Read Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of this story.

Many times, in telling the stories of Brooklyn’s heroes and villains, and the Brooklyn they helped create, the topic of slavery has come up. It’s an historical fact that many of the people whose names grace our streets and neighborhoods were participants in the willful bondage of their fellow human beings. Brooklyn’s founders were slaveholders.

What does that really mean? What was slavery like here, and what is its legacy? There are courses taught on this subject, and entire books written, or waiting to be written, and I couldn’t possibly do the history justice in a couple of blog posts, but join me in a short look at Brooklyn’s own variation of the “peculiar institution”.

Henry Hudson, sailing under the flag of the Dutch East India Company, sailed up the river that bears his name in 1609. By 1619, more Dutch explorers and would-be colonists started coming to these shores. In 1623, the Dutch West India Company began bringing settlers to the new settlements.

Between the efforts of these two companies, the Dutch had settlements from Albany down through New Amsterdam (New York City), out onto Long Island, and down the east coast through parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The original six towns that would one day make up Brooklyn were established and growing by the mid 1600’s. The towns of Breukelen, New Utrecht, Bushwick, Midwout (Flatbush), and Nieuw Amersfoort (Flatlands), were joined by the English settlement of Gravesend. Spreading out from these towns were large farms, and almost all of the farmers; the large landowners whose names are still familiar to us, had slaves.

Records show that in 1626, the first shipment of African slaves arrived in New Amsterdam, on a ship operated by the Dutch West India Company. The WIC was the largest slave trader in 17th century Africa.

Most of their captives went to the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, but the company imported many to work in New Amsterdam, using slave labor to clear forests, grow food, and build houses and roads. African slave labor built the wall that gave rise to Wall Street.

Having slaves doing all of the heavy lifting encouraged Dutch settlers to become farmers and landed gentry, allowing them to bring, or start families in the New World, assured of a labor pool to work the land and help build successful farms.

Farms flourished in the Hudson Valley, and on Long Island, including Brooklyn. Here, the farms were smaller, by farming standards, perhaps only a couple of hundred acres, and such a large farm would have perhaps no more than twelve slaves, although that was often a higher number than family members present.

Many of Brooklyn’s oldest Dutch families had slaves: the Lotts, Remsens, Lefferts, and many more. They were all from Africa, although some had been “seasoned” by the harsh life in the Caribbean. Almost all of them were purchased from the WIC, who ran the slave business like an efficient machine.

It was all business – nothing “personal”. Slaves were valuable commodities who could perform labor and other tasks. The Dutch had a strange disconnect in their form of slavery, making it rather unique in the annals of American slavery.

Bondsmen could have days off, they could have their own side businesses, and make their own money, as long as they handed a percentage over to their owners. They could also seek new masters if they didn’t like their present ones.

After a number of years in slavery, freedom could be purchased or given, and the emancipated man or woman was free to go or stay on as a paid employee. If the owner was the West India Company, often an agreement was made where a former bondsman would agree to work on municipal projects for a set amount of time, guaranteeing the colony a labor pool for fortifications and public works.

Free black communities were permitted under the Dutch. In Bushwick, the town gained its charter from Director General Pieter Stuyvesant in 1661. One of the signers of the town charter was one Francisco de Niger, who up until the year before, had been a slave owned by the West India Company.

He was now a free citizen of the town, able to take part in the building of his community. The records show other instances of freed former WIC laborers, who after emancipation, opened shops and operated businesses in Brooklyn. Things changed for many after the English took over New Amsterdam.

The British and the Dutch fought a series of battles in a war for shipping lanes, trade and colonies in the New World. In 1663, the British won, and New Netherlands, the Dutch settlements from Albany to Pennsylvania, fell under British rule.

At first, this did not really affect slavery in Brooklyn. In fact, the new British rule barely affected anything in Brooklyn. New Amsterdam became New York, and the towns of Brooklyn were incorporated as Kings County, but not much else changed, as far as daily life.

The wealthy Dutch farmers continued to farm, and the merchants continued their trades. The old Dutch families continued to grow and prosper, and their slaves continued to work in the fields and in the homes of their owners. Across Brooklyn, more English speaking settlers began to move into the old Dutch towns of Midwout and Breukelen, and other European settlers, from Germany, Sweden, Poland, and other countries began to move in, as well.

But as the colonies grew, so too did the desire for more and more slave labor. England now took over as the chief importer of African labor to these shores. The Duke of York, for whom the city and state are named, was a large shareholder in the Royal African Company, whose only product was slavery.

Company goals mandated that New York become a ready market for slaves. Between 1701 and 1726, over 1570 slaves were imported from the West Indies, and another 800 from Africa. By 1756, New York had more slaves than any colony north of Maryland.

At that same time period, enslaved Africans made up over 35% of all the immigrants passing through the port of New York, which doesn’t include the countless number of slaves smuggled in, bypassing customs by landing all up and down the coast of Long Island. By 1756, enslaved people made up 25% of the population of Kings, Queens, Richmond, New York, and Westchester counties.

When the British first took over, they were content to continue the Dutch way of slavery. Europe and Africa had come together in a very short time. The enslaved and the free mixed on the streets and in communities. There were racially mixed people, who may or may not have been slaves.

Slavery became a matrilineal “inheritance”. The child of a slave woman and a free man was a slave, the child of a free woman and a slave was free. The tradition of “hiring out” was upheld, and blacks and whites operated in the same spheres in many occupations and occasions.

But as the number of slaves continued to rise, the atmosphere changed dramatically. The paranoia of living around a large percentage of enslaved people caused new laws and customs to be enforced. It became illegal for more than four black people to congregate.

By 1702, the law was changed to only three people. No more than twelve black people could be at a funeral, as it was perceived as a gathering place for the planning of insurrections. Anyone caught out at night was arrested and whipped. Every town had to hire a “Negro Whipper”, whose job it was to enforce these laws.

A failed, but bloody slave uprising, and brutal reprisal, in 1712 led to full scale paranoia and restrictions on the movements and motivations of black folk in New York. Free blacks in New York soon found themselves in danger. Any white man could claim his black employee was a slave.

The legal burden fell on the so-called slave to prove that he or she was not. Black people in the street could be stopped and questioned. If they couldn’t explain why they were about, or prove their freedom, they could be jailed as runaways.

Advertisements would be placed in newspapers, and if someone came forward and claimed ownership, they had only to pay for the advertisement and the cost of jailing, and a free man could find himself in slavery, and no one in the legal system cared, or investigated further.

By the dawn of the American Revolution, in 1776, the cry for American freedom was a bittersweet song for African people in New York. Freedom from Britain did not include freedom from slavery.

Photo: “Slavery in New Amsterdam”. Columbia University.

Next time: Slavery in Brooklyn from the mid 1700’s to 1825. The War of Independence and the independence of the enslaved.


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. Yeah I really don’t want to wade into this too much but I will say 1. Another interesting piece by MM 2. Sonny Carson was a race-baiter and 3. I am not sure anything is gained by the parsing of levels of immorality, cruelty and genocide.

  2. brooklynishome- I do agree- I wasn’t really clear in my post – whatever the intent, in the dictionary sense. the effect was certainly the same. A lot of people assume that slavery was not as “bad” as genocide- on some strange scale of dreadfulness. I think it was. What I find so fascinating is that slavery was so dehumanized, and viewed as commerce (ugh, ugh and more ugh), so maybe that’s why we see so much hypocrisy and doublethink about slavery as an institution. On the other hand, the intent and effects of genocide were blunt and inarguable. So while genocide is terrible, in some respects slavery is much worse- it’s a soul killer for slave and master alike. At least, as I view it.

    I think slavery is closer in concept to the Holocaust- genocide on steroids. Although in retrospect, no matter how we define any of them, the effect is the same- terrible.

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