In 1780, a raiding party moving through Upstate New York attacked the homestead of Frederick Fisher (Visscher in Dutch), a patriot and colonel in the Tryon County militia. Fisher was scalped and left for dead on a pile of grain, while his house was set ablaze and his property, including two slaves, carried away. But Fisher did not die, and the first person to reach him was Tom Zielie, a man enslaved to Fisher’s neighbor Adam Zielie. Tom wanted to aid the wounded man, but before he could, another neighbor, Joseph Clement, arrived on the scene. Clement was a Tory and cared little for Fisher’s life. In the tense moment of Clement’s arrival, Tom sought instruction for what he should do with Fisher. Clement responded in Dutch, “Laat de vervlukten rabble starven!” (“Let the cursed rebel die!”).Footnote ¹

Since Clement’s comment came down to historians about sixty-five years later, one might be tempted to discount it, but if such a phrase was indeed spoken, it would be illustrative of the strength of the Dutch language then in the Mohawk Valley.

Clement had come to New York as a boy, probably from England.Footnote ² He was a native speaker of English, but that he spoke to Tom directly in Dutch showed that the two men knew each other, and that Dutch was their common language of discourse. It also demonstrated that Clement had learned some Dutch from his neighbors. And, if we might speculate further, it may demonstrate that Tom spoke little English.

To many a historian’s ear, such a scene sounds like an anomaly: a man born in England speaking Dutch to a slave in New York in 1780! Historians of early America know that abolitionist Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) grew up in the Hudson Valley, speaking Dutch. But she was just one of many Dutch-speaking slaves in New York in the nineteenth century.

Dutch culture and language in New York was widespread. For over two centuries, the Dutch in New York and New Jersey conversed in their native tongue. In this Dutch culture, slavery was a crucial and enduring element, and by no means in decline before the year 1800. Demographic data, in addition to sources from Dutch New York religious and cultural history, demonstrate that Dutch-speaking slaves were a large and identifiable group, that they were mobile despite legal restrictions, that they were united in language and culture, and that they grew in number primarily from natural births rather than imports.

Historians have wondered how many Dutch-speaking slaves there were in New York. Several write of “some” Dutch-speaking slaves; others of “many,” but none have been precise because they relied on published aggregated census figures.Footnote ³

So, in an article published in 2022, I took a more critical and rigorous approach to the question about the number of Dutch-speaking slaves in New York, and I arrived at an answer that might be as surprising as it is enlightening. By using demographic analysis of birth and death rates and statistics on slave imports and exports, I concluded that in the eighteenth century, between 30 and 40 percent of New York slaves spoke Dutch. In numbers, this was between 22,800 and 30,000 persons. I found that the total number of slaves who lived in New York during the eighteenth century was probably around 76,000.

To estimate when and where the Dutch language was spoken among these slaves, I analyzed the regional distributions of slaves over time and made informed estimates of language use based on qualitative and quantitative sources. The percent of New York’s slaves who spoke Dutch remained quite consistent over time, even to the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴ Dutch-speaking slaves in New York were not an occasional curiosity, but a commonplace.

Figure 1.1, based on colonial and early federal census data, shows the estimated population of blacks and slaves in New York State from 1689 to 1830. Further insight comes by breaking the numbers down by regions: New York City, Long Island (including the counties of Kings, Queens, Richmond, and Suffolk), and the Hudson Valley (including all counties from Westchester to Washington). By analyzing these three regions independently, clear patterns of Dutch slave ownership emerge.

Figure 1.1 Total black population (free and enslaved) and slave population in New York Colony/State, 1689–1830.

The first region, New York City, has been the focus of most historical study of the role of slavery in the state. But the percent of slaves in the city was never greater than 26 percent of the statewide totals (Figure 1.2). And the number steadily declined to less than 15 percent by the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁵

Figure 1.2 New York City enslaved population as a percent of the statewide number of enslaved persons.

New York City in this period was never a place of concentration of Dutch slavery, except perhaps in the earliest years of the century.

In 1700, roughly half of the inhabitants of New York City were of Dutch extraction. Analyzing the 1703 census for New York City, Joyce Goodfriend found that out of 704 of the city’s slaves, 314 (45 percent) were own by Dutch families. Since Dutch had been the dominant language in the city in the seventeenth century, most of these slaves probably spoke some Dutch, in addition to English, French, Portuguese, or other languages. Through at least 1730, as the city’s slave population reached 2,000 persons, Dutch remained the dominant language in the city.Footnote ⁶ Of the 211 slaves accused in the 1741 “uprising” in New York City, 81 belonged to Dutch families.Footnote ⁷ By the 1750s, English had clearly replaced Dutch. But as Joyce Goodfriend has argued, the “actual record of Dutch speakers and readers” in eighteenth-century New York City has been “drowned out” by a “discourse of decline.” The decline of Dutch in Manhattan was slow. Dutch churches in New York City introduced English services only in the 1760s, and Dutch could be heard in the pulpit as late as 1803. Throughout the eighteenth century, as Dutch speakers gradually shifted to English, the Dutch language survived in neighborhoods in the north and west wards of Manhattan.Footnote ⁸

Runaway-slave advertisements indicate that Dutch-speaking slaves were living in Manhattan in the 1790s and 1800s. As late as 1808, a seventeen-year-old Dutch-and-English-speaking slave named Sarah ran away from William Van Wyck on 40 Front Street, Manhattan.Footnote ⁹ Two years earlier, in 1806, the bilingual Sarah had fled from 209 Broadway.Footnote ¹⁰ Dutch-speaking runaways coming to the city from other parts of New York and New Jersey added to the stable number of free Dutch-speaking blacks in the city at that time. Slave sale advertisements provide evidence of additional Dutch-speaking slaves in New York City. These sources are not always easy to interpret, and the location of the person for sale was often omitted. It is difficult to say, for example, if a twenty-three-year-old Dutch-speaking enslaved woman in a 1798 advertisement in the New York Morning Post lived in the city or elsewhere.Footnote ¹¹ Concerning an enslaved woman for sale in a 1793 newspaper account, we learn that she was born in Jamaica, New York, and could speak both Dutch and English, but there is no information as to where she lived at the time of the advertisement.Footnote ¹² Nevertheless, even by the end of the century, 5–10 percent of city slaves could speak Dutch. Slave growth patterns suggest that for the entire century, perhaps 10–20 percent of enslaved persons in New York City spoke Dutch.

Dutch slavery was numerically stronger in Long Island than it was in New York City, in the eighteenth century, but the percentage of Long Island slaves who spoke Dutch varied significantly depending on their location. For example, only a small percent in Queens and Suffolk spoke Dutch. But those in Richmond and Kings were mostly Dutch-speaking or bilingual, even to the end of the century. Richmond and Kings held about 42 percent of Long Island’s slaves in 1703, 25 percent in 1723, 31 percent in 1749, 32 percent in 1771, 39 percent in 1790, and 47 percent in 1800. The proportional rise in slaves in Dutch areas indicates that the Dutch Long Islanders held onto their slaves longer than families in areas of dominant English descent. Given these considerations, one might estimate conservatively that 25–30 percent of slaves on Long Island spoke Dutch in the eighteenth century.

The true center of Dutch slavery in eighteenth-century New York, however, was the Hudson Valley.Footnote ¹³ The combined populations of Dutch-speaking enslaved persons there was much larger than in New York City and Long Island. The Dutch language also held on longer in the Hudson Valley than elsewhere in New York. In Claverack, for example, Dutch was still the common language in 1801.Footnote ¹⁴ Dutch church services continued in Poughkeepsie until 1794, in East Greenbush (Rensselaer County) until 1812, and in Schenectady until 1804. In Ulster County, Dutch services continued until as late as 1824.Footnote ¹⁵ Dutch was spoken in an ever-shrinking and changing geographical pocket, or rather in several enclaves, as described in The American Gazetteer in 1797: “The English language is generally spoken throughout the State, but is not a little corrupted by the Dutch dialect, which is still spoken in some counties, particularly in Kings, Ulster, Albany, and that part of Orange which lies S. of the mountains.”Footnote ¹⁶ Figures 1.3–1.5 demonstrate the size of these slave populations by region over time.

Figure 1.3 New York City total black population and slave population, 1703–1830.

Figure 1.4 Long Island and Staten Island black and slave population, 1703–1830.

Figure 1.5 Hudson Valley total black and slave population, 1703–1830.

The largest population of slaves in the Hudson Valley was always found in Albany County, where the Dutch language was dominant the longest. Most slaves in Albany County probably spoke Dutch until at least the 1770s. Heavy concentrations of Dutch speakers in Ulster, Orange, and Dutchess County lend credence to the assumption that 50 percent of Hudson Valley slaves could speak Dutch around 1750, and 30 percent or more by the year 1800. All told, nearly half of all slaves in the Hudson Valley in the eighteenth century probably spoke Dutch. Figure 1.6 shows the regional slave populations in comparison and demonstrates how the Hudson Valley slave population overtook that of other regions.

Figure 1.6 New York State black population, free and slave combined, 1703–1830.

A large part of the black population of New York lived in these three regions, but the sum of these three population lines is not coequal with the state totals for slave and free blacks, since this does not include slaves in the counties of western New York.

Dutch last names among slaveholders in the incomplete 1755 census and the more complete 1790 census provide further evidence of the extent of Dutch slavery. A few caveats are in order, however. Not all families with Dutch last names were still speaking Dutch at home at the end of the eighteenth century. This would be especially true for Dutch families in New York City. But enslaved persons were often bought and sold, and hired out to neighbors, meaning that some New York slaves belonging to non-Dutch families were likely to have grown up in Dutch families, or at least spent some time working for them, suggesting that the number of Dutch-speaking slaves may have been greater than the number of slaves owned by families of primarily Dutch ancestry.

In 1755, district captains of the state’s militia, presumably acting as a security measure during the French and Indian War, took a census of slaves above fourteen years of age.Footnote ¹⁷ The census takers were far from consistent. Some wrote down the names of the slaves, others just tallied their number. But all of the census takers gave their masters’ names and the number of male and female slaves. The 1755 slave census is of limited value. Not only is it missing a count of children under fourteen, but it also omits New York City and Albany entirely. There may also be other sampling errors.

However, because the 1755 census includes the last names of all recorded slave owners, it is useful for estimating the percent of English- and Dutch-owned slaves in that year (see Figure 1.7). In total, about 1,066 of the 2,467 (or 43 percent) listed slaves lived with Dutch families. New York City (with a declining Dutch-speaking population) was not included in this census, and neither was Albany, where there was certainly a large pocket of Dutch-speaking slaves (1,480 slaves according to the 1749 census). Most of these slaves living with Dutch families in 1755 probably spoke Dutch, as the language was still dominant in the conservative, rural Hudson Valley. The census also demonstrates a few clear pockets of Dutch cultural control such as Kings, Richmond, and Ulster counties.Footnote ¹⁸ While Kings and Richmond (Staten Island) had both Dutch and English populations, the census indicates that the Dutch slaves may have lived in a mostly Dutch environment. The large numbers of slaves in Ulster created a sizable language community not impervious to English interlopers, but certainly with Dutch as a dominant language. A traveler going through New York State in 1759 wrote, “I’ve found very few who are not either Dutch, or the descendants of that people, at some distance from York are able to converse in no other language.”Footnote ¹⁹

Figure 1.7 1755 slave census, Dutch versus English.

The census of 1790 included a category for the national origins of the white population. A 1909 census bureau report estimated that 50,600 (or 16.1 percent) of white New Yorkers in the year 1790 were primarily of Dutch descent and that Dutch New York families then owned a total of 8,357 slaves, roughly 39.2 percent of the state’s total.Footnote ²⁰ Later studies led to similar estimates of a statewide Dutch-descent population of between 16 and 17 percent for 1790.Footnote ²¹

Demographic data shows the extent of Dutch New York slavery, but so do qualitative sources. In fact, in many nineteenth-century sources, the connection between Dutch New Yorkers and slavery was so well established that it was taken as self-evident. The historian Jeptha Root Simms (who was the source of the opening story about Fisher, Zielie, and Clement) wrote that slaves “accompanied the Dutch on their arrival [in Schoharie County] as part of their gear.”Footnote ²² Some modern scholars who have focused on particular regions of New York have found a similar connection. Describing Columbia County, John L. Brooke says, “Slaves were concentrated in the older river towns, held for the most part by the Dutch, the Germans, and the Anglo-Dutch landlord elite …. In sharp contrast, the Yankee-settled towns along the Massachusetts border contained virtually no slaves.”Footnote ²³ These slaves of Claverack, Clermont, and Kinderhook lived in a Dutch rural milieu. They celebrated Paas (Easter) and Pinkster (Pentecost).

For Saratoga County in 1790, James E. Richmond found that all the leading slaveholding families were Dutch. Saratoga’s John Schuyler had fourteen slaves, Cornelius Van Vechten ten, Dirck Swart eight, and Janatje Van Vrankin seven. Most of these slaves were on Dutch estates along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers. The Dutch were the first waves of settlers in the county, and they took the lands near the rivers because they were prime for wheat cultivation. When waves of New England migrants arrived in the county towards the end of the eighteenth century, some brought slaves with them, but not in great numbers.Footnote ²⁴

Despite all this evidence, historians have found few Dutch-language sources in New York State that would confirm the persistence of the Dutch language and the geographical extent and numbers of Dutch-speaking African Americans. Why is this the case? First, it is clear that the Dutch language in eighteenth-century New York was primarily a rural, spoken language. It had faded from New York City but held on much longer in areas where it was not recorded, where little was published, and where few letters survived. Records in Dutch tended to survive if they were written by the elite (e.g., bilingual gentlemen who conducted business in English, or ministers of the Reformed Church). Records from non-elite Dutch speakers, on the other hand, are difficult to find.

Yet the switch from Dutch to English in letters and on the streets of New York City should not obscure the fact that there was a distinct Dutch culture that persisted elsewhere, in Brooklyn, Albany, the Hudson River villages, and the Mohawk Valley. In the Schenectady area, the beginning of the transition from Dutch culture to English happened during the Revolutionary War, which “had taken the simple Dutchman from his bouwery on the flat and had brought him in contact with men from all other colonies.”Footnote ²⁵

The Wynkoop family letters present some insight into the connection between the Dutch language and slaveholding in late eighteenth-century New York. Cornelius Wynkoop and his son of the same name were merchants. In the 1790s, the son lived in Kingston and maintained frequent correspondence with his father in New York City. Cornelius the younger owned slaves, but how many and when he owned them is unclear. In a letter dated February 4, 1793, he explained to his father that his wife and family had gone on a visit to Kinderhook and had left him “a bachelor once more.” Only a female slave remained at the house.Footnote ²⁶ While Cornelius wrote his father in good English, and in a clear hand, he received letters in Dutch from his sister, Lea Wynkoop. Lea’s letter dated May 29, 1795, shows middling writing skills. It is in grammatical Dutch, but in a rough hand, with poor capitalization and punctuation. At the end she wrote, “het schrijven valt mij nit [sic] makkelijk” (writing is not easy for me).Footnote ²⁷ In 1799, the same Lea Wynkoop wrote her brother’s wife, Henrietta, again in Dutch, to ask her to purchase for her the best, darkest, and cheapest fur available.Footnote ²⁸ The point is that language use and abilities varied even within a family. The more mercantile-oriented tended to use more and better English, and in this period, men tended to write more letters than did women. The Wynkoop family likely spoke Dutch to each other, but the men wrote in English or Dutch, depending on the circumstance and the correspondent.

Historians have been keen to refer to observations from outsiders who paint the picture of the decline of Dutch language and culture in New York State at the end of the eighteenth century, but this can create a limited or even false picture. William Strickland, riding through New Jersey from Hackensack to Hoboken in 1794, met a people who “universally speak English to those who address them in that language, but among themselves speak only Dutch, though greatly corrupted.”Footnote ²⁹ Then in Poughkeepsie, New York, Strickland gave a more pessimistic vision of the Dutch language.

Despite this pessimism, more than thirty years later, in 1826, the Dutch traveler Gerhardus Balthazar Bosch found that Dutch was still commonly spoken in both the Albany area and in Bergen County, New Jersey.Footnote ³¹ Harm Jan Huidekoper, writing in 1839 but reporting on his trip of 1796 in New York, wrote that “on Long Island, in New York along the North River, at Albany, Schenectady &c the low Dutch was yet in general the common language of most of the old people, and particularly of the Negroes though in New York it had begun to be superseded by the English language.”Footnote ³² Bosch and Huidekoper were speakers of Dutch, while Strickland was not. Visiting the Rensselaer patroonship, Francis Hall noted in 1818 that “[m]any of the neighbouring villages continue almost entirely Dutch.”Footnote ³³

Other foreign visitors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries drew the common connection between New York Dutch and slavery.Footnote ³⁴ Besides Bosch and Huidekoper, however, these visitors typically could not speak Dutch and they stayed on the main roads and river passages. Absence of evidence is not evidence itself, but indications of the quick death of the Dutch language appear premature.

Slavery among the Dutch in the Hudson Valley appears to have been mostly a rural phenomenon, and it stands to reason that the most rural, most conservative Dutch speakers tended to hold slaves the longest. Slave advertisements in newspapers make clear that as late as the 1820s, there were monolingual or near-monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves, not from one small enclave, but from around New Jersey and New York State. What is more, these were typically advertisements for young men, which indicates that Dutch had been the primary language of their youth. In 1808, the slave Philip of Ulster County, for example, spoke broken English and Low Dutch very well. Jack in Schoharie in 1807 was described with similar terms. Joe in Rensselaer County, Ben of Dutchess County, and Tom of Albany also spoke only broken English and Dutch in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Monolingual Dutch-speaking slaves were probably less likely to run away, since they stood less of a chance of blending into the background of New York society; yet there were monolingual or near-monolingual Dutch-speaking runaway slaves reported from across the region: Tappan, Orange County (1762), Staten Island (1764), Orangetown, Rockland County (1771), Trenton, Essex, New Jersey (1782), Dutchess County (1792), Helleberg, Albany County (1796), Shodach, Rensselaer County (1796), Narrows, Kings County (1798), Clintontown, Dutchess County (1803), Marbletown, Ulster County (1805), Rensselaerville, Rensselaer County (1807), Middleburgh, Schoharie County (1807), New Paltz, Ulster (1809), Ringwood, Essex, New Jersey (1811), Claverack, Columbia (1817), and Warwick, Orange (1817).Footnote ³⁵ This observation is useful in charting the history of the decline of Dutch in New York and New Jersey. Although the English language had conquered New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley, Dutch was alive and even dominant in many households, villages, and rural areas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, particularly in the rural regions where slaves still tilled fields and cut grain.

Recognizing the persistence of the Dutch language is crucial for understanding that the Dutch in New York were a distinct ethnic group, and that their Dutch-speaking slaves formed their own culture. Evidence from across the eighteenth century suggests that Dutch was widely spoken among New York’s slave population first in New York City, for an enduring period on Long Island, and in large, growing numbers in the Hudson Valley. The United States’ Constitution was translated into Dutch before its ratification in 1788, and political handbills were translated into Dutch and distributed in the Hudson Valley as late as 1828.Footnote ³⁶ Dutch religious publications were printed in New York City until the 1760s, but the most common type of Dutch publication in eighteenth-century New York was probably the almanac.Footnote ³⁷ Dutch-language almanacs, sometimes by rival printers in the same year, appeared in New York City nearly every year from 1737 to at least as late as 1775. Like most common-day reading materials, however, these almanacs rarely survived the passage of time. Multiple booksellers in New York City in the 1760s and 1770s also imported books from the Netherlands.Footnote ³⁸

Another marker of the persistence of language was church services. E. T. Corwin thought Dutch held on in the rural Reformed churches until around 1820.Footnote ³⁹ The churches’ departure from Dutch did not signal a halfway point from English to Dutch, nor did it mean the death of Dutch in the communities either. It did suggest, however, a point at which the older generation had yielded to the inevitable death of its language.

Besides language, religion served as an important mark of cultural differences between Dutch New Yorkers and their Anglo-American neighbors, a point that many historians have investigated, with varying results. The Dutch Reformed Church (which dropped the word “Dutch” from its name in 1867 to incorporate as the Reformed Church in America) neither condoned nor condemned slavery, but its members, and particularly its ministers, were fully inculcated in slavery. Slavery enabled the church specifically by helping to provide a source of support for its ministers. In fact, slaveholding ministers were common in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church. A list of slaveholding Reformed ministers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries includes but is not limited to John Megapolensis,Footnote ⁴⁰ George Mancius,Footnote ⁴¹ Gideon Schaats,Footnote ⁴² Johannes Polhemius,Footnote ⁴³ Lambertus De Ronde, Theodorus Frelinghuysen, Martinus Schoonmaker, Simeon Van Arsdale, Samuel Drisius, Eilardus Westerloo, Isaac Labagh,Footnote ⁴⁴ and Elias Van Bunschoten.Footnote ⁴⁵

I have been unable to find any writings about slavery by Reformed ministers during this period, but some ministers from later periods provide clues into the mindset of Dutch proslavery clerics. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer (1808–1860) was a son of the wealthy Stephen Van Rensselaer (1764–1839), a slaveholder tied by marriage to other prominent Dutch New York families. The younger Van Rensselaer was a Presbyterian minister living in Burlington, New Jersey. Van Rensselaer accepted the name of “conservative,” as Armstrong, a Presbyterian minister and southerner, had called him. Part of his conservative view, which he repeated several times in his text, was that “[s]laveholding is not necessarily and in all circumstances sinful.” This was a position, defended on biblical and historical grounds, that he expressed as earlier as 1835, if not earlier. “There is a slaveholding,” he wrote, “which is consistent with the Christian profession” that it “may be right or wrong, according to the conditions of its existence.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Van Rensselaer took what some at the time might have seen as a moderate view, against Armstrong’s contention that slaveholding is not sinful under any circumstance. Van Rensselaer reflected the view of many of his and his father’s generation, who defended slavery in one time and place, say New York in 1790, yet condemned it in another place, for example, the Southern states in 1850. Despite arguing that slaveholding was not evil per se, Van Rensselaer explained that it “is not a natural and permanent phase of civilization.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The reverend Cornelius Vander Naald, minister of a Reformed Church on Staten Island in the 1940s and 1950s, provided an explanation about the church’s position on slavery that harked back to some of its earlier ministers. In 1955, he wrote:

Because participation in slavery among the religious Dutch varied regionally, it is difficult to draw general conclusions. In Schenectady, from the 1690s to the 1750s, says Thomas E. Burke, there was a “an almost total lack of black participation” in the Reformed Church and “no slaves were married at the Dutch church, none became members of the congregation, and in only three instances were slave children baptized in the church.”Footnote ⁴⁹ But the Dutch Reformed Church in Schraalenburgh, New Jersey, records dozens of slave baptisms in the 1790s.Footnote ⁵⁰ In late eighteenth-century Brooklyn, meanwhile, a Reformed congregation argued about whether African Americans should be admitted as members of the church. Congregants objected that “Negroes have no souls,” are “accursed of God,” descendants of Ham, had “nauseous sweat,” and would be forebearers of a larger black population in the church that would bring poor manners and disharmony.Footnote ⁵¹

In many New York communities, a Dutch Reformed Church served not only as an institution of social conservation and as a social center but also often exercised a virtual monopoly on moral authority.Footnote ⁵² There is plenty of evidence that black slaves regularly attended the Reformed Church services, although usually marginalized. Andrea Mosterman has argued convincingly that the Reformed Church served as a bulwark of social control over enslaved persons, who were given separate spaces in the church and in church cemeteries, thereby reinforcing the social division in other domestic and public spaces.Footnote ⁵³ A historian of Catskill, New York, related that the minister Henry Ostrander administered communion with his own hand, first to the elders and deacons, then to the congregation, the slaves coming last from their seats in the galley. On one occasion an old colored woman, who was probably asleep, did not move with the rest. Her master, an aged elder, arose and called out in a loud voice, “Deyaan! Deyaan! de dominie roept aan u!” [Deyaan! Deyaan! The minister is calling you!].Footnote ⁵⁴ In Bergen, New Jersey, Dominie Cornelisen alternated between Dutch and English Sundays, and also watched over the religious instruction of slaves “a number [of whom],” a historian says, “were admitted to church fellowship.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, it was routine to see blacks named in Reformed Church records, sometimes even listed as official church members.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nineteenth-century recollections also placed black slaves in attendance at the Reformed Church services, while also giving evidence that the slaves were sometimes waiting outside the church with a horse and wagon or sleigh to return their enslaver family home after the service.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nor did anything seem out of the ordinary when, on January 5, 1786, Samson Occom, an itinerant preacher, visited Saratoga, stayed at Philip Schuyler’s house, and held a religious meeting mostly attended by Dutch people, including their slaves. Occom recorded in his journal that “the poor Negroes were Surprizd [sic] with the Texts they Chose.” It is ambiguous who “they” are in this sentence, that is, who was doing the choosing of the texts. But what it does show is that African Americans had joined in this religious meeting and had knowledge of the scriptures. Occom records that when he left the next morning, “the generals Boss ordered one of the genl’s [sic] Negroes to Carry me.” That is, one of Schuyler’s men ordered Schuyler’s slaves to carry him, likely meaning to transport by horse and wagon. Here Occom notes that “Boss” meant “overseer,” a curious note on the introduction of a Dutch word baas (boss) into the American language (Figure 1.8).Footnote ⁵⁸

Figure 1.8 An early use of the Dutch word baas (boss) at the Schuyler estate from the Occom journal, 1786.

More than any other topic relating to the Reformed Church and slavery, historians have shown an interest in the history of baptism of the enslaved, often to suggest that this can be used as a proxy for indicating how well-integrated Dutch slaves were in the Dutch cultural and religious milieu. This has proven to be difficult work and the conclusions historians have drawn are varied, and, I believe, largely in error. A major source of error is the uncritical acceptance of the writing of Charles E. Corwin, a church historian writing in the 1920s. Corwin argues, without presenting any evidence, that Dutch Reformed ministers regarded black baptism as a matter of course. Corwin’s logic here is quite poor. He writes: “That we have so little definite knowledge of the work of Dutch Colonial pastors for the negro slaves during the English period, is proof that it [baptism] was taken for granted.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Historian Graham Russell Hodges interpreted this to mean that the church “insisted masters be responsible for slave baptism,” a statement that is more than a little ambiguous.Footnote ⁶⁰ Clarifying this somewhat, Hodges notes further that “the synod gave Reformed laity the power to choose whether household servants would be baptized.”Footnote ⁶¹

James Gigantino went one step further, writing that the Dutch Reformed Church mandated slave baptism.Footnote ⁶² To arrive at this startling conclusion, Gigantino cites Hodges’s and the work of Ira Berlin, but neither Hodges nor Berlin argued that the church made slave baptism mandatory.Footnote ⁶³ If one traces these citations of Gigantino, Hodges, and Berlin back to their sources, one arrives at only one source, which is an article by Charles E. Corwin from 1927, but Corwin presents no evidence or sources for his case. A similar error occurs when Hodges asserts that the Dutch minister Lambertus De Ronde was a proponent of black baptism.Footnote ⁶⁴ But the pages Hodges cites from De Ronde’s work present no evidence to this effect.Footnote ⁶⁵ The origin of this idea is Corwin, who was writing for the Federal Writer’s Project and was confused about De Ronde’s plan for writing a book in “Negro-English and Dutch,” assuming this to be related to De Ronde’s concern with slavery in New York. De Ronde had indeed planned to write such a book when he was still living in Suriname, but not in New York, and the language of the book was to be a mixture of the Surinamese Negro-English and Dutch, not American English and Dutch. Hodges abstracts from Corwin’s mistake the unevidenced supposition that De Ronde supported black baptism. It is difficult, however, to extract from the few available sources any solid understanding of De Ronde’s views on slavery. De Ronde was behind a plan for the conversion of slaves in Suriname in 1747. But between his experience in the slave colony of Suriname in the 1740s and the inventory of his death in 1795, there is no other available source to demonstrate his relationship with slavery.Footnote ⁶⁶ Unfortunately, Corwin’s claim, once taken root in Hodges’s work, again spread to Gigantino.Footnote ⁶⁷

The historical truth is always messy, and historians can sometimes be forgiven for accepting a standing view without digging further into its origin. But a better position about Dutch Reformed slave baptism is that it occurred, but irregularly, and varying by place and time. Slave baptism was not mandatory, nor was it infrequent, but it might not have been common. Dick Mouw speculates, with good reason, that African American baptisms and marriages in the church often went unrecorded because fees associated with the events were unpaid and “some church clerks simply chose not to record African American baptisms at all.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Evidence of a certain stigma against slave baptisms in the church might be seen in the baptismal registers of the Old Dutch Church of Kingston. Entries for “a negro of Hendrik de Joo” named “Leonardus” on November 26, 1732, “a negro of Johannes Wynkoop named Henry” on June 26, 1741, a “negro child (female) of Levi Paling” named Elisabeth on December 23, 1750, and a “negro child (female) of Cornelius Horenbeek” named Betty, on December 19, 1756 were all made with no witnesses to the event listed. Meanwhile, nearly all the white children whose baptisms were recorded in the book had witnesses recorded. Was there a stigma against being a witness for the baptism of a black child, or did the white church members just not find it important enough to be listed as a witness?

One confusion that might arise is whether these baptized children were actually the offspring of the member listed. In most cases it appears not, and that “the negro child of Levi Paling,” for example, was not his genetic child, but a slave child living with him.Footnote ⁶⁹

The emphasis here on the involvement of the enslaved in the Dutch Reformed Church is part of an attempt to understand how distinctly Dutch were the slaves of the New York Dutch. If they not only spoke Dutch but also went to the Dutch church and confirmed a belief in the teaching of the church, this helps to see them as building a common but separate identity. But this is just one of many ways in which historians can determine whether there was a distinctly Dutch slave culture in New York.

Early nineteenth-century sources commonly use the term “Dutch negro,” in which Dutchness can be seen as a primary or defining characteristic of a type of black person.Footnote ⁷⁰ In 1832, the Republican Monitor spoke of “Dutch negroes along the Mohawk” as a distinct group.Footnote ⁷¹ The term “Dutch Negro” seems to have been in use longer in the northern reaches of the Hudson Valley. A 1912 history of the Hoosac Valley relates that “between 1781 and 1827 several Negro slaves of Berkshire, Albany, Saratoga, and Dutch Hoosac fled to English Hoosac and settled on the banks of Broad Brook in White Oaks Glen, Williamston.” One of these was a “yellow-haired Dutch-Negro half-breed.”Footnote ⁷² The term “Dutch negro” was also used in parts of western Massachusetts and Vermont. Hiram Harwood wrote in his diary in 1831 of a “Dutch negro called ‘Coxsackie.’”Footnote ⁷³

Dutch-speaking slaves could be found from Long Island to Albany, but their relative mobility and interconnectedness helped them form a common identity and culture. There is good evidence that the slave population in New York was mobile and well connected, even over long distances.Footnote ⁷⁴ In fact, the movement of slaves in New York was probably greater than in any other region, even including colonial New England. New York’s slaves frequently carried messages, transported goods on the Hudson River, brought crops to town, ran errands for their masters, and even traveled to meet with other slaves.Footnote ⁷⁵ Account books from the Hudson Valley provide evidence that enslaved persons often picked up goods at the store on account of their masters.Footnote ⁷⁶ In a store account book from Churland, Ulster County, in 1768 and 1769, slaves were trusted to deliver alcohol. The records show Laurens Winnin’s enslaved man Frank bought a half gallon of rum, and Jacobus Wolfsen’s “negro Pet” bought a full gallon of rum. Peterus Meyndertje also sent a slave to get a gallon of rum, while Christian Valkenburgh sent his slave to get a pint of wine.Footnote ⁷⁷

Dutch slaves could also commonly be found as ferryboat men. Crom Wiltsie, a slave of Martin Wiltsie, sailed a pirogue out of Fishkill on the Hudson.Footnote ⁷⁸ Another source records his name as “Quam” and demonstrates that he had quite a bit of freedom of movement, even in the evening when he looked for alcohol.Footnote ⁷⁹ “The Reminisces of Catskill” recalls a black ferryman who plied between Greene and Columbia counties. “No admiral ever trod the quarter-deck with more dignity and pomposity than black Ben,” who was called “boss of the scow.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Further evidence of this mobility can be seen in the fact that slaves in New York were routinely given permission to seek new owners on their own. One surviving written pass allowed an enslaved woman named Charr to travel on her own for a few days. The note was folded multiple times, as if stuffed in a pocket. It read: “The bearer hereof a Negro Woman named Charr has our Permission to look out for a Master to be sold for Seventy-five Dollars she being back again by Friday Night. Shodack, Feb 25th, 1800. Marte Beekman, Jacob Baurhyte, John S. Miller.”Footnote ⁸¹ Dutch slaves away from home, on their own initiatives, appear again and again in the historical record as a casual fact, as nothing out of the ordinary. Although slaves were required to work, and they could not abscond for the long term, there were Sundays and particular holidays when they could move around.Footnote ⁸²

The general mobility of New York slaves defeats the idea that Dutch-speaking slaves could not form a common culture because they were isolated from each other. While the average number of slaves per household was low, movement of slaves between households, within and between communities, appears to have been fairly extensive, and had to be, considering New York’s labor demands, and the frequency with which New Yorkers bought, sold, and hired out enslaved labor. Unlike in the South, enslaved people in New York were generally not bound to a plantation and there were few hired supervisors to watch over them.

Attempts to determine the percent of white New Yorkers who owned slaves always fail to incorporate the percent who also rented slaves and the turnover in slave ownership between census accounts. A much larger number of people were involved with slavery that any snapshot of a census would indicate, which gives support to the idea, recently argued by Anne-Claire Faucquez that New York was truly a slave society, not a society with slaves.Footnote ⁸³ Runaway-slave advertisements indicate that slaves often fled to seek family members elsewhere, and that they knew the route well (see Chapter 4).

My demographic research on New York’s enslaved population also indicates that in the eighteenth century they maintained consistently high birth rates, which I have estimated at fifty to sixty per thousand per year. This is further evidence against the idea that slaves in New York were routinely isolated from each other.Footnote ⁸⁴ Here, my findings question propositions frequently found in the historiography of New York slavery, which I believe to be lacking solid evidence and misinterpret slave society in New York. This historiography argues that New York slaves were barred from meeting together, that slave owners in New York discouraged their female slaves from having children because it lessened their productivity, and that the enslaved population grew mostly on account of imports, not domestic births. This still dominant narrative portrays slavery in New York as dying under the weight of demographic disaster.

The source of the idea that New Yorkers “prized sterility” may stem partly from the historian Edgar McManus, but he appears to take both sides on this issue.Footnote ⁸⁵ More influential is probably the work of Ira Berlin, who argued that “northern slaveholders discouraged their slaves from marrying” and women “with reputations for fecundity found few buyers.”Footnote ⁸⁶

It is true that New York City advertisements sometimes noted that a female slave was being sold on account of having children, or too many children, but this does not mean that slaveholders statewide tried to limit slaves from having children or that a majority of them found fault in fecundity.Footnote ⁸⁷ Indeed, Max Speare took the opposite position in his dissertation, arguing that “the presence of enslaved children” in some New York slave sales appears to have been an “attraction to potential buyers.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Errors in the historiography have a tendency to spread, if left unchecked. Ira Berlin accepted fertility claims for slaves in Philadelphia and then applied them broadly to all Northern slaves. Historian Marc Howard Ross then accepted Berlin’s view and explained that not only did the black population not reproduce itself, but the “continued importation of enslaved people kept it from shrinking during the colonial period.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Finally, and most recently, David Hackett Fischer asserted that the New York slave population grew mostly due to slave imports. But even if the numbers Fischer cites are accurate, and we accept that an additional 41 percent of imported slaves were never recorded, the number of slaves imported into New York would not have eclipsed the number of domestic births, given known census figures and reasonable estimates of birth and death rates. What is more, the largest growth of the enslaved population occurred after the Revolution, when imports were probably negligible.Footnote ⁹⁰ Domestic births must have provided for the growth of this population, and balanced their gender ratios over time. The heavily skewed ratios towards men at the mid eighteenth century shifted to parity by the century’s end.

The crux of the matter is that slaves in New York, despite sometimes being isolated by distance, could not have been consistently barred from meeting and procreating. Nor, by extension, were enslaved persons unable to form a common culture, even a common “Negro Dutch” culture in areas of Dutch dominance. New works by Andrea Mosterman and Nicole Maskiell have shown that Dutch enslavers in New York created systems of control and supervision for their enslaved persons, but this does not mean that some enslaved persons could not meet each other from time to time on weekends, or in village centers, or even in larger groups such as during the Pinkster festival. Nor does it follow that supervision was so tight that the enslaved population did not have the opportunity to reproduce.

More typical or illustrative was the situation of Quamino, an enslaved man living near New Brunswick, New Jersey, who experienced periods of constructive family and social life, broken by slave sales and periods of isolation. As a young man, Quamino was torn away from his family to spend eight years “away” working in Poughkeepsie. But at twenty-six years old, he returned to New Jersey and married Sarah, “a slave on a neighboring place.” When Sarah was sold to another slaveholder some five miles away, Quamino was only able to visit his wife once a week, on the Sabbath.Footnote ⁹¹

Likewise, records of the Overseers of the Poor in Poughkeepsie in the early nineteenth century indicate that many local slaves were married but lived under different houses, serving different masters, while traveling in between to visit each other.Footnote ⁹² In a dissertation on colonial Flatbush in Kings County, John William McLaughlin shows from census evidence that enslaved persons in Flatbush formed conjugal pairs and lived in family units.Footnote ⁹³

Despite the standard antifertility thesis, there is little convincing evidence that New York slaveholders discouraged, systematically or otherwise, the fertility of their slaves.Footnote ⁹⁴ Anecdotal evidence also shows enslaved women in New York had large numbers of children.Footnote ⁹⁵ The memoirs of Anne Grant, despite their romantic image of slavery in Albany, explain that the rapid increase of the enslaved population was due to their marrying very early, and that they lived “comfortably without care.” The youngsters remained living in the house, which “swarmed like an over-stocked bee-hive.”Footnote ⁹⁶

While sexual relations between enslaved persons and free whites doubtless contributed to the demographic picture, evidence here is also limited.Footnote ⁹⁷ According to documents in the Ulster County archives, in 1722, Grietje Brass, a white woman, had a child with Robin, a black man, slave of Albert Roosa. A warrant was issued for Robin and Albert Roosa to appear before the Justice of the Peace. The biracial relationship and birth of a mixed-race child was not a crime, but it did create a situation of concern for the authorities, who sought to ensure the protection of the child. The court, with Grietje’s confirmation, declared that Albert Roosa would care for the maintenance of the child if the mother became unable.Footnote ⁹⁸

The strongest direct evidence for a separate, coherent culture of Dutch slaves comes from the reports of Pinkster, originally a Dutch festival, which became a popular African American celebration by the late eighteenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth century. According to Jeroen Dewulf, the first explicit reference of African Americans in New York celebrating Pinkster is from 1786, although Dewulf believes it had been around much earlier.Footnote ⁹⁹ The majority of the observations of this group’s dancing, merriment, and travel for Pinkster is from the period 1790 to 1820, in the decades when the absolute number of Dutch-speaking slaves reached its peak. Pinkster became one of the major holidays on the calendar of Dutch-speaking slaves.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

African American Pinkster was primarily a city festival, a gathering celebrated only in places with a Dutch presence such as Albany, Kingston, Hudson, Schaghticoke, Brooklyn, and Paterson and New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was also celebrated on Manhattan, where Long Island’s slaves came to sell clams and oysters, or to be hired to dance to attract a crowd to a place of business.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The New York Sun recalled in 1881 that “The old Dutch negroes, as they were called, were famous for their dancing. The veteran Long Islanders are wont to tell stories of negroes dancing for eels on a barn floor in olden times, and they say that modern minstrelsy is a tame imitation of the fun given by these old Dutch servants.”Footnote ¹⁰² Pinkster lasted only a few days, but in Albany, it was said that the black population spent a week in preparation for the event, spending more time in the streets than usual, practicing a bit on the Guinea drum.Footnote ¹⁰³

Pinkster was a brief interlude of liberty in the coerced drudgery of a slave’s life. It also became an important element in negotiations between slaves and slave owners. In Albany, slaves coordinated the festival. Black participants in the Pinkster celebrations asked for white observers to pay “tax” before they would perform dances.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Each of the celebrations had a local flavor, but typically included a procession, dancing, and the naming of a “King” for the holiday. All these examples demonstrate a common, unified Dutch slave population who were given a certain amount of leeway, allowed to travel, dance, and earn money for themselves. The Pinkster celebration also provided an opportunity for slaves to leave and not return. An advertisement in the Albany Gazette in 1815 explains that an enslaved man named Caesar was allowed a “leave of absence from his master to join in the amusements of Pinkster Hollidays [sic], with a promise that he would come back on the Tuesday following, but he has not yet returned.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

By tradition, Dutch slaves would be free on Pinkster, even if they served English-speaking masters. The account books of Simeon Button (1757–1836), a farmer and sometime Justice of the Peace for Rensselaer County at Pittstown, New York, demonstrate how a slaveholder would allow an enslaved person to celebrate Pinkster as a reward for hard work. Button recorded renting the slave Pomp in 1805 at the rate of $100 for the year. Pomp had likely been owned by Button a few years earlier, then sold and temporarily rented back. In 1805, however, Pomp remained in Button’s service for less than four months. In April, he recorded giving Pomp 2 shillings on “Poss” (that is, Paas, the Dutch word for Easter). On June 2, Button also gave Pomp 8 shillings for Pinkster. Button provided this cash for Pomp despite the fact that he had been sick and had not worked much in the month of May. In fact, Pomp did not work from May 10 through May 27, and Button twice paid for a doctor to bleed Pomp and even bought him a half pint of gin, perhaps hoping the alcoholic remedy might do him some good. In April, Button purchased breeches for Pomp and in July he bought him shoes. All of these charges Button recorded as offsetting the cost of renting Pomp so that he could deduct these costs when settling with Solomon Tinsler, Pomp’s legal master. Button also recorded Pomp’s “lost time,” that is, the time in which he did not work. Pomp lost 4 days in April, 14½ in May, 7½ in June (including 3 for Pinkster), and then 3 days in the beginning of July before Pomp “went off.” On March 6, 1806, Button settled with Tinsler, paying him a total of $15 for Pomp’s labor during the past year.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Button continued his account book for decades, but in later years apparently always hired free labor. In 1796 and 1797, Button also gave cash on both “Poss” and Pinkster to Peter Stalker. The status of this Peter is unclear, but it seems that he might have been a free black man who worked for Button.

Explanations for the demise of Pinkster have ranged from legal restrictions on its excesses, as African Americans turned towards evangelical Protestant morality, or even the death of one particularly popular Pinkster “King” in Albany. Demographic study reinforces Dewulf’s view that “an increasing number of people no longer considered ‘Dutchness’ to be an important part of their identity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As slaves were emancipated and Dutch-speaking slaves became bilingual or switched to English, they abandoned this common festival in the 1820s. If Pinkster was partially or mostly celebrated because it offered a respite from slave work, and served as a tool of negotiation, it stands to reason that freed blacks would show less interest in the event. Pinkster celebrations coincided with the growth and decline of an explicitly Dutch group of slaves. As their Dutch identity declined, African Americans in New York gradually abandoned the celebration. The death of Pinkster, I believe, was largely tied to demographic changes. Slave numbers declined by half from 1800 to sometime right after 1810. As slave numbers declined, the celebrations would have been smaller, less meaningful, and, with emancipation on the horizon, less intense as an expression of temporary limited freedom. Dewulf explains that the festival continued to be celebrated much later in the nineteenth century, but in more modest scale.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Finally, in understanding the nature of Dutch slavery in New York, we cannot discount entirely or dismiss fully the claims of so many Dutch slaveholding families who thought of their slaves as part of their families. Such claims are commonly found in nostalgic apologias and reminiscences of the nineteenth century. The views that the children and grandchildren of Dutch slaveholders shared might not have matched the reality of the feelings of the enslaved, but they did reflect the feeling of what certain Dutch families thought about the nature of slavery. The Dutch saw slavery as a family enterprise and slaves as members of the household. They had a custom of giving children their own personal slaves, and wills often specified which slaves a widow would receive to “serve and assist” her. Published memories in the nineteenth century spoke of a love and kindness for former slaves that was returned by the slaves, and certainly, even if this was not representative of the general picture, some of these memories were authentic representations of the past. It is said that liberated slaves in Queens County, for example, would return to their masters years after gaining their freedom, and when word would come of the death of “Old Tom,” “there would be sorrowful faces among the children.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ A similar memory persisted in Somerset County, New Jersey, where, in 1889, a community historian wrote: “[E]ven to this day old residents tell pleasant tales of the affection existing between our forefathers and the old-time family and farm servants.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

In many instances, Dutch slaveholders apparently tried to incorporate their slaves into the household and its activities, but this was often by force, and required violence. In this there was a certain paternalism that required surveillance. Memoirs frequently recall “loyal slaves” and “faithful servants” as the ideal type. But historical evidence shows that slaveholder–enslaved relationships in Dutch New York were often full of conflict. A fuller picture of the struggle that played out in Dutch slaveholder houses can be found in new works by Andrea Mosterman and Nicole Maskiell. Maskiell, for instance, indicates that in a number of elite Anglo-Dutch slaveholding households, there was a kind of war going on, a struggle for control.Footnote ¹¹¹

Despite (or indeed perhaps because of) the mobility of slaves, the landscape of Dutch New York slavery was marked with violence. Slave whippings were the primary instrument for punishment and control, and often included an element of public observation.Footnote ¹¹² Public whippings were given at a whipping post, typically located outside either the county courthouse or the village tavern. Whippings were also applied in private. A New York law of 1730 allowed the master or mistress to punish slaves at their discretion, provided the punishment did not destroy life or limb. In one recorded example, Jacob Van Orden, of Catskill, who could swear “pretty well in English and unsurpassably in Low Dutch,” threatened an ill slave with a severe whipping if the slave should die.Footnote ¹¹³ A certain anti-authoritarianism in eighteenth-century New Yorkers challenged the power of the courts and effectively left the decision to punish a slave in the hands of the master. This could potentially work in the favor of the slave. Douglas Greenberg relates that when a slave named Canning, belonging to a “a Kings County Leislerian” named Myndert Courten, was sentenced to pay a fine of 6 shillings or receive thirteen lashes, Courten made it clear what he thought of the court, saying that “he did not value the Court’s order a fart for their power will not stand long … and that he would obey none of their orders.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

A primary purpose of whippings was to reinforce restrictions on the free movement of slaves. Laws restricting movement were generally post facto, in response to what the free citizens felt was too much liberty of movement and assembly given to slaves, so they suggested not only that there was some freedom of movement among slaves, but that it also often needed to be curtailed. These laws can be read as an indication of what slaves were already doing. For example, in 1730s, in New York City, there were laws to prevent slaves from gaming with money (i.e. gambling), walking after sunset without a lantern or candle, to not assemble in greater number than twelve persons for a funeral, and not to ride their master’s horses in a disorderly manner in the streets.Footnote ¹¹⁵

To summarize, the New York Dutch were a substantial slaveholding presence in New York. In rural areas, especially in the Hudson Valley, they continued to speak Dutch in large numbers to the end of the century, and they held thousands of slaves and taught them to speak Dutch. The Dutch often viewed their enslaved persons as family members, but they were not afraid of using violence to control them. Enslaved persons in New York were often quite mobile, and they were bought and sold, and rented out many times during their lives. Dutch-speaking slaves had opportunities to meet each other and build a common culture.