Indenture of Bet, 1803 Analysis
ANALYSIS:
On the third line of this document the word “slave” is crossed out and replaced with the word “wench.” The error is mentioned in the postscript, as well, where it says “note the word slave in the third line from top erased before executed.” Both the initial error and the subsequent correction are telling of shifts in the institution of slavery in early 19th century New York and the subsequent effects that these shifts had on African descended peoples. In 1799, the New York state legislature passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. The law did not immediately free any enslaved people. Instead, it guaranteed that children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799 would be technically free but continue to live under their mother’s enslavers as indentured servants until they reached the age of 28 for males or 25 for females.
This legal sleight of hand extended slavery under other terms. It is no wonder, then, that only three years later the clerk wrote slave by accident but had to correct his error to align with the law. Though she was technically free Bet, only two years old at the start of her indenture, could have her indenture contract bought and sold and would be forced by law to follow where the contract went and abide by its rules. Indeed, on the back of the indenture which binds Bet to Tobias J. Ten Eyck as a housemaid in training, there is an additional note where her indenture is sold to a man named John S. Glen. It appears that a year after buying Bet’s indenture, Ten Eyck sold it again to Glen.
While there is record of the status of the free or enslaved status of many African descended people and who their indenturers or enslavers were there is little record of the effects that their sale had on their loved ones. It is difficult to imagine what Bet’s mother must have felt, knowing that her young child would be forcibly removed from her care. Or how must Bet have felt, young, scared, and confused, forced to work for strange people in a strange new place? Saidiya Hartman writes about these unknowable thoughts and feelings saying that they are stories “predicated upon impossibility—listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives” (“Venus in Two Acts,” 3). All we can do, she says, is “to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible” (11). In her book Bound by Bondage (2022), Nicole J. Maskiell attends to the grief of an enslaved family when she tells the story of Isabel, a enslaved girl who lived with her family on Livingston Manor until 1712 when they sent her to Boston to attend to Margaret, the Livingstons’ daughter, who was expecting her third child. Two years later, in a court record about an attempted murder on the manor, another enslaved man testified to Isabel’s father Ben’s grief over the loss of his daughter to Margaret in Boston. Ben is nowhere else recorded as Isabel’s father.
Records of parentage for enslaved people are often hard to find in the colonial archive but could mean the difference between freedom and enslavement for Black people in the colonial era. Later in the book Maskiell tells the story of Simon Moore, a Black apprentice to a merchant named William Paxton based in North Carolina. In 1749, Moore petitioned Paxton to be on the crew of a sloop he co-owned with the captain Samuel Bayard bound for New York. When the ship arrived in New York, Bayard enslaved Moore, claiming that he was collateral on a debt that Paxton owed him. For five years, Moore petitioned the court for his freedom. In his testimony there is another crucial error corrected. The court clerk writes, “This informant says he was born in Bath Town in North Carolina the son of Abraham and Mary Moore that his Father was Mother was a free Woman and born so, that his Father was not” (169). Again note the crossed out words and the correction; the difference between a free mother and free father is of utmost importance to Moore’s case. Hereditary slavery was the law of the colonies since it was passed in Virginia in 1662, meaning that if a person’s mother was enslaved then they were also enslaved. Returning to the stories of Isabel and Bet with this logic, Ben’s role as her father is less important to her enslavers than her mother Diana, because Diana was also enslaved and therefore passed down her status to her children. And though we do not know Bet’s mother’s name, we can assume she was enslaved as well based on the record of Bet’s indenture. In New York, Moore had to write letters to white neighbors in North Carolina to corroborate his mother’s freedom in order to escape Bayard’s clutches.
Isabel, Simon Moore, and young Bet were all caught up in the relentless system of enslavement that stretched throughout the colonial Americas. Their stories are worth telling for all of their brevity in the historical record, even as we grapple with the impossibility of recovering more of their voices.
For more information about slavery in the northern colonies visit:
https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-north-and-slavery/
For more information about sites of enslavement in the North visit:
https://dyckmanfarmhouse.org/initiatives/northern-slavery-collective/
