Four years ago when a few of us began looking into early East Hampton’s relationship with slavery, we were almost on our own, it seemed. We joke about it now, but at the time (and in some places, to this day) our inquiries were met with a cocked head and some variation of “We don’t have anything about slavery” from traditional history-keepers. But they come around; one who at first visibly stiffened when I broached the subject became one of our most active supporters, bringing material by with fresh indications of how pervasive slavery was here on the East End.
One of the stunning things that I learned along the way was that slavery existed here for 180 years — from about 1650 until 1830, even though New York’s gradual emancipation law was to have freed all of the state’s enslaved by 1827. Through studying old account books, church records, and a range of other sources, we have documented the lives of hundreds of enslaved people, like Adam, who was stolen from West Africa as a boy and became the patriarch of a large, extended family in Sagaponack.
I often think of Gene, an infant girl who was born to an enslaved mother on the property where the East Hampton Library’s Children’s Wing now stands and who died in 1747, three months shy of her second birthday. Or I wonder about Mingo, who was captured in East Hampton after fleeing his enslavement in Southold, before the town trustees paid to have him taken back. A Mingo Fanning, perhaps the same person, appears some years later living as a free man in Southampton.
What of Prince, who escaped from his bondage here in 1772 when he was about 28? An advertisement in a Connecticut newspaper described him as wearing a kersey waistcoat, striped tow cloth trousers, and a beaver hat when he disappeared. Three dollars would be paid by his former enslaver as reward for his return.
There is Dick, an enslaved man who drowned in 1753 with two others as they tried to come ashore in a whaleboat. Just this week, an image came by email of a bill of sale for a “Certain Black Boy Called Pomp,” for whom two East Hampton men, probably brothers, paid 40 pounds in cash in June 1797.
And then there are the ones whose names we do not know, like a young boy who died on the first of September 1719 with three other youths on their way home from church as they crossed Georgica Pond in a canoe.
There are so many more stories like these, and the more we look, the more we find — and the more others notice.