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. 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.
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?