WHY THE RAILROAD STAYED UNDERGROUND BY STEVE KENT (PUTNAM COUNTY, NY)
Looking into African American history in Putnam County and imagining the
lives of slaves and freed blacks in these small towns where we live today
is a project full of surprises. Perhaps the biggest surprise is to
realize how deeply African American experience and heritage has been woven
into the history of Putnam County. It is surprising because it is so
little in evidence today. Even though this part of New York played a
pivotal role in the history of slavery, abolition and the civil rights
movement, and even though 19th century New York State was the stage on
which Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Harriet Tubman and other giants of our
history acted, one would hardly know it judging from our lives here at the
end of the century. There are very, very few people of color living in
Putnam today, despite the fact that the county is located in one of the
most racially diverse parts of the United States. Compared to
Westchester, Dutchess, Orange and Rockland, Putnam County is racially
homogenous, or if the word must be used, segregated. The African American
population peaked here in the mid-nineteenth century, and then declined to
almost nothing over the next century. And thereon hangs a tale.
School children in New York may learn about Harriet Tubman, but judging
from my own memories of public school in Westchester, I doubt whether most
are taught that the Underground Railroad passed through Manhattan, up the
Hudson and North to Albany. And I'm sure they are not trained to ask the
obvious question of why, when New York was supposed to have abolished
slavery in 1799, it was still necessary in 1860 to have a secret conduit
for slaves to escape through the State and into Canada.
New Yorkers, including me, think of ourselves as a relatively tolerant
society and likely to support racial diversity as a cultural value. Yet
historically, New York was the largest slave-owning colony and state in
the North from 1630 through 1790, and the main bastion of slavery outside
the South. It abolished slavery later than any other northern state
except New Jersey, and even then only when it was considered unprofitable
to maintain it.
The character of slavery in New York was different from slavery in the
South. Northern slavery was influenced by the Dutch institution, which
was more like white indentured servitude, more of an economic convenience
than a racial ideology. The Dutch typically released their slaves after a
certain period rather than viewing slavery as the permanent lot of blacks.
Under English rule, slavery was more rigid and more permanent, but aspects
of the earlier Dutch model survived. Most slaveholdings were small,
consisting of only one to five slaves, who lived in their white owners'
households on more intimate terms. There is evidence that northern whites
and blacks may have known each other better and feared each other less
than in the South. New York slaves were allowed, for example, to celebrate
their cultural tradition in a carnival-like holiday called Pinksterfest
adapted from the Dutch celebration of the Pentecost, at least until Albany
outlawed it in 1811. But that didn't necessarily mean that Northern
blacks were better off. Northern slaves living in white households were
more isolated than their Southern counterparts living in slave quarters,
and smaller Northern slaveholdings meant that black families were more
often broken up. The slightly more flexible and socially palatable model
of northern slavery made it economically very succcessful and inclined
Dutch and English New Yorkers to defend it fiercely, and as a result its
vestiges were terribly slow to die.
So although John Jay was proud of passing a state law to emancipate slaves
in 1799, it was a half measure at best. The law was not only late in
coming compared to other northern states, but in view of how thoroughly
slavery was integrated into the state's economy, the law ensured it would
take many decades for emancipation to take hold. The 1799 law abolished
slavery through gradual manumission. Children born to a slave woman after
July 4, 1799 (a date chosen to symbolize freedom) had to be registered to
a slaveholder who took responsibility for the child's education. Failure
to register was punishable by a fine and immediate freedom for the child.
Those who remained slaves would have to devote their youth, as opposed to
their entire lives, to slavery under the new law. They were to be freed
automatically at age 28 for males and age 25 for females. Theoretically,
all slaves would be free by July 4, 1827.
But cheating was rampant. Birthdates went unrecorded, so it was often
unclear who was eligible for manumission and who was not. Sojourner
Truth, who lived in slavery in Kingston, was such a case. Many children
were sold into slavery in southern states to circumvent the law. This
happened to Sojourner's son, and in a highly exceptional episode she sued
successfully for his return. The New York State legislature moved to
fight illegal southern slave traffic by enacting 1809 laws to recognize
slave marriage, legitimize slave children and prevent the breakup of
families, and also granted property rights and the right of trial by jury.
Nevertheless, gradual emancipation tended to undermine black families.
Not only did the New York slave system tend to force family members to
live apart, but under gradual emancipation, three different degrees of
freedom existed -- free, bound-to-service, and slave -- sometimes all
within the same family.
That made it harder to keep families together, and made individuals more
vulnerable. The practice of illegal trafficking southward continued long
after slavery was officially supposed to be extinguished in 1827. A locally
infamous case in mid-century Putnam County involved a white wife who lured
her black husband south and actually sold him into slavery. Long into the
19th century, getting kidnapped and sold into southern slavery was a present
danger for free blacks or blacks on their way to manumission in New York State.
Around 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law upheld southern slavecatchers' legal
right to chase their prey into New York State and drag them back. Given
the illegal traffic in freed blacks kidnapped from New York and sold in
the South, it is no wonder that a long lifetime after state emancipation
began, the effort to assert blacks' freedom in New York was still
underground in 1860, up to the very brink of the Civil War. Harriet
Tubman was at the center of a famous 1860 riot in Troy, New York, a stop
on her Underground Railroad. Troy officials tried to enforce the Fugitive
Slave Law in the case of a slave who escaped from Virginia, Charles Nalle.
Nalle's own attorney betrayed him to his owner, who sent agents to Troy
to retrieve him. Civil War was immanent, war sentiment was running high,
and it caused a riot when a crowd tried to prevent Nalle's transfer by
police. Harriet Tubman, about 40 at the time, got to the center of it by
disguising herself as an elderly woman for whom people would make way.
She grabbed Nalle by the wrist and the two ran a gauntlet of clubs and
cudgels. Nalle was battered, but Tubman got him to a skiff and crossed
the Hudson. He was arrested in West Troy, but the crowd followed him on a
regular ferry and broke into the prison, braving pistol fire. Bloodied by
now herself, Tubman put Nalle on a coach to a safe house in Schenectady.
He was never caught after that.
This episode is exceptional because the crowd in Troy got behind Nalle,
but it also illustrates the degree of everyday danger blacks in New York
lived under even in mid-century. They were under constant threat from
slavecatchers who had the sanction of the police and the courts, and from
illegal slave traffickers who didn't need it. They had to develop
survival mechanisms that enhanced their mobility. In Putnam and the
surrounding counties, one of the main ones consisted of the river sloops
that plied the Hudson. African Americans have a long maritime history.
Shipping was one industry in which blacks managed to achieve some status
and self-determination even during slavery. About 75% of the crews on the
Hudson sloops in mid-century were black. They provided a support network
for the Underground Railroad, and an informal transportation network for
blacks when they needed it. Many stories survive of fugitive slaves or
freed blacks who needed to disappear and were hidden amid the cargo of the
river sloops.
As precarious as life was for African Americans in this part of New York
State in the mid-19th century, it declined further. Their families and
lives disrupted as emancipation played out over decades and freedom was
slow to take hold, many blacks chose to stay on as servants to their old
masters after 1827. But conditions did not improve after slavery. Freed
blacks faced discrimination in housing and employment. The Civil War
corresponded with rise of the industrial revolution in New York, and
blacks were increasingly displaced by immigrant workers. The Cold Spring
Foundry was a center of manufacturing for Civil War cannon, and at its
height employed thousands of men -- so many that they had to hot-bunk
their barracks. These populations were largely Irish and Italian, and
their communities took root in Philipstown, but the Foundry did not employ
blacks.
By 1900, the Foundry was in decline. Its rise meant that Putnam County's
waterfront became one of the first to industrialize, but it happened too
early in the long, slow unfolding of emancipation to allow freed New York
blacks a foothold in it. Its fall meant that Putnam County reverted to a
rural, agricultural economy. In the early decades of the 20th century
those blacks who stayed in this part of New York state migrated away from
rural towns to nearby cities with waterfront manufacturing -- Peekskill,
Beacon, Newburg, Ossining. They found work there until the Depression
closed the factories. Many stayed on and weathered the Depression, and
their descendants after them.
This is one reason why Putnam stands out today as a pocket of homogeneity
in an otherwise racially integrated region: blacks left Putnam County by
attrition.. The County census numbers tell a poignant story as they
register the numbers of people of color, taxed (freed) and untaxed
(slaves), dwindling steadily from a high in the mid-19th century to single
numbers around the turn of the century. But blacks were also actively
kept out. After World War I the Ku Klux Klan became powerful in the
midwest and expanded rapidly north and east, especially into rural areas
where there were few blacks. There were open, active Klan cells in many
towns in this area, including Fishkill and Nelsonville, until the middle
of the 20th century, some say until the 1970s. Very little about their
activity is documented, although it survives in the memory of Putnam
county residents, and an oral history project is now underway to study its
role in local racial and ethnic history.
New York State's African American heritage is rich. Its complexity
mirrors our national experience, and reflects the best and the worst of
our history. The Underground Railroad ran through here, and giants of the
abolition and civil rights movements walked here. Ogres of slavery,
oppression, discrimination and persecution also thrived here. As Putnam
County celebrates its various Civil War observances this year, a glance at
the broad outlines of our complex history over the last 135 years begins
to answer the demographic question of how ours came to be a virtually
all-white county. But it does not begin to answer the question of why it
was a century after the Civil War before Jackie Robinson could break
baseball's color bar, why a performance by Paul Robeson sparked the
Peekskill Riots of 1949, why race riots broke out in Ossining High School
in 1973, why a black cemetary in Southeast was bulldozed and blacktopped
in 198_ with little outcry, why cross burnings are within the living
memory of Putnam County residents, or why, at this very, very late date,
we in Putnam have yet to open our communities sufficiently to establish
any significant residency by people of color. I believe that how my
generation of Putnam County residents copes with its inheritance of de
facto segregation will be a key criterion -- perhaps the key criterion --
by which history will judge us 135 years from now.
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