Introduction
A Spatial Analysis of Slavery in Dutch New York
When studying slavery, it is important to consider the spaces of enslavement. I first came to this realization when I visited the Maison des Esclaves, or house of slaves, at Gorée Island, Senegal (see Figure 0.1). As I entered the space where enslaved men were once held, I instantly felt physically ill, a reaction that completely took me by surprise. At that point, I had studied the history of slavery for years. Yet, that moment when I stood where these men were once held affected me in ways no primary source document or scholarly book had. As I imagined the sounds, sights, and smells of the space, that holding cell—its small size, thick walls, and only a loophole that provided some light and fresh air—told a story of enslavement and human trafficking that is rarely captured in written sources.1
It was this experience that led me to consider the spaces enslaved people in Dutch New York inhabited and frequented more carefully. What did the cold, damp cellar Sojourner Truth grew up in look, feel, sound, and smell like? How did Mary, Hannah, Mell, Cate, Harry, Hechter, Powel, and the children Syrus, Jan, Jacob, Hannah, and Poll find rest in the small, dark garrets that served as their living quarters? Where in the Kingston church would Elisabeth have worshipped after she became a full member in 1750? Was she sitting with her enslavers, or was she restricted to back benches where she could barely hear the minister preach? How had Dean, Bet, and Pompey been able to circumvent Albany’s watchmen when they made their way to Peter Gansevoort’s house and set it on fire with the hot coals they were carrying? These were some of the questions that guided the research for this book.
FIGURE 0.1. Maison des Esclaves, Gorée Island, Senegal. Picture by author.
I began to visit these spaces of enslavement in New York homes, churches, and towns. Instead of entering historic homes from the front, I would enter from the back as its enslaved inhabitants would have. I would walk through the cellars where many of them lived and worked, and I would visit the garret spaces that regularly served as their sleeping quarters. Instead of using the main stairwell, I would walk down the steep and narrow service stairs when possible. Thanks to Joseph McGill’s Slave Dwelling Project, I was able to spend the night in one of the garret spaces at Stenton Hall, a Georgian-style home that much resembled eighteenth-century mansions that belonged to Dutch New York elite families.2 In the churches I visited, I would look for the benches that were reserved for Black worshippers in an effort to gain some perspective of what they would have been able to hear and see from those seats. Doing so helped me think about the history of slavery in early New York’s Dutch communities in new ways.3
Thus, spatial analysis became the core form of research for this study. As several scholars have noted before me, spatial control proved a central element of enslavement.4 Enslavers sought to limit and control enslaved people’s movements and activities through, among others, systems of monitoring, enclosing, segregating, and patrolling. Enslaved people’s resistance to their bondage included their efforts to escape or modify these spaces and expand their mobility and activities within them. In so doing, enslaved people developed “alternative ways of knowing” and navigating these spaces.5 This book examines such spaces of enslavement in Dutch New York. On the one hand, it looks at the ways in which Dutch Americans used their dominance over these spaces to control and surveil enslaved people. On the other hand, it shows the ways in which enslaved New Yorkers resisted such control. Not surprisingly, these spaces of enslavement meant significantly different things to the free and enslaved people who inhabited or frequented them.
The subject of slavery in Dutch New York has gained significant scholarly attention over the past few decades. Several studies have examined the particularities of slavery in seventeenth-century New Netherland—the Dutch colony in present-day New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and parts of Connecticut and Pennsylvania—where several enslaved Africans accessed the court, owned property, and even obtained (conditional) freedom. The subject of slavery and the Dutch Reformed Church has also received significant scholarly attention. Historians like Graham Russell Hodges and Patricia Bonomi have examined enslaved New Yorkers’ participation in this denomination. Leslie Harris, Thelma Wills Foote, Craig Steven Wilder, Joyce Goodfriend, and Shane White, among others, have examined slavery and the lives of the enslaved in New York City, and in recent decades, a growing number of scholars, including A. J. Williams-Myers and Michael Groth, have investigated slavery in the Hudson Valley. These studies are part of growing scholarly and popular interest in the history of slavery in the northern colonies and states.6
Through the use of spatial analysis, this book adds a new perspective to the growing number of studies that examine slavery in New York. This book argues that sustaining a system of enslavement necessitates strategic spatial control. Thus, as reliance on enslaved labor expanded in the region, Dutch Americans increasingly used their dominance over spaces to control, contain, segregate, and monitor the men, women, and children they enslaved within them. In fact, it was in part due to an initial lack of such spatial control that enslaved men and women were able to access the courts, church, and public spaces during the Dutch colonial period.7 Whereas the absence of spatial control in the seventeenth-century Dutch colony enabled enslaved people to expand their participation in the community and eventually challenge their enslavement, they no longer had such opportunities when Dutch American slaveholders developed various strategies to control, regulate, and segregate spaces. Indeed, as this study shows, such systems of spatial control and regulation, which were common in plantation societies, also existed in places like New York.
The Dutch West India Company first brought enslaved laborers to its North American colony New Netherland only a few years after the first Europeans settled there in 1624.8 The company used the labor of these enslaved men and women to cultivate the land and build an infrastructure. During these early years of colonization, most enslaved people were considered company property, but as the colony and its European settler population expanded, more of these individuals purchased enslaved workers. Indeed, over the course of the seventeenth century, a growing number of individuals held people in bondage. This trend continued into the eighteenth century, long after the English takeover of the colony in 1664. In the region the English named New York, this expansion did not end until the late eighteenth century. With the advent of the state’s first gradual abolition legislation that passed in 1799, slavery finally came to an end in 1827.9
During the two centuries of slavery in the region that would eventually become New York State, this system of human bondage affected every part of society. Enslaved people could be found in all parts of the region, and their labor was used for a wide variety of tasks. As Anne-Claire Merlin-Faucquez’s research demonstrates, free New Yorkers from all ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic ranks participated in and benefited from slavery.10 Nevertheless, the larger implications of slavery in New York society have often been underestimated, in part because many free New Yorkers never enslaved people and slaveholding families commonly held fewer than five people in bondage. Even the more prosperous families rarely enslaved more than twenty people. Moreover, New York never had a Black majority or a successful plantation system that relied on the labor of enslaved men and women. But when considering the mechanisms necessary to hold people in bondage, it becomes clear that these nevertheless permeated every part of society.
This study began as an analysis of slavery in Dutch New York, an effort to uncover how slavery and the lives of the enslaved might have been different in these communities. Over time, however, it became increasingly clear that when it concerned the control of spaces to sustain or strengthen the system of slavery and limit resistance, New York’s Dutch communities much resembled others. Sure, enslaved and free people in these communities often spoke the Dutch language, worshipped in Dutch Reformed churches, and ate Dutch American foods, but Dutch American enslavers’ participation in human bondage, their slaveholding practices, justifications, and regulations were really not that different from enslavers elsewhere in the Americas. Similarly, the ways in which enslaved New Yorkers resisted their enslavement resembled resistance in other areas.11
This book focuses on the interactions between Dutch American slaveholders and enslaved New Yorkers, but of course not all Dutch Americans held people in bondage, and the social stratification of New York society proved more complex than a simple dichotomy of enslaved and enslaver. Poor and often indentured white men and women regularly lived in close proximity to enslaved people, and they interacted with each other in the region’s streets, taverns, and marketplaces. Various scholars have researched these complex social dynamics in early American communities.12 This study does not deny that these interactions occurred or that such social stratification existed but instead focuses on the relationships between enslavers and the people they enslaved, as well as the ways in which the system of slavery impacted society at large.
Slavery in Dutch New York
Research for this study centers on New York’s Dutch communities. For the Dutch colonial period, this study draws on sources pertaining to the entire colony of New Netherland but with an emphasis on the town of New Amsterdam, the colony’s main settlement in the most southern part of Manhattan. For the period from the English takeover of the region in 1664 to the abolition of slavery in the 1820s, research focuses on Kings, Ulster, and Albany Counties, which were largely Dutch American strongholds. When useful it includes evidence from other parts of the region, especially New York City.
This study identifies people as Dutch American if these European descendants were part of Dutch American communities, spoke the Dutch language, were members in the Dutch Reformed Church, or identified themselves as Dutch American. Many of these men and women descended from colonists who were ethnically Dutch, but some of their ancestors originated elsewhere in Europe and traveled to America by way of the Netherlands, or they became Dutch American through intermarriage. Consequently, this study recognizes Dutch American predominantly as a cultural identity.
Although the region first came under English control in 1664, Dutch American identity and culture survived for many generations. In some predominantly Dutch American communities, such as Kingston and Flatbush, Dutch Americans continued to speak the Dutch language until at least the early nineteenth century. Dutch Reformed churches generally held services in the Dutch language until they began to integrate English services in the late eighteenth century, and Dutch Americans took steps to ensure that their children could speak and read Dutch.13 Of course, their culture was not static. Political, religious, social, and economic changes, such as the Revolution and Awakenings, significantly impacted Dutch American communities. Yet, their American identity did not replace their deep cultural Dutch roots.
The region’s enslaved men, women, and children came from diverse backgrounds. The first generation of enslaved Africans who were brought to New Netherland predominantly originated in West Central Africa and parts of the Iberian Atlantic. They were what Ira Berlin called “Atlantic Creoles”: they had a multicultural, creolized, and often cosmopolitan background.14 From 1665 through 1775, more than seven thousand African captives disembarked in New York on board at least seventy-two ships, several of which were owned by Dutch descendants.15 Many of these enslaved men, women, and children were forced to board these ships in Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and the Senegambia. In fact, from 1665 through 1704 all recorded ships that imported African captives into New York directly from Africa, carrying over one thousand men, women, and children, originated in Madagascar.16 In the eighteenth century, at least seven slave ships transported more than five hundred enslaved people from the Gold Coast and more than seven ships brought over seven hundred captives from the Senegambia area. Importantly, these estimates provide very little information on the total number of enslaved men, women, and children who originated in these regions. For over half of the known ships that brought African captives to New York, no clear place of origin has been identified.17
In addition to the enslaved people who were shipped to New York directly from the African continent, many enslaved people arrived on board ships that originated elsewhere in the Americas.18 Some of them would have been born in the Americas, while others would have been brought from Africa to New York via mainly English colonies in the Caribbean. From 1701 through 1770, over a third of all enslaved people who arrived in New York did so via the Caribbean.19
New York’s enslaved population also included a significant number of Native Americans. In fact, frequent references to enslaved Native Americans in colonial legislation suggest that their enslavement was not uncommon in the region, even though a 1679 law prohibited the bondage of New York’s indigenous populations and granted freedom to Native Americans who had been brought into the colony from other parts of the Americas after they had been there for six months.20 Thus, New York’s enslaved population consisted of an ethnically diverse mix of men, women, and children of African and Native American descent.
Spaces of Enslavement
As the words slavery, bondage, and captivity indicate, restricting people’s mobility proves integral to enslavement. Historian Stephanie Camp rightly points out that in slavery, “space mattered: places, boundaries, and movement were central to how slavery was organized and to how it was resisted.”21 Thus, spatial analysis can be used to better understand how enslavers used space to control the people they enslaved, and it can reveal how enslaved people resisted in these spaces. In fact, spatial analysis has proven an especially useful method to reconstruct the histories of those people whose voices are rarely found in the archives. Their stories can emerge more clearly from an analysis of the spaces they inhabited.
In a 1967 lecture titled “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Foucault suggested that “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.”22 Indeed, since his now famous speech, spatial analysis has made a significant impact in various disciplines, including history. In fact, literary scholar Robert Tally noted in 2013 that “a recognizable spatial turn in literary and cultural studies (if not the arts and sciences more generally) has taken place.”23 This spatial turn has affected multiple disciplines and includes wide-ranging approaches of analyzing space or interactions within spaces, what Tally identifies as the “multilayered and interdisciplinary debates concerning space, place, and mapping.”24
This spatial turn has been influenced greatly by the work of various twentieth-century scholars who explored the importance of spatial analysis in the humanities and social sciences. Henri Lefebvre introduced the concept of “social space.” In his book The Production of Space, he argues that it is important to consider what occupies a space, because “space considered in isolation is an empty abstraction.”25 Michel Certeau explores the relationship between space and place in his now famous work The Practice of Everyday Life when he writes, “Space is a practiced place.” As an example, he explains that the street, which is “geometrically defined by urban planning[,] is transformed into a space by walkers.”26 In other words, people give meaning to places and transform them from purely mathematical, natural, or physical into social spaces.
Many of these early theorists of space and spatial analysis explored the connections between power and space. Foucault identifies cartographies of power in which he examines how space and power intersect; in fact, Foucault suggests that consideration of space should be central to an analysis of power.27 Similarly, Lefebvre argues that no space remains untouched by the “exercise of hegemony.” Yet, although he acknowledges that space serves as a “means to control,” such control is never complete.28 Spatial analysis of slavery similarly reveals that control and power largely determined the ways in which enslaved and free people organized, navigated, and experienced these spaces.
Not surprisingly, historians of slavery have increasingly turned to spatial analysis. In fact, Foucault’s writings on heterotopic spaces and the panopticon model of surveillance, first introduced by Jeremy Bentham, proved influential in slavery studies.29 Over the past decades, developments in mapping, cartography, and Geographic Information System (GIS) have further encouraged research that looks at slavery from a spatial perspective. For instance, in her 2005 study of the 1741 New York City conspiracy, Jill Lepore uses GIS to map the city, its enslavers, their wealth, and where the fires that led to fears of an impending slave revolt occurred. In doing so, she succeeded in telling a more nuanced story of what happened during those months. More recently, Vincent Brown mapped the different stages of Tacky’s 1760 revolt through which he was able to show “that the insurrection was in fact a well-planned affair that posed a genuine strategic threat” to the British.30 In her study of unfree labor in New Orleans, Rashauna Johnson uses mapping to trace the cultural and social lives of enslaved New Orleanians.31
The fields of archeology, architectural history, and women and gender studies have played a similarly important role in advancing spatial analysis as a way to obtain new insights into the history of slavery in the Americas. In archeology, consideration of space and spatial organization naturally plays a role, and so it is not surprising that archeologists James Delle, Theresa Singleton, and Terence Epperson, among others, have used spatial analysis to interpret archeological findings. Through their analysis of artifacts, their placements, and plantation layouts, they have been able to provide important new perspectives of slavery and the lives of enslaved peoples.32 Similarly, architectural historians like Dell Upton have used analysis of the built environment to gain a better understanding of the role architecture played in efforts to control enslaved people. Yet, some of the most innovative scholarship on slavery and space has been conducted by scholars in women and gender studies, a field that has long considered the important connections between gender and space. Katherine McKittrick, Marisa Fuentes, and Stephanie Camp have all used spatial analysis to reconstruct the histories of enslaved women.33
Several scholars have addressed shifting or conflicting meanings of certain spaces. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon demonstrates in her study of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography how the meaning of certain spaces changed depending on Equiano’s circumstances. For instance, he considered the ship on which he was transported across the Atlantic as a young enslaved man as a “hollow place,” a space of pain and suffering. Yet, when he later worked as a sailor, the ships he sailed on became spaces of meaning to him.34 Ann Stoler’s work further shows how people might experience the same spaces or interactions very differently. In her book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, she demonstrates that Dutch colonists often remembered interactions with the Indonesian men and women who worked in their homes very differently from how these Indonesians remembered them: “Whereas the Dutch invocation of family ties conjured an enclosed realm of cozy intimacy, former servants who spoke of being treated like family evoked their stance of respectful fear and deference.”35 Enslaved men, women, and children in Dutch New York likely experienced such intimate interactions similarly dissimilar.
The painting of a Van Rensselaer child with an enslaved boy perfectly captures how enslaved and free Dutch Americans might have occupied the same spaces, yet their circumstances and thus experiences in them proved distinct (see Figure 0.2). The Van Rensselaer family had the artist, thought to be John Heaton, portray this member of their family with the intent to have his image saved for posterity. Thus, the young boy looks proud and prosperous, dressed in a high-quality and colorful dress. The color of his orange dress also appears in the sky, the mountain, and the sleeve of an enslaved boy who is placed behind him, as if to suggest that all of this belongs to him. The enslaved boy is wearing dark clothes and almost becomes invisible, like a shadow on a dark background. In fact, a shadow of the Van Rensselaer child on this boy signals that he stands in the shadow of this child. Clearly, the enslaved child is depicted here as a symbol of the Van Rensselaer family’s wealth and status. Although these children are placed within the same space, it is evident that their roles and experiences there were vastly different.36
As the above discussion illustrates, spatial analysis encompasses a wide variety of methods and interpretations. For instance, archeologists will use the location of an artifact to help reconstruct its use and meaning, literary scholars might use narrative cartography in their analysis of a novel or autobiography, and anthropologists will consider what a space means to the people they study. Some of these methods are predominantly qualitative, whereas others are largely quantitative. The analysis in this book combines such qualitative methods to reconstruct the history of slavery and the lives of the enslaved in Dutch New York. This study uses analysis of the built environment to see how people related to these spaces and modified them, the location of places and people and how that influenced their experiences, and the meaning of spaces for the free and enslaved people who inhabited and frequented them.
FIGURE 0.2. Child of the Van Rensselaer Family and Servant. Attributed to John Heaton. Albany, NY, c. 1730. Current repository: Ms. and Mr. Rockefeller.
The spatial analysis at the heart of this study shows the important ways in which control over or regulation of spaces changed over time. Whereas very little spatial regulation of enslaved people existed in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, such control in these spaces became increasingly important to sustaining slavery in the region now called New York. Because enslaved people in New Netherland encountered few restrictions on their access to, among others, the public space, church, and court, they were able to participate in these spaces in ways that would become increasingly challenging over the course of the long eighteenth century. A consideration of geography further shows that close proximity to the various institutions facilitated participation in these spaces in ways that were unattainable to enslaved men and women who lived in more remote parts of the colony. Because enslaved people had only limited mobility, space and geography mattered.
Such spatial analysis also demonstrates that enslaved people in these Dutch communities resisted their bondage daily. They circumvented systems of patrol and surveillance, and they regularly pushed the limits of their permitted mobility. They modified the spaces they inhabited, and they challenged restrictions on their religious and cultural practices. When keeping the spaces they inhabited and frequented in mind, it becomes evident that they created alternative ways of knowing and navigating these spaces. These enslaved men and women knew how to avoid being caught by watchmen who patrolled the streets, and they understood when and how they would be able to escape their enslaver’s surveillance to participate in prohibited activities. Stephanie Camp has termed such resistance “rival geographies,” alternative geographies created by enslaved people in which they resisted their enslavers’ control over their movements and activities.37
This book centers on various spaces of enslavement in Dutch New York. The first two chapters focus on the Dutch colonial period. Chapter 1 explores the importance of enslaved laborers in Dutch efforts to settle the colonial space—the region they called New Netherland. Chapter 2 examines how some of the company’s enslaved laborers took advantage of the lack of spatial control in the Dutch colony and their close proximity to each other and several important institutions. This chapter argues that because these enslaved men and women were able to access, among others, the court and church, they were able to advance their social standing.
Chapters 3 through 5 each analyze a separate space of enslavement during the long eighteenth century: the public space, the home, and the church. Chapter 3 shows that as slavery expanded in the eighteenth century, authorities increasingly restricted enslaved people’s activities and movements in New York’s public spaces. This chapter also explores how enslavers utilized the celebration of Pinkster, the Dutch version of Pentecost or Whitsuntide, to support the system of enslavement. Yet such control was never complete, and enslaved people developed endless ways to escape or circumvent it, thus creating geographies of resistance. Chapter 4 demonstrates that over the course of the eighteenth century, Dutch American architecture began to include a more intentional ordering of domestic spaces to house enslaved men, women, and children and their labor in these homes. It further investigates the rival geographies enslaved people created in these spaces, and it explores the dual nature of these homes, as these buildings had very different meanings to their free and enslaved inhabitants. Chapter 5 turns to the region’s Dutch Reformed churches. It shows that these churches and membership in them became tools of enforcing social power in these communities, which proved crucial in sustaining slavery. This chapter also demonstrates that enslaved people created alternative ways to continue religious worship when excluded from or segregated within these churches.
In all, this study shows how considerations of geography and space can contribute to our understanding of slavery. Such analysis requires an interdisciplinary approach, but this work also relies on a wide array of archival sources, from account books to church records, located in multiple archives across the United States and The Netherlands. Importantly, however, these archives rarely hold records that were produced by the enslaved people themselves.38 Consequently, historians who rely on the archives often struggle to piece together the history of slavery and the lives of enslaved women, children, and men. Through its interdisciplinary approach and spatial analysis, this book is able to tell a more complex history of enslavement in Dutch New York.