By Richard Tomzack On Tuesday, May 21, 1765, an enslaved African American named Will escaped the estate of Jacob Dyckman in Kingsbridge, New York. Taking nothing but his clothes, described by Dyckman as a “blue Broad Cloth Coat,” and “Homespun Trowsers, a Beaver Hat, halfworn, with a hole through the rim,” Will made his escape under the cover of darkness. Like many of the 10,000 enslaved individuals living in the province of New York, Will had been bought and sold multiple times, passing from the ownership of both the Alsop and Keteltas families in New York City, before Jacob Dyckman purchased him and relocated him to his property in Kingsbridge. Will undoubtedly understood the perils of his decision to break his chains of bondage, especially under the cover of night. Just two decades earlier, the New York Common Council had ratified a slave code that made it illegal for any “Negro, Mullato, or Indian Slave” to walk the “Streets of this City, above an hour after Sun-set without a candle and Lanthorn.” The Council further clarified that the sun-down restriction could result in “being Whipt at the Publick Whipping Post.” Despite the Dyckman’s location north of city boundaries, Will’s prior enslavement in New York City would have provided him with the insight that his flight would result in physical punishment and a symbolic demonstration of the law. Perhaps skirting the High Road to New York through the forested hills of Manhattan Island, Will ventured south into the city limits. One week later, a fugitive slave ad published in the New York Gazette specified that Will was last seen at the Whitehall. From there, the document trail disappears, and Will’s fate is unknown.

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

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

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

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

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

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