Community-Building in the History and Memory of Slavery in Dutch New York

Abstract

Looking at slavery from the perspective of the community breaks the representation of the enslaved as victims of a harsh system. Northern slavery especially has traditionally been depicted as a world in which the enslaved were totally isolated, rarely being more than two or three per household, with limited possibilities of contact with other individuals of the same culture. 1 Focusing on the community thus immediately restores enslaved people’s humanity and agency. One can see them as a group in which they are unfortunately seen as anonymous, except for those individuals who occasionally stand out in archival records, but in which they are willing to associate themselves and interact with one another. They can find comfort and relief despite their predicament. The existence of slave communities has been recognized since the 1970s and the publication of John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979) in which he advanced that the enslaved were able to maintain cultural traditions and used them as a form of passive resistance to slavery. 2 As Dylan Penningroth puts it, “Slave communities and families were tough, resilient havens that helped Black people survive the oppression of slavery and Reconstruction.” 3 If the concept has widely been studied for the Southern region, where enslaved people lived on plantations and were necessarily brought together, communities in the North 1. For such conclusions on Northern slavery see Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 123; John F. Watson, Annals and Occurrences of New York City and State, in the Olden Time: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents Concerning the City, Country, and Inhabitants, from the Days of the Founders . . . Embellished with Pictorial Illustrations (Philadelphia: H. F. Anners, 1846), 18. 2. See also George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972); and Charles W. Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). The concept of community was also developed about