Staten Island's 'Napoleon' is complex
Napoleon’s story is still being excavated, as visitors to “Louis Napoleon: Underground Railroad Agent” newly opened at the Sandy Ground Historical Society will see. Only the barest details — census records, an obituary, a photograph of his house (now gone) on Bloomingdale Road have emerged so far.
Son of a Jewish father and an enslaved woman, Napoleon was born free. (Had he arrived just a few months earlier, it would have been otherwise: New York had decreed only the previous year that all children born in the state were free, no matter their mother’s status.)
According to his obit, Napoleon was known for his intelligence and his ties to the abolitionist movement. At one point he was hired as a janitor by the Manhattan-based American Anti-Slavery Society, but the job title is thought to have been a cover for his real occupation — spiriting slaves into free territories and Canada. He is known to have married several times and to have maintained households in Sandy Ground, a village of free black people established in 1828, as well as in Brooklyn.
Another tradition in the community has been its status as a stop or safe haven on the Underground Railroad. Louis Napoleon’s “arrival” helps to confirm what Sandy Ground descendants have believed all along.
Proof has been elusive, though. A fresh trail began surfacing recently when an upstate historian came across a reference that linked the community and Napoleon.
That historian, Don Papson, contacted Sylvia D’Alessandro, executive director of the Sandy Ground Historical Society, and she presented the project to Debbie Paige, a candidate for a master’s degree in history at the College of Staten Island.
Ms. Paige unearthed the significant information reproduced in the exhibit. She’s reasonably confident about finding more. This summer, she plans to investigate the doings of several prominent Island abolitionists — William Emerson, Sidney Howard Gay and Francis George Shaw — whose papers are kept at Harvard. All might well have had ties to Napoleon and Sandy Ground.
Historically, Sandy Ground was a community of oystermen who worked the shellfish beds of Raritan Bay. They had boats and they knew local waters well. Their knowledge would have been a valuable asset on the Underground Railroad, which often traveled by water.
Both Ms. Paige and Ms. D’Alessandro are hoping to discover historical material that ties the oystermen to the underground conduits.
Evidence of such connections is often well-hidden. At Sandy Ground, records might have been lost in 1963, when much of the original community was destroyed by fire. Development, following the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, took much of what remained.
Back in the day, record-keeping would have been dangerous.
“You have to remember,” says Ms. D’Alessandro, “the railroad was a covert operation and the penalties for involvement were harsh.”
Still, connections do come to light.
Ms. D’Alessandro recalled a visit last year from a staff member of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a registry: “She said to me, ‘Sylvia, you have all the dots — now all you have to do is connect them.’”