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Maskiell, “Slavery Among Elites in Colonial BOUND BY BONDAGE: SLAVERY AMONG ELITES IN COLONIAL MASSACHUSETTS AND NEW YORK A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Nicole Saffold Maskiell May 2013 0 © 2013 Nicole Saffold Maskiell 0 BOUND BY BONDAGE: SLAVERY AMONG ELITES IN COLONIAL MASSACHUSETTS AND NEW YORK Nicole Saffold Maskiell, Ph. D. Cornell University 2013 This study compares the ways that slavery shaped the elite cultures of colonial Massachusetts and New York by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved. It is anchored around three main family groups: the Stuyvesants, Bayards, and Livingstons. Although most works concerning these families remain largely rooted in colonial New York, this study seeks to follow these families’ wider diasporic networks, especially their connections to the elites of colonial Massachusetts. As such, this dissertation is comparative as well as Atlantic in focus. The comparative aspect flows out of its central focus on elite families and thus necessitates the shedding of modern boundary lines between colonies, allowing the porous nature of elite slave contacts to emerge and resurrecting a very different early modern landscape. Instead of focusing on the small individual slaveholdings of most northern elites, it highlights slaveholding across family units, which offers a more comprehensive view of the cultural impact of slavery. Even as slavery disrupted the personal and family lives of enslaved Africans and Indians, it created a common slave culture and knit together Dutch merchant families with New England’s ministerial elite, cementing Atlantic alliances that crossed contested colonial lines. Although this project is racial and gendered at its heart, it seeks to question the “natural communities” that have been constructed in scholarly works. Thus, instead of solely excavating 0 the lives of the enslaved, it emphasizes the effects that their lives had on the worldview of those who held them in bondage. Rather than addressing the experiences of enslaved African and Indians separately, it analyzes them as overlapping experiences. It examines the development of a mistress culture among elite northern women and revises the prevailing scholarly image of the overwhelmed Northern goodwife, whose husband bequeathed her a large number of enslaved men and women. It explores the ways in which the religious experience of elite families was interconnected and profoundly shaped by the culture of slavery and the development of systems of reciprocity and gift exchange between elites based on slavery. 1 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Nicole Saffold Maskiell, a native of Oak Park, Illinois, and a 1998 graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, received her AB cum laude from Harvard College in 2002. She began her graduate studies under the principal advisement of Mary Beth Norton at Cornell University in 2007, receiving her MA in 2010 and her PhD in 2013. iii To my family iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A myriad of friends and family joined forces to make sure this dissertation transitioned from idea to reality. To acknowledge everyone with the space that they deserve would require a second dissertation length project. What follows is but a paltry offering in the face of all of the support I have received. I must, before anyone else, thank my advisor, Mary Beth Norton, for her tireless support. She has been a rigorous reader, an ardent cheerleader, a financial backer and a peerless advocate. Words fail in my expression of gratitude for such a labor of mentorship. I can only hope that my own career lives up to a tenth of that of the world class historian who inspired me through graduate school. I am proud to be known as one of “Liberty’s Daughters.” My other committee members, Robert Travers (whose history course on the British Empire that I took as an undergraduate left an indelible mark) and Duane Corpis helped me navigate graduate life and never failed to challenge me to look deeper into my subject. I am grateful to them for all the time and effort spent reading through my dissertation and providing helpful feedback to hone my ideas. My Dutch language instructors Martijna Briggs and Chrissy Hosea spent countless hours teaching me a language that I had no knowledge of before beginning my graduate program. Chrissy patiently helped me also gain some knowledge of early Modern Dutch, introduced me to paleography, pointed me in the direction of the fabulous Colombia Reading Dutch 17th-Century Texts workshop, and painstakingly walked me through the documents that I brought back from my research trips. The support and tireless effort of my writer’s group was essential: Maeve Kane, Abigail Fisher, and Mari Crabtree read drafts and offered moral support through the hills and valleys that v demarcate graduate life. Words can never express just how essential they were to making this project take form, and I will be forever in their debt. I was humbled by the outpouring of financial support that I received throughout this dissertation project, without which none of the archival research trips would have been possible. Early in my research, Professor Michael Kammen offered me encouragement and the Farr Fellowship that helped me to travel to the Netherlands to do research. The Cornell University Mario Einaudi Center’s International Studies Travel Grant allowed me to travel to Curaçao and research at the National Archives. The U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship offered me the time to gain the language skills necessary to pursue a Dutch Atlantic topic. The financial support and research help that I received at the Gilder Lehrman collection on deposit at the New-York Historical Society was invaluable to my research. Reference librarian Alyson Barrett-Ryan helped me find numerous documents and make the most of the collection. Ted O’Reilly, reference librarian at the New-York Historical Society directed me to the John Tabor Kempe and Alexander Papers that were invaluable to my project. The resources I found at the Cambridge Historical Commission, the Massachusetts Archives, and the Huntington Library proved instrumental in fleshing out the larger world of elite Massachusetts slaveowners. My time at the Huntington Library would not have been possible without the generous support of the Huntington Meyers Short-Term Fellowship. I would like to also thank the Boston Colonial Society for inviting me to give a paper that explored the then-nascent ideas which became chapter five. During my writing years, Jeroen Dewulf at UC Berkeley gave freely of his time to listen to my ideas and always generously pointed me towards wonderful Dutch resources on the West Coast. vi My parents, Monroe and Patricia Saffold, inspired my zeal for uncovering the past. They have supported every bend in the road, giving me a gift of love that can never be repaid. My brother, Brian, has always been there to listen to my ideas—no matter how bizarre—and dream alongside me. Finally, my husband Bill offered countless hours of reading and re-reading every conference paper and dissertation chapter. He was there on that windswept fall morning in Cambridge during my sophomore year of college when I stumbled upon the gravestone of Cicely, late servant of ye Reverend William Brattle, and has been my champion every step of the way. He traveled across the world with me, hunting down the lives of elites and the more elusive lives of their slaves, and poured over reams of seventeenth and eighteenth century documents. Through triumph and shattering personal tragedy, he remained a boundless font of love and encouragement. Bill, my heart, this dissertation would never have been completed were it not for you. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch ..................................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents....................................................................................................................................................... viii List of Figures ...............................................................................................................................................................ix List of Abbreviations ..................................................................................................................................................... x Introduction “They can never embody with us”: The centrality of the enslaved to the narrative of colonial Massachusetts and New York ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 “Together in the Heavenly City:” Elite ties, enslaved lives ....................................................................... 28 1.1 The First Sight of Land: Tracing the Stuyvesant-Bayard family slaveholding network .................................... 29 1.2 A Tangled Web: The Livingston family’s inter-colonial slaveholding ties ....................................................... 49 1.3 “Our poor slaves”: Slavery and Massachusetts’s elite intellectual culture ........................................................ 66 1.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................
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