Part II · THE X ON THE WILL · Chapter 9

Lydia

Southampton Township, Bucks County · 30 April 1784

In the record Derrick³ Kroesen (1701–c.1786) · Cornelia Bergen (1706–c.1758) · Jude · Striffin · Lydia · Henry⁴ Kroesen (1756–1788) · Else⁴ Van Artsdalen (1732–1810)

The codicil is dated the thirtieth of April 1784, and it begins by saying how its maker felt:

Very very painful. The clerk wrote it as the old man said it. He was eighty-two or eighty-three, and he had four things left to settle, and three of them were people.

This is the family's direct line. Every Krewson in the last four parts of this book descends from the man who made this mark, through the son Derrick he named here as executor. He is the fourth generation in America, the grandson of the cooper and the great-grandson of the Burgomaster, and he was born on Staten Island in the first year of the eighteenth century and died in Pennsylvania two years after the end of the Revolution — "a life long enough," as the family's record puts it, "to span from Queen Anne's War to three years after Yorktown." He is also the man in this family who wrote down, in the year after the war for liberty was won, what liberty would cost three people who worked his farm. The book has been coming toward this will since the cooper's grandson inherited a man named Fortune with half a cellar. Here it is.

Derrick, the third of the name

He was baptized at Port Richmond on 22 October 1701 — "Derck Derck Kroessen," in his uncle Hendrick's hand, with a Bogardus aunt as witness — the seventh of Derrick and Elizabeth's eight, and he was nine when the family crossed to Bucks County and eleven when his father paid six hundred pounds of silver for the farm [2]. On 1 January 1729, by a family record, he married Cornelia Bergen, born in 1706, the daughter of Jacob Hansen Bergen and Elsje Lubbertsen; her sister Elsje married his brother Henry, and a Brechje Bergen married his brother Jan — "three brothers, three Bergen wives," the family's book calls it, and the Bergens were old Long Island Dutch, so that the Kroesens of Bucks County went on marrying Brooklyn for a generation after they had left it [3]. In the deeds of gift of 1727 his father had given him a tract of a hundred and forty-three acres, or two hundred — Swain never settled which — along the County Line, in whose north corner, at the Street Road, the Dutch congregation's Feasterville meeting-house and its walled graveyard stood [4]. His mother died in 1740; his brothers scattered to Delaware and Maryland and New Jersey; his eldest brother Garret carved the date stone and dictated the will that spelled the name. Derrick stayed on the County Line.

Four children are known: Derrick⁴, born in November 1729, ten months after the wedding; Else, in 1732; Jacob, baptized in 1742, who vanishes from the record after it; and Henry⁴, born 12 September 1756, when his father was fifty-five [5]. That gap — fourteen years between the third child and the fourth — is where the family's researchers have argued for seventy years. Swain thought there was a second wife, an Anna Bennet, Hulst or Hufte; General Kroesen, working the same papers, thought there might be three marriages, on the evidence of a baptismal entry naming a "Cornelia Luister" as mother and a later will in which Henry⁴ names a half-brother, Peter Hufte, to inherit if his own sons should die young; and neither could prove it, and the general ended his memorandum with a question: "Who was Peter Hufte, or who was his father?" [5]. The likeliest reading is the general's — that Cornelia Bergen died, that Derrick married again, perhaps twice, and that Henry was the son of a later wife — but no marriage record has been found, and this book leaves the mothers of Derrick's children where the record leaves them.

By 1783, when he made his will, two things had changed in how he described himself. He was "of Southampton Township in the County of Bucks and State of Pennsylvania" — State, the first Kroesen will to say so — and he was "Gentleman." Not yeoman, as his father and grandfather and brothers had been: gentleman, the word a man used when he no longer worked his own land with his own hands [1]. He had two plantations by then, his own and one he had bought from a Henry Pinter — presumably the Pointer, or Paynter, whose land had bounded his father's in the deed of 1712 — and he had "paid for" his son Derrick "at sundry times … not less than one hundred pounds" and for his daughter "a servant maid and a Negro wench … not less than fifty pounds" [1]. His son Derrick⁴ lived across the County Line in the Manor of Moreland, in Philadelphia County, on land the father owned and the son farmed. His daughter Else had married Simon Van Artsdalen in 1751; his son Derrick⁴ had married Simon's sister Margaret the same year — two Kroesens for two Van Artsdalens, the Bergen pattern again [6]. And his youngest, Henry, twenty-seven, had come home from the Revolution.

The war he did not fight

Derrick Kroesen was seventy-five when the Declaration was signed in Philadelphia, twenty miles from his door, and eighty-two when the treaty was. The war came close: the British held Philadelphia from September 1777 to the following June, Washington's army camped on the Neshaminy in Bucks County in the August before, and the foraging columns that stripped the farms that winter went out into Chester County and the Jerseys rather than north-east into Southampton — close enough to be real, as the family's record says of the same war, "without this record being able to say it ever reached his own farm" [7]. What it did reach was his house. Henry⁴, born in 1756, is entered in the family's book as "RWV" — a Revolutionary War veteran — and buried at Feasterville in lot 6, plot 8, with his wife in plot 9; he died in August 1788 at thirty-one, two years after his father, leaving twin sons and a third, and a widow who married again within fifteen months [8]. His cousin Henry Lott, who had witnessed Garret's will, was a veteran too, and married Derrick's sister Catharine in her widowhood [9]. What Henry⁴ did in the war, in what unit, on which fields, the family's book does not record, and neither, yet, does this one; it is the first thing on the research list for the next chapter, which is the Revolution's.

The will was made on 2 May 1783, four months before the Treaty of Paris, in a state that had, three years earlier, passed the first law of its kind among the new states for the gradual abolition of slavery. That law is the ground the will stands on, and it has to be understood to read what Derrick did. Pennsylvania's Act of 1 March 1780 freed no one. It required every owner to register every enslaved person by name and age with the county clerk by that November, and it provided that those so registered remained enslaved for life; only their children, born after the act, would be freed — at twenty-eight. For Jude and Striffin and Lydia, if they were registered in Bucks County in 1780, the law of the new state offered nothing. The only door out was the one their owner chose to open, and on what terms [10].

The will

The body of the will is a farm, itemised, going to the youngest son:

Four horses fit for service, four cows, eight sheep, the hogs; a sleigh and a sled for a Pennsylvania winter; a gun; six silver teaspoons and three pewter dishes; a cider mill and press — the family's orchards, again, three generations after the tree-thief; a case of flasks; beef and pork in the barrel. It is a prosperous farm, and every item in it is the produce of labour, and the will then says whose:

Three people. A woman, a man, a girl. Whether they were a family — a mother, a father, a daughter — the will does not say, and the family's genealogist, reading it in the 1990s, assumed they were: "the conditions under which the Negro family could live on the farm and pay off their indebtedness for freedom" [11]. It is the natural reading of three people held together on one farm across a generation, and it may be right; but it is a reading, and this book records it as one. What the will does say is the terms. Jude, the woman, is freed outright, and given the bed she slept in and the spinning wheel she worked at and her own clothes, and — the one provision in three generations of these wills that reads like an obligation rather than a bequest — a promise that if she fell sick the three children would keep her. Striffin and Lydia are not freed. They are permitted to buy themselves: fifty pounds for the man, thirty for the girl.

A year later, on the last day of April 1784, the codicil changed the schedule. Striffin would have three years, fifteen and fifteen and twenty. Lydia would pay ten pounds a year for three years. Jude would have four bushels of wheat every year from Henry, "and if she thinks proper to live in the kitchen during her life, I give her that privilege" [1]. A man "very very painful and weak" had thought again about the three people in his house, and every change was in their favour: the lump sums became instalments, and the woman he had freed was given bread and a room for life. It is not much. It is what he could think of, and it is more than his grandfather's will did for Fortune, which was nothing.

He signed the will, or someone wrote his name for him — the transcription gives a signature, "Derrick Kroesen," and a witness's oath that they "saw and heard Derrick Kroesen, testator therein named, sign, seal and publish the same." He signed the codicil with a mark: "His Derrick X Kroesen mark" [1]. Either a Bucks County gentleman of eighty-two had learned to write his name late and lost the use of his hand within the year, or the clerk of 1783 signed for him and the clerk of 1784 did not bother to pretend; the second is likelier, and either way the last document of the family's fourth American generation carries the same X as the first. The witnesses to the will were Leonard Kroesen — his brother Francis's son, the one who got the silver shoe buckles — Mathew Light, and a Garret Kroesen. It was proved on 10 January 1786 before John Hart, deputy register, on the oaths of the two nephews [1].

What the money meant

Thirty pounds "lawful money" of Pennsylvania in 1784 — after the collapse of the Continental paper, when the state's accounts were again in hard money — was, by the usual reckoning, roughly a year's wages for a free farm labourer, and Lydia was a girl, and the will gave her nothing to earn it with but "all her wearing apparel." Striffin's fifty was more than a year and a half. The family's genealogist, who was a mining engineer and thought in costs, wrote the sentence that this chapter cannot improve on: "It must have been difficult for them to pay off the 80 pounds required, considering that they probably received little pay" [11]. The ordinary way it worked, in the Delaware Valley of the 1780s, was that the person to be freed was hired out — to a neighbour, or to the heir himself — and the wages credited against the price, so that "free on paying" meant "free after three more years of the same work, for someone else's book." That is presumably what Derrick intended, and what Henry⁴, as executor and heir, would have arranged. But Henry⁴ died in August 1788, two years and seven months after the will was proved — inside Striffin's third year and Lydia's — and his own will, made three days before his death, is not transcribed in the family's book; his uncle Henry³'s, made the same year, disposes of a household and names no enslaved person [8, 12]. Whether Striffin ever paid the last twenty pounds, whether Lydia ever paid the last ten, whether Jude lived in the kitchen and drew her four bushels of wheat from a widow who remarried within the year and moved on — none of it is in the family's record. The book that traced the Kroesens' every deed and baptism for three hundred pages does not follow the three people in the will past the page they are on. That is not the genealogist's failing; it is what the sources are. The Kroesens left wills. Jude and Striffin and Lydia left the one paragraph someone else wrote about them.

There are places to look, and this book names them because the next edition should have looked: the Bucks County register of slaves of 1780, which if it survives for Southampton Township would give their ages and the year of Derrick's return; the Pennsylvania Abolition Society's manumission books; the 1790 census, which counted "other free persons" and "slaves" by household, and would show whether the households of Henry's widow and of Else Van Artsdalen held either [10]. A girl who paid ten pounds a year from 1786 would have been free in 1789, in time to be counted. If she was, she is in a column with no name.

Fortune, again

This chapter has to close a door it opened two chapters ago. Derrick's father's will, in 1729, gave Henry³ the east end of the house, half the cellar, and "my Negro man Fortune," and made Elizabeth's widow's portion depend on Fortune's life. Henry³ lived until 1789. His will, made in May 1788, disposes of his land and his household and names his wife and daughter and grandchildren, and says nothing of Fortune, or of any other person he owned [12]. Fortune was a grown man in 1729. Sixty years later he was dead, or sold, or freed, or too old to be worth mentioning, and no document the family kept says which. Two enslaved men in two generations of this family's wills: one who is counted with the ploughs and then disappears, and one who is offered his freedom for fifty pounds in three instalments and then disappears. The record is the same shape both times, and the shape is the point.

Eighty-five years

Derrick³ Kroesen died some time between the codicil of April 1784 and the probate of January 1786 — the family's book says "ca. 1785–86" and does not know where he is buried, "probably Bucks County" [2]. He had been born in one century and died in another; born a subject of William III on an island with no church, and died a citizen of a republic on a farm with a cider press, having styled himself, at the end, a gentleman. In between he had been the boy who crossed the Delaware at nine, the bridegroom of a Brooklyn Bergen, the father of a soldier, and the owner of at least three human beings, whose names he wrote down once, with a price beside each.

The family's book, reaching him, calls him "our direct ancestor" and gives him the number 13. This book has given him a chapter and called it by the name of the girl in it, because of all the people in the will she is the one about whom the least is known and the most was asked. Thirty pounds, ten a year. Her name was Lydia, or Liddy — the will spells it both ways, once in each hand. That is all. It is more than the family has of Elsje's maiden name, and it is written in the same book, and it is enough to say she was here.

The ground it happened on

As always, what follows is the period's own account of the things named above, not a record of these people. The kitchen Jude was given the privilege of living in was, on a Delaware Valley farmhouse of the 1780s, ordinarily a separate wing or lean-to with its own hearth — the warmest room in the house and the one where the people who cooked slept, so that the codicil's "privilege" was, in most such houses, the room she already lived in, now secured to her for life rather than at the heir's pleasure [13]. A cleaning mill was a winnowing machine, a hand-cranked fan that blew chaff from threshed grain; the sleigh and sled were the winter wagons, one for people and one for loads, on roads that froze harder than they ever dried. Six silver teaspoons were the sign of a household that took tea, and pewter dishes the ordinary tableware of a family that had not yet bought china. The Manor of Moreland, where Derrick⁴ farmed his father's land, lay just across the County Line in Philadelphia County — a Penn family manor in name, ordinary farmland in fact — and is the reason Simon, in the next chapter, was born "in Bustleton, Philadelphia County," a few miles from the house his grandfather made the will in. Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 1 March 1780, is the first such law anywhere; its registration returns, township by township, survive in part in the county courthouses and are the first document to look for [10].

1. The will of Derrick Kroesen, Senior, of Southampton, "Gentleman," made 2 May 1783, with the codicil of 30 April 1784 and the probate of 10 January 1786 before John Hart, deputy register — Bucks County Will Book 4, p. 420, file 2055; copied by Anne Raike for Frank K. Swain at Fonthill, 14 March 1932; transcribed in full in Warren D. Cruise, The Croesen Families of America, Vol. I (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1998), pp. 301–305. As throughout, the documents are read as Cruise transcribed them; spelling is modernised in quotation. The will's signature is printed "(SS) DERRICK KROESEN"; the codicil's as "His Derrick X Kroesen mark."
2. Derrick³'s baptism (22 October 1701, Port Richmond, witnesses Niclaes Backer and Blandyena Bogardus), his dates, and the uncertainty of his burial: Cruise, pp. 173, 300.
3. The marriage to Cornelia Bergen (family record, 1 January 1729), her parents, and the three Bergen wives: Cruise, pp. 278–279, 300, 312.
4. The 1727 gift along the County Line and the Feasterville meeting-house corner: Swain's notes, in Cruise, pp. 188–189.
5. The four children; Swain's and General Kroesen's competing readings of a second and third marriage (Anna Bennet Hulst/Hufte, Cornelia Luister, Peter Hufte): Cruise, pp. 300–301. Cruise's data sheet for Derrick⁴ (p. 306) prints "Will made 1783 / Will proved 10 January 1786," which are his father's dates; the family record, from WikiTree and a photographed descendants' tree, has Derrick⁴ dying 3 July 1798 at Moreland, and this book follows the record.
6. Else⁴'s marriage to Simon Van Artsdalen (24 January 1751) and Derrick⁴'s to Margaret Van Artsdalen (1751), both children of Simon Van Artsdalen and Jane Romeyn; the Moreland plantation: Cruise, pp. 302, 306–307.
7. The Revolution's distance from Southampton — the occupation of Philadelphia, the Neshaminy camp, the foraging: the family record's own summary of the standard histories, in the entry for Simon Krewson; Cruise does not treat the war's course.
8. Henry⁴ Kroesen "RWV" — born 12 September 1756, died 18 August 1788, will made 15 August 1788, buried Feasterville lot 6 plot 8, wife Letitia Reeder (plot 9), twin sons Henry and Isaac and a son Absalom, Letitia's remarriage to Joseph Hunt on 19 November 1789: Anne Raike's information, in Cruise, p. 309.
9. Henry Lott, Revolutionary War veteran, second husband of Catharine³: Cruise, p. 178.
10. Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 1 March 1780 — registration by name and age, life servitude for those registered, freedom at twenty-eight for children born after the act — and the 1790 census categories: general Pennsylvania history; the act's text is in The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania, Vol. X, pp. 67–73. The research leads named are the author's, not Cruise's.
11. "The conditions under which the Negro family could live on the farm … It must have been difficult for them to pay off the 80 pounds required, considering that they probably received little pay"; slavery in Bucks County from 1636, "quite common for masters to liberate their slaves by wills": Cruise, p. 305, citing Davis, History of Bucks County, Vol. II, p. 295.
12. Henry³'s will of 7 May 1788, naming his wife Ann, daughter Alsie and four grandchildren, with no mention of Fortune or any enslaved person: Cruise, pp. 313–314; Fortune's bequest is in the will of Derrick², Cruise, p. 192, and in chapter 7.
13. Farmhouse kitchens, winnowing mills, and the household goods of the Delaware Valley in the 1780s: the standard material-culture surveys of the region; stated here as period-general, not as a description of this house.