Uncomfortable truths: The role of slavery and the slave trade in building northern wealth

Sculpture of young, enslaved Isabella Baumfree, who would become Sojourner Truth, located in Ulster County, N.Y.

On my way to work, I drive past a statue and memorial park dedicated to Sojourner Truth in Port Ewan, Esopus, New York. It depicts young Isabella Baumfree, who was enslaved in that village. When I get to the campus where I teach at SUNY New Paltz, I frequently use the resources of the library — which is named after Sojourner Truth and has documented her time here in Ulster County.

I was pleased to see local news coverage recently about her and the park.

Not many people outside Ulster County know where the abolitionist Sojourner Truth is from. In the 1840s and 1850s, she traveled through New England and Western states teaching about the horrors of slavery. Her message will forever live on through history. “Trying to convert the common people to understand that what was happening was not only a crime but a sin,” said former Ulster County Historian Anne Gordon.  

Sojourner Truth was born in the town of Esopus and was sold many times in the county. A statue in Esopus shows the brutality she endured as a slave. Trina Greene made the Sojourner Truth Sculpture, which depicts marks from where her master whipped her.  “He whipped her because she spoke only Dutch,” said Greene. 

She spent much of her life in Ulster County, but it was on a road in West Park where she escaped slavery and found freedom in Rifton. “She decides she’s in control here and she’s going to decide what happens in her life,” said Gordon.  That determination took her to Ulster County Court in Kingston where she sued the man who sold her son into slavery. With that act, she became the first black woman to successfully sue a white man in court.

The Rev. James Rowe describes her statue, which he sees on his early morning jog:

She is carrying two heavy jugs, one of liquor and one of molasses, back from the Rondout Creek area where she would have purchased them for her owner who ran the local Jug Tavern. The statue is beautiful, but it is not pretty. Her clothing is a rag of a dress, her feet bare, her back showing the scars of beatings, and in the predawn light I can almost see the determination in her eyes set toward freedom.

He muses about his white privilege in the land of Sojourner’s slavery.

And as my predawn runs and ministry take me along these historic and ancestral streets alive with ghosts, I cannot help but wonder occasionally how my life would have turned out if my ancestors had been Mohegan instead of white settlers or slaves instead of free. I say occasionally because as a white, male, cisgender person I have the privilege to be able to not think about such things because who I am as considered the norm for our society. And not thinking or speaking about these things is the preferred societal, "normal" thing to do. When I talk about my white privilege in my predominately white privileged world, I get pushback from others.

That pushback likely comes from those to whom any mention of privilege makes them uncomfortable—or is received as an affront, and not merely a fact of life. Hopefully, the sight of young Isabella pushes other viewers to introspection.

It never ceases to amaze that even students who use our school library on an everyday basis, when asked for their thoughts about slavery, immediately mention the South and the Civil War. Those who are not bIack see no connection between their present and our past. If they mention the North at all, it is as the destination point for escape from the South via the Underground Railroad. They cite Harriet Tubman or the place from which former slaves waged mighty abolitionist battles, like those spearheaded by Frederick Douglass (don’t get me started on current White House occupant’s ignorance on Douglass). A few mention ancestors who fought in the Civil War—for the Union. This lopsided view of American history colors current day discussions of race and racism with too much finger-pointing only at the South and white southerners. It is rare to hear discourse on northern culpability. This oversight encourages a disassociation with white privilege benefits reaped by northerners who can say, “but … but … my family came here after slavery was over,” or “my ancestors didn’t own slaves.”

Racism is not regional and the enslavement legacy inherited from the time of the founding of our country affects all of us in the U.S., no matter our color, location, or date of immigration.

The cemetery near The Manor has unmarked slave graves.  A large rock, with pebbles on top, is inscribed “Burying Ground of the Colored People of the Manor From 1651.”

Last summer my husband and I paid a visit to Shelter Island, New York, and the dear friend we were visiting, who knows our deep interest in all things relating to black history, took us for a short drive to visit Sylvester Manor. The site is the subject of The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island, by Mac Griswold. It was a very emotional experience for me, especially seeing the large rock in the slave burial ground topped with pebbles, placed there by people who have come to that spot to honor the spirits of the dead.

When you hear Long Island mentioned, it’s doubtful you associate it with slavery and the triangle trade. Yet this is a major part of our history.  

Mac Griswold's The Manor is the biography of a uniquely American place that has endured through wars great and small, through fortunes won and lost, through histories bright and sinister—and of the family that has lived there since its founding as a Colonial New England slave plantation three and a half centuries ago.
In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming boxwoods. She instantly knew that boxwoods that large—twelve feet tall, fifteen feet wide—had to be hundreds of years old. So, as it happened, was the house: Sylvester Manor had been held in the same family for eleven generations.
Formerly encompassing all of Shelter Island, New York, a pearl of 8,000 acres caught between the North and South Forks of Long Island, the manor had dwindled to 243 acres. Still, its hidden vault proved to be full of revelations and treasures, including the 1666 charter for the land, and correspondence from Thomas Jefferson. Most notable was the short and steep flight of steps the family had called the "slave staircase," which would provide clues to the extensive but little-known story of Northern slavery. Alongside a team of archaeologists, Griswold began a dig that would uncover a landscape bursting with stories.
Based on years of archival and field research, as well as voyages to Africa, the West Indies, and Europe, The Manor is at once an investigation into forgotten lives and a sweeping drama that captures our history in all its richness and suffering. It is a monumental achievement.

New York University is now the home of an extensive Sylvester Manor archive, and the grounds and graves are a site of archaeological research. 

There are thought to be up to 200 graves on the grounds, the final resting place of Manhansett Indians, enslaved Africans, and European indentured servants, who helped to supply food, timber, and materials to the West Indies — including supplies for the Sylvester family sugar plantations in Barbados — as part of the colonial “triangle trade,” in which slaves were bought on the African Gold Coast with New England rum and then traded in the West Indies for sugar or molasses, which was brought back to New England to be manufactured into rum.

An article entitled “The House that Slavery Built” explains how an estate near the Hamptons used to be one of the largest slave-owning plantations in the North.

Northern plantations differed from those in the South in treatment of the African-born slave population. “Slaves didn't live in quarters, as in the South, but in the houses of their captors, meaning that normal privacy and family life didn't exist,” Griswold said. “Also, as they weren't part of an immense agricultural system growing staple crops such as cotton, rice, and indigo, many were highly skilled and were hired out to other whites at slack times on their own ‘plantations,’ which we can really think of as large family farms. They worked alongside their owners and with indentured servants and wage laborers, but of course the pay-out for those other workers in eventual freedom or in wages didn't exist for slaves, or for their children, for many generations.” 

The Manhassets, who were native to the region, were also enslaved, but “more informally,” Griswold said. Their wages were paid in alcohol (rum from Barbados) and goods such as kettles and blankets. Although a law was passed in 1676 in New York forbidding the enslavement of Indians, “Indian slaves” were often handed down as property in family wills. Others were indentured servants, like Isaac Pharaoh, a Montaukett Indian whose indenture papers Griswold found in the vault at the manor house. “Esther Pharoah, Isaac's mother, signs her son away,” Griswold tells me, “‘of his own free will’ at the age of 5 years.”

…

A boulder carved in 1884 marks the cemetery where Isaac Pharaoh, Julia Johnson, and some 200 others lie. The people laid to rest there were part of a society that “rejected them as full human beings,” Griswold writes. “But as they lie here, unmarked, they are also vividly present.” The Manor is a step toward restoring these once-forgotten souls to a place in our shared history.

Sylvester Manor was not the only enslavement site on Long Island, as detailed in “Confronting Slavery at Long Island’s Oldest Estates.”

New York City’s slave market was second in size only to Charleston’s. Even after the Revolution, New York was the most significant slaveholding state north of the Mason-Dixon line. In 1790, nearly 40 percent of households in the area immediately around New York City owned slaves — a greater percentage than in any Southern state as a whole, according to one study.

In contrast to the image of large gangs working in cotton fields before retiring to a row of cabins, slaveholdings in New York State were small, with the enslaved often living singly or in small groups, working alongside and sleeping in the same houses as their owners. Privacy was scant, and in contrast to any notion of a less severe Northern slavery, the historical record is full of accounts of harsh punishments for misbehavior. “Slavery in the North was different, but I don’t think it was any easier,” Mr. McGill said. “The enslaved were a lot more scrutinized in those places, a lot more restricted. That would have been very tough to endure.”

Slavery in Southampton, the oldest English settlement in New York, dates almost to its founding in the 1640s. A slave and Indian uprising burned many buildings in the 1650s. Census records show that by 1686, roughly 10 percent of the village’s nearly 800 inhabitants were slaves, many of whom helped work the rich agricultural land. But this is not a part of its history that the town, better known for its spectacular beach and staggeringly expensive real estate, has been eager to embrace. “I think for a while a lot of people didn’t know or didn’t want to acknowledge there were slaves out here,” said Brenda Simmons, executive director of the Southampton African-American Museum, which plans to open in an old barbershop — the village’s first designated African-American landmark — on North Sea Road. Mr. McGill’s visit, she said, “will help confirm the truth of the matter.”

In the past I’ve written about the enslaved Africans who built Wall Street in New York City, and about the African Burial Ground. Heading further upstate New York to Albany, we find enslavement history from the time it was settled.

Albany's long, neglected history of slavery

Here is a statistic that might shock you. In 1790, there were 217 households in Albany County that owned five or more slaves of African descent, a portion of the county's 3,722 slaves, the most of any county among New York state's 21,193 slaves counted in that year's census.

History textbooks and conventional wisdom tend to relegate slavery as an issue of the Southern states, a shameful narrative bracketed by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the grim toll of the Civil War.

But new research at the State Museum and an exhibit at Fort Crailo, a state historic site in Rensselaer, titled "A Dishonorable Trade: Human Trafficking in the Dutch Atlantic World," is bringing slavery out of the shadows and directly onto the front stoops of Albany across three centuries.

I have both enslaved people and slave owners in my family tree. Though I’ve had success tracing my enslaved ancestors in the South, it was only in more recent years I uncovered both a slave owner, Jacobus Bradt, from Schenectady, New York, who owned seven slaves in the 1790 census in my tree, and an extended family legacy of enslavement in Chester County, Pennsylvania. It was during the time of my genealogical research that I discovered a website that I have returned to frequently and often link to in response to those who still only look southward. Douglas Harper has compiled an extensive body of data on his website Slavery in the North. There is so much on his site I hardly know where to begin to quote from it. Here’s a segment of “Profits from Slavery.”

On the eve of the Revolution, the slave trade formed the very basis of the economic life of New England. It wove itself into the entire regional economy of New England. The Massachusetts slave trade gave work to coopers, tanners, sailmakers, and ropemakers. Countless agents, insurers, lawyers, clerks, and scriveners handled the paperwork for slave merchants. Upper New England loggers, Grand Banks fishermen, and livestock farmers provided the raw materials shipped to the West Indies on that leg of the slave trade. Colonial newspapers drew much of their income from advertisements of slaves for sale or hire. New England-made rum, trinkets, and bar iron were exchanged for slaves. When the British in 1763 proposed a tax on sugar and molasses, Massachusetts merchants pointed out that these were staples of the slave trade, and the loss of that would throw 5,000 seamen out of work in the colony and idle almost 700 ships. The connection between molasses and the slave trade was rum. Millions of gallons of cheap rum, manufactured in New England, went to Africa and bought black people. Tiny Rhode Island had more than 30 distilleries, 22 of them in Newport. In Massachusetts, 63 distilleries produced 2.7 million gallons of rum in 1774. Some was for local use: rum was ubiquitous in lumber camps and on fishing ships. But primarily rum was linked with the Negro trade, and immense quantities of the raw liquor were sent to Africa and exchanged for slaves. So important was rum on the Guinea Coast that by 1723 it had surpassed French and Holland brandy, English gin, trinkets and dry goods as a medium of barter. Slaves costing the equivalent of 4 or 5 in rum or bar iron in West Africa were sold in the West Indies in 1746 for 30 to 80. New England thrift made the rum cheaply -- production cost was as low as 5 pence a gallon -- and the same spirit of Yankee thrift discovered that the slave ships were most economical with only 3 feet 3 inches of vertical space to a deck and 13 inches of surface area per slave, the human cargo laid in carefully like spoons in a silverware case.

A list of the leading slave merchants is almost identical with a list of the region's prominent families: the Fanueils, Royalls, and Cabots of Massachusetts; the Wantons, Browns, and Champlins of Rhode Island; the Whipples of New Hampshire; the Eastons of Connecticut; Willing & Morris of Philadelphia. To this day, it's difficult to find an old North institution of any antiquity that isn't tainted by slavery. Ezra Stiles imported slaves while president of Yale. Six slave merchants served as mayor of Philadelphia. Even a liberal bastion like Brown University has the shameful blot on its escutcheon. It is named for the Brown brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses, manufacturers and traders who shipped salt, lumber, meat -- and slaves. And like many business families of the time, the Browns had indirect connections to slavery via rum distilling. John Brown, who paid half the cost of the college's first library, became the first Rhode Islander prosecuted under the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794 and had to forfeit his slave ship. Historical evidence also indicates that slaves were used at the family's candle factory in Providence, its ironworks in Scituate, and to build Brown's University Hall.

One of those leading families and their wealth from slaving is documented in “Traces of the Trade.” I recommend it as a must see for anyone who has an interest in this history. 

In Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, one family's painful but persistent confrontation with the continuing legacy of the slave trade becomes America's. Katrina Browne uncovers her New England family's deep involvement in the Triangle Trade and, in so doing, reveals the pivotal role slavery played in the growth of the whole American economy. This courageous documentary asks every American what we can and should do to repair the unacknowledged damage of our troubled past.

Katrina Browne was shocked to discover that her Rhode Island forebears had been the largest slave-trading dynasty in American history. For two hundred years, the DeWolfs were distinguished public servants, respected merchants and prominent Episcopal clerics, yet their privilege was founded on a sordid secret. Once she started digging, Browne found the evidence everywhere, in ledgers, ships logs, letters, even a family nursery rhyme. Between 1769 and 1820, DeWolf ships carried rum from Bristol, Rhode Island to West Africa where it was traded for over 10,000 enslaved Africans. They transported this human cargo across the Middle Passage to slave markets from Havana to Charleston and beyond, as well as to the family's sugar plantations in Cuba. The ships returned from the Caribbean with sugar and molasses to be turned into rum at the family distilleries, starting the cycle again.

This film explains how the New England slave trade supported not just its merchants but banks, insurers, shipbuilders, outfitters and provisioners, rich and poor. Ordinary citizens bought shares in slave ships. Northern textile mills spun cotton picked by slaves, fueling the Industrial Revolution, and creating the economy that attracted generations of immigrants. It was no secret; John Quincy Adams, sixth president, noted dryly that independence had been built on the sugar and molasses produced with slave labor. Traces of the Tradedecisively refutes the widely-accepted myth that only the South profited from America's "peculiar institution."

The website for the film includes a wealth of instructional materials. One I use frequently is “Myths About Slavery.” Here’s the PDF:

Contrary to popular belief:

• Slavery was a northern institution
  • The North held slaves for over two centuries
  • The North abolished slavery only just before the Civil War
  • The North dominated the slave trade
  • The North built its economy around slavery
  • The North industrialized with slave-picked cotton and the profits from slavery

• Slavery was a national institution
  • Slavery was practiced by all thirteen colonies
  • Slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and practiced by all thirteen original states
  • The slave trade was permitted by the federal government until 1808
  • Federal laws protected slavery and assisted slave owners in retrieving runaway slaves
  • The Union was deeply divided over slavery until the end of the Civil War

• Slavery benefited middle-class families
  • Slavery dominated the northern and southern economies during the colonial era and up to the Civil War
  • Ordinary people built ships, produced trade goods, and invested in shares of slave voyages
  • Workers in all regions benefited economically from slavery and slavery-related businesses
  • Consumers bought and benefited from lower prices on goods like coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cotton

• Slavery benefited immigrant families
  • Immigrants who arrived after the Civil War still benefited from slavery and its aftermath
  • Immigrants flocked to the “land of opportunity” made possible by the unpaid labor of enslaved people
  • Immigrants found routes to prosperity which were closed to the families of former slaves
  • Federal programs in the 20th century provided white families with aid for education, home ownership, and small businesses

A companion to the film is the book by one of the descendants who went on the journey titled Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, by Thomas Norman DeWolf. 

In 2001, at forty-seven, Thomas DeWolf was astounded to discover that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in American history, responsible for transporting at least 10,000 Africans to the Americas. His infamous ancestor, U.S. senator James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island, curried favor with President Thomas Jefferson to continue in the trade after it was outlawed. When James DeWolf died in 1837, he was the second-richest man in America. When Katrina Browne, Thomas DeWolf’s cousin, learned about their family’s history, she resolved to confront it head-on, producing and directing a documentary feature film, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. The film is an official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Inheriting the Trade is Tom DeWolf’s powerful and disarmingly honest memoir of the journey in which ten family members retraced the steps of their ancestors and uncovered the hidden history of New England and the other northern states.Their journey through the notorious Triangle Trade-from New England to West Africa to Cuba-proved life-altering, forcing DeWolf to face the horrors of slavery directly for the first time. It also inspired him to contend with the complicated legacy that continues to affect black and white Americans, Africans, and Cubans today.

Inheriting the Trade reveals that the North’s involvement in slavery was as common as the South’s. Not only were black people enslaved in the North for over two hundred years, but the vast majority of all slave trading in America was done by northerners. Remarkably, half of all North American voyages involved in the slave trade originated in Rhode Island, and all the northern states benefited.
With searing candor, DeWolf tackles both the internal and external challenges of his journey-writing frankly about feelings of shame, white male privilege, the complicity of churches, America’s historic amnesia regarding slavery-and our nation’s desperate need for healing. An urgent call for meaningful and honest dialogue, Inheriting the Trade illuminates a path toward a more hopeful future and provides a persuasive argument that the legacy of slavery isn’t merely a southern issue but an enduring American one.

Sojourner Truth is quoted as having said “Truth is powerful and it prevails.”

Some of those truths may make us uncomfortable. From my perspective, it is better to march forward with the truth, comfortable or not, than to be drowned and silenced in a swamp of lies and alternative facts.