Boston-News-Letter did at the turn of the eighteenth century.25
Just as the Bayards were doing in New York City, the Livingstons sought to expand their own trading portfolios, family influences, and physical footprint in the Hudson Valley. Robert Sr.’s eldest surviving sons settled on landed estates of their own. Even Robert’s youngest son, Gilbert, ended up on the massive Beekman lands in Kingston with his marriage into that family. Robert Jr. (who came to be termed Robert of Clermont in later histories) inherited the southern part of the manor and erected a stately house he named Ancram, evoking his father’s Scottish birthplace. He would eventually come to rename the house Clare Mount and, after the destruction of the original house during the American Revolution, its successor was called Clermont. Robert Jr. did not abandon the name Ancram, and used that name for other projects, blending the family’s European origins with enslavement, just as his father’s choice of Onckell Philips for a slaver had done a generation earlier. The Scottish identity the two brothers conjured, during a time when Scottish ports spewed slaving voyages, would become the primary identity assigned to the Livingstons in later histories. On November 18, 1741, the Ancram arrived from Jamaica, carrying three enslaved people aboard.26 The name Robert Jr. chose for the ship evoked his father’s Scottish birthplace as a floating statement of mastery, one his elder brother could not control. And yet the two brothers’ aims were intertwined. Philip had been given charge of the ironworks business from his father, who had only begun to scope the project; Ancram ironworks would ultimately grow it to profitability. White laborers of varying degrees of unfreedom, in addition to a group of African-descended enslaved laborers, toiled in the Ancram ironworks.27 The Livingstons’ entry into the iron market must be viewed within a broader perspective: their Schuyler cousins in New Jersey were also heavily involved in copper and silver mining, and the turn was part of a diversification strategy that other elite families like the Rhode Island–based Browns pursued.28
Three generations of Livingstons—Robert Sr., brothers John and Philip Sr., and Robert Jr.—all imagined a manor workforce of mixed labor where enslaved workers—while not, on the surface, strictly needed—were nevertheless a vital part of their business plans. Their wide-ranging family and business contacts would have afforded them numerous models of ironworks worked solely by enslaved labor, had they chosen to go that direction. The first of such ironworks were begun in the Chesapeake at the turn of the eighteenth century. Indeed, one scholar has argued early success turned most southern ironworks solely to enslaved laborers and “helped to establish slavery as the dominant labor system within most antebellum southern industries.” In middle colony ironworks, enslaved labor was deployed precisely to “discipline white waged workers.”29 Robert Sr. and John Livingston’s own nascent designs at building a successful ironworks in their lifetimes were challenged by the continued state of warfare that marked the sociopolitical landscape at the turn of the eighteenth century. Robert Sr.’s tenants were continually being called up for service, first in King William’s and then for Queen Anne’s War, a destabilization that some of their enslaved people exploited to self-emancipate. Their heirs determined to profit from the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by dotting the landscape with markers of possession: grain, ironworks, tenants, bonded and enslaved laborers.
While working on the iron project, Philip was also scouting new markets. In December 1740, he wrote to his brother Robert Jr., that he was “very well Satisfied” that the “Ship Oswego” is “designed for South Carolina and Amsterdam.” He explained that their Amsterdam-based factor Pedro de Wolf informed him that rice “was up again” and that he “expected it would advance higher.” Philip hoped that it would not “be too late” to send the ship directly “to South Carolina in order to be one of the first Ships, in the spring, at Market.”30 In naming the ship Oswego, the Livingstons symbolically transported a landscape borne out of dispossession and brutality from the Northeast to the wider Atlantic World as a controllable commercial family product. The name also expressed an aspirational domination in a regional market over which they had little control. The trading post of Oswego had been created to directly counter French competition, but these English efforts also undercut Albany’s fur trade market of which Philip was a major fur trader. But the ship represented Philip’s diversification in slaving where he became a major actor both in the Caribbean and direct African markets.31
Such ships traced the routes other earlier vessels had traveled bearing enslaved Native people southward in the aftermath of brutal wars of dispossession in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Livingstons’ confederation with the South Carolina trading firm Yeomans & Escott was one that connected their bonded world in the Hudson Valley to the misery of captured, brutalized, and exploited African and African-descended people in Charleston and Barbados. The thirteen years that the firm’s trading business was advertised in the South-Carolina Gazette exposes the misery their “profit” was built on. In August 1732, they listed Rum and Madera Wines—most likely sourced from the Livingstons—alongside “a Negro house Wench and two children.”32 Two years later, in 1734 they advertised “a choice parcel of Gold Coast Negroes, just arriv’d.” In the fall of 1736, they listed “a Small Parcel of likely young new Negroes lately imported,” as well as choice “Barbados Rum, Lime-juice & Muscovado Sugar.”33 In 1739 they sold a “plantation belonging to Mr. Lake, on the Ashley-River, within 3 Miles of Charlestown,” replete with “7 Negroes, among which is a very good Sempstress and House Negroes.”34 That same year, an enslaved man named Cato, who was enslaved nearby along the Ashley River, joined by other Kongolese enslaved people mounted an armed response against their enslavement. News of this uprising would be carried on such elite-owned ships, manned in part by African-descended people whose presence would fill New Yorkers with fear.35
On April 11, 1741, a year after he worked to pass a law to reassert a semblance of elite control over the bustling New York marketplaces, Gerardus Stuyvesant, acting in concert with his fellow councilmen passed a resolution requesting that Lieutenant Governor George Clark issue a proclamation offering monetary rewards for any white persons, enslaved person, and free “Negro, Mulatto or Indian” with information on persons of interest related to the series of fires that had broken across the city a month earlier. Clarke’s own residence was completely destroyed, and popular opinion had shifted in support of a wide-ranging conspiracy.36 For the enslaved, an added incentive of freedom was proffered with a cash reparation of twenty-five pounds, given to the bondsperson’s enslaver.37 As an alderman representing the Out Ward, Gerardus hoped to gain information from the population of enslaved and free people who lived near the bouweries.
A little over a month later, on May 30, the executions began with the public burning at the stake of Quack and Cuffee. After the men desperately confessed at the stake with a rowdy crowd pressing in, a dragnet resulted in the arrest of numerous enslaved people. The testimony of two enslaved men—Adam and Braveboy—extracted under coercion, placed much of the “frolic” at sites that would have been very familiar to Gerardus and his Bayard cousins. They mentioned “the new Dutch Church,” the Out Ward’s “fields,” and a “free negroes’ house in Bowery-Lane,” which was located “between Mr. Bayard’s land and Greenwich’s land.” Such sites were places where Black people congregated together to relax, dance, and mingle with one another.38 The court was not interested in investigating these locations—while the Out Ward bouweries were sites of Black community life, they were also claimed land and, as such, were protected by the elites whose property had been wrested from the free Black community. Despite owning a considerable number of human beings, the Stuyvesant and Bayard families maintained their wealth in captive people and none enslaved to them were executed, though one was transported.
Philip Livingston remained detached from the hysteria gripping the city. This silence stood in stark contrast to the involved network of contacts and cousins living in New York: his friend and business partner John Cruger was mayor of the City of New York, his cousin James Livingston was called as part of the grand jury, and the enslaved man of another cousin, Captain Robert Livingston Jr. was implicated (Tom, who was ultimately sentenced to transportation). In a break with the events of 1712, fears of conspiracy did not sweep through his correspondence with family members at either the manor or Clermont in 1741. Instead, his focus was trained toward tending and expanding the Livingstons’ cross-colonial trading connections, and if he harbored fears that those enslaved on Manor Livingston might thwart his designs it left no trace in his letters. Instead, as Craig Wilder asserts, Philip, his wider family, and merchant network invested in the slave trade.39 The biggest crisis that appeared in Philip’s correspondence was the May 9 news that his South Carolina contact, Gabriel Escott, died after having gotten sick in Barbados on a business trip, an event that delayed the sale of the Livingstons’ wine.40 Meanwhile, Philip was obsessed with the ironworks as a retirement project, writing to his son, Robert, during the summer of 1741: “I hope to live more at my Ease and have more time to Enjoy my Brook and find and lay up an Everlasting treasure.”41 Philip held plans to develop the estate into a vision of landed leisure: “I wish you would inquire for Some Timothy Seed & Clover seed I intend to make a fine English Farm at Ankram.”42 Despite his “ease” and vision for a “fine English Farm,” Ancram would develop in the midst of a Hudson Valley riven by tenant uprising and slave resistance. The Livingstons may have claimed the upper Hudson as their domain of mastery where they could pursue diverse economic interests, but slavery remained central to their pursuits.
Factors
The global reach of these families was also underwritten by the forced labor of subjugated family members. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Livingstons sent their grain milled by enslaved workers, iron forged in part by enslaved smiths, and Madeira wine in wooden “pipes” made by Black coopers to global markets. Caesar, Diana’s son, and Isabel’s brother, who had been bequeathed to Philip by Robert Sr. nearly two decades earlier, had been working as a cooper on Manor Livingston. Caesar was a vital member of Philip Livingston’s business empire. For every good listed in Philip and Robert Livingston’s correspondence—for flour, corn, molasses, and rum—Caesar’s labor would have created the wooden containers that stored them. He had learned his trade well, as Philip Livingston grudgingly conceded by noting, “He is a good working fellow.” Caesar had lost much. His family had been scattered across the Northeast. His mother, Diana, did not appear in the list of enslaved people parceled out among the Livingston children, and thus could have died or been sold. His half-sister, Isabel, had lived out her life in Boston and was either sold or had died, given that she too did not appear in Robert’s final will. Caesar’s own white father’s identity remains shrouded in mystery, but could well have been one of the Livingston sons, given the timing of his birth and the fact that Robert Sr. was in Europe at the most likely times of conception.
A few months after the collapse of the Livingstons’ South Carolina contacts, the Oswego netted a shortfall. Philip used the loss as a teachable moment for his adult son, Robert: whom he counseled not to “murmur” and “grumble,” but rather “patiently Submitt” to the will of God. Such pious suffering, Philip hoped, was not without reward, but rather the catalyst for future blessing. He framed Robert’s trading ventures with religious imagery and presented them as a “Just Endeavor for ye future.” In the following paragraphs, he turned to a discussion of Caesar, who either consciously or unconsciously emerged as the very antithesis of submission. He was according to Philip, “discontented,” displaying “wimsecall humors” and acting “quarlesome.”43 These attributes are the very opposite of the sober submission that he wished for Robert to embrace. That he was relying on gossip about Caesar’s actions, admitting “the fellow I hear is discontented” offered him no cognitive dissonance.
Caesar had earlier requested to be “sold out of the Country,” an appeal that could suggest a personal tragedy.44 Caesar had been listed as the father of a little boy named Daniel, whom the Livingstons owned completely. There is no record of his fate. Caesar was also ostracized from the community of Manor Livingston’s enslaved people. Philip noted that “he has been troublesome & quarrelsome with our Negroes.”45 The details behind the strife in the enslaved community are lost, but it was enough that Philip sent Caesar down to New York and counseled that Robert “sell him” or “send him to Madera.” Failing that, he told Robert to “put him on board of any vessel at what you can agree for [several] months.” Robert was clearly in no hurry to comply with any of his father’s suggestions, and Caesar remained with him by the time that his father wrote of the Oswego and his continuing plans for Ancram, as Philip was clearly responding to an earlier letter from Robert arguing for retaining Caesar when he responded: “I can’t advice you to keep ye Negro Ceasar.” Philip had planned to “put out” Caesar “to a Smith” so that he might labor at Ancram, but never entertained allowing Caesar to stay with Robert on a permanent basis: “Try this fellow, how he may prove and then Send him after or sell him.”46
Philip posited “Madera” as the location for the “discontented” Caesar, one that would have taken him off the coast of Africa and far from all he had known and loved. It was where several of those enslaved accused of conspiracy and sentenced to transportation had been sent.47 Madeira was organized around one of the oldest, brutal sugar slave regimes in the Atlantic world. But Philip’s desire to send Caesar to the island—and the indication that it was offered to Caesar as a choice—hints at a possible familial relationship between the two men. Philip and his by-then-widowed elder sister Margaret imported wine from Madeira—the only Albany merchant family to do so—and arguably he had plans to install Caesar as a kind of contact on the island.48 Philip trained each of his sons with specialized skills so that they might serve as family contacts in a truly Atlantic empire.49 If Caesar had requested to be “sold out of the Country,” then going to sea would allow him to get away from the suffocating reality of Manor Livingston, the place where he spent his childhood but had lost his family. He could have already spent some of his time as a cooper on Philip’s local ships because Philip advised Robert, Jr. to essentially hire him out by putting “him on board of any vessel at what you can agree for [per] month.” Caesar’s future was debated, like that of Andries nearly a century earlier, by two people with power to change his circumstances completely. His protest was juxtaposed against the religiously infused business identity Philip hoped to instill in Robert Jr. The banishment Philip planned for Caesar mirrored the exile Robert had imposed on Isabel, and Caesar’s son would, like his father before him, feel the pain of lost family.
The shift to such diversification was regional, mirrored by the Schuylers in New Jersey and the Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island. Philip Sr. likewise envisioned a labor organization at Ancram that used enslaved laborers: “I want to buy two negro boys of 16 or 18 years to put to a Smith or a hammerman.”50 Such a smith would have worked in sweltering conditions, in front of a blast furnace, manipulating molten metal, the purest of which was poured into castings with the less pure made into iron bars, known as “pig iron.”51 These bars would be transferred to the second forge at Ancram. The hammerman at this second forge would then be tasked with refining the pig iron bars.52 These men would have spent hot days marked by the sound of the percussive hammer powered by the Livingstons’ watermill, blending with the sounds of their own efforts to work the melted pig iron bars—called the bloom—into iron quality enough to fashion the Livingstons’ export products.53 The Livingstons’ laborers would have kept a gang-style yearlong schedule that closely hewed to the type of labor arrangements found on a Chesapeake plantation devoted to staple crop agriculture.54 Arguably Philip hoped that among the African captives that his slave ships brought back were some that brought knowledge of metalworking, though such a person would have also received instruction from white forge men as well.55 Skilled African and African-descended artisans, who had forged and fashioned the gated mansions of Charleston, had been brought along with Barbadian planters to South Carolina. Such considerations likely guided Philip’s investment in slave-trading ventures.56
White supervision was the norm when it came to enslaved ironworks. Just as tenants on the Livingstons’ estate were also enslavers, ironworkers could have had their own enslaved people who worked alongside them at Ancram. The specter of violence would also rule the lives of enslaved workers on ironworks across the region. The iron that they manipulated was shaped into shackles, manacles, and other devices designed to torture the enslaved into submission.57 The enslaved presence could also tip the balance of power toward business owners in regards to white labor. Iron entrepreneurs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania used enslaved labor to solve the labor shortage, thus creating a surplus within the free labor population, which weakened white workers’ bargaining position.58 Some of the iron produced on mid-Atlantic and southern forges was destined to construct slaving vessels owned by Northeastern elites.
The Livingston-owned Rhode Island departed alongside the Storke in November 1748 bound for the Gold Coast and their missions were entwined from the start.59 Although the Livingstons, like most Northeastern merchants who invested in the slave trade, focused on lighter vessels to cut the time across the Atlantic, they settled on a strategy of clustering such slave voyages together to mitigate the risk. The Rhode Island’s name conjured the family’s dense political and personal connections to the colony. In 1732, a decade before the Rhode Island departed from New York bound for Africa, Philip Livingston Sr. presided as president over a committee of twenty commissioners drawn from New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Nova Scotia.60 His sons Philip and Henry had slave-trading deals with the Channing and Lopez families of Rhode Island.61 Perhaps the ship’s name had been meant as an enduring legacy to Philip’s own political accomplishments in negotiating the colony’s southern and eastern boundary lines, or an homage to the family’s Rhode Island slaving associates, one that hoped for continued collaboration. Family, slavery, and diversified interests emerged as a regional trend that was part of claiming the land and expanding a newly generic elite power that was intended to be legible far beyond the Northeast. Although situated by later scholars as provincial elites, these Northeastern families of traders had global ambitions of mastery.
Global Identities
Northeastern slaveholders’ households, warehouses, wharves, and slave ships were never distinct spaces; they served as nodes of connection and expanding familial identity that superseded imperial allegiances. Before the slave ships returned to New York, Philip Sr. would be dead, but not before ensuring a smooth transition of his lands and operations, which would be doled out to his sons whom he had meticulously placed across the Atlantic world. In 1748 Philip left “unto my said son Robert Livingston Junior his Executors and assigns my Negro Man Tom and his wife Mary and my Negro Man Benjamin, Twelve horses Six Gildons, six mares, six melch Cows, Six Sheep, Six hoggs my Chariot and Gold watch.” He further gave his eldest son Robert the remainder of my “slaves,” and to his wife, Catrine, bequeathed “the half of my silver plate, three negro men & three negro women.”62
While Tom, Mary, and Benjamin, were named in Philip’s will, other people held captive by the Livingstons appear fleetingly in his personal correspondence. John Livingston (Philip’s third son), described the gathering of his parents, cousins, and extended family on the Manor, a portrait that included a family moment between an enslaved couple in the postscript: “People Came her[e] to call Jack our Jenna’s husband.”63 Benjamin drove Philip’s sled between Albany and Kingston and, on one occasion, was sent to “accompany” Philip’s daughters after their visit to the community.64 Of those named in Philip’s will, Tom would appear in the family correspondence with some degree of frequency. At a time when the family turned to slave trading, their correspondence also evidences the indispensability of Tom’s function within the family in the wake of Philip’s death. On March 6, 1749, overseer Petrus de Witt closed his favorable report to Robert Jr. concerning the iron-works: “I now send Gysbert Voogterhoneth & Thom the Negroe in order to fetch the Boate, about which I have wrote Mr. Peter at Lange. The Grist Mill begun to Grind last fryday.”65 Tom would navigate a world of ever-proliferating Livingston-owned slave ships that would have been different in degree but not character to the one inhabited by Ben and Dego a generation earlier.
By the summer, the Rhode Island had returned to New York, full of sick and dying captives and one-half of the enslaved people and goods traded by the Storke on the Guinea Coast. On July 29, 1749, Robert Jr. wrote to Petrus DeWitt of the voyage. The Rhode Island had disembarked the African coast with 120 captive people aboard, a number that could have only been accommodated by the tight packing method. Robert Jr. noted that the additional days at sea caused the deaths of thirty-seven peoples whose corpses were thrown unceremoniously into the sea, or “bumped.” One more person did indeed die of the voyage, which brought the death toll up to thirty-eight human beings.66 Their deaths moved Robert Jr. only as financial loss.67 It was one that Robert Jr. was determined to turn to his favor and make “a savering voyage” out of one that had seemed to him at the start, “golden.” Ignoring the weak condition of those survivors who made it to New York, Robert Jr. was eager to have his overseer inspect and price the arrivals. While he had planned to purchase several people for the manor, forwarding Petrus cash for that reason, he also was pricing them to sell in the northern New York Market. He had his eye on one particular captive whom he described as “a negro man I judge not to be above 20 years of age,” whom he priced as “worth £56” and instructed Petrus not to sell him for “under £54.”68
Of those remaining that were not sent up the Hudson to Manor Livingston, they were put up for sale, and advertised in the July 31, 1749, edition of the New York Evening Post: “A Fine Parcel of Men, Women, Boys and Girls Slaves, imported direct from Africa, to be sold on board the sloop Rhode Island, at Mr. Scuyler’s Wharf.”69 While the fates of those captives lay off the weathered pages of the Livingston Family Papers, Tom’s life appears in fragments and passing references. On his trips up and down the river, Tom was given cash to purchase provisions and might have also ferried the captive peoples up the Hudson. On June 12, 1751, Peter van Brugh opened his letter to his older brother Robert Jr. noting, “Your Letter by Tom I have rec’d,” and closed it with a supplies list given for the journey, including two line items amounting to six dollars and labeled “Cash to Tom for Provisions”70
The New York traversed by Tom was much different than the city experienced by the Livingston brothers. When the Livingston-owned Rhode Island arrived in New York, two years after its first African voyage, on Monday, May 27, 1751, it was the day after Pentecost. In its holds were sixty-nine enslaved men, women, and children. Tom left an upper Hudson abuzz with Pinksterday celebrations, to make the journey down to New York. The traditionally Dutch holiday had become an important cultural event in the Black community, though as Andrea Mosterman notes, this was also a time of surveillance.71 When Tom reached the city, carrying a letter meant for Peter van Brugh, did he pass the Rhode Island or witness the men, women and children who had survived the voyage only to be sold? The specter of the trading vessel shaped and determined the lives of enslaved people, existing as a conjured threat, or a place of work. It functioned within the entangled lives of those enslaved by the Livingstons to shape the terms by which they worked, struggled, lived, and died.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, white Livingston children settled as slaveholders in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. By mid-century, Livingston heirs migrated southward but still maintained their ties to the Northeastern regional elite. Henry, the youngest of Philip’s sons, relocated to Jamaica and conducted the family’s trade from the island, eventually becoming a plantation owner on a large scale. He maintained friendships with slaveholding peers across the Atlantic world. On February 26, 1752, his brother, Peter van Brugh, noted to Robert that their sloop the Diamond “coming from Jamaica bound for South Carolina in the windward passage near Cap Nicholas she had above £3,000 Jamaica money on board £200 of which was shipped by Brother Henry for his Carolina friends.”72 While Henry created a Caribbean life, he—like Balthazar Stuyvesant had nearly a century earlier—became an Atlantic arm of his Northeastern family’s slave-holding dynasty. By the time of his relocation, such Atlantic identities were commonplace. But Henry would ultimately attempt to expand his family’s aspirations beyond the Atlantic world.
On October 24, 1753, Henry faced John Channing and Walter Chaloner in a Jamaican court. The two men accused Henry of shorting them “£2,470 current money of Jamaica” in the form of the lives of “80 Negroes” who had never arrived to be “disposed of at the Island of Jamaica.”73 Where did these enslaved people end up? Had they been promised and then sold in New York? Had some of their number been part of those enslaved on the Livingstons’ many holdings in the Hudson Valley and in New York City? Were some included in that number as a punishment for running away? Henry spent most of his adult life away from New York in Jamaica, but he would be far from the only Livingston to have active ties to the island. In 1750 and 1751, Henry’s brother, Philip, was the principal investor in the slave ship Stork, which landed in St. John, Antigua, after leaving Anomabu on Africa’s Gold Coast. A month before, Henry stood in court in Jamaica to answer for shorting his Newport business partners the lives of eighty people. On July 13, 1754, Henry angrily wrote to the Rhode Island owners of the slave ship Elizabeth, which had arrived in Kingston on July 7, characterizing the sixty-two enslaved people who arrived—fifteen men, nineteen women, seventeenth boys, and eleven girls—as “no better than refuse.”74 The majority of the ship’s inhabitants had been sold to Dias and Gutteres, enslavers in Kingston, Jamaica.
Henry’s ambitions for a global family presence went far beyond the older markets plied by his grandfather and colonials like the Stuyvesants. By 1764, Henry was trading in Aleppo, Syria, in an attempt to expand his sugar trade ventures from the Caribbean to the Middle East.75 That same decade he purchased a plantation in Jamaica along with his nephew, Philip Philip which he named Aleppo. Upon settling in Jamaica, Philip Philip married Sarah Johnson, who had been born in St. Andrew’s parish on the island, and by early 1770, he acquired the Friendship sugar estate and another he named Albany Estate in Saint Mary’s upon the death of its previous owner George Paplay Esquire.76 At his death, Henry Livingston had settled in the Parish of St. Mary’s, Jamaica, and was a large slaveholder with landholdings in New York and Jamaica. In his will dated 5 February 1772, Henry left all his “lands and tenements, and all real and personal property in the Province of New York” to his brother, John Livingston, naming him executor. He left a “silver punch bowl,” all “books and real and personal estate in Jamaica” to his nephews, the sons of John Livingston. Henry’s last wishes also uncovers the extensive network of Livingstons living throughout the empire, including “John Livingston, son of Captain Gilbert Livingston, of Bermuda and Captain Muscor Livingston of Great Britain, mariner.”77
FIGURE 11. Names of enslaved people listed on Friendship Indenture.
By the middle decades of the eighteenth century the Stuyvesants would grow in wealth and power, expanding their regional influence through ties of enslavement. By midcentury, Petrus, Gerardus Stuyvesant’s eldest, wed Margaret “Peggy” Livingston, and lived in an imposing hilltop Georgian mansion on Eighth Street. His business ties with his Bayard and Livingston cousins would include tracking down runaways and managing the sale of estates advertised with “negroes” and “negro houses,” even throughout the Revolutionary War. Nicholas William, Gerardus’s youngest son, established himself as a player in regional trade and educated circles. Possessing a degree from Kings College (now Columbia University), he operated a trading shop in the city, was a Trinity church vestryman and a mentee of King’s College president Samuel Johnson.78 He had spent time in Connecticut and maintained contacts in New England. He lived in a house in the city and was attended by a pregnant enslaved woman named Sarah whose family resided in Connecticut.79 Like his great grandfather before him, he traded the lives of enslaved human beings to cement ties of friendship, networking with New England families such as the Willets that his ancestor Petrus had pioneered, and expanding his own ambitions. In 1765 he advertised a “negro wench and child” to be sold at his shop on King Street, along with a few Pieces of Plate.80
His cousins were united in similar purpose. In 1752 William Bayard posted an advertisement in search of a man demeaningly named Crook, who he described as “a likely Mulatto fellow” and estimated was twenty-two years old. William noted that he “pretends to be free” but wore signs of his subjugation including the detail that he was barefoot.”81 William’s advertisement was meant to appeal to his network of contacts, and the entire region teamed with an interconnected kin network united in singular purpose from Maine to the southern banks of the Delaware. Yet, one practice that they had decidedly abandoned since the days of New Amsterdam was manumission of any sort. Instead, by the mid-eighteenth century, such elites were committed to closing off avenues of emancipation.
A month before William Bayard posted his advertisement, Philip Livingston was called on to witness the manumission of an enslaved woman named Ann. Her two hundred pound bond was paid, not by the wealthiest members of New York society, but by tradespeople—John Vanduersen, a cordwain, and Peter Burger, a cooper—in order to enact the manumission given to Ann as a stipulation of the will of Eve Surlock, a New York City tavern keeper. The exorbitant price was levied in accordance with the Conspiracy Act, which was explicitly laid out in Ann’s manumission papers. The document promised that despite the payment of the extraordinary fine, if Ann did not “live or Reside according to the tenor Effect and true Intent and meaning of the said Recited act then the above bond or Recognizance shall be Void and of none Effect,” a condition that linked her moment of freedom to Mayken van Angola nearly a century before. But while Petrus had wanted to keep Mayken’s labor for himself, even as he agreed to emancipate her after decades of service, Philip and his ilk had no interest in profiting from Ann’s continued bonded labor—they were there to enforce a race-based control that formed the foundation of their efforts to expand in a global market that incorporated slavery.