The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  Inevitably, when a solitary Tammero, or Tony, or Negro Jenkin, or Black John, or J.O. plowed a manor field, back and forth, back and forth, he knew he was retracing his own steps, with no escape and no reward. But sometimes even within the poverty and powerlessness of his life, when he walked behind an animal like Major (or a team of oxen), he could instead have felt—for a brief, beautiful moment—in step with himself and his work, and in control.

  12

  “OPPRESSION UPON THE MIND”

  “God in Every Man”

  In the Quaker cemetery at the top of Gardiners Creek, spangled shadows cast by high oaks flick across the lichen-crusted nineteenth-century stone table monument to Nathaniel Sylvester. The inscription commemorates him as one who sheltered Friends “Persecuted for Conscience’ Sake” in New England. Not as the slaveholding Quaker he was. Only a half mile separates this spot from the “Burying Ground of the Colored People,” a short distance that underlines the disorienting, dislocating contradiction for anyone today between the words “Quaker” and “slaveholder.”

  How can it be that Quakers, the first Americans to abolish slavery in the eighteenth century, were themselves originally slave owners and—in some cases—even slave traders? Questions about the morality of slavery had been raised early on by George Fox. Soon after his convincement (as Quakers call conversion) in England in 1647, he preached, “There is that of God in every man.” A decade later he published an epistle, “To Friends Beyond Sea, that have Blacks and Indian Slaves,” reminding his coreligionists that God “hath made all Nations of one Blood.”

  In Barbados, in a teaching later published as “Gospel Family-Order” that Fox preached when he was staying at the sugar plantation of Shelter Island partner Thomas Rous, Fox expounded on 1 Corinthians 7:22: “He that is called in the Lord, being a Servant, is the Lord’s free Man.” Fox urged planters to bring their slaves to meeting, as Quakers call their form of church service; those Friends who did so, including Thomas Rous, were heavily fined by the authorities. Fox’s explosive words could make a slave believe that conversion to Christianity entitled a “free Man” to freedom from more than “Sin and spiritual Bondage.” Fox also spoke for slaves’ rights to humane treatment and the sacrament of marriage. Aware that planters were listening to what they considered very subversive teachings, Fox cautiously proposed that they eventually liberate their Africans—after nearly a lifetime of service. His most direct appeal to slaveholders simply adapted the Golden Rule: “Consider with your selves, if you were in the same Condition as the Blacks are … you would think it … very great Bondage and Cruelty … And therefore consider seriously of this, and do you for them and to them, as you would willingly have them or any other to do unto you.”

  Completely altering the social system was not Fox’s goal. He sought to shape a religious organization and win converts who, struck by the Inner Light, would radically change their own lives and act more humanely. When Barbadian planters and clergy pounced on the perils of advocating manumission, Fox equivocated. Far from teaching “the Negars to Rebel … a thing we do utterly abhor and detest in and from our Hearts,” he wrote, a true Quaker should admonish slaves “To be Sober, and to Fear God, and to love their Masters and Mistresses, and to be Faithful and Diligent in their Masters Service and Business.”

  As slavery in American and West Indian colonies expanded at an explosive rate over the first decades of the Society’s growth, a few doubts, a very few doubts, about the institution were expressed during the seventeenth century—by Quakers or anyone else. Quaker William Edmundson, pompous and unlikable (Roger Williams said he had “a flash of wit, a Face of Brass, and a tongue set on fire from the Hell of Lyes and Fury”) but a hero nonetheless, launched the first American attack on the immorality of slavery in 1676. He addressed a meeting of slave-owning Newport Friends who regularly gathered at the Coddingtons’ and who almost certainly didn’t want to hear what he had to say. As an Irishman, Edmundson drew a direct connection between African slavery and his compatriots’ brutal subjugation to English rule. He spoke out after the end of King Philip’s War in the region in 1676, when Indian captives were shipped to the Caribbean—just as Irish slaves had been shipped to America throughout the 1650s—under the old rationale that prisoners of war deserved this fate. Debate briefly flared up over the legitimacy of lifelong servitude for Indians who were not prisoners of war. “And many of you count it unlawful to make slaves of the Indians, and if so, then why the negroes?” thundered Edmundson, asking his slave-owning listeners to “consider their condition of perpetual slavery, and make their condition your own [i.e. free them] … for perpetual slavery is an agrivasion [sic], and an oppression upon the mind.” After leaving Rhode Island, the itinerant Irish missionary passed through Shelter Island, holding a meeting there as the guest of “Nathaniel Sylvester, a Friend”—who was also the possessor of twenty-four slaves. The outspoken Edmundson must have raised the subject with his hosts. As observant Friends, Nathaniel and Grizzell would have respected “openings” of the spirit like Edmundson’s as communications from God without feeling obliged to adhere to them as absolute commandments. Even if the Sylvesters acknowledged, in the silence of meeting and within themselves, where their belief in spiritual equality could lead, it was simply a possibility to ponder.

  Preaching on Barbados in 1671, George Fox envisioned a “Government of Families” that included “those bought with money,” meaning both indentured servants and slaves.

  Why didn’t the Sylvesters free their slaves? The short answer is that like other early Quaker slaveholders—and like “early Christians” or members of an opposition party that becomes the government—they had been something else before. They were slaveholders who derived their wealth and status from the people they held as chattel. And after “convincement,” Nathaniel and Grizzell continued to live as they previously had.

  Their quarter century of Quaker activism does not seem to have made them sensitive to the plight of their slaves. Although Nathaniel listed black families with their children in his will, neither he nor his wife held those relationships sacrosanct: all the offspring of Shelter Island slaves suffered the same fate as Hope and Isabell, Jacquero and Hannah’s girls. Separated from their parents and from each other, they were property, to be tossed back and forth after Nathaniel’s death as various family debts got paid off.

  They seem hypocritical to us, accustomed as we are to regard the Friends as people who observe a higher spiritual standard. They enjoyed the economic benefits of owning human property while professing their belief in the sacredness of the individual, the ability of every person to find an inner path to God, and the perfectibility of each life. Even the details that set Quakers apart outwardly—the democratic thees and thous, their refusal to take off their hats to show deference to another person—run counter to the idea of enslavement based on skin color. Only after a century of debate, and arising from the slow conversations among Friends about the nature of property and human nature, did any American Quaker meeting outlaw members who owned slaves. The Philadelphia Friends did so in 1776, the year that also saw the declaration (written primarily by the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson) that says “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  “Offensive Carriage Concerning the Saboth”

  Nathaniel personified what the Quaker historian Rufus Jones called “prepared ground”: the right man in the right place at the right time to give what would become the Society of Friends a foothold in America. Brought up as a religious nonconformist, Nathaniel would have been open to the radical message brought to the New World by Friends traveling first to Barbados in 1655. He chose the right place to settle: Long Island’s East End, where the towns only nominally adhered to the strict religious covenant of the New Haven Colony. The watery, uncertain miles between New Haven and Long Island gave dis
sidents room to feel estranged from the colony’s particularly godly and restrictive form of Puritan governance. They fretted over New Haven’s cumbersome and centralized judiciary and what they saw as misuse of tax revenues. Most of all they wanted the opportunity to vote in general and local elections, denied them because they were merely landholders, not full church members, or “saints,” as the Puritan church called their elect. (“Freemen,” as voting members were called, formed only a small percentage of Southold’s inhabitants.) Southolders in particular were guilty of “high miscariages.” In March 1653, for example, Nathaniel and his new young Shelter Island partner, Ensign John Booth, swore that the local pastor’s son had threatened to recruit sixty Indians and “make a garrison at Southhold to defend him against the power of Newhaven.”

  Similar threats of revolt against the colonial government shake many pages of New Haven and Southold’s court records, a mix of what today would be police blotter reports and criminal trial proceedings. More often than not, the accused admitted guilt, repented publicly, confessed to having “feared that in his passion and distemper he might speake such things as are charged,” and appealed for a light sentence. This was Nathaniel’s strategy in his first litigious encounter with New Haven in 1654, when his defiance erupted, a sign that his resentment of church-and-state regimes predated his Quaker convincement by at least three years. New Haven’s general court accused him of calling the colonial government “tyrannical,” and declared his “carriage concerning the Saboth & ordinance” in Southold “offensive.” (It sounds as though he spoke out against a requirement that all attend church or pay to support the minister.)

  Even before he faced Governor Theophilus Eaton and the gathered deputies and magistrates of the colony, including Deputy Governor Stephen Goodyear (the same Stephen Goodyear who had sold the island to the partners), Nathaniel had already “shewed much passion and hight of spirit [before a lesser bar], to the courts great dissatisfaction.” Worse yet, furious over rumors that Southold was about to ban him from the town, he had threatened that “if any mett him in the streets and medled with him he would pistoll [shoot] them.” A sidebar conference with Governor Eaton persuaded Nathaniel to back down. Admitting that he was guilty as charged, he expressed regret for “too much bitterness of speech, wch he now sees the evil of and hopes to walk inoffensively for time to come.” The bench informed “Capt. Silvster that [it was] willing to take satisfaction, hopeing he sees his evill.” This moment in court was Nathaniel’s one stab at getting along with the New Haven regime. From then on he used the law to further his commercial enterprises and to conduct political and military maneuvers, but he refused to be held accountable to the state for his beliefs.

  The Darkness Within

  In 1656, two years after Nathaniel’s trial, eight English Quakers took passage to Boston aboard the Speedwell. Upon arrival, they were imprisoned for eleven weeks for sedition and heresy and shipped back home at the captain’s expense. It seems almost too good to be true for this story that another passenger on the Speedwell’s westward voyage was twenty-three-year-old Francis Brinley, Grizzell’s brother, returning to the colonies from England, given his expressed distaste for Quakers in general. If Nathaniel and Grizzell hadn’t previously heard of the Friends from Thomas Rous and his son, John, among the first Barbadian Quaker converts, Francis certainly would have brought news of his shipmates to Shelter Island. The Quakers’ daily shipboard prayer meetings surely repelled this conservative young gentleman. They shouted and moaned, recounted their “night-journeys,” spoke in tongues, urgently embraced one another, and fell to the deck. Being struck by the Inner Light—the presence of God within every human soul—was a physical assault; men and women found this encounter as unsettling and painful as it was joyful. The “children of the light,” as they styled themselves, swam to America on a sea of dreams. God’s hand hovered overhead and every journey gave proof of miraculous escapes, proving that the Lord guided the traveler to safety “as a man leads a horse by the head.”

  To most present-day Americans, Quaker history embodies a magnificent struggle within the colonies for the rights to free speech, religious toleration, and the separation of church and state. Our Quakers are Gary Cooper as a pacifist refusing to fight in the Civil War in Friendly Persuasion, or the painter Edward Hicks’s chummy lions and lambs in multiple versions of The Peaceable Kingdom. The historian Barry Levy offers George Fox (1624–1691) as a classic frontier hero, even before he left the Old World for the New. “In his story,” Levy writes, drawing on the journal that Fox published late in life, “a young shepherd from Leicestershire with a divine call rides on horseback through the edges of England, restoring insane women to inner peace, frightening cosmopolitan ministers from their pulpits, piercing judges into anguish with his eyes, enduring repeated riots and stonings without recanting or even changing his facial expression. He invades the center of cosmopolitan life, London, where he earns the respect of the country’s leader, Oliver Cromwell … The journal is spiced with amazing tales, home remedies, egalitarian values, atrocious spelling, and a larger than life manly, gentle folk hero dressed in leather britches.”

  Fox’s accounts of his mystical experiences and the certainty of his faith fired many converts, who, like him, came “up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God” and found that “all things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before.” Fellow Quaker Robert Barclay wrote that in meetings, “there will be such a painful travel [travail] found in the soul, that it will even work upon the outward man, so that … the body will be greatly shaken, and many groans sighs and tears. Sometimes the Power of God will break forth into a whole meeting.” Anyone, man or woman, could obtain mercy from God and become “an heir to His kingdom, a member of His body, a minister of His Spirit, and an inheritor of His Eternal rest blessed forever.” Fox’s crusade, “the Lamb’s War,” was first a war against the darkness within. When a Massachusetts inquisitor asked one Speedwell Friend where this “dark place” was, the prisoner placed his hand over his heart and answered, “It is under my hand.”

  Like Francis Brinley, the Puritans viewed Quakers as anything but heroes. Puritans saw them as dangerous subversives intent on infecting every aspect of existence with their seditious beliefs. Saying they always spoke the truth and had no need to swear to it, Friends would not take an oath, which eliminated them from government service and made them suspect in business dealings to anyone but fellow Quakers. According to the authorities, a particular communal failing—since Indians were considered a constant threat—was their refusal to take up arms to defend themselves or their communities.

  Alarmed magistrates and ministers saw the Quakers as an incoming wave of wild sectarians, like those who had proliferated during the runup to the English Civil War in the tumultuous 1640s. This fear inspired repressive legislation: only nine years after Fox first preached in England, Massachusetts enacted its first anti-Quaker law in October 1656, imposing an enormous fine of £100 (about $16,000 today) on any ship captain who brought foreign Friends into the colony. The law also required that he transport these undesirables out of the Bay Colony at his own cost. Resident Quakers faced fines as well as incarceration, whipping, forced labor, and restricted public speech. Legislation in 1657 mandated branding, boring the tongue with a red-hot poker, and the cropping of ears. In 1658, nonresident Quakers were sentenced to banishment on pain of death. Other New England colonies followed suit, although none hounded Quakers as vengefully as did Massachusetts.

  The earliest Puritan apologia for such persecution (published in 1659) painted Quakers as heretical lunatics and dangerous anarchists. Friends fired back with New England Judged (1661), portraying the Puritans as sadists and hypocrites. Historians have rounded up the considerable reasons why the Puritan establishment found Quakers so toxic—and why much of what Friends preached sounds alluring today. Quakers denied original sin and proclaimed their own salvation to be unconditional. They insisted tha
t any convinced man or woman could find divine truth and preach it as well as a university-trained minister. They welcomed women as preachers and itinerant “witnesses to truth” who willingly left home and family. They believed that spiritual rebirth lifted the curse Genesis had laid on women, making them equal partners in marriage “as they were before the Fall”—an earth-shattering heresy for Puritans and most other Christians. Quakers also rejected orthodox assertions that God had inflicted the pain of childbirth as punishment for Eve’s disobedience; instead, they argued, this was but another part of incomprehensible suffering throughout the world. Puritans warned that such challenges to conventional rules of family order doomed women to the flames of lust and adultery.

  As alarming for Puritans as the number and kind of converts the Friends attracted was the freewheeling community they enjoyed. Quakers served and supported each other as “children of the light” who would carry out the holy work of conversion. Quakers wrote to each other with an ecstatic ardor that can sound steamily erotic. A feverish, almost physical heat emanates from their religious transports. Their correspondence does not distinguish between the sexes, impose any hierarchy on family relationships, or differentiate degrees of friendship—all are lovers. Although they embrace each other first and foremost as lovers of Christ, they also prize one another’s courage, fortitude, spiritual insights, and suffering. The tender rapture Quakers shared in the trenches helped them to overcome distance, isolation, and fear.