Interview: Andrea Mosterman on her book, Spaces of Enslavement
Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York
By Andrea C. Mosterman
Cornell University Press, 2021
246 pages
Interviewed by Deborah Hamer
In her new book, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York, Dr. Andrea Mosterman looks at the lives of enslaved people in New Netherland and Colonial New York from the 1620s until 1820. She shows how central enslaved labor was to individual households and to the colony as a whole and how this dependence on enslaved people shaped life for all New Yorkers — Black and white — over this two hundred year period.
Spaces of Enslavement argues that we can’t rely on archival records to tell the history of enslaved people in colonial New York; the book instead relies on a spatial approach to the study of slavery. What is a spatial approach? And what sources did this approach encourage you to look at?
Lott family home in Brooklyn, New York. This picture shows the initial structure with lean-to. The larger home, which was built in the early nineteenth century, is now attached to this structure. Picture by author.
Spatial analysis is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. Among others, it includes mapping, cartography, architectural history, and space/place theory. I have used various forms of spatial analysis in my research. For instance, I consider architecture, geography, as well as the meaning of these spaces of enslavement for the free and enslaved people in them. Architectural structure reports, including the Historic American Buildings Survey of the 1930s, maps, and archeological research proved crucial to my research. I also made sure to visit the actual spaces — churches, homes, and streets — I researched. In Manhattan, for instance, I explored the Dyckman Farmhouse, and in Brooklyn I visited the Hendrick I. Lott home and the Flatbush Reformed Church. I also walked down the streets of Manhattan where in the 17th-century the people enslaved by the Dutch West India Company lived, including South Williams Street in lower Manhattan. Mapping the various places frequented by New Amsterdam’s enslaved population helped me understand how they moved through this 17th-century Dutch settlement.
Your book looks at people enslaved by the Dutch both before and after the English conquest of New York in 1664. How were the lives of the men and women who lived in bondage to Dutch enslavers different from those who lived in bondage in English households? Why is it important to study the enslaved people who labored in Dutch households specifically?
First of all, it is important to bring attention to the fact that Dutch descendants continued to enslave people in this region well into the 19th century. Thus, the history of slavery in Dutch New York is part of Dutch Atlantic history.
When it came to systems of bondage, it would have been very similar in the Dutch and English communities, but there were significant cultural differences. People enslaved in Dutch American households often spoke Dutch as their first language. They would have prepared Dutch American foods, celebrated Dutch American holidays, and, if they had the opportunity, they would have been more likely to attend Dutch Reformed churches. By the late 18th century, the Dutch Pinkster celebration had become a popular African American festival with Dutch and African origins in New York’s Dutch communities. Free and enslaved Black New Yorkers would gather during Pinkster — the Dutch word for Pentecost or Whitsuntide — for a several-days-long celebration. Descriptions of Pinkster in Albany, for instance, mention a Black king named Charles or Charley who would lead a parade down the streets of Albany. This parade would be followed by games, dancing, and simply spending time with family and friends, something that was rarely possibly for enslaved New Yorkers. Sources have mentioned similar Pinkster celebrations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Even though the system of slavery was very similar in English in Dutch communities, culturally they were different and that also affected the culture and practices of the enslaved people who lived in these Dutch American households.
We know that enslaved people resisted those who held them in bondage, but it is often difficult to see that in surviving documents. What types of resistance does looking at space reveal that we might otherwise miss?
Jacques Cortelyou, Afbeeldinge van de stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt. Based on the Castello Plan. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs: Print collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections,http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7c0b-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Annotations by the author.
For one, we can see how enslaved people navigated these spaces differently from their enslavers. Starting in the late 17th century, the colony and city of New York passed wide-ranging legislation that limited the movements and activities of enslaved people in public spaces. Enslaved New Yorkers could not purchase alcohol, trade goods without permission from their enslavers, or gather with more than four people. They needed a pass in public spaces to show that they were there legitimately, and in New York City they were required to carry a lantern to walk the streets at night. Yet, we can see that these enslaved men and women found alternative ways of navigating these spaces, either by timing their movements to avoid night watches or patrols, or by moving through backyards or alleyways rather than using the main roads. We see similar everyday resistance in other spaces as well.
Your book covers a 200 year period from the arrival of the initial enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam in the 1620s to the abolition of slavery in New York in 1820. What challenges did you face in identifying and using sources that could tell the story over such a long period?
My research draws on evidence from the entire New Netherland and New York area, but to limit the scope of the research, I focused on three counties for the long 18th century: Albany, Ulster, and Kings County. Still, the records were often scattered across multiple archives in the Netherlands and the United States In New York City, I spent most time at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library.
It is always challenging to find evidence about enslaved people in the archives. I would often spend days going through collections without finding any references to enslaved people. Nevertheless, I was determined to uncover new evidence rather than merely return to the known sources, and at times I succeeded in finding new records. For instance, at the Brooklyn Historical Society I discovered a 1788 letter by Peter Lowe, minister of the six congregations of Kings County’s Dutch Reformed Church. In his letter he lists the objections of many of his congregants when a group of Black men wanted to join the church. These objections included Black people “have no souls,” “they are accursed by God,” and “They are a species very different from us—witness their nauseous sweat, complexion, manners &c, I cannot endure them near me. I would be asham’d to commune with them.”[1] Interestingly, Reverend Lowe did not agree with any of their objections. This letter provided an unusual insight into some of the discussions that took place in these Dutch Reformed congregations. The document also helped me reconstruct what these white New Yorkers in what is now Brooklyn thought or said about the Black men, women, and children who lived in their homes, cooked their food, worked their fields, and took care of their children. Finding evidence like this made it worthwhile to spend so much time in the archives going through countless family and church records.
You wrote your dissertation on slavery in New York, and now you’ve written this terrific book. How has your study of slavery changed between now and when you finished your PhD?
Lott home garret space. Corn cobs placed by the enslaved people who slept in this space can be seen on the right where the floorboards have been removed. © Chester Higgins Archive/All Rights Reserved.
When I wrote my dissertation, I was still very much influenced by the literature that suggests that free and enslaved New Yorkers in these Dutch communities shared spaces. That they lived, worked, and worshipped together. When I began to look more closely at the spaces of enslavement, it became abundantly clear that that was not a useful way to think or write about slavery in New York. Even though free and enslaved New Yorkers often lived in the same homes, worked the same fields, or worshipped in the same churches, the enslaved men, women, and children were restricted to separate areas of these spaces that were in no way comparable to those of their enslavers. Moreover, they experienced these spaces inherently different. For instance, whereas white New Yorkers would have considered their homes safe, domestic spaces, these were places of abuse, neglect, forced labor, and family separation for the people held in bondage in these structures. When doing more research for the book, I began to see that using “shared” or “sharing” when discussing these spaces of enslavement in some way helped sustain the myth of New York slavery somehow being milder or more benign.
One of the major developments in the study of slavery in the last decade has been new focus on the institution in the North. How does studying slavery in New Amsterdam/New York change the way we think about slavery in North America and the Atlantic world?
Some truly excellent work has been published on slavery in the North in recent years. I think this scholarship helps us see that slavery in the Americas took many different forms. When thinking about slavery in North America, the cotton plantations of the 19th-century South tend to come to mind. Yet, slavery was much more diverse. Not only did it differ per region, it also changed over time.
In New York, enslaved men and women often worked in domestics, workshops, on the docks, and on farms. They usually lived in close proximity to their enslavers with only a few other enslaved men, women, or children. Similarly important, New York slavery in the 17th century differed from that of the 18th and 19th centuries. Whereas some enslaved Africans in the Dutch colony owned property, used the court, attended the Dutch Reformed Church, and frequented the towns taverns, enslaved New Yorkers were rarely able to do these things in the 18th century.
In short, as we learn more about slavery in the North, we begin to see that enslavement and enslaved labor in the Americas took on many different forms. It also becomes evident, however, that they also have some very important similarities: in all of these areas, systems of control, intimidation, violence, and surveillance were necessary to sustain the enslavement of part of its population.
You’re continuing to work on slavery in Dutch New York; can you tell us what projects you have on the horizon?
My next project focuses on the Dutch slaver Gideon, which brought 290 enslaved men and women into the New Amsterdam harbor, only a few weeks before the English took over the colony and renamed it New York in September of 1664. Petrus Stuyvesant actually claimed that the arrival of the Gideon caused in part the loss of the colony to the English, because the men and women on board the ship were in such poor health that they required many of the provisions he desperately needed for the troops. James Baldwin later called this “a marvelous fore shadowing of the scapegoat role the black was to play in American life.”[2] I plan to reconstruct the voyage of the Gideon, and more importantly the experiences of the people involved in its journey, both free and enslaved. I have started the research and published a short article on the subject, but I can’t wait to really focus on this project.
Andrea C. Mosterman is an associate professor at University of New Orleans. Her work explores the multi-faceted dimensions of slavery, slave trade, and cross-cultural contact in the Dutch Atlantic and Early America with special emphasis on Early New York.
Deborah Hamer is an editor for Gotham and the director of the New Netherland Institute.
[1] Andrea C. Mosterman, “’I Thought They Were Worthy’: A Dutch Reformed Church Minister and His Congregation Debate African American Membership in the Church,” Early American Studies (Summer 2016): 610-616, 615.
[2] James Baldwin, preface to The Negro in New York, edited by Roy Ottley & William Weatherby (New York: Oceana Publications, 1967), xvi.