The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  big, handsome Major: Both riding and draft horses, almost all of mixed breeds in the colonies, rarely exceeded fifteen hands (the measurement of the breadth of a palm, four inches) or five feet at the withers in the seventeenth century. James E. Kences, “The Horses and Horse Trades of Colonial Boston,” The Dublin Seminar for New England Folk Life, Annual Proceedings 18 (1993): 73.

  12. “OPPRESSION UPON THE MIND”

  The inscription: For the 1884 monument, see Edward Doubleday Harris, “Ancient Burial Grounds of Long Island, NY,” NEHGR 54 (1900): 59–61, and Katherine Howlett Hayes, Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651–1884 (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 145–47; 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.

  slave traders: Quaker merchant John Grove of Barbados was one of the largest importers of slaves to Barbados, bringing in 1,362 people between 1700 and 1704. Smith, Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism, 29–30 and note 76.

  “There is that of God in every man”: George Fox, A Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles, Letters and Testimonies, Written on Sundry Occasions, by That Ancient, Eminent, Faithful Friend and Minister of Christ Jesus, George Fox (London, 1698), 117.

  “To Friends Beyond Sea”: George Fox, “To Friends Beyond the Sea, That Have Blacks and Indian Slaves,” Number 153 (1657), in The Works of George Fox (Philadelphia: Marcus T. Gould: 1831), http://www.qhpress.org/texts/oldqwhp/gf-e-toc.htm.

  “He that is called in the Lord”: Delivered by Fox in the Barbados Quaker meetinghouse in 1671, the epistle was printed as Gospel Family-Order, Being a Short Discourse Concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of Whites, Blacks and Indians (London, 1676), quoted in J. William Frost, The Quaker Origins of Antislavery (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1980), 49.

  “Consider with your selves”: Fox, Gospel Family-Order, quoted in Frost, Quaker Origins, 51.

  “the Negars to rebel”: Fox, To the Ministers, Teachers and Priests (so called and so stileing yourselves) in Barbadoes (London, 1672), quoted in Kristen Block, “Faith and Fortune: Religious Identity and the Politics of Profit in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 2007, 239.

  a few doubts: Alice Curwen, Letter to Martha Tavernor, delivered on Barbados in 1676, in Curwen, A Relation of the Labours, Travails and Suffering of that Faithful Servant of the Lord Alice Curwen (London, 1680), 18; Morgan Godwin, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate, Suing For Their Admission into the Church (London, 1680); Francis Pastorius, The German Mennonite Resolution Against Slavery (Germantown, PA, 1688) (the first formal protest against the practice to be made in the British American colonies); and Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave (London, 1688).

  “a flash of wit”: Williams and Edmundson held four debates about Quaker tenets in Rhode Island in 1671. Roger Williams, George Fox Digg’d Out of his Burrowes (Boston, 1676). For Williams’s quote, see Richard L. Greaves, “Edmundson, William (1627–1712)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8508.

  the first American attack: Edmundson’s attack was preceded by that of Samuel Rishworth on Providence Island, in the Caribbean, in 1633, where English Puritans had founded a colony in 1630 and imported slaves. Kupperman, Providence Island, 168–69.

  “And many of you”: “A Paragraph of an Epistle from William Edmundson, Dated at Newport the 19th of 7th mo. 1676,” The Friend, or, Advocate of Truth 3, no. 1 (1834): 9.

  “Offensive Carriage Concerning the Saboth”: NHCR 2:93.

  “prepared ground”: Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (London: Macmillan, 1923), 215.

  Nathaniel would have been open: It seems likely that NS knew of the visit to Barbados in 1655 of Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, the first Quakers to visit the American colonies. Both NS and Constant knew Lieut. Col. Lewis Morris, a Barbadian planter, who in 1650 with Constant and Thomas Middleton was punished as a Parliamentarian. Morris escaped to England, and on his return to Barbados he invited the Quaker missionary Henry Fells to visit his plantation; Fells convinced him. Nathaniel’s relationship with Morris lasted a lifetime: he interceded on Morris’s behalf with the Dutch in New York during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1673–74); Morris witnessed NS’s 1680 will. Lieut. Col. Thomas Rous, a Shelter Island partner in 1651, was convinced as early as 1655 by Fisher and Austin. His son, John, already a Quaker, sailed from Barbados for Rhode Island in October 1657, then traveled in early 1658 from Newport to Southold and New Haven. Therefore it seems extremely likely that by February 1658, NS was already familiar with Quaker doctrine through Morris, or the Rouses, father and son, or was already a Quaker himself. Barbara Ritter Dailey named Constant Sylvester as a Quaker, but there is no evidence; Constant was buried in St. Mary’s, the Anglican church in Brampton, Yorkshire, England. Barbara Ritter Dailey, “Morris, Lewis (1613?– 91)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/71108; I. Gadd and Steven C. Harper, “Rous, John (d. 1695)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24175. Also Jones, Quakers in the American Colonies, 61–62; Barbara Ritter Dailey, “The Early Quaker Mission and the Settlement of Meetings in Barbados, 1655–1700,” JBMHS 39 (1991): 27, 29; Larry Gragg, The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009).

  opportunity to vote: Most New England settlements were also governed by a church member “elect.” The East End’s distance from the center, New Haven, increased opportunities for open dissent. NHCR 2:47–51 (November 22, 1653) and NHCR 2:58–59 (March 22, 1653).

  “high miscariages”: NHCR 2:17, 51.

  Ensign John Booth: By 1652, when the articles of agreement for Shelter Island were signed, Thomas Rous’s quarter rights from the 1651 purchase of Shelter and Robins Island had been turned over to John Booth. Booth’s descendants still live in Southold today.

  “garrison at Southhold”: NHCR 2:51.

  Similar threats of revolt: This paragraph and the next draw on courtroom descriptions in NHCR 2:76 and NHCR 2:92–93.

  eight English Quakers: William Brand, John Copeland, Christopher Holder, Thomas Thurston, Mary Prince, Sarah Gibbon, Mary Weatherhead, and Dorothy Waugh. Almost all became leaders in the Quaker movement in America. Michael Tepper, ed., Passengers to America: A Consolidation of Ship Passenger Lists from the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Baltimore: Genealogical, 1977), 462; also Jones, Quakers in the American Colonies, 36–38; and James Savage, Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, Showing Three Generations of Those Who Came Before May 1692 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1860), 1:255, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=HWEblLuls8kC&rdid=book-HWEblLuls8kC&rdot=1.

  Speedwell’s westward voyage: “Francis Brinsley,” Tepper, Passengers to America, 462.

  “night-journeys”: See Carla Gerona, “‘Like a Horse by the Bridle’: Mapping a New World in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Chap. 3 in Night-Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Quaker Culture, 70–95 and Introduction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), for Quakers’ interpretations of their dreams and the uses to which they put them.

  “a horse by the head”: Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies, 45–53, quoting Quaker testimony about the voyage of the tiny, unseaworthy Woodhouse from Portsmouth, England, to New York.

  “In his story”: Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56.

  “the flaming sword”: Fox, Journal of George Fox, ed. Nickalls, 27, quoted by Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1985), 35.

  “painful travel [travail]”: Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, etc. (London, 1678), Proposition 11, #8, as quoted by Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Pur
itan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964; Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1985), 36.

  “an heir to His kingdom”: Humphrey Norton, writing about his convincement. Humphrey Norton and John Rous, New England’s Ensigne (London, 1659), one of the first published accounts of the sufferings of the Quakers in New England, quoted in Jones, Quakers in the American Colonies, 52.

  “It is under my hand”: Quaker William Brend, in Norton and Rous, New England’s Ensigne, quoted by Jones, Quakers in the American Colonies, 37.

  (about $16,000 today): Calculated as the buying power of £100 for commodities. But if the value of the sum is calculated against the earnings of the average person in Britain in 1660, then the amount escalates to approximately $222,038. Calculations from Measuringworth.com.

  Resident Quakers: In July 1656, Massachusetts had punished Ann Austin and Mary Fisher under a general law against heretics: in September 1656, New Haven passed legislation forbidding entry to Quakers, Ranters (another radical nonconforming sect), and other heretics, but without specifying punishment. In May 1657, New Haven passed another law, retroactively justifying Norton’s punishment. The penalties in New Haven for those who brought Quakers into the colony were half those of Massachusetts and “permitted Quakers to enter … to dispatch their lawful business … to lose no penny of profit which might accrue to the merchants of the colony through trade with the proprietors of Shelter Island.” In October 1657, New Haven passed more repressive legislation. In September 1658, the New England Confederation (which included all the colonies except Rhode Island) was the first to recommend the death sentence for “that accursed and permisious sectt of heretiques.” Isabel Macbeath Calder, The New Haven Colony (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1970), 95–98; NHCR 2:217, 238–41; Plymouth Colony Records 10, 155–58, http://plymouthcolony.net/resources/pcr.html.

  Puritan apologia: John Norton, The Heart of New England Rent (Cambridge, MA, 1659; London, 1660).

  Quakers so toxic: See Carla Gardina Pestana, “The City upon a Hill Under Siege: The Puritan Perception of the Quaker Threat to Massachusetts Bay, 1656–61,” NEQ 56 (1983): 323–53, 327–42; Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 120–44; Pestana, “City upon a Hill Under Siege,” 326, note 6; and for meetinghouse disturbances, 330–31.

  Quakers also rejected: See Mary Maples Dunn, “Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period,” in Women in American Religion, Janet Wilson James, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 27–46, 42, for female Quaker preachers traveling alone; for Fox’s beliefs on original sin and the curse of Genesis, see Dunn, “Saints and Sisters,” 41 and note 20. After the Restoration, when Quakers united under George Fox to become less radical, women again took second place in the hierarchy. For changes in Quaker attitudes toward women Friends and their domestic and public roles over the next century, see Levy, Quakers and the American Family, 5–18.

  Quakers were often suspected of witchcraft: Pestana, “The City upon a Hill Under Siege,” 336.

  civil disobedience: See Jonathan Chu, Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism in Seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), for how the Quakers appeared to Boston authorities; also Jonathan Beecher Field, “The Grounds of Dissent: Heresies and Colonies in New England, 1636–63,” vol. 1., Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2004. In Barbour, Quakers in Puritan England, see chap. 2, “‘The Lamb’s War’: The Quaker Awakening,” 33–71, for a summary of the Quakers’ formative years.

  “The word of ye lord”: Henry Fell in Barbados to Margaret Fell, January 19, 1656/7. Ms.1.68 Tr. 2, 111, Typescript #366, Library of the Society of Friends, London; printed in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Early Quaker Letters from the Swarthmore Mss. to 1660, Calendared, Indexed, and Annotated by Geoffrey F. Nuttall (privately printed, Library of the Society of Friends, London, 1952), http://www.hallvworthington.com/Persecutions/Part-2.html.

  “loose and wild spirit”: Pestana, “City upon a Hill Under Siege,” 333, quoting from Williams’s George Fox Digg’d Out of His Burrowes.

  “they heard me soberly”: John Taylor, An Account of Some of the Labours, Exercises, Travels and Perils, by Sea and Land of John Taylor, of York (London, 1710), 6–7.

  “They would … pray”: John Winthrop, “A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines,” quoted in David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–38: A Documentary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 204–5.

  “an ocean of darkness and death”: George Fox, Journal, ed. Nickalls, 12, quoted by Barbour, Quakers in Puritan England, 35.

  whipped: See Calder, New Haven Colony, 96–97; Arthur J. Worrall, Quakers in the Colonial Northeast (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1980), 22–24; Humphrey Norton, John Rous, and John Copeland, New England’s Ensigne (London, 1659); Steven C. Harper and I. Gadd, “Norton, Humphrey (fl. 1655–60)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20344.

  “I see you say”: Depositions of John Youngs, Thomas Moore, and John Budd, February 3, 1658; of Edward Preston, same date; and George Deakins, February 12, 1658, STR 1:466–68.

  “all the ministers”: Deposition of Giles Sylvester, February 28, 1658, STR 1:467–68.

  “A Place Called Shelter Island”: William Robinson to George Fox, July 12, 1659. Ms. vol. 366, Library of the Society of Friends, London.

  “Sinke”: John Woodbridge Jr. to Richard Baxter, in “Woodbridge-Baxter Correspondence,” ed. Raymond Phineas Stearns, NEQ 10 (1937): 573.

  independent status: Griswold, “Nathaniel Sylvester of Amsterdam and Shelter Island,” 1–3. Faren Siminoff, author of Crossing the Sound, concurs, saying, “I agree that neither New Haven nor Connecticut would have had any claim of jurisdiction to Shelter Island … There is no legal nexus that I can see between Shelter Island to New Haven despite the fact that New Haven may have later regretted passing on the island and then tried to take jurisdiction through ‘the back door’ so to speak. The precedent for Shelter Island and the other areas on Long Island as being able to voluntarily align (or not) themselves with a southern New England colony is seen both on Gardiners Island as well as Southampton.” Siminoff, pers. comm., July 16, 2008.

  “As the Lord gives the opportunity”: Thomas Brucksupp of Little Normanton, July 1, 1664, to John Bowne, Flushing, Long Island. Norman Penney, ed., The Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 9 (London: Swarthmore Press, 1912), 13–14.

  “in much Love and Tenderness”: Taylor, An Account of Some of the Labours, 8.

  Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick: Will of Lawrence Southwick, written July 10, 1659, “in presence of Nathaniell Silvester” and recorded November 29, 1660. Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary, 4:91. See Carla Giardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists, 25–31, for Salem Quakers and the Southwicks. For other versions of their story, see Jones, Quakers in American Colonies, 67–70, and Quaker poet James Greenleaf Whittier’s “Cassandra Southwick” and “Banished from Massachusetts. 1660. On a Painting by E. A. Abbey,” The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Riverside Press, 1888), 1:65–75, 419–21, http://books.google.com/books/reader?id=iCIqAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA366. Whittier was a close friend of the Horsfords and visited them on Shelter Island.

  she had traveled further: Given the freedom that women found as Quakers, and the equality of status Quakers held out to women, one may consider the possibility that Grizzell was the first of the couple to be convinced.

  on the Quaker map: “I suppose you have heard of the Quakers ship that arrived at Capt. Silvesters + came over wth him to New London and thence to Rhode Island … they were but 7 weeks as I heare from England.” JWJr to John Richards, Hartford, December 12, 1659, MHS Colls., ser. 5, 8 (1882): 55; “There is a ship of 300 tunnes at Shelter Iland, fro Barbados, consigned to Capt Sylvester (its said fro ye Quakers),” JWJr to Thomas Lake
, Hartford, April 15, 1661, MHS Colls., ser. 5, 8 (1882): 73.

  13. QUAKER MARTYRS, QUAKER PEACE

  Antinomian Controversy: Martin Luther coined the term to condemn teachings by his former follower, John Agricola, who (in Germany in 1535) countered the Vatican’s emphasis on works as the means of salvation by stating, as the Reverend Walter Farquhar Hook wrote, “that good works do not promote salvation, nor evil works hinder it.” Hook, A Church Dictionary (London: John Murray, 1858), 33. The doctrine surfaced again in seventeenth-century England, where it provided the background for the Massachusetts Puritans to condemn the Hutchinsonians as dangerously immoral. Flung about loosely, the term became an epithet used against those whose politics as well as religious beliefs were unorthodox. John Milton grouped Anabaptism, Familism, and Antinomianism together as “fanatick dreams.” Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (London, 1644; London: Pickering, 1851).

  Anne Hutchinson: Anne Hutchinson’s challenge to the Boston hegemony was not the first; Roger Williams was banished in 1636 for, among other points, denying the colony’s right to compel obedience to the Puritan church, and for questioning the limits of ministerial authority, a point Hutchinson also made. Besides arguing for the effects of grace, she also spoke out for the rights of a congregation to appoint its own ministers, rather than having them appointed by the state. See Berkin, First Generations, 37–41. Bernard Bailyn and other historians take the view that the Massachusetts schism also reflected a major struggle between the merchant contingent in Boston and the public authorities over the definition of the limits of acceptable business conduct. Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 39–41. See Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 1636–38 for all documents relevant to the controversy and an understanding of the process.

  “a haughty and fierce carriage”: John Winthrop, A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines (London, 1644), in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 263–64.