The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island by Mac Griswold

Abstract

Book Reviews 513 Mahican past contain “largely unsupported, if not invented, constructions” based on inappropriate comparisons with other Algonquian and Iroquoian societies; and he carefully picks apart one source after another in order to sift out what we can know of the Mahican with any degree of confidence (61). Even as Mahican history sharpens somewhat with their resettlement in Stockbridge, Starna reminds us that “Native life . . . is not easily reconstructed” there because there was little ethnological interest in people that whites regarded as objects of a civilizing mission(186). Readers of New York History will appreciate the care with which Starna reviews the literature on Mahican history and raises probing questions about the presumptions that have shaped the scholarly consensus. As Starna acknowledges at the outset, one of his aims with this project was to follow Francis Jennings’ advice to “open the field rather than to close it.” From Homeland to New Land fulfills that mission admirably. The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island. By Mac Griswold. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.480 pages, $28.00 Cloth. Reviewed by Ahmed Reid, Bronx Community College, CUNY The historiography of slavery in the Americas has seen many important contributions that have broadened our collective understanding of the nature and structure of slave plantation societies. The Manor, a well-researched book, adds to the ever growing list. Working almost exclusively from manuscript sources found in the United States, Barbados, Europe, and Africa, Griswold has written the history of this small northern plantation. In doing so, she reconstructs the lives of the owners, the enslaved Africans (who provided the labor needs from 1650 until 1827 when the state of New York outlawed slavery), and the local Manhasset Indians (many of whom worked alongside slaves to provide labor on the plantation). In many ways, slavery in New York City (and throughout the Americas) was linked to the emerging transatlantic trading networks of the 514 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A quick glance at the city’s founding shows the centrality of the slave trade, and the priority given to it by the Dutch and the Dutch West India Company. It is within this framework of trade and the globalizing tendencies of transatlantic commerce that Griswold has placed The Manor. At the heart of this narrative are the Sylvester brothers (Nathaniel and Constant), who, like thousands of white Europeans, traveled to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in search of fortune. In 1642, Constant, the elder brother purchased a slave plantation in Barbados. Soon after, they bought Long Island manor, which would emerge as an important link in the Barbados plantation’s supply chain. In this way, the plantation became a part of a larger global network that encompassed the transshipment of over 12 million Africans to the Americas, and in turn, the shipping of sugar and rum to the mainland colonies and Europe. The manor’s location proved ideal. Situated just a few miles south of Newport, Rhode Island, with its bustling trade with the British Caribbean, the Sylvester’s turned the manor into a provisioning plantation, supplying meat, horses, and wooden staves (used to make barrels to transport muscavado sugar, rum and molasses) to the British West Indies. In return, the manor would import sugar and rum for domestic consumption. In many ways, the fact that the manor was a provisioning plantation distinguished it from the typical slave plantations in the southern colonies and Caribbean where monoculture formed the basis of economic activity. The manor was smaller in size, more diversified, and its crop cycle relatively shorter. Another distinguishing feature was the number of enslaved peoples who worked on the plantation. In Nathaniel Sylvester’s will of 1680, the labor force comprised twenty-four slaves, thirteen of whom were children. Crucially, there was no separated space between master and slave; thus, enslaved peoples had little ability to construct alternative lifestyles. But, what was the level and nature of exploitation on the manor? Were the enslaved treated any differently from their southern counterparts? These are questions that would have afforded the reader an important insight into the true nature of plantation slavery, regardless of spatial...