Philipsburg Manor: The North Had Slavery Too

Most Americans learn slavery as a Southern institution. Philipsburg Manor, standing on the banks of the Pocantico River in what is now Sleepy Hollow, tells a different and necessary story.

Frederick Philipse arrived in New Netherland in sixteen fifty-three as a carpenter for the Dutch West India Company. Through shrewd business deals, two advantageous marriages, and a ruthless facility for colonial commerce, he amassed fifty-two thousand acres of Westchester County. In sixteen ninety-three, King William the Third confirmed his ownership in a royal patent. Philipse built a gristmill, a manor house, and a wharf, and he connected the whole operation to trade networks stretching from the Hudson Valley to the West Indies and across the Atlantic.

The engine of that enterprise was enslaved labor. By seventeen fifty, twenty-three enslaved people of African descent ran the mill, farmed the land, and kept the manor functioning. The Philipse family was among the largest slaveholders in the colonial North. For more than three decades, Frederick and later his son Adolph transported hundreds of African men, women, and children across the Atlantic as part of their trade network.

The most important man at the gristmill was not a Philipse. He was an enslaved miller named Caesar, the only person on the property who fully understood the milling process. The mill produced flour and meal in large quantities. Enslaved boatmen moved those goods down the Hudson to New York, where they were shipped to the Caribbean in exchange for sugar and tobacco. The manor's wealth flowed entirely through enslaved hands.

When the Revolution came, the Philipse family chose the wrong side. As Loyalists, they forfeited their land, and the estate passed into American hands.

Historic Hudson Valley now operates the site as the only living-history museum in New York with a sustained focus on colonial Northern slavery. The mill still turns. The story it tells now is the one that was hidden for two centuries.