New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Popular outcry and even legislation against the use of black tradesmen, and especially the employment of slaves by coopers, had not stopped Comfort from leaving Jack to manage his cooper’s shop. Comfort left Jack so entirely in charge that Jack “looked upon the House as his own, and himself as his own Master.” Jack was “a leading Man” in the conspiracy; he ran the meetings, going “backwards and forwards from the Shop to the Kitchen,” swearing black men into the plot, keeping a list of their names, making threats, making promises. He looked “like a Gentleman.” He was fierce. When Sandy cried in front of him, Jack said, “D—m you, do you cry? I’ll cut your Head off in a Hurry.” When Dundee pledged to “cut his Mistress’s Throat in the Night,” Jack said he’d kill Robert Todd himself, because he “once followed Dundee to Comfort’s House, when he went for Tea-Water, and made a Noise at him for staying.”

  Black men and women who came to Jack’s house called him “Captain,” and “Uncle, and Brother, and Cousin.” And they called him “Countryman.” Because what Horsmanden recorded of Jack’s literal speech—“ Ben ride da fat Horse”—sounds Jamaican, it’s likely that Jack, who may have been an Akan-speaking Coromantee, had lived for a time in Jamaica. At Hughson’s, plotters swore an oath that sounded like a Masonic pledge. But at Comfort’s, Jack made them swear “that the first Thunder that came, might strike them dead, if they did not stand to their Words,” an oath much like the Akan oaths sworn by a supernatural power that would kill those who violated it.24 Not only the oaths but much of the plotting to which slaves confessed in 1741 bears considerable resemblance to ceremonies known to have taken place among other Akan-influenced communities in the New World. The coronation of a king, like that of Court in Antigua in 1736, was an Akan rite, which raised a respected and worthy member of the community, even a commoner, to the status of nobility. In New York, Mary Burton set the precedent for testifying that Hughson was to be king, and Caesar merely governor, but at least one slave had it the other way: Bastian said that “Hughson was to be the Governor” and “Caesar was to be King.”25

  Coromantee rituals had played a similar role in the 1712 revolt: 19 percent of those accused in 1712 bore Akan names. In 1741, 8 percent of the accused—and 38 percent of those burned at the stake—had Akan names. Given that the incidence of Akan names in the general slave population was about 4 percent, these numbers are significant. (People with Akan names also made up a disproportionately high number, 14 percent, of the city’s runaways.)26 At Jack’s, men born in New York, in the Caribbean, and in Africa—and perhaps especially men like Jack and Cook, born in Africa and “seasoned” in the Caribbean—forged bonds of fictive kinship and participated in Akan-influenced rituals that named leaders and established a new political order. A “king” was often chosen on the basis of his wealth, something that Caesar, who was wealthy enough to pay for Peggy Kerry’s lodging, could easily have boasted. And the naming of “captains” like Jack drew on. Coromantees, long military tradition; some of the men who ended up in New York might once have been soldiers, experienced with the guns they so frequently described in their confessions.27

  Horsmanden grudgingly acknowledged Jack’s crucial role in the slave community. “To his Well every Morning and Evening resorted Negroes from all Quarters of the Town for Tea-Water,” he wrote, “which therefore afforded him convenient Seasons for gaining Parties, which he made Use of to the Utmost; and hereat Jack was so dexterous, that he became the very Counter-part of his Master Hughson.” But what if Horsmanden had it backward: What if Hughson was merely the counterpart of Jack? What if Hughson practiced a Masonic prank but Jack commanded a brotherhood whose best English translation was “Freemasonry”?28

  To Horsmanden, what happened at those black gatherings in New York was a slave conspiracy that could be put to use in suppressing white political opposition. To Hughson, it was a mockery of Masonry. To Jack, it was a brotherhood of countrymen. Like Hughson’s Plot, the “Negro Plot” was real—it happened—but it was no prank.

  “WHAT NEWS?” Jack asked Ben, hauling his keg to the tea-water pump. “What News?” he asked Cato on “the Night that Hilton’s House burnt . . . for he had heard that there had been a Fire at that End of the Town.” Jack was, above all, a collector and a reporter of news. Zenger and Bradford printed their newspapers weekly, and filled their pages with slow-traveling letters from foreign correspondents. White New Yorkers who wanted to find out what happened in Amsterdam two months ago could read the Weekly Journal at the end of the week. Or they could meet in coffeehouses and taverns, to read newspapers from other cities. 29 Black New Yorkers who wanted to find out what happened in the city all day, and overnight, could find out at Jack’s before the sun rose.

  In a small, crowded, bustling metropolis, then as now, most people spend a good deal of time walking the streets, conducting errands, picking up bits of news. But in eighteenth-century New York, people who were enslaved walked greater distances, conducted more errands, and picked up news earlier in the morning and later at night. Unlike the conditions in large rural slave plantations, where slaves lived with their families in slave quarters, well apart from whites, city slaves slept in the attics and cellars of their owners’ houses, or in “Negro kitchens,” and worked all day alongside whites—servants, artisans, laborers. In New York, whites and blacks lived, literally, on top of one another. If slaves lacked separate quarters, they did have different hours: slaves woke up earlier than anyone else (servants woke up next), and stayed up later (servants went to bed just before them). And, since the very first and the very last chore slaves did every day was fetching water, which meant meeting friends and neighbors at pumps, they heard the news first.30

  If there were nothing else to be learned from the confessions extracted in New York City in the spring and summer of 1741, there would be this: while slaves in Manhattan lived and worked alongside whites, they sought out other slaves, for news, for companionship, for love, and they found it, all over the city. Forever conducting errands, fetching water, visiting friends and family scattered across the city, slaves circulated, even more than free whites, who lived in the same houses as their husbands, wives, and children. Most enslaved New Yorkers lived in households where there were only one or two other slaves. A lucky few found mates in the same household, like Robin and Cuba, the married couple owned by attorney John Chambers; but even then, they were likely to be separated, eventually, by sale. James Alexander and Cadwallader Colden congratulated themselves on their own happy marriages (“I agree with you in the Commendations of the married State & believe where it hits right it yields the greatest Satisfaction in this Life,” Alexander wrote to Colden in 1730) even as they attempted to sever romantic attachments among their slaves: Colden wrote to a North Carolina man who had purchased his slave, Gabriel, in 1726, “Since you went my Negro Wench tells me that Gabrield designs to return if he do not like the place but as one reason of my selling him was to keep him from that Wench that I value You must not allow him to return.”31

  In New York, slave families most often lived apart. Running away usually meant running to visit a wife, a child, a parent. Nearly two thirds of runaway slaves in colonial New York were suspected of having fled to family members.32 But running away wasn’t always necessary. Since the city was so small, a man might live just doors away from his wife, or a mother just blocks away from her grown children; most family members must have lived less than a mile apart. In these circumstances, some spouses belonging to different owners managed to sleep together. Quack (Roosevelt) usually went to the fort to “stay there a-Nights with his Wife,” Barbara. On Sundays, while most whites went to church or stayed at home with their families, slaves spent their day of rest walking across the city to see family and friends. One Sunday, Ben (Marshall) and his wife together visited Jeffrey, owned by Captain Brown, and his wife, greeting them, “How d’ye do, how d’ye do, my Friends? ” Quack, a slave of an East Ward English butcher named John Walter, saw his wife, Maria, often, since her owner, Paul
Richards, lived in the same ward. Adam had been friends with Quack since childhood, when they played marbles together, but Quack preferred his wife’s company; when Adam sent for Quack to come to a plotting meeting, Quack, “being at Mr. Richard’s with his Wife, refused to go.”

  In the geography of the city, neighborhoods—or wards—mattered more to whites, especially property-owning white men, who elected ward aldermen, paid taxes to ward tax collectors, and, in general, organized their political, economic, and social lives around ward divisions.33 Slaves mapped the city differently. Daniel Horsmanden concluded that “the Conspiratorshad divided the City . . . into two Districts”: one at the east end of town, near the Fly Market, run by a gang called “the Fly-Boys”; and one at the west end, run by the “Long-Bridge Boys.” He may have been right. In any case, the slaves’ web of social connections stretched across the map, a pattern grimly, if persuasively, illustrated in their confessions: forced to name names, men jailed in the basement of City Hall almost never accused slaves only from their own wards; the men they named came from all across the city.

  Consider Caesar, owned by John Pintard, an alderman from the Dock Ward. Peggy Kerry named Caesar on May 7; he was arrested two days later. On June 1, Sandy told the grand jury that Caesar had attended the great meeting at Comfort’s; Sarah (Burk) agreed. On June 12, Jack (Sleydall) said Caesar was at Hughson’s “Great Feast.” Ten days later, Peter DeLancey’s slave Pompey told one of the judges that Caesar had initiated him into the conspiracy. Caesar confessed later that same day, availing himself, as Pompey had, of Clarke’s June 19 proclamation of amnesty. Before the ink was dry on Caesar’s confession, Cato (Moore) confessed too, and said that he had walked with Caesar to the feast at Hughson’s.

  How did Caesar’s accusers know him? Kerry had definitely met him somewhere: she correctly identified him in a lineup on May 9. Sandy probably knew Caesar as a neighbor; before Sandy was sold and sent to Albany, he, too, had lived in the Dock Ward. Sarah and Jack may not have known Caesar at all; maybe they offered his name because they had met him in jail. Pompey and Cato knew Caesar better; they were his friends, not his neighbors: Pompey lived in the East Ward and Cato in the South Ward. In accusing Caesar, Cato and Pompey by no means sent him to the gallows or the stake. They named him on the day that he himself confessed and they knew that in doing so they did little to worsen his situation; he, like them, was sure to be granted a pardon. Quite possibly, the three friends coordinated their confessions.

  In his own confession, Caesar accused twenty-three black men of involvement in the conspiracy. Nine of these men had already been executed, as Caesar well knew: Quack (Roosevelt), Caesar (Peck), Curacoa Dick (Tiebout), Cato (Provost), Fortune (Vanderspiegle), Cato (Cowley), Albany (Carpenter), Caesar (Vaarck), and Ben (Marshall). Eight had already been arrested as, again, Caesar well knew: Jack (Breasted), Tickle (Carpenter), Will (Ten Eyck), Prince (Crooke), Jack (Comfort), London (Wyncoop), Primus (DeBrosses), and Harry (Kipp). Six men were new to the inquiry, and were arrested following Caesar’s confession: Mars (Benson), York (Peck), London (French), Will (Vaarck), Tony (Brazier), and Bridgewater (Van Horne). These were the men Caesar betrayed.

  These last six names mattered most, not least because it was only by supplying new names that Caesar secured for himself a pardon. (As it would turn out, none of the six was executed; all were, like Caesar, ultimately pardoned and transported.) How did Caesar know these six men? Will and London lived in the Dock Ward and were, like Sandy, Caesar’s neighbors, at least in the limited sense of residing in the same ward. But Mars and York lived in the Montgomerie Ward, and Tony and Bridgewater in the East Ward. Their owners were neither all French, like Pintard, nor all Dutch, nor all English; nor were they all bakers, or all merchants or aldermen. In short, Caesar’s social network does not seem in any way to have followed his owner’s pattern of association.

  Caesar was accused nine more times after he confessed. But none of the people he named ever accused him, just as he did not accuse any of the people who had accused him. How Caesar knew Mars, York, Tony, and Bridgewater, and how Pompey and Cato knew him, is in all likelihood entirely unrecoverable. But that these men knew one another is indisputable. Their range of acquaintance spanned the city.

  Indeed, it seems altogether possible that every black man in New York knew every other black man in the city. Two hundred and fourteen black men and women were mentioned in the investigation of the conspiracy. Eighteen of these were women (of whom only one, Burk’s Sarah, was convicted). Of the remaining 196, 5 were described as “boys”: Sandy, Denby, Hereford, Cato (Richards), and Patrick. Sandy, age sixteen or seventeen, and Denby, Quack’s son, were not adults; but calling Hereford, Cato, and Patrick “boys” may have been more a reflection of status than age. (Whites, including John Hughson, commonly called grown black men “boys.”) The conspiracy was, above all, a fraternity. In 1741, there were probably about 450 black men over age sixteen living in New York.34 When Daniel Horsmanden said, “it seemed very probable that most of the Negroes in Town were corrupted,” he meant the men. Out of a possible adult black male population of about 450, nearly 200 were bound up in the conspiracy in one way or another. All 200, and even all 450, may well have known one another, at least in passing.

  Black women in New York spent much of the working day indoors, or near the house, cooking and doing domestic work. A 1734 classified ad enumerated the skills and virtues of “a Young Negro Woman, about 20 Year old, she dos all sorts of House work; she can Brew, Bake, boyle soaft Soap, Wash, Iron & Starch; and is a good darey Women she can Card and Spin at the great Wheel, Cotten, Lennen and Wollen, she has another good Property she neither drinks Rum nor smoaks Tobacco, and she is a strong hale healthy Wench, she can Cook pretty well for Rost and Boyld.” But black men spent much more of their time outdoors, working for day wages for their owners, doing skilled or unskilled work, hauling crates and barrels on the docks, building and repairing boats, carrying goods to and from markets and warehouses, walking across the city fetching tea water. John Roosevelt hired out Quack all the time: alongside dozens of black men from across the city, Quack helped build George Augustus’ Royal Battery, stone by stone. In 1731, when the city needed a new Watch House, the Common Council paid substantial wages to white bricklayers and carpenters but also smaller sums to a long list of slaveowners, no doubt the daily fee for hiring their slaves. Slaves owned by Elizabeth Carpenter, Peter Lowe, and John Roosevelt helped build the Watch House, working together for days.35 Carpenter’s Tickle and Albany; Lowe’s Juan and Sam; Roosevelt’s Jack and Quack—all probably worked together building that Watch House.

  Even if their trades and their unskilled labor and their errands didn’t take them across the city, black men circulated on Sundays, when they visited friends, wives, and children. All day and into the night, black men walked the streets of the city.

  Consider this walk described by Pedro, in a confession he made on June 29: “last Fall he went out one Sunday Morning with Mrs. Carpenter ’s Negro Albany; that as they went along the Broad-Way, they met with Mr. Slydall’s Jack, who was going to Comfort’s for Tea-Water; that at the Market near Mr. DeLancey’s House they met two other Negroes; and that Albany asked them all to go down to Hughson’s and drink with them.” Pedro lived in the East Ward with his owner, the Dutch merchant Peter DePeyster. Albany probably lived near the Old Slip Market, a meat market at the bottom of Smith Street, because his owner, the butcher Elizabeth Carpenter, rented a stall there (the Old Slip was once known as the “Great Flesh Market”).36

  The DeLancey house, on Broadway between Little Queen and Little Stone streets, was just south of the Broadway Market, in the middle of Broadway, at Crown Street. If Pedro began his trip in the East Ward, he would have had to walk south down Queen Street or Little Dock Street, to meet Albany near Carpenter’s house; north up Smith Street to Wall Street, which he would have followed for three blocks, past the Sugar Refinery, past City Hall, to Broadway, and from there northeast to the B
roadway Market to meet “two other Negroes”; and west to the river, down Crown or Cortlandt Street, which would put him and his three friends at Comfort’s pump—and that’s without accounting for where they picked up Jack, owned by Joshua Sleydall. Even if Pedro made up everything he said about what happened at Hughson’s (which he might have; he later recanted his confession), his walk there was so utterly ordinary a description of a slave’s Sunday morning as to be entirely plausible, both to him and to his interrogators.

  Nonetheless, ordinary as Pedro’s walk was, it violated several laws, including a 1730 act stipulating that “it shall not hereafter be lawful for above three Slaves to meet together att any other time, nor att any other place, than when it shall happen they meet in some servile Imploym’t for their Master’s or Mistress’s proffitt, and by their Master or Mistress consent, upon penalty of being whipt upon the naked back, at discretion of any Justice of the peace, not exceeding fforty Lashes.” Of Pedro and his four companions, only Jack (Sleydall) was “in some servile Implym’t”: fetching water. If the sun wasn’t yet up when Pedro left his house, and if he wasn’t carrying “A Lanthorn and lighted Candle in itt so as the light thereof may be plainly seen,” he was guilty of violating a municipal law prohibiting slaves from being in the streets in the dark without express permission. If, along the way, Pedro and his friends laughed too loudly, or hollered, or gambled for money, they would have violated another municipal law, passed in 1731, charging that “No Negro, Mulatto or Indian slaves, above the Number of three, do Assemble or meet together on the Lords Day Called Sunday, and Sport, Play or make any Noise or Disturbance, or at any Other time at any place from their Masters service, within this City.” If any of them was riding a horse, and rode it “Swiftly, Hastily, Precipately or disorderly, and Otherwise than softly Orderly Patiently without Pasing Swiftly, Trotting fast or Galloping,” he would have been guilty of breaking a city law “for Punishing Slaves who Shall Ride Disorderly through the Streets.” And if Pedro had met his friends on a market day and had tried to buy or sell fruit, they would have broken a law, passed in August 1740, “to Prohibit Negroes and Other Slaves Vending Indian Corn Peaches or any other Fruit with this City.”37