by Debra Bruno

He was captured from Madagascar when he was an adolescent, brought to New York, and enslaved in the Hudson Valley. With such an inauspicious beginning, few would have expected that the man who became Pieter Christiaan would have the temerity to shake up 18th century life in the tiny frontier village of Loonenburg on the west bank of the Hudson River. 

In fact, Christiaan’s life serves as a good lesson that stereotypes about the enslaved and what their lives might have been after their emancipation were often wrong. 

There are very few references in early literature of the enslaved and formerly enslaved having this kind of large impact on a community of what was probably only a few hundred people. When the enslaved appeared on records, those references often referred to criminal acts such as theft or arson, or the occasional slave bequeathed by name in the will of an enslaver. 

That’s why the Albany Protocol, the journal kept from 1731 to 1750 by pastor Wilhelm Christoph Berkenmeyer, is an invaluable window into early church life, slavery, the colonial world, and what became of the people who managed to achieve their freedom, especially the man who became his nemesis, Pieter Christiaan. Berkenmeyer was the second pastor of Zion Lutheran Church, which had been established in the village as early as 1703. In its earliest days, church services were held in the homes of the village’s founding families. Although Dutch Reformed churches dotted the Hudson Valley, Loonenburg, which later became Athens, didn’t incorporate a Dutch Reformed Church until 1826.

Berkenmeyer’s journal was remarkable in its honest reporting on the challenges he faced with townspeople who found him intolerant and arrogant, even noting his ongoing feuds with the Christiaan family. Berkenmeyer was a multi-lingual scholar with a library of hundreds of books who suddenly found himself in a place where he had to badger the townspeople to build him a home and supply him with enough wood for his hearth. In his journal, he struggled with the question of where to seat the enslaved during church services – his preference was up front unless a white person might need the seat – and what to do about the babies born out of wedlock in Loonenburg, both those of the enslaved and those of white families. 

At the same time, Pieter Christiaan seemed to have been his biggest headache. Whether this story, with details that resemble moments in a reality TV show, represents an anomaly or a clue to the agency of those people brought to America against their will is hard to know. The saga is nonetheless a fascinating look into life in a frontier village and its relationship to slavery. 

It’s unclear how long Christiaan had lived in Loonenburg before he was freed by his enslaver, Jan Van Loon, the founder of the village. The first time he showed up in the records was Jan. 27, 1712, when “Pieter, negro, about 30y old” was baptized by Zion Lutheran’s first pastor, Justus Falckner and described as the “slave of Jan Van Loon.” While enslaved people were sometimes baptized, what happened next was far more unusual. Two years later, in 1714, he was married by a traveling German pastor, Rev. Joshua Kocherthal, to a German widow named Anna Barbara Asmer. Interracial marriages were more uncommon than emancipation, and it’s unclear whether Christiaan had been emancipated at that point. 

Within two years, Christiaan’s first wife was dead, and in February 1716, he married another German woman named Elisabeth Brandemoes. One month after their marriage, the couple baptized their first child, Anna Catharina. Over the next twenty years, they brought a total of eleven children to be baptized in Zion, ending with the December 1740 baptism of Eva.

While his family grew, Pieter Christiaan also served on Zion’s church council, in 1732 and 1734. The pastor records his presence at council meetings without commentary, but in 1741 Berkenmeyer asked Pieter and his wife to come before the church council “in order to make good their accusations which they brought to the Pastor. If they do not appear, their accusation will be considered to be false.” There is no detail about the nature of the accusation.

Berkenmeyer, meanwhile, continued to battle with his congregation, reporting thefts, petty arguments, name-calling, babies born out of wedlock, divorce, broken promises, and the pastor himself threatening to quit. One incident involved what may have been infanticide by Catharina, the eldest daughter of Pieter Christiaan, whose baby apparently was alive one day and being buried the next although he was not ill.

Finally, matters came to a head in 1745 when Margarita, another daughter of Pieter, accused Berkenmeyer of fathering the child she was now carrying. Margarita, also called Grit, had worked as a servant for the pastor and his wife from the age of seven until she was 21, when she became pregnant. Berkenmeyer denied the accusation and said that the only reason she accused him was to prevent her parents from kicking her out of the house. Pieter Christiaan tried to use this as leverage against the pastor. 

On the day Grit delivered her baby, Pieter sat in the doorway of his house, both to wait for the midwife and, according to Berkenmeyer, “to call to all the people going to church to rejoice with him.” Christiaan must have assumed the baby would be proven to belong to Berkenmeyer. But instead, the midwife said she had “never seen a blacker baby even among the blackest of Negroes.” That statement seemed to exonerate Berkenmeyer, but the damage was already done. 

Berkenmeyer stewed for thirteen more pages in his journal, comparing his suffering to that of Christ, adding, “I am a stranger here. I have no friends in these parts of the world and as many enemies as people say a dog has hairs.” 

Pieter Christiaan, in the meantime, disappeared from that history after the 1745 incident. Berkenmeyer recorded in 1745 that Pieter and his wife threatened to come to church even thought they had been banished from it. “With good reason it may be concluded from this that much evil is rooted in this race of Piet’s.” He added that “they misuse their coming to church as a cover for their evil and thus defy God and the people.”

Attendance at Berkenmeyer’s church council meetings dropped off, and the journal ended abruptly mid-sentence on May 28, 1750. Berkenmeyer lived another sixteen months but stopped writing in the journal. Pieter Christiaan may not have succeeded in pinning blame on Berkenmeyer for his daughter’s baby, but he won a sort of pyrrhic victory at a time when free Black men had little social standing. 

Zion Lutheran continued to baptize 146 slaves, free Blacks and mixed-race children, teenagers, and adults from 1712 until the end of the century, during a time when the Dutch Reformed churches in the area had halted these sorts of baptisms. Pieter Christiaan had been the first to be baptized. But he was far from the last.