Conclusion

Gentry

When John Bayard attempted to retrace the route of a man named Toby, the trail was already nine months cold. The expanse that he conjured for Toby’s potential whereabouts was a map that traced nodes on the wider Bayard family’s own centuries-old slaveholding network and included Philadelphia, New York, the West-Indies, Albany or New England. John Bayard ran the advertisement four times, twice in the Boston Gazette, on March 25 and April 8, 1771, and another two times in the New York Journal, on March 28 and April 11, respectively. In the time between when Toby fled and when John ran the advertisement, John Bayard had already tapped his own personal network—evident in the fact that he offered intelligence of Toby’s whereabouts two months after he had run away—a web of connections that included the leading merchants, politicians, and slaveholders in the Northeast. Widening the dragnet across the major metropolitan centers of the Northeast, he hoped to add the eyes of a watchful public to apprehend Toby.1

John and his twin brother James had been born in the Great House of a sprawling plantation in Bohemia Manor, Maryland, on August 11, 1738.2 Their father Samuel had, like their grandfather Petrus before him, been drawn to relocate to Maryland from New York. But, far from pursuing a life of retreat from the corrupting influences of the riches of the world, Samuel Bayard had transformed his father’s “neck” of the Labadie tract, building a brick mansion known as the Great House, and along with his brother-in-law, Hendrick Sluijter, became a planter.3 While his cousins expanded their political influence, business contacts, lands, and property—including property in human beings—in New York City and New Jersey, Samuel became enmeshed in the burgeoning community of Bohemia Manor, which included the Herman family who had relocated from New Netherland. By the time that Samuel joined the community at the turn of the eighteenth century, the original Labadist community had vanished and in its place was one devoted to profiting off of the regional tobacco trade.

FIGURE 12. Runaway Slave Advertisement in search of Toby posted by John Bayard in New-York Journal; or, the General Advertiser, March 14, 1771.

Despite these changes, the tension between profit and piety did not fade away. In 1740, two years after the brothers’ births, the evangelist George Whitefield toured the area and was hosted by the Bayards. The conditions that he observed in the region induced him to write his “Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,” which admonished the slaveholders of the region to Christianize their slaves and improve their conditions but did not, ultimately, advocate abolition.4 He warned the “rich Men” to “Behold the Provision of the poor Negroes . . . the Cries of them which reaped, are entered into the Ears of the Lord of Sabaoth!”5

If Samuel was personally chastened by Whitefield’s admonition, it left no evidence in the historical record. He, like his slaveholding cousins across the Northeast, remained committed to the institution and the benefits it bestowed on his family. John and James, like their Bayard cousins in New York and New Jersey, were sent to a local institution of higher learning, attending Maryland’s Nottingham Institute whose headmaster, the Reverend Samuel Finley, would go on to become the president of Princeton.6 After the death of both their parents, John split his inheritance of his family’s plantation with his brother.7 In 1756, both brothers left Bohemia Manor and moved to Philadelphia, where John was trained as a merchant, apprenticing at the counting-house of John Rhea, while James studied medicine. Less than a decade after moving to Philadelphia, John had married and profited as a merchant. He found success in a time of expansion for Philadelphia.8 Yet, the Townshend Acts threatened that success. In October 1765, John signed the nonimportation agreement. John maintained personal and trading contacts with his cousins across the Northeast, traveling to visit William Bayard in New York and Balthazar Bayard, who lived in Boston after his marriage to Mary Bowdoin. But he was not the only member of his household who maintained wide-ranging contacts that could be leveraged.9

At the dawn of 1770, Philadelphia’s social climate was undergoing a revolution. Numerous enslavers were freeing the human beings they held in bondage, a manumission impetus that was not solely connected to Quakerism. Among some of Philadelphia’s urban professional elite, antislavery had become fashionable, especially with those who, like John Bayard, employed enslaved domestics.10 Due to an influx of white workers after the Seven Years War, the demand for slavery lessened, alleviating the economic incentive. John did not follow the trend. Instead, like his cousins across the Northeast, he remained comfortable with holding Toby in lifelong heritable bondage. On January 8, 1770, James died, an event which one chronicler reported, “produce[d] a serious illness which confined [John] to his bed for several days.”11 Just three weeks later, on January 30, 1770, Benjamin Franklin published “A Conversation on Slavery” in the Public Advertiser, where he placed the debate over slavery in the mouths of an Englishman, a Scotchman, and an American. In a nod to transatlantic debates, it opened with the Englishman questioning American hypocrisy over slavery opining: “You Americans make great Clamour upon every little imaginary Infringement of what you take to be your Liberties; and yet there are no People upon Earth such Enemies to Liberty, such absolute Tyrants, where you have the Opportunity, as you yourselves are.”12 Six months later, Toby made his escape. Might he have read those lines and felt personal outrage at his own enslavement? As the advertisement noted, he was literate.

More likely, Toby was influenced by other enslaved people, or perhaps newly emancipated friends, and wished to ameliorate the condition of perpetual servitude into which he found himself serving a lifelong sentence. John Bayard’s grief at the loss of his twin brother and the chaos of the funerary arrangements would have provided Toby additional space to plot his plan for escape. Toby, John advertised, had been “brought up to housework” and could “write.” John predicted that “he may change his name and pretend to be a free negro.” Toby’s choice of June offered him adequate cover. Perhaps he used the festival days allotted African Americans in the mid-Atlantic to blend into the crowd and disappear.13 Such public celebrations were also surveilled and might have been the reason that he landed in the jail mentioned in John’s advertisement. Toby’s plan likely involved a maritime network, a fact that John highlighted in the advertisement, one that reached beyond the city of Philadelphia well into New York, and Albany. He may have held kinship ties in northern New York, been sold, or given to John from a New York member of the extended Bayard family network.14 John at least imagined that he had ridden the regional waterways of the Delaware Bay into New York harbor and then up the Hudson toward Albany or perhaps skirted around Long Island, and into the heart of New England. He may have followed the route that Tom took two decades earlier, through New Jersey, into Perth Amboy and using the ferries to cross into New York City. Or, a fully committed mariner, with a new name and the highly useful ability to write, could freely sail down to the West Indies—a direction that scores of slaveholders used as the ultimate weapon against their slaves—toward freedom.

Before the first rumblings of dissent and displeasure at the imperial policies of metropolitan Great Britain began to become a roar within the networks of elites, these same elites had already enjoyed nearly a century and a half of slaveholding and mastery. In that time, they had hammered out legal codes that were both reactionary and a part of a larger scheme for empire. While never the main source of wealth of the Northeastern families who retained their home base in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, slavery was part of the family’s broader portfolio of activities, and the members who made their homes in the Chesapeake, South Carolina, Curaçao, and Jamaica practiced slaving policies in step with their neighbors. These families maintained a remarkably strong network that drew them together as an economic and social whole. Despite the unity that such an intertwined system might deploy, local conditions and individual actors did cause division within the whole. While individuals might make different choices in terms of their personal relationship to slavery, the family identity was firmly invested in the proliferation and continuation of Atlantic slavery.

New Netherland’s leadership was deeply enmeshed in the burgeoning Atlantic slave system. Reflected in personal and administrative correspondence, colonial elites built their conceptions of status and social hierarchies on racial sensibilities, which were first forged in South America and the Caribbean before being tempered in the Northeast. The regional aspect of slavery became a key unifying force behind the emergence of blended Anglo-Dutch elite networks in the years after New Netherland fell to the English and assumed its New York moniker. Indeed, those elite networks were marshaled for a dual purpose—not just to grow power and connection among other elites across the Northeast, but also to constrain and marginalize those they enslaved, particularly as fears of rebellion and threats of violence became more widespread in the aftermath of Queen Anne’s War and the 1712 Slave Revolt. Slave laws, culture, and society became increasingly rigid and surveillance of enslaved people increased as expansion-minded Anglo-Dutch elites leveraged slave regimes, racial, and gendered claims to grow their trade and kinship networks cross-colonially. Enslaved people’s struggles for personal freedom and family cohesion rippled through the Northeast, impacting regional and local histories. Similarly, a heritage of Dutch slaveholding formed an important, but overlooked, part of the identity of elites like the Livingstons as they created regional networks of kinship and influence from the Northeast southward through the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. Running alongside those elite networks lay a broad web of connections between a diverse group of enslaved, bonded, and free people, knitting together the region along alternate pathways.

The ancestors of Samuel Bayard’s gentry class relied on familial networks borne of marriage and blood to expand zones of trade and influence. Fur, timber, wheat, sugar, and enslaved people were traded to their fellow colonists and across transatlantic routes in a bid to increase their wealth and power. Interconnected family units provided them with access to markets and resources, and provided a vector along which they could exert mastery. The enslaved people who served them were viewed as engines of growth, providing much-needed skills and labor that fueled their burgeoning empires, but were also signifiers of class who provided members of the gentry opportunities to unite in the expression of a common language of control. Mastery and slavery defined the gentry’s approach to trade, growth, and connection, with ships named for colonial locales, built by enslaved people, and used to trade goods that included other enslaved people.

Enslaved laborers, acting on behalf of their captors, had access to these same familial and trade networks, and often established their own shadow networks alongside them. Coordinated moments of violence and rebellion, like the Slave Revolt of 1712 and the Slave Conspiracy of 1741, were obvious but infrequent displays of the value of these networks. Less obvious but more frequent was the use of these networks to foster resistance and escape. Robin, Galloway, and Toby each used their facility with multiple languages and networks of contacts to navigate Anglo-Dutch, African, and Indigenous environments and escape their enslavers. Enslaved people were political actors who leveraged the vagaries of diplomacy to assert their autonomy.

Elites made sense of the changes wrought by a century of colonization using the language of racial slavery: a frame as old as their families’ settlement in the Americas. Over the years, much had changed about the circumstances the families found themselves in: they no longer lived under the rule of the Dutch Republic, or ultimately by the end of the eighteenth century even Great Britain, they no longer conversed—even at church—in Dutch, and they reckoned their estates following the English custom; some had traded in old religious convictions for new ones. They shifted market interest from dairy to wheat, and from privateering to iron, but slavery remained a constant aspect of their everyday lives and their larger portfolios. Bondage was both foundational and fundamental. It shaped their self-identities and the societies that they sought to build—either on a small or large scale. Strategies of mastery changed with time, and as a result of local and market conditions, but the fact of bondage reigned supreme. Elites did inhabit societies built on the assumption of overlapping inequalities, but chattel slavery was a new experiment for British and Dutch societies and the colonial societies that they spawned, and it was one that such families not only vigorously took on but actively shaped. Such interconnected elites created a network of bondage that had been birthed and nurtured simultaneously in the Northeast, the Southern colonies, and the Caribbean. It was a legacy that would continue to expand in the nineteenth century, even as members of dynastic slaveholding families joined the antislavery effort.