Dutchess County Free Black Communities: Opportunities & Risks of Maritime Adventures Before the Civil War By Bill Jeffway. © Dutchess County Historical Society, 2024. This is a verbatim script of a talk given February 22, 2024 spoken with presentation slides that may be found in the video documentary. ______________________________________________________________________ Thanks for joining us. I'm Bill Jeffway, speaking to you from our offices in Rhinebeck, New York. I am the executive director of the Dutchess County Historical Society and have been for a number of years. I am pleased to speak to you tonight in this program through the sponsorship of Dutchess County Government who year after year, especially for Black History Month, have sponsored our DCHS Virtual Event Space and Black History Month program. So I want to particularly thank the Dutchess County Government, the county executive, county clerk, and office of the county historian for making this work possible. In this way we can bring programs to the public, both live and archived, at no cost to the public. So thank you to Dutchess County Government for being our sponsor. I also want to thank my close collaborator, Melodye Moore, who is a collaborator on all things important, and Will Tatum, the county historian. The three of us meet regularly and try to orient and discipline ourselves to a fact-based source-based understanding of local history. Just as a point of background, I want to mention that what I'm doing tonight is a little bit different. I often give a presentation, there's a big point to make. There are supporting points, but what I want to do this evening was give a little bit of a view into some of the things we're working on, and some of the discoveries we're making. As a matter of fact, we were joking because some of them we were discovering today. I do that in part to try to encourage others to develop the curiosity that I know some of you have, who I see here, to go down these research rabbit holes. And sometimes you find something and put it aside and it doesn't make a connection for six months or a year or two. So I'm trying a slightly different approach tonight to share work-in-progress findings rather than present a fully baked, finely crafted full narrative with support points. To give you a sense of what this process of discovery is like – a century ago, Vassar Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon, I love to quote her because she said, and I quote, “A historian's most important job is to rewrite history,” unquote. This sounds very controversial. But she insisted this was the most important job of a historian if the rewriting was motivated by getting to a closer truth. She talked about clearing away the myths of prejudice. She talked about finding new ways of information (she would have loved the internet, virtually all the research I do is online). And so I want to bear in mind tonight the idea, especially as a nation, when we frequently are talking about what history should be taught or understood, to suggest that the history that should be taught and understood is the history that's historically true, and that we learn this truth from the
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