1. I am aware that the Maison des Esclaves in Senegal has been a site of controversy for decades, with disagreements between scholars about how important this site really was in the transatlantic slave trade. My comments here are not intended to take a position in these debates. Instead, they are merely meant to describe my personal experience when visiting this site.

2. The Slave Dwelling Project blog discusses this and other sleepovers at https://slavedwellingproject.org/there-is-something-special-about-sleepovers/.

3. The archeological work at Royall House as discussed by Alexandra Chan proved especially influential early on in thinking about ways we can use consideration of space to reconstruct the experiences of enslaved people in these spaces. Alexandra Chan, Slavery in the Age of Reason: Archeology at a New England Farm (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007).

4. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xviii–xix; Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 20; Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 6–7.

5. Stephanie Camp explains that enslaved people created “a rival geography,” a term first introduced by Edward Said and used by geographers “to describe resistance to colonial occupation.” In her study of southern plantations, the rival geography represents “alternative ways of knowing and using plantation and southern space that conflicted with planters’ ideals and demands.” Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7.

6. Relatively recent studies on slavery in New York include Michael E. Groth, Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017); Katherine Howlett Hayes, Slavery before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651–1884 (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Nicole Maskiell, “Bound by Bondage: Slavery among Elites in Colonial Massachusetts and New York” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2013); Anne-Claire Merlin-Faucquez, “De la Nouvelle-Néerlande à New York: la naissance d’une société esclavagiste (1624–1712)” (PhD diss., Université Paris VIII—Vincennes Saint Denis Ecole Doctorale, 2011); Andrea C. Mosterman, “Sharing Spaces in a New World Environment: African-Dutch Contributions to North American Culture, 1626–1826” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2012); Jeroen Dewulf, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017); Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), chap. 4. For earlier studies on slavery in New York, see Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Myra B. Young Armstead, ed., Mighty Change, Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665–1865 (Madison, WI: Madison House Publishers, 1997); Patricia Bonomi, “ ‘Swarms of Negroes Comeing about My Door’: Black Christianity in Early Dutch and English North America,” Journal of American History (June 2016): 34–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw007; Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Vivienne Kruger, “Born to Run: The Slave Family in Early New York, 1626 to 1827” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1985); Joyce Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks: The Evolution of a Slave Society at New Amsterdam,” New York History (1978): 129–130; Joyce Goodfriend, “Slavery in Colonial New York,” Urban History, no. 3 (2008): 485–496; Joyce Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” in A Beautiful and Fruitful Place, ed. Nancy McClure Zeller (Albany: New Netherland Project, 1991): 147–156; Joyce Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1644–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York: New Press, 2005); A. J. Williams-Myers, Long Hammering: Essays on the Forging of an African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley to the Early Twentieth Century (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Oscar Williams, African Americans and Colonial Legislation in the Middle Colonies (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2014 [repr. ed.]); Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966). Recent work on slavery in the North includes Jared Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2016); Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Harvey Amani Whitfield, North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016); and James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

7. Cynthia Van Zandt similarly suggests in her study that “enslaved Africans charted the spaces in which they could blunt the oppressive force of slavery …, and slavery in the early seventeenth century provided far more such spaces than existed in later periods.” Cynthia Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliance in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9.

8. Hodges, Root & Branch, 8.

9. The 1830 Federal Census suggests that slavery had not yet come to its complete demise in New York State. According to this census, seventy-six men, women, and children still lived in bondage in the state. In 1840, New Yorkers reported four enslaved people to the census, three of whom lived in Brooklyn. Abstract of the Returns of the Fifth Census, showing the number of free people, the number of slaves, the Federal or Representative Number; and the Aggregate of Each County of Each State of the United States. Prepared from the corrected returns of the Secretary of Congress, By the Clerk of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Duff Green, 1832), 9–10; Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States, as obtained at the Department of State, from the returns of the sixth census, by counties and principal towns exhibiting the population, wealth, and resources of the country (Washington, DC: Printed by Thomas Allen, 1841), 22; also see Gellman, Emancipating New York.

10. Merlin-Faucquez, “De la Nouvelle-Néerlande à New York,” 175–178, 352.

11. Several scholars have written about the ways in which Dutch culture influenced African American ways of life in Dutch American communities. See, for instance, Jeroen Dewulf, “ ‘A Strong Barbaric Accent’: America’s Dutch-Speaking Black Community from Seventeenth-Century New Netherland to Nineteenth-Century New York and New Jersey,” American Speech 90, no. 2 (May 2015): 131–153, https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3130302; David S. Cohen, The Ramapo Mountain People (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Linda Heywood and John K. Thornton, “Intercultural Relations between Europeans and Blacks in New Netherland,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations: 1609–2009, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009); Mosterman, “Sharing Spaces in a New World Environment.”

12. See, for instance, Max Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Hardesty, Unfreedom; Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); Simon Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Serena R. Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

13. Multiple archival records show that families purchased Dutch books for their children. See, for example, Peter Winne’s purchase of De Trap Der Jeugd in 1771. Elmendorph Account Book 1770–1777, December 18, 1771, CV10181: Kingston Collection, box 17, NYSL. Also see Charles T. Gehring, “The Dutch Language in Colonial New York: An Investigation of a Language in Decline and Its Relationship to Social Change” (PhD diss., Indiana University Press, 1973); Gerald F. De Jong, The Dutch Reformed Church in the American Colonies (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1978), 86.

14. Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, no. 2 (April 1996): 254, https://doi.org/102307/2947401.

15. Frederick Philipse, Rip Vandam (Van Dam), Anthony Rutgers, Abraham van Horne, Garret Van Horne, John Van Horne, Arnolt Schuyler, Peter Schuyler, Adoniah Schuyler, and John Van Cortland were all listed as slave ship owners. Voyages database, 2013, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed October 26, 2016).

16. Voyages database, 2013, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed October 26, 2016); Walter Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2006), 31. For more about the Philipse family and the Madagascar trade, see Jacob Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” New York Historical Society Quarterly, no. 4 (September 1971): 354–374.

17. Voyages database, 2013, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed October 26, 2016).

18. Rucker, River Flows On, 32–33. According to Rucker, a fourth of New York’s newly imported slaves came directly from Africa, primarily from the Gold Coast, in the first half of the eighteenth century. British slaves imported from Jamaica, Antigua, and Barbados mainly came from the Bight of Biafra, the Bight of Benin, the Gold Coast, and West Central Africa.

19. Gregory O’Malley has calculated that more than 92 percent of the enslaved people who were traded in the British intercolonial trade had only recently arrived in the Americas from Africa. Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 21, 202. About 3,350 enslaved Africans arrived in New York from the Caribbean, whereas about 6,089 enslaved Africans came directly from Africa during the period from 1701 through 1775. The number of African captives who arrived in New York by transatlantic slave trade is based on the number of people who survived the journey and disembarked in New York. Many more African captives boarded these ships but never made it to New York. Examination of the eighteenth-century British slave trade reveals that most African captives who arrived in the Americas on board British ships would have come from the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, and West Central Africa. Estimates from Voyages database, 2013, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed November 16, 2016).

20. E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, trans and ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York: Documents relating to the history and settlements of the towns along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers (with the exception of Albany), from 1630 to 1684 (Albany: Weed & Parsons, 1881), 2:537. Also see Maskiell, “Bound by Bondage,” 108; Ansel Judd Northrup, Slavery in New York: A Historical Sketch (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1900), 305; Charles Zebina Lincoln, William H. Johnson, and Ansel Judd Northrup, eds., The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution, Including the Charters to the Duke of York, the Commission and Instructions to Colonial Governors, the Dukes Laws, the Laws of the Donagan and Leisler Assemblies, the Charters of Albany and New York and the Acts of the Colonial Legislature from 1691 to 1775 (Minneapolis: J. B. Lyon, State Printer, 1894), 1:598; 3:1060.

21. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7.

22. His speech was later published: Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

23. Robert T. Tally, Spatiality (New York: Routledge, 2012), 11–12.

24. Tally, 4.

25. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. First published in French in 1974), 12.

26. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.

27. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 19.

28. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 12.

29. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195–230.

30. Lepore, New York Burning; Vincent Brown, “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative,” http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html; also see Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020).

31. Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

32. James A. Delle, An Archeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (New York: Plenum, 1998); Terrence W. Epperson, “Race and the Disciplines of the Plantation,” Historical Archeology 24, no. 4 (1990): 29–36; Theresa A. Singleton, “Slavery and Spatial Dialectics on Cuban Coffee Plantations,” World Archeology 33, no. 1 (2001): 98–114; Theresa A. Singleton, ed., The Archeology of Slavery and Plantation Life (San Diego: Academic Press, 1985); Theresa A. Singleton, “The Archeology of Slavery in North America,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 119–140; Terrence W. Epperson, “Panopticon Plantations: The Garden Sights of Thomas Jefferson and George Mason,” in Lines that Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender, ed. James A. Delle, Stephen Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 58–77.

33. Camp, Closer to Freedom; McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives.

34. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “A Sea of Texts: The Atlantic World, Spatial Mapping, and Equiano’s Narrative,” in Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World, ed. John Corrigan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 38–39.

35. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010 [repr. ed.]), 183.

36. Many thanks to art historian Anna Mecugni for her help analyzing this painting.

37. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7. James Delle has termed these “spatialities of movement,” the ways in which enslaved people “expressed control over the spatiality of movement, at least for a brief time.” Delle, Archeology of Social Space, 165. Also see Rebecca Ginsberg and Clifton Ellis, eds., Slavery in the City: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban Slavery in North America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 2–3; Aisha Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgency of 1841–1844 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 53; Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 131–132.

38. A growing number of scholars are paying attention to these silences in the archives. See, among others, Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Stephanie Smallwood, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 6, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 117–132, https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0117.

1. In the historical records, Groot Manuel is also referred to as Groote Manuel or Manuel de Groote. For clarity, I will continue to use Groot Manuel. Some scholars confuse Groot Manuel and Manuel de Gerrit de Reus, but these are clearly two different men. Robert Swan details how Manuel de Gerrit de Reus likely got his name. Robert J. Swan, “Slaves and Slaveholding in Dutch New York,” Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 17, no. 1 (1998): 56.

2. Court Proceedings, January 17, 1641, NYCM, IV, 83, NYSA; Sentence of Manuel de Gerrit de Reus, January 24, 1641, NYCM, IV, 84, NYSA; Council Minutes, January 24, 1641, NYCM, IV, 85, NYSA. Many scholars have discussed these events. See, for example, Romney, New Netherland Connections, 220–221; Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations, 158; Cynthia Jean Van Zandt, “Negotiating Settlement: Colonialism, Cultural Exchange, and Conflict in Early Colonial Atlantic North America, 1580–1660” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1998), 142–186; Jaap Jacobs, “Van Angola naar Manhattan. Slavernij in Nieuw-Nederland in de seventiende eeuw,” in Slaven en schepen. Enkele reis, bestemming onbekend, ed. Remmelt Daalder, Andrea Kieskamp, and Dirk J. Tang (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2001), 69–75; Christopher Moore, “A World of Possibilities: Slavery and Freedom in Dutch New Amsterdam,” in Slavery in New York, ed. Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris (New York: New Press, 2005), 39; Peter Christoph, “The Freedmen of New Amsterdam,” in A Beautiful and Fruitful Place: Selected Rensselaerswijck Seminar Papers, ed. N. A. McClure Zeller (n.p., 1991), 158.

3. Minutes, February 25, 1644, NYCM, IV, 183, NYSA; A. J. F. van Laer, Council Minutes, 1638–1649 (New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch. Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Co., 1974), 4:213.

4. When discussing slavery in Batavia, Niemeijer writes, “Deze zwarte Indiers, hetzij vrij of slaaf, kwamen soms met een christelijke identiteit in Batavia of zouden er weldra een krijgen. Het doel was om in Batavia een betrouwbare, ‘christelijk-inlandse’ burgerij te vormen.” Hendrik E. Niemeijer, Batavia: Een koloniale samenleving in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2005), 42.

5. Cynthia Van Zandt also argues in her book Brothers among Nations that the company may have spared their lives because they were too valuable to the company. Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations, 149–156.

6. See, for example, P. C. Emmer, De Nederlandse Slavenhandel, 1500–1850 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Arbeidspers, 2000), 56–57; Willem Frijhoff and Jaap Jacobs, “The Dutch, New Netherland, and Thereafter (1609–1780s),” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 46; Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2015). For more about the Dutch West India Company’s efforts to colonize the region, see, among others, Susanah Shaw Romney, “ ‘With & alongside his housewife’: Claiming Ground in New Netherland and the Early Modern Dutch Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 2 (April 2016): 187–224, https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.73.2.0187.

7. At least one document uses the term half-free to refer to such conditional freedom. This document declares that a group of men would become “half free” (datse half-vrij sullen sijn). This document later details when “this half freedom” (dese halve vrijdom) will go into effect. Council Minutes, December 8, 1663, NYCM, X, 429, NYSA. A December certificate of freedom also included the term half-freedom. Council Minutes, December 11/21, NYCM, X, 327, NYSA. On September 4, 1664, the council minutes includes a petition from men who had obtained such half-freedom in which they requested to be released from “half-slavery” (halve slavernije). Council Minutes, September 4, 1664, X, 317, NYSA.

8. Indeed, as Cátia Antunes explains, “perpetuating a binary narrative (VOC/WIC, East/West) when analysing the Early Modern Dutch maritime expansion overseas obscures and neglects the importance of the features of empires actually encapsulated by this expansion.” Cátia Antunes, “From Binary Narratives to Diversified Tales: Changing the Paradigm in the Study of Dutch Colonial Participation,” TVGESCH 131, no. 3 (2018): 387, https://doi.org/110.5117/TVGESCH2018.3.001.ANTU. Also consider connections between the families involved in the WIC and VOC as discussed in Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

9. Antunes, “From Binary Narratives,” 393, 401.

10. Gerrit Knaap, “Kasteel, stad en land: Het begin van het Nederlandse Imperium in de Oost,” Leidschrift 21, no. 2 (September 2006): 19. Also see Matthias van Rossum, “Labouring Transformations of Amphibious Monsters: Exploring Early Modern Globalization, Diversity, and Shifting Clusters of Labour Relations in the Context of the Dutch East India Company (1600–1800),” IRSH 64 (2019): 20–21, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859019000014.

11. Benjamin Schmidt, “The Dutch Atlantic: From Provincialism to Globalism,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 170.

12. Erin Kramer, “New York’s Unrighteous Beginnings,” Gotham Center Blog, https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/new-yorks-unrighteous-beginnings, August 5, 2020. For more on early Munsee-Dutch encounters, see Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). Also see Adam Clulow, “The Art of Claiming: Possession and Resistance in Early Modern Asia,” American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (February 2016): 19, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.1.17. Although Dutch officials claimed legal ownership of such territory, indigenous populations frequently challenge these legal claims. See, for instance, Saliha Belmessous, ed., Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

13. Nigel Worden, “Space and Identity in VOC Cape Town,” Kronos 25 (1998–99): 76–77.

14. Marsely L. Kehoe, “Dutch Batavia: Exposing the Hierarchy of the Dutch Colonial City,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 8, 14, 16–17, https://doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2015.7.1.3.

15. Edmund B. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland; or, New York Under the Dutch, (New York: D. Appleton, 1846), 1:400. Also see Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 198; Henk den Heijer, “The Dutch West India Company, 1621–1791,” in Riches from the Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, ed. Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 85. For a detailed discussion of the West India Company, see Henk den Heijer, De geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2002).

16. Knaap, “Kasteel, stad en land,” 24; Markus Vink, “ ‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (June 2003): 164, https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2003.0026; Clulow, “Art of Claiming,” 19.

17. For initial Dutch portrayals of Native Americans as possible allies against the Spanish, see Benjamin Schmidt, “Exotic Allies: The Dutch-Chilean Encounter and the Failed Conquest of America,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 440–473, https://doi.org/10.2307/2902060; Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Arthur Weststeijn, “Republican Empire: Colonialism, Commerce and Corruption in the Dutch Golden Age,” Renaissance Studies 26, no. 2 (September 2012): 496–497; Pepijn Brandon and Karwan Fatah-Black, “ ‘For the Reputation and Respectability of the State’: Trade, The Imperial State, Unfree Labor, and Empire in the Dutch Atlantic,” in Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500–1914, ed. John Donoghue and Evelyn Jennings (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 90. For Hugo Grotius and just war in Dutch colonial expansion, see Martine Julia van Ittersum, “The Long Goodbye: Hugo Grotius’ Justification of Dutch Expansion Overseas, 1615–1645,” History of European Ideas 36 (2010): 386–411, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2010.05.003.

18. In fact, Susanah Shaw Romney suggests that “Dutch intellectuals thought settlement and trade inseparable within a republican empire.” Romney, “ ‘With & alongside his housewife,’ ” 190.

19. Brandon and Fatah-Black, “ ‘For the Reputation,’ ” 85.

20. Deborah Hamer, “Marriage and the Construction of Colonial Order: Jurisdiction, Gender, and Class in Seventeenth Century Dutch Batavia,” Gender & History 29, no. 3 (November 2017): 633–634, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12316; Leonard Blussé, “Batavia: 1619–1740: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Colonial Town,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1981): 167.

21. Alison Games, “Cohabitation, Suriname-Style: English Inhabitants in Dutch Suriname after 1667,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 72, no. 2 (April 2015): 241, https://doi.org/10.5309/Willmaryquar.72.2.0195.

22. See, for example, Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Gijs Kruijtzer, “European Migration in the Dutch Sphere,” in Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage, ed. Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV, 2008), 97–154.

23. Romney, “ ‘With & alongside his housewife,’ ” 210.

24. Blussé, “Batavia,” 167; Remco Raben, “Facing the Crowd: The Urban Ethnic Policy of the Dutch East India Company, 1600–1800,” in Mariners, Merchants, and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, ed. Skaria Mathew Kuzhippallil (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 216.

25. Tonio Andrade, “The Rise and Fall of Dutch Taiwan, 1624–1662: Cooperative Colonization and the Statist Model of European Expansion,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (December 2006): 430, https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2006.0052. Also see Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 [Gutenberg-e]).

26. Brandon and Fatah-Black, “ ‘For the Reputation,’ ” 90. Similarly, Rik van Welie writes, “All overseas possessions of the Dutch depended to varying degrees on the labour of slaves who were imported from diverse and often remote areas.” Rik van Welie, “Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World, 1596–1863,” in Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage, ed. Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV, 2008), 155.

27. As quoted in Adam Clulow, Amboina, 1623: Fear and Conspiracy on the Edge of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 50.

28. Vink, “ ‘World’s Oldest Trade,’ ” 152; Clulow, Amboina, 1623, 51, 56.

29. Clulow, “Art of Claiming,” 19; Vink, “ ‘World’s Oldest Trade,’ ” 164.

30. Raben, “Facing the Crowd,” 452.

31. Remco Raben, “Cities and the Slave Trade in Early-Modern Southeast Asia,” in Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian Histories, ed. Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman, and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV, 2008), 125. Hendrik Niemeijer points out that by the late seventeenth century more than half of Batavia’s population was enslaved. Niemeijer, Batavia, 51. For more on the Dutch slave trade in the Indian Ocean, see Clulow, Amboina, 1623; Linda Mbeki and Matthias van Rossum, “Private Slave Trade in the Dutch Indian Ocean World: A Study into the Networks and Backgrounds of the Slavers and the Enslaved in South Asia and South Africa,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 1 (2017), 95–116; Rik van Welie, “Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial Empire: A Global Comparison,” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 82, no. 1 & 2 (2008): 73; Richard B. Allen, “Satisfying the ‘Want for Labouring People’: European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850,” Journal of World History 21, no. 1 (2010): 45–73, https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.0.0100; Vink, “ ‘World’s Oldest Trade.’ ”

32. Nicolaes van Wassenaer, “Historisch Verhael,” in Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 89. Also see Nicolaes Wassenaer, Historisch verhael aldaer ghedenck-weerdichste geschiedenisse, die vanden beginner des jaers 1621 (tot 1632) voorgevallens syn (Amsterdam, 1622–1635), International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. See Jaap Jacobs for additional Dutch descriptions of New Netherland. Jacobs, New Netherland, chap. 1.

33. Jaap Jacobs, for instance, claims that the Dutch had “little incentive to go overseas.” Jaap Jacobs, “Migration, Population, and Government in New Netherland,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. Van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 87. In his book New Netherland, Jacobs provides great detail on migration to the colony and the various strategies of the company to promote or force migration. In this chapter, he does not discuss enslaved people. Jacobs, New Netherland, chap. 2. A later version of the book includes a one-page description of enslaved people in a chapter on the colony’s population. Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 55–56. Wim Klooster provides a similar discussion about migration in the Dutch Atlantic, including New Netherland. Klooster, Dutch Moment, chap. 6.

34. Jeroen Dewulf, “Emulating a Portuguese Model: The Slave Policy of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) and New Netherland (1614–1664) in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Early American History 4 (2014): 7, https://doi.org/10.1163/18770703-00401006; Klooster, Dutch Moment, 19; José Antônio Gonsales de Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië, (1624–1654): de invloed van de Hollandse besetting op het leven en de cultuur in Noord-Brazilië, trans. G. N. Visser (Zutphen: Walburg, 2001 [repr. ed.]), 190; Clulow, Amboina, 1623, 57–58.

35. Vrijheden privilegien ende Exemtien, SG 1.01.03, inv. no. 5753, Nat. Arch. Also see Hugh Hastings et al., eds., Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York (Albany: J. B. Lyon, state printer, 1901), 1:78–79; Charles T. Gehring, “New Netherland: The Formative Years, 1609–1632,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 83. Mark Meuwese discusses the debates within the Amsterdam chamber of the WIC that led to the creation of patroonships. Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 48–49. Also see Jaap Jacobs, “Dutch Proprietary Manors in America: The Patroonships in New Netherland,” in Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, ed. Lou Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 301–326.

36. Ernst van den Boogaart, “The Servant Migration to New Netherland, 1624–1664,” in Colonialism and Migration; Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, ed. P. C. Emmer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 57. According to Isaac Jogues, already in 1646 there were “four or five hundred men of different sects and nations” on Manhattan Island, and only about a hundred people in Rensselaerswijck. Isaac Jogues, “Novum Belgium,” in Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 262. Jaap Jacobs also discusses the early challenges to attract settlers. Jacobs, New Netherland, 45–46.

37. Rapport & advijs over de gelegentheijt van nieu nederlant, December 15, 1644, SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.30A, Nat. Arch.

38. Wim Klooster points out that many Dutch migrants returned to the Dutch Republic. Wim Klooster, “The Dutch in the Atlantic,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 70.

39. Arnold J. F. van Laer, ed. and trans., Minutes of the Court of Rensselaerswyck, 1648–1652 (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1922), 163.

40. Johannes Winckelman contra Abraham Pietersen, March 13, 1642, NYCM, IV, 115, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 135.

41. Resolution, December 5, 1647, NYCM, IV, 353, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 470–472.

42. Minutes, August 9, 1640, NYCM, IV, 73, NYSA; Ordinance, October 1648, NYCM, XVI, 17, NYSA.

43. Jacobs, New Netherland, 47.

44. Klooster, Dutch Moment, 91; Jacobs, New Netherland, 373.

45. Van den Boogaart, “Servant Migration,” 57.

46. Jacobs, New Netherland, 47.

47. Letter from the Directors to Stuyvesant, November 23, 1654, NYCM, XII, 17, NYSA; Directors in Amsterdam to Stuyvesant, January 20, 1660, NYCM, XV, 97, NYSA; Letter to the Staten Generaal, n.d., SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.30A, 10–11, Nat. Arch. In 1645, the States General instructed the WIC to bring slaves to New Netherland. Instructions by the West India Company for the Council and Director General of New Netherland, July 8, 1645, SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.30A, Nat. Arch. For more on the slave trade with New Netherland, see P. C. Emmer, “De Slavenhandel van en naar Nieuw-Nederland,” Economisch-Historisch Jaarboek 35 (1972), 94–148; Albert van Dantzig, Het Nederlandse aandeel in de slavenhandel (Bussum: Fibula-van Dishoeck, 1968); Joyce Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks,” New York History 49 (1978), 125–144; E. B. O’Callaghan, ed. and trans., Voyages of the slavers St. John and Arms of Amsterdam, 1659, 1663: together with additional papers illustrative of the slave trade under the Dutch (Albany: J. Munsell, 1867). For more on the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic slave trade, see, among others, Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650 (Zutphen: Uitgeverijmaatshappij Walburg Pers, 2000), 91–120; Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa: Empires, Merchants and the Atlantic System, 1580–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 213–270; Jelmer Vos, David Eltis, and David Richardson, “The Dutch in the Atlantic World: New Perspectives from the Slave Trade with Particular Reference to the African Origins of the Traffic,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Johannes Postma, “A Reassessment of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and shipping, 1585–1817, ed. Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 115–138; Ernst van den Boogaart, “The Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World, 1600–90: Estimates of Trends in Composition and Value,” Journal of African History 33, no. 2 (November 1992): 369–385; Pieter Emmer and Ernst van den Boogaart, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Johannes Postma, “The Dimensions of the Dutch Slave Trade from Western Africa,” Journal of African History 13, no. 2 (1972): 237–248; H. den Heijer, “Goud, ivoor en slaven. Scheepvaart en handel van de Tweede Westindische Compagnie of Afrika, 1674–1740” (PhD diss., Universiteit van Leiden, 1997); Christian Koot, “Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, 1621–1733,” in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders, ed. Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 72–99; Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter Emmer, The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1979).

48. Vrijheden privilegien ende Exemtien, SG 1.01.03, inv. No. 5753, Nat. Arch.

49. Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz: Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995), 768; Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 114–115; Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks,” 127.

50. Report on New Netherland, December 15, 1644, SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.30A, Nat. Arch.

51. O’Callaghan, Voyages of the slavers, 198–200.

52. Charles T. Gehring, ed. and trans., Correspondence, 1647–1653 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 222–223.

53. Directors in Amsterdam to Stuyvesant, March 9, 1659, NYCM, VIII, 74, NYSA.

54. Directors in Amsterdam to Stuyvesant, January 20, 1660, NYCM, XV, 97, NYSA.

55. November 15, 1663, NYCM, XV, 77, NYSA; Directors to Stuyvesant, January 20, 1664, NYCM, XV, 97, NYSA; Contract, 1664, NYCM, XV, 98, NYSA; Stuyvesant to Beck, May 7, 1664, NYCM, XV, 123, NYSA; New Netherland Council to Directors at Amsterdam, August 17, 1664, NYCM, XV, 139, NYSA; O’Callaghan, Voyages of the slavers, 200–201. Also see Emmer, “De Slavenhandel van en naar Nieuw-Nederland,” 124–126; Dennis J. Maika, “To ‘Experiment with a Parcel of Negros’: Incentive, Collaboration, and Competition in New Amsterdam’s Slave Trade,” Journal of Early American History 10, no. 1 (2020): 33–69. For more about the colony on the Delaware, see G. Murray Bakker, “Iets over de stichters van Nieuw-Nederland en hunne afstammelingen,” Eigen Haard, no. 32 (1888): 384; Simon Hart, “The City-Colony of New Amstel on the Delaware: II,” de Halve Maen: Journal of The Holland Society of New York 40, no. 1 (April 1965): 5–6, 13–14; C. A. Weslager, “The City of Amsterdam’s Colony on the Delaware, 1656–1664,” Delaware History 20 (1982): 1–25, 73–97; Mark L. Thompson, The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). For more about the Gideon and the city colony New Amstel, see Andrea C. Mosterman, “Een slavenschip voor Nieuwer-Amstel, stadskolonie aan de Delaware,” in Amsterdam en de Slavernij in Oost en West, ed. Pepijn Brandon, Guno Jones, Nancy Jouwe, and Matthias van Rossum (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Het Spectrum, 2020), 164–171.

56. See O’Malley, Final Passages. For the ships that arrived in New Netherland via intra-American trade, see the Intra-American Slave Trade Database at slavevoyages.org.

57. Request, October 20, 1657 [Received April 26, 1658], SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.46, Nat. Arch; Court Proceedings, September 30, 1652, NYCM, V, 65, NYSA. Also see Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks,” 129; Romney, New Netherland Connections, 199–200. Romney spells his name as Geert Tÿssen.

58. Johannes de Laet [Ioannes de Laet], “Kort Verhael uit de voorgaende Boecken getrocken,” in Johannes de Laet, Historie ofte Iaerlijck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie, Zedert haer Begin/ tot het eynde van ‘t jaer sesthien-hondert ses-en-dertich (Leiden: Bonaventuer ende Abraham Elsevier, 1644), 21. Also see O’Callaghan, Voyages of the slavers, xii; Morton Wagman, “Corporate Slavery in New Netherland,” Journal of Negro History 65, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 34, https://doi.org/10.2307/3031546.

59. O’Callaghan, Voyages of the slavers, 108–110; Letter to the States General, no date, SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.30A, 10–11, Nat. Arch. A 1653 description of New Netherland notes that the WIC allowed some independent merchants to travel to Africa to purchase African captives and sell them in the Caribbean and New Netherland. Description of New Netherland, July 24, 1653, NYCM, XI, 86, NYSA.

60. Court Minutes, March 6, 1656, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, I, December 1655–August 1656, 525, NYCMA; E. B. O’Callaghan, trans., Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674 Anno Domini (New York: Knickerbocker, 1897), 2:54.

61. List of Purchasers, May 29, 1664, NYCM, X, 28, NYSA; O’Callaghan, Voyages of the slavers, 203–206.

62. Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664, 330; Extract of Council and Director General of New Netherland Resolution, May 31, 1664, SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.57, Nat. Arch.

63. Letter from Stuyvesant to Vice-Director Curaçao, July 30, 1664, NYCM, XV, 137, NYSA.

64. Jonathan Pearson, trans., A. J. F. van Laer, ed., Early Records of the City and County of Albany and Colony of Rensselaerswyck (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1919), 4:112; Venema, Beverwijck, 116. According to Venema, this is the only recorded public slave sale in Beverwijck.

65. For trade between New Amsterdam and the Chesapeake, see April Hatfield, “Dutch and New Netherland Merchants in the Seventeenth-Century English Chesapeake,” in The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, ed. Peter A. Coclanis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 212.

66. See, among others, Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Meuwese, Brothers in Arms; John K. Thornton and Andrea C. Mosterman, “A Re-Interpretation of the Kongo-Portuguese War of 1622 According to New Documentary Evidence,” Journal of African History 51 (2010): 235–248.

67. According to Jan de Vries, the Dutch transported 31,533 slaves to Brazil from 1630 to 1650. Jan de Vries, “The Dutch Atlantic Economies,” in The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, ed. Peter A. Coclanis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 4.

68. Estimates database, 2013, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed October 18, 2016).

69. The Dutch slaver St. Jan, for example, shipwrecked on the Reef of the Caribbean island of Rocus in 1659. Initially, the crew fled the sinking ship, leaving the enslaved men, women, and children to drown. When they returned to the ship to fetch those enslaved people who were still alive, they could not prevent a privateer from capturing eighty-four of the surviving enslaved Africans. But even before the ship stranded on the reef, 110 of the African captives who boarded St. Jan in Africa had already died. Among them were four children who died due to the poor conditions on the ship, and an enslaved man who jumped overboard. Journal kept by Adriaen Blaes van der Veer, March 4, 1659—November 4, 1659, NYCM, VIII, 43a, NYSA; List of Slaves who died aboard the slaver St. Jan, June 30—October 29, 1659, NYCM, VIII, 43b, NYSA; Depositions relating to the seizure by pirates of slaves aboard the wrecked slaver St. Jan, November 27, 1659, NYCM, VIII, 52, NYSA. Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Curaçao Papers 1640–1665 (Albany: New Netherland Research Center and the New Netherland Institute, 2011), 135–140.

70. Testimony, March 22, 1639, NYCM, I, 112–113, NYSA.

71. Court Proceedings, September 8, 1644, NYCM, IV, 202, NYSA; Robert Swan points out that they did not carry the same weapons as the company soldiers. Swan, “Slaves and Slaveholding,” 55; Jacobs, New Netherland, 382. Also see De Mello on the company’s use of enslaved and indigenous people to defend Brazil. De Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië (1624–1654), 184; Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, 147–158.

72. A. J. F. van Laer, trans., and ed., Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1642–1647 (New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1974), 2:187–188 [NYCM, II, 93e]. Also see Jacobs, New Netherland, 382. For more on Kieft’s War, see, among others, Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, 241–249; Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 110–132; Merwick, Shame and the Sorrow, 133–179.

73. For example, enslaved laborers functioned as executioners, a task deemed fit for people of low status. Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations, 152; Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13–24.

74. Directors in Amsterdam to Petrus Stuyvesant, April 7, 1657, A1810 Correspondence, 56, NYSA; Jacobs, New Netherland, 382; Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks,” 131.

75. Stuyvesant to Vice Director of Curaçao, October 28, 1659, NYCM, XIII, 49, NYSA.

76. Minutes, February 3, 1639, NYCM, I, 31, NYSA.

77. July 11, 1642, NYCM, IV, 129, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 151, 174. The Van Laer transcription of the July 11, 1642, ordinance says “mette negros te arbeyden inde kettingh sonder ymant te verschoonen.” For use of the term in de ketting gaan, see, among others, Jan Janszoon Struys, Drie aanmerkelijke en seer rampspoedige Reysen door Italien, Griekenlandt, Lijslandt, Mascovien, Tartarijen, Meden, Persien, Oost-Indien, Japan, en verscheyden andere Gewesten (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1676), 235.

78. Minutes, April 15, 1658, NYCM, VIII, 831, NYSA; Gehring, Council Minutes, 1652–1654, 185.

79. Sentence, April 12, 1658, NYCM, VIII, 829, NYSA; Minutes, April 15, 1658, NYCM, VIII, 831, NYSA; Sentence, July 13, 1658, NYCM, VIII, 922, NYSA.

80. Clulow, Amboina, 1623, 65–67; F. de Haan, Oud Batavia (Batavia: G. Kolff, 1922), 1:354–355. Also see A. Reid, “ ‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Pre-Colonial Asia,” in Slavery, Bondage, & Dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983); J. Fox, “ ‘For Good and Sufficient Reasons’: An Examination of Early Dutch East India Company Ordinances on Slaves and Slavery,” in Slavery, Bondage, & Dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983).

81. Minutes, April 8, 1654, NYCM, V, 242, NYSA.

82. Petition, n.d., NYCM, VIII, 933–934, NYSA; Venema, Beverwijck, 122.

83. Minutes, January 24, 1641, NYCM, IV, 85, NYSA; A. J. F. van Laer, “Introduction,” in Minutes of the Court of Rensselaerswyck, ed. and trans. A. J. F. van Laer (Albany: University of the State of New York Press, 1922), 12; Dennis Sullivan, The Punishment of Crime in Colonial New York (New York: Peter Land, 1997), 71; Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations, 152; Spierenburg, Spectacle of Suffering, 13–24. These enslaved men were often compensated for these services. In 1662, for instance, Pieter requested payment for “executing the sentence on one Mesaack Martens and Marten van Weert.” Court Minutes, January 31, 1662, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, III, November 1661–August 1662, 428, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, 4:24.

84. Directors in Amsterdam to Petrus Stuyvesant, March 26, 1663, NYCM, XV, 7, NYSA.

85. Deed from the Directors of the WIC to Petrus Stuyvesant, March 12, 1651, NYCM, III, 87b [copy], NYSA; Gehring, Correspondence, 1647–1653, 122.

86. Indenture, May 25, 1644, NYCM, II, 111b, NYSA.

87. Minutes, November 7, 1661, NYCM, IX, 915, NYSA; Minutes, December 8, 1661, NYCM, IX, 917, NYSA; Wagman, “Corporate Slavery in New Netherland,” 37.

88. Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Correspondence 1654–1658 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 106.

89. Letter Secretary van Ruyven to Jacques Corteljou, June 14, 1658, NYCM, VIII, 894, NYSA; Permit, July 2, 1658, NYCM, VIII, 900, NYSA; Order, November 28, 1658, NYCM, VIII, 1046, NYSA. Also see Jacobs, New Netherland, 383.

90. Wagman, “Corporate Slavery,” 34; Merlin-Faucquez, “De la Nouvelle-Néerlande à New York,” 136; Jacobs, New Netherland, 381–382. For an analysis of individual enslavers in New Amsterdam and their ethnicity and socioeconomic status, see Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks,” 142–143.

91. Minutes, May 1, 1657, NYCM, VIII, 547, NYSA; Gehring, Council Minutes, 1655–1656, 203, also see pp. 199–201; Arnold J. F. van Laer ed. and trans., Correspondence of Jeremias Van Rensselaer 1651–1674 (Albany: University of the State of New York Press, 1932), 220.

92. Court Minutes, September 16, 1664, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, IV, May 1664–April 1665, 448, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, 5:111–112.

93. Court Minutes, September 9, 1659, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, II, August 1659–June 1660, 348, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, 3:40.

94. Van Laer, Correspondence of Jeremias Van Rensselaer, 136, 152–153, 196.

95. Van Laer, 159.

96. Van Laer, 167.

97. Jean Barbot, Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712, ed. P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992), 1:84, 90, 100; Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche Gewesten (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1668), 353. Also see John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 293–294; Barton C. Hacker, “Firearms, Horses, and Slave Soldiers: The Military History of African Slavery,” Icon 14 (2008), 62–83; Robin Law, “Horses, Firearms, and Political Power in Pre-Colonial West Africa,” Past and Present Society, no. 72 (August 1976), 119–120; John K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa (London: Routledge, 2000). Jeremias had bought Andries for his brother in 1657 from Catharina Roelofs, the widow of Lucas Roodenburg, who was the former vice director at Curaçao. In the early seventeenth century, several slave ships from the Senegambia traveled to the Spanish Americas. Certainly, some enslaved Senegambians would have ended up in Curaçao during Roodenburg’s tenure, and several of them would have been brought to New Netherland. For more on the Senegambian presence in Curaçao, see Bart Jacobs, “The Upper Guinea Origins of Papiamentu: Linguistic and Historical Evidence,” Diachronica 26, no. 3 (2009): 319–379, https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.26.3.02jac.

98. Minutes, February 25, 1644, NYCM, IV, 183, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 213. A case in 1663 confirms that children who were born after the resolution would remain lijff eijgenen or serfs of the company. The records appear to use the terms lijff eijgenen and slaven interchangeably. Minutes, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 417, NYSA.

99. Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 212–213.

100. Patricia Bonomi, among others, discusses these similarities. She suggests that thus these men were technically free. Bonomi, “ ‘Swarms of Negroes,’ ” 41–42.

101. Petition, December 28, 1662, NYCM, X, 296, NYSA; Minutes, December 8, 1663, NYCM, X, 429, NYSA.

102. Minutes, February 17, 1649, NYCM, III, 30b, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 342. According to Christoph, the annual wage of a farm laborer was 150 guilders. Christoph, “Freedman of New Amsterdam,” 159.

103. Kruger, “Born to Run,” 49; Berlin, “From Creole to African,” 270; Jaap Jacobs suggests that Kieft and the council’s motivations may have been financial in nature. Jacobs, New Netherland, 384.

104. José Antônio Gonsales de Mello argues that the Dutch treated enslaved Africans according to the “indisputably humane” Portuguese example. In his article on the Dutch slave trade with New Netherland, Dutch historian Pieter Emmer contends that racial slavery never developed in New Netherland. Boogaart, “Servant Migration,” 69–70; Wagman, “Corporate Slavery,” 40; De Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië, 190; Emmer, “De Slavenhandel van en naar Nieuw-Nederland,” 129.

105. Charles Gehring, trans. and ed., Council Minutes, 1652–1654 (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1983), 70.

106. Their children’s continued bondage proved a topic of interest among Dutch authorities. In 1649, Jacob van Couwenhoven, Jan Evertsen Bout, and Adriaen van der Donck traveled to patria to voice their complaints about New Netherland’s leadership. When they presented a list of grievances to the States General, they claimed that keeping the children of these freed men and women enslaved went against “all people’s rights.” Kort begrijp van d’excessen en hoochschaedelijck versuijm, in en over nieuw-nederlandt gepleeght, January 27, 1650, SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.30A, unpaginated, Nat. Arch. For more on the conflict with the colony’s leadership, see J. Jacobs, New Netherland, 144–152. The company defended the practice, however, by explaining that only three of the children actually remained in bondage: one of them lived at Director General Petrus Stuyvesant’s house, another stayed at Huys de Hoop (Hope House, a Dutch trading post and fort in present-day Connecticut), and a third child served settler Marten Cregier. Antwoort van Bewint hebberen op de remonstrantie uijt N.Nederlant, January 3, 1650, SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.30A, 43, Nat. Arch.; Cort bericht ofte antwoorde op eenige poncten, begrepen inde schrifte deductie van Adriaen vander Donck cum socijs aen ho: mo: heeren Staten Generael overgelevert, November 24, 1650, SG 1.01.07, inv. no. 12564.30A, unpaginated, Nat. Arch.

107. Henrik Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (Boston: Brill, 2005); Cam Grey, “Slavery in the Late Roman World,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: The Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1:505.

108. William D. Phillips, Jr., “Manumission in Metropolitan Spain and the Canaries,” in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 45. Similar conditional freedoms existed throughout the Americas and elsewhere. See, for example, Uma Kothari, “Geographies and Histories of Unfreedom: Indentured Labourers and Contract Workers in Mauritius,” Journal of Development Studies 49, no. 8 (2013): 1042–1057, https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2013.780039.

109. De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1:457–458. Rik van Welie suggests that some enslaved people in the East and in New Netherland were “cases of manumission as a strategy toward cost-effectiveness among Dutch colonists.” Rik van Welie, “Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial Empire: A Global Comparison,” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 82, no. 1 and 2 (2008): 84, https://doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002465.

110. See, for instance, Dewulf, “Emulating a Portuguese Model,” 10–11.

111. Though various forms of Roman-Dutch law had been used in the sixteenth century, the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius provided a clear basis for this law in his Introduction of Jurisprudence (Inleiding tot de Hollandsche Rechtsgeleerdheid) in 1631. Another Dutch legal text that influenced the judicial systems of both the Dutch Republic and New Netherland was Joost Damhouder, Practycke in Civile Saecken, seer nut/profijtelijck ende nodigh allen Schouten, Borghemeesteren Magistraten ende andere Rechteren (‘s Gravenhage: Ordinaris Druckers vande Ho.Mo. Heeren Staten Generael, 1626). Also see Sullivan, Punishment of Crime, 29–30; Venema, Beverwijck, 121.

112. Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1680–1791 (Maastricht/Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985 [repr. ed.]), 529; Adriana van Zwieten, “The Orphan Chamber of New Amsterdam,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 2 (April 1996): 325, https://doi.org/10.2307/2947403. Also see Jaap Jacobs’s discussion on the status of their children. Jacobs, New Netherland, 384–385. Several scholars note that the Dutch often followed the Portuguese model. Dewulf, “Emulating a Portuguese Model,” 7; Klooster, Dutch Moment, 19; De Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië, 190; Clulow, Amboina, 1623, 57–58.

113. Jaap Jacobs points out that Black people in New Netherland, free or enslaved, “were at the bottom of the social ladder” and they “had little chance of improving their circumstances.” J. Jacobs, New Netherland, 387–388.

114. When De Reus petitioned for his freedom in 1644, the petition noted that he and his fellow petitioners had been company slaves for eighteen or nineteen years. Consequently, scholars have generally concluded that these enslaved men were among the first African slaves in the colony in 1625 or 1626. Susanah Shaw Romney has rightly pointed out that there is no evidence to prove that they were in the colony this early, since they could have been company property elsewhere in the Atlantic. Nevertheless, they likely were among the first African captives in the colony. Romney, New Netherland Connections, 191–244.

115. Paulo Angola, Groot Manuel, Sijmon Congo, Antonij Portugies, Gracia, Cleijn Antonij, and Jan Fort Orange all obtained conditional freedom after they admitted to killing Jan Premero. Van Laer, Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638–1642, 123 [NYCM, I, 91]; Minutes, February 25, 1644, NYCM, IV, 183, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 213; Francis J. Sypher, ed. and trans., Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, pt. 2 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2015); Romney, New Netherland Connections, 215–216.

1. Minutes, April 19, 1663, NYCM, X, 71, NYSA. According to Heywood and Thornton, she was “the earliest named African in New Netherland.” Heywood and Thornton, “Intercultural Relations,” 19.

2. Minutes, April 19, 1663, NYCM, X, 71, NYSA; Petition, December 28, 1662, NYCM, X, 296, NYSA; Certificate of Manumission, April 17, 1664, NYCM, X, 170, NYSA.

3. Minutes, April 19, 1663, NYCM, X, 71, NYSA.

4. See, for instance, McManus, History of Negro Slavery, 11; Christoph, “Freedmen of New Amsterdam,” 166; A. Judd Northrup, “Slavery in New York: A Historical Sketch,” State Library Bulletin History no. 4 (Albany, 1900): 254; Wagman, “Corporate Slavery in New Netherland,” 40.

5. Heywood, Thornton, Jeroen DeWulf, and Ira Berlin emphasize the significance of their African and Atlantic backgrounds. Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans; Dewulf, Pinkster King; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998); Berlin, “From Creole to African.” Willem Frijhoff attributes their active participation largely to their Christian background. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 773–775. Susanah Shaw Romney and Cynthia Van Zandt both show how crucial their close connections to each other proved in achieving certain legal successes. Romney, New Netherland Connections, 212–224; Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations, 137.

6. In the church records, Jan Premero is regularly referred to as Jan Premier. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 472. Sentence of Manuel Gerrit, January 24, 1641, NYCM, IV, 84, NYSA. A document from 1639 refers to the “swarte huijsen,” which may have referred to the slave quarters. Court Proceeding, September 22, 1639, NYCM, IV, 50, NYSA.

7. I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1916), 2:207.

8. Patent to Evert Duyckingh, June 22, 1643, Land Papers, GG, 67, NYSA; Patent to Touchyn Briel, July 6, 1643, Land Papers, GG, 77, NYSA.

9. Patent to Adriaen Dircksen Coen, June 19, 1654, Land Papers, HH, 11, NYSA.

10. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 2:297; Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks,” 130.

11. Patent to Adriaen Dircksen Coen, June 19, 1654, Land Papers, HH, 11, NYSA; Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 2:297. In comparison, Thomas Hall contracted builders to build him a house of 32 by 18 feet, or 576 square feet in 1639. Philip Gerardy contracted Juriaen from Osenbruch to build him a home of 25 by 18 feet, or 450 square feet. Two English carpenters were to build a dwelling home for Isaac de Forest of 30 by 18 feet, or 540 square feet. Van Laer, Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638–1642, 217–218, 336–337, 338.

12. Documents do not provide conclusive information on how many enslaved people belonged to the company. In the early 1640s, there must have been at least thirty people enslaved by the company in New Amsterdam and its immediate surroundings, but this number would have decreased significantly after many of them obtained conditional freedom in 1644. A source from the 1650s suggests that at that time the total number of workers enslaved by the company in New Amsterdam who were capable of doing strenuous physical labor ranged from eleven to sixteen. A source from 1663 indicates that at that time there were only seven or eight enslaved company laborers left. On August 23, 1664, the city of New Amsterdam requested twenty-five slaves from the company, but this request came only eight days after the ship Gideon arrived in the harbor with 291 enslaved men, women, and children on board. Councilor Johan de Deckere to Petrus Stuyvesant, August 26, 1658, NYCM, VIII, 955–957; Directors in Amsterdam to Petrus Stuyvesant, March 26, 1663, NYCM, XV, 7, NYSA; Court Records, August 23, 1664, Original Dutch Documents, IV, May 1664–April 1665, 439, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, 5:104.

13. Directors in Amsterdam to Petrus Stuyvesant, March 26, 1663, NYCM, XV, 7, NYSA.

14. Van Laer, Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638–1642, 380–381; Deed, March 12, 1651, NYCM, III, 87b [copy], NYSA; Arnold J. F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1648–1660 (New York Historical Manuscripts. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1974), 3:216. Also see Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks,” 132–133.

15. Court Minutes, March 21, 1662, Original Dutch Documents, III, November 1661–August 1662, 465, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, 4:53.

16. Patent to Evert Duyckingh, June 22, 1643, Land Papers, GG, 67, NYSA.

17. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 2:294.

18. Patent to Domingo Antony, July 13, 1643, Land Papers, GG, 80, NYSA; Patent to Catelina Antony, July 13, 1643, Land Papers, GG, 81, NYSA.

19. Certificate, April 20/30, 1665, NYCM, X, 329, NYSA.

20. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 2:302.

21. Stokes, 2:294.

22. Court Minutes, March 7, 1662, Original Dutch Records, III, November 1661–August 1662, 455–456, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, 4:45–46.

23. Ordinance, April 29, 1648, NYCM, IV, 382, NYSA; Hugh Hastings et al., eds., Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York (Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1901), 1:512.

24. Court Minutes, March 7, 1662, Original Dutch Records, III, November 1661–August 1662, 455–456, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, 4:45–46.

25. Court Minutes, February 28, 1662, Original Dutch Records, III, November 1661–August 1662, 449, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, 4:42.

26. Swan Loange (or Swaen van Luane) later obtained his freedom and became a farmer on Long Island. See, among others, Henry Hoff, “Swan Janse Van Luane: A Free Black in 17th Century Kings County,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 125 (April 1994): 74–77; Robert Swan, “The Black Presence in Seventeenth-Century Brooklyn,” de Halve Maen: Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America 63, no. 4 (December 1990): 3–5; Rogier van Kooten, “ ‘Like a Child in Their Debt, and Consequently Their Slave’? Power Structures in the Commercial Circuits of a Colonial Agro-system near New York around 1675” (MA thesis, University of Antwerp, 2016), 51; Dennis Maika, “Slavery, Race, and Culture in Early New York,” de Halve Maen: Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America 73 (Summer 2000): 30; Romney, New Netherland Connections, 211.

27. Minutes, June 6, 1644, NYCM, IV, 189–190, NYSA.

28. Court Minutes, March 6, 1656, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, vol. 1, December 1655–August 1656, 526, NYCMA; Court Minutes, April 8, 1656, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, vol. 1, December 1655–August 1656, 556, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, 2:54, 84–85.

29. Van Zwieten, “Orphan Chamber,” 332.

30. O’Callaghan, Voyages of the slavers, 196–198.

31. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 765–779; Dewulf, “Emulating a Portuguese Model”; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans; Berlin, “From Creole to African”; Bonomi, “ ‘Swarms of Negroes’ ”; Gerald De Jong, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America,” Church History 4, no. 4 (1971); Hodges, Root & Branch; Foote, Black and White Manhattan; Goodfriend, “Slavery in Colonial New York”; Leendert Jan Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld: Ontmoeting met Afrikanen en Indianen (1600–1700) (Kampen: Kok, 2008); Dennis Maika, “Encounters: Slavery and the Philipse Family: 1680–1751,” in Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, ed. Roger Panetta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 35–72.

32. Anthonie van Angola and Lúcie d’Angool entered their intentions to marry on May 5, 1641. At the time, Anthonie was the widower of Catalina van Angola and Lúcie had been married to Laurens van Angola. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 472.

33. Sypher, 471–475.

34. Sypher, 472–596.

35. Sypher, 4–7. Jan Fort-Oragnien is in this document referred to as Jan van ‘t fort Orangien.

36. Sypher, 3–37.

37. Most Black children received baptism when Everardus Bogardus was the reverend of the church. Except for the baptism of Jan de Vries’s son Jan, born to an enslaved Black mother, all baptisms of Black children took place before Bogardus departed in August of 1647. After his departure, the percentage of African baptisms dropped from about 11 percent in 1647 to 4 percent in 1648 when only one, possibly two Black children were baptized in the church. Johannes Backerus was in charge of New Amsterdam’s congregation from Bogardus’s departure until Johannes Megapolensis’s arrival in July of 1649. During these years, it appears that only one Black child was baptized: Emanuel Swager van Angola’s son Dominicus received baptism on February 16, 1648. That this dramatic decline in baptisms of Black children might have had something to do with Backerus becomes especially evident when considering that after Megapolensis arrived in July of 1649 several Africans had their children baptized. In fact, on August 22 and 29, five African men presented their children for baptism. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2; also see Swan, “Slaves and Slaveholding,” 60.

38. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 589.

39. Frijhoff, 706.

40. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, xxiv–xxx, 473–475. Sypher explains that the Dutch Reformed marriage records listed the marriage intentions, not the actual dates of the marriage. Later marriage records include both the date of the intention and the wedding, which usually took place a few weeks later. For more on the marriage intentions in the Dutch Republic and marriage law in general, see L. J. van Apeldoorn, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Huwelijksrecht voor de invoering van de Fransche wetgeving (Amsterdam: Uitgeversmaatschappij Holland, 1925), 47–54, and 84–89 in particular on marriage intentions.

41. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 3–5.

42. C. G. A. Oldendorp and Gudrun Meier, eds., Historie Der Caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux Und Sanct Jan: Insbesondere Der Dasigen Neger Und Der Mission Der Evangelischen Brüder Unter Denselben (Berlin: VWB, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000), 742 (III: §120); Berlin, “From Creole to African,” 278; Romney, New Netherland Connections, 212–219.

43. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 18, 488; Petition, March 21, 1661, NYCM, IX, 557, NYSA.

44. Romney, New Netherland Connections, 215–216.

45. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 3.

46. Sypher, 24. Swan states that “in twenty-two occurrences, it is assumed that a white witness to a Black baptism owned the parents. Few examples, such as Teunis Craey and Jan de Vries, can be substantiated.” Swan, “Slaves and Slaveholding,” 61.

47. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 22, 45.

48. John K. Thornton, “Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500–1700,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83; Georges Balandier, Daily Life in the Kingdom of the Kongo: From the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 45; John K. Thornton, “Afro-Christian Syncretism in the Kingdom of Kongo,” Journal of African History 54, no. 1 (2013); Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 49–108; Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 772–773; Dewulf, Pinkster King. Even though several scholars have pointed to the Central African majority among New Netherland’s enslaved population, some historians still question whether the enslaved African population was really that homogenous or if West Central Africans could be considered Christians before they reached the North American shores. See, for instance, Susanah Shaw Romney’s discussion on the African origins of New Netherland’s African population. Evan Haefeli argues that most enslaved Africans in New Netherland were not Christian, and that they most likely attended the church to obtain freedom. Romney, New Netherland Connections, 198; Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 126–129.

49. Ferdinand van Capelle to the Directors, March 1642, OWIC 46, unpaginated, 5th folio, Nat. Arch.

50. Dionigi de Carli and R.R.F.F. Michele Angelo de Guattini, “A Curious and Exact Account of a Voyage to Congo, in the years 1666 and 1667,” in A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World; Many of which are now first translated into English, ed. John Pinkerton (London: Longman, 1814), 16: 168.

51. Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 98–108.

52. Minutes, February 25, 1644, NYCM, IV, 183, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 213.

53. Minutes, February 25, 1644, NYCM, IV, 183, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 213.

54. Minutes, March 21, 1661, NYCM, IX, 557, NYSA; E. B. O’Callaghan, trans., K. Scott, and K. Stryker-Rodda, eds., The Register of Salomon Lachaire, Notary Public of New Amsterdam, 1661–1662. Translated from the original Dutch Manuscript in the Office of the Clerk of the Common Council of New York (New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch) (Baltimore, 1978), 22–23; Minutes, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 416, NYSA; Order by P. Stuyvesant and Nicasius de Sille, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 417, NYSA; Christoph, “Freedmen of New Amsterdam,” 161; Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 151.

55. Minutes, March 21, 1661, NYCM, IX, 557, NYSA; O’Callaghan, Scott, and Stryker-Rodda, Register of Salomon Lachaire, 22–23.

56. Order by P. Stuyvesant and Nicasius de Sille, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 417, NYSA; Christoph, “Freedmen of New Amsterdam,” 161; Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 149.

57. Petition, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 416, NYSA; Order on the above petition, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 417, NYSA; Note, September 16, 1664, NYCM, X, 417, NYSA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, 4:42; Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 511; Christoph, “Freedmen of New Amsterdam,” 161; Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 151. This is the same Swan who previously had been interrogated for drinking on the Sabbath. Christina Emanuels and Swan van Loange married in February of 1664.

58. Council Minutes, April 15, 1638, NYCM, IV, 3, NYSA [A. J. F. Van Laer transcription]; E. B. O’Callaghan, trans. and ed., Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638–1674 (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, printers and stereotypers, 1868), 12; Van Laer, Council Minutes 1638–1649, 4.

59. See, among others, Hodges, Root & Branch, 12; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 289. A. Leon Higginbotham also points out that this ordinance did not prohibit interracial relations. Leon A. Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 110.

60. Instructions for Jacob Pietersen Tolck, Director of Curaçao, August 15, 1640, NYCM, XVII, 1, NYSA.

61. Hans de Mol, “Het Huwelyck is goddelyck van aart, wanneer men tsaam uyt reine liefde paart,” in Kent, en Versint eer datje Mint: Vrijen en trouwen 1500–1800, ed. Petra van Boheemen et al. (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgeverij, 1989), 106. For more on marriage in the Dutch Atlantic, see Deborah Hamer, “Creating an Orderly Society: The Regulation of Marriage and Sex in the Dutch Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014). While a marriage between people of different faiths would not be denied, church and state did strongly discourage and complicate such unions. De Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië, 193.

62. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 483.

63. All these names signify Van Salee’s exceptional background. Genealogical research indicates that Van Salee was the son of the Dutch sailor turned pirate Jan Jansz. van Haarlem, after his conversion to Islam in 1618 also known as Murad Reis, and his second wife, whom he married in either Morocco or Spain. His son Anthony Jansen van Salee’s Dutch marriage record notes Cartagena as his birthplace. Both Anthony and his brother Abraham were often identified as mulatto. Their mother may have been a descendant of West Africans who had been taken to North Africa and Southern Europe in the trans-Saharan slave trade, or she may have been part of the Afro-Iberian community that largely originated in Central Africa. For more about Van Salee, see Leo Herskowitz, “The Troublesome Turk: An Illustration of Judicial Process in New Amsterdam,” New York History 46, no. 4 (1965): 299–310; Swan, “Black Presence,” 2–3; Nicolaes Wassenaer, Historisch verhael aldaer ghedenck-weerdichste geschiedenisse, die vanden beginner des jaers 1621 (tot 1632) voorgevallens syn, 3 (Amsterdam, 1623), 53; Arne Zuidhoek, Zeerovers van de Gouden Eeuw (Bussum: De Boer, 1977), 65–76; Henry B. Hoff, “A Colonial Black Family in New York and New Jersey: Pieter Santomee and His Descendants,” Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 9 (1988): 101–134.

64. Van Laer, Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638–1642, 11.

65. Council Minutes, April 7, 1639, NYCM, IV, 38, NYSA [Van Laer transcription]; Van Laer, Council Minutes, 1638–1649, 46–47; Van Laer, Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638–1642, 66–67, 69.

66. Council Minutes, April 7, 1639, NYCM, IV, 38, NYSA [Van Laer transcription]; Van Laer, Council Minutes, 1638–1649, 46–47.

67. Van Salee continued to have disputes with almost everyone, even with his son in law, Thomas Southart, who was married to Van Salee’s daughter Annica, and for many years Van Salee and the magistrates of Gravesend argued over the borders of Van Salee’s land. Council Minutes, April 12, 1656, NYCM, VI, 364, NYSA; Council Minutes, July 19, 1656, NYCM, VI, 73, NYSA; Council Minutes, July 20, 1656, NYCM, VI, 73, NYSA; Council Minutes, August 18, 1656, NYCM, VI, 140, NYSA; Council Minutes, April 20, 1648, NYCM, IV, 38, NYSA [Van Laer transcription]; Van Laer, Council Minutes, 1638–1649, 513.

68. Historian Willem Frijhoff argues that Bogardus used his charges against Van Salee and his wife, neither of whom attended the Dutch Reformed Church, to emphasize the public honor code of Christian piety that should be upheld in New Netherland’s society. Frijhoff, Wegen Van Evert Willemsz., 712.

69. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 36. On August 25, 1647, they had their son Jan baptized in New Amsterdam’s Dutch Reformed Church. While she was named Swartinne in the baptismal records, she was likely Elaria Crioole, who inherited some of De Vries’s land after his death. Deed, March 31, 1651, NYCM, III, 75a, NYSA; Van Laer, Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1648–1660, 228–229. For more on slavery and sexual coercion, see, among others, Sharon Block, “Lines of Color, Sex, and Service: Comparative Sexual Coercion in Early America,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999): 141–163; Catherine Clinton, “ ‘Southern Dishonor’: Flesh, Blood, Race, and Bondage,” in In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900, ed. Carol Bleser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 52–68; Brenda Stevenson, “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Concubinage and Enslaved Women and Girls in the Antebellum South,” in Sexuality & Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the America, ed. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 159–188; Kirsten Fischer and Jennifer Morgan, “Sex, Race, and the Colonial Project,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 1 (January 2003): 197–198, https://doi.org/10.2307/3491504; Sharon Block and Kathleen M. Brown, “Clio in Search of Eros: Redefining Sexualities in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 1 (January 2003): 5–12, https://doi.org/10.2307/3491493; Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Also see chap. 4 for a discussion on this subject in Dutch New York.

70. Court Proceedings, February 11, 1648, NYCM, IV, 361, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes, 1638–1649, 480–481.

71. Court Minutes, March 27, 1656, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, I, December 1655–August 1656, 547, NYCMA; Court Minutes, April 3, 1656, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, I, December 1655–August 1656, 553, NYCMA; April 24, 1656, Original Dutch Records of New Amsterdam, I, December 1655–August 1656, 560, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, 2:76, 82. Thanks to Deborah Hamer and Jaap Jacobs for helping to translate the original Dutch document.

72. Certificate, December 8, 1663, NYCM, X, 429, NYSA.

73. Minutes, September 4, 1664, NYCM, XII, 317, NYSA.

74. For more on slavery, race, and Dutch jurisprudence, see Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations, 144; J. Jacobs, New Netherland, 380; Romney, New Netherland Connections, 191–244; Christoph, “Freedmen of New Amsterdam”; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans; Berlin, “From Creole to African”; Wagman, “Corporate Slavery in New Netherland,” 38.

75. Articulen ende Conditien door de Camer van Amsterdam, 1635, SG 1.01.03, inv. no. 5755, unpaginated, Nat. Arch.; Venema, Beverwijck, 118. Because the court of Rensselaerswijck, which handled its first case in 1632, was not under the control of the West India Company, it had the authority to handle all local civil and criminal matters. Also see Martha Shattuck, “Dutch Jurisprudence in New Netherland and New York,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 143–153; Martha Shattuck, “A Civil Society: Court and Community in Beverwijck, New Netherland, 1652–1664” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1993); Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 529–531; Van Zwieten, “Orphan Chamber.” For scholarship on seventeenth-century Dutch jurisprudence, see Florike Egmond, “Fragmentatie, rechtverscheidenheid en rechtsongelijkheid in de Noordelijke Nederlanden tijdens de zeventiende en acttiende eeuw,” in Nieuw Licht op Oude Justitie: Misdaad en straf ten tijde van de republiek, ed. Sjoerd Faber (Muiderberg: Dick Coutinhio, 1989), 9–23; Florike Egmond, Underworlds: Organized Crime in the Netherlands, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); Pieter Spierenburg, “Judicial Violence in the Dutch Republic: Corporal Punishment, Executions and Torture in Amsterdam, 1650–1750” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 1978); Spierenburg, Spectacle of Suffering.

76. Gehring, Council Minutes, xiv.

77. De Vries, “Dutch Atlantic Economies,” 14; J. Jacobs, New Netherland, 144.

78. Jaap Jacobs, “ ‘To Favor This New and Growing City of New Amsterdam with a Court of Justice’: The Relations between Rulers and Ruled in New Amsterdam,” Amsterdam–New York: Transatlantic Relations and Urban Identities Since 1653, ed. George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 2005), 23.

79. Shattuck, “Civil Society,” 201.

80. James Homer Williams, “Dutch Attitudes towards Indians, Africans, and Other Europeans in New Netherland, 1624–1664,” in Connecting Cultures: The Netherlands in Five Centuries of Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Rosemarijn Hoefte and Johanna Kardux (Amsterdam: VU Press, 1994), 43.

81. Court Proceedings, December 9, 1638, NYCM, IV, 29, NYSA; Court Proceedings, December 16, 1638, NYCM, IV, 29, NYSA. Van Zandt explains that since Antonij Portugies was termed a company slave during the 1641 Premero murder case, he must have been enslaved during his 1638 court case. Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations, 224n29.

82. Van Laer, Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1638–1642, 123.

83. Minutes, November 19, 1643, NYCM, IV, 180, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes, 1638–1649, 208–209. In some documents, Celes’s name was spelled as Selis.

84. Minutes, November 26, 1643, NYCM, IV, 180, NYSA; Van Laer, Council Minutes, 1638–1649, 208–209.

85. See, for example, Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo Garofalo, eds., Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009); Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Jane Landers, “Traditions of African American Freedom and Community in Spanish Colonial Florida,” in The African American Heritage in Florida, ed. David R. Colburn and Jane L. Landers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 17–41; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). When enslaved people had access to the court, not only did they participate in the legal system, but in fact they often shaped legislation. For more on enslaved people using the courts, see, among others, Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartacíon and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2007): 659–692, https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168; Camillia Cowling, “Gendered Geographies: Motherhood, Slavery, Law, and Space in Mid-nineteenth-century Cuba,” Women’s History Review 27, no. 6 (2018): 939–953, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2017.1336845; Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Michelle A. McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lauren Benton and Richard Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Anne Twitty, Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Berlin, “From Creole to African”; Lea Vandervelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Kelly Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

86. Berlin, “From Creole to African,” 254.

87. In the Portuguese Kingdom of Angola, for example, the courts implemented Angolan adaptations of Portuguese law. Linda Heywood, “Queen Njinga Mbandi Ana De Sousa of Ndongo/Matamba: African Leadership, Diplomacy, and Ideology, 1620s–1650s,” in Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812, ed. Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 38; Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, “Missione evagelica nel Regno de Congo,” trans. John K. Thornton, http://centralafricanhistory.blogspot.com/2008/08/book-i-chapter-3.html (accessed on November 3, 2016), bk. 1, chap. 3; Joseph Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 232–235; Heywood and Thornton, “Intercultural Relations,” 20. Since both the Portuguese and Dutch legal systems were based on Roman law, Portuguese influences caused important similarities between Angola’s and New Netherland’s legal system. The Kingdom of Kongo had a well-organized judicial system that predated European contact. Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 61; John Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 45; Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 85; Linda Heywood and John Thornton, “The Treason of Dom Pedro Nkanga a Mvemba against Dom Diogo, King of Kongo, 1550,” in Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812, ed. Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009). In West Central Africa and other parts of the diaspora, Africans had a long history of petitioning local authorities. Their frequent petitioning to the Spanish and Portuguese courts, among others, demonstrates that Africans in the diaspora had successfully utilized this technique. Leo Garofalo, “Afro-Iberian Subjects: Petitioning the Crown at Home, Serving the Crown Abroad, 1590s–1630s,” in Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812, ed. Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 52–54.

88. Venema writes that in 1652 there were “only few Africans in the upper Hudson area.” Venema, Beverwijck, 114. Also see Wagman, “Corporate Slavery in New Netherland,” 36.

89. Van Laer, Minutes of the Court of Rensselaerswyck 1648–1652, 192.

90. Staten Generaal to Petrus Stuyvesant and Council, September 6, 1656, Staten Generaal 1.01.07, 12564.46, unpaginated, Nat. Arch. For more about the slave trade, see chap. 1. As Susanah Shaw Romney has pointed out, many of the captives who had been brought into the colony by Geurt Tijsen had been changed to different enslavers at least once over a four-year period. Romney, New Netherland Connections, 206. Also see Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks,” 132.

91. Fred van Lieburg, “The Dutch and Their Religion,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009, 155.

92. Hastings, Ecclesiastical Records, 1:488; Joyce Goodfriend, “The Souls of African American Children: New Amsterdam,” Common-Place 3, no. 4 (July 2003), http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-03/no-04/new-york/.

93. People who lived in this area of Manhattan also attended church here. Hastings, Ecclesiastical Records, 1:488–490; Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 2:80; Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2, 524–572; Bonomi, “ ‘Swarms of Negroes,’ ” 43.

94. Although inferior or local courts were founded across the region, many settlements were not considered large enough to have their own court. In the 1650s, there were seven courts in Long Island, one in Manhattan, and two in the Upper Hudson region. Gehring, Council Minutes 1655–1656, xiv; J. Jacobs, Colony of New Netherland, 87–89.

1. Court Minutes, March 7, 1671, Original Dutch Records, VI, October 1670–October 1671, 36, NYCMA; O’Callaghan and Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, 6:286; Minutes, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 416, NYSA; Petition, December 28, 1662, NYCM, X, 296, NYSA; Minutes, April 19, 1663, NYCM, X, 71, NYSA; Minutes, April 17, 1664, NYCM, X, 170.

2. Petition, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 416, NYSA; Order, December 6, 1663, NYCM, X, 417, NYSA; Christoph, “Freedmen of New Amsterdam,” 161; Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 151.

3. See A. J. Williams-Myers for an in-depth discussion of the types of labor enslaved people in NY performed. Williams-Myers, Long Hammering, chap. 2.

4. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908, 9.

5. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 188. Also see Hardesty, Unfreedom, 5.

6. Elijah Anderson discusses “the white space” in the post–Civil Rights era. Similar to what we see in enslaving communities like New York, “black people [in modern America] are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.” He points out that “while operating in the white space, they can be subject to social, if not physical, jeopardy.” Elijah Anderson, “The White Space,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 11–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214561306.

7. Anderson, “White Space,” 10–21. Also see Elijah Anderson, “Cosmopolitan Canopy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595 (September 2004): 14–31, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716204266833.

8. The area of this free Black community most closely resembled the neighborhoods that Anderson defined as “black space.” Anderson, “White Space,” 11.

9. Stephanie Camp explains that enslaved people created “a rival geography,” a term first introduced by Edward Said and used by geographers “to describe resistance to colonial occupation.” Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7. Similar challenges to their enslavers’ control can be seen in other regions. As noted by Rebecca Ginsberg and Clifton Ellis, the way enslaved men, women, and children “expressed their autonomy, restored their dignity, and even achieved their freedom was through manipulation of the very landscapes designed to restrict them.” Ginsberg and Ellis, Slavery in the City, 3. Finch notes that “black mobility was one of the most important but difficult for slaveowners to police.” Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba, 53. James Delle has termed these “spatialities of movement,” the ways in which enslaved people “expressed control over the spatiality of movement, at least for a brief time.” Delle, Archeology of Social Space, 165. Also see Ross’s discussion of similar dynamics in South Africa. Ross, Status and Respectability, 131–132.

10. For more on slave societies, see Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 8–9; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 8–11.

11. “Kings County, NY 1698 Census,” in Documentary History of the State of New York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1850), 3:87–89; Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, 9.

12. Dingman Versteeg, trans., Peter R. Christoph, Kenneth Scott, and Kenn Stryker-Rodda, eds., Kingston Papers: Kingston Court Records, 1668–1675 and Secretary’s Papers, 1664–1675 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1976), 2:213–214, 650.

13. Thomas L. Purvis, Colonial America to 1763, ed. Richard Balkin (New York: Infobase, 2014), 148; O’Callaghan, Documentary History, 1:693, 696. By 1756, they reached 1,500 out of a total population of 8,105, or just below 19 percent. And although their total population increased significantly over the next few decades, up to 2,906 in 1790, they now made up a smaller part of the total population.

14. Bureau of Census, F. S. Crum, “A Century of Population Growth, 1790–1900 (1909),” Publications of the American Statistical Association 12, no. 92 (1910), 181; Purvis, Colonial America to 1763, 149; O’Callaghan, Documentary History, 1:693. For more on Albany’s enslaved population, see Oscar Williams, “Slavery in Albany, New York, 1624–1827,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 34, no. 2 (July 2010): 154–168.

15. Merlin-Faucquez, “De la Nouvelle-Néerlande à New York,” 175–178, 352. In New York City, English cultural and political influence spread most quickly and successfully after the region came under English control. That did not mean, however, that the city and its population completely lost their Dutch character. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot; Joyce Goodfriend, Who Should Rule at Home? Confronting the Elite in British New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).

16. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, 96–98.

17. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, 36, 52, 55.

18. Thomas Humphrey argues that by the 1770s, “the Hudson River Valley had emerged as one of the foremost grain-producing regions in the North American colonies.” Thomas J. Humphrey, “Agrarian Rioting in Albany County, New York: Tenants, Markets and Revolution in the Hudson Valley, 1751–1801” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 1997), 2; Joyce Goodfriend, “Why New Netherland Matters,” in Explorers, Fortunes, & Love Letters, ed. Martha Dickinson Shattuck (New York: New Netherland Institute and Mount Ida Press, 2009), 153.

19. Various primary sources reveal the tasks completed by enslaved laborers and special skills they had. See the following runaway slave advertisement, New York Evening Post, October 8, 1808. Also see, Indictment, 1722, the Ulster County Tomlins Collection, 1670–1729, item 21, N-YHS; Slave Bill of Sale, October 14, 1728, ArMs 1974.106 William P. Hulst Papers, f.14, BHS; Abraham Van Gaasbak to Gerret Elmendorf, January 8, 1762, Elmendorph, Garret—Accounts, Bills and Receipts, 1737–1774, box 1, folder 28, SC23070 Dumond-Elmendorph-Smith Family Papers, 1727–1914, NYSL; Susan Stessin-Cohn and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini, eds., In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 1735–1831 (Delmar, NY: Black Dome Press, 2016), 55, 110, 122, 166; Jacob Van Schaick, Vrooman, and Degraff to Jacob Gordon, June 12, 1786, SC10837 Van Schaick Family Papers, box 1, folder 7, NYSL; Crooke-Elmendorph Account Book, 1770–1777, CV10181 Kingston Collection, box 17, NYSL. Also see Williams-Myers, Long Hammering, 13–42; White, Somewhat More Independent, 10–11, 21–22; Hodges, Root & Branch, 40–47.

20. Alexander Coventry, Memoirs of an Emigrant: The Journal of Alexander Coventry, M.D.; in Scotland, the United States and Canada during the Period 1783–1831 (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art and the New York State Library, 1978), 145.

21. William Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 1794–1795 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1971), 163. Also see David S. Cohen, The Dutch-American Farm (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 144–145.

22. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York, 1:761–763, 922–923.

23. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, 9; Federal Census, 1800, ArMs 1977.351 Helen Zunser Wortis Collection, 351 B #33, BHS.

24. “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 1799,” March 29, 1799, Dept. of State, Bureau of Miscellaneous Records, Enrolled Acts of the State Legislature, Series 13036–78, Laws of 1799, chap. 62, NYSA.

25. Kings, NY, 1810 U.S. Census, transcribed by Jeri Shangle, USGenWeb Archives; Abstract of the Returns of the Fifth Census, 9–10; Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States, as obtained at the Department of State, from the returns of the sixth census, 22.

26. Franklin to Schuyler, May 27, 1776, given to Schuyler Mansion by Louisa Lee Schuyler and Georgina Schuyler on October 13, 1921, Schuyler Mansion, Albany.

27. Fiske discusses similar dynamics in present-day society. John Fiske, “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism,” Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 2: 72, 86, https://doi.org/10.1177/026327698015002003.

28. In what now were New York City, Staten Island, and Westchester County, these laws came into effect as early as 1665. Kingston (formerly Esopus) began to use the Duke’s laws in 1669, while in Albany (Beverwijck) significant changes in the judicial system did not take place until late 1674. Sullivan, Punishment of Crime, 210–211; Shattuck, “Civil Society,” 18; Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York, 1:18; Hodges, Slavery and Freedom, 2.

29. Proceedings of the General Court of Assizes held in the City of New York, October 6, 1680, to October 6, 1682 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1913), 37–38; Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 116–117.

30. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York, 1:519–520; Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 119.

31. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York, 1:597–598.

32. This ban was repeated in, among others, 1710 and 1713. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, 1:666, 708, 788.

33. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, 1:762.

34. Herbert L. Osgood et al., eds., Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675–1776 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905), 2:323, 327.

35. Osgood et al., 2:242–243.

36. Osgood et al., 3:28.

37. J. Munsell, Collections on the history of Albany: from its discovery to the present time; with notices of its public institutions, and biographical sketches of citizens deceased (Albany: J. Munsell, 1865–81), 2:268; Scott, “Ulster County, New York, Court Records, 1693–1775,” 277.

38. For similar efforts in Dutch communities elsewhere, see Worden, “Space and Identity,” 76–77; Kehoe, “Dutch Batavia,” 8, 14, 16–17.

39. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 37.

40. Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 1995), 243.

41. Osgood et al., Minutes of the Common Council, 4:497–98; 5:85–86, 158. According to Douglas Greenburg, “prosecutions for theft were almost twice as frequent among blacks as in the population at large.” Douglas Greenburg, “Patterns of Criminal Prosecution in Eighteenth Century New York,” in Courts and Law in Early New York: Selected Essays, ed. Leo Hershkowitz and Milton M. Klein (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1978), 67.

42. Ordinary Sessions, August 12, 1676, Kingston Papers, bk 2:446, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division.

43. Scott, “Ulster County, New York, Court Records, 1693–1775,” 278.

44. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 3.

45. Newman, 18.

46. Newman, 7; Munsell, Collections on the history of Albany, 2:419–420.

47. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201. Foucault built his theory on Jeremy Bentham’s work on the panopticon.

48. May 21, 1796, 11155: Society for Apprending slaves, 1796, NYSL.

49. In Munsell’s history of Albany, Munsell notes that Albany’s bell ringer would go to the Dutch Reformed Church every night at 8 P.M. “to ring the suppaan bell. This was the signal for all to eat their suppaan, or hasty-pudding, and prepare for bed. It was equivalent to the English curfew bell.” Munsell, Collections on the history of Albany, 2:27–28. Louis P. Nelson discusses similar curfews in eighteenth-century Charleston. Louis P. Nelson, The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism & Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 298.

50. In New York City, a ratelwacht, or rattle guard, had been formed as early as 1658. In Beverwijck, a rattle guard was established in 1659. Bellmen and watchmen were usually tasked with watching for fires and helping to fight criminal behavior such as burglaries and escapes from the city’s gaol, which apparently occurred regularly. These bellmen were to go “Every hour in the Night through the several Streets of this City and publishing the time of the Night and Apprehending all disturbers of the peace Felons Negro and Indian Slaves and Other persons and also take care that No damage be done in this City by fire or Other Casualties.” Osgood et al., Minutes of the Common Council, 2:33, 209–210, 242–243, 291, 313, 425, 432; 3:61, 94, 362–363, 405–406, 451; 4:122–128, 127–128, 238–239, 266–267, 268, 299, 322, 360–361, 392, 449, 480; 5:7, 43–44, 78–80, 319. The examination of Bet a Negro Female Slave of Philip S. Van Rensselaer Esquire taken the 28th day of November 1793, NYSL; A Law Establishing a Night Watch, November 27, 1793, S.A.R.A. City Records, Common Council 1765–1840, box 1, 88-02947, nos. 75 & 188, Albany County Hall of Records. Also see Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 199; Jill Lepore, “The Tightening Vise: Slavery and Freedom in British New York,” in Slavery in New York, ed. Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris (New York: New Press, 2005), 78; J. Jacobs, New Netherland, 370.

51. Run-Away Slave Advertisement, Daily Advertiser, June 9, 1798; Permission, February 25, 1800, Slavery Collection, N-YHS; For Sale, Mercantile Advertiser, June 19, 1802; Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance, 203, 277.

52. Sylvia Dubois and C. W. Larison, Sylvia Dubois, a Biography of the Slav Who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 70–71.

53. Osgood et al., Minutes of the Common Council, 3:30–31.

54. Osgood et al., 3:402. For more on slave patrols, see Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3–4.

55. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York, 2:656.

56. White, Somewhat More Independent, 119.

57. Jonathan Prude, “To Look upon the ‘Lower Sort’: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750–1800,” Journal of American History 78, no. 1 (June 1991): 127, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078091; David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 247, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674119; Lorenzo J. Greene, “The New England Negro as Seen in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 29, no. 2 (April, 1944): 125–146, https://doi.org/10.2307/2715307.

58. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance, 42.

59. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 44.

60. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 76; Albany Gazette (Albany, NY), June 3, 1815.

61. Hillitje DeWitt to Peter DeWitt, May 17, 1804, LK15161 DeWitt Family Papers, box 5, folder 7, NYSL.

62. Albany Register, November 18, 1793; Albany Register, November 25, 1793; Elizabeth Covart, “Collision on the Hudson: Identity, Migration, and the Improvement of Albany, New York, 1750–1830” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Davis, 2011), 178–179.

63. Bet and Dean were convicted and executed on Friday, March 14, 1794. Albany Register, March 17, 1794. Pompey was executed almost a month later, on April 11, 1794. Edwin Olson, “The Slave Code in Colonial New York,” Journal of Negro History 29, no. 2 (1944): 160–161, https://doi.org/10.2307/2715308.

64. Elizabeth Covart points out that several fires occurred in the city after Bet, Dean, and Pompey had been arrested. In the aftermath of the fire, the city established a citizen’s nightwatch. Covart, “Collision on the Hudson,” 179. Also see “A Law, establishing a Night-Watch of the Citizens,” Albany Register, December 2, 1793. It also prohibited enslaved people from wandering the streets after 9 P.M. Don R. Gerlach, “Black Arson in Albany, New York: November 1793,” Journal of Black Studies 7, no. 3 (March 1977): 307; Bradford Verter, “Interracial Festivity and Power in Antebellum New York: The Case of Pinkster,” Journal of Urban History 28, no. 4 (2002): 409, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144202028004002.

65. The examination of Bet a Negro Female Slave of Philip S. Van Rensselaer Esquire taken the 28th day of November 1793, 3–4, NYSL.

66. Osgood et al., Minutes of the Common Council, 4:497–98.

67. Bernard L. Herman, “Slave and Servant Housing in Charleston, 1770–1820,” Historical Archeology 33, no. 3 (1999): 90.

68. Aisha Finch discusses such circulation of people, goods, and ideas in Cuba. Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba, 54–55.

69. Strickland, Journal of a Tour, 163. Also see Cohen, Dutch-American Farm, 144–145.

70. As Sally Hadden notes about Barbados, just because slave codes existed, that did not mean they were strictly enforced. In fact, regular reenactment of the various laws suggests that enslaved people found ways to circumvent or break these laws. Hadden, Slave Patrols, 12.

71. Court Minutes, May 3, 1710, The Court of General Sessions, 1683–1847, New York City, 179, microfilm.

72. William Livingston to unknown, November 21, 1774, GLC 04842.10, Gilder Lehrman Collection.

73. Petition, January 24, 1792, no. 88, 10970 Ulster County Residents Signed Petition [copy], NYSL.

74. Court Minutes, August 28, 1696, New York County Clerk Court of General & Quarter Sessions of the Peace, 1683–1742, microfilm, reel 1, 15.

75. Court Minutes, August 2, 1710, New York County Clerk Court of General & Quarter Sessions of the Peace, 1683–1742, microfilm, reel 1, 188.

76. Court Minutes, November 10, 1738, New York County Clerk Court of General & Quarter Sessions of the Peace, 1683–1742, microfilm, reel 1, 257–258.

77. Scott, “Ulster County, New York, Court Records, 1693–1775,” 278.

78. Scott, 283.

79. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York, 2:679–680.

80. Petition, January 24, 1792, 10970: Ulster County Residents Signed Petition, NYSL.

81. See, for instance, Lepore, New York Burning; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 174–210.

82. Hardesty, Unfreedom, 94.

83. Jacob Van Schaick to Jacob Gordon, June 12, 1786, SC10837: Van Schaick Family Papers, box 1, folder 7, NYSL.

84. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York, 1:582–584.

85. Graham Russell Hodges, ed., “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey (New York: Garland, 1994), xxxiii. Others have also pointed out that attempts to escape enslavement increased during the Revolution, including White, Somewhat More Independent, 141; Henry Reed Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn (Brooklyn, 1869), 303; Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt, The Social History of Flatbush: And Manners and Customs of the Dutch Settlers in Kings County (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), 325.

86. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance, 127.

87. Run-Away Slave Advertisement, Daily Advertiser, June 9, 1798.

88. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance, 203.

89. Albany Register, June 2, 1815.

90. Daily Advertiser, June 29, 1803.

91. White, Somewhat More Independent, 99; Shane White, “Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley,” Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (January–March 1989): 70, https://doi.org/10.2307/540082.

92. Hodges, Root & Branch, 87.

93. For more about Negro Election Day and General Training, see, among others, William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 117–128; Joseph P. Reidy, “ ‘Negro Election Day’ & Black Community Life in New England, 1750–1860,” Marxist Perspectives 1, no. 3 (Fall 1978), 106; Shane White, “ ‘It Was a Proud Day’: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North,” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (June 1994): 24, https://doi.org/10.2307/2080992; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Camp, Closer to Freedom, 65; Nicholas Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 45; Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 88–89; David Steven Cohen, “In Search of Carolus Africanus Rex: Afro-Dutch Folklore in New York and New Jersey,” Journal of Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 5 (Fall & Winter 1984): 154; A. J. Williams-Myers, “Pinkster Carnival: Africanisms in the Hudson River Valley,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 9, no. 1 (1985): 7–17.

94. White, “ ‘It was a Proud Day,’ ” 29; Hardesty, Unfreedom, 99.

95. A. Th. van Deursen, Mensen van Klein Vermogen: Het Kopergeld van de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1999), 130; Jan ter Gouw, De Volksvermaken (Haarlem: Erven F. Bohn, 1871), 3:226–227.

96. Ordinance, December 31, 1655, A1875: Ordinances, 62, NYSA; Court Minutes, December 31, 1655, Original Dutch Documents, I, December 1655–August 1656, 464–465, NYCMA; Fernow and O’Callaghan, Records of New Amsterdam, 1:172, 420; Van Laer, Minutes of the Court of Rensselaerswijck, 138; Gehring, Council Minutes, 1652–1654, 118–119. Also see Venema, Beverwijck, 112; J. Jacobs, New Netherland, 433–434, 464–471.

97. Marc Wingens, “De Pinksterkroon is Weer in ‘T Land, Hoezee! Het Pinksterkroon Feest in Deventer,” Volkscultuur 6, no. 2 (1989): 7–8.

98. Jasper Danckaerts, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 239.

99. Gabriel Furman, Antiquities of Long Island (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1875), 264–269.

100. Coventry, Memoirs of an Emigrant, 215.

101. William Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, 1766–1839: the Memoirs of a Dramatist, Theatrical Manager, Painter, Critic, Novelist, and Historian, ed. Dorothy C. Barck (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 65.

102. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 65.

103. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44–45.

104. James Fenimore Cooper, Satanstoe; Or, the Family of Littlepage: A Tale of the Colony (New York: Burgess, Stringer, 1845), 72–73.

105. White, “Pinkster,” 70.

106. White, 70.

107. “Albany Fifty Years Ago,” Harper’s Magazine (March 1857), 451–463.

108. Cooper, Satanstoe, 77.

109. Albany Centinel (Albany, NY), June 17, 1803; Daily Advertiser, June 29, 1803.

110. Geraldine R. Pleat and Agnes N. Underwood, “Pinkster Ode, Albany, 1803,” New York Folklore Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Spring 1952): 37. For more about the likely author of the ode, see Verter, “Interracial Festivity,” 413.

111. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 130.

112. Daniel Miller, Unwrapping Christmas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9.

113. Evan M. Zuesse, “Perseverance and Transmutation in African Traditional Religions,” in African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 176.

114. Wingens, “De Pinksterkroon is Weer in ‘T Land, Hoezee!,” 13–14; K. ter Laan, Folkloristisch Woordenboek Van Nederland En Vlaams België (‘s Gravenhage: GB van Goor Zonen, 1949), 300. For more about Pinkster celebrations in the Netherlands, see S. J. van der Molen, Levend Volksleven: Een Eigentijdse Volkskunde Van Nederland (Van Gorcum: HJ Prakke & HMG Prakke, 1961), 84; Ter Gouw, De Volksvermaken, 3:224. My mother, who grew up in Drenthe in the 1940s and 1950s, remembered similar Pinkster celebrations took place there.

115. Wingens, “De Pinksterkroon is weer in ‘t land, hoezee!,” 13–14. See also Charlotte Wilcoxen, Seventeenth Century Albany: A Dutch Profile (Albany: Education Dept., Albany Institute of History and Art, 1984), 119–120.

116. Albany Centinel, June 17, 1803; Daily Advertiser, June 29, 1803.

117. Pleat and Underwood, “Pinkster Ode,” 35.

118. Albany Centinel (Albany, NY), June 17, 1803; Daily Advertiser, June 29, 1803. For more on complaints about the increased participation of white Albanians, see Verter, “Interracial Festivity,” 412. For more on Albany’s changing demographics in the late eighteenth century, see, among others, Covart, “Collision on the Hudson”; David G. Hackett, The Rude Hand of Innovation: Religion and Social Order in Albany, New York, 1652–1836 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

119. Albany Centinel (Albany, NY), June 17, 1803; Daily Advertiser, June 29, 1803.

120. A Law to Regulate the Amusements of the Negroes during the Whitsuntide Holidays, July 17, 1804, S.A.R.A., box 1, 88-02947, no. 131, Albany County Hall of Records. Also see Verter, “Interracial Festivity,” 412.

121. White, “ ‘It was a Proud Day,’ ” 30; Verter, “Interracial Festivity,” 400.

122. Reidy, “ ‘Negro Election Day,’ ” 106.

123. Prude, “To Look,” 130–133; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 3.

124. Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 30.

125. “Death of Capt. Shawk,” Albany Centinel (Albany, NY), July 13, 1804.

126. Stiles, History, 2: 40; White, “ ‘It was a Proud Day,’ ” 28.

127. Ross, Status and Respectability, 125–127.

128. Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis, 117.

129. Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 35.

130. Sonjah Stanley Niaah, “Mapping Black Atlantic Performance Geographies: From Slave Ship to Ghetto,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Boston: South End, 2007), 194.

131. Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 35.

132. Description by Ferdinand van Capelle, OWIC 46, March 1642, unpaginated, 5th folio, NA. Also see chap. 2.

133. Hilton, Kingdom of Kongo, 96.

134. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 244; John K. Thornton, “Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500–1700,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 85.

135. Hilton, Kingdom of Kongo, 96.

136. Both Harper’s New Monthly and the “Pinkster Ode” suggest that Albany’s Pinkster celebration was located close to a burial ground. Pleat and Underwood, “Pinkster Ode,” 42; “A Glimpse of an Old Dutch Town,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 62 (March 1881): 525–526. Jeroen Dewulf argues that the Pinkster Ode here refers to Dean, the enslaved girl who had been executed in 1794 for the Albany fire and who, according to Dewulf, was buried close to the Pinkster Hill. He does not provide any evidence to support this claim. Dewulf, Pinkster King, 162.

137. John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31–33. Also see David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and Their Neighbours under the Influence of the Portuguese, 1483–1790 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 97.

138. Thornton, “Religious and Ceremonial Life,” 85; Hilton, Kingdom of Kongo, 96–97.

139. Fromont, Art of Conversion, 268. Jeroen Dewulf’s book argues that the Pinkster festival is rooted in these Kongolese celebrations. Dewulf, Pinkster King.

140. Willem Bosman, Nauwkeurige Beschryving Van De Guinese Goud-Tand-En Slave-Kust (Utrecht: Anthony Schouten, 1704), 2:159.

141. Barbot, Barbot on Guinea, 2:395–396.

142. Melvin Wade, “ ‘Shining in Borrowed Plumage’: Affirmation of Community in the Black Coronation Festivals of New England (c. 1750–c. 1850),” Western Folklore 40, no. 3 (July 1981): 219, https://doi.org/10.2307/1499693.

143. Reidy, “ ‘Negro Election Day,’ ” 108.

144. Daily Advertiser, June 29, 1803. Also see “Pinkster Festivities in Albany Sixty Years Ago,” in Munsell, Collections on the history of Albany, 2:323–327.

145. “The Albany Theatre,” in Munsell, Collections on the history of Albany, 2:56.

146. Pleat and Underwood, “Pinkster Ode,” 34.

147. Several scholars have examined the close link between music and religion in precolonial African societies. Joseph M. Murphy, for instance, found that music and dance played an important role in religious ceremony since they served as way to connect with the otherworld. Joseph Murphy, Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 5–6.

148. De Carli and Guattini, “Curious and Exact Account,” 165.

149. De Carli and Guattini, 160.

150. Pleat and Underwood, “Pinkster Ode,” 36.

151. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 11.

152. African Americans in western Long Island still celebrated Pinkster in 1874. Goodfriend, “Why New Netherland Matters,” 155; Cohen, Dutch-American Farm, 163; Furman, Antiquities of Long Island, 264–269.

1. Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 2. For more about Truth’s life and legacy, see, among others, Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Carleton Mabee, Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Larry G. Murphy, Sojourner Truth: A Biography (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2011); Margaret Washington, “ ‘From Motives of Delicacy’: Sexuality and Morality in the Narratives of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 57–73.

2. Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 13.

3. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, 96–97; White, Somewhat More Independent, 18.

4. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, 12–55.

5. A few scholars have looked at this history in early New York, including Thomas J. Davis, “These Enemies within Their Own Household: Slaves in 18th Century New York,” in A Beautiful and Fruitful Place, ed. Nancy McClure Zeller (Albany: New Netherland Project, 1991); Maskiell, “Bound by Bondage”; H. Arthur Bankoff and Frederick A. Winter, “The Archeology of Slavery at the Van Cortlandt Plantation in the Bronx, New York,” International Journal of Historical Archeology 9, no. 4 (December 2005): 291–318, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-005-9302-5; Kruger, “Born to Run”; Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 147–156.

6. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7.

7. Sean E. Sawyer, “Constructing the Tradition of Dutch American Architecture, 1609–2009,” in Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, ed. Roger Panetta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 98; Roderic H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776 (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1988), 117–118.

8. Joseph Manca, “Erasing the Dutch: The Critical Reception of Hudson Valley Dutch Architecture, 1670–1840,” in Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609–2009, ed. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Benjamin Schmidt, and Annette Stott (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 60; Blackburn and Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria, 92–116.

9. “Schuyler Mansion: A Historic Structure Report” (Division for Historic Preservation Bureau of Historic Sites, 1977), 12; Sawyer, “Constructing the Tradition,” 103–104.

10. Today, Bartel Engelbertszen Loth is more commonly known as Engelbart Lott.

11. E. B. O’Callaghan, Census of Slaves, 1755 (New York, 1850). This census did not provide any information on the number of children under the age of fourteen.

12. Johannes Lott Probate Record, June 11, 1803, Robert Billard Collection (private).

13. Dell Upton claims one- or two-room homes were popular in early eighteenth-century Virginia, even among more well-to-do families. Dell Upton, “Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 316–317.

14. Robert K. Fitts discusses the constant “alien status” of enslaved New Yorkers, which became especially evident when slaveholders segregated certain activities. He explains that even though free and enslaved New Yorkers shared the most intimate spheres, white families would never eat with the people they enslaved, share their pews with them, or bury them in the same graveyards as their families. Robert K. Fitts, “The Landscapes of Northern Bondage,” Historical Archeology 30, no. 2 (1996): 54–73, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03373588.

15. Christopher Gerard Ricciardi, “Changing through the Century: Life at the Lott Family Farm in the Nineteenth Century Town of Flatlands, Kings County, New York” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2004), 84. Such two-room structures were not uncommon in the colonies. See Gabrielle M. Lanier, Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 20–21; James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archeology of Early American Life (New York: Doubleday Dell, 1996), 130.

16. H. Arthur Bankoff, Christopher Ricciardi, and Alyssa Loorya, “Remembering Africa under the Eaves,” Archeology 54, no. 3 (May–June 2001): 38.

17. Bankoff, Ricciardi, and Loorya, 38.

18. Excavations of the brick kitchen’s location uncovered very few kitchen utensils but did unearth various personal items, including buttons, toys, and hairpins, with manufacturing dates that ranged from 1790 to 1842. The quality of these items, such as the buttons made of bone and shell, suggest that they belonged to servants or enslaved inhabitants who likely lived there. Ricciardi, “Changing through the Century,” 136–137, 185–186.

19. According to Ricciardi, the Lott family freed all but one of the family’s enslaved laborers in the early nineteenth century and then hired them to work on the farm as paid laborers. Ricciardi, 49.

20. Sawyer, “Constructing the Tradition,” 98–99.

21. Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 2. Archeologist Joe Diamond has worked on the Abraham Hasbrouck home in New Paltz, where he has found evidence that enslaved people lived in the basement of the home. Phone conversation, January 13, 2017.

22. Anne MacVicar Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, With Sketches of Manners and Scenery in America (New York: D. Appleton, 1846), 38.

23. According to Abbott Lowell Cummings, some homes in Boston contained cellar kitchens due to a lack of lateral space in the city. Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625–1725 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 39. Many thanks to Christa Beranek for bringing this to my attention. Robert Blair St. George and Marla Miller show that lean-to additions to southern New England homes of the area’s well-to-do families became the main places for domestic tasks such as food preparation. Robert Blair St. George, “ ‘Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 355; Marla Miller, “Labor and Liberty in the Age of Refinement: Gender, Class, and the Built Environment,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 10 (2005): 15–31. Comparable architectural changes had also occurred in Europe. Some families in Amsterdam moved their kitchen to the back of the home or the basement as early as the sixteenth century to free the home from the “heat, bad smells, and smoke” that came from the kitchen. Ir. R. Meischke, H. J. Zantkuijl, W. Raue, and P.T.E.E. Rosenberg, Huizen in Nederland: Amsterdam. Archtitectuurhistorische verkenningen aan de hand van het bezit van de Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1995), 1:23. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, well-to-do Amsterdam families often moved the kitchen to the basements of these homes to create more space in the main living areas, and eventually these basements and summer kitchens became the predominant areas of domestic labor. Meischke, Zantkuijl, and Rosenberg, Huizen in Nederland: Amsterdam, 1:72–73; Ir. R. Meischke, Het Nederlandse Woonhuis van 1300–1800: Vijftig jaar Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink & Soon N.V., 1969), 97. A similar shift took place in many seventeenth-century English homes where elite families began to relegate service activities to basements. By 1750, cooking and food preparations had been moved out of most of these homes’ central halls to specialized kitchens in the back or basement, thus separating cooking and eating spaces. Matthew Johnson, An Archeology of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 143, 176.

24. Upton, “Vernacular Domestic Architecture,” 320. Also see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 250, 262–263.

25. Cary Carson, “Doing History with Material Culture,” in Material Culture and the Study of American Life, ed. Ian M. G. Quimby (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 54. Larry McKee suggests that well into the eighteenth century “the typical domestic arrangement for slaves was a haphazard array of reused buildings, large, dormitory-style dwellings, and various kinds of unsettled quarters.” Larry McKee, “The Ideals and Realities behind the Design and Use of 19th Century Virginia Slave Cabins,” in The Art and Mystery of Historical Archeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, ed. Anne Elizabeth Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 1992), 196–197.

26. Johnson, Archeology of Capitalism, 143. Also see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 72–74, 302–305.

27. Kenneth E. Lewis, “Plantation Layout and Function in the South Carolina Lowcountry,” in The Archeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, ed. Theresa A. Singleton (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1985), 35–65, 38. Also see Stephen Hague, “Building Status in the British Atlantic World: The Gentleman’s House in the English West Country and Pennsylvania,” in Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture, 1600–1850, ed. Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

28. Bankoff and Winter, “Archeology of Slavery,” 291; Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Places 2, no. 2 (1984): 64; Deborah Rothman, “Introduction,” in Shared Spaces and Divided Place: Material Dimensions of Gender Relations and the American Historical Landscape, ed. Deborah Rothman and Ellen-Rose Savulis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 7. Others who have discussed this include Mark P. Leone, “Interpreting Ideology in Historical Archeology: Using the Rules of Perspective in William Paca Garden in Annapolis, Maryland,” in Ideology, Power, and Prehistory, ed. Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Johnson, Archeology of Capitalism, 149; Brown, Good Wives, 261; Epperson, “Race,” 31.

29. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, 12.

30. References to the people enslaved by the Schuyler family can be found throughout his correspondence, the Philip Schuyler Papers at the New York Public Library. A runaway slave advertisement reveals that Claas, or Nicholas, fled Schuyler’s Saratoga Estate in 1782. New York Gazetteer (Saratoga, NY), November 4, 1782.

31. John Jay to Schuyler, February 19, 1780, box 1, folder 6, 8, Schuyler Family Collection, SC19811, New York State Library.

32. John Jay to Schuyler, February 19, 1780, box 1, folder 6, 8, Schuyler Family Collection, SC19811, New York State Library.

33. “Schuyler Mansion,” 18.

34. “Schuyler Mansion,” 22, 27, 29. When the British tried to kidnap Schuyler in the evening of August 7, 1781, they entered the home through the outdoor kitchen, which according to at least one account had a passageway to the main house. George Clinton, Public Papers of George Clinton: First Governor of New York, 1777–1795–1801–1804 (Albany: Oliver A. Quayle State Legislature Printer, 1904), 7: 184–185.

35. “Schuyler Mansion,” 22, 29; Clinton, Public Papers, 7: 185.

36. “The Ten Broeck Mansion Existing Conditions Report” (Compiled for the Albany County Historical Association, 2015), 4.

37. “Ten Broeck Mansion,” 83.

38. James Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred: The Archeology of a Virginia Plantation (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 145. Vlach shows how nineteenth-century southern planters tended to hide their enslaved laborers’ work and living areas unless their labor and living quarters appeared clean and organized. John Michael Vlach, “ ‘Snug Li’l House with Flue and Oven’: Nineteenth-Century Reforms in Plantation Slave Housing,” in Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, V (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 118–120. Also see Theresa A. Singleton, “Slavery and Spatial Dialectics on Cuban Coffee Plantations,” World Archeology 33, no. 1 (2001): 102–103.

39. Architects’ Emergency Committee, Great Georgian Houses of America, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1970), 25, 95–97.

40. Brown, Good Wives, 250, 262–263; Epperson, “Race,” 32.

41. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195–230.

42. Delle, Archeology of Social Space, 159. In his study of Jamaica plantations, Louis Nelson found “the overseer’s house at Good Hope had almost no capacity for surveillance over the slave village.” Instead, surveillance focused on the plantation’s work areas. Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 124.

43. Epperson, “Panopticon Plantations,” 58–77.

44. Singleton, “Slavery,” 106.

45. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York, 1:631; Jessica Kross, The Evolution of an American Town: Newtown, New York, 1642–1775 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 156, 176; Hodges, Root & Branch, 64.

46. For more on the 1741 Slave Conspiracy, see Daniel Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy (Boston: Beacon, 1971); Rucker, River Flows On, 59–90; Lepore, New York Burning; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 174–210.

47. Minutes, February 2, 1715, GLC3107.01103, Gilder Lehrman Collection; A. J. Williams-Meyers, “Re-examining Slavery in New York,” New York Archives 1, no. 3 (Winter 2002): 15–18. Nicole Maskiell discusses this case in greater detail in her dissertation and in her forthcoming manuscript. She points out that Dijkemans survived the attack. Maskiell, “Bound by Bondage,” 56; Accusation, April 1730, Justices Court, H box no. 4, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division; Kenneth Scott, “Ulster County, New York, Court Records, 1693–1775,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 61, no. 1 (1973): 62.

48. N.d., Isaac Cortelyou family notebook, 1974.137, Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS).

49. Bankoff, Ricciardi, and Loorya, “Remembering Africa,” 40.

50. Roderic H. Blackburn, Dutch Colonial Homes in America (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2002), 162.

51. Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 119.

52. Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 3.

53. Hardesty, Unfreedom, 74.

54. The examination of Bet a Negro Female Slave of Philip S. Van Rensselaer Esquire taken the 28th day of November 1793, 2–3, NYSL.

55. Delle, Archeology of Social Space, 161–163.

56. Epperson, “Race,” 34.

57. Epperson, 34; Singleton, “Slavery,” 108. Also see Patricia Samford, “The Archeology of African-American Slavery and Material Culture,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 1 (January 1996): 100, https://doi.org/10.2307/2946825; Warren R. DeBoer, “Subterranean Storage and the Organization of Surplus: The View from Eastern North America,” Southeastern Archeology 7 (1988): 1–20.

58. Bankoff, Ricciardi, and Loorya, “Remembering Africa,” 36–40; Ricciardi, Changing through the Century, 188–189.

59. Mark P. Leone and Gladys-Marie Fry, “Conjuring in the Big House Kitchen: An Interpretation of African American Belief Systems Based on the Uses of Archaeology and Folklore Sources,” Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 377; Diana diZerega Wall, “Twenty Years After: Re-examining Archeological Collection for Evidence of New York City’s Colonial African Past,” African Diaspora Archeology Newsletter 7, no. 2 (April 2000): 2.

60. Walter Richard Wheeler, “Magical Dwelling: Apotropaic Building Practices in the New World Dutch Cultural Hearth,” in Religion, Cults & Rituals in the Medieval Rural Environment, Ruralia XI, ed. C. Bis-Worch and C. Theune (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2017), 389–390.

61. Laurie Wilkie, “Secret and Sacred: Contextualizing the Artifacts of African-American Magic in Religion,” Historical Archeology 31, no. 4 (1997): 89–90; Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 129–131; James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 179–185; Laurie Wilkie, “Magic and Empowerment on the Plantation: An Archeological Consideration of African-American Worldview,” Southeastern Archeology 14, no. 2 (1995): 145; Samford, “Archeology,” 107–109. For more about the minkisi, see Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2007), 105–145; Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 43–45; Rucker, River Flows On, 35–37 and 164–167; Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 57–58. In his description of the seventeenth-century Senegambia, Jean Barbot claimed that “one grigri will save them from drowning at sea, and another from being killed in war; another again will give a woman a safe childbirth, another will prevent fires, another heal fevers, and so on.” Barbot, Barbot on Guinea, 1:85–86.

62. Patricia Samford has argued that these items would be most effective when buried in the dirt. She explains that among the Igbo, for example, “earth is one of the most important sacred places.” Other scholars have pointed out that even though that may have been more common practice variety exists. For example, similar bags have been hidden below floorboards. It is possible that enslaved people adjusted these practices to their circumstances: if their living quarters only had floorboards, as would be the case in garret spaces, they would likely have used these. Patricia Samford, Subfloor Pits and the Archeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 181; Young, Rituals of Resistance, 125–127; Wheeler, “Magical Dwelling,” 389; Matthew Kirk, “Out of the Ashes of Craft, the Fires of Consumerism: A 1797 Deposit in Downtown Albany,” in People, Places, and Material Things: Historical Archeology of Albany, New York, ed. Charles L. Fisher (Albany: New York State Museum, 2003), 53.

63. Wheeler, “Magical Dwelling,” 381.

64. Wheeler, 391.

65. Joseph points out that “both the X and cross-in-circle marks have European as well as African contexts and meanings.” J. W. Joseph, “ ‘… All of Cross’—African Potters, Marks, and Meanings in the Folk Pottery of Edgefield District, South Carolina,” Historical Archeology 45, no. 2 (2011): 134, 149.

66. Archeologists also found what appears to be a dikenga carved on the northeast side of a hearth, located in the basement where enslaved laborers lived in present-day Germantown, NY. Christopher Lindner, “West African Cosmogram Recognized adjacent to Probably Hearth Concealment at 19th-century Slave Quarter in mid-Hudson Valley Settlement of early German Americans,” SHA Newsletter: Quarterly News on Historical Archeology from around the Globe 49, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 28–30.

67. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 109; Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archeology and Early African America, 1650–1800 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 110; Fromont, Art of Conversion, 76, 150; Leone and Fry, “Conjuring in the Big House Kitchen,” 377; Wall, “Twenty Years After,” 1. See chap. 6 for a more detailed discussion on the religious meaning of these items.

68. Marla Miller similarly shows that domestic workers in New England gained some autonomy when their workspaces were segregated from the main living areas of the rural New England gentry homes. Miller, “Labor and Liberty,” 15–31.

69. Sibley notes that the home is not often seen as a space of exclusion. David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995), 91–92. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s analysis of Olaudah Equiano’s narrative shows how the meaning of spaces changes. Dillon, “Sea of Texts,” 38–39.

70. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 183.

71. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS. Also see Andrea Mosterman, “ ‘I Thought They Were Worthy’: A Dutch Reformed Church Minister and His Congregation Debate African American Membership in the Church,” Early American Studies 14, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 610–616.

72. Maria Louw to Peter Louw, July 6, 1786, Misc. Mss. Peter Lowe, New-York Historical Society (N-YHS); U.S. Census, 1790: Heads of Families, 172. See chap. 6 for more about Peter Lowe.

73. Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, 58.

74. Lisa Anderson, “Update on the Schuyler Flatts Burial Ground,” Legacy: The Magazine of the New York State Museum 5, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 9; Esther J. Lee et al., “MtDNA Origins of an Enslaved Labor Force from the 18th Century Schuyler Flatts Burial Ground in Colonial Albany, NY: Africans, Native Americans, and Malagasy?,” Journal of Archeological Science 36 (2009): 2805–2810, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2009.09.008.

75. Prince to Mrs. Schuyler, 1776, Schuyler Family Slavery Records (copies), Schuyler Mansion.

76. Marisa Fuentes has shown how such scars can be used to learn about the people. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 14.

77. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance, 74.

78. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 197.

79. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 48.

80. Clinton, “ ‘Southern Dishonor,’ ” 54.

81. Van Laer, Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswijck, and Schenectady, 1:254; Sullivan, Punishment, f. 319.

82. Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, 36.

83. Several scholars have discussed these silences in the archives. See, for instance, Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 1–14; Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives.

84. Block, “Lines of Color,” 142.

85. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 2001). Amanda Flather describes similar circumstances for female servants in England. Amanda Flather, “Gender, Space and Place: The Experience of Servants in Rural Households 1550–1750,” Mundo Agragrio 18, no. 39 (December 2017): 171–188. Also see Terri Snyder, Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 45–66.

86. For more about enslaved women and sexuality, see Washington, “ ‘From Motives of Delicacy,’ ” 57–73.

87. Block, “Lines of Color,” 142.

88. Marisa Fuentes provides an important discussion of enslaved women and the violence enacted upon them. She also explains the challenges of discussing enslaved women’s agency when researching their sexual relations with free, white men. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 9–11.

89. Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, 58.

90. Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 7–8.

91. Gerardus Duyckinck to Henry Van Rensselaer, April 29, 1738, Van Rensselaer Miscellaneous Papers, I/3/9, HL80-30, AIHA.

92. Slave Bill of Sale, September 2, 1752, Van Schaick Family Papers, SC10837, NYSL.

93. Slave Bill of Sale (formerly folder 1815), Seaman Family Papers, 19.74.005, BHS. For more on the trade of enslaved people in the nineteenth century, see, among others, Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon, 2017); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

94. Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, 18.

95. Gustave Anjou, ed., Ulster County, N.Y. Probate Records in the Office of the Surrogate, and in the County Clerk’s Office At Kingston, N.Y.: A Careful Abstract and Translation of the Dutch and English Wills (Rhinebeck, NY: Palatine Transcripts, 1980): 1:106–110.

96. Anjou, 2:89.

97. Anjou, 2:15.

98. Will of Nikus Jans, December 19, 1712, GLC 3107.00947, GLC.

99. For more on motherhood, mothering, and slavery, see Wilkie, Archeology of Mothering, 49–78; Sasha Turner, “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 232–250, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1316962; Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

100. O’Callaghan, Census of Slaves, 1755.

101. R. Bleecker to John Elmendorp, November 27, 1773, box 6, folder 4, Kingston Collection, CV10181, NYSL.

102. Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 15.

103. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance, 48.

104. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 286, 290.

105. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 120.

106. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 190.

107. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 130.

108. Bett and the children lived in Albany while Bill resided in Troy. Their enslavers suspected that they had fled to Massachusetts together. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 127.

109. Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, 178.

110. Runaway Slave Advertisement, New York Evening Post, October 8, 1808.

111. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston: Published at the Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 28. Larry McKee has used archeological evidence to show that enslaved Africans on southern plantations had little to no emotional attachment to the places in which they lived. McKee, “Ideals and Realities,” 207.

1. Will of David Johnston, 1809, 2, Historic Huguenot Street [copy; original is located at the Dutchess County Surrogate’s Office]; Russell Gasero, Historical Directory of the Reformed Church in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 280; letter to the Rev. Particular, Synod of Albany, concerning “The Memorial of Ann Bevier and Rachel Westbrook, members of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Rochester,” 1823, Philip Dubois Bevier Family Papers (1685–1910), Historic Huguenot Street.

2. Dirk Mouw discusses that a Dutch Reformed Church minister had significant power not just in the church but in the community at large. Dirk Edward Mouw, “Moederkerk and Vaderland: Religion and Ethnic Identity in the Middle Colonies, 1690–1772” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2009), 155–156. Gerald De Jong describes the ritual of the minister climbing the steps of the elevated pulpit. De Jong, Dutch Reformed Church, 131.

3. Letter to the Rev. Particular, Synod of Albany, concerning “The Memorial of Ann Bevier and Rachel Westbrook, members of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Rochester,” 1823, Philip Dubois Bevier Family Papers (1685–1910), Historic Huguenot Street.

4. Minutes, April 7, 1823, Classis Ulster, 1:419, ARCA.

5. For more on religious pluralism in early New York, see Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York’s Early Republic Congregations (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Bonomi, “ ‘Swarms of Negroes’ ”; Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot.

6. In fact, Kingston church members requested that the church hire a Dutch-speaking minister for Dutch sermons as late as 1811. Consistory Minutes 1795–1841, October 14, 1811; November 27, 1811; December 9, 1811; January 1812; June 20, 1812; July 3, 1812; Kingston Church Records, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division. Also see Randall H. Balmar, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot; De Jong, Dutch Reformed Church; Hackett, Rude Hand of Innovation.

7. For a more detailed discussion of the church’s institutional organization, see Mouw, “Moederkerk and Vaderland,” 163–172.

8. Bonomi notes the important social and political function of colonial churches: “Churches in both country and town were vital centers of community life, as government proclamations were broadcast from the pulpit and news of prices and politics was exchanged in the churchyard.” Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 88. Also see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Social Dimensions of Congregational Life in Colonial New York City,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 2 (April 1989): 252–278, https://doi.org/10.2307/1920254; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 165; Beasley, Christian Ritual, 10; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 120.

9. As David Hall explains, “the everyday meaning of religion thus involved the social experience of withdrawing from one kind of community and uniting with another.” Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, 117–118. Also see Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 107–108.

10. For discussions of social power and church life, see, Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects; Frances E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 641–665; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia; Beasley, Christian Ritual; Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, eds., Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005); Gretchen Townsend Buggeln, Temples of Grace: The Material Transformation of Connecticut’s Churches, 1790–1840 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003); Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jeanne Halgren Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Peter Benes, “The New England Meetinghouse: An Atlantic Perspective,” in Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture, ed. Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 119–120; Peter Benes and Philip D. Zimmerman, New England Meeting House and Church: 1630–1850; A Loan Exhibition Held at the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire (Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 1979).

11. See, among others, Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 25–28; Bonomi, “ ‘Swarms of Negroes’ ”; D. L. Noorlander, Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 166–191; Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld; Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz, 765–794; Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil, 1630–1654 (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1998). Gerald De Jong discusses some of the more practical aspects of having enslaved people in the church. De Jong, Dutch Reformed Church, chap. ix; De Jong, “Dutch Reformed Church,” 423–436.

12. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Boston: Mariner Books, 1968); Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space; Spicer and Hamilton, Defining the Holy; James P. Walsh, “Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England,” American Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 79–95, https://doi.org/10.2307/2712497; Anthony Garvan, “The Protestant Plain Style before 1630,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 9, no. 2 (October 1950): 4–13, https://doi.org/10.2307/987455; Kevin M. Sweeney, “Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches: Changing Perceptions of Sacred and Secular Space in Southern New England, 1720–1850,” Winterthur Portfolio 28, no.1 (Spring 1993): 59–93; Buggeln, Temples of Grace; Spicer, Calvinist Churches; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia.

13. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment.

14. Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Isaac, Transformation of Virginia; Beasley, Christian Ritual; Spicer and Hamilton, Defining the Holy; Buggeln, Temples of Grace; Spicer, Calvinist Churches; Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space; Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space; Benes, “New England Meetinghouse,” 119–120; Louis P. Nelson, The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

15. For more about slavery, race, and Protestant Christianity in the Americas, see, among others, Heather Miyano Koppelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Gerbner, Christian Slavery; Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Jon J. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Bonomi, “ ‘Swarms of Negroes’ ”; Richard J. Boles, “Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Racially Segregated Northern Churches, 1730–1850” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2013); Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, chap. 3.

16. See De Jong, Dutch Reformed Church, 164; Hodges, Root & Branch, 22–24; Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 49; Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 125–126; Frijhoff and J. Jacobs, “Dutch, New Netherland, and Thereafter,” 46; Graham Russell Hodges, “The Pastor and the Prostitute: Sexual Power among Africans and Germans in Colonial New York,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 63; Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America, 19.

17. Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space, 117.

18. William Durell, ed., The Constitution of the Reformed Dutch Church in the United States of America (New York: William Durell, 1793), 78.

19. Robert S. Alexander, Albany’s First Church and Its Role in the Growth of the City (Delmar, NY: Newgraphics Printers, 1988), 56.

20. Consistory Minutes, 1704, Kingston Reformed Churchbook, vol. 2, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division.

21. Alexander, Albany’s First Church, 56.

22. Nicholas Beasley observed that marriage and baptism in colonial Anglican churches could advance the social positions of free and enslaved Africans and African descendants. Beasley, Christian Ritual, 79–80. Also see Hardesty, Unfreedom, 160–161; Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 22–28.

23. Selijns to the Classis Amsterdam, June 9, 1664, Amsterdam Correspondence, nr. 46, ARCA.

24. See chap. 2.

25. Baptismal Records, September 5, 1703, Churchbook/Volume 2 of the Kingston Dutch Reformed Church, 67, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division; Roswell Randall Hoes, ed. and trans., Baptismal and Marriage Registers of the Dutch Church of Kingston, Ulster County, New York, 1660–1809 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1980), 70.

26. Lincoln, Johnson, and Northrup, Colonial Laws of New York from the year 1664 to the Revolution, 1:598. Beasley discusses how similar concerns caused English colonists to be hesitant about baptizing their enslaved laborers. Beasley, Christian Ritual, 80, 84–108.

27. Hoes, Baptismal and Marriage Registers, 351.

28. Together with his colleague Martinus Schoonmaker, Lowe rotated between the Collegiate Churches of Kings County, and eventually he became responsible for the English services at these churches. In 1808, he accepted a call from the Flatbush and Flatlands churches, where he stayed until his death in June of 1818 at the age of fifty-four. From 1805 to 1818, Lowe also served as the principal of the Erasmus Hall Academy in Brooklyn. De Jong, Reformed Church, 224; Thomas M. Strong, The History of the Town Flatbush in Kings County, Long Island (New York: T. R. Mercein, Jr., printer, 1842), 94; Gasero, Historical Directory of the Reformed Church in America, 241.

29. It appears the letter remained unsent. The letter does not detail whether these men were free or enslaved, but considering the congregants’ objections and Kings County’s demographics at the time of their request, these men were most likely enslaved. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS.

30. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS.

31. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS.

32. David D. Demarest, The Reformed Church in America: Its origin, development and characteristics (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Church in America, 1889), 181.

33. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS.

34. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS.

35. Both Lowe and his colleague Martinus Schoonmaker held people in bondage, as had been common among Dutch Reformed Church ministers. At the time of the 1790 census, Lowe included two enslaved people as part of his household and Schoonmaker held one person in bondage. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790: New York, 97; Advertisement, Republican Watch-Tower, August 20, 1800.

36. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS.

37. Ryan Hanley, “Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw,” Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 2 (2015): 362, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.920973.

38. Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, The Agony of Asar: A Thesis on Slavery by the Former Slave, Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, 1717–1747, ed. and trans. Grant Parker (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1999).

39. Edward T. Corwin, trans. and ed., Ecclesiastical Records: State of New York (Albany: J. B. Lyon, state printer, 1901), 4:3109.

40. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS. Other denominations also professed that Christianity would make enslaved people better servants. See, for instance, Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 103–139.

41. Consideratie des E. Classis van Amsteldam, Archief van de Classis Amsterdam van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk (access no. 379), inventory no. 160, 6–8, SAA; Extra Ord. Classis, November 5, 1743, Classis Amsterdam van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk (access number 379), inventory no. 159, 589–592, SAA.

42. Classis ordinaria, April 12, 1779, Archief Classis Asd (379), inventory no. 161, 231–235, SAA.

43. Extra Ord. Classis, November 5, 1743, Classis Amsterdam van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk (accessnumber 379), inventory no. 159, 589–592, SAA; Extract from letter Henr. Muller to Classis, June 15, 1775, Archief Classis Asd (379), inventory no. 166, 502–505, SAA; Henricus Muller to the Classis Amsterdam, March 10, 1779, Archief Classis Asd (379), inventory no. 166, 604, SAA.

44. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS.

45. E. T. Corwin, ed., A Digest of Constitutional and Synodical Legislation of the Reformed Church in America: Formerly the Ref. Prot. Dutch Church (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Church in America, 1906), 679–680, ARCA.

46. Corwin, Digest, 680, ARCA.

47. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 2. These black families include the Bastiaenszen, Luykasse, Dee, Salomons, and Pouwelse families. Also see Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 116.

48. Thomas Grier Evans, ed., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam and New York: Baptisms from 25 December, 1639, To 27 December, 1730 (New York: Printed for the Society, 1901), 329, 351.

49. Louis Duermeyer, ed., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of Albany, New York, 1683–1809 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1978), 1:52, 55, 56, 58, 67, 68, 71, 80, 110; 2:17, 22, 29, 32, 61, 70; 3: 14, 45, 55. Also see Mouw, “Moederkerk and Vaderland, 99; Maskiell, “Bound by Bondage,” 207–210.

50. List of Members, December 21, 1750, Kingston Church Records, 3:319, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division; Hoes, Baptismal and Marriage Registers, 70, 17, 307.

51. First Book of Records of the Dutch Reformed Church at Caughnawaga, Fonda, NY, 158, ARCA.

52. See, for example, the Kingston consistory minutes: Consistory Minutes, April 3, 1739, Kingston Church book, vol. 2, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division; Consistory Minutes, October 7, 1789, Kingston Church book, 3:438, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division.

53. Mouw, “Moederkerk and Vaderland,” 97.

54. Not only Dutch Reformed Church congregants proved reluctant to admit enslaved men and women to their church. Nelson discusses similar hesitancies in the eighteenth-century Anglican Church. Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 178–179.

55. The Acts and Proceedings of the General Synod, of the Reformed Dutch Church, in North America at New York, June 1816 (Albany: Websters and Skinners, 1816), 18–19, ARCA.

56. Firth Haring Fabend, Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 39; Minutes of the Particular Synod of New-York, October 1826, 12, Flatbush Reformed Church Collection, located at the Flatbush Church.

57. Olwell provides an interesting discussion on the meaning of accepting enslaved people in communion. Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 115–139.

58. Gerald De Jong discusses communion in North America’s Dutch Reformed Church. De Jong, Dutch Reformed Church, 134–135. As is evident from Nelson’s study of South Carolina’s Anglican churches, slavery and social hierarchy did not necessarily prohibit sharing communion with enslaved men and women. He found that in these churches black and white communicants usually had the Lord’s Supper together, even when these black congregants were enslaved by the white men or women with whom they shared this meal. Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 179, 200.

59. Peter Lowe to unidentified friend, 1788, Reverend Peter Lowe Correspondence, 1782–1818, ArMs 1974.008, BHS.

60. Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space, 112.

61. Joyce Goodfriend, “The Social and Cultural Life of Dutch Settlers, 1664–1776,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 124.

62. Extra Ord. Classis, November 5, 1743, Classis Amsterdam van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk (access no. 379), inventory no. 159, 589–592, SAA; Extract from letter, Henr. Muller to Classis, June 15, 1775, Archief Classis Asd (379), inventory no. 166, 502–505, SAA; Henricus Muller to the Classis Amsterdam, March 10, 1779, Archief Classis Asd (379), inventory no. 166, 604, SAA.

63. Classis of Ulster meeting, October 19, 1814, Classis Ulster, 1:309, 313, 317, 419–425, ARCA.

64. Minutes, April 7, 1823, Classis Ulster, 1:419–425, ARCA.

65. The Acts and Proceedings of the General Synod of the Reformed Dutch Church, in North America at Albany, June 1823 (New York: Abraham Paul, 1823), 47–48, ARCA.

66. The Acts and Proceedings of the particular Synod of Albany, Convened in the city of Albany, May 19, 1824 (Albany: Printed at the office of the Daily Advertiser, 1824), 7, ARCA.

67. Gasero, Historical Directory, 688. Susan Stessin-Cohn and Rose Rudnitski are currently working on a biography and documentary about James Murphy. In an interview, Stessin-Cohn suggests that his background would eventually catch up with him. Lynn Woods, “A Pastor’s Double Life Unearthed,” Hudson Valley online, accessed June 6, 2019, https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2013/05/05/the-mystery-of-james-murphy/.

68. Examination of Students, 1822, Minutes of the Classis of New York, 5:95–96, ARCA.

69. Minutes, April 1823, Minutes of the Classis of New York, 5:111–112, ARCA.

70. Examination of Students, May 26, 1823, Minutes of the Classis of New York, 5:119, ARCA; Grievances, October 1823, Minutes of the Classis of New York, 5:134, ARCA.

71. Samuel Cornish still did not give up on his objections. Minutes of the Classis of New York, 5:122, 134, 205–207, ARCA.

72. Inventory of the Church Archives in New York City: Reformed Church in America (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1939), 43.

73. Hodges, Root & Branch, 214.

74. Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space, 3, 9.

75. Coster and Spicer explain that in European churches, seating “was sometimes used to separate men from women, the young from the old, but most frequently it reflected the hierarchical social structure of early modern society.” Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, “Introduction: Dimensions of Sacred Space,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, Sacred Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9. Louis Nelson points out in his work that Anglican churches in the eighteenth-century British colonies often had “differentiated entrances, honorific seating, internal burials, elite wall memorials.” Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 277. Beasley discusses seating in Anglican churches in British slave societies: “Applicants for seats in newly pewed spaces desired to be able to see and hear the officiating minister above all but also desired seats that reflected their understanding of their proper place in the parish hierarchy, especially as revealed by one’s ability to pay.” Beasley, Christian Ritual, 27. Also see Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 64–65.

76. Derek A. Rivard, Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 45–46; Christian Grosse, “Places of Sanctification: The Liturgical Sacrality of Genevan Reformed Churches,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer and Will Coster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 73; Henk van Nierop, “Sacred Space Contested: Amsterdam in the Age of the Reformation,” in The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Cities of Italy, Northern France, and the Low Countries, ed. Marc Boone and Martha Howell (Turnhout, Belium: Brepols, 2013), 154–155, 157; Walsh, “Holy Time,” 79.

77. Coster and Spicer, “Introduction,” 4; Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 44.

78. Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer, “Defining the Holy: The Delineation of Sacred Space,” in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer (New York: Ashgate, 2005), 19; Van Nierop, “Sacred Space Contested,” 154–155; Coster and Spicer, “Introduction,” 5; Walsh, “Holy Time,” 90.

79. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz, 589.

80. Spicer, Calvinist Churches; T. S. Doolittle, “The Architecture of the Reformed Church,” in A manual of the Reformed Church in America: formerly Ref. Prot. Dutch Church, 1628–1902, ed. Edward Tanjore Corwin (New York: Reformed Church in America, 1879), 153–154. See also Pehr or Peter Kalm’s description of the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany: “It is built of stone; and in the middle it has a small steeple, with a bell.” Pehr Kalm, Travels into North America; containing its natural history, and a circumstantial account of its plantations and agriculture in general, with the civil, ecclesiastical and commercial state of the country, the manners of the inhabitants, and several curious and important remarks on various subjects, trans. Johann Reinhold Forster (London: The editor, 1770–1771), 2:256.

81. Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space, 113–114; Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 76.

82. In 1681, Cornelis Dircksen’s estate included “a Church seate.” Inventory and Appraisal of Cornelis Dirckse Estate, August 10, 1681, JLP no. 2158, NNA Wills 18: 24–26, Jacob Leisler Institute. Many thanks to David Willem Voorhees for sharing this reference. Also see Garvan, “Protestant Plain Style before 1630,” 4–13.

83. Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space, 120.

84. Benes, “New England Meetinghouse,” 128.

85. Barry L. Stiefel, Jews and the Renaissance of Synagogue Architecture, 1450–1730 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 109–110. For more about gender segregation, see Van Swighen, Protestants Kerk Interieur (1984), 223, Willem Frederick (Eric) Nooter Papers, box 2, folder Q, Jacob Leisler Institute; Wells, Quarter Millennial Anniversary of the Reformed Dutch Church of Flatbush, 15–16, Jacob Leisler Institute.

86. Some of the Kingston Church records suggest that women still had separate seats in the early nineteenth century. Consistory Minutes 1795–1841, February 1816, Kingston Church records, vol. 5B, p. 63, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division; Consistory Minutes 1795–1841, 20 April 1819, Kingston Church records, vol. 5B, 80, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division. The church of Caughnawaga also continued its gender divisions into the early nineteenth century. Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Caughnawaga, now the Reformed Church of Fonda, in the village of Fonda, Montgomery County, N.Y. / transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (New York City: [s.n.], 1917) 2:160–166.

87. Dr. John Coulbourn, A History of the Reformed Church of Claverack (1966), Claverack Church, Mary Hallenbeck Collection, Jacob Leisler Institute.

88. Kalm, Travels into North America, 1:251.

89. Alexander, Albany’s First Church, 38.

90. Alexander, 106; Munsell, Collections, 2:384; Arthur James Weisse, History of the City of Albany, New York: From the Discovery of the Great River in 1524, by Verrazzano, to the Present Time (Albany: E. H. Bender, 1884), 282.

91. Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space, 125.

92. Consistory Minutes, April 18, 1754, Kingston Church book, vol. 3, 448, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division.

93. Wells, Quarter Millennial Anniversary of the Reformed Dutch Church of Flatbush, New York, 15, Jacob Leisler Institute.

94. Alexander, Albany’s First Church, 107. Also see Demarest, Reformed Church in America, 181–182.

95. Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space, 120.

96. Beasley introduces the concept of “permanent guests” when he discusses how free and enslaved black people in the Anglican churches he studies never had designated seats or owned pews. Beasley, Christian Ritual, 33–34.

97. Alexander, Albany’s First Church, 105. Also see Munsell, Collections, 2:384–385.

98. Alexander, Albany’s First Church, 106.

99. Beasley notices the same thing in American Anglican churches. He also found evidence of enslaved people who waited outside the churches. Beasley, Christian Ritual, 31–32, 34.

100. Francis J. Sypher, ed. and trans., Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, part 1 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2015), 140–145.

101. William B. Rhoads, An Architectural History of the Reformed Church New Paltz, New York (Tricentennial Committee of the Church, 1983), 12; Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 88; Benes, “New England Meetinghouse,” 119–120.

102. Benes, “New England Meetinghouse,” 133–136; Benes and Zimmerman, New England Meeting House and Church, 1.

103. Benes and Zimmerman, New England Meeting House and Church, 28.

104. Rhoads, Architectural History, 6.

105. Benes and Zimmerman, New England Meeting House and Church, 31; Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 77–79.

106. Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 50; Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 75.

107. Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 146; Rhoads, Architectural History, 8; D. D. Cornelius L. Wells, Quarter Millennial Anniversary of the Reformed Dutch Church of Flatbush, New York (1904), 39, Willem Frederick (Eric) Nooter Papers, box 2, folder F.

108. Available pews would often be sold at a public auction that would take place in the church. Consistory Minutes, March 1810, Kingston Church records, vol. 5B, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division; Consistory Minutes, June 15, 1811, Kingston Church records, vol. 5B, Ulster County Clerk, Archives Division; Ame Vennema, History of the Reformed Church of New Paltz, Ulster County, NY from 1683 to 1883 (Rondout, NY: Kingston Freeman Steam Printing House, 1884), 29.

109. Alexander, Albany’s First Church, 187.

110. In Consistory, January 22, 1799, Consistory Minutes, 1795–1801, First Reformed Church of Albany, NYSL; In Consistory, February 25, 1811, Consistory Minutes, 1809–1815, First Reformed Church of Albany, NYSL; In Consistory, May 2, 1815, Consistory Minutes, 1809–1815, First Reformed Church of Albany, NYSL; Alexander, Albany’s First Church, 106.

111. Consistorial Record, 1839, Reformed Dutch Church of New Paltz, Ulster County, NY, bk. 4, 424, located at the New Paltz Reformed Church, New Paltz. Many thanks to the New Paltz Church historian Kevin Cook for showing me these records. According to Richard Hasbrouck, the New Paltz church became part of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1773. Richard Hasbrouck, A Brief History of the New Paltz Reformed Church (published by the Tricentennial Committee on the occasion of the 300th Anniversary, 1982), 3.

112. Rhoads, Architectural History, 7. When a congregation planned to build a new church, congregants would usually raise money, supplies, and labor. Several church records show that some congregants would offer the labor of the men they enslaved to build these churches. For instance, when the New Paltz congregation built a new church, Petrus van Wagenen contributed the labor of Tam. Alexander notes in his book on the Albany church that when they gathered contributions for a new church in 1714, several prominent Dutch Americans, including Jonas Douw, Hendrick Douw, Cornelis Schemmerhorn, and Peter Schuyler, had some of their enslaved laborers work on the building. Receipts, Abraham Deyo (1771–1775), New Paltz Reformed Church Records, Huguenot Historical Society Library and Archives; Dingman Versteeg trans., Peter R. Christoph, Kenneth Scott, and Kenn Stryker-Rodda, eds., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of New Paltz, New York: Containing an Account of the Organization of the Church and the Registers of the Consistories, Members, Marriages, and Baptisms (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1977), 33; Alexander, Albany’s First Church, 103–104. Buggeln points out that among church builders were often the enslaved men who were excluded from worshipping in these buildings. Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 32.

113. Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 317–318; Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 110–111; Upton, “White and Black Landscapes,” 69.

114. Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 317.

115. Nelson, 362–363.

116. Upton, “White and Black Landscapes,” 69. Beasley comes to a similar conclusion. Beasley, Christian Ritual, 35. Also see Paula Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York: Becoming American in the Hudson Valley (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 164.

117. Sensbach, Separate Canaan, 211–215.

118. In Consistory, January 22, 1799, Consistory Minutes, 1795–1801, First Reformed Church of Albany, NYSL.

119. In Consistory, February 5, 1811, Consistory Minutes, 1809–1815, First Reformed Church of Albany, NYSL.

120. In Consistory, February 25, 1811, Consistory Minutes, 1809–1815, First Reformed Church of Albany, NYSL.

121. In Consistory, May 2, 1815, Consistory Minutes, 1809–1815, First Reformed Church of Albany, NYSL.

122. In Consistory, May 2, 1815, Consistory Minutes, 1809–1815, First Reformed Church of Albany, NYSL.

123. Diary of James Kent [or Kant], pt. 9, New York March 6, 1822, BV Diary vol. 1, N-YHS.

124. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Co., 1857), 352–353.

125. Cato Pearce, Jailed for Preaching: The Autobiography of Cato Pearce, a Freed Slave from Washington County, Rhode Island (Kingstown, RI: Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, 2006), 15, 27. Many thanks to Richard Boles for bringing the Cato Pearce and William Brown narratives to my attention.

126. William J. Brown, The Life of William J. Brown, of Providence, R.I.; with Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 46.

127. Andrew D. Mellick, The Story of an Old farm; or, life in New Jersey (Somerville, NJ: Unionist-Gazette, 1889), 5–7.

128. Mellick, 437. Also see De Jong, Reformed Church, 133.

129. Dell Upton discusses such practices in Virginia and notes that announcements included runaway slave notices. There is no reason to believe such announcements would not be posted in Dutch Reformed churchyards. Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 204; Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space, 112; Benes and Zimmerman, New England Meeting House and Church, 64.

130. Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 203; Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 246–247; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 61; Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 32.

131. Lillian Dockstader van Dusen, A History of the Reformed Church of Fonda, N.Y. beginning with the old Caughnawaga Church (Ladies Aid Society, 1925).

132. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, 1628–1700, part 1, 42.

133. Sypher, Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, 1628–1700, part 1, 12–13. These were common practices in various denominations in the colonies and in Europe. For instance, Louis Nelson shows that South Carolina planters had family mausoleums built in the most prominent parts of the cemetery, usually close to the church’s main entrance. Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 272. Will Coster details how money determined the place of a burial in medieval England. Will Coster, “A Microcosm of Community: Burial, Space and Society in Chester, 1598 to 1633,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer and Will Coster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 124–143, 135.

134. A plaque at the Shawangunk church marks the place where these ministers were interred.

135. Will Coster highlights the ways in which the medieval English church cemetery served as a place of exclusion. Coster, “Microcosm of Community,” 135–136.

136. Beasley discusses how “limited space and deepening racism led to increasingly racialized control of burial ground by the middle of the eighteenth century.” Beasley, Christian Ritual, 125.

137. Maika, “Slavery, Race, and Culture,” 30.

138. The New York African Burial Ground: Unearthing the African Presence in Colonial New York (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 2009), 43.

139. Venema, Beverwijck, 117, 353.

140. Stiles, History of the City of Brooklyn, 1:389; Vanderbilt, Social History of Flatbush, 165–168.

141. Cohen, Ramapo Mountain People, 63.