The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  found Hutchinson guilty: “A Report of the Trial of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson Before the Church in Boston,” in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 372.

  Winthrop circulated: Although the print version of the “monstrous births” was not published until 1644, the news was quickly circulated by JWJr (and doubtless by others) in private correspondence in 1638. For various contemporary views of the two births at a time when monstrous births were being attributed to natural explanations (thanks to “the new science”) as well as to older beliefs crediting supernatural intervention or the appearance of “marvels,” see Anne Jacobson Schutte, “‘Such Monstrous Births’: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy,” Renaissance Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 8, n9 and 85–106.

  “30. [sic] monstrous births”: Thomas Weld, Preface, added to the second edition of Winthrop’s A Short Story, Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 214.

  “comely young woman”: Winthrop, A Short Story, 280. A quarter century later, the Quaker leader and polemicist George Bishop described her as “a comely and grave Woman, of goodly personage and of good report.” George Bishop, New-England Judged by the Spirit of the Lord in Two Parts (London, 1661; Philadelphia: Thomas William Stuckey, Printer, ca. 1885), https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=67kTAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA103, 119.

  “person of no mean extract”: Gerard Croese, The General History of the Quakers (London: John Dunton, 1696), quoted in Ruth Talbot Plimpton, Mary Dyer: Biography of a Rebel Quaker (Boston: Branden, 1994), 11. Croese, writing some thirty years after Dyer’s death, probably drew on Bishop’s descriptions of Dyer in New-England Judged.

  Quakers from all over New England: Pestana, Quakers and Baptists, 32–33.

  “hand in hand”: Bishop, New-England Judged, 103.

  to Boston: In a letter to the Boston authorities pleading for his wife’s life, William Dyer stated, “I have not seen her above this half yeare … so itt is from Shelter Island about by Pequid [New London] Narragansett and the Towne of Providence she secrettly and speedyly journyed, and as secretly from thence to yor jurisdiction.” William Dyer to the Boston Magistrates, May 27, 1660, Portsmouth, Rhode Island, quoted in Plimpton, Biography of a Rebel Quaker, 184.

  “She did hang as a Flag”: Edward Burrough, A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God called Quakers in New-England, for the Worshipping of God (London: Robert Wilson, 1661), 30, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=etas.

  English Friends: Chu, Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen, 86. The earliest petition, dated December 19, 1660, was held by the Council for Foreign Plantations for five months. The injunction against further persecution of Quakers reached Massachusetts after Leddra’s execution.

  to the king: “Petition of the Quakers at the Court at Whitehall the Viiith day of April 1661,” TNA: PRO, America and West Indies Colonial Papers, 1661, CO 1/15 31 (ff.60–61). Giles, the only Long Islander to sign, and much less prominent in Friends’ affairs than the other three, quite possibly had been an eyewitness to the Boston executions.

  the petition ground its way: For progress through the bureaucracy, see entries for meetings on March 25, April 1, April 25, May 20, June 17, and June 23, 1661, all attended by Thomas Middleton. TNA: PRO, America and West Indies Colonial Papers, 1661, Journal of the Council for Foreign Plantations, CO1/15 (ff.153–58).

  appended to which was a note: Field, “The Grounds of Dissent,” 267.

  mandamus: The writ was signed by Charles II on September 8, 1661. Called after the Latin verb mandamus, meaning “we command,” a writ of mandamus is a court order from one court or official to another court or official to perform a certain action. In this case, the command was to cease capital punishment and other corporal persecution and to send any accused to England for trial instead of standing trial in Massachusetts.

  “The King’s Missive”: Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, 1:381–86, http://books.google.com/books/reader?id=iCIqAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA366.

  “With a prosperous gale:” George Fox: An Autobiography, ed. Rufus M. Jones (Philadelphia: Ferris & Leach, 1903), 161, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=SsthpbX3ZyUC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA160.w.0.3.0.

  “Governor John Endicott’s door”: George Fox: An Autobiography, 161.

  “We shall obey”: The entire previous paragraph is taken virtually word for word from George Fox: An Autobiography, 161.

  exclusively Puritan rule had ended: After Charles II’s show of tolerance, persecution of Quakers increased over the next decade in England, concluding with the Conventicle Act of 1670 in England, which forbade gatherings of sects not in accordance with the Anglican Church.

  “slanderous & blasphemous letter”: The timing of NS’s letter—which unfortunately has not been found—and the collecting of New Haven’s accusations against him for this court sitting suggest that New Haven considered that the Quaker situation was moving rapidly out of control and that Shelter Island had become an important sanctuary. NHCR 2:364, 380, 416.

  “written with his owne hand”: NHCR 2:364, 380, 416.

  Nathaniel failed to turn up: October 17, 1660, NHCR 2:380; May 27, 1661, NHCR 2:412.

  “divers persons under the Government”: Giles outlines the history of the sale as the basis for the island’s separate jurisdictional status, concluding that when New Haven “endeavored to bring the Petitioner and other Inhabitants on the Island under their Jurisdiction … your Petitioner well knowing they had not right so to do did refuse to yield obedience thereunto.” That the petition frames the sale of Shelter Island to “Colonel Thomas Middleton Esq. who by himself and partners did at their very great charges settle a Plantation upon the said Island” reinforces the idea that Giles and Middleton worked together in London on Shelter Island’s behalf. Middleton sat on the Council for Foreign Plantations when Giles’s petition was submitted. “The Humble Petition of Gyles Silvester, Merchant for and on behalf of himself and divers other of the inhabitants of Shelter Island near the Colony of New Haven in New England,” TNA: PRO, America and West Indies Colonial Papers 1660, CO 1/14 No. 65 (f.189).

  Captain Ralph Goldsmith: In 1665 in Southold, Ralph Goldsmith, “Sea Captain of London,” purchased more than three hundred acres of land, a meadow lot, and eight acres of “upland … and meadow” near the point “apposite to the ––––[?] necke of Shelter Island.” One of the deeds was witnessed by Joshua Sylvester and one “Sampson,” perhaps Latimer Sampson, who styled himself “of Oysterbay upon Long Island” and who partnered with NS in the purchase of Horse Neck, now Lloyd’s Neck, near Oyster Bay, New York, and had been engaged to marry Grizzell Sylvester before his death in 1668. It is possible that the Sylvesters were attempting (unsuccessfully) to shape their own East End Quaker community. Goldsmith was “received as an inhabitant so behaving himself as a naybor” in Southold, but he never built a house or lived there. See STR 1:233–35, 357; 2:150, for Goldsmith deeds.

  “After we had stayed”: George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Penguin, 1998), 458.

  “in a great barn full of people”: For this quote, and quotes in the following paragraph, see Fox, Journal (Smith edition), 456–58 and 461–62.

  “and yet by the continued coming in”: Ibid., 426.

  “tender Plants”: Public Friend Alice Curwen addressed “An Epistle to Nathaniel Sylvester and his Wife, at Shelter-Island” in which she exhorted the Sylvesters, as “Friends” and as “those who are Parents,” to “watch over your Children in the Fear of the Lord, and keep them to Plainness of Speech.” Curwen, A Relation of the Labours, 13.

  “at Shelter Island”: Fox, Journal (Smith edition), 459.

  “many of the world”: Ibid.

  “a very great fog”: Ibid.

  Fewer than a thousand: Richter, Before the Revolution, 286.

  “So must we be one as they are”: Gardiner, Relation of the
Pequot Warres, 25.

  Winthrop’s emissary: Matthias Nicolls to JWJr, March 7, 1675, Winthrop Family Papers, MHS.

  “The Spirit of Christ”: Barbour, Quakers in Puritan England, 206.

  14. “A DUCHMAN IN HIS HARTT”

  “provisions of the country”: For this paragraph, see O’Callaghan and Fernow, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 2:587–88. The Dutch confiscated NS’s partners’ shares on the grounds of damages they had suffered when the English conquered New Netherland in 1664. The rest of the list of goods was compiled from Winthrop Family Papers, Calder’s New Haven Colony, and Southold and New Haven town records as being typical of what would have been at the manor in February 1674.

  “Horses and Mares, Cattle, sheep, hogs”: Will of NS.

  Long Islanders had chafed: Donald Shomette, “Empire Strikes Back: On the East End in 1674,” lecture delivered at East Hampton Library, East Hampton, NY, Sept. 12, 1998, http://www.easthamptonlibrary.org/pdfs/history/lectures/19980912.pdf.

  “houses, lands, movables”: O’Callaghan and Fernow, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 2:587.

  pragmatic realignment with the Dutch: Morris and Gardiner had none of NS’s obvious Dutch connections; there is no evidence they were viewed as traitors. O’Callaghan and Fernow, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 2:645, 664 for Morris, and 2:587 for Gardiner. Morris was a witness to NS’s will.

  “I understand Captt Sylvester”: Richard Smith Jr., in Wickford, September 5, 1673, to JWJr, in Updike, Richard Smith, 100–1.

  “submit as dutiful subjects”: O’Callaghan and Fernow, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 2:645.

  “the Poore in their Cottages”: Quoted by Shomette, “Empire Strikes Back.”

  “reduce or destroy”: Fitz John Winthrop, in Southold, report to Captain John Allyn, February 25, 1674. MHS Colls., ser. 5, 8 (1882): 30:91.

  “himself in no condition”: Ibid.

  “prevent the shedding of blood”: Fitz John Winthrop report to Captain John Allyn, MHS Colls., ser. 5, 8 (1882): 30:91.

  “Capt. Sylvester being returned”: Winthrop, February 25, 1674, in Southold to Capt. John Allyn, MHS Colls., ser. 5, 8 (1882): 30: 91.

  persuaded the Dutch: Other details of the engagement from Shomette, “Empire Strikes Back,” and from O’Callaghan and Fernow, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 2:656. For a possible construction of Dutch commander Eewoutsen’s motives, see Shomette: “But for troops in open boats, Eewoutsen considered, the defender’s fire was all too hot. Thinking better of conducting a costly assault on a town that would only continue to refuse subjugation, he called off the attack. Soon afterwards he ordered anchors raised and all sail made for New Orange.”

  “Favoirs that have so liberally”: NS, Shelter Island, May 9, 1674, to JWJr, Hartford, MHS Proc. 2, 4 (1887–89): 274. This letter, delivered by Nathaniel’s first cousin, Isaac Arnold, tells Winthrop (who was probably already aware of the news) that the English and Dutch have made peace.

  sensitivity: To ward off any threat to their autonomy, the Sylvesters retained the slippery Captain John Scott as an overseas agent 1661–62, presumably to ward off attempts to include Shelter Island in the Connecticut Patent. Scott, generally regarded as a transatlantic con artist, lost favor with the Sylvesters, however; by 1664 Giles Sylvester wrote to JWJ about Scott’s “Unhuman and Unheard of perfidiones” and his “lying and Wicked Corses.” Black, Younger John Winthrop, 236; Giles Sylvester, June 28, 1664, Barbados, to JWJr, Hartford, MHS Proc. 2, 4 (1887–89): 280; Giles Sylvester, S Jr., Hartford, MHS Proc. 2, 4 (1887–89): 278.

  “uncomfortable oppositions”: “But if any misunderstanding hath beene in any kinds, I beseech you to forbeare any further proceedings, about Mr Sylvesters or parts towards the Dutch, or any other places, in respect whereof these may be uncomfortable opositions and litigious controversies raised.” JWJr, London, March 4, 1662 (3?), to John Mason, Deputy Governor, Connecticut, Hartford. MHS Colls., ser. 5, 8 (1882): 77, quoted in Black, Younger John Winthrop, 239.

  “fitt testimony”: JWJr to Fitz John Winthrop, Hartford, October 23, 1673, MHS Colls., ser. 5, 8 (1882): 158.

  By May 1674: See Shomette, “The Empire Strikes Back,” for a full account of the peace treaty contracted overseas, the arrival of a copy of the document, and the arrival of Edmund Andros, the incoming English governor, who had been appointed in July 1677.

  end of the Dutch empire: The treaty was ratified by the Dutch State-General on March 4, 1674. Because communications by sea were uncertain and slow, on February 23–24, when the Southold engagement took place, the participants were unaware that a peace treaty between Great Britain and the Netherlands had been signed in England. For background to the war, see Henry L. Schoolcraft, “The Capture of New Amsterdam,” English Historical Review 22, no. 88 (1907): 674–93, http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/content/XXII/LXXXVIII/674.citation.

  customs inspectors: The seventeenth-century Navigation Acts were intended to restrict the nationality of vessels and the kinds of goods that could be shipped, and how. The first Act (1651) was intended to injure the Dutch trade; gradually emphasis shifted to control of the relationship between colonists and the mother country: trade was supposed to benefit Britain, not the colonists.

  Shippers and merchants: The long colonial coastline made enforcement expensive and almost impossible, however, so that the Acts were an irritant but not a bar to what became a deep-rooted habit of illegal trade. See Calder, New Haven Colony, 166–68; Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “The Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century,” in Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion, eds. Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 105–14; and Barrow, Trade and Empire, 4–19.

  “an auxiliary to landowning”: Bernard Bailyn, New England Merchants, 55, 102.

  “as if the said Child so doeing”: Will of NS.

  left all his property to his fiancée: Will of Latimer Sampson, Oct. 18, 1666. SMA, NYU I/A/140/7. For Sampson’s connections to Bristol, see Roger Hayden, “The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687” (Bristol: Bristol Record Society 23 [1974]).

  Patience: Patience (1664–1719) married Benjamin L’Hommedieu in 1684. Giles and Hannah Savage Gillam were married in 1686 by Laurent van der Bosch, the first Anglican minister in Boston. Nathaniel II (1661–1705) was baptized in January 1683 by New York Colony’s English chaplain, Dr. John Gordon. Nathaniel’s witness was William Nicoll, his brother Giles’s executor. Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 17, 18; Washington Chauncy Ford, “Ezekiel Carré and the French Church of Boston,” MHS Proc. 3, 52 (1918–19): 122–24; mimeograph copy of Nathaniel II’s baptismal certificate, “Legal affirmation #402,” SIHS. All three married or converted after NS’s death but before that of GBS (1687).

  married a Matthew Carey: D. Brenton Simons, “Bigamy in Boston: The Case of Matthew Cary and Mary Sylvester,” NEHGR 159 (Jan. 2005): 5–11.

  brother Giles petitioned: See Simons, “Bigamy in Boston,” petition of Gyles Sylvester, stating that Matthew Carey, acquitted of the charge of bigamy for want of evidence, “continues to live with the sister of the petitioner, and asking that it be prevented till proof is received that the other wife is dead, etc.,” dated Nov. 17, 1698. For desertion and divorce in Massachusetts, see Saxton, Being Good, 71–74.

  15. “CHILDREN OF THE FOUNDERS”

  “the ultimate goal”: Dennis Piechota, “The Laboratory Excavation of a Soil Block from Sylvester Manor,” Historical Archaeology of Sylvester Manor, 84.

  When organic matter: Piechota, “Soil Block,” 92; Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU, 2003.

  she did not swear: A typed version dated Dec. 11, 1911, of NS’s inventory states: “I, Grissell [sic] Sylvester, widdow and executrix … doe testifie that in March last past 1680 I did give into the App
rizers … a full and just inventory of the estate of my husband deceased for the truth of which (being a person that cannot take an oath for conscience sake) I have here-unto sett my hand this 3 day of Nov. 1681 on Shelter Island.” SMA, NYU, V/A/118/28.

  We don’t know: Directions to prove her will were issued on Sept. 10, 1687, with a probate inventory for her taken by a William Brinley, either her youngest brother or her nephew, on Oct. 12, 1687, on Shelter Island. Barck, Papers of the Lloyd Family 1:113; Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 16–17; Books of General Entries of the Colony of New York 1674–88, ed. Peter R. and Florence A. Christoph (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co. for the Holland Society of New York, 1982), 390; Scott, Genealogical Data, 148.

  His brothers Peter and Constant: Peter died at thirty-three, Constant at twenty-five. Will of Peter Sylvester, Feb. 22, 1696, proved Suffolk County, Mar. 14, 1696, New York County Wills 5:152; will of Constant Sylvester, October 26, 1695, proved Mar. 2, 1697, SMA, NYU I/A/140/26.

  died of unknown causes: His share of land was transferred to the common land of his four brothers.

  sporadic accounts of payments for farm work: Giles’s dealings with Black John, who was mentioned as a slave in NS’s 1680 will, were set up as a separate “line” in a farm account book. But only two entries are noted, both in September (harvest time) 1688, each for two shillings and paid in cider. That he was paid underlines the variability of a slave’s status: was he paid as a slave for extra labor, or as a freedman? Shelter Island Account Book, 1658–1768, East Hampton Library.

  “husbandman”: Giles Sylvester to Edward Downing, December 1, 1693, Suffolk County Deeds, Liber A:161, Riverhead County Clerk’s Office, Riverhead, NY.

  The historian David Hackett Fischer: Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 98.

  sold off: In the 1680s, Long Island land prices rose in light of new demand for grain. Instead of branching out to other West Indian markets besides Barbados (where demand was lessening) and increasing the island’s own grain production, Giles and Nathaniel responded to the pressure to produce more grain by selling land to others who wished to take advantage of the new markets. See Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York, 27–28.