'People Not Property' Takes a Hard Look at Slavery in the Hudson Valley

Slavery is generally thought of as a Southern institution. But some historians are working to expand the geographic understanding of the systematic owning of human beings as a way to obtain free labor.

Historic Hudson Valley has launched a documentary website called “People Not Property: Stories of Slavery in the Colonial North.” The interactive project explores the systems of enslavement in the Colonial North by telling the history of a particular site: the Philipsburg Manor near Sleepy Hollow.

While plantations are typically seen as a Southern phenomenon, Philipsburg Manor was a plantation as well. Instead of cotton and sugar cane, though, enslaved workers on the 52,000 acre property grew wheat and milled flour, along with other goods that eventually made their way to the South and the Caribbean. One of the enslaved people featured in "People Not Property" was named Caesar, and as historian Leslie Harris tells WNYC's Jami Floyd, he was a highly-skilled worker who ran the plantation's lucrative mill operations.

"He was really in charge of that operation. His supervisor was a white overseer, but he, and we believe many of the enslaved people who lived there, did this work semi-independently," said Harris. "And so for many years, he was in charge of wheat that went to the Caribbean and that fed lots of people, both slaves on Caribbean plantations and also the white overseers and owners of those Caribbean plantations."

You can hear the full conversation by clicking "Listen."