SEPARATING THE MALEFACTORS

   “That they cut out the tongues of horses and cattle, and left them to wander in the midst of those fields, lately so luxuriant, and now in desolation, seeming to enjoy the torments of their lingering death.”- Charles E. Stickney “A History of the Minisink Region”

    After the Revolutionary War John L. Hardenbergh accompanied a New York State surveyor back into the burned out Indian villages of the Six Nations, rapturously gazing over the acres of girdled orchards and fallow fields he had helped destroy. A few years prior, during the Sullivan/Clinton Expedition, Hardenbergh had been a dutiful Lieutenant under Maj. Gen. John Sullivan’s command. The state surveyor divided the Onondaga, Cayuga, Mohawk, and Seneca villages, “into 28 townships, containing each one hundred lots of six hundred acres.” Each soldier and non-commissioned officer from the Sullivan campaign had one lot assigned him as compensation for his service. An Osterhout or two may also have benefitted from Sullivan’s scorched earth policy along the “trail.” 

     Realizing the immediate future would be hydro-powered, on February 16, 1792, J.L. Hardenbergh sold off his allotted portion and bought the prime Lot 47, near the outlet of the Owasco River, for $160. A widower, John L. Hardenbergh, his infant daughter and his slaves, the Freeman family, built a bark house along the outlet and named their little settlement Hardenbergh Corners. 

    Renamed Auburn in 1805, John L. Hardenbergh’s son, John H. Hardenbergh, later donated eight acres to Rev. William Wisner, so he could build The Auburn Theological Seminary, where both Jack Hodges and William Freeman would work. When his father, John L. Hardenbergh, died a year later, at the age of 59, his “faithful slave,” Harry Freeman led his master’s riderless horse, sword dangling from an empty saddle, in a solemn funeral procession through the dirt streets of the town named for him, to the North St. Cemetery.

     After John L. Hardenbergh’s death a hand written account of the Sullivan/Clinton Campaign was found in his possessions. The journal begins on May 1, 1779, almost two months before Gabriel Wisner was killed at Minisink. The expedition journal ends on Sunday, Oct. 23, 1779, with a whimper, not a bang. The Indian heartland now laid in ruins, thanks to John L. Hardenbergh, John Sullivan and John Clinton’s diligence carrying out George Washington’s orders. Churches, taverns, mills, stores, a seminary and Auburn Prison would crop up where the Cayuga tribe once lived and farmed. Mission accomplished. 

    No ancestory.com records of the slave Freeman family of Auburn exist, but I think we can confidently conclude that the Freemans were also the Founders of Auburn and the riverside “negro settlement” of New Guinea. William Freeman could well have been a descendent of Hardenbergh’s slave Harry Freeman, for all the good that distinction would do him. It’s a little like being a free black in prison.

     

    William Hannibal Freeman’s youth was spent working for whites as a hewer of wood and drawer of water, tilling gardens, picking weeds, shoveling horse shit and emptying chamber pots. No attempt was ever made to teach young Freeman to read, write or become proficient in any task, other than the menial. His naturally inquisitive, lively, disposition was squashed and punished repeatedly. Being born of two great ancient races, both now powerless, demonized and enslaved, Freeman found no sense of identity nor acceptance from either. Blacks treated him as an Indian, whites treated him as a farm animal. His mother was all that was left of the scattered Narraganset tribe. Her relatives had been systematically annihilated in New England, eventually vanishing from the face of the earth. There were no Indians left in Auburn to treat him one way or another. And things were about to get much worse.

     While living with his brother-in law John Depuy, an old saddle horse was stolen a town over, from the widow Martha Godfrey. She told the police the horse thief was a “negro, or someone disguised as one.” With nothing to go on but this vague description, William Freeman was picked up at his brother-in-law’s by the Auburn police. Freeman protested his innocence, telling the arresting constable that he had been playing cards with John DePuy all night. The constable paid no attention and took Freeman into custody. 

      A day later John Depuy went to the jail and backed up Bill’s story. Having finally convinced the authorities of the solid alibi, John Depuy got the wiry, 16 year old boy released. William Freeman had never been arrested.  He was small for his age, but plenty street wise. He was neither a horse thief, nor a violent threat to anyone. Everyone knew and liked the boy. This seemed to make no difference to the Auburn police. Even though they released Freeman, they weren’t convinced that he hadn’t stolen the widow’s horse. 

    After William Freeman’s arrest, Martha Godfrey’s horse turned up miles away, in Chemung County, sold to a local man by another black man by the name of Jack Furman. Furman was also arrested and brought back to Auburn on the same charge. Jack Furman actually was the man who had stolen the widow’s horse. A black horse thief caught by the police could easily be lynched on the spot without much objection. In the New York countryside theft was still a capital offense, almost as bad as murder—especially if the culprit was black. The best, even a white convicted horse thief could expect was a long prison stretch. Jack Furman had to think fast. 

    When Furman heard, through jail gossip, that “another negro” got arrested for stealing the same horse in Auburn, he didn’t waste any time in pointing the finger directly at young William Freeman. Jack Furman protested his arrest and blamed William Freeman for selling him the horse and trying to frame him. The sixteen year old had no idea what Jack Furman was up to, until he was again arrested and dragged back to the Auburn jail.

    The fact that both men, both black, with similar last names, were implicated in the crime, lent to the ongoing confusion amongst the white Auburn Police department. The older, more experienced, Furman, realized his only chance of getting free was to insist it was the “Indian” Bill Freeman who sold him the horse. In the meanwhile, as one of Bill’s lawyers would later put it,  “….[Bill’s] veins coursed [with] the blood of a race that has never been restrained without difficulty- never incarcerated without mental disaster.” Bill didn’t waste any time waiting around for the deputies to sort it all out. He easily broke the lock on his cell door and escaped into the Owasco woods. All he knew was, he didn’t steal no horse.