Once in America, some of these people created families through marriage, childbirth, and informal adoptions. They remained vulnerable to being sold or given away. Many of them struggled to keep their families intact, to provide protection for their loved ones, and to take advantage of loopholes that might extricate them and their family members from enslavement.
Some Black people also responded to the era’s high mortality rates by taking responsibility for children who were not their own. In New Amsterdam, Emmanuel Pietersen and his wife, Dorothe Angola, raised a child of their deceased friends, and when the child reached the age of eighteen, Pietersen sought to gain legal protection for him. In his petition to officials of the colony, Pietersen asserted that his wife had stood as “godmother or witness at the Christian baptism” of Anthony, whose parents had died shortly thereafter. The petition asserted that Dorothe, “out of Christian affection, immediately on the death of his parents, hath adopted and reared him as her own child, without asking assistance from anyone in the world, but maintained him at her own expense from that time unto this day.” Pietersen said that he too wanted to promote the well-being of the boy and asked the authorities to officially recognize that Anthony was born the child of free parents, had been raised by free persons, and should therefore be declared free and capable of inheriting from Pietersen. Emmanuel Pietersen realized the tenuous status of Black people in the colony and sought to ensure that the child he and his wife had raised would always be recognized as a free person, despite also being Black. The council granted Pietersen’s petition.
Pietersen used very deliberate language in his petition. He was careful to assert that Anthony had received a Christian baptism and that Dorothe Angola had cared for the child out of her “Christian affection.” These were consequential claims in those early years for Black people desiring to be acknowledged as free. After all, the Dutch, English, and other Europeans operated at the time under the belief that Christians should not be enslaved, and part of their stated justification for enslaving Africans was that they considered them heathens. If Black people could then prove their Christianity through baptism or marriage in the Christian church, as occurred in New Amsterdam, they might logically be exempted from slavery.
It seems that the baptism loophole was effective for some time. Between 1639 and 1655, Black parents presented forty-nine children for baptism in the Dutch Reformed Church in New Netherland. But in a society become ever more dependent on the labor of enslaved people, laypeople as well as clergy grew concerned about the correspondence between baptism and freedom, and Christianity and freedom.
What would later become New York closed this loophole for maneuvering out of slavery. By 1656, the Dutch Reformed Church, caring more about saving slavery than saving souls, had stopped baptizing Black people. “The Negroes occasionally request that we should baptize their children,” wrote a clergyman who ministered to the forty people Governor Peter Stuyvesant owned in Manhattan. “But we have refused to do so, partly on account of their lack of knowledge and of faith, and partly because of the worldly and perverse aims on the part of the said Negroes. They wanted nothing else than to deliver their children bodily from slavery, without striving for piety and Christian virtues.”
Ironically, the minister deemed Black parents’ desires to free their children “worldly and perverse” because of their emphasis on physical freedom, presumably in contrast to the spiritual freedom of the Christian people who claimed ownership over them. Although the minister went on to say that when he deemed it appropriate, he did baptize a few enslaved youth, he also noted, “Not to administer baptism among them for the reasons given, is also the custom among our colleagues.”
Over time, New Netherland and other colonies imposed more and more restrictions against Black freedom. When Virginia codified the fact that baptism would not free Black people from enslavement, the language of the statute focused on “children that are slaves by birth.” In that colony, too, policy makers blocked parents from using Christian baptism as a means of gaining freedom for their children.
In Virginia, Emmanuel and Frances Driggus took care of two adopted children, one-year-old Jane and eight-year-old Elizabeth, in addition to Ann, Thomas, and Frances, the three children who were born to the couple. They all belonged to Captain Francis Pott, although Jane and Elizabeth were not enslaved but indentured for terms of several years. To cover his debts, Pott mortgaged Emmanuel and Frances and eventually was forced to turn them over to his creditor, who lived twenty miles away from Pott’s farm, where all the children remained. Emmanuel, who had been given a cow and a calf by Pott, was eventually able to save enough money to purchase Jane’s freedom in 1652, thereby releasing her from her indenture at age eight, twenty-three years earlier than scheduled.
By the end of that same year, Pott prevailed in a lawsuit against his creditor, and Emmanuel and Frances Driggus returned to live on his property in Northampton. Seven years had elapsed since they had lived with their children. Upon their return to Northampton, Emmanuel Driggus faced a new threat to his ability to free himself and his family from slavery through the sale of his cattle—the county moved to prohibit enslaved people from engaging in trade. But Driggus was able to get Pott to put in writing the fact that Driggus legally owned the cattle and was allowed to sell them. Pott later restricted this prerogative, however, when he declared in court a few years later that no one should engage in trade with his slaves without his approval.
Just as Emmanuel Pietersen in New Amsterdam petitioned to protect the free status of his adopted child, Driggus sought to protect his ability to sustain some limited degree of economic autonomy in order to free his family.
More stunning for the Driggus family, though, was when Pott sold their eldest daughter, ten-year-old Ann, for five thousand pounds of tobacco. He also sold a younger son, Edward, four years old. These children were sold into lifetime enslavement.
Frances Driggus died a few years after her children were sold. Emmanuel remarried, and several years later, as a free man, he gave to his daughters Frances and Jane a bay mare “out of the Naturall love and affection.” Jane was free and married; Frances’s status is not clear.
Emmanuel Driggus was aware of the perilous lives of his daughters in the Virginia colony. His gift of a female horse who might produce other horses, he likely hoped, would provide his daughters, now in their twenties, with income that might render them a bit less vulnerable. After all, in the 1650s Virginia and other English colonies were racing toward full dependence on the forced labor of Black people.
1654–1659
UNFREE LABOR
Nakia D. Parker
In history textbooks and in popular memory, the enslavement of people of African descent is often depicted as an unfortunate yet unavoidable occurrence in the otherwise glorious history of the American republic. Echoing this common sentiment, Republican senator Tom Cotton called slavery “the necessary evil upon which the union was built” in his objection to adding The 1619 Project to school curriculums. The United States was indeed built on chattel slavery, which deemed people of African descent inferior to white people and defined Black people as commodities to be bought, sold, insured, and willed. That was certainly evil. It was not, however, “necessary” or inevitable. The system of racialized slavery that is now seared into the American public consciousness took centuries to metastasize and mature.