Segregation, Surveillance, and Systems of Control in Dutch American Homes

Whereas sleep and work areas for the enslaved were often haphazardly created in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by the latter part of the eighteenth century these considerations had become more central to the layout of homes. Especially prominent Dutch American families who held several people in bondage organized their homes in ways that separated the enslaved laborers’ work and living quarters from the family’s main living spaces. These enslavers also structured their homes and grounds so that the movement of the men, women, and children they enslaved could best be controlled and surveilled. Much like their southern counterparts, architecture in these Dutch American communities proved a powerful tool in controlling enslaved people and the labor they produced.

While influenced by Dutch building styles, Dutch American homes differed per region and changed over time due to, among others, climate, environment, building materials, and Anglo-American influences. Dutch American farmhouses in western Long Island, for example, were usually wooden-clad, whereas stone farmhouses were more common in the mid-Hudson region, and farmhouses in the upper Hudson area were usually brick-sheathed.⁷ In urban areas, like Albany and New York City, Dutch colonists preferred the narrow, brick townhouses with gable fronts that resembled Dutch medieval architecture.⁸ Equally important, however, were the social and cultural circumstances that influenced Dutch American architecture. The system of slavery and class distinctions affected local architecture. By the mid-eighteenth century, for example, the area’s elites often built Georgian-style homes that had become popular among North America’s most well-to-do families.⁹

As an increasing number of Dutch American households relied on enslaved workers, they began to consider where these enslaved men, women, and children would live and labor more carefully. Research of the Hendrick I. Lott home in Flatlands, Kings County, reveals where this Dutch American farm family housed their enslaved laborers, and shows that while they initially approached the lodging of their enslaved laborers more haphazardly, they managed their housing more methodically as their numbers increased over the course of the eighteenth century.

Today, the Lott home stands in the middle of Marine Park, a residential area of Brooklyn. This suburban part of New York City was once farmland, largely owned by the Lott family. Johannes Lott, a descendant of Bartel Engelbertszen Loth who migrated to New Netherland in the 1650s, purchased the property in 1719 and built the original structure soon after (see Figure 4.2).¹⁰ In 1800 his grandson Hendrick I. Lott built a new house to accommodate his family and their nineteenth-century lifestyle, and he attached the initial structure to the new house.

The Lott house became home to several generations of the Lott family and the people they enslaved. Very little documentary evidence discusses the enslaved people who lived in this house, though it is clear that the Lott family held several people in bondage over the course of the eighteenth century. In 1738, Johannes Lott reported three slaves to a local census, and a 1755 census of adult slaves listed two men and two women enslaved by the Lott family.¹¹ As was common in Kings County, the number of people held in bondage by the Lott family continued to grow over the course of the eighteenth century. By 1790, the family reported eleven slaves, and the 1803 probate records of Johannes Lott’s estate listed four enslaved women, three enslaved men, three enslaved boys, and two enslaved girls: Mary, Hannah, Mell, Cate, Harry, Hechter, Powel, Syrus, Jan, Jacob, Hannah, and Poll.¹² Until the early nineteenth century, they likely all lived in the Lott home.

The original home built by Johannes Lott was a salt-box-style house, a one-room building style popular in early American settlements, with a small additional room on the north side.¹³ This building had a loft that served as sleeping quarters for members of the Lott family. Much of daily life took place in the main room of the home, allowing for very little privacy for the Lott family and its enslaved laborers. Although the enslaved people who lived and worked in the home did not have clearly designated working and living spaces, the Lott family undoubtedly practiced social exclusion by prohibiting their enslaved laborers’ participation in certain daily rituals as a way to mark social difference.¹⁴

Soon after the initial structure was built, the Lott family added a lean-to that functioned as a kitchen and work area; thus most labor produced by the family’s enslaved laborers would have taken place in this lean-to.¹⁵ A small set of stairs with garret spaces on each side led from the lean-to to the loft area where the Lott family sleeping quarters were located (see Figure 4.3). According to archeological findings, these garret spaces served as sleeping quarters for the family’s enslaved laborers. The left garret space was ten square feet, four feet high, and had no windows (see Figure 4.4). A chimney ran through this space, which had a hole in it that may have functioned as “a beehive-shaped oven” to both heat up the room and warm up food.¹⁶ A triangle had been cut out of the door to this room, probably for ventilation. The right garret space was a bit smaller and had no heat source.¹⁷ Doors to both these garret spaces had locks on the outside that may have been used to lock up the enslaved laborers at night. These spaces would have been cold and drafty in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer. It would have been impossible to stand up straight in them. In fact, these rooms were so small and inconspicuous that researchers discovered them only a few decades ago. When Hendrick Lott expanded the house in the early 1800s, they likely moved the people they enslaved to an outdoor, brick kitchen.¹⁸ Thus, by the early nineteenth century, the Lott family had probably removed most of the people they enslaved from the main house.¹⁹

A similar, gradual separation of enslaved laborers’ working and living spaces appears to have happened in other Dutch American houses. Ulster County’s stone farmhouses, for example, often started as one-room buildings that were expanded over the course of the eighteenth century with several square rooms, attached to each other in a linear arrangement. Commonly, these rooms each contained its own hearth and door to the outside.²⁰ Initially, Dutch American residents would have shared these spaces with their enslaved laborers, but over time, as they expanded their homes, they commonly removed the people they held in bondage and their labor from the main living spaces, as had been the case with the Lott home. These enslaved men, women, and children would have been relegated to garret spaces, attics, cellars, summer kitchens, or, in a few instances, to slave quarters. In many cases, they would have inhabited the cellar. For instance, archeologists found evidence that Abraham Hasbrouck of New Paltz housed his enslaved workers in his home’s cellar, and of course the Hardenbergh family had Sojourner Truth and her family inhabit the cellar of their home.²¹ As Truth so vividly described, these cellars were often damp and cold with little light, comfort, or privacy.

In many of these homes, the enslaved laborers’ workspaces were moved to the cellar. Cellar kitchens became increasingly common in the region. With the kitchen in the cellar, excessive smoke was kept out of the first floor while the main living spaces of the home benefited from the heat that wafted from the cellar kitchen. Anne Grant, for example, noted that the home at Schuyler Flatts had a “sunk story, where the kitchen was immediately below the eating parlor, and increased the general warmth of the house.”²² Because in many of these New York homes most of the cooking and food preparation were done by enslaved laborers, cellar kitchens also kept the labor of servants and enslaved men and women separated from the main living quarters in the same way that lean-to buildings like the one at the Lott house did.

These developments were not particular to New York’s Dutch American homes. In fact, similar changes that removed cooking and service activities to cellars, lean-to buildings, or outdoor kitchens occurred throughout the North American colonies and in Europe.²³ With these changes in architecture, homeowners created separate spaces for domestic labor. In North America, this shift largely excluded enslaved workers from the home’s main living spaces. In fact, Dell Upton argues that adding such workspaces in Virginia homes came out of “an analytical desire for order and separation that grew out of and amplified the seventeenth-century division of servant and served spaces.”²⁴ Historian Cary Carson similarly notices this shift in Virginia, noting that “architecture became the instrument of segregation.”²⁵ An increased demand for privacy further promoted the segregation between the enslavers and their enslaved workers.²⁶ Changes in eighteenth-century New York architecture appear to have had very similar objectives.

At the same time that Dutch Americans increasingly separated the living and working areas of the people they enslaved from the main living spaces, elite families often organized their homes strategically to reflect their wealth, status, and power. As elsewhere in the colonies, Georgian architecture became the most popular building style among these elite families.²⁷ They moved most labor to dependencies on the sides and back of the home, while the main living areas of their houses became places of leisure and hospitality. These mansions were often located on hills overlooking roads or rivers because it made their homes appear imposing when approached from the river or main roads, and they regularly included tree nurseries and gardens in an effort to demonstrate that they controlled nature.²⁸ Thus, they used their homes and grounds to reinforce the idea that society’s class distinctions were natural and inevitable.

The Philip Schuyler and Abraham Ten Broeck mansions in present-day Albany are clear examples of these building tactics. Philip Schuyler, who descended from several generations of prominent Dutch Americans, was a member of the New York Assembly until 1775 when he was elected delegate to the Continental Congress. He was appointed major general in the Continental Army later that year, and he served as U.S. senator and as a New York state senator. Over the course of his political career, his family became closely connected to many of America’s most prominent political figures. The Abraham Ten Broeck family was equally prominent in the region. During the Revolutionary War, Abraham Ten Broeck served in the Albany militia, he was a businessman, and he held the position of Albany mayor from 1779 to 1783 and again from 1796 to 1798. He too came from a long line of Dutch American elites: both his father and grandfather had served as Albany City’s mayor. His marriage to Elizabeth Van Rensselaer, sister of the patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer II, further solidified his family’s elite status and Dutch roots. Ten Broeck also had a personal connection with the Schuyler family, in part because his daughter Elizabeth married Philip Schuyler’s son Rensselaer.

Philip Schuyler and Abraham Ten Broeck were among the largest enslavers of the region. Schuyler owned estates in Saratoga and Albany, largely operated by enslaved laborers. In 1790, he reported thirteen slaves as part of his Albany estate to the first Federal Census.²⁹ Personal correspondence of Schuyler and his family regularly referred to the enslaved people—including Dick, Bob, Prince, Cato, Cesar, Britt, Bet, Tone, Phoebe, Silvia, and Tom—who cleaned their homes, prepared their foods, tended to their guests, and operated their farm and mill; yet, these letters revealed very little about their daily lives and instead focused predominantly on the various tasks these enslaved laborers completed for the family.³⁰ Most is known about Prince, the family butler who was known to have “placed every day a Tooth-pick by Mrs. Schuyler’s plate.”³¹ As butler, he became well known by the family’s guests, so much so that when in Spain in 1780, John Jay proposed that they use Prince’s name, written backward, as a password.³²

Construction of Schuyler’s Albany mansion, then located just south of Albany, took place in the 1760s.³³ The large mansion had two stories, an attic, and a cellar (see Figure 4.5). The first floor included a hall, parlors, and a dining room. The second floor featured bedrooms and a large hallway with windows that overlooked the Hudson River. The home was located on a working farm and functioned as a residence and a place of business, where the family hosted, among others, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Attached to the home were a tree nursery and a kitchen on the northwest side and a building that functioned as an office on the southwest side of the main house. These structures were each one story high with small garret spaces. A 7.5-foot-high closed wall with a small roof and four windows that enclosed a work area behind the home connected to these dependencies (see Figure 4.6).³⁴ The Schuyler family largely restricted the men, women, and children they held in bondage to this enclosed work area and the home’s cellar. Most of the enslaved men, women, and children lived in the mansion’s cellar, which could only be accessed from the walled yard, as evidenced by an account of a British attempt to kidnap Schuyler, which detailed that one of Schuyler’s guards “sought shelter with the negroes in the cellar.”³⁵

The Abraham Ten Broeck family also lived in a spacious two-story Georgian-style building with a cellar and an attic, and they too built their mansion knowing that it would house enslaved laborers. When Ten Broeck had his new house built in the 1790s, he held twelve men, women, and children in bondage. Just like Schuyler mansion, the Ten Broeck home had a dining room, parlor, and large hallway on the first floor, while family bedrooms could be found on the second floor. Two one-story buildings were built at the sides of the home: most likely a privy had been located on the northwest side of the mansion and a summer kitchen and an office on the southwest side.³⁶ Although the home did not have an enclosed work area, most labor would have occurred in the building’s cellar and at the sides and back of the house.

An archeological report of the home shows that the kitchen, pantry, food storage space, food preparation area, and possibly the living quarters for enslaved people were all located in the home’s cellar. The cellar connected to the first floor with a service staircase in the back of the home. These stairs led to a space adjacent to the dining room that likely served as a pantry where the enslaved laborers made final adjustments to the food before they served it to the family and their guests. One cellar exit, located on the southeastern side, close to the front of the home, led directly to the outside where the yard and summer kitchen would have been located. Several enslaved people must have lived in the cellar room that had the best ventilation and was not associated with food preparation or storage, located in the back of the cellar on the most northwestern side, while some of them may have lived in the summer kitchen or the home’s attic.³⁷

The Schuyler and Ten Broeck families approached the housing of their enslaved laborers’ living and working spaces strategically. They had these homes built when they enslaved several men, women, and children. Thus, they developed a strategic ordering of the house and grounds in which they placed the work and living spaces of these enslaved laborers in segregated areas, mainly out of sight from family and guests. Their work and living areas were generally limited to the cellar and the area behind the home. The dependencies at the Ten Broeck home and the wall around this work area at the Schuyler mansion further made much of the enslaved labor invisible. Through this spatial organization, they presented an “ordered and manicured world” to their guests, while hiding the “more cluttered world of the working plantation” behind their home, a practice that was common on southern plantations.³⁸ In fact, these Dutch American houses resembled many eighteenth-century southern plantation homes. Drayton Hall on the Ashley River in South Carolina, for example, situated its kitchen and slave quarters in the basement, and other southern mansions confined slave quarters and work areas to wings or dependencies.³⁹ As Kathleen Brown points out in her work on race and gender in colonial Virginia, this spatial organization of the southern plantation homes affirmed these families’ gentility and placed slave labor at a “discreet distance from the white family’s living quarters.”⁴⁰ A similar spatial organization is evident in these elite Dutch American homes.

But these families did not only organize these homes to separate the enslaved workers and their labor from the main living spaces, they also created concentrated areas where most of the enslaved people’s labor and lives took place as a way to help control the people they held in bondage. This approach is especially evident at Schuyler Mansion where the enclosed work area could be watched through windows at the back of the home as well as from the office, located in the walled area. In some ways, this architectural structure facilitated complete surveillance of the enslaved people’s movements in ways that fit the panopticon model of surveillance first introduced by Jeremy Bentham but further developed by Michel Foucault.⁴¹ James Delle has called such constructs on Jamaican plantations “spatialities of surveillance,” spaces where visibility helped control the enslaved population.⁴² Terrence Epperson has shown how Thomas Jefferson and George Mason implemented such surveillance at their estates, and it appears that the Schuyler and Ten Broeck families practiced similar methods of surveillance and control.⁴³ In fact, Theresa Singleton has pointed out that wall enclosures, as seen at the Schuyler mansion, combined with “panoptic surveillance” would become well-established methods of control in factories and plantations by the nineteenth century.⁴⁴

In part, such surveillance and segregation were used to keep enslaved people from violent resistance. Even though some Dutch American slaveholders may have thought of themselves as benevolent masters, they still feared resistance from the people they enslaved. Most instances of slave resistance took place as individual acts within the home. The January 1708 murder of the William Hallett Jr. family of Newtown, Long Island, received a great deal of attention in the region. William, his pregnant wife, Ruth, and their five children were all killed in their sleep by two of their enslaved laborers—a Native American man and a Black female. White New Yorkers reeled from the horror, and in October of 1708, the state assembly passed “An Act for preventing the Conspiracy of Slaves,” which made special mention of the Halletts’ murders.⁴⁵ Due to its large scale, the 1712 New York City slave revolt, during which nine white New Yorkers died, again sent shock waves through these communities. In 1741, anxieties over such resistance led New York’s authorities to condemn several men and women to death for allegedly conspiring a revolt.⁴⁶ Yet, New York’s slaveholders were well aware that they were most vulnerable in their homes. In 1715 an enslaved man named Tom was charged with the attempted murder of his master, Johannes Dijkeman, a tenant farmer at Livingston Manor, and on April 10, 1730, authorities charged a man named Harry with the attempted murder of his enslaver, Zacharias Hoffman of Shawangunk, whom he, according to the court records, had attempted to kill with an ax.⁴⁷ Such attacks reminded Dutch American slaveholders of the potential dangers of holding people in bondage within one’s home.⁴⁸

While the actual occurrences of violence enacted by enslaved people upon the people who held them in bondage were rare, enslavers created systems of control and surveillance in their homes and on their grounds to avoid or limit such acts of resistance. At the Schuyler mansion, for example, the living quarters of the enslaved laborers had been separated completely from the main living areas. Because the mansion had no staircase that connected the cellar where most of the enslaved laborers lived to the main home, it would have been impossible for enslaved workers to access the main house unnoticed. The walled courtyard ensured that these men, women, and children could not easily exit the premises. At the Lott house, fear of attacks may have motivated the Lott family to place wooden latches on the outside of the garret doors where the people they held in bondage slept. These locks could have been used to lock enslaved people in these spaces at night so that they would not have access to the Lott family members, but they may also have been used to simply control enslaved people’s general mobility at night.⁴⁹

While it is not known how common it was among Dutch American enslavers to lock up their enslaved workers at night, it certainly was not unusual for slaveholding families to use locks to protect family and property.⁵⁰ William Strickland described in his travel journal how Mrs. Livingston and others secured valuables: “There always is adjoining the drawing room, the breakfast room, or dining room, which serves as a store room and place of safe deposit for the master or mistress of a family. This used to be indispensibly [sic] necessary when slaves were the only servants, in the state of slavery in the first establishment of it in the country, and custom now continues it.”⁵¹ Dutch Americans assumed that housing enslaved laborers in the home required extra security.

Analysis of Dutch American homes reveals that whereas Dutch Americans initially approached the housing of their enslaved laborers more haphazardly, over the course of the eighteenth century they developed more deliberate divisions of spaces that relegated their enslaved laborers to separate areas, often below, above, and behind the main living areas. At the same time, they created systems of surveillance and control within their homes and on their properties that much resembled those of their southern counterparts.

Spaces of Resistance

The conditions in which enslaved New Yorkers lived were undoubtedly harrowing. Cellars were often humid and cold, with meager light and ventilation. There, they lived on dirt floors sometimes covered by wooden floorboards. The garret spaces they inhabited had very little space and were largely devoid of natural light. In most cases, they shared small areas with several others and thus they had minimal to no privacy. Yet, the cellars and garret spaces where they lived were also the places where they made love, wept, played, prayed, dreamed, and shared stories as they huddled together on cold winter nights. Sojourner Truth’s description of the cellar in which she grew up points to the harsh conditions in which her family lived, but her narrative also reveals that her parents did what they could to create a comforting environment for their children. She recalled the evenings in particular, when they would spend time together either in the cellar gathered around a blazing knot or outside under the stars. During those moments, her parents taught her and her brother life lessons and shared stories about the family members who had been taken away from them.⁵²

As was the case with Truth and her family, enslaved New Yorkers always searched for ways to resist their enslavers’ attempts to control and monitor their activities. Increasing efforts by Dutch Americans to exclude their enslaved workers from the main living spaces helped these enslaved people to do so. The outdoor kitchens, garrets, and cellars, for example, often became semiautonomous spaces for the enslaved. Rarely would enslavers tread down the often small and narrow stairs to these cellars or up to the garrets, and in some homes, such as Schuyler Mansion, these spaces would be accessible only from the outside. Historian Jared Hardesty found that enslaved Bostonians often used the kitchen to receive guests; thus they may have seen the kitchen as part of their domain.⁵³ Bet’s confession after the 1793 Albany fire similarly suggests that many of Albany’s enslaved men and women at the time considered the kitchen a space with limited oversight. As she explained, she, Dean, and Pompey waited in Volkert Douw’s kitchen for the city’s watchmen to check the streets before they headed to Gansevoort’s home.⁵⁴ New York’s kitchens, cellars, and garret spaces often served as places where enslaved New Yorkers could escape their enslavers’ control temporarily.

Several scholars have researched the ways in which enslaved laborers used their living quarters to resist their enslavers’ control, often by finding ways to temporarily escape their surveillance. James Delle’s discussion of the “spatialities of resistance” proves pertinent here. He argues that enslaved laborers on Jamaica’s coffee plantations created these spatialities when they devised “ways to avoid becoming the disciplined and docile work force that the planters demanded.” On these plantations, the yaws house and hospital, where enslaved laborers with the yaws were isolated and treated, became such spaces of resistance because they lacked close surveillance.⁵⁵ Similarly, Terrence Epperson shows that while southern planters carefully arranged their property so that they could watch their enslaved laborers, control over these men, women, and children was “not absolute.” For example, the entrances to the slave quarters at Carter’s Grove plantation in Virginia were positioned in such a way that their movement could be “visually screened from the mansion,” but researchers found that inhabitants of one of these cabins had transformed a window at the back of the building into a door, thus making some of their movements unnoticeable. Epperson explains that the creation of this passage shows that there were “both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic conceptions of space within the landscape.”⁵⁶ He also points to the enslaved men and women who created pits underneath their cabins as ways to hide goods from their enslavers. Epperson identifies these modifications to their living quarters as acts of resistance, as does Theresa Singleton when she points out that enslaved people in nineteenth-century Cuba often “modified their living spaces” without permission from their masters.⁵⁷ Undoubtedly, enslaved New Yorkers similarly resisted their enslavers’ surveillance and control.

No large modifications to the enslaved people’s living quarters have been found in early New York’s Dutch communities, but scattered pieces of evidence do reveal enslaved New Yorkers’ efforts to create such geographies of resistance in their enslavers’ homes. Archeological research at the Lott house, for instance, shows how some of the enslaved men and women who lived in this garret tried to safeguard this space. There, archeologists found various artifacts hidden below the floorboards, including a child’s shoe, ritually placed corncobs, and a cloth pouch that contained an oyster shell and part of a sheep or goat pelvis.⁵⁸

The placement of these items close to the chimney and doorways suggests that they served to protect these spaces.⁵⁹ Similar cached deposits have been uncovered during excavations at several sites in the South, but research has also revealed such deposits elsewhere in New York. For instance, in his article on apotropaic building practices in New York, Walter Wheeler discusses two caches found at Latting’s Hundred, a home in Huntington, New York.⁶⁰ Several scholars have connected such charm bags to the minkisi—or the singular nkisi—of Kongolese people. Minkisi served wide-ranging purposes: they could be used to heal people, protect people or places, or inflict harm. These charm bags also resemble the grisgris—or grigri—that could be found in the Senegambia.⁶¹ There, such pouches were mostly worn on the body for protection, but sometimes they were buried to safeguard a space. Cached deposits contained sacred artifacts that ranged from buttons and shells to animal bones. Their positioning proved equally important in their effectiveness. They are usually found in walls, underneath floorboards, or buried in earth at the northeastern corner of a room or by places of entrée, such as windows, doors, and chimneys, because these were potential access points of evil.⁶²

The corncobs that archeologists found under the floorboards of both garret spaces at the Lott home possibly served to ward off evil. Their precise placing remains unclear because rodents may have disturbed them before they were found by archeologists, but they appear to have formed crosses or in one case a five-pointed star. The fact that they had been stripped but with the kernels still intact suggests that they were placed there intentionally, and their placement close to the chimney and doorways indicates that they were placed there to protect these spaces. Similar star-symbolism or ritual placement of corncobs has been uncovered at other New York homes. At the William Brandow house in Greene County, for example, a six-pointed star had been carved on the backside of planks that enclosed basement stairs, and at the Timothy Crane house in Charlton, Saratoga County, a drawing of a star had been hidden in the home’s kitchen.⁶³ In both cases, the location of these stars suggests that they were the work of enslaved people. Research at Johnson Hall, the home of Irish immigrant William Johnson and his Mohawk wife, Molly Brant, unveiled corncobs in what appears to have been a ritual deposit from the 1760s.⁶⁴ Because of the Johnson family’s close connections with the Iroquoian Nations, the use of maize here may have been derived from Iroquoian practices.

While it appears more likely that the corncobs at one of the Lott home garret spaces were forming a star, some of them may also have been placed in the shape of an X, a powerful symbol in many cultures. Scholars of the African diaspora have pointed out that the X held spiritual meaning in West Central Africa, and the Kingdom of Kongo in particular, where many of North America’s African captives originated. According to Robert Farris Thompson, the X-shaped cross originated from the dikenga, a Bakongo cosmogram that represents the connection between the world of the living and that of the dead. In its most pure form, the X would be circled, but noncircled varieties can be found as well, especially in the diaspora. In the Americas, the dikenga may have become an important symbol for captive Africans and their descendants because it was a powerful symbol in various pre-Christian African religions as well as in Christianity.⁶⁵ Not surprisingly, then, variations of the X have been found across the Americas, including New York, at sites inhabited by enslaved Africans.⁶⁶ In her work on what she calls Kongo Christianity, Cécile Fromont contends that the Kongo cross in its various forms held different meanings over time, but she also claims that, in addition to representing power, crosses often served as “trustworthy shields even in matters of life and death.”⁶⁷ If the enslaved person did indeed place the corncobs at the Lott house in the form of a cross, he or she probably did so in an effort to secure this space.

The artifacts found at the Lott home and elsewhere in New York demonstrate that the enslaved men and women who lived in these Dutch American homes did what they could to escape their enslavers’ surveillance and control within these houses, even if only temporarily. They also used the few opportunities available to them to secure these spaces, possibly guarding them from potential harmful sources. The increasing separation of their living and working areas from the main living spaces allowed them to do so more effectively.⁶⁸

The Dual Nature of the Home

When investigating Dutch American homes in early New York, it becomes apparent that enslaved and free inhabitants experienced these domestic spaces very differently from their enslavers. Whereas the main living areas of these houses were usually spacious and often had high ceilings and plenty of windows, the spaces where the enslaved men, women, and children worked and resided were usually small, damp, and largely devoid of natural light. They lived below, above, or behind the primary living spaces in cluttered environments with little to no privacy. Importantly, however, this dual nature of the home extended beyond these physical circumstances. Thus far, this chapter has focused on the physical layout of Dutch American houses; yet, the home fundamentally served as a social and emotional space, a place that symbolized family, domesticity, comfort, and care to the Dutch Americans who inhabited it. To the enslaved men, women, and children who lived in these houses, however, these were spaces of enslavement, forced labor, abuse, and possible separation from family members. To them, these homes represented anything but a safe haven.⁶⁹

Ann Stoler’s research of Dutch colonial Indonesia reveals this dual nature of the home. She found that whereas Dutch colonists recalled their interactions with their enslaved and servant laborers with great nostalgia and affection, these laborers often remembered these exchanges as moments of exclusion and control.⁷⁰ Enslaved and free people in Dutch New York would have experienced their interactions in the home similarly dissimilar, as becomes evident when closely examining the experiences of the enslaved people in these houses.

When investigating interactions in the home, it is important to first consider the ways in which Dutch Americans viewed the enslaved men, women, and children who lived and worked in these spaces. Other than the brief descriptions in family papers and advertisements, we know very little about the racial attitudes of New York’s Dutch American population. One document provides a more detailed discussion of such attitudes in the latter part of the eighteenth century: an unsent letter written in 1788 by Dutch Reformed Church minister Peter Lowe in which he lists his congregants’ objections to Black men becoming full members in the church. These congregants of Kings County’s six congregations claimed that Black people “have no souls” and that “they are accursed by God.” The congregants also suggested that African descendants were of a “different species”: “Witness their nauseous sweat, complexion, manners.”⁷¹ These depictions of Black New Yorkers should not be surprising. Their opposition occurred when slavery peaked in this community, and most Dutch Reformed Church congregants benefited from the labor of enslaved people. At a time that the United States had just passed its Constitution and started building a nation based on the principle of freedom and equality for all, only racist explanations could justify keeping these people in bondage. The same people who lived in their homes, took care of their children, and cooked their meals were considered subhumans and soulless. But these attitudes were not new to these communities, where slavery had already existed for over 150 years.

Even though they held deeply engrained racist thoughts when it concerned Black people, some Dutch Americans nevertheless believed they developed affection for the men, women, and children they held in bondage. For instance, Maria Louw of Kingston, mother of the previously discussed Reverend Peter Lowe, inherited from her father an enslaved man she had known since she was a child. In 1786, the man attempted to flee the Louw household, but he was found and returned to their residency. As punishment, Maria’s husband, Benjamin, shackled the man within their home. Maria wrote about these events to her son Petrus Louw, or Peter Lowe, the same Peter Lowe who two years later would face his congregants’ resistance to Black membership in a Kings County Dutch Reformed Church. In her letter, she explained that seeing this man in such miserable circumstances greatly distressed her, especially because she had known him since early childhood. Yet, she did not refer to the enslaved man by name, instead calling him “onse neger” (our negro).⁷² She also did not mention whether or not she opposed her husband when he decided to shackle the man within her home. In fact, her letter emphasized how these events made her feel instead of highlighting his suffering. Louw’s letter shows how these relationships differed significantly for enslavers and enslaved. Whereas Louw wrote about her affection for the man, he tried to escape the Louw family, and because of his attempt to gain freedom he was now chained, literally, within the house. Surely, the Louw home did not represent comfort or domesticity to him; instead, it was a place of bondage that he wanted to escape. For enslaved New Yorkers like him, the homes of their enslavers served as the most poignant reminders of the power relations necessary to sustain slavery.

Even when contemporaries suggested that Dutch American enslavers supported the family life of the people they held in bondage, research suggests the opposite was true. In her Memoirs of an American Lady, Scottish author and poet Anne Grant narrated her experiences living at the Schuyler Flatts estate, north of Albany, as a child in the mid-eighteenth century. She described life and culture in Albany and its surroundings, including slavery and the lives of the enslaved. These depictions often provided an idyllic representation of slavery in these Dutch American communities. For instance, she claimed that enslaved laborers and their children often lived with the same family all their life. She recounted that at the Schuyler Flatts two enslaved women—Maria and Diana—were “the principal roots from whence the many branches, then flourishing, sprung, yet remained. These were two women, who had come originally from Africa while very young; they were most excellent servants, and the mothers or grand-mothers of the whole set.”⁷³ Though some of this depiction may have been true, Grant’s discussion does not match the evidence uncovered at the Schuyler Flatts burial ground, where the family’s enslaved laborers were laid to rest. When researching several of the remains found at this site, scientists discovered that none of the enslaved people buried there were connected through their mtDNA, which indicates that none of them were related through the matrilineal line.⁷⁴ While this does not necessarily mean that Grant misrepresented the family connections of the enslaved families she encountered at the Schuyler Flatts, it does significantly challenge her account. Nevertheless, Grant’s description fits common narratives of slavery in North America’s Dutch communities as a more genteel form of slavery, thus ignoring the cruel realities of the system.

Like Grant, contemporaries often overstated the opportunities for enslaved people to establish families, but their depictions of slavery in New York’s Dutch communities also failed to acknowledge that in addition to living in cramped, cold, and unsanitary spaces, enslaved men, women, and children faced constant threats of abuse and neglect in their enslavers’ homes. Correspondence of the Philip Schuyler family suggests that Prince endured extreme neglect before the Schuyler family purchased him, but usually such discussions of neglect and abuse remain undiscussed in the records.⁷⁵ The violence committed upon enslaved people becomes especially evident when reading runaway slave advertisements that detailed the scars on the bodies of fugitives.⁷⁶ Amos who fled his enslaver in New Paltz, for example, had many scars “on and between his shoulders,” which likely resulted from severe whippings on his back.⁷⁷ A thirty-year-old man named Tite, who escaped the home of Conrad ten Eyck in Albany County, was, according to the advertisement that announced the search for him, “born with five fingers on each hand, but the small one on each was taken off when he was young.” The advertisement did not specify how and why his fingers were “taken off,” but one can imagine the abuse he had likely endured.⁷⁸ Multiple runaway slave advertisements mentioned fugitives whose toes had been frozen, which suggests that it was not uncommon for enslaved people to lack proper shoes for New York winters. When Harre ran away from Philip Schuyler, for example, he was described as having “large feet, and walks something lame, having had his toes frozen.”⁷⁹ Just as Prince requested to change enslavers in an effort to escape the abuse he endured, the men, women, and children described in these runaway slave advertisements often fled the houses in which they lived to find some reprieve from violence and neglect.

For enslaved women, it was particularly harrowing to live and work in close proximity to their enslavers, often in intimate spaces where these men could use their control over enslaved women to sexually harass or abuse them. As Catherine Clinton has so poignantly described in her work on sexual coercion, “slavery was not simply a system of labor extraction but a means of sexual and social control as well.”⁸⁰ Although enslaved men and boys were at times victims of sexual coercion, enslaved women and girls most frequently faced such violence. Very few records mention sexual exploitation of enslaved women in New York, and when they do, they generally leave out the woman’s experiences. In 1671, for instance, Jacob Jansz Flodder of Beverwijck (Albany) admitted in court that he could not sell an enslaved child “because the boy was his bastard son.”⁸¹ Tellingly, the court records did not mention the enslaved woman who gave birth to his child. She had no control over what happened to her body or the fate of her son.

One of the most famous cases of sexual coercion in Dutch American families occurred in the Schuyler family. According to Grant, one of the Schuyler men, whom she referred to as Colonel Schuyler, fathered a child with one of the family’s enslaved women. Grant noted that once the family found out about Colonel Schuyler’s relationship with the woman, they never again entrusted him “with anything of his own, and [he] lived an idle bachelor about the family.” Grant wrote that the Schuyler family took care of the child, whom they referred to as Chalk, and when he reached maturity they gave him a farm “in the debts [sic] of the woods,” probably as a way to hide the offspring of what they considered a disgraceful relationship.⁸² Grant did not say much else about Chalk or the man who fathered him, but she did not at all describe the boy’s mother. We do not know her name, age, or fate. Again, the woman’s experience was omitted from the records.⁸³

While we do not know the specifics of these cases, research of sexual violence enacted upon enslaved women shows how enslavers used their power to control the movement of enslaved women to place them in physically vulnerable circumstances.⁸⁴ Within the home, male predators created situations in which they would be alone with these women, whether this was in their office, bedroom, cellar, or any other temporarily private space. Enslaved girls often became aware of these dangers at a young age; consequently, they learned how to avoid being alone with their enslaver or male family members, using their knowledge of the home and grounds to protect themselves from such sexual violence.⁸⁵ They were especially vulnerable if they lived and worked in close proximity to their enslavers, as was generally the case in New York, and in the long term they would have struggled to defend themselves from the men who claimed to own their bodies, especially in an environment where enslaved women had no protection or legal recourse.⁸⁶ In fact, Sharon Block discovered in her research of rape and sexual coercion that “no historian has recorded a conviction of a white man for the rape of a slave at any point from 1700 to the Civil War, let alone a conviction of a master raping his slave.”⁸⁷ Yet, we know of many cases in which enslaved women were subjected to sexual violence.⁸⁸ To these women, the home certainly did not function as a safe haven.

For enslaved New Yorkers, these homes also failed to represent family and domesticity. Instead, enslaved New Yorkers struggled to establish families and lived with the constant fear that they might be separated from their kin. Grant suggested that when young children were sold, the action would not be complete “without consulting the mother, who, if expert and sagacious, had a great deal of say in the family, and would not allow her child to go into any family with whose domestics she was not acquainted.”⁸⁹ Her romanticized description of slavery among Albany’s Dutch descendants contrasts sharply with Sojourner Truth’s account of the sale of her and her siblings by the Hardenbergh family.⁹⁰ In fact, numerous documents show the frequent separation of enslaved families in these Dutch American communities, and not once do they mention that the child’s mother had a say in the decision. In 1738, for example, Dutch American painter Gerardus Duyckinck ordered Henry Rensselaer to sell one of his enslaved women with child “if you can get 60, or even 58 pounds in cash for them, or forty eight pounds for her without the child.”⁹¹ Not surprisingly, Duyckinck did not direct Rensselaer to consult with the mother before doing so.

Many of these children would have remained in the same county, but there are also plenty of bills of sale that detail transactions in which children were sold to enslavers who lived far from their parents, thus creating long distances between family members. Elizabeth Boelen of New York City, for instance, sold the eleven-year-old Florah to Jacob Van Schaick of Albany in 1752, and in doing so Florah was taken to the upriver settlement far away from her friends and family in New York City.⁹² The family of Sare, an enslaved woman in Albany, had been spread out along the Hudson River with her daughter Mace living in Poughkeepsie and her son Bob in New York City.⁹³ Their separate residencies made the chances that these family members would see each other again highly unlikely.

Dutch American enslavers regularly separated young children from their mothers. According to Anne Grant, enslavers commonly gifted enslaved children to one of their children the first New Year’s Day after they had turned three years old. On that day, the child “was solemnly presented to a son or a daughter, or other young relative of the family, who was of the same sex with the child so presented.”⁹⁴ Several documents confirm such arrangements. Dirck Schepmoes of Kingston left Jenny with “all her children” to his wife Maragrietie Schepmoes of Tappen, but he determined that at the marriage of his daughters Anna and Areyantie they each should be allowed to choose one of Jenny’s children: “Anna is to have the first choice of Jenny’s children, Areyantie shall have two of Jenny’s children.”⁹⁵ Even infants, as young as one year old, were separated from their mothers. For instance, Jean Hasbrouck of New Paltz stipulated in his 1712 will that the enslaved woman named Molly should go to his daughter Elizabeth, but if Molly were to have a daughter, the child should go to Hasbrouck’s son Jacob when she turned one.⁹⁶ Johannis Blanshan stated in his will that his wife should inherit the enslaved woman named Beth, but as soon as they no longer required to be nursed, Beth’s children were to be divided among his two sons.⁹⁷ In another example, Nikus Jans left the eight-year-old boy Jacob to his son John; his son Hendrik would receive Arlin, an enslaved girl of about a year old; and his daughter Leijntie was to get the five-year-old girl named Mat.⁹⁸ In these instances, young children, including infants and toddlers, were separated from their mothers, fathers, and siblings.

Due to their limited mobility, enslaved mothers, fathers, and children rarely had opportunities to visit the family members from whom they had been separated. Many of them would only have memories of the dearly departed ones, and the very little ones who were separated from their families before their third birthday would eventually lose all memories of the people who loved them so.

Enslaved fathers and mothers knew that any change in their enslaver’s circumstances could result in their family being ripped apart. Sojourner Truth described how her mother anticipated imminent separation from her children when Charles Hardenbergh passed away.

After this event, she was often surprised to find her mother in tears; and when, in her simplicity, she inquired, “Mau-mau, what makes you cry?” She would answer, “Oh, my child, I am thinking of your brothers and sisters that have been sold away from me.” And she would proceed to detail many circumstances respecting them. But Isabella long since concluded that it was the impending fate of her only remaining children, which her mother but too well understood, even then, that called upon those memories from the past, and made them crucify her heart afresh.

As Truth explained here, her mother understood all too well that soon the last two children she still had by her side would be taken from her.⁹⁹

Not only did enslaved families daily face the possibility of separation, most enslaved New Yorkers struggled to even start a family. Throughout the eighteenth century, the male/female ratio of New York’s enslaved population was relatively balanced. In 1755, for example, Ulster County had about four enslaved men for every three enslaved women, and in Kings County there were around five women for every six men.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless, most enslaved men and women found it challenging to find or keep a spouse in communities where most enslavers held fewer than five people in bondage. Husbands and wives were often held in bondage by different enslavers and therefore lived in separate homes, separate towns, or even separate counties. Harry, for instance, lived in Ulster County and had to cross the Hudson River to see his wife in Dutchess County.¹⁰¹ These enslaved New Yorkers often relied on brief moments of independence to connect with their partners. They could do so when they ran errands for their enslavers, at night, or on Sundays if they received some free time. When their enslavers were in bed or in church, they could try to sneak out unnoticed. Truth’s first love, Robert, for instance, frequently visited her even though his enslaver had forbidden him to do so.¹⁰² These circumstances made unions between enslaved men and women incredibly challenging.

For the enslaved New Yorkers who were bought and sold several times over the course of their lives, the houses in which they lived became temporary residencies they shared with enslaved men, women, and children they barely knew. These enslaved men and women would have found it extremely difficult to establish intimate relations. When Harre fled Philip Schuyler, he had already lived in Orange, Dutchess, and Albany County.¹⁰³ And at twenty-nine years old, Caesar of Ulster County had been enslaved by three different men in three different towns: Captain Legg of Saugerties, Tjerck Louw of Plattekill, and Stephen Scryver of New Paltz.¹⁰⁴ At a moment’s notice these people could be relocated, thus making it especially challenging to build intimate relationships.

Whereas the home symbolized family to its free inhabitants, enslaved New Yorkers often had to flee these homes to reunite with family members. Numerous enslaved New Yorkers responded to the separation from their family and friends by running away in the hope that they could reconnect with lost kin. When in 1764 Lucy, a thirty-year-old woman, ran away, her enslaver believed she would probably travel to “Bucks County, to one Lambert Vandyke’s near Shaminy Meeting-house, where she has a daughter.”¹⁰⁵ Similarly, Dinah Cesar, a twenty-five-year-old woman from Albany County, was thought to have fled to New York City to find her family.¹⁰⁶ Some enslaved families decided to flee their enslavers together either to avoid being separated or in hopes of finding a place where they could be free. Dan and his wife, Dian, took their seven-month-old baby and two-year-old daughter when they fled their enslaver in Albany County.¹⁰⁷ When Bett and Bill ran away with their children Charles and Jane, they were each held in bondage by different enslavers and lived in different towns.¹⁰⁸ Nancy, described as having “been bred in Dutch families, and talks Dutch pretty freely,” fled J. B. Desdoity in 1802 with Richard, also known as Dick Kettle, who, according to the runaway slave advertisement, “talks Dutch, and calls himself her husband.”¹⁰⁹ Finally, in 1808, a group of enslaved people ran away from the home of Isaac Cortelyou, one of the largest enslavers in New Utrecht, Kings County. Among them were Dina, her daughter Bett, and her grandson Ben.¹¹⁰ These men and women attempted to create a family life in ways they would not be able to do in the homes of their enslavers.

Although we rarely know the specifics of their individual cases, close examination of the various surviving records reveals that the homes in which enslaved New Yorkers lived provided little comfort to these inhabitants. The dual nature of these homes proved inescapable to the people who were held in bondage there.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Dutch Americans took more strategic approaches to housing their enslaved workers. They organized their homes and grounds in an effort to make these people and their labor largely invisible while also being able to surveil and control them most effectively. Ironically, the enslaved inhabitants of these homes were able to take advantage of Dutch Americans’ efforts to segregate these labor and living areas by reshaping these spaces into places of resistance whenever possible.

The home also holds important social and emotional meaning. As is evident from the accounts of Sojourner Truth and Anne Grant, the Dutch-American homes of early New York held distinct meanings to their different inhabitants. These women provided vastly different descriptions of the homes they inhabited as children. Whereas Grant remembered a warm and nurturing environment in which the enslaved men, women, and children were treated as family members, Truth details the anxiety and trauma enslaved New Yorkers endured in these homes.

Not surprisingly, the enslaved men, women, and children who lived in the homes of their enslavers never felt comfortable or safe in these spaces. Unlike their enslavers, they would not have associated these homes with safety, comfort, family, and domesticity. More likely, they saw these houses in the same way Frederick Douglass did the building he lived in on a Maryland plantation, which he later described: “Charmless, it was not home to me; on parting from it, I could not feel that I was leaving any thing which I could have enjoyed by staying.… I looked for home elsewhere, and was confident of finding none which I could relish less than the one which I was leaving.”¹¹¹