Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island's Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884

The study of slavery in the Americas generally assumes a basic racial hierarchy: Africans or those of African descent are usually the slaves, and white people usually the slaveholders. In this unique interdisciplinary work of historical archaeology, anthropologist Katherine Hayes draws on years of fieldwork on Shelter Islands Sylvester Manor to demonstrate how racial identity was constructed and lived before plantation slavery was racialized by the legal codification of races.     Using the historic Sylvester Manor Plantation site turned archaeological dig as a case study, Hayes draws on artifacts and extensive archival material to present a rare picture of northern slavery on one of the Norths first plantations. The Manor was built in the mid-17th century by British settler Nathaniel Sylvester, whose family owned Shelter Island until the early 18th century and whose descendants still reside in the Manor House. There, as Hayes demonstrates, white settlers, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans worked side by side. While each group played distinct roles on the Manor and in the larger plantation economy of which Shelter Island was part, their close collaboration and cohabitation was essential for the Sylvester familys economic and political power in the Atlantic Northeast. Through the lens of social memory and forgetting, this study addresses the significance of Sylvester Manors plantation history to American attitudes about diversity, Indian land politics, slavery and Jim Crow, in tension with idealized visions of white colonial community.

"Hayes offers a skillful and captivating take on some of the big issues in contemporary historical and anthropological scholarship:  race, community, material culture, memory, and heritage. This highly readable book will attract and satisfy archaeologists, historians, and general readers alike, and its thoughtful treatment of New Yorks colonial and 'racial' histories will resonate with researchers of colonialism around the world."-Stephen W. Silliman,University of Massachusetts, Boston

"Under Katherine Hayes's gifted eye, Shelter Island, NY, becomes the grain of sand within which a whole colonial world may be grasped. Skillfully blending archival and archaeological evidence, she shows Sylvester Manor Plantation to be a crucible of bondage in which Algonquians, Africans, and poor whites labored to provision the Atlantic economy even while beliefs about race drove them apart. Long forgotten (or intentionally suppressed), this colonial history speaks to our present as sharply as it clarifies our past."-James F. Brooks,President, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe

 "A valuable scholarly companion volume."-New York Times,

"This is one of the few studies on slavery in northern plantations and specifically plantations of the early New York, primarily before slavery was made into law.  In this revision of her 2008 dissertation, the author uses historical sources as well as material analysis to push beyond the argument of racial hierarchy on plantations.  Instead, she explores the interplay of relationships, politics, social interactions, and identity that demonstrate more give and take and fluidity between the laborers, enslaves or otherwise, Indian and African, and their white owners, who were of Dutch heritage, as well as the members of the community of Shelter Island." -Choice,

"Hayes makes the most of asking what is within and beyond the patterns other scholars have laid out.  Her observations about the politics and culture of public memory involve scholars as agents of forgetting.  Readers of Hayes's work will gain specific knowledge of early plantation slavery in the Northeast and also concrete lessons about being better students of the past."-Susan Kern,William and Mary Quarterly

Katherine Howlett Hayes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, and an M.A. in Historical Archaeology from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

ContentsList of Figures and Table xiAcknowledgments xiiiPrologue xvii1 Tracing a Racialized History 12 Convergence 173 Building and Destroying 574 Objects of Interaction 865 Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget 1216 Unimagining Communities 163Epilogue 181Notes 183Bibliography 187Index 215About the Author 221