By Richard Tomzack

Jacob Dyckman, Fugitive Slave Ad for Will, or Wiltshire, May 27, 1765. The New York Gazette, New York.

On Tuesday, May 21, 1765, an enslaved African American named Will escaped the estate of Jacob Dyckman in Kingsbridge, New York. Taking nothing but his clothes, described by Dyckman as a “blue Broad Cloth Coat,” and “Homespun Trowsers, a Beaver Hat, halfworn, with a hole through the rim,” Will made his escape under the cover of darkness.[1] Like many of the 10,000 enslaved individuals living in the province of New York, Will had been bought and sold multiple times, passing from the ownership of both the Alsop and Keteltas families in New York City, before Jacob Dyckman purchased him and relocated him to his property in Kingsbridge.[2]

“A Law for Regulating Negro’s & Slave’s Time in the Night Time,” New York Common Council, April 22, 1731. New York Public Library, Rare Books Division, New York.

Will undoubtedly understood the perils of his decision to break his chains of bondage, especially under the cover of night. Just two decades earlier, the New York Common Council had ratified a slave code that made it illegal for any “Negro, Mullato, or Indian Slave” to walk the “Streets of this City, above an hour after Sun-set without a candle and Lanthorn.”[3] The Council further clarified that the sun-down restriction could result in “being Whipt at the Publick Whipping Post.”[4] Despite the Dyckman’s location north of city boundaries, Will’s prior enslavement in New York City would have provided him with the insight that his flight would result in physical punishment and a symbolic demonstration of the law. Perhaps skirting the High Road to New York through the forested hills of Manhattan Island, Will ventured south into the city limits.[5] One week later, a fugitive slave ad published in the New York Gazette specified that Will was last seen at the Whitehall.[6] From there, the document trail disappears, and Will’s fate is unknown.

The DyckmanDISCOVERED initiative investigates the stories of people that were enslaved by the Dyckman family and the community that is now called Inwood. This initiative brings an inclusive history to the community, fosters a sense of transparency and, we hope, engages visitors who have not seen themselves represented in the current narrative. Each generation of enslaved individuals that labored for the Dyckmans faced unique challenges in their struggle for autonomy within this exploitive, and often violent, system of labor. Indeed, as Ira Berlin asserts, addressing these changes capture how “generations of people of African descent wrestled with the realities of slavery and freedom, trying to fashion a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making.”[7] In short, the enslaved people bonded to the Dyckman family, from the 17th to the 19th centuries, experienced vastly different laws as authority passed from the Dutch, British, and finally an independent American government.

Despite laboring for a family of Dutch descent, most of the enslaved people at the Dyckman estates lived under British laws. While documentation is scarce, the enslaved men and women of the property — Will, Francis Cudjoe, Harry, and Hannah — were all born under the British slave codes that governed the province of New York.[8] Will, in particular, lived during a time period in which magistrates across North America intensified regulations on slave behavior and installed a racial hierarchy that subordinated African Americans to the status of property. By the 18th century, New York City and its environs composed one of the largest, and most important, seaports in British North America.[9] To meet the demand for labor “both the number and proportion of black people” increased and “on average, the annual growth of the black population slightly outpaced whites.”[10] Will, for example, arrived in New York City during this massive increase in the enslaved population, first entering into the service of the Alsop family before changing hands to the Keteltas.[11]

Willem Cornelisz Duyster, “Family Group with Black Servant” (1634). Oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The individuals that were enslaved by the Dyckmans would have felt the constrictions of their freedoms on a daily basis. The swelling of the slave trade, and the tightening regulations that followed, connected New York to other British colonies. Partially in response to the 1712 New York Slave Conspiracy, the provincial assembly passed laws that step-by-step peeled away the freedoms that Africans had secured under the Dutch. For example, the 1702 statute entitled “An Act for Regulating Slaves,” prohibited slaves’ market purchases without the “master’s consent.”[12] Furthermore, a 1712 provincial decree authorized slave owners “to punish their slaves for their Crimes and Offenses at Discretion.”[13] Slaves found guilty of capital crimes or conspiracy could “suffer the pains of Death in such manner and with circumstances as the aggravation of the enormity of their Crimes… shall merit or require.”[14] White New Yorkers were not unique in their ambition to eliminate the rights and privileges of black men and women. Indeed, these laws matched the rhetoric of other British colonies, including the plantation-based economies of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.[15]

Contrary to popular memory, New York’s battle for abolition was hard fought in both the commercial and agricultural sectors of the newly independent state. For those emancipated in the opening decade of the 19th century, even “freedom,” a notoriously slippery word, would have been tightly restricted for African Americans. The navigation of these changing definitions of what it meant to be “free,” would have directly impacted the people that the Dyckmans enslaved. Jacobus, Garrett, and Staats Dyckman all manumitted those that they enslaved in the early 19th century.[16] Francis Cudjoe, Harry, Gilbert Horton, and Hannah all achieved what was impossible for Will’s generation — the ability to claim their humanity under the eyes of the law.

Residing at the juncture between the expanding Manhattan city and the rural estates of the Hudson Valley, the struggle for abolition would have been a regular topic of conversation amongst those enslaved by the Dyckman family. Their close proximity to the New York Manumission Society would have instilled them with the knowledge that just twelve miles south of their dwellings freed slaves were attending the African Free School and working for their own wages in the shops at the seaport.[17] Outside the city, emancipation “lagged behind the arrival of freedom in the city of New York.”[18] The differences would not have been lost on Francis Cudjoe and Harry. One step over the Dyckman’s Free Bridge would have symbolically represented entering a more restrictive world where the rhetoric of “Free Schools,” melted away to the reality of toil under the Hudson Valley planters.

In sum, the enslaved individuals that labored for the Dyckman family had a multi-faceted identity. Their location thrust them into a world defined by both the commercial and agricultural. They navigated ever-changing slave codes that defined freedom in increasingly racial language. Finally, they appropriated the customs of the multi-ethnic Hudson Valley and wielded these traditions as an expression of their autonomy. DyckmanDISCOVERED sheds light on the complex, entangled networks that enslaved people created and the cultural traditions that they generated in early New York.

Earliest Known Sketch of the Dyckman Farmhouse, 1835. Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, New York.

The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum’s current project investigates the stories of enslaved people belonging to the Dyckman family and the community that is now called Inwood. The research in this essay will be presented on Wednesday, March 10, at 6 PM. Registration information can be found here.

Richard Tomczak is a PhD Candidate in History at Stony Brook University. His research examines the entangled relationships among law, labor, and empire in the colonial Americas. Richard is currently the research assistant at The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in New York City.

[1] Jacob Dyckman, “Fugitive Slave-Ad for Will, or Wiltshire,” The New York Gazette, May 27, 1765.

[2] The demographic information of slaves in New York derives from the statistical analysis in Jill Lepore, “The Tightening Vise: Slavery and Freedom in British New York,” in Slavery in New York, ed. Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris (New York: The New Press, 2005), 61. The purchase and resale of Will comes from, Dyckman, “Fugitive Slave-Ad for Will, or Wiltshire,” The New York Gazette, May 27, 1765. Both the Alsop and Keteltas families were merchants in New York City, although the fugitive slave ad does not specify which member of each family purchased and sold Will.

[3] These acts come from “A Law for Regulating Negro’s & Slave’s Time in the Night Time,” New York Common Council, April 22, 1731. This act was renewed in 1773 by the New York City Common Council.

[4] These acts come from “A Law for Regulating Negro’s & Slave’s Time in the Night Time,” New York Common Council, April 22, 1731.

[5] Joseph Claude, Sauthier, “Excerpt from the Battle of Fort Washington Map, 1776,” Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington D.C.

[6] The Whitehall refers to former Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant’s manor, located in the colonial city. See, Dyckman, “Fugitive Slave-Ad for Will, or Wiltshire,” The New York Gazette, May 27, 1765.

[7] Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998), 12.

[8] Will, also called Wiltshire, as stated above, deserted the Dyckman property in 1765 at the height of British restrictions on enslaved people. Less is known of Francis Cudjoe and Harry. Francis Cudjoe was born in 1769, under British slave codes, but was later released by Jacobus Dyckman in 1709. Harry was born in 1777, and while he lived his childhood under British law, he would have come of age under the abolitionists of an independent United States. He too was freed in 1809 by Garrett Dyckman. Both Francis Cudjoe and Harry’s birthdates come from their entries in the “Names Index for Enslaved Persons,” Records of Enslaved Persons and Slave Holders in New York from 1525 through the Civil War, John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

[9] On the importance of 18th century New York, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press); and Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

[10] Lepore, “The Tightening Vise: Slavery and Freedom in British New York,” 63.

[11] Jacob Dyckman, “Fugitive Slave-Ad for Will, or Wiltshire,” The New York Gazette, May 27, 1765.

[12] “An Act for the Regulating of Slaves,” in Charles Lincoln, The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution (Albany, 1894), 1:519–521

[13] "An Act for the suppressing and punishing the conspiracy and insurrection of Negroes and other Slaves,” passed by the New York Provincial Assembly, 1712.

[14] Ibid.

[15] On the southern plantation slave codes see, Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, & Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

[16] Both Francis and Cudjoe and Harry were freed in 1809, “Names Index for Enslaved Persons,” Records of Enslaved Persons and Slave Holders in New York from 1525 through the Civil War, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Gilbert Horton’s manumission date is unknown, but is referenced in “The Case of Gilbert Horton,” New York Spectator, September 5, 1826.

[17] Rael, “The Long Death of Slavery,” 114. Documents related to both the New York Manumission Society and the African Free Schools are located at the New York Historical Society.

[18] Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 238.

Dyckman Discovered: Generations of Slavery on the Dyckman Property in Inwood, 1661-1827