Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651–1884 by Katherine Howlett Hayes

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

292 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY With so many virtues, it was difficult for this reviewer to find any fault with what Gallucci has accomplished here. This book deserves a wide audience. Discursive annotations of the Journal, found in the endnotes, are well done and will appeal to scholars. Libraries and historical societies in New York, particularly in the North Country, will also find that Desjardins and Pharoux offer unique detail and insight into the development of a region often neglected in the literature on the state. Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651–1884 By Katherine Howlett Hayes. New York: New York University Press, 2013, 220 pages, $65.00 Cloth, $22.00 Paper. Reviewed by Christopher J. Mauceri, Stony Brook University. Katherine Howlett Hayes’ Slavery Before Race is a masterful example of traditional archival-based history combined with historical archaeology . Hayes’ study examines Sylvester Manor, a plantation established on New York’s Shelter Island around 1652. The book attempts to correct two errors that Hayes believes plague scholarship on the history of plantation slavery: first, the notion that slavery was not important to the northern colonies , and second, the invisibility of Native Americans in studies of slavery. Thus, Hayes brings together Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans to present a much fuller depiction of plantation slavery. But Hayes also examines the ways scholars and amateur historians have told the history of plantation slavery. Her goal is to “trace the negotiations of affiliation and difference” among the three groups, and to explain “the subsequent replacement of that more complex story with a simpler one reflecting national discourses on race” (15). Hayes insists that she is not necessarily concerned with race as a historical force, but rather with how “race came to shape the way histories were and are told” (163). The plantation was established by Nathaniel Sylvester, one of four business partners who hoped to create a supply base for their sugar plantation in Barbados. Located on Shelter Island in between Long Island’s Twin Forks, the plantation was sandwiched between two other colonial ventures —English settlements in New England and the East End of Long Book Reviews 293 Island, and Dutch New Amsterdam (later New York City) to the west. The presence of Africans in this northern colony was not unique (although the twenty three slaves listed in Sylvester’s 1680 will did make it one of the largest exploiters of slave labor in the New York colony). Rather, it was the presence of a number of local Manhanset Indians, whom Hayes depicts as active and essential laborers on the plantation, that make the Sylvester plantation a place ripe for investigation. The book divides into three parts. The first explains the creation of the plantation and traces its history to about 1680. Hayes does an excellent job contextualizing the plantation amid the complexities of English, Dutch, and Indian relations in the Northeast during the mid-seventeenth century. The second and third parts of the book are the most interesting and informative. Here, Hayes examines the plantation through the lens of historical archaeology. An archeological approach “allows for a critical movement between memory and forgetting, curation and abandonment, representation and embodied experience” (5). Using research gathered from an archaeological dig conducted by her team from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, Hayes deftly shows how local Manhanset Indians were an essential facet of the plantation’s labor force, thus complicating the standard European/African duality inherent in most treatments of colonial plantations. What these digs exposed is instructive and, Hayes admits, not what she expected to find. Hayes notes the physical proximity in which Indians, Africans, and Europeans existed on the plantation. Work and living spaces were all located around a central plantation “core.” Excavations around this area revealed remains that suggest extensive cross-cultural contact between the three groups. Shell fragments from Manhanset wampum making were found in great quantity. This wampum could have been used by the Manhanset to pay the Sylvesters for protection from other Indians and Europeans. Shell remainders were used to make mortar for the house, the building of which was the responsibility of the Africans. The discovery of the first...