The Albany Fire of 1793 and the Hanging of Three Slave Children

Conflagration 1793 is a short historical fiction which takes us back to a little-known episode in the history of Albany, the state capital of New York. The story begins with the drive-by shooting of three African American teenagers near the State Capitol in December, 2016. Two die on the spot but one girl, Dinah Valker, awakens in the distant past. She discovers that not only is she a slave of the local merchant Volkert Douw but that her friends Pompey and Bethany are also living in that other world.

  NYS Capitol, site of the hanging

    of three young slaves in 1793

Here's the moment of Dinah's awakening after she was shot on Elk Street behind the State Capitol:

“Girl! Come here, I say, girl!” Mistress Douw turned in exasperation to her husband. “Meister Douw, do ye see what I be saying? The wench has gone daft.”

“How long is it that the wench is so bespelled?”

“Above half an hour, I ken. She was able and cheerful as ever when she woke and ‘sisted with all the morning chores. Then of a sudden she is in such state as this, stock still and staring as if stricken with an apoplexy.”

“I doubt it be an apoplexy, mistress mine.” Volkert van Douw took the clay pipe from his mouth and went up close to the girl, waving his broad hand before her face. “She has scarce fifteen years.”

“Ye said the Ulsterman you bought her of said she was hale n’ hearty.”

“He did.” Volkert pinched the girl’s arm with getting any reaction. He pulled both her ears. She did not move.

“The dusky ones are said to be prone to sickness.”

“I’ve as oft heard the contrary to be true. My father was fond of saying that the darker the hue, the sturdier the stock.” He sat down at kitchen bench and re-lit his pipe. “Tho I will confess, my heart, that the Ulsterman did drop his price without much cavil.”

“I’ve always said you were too quick to take the lowest priced goods.”

“Oh, tush your self, my dear Anna, we’ve had good service of this wench for near two year. Perhaps if you slap her soundly?”

“In the face?”

“Try the rump. “Twill not leave her marred.

“And wherefore should I be the one to chastise the wench?”

“I’d take it as a favor, for I’m too kind-hearted to strike the maiden meself, black as coal tho she is.”

Mistress Van Douw reached down a wooden spoon from a peg on the wall and stepping behind the apparently frozen girl, proceeded to strike her first once, then twice and three times. On the fourth blow, the girl yelped and gave a little jump.

“Fuck! What’d you do that for, lady?”

Ten years after the end of the Revolutionary War, New York had not yet taken any legal steps toward the abolition of slavery the enslaved population of the Hudson Valley was the highest of any state north of the Mason-Dixon line. The greatest number of slaves worked on the large plantations owned by the Livingstons, Van Rensselaers and other wealthy families, but well-to-do families in Albany, New York and other towns relied on slaves as their household servants. Slave masters, however, were uneasy at newspaper reports of the bloody rebellion that had broken out in Haiti two years earlier. It was in this climate of fear that a fire broke out in Albany on the night of November 17, 1793, destroying the central section of the town, bounded by Market Street, State Street, Middle Lane and Maiden Lane. The primitive fire-fighting methods available, principally a bucket brigade to the river, did nothing to stop the blaze until a sudden sleet storm put out the fire.

         Maiden Lane at the present time

Dinah finds herself implicated in setting this fire, which in my version of the events, is part of a planned slave uprising instigated by two men, Sanders and Bessbrown, who played a mysterious in the actual 1793 fire but were never charged:

 “Lemme ask you both somethin,” Pompey looked from the one man to the other. “Why you come to Albany to start this here uprisin? Ain’t there a lot mo slaves down South?”

“We’ve done our research, Pomp, and the Hudson Valley has more slaves than any place north of Virginia. These old patroons have very large plantations over in Kinderhook and Claverack. Hundreds of slaves, all chained up. But here in Albany, you people have a lot of freedom to traipse about on your own. If we can get fifty men to rise here, set fire to the town and march to the plantations, those slaves will soon join us and we’ll seize the city of New York. From there, we’ll gather thousands to advance into the deep bastions of slavocracy in Maryland and Virginia and the Carolinas.”

“But what do ye think all the other whi’ men be doin whilst you lead the black folks off to war?” Pompey asked them. “They gonna jus sit by and watch?”

“But don’t you understand, Pomp. I told you all about France, didn’t I? How the poor whites rose up and tore down the king and all the rich people?”

“Aye, ye tole me all that,” the boy muttered sullenly. “Back when I was yo family’s slave. Before I got sold to Vischer.”

“You know that I did not want my family to sell you, Pompey. I would have surely freed you as soon as I came into my inheritance.”

“So you say, but you went to France and yo mother sold me lickety-split. When I tole her you promised me my freedom, she had me whipped. That ain’t right.”

“I apologize, Pompey, for my mother’s actions.”

Bethany nudged her friend. “Now I seen everythin! A whi’ man apologizing to a nigger.” Dinah shook her head, still unable to believe the incredible racism even Black people took for granted here.

“Why’nt you buy me my freedom now?” Pompey complained.

“I would if only I could come into my inheritance,” Sanders tried to excuse himself. “But Judge Ten Eyck won’t budge. It’s all in the way my father’s will was written.”

Bessbrown was clearly growing impatient. “Listen, sanders, enough with all this palaver. If your boy can’t raise the men he promised, we need to change our plan to another town. Kingston perhaps.”

“No, no, Pomp can do it. And these brave girls will perform their part.” For the first time Sanders looked at Bethany and Dinah. “Are you primed to strike for your freedom, lasses? You should have seen the maidens of Paris when they rose up, kitchen knives in hand. I swear, Marat and Danton would have had no revolution at all without les femmes de Paris behind them!”

He reached out and took both their hands in his own. “And comely wenches such as you are surely capable of inveigling stout men to join the cause, are you not?”

They each nodded uncertainly. “Is we to be paid?” Bethany dared to ask. “Paid?” laughed Sanders.

“You’ll be paid with the finest coin of the realm, liberty itself!”

As they descended the hill back toward the sleeping town, Bethany asked Pompey if those white men were crazy. “It sound like they want us to burn up Albany town and kill all the other whi’ people. That don’t make no sense.”

“First of all, Mr Bessbrown, he a nigger too but he gotta act like he Mr. Sander’s slave. So they’s only one whi’ man, Mr Sanders. He kinda stupid but he truly want all niggers to be free.”

“All I know is they both stupid if they think us niggers gonna get free by doin what? Burning down all the whi’ people’s houses? What that gonna do ‘cept get us hanged?”

“Yeah,” added Dinah. All this time she had been watching Pompey and saw no signs that he had any memory of the other world. She laughed out loud at the strangeness of it all and her friend smiled at her.

    Simeon DeWitt's 1793 map of Albany, from the NYS Archives

Much like the contemporary inclination to immediately suspect Islamic terrorism for any act of mass violence, the white people of Albany assumed that their slaves were responsible for the fire. The immediate reaction can be found in an 1830 newspaper account quoted by Joel Munsell’s in his 1854 Annals of Albany:

The fire was so plainly the work of an incendiary, that not only were several slaves arrested upon suspicion, but subsequently a meeting of the common council was held and an ordinance passed forbidding any Negro or mulatto, of any sex, age or description whatever, from walking in the streets or lanes after 9 o'clock in the evening, or from being in any tavern or tippling house after that hour, under penalty of twenty-four hours confinement in the jail. At the expiration of such confinement they were to be brought before the mayor, recorder or an alderman, when they were at liberty to show, by their master or mistress, that they were out upon lawful and necessary business. If they established this fact, they were discharged upon paying the jail expenses; but if they failed, they were further punished by fine and imprisonment. The municipal authorities were active in ferreting out the perpetrators of this high crime, which, according to the English law, was punishable with death. It was then the law of this land, and as punishment was more summary than it is now, the guilty parties knew that hanging would follow conviction, proceedings in court which followed this fire attracted much attention, particularly among the colored population, in consequence of several of their number having been arrested upon suspicion of being implicated in the arson. [The above taken from the Albany Evening Journal which began publication in 1830]

Predictably, three slaves were quickly arrested. In the state archives in Albany is a very old legal document, the confession of one of the three, a slave girl known as Bet. The ancient paper bearing her mark, the signatures of three aldermen, Abraham Ten Eyck, Joseph Lansing and Durch Ten Broeck is the primary source for my fiction.

    The final page of "Bet's confession"from the NYS Archives

Her confession, written in the third person by her interrogator, outlines the role of two other slaves, Pompey and my main character, Dinah. The document also indicates a key role of two white men in instigating the fire, a man named Sanders from Schenectady and a mysterious figure named Bessbrown. According to Bet, Sanders had offered a gold watch to Pompey if he would set fire to the property of Peter Gansevoort, and Pompey inveigled the girls to join the plot.. According to her account, Sanders was angry because Gansevoort had blocked his courtship of his daughter. Bessbrown’s role is less clear, as is the role of a third white man, a jeweler named Murray.

Since 1788 slaves were entitled to a jury trial but I could find no record for the trial of Bet, Dinah and Pompey. What is known is that none of the whites were charged but after some delays, all three of the young slaves were hung at Pinkster Hill, now the site of the State Capitol building.

        from NY History Blog 

The history of slavery in Albany, and the fate of these three young people, has not been completely ignored in recent years. In 2015 Schuyler Friends, an education project sponsored by historic Schuyler Mansion produced a dramatic recreation of the events which can be found on You Tube as The Accused: Slavery and the Albany Fire of 1793. The Friends of Schuyler Mansion also developed a set of lesson plans on slavery and the 1793 fire for elementary, middle school and high school levels.

There have been significant efforts to make sure that new generations do not forget the tradition of the Pinksterfest, Albany’s Dutch-African Spring Festival which was once held on the same hill where the three slave children were executed and where the State Capitol now stands. (See reference in this article to “the merchant prince” Volkert Douw, who features in my story as the owner of the slave girl Dinah.)

Conflagration 1793 is available on Kindle for 99 cents and also


on Wattpad free.

The Forgotten African-American Burial Ground in Kinderhook

Columbia County is a very rural area between the upper Hudson River and the Berkshire Hills, and most of its population is concentrated in pleasant country villages resembling nearby New England. The northwestern corner is within easy commuting range of the state capital in Albany, and the southern and eastern sections contain the second homes of many prosperous residents of New York City. Agriculture is one of the primary industries. 

And a drive through the county’s bucolic countryside would leave the impression that nearly everyone  is of European ancestry.  

Only in the city of Hudson is there a sizable number of citizens of African descent, and  many of them are concentrated in the city’s public housing .  For most who live, or visit, it might seem that the rest of Columbia County is like a 1940s Hollywood film, a small town and entirely white America. This was not always so.

Ignoring our multi-racial past has its price, and racial tensions are bound to erupt from time to time among young people unaware of their common history and humanity.  On December 5 Stephanie Lee of the Albany Times Union reported on one such incident. An African-American father, Michael Moore, was outraged by the bigotry which his son reported experiencing from fellow students in the Hudson public schools, and his outcry quickly led to his own ostracism by school authorities:

  

     Then, on a bus in spring 2008, a Hispanic student handed a shoeshine brush to the 14-year-old special education student and told him to use it as a hairbrush, Moore said.

     Outraged, Moore marched to the microphone at a school board meeting, insisted he'd learned that his son's experience was not isolated and bluntly declared he knew of a white student who called blacks "niggers." He said that hateful word -- repeating it over and over, as if to splatter its shame on everyone.

     Weeks later, then-Superintendent Fern Aefsky responded to Moore, whom she had recently commended for volunteerism: He was barred from school grounds.

   "There's so much racism that happens at the Hudson City School District," said Moore, 56, "it's morally incompetent."

The article goes on to describe the two sides of Hudson revealed by this incident:

Warren Street, a classy main street lined with cafes and antiques stores, greets visitors to the city. But in many ways, it is like a movie back-lot facade. A block or two away lies a cloister of high-rise towers filled with black and other low-income occupants. Some 24 percent of the city's roughly 7,500 residents are black, and a quarter live below the poverty level, according to the latest available census data.

Judging by the present residential pattern in the county, young people of European descent are likely to see their African-American peers as interlopers,  while young African-Americans probably have little awareness of how deep their roots are in this county, or how much of it was built long ago by their ancestors.

In the 18th century this state had the largest slave population of any colony north of Maryland. Slavery in New York State, where it was gradually abolished beginning in 1799, was the most widespread here in the Hudson Valley, where the huge estates of wealthy Anglo-Dutch families rivaled Southern plantations in their reliance on slavery.

Robert Livingston on right, with Jefferson and Franklin,

working on the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence

Robert Livingston, renowned  for being part of the small group who drafted the Declaration of Independence, was, like Jefferson and Washington, a slavemaster. Clermont, the elegant manor home of the Livingstons south of Hudson NY, depended in part on slave labor, as well as on that of tenant farmers of European origin. The official Clermont website reports that some wealthy landowners may have disposed of their human property in a way that avoided the financial loss imposed by statewide emancipation: 

Some authors have also suggested that once the Gradual Manumission law was passed, Northern slave holders were beginning to sell their slaves to Southern owners to protect their financial investment. In 1827, manumission was completed, and all remaining enslaved peoples were legally free.

 Clermont, manor home of the slave- owning Livingston family

As the great semi-feudal estates were replaced by family farms following the Anti-Rent War of the 1840s, there was little room for the remaining African Americans who had done so much to create the prosperity in which they never shared. Their memory was forgotten, and even the graves of generations of hard-working people were forgotten and lost.

In the quaint village of Kinderhook, a scant dozen miles from the housing projects of Hudson, is one such burial ground, now so completely vanished that only the oldest residents of the village have a memory of its existence. And I believe that the unmarked burial ground is  located on land owned by the county’s historical society.

The Center for Columbia County History at the Vanderpoel house.

Probable site of African burial ground is in woods to right rear of house.

 According to  Edward Collier’s History of Kinderhook (1914) land was set aside for the internment  of African-Americans on the property of the Vanderpoel house, which was owned by a man whom Rev. Collier calls "somewhat erratic." Evidently, John Rogers was more tolerant than his contemporaries and felt sympathetic to families unable to bury their loved ones in cemeteries like  that of the nearby Kinderhook Reformed Church, reserved for  families of Dutch and English descent, including that of our 8th president:

“While the Vanderpoel place was owned by the somewhat erratic John Rogers, he set apart a portion of his land for the free burial of our colored people. It was thus used until every available inch was taken up; in some cases, it is stated, with coffin piled upon coffin. It was then, as it now long has been, closed against additional burials."

Captain Franklin, in his 1878 history of Kinderhook calls John Rogers “an Irishman of convivial habits, but withal a good business man” and says that he built a store and was on the board of a village bank in 1853, which would place the origin of the burial ground in the years between about 1821 and the Civil War.

When I first visited the Vanderpoel house several years ago, it was not hard to locate the most probable site for the forgotten burial ground  in a wooded quadrangle on the northwest corner of the property. The area presents an anomaly among the yards and gardens characteristic of the block, due most probably to a respect accorded to the small parcel of land by earlier property-owners of the neighborhood.  Neighbors of the parcel say that they had heard stories of the old graveyard, and an older resident of adjacent Albany Avenue, Mrs. Snyder, told me that when she was a child, the stones were still there. At some point they were just taken away, she said, and the graves were forgotten.

 Possible site of an unmarked grave in the parcel of land 

near the Vanderpohl house

I thought about the unmarked final resting places of so many people who worked to build this county, and was saddened to find no reminder of their lives. Doubtless, many of the simple markers were of wood and vanished even before the last gravestones were carried away, although it is clear that as late as 1914 the site was still recognized as a cemetery.

When I recently shared my discovery with the historical society’s executive director, Ann-Eliza Lewis, she said that she thought that the African burial ground was farther west, where the Little League field now exists, and directed me to the grave stones on the edge of that field.  She did agree that the wooded parcel of land on the Vanderpoel site was probably a burial ground, but she thought that it was that of the Pomeroy family. I thought this an unlikely possibility, considering the respect shown to  English and Dutch forebears in this region.

 The grave of the 8th president, Martin Van Buren, is set amid

stones honoring the memory of many of Kinderhook's early 

settlers of European origin.

However, Ann-Eliza  was open to the possibility that such an African  burial ground might exist on property owned by the historical society and hoped that, if verified, a suitable recognition of the site could become a central part of next year’s sesquicentennial remembrance of the Civil War.

 UMass archeologists at work near the Vanderpoel house, June 2009

In June 2009 a group of archeologists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst did some careful excavations near the Vanderpoel house, and uncovered number of interesting small artifacts. Doubtless, the expertise of the U Mass team could be consulted again to evaluate the probable burial ground.

 Grave markers  have been moved to this location near

the Little League field on Rothermel Lane

 One marker, that of "Sylvestes," may be that of a freed slave.

As to the gravestones near the ball field on Rothermel Avenue, to which Ann-Eliza referred me, they have clearly been moved from the actual location of the resting places they once marked. The very neatness of the quadrangle and the arrangement of the 13 headstones and four footstones  in size order, without regard for family names, is clear evidence that they have been moved and rearranged. Also, they are not the markers of slaves or freedmen, but of local families of European descent such as Van Valkenburgh and Leggett.  Only one stone, bearing the single name “Sylvestes,” who died in 1860, suggests an individual who was born as a slave. 

Confirming  the  location of  the village’s African Burial Ground, and providing appropriate recognition to these forgotten builders of the county, would be a small but significant step toward increasing an awareness among young people of our shared heritage, and might even contribute a to a greater understanding.

NOTE: I first presented these findings, or perhaps I should say this theory, in a letter published in the Hudson Register-Star in 2009.

Update October 2011: I received some interesting information from Annie Cooper, director of Columbia County Tourism, who reported the following from a person she considered extremely knowledgeble about Kinderhook history:

I am not sure about any stones being moved there. One of the stones that still stands is that of Mrs (Hannah, I think) Burgert who was wife of the AME minister in the village (at the little black church on Sunset). I think a lot of the stones have been stolen.

The cemetery began around 1814 or 1816, when John Rogers died. He was the owner of the Burgoyne / van Schaack mansion after David van Schaack had died; and in his will he provided that that land be set aside as a burying ground for the "colored people of Kinderhook". (John Rogers himself was an Irlishman and did not own slaves.)  Collier wrote in his book (1914) that by that time the cemetery was filled up.

In the 1970s or so, there was a Boy Scout project to clean up that cemetery which was badly overgrown etc. I believe at that time, they moved the remaining stones to one place to make it easier for DPW people to mow around. There are sure to have been more stones than there are now ... though I expect that not every black person could have afforded one.

I have never heard that slaves burials were moved there / though I suppose it is possible. I don't know of another black burial ground, though I am aware that some slaves were buried in the family plots of the people who had owned them.

When abolition was made law in NY state in the 1790s, the law said that anyone born to a slave after that time was free ... and that slaves themselves would become free in 1827 (i.e., a "generation" after the law had passed) unless individual slave owners decided to manumit their slave(s) before that date. — So when John Rogers bequeathed that land, there were still slaves in the community who might have been buried there. After 1827, a goodly number of black people lived in the village or in nearby rural areas and they are likely to have been buried there as well. I have tried a bit to see if there was any record of burials there, but have never been able to locate any church records for the Kinderhook African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The former A.M.E. church, now a private home

This well-researched 2008 historical novel by N.E.  Sartin offers a very interesting glimpse of the African-American community in Kinderhook in the 1880s.  The story centers on the important but little remembered  trial of "Battice" Jackson, a black man,  for the murder of Gertrude Hover, a white woman.


Update June 28, 2017

The Columbia County Historical Society has provided welcome recognition of the African American burial ground in Kinderhook. A state historical sign on Rothermel Lane and an informative sign at the site of the surviving grave markers refers to the estimated five hundred slaves and freed people buried on the land bequeathed by John Rodgers.