Identity
Navigating Racial Expectations to Escape Slavery (1750s–60s)
When a group of men escaped from Monmouth County, New Jersey, during the early summer of 1734, they set out together in a canoe, traversing the expanse of water that serves as the imaginary boundary between the mid-Atlantic and New England. Their lives each held separate and entwined geographies and genealogies, and their enslaver attempted to read their intentions like a map to aid in their capture. On June 24, 1734, Judith Vincent ran a runaway slave advertisement in the New-York Gazette that presented a portrait of three confederates with varied skills, a violin, and a canoe.1
Although the three surely pulled the oars together away from New Jersey across the sound bound for “Connecticut or Rhode Island,” Judith had her sights trained on only one, “an Indian Man named Stoffels.” He had a command of English and in his four decades on earth, had mastered a diverse set of skills, serving as a “House Carpenter, a Copper, a Wheelwright” and was even “a good Butcher.” She offered to pay “forty shillings” for his capture and return in addition to “all reasonable charges.” As to the others, she offered the barest of details. One of them was a musician who “plays upon the violin” and brought his instrument with him during the flight. The skills of the other remained undetailed in the advertisement, their names, and identities erased in favor of generic racial monikers “one being half Indian and half Negro and the other a Mulatto.” Who they were is lost to time, but they certainly knew the route or the sea. They also had some familiarity with one another. The intimacies of their lives were deemed unimportant to their pursuer who intended only to track them down.
Uncovering networks that were by necessity either intended to be hidden or were not privileged in a historical record designed by those with vested interests to undermine such confederacies is a difficult endeavor.2 Neverthe less, scholarly attempts at such reconstruction serve to uncover—however contingent—the lives of people discoverable only in such fragments. Struggling with recalcitrant sources is not only the hallmark of studies about the lives of the enslaved: women, the poor, children, and marginalized likewise present difficulties to any reconstruction of a past whose contours are reliant on available sources. Recently works have begun to question notions like what it meant to escape to “freedom” and the values that determined the lives and desires of eighteenth-century actors.3 The multicultural social world of those enslaved within Northeastern family networks necessitates a reimagining of not only the social expectations of slavery but the shifting cultural experiences of the enslaved.
Enslaved people maintained a vast network of associations that created a geographical map of the broader region that crossed colonial boundaries. Scholars most frequently emphasize the disconnections of enslavement in the Northeast, but the region was knit together by connections held between the enslaved. Such avenues of cross-colonial networking within the enslaved community bore fruit: supporting freedom cases, regional flights away from slavery, and by creating identities that challenged the power of elite hegemonic ambitions. Mixed-raced members of elite networks presented specific challenges to the structure of slaveholding that shaped not just the southern colonies and the Caribbean but also the Northeast, challenging the gendered and racial underpinnings of enslavement, and uncovering the sexual violence of such networks.
Manipulating Identity
Knowledge of enslaved networks (as well as the desire to gather more intelligence on them) culturally united enslavers of different means. Nonelite enslavers expanded their dragnets through their association with powerful, elite families, who in turn expanded the reach of their slaveholding networks. Judith Vincent was a nonelite enslaver, and she was not isolated. She was embedded within a network of women who benefited from their proximity to Anna Pritchard, Petrus Stuyvesant’s long-widowed granddaughter. By the time that she placed the advertisement, Judith had already been widowed once, had remarried the mariner Samuel Vincent, who traded in merchandise and enslaved people from the Caribbean to Perth Amboy, had at least one son named John by her first husband and a young daughter named Phoebe.4 Judith appeared in Anna’s 1759 will. Anna, who was the granddaughter of Petrus and Judith Stuyvesant by their son, Nicolaes Willem, left “Judith Vincent, of Monmouth County, East New Jersey, and her daughter Phebe, £20.”5 She also left a bequest to other elite widows, including Cornelia Schuyler (Alida Schuyler Livingston’s great-niece by marriage and the granddaughter-in-law to Arent Schuyler.) Judith was one of a group of widows of varying statuses folded into the Stuyvesants’ broader orbit.
Judith’s life depended on the forced labor of others, which also created a forced intimacy and knowledge of the wider worlds of those she held in bondage. Stoffels was clearly indispensable. As a house carpenter, he would have maintained the house structure and outbuildings, an essential task.6 Such woodworking knowledge complemented his skill as a wheelwright and would have made him vital to the household.7 His skills as cooper would have supported any type of trading that Judith wished to conduct on her property in making casks.8 But with this skill, he could have also been hired out to other merchants bringing in additional income for Judith.9 As a butcher, he would have kept food on Judith’s table.10 Judith placed the advertisement highlighting clues that she believed would aid in the capture of the group of men. Stoffels’s diverse set of skills would have distinguished him, as would the instrument of one of the runaway men but, alongside skills, she prominently highlighted race, language, and geography in her pursuit of the men.
Unlike Alida Livingston before her, Judith Vincent immediately widened the dragnet for Stoffels beyond her personal network to the readership of the New-York Gazette and posited that the three men were headed toward New England. Their destination could have been determined by Indigenous geographies as much as it was by the boundaries of European settlement. Rhode Island certainly seemed an odd choice for freedom, given Providence’s prominent place as a center for the trade in human beings, and the colony, like New Jersey, featured a high proportion of slave plantations.11 Likewise, Connecticut would have offered perils for runaway enslaved people, as nearly fifty years earlier, Alida Livingston had mobilized her own personal contacts to pursue an enslaved man who ran away in that colony.12
These inherent dangers suggest that such places were not the final destinations for the group. If they were making their way northward through Massachusetts and New Hampshire, then Fort Chambly in French territory offered a potential destination.13 Traveling by canoe, they were comfortable on the water and could have headed for work on a ship, particularly if we assume they had other skills that would have made it easy to adapt to the life of a seafarer. Knowledge of the sea and tidal marshes could have offered the men a vital defense against any pursuers.14 Although Judith did not provide any more specificity to Stoffels and his compatriots’ identities beyond the generalized monikers of “Indian,” “half Indian and half Negro,” and “Mulatto,” the men certainly held the asset of their own personal cultural histories as they ran. That Stoffels “speaks good English” suggests that another local language was his native tongue, an asset that would have allowed the group to fluidly converse across cultural boundaries. When they set off together, they encountered geography that would have been both familiar and wholly different from that experienced by Judith. Although scholarly treatments of the geographical and social world inhabited by self-emancipators largely privileges the unique understandings of their pursuers and enslavers, such sources can be read to reveal an alternate experience of the geographical avenues of escape and evasion open to the enslaved.15
The geography of the Northeast was connected by routes traversed by the enslaved that were created by navigating regional racial expectations and histories as much as physical environments. Six years after Stoffels and his compatriots ran away from Judith Vincent, on October 1, 1740, Galloway, a man enslaved to New York City leather dresser, John Breese, headed toward North Tarrytown, New York, and away from bondage. On October 27, 1740, his enslaver ran an advertisement in the New-York Weekly Journal, seeking his capture.16 For an enslaved person, the route north from New York City was far from safe, as it took Galloway into an area marked by large slaveholding estates. As a stranger clad in a hodgepodge of clothing that included a “dark gray homespun Jacket,” “a pair of Linnnen Breeches,” and a pair of “new Shoes,” Galloway would have seemed suspicious. Indeed, he was “seen and challenged at Coll. Phillipse’s Mill,” located in Philipsburg Manor.17 Neverthe less, displaying a canniness that reflected a sophisticated knowledge of not only the geographical terrain but the expectations of his interrogator, he “escaped by asserting he was sent in pursuit of a Cuba Man Run away.”
Constructions of social, ethnic, and racial identity were crucial to Galloway’s flight. When his enslaver ran an advertisement in the New-York Weekly Journal twenty-seven days later, it included Galloway’s ethnic identity—“mullato Indian”—the direction that he was headed “towards New England,” his nativity—“born in the Fort at Albany” and that he “lived many Years with Paul Richards, Esq; some Years Mayor of this City.” Galloway’s life had been spent in the two urban centers of New York, learning the intricacies, networks, and expectations of slaveholding society. He had a command of Dutch and had lived “many years” encountering the elite of New York society, through his enslavement to Paul Richards. Galloway manipulated the expectations of his society to aid in his escape. In so doing, his flight illuminates the cross-ethnic and cross-colonial networks that made up the physical and social geography of those enslaved by elite Northeasterners.
John Breese clearly employed his network to gather the details of Galloway’s flight. He maintained an ongoing enough friendship with Paul Richards that he named him an executor in his will two years later.18 The advertisement gives no timeframe beyond “a long while” for Galloway’s time spent enslaved to Paul, but the former mayor had been a slaveholder for decades.19 Paul Richards was also deeply embedded in the slaveholding elite of New York. He served as mayor of the city from 1735 to 1739 and was succeeded by John Cruger. Paul subsequently served as a representative from New York in the Twenty-fifth Assembly from February 12, 1747/8 until November 12 the following year alongside Cornelius van Horne and Henry Cruger.20 The representative from Livingston Manor was Robert Livingston, with Frederick Philipse and Lewis Morris representing Westchester. Paul’s household also stood at the heart of the New York slave conspiracy, as his enslaved woman Maria was married to Quack, the man who allegedly declared his intention to burn the city down if he were not allowed to see his wife.21
Galloway could have spent much of his time working for Florah, John’s wife. When John died, Florah inherited the Breese estate, along “with power to sell.”22 Flora passed on a thriving leather-dressing business to her son—who was still plying the trade twenty years later—leveraging skills that she either learned as a widow or gathered by co-running the shop.23 Giving her such broad powers in the future of the business indeed argues that Florah had skills in her own right. Notwithstanding laws that made enslaving local Indigenous people illegal, the lines between bonded labor and enslavement were thin and deployed against Indigenous people.24 If Galloway descended from one of the local Haudenosaunee peoples, he could have been familiar with leatherworking before being enslaved to the Breese household. Yet, this detail also includes a clue to the process of cultural alienation Galloway’s bondage would have enacted on his societal identity. In Haudenosaunee societies, leatherworking was a female task, and thus Galloway’s work within the leather shop—an inversion of gender norms—would have, like the work of male African captive people on the rice fields, enacted a specific form of social alienation.25
Galloway’s broader regional map came from his earlier experiences and connections among bonded people and slaveholders. His life had not begun in New York City but, instead in Albany. He held onto that past in his knowledge not only of Dutch but also of the “Road to New-England,” which led away from Albany. Although Galloway had endured the dislocation of slavery, moving from Albany to New York City, and changing hands from the political and merchant-minded Richards family to the leather-dressing Breese family, according to the runaway slave advertisement he had spent some time in New York. A member of Paul’s household, he would have had daily interactions with Maria and known her husband Quack, as well as his childhood friend, Adam, the enslaved man of lawyer Joseph Murray.26 He would have come into contact with many more enslaved people who served the elite politicians and families that frequented the Breese’s tannery. Richards was among the elite slaveholding New Yorkers who sent his enslaved people to Elias Neau’s catechism class.27 If Galloway had been among them, he could have made useful contact with people who helped him hatch the specifics of his escape.
Galloway’s escape route depended not just on understanding geographical landmarks of New York but the racial ones as well: it required he invent an enslaved “Cuba man” to evade capture. Elites across the Atlantic World employed Indigenous slave catchers, a reality that Galloway both noted and used to his advantage. Perhaps this is why he did not make for Quebec, where Haudenosaunee served as both slave guides and slave catchers, but instead took the road to New England. Perhaps he sought to establish himself as a leather dresser in Hartford or in Boston.28
Galloway was clearly running away from John’s wrath. The advertisement noted that “whoever Secures the said Slave so that his Master or Attorney may dispose of him shall have Forty Shillings, Reward and reasonable Charges paid by.” Eschewing the phrase “so that his master might have him again” for the more ominous “may dispose of him,” John gave little doubt of what awaited Galloway, should he be recaptured. A year later, John was called to sit on a jury to decide the fate of Quack, Maria’s husband, an enslaved man that Galloway and—through his friendship with Paul Richards—John had likely encountered on numerous occasions. Any familiarity he had with Quack—who protested his innocence—did not move John or the others who sat on the jury to mercy. On May 30, 1741, they convicted Quack of conspiracy and sentenced him to burn at the stake.29
John Breese’s description of Galloway’s escape route and strategies demonstrate that a skillful manipulation of environmental and social geographies, so central to enslaved escape plans, was to at least some extent understood by enslavers. The similarity and centrality of networks—between kin, friends and customers, religious and secular communities—was a language that both enslaver and enslaved held in common. Ten years later, a man named Tom ran away from the estate of Nicholas Everson in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. In 1751, Nicholas posted a runaway slave advertisement, highlighting that Tom had a command of both English and Dutch as well as knowledge of a skilled trade—shoemaking—and a saleable talent—“can play well upon the fiddle.”30 Like Galloway before him, Tom planned to use a cross-colonial network and Native racial identity in his bid for freedom. He was described as “a mulatto Negroe” who “intends to cut his watchcoat, to make him Indian stockings, and to cut off his hair, and get a blanket, to pass for an Indian.” He also “enquired for one John and Thomas Nutus, Indians at Susquehanna, and about the Moravians, and the way there.” Tom’s potential destination was advertised by his pursuing enslaver to aid in his capture, but it can offer a glimpse into the alternative geography that made up the landscape of his flight. He set out with not only a destination in mind but also contacts with whom he networked before crossing the border from New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Nicholas’s estate was merely “two miles from Perth-Amboy ferry,” offering Tom an opportunity to gather information from the multitudes of people arriving from New York. From there, Tom could have clandestinely followed the stagecoach route from Perth Amboy to Borden-town.31 If he had the proper papers to travel, as some skilled enslaved people would undoubtedly have had, then he would have even been able to board the stagecoach unmolested. In as much as Nicholas’s information can be trusted, Tom believed that he could convincingly “pass for an Indian.”
Unlike John Breese, Nicholas Everson did not give specific details of where his informants caught Tom’s trail, but the advertisement is not devoid of clues. Tom escaped from Nicholas in Perth Amboy. If Tom made his enquiries for “one John and Thomas Nutus, Indians at Susquehanna” before he left his hometown, he would have been able to access a local well of knowledge from those who could help him in his flight. The enslaved community in Perth Amboy was multiethnic.32 In 1737 another enslaved man named Wan fled his Perth Amboy enslaver Samuel Leonard, with abilities that allowed him to cross not only colonial but cultural borders. Like Tom, he was a musician. Despite his enslaver’s racialized presentation of Wan as “as black as most Negroes,” he spoke “good English and this country Indian.”33 He was also headed for Pennsylvania. Tom’s own destination of the Susquehanna, as well as enquiring for specific people by name, argues for familial or other close ties to Indigenous homelands of the Northeast. Moravian missions were a crucial feature of Nicholas’ advertisement, and such missions were sprouting up in towns and cities across New Jersey.34 Although Everson claimed that Tom was a “mulato” attempting to pass for an Indigenous person, Tom clearly had an inroad into Indigenous social networks that went beyond clothing. Moravians enjoyed such missionary success because they used Native missionaries as cultural go-betweens.35 Perhaps Thomas and John Nutus were Native missionaries. If that was the case, then Tom could have learned of them from community members who frequented the shop and attended one of their meetings. Tom’s flight, like Galloway’s, shows that regional networks and geographies were as present as local ones for enslaved people.
If he followed (or even rode) the stagecoach to Bordentown, Tom could have caught a ferry from his last destination in New Jersey to Philadelphia. Everson pursued Tom for a year before resorting to publishing his search in the Pennsylvania Gazette. His posting suggests that his network of informants gathered the information about Tom in Pennsylvania. During his journey down the Delaware River, the ferry could have passed slave ships heading toward Philadelphia as well.36 Upon arriving in Philadelphia, the urban environment would have aided in his attempts to shed his past.37 Tom was not just in possession of the skilled trade of shoemaking—Nicholas noted that he was a “good” shoemaker. An Indigenous identity would have allowed him to avoid the racial antipathy that was directed toward skilled workers of African descent. But the Susquehanna and not a colonial city was Tom’s intended destination. Tom’s passage through colonized spaces toward the Susquehanna highlights the continued importance of Indigenous geographies to Northeastern enslaved networks and regional conceptions.
Tom’s world was also shaped by contemporary demographic shifts, revolts, and slave ship arrivals, showing that enslaved networks, social circles, and geographic worlds were dynamic. Tom’s past was not used to aid in his capture and thus is shrouded in silence. Were his parents descended from the group of enslaved people from Madagascar sold in 1683?38 If the age Nicholas supplied was roughly accurate, then he would have been a young man during the slave revolt that broke out in Perth Amboy in 1734.39 His bilingual abilities and cultural fluency point to a past rooted in the area, but the makeup of the enslaved population of Perth Amboy was changing considerably during Tom’s lifetime. Although the period witnessed an influx of enslaved people from the Caribbean into Perth Amboy, there were also several slave ships destined for Perth Amboy from the “coast of Guinea.”40 Among those was the Catherine, a hundred-ton vessel with five mounted guns that arrived in 1731 and was co-owned by Alida Livingston’s nephew, Arnot Schuyler (the son of her younger brother Arent who had settled in Bergen County) and New York trader, John Watts.41 Three years later, the Catherine arrived again in Perth Amboy, this time co-owned by more of Alida’s family: her nephews Peter, Arnot, and Adoniah, as well as New York trader John Walter.42
Perhaps it was the shifting demographics that offered Tom the opportunity for escape, and once he made it to the city, he would have been harder to track. The dragnet, widened by the reach of print culture, would have pulled in any man of African or Indian descent who met the physical description. Tom’s life disappears from view—if it ever appeared as more than a negative of his enslaver’s priorities—with the publication of the runaway advertisement. If Nicholas continued his practice of owning human beings after Tom’s escape, that too is lost to the historical record: when he placed his estate of Chesequkes up for sale he did not feature it as having enslaved people or outbuildings, and by the time of his will in 1783, Everson did not explicitly mention any enslaved people as part of his estate.43 One year before Nicholas Everson died, Moravian Indians near Gnadenhutten were attacked and massacred by the Pennsylvania militia.44 The expansive geographies of enslaved people bound the Northeast together, offering an alternative map of the region that presents it as linked by the social, ethnic, and racial realities of bonded people as much as by colonial boundaries.
Fighting against the Networks
Archival records starkly illuminate the scope of elite slaveholding networks, and as scholars have shown, they are not just a record of what happened, but a part of the violence. Centralizing enslaved people as historical actors by reading such documents “against the grain” highlights the human struggles of bonded people underpinning the generational wealth cultivated by Northeastern slaveholding networks. Even partial reconstructions of the narratives of enslaved people sharpen a fuller picture of the varied human beings whose lives underpinned the wealth of Northeastern elites. Philip Livingston Jr. owned the Wolf, which was captained by Gurney Wall and set sail for the coast of Africa in 1749, an event that ran in the New-York Gazette.45 On May 13, 1751, the Wolf arrived back in New York, and Philip advertised a “publick Vendue” to sell “a Number of Likely Negro Slaves.”46 His advertisement collapsed into “likely” the hopes and dreams, nightmares, and sufferings of the women and children who disembarked the fetid sloop, whose tight holds, chosen to maximize Philip’s profits while minimizing his overhead, had offered them 112 days of torture.47
Some enslaved networks were forged by language and cultural affinities between captive peoples. Such confederations represent alternative maps of the region woven by landmarks of African belonging, not alienation. Two months after the arrival of the Wolf, Philip ran another advertisement, pursuing a man he described as “lately imported from Africa.”48 The man, with “His Hair . . . curled in Locks, in a very remarkable Manner . . . was seen last Monday on New-York Island, and is supposed now to be in the Woods near Harlem.” He could not “speak a Word of English, or Dutch, or any other Language but that of his own Country.” Newly arrived, he would have carried the still-fresh memory of the stench of the hold, and the chains that had held him. If he arrived on the Wolf, he would have seen numerous children die, their bodies full of worms.49 The ship began its trade in Africa on November 15, 1749, and who knows how long the man was forced to endure the ship’s coasting. Before the ship departed Africa for New York, a slave rebellion broke out on board. The memory of that event, although ultimately unsuccessful, would have lingered in the man’s mind and could have encouraged his flight.
Despite Philip’s contention that the man was unable to “speak a Word of English, or Dutch, or any other Language but that of his own Country” he managed to evade capture for a week without communicating in a European or Creole tongue. Slave ships arrived from the Gold Coast to New York with rapidity, and the man would not have been at a loss to find people taken from the Asante empire who were conversant in Anyi-Baule and Abrone.50 Or he could have encountered others brought several decades earlier who spoke Asante and Fante, who would have been able to decipher shared words and phrases.
Gendered markers of belonging physically linked the cultural landscapes of West and West Central Africa to the geographies of the Northeast. Several months before the man escaped Philip’s grasp, during the winter of 1750, a woman named Nell, who toiled for Robert James Livingston’s household in New York, ran away. Robert James did not descend from the elder Robert and Alida, but rather from Robert’s nephew, who had also immigrated to Albany following his uncle during the late seventeenth century. He subsequently married into the Schuyler family, beginning a pattern that would keep the cousins closely related for a century. Robert James placed an advertisement in the New-York Gazette, describing “a tall likely Negro Wench, named Nell, about 36 Years of Age . . . mark’d with nine Spots on each Temple, and nine on her Forehead.”51 At some point in the ensuing months, Nell was tracked down and brought back to Robert James. During that time, did she encounter the man who was pursued by Philip? Perhaps as punishment for her flight, Robert James sold her away from the city to Isaac Kingsland, who resided in Bergen County, East New Jersey. If the move was intended to chasten her, it proved no deterrence, because by April 12, 1753, she had escaped again. On April 23, Isaac posted an advertisement looking for “a Negro wench named Nell, who formerly belonged to Robert J. Livingston, Merchant in New York; she is a tall slim Wench, has three Diamonds on her face, one on each side and the other on her Forehead.”52
Read together the advertisements give some portrait, albeit distorted, of Nell. In Robert James’s advertisement she “had on when she went away, a blue Penniston Petticoat”; during her second flight she took along “three Petticoats” with one described as “old” and “quilted” and the “other two homespun.” “A short blue and white homespun gown” makes an appearance in both advertisements paired “with a short blue duffils Cloak.” Both men described her as “tall” with Robert James offering “likely” while Isaac described her as “slim.” Life for an enslaved person in rural New Jersey would have been one of want, and thus her frame, once “likely,” was now hollowed out by the harsh work routines. They both noted her facial markings, a detail that argues for an African birthplace. Perhaps she had been brought into the colony aboard one of Robert Livingston’s ships. Isaac Kingsland was willing to pay twice the bounty that Robert James had offered for her recapture. Nell’s body was read by her enslavers as a map to recapture her, but her facial markers and three petticoats could also have gained her shelter and aid from others who read cultural meaning in the signs of belonging she carried on her journey.
Such social and cultural connections were used by an array of people entrapped within the Bayards’ network of enslavement in New York. In 1749 a free Black North Carolina man named Simon Moore, who was apprenticed to a merchant named William Paxton, requested to be included as part of a crew on a sloop bound for New York.53 Upon arriving in New York, he was captured and held as a slave by the sloop’s co-owner, Samuel Bayard, as collateral against his business partner, William Payton, whom Samuel claimed had shorted him his payment. When in 1753, Simon faced the court in New York protesting his free status, he was a stranger far from anyone who might corroborate his story, challenging a powerful man with connections in the political and merchant slaveholding community and whose family roots dated back to New Netherland. Samuel Bayard’s father had been a judge in New York City, and his enslaved man named Pompey had been convicted during the New York Conspiracy and sentenced to transportation, though Pompey protested his innocence.54 Stephen Bayard, Samuel’s older brother, dispassionately handled the slave-trading affairs of his father-in-law, Robert Livingston.55 Samuel Bayard had the time, money, and resources to hold Simon Moore for life.
Although isolated far from home, Moore was not without defense. By mobilizing his own network, Simon Moore won the case against Samuel Bayard. He secured testimony from the captain of the sloop, Captain Samuel Dunscomb, and a man named “John Brown” identified as “a Sailor.” Samuel Dunscomb testified that “he well knows Simon Moor a Negro now residing with Samuel Bayard of New York Merchant, that he well knew him, his Mother and several of his Brothers in North Carolina and that they were all free people.”56 He named his place of indenture as Bath Town in North Carolina, and the man to whom he was indentured as William Peyton.
Simon depended on white testimony to verify his free status, but it was a testimony that he had to wait five years to receive. Nevertheless, the fact that his case made it to the court reflects that Simon mobilized far more than merely the word of the sloop captain. Did he network with other enslaved men on the dock to look out for Samuel Dunscomb’s return? Did his family in North Carolina begin the search from Bath, asking about where their son and brother had gone? Simon Moore did write “to his friends in North Carolina for certificates of his Freedom,” but the court official noted that he “never has received an answer.”57 Even in the face of frustration and failure, Simon was able to extricate himself from the clutches of Samuel Bayard, but not before spending five years of his life enslaved to the connected New York merchant. By 1758 he was back in Beaufort County, North Carolina, purchasing three hundred acres of land along with his brother Abram “on the south side of Terts Swam and Durham’s Creek.”58
Simon’s voice was distanced from his testimony, as were those of the men he amassed to testify on his behalf. Their statement was written down to be delivered later, and evidence of the interaction and assumptions of the scribe remain on the surviving record. The transcript of Simon’s testimony verifies this process, indicating that “this informant says he was born at Bath Town in North Carolina, the son of Abraham and Mary Moore, that his Father was Mother was a free Woman and born so, that his Father was not.”59
The clerk initially wrote that his father, rather than his mother, was free and then later crossed it out. Partus sequitur ventrum, which based one’s enslaved status on the free or enslaved status of his or her mother, made such a slip potentially costly indeed. It is unlikely that Simon would have made this mistake in his testimony, as the free-born status of his mother was his only claim to freedom. Thus, its addition begs the question, was the subsequent clarifying statement “that his Father was not” added by the transcriber to make it clear to the person tasked with reading the testimony? Everything rested on the voice of one man and the words that made it from the testimony page to the ears of the court. Simon Moore, Captain Duncombe, and Smith’s voices were all erased, replaced by that of the court clerk who was tasked with reading their testimony. What moved the court to back Simon against Samuel Bayard? Perhaps political considerations held some force in this case. Simon Moore had protested his freedom for five years, written letters to amass documentation of his free-born status, and yet there was little indication that he made any leeway. His case was finally heard after the tenure of Samuel’s father as mayor came to a close, suggesting that he waited to file, demonstrating political acumen.
While Simon Moore was resuming his life in Beaufort County, North Carolina, other enslaved people struggled against Samuel Bayard, using their feet, rather than the courts, to emancipate themselves from his grasp. On July 31, 1758, Samuel Bayard advertised in the New York-Mercury for “a Negro Fellow named Robin, lusty, and well-made, talks good Dutch and English, smooth-skin’d, and is about 36 Years old” who had run away from Hobuck.60 Robin’s bilingual capacity would have served him, as it had Galloway, to more easily maneuver his way through the colony. His choice of two coats—“one of Ratteen, with red Lining, and the other of Bearskin”—suggests a few possibilities about his flight. Either he was confident in his ability to evade Samuel because, although leaving in the summer, he planned to need such coats for the colder seasons, or he was industrious in keeping one and selling another on the market. Samuel eyed the same waterways that brought Simon Moore into his dragnet as a potential avenue for Robin’s escape, and in light of Simon’s ability to marshal evidence from several colonies away, he had reason to worry.
The following year, on August 13, 1759, Samuel Bayard ran another advertisement, this time in pursuit of a woman named Flora, who escaped “the 24th of July last, from Capt. Samuel Bayard, of the City of New-York . . . [she] has lived several Years with Ellias Ellis, near Oswego-Market, and used to go out a cleaning Houses and Washing, and is very well known in Town.”61 If Flora had not been purchased from Ellias by Samuel, then she arguably had been hired out as a house cleaner and washer to him. To Samuel, her potential network of connections—the fact that she was “very well known in Town,” coupled with her ability to readily change her physical appearance through fashion, as “she changes her Apparel very often” and “dresses very gay”—were crucial markers in identifying Flora to would-be slave catchers. Like Robin, her physicality was central as well: Samuel described Robin as “smoothed skinned” and Flora as “a strong, tall likely Wench.” With the breadth of his dragnet, Samuel acknowledged the geographical reach of Flora’s potential network, which, like Robin’s, could have taken her outside the limits of New York City. The enslaved strategized carefully, mobilizing robust and wide-ranging networks of their own in order to evade the grasp of their enslavers’ networks.
Identity in Black and White
In 1748 a little boy named Philip arrived in Somerset County, New Jersey, wrapped in a blanket.62 He was passed from the hands of James van Horne into those of Van Horne’s housekeeper, a woman named Margaret Wiser, who resided at the Rocky Hill plantation year round. Tasked with finding a wet nurse for the infant, Margaret decided on Jane Furman, a local woman of Welsh descent. Jane was at home with her niece Abigail when Margaret arrived with the baby, an event notable enough that Abigail relayed the detail of the encounter to her husband, Gabriel.63 After asking Jane if she “would be good enough to suckle the child,” Margaret pulled back the blanket that covered the child, and they “found he was a Blacke.”64 While a Black woman might serve as a wet nurse to her white enslaver’s children, especially within elite Dutch slaveholding networks in New York and New Jersey, the opposite was extremely rare.65 Margaret stressed the pedigree of Philip’s mother and that (perhaps as proof) she would visit her newborn child shortly. Despite Margaret’s case, Jane required “some persuasion” before she finally consented. James van Horne and his wife corroborated the story in person. Philip’s story would have been forgotten had he not used his nativity narrative in his successful bid for freedom. His subtle knowledge of the performativity of the courtroom and the way notions of gender and race would be read gives some insight into Philip’s own intellectual world, the shape of his community, and the resources available to nonwhite people within such elite networks who lived on the margins of freedom.66
The narrative had been carefully chosen and crafted to make a specific claim to freedom that would convince the court that Philip was indeed deserving of manumission. It conjured a time, nearly four decades earlier, and represents a rare glimpse into the everyday life of the denizens of the Raritan Valley. Most such reconstructions rely on reading moments of Black life from the margins. But, when combined with another account of life among the Van Hornes, written by an African man named Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, which had been published in England in 1772, a compelling picture of the conditions that surrounded African-descended people caught within such elite family networks emerges.
Two decades before Philip’s birth, a young captive man named Ukawsaw Gronniosaw arrived in the Raritan Valley. He had been purchased from a Barbados slaver by Cornelius van Horne, a New York merchant whose first cousin with the same name was the slave-trading factor married to Joanna Livingston. This Cornelius was married to Elizabeth French, whose massive landholdings in New Jersey augmented the property that Cornelius had inherited from his father Johannes. The properties that bordered the large plantation where Ukawsaw would be held in bondage belonged to Cornelius’s brothers Abraham and James. Although the Van Horne wills dwell on the division of the land, Ukawsaw’s narrative unfolds within the manor home: where he was “dress’d” in the Van Hornes’ livery, and put to the “chief business” of waiting “at table, and tea, and clean knives.”67 His subsequent description chronicles a domestic world of resentment and violence.
The “servants us’ to cus and swear surprisingly,” he described and it was “almost the first English I could speak.” He recounted a world filled with china and cursing in the rooms of the Van Horne house. He foregrounded the piety of an elderly enslaved man named “Ned,” who told him not to swear at an enslaved maid in the house by warning him of “a wicked man call’d the Devil, that liv’d in hell, and would take all that said these words, and put them in the fire and burn them.” Ned’s story easily contained two meanings: the image of Black people being thrown in the fire and burned was seared into the consciousness of the enslaved, who like Ned would have lived through 1712, the torture and burning of the Halletts’ enslaved people, and the executions of many others, designed to leave trauma on the community.
Despite describing Elizabeth French as “a fine young lady and very good to me,” he featured Elizabeth’s tyranny in the home. When Elizabeth cursed as she berated her enslaved maid for accidentally sprinkling the wainscotting with water while cleaning, Ukawsaw entreated her to stop, saying that “there is a black man call’d the Devil that lives in hell, and he will put you in the fire and burn you, and I shall be very sorry for that.” When asked who told him that, Ukawsaw identified Ned, who was ultimately “tyed up and whipp’d, and was never suffer’d to come into the kitchen with the rest of the servants afterwards.”68
Old Ned’s punishment was intended as an example, and he was banished from the house. The story became a lark that Elizabeth told at table to “many of her acquaintance that visited her,” which would have certainly included Johanna Livingston, Cornelius’s sister Catharine, and Cornelius’s brother James’s wife Margaret Bayard. The story became the means whereby Ukawsaw was ultimately purchased by the Dutch Calvinist firebrand minister Theodorus Frelinghuysen. In the year before Philip’s birth George Whitefield preached at Theodorus’s invitation to a massive crowd at Six Mile Run in New Jersey. That crowd would make up a good portion of the neighborhood of Philip’s childhood, members of whom were relatives, others that would lay claim to Philip’s body, and a few who would witness on his behalf.
Ukawsaw and Philip’s worlds intersected, illuminating a diverse community within the Van Hornes’ elite slaveholding orbit. In the latter decades of the seventeenth century, East New Jersey had, like Carolina, been settled by several Barbadian transplants and had only strengthened its ties to the institution of slavery during the eighteenth century. The Van Horne family profited from both the slave trade and from the bondage of people of African descent.69 One year after Philip’s birth, James’s sons, David and Samuel van Horne became co-owners of the slave ship Revenge, along with their cousins William, Gerard, and G. G. Beekman, and two other New York merchants.70 The ship left New York for the Sierra Leone estuary and the set sail for Jamaica, unloading 150 of its original 172 captive people as well as taking on additional slaves. It then embarked for New York, its final port of call, where 45 enslaved human beings were sold.
Gabriel, Philip’s witness, had lived in Somerset County for years and had some standing in the community but was by no means elite. He held only secondhand knowledge of the details as it was his aunt Jane who had been used as a wet nurse. Yet, according to his testimony, he had plenty of time to interact with Philip, who grew up and remained in the neighborhood after spending five years living with Jane. The Furman family were “near neighbors” of the Van Hornes and served other community functions. On July 12, 1735, Gabriel Furman and Nowell Furman acted as witnesses for the will of Ethan Field who lived in Newton, New Jersey. In 1739, Gabriel and Nowell, along with family members and friends were deeded land from Jacobus Springsteen south of Newton in order to build a school. They were described as “all farmers residing thereabouts.”71 The “neighborhood” where Gabriel and Philip lived roiled with racial tensions. Court cases within the Rocky Hill community, which would have certainly qualified as a society with slaves, reflected the violence and tension of slavery. Gabriel Furman would have likely been involved in policing the enslaved population and his wife Abigail, or aunt Jane might well have wielded direct control over enslaved people. In 1739, an enslaved man was tried for the murder of his overseer’s son and for burning their barn down, although his original target had been the overseer’s wife. He was publicly burned at the stake.72
Philip was by no means the only child of mixed racial heritage with links to the elite of New York and New Jersey, but his position in the community was apparently met with unease. The Furmans clearly understood that they were being tasked with safeguarding a certain degree of Philip’s elite familial identity. They recognized that whiteness and, by extension, blackness was not absolute. James van Horne, although leaving the couple with instructions to raise the child with an elite education in keeping with his lineage, did not need to explain that the child’s color would make him subject to intense discrimination. He would not grow up with his mother and among the rest of his elite household. He would experience such a separation that, in his adult years, a relative would claim him as property in court. His freedom would ultimately hinge on appealing to the blood of the elite Dutch-descended woman who gave him up and invoking whiteness reinforced by Jane’s milk.
Just as the actions of slaveholding women like Judith Stuyvesant were, at the very beginning of such Dutch-descended families’ American experiences, both buttressed and limited by the slave system, so too was Philip’s mother constrained from taking a public, active role in his early life. Philip’s mother, whose name remains a mystery, visited eighteen months after James dropped off her son, around the time that Jane weaned Philip.73 Now a toddler, young Philip would have changed dramatically. Nursed and cared for by Jane, his early words would have been English (or even a bit of Welsh) but not the Dutch words and idioms his mother would have no doubt heard as a child in the primarily Dutch elite community that surrounded Rocky Hill and the Van Hornes’ wider familial networks. Nevertheless, Philip’s later appeal would rest on his maternal blood tie to that elite Dutch community. Philip’s mother was prevented from breastfeeding her son, not due to biological fault or some disease of the breast, but to hide her nonmarital sexuality and her son’s race from elite society. Despite her status or personal wishes, she was pushed to the margins of his life, so far that her name and identity remain a mystery.
Several young women were the right age to have been Philip’s mother, including Johanna Livingston’s daughter Alida, who was born in 1724 and would have been twenty-four in 1748. Her parents would have been among the region’s “first rank.”74 Gabriel’s testimony details only that she arrived in the “company of Mrs. Van Horne.” The Van Hornes were closely linked to the Bayards through ties of trade and slavery. On February 4, 1751, an advertisement for the sale of James van Horne’s property ran in the New-York Gazette, which highlighted it as “containing between 13 and 14 Hundred Acres of choice Land . . . a good Dwelling House, Barn, Waggon and Negro Houses” and saying that any interested parties should “apply to William Bayard, Merchant in New York, or to the said James Vanhorne.”75
The advertisement was repeated four times in the New-York Gazette between February and May 1751.76 By June 16, 1755, James van Horne was on the market again, this time represented by Nicholas Bayard, advertising “four farms or plantations” that made up his Rocky Hill holdings, including the previous lands which were distinguishable by their “negro and waggon-house.”77 This advertisement was repeated eight times between 1755 and 1756.78 The Bayards and the Van Hornes’ merchant and slaveholding ties in East Jersey occurred during a time of both increased commitment to slavery and unrest. On March 10, 1757, the Pennsylvania Gazette ran a news story featuring the deaths of enslavers at the hands of the enslaved in Bergen County. Perhaps such tensions were behind James van Horne’s desire to sell his lands and his difficulty in so doing. The next year, December 18, 1758, James, working with Nicholas Bayard, ran yet another advertisement for his lands in Rocky Hill in the New-York Mercury, repeating the call another four times into the new year. James’s Rocky Hill plantation contained numerous enslaved women, and many could have also been lactating.79 So there had to be a specific reason for his and, by extension, Margaret Wiser’s choice of a white wet nurse.
James clearly intended that some vestige of Philip’s elite pedigree be passed down. According to Gabriel Furman, Jane’s nephew, James left an explicit directive that Philip be educated genteelly and took pains to emphasize the station of Philip’s mother.80 Philip’s freedom claim rested on his mother’s whiteness because freedom was intrinsically linked to gender in the colonial context with partus sequitur ventrum, which mandated that slavery followed the condition of the womb.81 New York, with its large contingent of seventeenth-century Virginia transplants, was the only other English colony that formally adopted partus before the middle of the eighteenth century, enacting the law in 1706.82 Two years earlier, in 1704, the New Jersey council passed the Act for Regulating Negro, Indian and Mallatoo slaves, which included a clause that mandated castration for any slave convicted of attempting “to Ravish or have carnal Knowledge of any White Woman, Maid or Child.” It also encouraged the departure of manumitted enslaved people by refusing them or their children the right to pass down or inherit property.83 In 1709, the Crown vacated New Jersey’s castration clause, arguing that it fell outside of the norm of English law but only because it mandated castration for rape; the Crown did not vacate Carolina’s law that mandated castration for repeat cases of running away.84 New Jersey strengthened its slave law again in response to a 1712 uprising of a biracial coalition of Black and Native enslaved people in New York, replacing the call for castration with the authorization “to inflict such Corporal Punishment (not extending to Life or Limb) . . . [as] shall seem meet,” in cases of assault against free persons “professing Christianity.” They replaced a trial by jury with summary en banc processes before two justices.85
Elite family networks ensnared African-descended members. By 1783, Philip was enslaved to John van Horne and Dierck Ten Broeck. If he was the child of Alida Livingston, then John, James’s eldest son, would have also been Philip’s first cousin. He grew up in a county with a considerable number of enslaved people whose economy was devoted to slavery. Dierck Ten Broeck was not only a member of the colonial elite, but kinship connected him to other members of the elite who sat on the court, including Philip Livingston (signer of the Constitution), who had married his daughter Christina. Unmoved by the language of liberty, these two men devoted considerable time and financial resources to hindering the freedom of people they counted their property.
But Philip appealed to maternity and pedigree. Gabriel Furman testified that, later, James van Horne directly asked for Jane’s consent to nurse Philip, arriving a second time in the company of his wife, and adding that the child’s grandparents were “some of the greatest people in New York.” Perhaps in this, he was not so obliquely signaling that the child was a close family member. The little boy’s name Philip was a family name, one that he shared with Cornelius’s eldest son. Further, James insisted that the child “was free-born and could not be made a slave” and “that he was determined to educate him genteelly.” As Craig Wilder has shown, the Van Hornes had, along with other elite New York and New Jersey families, been founding benefactors of the newly formed colonial schools such as Kings College in New York City. James’s instructions to Jane would have been in line with the educational opportunities he wished for his own children. Philip won his freedom. His erstwhile enslavers’ (and perhaps relatives’) claim was deemed illegitimate against the community testimony, maternal and social status conjured in Philip’s defense.
The geographic and genealogical realities of the enslaved steered not just the rudder of their own lives, but also those of their enslavers. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a diverse group of people found themselves ensnared by overlapping and robust networks of bondage but utilized their own networks to traverse the landscapes that others like them had crisscrossed for a century. They deployed their knowledge of the foundations of race as well as the social and family bonds that undergirded the realities of their enslavers to create alternatives to the lives chosen for them by those whose freedom was built on their bondage.