“… the Petitioner and his ancestors and those under whom they named have
ever since the year of our lord one thousand six hundred and sixty eight been
in the quiet possession of a farm and plantation situate on the west side
of Hudson’s River in the County of Albany and on the north side of a
creek called the Catts Kill…”
— From the confirmation of lands to Teunis Van Vechten
by the Governor of the Colony of New York, 1770
The legacy of slavery touches us all, despite whatever you may have heard. It is easy for us Northerners to imagine the peculiar institution as something distant; a crime framed as something “they” did which “we got rid of.” Such thinking gives us the moral high ground and corroborates what we want to believe about our heritage. This thinking, which I hear all the time, is cloaked behind the same insidious half-truths that brought us such classics as:
“The Civil War was fought over State’s Rights”
~or~
“My family didn’t own slaves”
We here in upstate New York live wrapped in the comfortable but completely unfounded belief that our closets aren’t jam-packed with the same yucky history as those of our southern countrymen. We tell ourselves a whole bunch of things: “the plantation system didn’t exist here,” that “by the time slavery was abolished in New York it was already almost totally gone,” and perhaps the grandest of lies in that vein, that “Slavery here in the Hudson Valley wasn’t as bad as other places.”
For a time I believed that last one, and I’ve since spoken it aloud a few times just to remind myself that I can be a real idiot sometimes. I suppose believing such a thing possibly helped me sleep at night, because it turns out my ancestors owned a ton of slaves. They owned slaves who worked and died where I went to High School, where I grew up, and even where I go for walks to clear my head. Their ghosts are everywhere, and their graves are unmarked so I can never make a pilgrimage to their hallowed ground.
Before I continue I should make one thing abundantly clear - I am no expert on slavery in the Colony and State of New York. I’m an archivist, and I occasionally put on a historian’s hat because I find stories that I have the hubris to think I can tell. When it comes to slavery in the Hudson Valley the only thing I have any qualification to speak on are its trappings - the remnants and ephemera of a complex system of exploitation that persisted even beyond the time when slavery was ended in New York. Such items, once mundane in function, are now priceless reminders of a time that was not nearly as long ago as you and I would like to think.
So what are these “trappings?” Take for an example a scrap of paper I found the other week in the Rebecca Doherty Memorial Collection. It was a receipt stuffed in a file with a selection of other receipts and notes of Jacob Van Hoesen. For Jacob these papers once held the same value as the receipt you might save for a new television or your last trip to McDonalds - some of them were worth hanging onto for a year, some not so much, and for whatever reason all these pieces of paper were accidentally kept in a box for 250 years. I love it when that happens.
So, among receipts for such things as shoe buckles and assorted goods was a scrap noting Jacob’s final payment made in 1788 to Albertus Van Loon for “that wench which he bought of me [A. Van Loon].” It was written below an accounting of other debts Albertus and Jacob must have haggled over that month. Albertus didn’t even need to write the woman’s name down, nor her age, because he had his money and she was now Jacob Van Hoesen’s property. Jacob could call her what he liked.
Bills of sale of enslaved persons are often only a little more descriptive than that. The usual format of these documents is a paragraph of legalistic “party of the first part and party of the second part” type jargon establishing who is giving who money. A sentence then often follows which gives the name and age of the person being sold, and then more legalese closes with signatures and pretty wax seals. They look like this:
Bill of Sale of Piet, a ten year old boy, from Mattys Halenbeck to Johannes Brandow, 1769.
The minimal ceremony involved produces a document that, except for the name, reads kind of like the bills of sale they used back in the day for things like sloops. In the eyes of the law the only difference between the slave and the sloop was that the latter was worth more and required other forms of registration. These bills of sale represent a fundamental refutation of the origin and value of personhood, and they fly in the face of a century of enlightenment philosophy which our nation so proudly founded itself on the principles of.
Such documents as the scores of bills of sale preserved in our archives testify to the mundane cruelty of Slavery. Virtually all of us heard in history class the horrible stories of black children being sold out of the arms of their mothers at southern slave auctions - what we didn’t hear (and what these receipts testify to) is that more or less the same scene happened right here in Coxsackie, not two miles from where I learned about these crimes perpetrated in the South before the Civil War.
On the few occasions I’ve had the pleasure to discuss American slavery this is usually the point where we hit the “you can’t judge the past by modern standards” part of the conversation. Some people get really tripped up by this and I don’t know why, because even by the standards of post-revolutionary America the conclusion was pretty widespread that slavery was not only morally corrupt, but a refutation of the democratic ideal we purportedly embodied as a culture. This means to say that what my great-great-great-great-great grandfather did was wrong, and his neighbors knew it, and two centuries later I know it too.
Abolition movements existed virtually from the inception of the nation, and the founding fathers (whether they chose to speak on it or not) knew Slavery was the question they weren’t brave enough to address as a government in the 1780s and ‘90s. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, one a staunch abolitionist and the other a slaveowner, would live long enough to see the Union almost shattered in the debates preceding the Missouri Compromise of 1820 - a very obvious result of their inability to resolve the slavery debate during the creation of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and their respective presidencies. Indeed it would be less than forty years after their deaths that the nation was nearly destroyed in the name of slavery, and the mending that occurred immediately following the Civil War was so incomplete that we are still reeling from the complications over 150 years later.
At the beginning of this essay I included an excerpt from the Confirmation Grant of the Van Vechtens for their lands in Catskill. I was compelled by the use of the phrase “Plantation” in the language of the document. The term “Plantation” has evolved over several centuries, but at that time (1770) the word was already closely tied to an understanding of colonial power dynamics and cash-crop agricultural enterprises. This is probably why the phrase reads “Farm and Plantation” in the grant instead of using just one word or the other - i.e. they were operating as both. A great explanation of the word “plantation” is available through this link.
Samuel Van Vechten, Farmer
— from a slide of a portrait done c. 1710
Suffice to say, by common definitions of the word the Van Vechtens were operating a plantation on their land. In an entirely self-sustaining universe along Catskill Creek they cultivated a variety of crops, milled their own grain and processed their own lumber as well as that of their neighbors, and produced a surplus that afforded them an exceedingly comfortable living - especially for a family on the frontier. Samuel Van Vechten was not running about in his coat and silk neckcloth in 1710 doing all of this by himself, nor were his nephew and great nephew who later inherited the land. In fact (you guessed it) the majority of the work that delivered the family its pre-revolutionary wealth was probably completed using enslaved Africans and some indentured servants (two VERY different things if you ever hear someone compare the two).
The only record we have of the enslaved people who worked the Van Vechten “plantation and farm” during the pre-revolutionary period is anecdotal - slaves who lived and died at Van Vechten’s were buried in a grove carefully described in Beers’ History of Greene County in 1884 - meaning that even if no record exists of their purchase or sale there were old-timers who still recalled the place where these people were interred. This same spot was partially destroyed in the 1920s, and a news clipping noted that several skeletons were uncovered by accident.
Except for the Van Vechten House itself, there is no trace of the plantation where these people lived out their lives as property. Such is not the case two towns north in Coxsackie. There, on the grounds of the Bronck House, stands a monument which you can still touch and stand in to connect with the lives of the slaves who worked that farm. The Bronck/Bronk family, much like the Van Vechtens and every other well-to-do Dutch family in what is now Greene County, owned several slaves at a time - operating a farm of a scale so considerable and profitable that it is laughable to think Judge Leonard Bronk ever walked behind a plow on his own land. He, occupied as he was with matters of local governance and law, almost exclusively ran his farm as a manager - leaving labor to the people he bought and sold in the years after the Revolution.
As a working farm the epicenter of all labors was the barn. Here was where the harvest was processed, hay was laid in store, and tools were kept from the weather. It was the place where any enslaved person would have begun and ended their workday, and the place they would have frequented the most in their routines around the farm. Built around 1790, the Dutch Barn is not only the oldest outbuilding on the Bronck Museum campus, its also the only building that can be interpreted exclusively in the context of the slaves who worked from it, around it, and likely even assisted with its construction. I’m personally of the opinion that it is the only building left in Greene County that can be understood solely in this context, and that makes it exceedingly important as a site of consciousness - a place that stares back at us as we examine it, giving testament to a story we may not want nor be ready to hear.
The c. 1790 Dutch Barn at Bronck House, Coxsackie.
I’m writing this on June 1, 2020, watching the news of cities burning and riots in the streets following the murder of a black man named George Floyd. I’ve heard all sorts of things about the validity of the protests, supporting the police, the looting and rioting “totally discrediting” the message of the protest movement itself. I’m sad that such things are the first words to come from the mouths of people I know, and I’m sad that it takes riots in Washington DC to precipitate a national debate on the heinous behavior of some members of law enforcement agencies. I have no solution to the cultural issues that continue to plague our country, but I do know that George Floyd’s murder is exactly the same at its core as Albertus Van Loon’s sale of a wench to Jacob Van Hoesen. She was never named, her personhood was denied her, and her right of self-determination stripped away because she was an African-American slave. She was less than human, and she was denied the right to exist as one. George Floyd was an American who was deemed guilty until proven innocent, his voice was ignored, and his killer felt perfectly justified in his actions because in this country we have a lingering, cancerous notion that sometimes it is ok to behave that way towards a black man - “he probably did it.”
There are some who even now question the necessity of nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd, and it troubles me to hear this for a multitude of reasons. A riot and its violence can’t be condoned, but are we prepared to value George Floyd less than the window panes that got broken and the cars that got burned? Is the slave still worth less than the sloop in 2020? Accepting that there is little difference between these two moments is a big step, and you don’t need to get there right away, but you can do something else in the meantime - head down to the barn, think about it, and acknowledge what happened.
“I can’t breathe”
Questions and comments can be directed to Jonathan Palmer, Assistant Greene County Historian, via email at archivist@gchistory.org