The Humble Petition of Prince: Navigating Agency Within Enslavement

 

The following article was written following new research on Prince, conducted in 2020 during NYS On PAUSE. As much as staff at Schuyler Mansion are dedicated to, and enjoy, offering engaging public programming, NYS On PAUSE not only helped ensure the safety of visitors and staff, but afforded us the opportunity to dig deeper into the rich, complex history of this site and the people who were here.

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Prince as portrayed in a video
in the Schuyler Mansion
Visitors Center

Of the more than forty people of African descent enslaved by Philip and Catharine Schuyler, a man named Prince has, for many years, held prominence in the interpretation of slavery and the enslaved at Schuyler Mansion. This is due, in large part, to the fact that the details of his life during the time he was enslaved by the Schuylers are better documented than are those of most of the other men, women, and children the Schuylers enslaved. He is regularly mentioned in the personal correspondence of the family, and even served as a common reference point for Philip Schuyler and John Jay when the two used his name as the key to decrypting their encoded messages during the Revolutionary War.

Yet as much his name has stood out in the documentary record, Prince has been the subject of far more questions than answers. One of the most basic of these is how did he end up enslaved in Albany in the first place? Despite a series of letters detailing the specifics of the financial transaction that led to his enslavement by the Schuylers, it is only recently that a fuller picture of his story and situation have emerged.

Prior to enslavement by the Schuylers, Prince was enslaved by a Mr. Alexander MacCulloch. MacCulloch was not your common businessman, rather, he was the Deputy Quartermaster General of Quebec, an important player in the British war effort. While Prince is not, to our current knowledge, documented prior to his arrival in Albany, we can trace Prince’s story and his path to Albany through his much better-documented enslaver.

The autumn of 1775 was one of high hopes for Major General Philip Schuyler, as the forces of the Northern Department prepared to secure British positions at Saint-Jean, Montreal, and Quebec. In late October, Fort Chambly fell to the rebels, along with ninety prisoners of war. Among them was Commissary MacCulloch, who joined other “Men of Rank in Canada”, as described by General Montgomery following the surrender of Saint-Jean, as a prisoner of the Continentals.

Fort Chambly in 1863, William Notman (1826-1891)

Prince’s presence with MacCulloch on the front lines of the conflict can give us insights into Prince as an individual. The services Prince performed for MacCulloch were important enough to MacCulloch that he considered Prince’s presence at the fort essential. Prince was likely a personal attendant to MacCulloch, assisting him with travel, dress and hygiene, and possibly even some secretarial work. Later, Prince seems to have been in close attendance upon Philip Schuyler in a similar capacity, and suggestions of Prince’s literacy can be found throughout Schuyler documents, including a 1791 letter in which Philip indicates that Prince may have reviewed the letter and reminded him to request boards from his son, John Bradstreet Schuyler.

His connection to a prominent military figure and businessman in Quebec raises the possibility that Prince was at least bilingual. His birthplace is unrecorded, but if he was born in Africa, as an adult he may have spoken one or more African languages, and/or possibly Arabic. We know from later sources that Prince spoke fluent English, but he might have spoken French as well. Whether he was born in Africa, the Caribbean, or in Quebec itself, he could easily have been exposed to French at a young age. This skill would have made him especially useful to MacCulloch, given the number of both English-speakers and French-speakers in MacCulloch’s social and professional interactions in Quebec. Philip Schuyler himself considered fluency in French an essential social and professional accomplishment.

American General Washington and valet William Lee
near the Hudson River- John Trumbull, 1780

Prince’s presence at Chambly is also a reminder of the agency denied to the enslaved. Prince went anywhere MacCulloch ordered—even into a warzone. A similar scenario would take place in 1777, when Philip Schuyler sent a man named Tom and another unnamed enslaved servant to sift through the ashes of his Saratoga estate for iron, while skirmishing fire was still being exchanged between Crown and Separatist forces following the Battles of Saratoga. John Trumbull's portrait of George Washington at West Point included a portrait of Washington's enslaved valet, William Lee, who accompanied the general throughout the Revolution.

By the end of December 1775, the campaign into Canada was rapidly crumbling, and Revolutionary forces slowly began a months-long process of retreat, back toward Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga. MacCulloch and Prince, however, had already begun their journey southwards in late November, following a decision by the Continental Congress to transport prisoners from Chambly and Saint-Jean to other colonies. While some were imprisoned in Pennsylvania, others, including MacCulloch, would end up as prisoners in New Jersey.

Edited map of Lake Champlain, with Fort Chambly circled in red at the extreme left.
Prince and MacCulloch likely began their journey by water along this route.

By late January or February, Prince and MacCulloch had travelled roughly 250 miles to reach Albany. For Prince at least, the journey had been arduous in the extreme. Unequipped for a winter journey when they were captured in October, and unsupplied by either his captors or enslaver with the necessary clothing or blankets, Prince was in poor health, freezing cold, unable to walk, and facing nearly 200 miles more on the route to Princeton NJ, where MacCulloch was to be held. While MacCulloch was a person of interest to the Revolutionaries, Prince was not, but because he was enslaved, he would have to accompany MacCulloch regardless. In the face of this seeming utter absence of agency or options, Prince made a bold move. He sent a letter.

On February 5^th or 6^th, 1776, Catharine Schuyler received the following:

To the Honourable Lady Schuyler-

The Humble Petition of Prince the Negro belonging to Mr. MacCulough [sic]-

Most Humbly showeth that as your Petitioner is in the greatest distress… & has quite lost the use of my limbs with cold for want of Cloaths [sic] or Blanket- so to inform your ladyship that I wrote to his Excellency the General received no intelligence of My Being Released from my long & miserable confinement. I am very willing to go to work for his Excellency the General at any sort of employ or any of the Inhabitants in the Town for my vituals [sic] & Cloaths [sic]. Therefore I Humbly Beg your Ladyship would be so Good as to intercede with His Excellency for me and Get me Released as I am Informed My Master Mr. McCulough is in Remedy and for your Great & Bountious [sic] Goodness I Shall be as in duty Bound ever Pray.

Prince the Negro

Whether the letter was in his own hand or not has been long debated. It has been suggested that a clerk wrote the letter on his behalf. While this is certainly possible, this interpretation assumes that, as an enslaved man, Prince was illiterate. While literacy was less common amongst the enslaved at the time, it was by no means an unheard-of skill. Africa was the home to a wealth of literary traditions, and those traditions sometimes survived the transatlantic trade well into the 19th century. Others, whether born here or captured and transported across the sea, acquired literacy as a skill in the Americas.

Further, the theory that the letter was written for him also assumes that Prince would be able to solicit the assistance of a literate person, whether a clerk or someone else. Given his status as the enslaved servant of a British POW, with no known local contacts or the means to recompense an assistant, his ability to find someone willing to help him is arguably as much a matter of speculation as is his literacy, if not more so. In either case, a little more than a month later, MacCulloch sent a letter to Philip Schuyler, dated March 20^th, 1776, to convey that, “…he [MacCulloch] has sent him [Schuyler] the Negro man Prince together with the Bill of Sale. The General will be so kind as to make it known to the Negro that he is now his property…”

Philip Schuyler purchased many enslaved people over the course of his life, so transactions like this are all too common in Schuyler documents. What makes this exchange so poignant is that, whether he held the pen in his hand or not, it was Prince, and not his former or future enslavers, who initiated the process that would end with his sale to Philip Schuyler. Faced with a “no-win” scenario, he had the options of continuing a life-threatening journey with MacCulloch or of finding someone in Albany, whether the Schuylers or another household, to purchase his continued bondage. He pursued the latter option, a choice that would be safer, at least in the short term, to his life, but which meant he would likely never be reunited with any friends or loved ones in Quebec. In either case, Prince recognized that his options to escape slavery were nonexistent at that moment--he was in unfamiliar territory, imprisoned, and physically unable to walk any distance for an unknowable amount of time. Up against an institution that denied his agency and humanity, Prince found a way to exert both from within the system.

Prince died at some point in the 1790s. In 1897, Katherine Schuyler Baxter, great- granddaughter of Philip and Catharine Schuyler, set out the recollections of her own grandmother, little Catharine, youngest of the Schuyler children, in a book titled A Godchild of Washington. In it, she presents a heavily romanticized view of slavery in the Schuyler household, but the only enslaved person Baxter describes by name is Prince. While Baxter’s description is deeply rooted in the racist narrative of the “happy, loyal slave”, it is striking that approximately a hundred years after his death, the memory of Prince still resonated in later generations of the family.

While Baxter’s work can be a valuable source of information in certain respects, it presents Prince’s memory as a memory of service, both the service he performed for Philip Schuyler, and a memory put to the service of glossing over Schuyler’s complicity in an inhumane practice. There is little that it tells us about him as an individual that we can embrace without a large grain of salt. In short, Baxter describes Prince the servant. The story that emerges with the details of Prince’s experiences in 1775 and 1776, on the other hand, gives us a much better picture of Prince the man, restoring some aspects of his own identity to that memory.