by Mac Griswold
Outside the east window, the boxwoods billow fatly along a path that runs straight for a quarter mile, cutting the long rectangular garden in half. Brinley incised this line on the earth not just as a way to get from one place to another, but as a mark of rational dominion: every eye and mind that follows the path tethers house to ground. He turned his mansion’s front entrance away from the water so it faced south (the work buildings were moved a suitable distance to the north, apart from the house). Brinley laid another straight line along the axis that led from the front door to the main road that crosses the island. This was terrain on which to breathe the atmosphere of the Enlightenment, an oxygenated mix of mathematics, geometry, natural philosophy, and theological speculation.
“Mr. Silvester’s Island”
Born in East Hampton in 1694, Brinley Sylvester moved to Newport with his father, Nathaniel II, and the rest of his family when he was ten years old. Nathaniel and Grizzell’s only grandson to survive to maturity, Brinley was to be the manor’s link to the next century. As an adolescent and then as a young man, he grew up with Newport itself and had entrée to its finest houses; the old house of his great-uncle William Coddington, once the town’s grandest mansion, was a reminder of his family’s long standing there. Over the next several decades, merchants thoroughly renovated or tore down many seventeenth-century buildings to make room for larger, sunnier, more symmetrical Georgian structures, both private and public. Houses glowed with precious Honduras mahogany and superb locally crafted silver, and their windows opened onto well-tamed “landskips.” Gardens brimmed with ornamental plants and apricots, plums, and other delicate table fruits. The local library loaned out Pliny’s Epistles and Virgil’s Georgics as well as Gerard’s Herbal and books on “the Method of Improving Barren Lands.”
Brinley kept his connections to Newport culture and style after moving back to Long Island sometime in 1718. On December 2 in Southold, he wed Mary Burroughs (c.1702–1751) of Jamaica, Long Island. A year later, they evidently moved into Nathaniel and Grizzell’s old house with baby Margaret, the first of their two children, named after Brinley’s sister and baptized by Mary’s brother-in-law, the Rev. Woolsey. The couple were tenants of William Nicoll, to whom Giles had bequeathed the property in order to pay off his debts. But Brinley wanted to be more than a tenant; he wanted his grandfather’s domain back as his own.
Luckily for him, Hannah and Giles’s 1686 prenuptial agreement directing that the property go to “the right heirs of the said Gyles Sylvester” had recently been found in a chestful of Francis Brinley’s old documents in Boston. (There’s no way to know why Brinley’s great-uncle Francis, so methodical about every detail regarding family and money, had not produced the document in 1707 when Giles willed his estate to Nicoll rather than to a member of his own family.) That ambiguous proviso, Brinley felt, might entitle him to ownership of the whole property. He believed he could win back at least some of the land if he sued Nicoll. Nicoll invited the couple to stay at the old place until the case was settled, and they promised to leave if Brinley lost. It sounds surprisingly reasonable, even gentlemanly. But Nicoll was confident of victory too. So confident that, one month after signing with Brinley, he made a new will leaving the manor house and its farm to one of his two illegitimate sons in the event of his death.
The Town of Shelter Island
The sell-off of Sylvester property that had begun with Giles and his brother Nathaniel’s sale of a thousand acres to George Havens in 1698 continued through the first three decades of the new century as Brinley and William Nicoll battled. A few other small buyers purchased from George Havens’s sons but continued to live on the North Fork, using their Shelter Island properties as remote pastures and woodlots.
Like other New York Colony landholdings that had been granted to one family—particularly those recognized as manors—Shelter Island developed slowly. It was first legislatively set off as a township in 1683, but no town government was set up and no officers elected. Finally, in 1729, New York’s General Assembly commanded the handful of island freeholders to set up a government, but the place continued to be known colloquially as “Mr. Silvester’s island.”
The seventeenth-century fiefdom had irrevocably vanished, replaced by a settlement, a town. In the nearly three centuries that have passed between 1730 and the present, less has changed in terms of social hierarchy and local government than between 1651, when the Sylvesters and their partners made their purchase, and 1730. The outlines of many fields—some of them now covered with development—still exist. Except for a change in the north ferry landing, the major road, crossing the island in unending dogleg turns, is still recognizable. James Fenimore Cooper, who had stayed on Shelter Island and was a partner in whaling ventures with Charles Dering, a Sylvester descendant, was seduced by this same thick timelessness in 1849 when he wrote The Sea Lions.
At last, in 1735, the verdict came down from New York Colony’s Supreme Court: Brinley had won back a thousand acres of land and his grandfather’s old house. Nicoll, who already owned the largest land patent on Long Island, Islip Grange, 51,000 acres, went on to fry other fish as Speaker of New York’s General Assembly, apparently remaining content with what lands he had on Shelter Island, including the 2,200 acres he had purchased from Giles in 1694, which he would leave to his son, William II, who moved to Shelter Island in 1726 upon his inheritance. Known as Sachem’s Neck (and today the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve), the long point of land is the least arable and perhaps the most beautiful part of the island, where ridges of oak and beech rise from a skein of tidal ponds, and where the last nineteenth-century Indian who was born on Shelter Island lived.
Brinley, titular “lord of the manor” even during the years of struggle, fitted the mold of a New England country squire. His fellow Shelter Islanders (twenty-one families in 1730) respected him as such. They considered him “a very handsome man, distinguished for his courteous manners and general benevolence,” as well as “a fine equestrian.” An eminent livestock breeder, he paid a whopping £120 in 1745 for a “rhone [roan] stallion,” to be transported with care from Sakonnet, Rhode Island. Brinley diligently noted every outlay for hay, freight, and stabling, and “oats to keep him while at Newport.”
A model of law and order, comity and culture, in 1732 Brinley became town supervisor, an administrative position equivalent to mayor that had evolved from its designation as town treasurer sometime in the seventeenth century. He served in every government from then until his death, frequently holding multiple positions. He and William Nicoll II, the son of his old adversary, worked together, apparently quite amicably, in the town’s government between 1734 and 1752, the year of Brinley’s death.
Brinley was the local go-to man when the colony wanted someone of stature to “investigate the complaints of Indians at Montauk.” (Even though the complaints—of deliberate encroachment on Indian lands and rights—were well founded, Brinley and his fellow commissioner predictably found them “baseless.”)
He served as surrogate of Suffolk County and associate justice in the Court of General Sessions, which heard criminal cases, and he acted as the local banker. Because he was a port collector, real money flowed through his hands in all the varied currencies of the cash-starved colonies—“pieces of Gould,” “pistoles,” and “Spanish dollars,” as well as standard English pounds, shillings, and pence.
Accommodating, cheerful, and well mannered, Brinley strove to help his neighbors frame a decorous, dignified society. For him, responsible government and organized religion were natural allies, even though they were no longer officially linked along the lines of the seventeenth-century Puritan theocracy. But on an island where five or six leading landowners held all the power, and nearly all of them, stoutly Presbyterian, attended the only house of worship (which they had paid to build), a de facto union of church and state persisted.
The “New Lights”
Meanwhile, the major religious revival movement of the century was pul
sating wildly just across the water: the Great Awakening of 1739 to 1745. The “New Lights” (as devotees called themselves) considered a rapturous personal conversion the measure of salvation, abandoning the Puritan (and Quaker) insistence on rigorous self-examination and scrutiny by an elect. The Great Awakening also reacted against the Enlightenment: many found its distant, rational God less enthralling than a radiant and immediate Presence. Revivalist preachers such as the English George Whitefield and the American James Davenport, the minister of Southold, filled the churches, barns, and fields where they spoke. The converts, the self-styled “wounded,” were left in states not unlike those of the early Quakers’ violent “convincements”: convulsions, fainting fits, and profound trances, with the afflicted lying open-eyed, reading in “the Book of Life in Golden Capitals” the names of those who would end up in heaven. Mass rallies and new evangelical congregations broke down social and racial barriers.
Brinley’s Anglican father, Nathaniel Jr., very likely reared his children in the Church of England. And as Brinley grew to manhood in Newport, God “withdrew slowly into the Newtonian stratosphere,” so that Newport’s famed acceptance of any and all faiths was further tempered by a neoplatonic largeness of vision, a sense that just as no one had God’s will perfectly right, no one could corner the market in perfection. Although Brinley thus found himself prepared to join Long Island’s Presbyterian mainstream, he was definitely not someone who could be “wounded” by the preaching of any “New Light” evangelist.
Neither was the Reverend William Adams, whom squire Brinley imported to his island as an antidote to radical contagion. Adams had no interest in public firebreathing, and, loath “to be encumbered with wife or parish,” he freelanced for sixty years, about thirty of them in the safe, comfortable berth on Shelter Island where he officiated mostly as Brinley’s private chaplain and had no official ministerial duties. An impression of “this amiable shepherd,” short, stout, and equipped with an angler’s rod, rambling the countryside in his white wig and cocked hat, conjures up Shelter Island’s eighteenth-century pastoral calm.
“I Want to Make Sum Money”
Sylvester Manor’s handsome steeds and table silver—like Newport’s garden books and sandstone-and-brick houses—were bought with proceeds from the slave trade. Or so goes the story, which manages to be both true and false. The North American “Guinea trade” indeed centered on Newport, which sent some eighteen to twenty-two ships to the west coast of Africa for slaves and gold every year between 1732 and 1764. Most of Newport’s top-tier investors bought shares in these voyages. The returns could justify the risks: “At a time when merchants considered 10 to 12 percent return on investments ‘a noble thing’ … the Champlins, a prominent Newport family, made 23 percent on a slaving voyage in 1773.”
“How was it that this unpromising, barely fertile region, incapable of producing a staple crop for European markets, became an economic success by the eve of the Revolution?” asks Bernard Bailyn about New England. He answers his own question by describing the region’s economy as “an annex, an offshoot, a service industry of the great powerhouse of the Atlantic economy in the pre-Revolutionary period: slave plantations and their workforce … Without the sugar and tobacco industries, based on slave labor, and without the growth of the slave trade, there would not have been markets anywhere nearly sufficient to create the returns that made possible the purchase of European goods, the extended credit, and the leisured life that New Englanders enjoyed. Only a few of New England’s merchants actually engaged in the slave trade, but all of them profited by it, and lived off it.”
The foundations of Newport’s eighteenth-century fortunes rested on the coastal colonial and West Indian provisioning trades, which generated steady profits year after year, just as they had for Nathaniel. Because Rhode Island’s tiny acreage could not furnish provisions and goods in the huge quantities needed for the West Indies trade, Newport’s citizens established complex networks with other continental colonies from whom they purchased what they would then sell south at higher rates. Brinley did the same: he informed a nephew that he planned to ship beef and mutton to Boston, “for I want to make Sum money there Early in the Spring.”
Brinley was no Newport Champlin, however. He operated regionally, running wheat, horses, and cattle to Boston, New York City, and points in between. What he shipped to Rhode Island, a collection point for the provisioning trade, undoubtedly found its way to the sugar islands, as did a shipload of goods for which he signed the clearances in December 1747 as “Deputy Collector, Surveyor & Searcher” of Southampton. The sloop Hampton, burden thirty tons, sailed for Jamaica out of the “East End of Long Island” with a cargo of over a hundred barrels of beef, pork, and tallow, as well as Indian corn, bunches of onions, staves, shingles, barrel hoops, and anchor stocks. Livestock aboard were twelve horses and seventy sheep. The venture was as typical of the West Indies trade on Long Island in the mid-eighteenth century as Nathaniel’s much smaller shipments had been in the seventeenth.
Brinley also acted as a factor, or intermediary, for the wide Long Island community that he supplied with goods as small as “1 bottle of Beachman’s Drops.” The vessels of his cousin, Captain Benjamin L’Hommedieu of Southold, active in both the coastal and West Indian trades, brought Brinley necessities like salt, as well as luxuries such as “6 China Custerd Cups” and a mahogany tea table. Brinley also made a range of domestic goods to sell and occasionally branched out beyond the usual farm products. He asked his cousin L’Hommedieu to ship him “a Barrell of the Best of Tarr” from Mystic, Connecticut, to produce tar water (touted by Dean Berkeley as a medical panacea) for sale.
Brinley’s direct connection with the West Indies is fleetingly revealed only once, in a note that Colonel George Bennett sent him from Jamaica in 1719 requesting an overdue payment of £68.17s for “rum, mollasses, and negros.” But rum and molasses, the lifeblood of all slave-based international trade, flow through the account book Brinley kept between 1738 and 1746. In 1739, for example, he sold 170 gallons of rum, probably from Rhode Island, to a thirsty James Fanning. And as port collector for Southampton, New York—besides pocketing his official percentage from seizures of contraband rum, tobacco, and molasses—he earned an eight-shilling fee from the £4 duty imposed on every legally admitted slave.
Eighteenth-century slaveholders like Brinley and Mary regarded themselves as people of “sensibility,” whose outward marks of refinement indicated an inner elevation. “The power of the genteel ideal lay in its transformation of personality; it lifted properly reared persons to a higher plane. At the same time gentility implicitly diminished the rest, creating differences which were difficult to forget,” writes Richard Bushman. He is addressing tensions between polite and vulgar in mid-eighteenth-century colonial society at large, but his comments also apply to new lines being drawn between free and slave, white and black. The conditions in which slaves lived, the clothes they wore, while probably no worse than in the seventeenth century, fell further behind the ever more luxurious accouterments of their white masters. This new kind of distancing increasingly relegated blacks to a permanent underclass.
The last and largest entry in the 1752 inventory of Brinley’s “movables” simply states “Negro slaves … £495,” without any numbers, names, ages, or family relationships. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the average price for a slave on Long Island was £33.13s. (An adult male was valued at £38, a woman at a few shillings less, and a child at £24.) So a crude computation gives a figure of fifteen slaves at the manor in 1752. Long Island’s total population more than quadrupled between 1698 and 1790 (the year of the first United States census), rising to thirty-seven thousand. The number of blacks rose more rapidly than the white majority. At the height of Brinley’s prosperity, in 1749, the percentage of Africans and African Americans, enslaved and free, stood at 13.5 in Suffolk County, or approximately one black person for every six whites. On agricultural Shelter Island the percentage
was probably higher.
The middle of the eighteenth century marks the nadir of Northern slavery, when the system was most tightly bound by custom, habit, and law. A freedman could no longer own property of any kind. Manumitting a slave required the master to post a £200 bond, ostensibly ensuring that the freed black would not become a public charge but in fact jamming the door to liberty. Slave owners’ rights to inflict punishment expanded in New York Colony (which was known for the harshness of its criminal statutes) to the point where only maiming or murder was illegal. Slaveholders who exceeded the limits got off with light sentences. When one New York man beat his runaway slave to death, the jury judged this an accident caused by “the visitations of God.”
The code, designed after slave legislation in the West Indies and Southern mainland colonies, where gang labor produced a single crop, didn’t fit the North. Judging from the variety of products that Brinley shipped from Shelter Island, the black laborers at Sylvester Manor had to be quite highly accomplished, able to move from task to task with expertise and judgment, both in the busy farm seasons and during the slack winters. The ubiquitous practice of “hiring out” to give masters every farthing of possible profit offered slaves further opportunities to acquire diversified knowledge and skills. They became valuable or even indispensable, and therefore were able to negotiate their positions to some extent, as Obium clearly did in his relations with the Lloyd family after he ran away. Punishing a slave severely cost an owner labor as well as profit. Loopholes in the acts passed in the first half of the century allowed masters room in “correcting” their human property. Consequently, punishments such as branding slaves’ bodies, forcing them to wear iron collars or shackles, and severe whipping—all legal—were often reduced to less than what New York law stipulated. For Brinley, as it had been for his grandfather, a working balance that included negotiation with his human property was essential. However, “negotiation” took place in an arena where the possibilities always existed that a master’s implicit threats of force and cruelty could become reality, and where slaves’ resistance could finally topple into sudden, violent action.