The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Quack and Cuffee were ordered burned alive. Their execution was to take place just behind the present New York County Courthouse at the intersection of Baxter, Worth, and Park streets. In this grassy valley hundreds upon hundreds of spectators watched with excitement as the fagots were piled high. The condemned slaves were questioned by their masters for the last time. Eager to save themselves, Quack and Cuffee blabbed everything expected of them. Hoarsely they “confessed” that the plot had originated with John Hughson, that Mary Burton had indeed told the truth, and that she could name many more conspirators if she cared to do so.

  The sheriff then halted the proceedings. He said that it was his duty to report the confessions to the lieutenant governor. Meantime, he would march the prisoners back to jail. The crowd roared in protest. Excited voices cried that they were not to be cheated of watching two damnable blacks burn to death. Listening to the hubbub and noting the menacing gestures of men closest to the stakes, the sheriff reversed himself. The trembling Negroes were tied, the fagots were lighted, and Quack and Cuffee perished in screaming agony.

  Their dying “evidence” led to the trial of seven other Negroes, six of whom were executed on June 7. The seventh slave saved his life by implicating fourteen others. One of these, in turn, won an amnesty by betraying still more slaves. Further burnings and hangings followed. At last, on June 12, Mr. and Mrs. John Hughson and Peggy Carey became the first white people to die because of the alleged conspiracy.

  Seven days later a deadline was set for pardons and rewards, the lieutenant governor ordering all conspirators to confess before July 1. Now the shower of accusations became a deluge. Terrified Negro prisoners had learned that it did no good to protest their innocence. In desperation they felt that they might save themselves by faking guilt, compromising others, and then bargaining for their own freedom. They talked. Oh, how they talked! As lies tumbled from their lips, it seemed as if a veritable convention of slaves had gathered in John Hughson’s house.

  Up to now Mary Burton had implicated no white man except Hughson, although Peggy Carey had accused John Romme. Suddenly Mary pretended to remember that John Ury, a white schoolmaster, was also involved. He was arrested on a charge of urging Quack to set fire to the governor’s house and of being an undercover Catholic priest. The law of 1700 condemning to death any priest in the province was still in effect. However, Ury claimed to be a clergyman of the Church of England and said that he sometimes held Anglican services in his home.

  Sarah Hughson, the illegitimate daughter of John Hughson, had been reprieved from time to time. Now she was told that Mary Burton had accused John Ury of being the chief conspirator. What did she know about it? At first she said that Ury merely had visited her father’s place with another white man, who considered renting the Hughson house. More pressure was applied to Sarah. She realized that she would be executed, after all, unless she concocted a tale that satisfied authorities.

  Sweat standing on her forehead, Sarah promised a complete confession if she were pardoned. A pardon was promised. Then she invented a voodoolike story. She swore that Ury had sneaked into her father’s house one night and joined a group of Negroes assembled there. He had chalked a circle on the floor and stepped into the center of it while holding a crucifix. As the slaves had taken places around the rim of this circle, Ury had sworn them to secrecy about the plot, had baptized them, and had forgiven them their sins.

  Sarah’s “confession” was reported to Mary Burton, who agreed it was true. Mary then denounced a soldier, named William Kane. Fearing for his life, he testified that he had been sworn into the plot by Hughson in Ury’s presence and that Ury had tried to convert him to Catholicism. Then a confectioner, named Elias Desbrosses, came forward to charge that Ury had once asked if he stocked the type of wafer used in the Catholic ritual. After all, Ury could read Latin, and of course, all priests read Latin.

  About this time Governor James Oglethorpe of Georgia wrote to New York warning that priests disguised as doctors and dancing masters were to be Trojan-horsed into the English colonies. At a signal these Papists would set fire to the principal cities to forestall an expedition the British planned to launch against Havana from America. This was during the Anglo-Spanish-English war. New Yorkers remembered that in 1740 the Spaniards had attacked Florida. They feared that New York City would be the next Spanish target, because it had always been one of the most desirable prizes when European powers were locked in combat.

  Thefts, fires, fears, accusations, confessions, executions, and now this chilling word from Georgia’s governor—all blended and fermented until the city bubbled with mass hysteria. Everyone went mad. Neighbor shrank from neighbor. Strangers walked warily. People hastened to accuse others of imaginary crimes lest they themselves be accused. Everything seemed to add up: The Papists wanted to dominate the New World. The Spaniards were monsters of cruelty and intrigue. Negro slaves sought revenge. The Negroes were willing tools of the Catholic Spaniards.

  That summer of 1741 New York City was as demented as Salem, Massachusetts, during the witchcraft delusion of 1692 and as psychotic as England in 1678, when a rogue, named Titus Oates, ranted about a Catholic plot to kill the king. Except for the Draft Riots of 1863, this was the worst blot on the city’s history. It was the ugliest orgy of Negro persecutions occurring anywhere in America during the colonial period. Between the eleventh of May and the twenty-ninth of August, 154 Negroes were jailed, 14 were burned alive, 18 were hanged, and 71 were banished to the West Indies. During the same period 24 white persons were imprisoned, and 4 of them were executed.

  Ury, the last of the victims, was hanged on August 29, 1741. The reign of terror might have continued if Mary Burton, dizzy with success, had not begun to accuse responsible citizens. This gave pause to New Yorkers eager to shed the blood of black men. But blue bloods? That was different Scores of families already had fled the city to escape reckless accusations. No one felt secure. Finally, the city fathers began to doubt Mary Burton, so they paid her blood money and escorted the lady out of town. That was the last ever heard of her.

  The massacre ceased. Accusations fell off. Everyone breathed more easily. No doctor or dancing master was revealed as a Spanish agent or Papist incendiary. No Spanish fleet attacked the city. As people regained their sanity, they began to regard the episode as a nightmare. Time cooled their heads, warmed their hearts, and left them ashamed of themselves. Within ten years all Negroes who met property qualifications were allowed to vote.

  Chapter 10

  DUEL FOR EMPIRE

  FRANCE now became more menacing than Spain. The French sent a fleet to the New World with orders to burn Boston, and although the attack failed, French soldiers raided upper New York State. As always, the French and the British vied for help from the Six Nations. New York’s new governor, George Clinton, offered a bounty to every Indian bringing in an enemy scalp.

  In 1746 hundreds of Oneida and Mohawk warriors, squaws, and papooses glided down the Hudson in canoes so that the sachems could confer with the governor. Beaching their craft on the western shore of Manhattan, they disembarked and set up camp at what is now the eastern end of the Holland Tunnel. Then the braves filed down Broadway, carrying poles hung with the scalps of dead Frenchmen. Upon reaching the fort, they powwowed with the white men, declared an end to their friendship with the British, and vowed that they would slay no more Frenchmen. New Yorkers watched silently and anxiously as the Indians left.

  Philadelphia feared an invasion from Canada as much as New York did, and four Pennsylvanians came here to borrow cannon. One of the men was Benjamin Franklin, then clerk of the Pennsylvania assembly. After returning home, he wrote about the conference with Governor Clinton:

  He at first refused us peremptorily; but at dinner with his council, where there was great drinking of Madeira wine, as the custom of the place was, he softened by degrees and said he would lend us six. After a few more bumpers, he advanced to ten; and at length he very good-naturedly conceded eig
hteen. They were fine cannon, eighteen-pounders with their carriages, which we soon transported.

  This wine-guzzling governor ruled the colony and city of New York from 1743 to 1753, or longer than anybody since Peter Stuy-vesant. Then, wracked with rheumatism and richer by 80,000 pounds, Clinton wanted to go back to England. The people were equally eager to see him depart. On October 7, 1753, Clinton welcomed his successor, thirty-eight-year-old Sir Danvers Osborn, still mourning his wife’s death a decade earlier. His brother-in-law, the Earl of Halifax, got him this job in the New World, hoping that a change of scenery would brighten his spirits.

  Three days after Osborn arrived, he was sworn into office by Clinton. As the new and the retiring governors paraded from the fort to City Hall and back, spectators shouted oaths and shook their fists at the detested Clinton. At first he shrugged off their hostility but finally took refuge within the fort. The more sensitive Osborn, shaken by the demonstration, murmured to Clinton, “I expect like treatment to that which you have received before I leave this government.”

  The next evening, while dining with Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey, the new governor complained that he felt ill and told his host, “I believe I shall soon leave you the government, for I find myself unable to support the burden of it.” A doctor was summoned, but Osborn ignored his advice, merely taking a bowl of broth. Dismissing his servant at twelve o’clock, he spent the rest of the night burning private papers and laying out a small sum of money owed to a friend.

  Osborn was a guest in the home of Joseph Murray, the colony’s leading lawyer, because the governor’s mansion was being redecorated. Just as dawn pearled the horizon on October 12, the young governor slipped out of the Murray household and walked into the garden. It was bounded by a high wooden fence, topped with spikes. Osborn climbed onto a board a few feet off the ground, took a silk handkerchief from his pocket, fashioned it into a noose, cast the loop over a couple of spikes, thrust his head through the handkerchief, and stepped off the board.

  About eight o’clock that morning people began shouting in the streets, “The governor has hanged himself!” In excitement and bewilderment officials gathered in the Murray home. Osborn’s secretary revealed that he had made an attempt on his life once before in anguish over the death of his wife. Now it was ruled that Sir Danvers Osborn had committed suicide while insane. After a dispute about giving a suicide a religous burial, he was laid to rest with full religious rites.

  The Reverend Henry Barclay, rector of Trinity Church, who officiated at the funeral, took part in a more pleasant activity the following year. This was the establishment of present-day Columbia University. In those days lotteries were the usual means of raising money for colleges. Back in 1746 New Yorkers had persuaded the assembly to hold a lottery for a local college, and 2,250 pounds had been realized. Five years later a second lottery had brought in 3,443 more pounds. The total sum was vested in a board of ten trustees appointed by the assembly. One trustee was a Presbyterian, two belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, and the other seven were members of the Church of England and served as Trinity vestrymen. When the assembly gave them the right to consider offers from citizens or counties wanting the college, Trinity’s vestrymen offered some Trinity land as a campus.

  The lone Presbyterian trustee, William Livingston, protested. He wanted a state college supported by the legislature, not an institution dominated by the Church of England. The local Anglican party, headed by De Lancey, fought back. After a furious controversy the Anglicans won. The college charter declared that the college president “forever and for the time being” must belong to the Church of England. Moreover, the college’s morning and evening services had to be conducted in the liturgy of this Church.

  The sixth college in the British colonies received its charter on October 31, 1754. It was named King’s College in honor of King George II. Its first president was a Church of England minister, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, Connecticut, tutor of the De Lancey grandchildren. His 250-pound salary was so inadequate that the vestrymen also named him assistant pastor of Trinity. Before construction began on the college buildings, the first class met in the vestry room of Trinity Church’s schoolhouse.

  For ten shillings the parish gave the college some land on the west side of Broadway. Bounded by Church, Barclay, and Murray streets, the campus sloped down to the Hudson River. An English writer vowed that it “will be the most beautifully situated of any college, I believe, in the world.” The cornerstone was laid on August 23, 1756, and during the celebration that followed, the first toast was drunk to George II. No one mentioned that the mere sight of a book threw him into a rage. Two years later eight students were graduated with bachelor of arts degrees.

  Across the sea the heavy-jowled bug-eyed king died of a stroke in 1760. He was succeeded by his twenty-two-year-old grandson, George III, a mama’s boy who couldn’t read until he was ten and who suffered neurotic disturbances. Eventually he went insane. The new monarch’s first ambition was to stunt the growing power of the English Cabinet and become a real king. As he left Westminster Abbey the day of his coronation, a large jewel fell from his crown—an omen remembered when Great Britain lost the American colonies.

  George casually referred to these colonies as his farms and let them go to weed. Until then the thirteen colonies lacked a central issue to unite them. Profit-conscious New York merchants, proud Virginia planters, and sea-battling Massachusetts mariners had little in common. But George III, his ministers, and Parliament acted so stupidly and repressively that the colonists began drawing together and finally rebelled.

  In the seventy-year duel for empire, England had fought successive wars with France, partly in America and partly in Europe. A treaty signed in 1763 gave England control of North America from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from Spanish Florida to the Arctic Sea. The wars had saddled the English with an enormous public debt. British officials felt that the colonies ought to shoulder part of this load because now that Canada had been wrested from the French, the American provinces were no longer threatened by an invasion from the north.

  Still, a few thousand French Canadians smoldered on the far side of the St. Lawrence River, and several hundred thousand hostile Indians bore watching. To guard this new empire, 10,000 British troops were to be sent to America, and the king’s men thought the colonists should share this military expense. First, however, the English decided to break up the smuggling that put American customhouses in debt year after year.

  The Navigation Acts would be enforced strictly, the colonies would be taxed, more power would be given to the admiralty courts, and royal governors would be told to demand compliance with the new acts pouring out of England. All these measures provoked the colonists, but they did not act in unison until the Stamp Act was passed in 1765. News of this outrageous law reached New York on April 11, 1765, and touched a spark to a long train of powder.

  Chapter 11

  THE STAMP ACT REBELLION

  ANGERED by the Stamp Act, malcontents took direct action on April 14, 1765. They spiked the guns in the fort, then headquarters for England’s small standing army in America.

  During the recent Seven Years’ War all the colonists had prospered, for British soldiers had spent money freely and contractors had reaped huge profits. However, after most of the troops had been withdrawn and the war contracts had been lost, there began a postwar depression, which was intensified by Parliament’s trade acts. Prices soared. Real estate values fell. Creditors squeezed debtors. One bankruptcy followed another until a New Yorker wrote: “It seems as if our American world must inevitably break.”

  The Stamp Act was to go into effect on November 1, 1765. Unlike the new trade laws, it was meant not to control commerce, but to collect revenue. Under its terms Parliament insisted that the colonists pay direct taxes. In the past, taxes had been levied indirectly by imposing requisitions on colonial assemblies, which then appropriated the needed funds. Money raised by the Stamp
Act would be used not to reduce the British debt, but to pay part of the cost of maintaining the 10,000 soldiers to be sent to America. Since this army would cost 350,000 pounds a year and the Stamp Act would yield only 60,000 pounds annually, British officials didn’t feel that they were being unreasonable. Besides, the law would operate almost automatically. All legal transactions and various licenses would require a stamp.

  The colonists didn’t want a standing army in America. They weren’t greatly concerned by the cost of the tax. What bothered them was the principle: taxation without representation.

  Tax stamps were already used in England, but the situation there was different because the British were represented in Parliament—after a fashion. Twenty-nine out of every thirty Englishmen could not vote, but as William Pitt said, everybody at least had the right to cheer at elections. The colonists lacked even this fun, so New York newspapers shrilled with alarm, as did other American periodicals.

  But what happened if the colonists refused to buy stamps? Well, they couldn’t get a marriage license, buy a newspaper, draw up a will, receive a college diploma, file a lawsuit, purchase an insurance policy, send a ship from the harbor, or drink in a tavern. Even dice and playing cards were to be taxed. A total of forty-three groups of business and social transactions would require stamps, costing from twopence to ten pounds.

  And who would collect the tax? Stamp masters—Americans, to be sure, but deep-dyed loyalists, who knew the right people in London. Each would be paid 300 pounds a year. There was a rush of applicants, but those chosen soon found themselves the most hated men in America. For example, Zachariah Hood of Maryland had his store demolished, was burned in effigy, and received threats against his life. Quaking with fear, he flung himself upon a horse and galloped toward New York, riding so hard that his steed died on the way. After getting another mount and reaching the city, he hid in Flushing. There he was discovered, however, and forced to resign his royal commission.