From left: Carloyn E. Storum Loguen about 1860; Mary Ann Brigham Brown’s husband Rev. Abel Brown under assault in Westfield NY about 1835.
Chautauqua County women Carolyn Loguen (1817-1867) and Mary Ann Brown (1814-1842) were active in New York state’s anti-slavery movement and in the Underground Railroad. Working mostly in the shadows of their widely known husbands, the women themselves were locally famous for their own efforts in the cause of freedom.
Carolyn E. Storum Loguen of Busti married the formerly enslaved minister Jermain Wesley Loguen (1813-1872). The couple then operated an Underground Railroad station in Syracuse. They had six children, and their daughter, Amelia, married the eldest son of the nationally known abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who also was formerly enslaved.
In 1851, the Rev. Loguen assisted in the rescue of William Henry, a formerly enslaved cooper working in Syracuse. Henry had been arrested under America’s Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, but he was rescued by abolitionists and then sheltered in Canada. Also in 1851, Harrison Williams was arrested under the same law, on Carolyn’s childhood farm in Busti, where her parents operated an Underground Railroad Station. In spite of several attempts to rescue him, Harrison Williams was returned to slavery. The historical marker paying tribute to Harrison Williams and the Storums stands today on Sanbury Road near Northrup Road in Busti. Another historical marker, to both Caroline Loguen and her husband, stands today at NYS Route 92 and Pine Street in Syracuse.
In 1854, Carolyn’s parents coordinated the widely attended Anti-Slavery Convention in Sugar Grove Pa., near Busti. Both Rev. Loguen and Frederick Douglass were featured speakers at that major event. However, Mary Ann Brigham Brown and her husband had been deceased long before the significant convention in Sugar Grove. Mary Ann was from nearby Fredonia, and she married another famous abolitionist, Rev. Abel Brown, Jr. (1810-1844) of nearby Forestville.
In the early 1830s, Mary Ann had met her future husband, while both attended the Fredonia Academy, which formerly stood on the site of today’s Opera House and Village Hall. The couple then traveled throughout the northeast, active in the Underground Railroad. Scholars have speculated that when the Western New Yorker Eber M. Pettit mentioned in his 1879 anti-slavery memoir that there was a “President” of the Underground Railroad, he was referring to the martyr Rev. Brown. Rev. Brown was so outspoken in his beliefs that he was often beaten by angry dissenters. His 1844 death in Canandaigua was said to have been from injuries sustained in just such a beating.
Another assault upon Brown had occurred in Chautauqua County a few years earlier, while he was preaching in Westfield. That was the period when New York State’s Anti-Slavery Society was being organized in central New York State, an endeavor also met with violent protests. However, within a few years of Brown’s beating in Westfield, the collected voices of Chautauqua County’s other abolitionists attracted increasingly more of their neighbors into what became known as “the liberty cause,” and the Underground Railroad became more safely active here, until the 1850 law. Although that law, signed by New York’s own Millard Filmore, generally made life dangerous for those involved in the Underground Railroad, the same law actually backfired in Chautauqua County, by drawing even more people into the anti-slavery movement.
Mary Ann died two years before her husband, shortly after the birth of their second child. Her children were then raised in Fredonia by her mother Mary (Polly) Dix Brigham Taylor (1790-1857), who also opened her home to a freedom seeker in 1844. There is no historical marker to memorialize Mary Ann, her husband, her children, or her mother, but a Fredonia mansion stands today where Mary Ann’s children grew up. The former Taylor farm is located on U.S. Route 20, just west of Fredonia.
After the Civil War, Daniel Fairbanks greatly expanded and modernized the former Taylor home. For the 1881 Chautauqua County Atlas, the elegant, new house was illustrated in the name of Sayles Aldrich.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Wilda B. and J. Carter Rowland operated a gift shop behind the mansion, at the approximate location of part of the former Taylor home.
The website freethoughtrail.org says she was born in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, in 1817, and worked as a schoolteacher. At age 18, she married John Maubry Davis, and they moved to Boston. He died of consumption in 1841. According to womenhistoryblog.com, “In 1843, Lucy married Luther Coleman (she later changed the spelling of her married name to Colman).” They moved to Rochester, and their daughter, Gertrude, was born about 1845. “Motherhood brought Colman’s attention to the issue of women’s rights,” the blog says. “She began to ask why married women and mothers had so few rights, and why women were dependent on the goodwill of their husbands for what freedoms they had.” She also befriended Rochester abolitionist Amy Post and advocated for emancipation of the slaves. By 1852 she had renounced Christianity because of churches’ complicity with slavery.
Coleman’s husband was killed in 1854 while working at the New York Central Railroad, which she blamed on the company’s unwillingness to spend money on repairs. She was hired afterward as a teacher in a segregated “colored school,” where Colman met Susan B. Anthony. According to the blog, at the state teachers convention, she spoke out against corporal punishment in schools, and she and Anthony decried the unequal salaries of male and female teachers. Disgusted with segregation, Colman “lobbied parents to withdraw their children, causing the school to close and losing her job in the process. By 1856, Rochester was providing education for both white and black children.”
Between 1856 and 1860, she became an abolitionist lecturer in Ohio, Iowa and Michigan and occasionally wrote for the antislavery newspaper The Liberator. She participated in an 1858 protest against capital punishment led by Anthony and Frederick Douglass and in an 1859 petition drive for New York women’s right to vote. In May 1863, Colman was one of the secretaries at the Women’s National Loyal League, which conducted the largest petition drive in U.S. history at that point, with 400,000 signatures, to promote a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. In 1864 and 1865, Colman worked at a Black orphan asylum in Washington, D.C., and taught and served as a superintendent in schools in Washington and Arlington, Virginia, to help former slaves. Colman arranged a meeting between Sojourner Truth and President Abraham Lincoln on Oct. 29, 1864, and accompanied Truth.
About 1870, Colman joined her sister in Syracuse. “During this time, Colman wholeheartedly embraced freethought, a philosophical viewpoint that opinions or beliefs should be based on science, logic and reason, and should not be derived from religion, authority, government or dogma,” the blog says. She spoke often at conventions and wrote columns for a freethought journal as well as writing her memoir.
Hidden Histories: What the Slave Masters of the Bronx Left Us
By Alice Augustine, Reposted from Amsterdam News, February 5, 2026
This fall, I introduced 42 Lehman College honors students to the Enslaved African Burial Ground at Van Cortlandt Park. As the college’s director of Campus Honors and Scholar Engagement, I have made it mandatory that all Campus Honors students participate in this project, Hidden Histories, in their first year.
Colleagues and students are often surprised to learn that there were enslaved people as far north as the Bronx. However, Jacobus Van Cortlandt, who served two terms as mayor of New York City, profited from the buying and selling of Africans in Manhattan’s markets. A walk through the Bronx reveals streets and parks named after other plantation owners — the Pells, the Morrises, and the Fords.
My students learn firsthand how difficult it is to find information on people of African descent who lived in the colonial Bronx. But it is not impossible. Over the last two years, they have dug through original documents to learn about the talented and resourceful Africans whose labor contributed significantly to making early Bronx residents among the wealthiest in the state.
Their stories are hidden in bills of lading, records of sale, runaway ads, wills, legal actions, and diaries. Little Haneh, age 52; Hager, age 42; Long Betty, age 31; Zibia, age 27 — these are four of over 90 names of enslaved people my students have identified and geotagged on a digital map of the colonial Bronx.
When we started, our goal was to contribute to the Northeast Slavery Record Index at John Jay College. Our initial search yielded little, but we gravitated toward wills after reading “Blacks in the Colonial Bronx”by Lloyd Ultan. The enslaved mostly appeared in recorded history only when wealth changed hands. Ironically, those diligent records of property are now the cracks where history lets in the light.
There were no birth certificates for Africans enslaved in the colonial Bronx and neither were there recordings of deaths. However, the heirs of enslavers were not deprived of their property. In wills, we learned of bequests of linen, kitchenware, land, rugs, and enslaved Africans that heirs would receive. Bequests quickly became our most trusted source of information on the people we have come to see as our ancestors.
My hope is that more students sign up for the research-intensive phase of the project — the ongoing module invested in unearthing the hidden stories of highly-skilled enslaved Africans. It is too easy to forget the contributions of Blacks in the Bronx when negative and untrue stereotypes of this borough roll off tongues with reckless abandon.
The project is in its third cycle of joint stewardship with volunteers from the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, which has done much to increase awareness. In 2021, Van Cortlandt Lake was renamed the Hester and Piero’s Mill Pond in honor of an enslaved couple — Piero the Miller and his wife Hester. The park now celebrates Juneteenth and Pinkster, an African American holiday which was originally a Dutch celebration of Pentecost. In 2024, the Mellon Foundation awarded a grant to the alliance to engage the community on ideas for a memorial at the Burial Ground. I serve on an advisory council for the construction, along with four of my students.
However, too much remains unknown. My students and the wider Bronx community deserve the chance to know, mourn, and celebrate our ancestors. My students are not historians; their majors span disciplines from biology to art. But almost all have incorporated lessons from this project as they go on to conduct research in their respective fields.
At the northeast corner of the burial ground, my students created an unofficial altar on top of a jagged rock shaped like a bench. They and community members have left flowers and photos of deceased loved ones there. We pour libations with water from Hester and Piero’s lake and call their names aloud as a collective.
Our hearts are filled with love as we continue to build the project even as funding sources become scarcer. In July, our digital map disappeared from the StoryMaps website after the free version we used was retired. We are currently seeking grants for software to support our findings long-term. Our goal is to make this a community-based research initiative that can be replicated at other colleges and perhaps high schools.
I created Hidden Histories knowing that the answers we seek may take decades to uncover. The process is beautiful and heart-wrenching. We are eager to learn everything we can about the enslaved in the colonial Bronx, even as we are deeply shaken by the cruelty of enslavement. We are, however, clear that our ancestors wanted us to find them and share their stories, and we will keep learning and searching and listening.
The Price of Silence – The Forgotten Story of New Jersey’s Enslaved People
“New Jersey is known as the Garden State,” says author Beverly Mills in the two-part documentary The Price of Silence. “We’re known for our blueberries. We’re known for our corn. We’re known for our peaches. But we’re not known for the slaves that were here tilling the soil. We’re not known for the whole history of slavery connected to New Jersey and how slavery was the underpinning of much of the wealth of New Jersey.” Enslavement was prolific from the very founding of New Jersey in the 1600s as a colony and eventual manufacturing hub that supplied the Southern states with leather goods and other products. Its eye on production and profit created a demand for the cost-effective services of the enslaved, a demand that only grew as New Jersey developed into a major maritime port. What’s more, white slave owners at the time could receive the equivalent of land rebates based upon the number of enslaved working their land. “New Jersey was the last Northern state to even attempt to abolish slavery,” says Linda Caldwell Epps, Ph.D. and CEO of 1804 Consultants, in the film. Mills reports New Jersey “was probably the Northern state with the strongest sympathies towards the South. Because it was the Southern-most Northern state, it had a lucrative trade policy with the Southern states.” She remembers “I never learned about this in school. … If anything, we were taught to feel shame. And today…I feel nothing but pride and I feel empowered.”
Part one of the documentary, “The Forgotten Story of New Jersey’s Enslaved People,” begins the series with the stunning fact that by the time New Jersey started the slow process of abolishing slavery in 1804, the state had 12,000 men, women, and children in bondage. The film reveals that New Jersey depended profoundly on enslaved people to drive agricultural and economic growth, was sympathetic to the South, and was the last of the Northeastern states to eliminate this heinous practice. https://www.pbs.org/video/price-of-silence-izsgr1/
Part two, “The Lasting Impact of Slavery in New Jersey,” continues with New Jersey’s history of bondage and expounds on the fact that the African American community is still feeling the effects of slavery today due to disparities with the White community in median income, criminal justice, and healthcare.
Part three, “The Search for Freedom in New Jersey,” examines the Black community’s Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to Newark, New Jersey, during the early years of the 20th century and tells the story through the eyes of descendants of individuals who made the Great Migration North and found life here to be a far cry from what they had hoped for.
By telling these fascinating stories through the eyes of descendants of slavery and individuals who have lived through the heartbreaking events depicted in the films, the audience will most certainly be captivated and inspired to learn more.
The Hidden History of Slavery in New York
The Hidden History of Slavery in New York is an Emmy award-winning 30-minute documentary produced by Larry Epstein and narrated by Richard French, a student at Rye Country Day School. The film features EJI founder Bryan Stevenson. Larry Epstein, an Emmy award-winning journalist and documentary writer/producer, is available to speak at schools and colleges. He can be contacted at larryep13@gmail.com. The Hidden History of Slavery in New York is available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUzlcZXBHAM
Harlem Urban Civil Rights Museum
The museum is set to open in Fall 2026 in an approximately 20,000-square-foot space within the Urban Justice League’s new 400,000-square-foot Manhattan headquarters at 117 West 125th St., across the street from the Studio Museum. The Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem presents the history of the Northern civil rights movement. It is a cultural institution that educates, inspires, and activates visitors through powerful storytelling, cultural engagement, and collective action. Rooted in history and in Harlem, it stands as a local anchor and a global destination for learning, reflection, and empowerment.
Morven house in Princeton, NJ was home to Richard Stockon one the New Jersey’s signers of the Declaration of Independence and five early governors of New Jersey. Morven house’s current exhibit as part of the national celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is Five Independent Souls highlighting the lives of the five men from New Jersey who voted for independence including Richard Stockon. As wealthy lawyers, the first two generations of Stocktons at Morven enslaved men, women, and children on site. At the expense of the enslaved, the Stocktons lived a comfortable lifestyle and increased their wealth with forced labor. Like other signers of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton held people in bondage while signing a document that declared “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The rhetoric of revolutionary America—freedom, equality, and liberty—was inescapably intertwined with the practice of slavery. In 1804, the State of New Jersey passed an act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, making it the last northern state to do so. Records indicate that by the time the third generation of Stocktons took ownership of Morven in 1840, enslaved people no longer lived on the property. At first, they were replaced by free African Americans, and then eventually by immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Morven house’s permanent exhibition is “Historic Morven: A Window into America’s Past.”
NY State Parks Launches ‘Enslavement to Freedom 1627-1827-2027’ Initiative
In 2027, New York State will recognize the 200th anniversary of the end of legalized slavery in the state (1827) and the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans enslaved in the former New Netherland colony (1627). The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation is working with partners across the state to share new research and resources that explore early Black American history in New York as part of its “Enslavement to Freedom: 1627-1827-2027” initiative. Collaborations include exhibition displays with the Office of General Services, educational resources with ConsidertheSourceNY.org, events and programs, and traveling exhibitions available for non-profit and educational organizations throughout the state. During this multi-year interpretive initiative, State Parks and relevant state historic sites are planning will develop exhibits, public programs, and other educational resources. These are expected to explore New York’s history with the institution of slavery and a pivotal period of transition for the Black community in early New York. It provides better context and understanding for later historic movements, like abolition and the Underground Railroad. State Parks is also inviting educational and nonprofit organizations to host one or more of the four available traveling banner exhibitions:
1) Poisonous Seeds: The Dutch and the Institution of Slavery in New York
2) Redefining the Family: One Descendant’s Journey into History
3) Another Face of War: Enslaved and Free Blacks in the Revolution and
4) Many and Varied Hands: The Work and Labor of the Enslaved.
Compact enough to be displayed in various environments, the traveling exhibitions tell stories from the past that center Black experience. “Enslavement to Freedom: 1627-1827-2027” resources and activities are expected to continue to be developed and shared with the public over the next several years. For up-to-date information about this and other Black history initiatives at State Parks, including how to request the “Enslavement to Freedom” traveling banner exhibitions, visit this website.
Manhattan’s Merchant’s House was an UGRR Safehouse
The Merchant House (https://merchantshouse.org/) at 29 East Fourth Street in New York City is a 19th century brick and marble landmark rowhouse that is now a museum. It was built in 1832 by hatter and merchant Joseph Brewster and sold to the Tredwell family three years later. An Underground Railroad safe space was recently discovered underneath the drawers of a second floor built-in dresser. A cut in the floorboards leads to an enclosed space about 2ft by 2ft with a ladder down to the ground floor. Brewster was a leading New York City abolitionist. There is evidence that he signed at least two antislavery petitions and played a prominent role in three antislavery churches. When a church was being constructed on Rivington Street, he had builders include a false floor there as well.
A Protest History of the United States(Beacon Press, 2025) by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall
The book chronicles the history of protest and resistance in America, from Indigenous peoples’ resistance to colonization through modern movements like Black Lives Matter and climate activism. It highlights both known and forgotten figures and movements. Drawing on legal documents, archives, and personal accounts to show how dissent has shaped the nation, it argues that protest is a vital force for change. It is part of Beacon’s ReVisioning History series. Browne-Marshall expands the definition of protest beyond traditional marches and rallies. Acts of resistance include journalism, legal battles, boycotts, everyday defiance, and more. There are sections on abolitionist John Brown, who was executed for initiating the 1859 slave revolt at Harpers Ferry; labor organizer Mother Jones, who fought for the enforcement of the 8-hour workday; and civil rights activist Daisy Bates, who played a leading role in the 1957 Little Rock school integration crisis. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a writer, educator, legal advocate, and playwright. She is a professor of Constitutional Law and African Studies at John Jay College (CUNY). Her books include She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society.
New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide (New York: The History Press, 2025) by David Felsen (Reprinted from New York Almanack, December 10, 2025)
“New York City got its first monument of a real Black American in 1946 when the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx dedicated a bronze bust to Booker T. Washington,” David Felsen, a history teacher at Avenues: The World School, writes in the introduction to New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide (History Press, 2025). He believes n“Behind every first is a story of triumph over adversity and exclusion.” A 2021 study of the nation’s monuments found that 50% of the top 50 most memorialized people enslaved other people and that only 10% of the top 50 most memorialized people are Black/Indigenous. Just six percent of the Top 50 nationwide are women. It wasn’t until 2007 that the city dedicated its first monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman. “At this time, when the media and academics were paying so much attention to problematic Confederate monuments and the white men on them, it seemed too little attention was being paid to the representation of Black people in monuments,” writes Felsen. “As a history teacher living in New York City, I began to wonder how many monuments of Black Americans there were in the city. Who was the first Black American honored, and when did it happen? Who were the artists, activists and civic leaders behind these monuments? Why did they get made? And what could they teach us about New York history, Black history, art history and American history?” According to Felsen, the first Black American represented on a monument in New York City is “a nameless, shoeless former slave help[ing] a Union widow to find her husband’s grave in the South” at the base of the 1876 Civil War Soldiers’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Felsen’s new guide identifies and tells the stories of thirty statues and monuments of Black Americans in the city. It includes maps, and photos and a detailed history of each. This book provides a refreshing take on a subject that has been on the minds of many Americans.
Black Legacy: A History of New York’s African Americans(Seven Stories Press, New Edition, 2026)
by William Loren Katz
Discover the complete Black history of New York — from 1609 to the present — by the award-winning author of Breaking the Chains and Black Indians. For readers 12 and up. Includes a new intro and last chapter with insights on modern-day movements like Black Lives Matter, plus 50+ historical maps, illustrations, and photos. Essential for NY teachers, librarians and teens. From the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam in 1609, to the Harlem Renaissance, to the impact of Black Lives Matter, here is a concise and newly updated history of Black Americans in New York for readers 12 and up. Black Legacy reasserts the essential work of teacher and historian William Loren Katz, who was committed to documenting and uplifting the stories of Black Americans’ courage and creativity, resilience and rebellion, especially for younger readers. A new introduction by award-winning journalist Herb Boyd gives context to Katz’s “full tableau of Black accomplishments and aspirations,” and a new chapter by historian Alan Singer and social studies teacher Imani Hinson brings the book up to the present day, considering the changing economic, cultural and political influences on Black New Yorkers. Black Legacy includes Black politicians and poets, abolitionists and athletes and activists, and the first Black children to attend public schools; Sojourner Truth, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and others who fought for Black freedom; Shirley Chisholm, Madame C.J. Walker, NY’s first Black mayor David Dinkins and many other businesspeople and politicians who brought dignity through their work toward equality; and the Black history of Seneca Village and Weeksville, the Savoy and Cotton clubs of the Jazz Age, Harlem Hospital where Martin Luther King Jr. nearly died, the African burial site at Trinity Church, and so much more. Written with economy and flair, Black Legacy is a fascinating read, a necessary teaching tool, and a great addition to the literature of the Black history of New York and of America. According to Haley Pessin, co-editor of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance, “Dispelling the myth of Northern progressivism, Katz offers a far more compelling account of the bravery and perseverance through which Black people resisted their own subjugation and, in so doing, indelibly altered New York history. Katz reminds us that New York history is Black history, and Black history is the history of New York. This is a book that should be read by all New Yorkers.”
The Power of Quiet Courage(North Carolina Office of Archives, 2025) by Amy Nathan and Sarah Keys Evans; Illustrated by Jermaine Powell Sarah Keys Evans wasn’t a person anyone thought would spend a night in a jail cell or change the world. But trouble came Sarah’s way in 1952 at a North Carolina bus station. Dressed in her Women’s Army Corps uniform, she was arrested for not moving to the back of a bus, three years before it happened to another Black woman, Rosa Parks. Sarah Keys Evans: The Power of Quiet Courage tells how Sarah stood up for what’s right and helped end that kind of unfairness. Others have now honored her by creating a monument that calls her a “Trailblazer for Justice.” Deborah Menkart wrote, “Sarah Key Evans’ story, along with many others who protested racism on public transportation in the 19th and 20th centuries, are omitted from most history books. Thankfully, Amy Nathan and Evans have broken that silence in a beautifully written book for upper elementary students. Readers learn that standing up for justice requires years’ worth of determination, patience, and courage. Evans was brave when she righteously refused to move on the bus, but there would have been no legal victory were it not for her continued bravery to pursue the case, to face lies about her actions, and to testify at hearings. As the book also makes clear, Evans’ family and attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree provided crucial support. Evans’s story will inspire readers and offer a roadmap of the pitfalls and possibilities when pursuing justice.”
The Sewards of New York: A Biography of a Leading American Political Family (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press) by Thomas Slaughter
The Sewards of New Yorkshines a light on one of the most important and fascinating political families of the nineteenth century. Through recently discovered family correspondence, Thomas P. Slaughter unveils the inner lives of the Seward family, tracing their joys and sorrows as the nation grappled with rapid expansion and deepening divisions on its path to the Civil War. William Henry Seward, the family’s most prominent member, was a state senator, governor, U.S. senator, and Secretary of State. Henry, as his family knew him, was often absent from their Auburn, NY, home, serving in Albany or Washington, DC, and remained connected to the family through the long letters numbering in the thousands that they exchanged. These writings reveal Henry as a son, brother, husband, and father, as much as they show him as a politician and statesman. His wife Frances is the hub around which this family story revolves. Slaughter explores the extended Auburn family during a half century of profound change in American homes, marriage, and childrearing. With an eye for the provocative and revealing, Slaughter takes us behind the curtain of the early Victorian era’s private sphere. The Sewards of New York paints a rich portrait of an extraordinary family that played a key role in nineteenth-century New York and national politics.
Women, Immigrants, and the Working-Class Battle in Little Falls, New York: The Textile Strike of 1912-1913 (New York: Algora Publishing) by J.N. Cheney
J.N. Cheney recounts the political and cultural origins that created the conditions for the strike including factors such as immigration law and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. It carefully considers the plight of the primarily working-class immigrant women from Eastern and Southern Europe (mostly Italy, Poland and Slovakia) and their pursuit of better wages and improved working and living conditions.
The book details the horrific conditions they endured including dangerous, unsanitary factories, rampant tuberculosis, and dilapidated tenement housing, which were courageously exposed by nurse, social reformer, and suffragist M. Helen Schloss. When the workers in two Little Falls mills organized to improve their conditions with the help of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party of America, they were met with a brutal campaign of repression. This new research exposes the police violence, the suppression of free speech by local authorities, and the hostile media coverage that sought to demonize the strikers as dangerous agitators.
Jamie’s Decisions (TrueFiktion) by Joe Visconti
The graphic novel follows Jamie, a skilled laborer and formerly enslaved person in Virginia who found refuge in Syracuse, New York. His world is shattered when the federal government passes the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the U.S. Marshals capture his formerly enslaved friend, Jerry, under the law. Now, Jamie must decide whether to put his own freedom at risk to help the community save Jerry. This graphic novel focuses on the Jerry Rescue, an event that happened in Syracuse on October 1, 1851. A group of abolitionists forcibly liberated William “Jerry” Henry from U.S. custody after he was arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Jamie’s Decisions explores the Jerry Rescue and the Syracuse abolitionist movement to highlight how community members – sometimes with different motives – can come together to seek justice for all.
Sag Harbor in the Revolution (Sag Harbor Museum) edited by Zachary Studenroth
Have you heard of the Battle of Sag Harbor, the heroic raid on the British fort that still lies beneath our feet in the Old Burying Ground? Or of the mass exodus to Connecticut from Sag Harbor in September 1776, when local residents escaped the British occupation? Or do you know how our village rebuilt its economy after the Revolutionary War? These and many other questions will be answered in “Sag Harbor in the Revolution,” a book that the Museum is publishing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Thirteen authors, all distinguished historians or specialists in their fields, have been brought together to contribute new research on the subject of Sag Harbor’s role in the American Revolution.
Until the Last Gun is Silent (New York: Viking, 2026) by Matthew Delmont
The book is sub-titled “A Story of Patriotism, The Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul.” While over 300,000 African American young men and women were serving in Vietnam, African Americans stateside played an important role in the anti-war movement, despite facing severe criticism in the media, by government officials, and by prominent leaders of civil rights groups. Anti-war activists included the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and Medal of Honor recipient Dwight “Skip” Johnson. Much of the book focuses on Coretta Scott King, who the author credits with convincing her husband to support the anti-war movement, and Johnson’s family and friends, who fought to have him receive full honors and his family to receive full benefits. Matthew Delmont is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College.
Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (Chicago University Press, 2024) by Seth Rockman.
Rockman uses the exchange of products between the North and South to present a fuller picture of slavery as a national institution with economic ties binding different regions of the country. Examples include cloth and shoes manufactured in Massachusetts worn by enslaved Africans on Southern cotton plantations, tools like axes, hoes, and shovels manufactured in the North for sale to Southern planters, slave-produced commodities marketed by Northern companies, and a Northern ship construction industry building vessels to transport cotton to European markets. Seth Rockman is a Professor of History at Brown University.
Stitching Freedom: A True Story of Injustice, Defiance, and Hope in Angola Prison (New York: One Signal, 2025) by Gary Tyler with Ellen Bravo
This book is the memoir of Gary Tyler, written with the assistance of Ellen Bravo, an anti-racist activist involved in campaigns for fair trials and prison reform. In 1975, seventeen-year-old Gary Tyler was sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole at the notorious Angola Prison in Louisiana. Tyler, who is African American, was convicted of the murder of a white teenager by an all-white jury. His case was picked up by Amnesty International, and he was recommended for parole three times; each time the Governor of Louisiana rejected the recommendation. He spent four decades in prison for a crime he did not commit until he was released in 2016. While in prison Tyler took up quilting to remain sane, hence the book’s title Stitching Freedom.
Capitalism: A Global History (New York: Penguin 2025) by Sven Beckert
The text of this book is 1,087 pages. The total book with references, footnotes, and index is 1,325 pages. It is too heavy to hold so you can only read from it if it is positioned on your desk. For global history teachers, it acts more as a reference encyclopedia rather than a book, but it is an incredibly valuable reference. Beckert argues that no phenomenon has shaped human history as powerfully as capitalism. He believes capitalism shapes every facet of human existence including work, leisure, politics, values, and self-definition. Rather than centering the history of capitalism in Western Europe, Beckert examines islands of capitalism emerging all over the world starting about 1,000 AD with the development of trading centers, markets, and long distance merchants. The book starts at the port of Aden on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula and ends as globalization transforms rural, previously isolated regions of Southeast Asia. Along the way we learn how capitalism reshapes the world with the conquest of the Americas, the trans-Atlantic trade in human beings and slave-produced commodities, the Industrial Revolution, and a “neo-liberal age” of unfettered borders and instantaneous electronic transfers of capital around the globe. Key to the development of capitalism is the alliance of producers and traders with states that facilitate commerce and industry. This massive work draws on archives from six continents and countless countries. Sven Beckert is a Professor of History at Harvard University.
PBS and Ken Burns have a new three-part series on the legacy of 19th century American philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau and his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” which inspired activists including Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The website includes a seven minute video and excerpts from the well-known essay.
Parts 1–2 work well as paired reading and analysis. Part 3 is designed for longer written responses or small-group discussion. Part 4 may be assigned as a take-home shot essay prompt. This worksheet is designed to serve as the capstone activity for a civil rights unit.
ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today)
Part 1
Thoreau & the Origins of Civil Disobedience
CONTEXT: In 1846, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax, was arrested, and spent a night in jail. He opposed both slavery and the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), which he saw as an unjust war designed to expand slavery itself. His 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” became the philosophical foundation for mass movements around the world.
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?… Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. – Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849
I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was still a more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. – Henry David Thoreau, regarding his night in jail
Questions: 1. Thoreau argues that “the true place for a just man” under an unjust government is prison. What does he mean? How can accepting imprisonment represent freedom rather than defeat?
2. Thoreau was upset not just with the federal government, but with Massachusetts (his home state), a state that claimed to oppose slavery but still collected taxes that funded it. What does his critique of complicity tell us about moral responsibility in a democracy? Is paying taxes that fund an unjust policy the same as supporting it?
3. Reportedly, when Thoreau was in jail, his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him and asked “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?” What argument is Thoreau making in this exchange? Why does he consider Emerson’s freedom to be a kind of imprisonment for his friend?
Part 2
Four Movements Comparing Civil Disobedience in Practice
REFERENCE TABLE: Use the comparison table and the core principles card to ground your analysis. Return to both as you work through each question.
Movement
Act of Disobedience
Unjust Law Targeted
Scale
Outcome
Henry David Thoreau 1846 United States
Refused to pay state tax; accepted one night in jail
Fugitive Slave Act; tax support of an unjust war
Individual
Essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849); philosophical foundation for all later movements
Mahatma Gandhi 1930 British India
Led 240-mile Salt March; thousands deliberately violated British salt law
British colonial salt monopoly
Mass Movement
Exposed colonial injustice globally; accelerated Indian independence (1947)
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1955–1968 United States
Sit-ins, marches, boycotts; Letter from Birmingham Jail written while imprisoned
Jim Crow segregation laws throughout the South
Mass Movement
Civil Rights Act (1964); Voting Rights Act (1965)
ADAPT Disability Rights Activists; 1990 United States
60 protesters crawled up 83 Capitol steps; arrested
Inaccessible built environment; no federal disability civil rights law
Organized movement
ADA signed July 26, 1990 four months after the Capitol Crawl
Thoreau’s Four Core Principles of Civil Disobedience
1. Break the unjust law publicly; The act itself is the argument made visible
2. Accept the legal consequences willingly; Punishment demonstrates the law’s injustice
3. Use sacrifice to awaken public conscience; Suffering must be made meaningful, not merely endured
4. Force systemic change through moral pressure; The goal is transformation of law or policy
Questions:
1. What core principles of civil disobedience remained unchanged across all four movements from Thoreau (1846) to the Capitol Crawl (1990)? Identify at least two that appear in every case and explain why those specific principles are essential to the strategy of Civil Disobedience.
2. Thoreau’s act was individual. Gandhi turned the principle into a mass movement. King organized city-wide boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. ADAPT mobilized a coordinated national campaign. What did each movement gain by expanding from individual to collective action? What did it risk losing? 3. Is individual civil disobedience one person refusing, accepting arrest, making a point politically effective on its own? Or does it require mass participation to force change? Explain your response.
Part 3
Conditions for Success: What Made Each Movement Effective?
ANALYTICAL FRAME: Effective civil disobedience does not operate in a vacuum. Timing, media coverage, public response, government reaction, and the clarity of the injustice being demonstrated all shape whether a movement succeeds or fails. Use the reading and the comparison table to analyze what specific conditions made each movement’s disobedience effective.
ANALYTICAL QUESTION COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS:
Compare the outcomes of at least two of the four movements identified above.
1. How did specific conditions, timing, public response, media attention, and government reaction make each form of civil disobedience effective?
2. Why did Thoreau’s individual act produce an essay rather than immediate political change? Why did the Capitol Crawl produce the ADA within four months?
3. Each of the four movements used protesters’ own bodies to make injustice visible: Thoreau in a jail cell, Gandhi marching to the sea, King’s marchers facing police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, disability activists crawling up the U.S. Capitol steps. Why is using the body itself as the instrument of protest so powerful? What does it communicate that speeches and petitions cannot?
4. King wrote in the ̈Letter from Birmingham Jail ̈ that direct action “creates such a crisis and fosters such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” How did each action or movement succeed in forcing confrontation?
Part 4
Synthesis: The Legacy of Civil Disobedience
CORE SYNTHESIS QUESTION: Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and ADAPT activists all believed that breaking an unjust law openly, accepting punishment willingly, and making injustice visible could lead to changing unjust laws. Their success proves that civil disobedience works under specific conditions. What are those conditions?
PERSONAL REFLECTION: Is there an issue today for you which civil disobedience: breaking a law publicly and accepting the consequences willingly would be justified? What would be required before you made your move?
Excerpts from Thoreau’s Essay on “Civil Disobedience.”
Excerpt 1: Thoreau Believed there is a Moral Obligation to Resist Unjust Laws
“He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist. How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ’75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is
most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”
Excerpt 2: Thoreau Rejected a Moral Obligation to Obey Authority
“[William] Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say that “so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of God… that the established government be obeyed, —and no longer. This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”
Note: William Paley was an 18th century British philosopher and theologian who argued that people had a duty to submit to government authority.
Excerpt 3: Thoreau Argued Against Waiting for Reforms that Might Never Happen
“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?”
Excerpt 4: Thoreau Advocated for Nonviolent Resistance
“One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again. If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth, — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
Excerpt 5: Thoreau Condemned the State’s Resistance to Change
As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not bear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is any change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body. I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.
Excerpt 6: Thoreau Believed in the Power of Truth and the Individual
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her – the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.”
Original and deeply researched, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700–1827 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) provides a new interpretation of Dutch American slavery which challenges many of the traditional assumptions about slavery in New York. With an emphasis on demography and economics, Michael J. Douma shows that slavery in eighteenth-century New York was mostly rural, heavily Dutch, and generally profitable through the cultivation of wheat. Slavery in Dutch New York ultimately died a political death in the nineteenth century, while resistance from enslaved persons, and a gradual turn against slavery in society and in the courts, encouraged its destruction.
This important study is expected to reshape the historiography of slavery in the American North. It joins several recently published works in the same subject area:
Twenty-five years before Frederick Douglass gave his famous “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” speech in Rochester, the enslaved population of New York contemplated a similar question as they prepared to celebrate the abolition of slavery, on July 4, 1827.
As communities across the state decorated to honor the birthday of the new nation, it became increasingly clear to the state’s Black communities that perhaps parading and celebrating in public space to honor their own freedom, had the potential to not end well if they did so on the 4th, the official day of the legal end of slavery in the state. They feared being attacked and suffering other types of violence from the White community because they too would call upon the words their enslavers had shouted so long ago.
They had waited 28 years for legal slavery to end, the time clock started in 1799 with the passing of the Act of Gradual Abolition, which gave no end date for their emancipation, but bound their unborn children to their mother’s enslavers until they were in their mid to late 20s. The Act that opened the way for their children, but not for anyone else. Those who toiled inside and outside for the benefit of others, would be left behind, to continue raising other people’s children, while theirs, at some point in the future could walk unfettered by the unseen, but ever-present chains they wore.
Then came the 1810 law that required the people holding those born free to teach them to read and write. This law was largely ignored, in spite of the fact that not doing so would allow those born free to see emancipation earlier at 18. Something that the New York Manumission Society helped a number of them do, by taking their enslavers to court and proving that at 18, they could neither read nor write. Then it was seven more years to get to the 1817 Act relative to Servants and Slaves that actually set a date for abolition, even though it was ten years in the future. It also pave the way for those born before July 4, 1799, and called “slaves” to be released. Finally, there was more than just hope.
But things rarely play out as smoothly as we would like. Weeks before the day was to arrive the conversations started happening. I imagine them beginning as whispered conversations, shared on the fly, when they were out and about working. Then in a somewhat louder voice when they were alone. Their conversations grew until preachers began talking about it. Up and down the road as they moved about, between those enslaved and those already freed, they continued.
They found themselves debating if it was wise for them to celebrate in mass on the official day, because it was the new nation’s birthday, and racism was increasingly a cause for worry as more and more were manumitted, and the presence of free Blacks walking the streets, starting businesses, living their lives began to grind on people’s nerves. Not to mention it had been against the law from the early 1690s for enslaved people to make noise on Sundays. It even appeared in the nation’s first Black owned newspaper which was published in New York City.
These conversations about when to celebrate happened years after many of them had overheard their enslavers talking about obtaining their freedom from Britain in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. Even as their enslavers tossed around words suggesting that they were being treated like slaves and would not have it, as if taxation without representation equaled being seen as property and not people. I imagine that many enslaved men who had replaced their enslavers on the battlefield thought about their own freedom for the eight years of the war. I’m sure they wondered if the promise of their own freedom given to them when they put on the uniforms, either red coats, or blue jackets, would truly play out.
During the war years as separation from Britain reigned supreme, the large population of enslaved had to manage not only their own lot in life, but the stress and anger of their enslavers who lost homes, crops, animals, stored food, family members, and even other enslaved as various parts of the state were burned out or stolen as troops from both sides, passed by or engaged in battle.
Years after in 1783, at end of the war when Loyalists and British troops were leaving New York, some enslaved may have begun grieving the loss of family or friends who did gain their freedom and may have been aboard one of the ships that took thousands of newly freed Black people from New York’s harbor to Nova Scotia and other ports on evacuation day. After all that time, the enslaved, longing to finally be free, found themselves debating whether it was safe for them to rejoice in their own freedom on the actual day it was given.
As we approach the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in New York on July 4/5 of 2027, many of us find ourselves contemplating some of the same thoughts the waiting to be free people of Albany and New York in general, did. Thinking on some of the sentiments Douglass shared in his 4th of July oration. Asking ourselves, what does the 4th of July mean to us? As my colleagues and I delve deeper into the mountains of documents related to the long history of chattel slavery in New York, and the cumbersome process of dismantling a portion of the institution of slavery, we find ourselves constantly amazed that so many people are still unaware of the deep roots slavery has in our state’s history.
Every once in a while, I find myself thinking that surely it is not so. To figure it out I began talks on occasion with a short three to five question survey. Answers given simply by raising a hand. Unfortunately, when I did this recently before giving an overview of Slavery in New York at Riverbank State Park, the audience of fifty or so people proved that things remained the same. That no matter if the audience is Black or White, or a mixture of our state’s wonderful cultural rainbow, the awareness of New York as a place of enslavement remains too hidden.
I can ask about the 1619 Project and people are aware of it, even if they have not read it. But if I ask when the first enslaved arrived in New Netherland, there generally is silence. I have learned to also ask them if they know what the original colonial name of New York was. Then I generally get a few hands, but not many. So, we are all clear, for years we danced around the year, finally settling on 1626, but after years of wondering, we know now that on August 29, 1627, 22 African men and women arrived in New Amsterdam on a Dutch privateer and became the first of the Dutch West India company’s slaves. We know the name of the ship and the circumstance surrounding how they ended up on a Dutch privateer. Currently we are awaiting the publishing of a paper that will also give us the name of the Portuguese ship they were taken from. Those 22 were part of a larger cargo of over 200 people headed to Brazil. Those 22 men and women were the first, but they would not be the last.
From that day forward, for 200 years, West Central, West, and Malagasy Africans would become the dominant labor force in the colony of New Netherland that would ultimately become the state of New York. Although this truth has been shared for years, it is still too common for people to say that slavery was not part of our state’s history. Part of that is due to the use of the word servant(s) instead of slave(s). In document collections across the state, in maps referring to burial grounds, the servants take up a lot of space. And with our love of British history, we imagine programs like Upstairs, Downstairs, or more recently Downton Abbey, where the servants are White making a decent wage, not enslaved Africans or their descendants. So, we read or listen to Douglass’ speech and say, well…it didn’t happen here. New York was a place of freedom, or a landmass that needed to be crossed to take people to the freedom they’d find in Canada. But it did. And it happened in Canada too.
The enslavement of thousands is only one part of the institution of slavery that graced New York. During the 200 years of forced servitude and long after 1827 ended the law of holding people as property, wealth flowed into the state as it had for decades because of the multiple economic links to the transatlantic slave trade, the ties that bound New York to the rest of the world. The wheat economy that was birthed in the 1630s with the establishment of Rensselaerwijck would spread southward down the Hudson River Valley and out to Long Island, and thousands of tons of wheat would flow from the harbors of New York to the Caribbean and West Indies to feed those bound to sugar and salt plantations. Money from the coffers of New York’s elite families would purchase sugar plantations in Jamaica, Barbados, and on other islands, and that wealth would create beautiful homes well into the 19th century like Hyde Hall on Glimmerglass Lake. As the years rolled along, enslaved from those sugar plantations would flow in and out of New York to serve in one way or another their enslavers or their relatives. Or to be sold, bequeathed or rented out, depending upon the need.
The ties to Southern tobacco and later sugar plantations that began during the Dutch period would continue to grow throughout the 200-year history, as people were brought directly from Africa and sold in the South, leaving New York City with the legacy of being the second largest slave market in the 13 colonies. And later in the 19thcentury, Brooklyn would flourish as more of that sugar would arrive to be processed there. As southern cotton expanded, after slavery had ended here, New Yorkers would build factories up and down the Hudson River for processing it. Political dances would be done, to hide the collusions between a free state and southern slavery. Profits would not be forfeited.
Insurance companies based in New York would grow bigger to cover cargo on ships flowing in and out including slave ships. More slave traders would move to New York, the ancestral home of many, in the early 19th century, where ships were easier to get and sail from the state’s harbors to the coasts of West Africa and even though they could not bring Africans into the US any longer, they were fine taking them into Cuba. Fine, until Lincoln finally said no more and the last of New York’s slave traders was hanged in 1861.
The New York Stock Exchange would grow out of these economic links to slavery, and more money would be made. Continuing the process began by the Dutch of individual investors, buying stock in the shipments, just one of many commodities on the world market. The underbelly of slavery would continue to grow fat, well past the years of Douglass’ speech and eventually the history of New York slavery would try to be buried in the early 20th century as the colonial revival period saw many people rewriting their family’s early stories, removing the names of women who raised children, or men who plowed fields, or just burn the wills to hide the numbers of people passed on. But even as hard as they tried, the history of slavery would not be buried for long. Bones were unearthed as villages grew into towns, then into cities and land, once considered worthless was needed. In the expansion, the presence of unmarked graves sent people to maps, which showed African burial grounds or Colored or Negro ones. But that would not stop the desecration. The projects would just move on with remains being dug up and discarded or just covered over.
The legacy of 200 years of slavery has increasingly caught up with many, as more people delve into their family histories and find that their ancestors were not as pristine as once believed, and the money they bequeathed across the generations came tainted with blood, sweat and a lot of tears. Or they run into someone with the same last name but not the same color skin which has resulted in the messages on many DNA companies which inform people of that before they are shocked by the discovery of who they really are.
What to the slave is the 4th of July is a question that haunts us even today, as we are challenged by the rewriting of our nation’s history by those who live in a settler’s colonized world. The foundation of our nation did not bypass New York. And, it reminds us daily that our state was built on a slave society even as we try to pretend, we were a society with just a few slaves.
2027 is just around the corner, and July 4th will echo Douglass’ time, and fall on a Sunday. A day sacred in its own right. And like the ancestors, across the state, including the folks right here in Albany, many of us will bypass it as the day to honor the abolition of slavery in New York, because well…some history does seem to repeat itself. And like them, we will take to the streets on Monday, July the 5th, and we will listen as bells ring in the air and from our hands at 12:00 noon, for one minute, to remind those who know, and educate those who do not, that slavery was part of New York’s history, and it will never be forgotten again.
Review by Linda Rice (reposted from the Journal of the American Revolution)
Set in New York at the time of the American Revolution, Chains spans May 27, 1776 to January 19, 1777. As the novel opens, the young teenage protagonist, Isabel, is optimistic about her future as her owner, Miss Mary Finch, has died and had let Isabel know beforehand that she and her five-year old sister Ruth would be free upon her passing. Unfortunately, no lawyer is present to produce the will that shows Miss Finch’s wishes. Mr. Robert Finch, Mary’s nephew and only surviving relative, has come to claim Isabel and Ruth and accuses Isabel of lying about the will. He proceeds to sell Isabel and her sister to Elihu and Anne Lockton from New York. The couple are Loyalists, and while Mrs. Lockton treats Ruth as a kind of pet that she shows off to friends she entertains, she treats Isabel, whom she refers to as “Sal,” in a harsh and degrading fashion, always showing her disfavor.
Isabel has two aims: to protect her sister and to gain freedom. She lives in fear that the Locktons will sell Ruth and thus separate them. At one point Mrs. Lockton provides sweets to them, something that was unusual. But she had laced them with something to make Isabel fall into a deep sleep. When Isabel awakens she learns that Mrs. Lockton has sold Ruth into slavery in the West Indies. This crushes Isabel, who is unable to escape due to constant monitoring by the Locktons.
While doing errands in town for Mrs. Lockton, Isabel meets Curzon, a teenage slave of Mr. Bellingham, a Patriot. Curzon asks Isabel if she would be willing to spy on the Locktons to get information to the Patriots. Initially Isabel refuses but then begins doing so. Mrs. Lockton finds out and punishes her by branding her cheek with an “I” for “insolence.” It takes Isabela six days to regain consciousness after the branding.
Mrs. Lockton makes Isabel care for Lady Seymour, Elihu’s aunt, who lives in town. As Isabel goes to town she is able to deliver messages about Loyalist activities to the Patriot soldiers. Lady Seymour has compassion for Isabel, treating her with kindness and feeding her well. Her house burned in the great fire of New York (September 21, 1776), and Isabel saves her as well as a portrait of her husband and some letters that were dear to her. This becomes important late in the book as Lady Seymour, then an invalid and unable to speak, gestures to Isabel that she approves of her taking coins that she had saved.
The Locktons don’t recognize Isabel as intelligent, which works to her advantage when she is in the room delivering food or waiting for orders when Mr. Lockton is talking with other Loyalists. Isabel learns of the plot to kill Gen. George Washington and shares this with Patriots who come and arrest Mr. Lockton. However, he is soon released and later escapes by hiding in a barrel of cheese. Readers learn that Ruth has not been sold to the West Indies but rather sent to Charleston, South Carolina. Isabel plots her escape for the night that people are distracted by a celebration of Queen Charlotte of Great Britain’s birthday. Though Mrs. Lockton had Isabel locked in a potato bin during the ceremonies, she manages to dig her way out, find a pass and forge papers showing she is free.
Curzon, who had fought in battle for the Patriots, was shot in the leg and held at Bridewell as a prisoner of war. Isabel is able to see him by bribing the guards with food. On the night of her escape, she goes to Bridewell and says she was sent to clean the cells where “prisoners been dropping dead like flies. Fever.” “Curzon lay insensible, his skin burning with fever, his eyes rolled up into his head. I called his name and pinched him, but he did not look my way nor speak a word.” Isabel claims Curzon is dead, loads him in a wheelbarrow and covers him with a filthy blanket. The two manage to make it to the wharf and to a boat. “I rowed that river like it was a horse delivering me from the Devil. My hands blistered, the blisters popped, they re-formed and popped again. I rowed with my hands slick with blood … The sun rose beyond the water, at the other side of the river. I was on the west bank. I was in Jersey. I had set myself free.” At this point Curzon awakes asking where they are, and Isabel replies “I think we just crossed the river Jordan.” The book ends with Isabel asking Curzon if he can walk and with an advertisement for the sequel Forge that gives the account of Isabel Gardner (formerly Sal Lockton) and companion Curzon Bellingham.
The first teaching strategy for Chains is a set of ten questions designed to guide students in a close reading and deeper study of the novel. These questions may be used as the basis of class discussions, exams or essays.
Questions for Study and Discussion for Chains 1. How do Isabel’s and Curzon’s views of freedom differ in chapter 6? Also consider whether this changes as the novel progresses. 2. What evidence exists that Mr. Lockton is conspiring against the Patriots? Trace his journey from the point that he is arrested to the last mention of him. 3. In chapter 29 Isabel speaks of being “chained between two nations.” What does this mean? 4. Isabel’s grandfather speaks to her about the river Jordan in chapter 26, and in the last paragraph of the book, Isabel states “I think we just crossed the river Jordan.” What is the significance of the river Jordan?
5. Discuss the circumstances by which Isabel secures a copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in chapter 39. How does the pamphlet influence her in later chapters? 6. How does the author contrast Lady Seymour and Mrs. Lockton in chapter 41? 7. In what ways was the relationship between Isabel and Lady Seymour a reciprocal one where each benefited? Consider especially the events of chapters 31 and 44. 8. It may be said that at the time of Chains, both Isabel and America are rebellious, young, and conflicted. Explain. 9. Identify three scenes that you believe are the most important in Chains and explain why each is key to the novel. 10. The trilogy of which Chains is book one is called Seeds of America. What role do seeds play in the novel?
While these questions help to ensure close reading and provide opportunities to check for student understanding in a traditional way, the next activity engages students in a more creative, nontraditional manner as they use symbolic thinking and hands-on creativity.
Coat of Arms Overview and Instructions
A coat of arms is a visual design in the form of a shield, that goes back to Medieval days when families and communities used them to show their identity. The coat of arms includes a motto or slogan that captures the important essence of the family, nation, school, or in our case, Chains. A coat of arms can be elaborate, including features such as “supporters” (visuals on each side of the shield) and “toppers” (one or more visuals at the top such as a crest, torse, helmet, or crown).
This assignment consists of three parts: 1) Pre-writing via the writing frames for the coat of arms; 2) The visual coat of arms; 3) A paper that explains the symbols chosen in connection with the character the student chose from Chains.
Visual Coat of Arms
The slogan “Per Aspera ad Astra” is Latin for “Through hardships to the stars” which is why the top of the crest features stars. There are three stars, each with an initial, representing Isabel in the middle and Curzon and Ruth on each side. The pre-writing in Table 1 provides additional insights about the symbols and colors used in Isabel’s shield.
The White House has issued complaints about the history on display in our national museums, complaining that it is too negative, that it portrays the past as a place of hurt. Yet, I would argue that historians, those in the academic world, museum directors, and local historians have been doing their job — and doing it well.
I am a local historian in Ithaca, New York, writing mostly about the place where I live and the region that surrounds it. By listening and observing the work of others, I have learned about Rosie, a young immigrant woman who led a strike in 1913 in Auburn, New York. I have come to see H. H. Coleman as an inadvertent historian whose columns in the Colored American in the 1880s, described the social life of Black people in my town. I have learned about Juanita Breckenridge Bates who led the fight for suffrage in my town and the curious fact, that her husband, in 1917, forgot to turn over his ballot to affirm the fact that women should have the vote. I have learned about Lizzy the enslaved woman who was suddenly “disappeared” from her home in Caroline and sold in the south just as New York was passing a law in 1827 to abolish slavery in the state. I have come to know about Rev. Henry Johnson who brought the AME Zion church in Ithaca into being, but while lecturing around the state was beaten 17 times. I know that the first Jewish rabbi in Ithaca arrived in 1915 where he and his wife had a child; then moving on to Alabama his family was listed as having a child born in Ithaca — with Greece written in pencil above young David’s name, no one in Alabama knowing about Ithaca, New York.
Small things. But they tell a greater picture. That life in the past was not always a rosy place, that laborers had to strike for better working conditions, that Black people fled here and then away again because this was not far enough away from the federal marshals unleashed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. I learned that local women worked hard to achieve equality in the law by sending a petition to Albany in 1878 asking that the word male be removed from the state constitution, and that petition, while registered, was then deposited in the trash and never heard of again. So, the women had to go to work again to gain equal rights.
Opening up the faults of the past does not tear down our country but rather it aids us in rising above it. It allows us to see that we can change for the better, recognize our faults, and strive to bring about a pluribus unum. The truth of the past allows us to see that problems and faults can be overcome, that there are moral truths worth fighting for, that individuals matter. It is this diversity that has been uncovered over the past 50 years that has broadened our view of the past and is displayed in museums across the land.
This country was not a place of peace and harmony but a place where individuals had to step out of line to make “good trouble” to bring about necessary change. That story needs to be told ‘lest we believe that the past was unlike the present where there are tensions and contests and inequities that need to be resolved for this be a true democracy.
Historians are doing their job. It is now up to those in power and voters to see that where there is inequity we work for fairness, where there is harm, we bring balm, where there is strife we talk to each other to make the country and the world better places.
How Rightwing Money Tries to Shape the Teaching of American History
By Alan Singer
The Bill of Rights Institute sponsors events and provides scholarships for the annual conference of the National Council for the Social Studies. On the face of it, it seems innocuous, until you dig a little deeper. The NCSS sells sponsorships, display booths, and sessions that combined can cost a publisher or an organization almost $15,000 which it uses to cover the cost of the convention. At the 2024 NCSS National Conference in Boston, Bill of Rights Institute representatives conducted ten sessions. I have no idea what the Bill of Rights Institute actually pays, but I do know the money and their curriculum initiatives come from the rightwing Koch Foundation and its network of aligned organizations including Americans for Prosperity and the Stand Together Trust. In a 2017 interview with the conservative research group Accuracy in Academia, the President of the Bill of Rights Institute claimed it was working with “approximately one-quarter of the nation’s secondary school teachers in American history, civics, and social studies.”
Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the United States, is a $115 billion conglomerate that owns oil refineries and pipelines, markets oil, coal, and chemicals, wood pulp and paper. It uses the Koch Foundation and network to fund conservative causes including challenges to climate science, support for corporate tax cuts, and eliminating federal regulations and environmental controls. The Koch network channeled over $9 million to Project 2025 advisory groups. Other major financial backers of the Bill of Rights Institute include the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Bradley Impact Fund, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, all donors to the Heritage Foundation for creation of Project 2025. Much of that money was channeled through and the Donors Capital Fund.
In 2014, Bill Bigelow, writing for the Zinn Education Project, accused the Koch Brothers of trying to shape social studies curriculum through their Arlington, Virginia-based Bill of Rights Institute, founded in 1999. According to Bigelow, the Bill of Rights Institute’s tactics to infiltrate social studies include presentations at conferences, essay contests for students, and free seminars for teachers on topics like “Being an American,” “Preserving the Bill of Rights,” and “Heroes and Villains: The Quest for Civic Virtue.” Bigelow argued that their curriculum material “cherry-picks the Constitution, history, and current events to hammer home its libertarian message that the owners of private property should be free to manage their wealth as they see fit.” In one lesson students learn, “The Founders considered industry and property rights critical to the happiness of society.” Of course in many cases their belief in individual property rights included the right to enslave Africans and confiscate land from North America’s indigenous population. In his review of Bill of Rights Institute curriculum and background material, Bigelow found “nothing that could help teachers show students how race and social class shaped the U.S. Constitution” and “nothing that invites students to think about the Constitution from the point of view of anyone other than the elites who drafted it,” including the new nation’s enslaved population.
I attended a regional social studies council conference where a representative from the Bill of Rights Institute made multiple presentations including one on African American participation in the American War for Independence. The lesson plan and supplementary material is available of the Bill of Rights Institute’s website (https://billofrightsinstitute.org/lessons/paths-to-freedom-african-americans-and-the-revolutionary-war). With the Trump administration’s war on museum displays and social studies curriculum that portray negative aspects of U.S. history like the brutality of chattel slavery, I think it is a good example of how the Bill of Rights Institute skews the teaching of American history in line with patriotic history as championed by Project 2025 and the Trump administration’s The 1776 Report. This lesson acknowledges slavery but emphasizes, I believe incorrectly, how the American Revolution was a significant step towards emancipation using isolated examples to support its contentions. The reality is that with the development of the cotton gin in the 1790s and the expansion of cotton production and textile manufacturing at the start of the 19th century slavery in the United States expanded exponentially.
Excerpts from a statement by the Bill of Rights Institute followed by my comments in italics.
The resistance against Great Britain and the Revolutionary War inspired American colonists to think about their natural and constitutional rights. The language and principles of liberty, equality, and self-governance led White and Black Americans to question the institution of slavery and to challenge it more directly. Their diverse efforts led to the largest emancipation in world history at that time and freed an estimated 100,000 enslaved people.
This is misleading. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution challenged the existence of slavery in what would become the United States. A majority of the men who wrote both documents were slaveholders. A statement blaming the King of England for imposing the slave trade on British colonies was removed from the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution indirectly acknowledged the legitimacy of slavery with the three-fifth compromise and provisions for the capture and return of freedom-seekers.
Some colonists acknowledged the moral wrong of slavery while protesting British violations of their rights in the 1760s and 1770s. Pamphleteer James Otis wrote that, “The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.” Pennsylvanian Benjamin Rush wrote, “It would be useless for us to denounce the servitude to which the Parliament of Great Britain wishes to reduce us, while we continue to keep our fellow creatures in slavery just because their color is different from ours.” While some colonists addressed the contradiction of slavery and freedom, Black Americans challenged the institution.
Neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson freed enslaved Africans that they owned during their lifetimes. A 1773 letter written by Patrick Henry, who is remembered for declaring “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death,” is telling about the attitudes of white colonialists about the institution of slavery. In the letter, Henry wrote “Would any one believe that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by ye. general inconvenience of living without them.”
Enslaved persons appealed to revolutionary ideals to argue for their natural rights. In 1773, four enslaved persons in Massachusetts petitioned the legislature for their freedom “which, as men, we have a natural right to.” The following year, a group of enslaved men presented a freedom petition claiming their natural rights and right to consent. “We have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedom without being deprived of them by our fellow men.” The legislature did not yet act upon the petitions, but Black Americans continued to petition for their freedom during the war as did Nero Brewster and 19 other enslaved individuals in New Hampshire in 1779.
The petitions were almost always unsuccessful.Only one of the original thirteen colonies, Massachusetts, outlawed slavery. Most of the enslaved Africans emancipated during the war were emancipated by the British.
Once the Revolutionary War began in 1775 at Lexington and Concord, free and enslaved Blacks joined both the patriot and British sides. Several Black patriots fought bravely at the Battle of Bunker Hill alongside White soldiers, but General George Washington forbade their service in the Continental Army that fall. However, dire manpower needs caused Washington and Congress soon to reverse that policy. The differing states had varied recruiting policies during the war: only South Carolina and Georgia prevented all Blacks from serving. A total of 5,000 free and enslaved Blacks fought for the patriot side throughout the war.
After Lord Dunmore offered freedom to any enslaved Africans who escaped to the British lines, an estimated 20,000 former slaves fought for their freedom by joining the British. The most famous of these was Titus Cornelius, Colonel Tye, who initially fought with Virginia’s Ethiopian Regiment and later led the New Jersey region’s Black Brigade.
Three Pounds Reward – Run away from the subscriber, living in Shrewsbury, in the county of Monmouth, New Jersey, a Negroe man, named Titus, but may probably change his name; he is about 21 years of age, not very black, near 6 feet high; had on a grey homespun coat, brown breeches, blue and white stockings, and took with him a wallet, drawn up at one end with a string, in which was a quantity of clothes. Whoever takes said Negroe, and secures him in any gaol, or brings him to me, shall be entitled to the above reward of Three Pounds, proc. And all reasonable charges paid by John Corlis. Nov. 8, 1775.
The British consistently encouraged enslaved persons to escape to support the British war effort and disrupt the American cause rather than out of a sincere desire for Black freedom.
During peace negotiations George Washington demanded that the British return formerly enslaved Africans including people he claimed to own as contraband. The British refused and evacuated as many as 20,000 Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia and other parts of the British empire.
During the war, General Washington’s aides, John Laurens and his friend Alexander Hamilton, developed an emancipation plan. In 1779, Congress endorsed their plan to raise a contingent of 3,000 enslaved men in South Carolina and Georgia who would be granted their freedom in exchange for military service. The legislatures of those two southern states rejected the scheme because of their opposition to emancipation and to arming enslaved persons.
In November 1775, George Washington issued an order barring both free and enslaved Black men from serving in the colonial army. In January 1776, Washington permitted the enlistment of free Black men who already were serving in the army and in 1777, all free Black men were permitted to join. Only Rhode Island offered freedom to enslaved men who joined the army. In a letter to Laurens’ father, Washington explained his fear that if the colonists did not arm enslaved Africans and offer them freedom, the British would and the war could be lost. Despite Washington’s pragmatic change of position, the plan was never implemented.
Bill of Rights Institute Guiding Questions:
How did African Americans participate in the Revolutionary War?
How did their actions reflect a desire to enjoy their natural rights?
Objectives:
Students will be able to connect actions taken by African Americans during the Revolutionary War to an understanding of natural rights of equality and justice.
Students will summarize the main ideas of historic texts.
Students will create an argument supported by evidence from primary sources. How did African Americans participate in the Revolutionary War? How did their actions reflect a desire to enjoy their natural rights?
These materials are missing from the Bill of Rights Institute’s suggested documents.
A. This charge against the King of England was removed from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence before it was signed on July 4, 1776:“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither . . . Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has suppressed every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”
B. Boston King’s Escape to the British Lines (1779): “As I was at prayer one evening, I thought the Lord Heard Me, and would mercifully deliver me. [P]utting my confidence in him, about one o’clock in the morning, I went down to the river side and found the guards were either asleep or in the tavern. I instantly entered the water, but when I was a little distance from the opposite shore, I heard the sentinels disputing among themselves. One said, I am sure I saw a man cross the river. Another replied, there is no such thing. When I got a little distance from the shore I got down on my knees and thanked God for this deliver-ance. I traveled until five o’clock in the morning and then concealed myself until seven o’clock at night, when I proceeded forward thro’ brushes and marshes for fear of being discovered. When I came to the river, opposite Staten Island, I found a boat and altho it was near a whale-boat, I ventured into it and cutting the rope, I got safe over. The commanding officer, when informed of my case, gave me a passport and I proceeded to New York.”
C. Pennsylvania Gazette on April 12, 1780 reported on a Monmouth County raid led by Colonel Tye:On the 30th ult. a party of Negroes and Refugees, from the Hook, landed at Shrewsbury in order to plunder. During their excursion, a Mr. Russel, who attempted to make some resistance to their depredations, was killed, and his grandchild had five balls shot through him, but is yet living.” On September 9, 1780, Philadelphia Gazette reported: “One of these attempts (and one which very nearly proved successful) was made about the 1st of September, 1780, by a body of Refugees black and white, including among the former the mulatto leader known as “Colonel Tye.” The party made an unexpected attack on Huddy’s house, which was bravely defended by himself and a girl of about twenty years of age, named Lucretia Emmons. The house had been a station for a detachment of the militia, and fortunately the guard had left there several muskets, which the girl now loaded as rapidly as possible and handed to Huddy, who fired them successively from different windows, wounding several of the assailants and causing them to greatly overestimate the number of defenders. This caused them to shrink from further direct attack, and they then set fire to the house, which, of course, ended all hope of successful resistance on Huddy’s part, and seeing the flames beginning to spread, he, to save his house, agreed to surrender on condition that they would extinguish the fire, which terms they accepted.”
D. George Washington, while headquartered at Newburgh, New York, objected to British plans to evacuate formerly enslaved Africans as a violation of the provisional peace agreement and he sought to find and reacquire people he claimed as his own property. In an April 1783 letter to Benjamin Harrison, the Governor of Virginia, Washington wrote: “I transmitted the list of your Slaves to a Gentleman; a worthy active Man, of my acquaintance in New York and requested him to use his endeavors to obtain and forward them to you. All that can be done, I am sure he will do, but I have but little expectation that many will be recovered; several of my own are with the Enemy but I scarce ever bestowed a thought on them; they have so many doors through which they can escape from New York, that scarce any thing but an inclination to return, or voluntarily surrender of themselves will restore many to their former Masters, even supposing every disposition on the part of the Enemy to deliver them.”
E. Virginians Petition to Protect Slavery (1784):“Some men of considerable weight to wrestle from us, by an Act of the legislature, the most valuable and indispensable Article of our Property, our SLAVES by general emancipation of them. … such a scheme indeed consists very well with the principles and designs of the North, whose Finger is sufficiently visible in it. … No language can express our indignation, Contempt and Detestation of the apostate wretches. … It therefore cannot be admitted that any man had a right … to divest us of our known rights to property which are so clearly defined.”
F. Article in the New-York Packet, April 4, 1785:“It would be greatly injurous to this state if all the Negroes should be allowed the privileges of white men, unless there could be derived some possible means consistent with liberty, to separate them from white people, and prevent them from having any connection or intercourse with them . … [I]f they are emancipated on any other terms, it must be evident to the most common understanding, what will be the consequence in a short time; besides the shame we should most inevitably incur from a mixture of complexions, and their participating in government, … still greater consequence is to be dreaded, which is a total subversion of our liberties.”
G. Jupiter Hammon, poet and minister, was enslaved on Long Island. In 1786, he addressed this statement on slavery to the African population of New York State:“Now I acknowledge that liberty is a great thing, and worth seeking for, if we can get it honestly, and by our good conduct, prevail on our masters to set us free. That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white people, in the late war. How much money has been spent, and how many lives have been lost, to defend their liberty. I must say that I have hoped that God would open their eyes, when they were so much engaged for liberty, to think of the state of the poor blacks, and to pity us. He has done it in some measure, and has raised us up many friends, for which we have reason to be thankful, and to hope in his mercy.”
H. According to the Mount Vernon library, seventeen members of the Mount Vernon enslaved population, fourteen men and three women escaped, many to a British warship anchored in the Potomac River. Hercules Posey, George Washington’s cook, and Ona Judge, Martha Washington’s personal servant successfully escaped bondage during Washington’s Presidency while the family was in Philadelphia. They fled to freedom when Washington tried to rotate them back to Virginia to avoid Pennsylvania’s emancipation laws. Posey was later sighted in New York City. Frederick Kitt, who oversaw the executive residence in Philadelphia, placed an advertisement in the Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser offering a $10 reward for Judge’s capture. In 1847, The Liberator published a letter from Reverend Benjamin Chase describing a visit with Ona Judge Staines who was now elderly where she recounted her escape. From Philadelphia Judge secured passage on a ship bound for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A few months after arriving in Portsmouth, Judge was recognized by a friend of Martha Washington’s granddaughter and George Washington enlisted the customs collector there, a federal employee, in an unsuccessful effort to capture Judge. The runaway slave ad and The Liberator article are included on the Bill of Rights Institute web page as “Further Reading,” but not the letter from Washington to the Portsmouth Customs Collector.
I. Letter from President George Washington to Joseph Whipple, Customs Collector, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, November 28, 1796:I regret that the attempt you made to restore the girl (Oney Judge as she called herself while with us, and who, without the least provocation absconded from her Mistress) should have been attended with so little success. To enter into such a compromise, as she has suggested to you, is totally inadmissible, for reasons that must strike at first view: for however well disposed I might be to a gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of People (if the latter was in itself practicable at this Moment) it would neither be politic or just, to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference; and thereby discontent, beforehand, the minds of all her fellow Servants; who by their steady adherence, are far more deserving than herself, of favor. … If she will return to her former Service, without obliging me to resort to compulsory means to effect it, her late conduct will be forgiven by her Mistress; and she will meet with the same treatment from me, that all the rest of her family (which is a very numerous one) shall receive. If she will not, you would oblige me, by pursuing such measures as are proper, to put her on board a Vessel bound either to Alexandria or the Federal City.”
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