Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

“Looking Over Bet’s Shoulders: The Archive and the Albany Arson Plot” – Michael Monescalchi

In the prologue to Facing East from Indian Country, Dan Richter claims that it is nearly impossible for scholars who are interested in recovering disenfranchised persons’ perspectives “to see the world through [the] eyes” of those we study.1 Rather than despair over the archive’s limitations, however, he offers a solution to this problem, arguing that we must try to look over our subjects’ shoulders to “reconstruct something of the way in which [they] might have understood the world.”2 

I see Richter’s anecdote about the need to look “over the shoulder of a Wampanoag woman hoeing her corn” as an expansive, context-based approach to the archive that undergirds all our contributions to this roundtable.3 For Sherri Cummings, a 1751 legal dispute between a wigmaker and an enslaver in Newport, Rhode Island is less the focus of her analysis and more the context through which we learn about the life of an unnamed enslaved girl who is “pushed to the background of a legal case that centers on her labor and monetary value.” When reflecting on the New York Historical Society’s Acts of Faith exhibit, Brad Dubos similarly demonstrates the importance of archival perspective, arguing that a Sanford Plummer (Seneca) painting and its mapping of the competing colonial and Haudenosaunee geographies of present-day New York State forces visitors to “consider the consequences of how we remember and retell early American histories.”

As I begin a new research project on the three enslaved persons—Bet, Dean, and Pompey—who were accused of and then executed for setting half of Albany, New York on fire in 1793, I continue to be reminded of the importance of context. Writing in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, French aristocrat Henriette Lucie Dillon claimed that “an insurrection of negroes” caused the fire.4 Though contemporary newspapers echoed this belief, Bet made no mention of protest in her dictated confession. Instead, she said that “five white men with a grudge” against Leonard Gansevoort hired Pompey, who then enlisted her and Dean, to “set fire” to his stable.5

Figure 1. This 1794 plan for the city of Albany accurately reflects where the fire started. The Gansevoort residence was located (on the lower right hand side of the map) between the vertically positioned State Street and Maiden Avenue and the horizontally positioned Market Street and Middle Lane. Simeon DeWitt, “Plan of the City of Albany,” Albany, N.Y., 1794, Lithograph by Pease, Albany Institute of History, Map, ht.11″ x w.15″.

When I assigned these texts in my “True Crime in Early America” course, my students and I initially debated which source provided a more accurate report of the fire. But once I gave them a better picture of the world over Bet’s shoulders, and they learned about increasing fears of enslaved rebellion after the Haitian Revolution, my students realized that the prevalence of texts that characterized the fire as an insurrection correlated not with the truth value of those sources, but with the various writers’ racist motivations. For a class that focused on how “true” events were communicated in writing, the competing accounts of the Albany arson plot revealed something larger about both the “true crime” phenomenon and the archive: because subjective beliefs get in the way of objective “truths,” we must deal with subjective impressions before we can make any claims about “objective” knowledge. What Richter’s work, this roundtable, and these sources on the Albany arson plot show, then, is that the archive becomes more accessible once we understand the world that made it appear inaccessible in the first place.

Figure 2. A copy of a newspaper column that was printed in many newspapers throughout New England in January 1794, which detailed the sentencing and impending executions of Bet, Dean, and Pompey. “Albany, January 13,” Albany, N.Y., January 21, 1794, The Federal Spy and Springfield Weekly Advertiser.

 

Michael Monescalchi is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the English Department and Writing Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is working on a project on race, republicanism, and evangelicalism in early America.

Links to Other Facing the Archives from the Present, Part II Posts:

Facing the Archive from the Present, Part II: A Celebration of Dan Richter’s Work – Tara A. Bynum and Liz Polcha

The Language of Symbols and the Unspoken – Sherri V. Cummings

Letters Lost and Found: Silences in the Early American Archive – Bradley Dubos

  1. Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9. ↩
  2. Ibid. ↩
  3. Ibid., 8. ↩
  4. Henriette de Lucie, Recollections of the Revolution and the Empire. From the French of the “Journal D’Une Femme De Cinquante Ans” by La Marquise De La Tour Du Pin, edited and translated by Walter Geer (New York, 1920), 192. ↩
  5. “The Examination of Bet, a Negro Female Slave of Philip S. Van Rensselaer, Esquire, Taken the 28th day of November 1793,” New York State Library, Albany, New York, Manuscripts and History Section. ↩