A pastor’s double life unearthed

Another source discovered by Stessin-Cohn, an 1858 book by Nathan Crosby titled Eminent Persons Who Have Died in the US in 1857, includes a listing for Murphy that traces his career from Rochester to the Reformed Dutch church of Scotia for seven years, followed by stints in St. Johnsville, Herkimer and Coeymans. The account notes that Murphy returned to Herkimer, but then, for mysterious reasons, in 1849 his relations with the Herkimer church were dissolved.

The break was traumatic, marking the beginning of Murphy’s downfall, according to another extraordinary account that Stessin-Cohn found in a book about the history of the Herkimer Reformed Church. Though he subsequently became pastor of churches in two nearby small towns, Murphy had fallen into poverty, according to this account. His family apparently had abandoned him: Murphy was buried in an unmarked grave.

“He had been a man of influence and power, but toward the last, for reasons which I am unable to apprehend, he seems to have lost his hold upon the church. I do not know…to what extent the sins of his children were visited upon him,” the author writes enigmatically. “The indifference and neglect of the people whom he had served so well, together with the domestic trials that he was compelled to endure, had brought his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.” Noting that “no hand living has reared the meanest slab” over his grave, the writer also protests “the sin of such neglect. But are there none among the many that remain of Dr. Murphey’s [sic] spiritual children who will undertake to remove that stigma from the church?”

Stessin-Cohn speculated that Murphy’s black slave origins in the end had caught up with him, leading to his disgrace. Plus, she believed that Murphy likely cracked under the strain of living a lie. At a time when Union College, to cite one example, required applicants to sign an affidavit they had no black blood, the pressure on this African-American man of pretending to be white must have been intense. “He must have been torn constantly,” she said.

Local attitudes toward African-Americans at the time were generally hostile, she noted. With the exception of its Quaker communities, New York was by no means an abolitionist state, and the remnants of slavery persisted into the 1840s. The state passed its first manumission law in 1799, but it hardly represented a clean break with the evil institution: It stipulated that female babies born to slave women would be freed at age 28 and male babies at age 25. In 1817, the age was lowered for all slave babies to age 21. After the emancipation of 1827, which automatically freed any slave except people under age 21, such children became known as “indentureds.” Stessin-Cohen noted that Ulster County, with the exception of its Quaker communities, was a conservative outpost, lacking the Underground Railroad that helped ferry slaves to freedom across the river in Dutchess.

A lurking question during Stessin-Cohn’s research was Murphy’s appearance. She discovered that portraits of both him and his wife hang on the wall of the Herkimer Dutch Reformed Church. (In a quirk of fate, someone had bought them up at an estate sale of a Murphy descendant and donated them to the church.) The primitive-style portrait depicts Murphy as a genial, large-faced white man. She also located a photo of the reverend, printed in one of the commemorative books, which shows a serious, distinguished gentleman with thick, slightly receding hair, scowling over his high white collar.

Stessin-Cohn’s in-depth research was made possible by a grant from the Southeastern New York Library Resource Council, which also paid for the postings of several documents, including the Memorial letter, on the Hudson River Valley Heritage website, where it is packaged in a program for high school and college students (though anyone can access the online sources, which are further made accessible by accompanying text translations). To review the material and draw your own conclusions about this fascinating case, go to https://www.hrvh.org/, select Historic Huguenot Street under “Collections,” and click on “Educational Resources”; the Murphy material is included under “The Missing Chapter: Untold Stories of the African-American Presence in the Mid-Hudson Valley” section.

Stessin-Cohn, who chairs the Hudson River Valley Heritage Digital Advisory Committee, said that the support of this organization is key to making historic data freely available to the public. Meanwhile, she continues to dig into the story of Reverend Murphy. The next step is a visit to Herkimer, where she hopes to connect with his descendants and find out more about what happened in 1849.

“Murphy must have been an extremely brilliant and extraordinary man,” she said. “It makes you think about all the people who never had that opportunity. At least he got it, but nonetheless his life ended in pain and sorrow. It’s heartbreaking that this man, who felt called to be a minister, had to wake up terrified every day of being found out that he was black.”