“A Negro girl five Years old named Phillis”: Slavery in Northern New York

Detail of quilt made by Anna Moore Hubbell.
Textile ca. 1785-1800

This post begins with a return to an item from the Alice’s collection that I’ve discussed several times before, on the blog and on North Country Public Radio’s “Adirondack Attic.” The quilt made by Anna Moore Hubbell using a patriotic textile is truly one of the gems of the collection due to the unique nature of the object itself, as well as its connection to local history. Anna (1790-1861) was the daughter of Pliny Moore, one of the founders of the town of Champlain, and the wife of Julius C. Hubbell, a long-time prominent citizen and lawyer in Chazy. The quilt was donated to Alice T. Miner by Anna’s granddaughter Isabella Mygatt.

The textile that Anna Hubbell repurposed to make the quilt was originally part of the furnishings of Pliny Moore’s elegant residence in Champlain. In this post, I want to take a closer look at the residents of that household, which included not just Pliny Moore and his wife and seven children but an enslaved woman named Phillis. Although very little information about Phillis has entered into the official historical record, her life nonetheless opens a window into the often-neglected history of slavery in northern New York.

Map showing location of Kinderhook
and Champlain

First, let’s look at how and why Pliny Moore settled in Champlain. Moore was born in 1759 in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Like many 18th century families, the Moores made several moves in search of new prospects—first to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and then to Spencertown, New York, near Kinderhook. During the Revolutionary War, Moore enlisted in a regiment commanded by Colonel Marinus Willett and earned a lieutenant’s commission. Moore’s Revolutionary War service would prove to be significant in a number of ways, not least of which was the fact that his second enlistment took place under a new law which offered land bounties for soldiers; as an officer he was entitled to receive 1,000 acres. As early as 1782, Moore began purchasing claims from fellow soldiers, or taking on the job of locating land on their behalf in exchange for a portion of their claims. Why, exactly, Moore was drawn to northern New York, remains unknown, but he began to formulate a project for a grant along the Canadian border in 1783.

For several years, Pliny Moore traveled back and forth between Kinderhook and what would become Champlain, surveying land, laying out lots, building dams and sawmills. During this time he also married Martha Corbin and their first child, Noadiah, was born in 1788. In the spring of 1789, the family settled permanently in Champlain, which was now part of the newly-created Clinton County. Moore tried his hand at almost every kind of business that could be done in northern New York—timbering, making potash, milling, carding and fulling wool, maple sugaring, along with farming and livestock raising. He became an agent for John Jacob Astor and others, receiving furs coming into the United States from Canada, and served as postmaster for the town of Champlain and county court justice and later judge.

Pliny Moore’s home, as depicted in an 1869 publication

During this period, Moore maintained his connections to the southern part of the state, where many members of the Moore and Corbin families still lived. In 1793, he purchased a slave from Isaac Van Slyk of Kinderhook. The deed of sale simply describes her as “a Negro girl five Years old named Phillis”; Moore paid £14 (about $65) for her. Moore likely purchased Phillis with the idea that she could provide domestic assistance for his growing family, which by that time included three young children. Owning a slave was also a sign of status. Like many people who moved to frontier regions during this period, Moore was eager to find ways to demonstrate that he was nonetheless a man of gentility. The house he built in 1801, furnished with fashionable items like patriotic textiles, would be the ultimate symbol of refinement, but even before then, Moore was showing his neighbors he was a man of substance by purchasing a slave.

New Amsterdam, engraving ca. 1640

For five-year-old Phillis, moving 200 miles from her home in Kinderhook to the remote northern outpost of Champlain could only have been deeply traumatic. Although we don’t know anything about her life in Kinderhook, it seems safe to assume that she was taken away from her parents and perhaps siblings and other relatives. Her first language may have been Dutch. In the 18th century, New York State had the largest population of enslaved people in the north, and most of them were concentrated in the Hudson Valley, where the early Dutch settlers had established large landed estates. Phillis thus would have been leaving a place where she was part of a large and long-standing black community, and going to a part of the state where she was one of a small handful of people of color (the 1790 census counted only 33 nonwhite people in all of Clinton County) and would be the only enslaved person in the Moore household.

In 1799, New York passed a gradual emancipation act, which freed children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799, though they would serve a period of indenture until the age of 28 (for men) or 25 (for women). Anyone already enslaved as of July 4, 1799 would be reclassified as a permanent indentured servant, but effectively was still a slave. In 1817 a new law was passed that would free those slaves born before July 4, 1799—but not until July 4, 1827. When, exactly, Phillis became free is not clear. In 1818, Pliny Moore wrote in his will, “I gave her her freedom many years since[. S]he has hitherto chosen to remain in my family as before her freedom.” However, the 1810 federal census recorded her as a slave in the Moore household. In a society where slavery was disappearing but still had no real place for people of color, “freedom” was a slippery concept.

There are no images of Phillis.
This drawing of a cook is by
Anne-Henriette-Marguerite de Neuvelle,
a French émigré who lived in
New York from 1807 to 1814.

How much difference it would have made to the material circumstances of Phillis’s life whether she was a slave, an indentured servant, or a free person of color, is a difficult question to answer. Moore framed Phillis’s decision to remain with the family as a choice, but her options were probably fairly limited, particularly because she had children to provide for. Moore stated in his will that Phillis had, in his opinion, “conducted vilely in lewdness & occasioned much trouble & expence with her children yet she has many good qualities is patient honest kind to all my family & much attached to them all.” He left her $10 per year, “as long as her conduct is virtuous,” and hoped that one his children would bring her to live with them after the death of Martha Moore.

Moore’s words raise as many questions as they answer. We can guess that her “vile” and “lewd” conduct was probably having children out of wedlock, but we don’t know for sure. How many children did Phillis have, when were they born, who was their father, and what happened to them? 

Moore believed that Phillis was “much attached” to his family, and she probably was—but again, she didn’t have a lot of choice, after being taken away from her own family at the age of five. Moore’s financial support was contingent upon Phillis’s good behavior, though it must be said that he used similar leverage on his own children, threatening to disinherit his son Royal, who had eloped with a “worthless Strumpet.” However, Moore also expected that his children would eventually become independent, whereas he assumed that Phillis would continue to be someone’s responsibility for the rest of her life.

Because everything we know about Phillis comes through the writing of Pliny Moore, she disappears from the historical record after his death in 1822. She probably continued to work for Martha Moore until Martha died in 1825, but what happened to her after that remains a mystery. As is so often the case when researching the lives of non-elite Americans, there are a lot of holes in our knowledge. Still, just acknowledging that Phillis was part of the Moore household and a member of the Champlain community helps to enrich our picture of life in northern New York in the early days of settlement. Pliny Moore is known today as a pioneer, but Phillis was, too. Her labor, and the labor of other men and women, enslaved and free, remembered and unremembered, was essential to the development of the North Country.

Sources:

Pliny Moore’s papers, including documents related to the life of Phillis, are part of the McLellan Collection, Special Collections, Feinberg Library, SUNY Plattsburgh.

Information about the life of Pliny Moore and his family comes from Allan S. Everest, Pliny Moore: North Country Pioneer of Champlain, New York (Clinton County Historical Association, 1990).

An excellent overview of the history of slavery in New York is Slavery in New York, a book edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, and published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name held at the New-York Historical Society in 2005.

“Where Liberty Dwells There Is My Country”: Anna Hubbell’s Quilt

I recently had the opportunity to take a closer look at the quilts in the Alice’s collection when Hallie Bond came to document the quilts for a project she is working on with Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (she also gave a fantastic talk on Adirondack quilts). Some of these quilts don’t get to come out of their boxes very often and there was one that I had never even seen that I found particularly interesting.

The whole-cloth quilt was made by Anna Moore Hubbell (1793-1861), the daughter of Judge Pliny Moore of Champlain and wife of Julius C. Hubbell of Chazy. Unlike the patchwork quilts (made of many small pieces of material sewn together) that became common later in the 19th century, this quilt is made of just one fabric—and it’s a very unusual textile with an interesting history of its own.

Textile historian Whitney A. J. Robertson has written about this pattern, which is known as “The Apotheosis of Franklin and Washington,” and is one of the most common textiles of its kind to appear in museum collections. You can find it in at least 18 different places, including Colonial Williamsburg, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Old Sturbridge Village, and the Winterthur Museum. As Robinson notes, it’s hard to say “whether this fabric is so ubiquitous because of its popularity during its own time, its appeal to collectors in the 19th and 20th centuries or both,” but I think it’s easy to see why many people might have been attracted to its wealth of patriotic imagery.

Robertson explains that patterned cotton and linen bed furnishings became popular in Britain in the 17th century as washable, inexpensive alternatives to wool and silk. These early fabrics were printed with wood blocks; initially they were imported from India and later were produced domestically. In 1752, Francis Nixon of the Drumcondra Printworks in Ireland figured out how to use the copperplate printing technique used on paper to produce patterns on textiles. Copperplate printing allowed for more detail and larger pattern repeats than wood-block printing, though it was limited to a single color.

Copperplate-printed fabrics, also known as “toiles,” frequently borrowed designs directly from existing engravings. Pastoral scenes and landscapes were common, as were political and military subjects. Many of these fabrics were made by British and French manufacturers specifically for the export market. This market really boomed after the Revolution—American industry wasn’t advanced enough to produce these textiles, but English tradesmen realized that there was a good deal of money to be made in providing fashionable and patriotic materials to Americans.

The unknown maker of “The Apotheosis of Franklin and Washington,” which was produced in England ca. 1785-1800, clearly felt that it was a good idea to put as many different symbols into the pattern as possible. In one scene, George Washington drives in a chariot with a female figure wearing a plumed headdress, representing America; she carries a caduceus, symbolizing the blessings of commerce. The chariot is pulled by jaguars and is led by two Indians, one with a trumpet and a “Unite or Die” flag and one with an early version of the American flag. In the background are scenes from the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In another scene, Benjamin Franklin, accompanied by Liberty, is being led by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, to the Temple of Fame, where two cherubs hold a map of America. Over the heads of Franklin and Liberty is a banner reading “Where Liberty Dwells There Is My Country.” Liberty carries two conventional symbols, the liberty pole and liberty cap, while Minerva holds a shield decorated with thirteen stars. In addition to these two major scenes, the textile also depicts a Liberty Tree with a copy of the Stamp Act tacked to it, instruments of war, and distinctively American flora and fauna such as the beaver. While all of these symbols would have been familiar to most people in the late 18th century, it is definitely unusual to see so many different forms of iconography in one place.

So how did Anna Hubbell come to make this quilt? Because she signed it with her married name, we know she must have made it some time after her marriage in January 1812—probably many years after this textile was first produced and became fashionable. A label attached to the quilt gives us some clues. According to the writer of the label, the quilt was taken from a bed in the home of Pliny Moore by M. A. Mygatt—presumably Anna and Julius’s daughter Martha Anne Mygatt (Martha’s daughter Isabella donated it to Alice Miner). There is also a barely legible line that says something about “bed curtains.” 

Did Pliny Moore once have an entire set of bed furnishings made from this textile? Moore permanently settled in Champlain in 1789 and built a fine Federal-style house in 1801. He is said to have owned the first piano in Champlain, and he sent his daughter Anna to Litchfield Female Academy, one of the most important institutions for women’s education in the early republic. As a wealthy landowner, judge, and Revolutionary War veteran, he was just the sort of person one might expect to purchase a fashionable toile like “The Apotheosis of Franklin and Washington.” Champlain may have been considered the frontier in those days, but clearly its residents were aware of the latest styles in furnishings. 

My theory is that Anna may have used some of the bed hangings and refashioned them into a quilt—perhaps during the War of 1812 when nationalistic fervor was running high and the British naval blockade limited the importation of new fabric. A close examination of the quilt shows that the material was patched in one spot, the pattern carefully matched so that it is hardly visible. Stories that are still told about Anna Hubbell’s actions when British troops were quartered in Chazy before the Battle of Plattsburgh indicate that she was a spirited and patriotic woman; as the young wife of a newly-minted lawyer she probably also had to be economical in her housekeeping. By refashioning an older textile, Anna would have demonstrated both her patriotism and her resourcefulness.

Sources:

Whitney A. J. Robertson, “Sleeping Amongst Heroes: Copperplate-printed Bed Furniture in the ‘Washington and American Independance [sic] 1776; the Apotheosis of Franklin’ Pattern,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, Paper 739, 2012.

Walter Hubbell, History of the Hubbell Family (New York, 1915).

Duane Hamilton Hurd, History of Clinton and Franklin Counties, New York (Philadelphia, 1880).

Nell Jane Barnett Sullivan and David Kendall Martin, A History of the Town of Chazy (Burlington, 1970).

Litchfield Historical Society, Ledger of Students at the Litchfield Law School and the Litchfield Female Academy.

Interpretive panel about Pliny Moore’s home in Champlain.