Cash & Nemo, and Bye Bye Sunset Park

Fabulous new from a fabulous pal that left me all misty-eyed about the mysterious workings of the Universe: It provides.

I’ll miss Sunset Park. But the fabulous pal won’t.

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In other news: I went to a lecture on slavery in Ulster County.

As noted here previously, New York had the biggest population of enslaved north of Maryland, and in these parts—Dutchess and Ulster Counties—the locals fought quite hard against manumission.

Here in Dutchess, slavery’s persistent appeal was a byproduct of the strangely manorial land ownership model: The Brits never dismantled the patents granted by the original Dutch overlords; consequently, ownership of vast lands—we’re talking hundreds of miles here—ended up in the hands of perhaps half a dozen families.

Immigrants did not set forth upon the hard Atlantic voyage merely to end up as indentured servants on a master’s estate! No. They landed in New York City and then promptly set out for wherever the Western frontier was at that moment. Consequently, the landowners had a labor problem!

They solved it with slaves.

Montgomery Place in Barrytown, for example, is essentially a Northern plantation.

I mean, I guess some might quibble over my use of the word “plantation” since Montgomery Place wasn’t a single crop operation: It was a huge farm that grew a variety of fruits and vegetables for sale to the NYC markets. But I think “fruits and vegetables” can be aggregated as a single commodity.

On the western side of the Hudson, the dynamics were different. The Dutch influence was much stronger in Ulster. Church services, for example, were conducted in Dutch well into the 19th century.

Those scrappy, parsimonious Dutch were wheat farmers for the most part. Their parcels of land were relatively small. But they were not about to give up their human property without a fight!

New York’s exceedingly weird manumission law of 1799, which kinda, sorta ended slavery but not really for another 30 years, is thought by some historians to have been a sop thrown to Dutch interests.

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It’s estimated that the enslaved accounted for approximately 15% of the local population up until 1830 or so when slavery was actually abolished, but nobody actually kept very accurate records documenting their existence. Thus, the most accurate database attesting to their existence is actually the runaway slave notices published in various local newspapers.

Much of the lecture was a slideshow of such notices.

What can one deduce about Nemo and Cash, described in the advertisement above?

They’re not married or lovers: Difference in height, difference in ages.

Yet, they both speak French, not a language commonly spoken in 18th century New York, which suggests some contextual connection. Perhaps they were African by way of the same Caribbean island?

Cash is described as a “wench,” which suggests that some portion of her duties consisted of sexually servicing those stolid, pig-eyed old Dutchy burghers.

Cash also had the presence of mind to steal the linen and other “valuable Effects”—silver spoons?—and she wore as many clothes as she possibly could, kinda the way that smart travelers today defy air carriers who charge for baggage by piling on the sweaters and coats.

Cash was clearly the brains of the operation.

What happened to her?

We’ll never know.

But I’m thinking that when I finish the current Work in Progress—which is progressing, all hail to the mysterious workings of the Universe—I might like to write something about slavery in New York state and the evil Livingstons and the pig-eyed burghers.