FOREWORD CONTINUED....

We Osterhouts sailed to upstate NY from Amsterdam, the Netherlands in the 1650’s and we Jennings (mom’s side) from Acton, England a short time later. Many of us never left. You can’t throw a spent pack of Newports out your car window in Sullivan, Orange or Ulster County, NY without hitting an Osterhout or Jennings headstone. Dipped in the blood of both, grave robbing of the “unblessed” has become my obsession.  

       I’m not a scholar, historian, nor genealogist. I’m an artist (a dead snake), an amateur, a curious dilettante, and as such I approached this project with the naïve notion that, with the help of a few trips to the library, google, wikipedia, and ancestry.com I could develop a relatively complete, cut and paste family history in a couple of months and move on. Boy, was I wrong. Little did I realize where these individuals claimed by virtue of the accident of birth two hundreds years ago, would lead me and how hard it would be to shake them once roused. Characters, historical and obscure, complex, despicable and sympathetic beyond belief, would emerge from this fringe family fairytale to tell a story that is as pertinent today as it was then.  

       Somewhere, deep within me, the ghosts of these visitors were stirring, grumbling jealously, kicking at their coffin lids, pleading for my attention. Everyone had forgotten them and they looked to me to rectify the slight. They’d left the stage with barely any notice and were not content in their eternal obscurity. Did they pick the wrong guy! 

     This scattered, often frustrating process began online, and when that was insufficient I turned to out of the way historical society monthly meetings and genealogical church basement files, where the only thing missing was code rings and secret handshakes. I had no plan, but context is important and in that regard I had to know a little about the vintages of the bottles I was about to uncork. If the stage was to be set, continuity was crucial. Can’t have a phone ringing or revolver cocked in 1830.

    The rule would be simple. Each Osterhout or Jennings dangling from the tangle of thorny vines and twisted branches of the family tree was mine for the picking. If I could prove blood relationship (and that’s not too difficult these days) or reveal an adoption, a marriage, or even “ownership” through slavery, they were ripe for narrative purposes.

    Just so happens, my American family gestalt from the 17th century forward mirrors what ethnohistorian Francis Jennings (no relation that I can find) would accurately describe in the tile of one of his books as the “The Invasion of America, Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest.” My family has been in North America almost since the earliest Dutch and English invasions of the new world and many family branches remain today (13 generations later), casting shade over the old Indian paths, continuing to fell the trees, plow up the fields or serve out their long prison sentences. Not everyone in the family stayed put, but my branch did. Thirteen generations in one spot is unheard of in modern America! It’s a very large tree and other family branches were not so sedentary. 

      Our finger prints are all over Dutch commerce, British military imperialism, the slave and liquor trade, penal institutions, and Indian genocide, as well as missionary zeal, gold fever, iconic advances in science, and even failed attempts at world peace. Stacks of archival folders and a community of devoted volunteers bent on helping me connect my genealogical dots awaited. It’s strangely inviting, and damned if I’m not mutating into one of the faithful, enthusiastically joining local historical societies and conversing intimately to Delhi county clerks, village of Goshen librarians and serious archivists across the world. 

     Australian historian Dr. Peggy Brock sent me excepts of the famous Pacific Coast Tsimshian Indian, Arthur Wellington Clah's, diary. This diary is widely regarded as the first Indigenous journal to be written in English. Concerning the Methodist missionary Rev. Dr. Smith Stanley Osterhout, Clah wrote: 

“May 8 thursday, clouden But sharp cold. North heavy snowing 10 o'clock thick…..tell SS Osterhout priest that no right to telling about solling (selling) church to anyone.” 

   Rev. Osterhout would become one of the many architects of Methodist Indian policy in Canada. His theology would join the brutally destructive, government administered Indian Residential school system, blamed for the cultural genocide of Indigenous people in Canada. Some diaries by family members or their associates will guide me through the centuries, trailing the more literate ghosts, who felt compelled to write things down, justifying, as well as unintentionally indicting themselves.

     If you are of European descent, white, and have documented lineage that goes back this many generations in one place, you just hope someone along the way concedes, “At least your people treated their slaves kindly.” But that’s about the best you can hope for. There’s very little to crow about. Owning slaves (I have the receipts) and killing Indians (the scalps are piling up) were foregone conclusions with roots this deep. It would be futile to try to deny it. 

    Bellville, Texas newspaper editor, frontier judge, and shameless slaveholder, John Peterson Osterhout proudly wrote of his first slave purchased for an estimated $2000, as late as 1860,  “Hasty is a good servant and has become almost one of our family.” In another instance, a will dated June 5, 1771 has Osterhout cousin Johannis Snyder of Kingston leaving “To my Loving Wife Named Grietje my Negro Wench Named Floor…” Primary material still exists. A receipt marked March 28, 1794, that I gingerly turned over in my white gloved hands at the Goshen Public library listed the sale a man simply named, “Nail.”    

     John P. Osterhout admitted, after purchasing his slave Hasty, that, his wife Junia Roberts, “don’t like niggers much….” What men and women like John Peterson and Junia Roberts Osterhout left in their wake, was the common, Christian inspired perception of their white superiority and belief that, because of the African American’s perceived genetically inferiority, blacks needed the whites as much as the whites needed them. In John Peterson Osterhout’s opinion the institution of slavery was ultimately altruistic, humanitarian, and operated as much for the “benefit” of blacks as oppressing them. He worried in one of his many editorials in the Bellville Countryman that if African American suffrage followed manumission (the freeing of the slaves) “a war of races and the extermination of the negro will surely come…” And little did John P. Osterhout know that there were successful “negro” Osterhouts living in NY and Lenox, Mass. at the very same time.   

      On a list of delegates for “The Convention of Colored Inhabitants of New York State Aug. 18-20, 1840,” representing Hudson, NY appears the name of C. (Charles) Osterhout- a free black man. A document written by the African American abolitionist Austin Steward, and presented at this convention, among other things states, 

“We, the Colored Citizens of the State, in Convention assembled, representing 50,000 of the population, do ask your earnest attention, your deep reflection, your unbiased and conscientious judgement in this matter…We wish to be something more than political serfs and slaves.” 

  This was twenty-eight years before citizenship for African Americans was legislated into the 14th amendment. 

     Either through adoption, the result of a mixed race birth (consensual or not), marriage or more likely by being a former family slave, the “freeman” Charles Osterhout is proof of not only African American lineage in the Osterhout family tree, but provides a record of at least one member of the family being an activist for an equal racial franchise, and an advocate for black rights in NY. The earliest mention of a black family member I’ve found is the marriage of Quash and Caty Osterhout (both listed as free) in 1822 in New Baltimore, NY. What right do I have as a white man to exploit their struggle by virtue of a last name? Absolutely none. But that won’t stop me.

    Then I stumbled across one of the most intriguing examples of the Osterhout name claimed by an African American family. It’s a haunting, light streaked, studio portrait of three black individuals, two women and a man, gathered in the great Harlem Renaissance photographer, James VanDerZee’s studio in 1926. These are James VanDerZee’s aunts and uncle, the Osterhouts.

      Both sides of my family originally came to and many still remain, in the Catskills, Wallkill, Mohawk and Hudson river valleys of NY state. As the 17th turned into the 18th and 19th centuries family members moved down into Pennsylvania, and west to Illinois, Missouri, Colorado, Michigan, Texas, California, Idaho and British Columbia. My particular branch of Jennings/Osterhout genetics remain within fifty miles of the spot where we got off the boat in 1653. Our sense of place is as powerful as any bloodline. 

     Researching (F)ancestor has been a crash course in American history. I knew little of history and nothing of my ancestral roots before this and now I dare say I know way too much. Half of this book, that documented much of the family’s early bloody history with Indigenous peoples and slavery from 1653-1790 was dumped, in order to narrow my scope and focus on non-family members like Jennings murderer Jack Hodges, and later William Freeman and Austin Reed. These three African Americans provide a unique perspective, a peek into the world of post-slavery crime and punishment. 

      The history of America is replete with real estate deals and rental agreements gone horribly wrong and real property figures prominently in much of the Jennings and Osterhout history. Anyone who's ever had a neighbor (and I think that's all of us) can relate. It's universal- especially in the United States. We are, if nothing else, a nation of witness trees, fluorescent surveyor ribbons, shared brick walls, posted signs, piled stones, split rail, white picket, and barbed wire fence lines. Owning or renting property, and trying to hold on to it, became the colonial religion, and subsequent obsession long before anybody even contemplated converting the colonies into a Christianized "united" states. And in those early days of empire, battles over property between complete strangers, as well as close family members, became commonplace. 

      

    “I can give but a few incidents of his life, which I heard from his only son, my deceased father, and from other aged persons long since dead, as he died about the time of my birth, which was in 1790, then not far from 70 years of age. His death was caused by his having been pushed from a wagon by a man in East Camp, to whom he had willed his property…”- Peter Osterhout as told to Rev. Charles Rockwell 1867

     In a time span of less than 30 years (1790-1818) men on both sides of my family (Gysbert Osterhout and Richard Jennings) would be separately murdered over much more modest land transactions and bequeathments gone wrong than Seward’s Alaskan Folly, brokered by Jennings kin William Henry Seward. One murder case would be splashed across the press, and famously “settled” in a Goshen, NY courthouse, while the other was barely noted, and today still remains an unsolved mystery. Gysbert Osterhout died  after “having been pushed from a wagon by a man in East Camp…” Nobody ever found out who the heir/murderer was. His will was never probated.

    Turns out that for over a century before Richard Jennings’ murder, various members of my family had been kidnapped, scalped, shot, or just unlucky enough to be crushed by a boulder, fall down a well, or drop dead in church. And that’s only the ones who left a record of their demise. 

    A cantankerous, yet prominent local farmer, Richard Jennings, embroiled in a legal battle over his late sister’s estate, would walk out of his house on a cold, snowy December morning in 1818 to check on what would have legally been his in a little over a week. The 50 acre property had been in contention for years, and finally a circuit court in Goshen had sided with Richard Jennings’ claim of ownership, denying his nephew James Teed title. This was the tipping point of a family battle and the brewing conspiracy that ended in Dick’s death. 

    Three white men, a white woman, a black man, and multiple historical figures, among them not only the Sewards, but the future US president, then NY Attorney General Martin Van Buren, would become embroiled in this sordid affair, influencing and influenced by events that would shape the political, judicial and racial climate of the county for years to come. It was “the crime of the century”  in Orange County and the 19th century was only 18 years old. This was the story of the cleaving of mom's side of the family, of Richard Jennings, his relatives, his murderers, and the small upstate NY communities of Sugar Loaf and Goshen, who found themselves at the center of this morality play.

     Of course it’s not so easy to tie our tales of conversion and perfidy up with a neat little bow. I’ll need some help. The Jennings and Osterhouts are simply not sufficient to tell their own story. Victims as we sometimes were, instigators and oppressors more often than not, we were minor players at best, lost in the piles of family bibles, pressed flowers and cannon smoke of progress. Even the ones who rose to prominence in universities, had plants named after them or committed sensational crimes, have been pushed aside, now long forgotten. Never making it to the marquee our obscurity could be our saving grace, the reason we were able to minimize our transgressions, climb from the primordial goo and prevail. Hidden in the crowd, cloaked in the shadows was one way to survive. 

      We were Freemason initiates and Hoo-Hoo “kittens,” Calico Indians, Lions, Rotarians, Elks, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Socialists, Mormons, Catholics and even a few Quakers. Most of the Osterhouts were “patriotic” American colonists, while the Jennings (and at least one William Osterhout) remained loyal to the British crown. We killed Indians, and dressed as them, as we murdered unsuspecting frontier families in the name of King George. There’s so many Indian “massacres,” mentioned I suspect the family was specifically targeted. We weren’t always good neighbors. At least one law officer, Sheriff Osman Steele, was murdered in the anti-rent Calico Indian struggle by family members. Two Osterhouts were convicted (along with many others) of the crime.

         

“The committee of Ulster county…… ordered that Johannis Osterhout, jr. be paid 13.2 pounds for going to the Indian towns. A payment made to Nicolas, the Indian, for a like service.…A charge was made for “a pint of rum for the Indian.”- July 2, 1777

      It is an extremely rare commodity these days, when everybody is digging into their ancestral roots, to be so deeply planted in one particular place. It is a connection that equally rivals, and in many ways surpasses blood kinship in a transient culture. This is what we present day Osterhouts and Jennings here in the northeastern U.S. have in common with the Dutch and English aborigines, inhabitants and freeholders of the 17th century. Our family still clings to a delusional right, that the “emptiness” was ours for the taking but virtue of deed, not the Indians’ for the keeping, our slaves for the working or even our uncle’s for the inheriting. It’s a lurid, dark, and in many ways shameful past. Francis Jennings’ term “the cant of conquest” says it all. 

      We live in what many consider a fractious, difficult, divisive era. All the issues of race, social and economic disenfranchisement, religion, denial, revisionism and government sponsored terrorism facing the inhabitants of the 19th century still lurk just below the surface today. Political polarization, combined with ideological entrenchment has created a nervous climate of what will happen next. I began working on this book in the early fall of 2016, slicing through the past, as global events and the US elections surprisingly unfolded. As much as we want to think our times uniquely crucial to maintaining a grip on the normalcy, that seems one small slip from dissolving into bloody chaos, our time is nothing compared to those early days of empire in antebellum America.