Taken up in the woods near Catskill the 22nd October 1780
A Negro man named Peter, supposed to be run away from his master,
he speaks nothing but English and his Mother Tongue, the former he speaks so
improper that he cannot be understood only here and there a word and the
latter is such a tongue that our Negros here cannot understand. We understand
by him (or at least we think so) that he has lived with one Rineheart
and that he was going to sell him on which the Negro run off, but
where Rineheart lives we can not learn. He is about six feet high
and about 26 years old, spare and ragged. Whoever proves [illegible]
Negro to be their property and paying charges may have him again
of the subscriber at his house in the District of the Great Imbought
in the County of Albany and State of New York —
October 25, 1780 John B. Dumond
So reads the entirety of a document written on the back of a piece of scrap paper which has been in the care of the Greene County Historical Society since 1966. John Dumond’s notice of the capture of Peter is a devastatingly incomplete window into the intersection of the lives of two men - one a relatively well-documented freeholder in the Great Embought District of Albany County, the other a young enslaved man whose life and existence are only testified to through the surprising preservation of this solitary piece of paper.
This notice is fascinating for myriad reasons, but chief among them is the anecdotal clue revealed about the status of the slave trade in New York at the time this notice was written. Specifically, the commentary on linguistic barriers is surprising because of its implications concerning the origin of people enslaved in the upper Hudson Valley during the late 18th century. John Baptiste Dumond himself was a landowner in Catskill who owned four people in the United States Census of 1800. Whether this was similar to the number of enslaved people in his household in 1780 is unknown, and unfortunately the Federal Census of 1790 offers no insight because the margin which tallied his slaves and those of his neighbors was destroyed.
The notice written by John B. Dumond of Catskill advertising the capture of the runaway enslaved man Peter. The text is reminiscent of notices published in newspapers, but it is unknown if this notice was ever put in print or distributed. Charles Anderson Collection, Vedder Research Library.
The number of enslaved people in Dumond’s household aside, it is interesting that they apparently possessed a common second language other than English or the still commonly spoken Dutch of this area. For that to have been the case these people couldn’t have been separated by more than a generation or two from people who were purchased through transatlantic or Caribbean slave markets. The isolating nature of enslavement in New York, where blacks were frequently the sole or one of only two or three enslaved people in a household, meant there was no broader community to help perpetuate cultural traditions and language. This, and the tendency of enslavers to separate children for sale at a young age, meant there were also few opportunities to pass on generational cultural identities once the enslaved arrived in the upper Hudson Valley.
That the runaway man in this notice was from a different language group and not fluent in English, Dutch, or the common language of the enslaved people in Dumond’s household is a possible clue that he was a survivor of the middle passage, stolen from his home and brought to a market in New York which even in the late 18th century was bolstered by an ongoing demand for imported slaves. Whether the runaway man Peter or Dumond’s enslaved people spoke Spanish, Portuguese, or different African languages may never be known, but the meeting of these people in this circumstance illustrates broadly the strange cultural collisions precipitated by chattel slavery.
Unrelated to the purpose of the notice is John Dumond’s closure with “State of New York” in the year 1780, one year prior to the conclusion of the Siege of Yorktown and three years prior to the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Whether this can be taken as evidence of Dumond’s patriot leanings is unknown, but the fact that he would bother to note “State” of New York rather than “Colony” on a notice such as this (unrelated to functions of the Revolutionary State Government) is perhaps illustrative of the transforming sociopolitical identity of the people in the Town of Catskill at that time. If that is the case it is doubly ironic that a freedom seeker’s flight would be hindered by a man concerned with the business of liberty and self-determination.
By Jonathan Palmer, Greene County Historian
Questions about anything in this feature can be directed to Jon by email at archivist@gchistory.org