When our region was opened to white settlement in the 1780s, it was opened to black settlement as well, because the early white settlers brought along their slaves.
Slavery was forbidden in the Northwest Territory, bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi, and Massachusetts abolished slavery by court order in 17??. But apart from that, slavery was legal everywhere in U.S. Territory, including New York.
Since our area had direct connections with Chesapeake Bay and the Maryland-Virginia Tidewater (via the Conhocton-Chemung-Susquehanna River route), this became a “natural” area for slavery to extend. Indeed, land agent Charles Williamson, who had 1.2 million acres to dispose of, marketed this region to southerners as a place to buy huge estates, bring your slaves, and live like a king. This never came to pass, but Steuben County and its neighbors did become home to a noticeable slave population.
A hundred years ago you could still see buildings in Canisteo and in Bath that were reported to have been slave dwellings, and you could also find slave cemeteries that have since disappeared.
By and large, white men didn’t record much about the lives of slaves, just as they didn’t record much about the lives of women and poor people (of any race). We do have record of Colonel L. A. Jones in Addison, who won a woman and two sons in a game of cards (!) around 1820. According to a town history he passed the woman on to his brother, but recognizing the impending end of slavery enrolled the sons in school. “They were refused admission on account of color. He called a meeting of the citizens at the school house…. He said, ‘Gentlemen, the law will soon free these boys, they will have no master to look after them. They must earn their living as white men do, they must have a chance, they must have some education. They are going to attend this school and by the great Jehovah I will mop the ground with the man who refuses them admission and throw this building in the river stick by stick.’”
While this is stirring, the story also suggests the horror of casual, offhand transfers and the breakup of families as slaves (even children!) were routinely sold for payment of debts or taxes, or in liquidation of assets to settle estates.
Austin Steward left a remarkable slave narrative in which he described being brought to Bath from Virginia and hired out along with other slaves, including his sister. “One pleasant Sabbath morning, as I was passing the house where she lived, on my way to the Presbyterian church, where I was sent to ring the bell as usual, I heard the most piteous cries and earnest pleadings issuing from the dwelling. To my horror and the astonishment of those with me, my poor sister made her appearance, weeping bitterly, and followed by her inhuman master… flourishing a large raw-hide. Very soon his bottled wrath burst forth, and the blows, aimed with all his strength, descended upon the unprotected head, shoulders and back of the helpless woman, until she was literally cut to pieces. She writhed in his powerful grasp, while shriek after shriek died away in heart-rending moanings; and yet the inhuman demon continued to beat her, though her pleading cries had ceased, until obliged to desist from the exhaustion of his own strength…. The kind reader may imagine my feelings when I saw the smooth-faced hypocrite, the inhuman slave-whipper, enter the church, pass quietly on to his accustomed seat, and then meekly bow his hypocritical face….”
Steward describes being hired out to a man who clubbed and beat him frequently, not on any grounds, but simply because he could. Encountering attorney Daniel Cruger as both men crossed a bridge, Steward asked whether he shouldn’t in fact be free under New York law. Cruger loudly stated that of course Steward was NOT free, but the two men later held a private consultation (“you didn’t hear this from me”) in Cruger’s office.
A New York law for gradual emancipation had gone into effect in 1799, and court rulings since then had held that importing a slave, then hiring that slave out, was an evasion of the law’s provision against slave sales, and that the act ipso facto emancipated the slave. Cruger helped Steward get in touch with anti-slavery activists; at the age of 22 he walked away from Bath to settle in Manchester, where the activists helped him maintain his legal freedom when his owner later found him and tried to reclaim him. Facing the legal reality, the owner tried to lure Steward back “with honeyed words.” Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work.