New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Among Lush’s one hundred Spanish prisoners were “Nineteen Negroes and Molattoes.” In presenting his prize to the New York Admiralty Court in May, Lush said that these nineteen men were slaves, and, as they could present no evidence to the contrary, the court declared them to be so. Eighteen were subsequently sold at auction. Lush kept one man, William, for himself.47

  Inspired by Lush’s success, Captain Benjamin Kiersted sailed his sloop, the Humming Bird, for Curaçao in July 1740. That October, he captured at least two vessels, and at least two “Spanish Negroes,” including Pablo Ventura Angel. But on his return to New York, Kiersted’s prize became the subject of dispute.48

  Meanwhile, Lush’s reputation had suffered as well. He had been accused of gross misconduct by one Lieutenant Wimbleton, a British naval officer. By February 1741, Lush had been arrested on an Admiralty warrant. Although bail was set at £2,000, Lush convinced the Admiralty judge, Lewis Morris, Jr., to reduce it to £40. On May 12, Lush’s case came before the Vice Admiralty Court, and Morris again ruled in Lush’s favor, charging a commission to inquire into the credibility of Wimbleton as a witness.49

  New York’s Vice Admiralty Court met at City Hall, in the same courtroom used by the Supreme Court. William Smith, Richard Bradley, and James Alexander practiced before that court. In the spring of 1741, Alexander acted as attorney in at least two cases before the Admiralty Court, involving Vincent Pearse, captain of the Flamborough, and Benjamin Kiersted, master of the Humming Bird. Daniel Horsmanden had served as justice on the Admiralty Court beginning in 1736, but Morris had replaced him in 1738. In his Journal, Horsmanden made no mention of the meetings of the Admiralty Court, but the two courts often met on the same day, and in the same room, and it’s impossible that Horsmanden was unaware of the proceedings in Admiralty, which were, in any event, very much related to his own criminal investigation. On May 12, 1741, both courts were in session: in the morning, the Supreme Court heard indictments in King v. John Hughson and Sarah his Wife, and Horsmanden ordered Mills to put Cuffee in the same cell with Arthur Price; in the afternoon, after the Supreme Court had adjourned, John Lush’s case came before the Admiralty Court. Not long afterward, “Spanish Negroes” became a focus of Horsmanden’s investigation.

  On May 22, Sandy told the grand jury that he had heard Lush’s slave Will say that “if they did not send him over to his own Country, he would ruin the City.” In this and subsequent interrogations, Sandy impeached several other “Spanish Negroes,” too, saying that he had heard them talk on the street, and at Comfort’s, about a plot to burn the city down. Jack placed them at Hughson’s: “There were Spanish Negroes at Hughson’s,” Ben had told Jack, and “they had Designs of taking this Country.” Hughson promised to unify the (New) York and Spanish slaves, Jack said: “he would go before, and be their KING, and would mix them one amongst another when they came to fight.” A conspiracy of slaves across the city now seemed to stretch across the Atlantic: Jack’s confession transformed the plot into an international conspiracy. At Hughson’s, he said, the city’s slaves, New Yorkers and Spaniards, “agreed to wait a Month and half for the Spaniards and French to come,” before setting the city on fire. The fire at Fort George, Patrick said, was to serve as a signal to the Spanish that the rebellion had begun.

  Bastian’s was the first in a long procession of confessions to corroborate this; he said, “they expected that War would be proclaimed in a little time against the French; and that the French and Spaniards would come here.” “By-and by this will be put in the News,” Cato (Moore) told Dundee, as they watched the fort burn, “and then the Spaniards will come and take us all.”

  It was not implausible. The Spanish could very well have hoped to incite rebellion among New York’s slaves, in preparation for an attack on the city. And news of the war could easily have informed or even directed, the actions of some of New York’s slaves, Spanish or no. Spain had earlier published a proclamation “declaring Freedom to all Negroes, and other slaves, that shall Desert from the English Colonies.” A handful of slaves in South Carolina had fled to Spanish St. Augustine, and the Spanish governor there had refused to return them. South Carolina’s 1739 Stono Rebellion took place the very weekend that official word reached Charleston that England and Spain were at war.50 Two years later, New York’s Fort George was set on fire just as word was arriving in the city that England was now also, if only unofficially, at war with France. When asked to raise more troops to fight against the Spanish, Clarke reported to the Lords of Trade, in late June, that no men in New York would be willing to leave the city, because the slave conspiracy “has begat a general opinion that no man ought to leave his habitation to go out of the Province and the apprehension of a French warr as this is a frontier Province will make every one, who has any thing at stake industrious to discourage men from inlisting themselves for this expedition.”51 What Spain promised led New York slaves to seek alliance with “Spanish Negroes,” and, later, to betray them in their confessions, but there is little evidence that Spanish slaves joined either “Hughson’s Plot” or the “Negro Plot.”

  TH E FIRST SPANISH slave tried for conspiracy was Francis, on June 10. He spoke barely any English, and an interpreter was called to serve at his trial. Still, Jack (Comfort) and Mary Burton, neither of whom spoke Spanish, were able to testify against him. Francis was burned at the stake on June 12. The next day, five more Spanish slaves were indicted: Juan de la Silva, Pablo Ventura Angel, Augustine Gutierrez, Antonio de la Cruz, and Antonio de St. Bendito. They pled not guilty and their trial was scheduled for June 15.

  In the basement of City Hall, the five men arrived at a strategy for their defense. The next morning, Philipse and Hormanden called the “Spanish Negroes” to the bar to be tried. “But they complained,” Horsmanden said, “that they had great Injustice done them by being sold here as Slaves; for that, as they pretended, they were Freemen in their own Country.” They also “gave in their several Sir-names,” asserting, by this too, that they were free men. While the court considered the question, their trial was postponed until Wednesday, June 17.

  Horsmanden suspected that someone had given the prisoners legal advice. He believed this because their protestation of freedom had an important legal consequence: if the Spanish slaves were free men, the testimony of slaves could not be allowed against them, leaving only Mary Burton, who did not understand Spanish and was therefore a weak witness against them, to testify for the prosecution. “Should it be credited that they could speak only in a Tongue which she did not understand,” Horsmanden believed “their Advisers” had suggested, “how could she tell what passed between them in Conversation at Hughson’s ? ”

  On Tuesday, as scheduled, “three Negroes were hang’d, and two burnt alive,” as Zenger reported in the Weekly Journal. All five had been tried on June 13: Fortune, owned by John Vanderspiegle; Cato, owned by Joseph Cowley; a second Cato, owned by the Dutch cooper John Provost; Quash, owned by the Dutch brewer Hermanus Rutgers, Jr.; and Ben, who had kept the list. At their sentencing on June 15, Horsmanden told Fortune and “you two Catoes” that they were but “inferior Agents,” yet he called Ben “a deep Politician” and damned him for his “hypocritical, canting Behaviour” during his trial—although what Ben had done, besides protest his innocence, was unrecorded. Horsmanden warned, “unless you acknowledge every one his Guilt, and bewail it with hearty Sorrow, and sincere Tears of Repentance; and beseech his Forgiveness; laying open the whole wicked Scheme, and discovering your several Confederates and Accomplices, all the Parties concerned. . . . Upon these Conditions only can you expect Mercy at the Hands of God Almighty.” At the end of his lengthy speech, the Third Justice concluded: “It is a very tiresome Task to pronounce that Sentence which the Law requires of us; for we delight not in any Man’s Blood; but the Law adjudges you unfit to live.” On the morning of June 16, both Catos and Fortune were hanged, before a large crowd. After a break for lunch, New Yorkers headed once again to the outskirts of town. In the afte
rnoon, Ben and Quash were burned. Zenger reported, “they all of them died hardned, professing innocency to the last.”52

  In between attending the executions, Philipse and Horsmanden spent the day considering the Spanish slaves’ complaint. They arrived at a rather astonishing solution: they would try the “Spanish Negroes” on two separate indictments; on one, as slaves, and on the other, as free men. On Wednesday, De la Silva, Ventura Angel, Gutierrez, De la Cruz, and De St. Bendito were arraigned on a second indictment, “for counselling and advising the Negro Quack, to burn the Fort.” In this indictment, their surnames were included. In the trial that followed, the five Spaniards were tried on both charges; on the first charge, of conspiracy, they were tried as slaves, against whom “Negro Evidence” was admissible; on the second charge, of counseling Quack, they were tried as free men, and only Mary Burton’s testimony was allowed.

  The “Spanish Negroes” had gained but a partial victory; Philipse and Horsmanden had refused to rule on whether they were slave or free and instead determined to prosecute them, whatever their status. Still, Juan de la Silva and his comrades had argued effectively. And when the trial began, the defendants also conducted what was by far the most elaborate and effective defense of any enslaved men accused in the conspiracy. Did they arrive at their strategy by themselves, or were they advised by someone else, someone with intimate knowledge of the law?

  One possibility is that James Alexander advised them. On April 23, Alexander had agreed with “all the Gentlemen of the Law” to aid the prosecution, and to take turns in trying prisoners. He had served at the trial of John and Sarah Hughson and Peggy Kerry, but, even there, it’s not at all clear what service he really offered. He neither opened nor closed to the jury; nor was he identified as examining specific witnesses; his name was simply listed as one of the “COUNCIL for the KING.” Alexander appears to have been equally inactive at the trial of the five Spaniards on June 17. Chambers opened the indictment and summed up against De la Cruz and De St. Bendito; Murray summed up against Gutierrez and De la Silva. (Richard Bradley, who was ill, was unable to attend.) And after Alexander’s brief and silent appearance at City Hall on June 17, he did not return to the courtroom for the duration of the proceedings against the city’s slaves. Alexander, it seems, boycotted the trials.53

  It is possible, but impossible to prove, that Alexander believed the Spanish slaves were innocent or even that they were free; or he may, by now, have become alarmed by the direction of the proceedings and the pace of the executions. He was, in any event, well aware of the proceedings in the Admiralty Court against Kiersted and Lush, and the fate of the “Spanish Negroes” may have had some bearing on his clients’ cause in that court (although, since those records are lost, this is impossible to determine). Alexander could easily have met with the defendants either before their original trial date, June 15, or on June 16.

  In any event, in the courtroom on June 17, Alexander sat, passively, as a member of the prosecution. Mordecai Gomez served as an interpreter. Murray and Chambers trotted out the evidence against the defendants: the confessions of Quack and Cuffee were read aloud; Mary Burton, Sandy, Jack, Tickle, and Bastian appeared on the witness stand. Burton testified that she had seen the defendants at Hughson’s, where, even if she couldn’t understand what the Spaniards had said, the plot was the “common talk.” She had also heard Hughson say that the Spanish slaves “would burn Lush’s House, and tie Lush to a Beam, and roast him like a Piece of Beef.” On the street in front of Lush’s house, Sandy had seen De St. Bendito and other Spaniards point to the house and pledge, “D—m that Son of a B—h, if he did not carry them to their own Country, they would ruin the City.” He and Jack, Tickle and Bastian dutifully reported seeing the defendants at Comfort’s, or Hughson’s, or both. To answer the defendants’ complaint that they were free men, the prosecution called Richard Nichols, who served as Deputy Register of the Admiralty, to testify that all of the defendants had been properly and legally claimed as prizes.

  The defendants proceeded to call no fewer than twelve witnesses. All five of their owners took the stand, and four offered testimony supporting the defendants’ alibis, which rested on the wretched state of their health during their first winter in New York. Peter DeLancey said De St. Bendito had been at DeLancey’s farm in the country from before Christmas until after the fort fire, and had been made lame with frostbite “after the first great Snow.” Sarah Mesnard said De La Cruz had been similarly crippled, and hadn’t been able to come downstairs all winter. Neither man had decent boots. Frederick Becker agreed that Ventura Angel had been sick in bed, too, and John Macmullen said Gutierrez “had an Ague” and “kept his Bed most of the Time.” Nor were these defenses frivolous; De la Cruz presented two doctors, Francis DuPuy and Francis DuPuy, Jr., who had treated him for feet so injured “that he could not walk.” The other defendants produced more witnesses to their incapacity. Of the five men accused, only Juan de la Silva was well enough to have walked to Comfort’s or Hughson’s in January or February. But he offered a defense more powerful than an alibi: when De la Silva examined his own owner on the witness stand, Jacob Sarly was forced to admit that “he had heard that his Negro was free.”

  In separate statements to the court, each defendant also asserted his status as a free man by telling the court that he “had not kept Company with any Negroes since he came to [this] Country” because he “ had not been used to keep Company with Negroes” at home. This point was taken up by the judges in their instructions to the jury, in which Philipse and Horsmanden asked jurors to put aside the question of whether the defendants were free: “be they Freemen, or be they Slaves, the main Question before you is, whether they, or any, or which of them are guilty of the Charge against them.” Arguing that there had been “no sufficient or proper Evidence” that the defendants were actually free, the judges instructed the jury that “all the Negro Evidence which has been given upon this Trial against them, is legal Evidence.”

  But even if the jurors were persuaded that the defendants were free, there remained the charge of abetting Quack’s crime, and the testimony of Mary Burton, who neither spoke nor could understand Spanish. Here, the judges admitted the weakness of that case: “To prove the Charge in this Indictment, there was the Testimony of Mary Burton; I must observe to you, that her Testimony, as to the Charge in this Indictment, is single; there is no other Witness; but nevertheless, Gentlemen, one Witness is sufficient; and if you give Credit to her Testimony, you will, no doubt, discharge a good Conscience, and find them Guilty; If you should have sufficient Reason in your own Minds to discredit her Testimony, if you can think so, you must then acquit them.”

  These were the most balanced jury instructions given in the entire course of the conspiracy proceedings, undoubtedly because the case rested on very weak evidence. But the jury found the defendants guilty on both counts after half an hour of deliberation. Sentencing all four to be hanged, Horsmanden put it to them that if “they were Free-men, they ought in all Reason to have waited the Event of the War, and suffr’d patiently under their Misfortune; and when Peace should have been concluded, they might have made the Truth of their Pretensions appear, and then Justice would have been done to them.”

  AT JUST THIS POINT, in mid-June, Joseph Murray’s slave Adam began behaving strangely: “he appeared very uneasy and disturbed in his Mind.” Murray owned five slaves: Adam, Jack, Caesar, Congo, and Dido. As Murray trudged to City Hall day after day, prosecuting black conspirators, he became more and more suspicious of the black men who lived in his attic, and in his cellar. And, as Murray’s slaves saw Quack, Cuffee, Ben, and Quash burned, and more men hanged, they too grew edgy. Murray was busy in his study, preparing his cases: on June 17, he prosecuted the “Spanish Negroes”; on June 19, he prosecuted York and London, both owned by the Dutch baker Peter Marschalk; Harry, owned by the widow Katherine Kipp; and yet another Cato, this man the property of John Shurmur.

  On June 25, Murray’s slave Jack was acc
used. Brash, owned by the French merchant Peter Jay, who lived not far from Murray’s house in the West Ward, told one of the judges that once “He and Mr. Murray’s Jack went for Tea-Water to Comfort’s,” and from there they walked to John Hughson’s house, where “Hughson carried Jack up Stairs, and swore him of this Plot . . . ; and Jack agreed to burn his Master’s Stable, his House, and to murder his Master and Mistress.” Philipse and Horsmanden recommended Brash for pardon and ordered Jack arrested. Murray must have been horrified, though hardly surprised, to learn that his own slave had placed live coals under a haystack in his coachhouse in April.

  On the night of June 25, constables arrested Jack at Murray’s house on Broadway. The next morning, while Murray was at City Hall conducting the prosecution of Prince, owned by Anthony Duane, and Tony, owned by the English ship’s carpenter John Latham, Adam, at home, “came several Times into the Clerk’s Office, with a seeming Intention to disclose some Secret; the young Gentleman at last took Notice of it, and shutting the Door too, asked him, Whether he knew any Thing of the Plot?” Adam said no, but added, “he was afraid some Dog or another would owe him a Spite, and bring him in.”