by Mac Griswold
The first Federal Census in 1790 listed ten slaves in the manor household of Sylvester Dering, Thomas Dering’s eldest son. It would appear that he was farming big time, except that many of those slaves were far past their prime. The 1786 probate inventory for Thomas Dering’s estate already listed “1 Negro man Blind (Comus).” Comus may have reached his seventies by 1812, when the island’s Presbyterian church admitted him as a member, along with another manor slave, Matilda. He paid pew rent as a full subscriber ($2.50), but he sat in the four short rows reserved for his race at the back of the church.
On an island whose total population numbered only two hundred in 1790—less than that of many large Southern plantations of the same era—Comus was surely a familiar figure. But his local renown had been established as far back as the pre-Revolutionary period of Thomas Dering, judging from what a local historian, the Reverend Jacob Mallmann, relates:
Among other possessions Mr. [Thomas] Dering owned a number of slaves, one of whom, by the name of Cato, was once caught in his wine cellar imbibing. Mr. Dering had him immediately brought before him for punishment, and in order to make his punishment as effective as possible, both on the guilty one and the rest of the slaves, had them all summoned, with all the whites whom he had in his employ, in the large servants’ kitchen [the Great Kitchen]. Among the other slaves was one named Comus, who was remarkable for his keenness of intellect as well as for his immense stature, he being six feet and six inches tall. While the sin and punishment of Cato was being discussed, this giant of a slave rose up and asked permission to plead for Cato, and having received permission from his master, proceeded as follows: “Massa, you have pigs and you have corn, ’spose them pigs get in and eat some of that corn. The pigs are yours, and is not the corn yours just the same, if the pigs have eaten it? Now Cato is yours and the cider he drank was yours before, and is it not still yours after he drank it? I do not see why Cato should be punished.” Mr. Dering rose and said: “Comus, thou reasoneth well. Cato, thou art discharged.”
Mallmann wrote this in 1885, regaling readers with a tale that had been handed down for more than a century. It’s a story told in many versions throughout the Atlantic slave world. The plot invariably turns on the issue of property. The subtext is resistance, couched as mockery of the legal fiction that people are things. Comus, as he rose in the Derings’ kitchen, may have swelled to Paul Bunyan size in the island storytellers’ imaginations, but before we dismiss Mallmann’s portrait of the man as folklore, it’s important to weigh Hepzibah Edwards’s comments about Comus. Even though Edwards called Comus “a plage,” Thomas Dering may well have had practical reasons to overlook a large, strong worker’s bad behavior. What Hepzibah termed “rogry,” her cousin may have come to value as intelligence and resourcefulness.
Mallmann’s account of the kitchen tribunal makes both men shine. Thomas doubtless wished to be remembered as a just Christian master, and it appears he was. Comus had no say as to how he might be memorialized, but the thirty years before his death in 1820 at least granted him time to take satisfaction in his defense of Cato—a good story, one that evidently continued to sound as fresh to nineteenth-century islanders’ ears, white and black, as if they’d never heard it before. These were two old fellows who had reached an accommodation with each other, wary, perhaps, but respectful on both sides, or so it appears. Forget for a moment Mallmann’s jocular tone, and the high-flown biblical syntax he gives Thomas, and Comus’s African American dialect. What did it take for Comus to stand up and contest Thomas’s power? Mallmann presents Comus as a confident man who had fought to achieve a measure of self-respect and autonomy.
But not freedom. Comus was Thomas’s property, and subsequently remained that of his son Sylvester. Becoming free was immensely difficult. Slaves had to negotiate and earn their freedom price, complete the contract or find someone to help them do so, register the bill of sale, and “secure approval from the courts or the Overseer of the Poor. New York slaves and independent blacks had no legal standing in the courts, and they often relied on third parties to undertake these tasks,” as the historian of Long Island slavery Richard S. Moss writes.
The legislative progress of emancipation in New York State was agonizingly slow and circuitous, and so complex that even the simplest explanation of the various stages is almost unintelligible. Even New York’s first antislavery law of 1788 outlawed slave importation and imposed heavy fines on offenders. In 1799, a Gradual Emancipation law ruled that children born to slave mothers after July 4 of that year would be considered free—with the proviso that boys serve their mothers’ owners as indentured servants until age twenty-eight, and girls until twenty-five. The slaveholder could thus profit from a servant’s most productive years without any loss of investment. Anyone born a slave before 1799 had to wait until 1817, when a second Gradual Emancipation law determined that all slaves born before July 4, 1799, would be freed on July 4, 1827. But children born into slavery between 1817 and July 4, 1827, were required to remain bound servants until they turned twenty-one. Incredible as it seems to us today, had that 1817 law not later been modified to grant freedom to all slaves, a person born on July 3, 1827, in New York would not have gained full freedom until 1848, only thirteen years before the Civil War.
“Few enslaved people got free by convincing their masters that slavery was wrong,” writes the historian John Sweet; “many, however, did earn manumission as part of a more or less articulate quid pro quo … Still, any agreement forged by masters and slaves was effective only to the extent to which it could be enforced.” Enforcement depended not just on the law or the prodigious efforts of slaves themselves, Sweet says, but on a shift in public opinion that began in the 1760s and owed as much to a new secular humanitarian altruism as to lofty religious reflections on the golden rule or Revolutionary-era concerns about the natural rights of all men. Humanitarian thinking grew directly out of the eighteenth century’s culture of sensibility. As compassion and a reluctance to inflict pain became touchstones of civilization, white Northerners eventually questioned the morality of the whole system. The newly awakened emotional response to cruel treatment of fellow creatures often came first: “What is necesary, is to stir up the Sparks of Compassion in the human Breast.” As Sweet tellingly observes, however, instead of confronting the central problem of race relations—equality—such an appeal to the heart instead “provided … a compelling correlative to the language of natural rights and Christian benevolence precisely because it evaded and obscured the question of equality.” Pity seldom confers equality.
The House on the Creek
Julia Johnson worked sporadically as housekeeper at the manor for three generations of the Sylvester family. Born free between 1807 and 1811 in the last years of New York’s slavery, she died in 1907. She was photographed as part of a suite of images—landscape views, documents, furniture, and small objects such as a portrait miniature and a snuffbox—for an 1887 magazine article about the manor by the historian Martha J. Lamb. Julia’s expression is strained—no surprise, since taking a photograph required a long exposure. But eyes rolled heavenward, bowed shoulders, and hands clasped loosely in her apron—even the apron itself and her head kerchief, instead of Sunday clothes—cast Julia as a type, not an individual. She sits outside the manor’s cellar door (a doorway that exists today). At the same time, elsewhere on the East End, many blacks and Indians headed to local photo studios in their best attire: in bustles, flowered and feathered hats and derbies, and dark three-piece suits. They themselves chose how they wanted to look for posterity. Julia was an illustration, costumed as a faithful domestic: the sentimentally inaccurate magazine caption reads “One of the last of the slaves.”
The photograph of Julia sits in front of me as I transcribe documents at the manor dining room table. The crystal drops on the candelabra tinkle when I slide my box of papers across the mahogany. At the end of March, with snow blowing in soundless sheets across the creek, it is too cold to stay in the workroom. Ther
e is nobody else in the house today; Alice is away for Easter. The old furnace groans and mumbles and diligently blows gusts of hot air through the floor grate by the fireplace. The comforting sense of being inside and warm surrounds me.
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One document more than a foot and a half wide is folded over to make four pages, with writing on all sides. It demonstrates how difficult it was for a free black man to hang on to land he had legally paid for. Dated September 30, 1828, this big sheet confirms a land sale transacted eight years earlier by Sylvester Dering and Comus Fanning, farmer. Comus Fanning. A second Comus, unrelated to the man who died in 1820. This man is distinguished by having a last name. He isn’t a slave, he isn’t called “Negro,” or “Negro farmer”; just “farmer.” Times are changing. Comus Fanning got both a surname and a start as a free man in 1796, when the will of his late owner, Captain Phineas Fanning, manumitted him. Fanning, who later lived on the North Fork in Laurel, a small village west of Southold, had been one of the two manor tenants in the 1750s, after Brinley’s death and before the arrival of the Derings in 1762. It’s not clear whether Comus Fanning was even alive at that time. But we know that Comus (as I’ll call him from here on) had moved to Shelter Island to work for Sylvester Dering at least as early as 1800, when the census lists one free person of color in the manor household.
For $35 per acre, Sylvester Dering sold Comus twenty-one and three-quarters acres of manor property, “beginning at a stake a little north of the outlet of Wilkinson Creek” with an existing “house … and garden … adjoining the meadow as the fence then stood.” On September 15, 1820, Comus paid Dering in full—$750—a large sum for a former slave to have amassed. Only a week later, Sylvester, then sixty-two, took a fall from his horse, and he died from complications on October 8.
When Sylvester’s heirs were forced to relinquish the manor because of estate debts in 1828, even though the bill of sale made note of the land sold to Comus, Sylvester’s widow and executrix, Esther, signed another document confirming the 1820 transfer to him. “By inadvertance,” however, she left out any mention of Fanning’s payment. The illiterate farmer, who signed his own will with an X, would not have noticed the crucial omission, but the Derings did. It must have struck them all that Fanning’s grip on his land could be slippery if the Gardiners came after him. Fanning was a black man holding a copy of a contract with a white man (by then dead for eight years) that acknowledged payment, but the executrix’s later confirmation of the sale said nothing about it. Hence the four-page ratifying document signed in 1828 by the widow and her children that I found in the box.
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Several months later, I discover a badly torn hand-colored map of the entire manor property rolled up in the vault. It had been completely hidden behind the largest and heaviest chest of drawers. (Restoring it to the point where it could be safely unrolled took more than a year.) On this map, an inlet a mile north of the manor house is simply marked “Creek”; a little rectangle is labeled “Tenant House.” Can this be Comus Fanning’s house? Confusion exists because the locals call this inlet “Dyd’s Creek,” not “Wilkinson.” However, by now I know from a later description of Julia Dyd that she lived somewhere north of the manor. When I walk to the creek I find one of the most beautiful water views on the island. The property faces south, sloping gently to a calm expanse of water fed by fresh springs visible only at low tide. On the sandy, sunny bottom, small, almost transparent crabs dance sideways. Minnows and tadpoles flirt with their own dark shadows; the shadows of overhanging leaves flicker above them. A blue heron stands in the shallows, watching. Swallows swoop through shining clouds of gnats, open-beaked, catching a meal. A fish lunges up at a fly. Louise Tuthill Green, who grew up on the island, remembers shrimping as a girl in this brackish tidal cove, which teems with life. A poem of a place: woods, water, pasture, sheltered harbor for small craft. In summer, no houses are visible: they are hidden in the deep green woods that spill down to the encircling bright stripe of salt marsh—sweet shrub, spartina, and salt grass.
I then discovered from Comus’s will that Julia was the child of Comus’s wife, Dido. The vanished tenant house shaded by the big oaks that still stand here was where Julia lived as a child. Next to the garden lay enough pasture for two cows. In Comus’s years working for Sylvester while he saved his money, he may have spotted this ideal place or lived here: no sweeping views, no lofty heights—just soft, small perfection. His own good ground. To get to work at the manor he could have rowed about a mile, heading south from his own creek. Or, if he traveled on foot, he walked farther along the track that crossed the North Peninsula, climbing over the high pasture knob and skirting the Negro Garden and Indian Graveyard. Then the land bridge led him to the line of work buildings along the Upper Inlet. From there he traversed lawns and gardens, heading for the farm barns near the Burying Ground of the Colored People.
At Comus’s death in 1831, his executor, Charles T. Dering, one of Sylvester and Esther’s sons, oversaw the bequest of twenty-one acres to Dido, “my wife the woman I now live with,” and after her death, “to a daughter of the said Dido named Julia who now resides with me … and to her heirs and assigns forever.” The one-page testament Comus signed on June 2, 1831, marked a watershed moment simply because it exists—a rare example of the will of a freed black man on Shelter Island. And his legacy appears to have been the largest freehold owned by a black islander at that time. “Dido a colored woman being duly sworn in” to confirm the will as that of Comus, appeared in court to sign her affidavit with an X, “her cross.”
Comus’s probate outlines a neat and self-sufficient rural life that Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Henry David Thoreau would have admired. But seen another way, the Fanning family’s meager effects are fewer than those accumulated by most first-generation New England yeomen. It had taken Comus thirty-six years as a free man—and however long Captain Fanning had let him work for hire—to become an extremely modest farmer. By the 1830s he had acquired a mattress, a bedstead, and a coverlet, three window curtains, a table (set with plates, cups and saucers, knives and forks, and six glasses), chairs, fire tools and a pair of andirons, a large iron kettle, and the chest in which he locked his will. The other possessions that made his life safe and profitable included a scow, a grain cradle, an ax, three tin milk pans, and two fine cows—at $25 each worth eight times more than his three-dollar gun, the second most valuable item. That “no money or notes belonging to the deceased have come to the knowledge of the executors” tells us that most of his family’s economic well-being probably rested on barter.
Comus, Dido, and Julia belonged to a community of free black men and women. According to the 1790 census, the first to list free blacks on Shelter Island, they were almost as numerous as slaves, twenty-three as against twenty-four. That census marked the high point of the island’s African American populace overall: forty-seven blacks out of a total of two hundred people. But only two black families—both headed by second-generation entrepreneurs—possessed their own houses. All other freedmen listed in the 1790 census lived in white households, probably those of their former owners. Like Comus, most adult slaves began their free lives with little or no education, meager or no savings, severely restricted voting rights, and lower wages than a white person would pocket for the same work.
Whites only reluctantly sold property to blacks, as the example of Matilda demonstrates. After thirty years of unpaid bondage at Sylvester Manor, Matilda began her life as a free woman in 1795 with no assets. Henry Packer Dering, Sylvester’s brother, lent her $75—to be repaid with interest—so she could build a house. Dering stipulated that “as soon as the said Matilda pays … the said Note [she] shall be intitled to the said house or building [but to no land].” Even after paying off that debt, she still owed Dering annual rent of $10 for her land. He kept a ledger of her accounts, accurate to the penny. Earning too little to cover her rent and living expenses, until her death in 1818 Matilda was as much a prisoner of debt as any migrant wo
rker today. Unlike Comus Fanning and Dido and Julia, although free, Matilda was not a freeholder. Barriers to land ownership had much to do with the decline of Shelter Island’s black population. The railroad reached nearby Greenport in 1844, and every African American who could do so left for what then looked to be better opportunities in the cities. By 1870 only thirteen blacks are listed in a total island population of 632.
In his early-nineteenth-century memoir of Shelter Island, Lodowick Havens, born in 1774, reached back deep into his childhood to recall the slaves of his distant cousin, Nicoll Havens (young revolutionary Fosdick’s correspondent), who died in 1783. Lodowick wrote, “In them days all kept slaves as could afford it.” His list includes a Dido—after the name of the Numidian queen of Carthage, the heroine of Virgil’s Aeneid—a name that was frequently given, ironically, to black female slaves by classically minded captors eager to flaunt their knowledge.
The Shelter Island Presbyterian church records list a Dido, aged sixty-two, who died in 1834. Because Julia, who had married a Morris Johnson at an unknown date, sometimes used Havens as her surname, it seems likely that this Dido was the same woman mentioned by Lodowick Havens and the mother of Julia. At other times Julia was known as Julia Dyd, using a matronymic, a common pattern used in slavery to recognize the mother but not the father of a black child. Like other slave states, New York refused to recognize marriages between people in bondage (and even those who had been freed) until 1809. The children of such unions were therefore officially bastards. Who was Julia’s father? Dido never identified herself as Dido Havens, and no male parent for Julia is mentioned in Comus’s will or any other document. Was Julia the child of a Havens slave, or of a white Havens owner? Dido took the answer to her grave in 1834. Julia left us only her trail of names to wonder about.