page_title: Elisabeth Samson
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Elisabeth Samson / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Location map of Samson's Paramaribo home, 1737
context_page_description: Elisabeth Samson was an Afro-Surinamese coffee plantation owner.
  She was born in 1715 in Paramaribo to a freed slave, known as Mariana. All of her other siblings had been born as slaves and were emancipated by her half-brother Charlo Jansz. Raised in the home of her half-sister Maria Jansz, Samson was taught to read and write by her brothers-in law who also trained her in business. She began acquiring property at the age of 19, but was banished from the colony in 1836 after being convicted of slander. Her appeal, heard by the Dutch Parliament, was successful and she returned to Suriname in 1839.
  After acquiring slaves and two small coffee plantations, Samson entered a relationship with Carl Otto Creutz. Creutz was a soldier who was deeded property in 1749 by the governor for his service in making peace with local maroons. Focused on his military career and colonial politics, he turned his plantation, Clevia, over to Samson's management. She brought her own slaves to work on his plantation and within two years, the couple drew up a document confirming their joint ownership of Clevia, as well as of a cattle ranch and two townhomes in the city of Paramaribo.
context_section_description: Samson died on 21 April 1771 and was buried without a headstone at the New Orange Garden Cemetery in Paramaribo. Her husband inherited over ƒ1,000,000 (around £132,100,000 in 2020) of property, which he promptly mortgaged and lived lavishly on the proceeds. A crop failure in 1772 and a bank crash in Amsterdam in 1773 then led him to take out a mortgage on Belwaarde. Unaware that he had mortgaged the property, Nanette tried to pay back the mortgage, but eventually declared bankruptcy in 1778. When Zobre died in 1784, having never paid the mortgages and with his family refusing the inheritance because of the debt, Jan and Theo Marselis, who owned a mercantile business in Amsterdam took over all of Samson's former estates. 
  As she had no children and her husband squandered her legacy, Samson was obscured in the historic record, often reflected as part of local folklore until writer and historian Cynthia McLeod decided to research her life, in 1988. Expanding her search beyond Suriname, McLeod consulted Dutch archives in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, as well as records in Germany, piecing together and salvaging Samson's life story. Her history gives insight, not only into how black and mixed-race women were able to impact the economy of the Caribbean region and challenge social constructs in the 18th century, but also providing details of the larger society of Suriname in the period. The Elisabeth Samson House located at 22 Wagenwegstraat in Paramaribo has been declared part of the historic city center and was added to South America's World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in 2002. McLeod has lobbied for years to conserve the property and in 2019 established a foundation, hoping to raise adequate funding for faithful restoration of the home to how appeared in Samson's lifetime.
  McLeod has repeatedly written about Samson in such historical studies as Bronnen van Afro-Surinaamse Samenlevingen (Sources from Afro-Surinamese Societies, 1993) and Elisabeth Samson: Een vrije zwarte vrouw in het achttiende-eeuwse Suriname (Elisabeth Samson: A Free Black Woman in Eighteenth-century Suriname, 1994) and a novel, De vrije negerin Elisabeth (The Free Negress Elisabeth, 2000), which was published in English in 2004. In 2014, Elisabeth Samson versus de Nederlandse Staat (Elisabeth Samson versus the State of the Netherlands), a play by the theater group Urban Myth, premiered at the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam. The performance explored Samson's life and whether her ambition to use her wealth and power to gain equal legal treatment was solely for her own benefit. Written by the novelist, Karin Amatmoekrim, the play examined Samson's long quest to marry a white man and find her place in white society, calling into question why she had not worked to free other black people from slavery.
caption: Location map for Samson's home at 22 Wagenwegstraat, Paramaribo
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