“Good Enough to Suckle the Child”: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the 1783 New Jersey Case of the Negro Philip

In 1748 a little boy arrived in Somerset County New Jersey wrapped in a blanket by the elite New York slaveholder of Dutch heritage James van Horne, with the instructions that he be nursed by his housekeeper a local white woman named Margaret Wiser. When the baby was uncovered, Wiser and her husband discovered that the child was mixed race, but Wiser agreed to nurse him anyway because his mother “was a white woman” and that her parents “were people of almost the first Rank in New-York.” Thirty-five years later, Philip returned to his origin story as the son of an elite white woman in his appeal for freedom against the claim of two elite men: James van Horne (who had, incidentally, that same year hosted George Washington at the Rocky Hill Plantation where Philip had first arrived and might have been a blood relation to Philip) and Dirk Ten Broek. He appealed to the broader Dutch community to establish his nativity and specifically highlighted Margaret Wiser's role as his white wet nurse. This paper explores the ways that gender and race were constructed together—in law and in custom—within elite networks across the North.