A HUDSON VALLEY RECKONING

A New Yorker charts the long history of slavery along the Hudson River.

The enslavement of African and African American people was, the national narrative has it, a thing of the agrarian South, terminated by Civil War–era emancipation. Bruno, a freelance journalist, learns almost by accident that the “peculiar institution” extended far to the north. “If you have Dutch ancestors in the Hudson Valley,” a friend tells Bruno, “they were probably slave owners.” It’s not for nothing that Sojourner Truth spoke English with a Dutch accent, after all. Methodical if not always meticulous, as her notes on the intricacies of genealogy show, Bruno explores this story: she talks to anyone she can, digs into the archives, reads, learns. There’s much to absorb: as she travels farther back in time, exploring the generation of her great-grandparents times five (and, she notes, that’s 128 people, a number we all share), she discovers that “nearly every one of them was an enslaver, registered with a check mark on the far edge of the 1790 census, our new country’s first official count.” It comes as no comfort to learn that the Dutch and Dutch-descended slaveholders of the Hudson were no more eager to manumit their slaves than were Southern plantation owners, and it’s disheartening to know that as recently as 1903 a Black man was threatened with lynching in the quiet town of Coxsackie, saved by a sheriff who, a newspaper reported, “took him down the river on the boat to Catskill, where there is a well built jail.” While chasing down these little-known stories, Bruno examines her own intentions: “Was I looking for absolution?” Her answer: a calling drew her to the task—and good thing, too, for this is very well done.

A strong, surprising addition to the history of slavery in America.