by Mac Griswold
Intellectually supple, intensely curious, and broadly tactical, not to say devious, John Winthrop moved in a wider arena than Nathaniel did. Fifteen years older than Nathaniel, he had been accustomed to governing almost from the moment he landed in America in 1631 at the age of twenty-five. His superior status—because of birth, wealth, rank, and education—was burnished by a lifetime of achievement. A master of political dissimulation and passive resistance, accustomed to dealing with fractious fellow colonists, he assiduously avoided saying a direct no, explaining instead why he couldn’t quite see a way to say yes. Winthrop was also a shrewd judge of character. He had watched Nathaniel build his small kingdom, and had been sympathetic to, or at least tolerant of, the Sylvester brothers’ Quaker beliefs and activities.
Winthrop would die in 1676; Nathaniel would survive him by four years. By then, Shelter Island was no longer a distant outpost. Nor was coastal New England a perilous frontier. Nathaniel had watched the western rim of the Atlantic expand from a narrow strand of discrete points linked by sea to Europe, England, Africa, and the West Indies into a wide mesh stretching inland as well. He was not a loner in this Atlantic World—he had his large extended family, his religious fellowship, and his partners and other business associates. But he remained averse to living in any community other than the one he had set up on his island domain. He had seen trade become, as Bernard Bailyn writes, “an auxiliary to landowning and agriculture.” He had laid the foundation for his descendants to become country gentlemen.
By turns grasping, sharp, tender, fearful, brave, resolute, and daring—but always devout—Nathaniel remains a difficult man to understand. All human beings are stubbornly irreducible, but in Nathaniel’s case neither a diary nor sufficient correspondence exists to help fill in a biography or flesh out the man. In a commercial world where trust was a rare commodity and a transatlantic deal could take years to consummate, or could fail with a single shipwreck, he drove hard bargains and left a strenuous court record (though no more so than many other merchants). Within his family, to the very end, he ruled as an iron autocrat. He intended to supervise his sons’ lives from the grave by driving them into theirs, at least figuratively, should they dare to challenge his will: if any one of them sold island property, Nathaniel wrote, it would be “as if the said Child so doeing … were dead before he made any such sale.” On the other hand, Nathaniel never thought to entail his children’s religious fidelity.
By 1700, only twenty years after his death, not a single Sylvester child remained a Quaker. Continuing as Friends on the East End would have been a lonely business in any case. Once the seventeenth century’s missionary fever had broken, the nearest Quaker communities lay at least half a day’s journey away on Long Island. Nathaniel had envisioned a close family of Quakers, which he had initiated with the betrothal of his eldest daughter, Grizzell, to Latimer Sampson, the son of an English Quaker from Bristol. Sampson died (but not before making a will that left all his property to his fiancée) and Grizzell married an Anglican, James Lloyd of Boston. Another daughter, Patience, married a Huguenot and attended Southold’s Congregational church. (After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, when Protestantism was made illegal in France, many Huguenot refugees came to America.) Their eldest son, Giles, was wed in Boston by a French Protestant minister who converted to the Anglican church; Nathaniel Jr. converted to the Church of England.
The difficulties of finding a suitable and well-connected mate (of any religious persuasion) for a young woman living on a remote island outside the orbit of her extended family in Newport were considerable. Elizabeth and Mercie did not do badly in their choice of husbands: Elizabeth married a Jonathan Brown of Southold; Mercie, a Jonathan Viall of Rhode Island. But in 1693 Mary, the seventh child, married a Matthew Carey in Boston, only to discover he had a wife in England. Such discoveries were quite frequent as men (and women) left their legal spouses behind, but it’s not clear that many chose to do what Mary did. Even though her brother Giles petitioned in Massachusetts court that the couple be prevented from living together until Carey’s English wife was proved dead (as he falsely claimed), Mary stayed with him.
Without Nathaniel and Grizzell, Shelter Island would lose both its center of gravity and its sense of forward momentum for a half century. With them vanished an ardent, severe, and admirable religious longing that Nathaniel and Grizzell satisfied by joining the Society of Friends, the ultimate Puritan stretch of the individual’s reach for God. What survived after their deaths were the island itself, the aging house and its compound, a profound sense of isolation, and the evolving American systems of race and class.
15
“CHILDREN OF THE FOUNDERS”
Decay
Dennis Piechota, a conservator with more than thirty years’ experience in preserving archaeological artifacts but almost none in field excavation, has come up with an unprecedented experimental plan. He wants to move an intact block of soil from the manor’s seventeenth-century midden to the Boston lab. Although measuring only sixteen by twenty inches across the top and bottom and twenty-four inches deep, his “soil sample” weighs an impressive eight hundred pounds. Dennis’s subject is decay. Shelter Island’s acid, sandy loam consumes many traces of organic matter—plants, flesh, wood, leather, textiles—leaving nothing to analyze except inert metal, stone, glass, brick, and a startling array of West Indian coral, probably hauled north as ballast and burned to make mortar for plaster and brickwork. Only some ten inches below the surface of Alice’s lawn, chunks and piles of the stuff pock the midden layer, skeletal, ribbed, and pale from long burial.
Dennis wants to see if, under lab conditions, gaseous “plumes” attest to the past existence of vanished organic matter. Using chemicals, dyes, and light rays, he will analyze microscopically the soil formation and soil interactions with any buried artifacts. Ultrafluorescence will let him visualize the degraded proteins that cling to soil particles. For instance, Dennis says, even though it’s impossible to differentiate between the Sylvesters’ brocade or worsted and their slaves’ coarse osnaburg, he might detect the former presence of some kind of textile—a ghost of seventeenth-century daily life in the form of evanescent gases, microscopic particles, and blooms of invisible light. As a conservator, Dennis usually thinks in terms of cleaning and preserving historical evidence. But here, he says, “the ultimate goal is the complete though orderly destruction of the object [the soil block] being ‘cleaned’!” To transport his chunk of earth intact to Boston, Dennis has arrived in the summer of 2003 with an elegant plywood box painted bright green; it looks like a small photographer’s trunk. Lifting blocks of soil has been done before, though in much smaller sizes and to preserve fragile objects (a Salvadorean calabash, for example), not to study soil processes. Dennis’s box comes apart into sections: four sides, a top and a bottom, all with aluminum tongue-and-groove edges and steel clasps.
At one edge of the front lawn excavation area, Dennis has cut away three vertical faces of his block. To keep them from crumbling, he has bound them with poly sheeting. Next, he plans to free the bottom by sliding a metal guide plate we quickly dub the “cookie sheet” between the block and the ground underneath. Then he will cut the block away from the earthen wall behind it, severing its last attachment to Shelter Island. The least elegant aspect of this operation will be the last: brute force, supplied by members of the field school, to heave the encased block from the pit and high enough into the air to set it very, very carefully in the van.
Conservator Dennis Piechota’s eight-hundred-pound soil block being encased at the manor for transport to the University of Massachusetts laboratory in Boston.
Since the dig began in June, it has rained hard every few days, and the soaked soil is holding together well. With her trowel, Kat Hayes pats the three exposed surfaces of the block as if she were smoothing icing on a cake, a cake filled with a three- or four-inch-deep layer of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century trash. From this point on, things don’
t go quite as planned. All afternoon a circle of patient observers watches as first Dennis and then a succession of students whang the metal cookie sheet under the resisting chunk of history with a mallet.
The midden doesn’t want to give up its secrets. It just doesn’t want to travel to Massachusetts. The afternoon isn’t hot, but everyone is sweating. At dusk, the air gets chilly and a flock of Windbreakers and sweatshirts appears. The cookie sheet has barely budged forward into the earth. This exercise suddenly seems fruitless, which somehow makes everyone relax. The archaeologists go off to smoke in little cabals, drink some beers. Alice, wearing her mobcap and a bright yellow slicker, sits in her director’s chair a few yards from the excavation, enjoying every minute.
At last the cookie sheet has been pounded far enough to reach the back of the block. Everyone is very quiet. Will the whole chunk disintegrate when the bottom section of the box slides in above the cookie sheet? Nope. It goes in easily. The final step of releasing the block from its surroundings begins. Something, however, keeps it attached—something invisible that’s lodged right in the middle of the back side of the block, about six inches above the bottom. Dennis takes a deep breath and says he wants to tip the entire sample forward on its base. Kat winces: although this will release the block, the action may mangle whatever attaches it to the side of the pit. Steve and a student agree to push back against the weight of the eight-hundred-plus pounds of soil to keep it from crashing forward. Strong arms push the block to a precarious forty-five-degree angle. Everyone grunts anxiously, sympathetically. Dennis, peering down into the darkness at the bottom of the pit, announces that the only thing keeping the chunk stuck in the ground is a yellow Dutch brick, a commonplace at this site. Out it comes.
Gray and exhausted, Dennis drives the last plywood section into the slot behind the block and snaps the final clasp. It is supposed to rain, and it does, but the big chunk of dirt gets to Boston in one piece. No whiff of textile or leather emerges from Dennis’s yearlong excavation of the sample. But from my nonarchaeological point of view, the project reveals the incredible power of earthworms, and how their activities at the manor display a pattern in time. When organic matter such as coral, bones, and shells were tossed across the midden surface (following the routine colonial practice of throwing trash out a door or window), the pH level of the naturally acid soil turned alkaline, ideal for worms, who had a feast and left an astonishing two-inch layer of lacy castings, or excrement, between two midden layers. The very existence of these fragile droppings, sensitive as they are to rain splash and trampling, signals an interval, perhaps of some years, between the rubbish deposits. Dennis hazards that the worm-casting layer might have been protected by an overhanging roof, although its survival could also simply indicate neglect of the place as the nearly vacant manor grew still. The household of Brinley Sylvester, Nathaniel’s grandson, may have added the second trash layer after they moved into the old manor house in 1719. And it was Brinley who buried this deposit, once he had built his new mansion, by spreading a layer of loam over the entire landscape, sometime between 1735 and 1750.
“The Children of the Founders”
Grizzell died at the age of fifty-one after a more adventurous life than she could ever have imagined for herself in Clerkenwell. After her husband’s death in 1680, she wound up his affairs on the island in November of the following year by signing off on his inventory as executor. As a Quaker, she did not swear to the truth of the probate, but attested instead, “being,” as she wrote, “a person that cannot take an oath for conscience sake.” She made at least one more trip to Newport in June 1685, to confirm that her will was her “voluntary act and deed,” and survived for another two years, dying sometime before September 10, 1687, on Shelter Island, when instructions were issued to probate her will in New York Colony. Her inventory, taken on Shelter Island a month later, is small: it includes the few things she had not bequeathed to her children—the wool of 138 sheep, two-thirds of a barrel of whale oil, and the “silver coral with bells,” the teething toy she had brought with her from England. We don’t know where on Shelter Island she is buried.
Giles, her eldest son, was thirty or thirty-one when he inherited the manor house and the surrounding forty acres of gardens and orchards. His brothers Peter and Constant (Benjamin, the youngest Sylvester son, born circa 1675, died of unknown causes before he turned twenty) built farmsteads with “housing, barns, and outhouses thereon,” but they held no outright title, mindful of the departed patriarch’s stringent plan for sharing the island’s 8,000 acres. For thirteen years following his father’s death, Giles apparently kept only sporadic accounts of payments for farm work to several Indians and one African, Black John, in exchange for cloth, “country pay” (farm products), and cider or rum. Then, in December 1693, Giles, who was spending most of his time in Boston, where he gambled and amassed huge debts, rented out the western half of his house to Edward Downing, “husbandman,” for a seven-year term as tenant farmer.
According to the lease, Downing paid Giles with half his yield—cider “in good, strong, tight, and Sweet casks,” butter, cheese, grain, livestock, and meat, which he brought to “ye landing place of ye farme” for pickup and sale. Two Sylvester hands from the 1650s—Jacques Guillot, who lived near the manor house in 1693, and John Collins—witnessed the lease along with Nathaniel Jr. Three of the Sylvester girls, Elizabeth, Anne, and Mercie, probably occupied the other half of the house, “ye Hall with ye chamber & ye garret over ye same and ye leanto therounto enjoyning,” and may have lived part-time with their married sister Patience in Southold. The little seaport’s 1698 white population had grown to 132 families, up from the dozen or so who founded the town in 1640. “Slaves, old & young” numbered forty, and the town’s Indians had dwindled from a reported four hundred Corchaugs (a local North Fork tribe) in 1640 to a mere forty. But the total population had expanded to 881 residents, reflecting its rise as a bustling entrepôt for scores of farmers and small traders. By contrast, once-busy Shelter Island slowed down, as Giles, the head of the clan, no longer moved within his father’s mercantile orbits abroad.
For the next three or four decades, the family would derive most of its Shelter Island income from land sales, not trade or agriculture. The dynastic monolith on which Nathaniel had insisted with such crushing force in his will (“as if the said Child … were dead before he made any such sale”) was never realized. The vehemence of Nathaniel’s phrase is extreme, even for an age in which Puritan parents loved their children but considered them depraved at birth by original sin. Parents were enjoined to break the will of their offspring to make them biddable and exact the reverence and awe due their elders. (Quakers rejected the doctrine of original sin, but Nathaniel, whatever his beliefs on the subject, ruled the roost as fiercely as any Puritan patriarch.)
The historian David Hackett Fischer notes that in the few existing New England autobiographies of the period, childhood was looked back on not with nostalgia, but with pain and guilt. Nathaniel may not have been an easy parent.
Whatever their reasons (besides the desire to make money) for wishing to get off the island, before 1700, Giles and Nathaniel Jr. circumvented their father’s will by making quitclaims (transfers of land that release ownership rights) to each other, after which they sold off several thousand acres to outsiders instead of settling it with tenants. Nathaniel Jr. moved to East Hampton and then to Newport. Giles began to style himself “sometime of Shelter Island now of Boston.” The younger daughters left as they married or went to live with relatives. In the 1690s both Constant and Peter, the two sons who had made their peace with the prospect of an island life lived under the commandments of their father’s entail, died within a year of each other as very young men, unmarried and without issue.
Except for the younger Grizzell, who married the Boston merchant James Lloyd, the second-generation Sylvesters were unsuccessful, in any worldly understanding of the word. In describing Boston’s second generation, the historian Be
rnard Bailyn could well have been writing about Giles: “The children of the Founders, however well-intentioned they might have been, knew nothing of the fire that had steeled the hearts of their fathers. They seemed to their elders frivolous, given to excess in dress and manners.” Giles lacked the acumen to compete in the changing world of high-level English contacts and newly powerful colonial councils. He had no Thomas Middleton at the Council for Foreign Plantations, no Uncle Giles to carry the mercantile business in London, nor the standing that Nathaniel evidently enjoyed with John Winthrop Jr. While more enterprising second-generation colonials built on their parents’ successes in commerce, and as the second stage of the big American land grab along the coasts and around emerging cities took place, Giles remained in the second rank, a true native colonial.
Giles was by no means a cipher: he became a judge of the Court of Common Pleas for Suffolk County and a member of a royal commission to investigate claims of the Mohegans in Connecticut. He added a working knowledge of the law to his skills, acting as an attorney (in a day when no special schooling or accreditation was required) in a number of cases in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York. As Suffolk County government began to muscle in on the manor’s independence, Giles fought back successfully. However, letters he wrote as a young man to Fitz John Winthrop and his younger brother, Wait, with their high-flown sentiments—“I am at leisure for noebody but you”—and his talk of “excellent romances” and family escutcheons and crests, to the almost complete exclusion of the politics, commerce, wars, and religion that had occupied Nathaniel and his brothers, expose Giles’s efforts to become, as Bailyn writes, “English as only British colonials can be English.”