New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Horsmanden later wrote that Othello “behaved upon this Occasion with a great deal of Composure and Decency; with an Air of Sincerity, which very much affected the Recorder.” But neither Othello nor his friend Quack, who was to die with him, could be pardoned. “The Judges could by no Means think them proper Objects of Mercy; and had they recommended them to the Governor as such, and his Honour had pardoned them, such Lenity towards them, might have been deemed Cruelty to the People.” DeLancey could hardly spare himself the financial loss his court had imposed on so many other slaveowners. Still, it was unnecessary for Othello to burn, when hanging would do just as well.

  At noon on Saturday, five of the eight men convicted on July 15 were hanged, one was burned at the stake, and two were reprieved and later transported. One of the men carried to the stake was “Doctor Harry,” a “Negro Doctor” from Long Island who had previously been prosecuted for practicing medicine, and who had been accused of providing the plotters with poison, both to be used in poisoning whites and for committing suicide “if they were taken.” If he ever had any poison, Harry had not used it in time to spare himself a wretched death. At the stake, Harry was questioned but said, “it signified nothing to confess.”30 Othello, “asked some Questions at the Gallows about the Plot, answered, he had Nothing more to say than what he had this Morning declared to one of the Judges.” He was the last “York Negro” to die.

  ON JULY 25, a week after Othello’s execution, the Supreme Court adjourned. Its spring term, begun April 21, had been extended so many times that it had almost run into the summer term, set to begin July 28. DeLancey closed the court for a brief recess. On July 27, Zenger’s Weekly Journal reported, “We seem to be easier as to the Thoughts of the Negroes.”31 On July 28, the summer session began, and a new grand jury was called, to conclude the investigation of the Priest’s Plot. The next day, John Ury was brought to trial, on a charge that he “of his Malice aforethought, wickedly, maliciously, voluntarily, willfully and feloniously did counsel, abet, procure and encourage” Quack in setting the fort on fire.

  Attorney General Bradley, who had been ill and had not attended court since June 13, opened the indictment, promising to prove that “the Prisoner was actually concerned in the Plot,” that “he has frequently been at Hugh- son’s House,” that he swore the black men at Hughson’s into the plot, and that he swore them to secrecy by making “a round Ring on the Floor with Chalk,” standing in the middle of it “ with a Cross in his Hand,” and promising to forgive them their sins. In a long aside, Bradley explained that Catholics like Ury “hold it not only lawful but meritorious to kill and destroy all that differ in Opinion from them, if it may any ways serve the Interest of their detestable Religion,” which was, in any event, a “Hocus Pocus, bloody Religion.”

  Next, George Joseph Moore, the clerk, read aloud Quack’s dying confession, after which Mary Burton was called to the stand, and John Chambers proceeded to question her. “Give the Court and Jury an Account of what you know concerning this Conspiracy,” he asked her, “but speak slow, not so hastily as you usually do.” Burton said she had often seen Ury at Hughson’s “about Christmass and New-Year.” He had sworn black men to the plot to burn the city. “I heard Ury tell them, they need not fear doing of it, for that he could forgive them their Sins as well as God Almighty.” Once, when they were all in a room upstairs, Mary looked under the door and saw “a black Ring upon the Floor, and Things in it, that seemed to look like Rats.” Another time, she said, “I was listening at the Door of the Room upon the Stairs . . . and I looked through the Door, and saw upon the Table a black Thing like a Child, and Ury had a Book in his Hand, and was reading, but I did not understand the Language; and having a Spoon in my Hand, I happened to let it drop upon the Floor, and Ury came out of the Room, running after me down Stairs, and he fell into a Tub of Water, which stood at the Foot of the Stairs, and I ran away.” The rats in the circle were supposed to have been black men’s toes, as they swore an oath. The “black Thing like a Child,” it was hinted, was a baby being baptized; the strange language, Latin.

  Ury, conducting his own defense, cross-examined. He asked Burton what clothes he usually wore at Hughson’s. Burton replied, “I cannot tell what Cloaths you wore particularly.” To which Ury responded, “That is strange, and know me so well.”

  Next, Chambers called William Kane. Kane said two nights after Christmas he had gone to Coffin’s house, where “they had a Child, and Ury christened it, and read Latin.” Ury had tried to convince Kane to become a Catholic, he said, and was at Hughson’s when Hughson swore Kane into the plot.

  Again, Ury, on cross-examination, asked Kane what clothes he wore. Kane had a better answer: “I have seen you in black, I have seen you in a yellowish great Coat, and sometimes in a straight bodied Coat, of much the same Colour.”

  Chambers next called to the stand Sarah Hughson, John Hughson’s seventeen-year-old daughter. Ury immediately objected, “for she has been convicted, and received Sentence of Death for being concerned in this Conspiracy, and therefore cannot be a Witness.”

  Ury was wise to object to Sarah Hughson’s evidence against him. Sarah had been arrested on May 6 and tried with her parents on June 4. She was found guilty and, on June 8, sentenced to hang. But on June 11, the day before she and her parents were to die, her execution was postponed “in Hopes, that after her Father and Mother had suffered, she might be mollified to a Confession of her own Guilt, and raise some Merit by making a further Discovery.” Sarah proved willful, however, and refused to confess. On July 1, she was again ordered executed, “THIS Criminal continuing inflexible.” On July 8, the day of her hanging, she talked with her cellmate, Burk’s “Negro Wench,” another Sarah, who was to be hanged along with her. Sarah Hughson, according to her cellmate, “at last owned to her, that she had been sworn into the Plot.” Sarah (Burk) then called for Mills, and “told what had pass’d between them.” (It was this that saved black Sarah’s life: instead of being hanged on July 8, she was shipped to Hispaniola one week later.)

  Mills called DeLancey and Horsmanden, who came to interrogate Sarah Hughson. She confessed “with great Reluctance,” and principally named William Kane and John Ury. But the judges deemed her confession “scanty,” and two days later again ordered Sarah’s execution. Once again, she confessed on the day she was to be hanged, and her execution was postponed. In her July 10 confession, taken before DeLancey and Horsmanden, young Sarah Hughson described a vast Catholic conspiracy, headed by “John Ury the Priest, ” who, she said, had “christen’d Caesar” and other slaves and had “made her Father and Mother Papists.” Peggy Kerry “was a Roman,” too.

  But the next day, when Sarah was brought before DeLancey, Philipse, and John Chambers for further questioning, “she denied all she had confessed.” (Like everyone else who recanted, Sarah recanted when Horsmanden wasn’t there.) “Exhorted by those Gentlemen to speak the Truth,” she changed her mind again, and said that her confession was true. Her execution was postponed yet again, but because of her recanting, she was not pardoned. In his Journal, Horsmanden saw fit to remark, “From the untowardBehaviour of this Wretch upon her Examinations, the Reader will be apt to conclude, there could be little or no Dependance upon her Veracity . . . and indeed the Case would have been so, if her Testimony had stood single, and not corroborated by many other Witnesses.” But, however weak a witness, Sarah Hughson was kept alive because she could prove useful at Ury’s trial, when witnesses were in scarce supply, since only whites were allowed. Moreover, Sarah’s testimony was the crucial link between Hughson’s Plot and the Priest’s Plot. On July 27, the judges decided that “if she could be affected with a Sense of Gratitude for saving her Life . . . and kept to her History concerning John Ury . . . they thought she would be a very material Evidence against him.”

  When Ury objected that a condemned criminal like Sarah Hughson could not take the stand, Bradley interrupted him: “But Mr. Ury, she has received His Majesty’s most Gracious Pardon,
which she has pleaded in Court this Morning.” Just moments before Ury’s trial began—but before Ury had entered the courtroom—Sarah Hughson had finally been pardoned.

  Chambers again called Hughson to the stand and asked her to give the court an account of Ury’s involvement in the conspiracy. She repeated much of what she had confessed on July 10, that Ury had christened slaves, and had directed them to burn the city, promising that he would forgive their sins. Ury, in cross-examination, asked her who he had baptized, and she answered, “Caesar, Prince, Bastian, Quack, Cuffee, and several other Negroes.” Horsmanden said that Sarah, who, during previous interrogations was nearly hysterical, appeared in court “ composed and decent; she seemed to be touch’d with Remorse and Compunction: what came from her, was delivered with all the visible Marks and Semblance of Sincerity and Truth, insomuch, that the Court, Jury, and many of the Audience, looked upon her at this Instant, to be under real Conviction of Mind for her past Offences.”

  After Sarah Hughson stepped down, Joseph Murray entered as evidence the letter Lieutenant Governor Clarke had received from General Oglethorpe, warning of priests disguised as schoolmasters and dancing masters. Ury then began his defense, calling several witnesses to establish that he was, in fact, merely a schoolmaster from Philadelphia, and a “Non Jurying Minister,” that is, an Anglican minister who refused to recognize the British monarch as the leader of the Anglican Church. Ury was a dissenter, he admitted, but no papist. When Ury called Joseph Webb, an English carpenter who had hired him to teach one of his children Latin, Bradley, on cross-examination, asked Webb, “in your Conversations together, what have you heard him say about Negroes?” Webb answered, We were one Day talking about Negroes, and I said, I thought they had Souls to be saved or lost as well as other People; Ury said, he thought they were not proper Objects of Salvation; I replied, what would you do with them then, what would you damn them all? No, says he, leave them to that Great Being that has made them, he knows best what to do with them; says he, They are of a Slavish Nature, it is the Nature of them to be Slaves, give them Learning, do them all the Good you can, and put them beyond the Condition of Slaves, and in return, they will cut your Throats.

  Joseph Murray and William Smith then offered further evidence against Ury, reading passages describing priestly sacraments and Catholic doctrine. Ury read a long statement he had prepared for his defense. He asked the jury whether he could be so “Lunatick” as to have organized the plot and then remain in the city for weeks and months after the investigation began. He pointed out that Quack, in his dying confession, never mentioned him, and that “neither Huson his Wife nor the Creature that was hanged with them [Peggy Kerry] and all that have been put to Death since did not once name me.” With rising passion, Ury addressed the court: “Gentlemen if I am a Priest as you take me to be I could not be so foolish as to engage myself in so absurd a Contrivance as to bind myself with a Cord for Negroes or what is worse profligate Whites the Scum of this Earth.”

  William Smith “summ’d up the Evidence for the King,” conflating Hughson’s Plot, the Spanish Plot, and the Priest’s Plot, by arguing that the “horrible Plot, to burn and destroy this City” had at last been explained as the result of “a Foreign Influence”: “a Spanish and Popish Plot,” for “What can be expected from those that profess a Religion, that is at War with God and Man?” Ury “tells you that he must have been a Lunatick to have staid in Town . . . if he had been guilty,” Smith reminded the jury. But “all Wickednessis in some sort Madness.”

  DeLancey delivered the charge to the jury, which then withdrew. The trial itself had lasted nine hours. The jury returned after only fifteen minutes, having found John Ury guilty.

  URY’S CONVICTION had the effect of somewhat rehabilitating John Hughson. Once an arch rebel against God and country, Hughson was now demoted to “an indigent fellow of a vile character,” a mere tool of Ury, little better than the credulous slaves he had also duped. In a letter to the Lords of Trade after Ury’s trial, Clarke now summarized the conspiracy differently: Hughson, “casting in his thoughts how to mend his circumstances inticed some Negroes to rob their masters and to bring the stolen to him on promise of reward . . . but seeing that by this pilfering trade riches did not flow into him fast enough and finding the Negroes fit instruments for any villany he then fell upon the scheme of burning the fort and town and murdering the people as the speediest way to enrich himself and them, and to gain the freedom, for that was the Negroes main inducement.” Enter John Ury, who converted Hughson to Catholicism, christened slaves, and planned to deliver the city to the Spanish.32

  On August 4, James DeLancey sentenced Ury to death by hanging. He was to die on Saturday, August 15, along with Juan de la Silva. De la Silva had been convicted on June 17, together with the rest of Lush’s “Spanish Negroes.” All but he had apparently been pardoned, and were transported out of the colony, although Horsmanden never recorded their pardon or explained why they were made objects of mercy. That Saturday, De la Silva was hanged, “neatly dressed in a white Shirt, Jacket, Drawers and Stockings.” He “behaved decently,” Horsmanden said, and “prayed in Spanish, kiss’d a Crucifix, insisting on his Innocence to the last.” Zenger’s newspaper reported that De la Silva “died stedfastly in the Roman Catholick Profession.”33

  Meanwhile, Ury’s execution was postponed; he had petitioned Clarke for a delay in order to better prepare his affairs, and to write his dying speech, a long sermon. Two weeks later, Saturday, August 29, Ury was carried to the gallows. He tried to read his speech, protesting his innocence, but “was turn’d off.” Zenger reported that Ury “died intrepid and without showing the least Concern at Death.” Death “is the Cup that my Heavenly Father has put into my Hand,” said Ury, “and I drink it with Pleasure.”34

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ink

  DANIEL HORSMANDEN did not watch John Ury die. The day after Ury’s sentencing, Horsmanden left for Albany, to preside at a circuit court, glad to be away from New York, glad for a break. En route, on August 7, he wrote to Cadwallader Colden. “After a long cessation of Correspondence I take the Liberty of resuming the pen,” he began. “Ever since the fire at the Fort,” he explained, “I’ve been engag’d in perpetual hurry, insomuch that I’ve been forced to dedicate part of my resting time to the publick Service.” The investigation into the conspiracy had been grueling, Horsmanden complained, “but I think the Labour bestowed has not been in Vain; for tho’ the Mystery of Iniquity has been unfolding by very Smal & Slow Degrees, it has at length been discovered that popery was at the Bottom.”

  As Horsmanden told it in his Journal, he had groped through a “Maze of Obscurity” to reach “the Bottom,” the truth: the Priest’s Plot. By the time the investigation came to a close, Horsmanden had little choice but to follow DeLancey’s lead in asserting that the Catholic conspiracy contained within it all of the plots his investigation had earlier focused on: Hughson’s Plot of thieving mock Masons and Christmas revelers, the “Negro Plot” of aggrieved black men planning arson and murder, and the Spanish Plot of war and liberation. All of these, Horsmanden now maintained, were simply elements of the Priest’s Plot. Hughson, Quack, Cuffee, the “Spanish Negroes,” Jack, William Kane—all were mere tools of John Ury.

  “The Mystery of Iniquity has been unfolding,” Horsmanden wrote Colden. With these words, he boasted that his tireless inquiry had solved nothing less than the problem of evil, the Mysterium iniquitatis of 2 Thessalonians (2:7–8): “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work. . . . And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.” In this, as in much of what Horsmanden wrote about the conspiracy, he employed language more often used to describe witchcraft. “This most horrible & Detestable piece of Villainy,” Horsmanden told Colden, “must have been brooded in a Conclave of Devils, & hatcht in the Cabinet of Hell.” And still New Yorkers refused to see the peril they had only very nearly
escaped. Already Horsmanden was filled with resentment that New Yorkers were ungrateful for his work. Worse, they had begun to condemn the proceedings as unjust. “Tho’ we have been So Successfull in prying into this Scene of Darkness & horror As to bring to Light near 90 Negroes & I think about a Dozen Whites Engaged to be actors in this black Tragedy,” he wrote. “And tho’ the Town were well pleas’d with the first fruits of Our Labours & inflicting the deserved punishment on the Offenders. Yet when it comes home to their own houses, & is like to affect their own propertys in Negroes & Cosinship in others; then they are alarm’d & they cry out the Witness must needs be perjured.”

  “Some among us,” Horsmanden told Colden (but he did not say who) had made two complaints. First, they doubted the slave confessions, to which Horsmanden replied in exasperation, “How can a Discovery of Such works of Darkness be expected but from some of the Confederates themselves; & if the witnesses are kept apart & Examined apart as most of them have been in both Instances upon most if not all the Trials, & their respective Testimonys Tally & agree, what better Evidence can be desired or expected?” Second, they had taken “great pains . . . to bring a discredit upon Mary Burton,” a girl Horsmanden considered “the happy Instrument of all this Discovery.”

  Horsmanden had a good deal to say about these doubters, “ wanton, wrong-headed Persons amongst us, who took the Liberty to arraign the Justice of the Proceedings, and set up their private Opinions in Superiority to the Court and Grand Jury. . . . God knows,” he complained, “they could not be Judges of such Matters; but nevertheless, they declared with no small Assurance (notwithstandingwhat we saw with our Eyes, and heard with our Ears, and everyone might have judg’d of by his Intellects, that had any) That there was no Plot at all!”