THE IRISH
Another cell in New York’s insurrectionary movement was Irish. These plotters, like their African counterparts, demonstrated a penchant for secret societies and conspiracy; they, too, called each other countryman. There were, in all, perhaps thirty to thirty-five Irish men and women involved in the conspiracy, though only eleven of these were recorded by name. One person testified that seventeen soldiers had attended a meeting at Hughson’s tavern; more commonly an ever-changing nine or ten turned up. Most all of the Irish were soldiers—“brother soldiers,” as they called themselves—stationed at Fort George. They wanted revenge against the Protestant English, expressing a desire “to burn the English church.” Hatred of the army was another motivation: Jerry Corker declared, “By G-d, I have a mind to burn the fort.” William Kane, whose involvement began when he told his fellow conspirators that “he would help them all that lay in his power” and ended in 1742 when he was shipped off to the Caribbean in punishment, wanted the fort in flames so that the soldiers “would have their liberty.” The complicity of Corker and Kane shows just how close the conspirators got to power: both had served as “sentry at the governor’s door” inside Fort George.24
Although little is known about the Irish individuals who took part in the conspiracy, it is possible to sketch in broad outline the historical experience that set the Irish in motion around the Atlantic in the years before 1741. A depression in the linen industry, intensified oppression by landlords and Anglican clergyman, and especially the famine of 1728–29 created new waves of Irish vagabondage and migration. Another famine in 1740–41, called in Gaelic “bliadhain an air” (“the year of the slaughter”), sent tens of thousands to their graves and thousands more across the seas in search of subsistence. Such vagabonds were called “Saint Patrick’s vermin.”25 The traditional spalpeen migrations now moved into wider, Atlantic orbits. For many the movement led to a military experience—in the army of Britain, France, or Spain—which in turn led to a new posting at the outskirts of the empire as a soldier or military laborer. Others made their way to Irish harbors, signed on in the cod fishery, and sailed for Newfoundland, where many fell into debt and whence they traveled on as indentured servants or maritime workers to the port cities of North America.26 Some variant of this process would appear to have been the experience of the “Irish Newfoundland beauty,” Peg Kerry.
Still others fell afoul of the law and ended up in the Americas as His Majesty’s seven- or fourteen-year passengers, having been sentenced as felons to long terms of punitive labor and shipped overseas. Crime and rebellion were inextricably intertwined for these Irishmen and Irishwomen, as for thousands of others in Britain who found themselves living on the wrong side of laws that were changing rapidly to protect new definitions of property. Irish felons transported to Georgia were denounced as a “Parcel of harden’d abandoned Wretches perfectly skill’d in all manner of Villainy, and who have been transported [from] their country for Committing Crimes by which they have been deemed too dangerous to be allowed to stay there.” Some of the transported were rioters who had lashed out against intolerable conditions; once in America, they stole their masters’ property and made “treasonable Designs against the Colony.”27
The Irish had a history in America of betraying the English, who themselves had a history in Ireland of brutally subjugating the Irish. Several times during the seventeenth century (in 1655, 1666, and 1689), Irish indentured servants had assisted Spain or France in attacks against the English Caribbean colonies of St. Christopher, Montserrat, and Nevis. These treacheries were well remembered among British colonial officials in the eighteenth century, especially after new calamities in Ireland sent new waves of migrants toward American shores. Governor Robert Hunter of Jamaica considered the Irish to be “a lazy useless sort of people, who come cheap and serve for deficiencies” (i.e., to expand the minority white population). On his island in the early 1730s were many—perhaps too many—Irish indentured servants and soldiers: “Many of them considering their religion might prove rather a disservice than of use to us in case of a rupture at any time with France or Spain.” Hunter could only conclude, ominously, “Their hearts are not with us.” The same fears gripped Hunter’s counterparts in New York, particularly after war broke out with Spain in 1739 and war with France simultaneously threatened.28
SPANISH AMERICA
Members of a third cell within the insurrectionary plot whispered in Spanish. The leading figures here were Spanish-American sailors, “negroes and mulattoes,” who had been captured on a prize vessel by Captain John Lush in the early spring of 1740, brought to New York from the West Indies, condemned with the rest of the vessel in the city’s Vice-Admiralty Court, and promptly sold as slaves. A merchant testified that he had heard, while in Havana, that one of the sailors came from a family of slaves in Cartagena. The sailors themselves maintained that they were “free subjects of the King of Spain” and hence entitled to treatment as prisoners of war. Known among the conspirators as the “Cuba People,” they had probably come from Havana, the greatest port of the Spanish West Indies and a center of privateering, military defense, and a free black population. Having been “free men in their own country,” they felt that great injustice had been done them in New York. They “began to grumble at their hard usage, of being sold as slaves.”29
The rage of the sailors heated many a conversation. Not surprisingly, Captain Lush, who had profited heavily from selling these prizes, was the object of special wrath. The sailors insisted that “if the captain would not send them to their own country, they would ruin all the city; and the first house they would burn should be the captain’s, for they did not care what they did.” Pointing to Lush’s house, they said, “D–n that son of a b—h, they would make a devil of him,” doubtless by turning his home into an inferno. They even threatened to tie him “to a beam and roast him like a piece of beef.”30
The Hispanic sailors had more than rage to contribute to the design to take the city, however, for they were highly skilled and knowledgeable in the ways of warfare. The tall, “very forward” Antonio de St. Bendito made no secret of their prowess. He bragged that when the time for the rising came, “while the York negroes killed one, the Spaniards could kill twenty.” The sailors’ reputation as experienced fighters circulated along the waterfront. John Hughson told York that “the Spaniards knew better than the York negroes how to fight”; he acknowledged their military experience by making Augustine an officer and Juan captain of the Fly Boys, one of the highest positions within the rebel command. Ben, a member of the conspiracy’s inner circle, considered it good news that the “Spanish negroes” were ready to lend a hand in the rising when “the wars came.” He told his skeptical countryman Jack that “those Spaniards know better than York Negroes, and could help better to take [the city] than they, because they were more used to war; but they must begin first to set the house (i.e. the houses) on fire.”31
Here, too, the Hispanic sailors had something to offer, in particular their knowledge of the incendiary substances called fireballs that had long been used in the marauding, plundering, city-burning warfare of the Caribbean. At one of the meetings at Hughson’s an unidentified Hispanic sailor “rolled something black in his hands, and broke it and gave to the rest, which was to be thrown in the houses, to set fire to the shingles in several places.” Antonio and Juan were especially knowledgeable about the “stuff to put the houses on fire, by flinging it into the house.” When on Monday, April 6, two fires broke out simultaneously on each side of Captain Sarly’s house, the cry went up, “The Spanish negroes; the Spanish negroes; take up the Spanish negroes.” Juan’s knowledge, motive of revenge, and insolent bearing upon being accused raised suspicions that eventually led to his hanging.32
The Afro-Hispanic sailors also contributed to the plot an example of freedom based on their own maritime experience, and a means to achieve it, by coordinating an internal uprising with an external attack by Spanish forces. Of course, N
ew York’s authorities could not comprehend that news about Spanish military plans in the New World might circulate among sailors and waterfront workers. But sensing that there were real connections between the New York Conspiracy and Spanish America, they seized upon a letter written by General James Oglethorpe from Georgia in 1741 about a “popish Plot” in which secret emissaries—priests disguised as physicians, dancing masters, and the like—were inciting revolts “to burn all the magazines and considerable towns in English North America, thereby to prevent the subsisting of the great expedition and fleet in the West-Indies.” Although Oglethorpe himself “could not give credit to these advices,” many New Yorkers could. The real credit instead belonged to the Hispanic sailors, the human vessels who transported information and experience from one Atlantic port to another.33
THE GREAT AWAKENING
Another Atlantic dimension of the conspiracy of 1741 was religious, for it occurred during the Great Awakening. Beginning in the 1730s, both sides of the Atlantic witnessed an outburst of popular religious enthusiasm in which itinerant preachers traveled from place to place, testifying about their own religious experiences and encouraging working people wherever they went to become, as Gary B. Nash has put it, the “instruments of their own salvation.” George Whitefield, a smallish preacher with crossed eyes, leather lungs, and burning charisma, ranged up and down the eastern seaboard of the colonies in 1739, delivering an endless succession of fiery sermons before the thousands, black and white (five to seven thousand in New York alone), who gathered to hear him.34 The more radical itinerants preached a spiritual egalitarianism based on the biblical precept “God is no respecter of persons,” and many members of the colonial upper classes hated them for it. James Davenport, for example, was accused by the conservative Charles Chauncey of Boston of acting out the communism of the Book of Acts, seeking to destroy private property and make “all things common, wives as well as goods.” As the evangelicals preached justification by faith against the more traditional idea of justification by works, the specter of radical antinomianism hovered around their message and haunted their conservative adversaries. Some feared that the Levellers, Ranters, and Fifth Monarchy men of the seventeenth-century English Revolution had reappeared a century later, and they were not entirely wrong. The physician Alexander Hamilton worried that such “New Light fanatics” would strip established religion of its ritualistic powers of mystification, letting loose “the mobile, that many-headed beast,” from its carefully constructed cage.35
Although prosecuting attorney William Smith would call New York’s slave conspirators “Pagan negroes,” it is clear that Christianity, much of it a result of the Great Awakening, had affected many of them. John Hughson used the Bible to administer binding oaths to a number of the slave rebels. Bastian would testify in court that he and several other slaves “were sworn on a bible.” Cato agreed, claiming that Hughson took him and Albany upstairs in the tavern and “swore them upon a bible,” after which they “kissed the book.” Once captured, Cato would appear in court clutching his Bible to “his bosom”; “he said he read [it] in jail as often as he could.” Another slave, Othello, wanted assurance that his taking part in the revolt “would not hinder him from going to heaven.” Many others, black and white, fretted that by violating their sacred oath they would be “wronging their own souls.” Many New York slaves had lived long enough in English-speaking colonies to comprehend and engage the Christian message of the Awakeners, and even to endow it with revolutionary meaning. As an Anglican missionary explained, “the Negroes have this notion, that when they are baptized, they are immediately free from their masters.”36
Whitefield made the issue of slavery central to the Great Awakening when, in 1740, he wrote and published a letter to “the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,” remarking upon the slave rebellions that had recently convulsed Virginia and South Carolina and expressing his surprise that there had not been more of them. He considered rebellions past, present, and future to constitute a “judgment,” a “visitation” from God. He cited the biblical story of “Saul and his Bloody House,” who were subjected to famine for having enslaved the Gibeonites, “the Hewers of Wood and the Drawers of Water.” God had avenged the poor slaves in the day of David and he would so again. Whitefield commanded sternly, “Go to now, ye rich Men, weep and howl for your Miseries that shall come upon you!” But he also offered the sinful masters a way out of their self-built Babylon, through a proper Christianity that attended to the souls of both masters and slaves. Masters would cease their brutalities and avert the awful judgment at the hands of the “sons of violence.” Slaves would cease to be rebellious and would naturally become better servants. Both would be conscious of their “relative Duties,” to the Lord and to each other.37
Such words were more than many slaveowners could bear to hear. The Reverend Alexander Garden, who ministered to the slavemasters of Charleston, South Carolina, responded by accusing Whitefield of “enthusiasm and pride” and comparing him to “the Oliverians, Ranters, Quakers, French Prophets.” Such antinomianism, said Garden, led Whitefield to incite insurrection among the slaves. Others, such as William Smith, writing from the Caribbean, agreed: “Instead of teaching [the slaves] the Principles of Christianity,” enthusiasts such as Whitefield were “filling their heads with a Parcel of Cant-Phrases, Trances, Dreams, Visions, and Revelations, and something else still worse, which Providence forbids to name.”38
The something worse reared its hydra head in New York in 1741, and Whitefield’s poisonous influence was duly noted. John Ury, a clergyman who would be hanged in 1742 for his role in the conspiracy, believed that “it was through the great encouragement the negroes had from Mr. Whitefield [that] we had all the disturbance.” Particularly pernicious, he thought, were Whitefield’s views of free grace, the theological issue at the center of the antinomian heresy, the embrace of which allowed self-declared, often poor saints to take the law into their own hands. Looking back on the conspiracy in 1746, Horsmanden would also denounce the “Enthusiastical Notions” and “New Fangled Principles” of Whitefield and other “Suspicious Vagrant Strolling Preachers.”39
An Anglican missionary in New York went further in his indictment. Whitefield, he claimed, was directly responsible for the rising, for in New York as elsewhere he had unified and encouraged the slaves as he divided and discouraged their masters. His “greatest address hath been to the Negroes alone”: he had proposed to erect a school for slaves, which would cause many to “run away from the masters in hopes that they shall be here maintained, and have their liberty.” The result would be baptism and, from the slaves’ perspective, the freedom that came with it. Whitefield also inspired “feuds and animosities” everywhere he went. He knew that a “kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, but is brought to desolation.” Whitefield thus “raised up a bitter spirit in the Negroes against their Masters.” In New York as elsewhere, “all the planters are forced to be doubly upon their guard, and are not sure when they go to bed, but that they shall have their throats cut before the next morning; and it may be the overturning of several colonies.”40
A CARIBBEAN CYCLE OF REBELLION
The overturning of several colonies by insurrection seemed a real possibility in the 1730s and 1740s. During these years a furious barrage of plots, revolts, and war ripped through colonial Atlantic societies like a hurricane. No respecter of national or imperial boundaries, this cycle of rebellion slashed through British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish territories, which stretched from the northern reaches of South America through the West Indies to the southern colonies and then the port cities of North America. Most of these events took place in plantation regions and were led by African Americans, but other areas (such as New York) and other actors (such as the Irish) were also involved. The magnitude of the upheaval was, in comparative terms, extraordinary, encompassing more than eighty separate cases of conspiracy, revolt, mutiny, and arson—a figure probably six or
seven times greater than the number of similar events that occurred in either the dozen years before 1730 or the dozen after 1742. It was within this cycle of rebellion that the actions of the African slaves, Irish soldiers, and Hispanic sailors in New York in 1741 took on their greatest and most subversive meaning.
Scholars have studied the acts of resistance that constituted this cycle of rebellion, but almost always as isolated events; rarely have they analyzed them in relation to each other, as having both a coherence and a collective causal power. But of course both the rebels and the colonial authorities of the 1730s and 1740s were acutely aware of this profound, generative wave of struggle, even if their latter-day chroniclers have not been. Governor Mathews of the Leeward Islands in 1737 wrote of the cycle in the idiom of disease: “The contagion of rebellion is spread among these islands more than I apprehend is discovered.” Governor Edward Trelawny of Jamaica, who had witnessed firsthand the numerous risings that climaxed in the Maroon War, saw clear political meaning in the rebellions, which for him expressed a “Dangerous Spirit of Liberty.” Daniel Horsmanden made repeated reference to other plots and revolts in his account of New York’s troubles. New York’s rebels likewise knew what was going on in “the hot country,” as one man called it. It had, in recent years, been hot in more ways than one.41
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