Conditional Freedom in the Dutch Atlantic: The Creation of Half-Freedom in New Netherland

When several African men petitioned for their freedom in 1640’s New Amsterdam, the council of this then Dutch colony determined that their freedom should be conditional, or half-freedom as they termed it. The men still had to pay yearly tributes, they had to provide assistance when the colony needed them, and their children remained enslaved.

The legal condition of these men, and several Africans after them who received similar conditional freedoms, has received the interest of many scholars. These scholars have used the half-free condition to examine the variations of slavery in the 17th century Atlantic. But as the name of their new status of half-free indicates, their condition should be similarly revealing about freedom in the early Atlantic. How did their condition differ from that of free people in New Amsterdam society, and what indeed constituted freedom in this Dutch colonial society where indentured servitude was common place, and certain restrictions also pertained to other, supposedly free, people in the colony?

Through investigation of the petitions for freedom by New Amsterdam’s enslaved population, this paper will examine what these men and women understood as freedom and what they believed were the requirements for obtaining their freedom in this Dutch colonial society. This paper will compare these petitions to the colonial council’s responses, and it will examine how these fit in with 17th century Dutch ideas about freedom and unfreedom. This paper contends that by testing the boundaries of freedom and slavery, which led to their half-free condition, these enslaved men and women inadvertently forced Dutch authorities to establish more specific requirements for obtaining freedom, and thus also to provide clearer parameters of slavery in the Dutch Atlantic.