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1 Kings County Edwin G. Burrows Inthefirsthalfoftheeighteenthcentury,despiteitsproximitytoManhattan, Kings County grew more slowly than any other in the province. Between 1698 and 1771, its population rose from 2,017 to 3,623 (an 80 percent increase); during the same period, the population of New York County, just across the East River, climbed from 4,937 to 21,863 (a 343 percent increase), while that of the entire colony jumped from 18,067 to 163,348 (an 804 percent increase).1 Not thatKingsCountywasanundesirableplacetoputdownroots:itsoriginalNative American inhabitants had been driven out or marginalized, and by all accounts the western end of Long Island (then often called Nassau Island) was as fertile as it was beautiful. Visitors never failed to marvel at its abundant wildlife, dense forests, bountiful orchards, fat cattle, and sweeping fields of wheat, corn, and tobacco—“the richest spot, in the opinion of New-Yorkers, of all America,” wrote the Rev. Andrew Burnaby.2 Why would the richest spot in New York, let alone all America, have captured so small a share of the burgeoning provincial population?The answer turns on two circumstances, both of which bear directly on how the people of Kings County would experience and remember the Revolution. First, the vast majority of its white inhabitants were fourth- or fifth-generation descendants of the Dutch and Walloon colonists who colonized New Netherland in the middle of the previous century and stubbornly resisted Anglicization after the English conquest of 1664. They spoke and wrote in Dutch, and they insisted on Dutch mates for their sons and daughters; many could boast of working the same land that had belonged to their grandfathers and should in the fullness of time belong to their own grandchildren. They relied on the Reformed Church rather than English courts for the resolution of disputes , and they clung to the Roman-Dutch legal tradition, which among other 21 things allowed married women to use their maiden names and control their own property. Thus, although Kings County itself was an institution of English local government (set up when the entire province was “shired” in 1683), its small rural communities remained so determinedly Dutch—so insulated from the economic and social forces reshaping British North America in the eighteenth century —that it is no wonder prospective settlers tended to look elsewhere.3 But Kings County presented a second and arguably even more formidable obstacle to newcomers: the growing dependence of its Dutch farmers onAfrican slave labor. Between 1698 and 1771, the number of slaves in the county rose from 296 to 1,162—an increase of 866 as against an increase of only 740 in the number of whites. On the eve of the Revolution, one out of every three residents was in bondage, a greater proportion than any other county north of the MasonDixon line, and slaves represented a significant share of the wealth of the Rapeljes, Van Brunts, Cowenhovens, Leffertses, Sudayms, Lotts, Wyckoffs, Remsens, and other prominent families. It is the breadth of slave ownership that commands attention, however. Nearly 60 percent of the county’s white families owned one or more slaves, relying on them to perform a wide variety of tasks: cooking and cleaning, tending crops and livestock, hauling agricultural produce to mills and markets, maintaining fences, building roads. The result, as a pair of observant Hessians discovered in 1776, was that Kings County offered few if any opportunities for a poor white man to make a living. “Near every dwellinghouse negroes (their slaves) are settled, who cultivate the most fertile land, pasturethecattle ,anddoallthemenialwork,”observedMajorBaurmeister.Whites, added Chaplain Waldeck, “cannot earn anything with fieldwork or other handwork in this area, since the landed gentleman has his work done by his own Negroes.” Besides, as the county’s servile population grew, so had the urgency of vigilance. Disorderly, disobedient, and runaway slaves became a more and more familiar feature of local affairs, and all whites, whether they owned slaves or not, were expected to aid and abet the racial regime.4 These two circumstances—Dutch clannishness and resistance to assimilation , plus the intensifying exploitation of slave labor—not only help explain why the population of Kings County failed to keep pace with the rest of the province, but also why the bulk of its white landowners took a dim view ofWhig resistance to Britain’s colonial policy after the end of the SevenYears’War.True, their forebears had rejoiced when Admiral Cornelis Evertsen drove the English out of New York in 1673...

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