Over a hundred years ago, a quiet, old man walked up and down Castle Point hill and tending to his various chores along the way. Despite having spent nearly a century carrying out the domestic responsibilities assigned to him on this hill and the mansion at its top, his existence was barely recorded. He had a front row seat to a hundred years of industrial progress in Hoboken and Manhattan, yet we will never hear his remarkable story. His name was Peter Lee and he was the household slave of the affluent Stevens family for which our institute is named.
Luckily, we can get a glimpse into his life thanks to the local Hoboken historian, Holly Metz. Last September, Holly Metz published The Untold Life of Peter Lee: Born of Slave Parents, the Property of Colonel John Stevens, where she illuminates the life and times of Peter Lee in scholarly and eloquent prose. The inspiration for the remarkable book came when Metz encountered a bronze plaque in the Church of the Holy Innocents in Hoboken that was dedicated to the memory of Peter Lee. What put Metz in a state of unease was that this was the only extant reminder of Peter Lee, and the only public reference of slavery in Hoboken. Moreover, this plaque revealed almost nothing of Peter Lee’s life, except for the terms of his enslavement to the Stevens family. Seeing this sparsely detailed dedication to Peter Lee’s life led Metz to embark on a long journey to understand who this character was and the kind of world that he lived through.
To understand the world that Peter Lee lived through, which unfolded itself to Metz with each new document she studied, it must first be understood that records concerning slaves in the 1800s were poorly kept and the possibility certainly exists that records were falsified or exaggerated by the original authors. For instance, the assertion that Peter Lee was born in 1804 could very well have been a lie by the Stevens family in order to disqualify him from the gradual emancipation provisions that the State of New Jersey instituted to slowly erase slavery from New Jersey. As Dr. Lindsey Swindall, who is a Stevens professor in the College of Arts and Letters and an expert on African American studies and Northern slavery, put it when commenting on gradual emancipation, “Gradual emancipation was not at all a straightforward process.” The process of gradual emancipation was often circumvented through legal loopholes, postponed, or outright denied by wealthy slaveholders in the North who saw their slaves as valuable property and unworthy of freedom. Moreover, Dr. Swindall commented that, “New Jersey is a tricky place because you have both Northern supporters and Southern supporters, and even small communities of Quaker abolitionists.” In a way, New Jersey was at a crossroads because of all the different viewpoints converging into one state, which made New Jersey unique among Northern states. Notably, New Jersey was the last Northern state to implement the process of gradual emancipation. Given the twisting and turning of many slaves’ fates in New Jersey combined with the dearth of record-keeping on slaves’ lives during the time period, the task of trudging through these old documents proved arduous. Metz stated that pouring through these documents was like “walking along a beach with a metal detector” where the treasure she was seeking were kernels of trustworthy information on the life of Peter Lee. Furthermore, some disturbing details materialized as the real story of Peter Lee became more and more clear.
As it turns out, Peter Lee should not have been born a slave, but should have been born free, as his mother, Silvia, was meant to have been freed four years before his birth as per the wishes set forth in the will of Mrs. Elizabeth Stevens. When Elizabeth, the wife of Colonel John Stevens III, died in 1800, she wrote in her will, “I leave all my slaves their freedom,” which would have applied to her slave at the time, Silvia. Given that the records state Lee was born four years after the wishes of the late Elizabeth should have been executed, Peter Lee should have been born free, but this was clearly not the case. From all that Metz could gather, it seemed that even though there was nothing legally wrong with Elizabeth’s will at the time under the laws of New Jersey, the process of granting her slaves their manumission (freedom from slavery) was not executed by Colonel John at the time probably due to him viewing such an action as “bad business.” After all, the Stevens family was a wealthy, land-owning family that amassed a great fortune and intended to keep it, even if that meant holding slaves instead of paid workers. Even more disturbing, Metz discovered in her research that Colonel John Stevens III’s father, whom she refers to as Honorable John because he was sometimes called that and because she needed to distinguish between the many people with the name of John Stevens, was deeply invested in the slave trade. His dealings in the slave trade began with a business partnership with his brother-in-law, William Alexander, during the mid-1700s when he expanded his mercantile enterprise by investing in ships bound for Africa that returned with human cargo. These dealings in slavery continued from 1748 to 1750 in the slave ports of New York and New Jersey, and amassed for Honorable John, who was in Perth Amboy at the time, a great fortune. Honorable John’s ledgers in 1749 show that his individual income from slave dealings stood at 3,993 pounds, or about $873,800 in 2018 dollars. Additionally, his records show that he sold slaves to some of the most prominent men in New York and New Jersey at the time, including justices and politicians. The slave trade was a profitable business for Honorable John and helped propel him to the status of a wealthy man with ties to the high society of the time.
The Stevens family’s connections to slavery did not end after Honorable John passed in 1792, with his descendants continuing to own slaves. Even after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, the memory of the Stevens family’s dealings in slavery lasted until the twentieth century. In total, Peter Lee served five generations of the Stevens family from his reported birth in 1804 to his death at the grand old age of 98 in 1902. Despite spending a significant portion of his life as a slave during a time when marriage between slaves was often stamped out, he did marry an African American woman named Mary “Hannah” Thompson in 1856. At the time, he was 52 years old and she was 30 years old. Though they did not have any descendants, Peter Lee did have a brother named George who married a woman named Betsy and ended up having a lot of children. Unfortunately, the family moved out of New Jersey and all records of what happened are scarce and unreliable. Additionally, we do have records of an African American man named Sandy Lee in New York, who may have been Peter Lee’s father. Remarkably, this Sandy Lee was a free man and even served in the War of 1812. On top of this, there are records to suggest that the same Sandy Lee purchased land in Hoboken on Washington Street in 1810, making him one of Hoboken’s earliest residents. Although, like with all details of Peter Lee’s life, the records are hazy.
Throughout his long and eventful life, Peter Lee saw the urbanization and modernization of both New York and New Jersey. By serving the Stevens family through five generations, he not only became an integral part of their history, but the history of Hoboken as well. Moreover, it should be noted that Peter Lee was in Hoboken during the same time that the acclaimed writer Frederick Douglass visited Hoboken in 1856. It is quite possible they met each other, but no record of them meeting currently exists. Metz’s detailed and stunning account of her journey to uncover the life of Peter Lee brings this mysterious character to life and sheds light on the Stevens family’s involvement with slavery. Her masterful prose honors the memory of Peter Lee. According to Nasir Montalvo, the Chair of the Stevens Student Government Association Diversity and Inclusion Committee who is currently planning an event about Peter Lee, “I would like to make sure we honor the good and the bad, including the lost history of Peter Lee, and that the community can acknowledge that these things have happened and that we should grow as a collective.” Holly Metz’s research certainly helps us understand the lost history of Peter Lee and will serve future readers as a great memorial to his life.
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