As I write the first version of this Panorama post, I’m standing in a building associated with the freedom struggle of celebrated nineteenth-century Black abolitionist Austin Steward: the Towar Land Office. The building is not a replica—it’s the real deal, a small but well-preserved structure from the 1830s that now sits on the grounds of Genesee Country Village and Museum, one of the nation’s largest (and best) living history museums. Located about 20 miles south of Steward’s eventual home in Rochester, the Land Office was not always right here. When Steward worked in this building (or, more likely, the even smaller structure preceding it), the Land Office was in Wayne County, east of Rochester. That detail doesn’t matter as much as the broader idea that Steward worked forcibly in western New York while he was enslaved. Having been born to bondage in Virginia in 1793, Steward moved with his enslaver to New York in the early 1800s, only to find that the state’s gradual-abolition law did not apply to him. In the vaunted North, he discovered not freedom but free-state slavery. Crossing the fabled Mason and Dixon Line barely made a difference in his life.

The Towar Land Office at Genesee Country Village & Museum. Photo by author.

When I began writing my JER essay on New York and Free State Slavery, I knew that Steward would play a key role in my broader discussion of “Emancipation Dissidents,” Black and white figures who challenged slavery’s maintenance in New York long after the passage not only of the 1799 gradual-abolition law but even the 1827 final emancipation act. As my essay shows, slavery and the quasi-slavery of multi-decade indentures survived for nearly forty years after gradual abolitionism took shape in New York. How could this be in an iconic free-labor state like New York? That was the same question that generations of Black and white abolitionists asked in their long effort to rout slavery from the Empire State.

But even as I plotted out many elements of the essay on free-state slavery in New York, my analysis was abstract and distant. I had not yet stood in the Land Office or considered its symbolic meaning in Steward’s life. The building itself represented both liberty and oppression. When his enslaver (a man named Helm) hired out Steward to the Land Office —keeping most of the money himself—he had a bit of autonomy but not full freedom. Indeed, though out of Helm’s clutches, Steward worked in a confined space and was under surveillance constantly. That intimate sense of oversight is clear when I look around the Land Office Building.[1] To say that it’s cramped by modern standards hardly does justice to the idea that there was not much room for Steward to maneuver, much less disappear for any amount of time from prying white eyes. All I can think about is how often Steward imagined leaving the Land Office and never coming back—only to realize that escape in western New York would be more difficult than he ever imagined. Still, Steward took risks, boldly asking others he came to trust in the community to aid his bid for freedom. When such overtures failed, he finally fled during the chaos of the War of 1812. He had liberated himself from New York slavery well before the state would.

Portrait of Austin Steward from the frontspiece to Twenty-two Years a Slave, 1857. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Austin_Steward_from_the_frontspiece_to_Twenty-two_years_a_slave,_and_forty_years_a_freeman;_embracing_a_correspondence_of_several_years,_while_president_of_Wilberforce_Colony,_London,_Canada_West.jpg.

It’s a heroic story but not one that New Yorkers like to tell when thinking about antebellum battles over bondage. Even today, many western New Yorkers (like northerners generally) focus on the Underground Railroad rather than free-state slavery. But the Land Office Building forces us to look again at Steward’s world. Why was he here in the first place—in the Land Office as an enslaved hireling—and why was he unfree for so long in abolitionist New York?

The reason I’m thinking about these questions while standing in the Land Office Building relates not just to my own scholarship on Steward but the public history of free-state slavery. How do we tell this story to people who associate the problem of slavery with the South? As a historical consultant for a GCVM project entitled “Seeking Freedom,” I’m a small part of a terrific team of curators, educators, and scholars seeking to use the historic village as a way to shed light on “the history of enslavement in New York State,” as the museum’s website proclaims. By examining “the powerful stories of enslaved individuals, freedom-seekers, Black and white abolitionists, and even enslavers” whose lives intersected with the historic structures on the GCVM campus, “Seeking Freedom” highlights “a history that has shaped our society in ways we cannot ignore.” As GCVM creates new walking tours and exhibits on free-state slavery and the Black struggle for full freedom, both Austin Steward and the Land Office Building play an important role in telling a story that includes many heroic people but doesn’t always end on a celebratory note.

The Nathaniel Rochester House at Genesee Country Village & Museum. Photo by author.

That’s all too clear in another structure at GCVM: The Nathaniel Rochester House. This too is an original building, the same one that Colonel Rochester—founder of the city later associated with his name—lived in when he arrived in western New York from Maryland with several enslaved people in tow in the early 1800s. If Steward’s story is somewhat familiar (he wrote an autobiography in 1857), the lives of the oppressed African Americans in the Rochester household remain obscure. But there are enough details to shed light on the problem of free-state slavery in their lives too. Take the tale of an enslaved teenager who long toiled for the Rochester family: a young woman named Casandra. Rochester family lore had it that he came north to liberate enslaved people like her (which he himself claimed was impossible in the Chesapeake), thereby cleansing his hands of bondage. Yet research by local public historians shows that Nathaniel Rochester eluded abolitionist laws in New York as long as possible, liberating the last of his enslaved servants only in the final year or so leading up to the 1827 state Jubilee. As for Casandra, she was manumitted in 1811 but immediately converted into a long-term indentured servant—another form of free-state slavery.

Inside the Rochester house, we (GCVM curators and historical consultants) discuss just how to illuminate this complex history, especially the voices of enslaved people like Casandra, who left few if any records of their freedom struggle. Even as we do this, I again notice the scale of the structure. The house has more rooms than the Land Office but is still very small by our standards. Where did enslaved people like Casandra sleep, eat, talk and pray? Could she ever plot escape from such an intimate environment, with Rochester family members always hovering, dictating, demanding, and even punishing?

An interpretive sign within the Rochester House asks visitors to reflect on the experiences of enslaved people who lived there. Photo by author.

As I leave GCVM this time around, I think about the many lessons I have learned about free-state slavery, especially the idea that the vernacular landscape of public buildings, offices, streets, and thoroughfares—and not simply the Black strongholds of African meetinghouses and churches—remains a powerful vehicle for understanding the wider dimensions of the Black freedom struggle in the North. To say that Austin Steward worked in this space (the Land Office) allows us to imagine what it must have been like to dream about freedom with others constantly hovering over you. And to walk from room to room in the Rochester house compels us to wonder just what enslaved people like Casandra were thinking when they were brought North to find not freedom but slavery. How did they survive free-state slavery and what would they want us to know about how they did it?

Endnotes

[1] The Land Office Building can be viewed as part of a virtual tour hosted on the GCVM website.