New York, the Slave State

My recent posts about David Crosby's New York State ancestors (here and here) reminded me that the history of enslavement in New York extended well past the American Revolution.

I'm not sure when I first realized there was ever slavery in New York, my home state. It may have been around the time I saw the musical "Hamilton" and then read the Ron Chernow biography it's loosely based on. (It comes up because Hamilton's in-laws, the wealth Dutch-American Schuyler family, were enslavers and there is discussion about whether Hamilton himself enslaved anyone.)

Did I learn about New York's history of enslavement in my 7th grade social studies class, which was all about the state's history? I don't think I did. I remember learning about the native peoples of the state, the battles of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, the coming of the Erie Canal, Boss Tweed and the political machine, and the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. But I don't recall a word about the fact that the Dutch land-owners, particularly, owned a lot of human beings.

The history of how the "peculiar institution" was abolished in the state is pretty shameful. New York was second-to-last among northern states to abolish it. (New Jersey pretended it had done it, but kept mandatory unpaid "apprenticeships" until 1865!) New York began a gradual phase-out in 1799 that lasted until 1827, where people born before 1799 were suddenly declared "indentured servants." Legally, they could no longer be sold, but neither could they go where they wanted and act like a free person. Their children who were born after 1799 were technically free, but indentured until the age of 28 for men and 25 for women.  

New York also went out of its way to prevent Black men from voting after 1827, even though it gave all white men the right in 1821. Black men needed to have property worth $250 (the equivalent of $5,000 today), while white men did not. That requirement was not dropped in New York until the 15th Amendment was passed.

I started thinking about this today because a Facebook friend shared a long post about Sojourner Truth. I'm almost 100% sure I never learned about her in school either; I think I first heard of her because of the feminist newspaper Sojourner, which I started reading in college, and then in feminist studies courses in graduate school. And despite all that, I think I've only learned these facts in the past few years from things I've seen online.

Sojourner Truth was not Southern. She was born Isabella Baumfree, around 1797, just south of Kingston, New York. The Dutch family that owned her parents and their children spoke Dutch at home and on their estate/labor camp, so that was her first language. She spoke with a Dutch accent through the rest of her life.

When she was about 9 years old, she was sold to an English-speaking man who lived a bit further south, just across the Hudson from Hyde Park, estate of the Roosevelts. (Additional abuses are described in her life on her Wikipedia page.) She had three daughters and a son who survived childhood, all of whom should have been subject to New York's  post-1799 indentured rule, but her son was sold into Alabama at age 5 in 1826.

Isabella had escaped to freedom with her infant daughter by this time, and went to court to get her son back. She was one of the first Black women to bring suit against a white man and win. This was not known until 2022.

After she was free, she became a Methodist in 1827 and was involved with various evangelizing figures in New York City for a number of years. In 1843, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth and began traveling to preach about the abolition of slavery. She connected with others who joined their abolitionism with advocating for women's rights and pacifism. She met Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and William Lloyd Garrison. In 1850 William Lloyd Garrison published her memoirs, titled The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave.

A Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in May 1851 was the place where she delivered the speech that is usually best known about her. Her Wikipedia page contains the version of her speech that ran in a newspaper a month after she spoke. It does not contain the words "Ain't I a woman" and is not written in Southern dialect. Given that she was from New York and had a Dutch accent, that makes sense. It was only 12 years later that another abolitionist writer put that version out into the world.

Despite the fact that Sojourner Truth most likely didn't say those most famous words, she was the real thing. Even in abolitionist circles, her opinions were considered radical. She sought political equality for all women, and criticized other abolitionists for failing to seek civil rights for black women as well as men. She spoke about her concern that the movement would settle down after winning victories for black men, leaving both white and black women without the vote and other rights. (She was right.)

She also advocated for prison reform and against the death penalty, testifying about those topics in the Michigan legislature, the state where she settled in the later years of her life.

All of this brings me back to thinking about how I wasn't taught any of the regionally relevant parts of her life in school when the subject was New York history.

I bet most of those omissions have been rectified in New York's curriculum at this point, and probably have been for a long time. But in the age of DeSantis, and the right's denial of the centrality of slavery in the economic structure of the American colonies and the United States, it's helpful to look back at your own education and remember the gaps you had to fill to become a person who had half a chance of understanding the country you live in.