The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  Weskhunck, tackhunck: Williams, Key, 37; Bragdon, Native People, 104.

  pestle: Mortar and pestle were sometimes buried with a woman, as hunting implements were buried with men. Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 102.

  roar of a mill: NS’s inventory lists a “horse mill,” a pair of millstones, and a grindstone. Robert Hefner, author of Windmills of Long Island (New York: W. W. Norton and The Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, 1983), surmised that the manor’s Upper Inlet would have provided enough flow. “An Inventory of the Estate of Nathaniel Sylvester taken the 22: September 1680,” GSDD #1, SIHS.

  Joshua: Born c.1626 in Amsterdam, naturalized as English with brothers Nathaniel and Giles in 1657, Joshua died in Southold June 21, 1706. He may have suffered from some physical disability: CS and NS made provisions in their wills for his upkeep, but soon after his arrival in America he was well enough to travel across Long Island Sound. Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 5; William A. Shaw, ed., Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland, 1603–1700 (Lymington: Huguenot Society of London, 1911), 71; Joshua Sylvester, Shelter Island, to JWJr, Hartford, Sept. 7, 1660, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 277–78; will of CS, 1671; will of NS, 1680.

  at the same table: Sarah Kemble Knight, “The Journal of Madam Knight,” in Colonial American Travel Narratives, 64.

  port and madeira: The Sylvesters stopped in the Azores as early as 1657 and in Madeira on at least one voyage. Coldham, English Adventurers, 165; Giles Sylvester II, Madeira, to JWJr, Hartford, May 30, 1666, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 281–82.

  Rhenish pottery jugs: Salt-glazed stoneware jugs became part of Dutch Atlantic traders’ standard stock-in-trade. Hancock, “Changing Landscape,” 90; Charlotte Wilcoxen, Dutch Trade and Ceramics in America in the Seventeenth Century (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1987), 73.

  “case bottles”: Nathaniel’s probate lists “1 Case with Bottles”; four case bottle fragments were found in the midden in front of the existing house. NS inventory; Hancock, “Changing Landscape,” 59.

  Barbadian rum: Entries for the 1680s, Sylvester Manor Account Book, 1658–1768, East Hampton Library.

  pewter plates: Nathaniel’s 1680 inventory lists a large amount of pewter, 280 pounds, but no silver. Mention of “all my plate” in Grizzell’s will leads to a conjecture that the silver was considered her personal property; NS inventory, GSSD 1; Will of GBS.

  stew in pottery bowls: Sarah Sportman, Craig Cipolla, and David Landon, “Zooarchaeological Evidence for Animal Husbandry and Foodways at Sylvester Manor,” in Historical Archaeology of Sylvester Manor, 127–40; Elizabeth Therese Newman, “What’s For Dinner: Distinctive Diets in New England,” paper presented at annual conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology, Providence, RI, January, 2003.

  nausamp: Nathaniel Sylvester presumably knew both Dutch and the English transliterations of the Indian word (the Narragansetts called it “nausamp”). Dutch chroniclers Isaac de Rasieres (1628) and Adriaen van der Donck (1655) both commented on “sappaen” or “samp.” Samp is dried or parched corn, yokeg, soaked in a hot lye preparation, then pounded to a consistency that makes porridge when mixed with water. Bragdon, Native People, 102–3.

  Samp was reheated for days: Alice Ross, “Corn the Food of a Nation,” Alice Ross Hearth Studios, http://www.aliceross.com/journal/articles.html; Ross, pers. comms. April 2001, June 20, 2012.

  “niggering corn”: Ralph Ireland, “Slavery on Long Island: A Study in Economic Motivation,” in Journal of Long Island History 6 (Spring 1966): 4.

  constantly redefined: Ira Berlin makes the point that “historians have frozen their subject [slavery] in time. While they have captured an essential aspect of chattel bondage, they have lost something of the dynamic that constantly made and remade the lives of slaves, changing them from time to time and place to place.” Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 5.

  “slave societies”: For this distinction, Berlin, in Many Thousands Gone, 8, credits earlier works that focus on slavery in antiquity, such as Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 99; Moses I. Finley, “Slavery,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968); and Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking, 1980), 79–80.

  “the planting field:” Will of NS, 1680.

  Jacques Guillot: Last Testament and Will of Constant Sylvester, Oct. 26, 1695. SMA, NYU I/A/140/26.

  midden: For a description and analysis of the slaughter pit and the remains it held, see Sportman et al., “Zoological Evidence,” 137–38.

  as late as the 1670s: Hayes, “Field Excavations,” 48.

  Lab analysis: According to David Landon at UMass, the pit contained mostly pig bones (65 percent), most of which (almost 90 percent) are head and foot bones, with few body bones, suggesting the meatier parts were barreled for shipment (barrels containing as little waste as possible). The smaller numbers of cattle and sheep bones, and of heads and feet, suggest that these animals were butchered for domestic Shelter Island consumption. Dr. David Landon, pers. comm., Sept. 27, 2005, Dec.11, 2012.

  Specific butchering cuts: Sportman et al., “Zooarchaeological Evidence,” 137–38.

  a large, smooth-bodied clay pot: Gary, “Material Culture,” 105; Katherine Howlett Hayes, “Race Histories: Colonial Pluralism and the Production of History at the Sylvester Manor Site, Shelter Island New York,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2008, 156–62.

  Fort Shantock: Hayes: “Race Histories,” 143–45, 157, Laurence M. Hauptman and James Wherry, The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 99.

  pan-Indian identity: Hayes, “Race Histories,” 235–37; Robert G. Goodby, “Reconsidering the Shantok Tradition,” in A Lasting Impression: Coastal, Lithic, and Ceramic Research in New England Archaeology, ed. Jordan E. Kerber (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 141–54.

  quickly: Sportman et al., “Zooarchaeological Evidence,” 138.

  ate them: for dog bones with butchering cuts, see Sportman, “Zoological Evidence,” 131.

  For meat and hides: Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 112–14.

  “mask being”: Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 112. Strong admits there is scant evidence for this assertion, but some evidence. John A. Strong, pers. comm., 2005.

  forced migrations: Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 112. The Lenape were forced progressively westward, ending in Oklahoma, where they live today; http://www.ancestral.com/cultures/north_america/lenni_lenape.html.

  East End tribes revered: Mesingw images had special powers and were ceremoniously “fed” every year. If they were damaged, they were given a ritual burial.

  a large mask: William Wood describes war paint among the “Abergenians” (not yet clear who he’s writing about) as “all black as jet, some red, some half red and half black [italics mine], some black and white, others spotted with diverse kinds of colors.” Wood, New England’s Prospect, 1977:103, quoted in Bragdon, Native People, 223.

  He watched the hunters: Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 113.

  four or five times as many people: In Southold, the closest town, according to the 1686 census, Isaac Arnold, Nathaniel’s first cousin, owned six, John Conkling, five, and John Budd, a wealthy timber merchant, three. Of the 111 families listed, only nine others were slaveholders, owning one or two at most. Rufus King, “Early Settlers of Southold, Suffolk County, Long Island,” NYGBR 30 (April 1899): 121.

  “bundle of silences”: Hayes, “Race Histories,” 232.

  plantation-period examples: Hayes, “Race Histories,” 141–43, 153–90.

  common African smelting and ironworking practices: Hayes, “Race Histories,” 188, 242.

  “a flow of knowledge”: Hayes, “Race Histories,” 246–47.

  “small acts of sharing”: Hayes, “Race Histories,” 229, also 189–90.

 
; a deliberate act: Hayes, “Race Histories,” 240–42; Hayes to MKG, e-mail Oct. 3, 2012.

  “very sullen”: Matthias Nicolls to JWJr, March 7, 1675, Winthrop Family Papers, MHS.

  “Hindsight being 20/20”: Kat Howlett to Mac Griswold, August 6, 1999, fax, “Some notes on the readings” regarding differences between Northern and Southern slavery. For housing slaves in their owners’ houses in the North, see William Dillon Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 25–36; Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 27. Later, in the eighteenth century, “where the holding was large, some had to be quartered in outbuildings at some distance from the main house”; see sale advertisements for farms with “Negro houses,” Edgar McManus, Black Bondage in the North, 92.

  At Rich Neck Plantation: The difference between the artifacts scattered around the Rich Neck house and the kitchen and quarters illustrates the increasing gulf between masters and black slaves, which was mirrored in increasingly restrictive legislation for blacks. Rich Neck was abandoned around 1700, leaving the seventeenth-century site intact. David Muraca, Philip Levy, and John C. Coombs, “Masters, Servants, Slaves and Space: Exploring the Social Structure of Early Colonial Virginia” (annual meeting, Society for Historical Archaeology, 2002); John C. Coombs, “Building ‘The Machine’: The Development of Slavery and Slave Society in Early Colonial Virginia” (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2003); Coombs, “One for the Negro Slaves: Houses, Homelots, and the Development of Slavery in Early Colonial Virginia” (annual meeting, Society for Historical Archaeology, 2007); Leslie McFaden, Philip Levy, David Muraca, and Jennifer Jones, with contributions by Dr. Douglas Owsley, D. Hunt, and Emily Williams, “Interim Report: The Archaeology of Rich Neck Plantation,” Marley R. Brown III, Principal Investigator, Williamsburg: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Department of Archaeological Research, 1999, 3–7, 23–26; Graham et al., “Adaptation and Innovation,” 508.

  masters and slaves: Bedding is listed in the “meel house,” where flour was also kept, and in small spaces on other floors in the inventory of Brinley Sylvester (1694–1752). Administration on the estate of Brinley Sylvester, Sept. 13, 1762, East Hampton Library. Some Northern families with more than two or three slaves built separate “quarters” in the late eighteenth century. At least two such structures existed on Shelter Island, but because the term “kitchen” is sometimes used to describe them, it is unclear whether they were completely separate buildings or not. Nicoll Havens’s Grand Central Mansion, since destroyed, had a “slave kitchen”; the Cartwright house, formerly located on the Henry Dering property, now on Coecles Harbor, was the house of London, a slave in the Thomas Dering family. For separate quarters in New York State during the eighteenth century, see John Michael Vlach, “Slave Housing in New York’s Countryside,” in Slavery in New York, eds. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, 72–73.

  various structures: Besides Nathaniel Sylvester’s 1680 inventory, a lease of 1693—when his eldest son, Giles, hired Edward Downing, “husbandman late of Boston,” to farm the place and live in the west half of the house—presents most of the documentary evidence for the seventeenth-century operation. NS inventory; Giles Sylvester to Edward Downing, December 1, 1693, Suffolk County Deeds, Liber A: 161–62, Suffolk County Clerk’s Office, Riverhead, NY.

  warehouse: The warehouse apparently stored and preserved 150 hogsheads of perishable salt for at least thirteen months. A hogshead stands five feet high and 42 to 44 inches wide. “Transcript of Trial Involving Nathaniel Sylvester (Original 1665),” SMA, NYU IV/H/4/106/25; Chapman, Weights, Money and Other Measures Used by Our Ancestors (Baltimore: Genealogical, 1996, reprinted 1997), 47–62.

  Shuttling livestock: In a letter to JWJr regarding the purchase of cattle for Shelter Island, NS writes “the sooner it is done better by reason ye yeare is passinge away,” meaning the weather would make it dangerous to transport them. A case tried in the New Haven court on March 15, 1656, reveals the dangers of shipping livestock by water even on short trips: a mare the Sylvesters bought in Southampton fell and was killed on the trip to Shelter Island. NS, Shelter Island, to JWJr, Pequit (New London), October 10, 1654, SMA, NYU I/A/140/3; Hoadly, NHCR 2:193–94.

  “a prsell [of staves]”: NS, Shelter Island, to JWJr (Pequit?), March 15, 1654, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 272; for the quotation: NS, Rhode Island, to JWJr, July 27, 1654. Freiberg, ed. WP 6: 412; NS, Shelter Island, to JWJr, Pequit, April 7, 1655, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 274.

  thousands of staves: NS acted as receiver in 1665 for 1,000 pipe staves (a “pipe” is a small barrel) and 1,768 hogshead staves in 1666 for the account of Thomas Revell, merchant of New England and Barbados, and in 1665 as attorney for Revell regarding an outstanding order for 700 hogshead staves. In 1686, when James Lloyd, NS’s son-in-law and one of the executors of his estate, tallied his final “Accounts with the Sylvesters of Shelter Island,” he listed twenty hogsheads of molasses and four hogsheads and twelve tierce of rum, as well as 5,350 pipe staves ready for shipping, indicating that NS’s Caribbean trade was thriving at the time of his death. STR 1:366 and 1:420. Barck, Papers of the Lloyd Family, 1:112, 113.

  African identity: According to Long Island history researcher Reginald Metcalf, Tammero’s origins may be Igbo, based on a reading of the name of his son Obium as a variant of the Igbo female name Obia. Charla E. Bolton and Reginald H. Metcalf, Jr., “The Migration of the Jupiter Hammon Family: A Notable African American Journey,” LIHJ, May 2013.

  proudly acknowledged: John Thornton states that “Records and inventories that give ethnonyms of slaves for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are rare,” but several of the names in NS’s will and other Sylvester documents appear to be of ethnic origin. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 195.

  Oyo Empire: See Thornton, Africa and Africans, “West African States,” map, vii, and xxiv–xxv for territory and brief history.

  collective identity: See “Talking Half African, Middle Passage, Seasoning, and Language,” in Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 184–85.

  “Whereas Tammero”: Will of NS.

  Tammero: “My Negro Tammero and his wife Oyou to my son Peter,” will of NS, is the first mention of the couple. On September 26, 1687, “Tomeo and O You,” with their son “Opium” (Obium), with another Sylvester slave, Tony, noted by Isaac Arnold (NS’s first cousin and an executor of Nathaniel’s estate), are valued at £83 New York money in a bill of sale to James Lloyd (Boston merchant and husband of Grizzell Sylvester Jr.), which also mentions £9 as due to Constant Sylvester’s estate (evidently as part of the original agreement in which Tammero was “yeelded to goe into partnership”), SMA, NYU I/A/140/21. On September 11, 1688, son Peter Sylvester, who was setting up his own farm on Shelter Island, bought the couple back from Lloyd for £38 New York money, SMA, NYU I/A/140/22. The will of Peter Sylvester (1663–1696) (Suffolk County Abstract of Wills, 2: 1665–1707) does not mention the two slaves, although he leaves the “improved part” to his brother, Constant. Constant mentions Peter as a beneficiary in his own will, dated October 26, 1695, SMA, NYU I/A/140/26, but Constant died in 1697. Tammero and Oyou may then have been returned to Lloyd, although this is unclear. In 1687 Tammero was valued at only £16 (so he was perhaps an old man), while the price for his wife was £22; see “James Lloyd’s Accounts with the Sylvesters of Shelter Island,” Barck, Papers of the Lloyd Family, 1:115.

  “socially stratified”: Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 154.

  “good fraight”: Richard Smith to Fitz John Winthrop, MHS Colls., Letter 31, April 2, 1674, quoted in Emily Coddington Williams, William Coddington of Rhode Island: A Sketch (Newport: privately printed, 1941), 78.

  lady’s maid: Two “smothing irons” are listed in NS’s 1680 inventory.

  winter isolation: The seventeenth century marked the nadir of
the Little Ice Age; ships avoided sailing in winter, as they could get trapped and damaged in the ice. For effects of the Little Ice Age, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in David D. Hall and David G. Allen, eds., Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachussetts, 1984).

  naming a child: Slaves’ names, often taken from the Bible, or from classical antiquity—Hercules, Juno—were given to slaves by their captors.

  One scholar: John Pulis, pers. comm., August 2001.

  baptismal and death records: In his will, NS spells the name of the elder woman as Semmie, and the girl as Semenie. For the 1698 listing, see Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, Lists of Inhabitants of Colonial New York, Excerpted from the Documentary History of the State of New York (Baltimore: Genealogical, 1979), 51, http://books.google.com/books?id=4XzO6xwgyY0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false; “my Negro girl [Simone]” (brackets original) is mentioned in the will of John Conkling II of Southold, January 15, 1705/6, copy, SMA, NYU I/A/140/27; for a Simene, “negro servant of Widow Seth Parsons,” bap. May 20, 1736, and a Simene, “servant of Widow of Deacon Mulford,” Sept. 16, 1736, as well as her three children in 1739, 1742, and 1745, see “Baptisms of Black Residents of East Hampton Township,” compiled by Dorothy Zaykowski, in a folder labeled “East Hampton Township … Deaths and Baptisms—Black Residents,” Sag Harbor History Room, John Jermain Memorial Library, Sag Harbor, NY; for the admission of a Semonie in 1791 as one of the first fifteen members of the Presbyterian Church in Sag Harbor, see Presbyterian Church Records, copy, East Hampton Library; and for the death on September 12, 1805 (b. 1750) of Simmany, “Esq. Fordhams negro woman” in “Deaths of Black Residents of East Hampton Township,” also East Hampton Library, but a different list from the above. Referring to slaves, T. H. Breen observes: “East Hampton’s colonial blacks appear in the records like subatomic particles in a physics experiment … All that we have are their names: Bess, Jack, Peter, Rose, Bristo, Betty, Hannah, and Simene.” T. H. Breen, Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989), 181–82.