Author’s Talk: In Defiance – Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson Valley

by Susan Stessin-Cohn and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini

The Historical Society of Woodstock Presents author Susan Stessin-Cohn for a talk on the second edition of her book, In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley 1735-1831

On Saturday September 7 at 3:00 p.m., the Historical Society of Woodstock will present a talk by Susan Stessin-Cohn on her newest research and second edition of the publication, In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley 1735-1831.   

In recent years, historians and researchers have taken a closer look at New York’s complicity in the “peculiar institution” of slavery. One of the books that helped shed more light on this tragic subject was the 2016 publication of In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 1735–1831. The core of that book by Hudson Valley historical researchers, Susan Stessin-Cohn and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini, was the reproduction and transcriptions of hundreds of 18^th and 19^th-century newspapers notices offering rewards for the return of enslaved persons who had escaped their enslavers and become “runaways.” Continuing their research, Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini discovered more than 250 additional runaway notices that prompted them to rewrite and greatly expand In Defiance in this newly released Second Edition.

Most enslaved persons held in the Hudson River Valley lived and worked and died and left behind no historical record—no birth certificates, no marriage records, no death certificates, unmarked graves. But In Defiance rescues over 900 of those individuals from obscurity because they decided to free themselves; when their enslavers placed notices in local and New York City newspapers offering rewards for their return, they not only gave identity to some of the enslaved people, but also unwittingly indicted themselves before the bar of historical judgment. Surnames synonymous with Hudson Valley history—names like Schuyler, Van Rensselaer, Beekman, Rockefeller, Van Cortlandt, Van Buren, Livingston—appear throughout the book as the authors of the notices advertising rewards for the return of their enslaved “property.”

The result of 17 years of research on behalf of Stessin-Cohn and Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance examines life in bondage in our region and the natural “fight or flight” instinct in every human being dominating the minds of all those who were treated as property.

The Historical Society of Woodstock is located at 20 Comeau Drive. Admission to this talk is free. While in attendance, visitors can also view HSW’s current exhibit: Woodstock Village – The Evolution as well as the Society’s permanent Tool Shed and Remembering Woodstock exhibits