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The Manor: Three Centuries At A Slave Plantation On Long Island (2013)

by Mac Griswold(Favorite Author)

3.23 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0374266298 (ISBN13: 9780374266295)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: The almost-intact survival of Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island off Long Island after three centuries is quite remarkable, for America, at least. 300 years in Britain would almost be considered modern. But it is not just the age of Sylvester Manor that marks it out, but the fact that is a rare example of a Northern slave plantation. So often the words 'slave plantation' conjure up images out of Gone with the Wind - the South, cotton fields, Southern belles - it is easy to forget that whilst slavery lasted longer in the South, in the early years of American history it was just as prevalent in the North.This is a thoroughly interesting look at the three centuries of existence of this estate - from the earliest colonial settlement, when Native American tribes still lived in i... morets woods, through the Revolution, the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and on into the modern era. Interspersed with the narrative is a charting of the archaeological and historical investigations taking place on the island across a period of some nine years, mapping out old building plans, sifting soil, analysing traces in the landscape. I found these insights every bit as interesting as the historical narrative itself.That said, that narrative focuses mostly heavily on those earliest years in the 17th and 18th centuries - I was a little disappointed at how little attention was paid to the Civil War era or the actual impact on the Shelter Island owners of the pre-Civil War abolition of slavery in the North. Perhaps that was simply as a result of the surviving documentation, although Griswold certainly seems to imply a mass of preserved documents were available to research. Certainly I felt that the actual existence of slavery, the lives of those slaves and the families, were skated over, to a degree, to focus on the lives of the lords and ladies of the Manor - interesting as those lives are, they are not the whole story.
review 2: This was the Long Island Read this year, so I read it with every other library book club patron in our two counties. A few years ago the author, Mac Griswold, stumbled on a house on Shelter Island where a family had maintained ownership for THIRTEEN generations and had an entire vault dedicated to family history documentation. She built such a relationship with this family that she eventually brought archeologist to dig for artifacts from the Native Americans, early colonial settlers, and their African slaves. This book is an extensive historical record of that family and their neighbors from the 1600s to today.Because I did not grow up here in New York, I missed studying the history of the state of New York that children get in elementary school (I got the history of New Mexico.) Therefore, I found that the pithy chapters covering the history of this family and their plantation really filled in my gaps.I was disappointed to find though, that the reference to "slaves" in the subtitle and the picture of a slave at the beginning was misleading. I got three quarters through the book and had read mostly about the early Dutch and Native American tribes, with very little said about the slaves at the manor. I felt like the book publisher pushed the cover design and subtitle to have an angle that didn't really ring true in the book's content.Have said that. . . I didn't actually finish the book. The writing is very detailed, very well research, and definitely not easy to breeze through. I just didn't finish it in time for my book group discussion and then found I didn't care enough to go back and finish the book once my deadline was passed.I would recommend this to someone local to Long Island who was interested in a long, intellectual read of a place they felt strongly about. less

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