Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Dataset CreatorsChristopher A. Barnes, Adelphi UniversityThis dataset contains records of enslaved African Americans manumitted between 1797 and 1825 by residents of Kings County, New York, better known today as the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The Borough of Brooklyn and Kings County are coterminous now, but Brooklyn was originally called Breuckelen, one of six towns founded by Dutch and English settlers in the seventeenth century on the lands of the Lenape at the western end of Long Island (see fig. 1).1 First a town, then a city, by the end of the nineteenth century Brooklyn swallowed up the other independent municipalities within Kings County and became a borough of New York City in 1898.2 Today the other five towns–Bushwick, Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, and New Utrecht–are remembered in the names of neighborhoods, streets, and subway stops located within their former borders. What is too often forgotten, however, is that these towns were heavily agricultural and the predominantly Dutch landowners relied on the labor of thousands of enslaved people to operate their farms.Although it may be hard to picture now, the densely populated urban spaces of Brooklyn and Queens were covered by fertile farmland for hundreds of years before the modern cityscape was created at the beginning of the twentieth century.3 First as the Dutch colony of New Netherland and then as the British colony of New York, the institution of slavery was integral to the region’s economic and cultural development.4 Recent research has revealed that the first enslaved Africans arrived in Manhattan on August 29, 1627.5 Their numbers and the demand for their labor increased exponentially over the course of the next 150 years, both in the city and the surrounding counties. By the end of the American Revolution, the State of New York had the fifth largest population of enslaved people in the new nation, and their number continued to rise through the 1780s.6In Kings County the enslaved population quadrupled between 1703 and 1790.7 Fully one third of its population was enslaved at the end of the war and it had relatively the smallest community of free Blacks of all New York counties (see Table 1).8 The farmers of Kings County also enslaved the largest numbers of people per household, with ten or more not uncommon. In terms of the percentage of households with enslaved laborers, at nearly 40 percent, Kings County outranked South Carolina, North Carolina, and Maryland.9 New York City itself was no less noteworthy for the size of its enslaved population. When the African American community celebrated Emancipation Day on July 5, 1827, marking the final stage of the state’s gradual emancipation process, their city contained the largest number of enslaved people outside of the South.10The farms of Kings County were smaller than Southern plantations and farmers typically enslaved fewer people, but slavery was no less integral to its economy and society. Rather than comparing raw numbers of enslaved individuals, “it is far more important to note that Kings County’s elite held Africans as their major investment, [and] that wealth could be measured more accurately in people than in land.”11 Most members of that elite were descendants of Dutch families who had settled on western Long Island and Staten Island in the seventeenth century, and historians have long noted their association with the retention and defense of slavery in the region.12Given the long history and centrality of slavery to the Dutch and English farmers of Kings County, it is no surprise that they and their elected representatives were among the most vociferous opponents to abolishing slavery in the state during the 1780s and 1790s.13 They and their fellow enslavers successfully delayed the passage of a gradual abolition bill until 1799; the law that was passed included various elements added to benefit them.14 As the first column of Table 1 shows, between 1791 and 1801 the number of enslaved individuals in Kings County actually increased, even though their percentage of the overall population decreased. The vast majority of manumissions in Kings County occurred after the passage of the 1799 gradual abolition law.The independent towns and cities of Kings County maintained their own records until they became part of Brooklyn and New York City. The records from all of these “old towns” are part of the same archival collection. Known as the Old Town Records collection, they were accessioned by the New York City Municipal Archives (NYCMA) in the twentieth century; most were digitized only recently. In 2021, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission gave NYCMA a grant to process, digitize, and describe all 187 volumes of the collection. Now complete, this project has made these records publicly accessible through the NYCMA Digital Collections website. The Old Town Records collection “contains administrative records, court records, financial records, land records, voting records, tax records, military records, records documenting enslaved people, and municipal infrastructure records, among other record types, circa 1630-1943.”15Records documenting births, abandonments, and manumissions constitute the majority of the materials relating to enslaved people, but there are a few records concerning sales and court proceedings as well.16 The record books from the Town of Gravesend contain records of births and abandonments but not manumissions, so this dataset only includes information from the other five towns in Kings County. The relevant records primarily date from the end of the eighteenth century through the 1820s and contain information including the enslaved individual’s name, age, and gender, as well as the identity of their enslaver. The race or color of the enslaved person was sometimes recorded, as was their trade and the name and occupation of their enslaver. Some records also provide us with additional information about family members or the circumstances of the manumission. All of this data can be valuable to historians and genealogists attempting to find records of these manumitted individuals in their new lives as free people.Manumission was the legal means by which an enslaver could grant a person their freedom. The terms and steps of the manumission process were dictated by the slave codes in effect at the time. Many manumissions would explicitly reference the law that governed their legality, and the two that are mentioned in the Old Town Records are New York’s 1788 “Act Concerning Slaves” and the 1799 “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” Prior to the 1788 law, enslavers who wished to manumit someone had to put up a sizable bond as insurance should the emancipated individual not be able to support themselves or otherwise become a burden on the community. The “Act Concerning Slaves” provided a pathway to legal manumission that did not require the enslaver to post a bond, but that individual needed to obtain the signatures of multiple elected officials attesting to the enslaved individual’s ability to provide for themselves.17 The “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” passed on 29 March 1799, made it even easier to manumit enslaved individuals. More importantly, the law also declared that “any child born of a slave within this state, after the fourth of July next, shall be deemed and adjudged to be born free.”18 While free, these children were required to serve their mother’s enslaver until the age of 28 for men and 25 for women.The earliest manumission contained in the Old Town Records is dated March 4, 1797; it references the 1788 slavery law and includes the signatures of three justices of the peace, two overseers of the poor, and the town clerk who entered the manumission certificate into the record book for the Town of Brooklyn. Cesar or Ceaser Foster, a butcher about twenty-three years of age, was manumitted by his enslaver, a Quaker butcher named John Doughty who also happened to be the Brooklyn town clerk at the time. Doughty wrote down Foster’s trade when he entered the manumission into the town record book (see Image 1),19 making him the only emancipated individual in the dataset whose occupation is listed. The vast majority of those enslaved in Kings County worked as agricultural laborers or domestic servants, but we know that there were many African Americans who knew a trade, especially in the more urban parts of Brooklyn. Knowing a skilled trade would give Foster a major advantage in his new life as a free man. It may also make it easier to learn more about what he did after being manumitted. Some research reveals that there was a free person of color named Cesar Foster living and working as a butcher in Albany in 1815.20 Could this be the same person?The 1820 US Census lists a Black man named Ceasar Foster living with a woman and a male child under the age of 14.21 Foster was “about twenty-three years” old at his manumission in 1797, so he would be about forty-six years old in 1820. Based on the age range recorded by the census taker, 26-44, and the uncertainty about his exact age, this could be the same man who was manumitted in Brooklyn twenty-three years earlier. Did he move to Albany and open his own butcher shop sometime before 1815? Does the 1820 US Census of Albany find him living with his wife and son as a free man? More research is needed to determine if these two men are the same Cesar Foster, but such genealogical possibilities are the reason this project has focused on manumissions.22 The births and abandonments also contained in the Brooklyn Old Town Records will be the subject of a future dataset.Beyond Cesar Foster, there is reason to believe that many of the other individuals and families can also be found in their post-manumission lives. All of the 149 individuals are named, which is not always the case, and 41 of them have a surname included. Some of them bear the same surname as their enslaver, as is the case with two other people manumitted by the Doughty family. Lucrecia and Nicholas Doughty were manumitted by Charles Doughty on the same day in 1799 and their manumissions, like Foster’s, were recorded by the town clerk, John Doughty. The surnames listed for the other emancipated individuals are different from those of their manumitters. There are also at least three families who were manumitted together, meaning there is a good chance that some of them remained together and were recorded by a census taker as living in the same household. One of these families has a surname, Porter. In May of 1819 Abigail Porter was manumitted with her son Jack, between four and five years old, and her son Benjamin, between two and three years old. Their enslaver was a Brooklyn farmer named George Powers Junior. Knowing the name, town, and occupation of this family’s enslaver can potentially reveal the geographic location where Abigail was enslaved and where her two sons were likely born. Maps of the era show the owners and locations of farms, meaning that descendants of the Porters could determine the place in modern-day Brooklyn where their ancestors lived and began their lives as free people.The dataset contains a total of 134 manumissions from Kings County, which emancipated 149 individuals. Most records contain information about those being manumitted, their enslaver, and the judgment of the town’s overseers of the poor that they are not elderly or unable to care for themselves. But there are some special cases that offer additional details about the forms manumission could take in the lived experience of the enslaved. One record documents the purchase of a girl named Hannah (PER-EMAN-BOTR-Brooklyn-016) in 1806 and the enslaver’s promise to manumit her fourteen years later. In 1809 another woman named Hannah (PER-EMAN-BOTR-Brooklyn-030) was promised her freedom in ten years but only, as her enslaver stipulated, “on condition of her serving me or my family faithfully during that term of time.” We cannot know if those enslaved people who were manumitted via will at the death of their enslaver were informed that they would be freed, but the dataset contains three such deeds of manumission,23 emancipating seven people in total. Some people who were manumitted by residents of Kings County were laboring in neighboring counties, presumably having been leased out to work.24Finally, one manumission in the dataset serves as a reminder that enslaved African Americans in Kings County could have their dreams of freedom shattered if the overseers of the poor ruled against them. The law required the overseers of the poor for every town to examine each manumitted individual to determine if they could provide for themselves. The goal was to prevent enslavers from manumitting the elderly, disabled, or those who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and require public assistance. The vast majority of manumissions in the dataset contain the signature of at least one overseer of the poor, usually two, attesting that the individual being manumitted is under 45 or 50 years of age and appears to be “of sufficient ability to care for” themselves. But we have no record of those enslaved individuals who were denied their freedom because the overseers of the poor deemed them likely to become a financial burden on the town. There is one exception, however, because at least one enslaver challenged the ruling of the overseers of the poor in court and won the case, granting a woman named Jane her freedom (EVE-MANU-BOTR-New_Utrecht-004).At the county courthouse in Flatbush in the spring of 1820, “in the matter of Albert Van Brunt on an Appeal from the Judgment of the Overseers of the Poor of the Town of New Utrecht,” the three judges overruled the overseers. They found that Jane (PER-EMAN-BOTR-New_Utrecht-004) to be “under the age of forty five years and of sufficient ability to maintain herself.” The court ordered her immediately manumitted and the record was signed by the clerk of the court and the clerk of the town. How many enslaved people were denied their freedom by the overseers of the poor? While we may never know the number of those people, or their names, the 149 people who were successfully manumitted in Kings County will now be discoverable on Enslaved.org.2024EnglishNew York1797-1825Civil DocumentSale or TransferBrooklyn Old Town records, Old Town records collection, RG 096, MSS-0004, New York City Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records & Information Services, https://nycrecords.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/SO_01284b10-107e-477d-ac25-f2d40f6298f8/The data in this dataset was extracted from the digitized versions of the record books for individual Kings County towns available online at the NYCMA website as part of the Old Town Records Collection.25 Record books containing information concerning enslaved people were identified by reviewing the record books and their finding aid descriptions. Record books from Brooklyn, Bushwick, Flatbush, Flatlands, and New Utrecht were found to contain a mixture of records documenting births, abandonments, and manumissions. Due to the large number of enslaved individuals identified in the record books, the decision was made to focus on a subset of them for this project. Given their genealogical possibilities, manumissions were selected as the focus of the project. The birth and abandonment records for an individual are often found together in the record books, lending further support for processing them separately from the manumissions.Spreadsheets were created using the categories and controlled vocabulary employed by Enslaved.org. Since manumissions were the subject, the EVENT template was deemed primary and each manumission was given a unique identifier. Each row represents an individual involved in the manumission. Some manumissions include only three individuals–the manumitter, the emancipated person, and the town clerk–but most also include one or two overseers of the poor and one or two witnesses. Creating an entry for every person mentioned in the manumission record provides more granular information for researchers and may facilitate analysis of the subject by genealogists and historians.Information was transcribed verbatim and there were no indecipherable names or words. Transcription was easier for records from Brooklyn, Flatbush, and New Utrecht because the originals had already been transcribed or “translated” into more legible script at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Alternate Names field contains spelling variations contained within the manumission record itself, as well as titles (e.g., Judge, Major), prefixes (e.g., Dr.), and suffixes (e.g., Esq., Jr., etc.). Some name variations may have resulted from the earlier transcription efforts for Brooklyn, Flatbush, and New Utrecht. The date of the record was listed under Start Date and the race or color of the emancipated person was transcribed verbatim when included in the record.The Description field was used to identify non-standard or noteworthy manumissions, such as those that occurred via will at the death of the enslaver or when a family was emancipated together. The Notes field contains verbatim transcriptions of the relevant portions of non-standard manumissions as well as additional explanations of potentially confusing elements.After the digital transcription process, the information in the dataset was compared with an earlier article attempting to document these records and publish the names of the individuals manumitted and those of their enslavers. In “Manumissions in Kings County, N.Y, 1797-1825,” Kenneth Scott provides a list of all the people he was able to find manumitted in the record books from Brooklyn, Bushwick, Flatbush, and New Utrecht.26 Evidently unable to locate or access the relevant record book from Flatlands, Scott’s list of manumissions is incomplete. Scott also considered abandonments to be a form of manumission and included the names of abandoned infants as well. In actuality, all of those abandoned were technically born free and held the status of indentured servants according to the 1799 gradual abolition law, so the records of their abandonment should not be treated as manumissions.Dataset Repository: Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MLZHJZEnslaved.org Linked Data Representation: https://enslaved.org/visualizedata?type=Dashboard&field=po&proj=brooklyn+old+town+records+collection
Author: Christopher A. Barnes
Institution: Adelphi University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4411454809