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A Freed Slave on His Own

Tom Gall starts a farm in Oyster Bay and even buys a slave for himself

Copy of a 1716 bill of sale (Nassau County Museum Collection, Long Island Studies Institute)

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

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When Alice Crabb's will was probated in Oyster Bay in October, 1685, it contained a striking sentence about her slave, known as Black Tom: ``I give to my negro man one calf one iron skellet one mare and his freedom and liberty.''

Black Tom, later known as Tom Gall, is believed to be the first slave to be freed on Long Island.

To tell a single slave's story is made difficult by the scarcity of written records. Slaves usually had only a single name, and that was given to them by their masters, a name that was sometimes plain, sometimes fanciful: For every Jack or Sarah there was a Bacchus or a Pleasant Queen Anne. Being mostly illiterate, slaves rarely left personal accounts, and white owners had few occasions to write about them, except in ledgers indicating how much they paid for them or sold them for.

After Black Tom, there would not be many more slaves freed for another century. Manumission did not begin in earnest until the colonial period was over. But slaves strove for freedom in other ways. Some bought their freedom with wages earned over many years. Others ran away. Some gained sanctuary with upstate Indian tribes such as the Iroquois; others fled to the anonymity of New York City or shipped out as seamen on a vessel in a harbor.

The story of Black Tom can be pieced together from Oyster Bay Town documents that record land sales, slave sales, excerpts from wills and surveyors' notes.

One example:

This is to satisfy all whom it may concern, that I, Richard Crabb, have received from Lewis Morris one Negro boy called Owah of about the age of 12 or 13 years to be employed in such services and labor as my occasions shall require.

This was written by Alice Crabb's husband on Nov. 26, 1673. Owah was Black Tom's name at the time, and he apparently was a gift to Alice Crabb. The document does not say what Crabb paid for the young slave.

There were conditions put on the sale by Morris, who was the son of wealthy New Yorker Richard Morris. Crabb had to provide Owah with ``sufficient diet and lodging, with good warm clothing.'' Also, and this was unusual for the time, Crabb had to agree that when the slave reached age 31, or when his wife, Alice, died -- whichever came first -- Owah would be set free.

At some point during his service to Crabb, Owah became known as Black Tom. He does not show up again in the records until he was freed at age 24 or 25 in 1685. To confirm her mother's intentions in her will, Crabb's daughter, Mary Andrews, swore to a statement on Oct. 26 that ``Tom the Negro which was formerly my mother's servant ... [is] therefore no longer in bondage, but to be a free man from the day of the date hereof to the day of his death ...''

The newly freed Black Tom took the name Tom Gall, and he married a free black woman named Mary. He began farming, though it appears only as a squatter on a two-acre piece of property that was not his. In 1697, the town granted ``unto Negro Tom and his children'' the two-acre plot, plus another plot of four acres. He raised cattle or sheep, since in 1700 the town gave ``Black Tom the Negro'' his own earmark for ``all his creatures.'' He also cultivated his own orchard.

Gall must have prospered as a farmer. When he was about 57 years old, he bought a black slave named Obed, age uncertain. Obed was purchased for 60 pounds from Nathaniel Weeks of Oyster Bay on Feb. 7, 1717. Then, in 1720, Gall purchased an additional eight acres of land from George Balden, or Baldwin, for 85 pounds. Two years later he sold the same parcel of land for 85 pounds to a Thomas Rodgers.

There are no records to indicate how Obed was used by Gall as a slave. But Tom and Mary Gall's daughter, whose name is not known, fell in love with Obed and they married. Four years after the Galls bought Obed, by then their son-in-law, they freed him from slavery.

Tom Gall's story fades away, rather than ends. At about age 67, he is mentioned in a 1727 land sale involving others. After that, nothing. How Gall and his wife died, where they died, where they are buried, these things are not known. His life begins and ends in the pages of the Oyster Bay Town Records. But this sketchy account of the life of Tom Gall is more than we know about the lives of most of the slaves who lived on Long Island.