Gomez Mill House: Ecker’s Reasoning
As an intern at the Gomez Mill House site in Marlboro, New York, I was left with a variety of avenues to pursue regarding researching one of the owners, Wolvert Ecker. When I began this internship, I did not have a very narrow scope of what information I wanted to pursue. With the help of my internship supervisor, I decided to pursue the circumstances surrounding a certain case that Wolvert presided over while he was a Justice of the Peace in Newburgh.
I located this case in a book written about local history, History of the Town of Newburgh by Edward Manning Ruttenber. The book, published in 1859, explicitly mentions Wolvert and his co-presiding judge, Benjamin Carpenter, and the case but does not delve into the circumstances regarding the decision.
The case regarded the freeing of an enslaved person by the name Peter who was owned by local revolutionary Jonathan Belknap. This case was of particular interest to me due primarily to the circumstances surrounding Wolvert. Wolvert himself was a slaveowner – a fact verified by the 1790 U.S. census in which five enslaved persons were counted residing at his residence in Marlboro. The case was also the first of its kind in the area as Peter was a young man in prime health and age at the time of his freeing. Through conducting historical research about Jonathan Belknap and overlapping instances with Wolvert’s life, I was able to come to the uncover the most likely reason as to why Ecker came to the conclusion to free Peter.
After the revolution, many revolutionary patriots found themselves drowning in debt after putting the majority of their money and time towards the fight. As a result, many individuals could not make enough money to keep up on mortgage payments or even just pay taxes. As a result, many individuals found their property and belongings confiscated and resold at a sheriff’s sale. Jonathan Belknap was one of many individuals who found himself deep in debt after the Revolutionary War. In order to offset this debt and keep his home. Jonathan Belknap decided to free his slaves – one of which was Peter. But in order to free Peter, the local Justices of the Peace had to approve such an act.
By researching the population of the town of Newburgh of the time, I found the population to be under 2,500. Due to the small nature of the town of Newburgh at the time, Wolvert would have most likely heard of Jonathan Belknap’s debt and emphasized with him as Wolvert also spent a great amount of his money to assist the revolutionary fight and as a result died very poor.While the small population of Newburgh could have been the most influential factor, I decided to dig deeper into how the lives of Wolvert Ecker and Jonathan Belknap overlap. Through researching the Belknap family history, I found that Jonathan Belknap was the brother of Isaac Belknap. Isaac sat on the Committee of Safety and Observation alongside Wolvert. The combination of public knowledge of Jonathan’s debt with what could be assumed as pressure from his brother Isaac, it is not surprising that Wolvert presided the way he did.
Although I cannot say for sure what the reasoning behind Wolvert’s decision, the research I conducted into the circumstances of the case and those involved in it, I was able to paint a clear picture of the reasoning for Wolvert’s decision to free Peter while owning enslaved persons.