6.3.3 Enforcing the Placaet of 1776

If we are to follow the lead of the Resolutiën van Holland, one gets the impression that, on the short term at least, the issue of black slaves who had come to the metropolis further caught the attention of the States of Holland.⁵⁷

On 12 August 1776, Sir Aron Jacobs Polak, a Surinamese planter, had sent a request to the Generality.⁵⁸ Polak had come to the Republic in 1769, and had apparently decided to make his stay more comfortable by taking four slaves with him.

The pattern of the previous acts was duly followed here as well. In a meeting of 30 September 1776, the records of the States of Holland were once more mostly copied verbatim. The States General clarified (or post facto changed the scope of, depending on one’s interpretation) that the resolution of 9 August 1771, with which it had declared that Marytje Criool and her daughter were free upon having entered the Netherlands, was of no use here. It was made in a particular case, and as a result, Sir Aron Jacobs Polak’s four slaves who had been in the Republic remained enslaved as well.⁶⁰

A second, more elaborate case, soon came before the States General. One way or another, Blondin and Sabina, the two slaves who were partially responsible for the enactment of the Placaet of 1776, had travelled to the Republic in 1775 together with their child Cicero.

Unfortunately, when the case came before them on 30 December 1776, this did not seem to matter a great deal to the States General. It were the creditors that had sequestered the plantation where Blondin’s family originally came from who asked for intervention by the States General. They asked for another confirmation that the resolution of 9 August 1771 freeing Marytje Criool was given in a particular case and had no precedential value, which the States General duly confirmed. The family would have to go back to Surinam.⁶¹

Unexpectedly, the case did not end there. In the private papers of Pieter van Bleiswijk (1724–1790), the raadspensionaris (Grand Pensionary, the most important civil servant⁶²) of Holland between 1772 and 1787, we find a request for reconsideration of the States General’s decision of the previous year.⁶³ In this rare document, we hear the Blondin family’s version of the events.

According to them, when their deceased owner Thomas Wybrand van Rees had taken them with him to the Republic in 1763, he intended that they had thereby gained their freedom. The family pleaded that they had returned to Surinam voluntarily, and had lived there as free persons in the years after. Things apparently started going wrong in 1774, when the widow of van Rees got into financial difficulties, and Blondin and Sabina were included on an inventory of the estate. The property being sequestered a little while later, the new owners Valckeniers and Du Quesne quickly wanted to lay their hands on the Blondin family, who by then lived with the widow in Panamaribo, the capital of the colony. Eventually, they left her, and Blondin ended up in the service of a high-ranking soldier named Jan Willem van Oldenbarnevelt (named Witte Tullingh), in the Republic. However, Du Quesne and Valckenier were not to be deterred. They had already petitioned the Court of Holland and had asked permission to send a deurwaarder (enforcement officer) in order to bring the family back into slavery.

Holland took a particular interest in the case again, and wanted the request examined by the deputies of the city of Dordrecht and the Gecommitteerde Raad of Holland.⁶⁴ A few months later, Bosschaert reported his findings to the States of Holland, and they agreed with him in rejecting the slaves’ request. Bosschaert pointed to the fact that the placaet of 1776 had confirmed in writing that slaves did not become free solely by having resided in the Republic. He did confer that the placaet of 1776 had a non-retroactivity clause, which stated that for cases predating its enactment, the status quo would apply. But were Blondin and Sabina free before that period, or not? Bosschaert discussed the results of his enquiry as to their status in Surinam. He came to the conclusion that they had always remained slaves and had simply tried to make the resolutions of 1771 and 1773 applicable to themselves. What is more, he held that, the resolutions of 1771 and 1773 aside, there had never been recognition of the maxim that coming to the Republic meant that a slave remained free when he returned to the colonies. Although this was Bosschaert’s main legal argument, another consideration influenced him. It was duly noted that if all slaves who had been here before the Placaet of 1776 were as “insolent” as Blondin and Sabina, and started claiming their freedom, the banks and creditors which kept many of the Surinam plantations afloat would be in trouble, as the value of mortgaged slaves disappeared through enfranchisement.⁶⁵

Clearly, this sealed the fate of the family, and the Generality followed the advice of Holland on 4 April 1777, condemning Blondin and his family to slavery again.⁶⁶

We hear of the family one final time in May 1777. In the meantime, the plantation’s creditors had pushed their case in the Court of Holland.

We do not know what eventually happened with Blondin and his family, but should assume that all did not end well. After this episode, both the records of the States of Holland and the States General become silent on slavery in the metropolis again.

If we look at Johannes van der Linden’s popular 1793 abridgments to Voet’s Commentarius ad Pandectas, he only took note of the same cases which we just discussed. Whereas Voet himself believed that slaves coming to the metropolis could have themselves declared free by a court ruling, van der Linden nuanced this. He noted the exception for runaways on the basis of the 1736 ruling, the exception that was created by the Placaet of 1776, and he also referred to the case of Aron Jacobs Polak.⁶⁸

So far, one can only wonder whether any more cases came before the court, or whether the States General bothered to studiously enforce the Placaet of 1776 in the long term. We have reason to be sceptical about the latter question.⁶⁹ Indeed, circumstantial evidence suggests that the unclarity about the legal status of slaves who had been in the Republic remained as great as ever.

First, there are two curious cases that seem to point at a modification of the placaet of 1776, though this is not to be found in the records of the States General or the States of Holland. A former slave called Caatje sent a request to the States of Holland in 1778. She had been in the Republic with her master, who had provided her with freedom letters during that stay. However, back in Surinam, the man who she stayed with, a vicar called Du Pasquier, had taken away her freedom letters “for safe-keeping”. As she feared for her freedom, she asked the city to send her a copy of those letters.

The case is rather strange. In neither of the previous sources does the requirement to have lived in the Republic for “a year and six weeks” come to the fore. And yet, it appears in a second case. This case involved John Gabriel Stedman (1744–1797), a Dutch colonial soldier known as the author of a work called The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. In this work, a prominent role was played by Quassie van Timotibo, a slave who took the side of the Dutch in the revolt. Interestingly for our purposes, Stedman both knew of the placaet of 1776, and reported how Quassie went to the Republic. One scholar has looked at the diary of Stedman, which stated that Quassie was declared free on 10 July 1778. Exactly one year and six weeks after he arrived in the Republic.⁷¹ Again, it is unclear where this idea originated.

Moreover, the placaet even caused considerable confusion outside of the Republic. Schoeman has traced some cases that arose in the Cape Colony in 1790, again involving the legal status of some slaves who had been in the Republic. The local Council of Policy was unsure how to proceed. There was reference to the instruction of 1714 which argued that slaves having touched the soil of the fatherland became free, others averred that this instruction had been repealed and replaced by a rule that stated that the slave only became free after having stayed in the motherland for three years, and yet other colonisers believed that the placaet of 1776, although not promulgated by the EIC, was also good law in the Cape Colony. Unfortunately, the clarifications that the Cape colonists might have received from the Heeren XVII back in the Republic has not been found in the records.⁷²

In retrospect, the placaet of 1776 seems like an emergency measure, which was made after some Resolutions of the States General had created the impression that slaves who had ever touched Dutch soil, were free. Obviously, this idea was dangerous to both the Sociëteit van Suriname and metropolitan creditors. Holland must have felt that its interests were threatened by these decisions, and forced a limitation on the freedom tradition upon the Generality, for whom this issue must have been less important. To further limit the damage of the 1771 and 1773 resolutions, the decisions in the cases of Polak and Blondin were made. As the immediate danger of financial loss retracted, the attitude of casual neglect returned.