Fancestor

“And, as set forth in the report, after that investigation, if we had had confidence that the president did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Robert Mueller May 29, 2019      After over two years of silence, Robert Mueller finally spoke. He sounded just like he looks. In a no nonsense, deep voice, Mueller laid out in very clear detail two things: the Russians helped get Trump elected and if he had the legal mandate he could’ve charged a sitting president with obstruction of justice. He didn’t. So he laid it on a silver platter for Congress. Will they eat from that plate? I doubt it. Those fucking Yalies (Democrats and Republicans) probably put their grubby fingers in Geronimo’s eye socket and they can’t get the stink off.               I used to think I could lay the blame elsewhere for mega-churches, private prisons, suburban sprawl, Trump, Kerry, the Bushes, the Clintons (from Charles to Hilary) and yes….even the d...

“The Great King might send you over to conquer the Indians, but it looks to us that God did not approve of it, if he had he would not have placed the sea where it is, as the limits between us and you.”- Gachradodow (Cayuga chief)             As Auburn and Sing-Sing were added to the archipelago of penitence, these prisons became the model for all U.S. (and the world’s) modern penitentiaries. Thomas Eddy’s well-meaning Quakerism, butted up against the brutal reality of forced labor, corporal punishment, and solitary confinement; highlighting the many complexities inherent in penal reform. I can’t help but think about Nott’s coal stove, and those frozen dead frogs in the road.      The old Admiral Warren estate where Newgate was built, lay just outside of Manhattan proper in 1796; a country suburb easily accessible by boat from up or down the North River. William Coffey described it as, “occupying one of the most healthy an...

     “Dreamt that my father was dead and laid in his coffin, that my mother was by and it was to be closed but I said it should not till I would strow over him some sweet herbs George had gathered for that purpose….”- Colonel Charles Clinton journal, Fort Herkimer June, 25, 1757           The size of Newgate was startling. Designed and built with the help of Quaker iron merchant Caleb Lownes, and architect Joseph F. Mangin, it was constructed like a medieval fort, with massive cell dormitories looming above the 23’ high walls and gun tower turrets, that surrounded the packed dirt yards, garden, and brick prison workshops. Under different circumstances William Coffey, David Conklin and Jack Hodges would’ve been in awe, completely impressed, and honored, to take a tour of this modern facility. The stonework was plain, but beautifully functional. The shops looked efficient, open and airy. The garden was well tended, and just starting to...

“A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us.”- Frederick Douglas      One thing that is very surprising in my investigation into the African American branch is how they (we?) avoided bone crushing poverty, and the “heavy and cruel hand,” of mass incarceration very early on in their histories; and continued to do so, well into the 20th century. Technical freedom from slavery in New York State was legislated in 1827, but freedom’s results were not always piquant, or predictable, for those emerging from centuries of enslavement.       Ten years after Charles Osterhout was elected as the representative of Hudson, at Austin Steward’s convention of Colored Inhabitants in Albany, David Osterhout moved from New Baltimore, New York, joining the Egberts and VanDerZees in Lenox, Mass.   He married Josephine Brister Egbert, and had three children: David, Jr., Estelle and Mattie. Josephine brought along her one daughter, Susan, from her previous marr...

   “In May 1819, I was, unfortunately, compelled to an acquaintance with the concern of the prison. Although I had lived all my life time, in the city of New-York, I had never, until then, entered the dreary prison gate.”- William Coffey Inside Out; or An Interior View of the New-York State Prison     David Conklin and Jack Hodges, were shackled together and led out the front of the Goshen gaol just before dawn on Monday April 19,1819. The prisoners’ heads whipped left to right in expectation of a lynch mob. But there was none. In the three days between the Teed and Dunning hangings, Hodges and Conklin had all but been forgotten. The town was exhausted, and peacefully desolate. Nobody cared anymore. The two men were taken in a secure black mariah coach, with six armed guards to Haverstraw, and then transferred to a vessel that deposited them on the dock of New York’s first prison— Newgate .         We have no first person account...

“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     Recently I drove over to Lenox, Mass. to locate the old Osterhout homestead and dig a little deeper into the African American Osterhout branch that connected James VanDerZee to my lineage. In the little historical society, housed in the Lenox Academy building, I found the best evidence to date of the New York slavery connection to the Lenox Osterhouts. I’m sorry to say that name attachment through slavery still seems the most plausible explanation for the existence of black Osterhouts in this predominantly white Dutch tree. I don’t know how we are going to remedy this through reparations. Happy to give what I can.       What I found in Lenox was a three page list compiled by the late Mrs. C. S. Gunn, a...

“I have a loathing towards that same Goshen, a disgust which is too violent to be suppressed; a low and mean groveling race are most of its inhabitants, and it is questionable which is most desired, their love or hate”- William H. Seward Lincoln’s Indispensable Man, Walter Stahr     I feel the same way as Henry Seward does about my New York neighbors. Leaving home at eighteen to attend college in the south (near Cherokee, North Carolina), married at twenty-two, and finally escaping to California in 1975, I still don’t know which I prefer the love or hate of the local hillbillies. Unlike Henry, I came back home to stay. I realize that to have the complete approval of my upstate neighbors is a trap. Many (not all) are that same “low and mean groveling race,” that young Henry Seward fled from in Goshen. If they all liked me I would question what the hell I was doing wrong? Other branches of the family felt the same way. They couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of Ne...

“This communication may excite much surprise and possibly indignation, I beg you to read without either.” -Rosetta Alexander in a letter to W.H. Seward April 11, 1866        Progressive views of the abolitionist North were seen by Southern aristocrats as irresponsibly naive, and unsustainable. Too much was at stake to upset the status-quo of this very delicate American economy. Abolitionism was a dead issue in the South. Any abolitionist was regarded as a northern agitator. The issues were purely monetary, not societal, revolving around crop production, and how to increase it with more slave labor. Whips and chains just went along with stable economics.      Over half of Seward’s Union Academy seventy student enrollment was female. There were much more interesting topics of conversation on the mind of Henry Seward than slavery, and market economy. Henry was about to turn eighteen, it was March in Putnam County and soon the honeysuckle would ...

    “Slavery was an institution that required unusual guarantees for its security wherever it existed; and in a country like ours where the larger portion of it was free territory inhabited by an intelligent and well-to-do population, the people of the South were dependent upon keeping control of the general government to secure the perpetuation of their favorite Institution….”- Ulysses S. Grant   Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant      From the very beginning of the alien invasion, civil/military government was the right hand of the church, speculator and developer. By maintaining a monopoly on all Indian property “sales,” as early as 1684, the New York Assembly enacted a bill that stated: “ from henceforward noe purchase of Lands from the Indians shall bee esteemed a good Title without Leave first had and obtained from the Governour signified by a warrant under his hand and seal… .” This gave governmental authorities the ultimate power over l...

“…to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continues on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.”- Thomas Jefferson, State of the Union 1806        I’m not much of a capitalist, but I have tried my hand at a few failed business ventures like selling fish worms and Holylgm Water, and dealt drugs from time to time. Never much of a player, only a small time “cottage dealer” connection, I dabbled in both the sale and use of the stuff. And where did I keep my drugs? In the bank. Not wanting to be caught with anything more than a small quantity of product, it was common practice (in the 1980’s) to open up a checking account, and buy a safety deposit box in a small neighborhood bank. That way, if the cops ever did come to my apartment, the place was relat...

  “Are we willing to cast ourselves as a society that creates crimogenic for some of its members, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as if engaged in some awful form of human sacrifice?”- Glenn Loury, quoted in The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander Osterhout slaves in Kingston year of 1755- Nathaniel Sylvester, History of Ulster County William Oosterhoudt- 4 slaves Tuenes Oosterhoudt- 1 slave Nelle Oosterhoudt- 3 slaves     Before small pox, chicken pox, bubonic plague, pneumonia, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis, yellow fever, whooping cough, the common cold, and every S.T.D. known to man were introduced into the Americas by the Spanish, French, Dutch, English, Italian, German, Irish, and (not by their own accord) African slaves, this was a complex, violent, warring, significantly inhabited place. An Amerindian was always one short step out of the raging fire, or just across from a ...

      “Female prisoners were housed separately, but not separate enough…..They would catcall to the men and attempt liaisons…..The utmost vulgarity, obscenity and wantonness, characterizes their language their habits, and their manners. Their bestial salacity, in their visual amours, is agonizing to every fiber of delicacy and virtue.” And of the insane inmates the ex-lawyer offered a dismal observation. “Poor creatures. Their histories would fill an octavo.”-   William Coffey, Inside Out; or the interior view of the New York State Prison 1823     The not so coded language of the time regarding Indians, blacks (both slave and free), as well as women and the mentally ill, belies a predisposition on the part of those doing the writing, to always place themselves on the periphery, in the role of reactionary. If genocide of the Indian, racism, and sexism existed it was merely as a justifiable, direct response to the other’s harmful actions. Th...

   “Fear is in the mind, but except in pathological cases has its origin in external circumstances that are truly threatening.”- Yi Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear             I’ve always been afraid and insecure. I overcome this by acting like a loud fool and pretending I’m not afraid of anything. It’s a defense mechanism. I’m still scared to death.       In 2003 I read in the Sunday morning paper of a black minister who had set up shop a few towns over, in Woodbourne. It being Sunday, I jumped in the car and headed for the 11:00 am service. Arriving at a shabby, old Borsht Belt hotel repurposed as a church, I parked the car and looked around. There was a Bentley in the driveway, alongside a lot of Toyotas and old Chevys. The members of the congregation eyed me suspiciously, as I seemed to be the only white face in the crowd. A “Farrakhan” looking gentlemen in dark suit and bow tie came over and asked if he could h...