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1 / Tracing a Racialized History When Nathaniel Sylvester and his young bride Grissell came to reside on Shelter Island sometime around 1652 or 1653, they might have spoken between themselves about how they had landed in a lonely place, feeling that the two of them had only one another in this unfamiliar land. Writing to his business colleague, Connecticut Colony Governor John Winthrop Jr., Nathaniel commented about his marriage, “I find my selfe very happie and I hope in God wee may be a Confort unto Each Other [sic].” Their comfort likely came from a shared background, shared values , and a shared understanding of their place in society. In the new colonies and in independent settlements like this one, colonists had to adjust to not only a new environment but also a social order without precedent or tradition. This was partly what they had gone to the New World to achieve, but they perhaps had not anticipated the variety of people that they would also have to accommodate in their society, particularly American Indians and Africans.1 Nathaniel, one of four partners who sought to supply their sugar plantations on Barbados, had settled here because of a business venture, but he was the only one of the four who would live on this 8,000-acre island. Located between the two forks of eastern Long Island, Shelter Island was also wedged between the Dutch West India Company settlement based in Manhattan to the west and the Puritan New England colonies which had begun settling on the east end of Long Island in the prior decade. Sylvester had encountered diversity in his life; born in Amsterdam of English Separatists, he had traveled widely throughout the Atlantic world 2 / tracing a racialized history in the 1640s as a merchant in the family business, reaching many areas of Europe, the west coast of Africa, the Caribbean, and Virginia, before settling on Shelter Island to attend to the planter side of the business. He had no love for the Puritans despite his Separatist upbringing, and his wife Grissell was the daughter of King Charles II’s auditor, in exile with the king following the monarchy’s defeat at the hands of the Puritan Cromwell. Thus, to be surrounded by Puritans, as well as the Dutch West India Company, to which he was no more than competition, was not necessarily a friendly neighborhood. Furthermore, the east end was only recently opened to settlement by the English. Indigenous Algonquian tribes there had previously been isolated from colonizer interference while under the protection of the Pequot, but the Pequot War with the English in 1637 had left the Paumanoc (Long Island) confederacy unhappily resigned to the necessity of dealing directly with the English. The Sylvesters might have been lonely—far from family and a friendly community—but they certainly were not alone. Not only were there settler villages in Southampton, Easthampton, and Southold and the indigenous Montaukett, Shinnecock, and Corchaug in the lands across a short stretch of water from Shelter Island, but they also had their own retinue of servants and laborers quite literally in their back yard. Archived documents and recorded anecdotes suggest that some of these servants and laborers were indentured, and some were enslaved persons captured from Africa, all perhaps arriving at this place via Barbados. By the time of Nathaniel’s death in 1680, he claimed to own twenty-three persons, most explicitly identified as Negro, constituting one of the largest holdings of enslaved persons in the New York colony at that time and larger even than the family of eleven children his wife bore who survived to adulthood. In addition, archaeological excavations have shown that the indigenous Manhanset were part of the labor of the plantation, despite documents and anecdotes suggesting their departure at the establishment of the estate. Their skills, technologies, and crafts contributed greatly to the success of the plantation, though their status as laborers— enslaved, indentured, coerced, or free-- remains unknown. The work of the plantation required many hands: construct buildings, tend livestock, plant and harvest crops, load and unload ships as goods of many sorts passed through often to or from Barbados. Nathaniel Sylvester was there to manage this work, not to undertake it himself. To manage effectively he and his partners assembled a heterogeneous group of laborers—African , Native American, and possibly poor English or Irish. Unlike the inhabitants of the Puritan colonies, on Shelter Island Sylvester was not [18.221.165.246] Project MUSE (2024...

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