New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Benjamin Lynde, in other words, met all of my deduced requirements for the author of the letter—he was a witchcraft hobbyist, a slave owner, and a judge with a reputation for leniency toward slaves. I suppose it was a good guess, but it was also dead wrong. (Although Lynde does turn out to have been a friend of the real author, Josiah Cotton.) Soon after the first edition of my book was published in August 2005, the historian Kenneth Minkema told me of Winiarski’s discovery. Winiarski, who is preparing Cotton’s papers for publication, had come across his diary entry for 1741, which indisputably proves his authorship of the letter. Through email and post in September 2005, Professor Winiarski generously shared with me his impeccable transcription of Cotton’s diary, as well as a manuscript copy of the letter that can be found in the Curwen Papers at the American Antiquarian Society and a copy of the newspaper in which Cotton’s letter was printed in September 1741. In February 2006, Carrie Supple and Peter Drumey of the Massachusetts Historical Society also independently alerted me to Cotton’s authorship of the letter, which was subsequently displayed in the society’s galleries.

  11. Josiah Cotton, “Account of the Cotton Family, 1728–1755,” Houghton Library, Harvard University; transcription by Douglas Winiarski. On Cotton’s haunted house, see Douglas Winiarski, “ ‘Pale Blewish Lights’ and a Dead Man’s Groan: Tales of the Supernatural from Eighteenth-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (October 1998): 497-530; 528. Lynde presided over the suit involving Cotton’s house. On Cotton more broadly, see Douglas Winiarski, “All Manner of Error and Delusion: Josiah Cotton and the Religious Transformation of Southeastern New England, 1700–1770,” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 2000.

  12. New England Weekly Journal, September 29, 1741. The manuscript copy of Cotton’s letter that survives in his papers in Massachusetts differs a bit from the letter, in Colden’s handwriting, that survives in New York. In Cotton’s copy, the comparisons to Salem are more elaborate. “2 things seem to Me almost as impossible as for Witches to fly in the Air, or change themselves into Cats, Viz. That the Whites should join with the Blacks, or that the Blacks (among whom there are no doubt Some rational Persons) should attempt the Destruction of a City.” How Cotton’s passionate agitation about Salem witchcraft turned to revulsion at the news from New York merits much closer inquiry than the brief treatment I have given it here.

  13. CC to George Clarke, August, 1741, LPCC, 8:272.

  14. Smith, History, 2:57–58.

  15. The events of 1742 bear further inquiry but lie outside the scope of this study, as does a related incident, in Kingston, New York, in the summer of 1741. See Leo Hershkowitz, “Tom’s Case: An Incident, 1741,” NYH 52 (1971): 63–71.

  16. MCC, 5:22, 48, 52–53, 60–61. On Burton’s April petition and its being referred to the Supreme Court, see NYCCP, 74:142 and 143. The depositions of Kannady, Hogg, and Masters, along with several others, appear in the Appendix to Horsmanden’s Journal.

  17. Proposals for Printing by Subscription, a Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy (New York, 1742).

  18. James Parker, A Letter to a Gentleman in the City of New-York (New York, 1759), reprinted in Beverly McAnear, “James Parker Versus New York Province,” NYH 22 (1941): 321–30. Bradford placed an ad for Parker’s return in the Gazette on May 14, 1733.

  19. Horsmanden’s personal copy of the Journal is described in Randy F. Weinstein, ed., Against the Tide: Commentaries on a Collection of African Americana, 1711–1987 (New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 1996), p. 4.

  20. Smith, Jr., Memoirs, 2:41.

  21. Journal of the Assembly, 2:70, July 5, 1745. George Clinton to the Lords of Trade, September 27, 1747, Docs. Col. NY, 6:380–82.

  22. George Clinton to the Duke of Newcastle, December 9, 1746, Docs. Col. NY, 6:312; Clinton to the Lords of Trade, September 27, 1747, Docs. Col. NY, 6:378–79, 386. Horsmanden’s troubled years in Clinton’s administration are chronicled in chapter 3 of McManus’s “Daniel Horsmanden.”

  23. Smith, Jr., History, 2:100. CC to George Clinton, February 14, 1748, LPCC, 4:13–14. Clinton to CC, April 1, 1748, LPCC, 4:32. A week later Colden wrote, “it is impossible to save your Excellency’s honour if Mr H___n be thought worthy to be inploy’d in places of the greatest trust after the publication of such libelous papers as have been printed & of which no one can doubt of his being the author”—CC to Clinton, April 9, 1748, LPCC, 4:45. The New York Gazette, revivied in the Weekly Post-Boy, January 18, 1748.

  24. See McManus, “Daniel Horsmanden,” pp. 134–61.

  25. NYG, March 18, 1734.

  26. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, chapter 13, para. 13.

  27. Clarke quoted in Smith, Jr., Memoirs, 2:41.

  Epilogue

  1. The Last Will and Testament of Daniel Horsmanden, February 5, 1777, in Abstracts of Wills, NYHSC 33 (1900): 57–58.

  2. Smith, Jr., Memoirs, 2:40–41. In 1757, when William Smith, Jr., set about writing his History of the Province of New York, he dismissed the conspiracy altogether: “That a few slaves would hope to effect a massacre of their masters, or thus vindicate their liberties, was the height of absurdity: but the fears of the multitude, led them to presume nothing less; and perhaps that extravagance then gave birth to the proof by which it was afterwards supposed to be incontestably confirmed.” Billy Smith was thirteen years old in 1741, when his father participated in the prosecution of those plotters. In 1756 and 1757, when Smith was writing, his father was still alive. Yet his source for much of his History came not from the senior William Smith, but from his close associate, James Alexander. As Smith was writing, he corresponded with Alexander, read books in Alexander’s library, and consulted his friend’s collection of historical manuscripts. Only Alexander’s death in April 1756 prevented him from checking Smith’s manuscript for accuracy, as he had agreed to. It is fair to say that Smith’s assessment of the trials was Alexander’s as much as his own: “Every new trial led to further accusations: a coincidence of slight circumstances, was magnified by the general terror into violent presumptions, tales collected without doors, mingling with the proofs given at the bar, poisoned the minds of the jurors, and the sanguinary spirit of the day suffered no check till Mary, the capital informer, bewildered by frequent examinations and suggestions, lost her first impressions, and began to touch characters, which malice itself did not dare to suspect”—Smith, Jr., History, 2:52–53; 1:xxii–xxiv, xxxiv, lxii.

  3. Smith, Jr., History, 2:100–101.

  4. John Watts to Sir Charles Hardy, August 13, 1763, Letter Book of John Watts, NYHSC 61 (1928): 172. Robert Livingston, Jr., to Robert Livingston, July 6, 1763, Robert Livingston Papers, Box 1, NYHS.

  5. William Smith, Jr., to Philip Schuyler, September 12, 1769, in Smith, Memoirs, 1:54. He had bought the chariot in 1763, the year he married Ann, but only paid for it months later. “The Old Gentleman has not paid for the Charriot,” his creditor complained. “No Cash,” Horsmanden explained. Horsmanden’s coach, chariot, and conduct with his creditor is detailed in McManus, “Daniel Horsmanden,” pp. 166–67.

  6. On the commandeering of Frog Hall, see McManus, “Daniel Horsmanden,” p. 162.

  7. Miles Sherbrook was a friend of Horsmanden’s wife’s family. In 1763, Ann’s brother-in-law, Joseph Haynes, wrote a will, witnessed by Sherbrook, making Ann his executor— Joseph Haynes will, codicil dated March 9, 1763, New York City Wills, 1760–66.

  8. Proclamation, The Number of Fires, September 23, 1776, New York.

  9. Horsmanden’s final years are best documented in McManus, “Daniel Horsmanden,” chap. 5.

  10. The full text of all these New York wills can be found at Ancestry.com.

  11. “A Law for Regulating the Burial of Slaves,” MCC, 4:88–89, November 18, 1731. For a fascinating discussion of slavery and deathways, see Vincent Brown, “Slavery and the Spirits of the Dead: Mortuary Politics in Jamaica, 1740–1834” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2002).

  12. Betty M.
Kuyk, “The African Derivation of Black Fraternal Orders in the United States,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 4 (October 1983): 559–92. John P. McCarthy, “African-Influenced Burial Practices and Sociocultural Identity in Antebellum Philadelphia,” unpublished paper, World Archaeological Congress 4, University of Cape Town, 1999.

  13. Bruce Frankel, “Black Cemetery in New York City New Key to Colonial Times,” New York Times, September 15, 1992. See also Michael L. Blaakey, “The New York African Burial Ground Project: An Examination of Enslaved Lives, A Construction of Ancestral Ties,” Transforming Anthropology 7 (1998): 53–58. None of the studies conducted of the African Burial Ground remains and artifacts have been made available to the public so far, and my repeated requests to read draft reports were denied.

  14. Christopher R. DeCorse, “An African Bead in New York City,” Newsletter of the African Burial Ground 3, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 6–7; Cheryl Laroche, “Beads from the African Burial Ground, New York City: A Preliminary Assessment,” Beads: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers 6 (1994): 3–20; Linda France Stine, Melanie A. Cabak, and Mark D. Groover, “Blue Beads as African-American Cultural Symbols,” Historical Archaeology 30 (1996): 49–75; Christopher R. DeCorse, “Culture Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold Coast, AD 1400–1900,” African Archaeological Review 10 (1992): 163–96.

  Appendix A

  1. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).

  2. They can be found in Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American PopulationBefore the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), pp. 97–98. I have altered the 1731 and 1737 censuses according to corrections offered by Robert V. Wells (“The New York Census of 1731,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 57 [1973]: 255–59) and Gary Nash (“The New York Census of 1737: A Critical Note on the Integration of Statistical and Literary Sources,” WMQ 36 [1979]: 428–35).

  3. David Franks, The New-York Directory (New York, 1786). The transcription of the 1730 tax list was made by Julius M. Block, Leo Hershkowitz, and Kenneth Scott, and published in New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 95 (1964): 27–32, 166–74, 195–202. (Because it has been transcribed, the 1730 tax list has also been used extensively by other historians of the city; see esp. Wilkenfeld, “New York City Neighborhoods, 1730.”)

  4. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot. “A Law for Punishing Slaves who Shall Ride Disorderly through the Streets,” MCC, 4:89–90.

  5. Goodfriend to the author, personal communication, May 23, 2002. Scattered occupations were also taken from Valentine, “List of Citizens Admitted as Freemen of the City of New York, from 1749 to the Revolutionary War,” Manual of the Corporation of the City of New-York for 1856, pp. 477–502, as well as from other miscellaneous sources. I entered additional biographical information for many of the 458 white trial participants from biographical encyclopedias (the Dictionary of American Biography, the Encyclopedia of New York City, and the American National Biography), as well as from print and online genealogical reference tools, including Ancestry.com and the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. The list of white trial participants was checked against a surviving list of the city’s militia companies (printed in Doc. Hist. NY, 4:211–26), which I entered in the database, along with the list of city firemen appointed in 1738. Public offices held are taken from E. B. O’Callaghan, “Officials of the Province of New York, 1630–1775,” O’Callaghan Papers, NYHS; and from David T. Valentine, Manual of the Corporation of the City of New-York for 1854 (New York, 1854), pp. 400–440.

  6. “Census of Slaves, 1755,” in Doc. Hist. NY, 3: (1850): 843–68.

  7. John Thornton to author, e-mail, June 1, 2004. James G. Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade, 1700 to 1774,” pp. 377, 383–84, 387–88.

  8. Sandra Heiler, “ ‘May It Please the Court . . .’: Confessional Strategies in the New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741,” unpublished paper, 2001. A related method was employed by a Boston University undergraduate, Greg O’Malley, in his 1999 honors thesis, “ ‘These Enemies of Their Own Household’: New York’s Slave Conspiracy and White Anxiety of 1741,” in which he measured pleas of guilty and not guilty before and after Clarke’s June 19 proclamation of amnesty.

  9. New York Colony Council Papers, 74:88, 99, 100, 105, 108, 109.

  10. Stokes, Iconography, 3:922–1025. I also consulted a handful of eighteenth-century travel narratives, and Nan Rothschild’s New York City Neighborhoods: The 18th Century (San Diego: Academic Press, 1990), pp. 185–227. William Burgis, “A South Prospect of ye Flourishing City of New York in the Province of New York in America,” 1719–21, is described at length in Stokes, Iconography, 1:239–77. Issued in 1719–21, the Burgis view depicts the city in 1716–18, and identifies 103 buildings along the East River.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Years before I began writing this book I assigned excerpts from Daniel Horsmanden’s Journalto undergraduates and graduate students at Boston University, whose fascination with the text served as a once-a-semester reminder that the murky events of 1741 were worth investigating. Greg O’Malley wrote a wonderful senior honors thesis on the topic in 1999. In the fall of 2001, I taught a graduate research seminar on the Journal, whose students brought to their work so much enthusiasm that I want to thank them all: Andrew Black, Susannah Black, Eoin Cannon, Hannah Carlson, Antonios Clapsis, Jennifer Coval, Steven Crowther, Sandra Heiler, Christina Kopp, Tara Kraenzlin, Carney Maley, Darrell Morey, Emily Murphy, Eric Plaag, Vanessa Pool, Satoka Sawauchi, Jeanette Sedgwick, Katherine Stebbins-McCaffrey, and Peter Surfin. I, for one, will never forget the cold December night, near Christmastime, when we made a pilgrimage to Cambridge to view Horsmanden’s portrait at the Harvard Law School, and then retired to drink and feast in the warmth of a nearby tavern.

  Two of my BU students, Kathryn Lindquist and Hannah Carlson, became my indefatigable research assistants, working long hours at the painstaking labor of entering data into tables. My thanks to both of them and to everyone else who helped me reconstruct New York: James Dutton tutored me in database design, Kashid Mohammed helped set up my first database, Paul McMorrow photocopied runaway ads, Albert Sutton helped analyze the data, David Rumsey supplied a geo-referenced eighteenth-century map, and Robert Chavez taught me how to work in GIS.

  At Harvard, I benefited immensely from the research assistance of Mark Hanna and especially Michelle Jarrett Morris, who saved me from a barrel of errors. I’d also like to thank Harvard graduate students and faculty in the Early American History Workshop, including Richard Bell, Vincent Brown, Joyce Chaplin, Brian DeLay, Judy Kertesz, and Margot Minardi.

  I presented portions of this research at seminars, lectures, and conferences, including meetings hosted by the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, the Legal History Workshop at Harvard Law School, the American Studies Program at the City University of New York, the New-York Historical Society, the American Studies Association, the History and Literature Program at Harvard University, the University of Toronto Centre for the Study of the United States, Cambridge University, the University of Southern Maine, Yale University, Boston University, Columbia University, and Boston College. I thank all who offered comments at those sessions.

  Several scholars offered very specific assistance: Ann Fabian attended the reburial ceremonies with me, sharing her boundless knowledge of what happens to old bones; Mary Beth Norton and Mark Peterson provided clues to the New York–Salem connection; Simon Middleton shared his digitized Mayor’s Court records; and Joyce Goodfriend, displaying exceptional scholarly generosity, mailed me a printout of her assiduously researched 1730 tax list. I would also like to thank Douglas Winiarski for correcting the error I made in an earlier edition of this book, in identifying Benjamin Lynde as the author of the New England letter; as Winiarski had wonderfully discovered, the letter was written by Josiah Cotton. Others read portions of the manuscript and supplied helpful corrections, inclu
ding Vincent Brown, Stanley Katz, Corey Robin, Erik Seeman, John Thornton, David Waldstreicher, and Shane White. Don Lamm read the first half, and shared with me his sage advice. A hardy few friends and colleagues read an early draft of the whole book: John Demos, Jane Kamensky, Daniel Penrice, Bruce Schulman, and Laurel Ulrich, along with my editor, Jane Garrett, and my agent, Andrew Wylie. I thank each for their generosity and insight. And I want to thank the editorial production staff at Knopf for their careful work and patience with my pile of last-minute changes.