The Big Oyster (16 page)

Throughout the nineteenth century, more and more was learned about oysters so that man's proclivity for destroying them was countered by the ability to re-create them. Such newfound powers were making humankind giddy with science's magical ability to withstand its own foolish excess.

The first natural beds
in New York City to be exhausted were those around Staten Island. By 1820, with the city's population and demand for oysters rapidly growing, the Staten Island beds were barren deserts from both overharvesting and suffocation from silt washed down the Raritan River. New York oystermen knew that, like Sergius Orata, they could replant their beds with oysters from elsewhere. They planted small young oysters from Arthur Kill and the Raritan River, but these took two or three years to reach a marketable size. They also tried Long Island oysters with slightly more success. With production declining, the market for oysters in New York City was growing. As early as 1816, Chesapeake Bay oysters were being sold in New York. Chesapeake oysters had the advantage that, having been reared in warm water, even transported to New York they had a faster first growing season than a native New Yorker. Small young Chesapeake oysters, seed oysters, two inches or smaller, planted in Staten Island beds would reach a marketable size—not the giants of New York legend but a suitable eating size—in only one year.

In the spring of 1825, Chesapeake spats for the first time were brought up by schooner and planted in Princess Bay, Staten Island. In the fall the oysters were collected and profitably sold in the city. Numerous schooners with a captain and a four-man crew began doing the same thing from Princess Bay, and from the New Jersey side out of Keyport and Perth Amboy. These crews could import hundreds of thousands of seed oysters each year. It took thirty-five to forty hours for a schooner to sail from Raritan Bay to the rivers of the lower Chesapeake. In two days they could load between 2,500 and 3,500 bushels of seed oysters with 400 to 500 little oysters in each bushel. Soon other mismanaged oyster regions on Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wellfleet in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, were doing the same thing. It was a simple transfer from one
Crassostrea virginica
bed to another.

When the schooner returned to Raritan Bay with the seed oysters, they hired an additional twelve men, often local farmers, to shovel the seeds overboard while the schooner sailed back and forth over the bed. They learned to control the density so that the bed would not be crowded—750 bushels per acre seemed the ideal formula.

Where France was an administrative society and cultivation was promoted by a government plan, the United States, and especially New York, is legalistic and needed the right laws in place before oyster cultivation could become widespread. U.S. law regarded a natural oyster bed in much the same way the Lenape had regarded all land. It could not be owned, and anyone had the right to harvest it, just like picking berries in a wild forest or fishing in the ocean. In the eighteenth century, territorial rights came into play. To harvest oysters in a particular area required residency. Any resident was entitled to the oyster beds. But planting was something different. Someone had invested labor and capital to plant spats in an empty bed. A planter would mark off his area with green saplings, the leafy parts sticking out plainly visible above the waterline.

But by the midnineteenth century, the issue had become more complicated. Some New York oystermen without the means to sail down to the Chesapeake and buy spats claimed that the Chesapeake spats had been planted in natural beds that still had wild oysters, and they had a right to collect oysters in these beds. The courts ruled that oystermen did have a right to file claims for beds they wanted to plant. No one but the state could own a sea bed, but an individual had the right to lease an underwater area from the state, provided no natural beds were within the area, and the lease granted exclusive rights to the shellfish harvested from that bed. Leases were issued by the states of New York and New Jersey for little or no fee.

This arrangement, by assuring the cultivator that he owned all the profits from his labor and investment, provided the necessary incentive to develop an extensive cultivated oyster industry in New York and New Jersey. Organizations such as the Richmond County Oyster-planting Association in Staten Island were formed to patrol the beds and guard against poachers.

Oystering in natural beds had required relatively little capital or risk. But cultivating oysters was a different kind of business. The investment in labor—buying, transporting, and planting spats and maintaining beds—was substantial. Each spat had a less than one-in-a-million chance of surviving predators, storms, and other maritime conditions. But at least, after the law was passed, no one else could harvest the planted oysters. Cultivation rapidly increased following the passage of this legal guarantee. Soon more than one thousand men were directly employed cultivating oysters in New York City waters.

Sturdy oak-splint bushel baskets became a standard unit of measure, though a bushel might contain as few as 250 and as many as 350 oysters. A new trade, oyster-basket making, was founded, bending splints of oak or maple to molds.

By the 1830s,
oystering, the single most important economic activity on Staten Island, employed about one thousand people, basket makers and spat shovelers included. Oystermen started coming north with the spats to plant them. Many of these Maryland oystermen were free blacks. But even as free men and women, they found things different in New York.

New York had never been progressive on the slavery issue, but it had made substantial progress since 1735 when a man named John van Zandt had whipped his slave to death because he had stayed out at night. The coroner's jury had ruled that the cause of death was not the brutality of the owner but a “visitation from God.” Immediately following the end of the Revolutionary War, New York and New Jersey were the only Northern states that did not abolish slavery or establish a program for gradual abolition. Staten Island and Brooklyn, along with Ulster County, had been particularly vehement in their opposition to the abolition of slavery. But slave labor was being replaced by immigrant labor, which was legally less complicated and just as cheap. After 1799, New York law automatically granted freedom to children born of slaves. By 1820, only 518 slaves lived in New York, mostly in agricultural areas. Finally, a law was passed abolishing slavery in New York State after July 4, 1827. Free blacks moved into an area in northern Manhattan, calling it Seneca Village, where they lived, along with remaining American Indians, in shacks and even caves. But most lived in the poorer sections of Manhattan along with mostly Irish immigrants. Seneca Village was bought up by the city in the 1850s to create Central Park.

Maryland was still a slave state, but it had an unusually high population of free blacks. The slave-owning establishment believed this population was a threat to the institution of slavery, and so the state passed laws restricting the rights of free blacks. A black oysterman was not allowed to own his own sloop or even captain a sloop unless a white man was present. On the other hand, if he wished to move to an unknown corner of West Africa called Liberia, he would be paid a stipend.

Restrictions against free blacks owning land in New York had been abolished in 1809, though blacks were still required to own at least $250 worth of property in order to vote. The property requirement had been removed for white people in 1825. In Maryland, free blacks could not own land, they could not own oyster beds, but could only be laborers working on them. In Staten Island, they could work their own oyster beds. They settled into a small community of freed New York blacks, on the far southern tip, the island's poorest land, in its most rural township. It was part of Westfield, one of the original four Staten Island townships, which had been settled by Dutch and Huguenot families, many of whom had been oystermen. Though the loam was laced with sand and clay, Westfield had farms and freed New York blacks went there for farmwork and oystering. The part of Westfield that Maryland blacks settled in was uncleared wooded land, inexpensively purchased. Though this area lacked the rich soil of the rest of the island, the blacks found the sandy soil well suited to growing strawberries. Originally called Harrisville, then Little Africa, by the 1850s it was called simply Sandy Ground, which is one of the prerequisites for growing strawberries.

The location was next to the oyster grounds of Arthur Kill on the north side and a short walk to Prince's Bay to the south. Prince's Bay oysters were particularly valued in Manhattan. Increasing numbers of blacks from the Maryland and Virginia oyster trade migrated to Sandy Ground. At first it was a poor community. The men worked for white oystermen and the women cleaned and did laundry for white families in Prince's Bay and Rossville. The black families lived in one-room shacks and built lean-tos for additions when they had children. In the summers they ate the produce from the gardens and in the winter they ate mostly oysters that they raked up from the forgotten deep recesses of Arthur Kill. Oysters are a food that loses charm when it becomes a staple.

But the little community became increasingly prosperous. Cultivation of strawberries continued, but oystering provided an economic base by which the blacks could thrive with their own shops and craftsmen and churches, becoming completely self-sufficient. They began to own their own boats. Some became basket makers, splitting the local white-oak saplings into strips they soaked and wove into bushel baskets. Others became blacksmiths, making tongs, rakes, and other equipment for oyster skiffs. Farms added to the strawberry crop such Southern foods as collard greens, sweet potatoes, and mustard greens. A boat left New Brunswick, New Jersey, every morning, steaming down the Raritan River and through the Arthur Kill, stopping in villages along the way, including Sandy Ground, picking up produce to be sold at the Washington Market in downtown Manhattan.

Some Sandy Ground oystermen operated skiffs collecting oysters with the long tongs of Lenape design or oyster rakes. Some earned enough money to buy single-masted sloops. The more affluent oyster families paved one road along the Arthur Kill, Bloomingdale Road, with crushed oyster shells. Starting in 1849, prosperous black oystering families built large, handsome, brick country homes along this road. Some of them traded oysters for bricks to build their homes.

As one of the first free black communities in New York, Sandy Ground became well known as an African American center. Black New Yorkers moved there from Manhattan at such a rate that despite the Maryland immigration, according to the 1860 census, the majority of Sandy Ground residents in the 1850s had been born in New York City or at least in New York State. It was a prosperous self-sufficient community. Esther Purnell, a woman from one of the Maryland families, established the community's own private school. It was also a stop on the Underground Railroad that moved escaped slaves north to freedom. Congress, meeting in Philadelphia in 1793, had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a crime to help a slave escape or give him refuge. To the anger of many New Yorkers, the law was further strengthened by Congress in 1850. The skiffs and sloops of Sandy Ground oystermen were regularly searched for runaway slaves.

But the Staten Island oyster industry was largely integrated. Some white families made their homes in Sandy Ground, and even during the Civil War years, when New York City race relations, never good, grew particularly ugly, with numerous lynchings, the people of Sandy Ground enjoyed a peaceful relationship with the white communities that surrounded them.