Anthony Van Angola was the name of an enslaved African man in New Netherland in the seventeenth century. It’s not common to know the name of a slave from a long time ago, so repeating the name—Anthony Van Angola—is worthwhile. There were thousands of others like him in the colony. The Dutch brought enslaved men and women with them almost as soon as they landed. African slaves were in what’s now New York from 1626, the year after New Amsterdam’s founding.
When the Dutch defeated Indians in battles, they also enslaved the captives and kept or sold them or gave them away as gifts. The Dutch West India Company promised prospective settlers, as an inducement, that they would be provided with slaves. Trading slaves was a part of the company’s business. Jonas Bronck’s neighbor Pieter Schorstinaveger, after whom the Bronx is not named, farmed with Black slaves. When Richard Morris arrived from Barbados and purchased Bronk’s Land, he brought enslaved Black people with him “to help plant the fields,” as one historian puts it, understatedly.
Morrisania always had slaves. In the early 1700s, two of them, Hannibal and Samson, regularly sailed in a sloop to take the manor’s produce to sell in Manhattan. (The manor and vicinity were like a truck farm, or sloop farm, for the city.) In 1712, about 16 percent of the people residing in what’s now the Bronx were enslaved. At Lewis Morris’s death in 1762 he bequeathed forty-six slaves to his heirs. Gouverneur Morris received a special bequest from his father. Ten years old at the time, he was given “a Negroe Boy called George.”
Farming in New York generally did not use large numbers of slaves, unlike on the South’s cotton, rice, or tobacco plantations. Slave-owning families here usually had only two or three slaves, and the owners and the owned lived together in the same house. Slavery in the North is sometimes portrayed as a milder form of it, as if such a thing could be. The gradual phasing out of slavery in New York gave the slave owners time to sell their slaves south instead of having to free them. A Morrisania slave was said to be the last enslaved person freed in the state, when New York finally outlawed the institution completely in 1827.