Fifteen Eighty Four

It has been more than three decades since the discovery and archaeological investigation of the African American burial ground in New York City. Since then, a generation of historians have prompted New Yorkers to ask themselves how it is that the history of slavery in the state is so unknown. Much progress has been made in charting this history, primarily in New York City. And many Americans are now aware that New York was once a slave state, and indeed a fairly major player in the history of slavery in the United States. Yet, the standard narrative of slavery in New York is warped by major conceptual errors and omissions. Let me state just two of these errors here. 

First, most people who know about Northern slavery and New York slavery in particular assume that this as an urban phenomenon. And they have good reason to believe this, since many of the major books on slavery in New York focus on Manhattan. In addition, there is a large African American population in New York City, and they must have come from somewhere.  However, the vast majority of slaves in New York history lived in rural areas, not in New York City. Reconceptualizing New York slavery as a rural institution changes how we think about New York’s past. Slavery played a major role in the history of Long Island, Staten Island, and especially the Hudson Valley. In these places, enslaved people plowed fields, sowed wheat, harvested the wheat, threshed it, and brought it to the mill to be ground into flour, which was then sold in New York City and often exported to the Caribbean and to Europe. Wheat was a major cash crop in early New York and one of the largest, most profitable exports in the early American republic. New Yorkers benefited from slave labor to make a profit in wheat.

A second problem with the standard history of slavery in New York is that it largely omits the role of the Dutch. The New Netherland Institute, based in Albany, has long had the goal of reviving the story that the Dutch played in the 17^th century foundation of the state. Because New York’s earliest records are in scribbly old Dutch, they were difficult if not impossible for historians in the nineteenth century to interpret. It took generations of attempts at translating these documents to bring out the story of New Netherland and to make attempts at incorporating this story in the grand textbook narrative of American history. First were the tolerant Dutch, said William Elliot Griffis. Then came the English who snuffed out their story. Until recently, historians often broke the history of colonial New York into two periods, a pre-1664 “Dutch” period and a post-1664 “English” period. The history of slavery in the state was likewise divided. But this division is more than superficial, it is unhelpful and indeed obscures the role that the Dutch played in developing slavery outside of New York City.

You see, the Dutch were a powerful force in colonial New York well after governance of the province was given over to the English. Under English colonial rule, Dutch speakers expanded their landholdings in Long Island and up and down the Hudson River Valley. They also financed expeditions to capture or purchase slaves in Africa and the Caribbean. The New York Dutch and indeed the New Jersey Dutch continued to speak their own Netherlandic language well into the 18^th century, with remnants still speaking it in the 19^th century. Curiously, many, perhaps 40% of New York slaves, I argue, could speak Dutch.

By reorienting the picture of New York slavery from the urban, English-speaking slaveholders, to the rural, Dutch-speakers and their slaves, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York investigates further the demographic and economic data behind the story.  It proposes that slaveholding in New York was profitable and not merely a status symbol for elite households. Point by point, this revisionist work overturns some of the main conjectures of the standard historiography and not only provides answers for why New Yorkers forgot this part of their own history, but questions why past historians have gotten the story so wrong.

The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York by Michael J. Douma