Talk:History of slavery in New York (state)

Formatting of citations

The usual automatic picking up of footnotes doesn't seem to work. Will check citation/link rules again.--Parkwells (talk) 17:24, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Citations desparately needed

Writers:

I don't disagree with any of the facts you presented, but there are no citations given!

"There's no truth without proof", as they say. Don't give some biased person ammo to say that you CAN'T back up your statements. Back 'em up!68.197.49.1 (talk) 16:00, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

I agree, 12 Jul 2010 poster. The people that plop in statements need to back them up. Wordreader (talk) 01:53, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Reference no 1: The nation

I could not find content related to the subject of this page (slavery in New York State) this citation  Peter Frishauf (talk) 20:18, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't understand the objections. I cite the landmark exhibit by The New York Historical Society on this subject and include the URL : http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org .. So what's the problem?

I don't see any problem.Parkwells (talk) 22:34, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

External links modified

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Provide correct sources

Editors need to use Wiki formats for sources - some were given that could not be verified. The article became unbalanced by too much information from Peter Christoph's paper on early slavery in New Netherlands, and it was copied verbatim wtihout quotes. Paraphrase and summarize more.Parkwells (talk) 22:36, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

Slavery under WIC governed by Roman-Dutch law

I have added a few citations (Faucquez and Hodges, Root and Branch) where they seemed appropriate. While reading these sources and many other relevant material on the web it occurred to me that all these competent historians appeared to be ignorant of the fact that the WIC operated under the Dutch system of law that is known as Roman-Dutch law. ( Cf. Van der Velden, B. (2011). Ik lach met Grotius en alle die prullen van boeken. Een rechtsgeschiedenis van Curacao (in Dutch). ISBN 9789088501623.) This incorporated a large amount of Justinian's Digest (as the wiki article makes clear) and hence of the Roman laws pertaining to slavery (as they were in late Antiquity). So the oft-repeated claim that "slavery was unregulated" in the colony of New Netherlands is incorrect. The WIC did not promulgate a "Black code" for the colony, because there was no need to (and probably because in the relevant time-frame the number of Black slaves did not warrant the effort). The Roman-law slave rules were sufficient. This also explains the "surprising" fact that slaves could sue free people in the courts of the colony (and could be sued by free people) and that they could own property, as these rights were by the time of the Digest also established for Roman slaves. Likewise, the "half freedom" the emancipated slaves enjoyed after their conditional manumission probably owed much to the Roman laws pertaining to coloni (the serf-like tenant farmers in the later Roman empire). or to the laws pertaining to freed slaves (liberti). There is often a large gap between possessing a right and exercising it. I think the Black slaves in New Amsterdam that sued the WIC and individual free persons in New Amsterdam were helped by local people (probably dominee Everardus Bogardus, who often clashed with WIC officials and must have been conversant with Roman-Dutch law, and probably also the local Civil law notary from whose archives the information about the legal cases must have been retrieved). as it seems unlikely that they possessed the necessary legal knowledge, or could even read and write. This may explain why in other WIC colonnies (Curacao, Suriname), where Roman-Dutch law also obtained, slaves proved to be far less litigious: they simply didn't get a chance to exercise their theoretical rights.

Though Roman-Dutch law was the "law of the land" in the Dutch Republic this did not mean that slavery existed as an institution in the metropolitan Netherlands. Slavery had existed in the early Middle Ages but had become "extinct" after slavery had been abolished in the territory of many cities that received city rights during the 13th century and later. Often there was a right of asylum for escaped slaves that established their freedom after they had been in a city for a-year-and-a-day. "Free Soil" was not a legal principle that applied everywhere, but it was jealously defended by the city fathers of the emergent new cities that possessed city rights. And once there were no longer indigenous Dutch slaves the institution could not be revived as in practice the methods of enslavement under Roman law (birth from a slave mother, debt-slavery and military conquest) did not apply, at least for white Christians. Once the Dutch started to intervene in the transatlantic slave trade in the early 17th century, and Black enslaved people were sometimes taken along to the Netherlands by their owners this opened the problem of what their status was. In 1644 the city of Amsterdam reiterated "... that ‘within the city of Amsterdam and its jurisdiction, all men are free, and none are slaves.’ The law clarified that anyone entering Amsterdam became ‘free beyond the control and authority of their masters and [master’s] wives’ and that, should there be any doubt, ‘the persons concerned can arraign said masters and mistresses in the court of law of this city, where they then shall formally and legally declare them to be free.’(Cf. Chadwick, Esther (7 January 2021). ""A Platter of Turnips", in: London Review of Books, Vol. 43, No. 1".) But this required certification of the freedom of the erstwhile slave by an Amsterdam court, and hence a legal action that in many cases required the cooperation of the owner, or sympathetic Dutch citizens. Evidently, what obtained within the Amsterdam city limits did not obtain in slave colonies like Surinam. Hence the apparent differences between the legal treatment of Black enslaved persons in overseas Dutch territories and the Dutch metropolis that otherwise would be difficult to explain, as Dutch-Roman law applied in both.

In sum, my impression is that many Anglophone historians that recently have become interested in the history of Black enslaved people in the North American WIC colonies, and that have done commendable archival research, have been unaware of the legal context of their archival discoveries, which has led to a number of misunderstandings. It might be useful to provide background information about this legal background in this article and in the article about the history of New Netherland.--Ereunetes (talk) 00:05, 5 February 2021 (UTC)