New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  The suspected priest did not elude capture for long. On June 24, constables arrested a man the court, and especially James DeLancey, would come to consider far more dangerous, blacker, than even John Hughson: John Ury, “alias JURY, who had lately come into this City, and entered into Partnership with Campbell, a School Master, pretending to teach Greek and Latin.” Mary Burton was summoned to City Hall to identify him and describe his role in the plot, despite her insistence, in her very first deposition before the grand jury on April 22, that “ she never saw any white Person in Company when they talk’d of burning the Town, but her Master, her Mistress,and Peggy.”

  But before Daniel Horsmanden, Burton swore that “the Person . . . shewn to her in Prison, lately taken into Custody on Suspicion of being a Roman Catholick Priest, is the same Person she has often seen at the House of John Hughson.” She was not certain of his name (“whether by the Name of JURY or URY, or DOYLE, she cannot now depose positively; but to the best of her Remembrance, some of his Names consisted only of one Syllable, and believes she has heard him called by all the said three Names”).10 But she knew this much: he had come to Hughson’s almost every night since Christmas, and, although he slept there, he was always gone by the time she woke up. Careful not to contradict her earlier deposition—that she had not seen any other whites but the Hughsons and Kerry talk of the conspiracy—Burton made clear that while she had never heard Ury speak of the conspiracy, “she esteemed his Actions and Behaviour to signify his Approbation and Consent.” And although she had no real evidence that he was actually a priest, she offered an anecdote: once, “when the Negroes had provoked her, she wished those black Toads at the Devil,” to which Ury replied, “let them be black, or what they will, the Devil has nothing to do with them; I can forgive them their Sins, and you yours too.”

  Two days later, Joseph Murray’s slave Adam said that Hughson had told him “there was a Man that he knew that could forgive him all his Sins.” What Tom and Adam had to say about Ury was useless, since it was “Negro Evidence” and inadmissible against a white man. Added to Burton’s comically corrupt testimony about Ury, it hardly amounted to damning evidence. But when James DeLancey returned to the city and assessed the suspects in jail, he quickly came to consider John Ury the most suspicious among them, and determined to collect evidence against him.

  On July 5, DeLancey and Horsmanden met at City Hall and together interrogated William Kane, the soldier who had been implicated by Will at the stake. Kane’s great vulnerability to prosecution was that he had been born in Ireland (he had moved to the colonies at the age of six). DeLancey and Horsmanden accused him of being a Catholic. Kane denied it and “Professed himself a Protestant of the Church of England; and said, that he never was at any Roman Catholick Congregation in his Life.” Nor would he admit to knowing John Ury, “nor had he any Acquaintance with him; nor was he ever at any Congregation or Meeting where the said Jury, alias Ury, either preached or pray’d.” At this point in Kane’s interrogation, James Mills, the jailkeeper, entered the room and told Kane “that Mary Burton had declared, that she had often seen him at Hughson’s. ” Burton, who had been waiting outside the door, was ordered into the room, where she identified Kane and declared her eagerness to offer another deposition, one in which she again risked perjuring herself.

  Burton’s zeal, apparently, gave DeLancey pause. “The Chief Justice, who was a Stranger to the Transactions concerning the Detection of the Conspiracy,” found Burton’s eagerness to accuse Kane alarming. He admonished her “in an awful and solemn Manner, concerning the Nature of an Oath, and the Consequences of taking a false one, more especially as it affected a Man’s Life.” Burton was not to be intimidated. “She was acquainted with the Nature of an Oath very well,” she said, and “would not take a false one upon any Account.” Burton was sworn, and deposed that Kane, whom she had never mentioned before, had talked with Hughson and his confederates about the plot. She had now directly contradicted her April 22 deposition.

  Kane looked as if he might faint, and was given a glass of water. Told that, given Burton’s deposition, he “must not flatter himself with the least Hopes of Mercy,” he decided to confess. After two hours of questioning, his statement was read aloud to him, and “(not knowing how to write) he put his Mark to it.”

  William Kane was the first white New Yorker to confess to participating in a plot hatched at John Hughson’s house. Parts of his confession followed the formula of earlier slave confessions: “he was at two Meetings at Hughson’s about the Plot; the First was the second Day of Christmas, and the Second the last Sunday in February, before the Fire at the Fort.” (Before Will named Kane, however, not a single slave had mentioned him in their confessions.) Hughson had sworn him into a plot to burn the city: “Their Design was to wait for the French and Spaniards, whom they expected; and if they did not come in six Weeks, then they were to try what they could do for themselves. ” Hughson would be king and Caesar “the Chief among the Negroes.” Here was a slight departure: in Kane’s new colonial order, Caesar was noticeably not to become the governor of all New Yorkers, white and black, but only chief of the blacks.

  Most of Kane’s account, however, was at even greater variance with the slave confessions—it had nothing to do with the “Negro Plot,” but was, instead, a new spin on Hughson’s Plot. For one thing, “he, Kane, never was at Comfort’s.” He had no grievance against slavery, he made no complaints about his inability to move freely about the town, and he mentioned nothing about meetings at markets or frolicks at the Bowery. Kane also described a bizarre initiation rite that had never been mentioned in any earlier interrogation or confession: “there was a black Ring made on the Floor about two Foot and a half Diameter; and Hughson bid every one pull off the left Shoe and put their Toes within the Ring, and Mrs. Hughson held a Bowl of Punch over their Heads as the Negroes stood round the Circle, and Hughson pronounced the Oath”—the slaves swore by thunder and lightning that “G-d ’s Curse and Hell Fire fall on them that first discovered the Plot”—“and then Hughson’s Wife fed them with a Draught out of the Bowl.”

  This mystical ceremony was only for blacks, Kane said. Whites separately swore a piratical pledge: “he first who discovered it was to be hanged at Low-Water Mark; his Privy-Parts were to be cut out and thrown in his Face; his Belly ript open, and his Body eaten by the Birds of the Air.” It was a saltier version of the Masonic pledge to maintain secrecy on pain of “no less Penalty than to have my Throat cut, my Tongue taken from the Roof of my Mouth, my Heart pluck’d from under my Left Breast, them to be buried in the Sands of the Sea . . . my Body to be burnt to Ashes and be scatter’d upon the Face of the Earth.” It sounded like nothing so much as the hazing that hapless Daniel Rees had suffered in Philadelphia, at the hands of the mock Mason Evan Jones. Since Masonry was spread, throughout the British Empire, largely by lodges attached to regiments of the British Army, Kane may well have had firsthand experience of it.11

  The Priest’s Plot to which William Kane confessed was not actually a slave conspiracy at all; it was a conspiracy of clandestine Catholics, with allegiances to France and Spain. “Most of the Negroes he believed would join them,” Kane said, but this was a white conspiracy, a papist plot. It was also a conspiracy of the poor against the rich. “We were to kill the principal people,” Kane said. Sworn to this plot, he said, was a crew of white men, two of them soldiers—Peter Connolly and Edward Kelly—and most of them poor—Jerry Corker, John Coffin, David Fagan, Henry Holt, and John Ury, “a little Man” in the city “who acted as Priest” and whose part in the plot was “to burn the English Church.” Added to these were not only Hughson and his wife but Hughson’s father and brothers and his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Luckstead.

  By far the oddest element in William Kane’s confession, which must have both troubled and thrilled James DeLancey and Daniel Horsmanden, was his description of what would happen in New York after the victory: the conspirators “were to burn what they could of the City, and g
et what Money and Goods they could and carry them to Mr. Alexander’s House, which was to be reserved for Hughson.” James Alexander, who had quite successfully kept himself and his slaves at arm’s length from the investigation during DeLancey’s absence, had now become ensnared, and within just days of DeLancey’s return. Alexander’s opulent, elegant house had been intended, Kane said, as King Hughson’s castle, the seat of iniquity, the papist palace.

  WILLIAM KANE CONFESSED on July 4. John Hughson’s four brothers, Nathaniel, Richard, Walter, and William, along with his father, Thomas—all farmers from outside the city—had been arrested on June 12, although there was no evidence against them until Kane’s confession. Jerry Corker and Daniel Fagan eluded arrest. Of the other new white conspirators Kane named, only the two soldiers, Peter Connolly and Edward Kelly, were already in jail; they had been arrested during the last week of June, as suspected papists. Three more white men Kane accused were arrested in the days following his confession: John Coffin, a peddler; David Johnson, a hatmaker; and another soldier, Edward Murphy. These men, like Kane himself, came from the city’s vast population of poor whites, unskilled or semi-skilled servants, soldiers, sailors, and apprentices. Most worked alongside slaves, in their masters’ houses, along the docks, at the market, in shops. They also drank in the same taverns. Crime was interracial, too. The Geneva Club, that gang of thieves who first banded together in 1738, included not only Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee, but also John Hughson; Christopher (“Yorkshire”) Wilson, the sailor on the Flamborough; and probably Arthur Price, servant of that ship’s captain. Fagan, Corker, Connolly, Kelly, Coffin, Johnson, and Murphy may have been perfectly innocent of anything but an acquaintance with William Kane; it is just as likely they were petty smugglers who drank at Hughson’s and sometimes traded with him.

  Whether or not these particular men were a part of it, a loose network of black and poor white thieves and smugglers apparently brought their takings to Hughson in exchange for the occasional feast and the more reliable dram of rum or bowl of punch. Just such an assortment of men— Caesar, Prince, Cuffee, Wilson, and Hughson—was behind the theft of Rebecca Hogg’s silver and linen. One of Hogg’s servants may also have been involved in the robbery. Just after Kane confessed and began naming his mates, Francis Jones, “a Welchman born,” ran away from his master, Robert Hogg. Hogg took out an ad in the Weekly Journal offering 20 shillings for his return, describing Jones as “a Tall thin Man of a sickly Couler, about six foot three Inches high or there about, by Trade a Tanner, and Stiles himself a Prize fighter.” After Jones ran away on July 11, he disappeared. 12

  Many of the city’s working poor were Welsh. But Kane and most of the men he named were Irish, like Mary Burton and Peggy Kerry, and formed the overwhelming number of the city’s poor, many of them recent arrivals. Soldiers like Kane and Kelly had probably been driven into the British Army by the Irish famine of 1740–41, the bliadhain an air (“year of the slaughter”).13

  Beginning with Kane’s confession, Horsmanden and DeLancey made much of the Gaelic origins of their suspects. The fire at the fort, it was now recalled, took place on March 18, the day after St. Patrick’s Day. Evidence was quickly discovered that the fire was intended for the night of St. Patrick’s Day itself, but was delayed. The conspirators, Horsmanden said, “could not have pitch’d upon a fitter Season for perpetrating their bloody Purposes; for on this Night, according to Custom, their Commemoration of their Saint, might be most likely to excite in those of the infernal League, Boldness and Resolution.”

  That Kane named poor Irishmen to the conspiracy was new, and especially gratifying to prosecutors. But parts of Kane’s confession followed accusations made by Adam on June 27. Adam said that he had met “a little short man four or five Times at Hughson’s, who used to teach school at Campbell’s.” John Ury had been brought to Adam’s interrogation room, and Adam had said that yes, this was the man. Like Kane, Adam had also named Henry Holt, stating that “he saw Holt, the Dancing-Master, at Hughson’s about New-Year Hollidays, at a Meeting of the Negroes, and another white Man belonging to him, whom they called Doctor,” whom Horsmanden identified as “Hamilton, a pretended Doctor who lodged at Holt’s.” At the heart of Adam and Kane’s confessions, then, were four skilled white men: a Dr. Hamilton (whose first name was never mentioned); John Ury, a Latin instructor; John Campbell, a schoolmaster who had leased John Hughson’s house after he was arrested; and Henry Holt, a dancing master.

  Hamilton, Holt, Campbell, and Ury fit Oglethorpe’s description perfectly. Hamilton, the “pretended Doctor,” was never found, or any better identified. Holt, who had probably brought Freemasonry to New York with him from Charleston, had served as a live-in tutor for James DeLancey’s children (Kane talked about Holt badly whipping his slave Joe “the Year he left Mr. DeLancey’s House”), but he had, rather suspiciously, left the city in March, just after the fire at Fort George. Taking Joe with him, Holt moved to Jamaica. Campbell had opened a school just that spring; beginning on March 30 he advertised in Zenger’s Weekly Journal: “ENGLISH, Latin, Greek, Writing, Arithmetick and Merchant’s Accompts, carefully Taught at the House of John Campbell’s, School Master, living in Bridge Street, New York. N.B. And Youth boarded reasonably.”14 But by early June, Campbell’s school had failed and he had been confined to the debtor’s prison, in the garret of City Hall.

  On June 18, just after Oglethorpe’s letter arrived in New York, Tom told the grand jury that Cuffee had said that if he thought the plot was “a wrong Thing, or a Sin, there was a Man that he knew, that could forgive him.” Constables must have scoured the city for possible priests disguised as teachers and doctors. Holt was gone, Hamilton nowhere to be found, Campbell hapless. John Ury was the best they could find. He had only recently arrived in the city, he had lodged at Campbell’s, and had tutored in private homes. He was arrested on June 24. First Mary Burton identified him, then Adam, and then William Kane. John Ury was doomed.

  TO B E A Roman Catholic priest was illegal in New York in 1741, a crime punishable by death. To be a priest disguised as something else—and, since being a priest was illegal, all priests were disguised—was to be a conjuror, a traitor, a liar, a seducer of women, a confidence man, a spy, a corrupter of children, an agent of the devil, a tyrant, a regicide in the making. This followed a long English tradition. In the conclusion to Horsmanden’s Journal,he quoted at length from a great wealth of English anti-Catholic literature, “treating of the Intrigues of the Popes and Papists” through the reigns of several English monarchs.15 In Farquhar’s Beaux’ Stratagem, “the mother of all this mischief is a priest,” whom Scrub is able to see through his disguise “Because he speaks English as if he had lived here all his life, and tells lies as if he had been a traveler from his cradle.” 16 To be a priest was to be false, cruel, wanton, lecherous, deceitful, treacherous, ruthless, and bloodthirsty.

  To be a priest was to forgive sins, and thereby to exonerate the evilest of deeds among the basest of peoples. A New York Act against Jesuits and Popish Priests, passed in 1691, accused “Jesuits and Popish Missionaries” of laboring “to debauch, seduce, and withdraw the Indians from their due Obedienceto his sacred Majesty, and to excite and stir them up to Sedition, Rebellion, and open Hostility against his Majesty’s Government.” Priests might call Indians to war, and slaves to rebellion. They might stand the empire on its head.

  But while it was true that New Yorkers’ fear of religiously inspired rebellion flowed from Catholicism, and from England’s war with Spain and France, it also flowed from Christianity more generally. Protestantism could incite slaves to rebellion, too, and was widely suspected of having played a part in the slave revolt in the city in 1712, which cast a long shadow over the events of 1741.

  In the eyes of white New Yorkers, blacks had no religion at all, except for the “Spanish Negroes,” who were professed Catholics. But many Africans imported to the city from Central Africa, even if by way of the Caribbean, had already been baptized. The Kongolese
King Afonso I had established a Catholic Church in the kingdom of Kongo in the first half of the sixteenth century, and Portuguese colonists in Angola had spread Catholicism there. But if the black men and women they enslaved were Christian, New Yorkers didn’t want to know about it. And they had little interest in converting others to Christianity, for fear that it would either set them free or encourage them to revolt. A law in force from the time of English possession in 1664 stipulated that “No Christian shall be kept in Bondslavery villenage or Captivity.” It made slaveowners nervous enough that in 1674 a clarification was added: “This law shall not set at liberty any Negro or Indian Slave, who shall have turned Christian after they had been bought by a person.” In 1699, King William III urged the passage of “A Bill for facilitating the conversion of Indians and Negros,” but it failed to win the necessary votes in the New York Assembly, “they having a notion that the Negros being converted to Christianity would emancipate them from their slavery.” An “Act to Incourage the Baptizing of Negro, Indian and Mulatto Slaves” wasn’t passed until 1706, and then only to remedy the “groundless opinion . . . spread itself throughout the colony” that baptizing slaves meant that “they would become free and ought to be set at liberty.” 17 Despite repeated assurances that Christ would not put their investments at risk, very few owners encouraged their slaves to become Christian, and few slaves converted, at least until 1704, when a pious French merchant named Elias Neau opened “a Catechising School for the Slaves at New-York. ”

  Neau, a Huguenot, had settled in New York City in 1690, after fleeing violent persecution in Catholic France in 1679. On a business trip to London in 1692, he was captured by French privateers and sentenced to serve as a galley slave; later he was jailed on the infamous island of If off the coast of Marseilles. He was released in 1698, by which time he was a well-known Protestant martyr; in the 1690s, his letters from prison—mystical writings and hymns embracing the utility of despair—were published in Boston, New York, London, and Rotterdam.