By LORNA CHEROT LITTLEWAY
THE IRVINGTON HISTORICAL SOCIETY in Westchester County presented a talk, “Correcting The Foundational Years of Slavery in New Netherland/New York,” via Zoom on Sunday, February 11. The speaker, Lavada Nahon, has been the interpreter of African American History for the NYS Office of Parks since 2019 when the position started. Ms. Nahon is a culinary and cultural historian of the Mid-Atlantic region, 17th–19th centuries with an emphasis on enslaved cooks in the homes of the elite class.
In her opening remarks, Nahon excitedly proclaimed, “Research is happening everywhere! In New York, in the Caribbean, in the Netherlands.” NYS has 35 historic sites, 15 from the Colonial Period and is in the process of updating its permanent collections. She added that there is a “heavy wave of research” that has expanded our knowledge “with so much detail.”
Nahon posed the question that divides historians: Was New Netherlands (New York) a slave society or a society with slaves? Nahon is decidedly in the former camp. She shared some recent information that has come to light and how it shifts the narrative around enslavement in New York. But, first, Nahon answered the question, What is a historic interpreter? “We talk to the public,” she said. They are the “gateway” between researchers and the public.
Nahon recalled that when she was 24 years old she visited the Brooklyn Museum and discovered that the top floor housed a Dutch Room and wondered why, thinking that such an exhibit would be more appropriate in a European country. But over time Nahon learned that the Dutch were integral players in the Colonial slave trade.
The first ship transporting Africans to Jamestown, VA in 1619 was a Dutch privateer. The New York History Journal recently reported that on August 29, 1627, twenty-two African men purchased by the Dutch West India Company, arrived in New Netherland and were enslaved. Previous research thought that shipment was half as large. The trafficking process was that the Dutch procured Africans from the continent and resold them to sugar plantation owners in the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Not only did the Dutch supply African laborers, Dutch New York farmers, also, provided the wheat to feed them as plantation owners were loathe to devote any land to crops other than sugar cane.
Nahon asked, “Who is profiting?” She identified esteemed families “the Rensselaers, Livingstons and Philipses.” Nahon explained that they were “individual investors.” It was once thought that the Livingstons had one sugar plantation but recently discovered records kept by a Black family descendant, who oversaw the Caribbean properties, reveal that the family had five sugar plantations. Nahon attributes the “wealth and money [that] flowed to New York” from African human and wheat exportation to the Caribbean, made the colony “a slave society.”
According to Nahon the Dutch were “learning how to be enslavers.” The mortality rate among their captives was “high.” When the Revolutionary War disrupted the wheat harvest and exportation, Caribbean Africans enslaved on sugar plantations starved to death. It was an “evolving process to dehumanize Africans and see them as property.”
Not only were members of the prominent New York families merchants, they, also, were politicians, who fought hard to maintain slavery in New York in the face of pressure from Abolitionists to end the practice. In 1779 the state legislature passed a Gradual Emancipation law that did not actually free anyone but provided future emancipation to the children of enslaved women when they reached the ages of 25 for females or 28 for males. Not until 28 years later was slavery outlawed in New York State without exception.
Before legal emancipation individual enslavers could manumit persons if they put up a bond or would attest that the soon-to-be manumitted could provide for themselves and would not become reliant on the state. Enslavers would relieve themselves of responsibility for the elderly, whose labor was no longer profitable. Also, manumission documents often included caveats requiring annual payments in crops or continued domestic labor to enslavers. Nahon derided the practice as “half enslavement” because the caveats insured that the manumitted person “had to stay close” to their enslaver.
She faulted American education for promoting a skewered view of the institution of slavery by focusing on practices in southern colonies and states only. “For every one book about northern practices there are five to six books on the southern system.” Nahon said that there are “street names and school names” and we don’t know who those people are.
Nahon credited the 1790 census as a source for new information about the pervasiveness of slavery in New York. It was once thought that Brooklyn had the largest number of enslaved but the 1790 census reports that Albany had the greatest population of enslaved.
Individuals wanting to be apprised of new research about enslavement in New York would have to sign-up on blogs, websites, newsletters, etc. as there is not “a single clearing house” for this information according to Nahon. She added, “We have thousands of documents that have not been read. We have thousands of documents that have not been translated.” A factor delaying this work is an inability to read cursive handwriting. “We need people who can read cursive,” she said.
A full transcript of Nahon’s talk is available at the irvingtonhistricalsociety.org
