New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  The city’s Common Council passed all these laws, of course, because slaves did walk through the city at night, even without lanterns or candles; just as they met together and gambled and sold fruit and galloped on horseback. On weekdays, markets were the best place for black men to meet, especially the Meal Market, at the base of Wall Street, where newly arriving slaves were auctioned and black New Yorkers were hired out by the day. Powlus met Jack at the Meal Market at dusk. York and Jack took a walk there. Quack met Caesar there, the constables be damned. And damn the constables they did. When Fortune went to the fort with Quack (Roosevelt) after dark, he told him “he must be going; for that the Watch would take him up.” Quack laughed; “there was no Danger of that.” Visiting his wife, Barbara, at the fort every night, Quack knew how to avoid the watchmen.

  On Sundays, the only day of the week when markets were closed, black men and women went “frolicking in the Fields,” especially in summer. The Fields, a wide swath of land, north of the Negroes Burial Ground, thinly populated by scattered farms, stretched from the Bowery, on the east, all the way to the road to Greenwich, on the west. There were very few free blacks in New York, especially as manumission was all but impossible. But almost all of that handful of freed men and women lived in the Fields.

  “Mate, we wanted you very much last Night at a Frolick out of Town,” Curacoa Dick said to a friend, when they met “at a Well by the New Dutch Church” on a Sunday in the summer of 1740. “They had a free Dance and were very merry.” When Braveboy, owned by the widow Elizabeth Kiersted, confessed, he admitted that he “was at a Free Negroes (the Negro Man and his Wife Isabella present) at a House between Mr. Bayard’s Land and Greenwich Lane.”

  When Braveboy visited the house of Isabella and her husband, he was not alone. “Frolicks” were parties, where men and women danced together. In his confession, Braveboy supplied a list of those in attendance, both men and “wenches”:

  These summer Sunday frolicks, where husbands and wives and courting couples danced to fiddle music, never became a focal point of the investigation. They were utterly unlike the indoor all-male gatherings at Hughson’s and Comfort’s, and no one, not the grand jury, not Horsmanden, considered them particularly dangerous. Still, they were yet another example of exactly the “Excess of Liberty” Horsmanden condemned when he sentenced Quack and Cuffee to burn at the stake: “Ye abject Wretches, the Outcasts of the Nations of the Earth, are treated here with Tenderness and Humanity; and, I wish I could not say, with too great Indulgence also; for You have grown wanton with Excess of Liberty, and your Idleness has proved your Ruin; having given you the Opportunities of forming this villainous and detestable Conspiracy.” In this, Horsmanden took his lead from the 1736 Antigua report, in which investigators concluded that the plot there was “carried on by the very top Negroes of this Island, and such as were indulged in such liberty that they kept one or two Horses a piece.”38

  Yet, however much “liberty” some enslaved New Yorkers might have enjoyed, it was always fragile and nearly always illicit. Constables could catch, report, and punish slaves who were found out on the streets at night without their master’s permission. The most intimate of human relationships were vulnerable to that authority. Will, from Antigua, used to walk across the city to spend the night with his wife until the captain of the watch, Cornelius (“Major Drum”) Van Horne, decided to stop him. “Mr. Van Horn would not allow him to come to his Wife,”Will complained, and “would not allow a Candle.” (Instead, Will made a makeshift torch to find his way through the city at night, ducking behind buildings when the watch approached.) In the summer of 1740, “the Governor had forbid Quack coming to the Fort” to spend the night with his wife, and it was this, and nothing John Hughson ever said, that committed Quack to decide “that he would burn the Fort.” Of the thirteen black men burned at the stake in 1741, at least five—Will, Quack, Ben, Robin, and Cook—had wives who were also slaves, and probably children, too. To be married was a liberty that made slavery more painful still.

  Black men and women sought out one another’s company, on street corners and at frolicks and other gatherings. Some married, although slaveowners discouraged that. In any event, slave marriages were not legal, or legally binding; they were simply acknowledged, or not. Some black men, like Caesar, had sex with white women, like Peggy Kerry. But when friendship, sex, and love crossed racial lines, as they did for Caesar and Peggy Kerry, it was not without censure: Kerry was dubbed “Negro Peg.” In 1737, a New York bricklayer named William Carr divorced his wife, Anne, on the grounds that she had “behaved herself in an undecent and Wicked manner, by being to familiar with a Negro Man,” Carr’s slave Jonneau. Jonneau, charged with rape, was acquitted: the sex was voluntary. Anne was put to hard labor in the Poorhouse.39

  In New York, as in every slaveowning society, white men who owned female slaves could exploit them sexually and were never held accountable. When white women had sex with black men, the consequences were more dire. Horsmanden, who had spent his wayward youth visiting prostitutes in London, was sickened by the thought of Peggy Kerry and Caesar together. And Mary Burton refused to care for their baby; indeed, nothing incensed Burton more than when Cuffee flirted with her, telling her he would have her for his wife. In a world where slaveowners labored to keep black men and women separated and where white men preyed on black women, they worried, lusted, and fantasized, endlessly, about the reverse. In 1734, New York taxpayers paid an additional tax to cover a one-time sum of £28 used “for the prosecution Execution & Payment for a Negro Man Slave lately Convicted and Executed for attempting to Committ a Rape.” The alleged rapist, a slave of the French merchant Peter Vallet, was convicted of attempting to ravish a “pretty virtuous young Woman,” fourteen or fifteen years old, and sentenced to death after other evidence appeared “That said Negro had endeavoured to make the like Attempt on another Woman some Time before.” (There was some debate about whether the rape was attempted or completed—a consideration that mattered more to the girl’s reputation than to the man’s fate, since blacks, unlike whites, could be executed even for attempted rape—and it was claimed that Vallet’s slave had given up and fled after the girl cried out, “That she knew him and who was his Master.”) Vallet’s slave was burned at the stake, “in the Presence of a numerous Company of spectators, great part of which were of the Black Tribe,” where “he shew’d not the least sign of Repentance, but died like a Wretch harden’d in iniquity, for was hardly heard to Complain, only call’d for Water.”40

  Nor were public punishments for illicit interracial sex or for any challenge to the racial order limited to men. In February 1737, Rose, a “Malatto Slave,” was arrested “for damning the white Peoples Throats.” She was ordered taken “to the Common Whipping Post & there be striped from the middle upwards & receive upon the Naked back thirty nine lashes by the Common Whipper,” after which she was sold and shipped out of the colony. But before leaving the city she was to be “tied & Carried round some of the Wards of this City & receive on the Naked Back thirty Nine lashes more by the Common Whipper.”41

  In the face of this vulnerability, the talk at Comfort’s, damning white people’s throats, encouraged solidarity. At the great meeting at Comfort’s, when Cato’s friends told him “the Negroes were going to rise against the white People; and asked him whether he would join with them?” Cato replied, “he was not willing; he had no Occasion for it; for he lived well,” to which “Quash made answer, that he himself lived as well or better than he; and Ben said so did he; but ’twas a hard Case upon the poor Negroes, that they could not so much as take a Walk after Church-out, but the Constables took them up; therefore in order to be free, they must set the Houses on fire, and kill the white People.”

  If “Hughson’s Plot” was a Masonic prank translated by Daniel Horsmanden into a conspiracy that could be put to use attacking political parties, the “Negro Plot,” hatched at Jack’s, on street corners, and in markets, was the forging of an Akan-influenced brot
herhood and a political order that encouraged individual and collective acts of vengeance, of cursing whites and setting fires, skirmishes in the daily, unwinnable war of slavery. At Comfort’s, to the extent that men like Cato and Ben and Quash talked about freedom, this was the freedom many meant: the freedom to “take a Walk after Church-out,” to dance at a frolick, to spend the night with one’s wife, to play dice with one’s mates. Dutch merchant Abraham Leffert’s slave Pompey said his fellow conspirators promised him that if they set their masters’ houses on fire, “they would be all Free, and be free from Trouble.”

  HUGHSON’S PLOT and the “Negro Plot” overlapped: many of the same people met at both Hughson’s and Comfort’s, especially at two crucial holidays, Christmastime and Whitsuntide. “Whitsuntide” is the English name for what the Dutch called “Pinkster,” the seventh Sunday after Easter. In their confessions, a host of slaves dated their first knowledge of the conspiracy to Whitsuntide 1740. Sterling, owned by the English mariner Samuel Lawrence, said that he and Scipio, owned by a Dutchman named Abraham Abrahamse, had first gone to Hughson’s at Whitsuntide. London, a Spanish Indian whose master, Benjamin Wyncoop, was a Dutch silversmith, said he met several men on the street, who “asked him to go and drink Beer” at Hughson’s for Whitsuntide. Tom, owned by an English ship’s captain, Henry Rowe, admitted that he was there then, too. All of these confessions confirmed testimony that emerged at John Hughson’s trial, when Constables Joseph North, Peter Lynch, and John Dunscomb gave evidence that they had been tipped off about a Whitsuntide gathering at Hughson’s, and “when they came there, they went into the Room where the Negroes were round a Table, eating and drinking, for there was Meat on the Table, and Knives and Forks; and the Negroes were calling for what they wanted.” Constable North had “laid his Cane about them, and soon cleared the Room of them.”42

  What happened at Hughson’s at Whitsuntide happened again the following Christmas. In their confessions, dozens of New York slaves described their “Christmas Hollidays” as a feast and revel, a world turned upside down, where young white women served a lavish, bountiful meal to black men who were seated around a fine table—with a tablecloth— listening to music, as if they were gentlemen; pledging themselves to a secret society, in imitation of Masons; plotting to overthrow the government, like politicians. Mary Burton, who had only just come into Hughson’s service, was appalled by the role she was expected to play in this charade. As Horsmanden wrote, admiringly, Burton had a temper that could “ill brook the Ceremony of attending and serving upon Slaves.”

  But this topsy-turvy was exactly the point. Christmastime had long been celebrated in New York as a pagan carnival of turning the world upside down, of men dressing like women, and of wassailing, in which the rich gave gifts of money to the poor who wandered the streets and knocked at their doors. By the turn of the century, New Yorkers’ wassailing Christmases would become so notoriously riotous and, finally, so threatening to public order and to the sensibilities of an emerging white middle class that the whole holiday would be domesticated and moved indoors, along with the evergreen. New Yorkers like Clement Moore, who wrote “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in 1823, invented a fireside tradition of family gift-gifting, under the grandfatherly eye of Santa Claus, to put an end to the street carnival of poor and working-class whites and blacks. 43 Whitsuntide, meanwhile, moved to the streets.

  By the second half of the eighteenth century, black Pinkster, and a similar celebration in New England known as “Nigger ’Lection Day,” would become regular, publicly celebrated holidays. On both, crowds of slaves and free blacks met in town commons and city parks to drink and dance and elect a black man king. “The blacks their forces summon. / Tables & benches, chairs & stools / Rum-bottles, Gingerbread & bowls / Are lug’d into the common,” one white versifier wrote in Boston in 1760. Whites found these public celebrations farcical, hugely entertaining, and above all greatly reassuring, not unlike later minstrel shows, by convincing them that blacks were, finally, so childishly comic as to be entirely harmless. But for the men and women who took part in Negro Election Day and Pinkster (called by one historian “one of the most important and revealing cultural phenomena in the history of the black experience in America”), these ceremonies meant something much different: in their elections, they chose important, prominent men, often African-born, who in many cases actually ruled, serving as respected leaders within the black community.44

  Long before Pinkster and Negro Election Day were observed and recorded by whites, black elections, both mock and real, must have taken place privately, at places like John Hughson’s tavern. A tradition like Pinkster does not simply sprout from the earth in a day. When Joseph North and his fellow constables testified at Hughson’s trial, they drew for the court an alarming picture of role reversal at Hughson’s during Pinkster the previous spring. What Constable North, barging in, saw was only the most immediately obvious of these reversals: young white women waiting on black men, “The Negroes . . . calling for what they wanted.” It certainly irked the court. Philipse accused Hughson and his wife “not only of making Negro Slaves their Equals, but even their Superiors, by waiting upon, keeping with, and entertaining them, with Meat, Drink, and Lodging.”

  The black men who met at Hughson’s tavern called on Dutch and English holiday traditions; even more, they called on the tradition of Caribbean Christmas, or black saturnalia. In the British West Indies, the source of 65 percent of New York’s slave population, the holiday between Christmas and New Year’s when slaves were spared hard labor—the time of Hughson’s “Great Feast”—was celebrated by revels in which slaves were allowed into white men’s houses for feasts and entertainment and gifts. The carousing easily turned violent. And easily slipped into rebellion. Thirty-five percent of all slave rebellions in the British Caribbean took place at Christmastime.

  Not surprisingly, Caribbean slaveowners hated the holiday. But by the early eighteenth century, blacks had come so entirely to expect and demand it that Caribbean planters considered it more dangerous to abandon the practice than to continue it. And planters understood that the Christmas feasts and role reversals acted as a safety valve of sorts, allowing slaves to play at freedom rather than to fight for it. In mainland colonies, there was less experience with, and less tolerance for, Christmas revels, traditions imported by creole slaves. In South Carolina in 1739, just after the Stono Rebellion, the Assembly asked the lieutenant governor to order the military “to draw out of their respective Companies a Number of Men sufficient to patrol in the Christmas Holy Days,” for fear that slaves would stage another rebellion over the holidays, “a Time of general Liberty to the Slaves throughout the Province.”45 Most white New Yorkers had even less familiarity with holiday role reversals, and little ability to measure their degree of frivolity or seriousness. Horsmanden, for one, complained about blacks’ “fictitious hypocritical Grins.” He couldn’t tell when he was being played. Maybe John Hughson couldn’t either.

  BLACK NEW YORKERS brought Caribbean traditions to bear on Dutch and English holidays, which nicely mixed, at Hughson’s, with mock Masonry and, at Jack’s, with Akan ritual. The city’s “Spanish Negroes” may have attended gatherings at both places—they were certainly accused of being there, and of being part of a “Spanish Plot.” But while they undoubtedly complained about the injustice of their enslavement (as they would at their trial), there is very little evidence that they plotted to destroy the city. The “Spanish Plot” was invented, as much by black as by white New Yorkers, the latter fearing what the former wished for: that the “Spanish and York Negroes” were joined in common cause.

  On April 6, 1741, after the houses on either side of Jacob Sarly’s had been set on fire, panicked citizens cried: “The Spanish Negroes; Take up the Spanish Negroes.” Constables arrested Sarly’s slave, Juan de la Silva, and as many more Spanish slaves as they could find, including Antonio de St. Bendito, owned by Peter DeLancey, the Chief Justice’s brother; Antonio de la Cruz,
owned by a widow named Sarah Mesnard; Pablo Ventura Angel, owned by the English brewer Frederick Becker; and Augustine Gutierrez, owned by the Scotsman John Macmullen. In court, all of these men, “lately imported into this City as Prize Slaves,” claimed to be free men, a claim that cast questions of slavery and freedom into sharp relief.

  Many of the Spanish slaves in New York City had been captured by John Lush, captain of the twenty-gun sloop Stephen and Elizabeth, the first privateer to sail from New York in the War of Jenkins’s Ear. Lush had sailed from New York in the fall of 1739, just weeks after England declared war against Spain. He captured two Spanish schooners off the coast of Cuba and a Spanish sloop off Port-au-Prince. All but one of the sailors on these three vessels jumped ship and swam to shore, or drowned trying. Near Mexico, Lush sighted “a large French Ship who hoisted Spanish Colours, and answered the Capt. in Spanish.” After a fierce battle, Lush captured this ship and its treasure of 22,000 pieces-of-eight, and then “sent to Jamaica, to know if there was War with France”—to learn whether he had any right to take this prize.

  Only after a month of waiting did word come that there was, as yet, no war with France. Lush had no choice but to release the ship and relinquish the prize. “But the Crew not liking of this, 30 of his Men mutiny’d.” The rest of the crew managed to suppress the mutineers and the Stephen and Elizabeth sailed to Jamaica, where Lush left the mutineers, replaced them with new men, and sailed to Porto Bello, off Panama. This time, he had better success in finding Spanish ships, and in taking their crews prisoner, as they were too far from shore to swim. By April 1740, the New York Gazette was able to report that Lush “has taken two extraordinary Rich Prizes, and is coming home with them.” With a crew of only thirty-five men, Lush had by now one hundred Spanish prisoners in his hold, and commanded not only the Stephen and Elizabeth but the two prizes, the Nuestra Señora de la Vittoria and the Solidad, with all their cargo. He landed in New York on April 26, and, for his extraordinary triumph, was greeted by the deafening salute of all the guns on all the ships in the harbor.46