The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  10. Horsmanden, Journal, 58, 59. George William Edwards, New York as an Eighteenth-Century Municipality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), 2:109. See also Lawrence Leder, “‘Dam’me Don’t Stir a Man’: The Trial of New York Mutineers in 1700,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 42 (1958): 261–83.

  11. Horsmanden, Journal, 322; 68, 93, 190, 194; 119, 271, 296, 302, 102; 33, 120, 413.

  12. Samuel McKee, Labor in Colonial New York, 1664–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 65, 66; New York Gazette, 3–10 July 1738; Lieutenant Governor Clarke to Lords of Trade, 2 June 1738, in O’Callaghan, ed., Documents, 115.

  13. Horsmanden, Journal, 77–78; 459; 277, 282.

  14. The Colonial Laws of New York, from the Year 1664 to the Revolution (Albany: James B. Lyon, 1894), 2:679; Horsmanden, Journal, 229; 41, 44; 418. On weapons, see Colonial Laws, 2:687; 218; 174; 72, 132; 263, 231, 417, 418, 253, 417; 263; 417; 301; 217; 318–19; 257; 152, 169; 453.

  15. New York Gazette, 31 January–7 February 1738; Horsmanden, Journal, 66, 448, 323, 13.

  16. Horsmanden, Journal, 419; 82; 81; 148, 174; 210; 81; 191, 196; 461; 59; 210; 143; 191; 81; 173, 268; 255.

  17. Ibid., 239. By calling each of these key organizers a “headman,” Hughson and others appealed to the dominant meaning of the term in the middle of the eighteenth century: a headman was a leader of an ethnic group; see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “headman.”

  18. Horsmanden, Journal, 245, 193. Papa, or Pawpaw, slaves had played a major part in the slave revolt of 1712. See Kenneth Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 45 (1961): 43–74. For an account of the early development of the African American community of New York, see Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 111–32.

  19. Horsmanden, Journal, 118, 120, 460, 461; Monica Schuler, “Akan Slave Rebellions in the British Caribbean,” Savacou 1 (1970): 15, 16, 23; and idem, “Ethnic Slave Rebellions in the Caribbean and the Guianas,” Journal of Social History 3 (1970): 374–85; Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 92–93, 131, 149; Kwame Yeboa Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), and J. K. Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbours, 1700–1807 (London: Longman, 1971); John Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1101–13.

  20. Horsmanden, Journal, 437, 284, 297; Z. Maurice Jackson, “Some Combination of Villains: The Unexplored Organizational Sources of the New York Conspiracy of 1741,” unpublished paper, Georgetown University, 1993; Orlando Patterson, “The Maroon War,” in Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Balrimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 262; A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua (Dublin, 1737), 7; David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Fynn, Asante, 58–60. For a contemporary’s comments on thunder and lightning and some of their cultural meanings on the Gold Coast, see P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, eds., Barboton Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barboton West Africa, 1678–1712 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1992), 2:398, 458, 579, 581, 589, 674.

  21. Horsmanden, Journal, 59; Governor Hunter to the Lords of Trade, 23 June 1712, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 5:341–42. See McManus, History of Negro Slavery, 122–26; Scott, “The Slave Insurrection,” 62–67, 57 (quotation); David Humphreys, An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1730), 240–42.

  22. Yioismanaen, Journal, 106, 547, 549, 200, 204; Scott, “The Slave Insurrection,” 52, 54–56; New York Weekly Journal, 7 March 1737.

  23. Horsmanden, Journal, 106, 59, 182, 80, 81, III, 118, 120, 163, 172, 228.

  24. Ibid., 277, 279, 281, 282, 285, 292, 293, 305, 341, 346–47, 460; Susan E. Klepp and Billy G. Smith, eds., The Infortunate: The Voyages and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant (1743; reprint, University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1992), 94–96.

  25. Audrey Lockhart, Some Aspects of Emigration from Ireland to the North American Colonies between 1660 and 1775 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 17, 22, 23; David Noel Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, and Revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1981), 62, 64; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 142; New England Courant, 4–11 January 1725 (quotation).

  26. Lockhart, Some Aspects of Emigration, 98, 102, 152.

  27. Kenneth Coleman and Milton Ready, eds., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 20:365, 366; Edwards, New York as an Eighteenth-Century Municipality, 113; Lockhart, Some Aspects of Emigration, 90.

  28. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 147; the Reverend Aubrey Gwynn, ed., “Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies,” Analecta Hibernica 4 (1932): 281–82; Lockhart, Some Aspects of Emigration, 130.

  29. Horsmanden, Journal, 28, 93, 182, 319.

  30. Ibid., 167, 117, 179, 81.

  31. Ibid., 179, 81, 147; see also 199, 197, 181.

  32. Ibid., 180, 151, 28; see also 173, 181, 182. On the earlier use of fireballs in the Caribbean, see, for example, Alexander O. Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America (1678; reprint, ed. Robert C. Ritchie, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993), 178, 180.

  33. Horsmanden, Journal, 350–51, 370; for references to the popish plot, see 341, 350, 387, 413, 420, 431–32. Oglethorpe’s letter is also excerpted in O’Callaghan, Documents, 6:198–99.

  34. The historical literature on the Great Awakening is vast. See Nash, The Urban Crucible, 206, 211, 216, 219; Charles Hartshorn Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920); Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). The slave James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw wrote some years later, “I knew Mr. Whitefield very well.—I had heard him preach in New York.” See his A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African prince, Written by Himself (Newport, R.I., 1774).

  35. J. Richard Olivas, “Great Awakenings: Time, Space, and the Varieties of Religious Revivalism in Massachusetts and Northern New England, 1740–1748” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997); Nash, The Urban Crucible, 208, 210, 482; Charles Chauncey, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion (Boston, 1742), iii-xxx; Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 33.

  36. Horsmanden, Journal, 105, 158, 203, 267, 300, 386. The religious instruction of slaves had long been a controversial issue in New York, as slaveowners feared the meetings and messages of Quakers, Baptists, and even the Church of England’s conservative Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The society’s catechist Elias Neau, a former sailor and galley slave, had been blamed for the slave revolt of 1712. See McManus, History of Negro Slavery, 70, 73, 75; Humphreys, An Historical Account, 235–43; Nash, The Urban Crucible, 211.

  37. George Whitefield, “Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,” in Three Letters from the Reverend G. Whitefield (Philadelphia, 1740). See also Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (1997): 823–34.

  38. South Carolina Gazette, 10–17 and 17–24 April 1742, as quoted in Alan Gallay, “The Great Sellout: George Whitefield on Slavery,” in Winfred B. Moore and Joseph F. Tripp, eds., Looking South: Chapters in the Story of
an American Region (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 24; Alexander Garden, Regeneration, and the testimony of the Spirit (Charleston, 1740); George Whitefield’s Journals (Guildford: Banner of Truth Trust, 1960), 442; William Smith, A Natural History of Nevis and the rest of the English Charibee Islands. . . (Cambridge, 1745), 230.

  39. Horsmanden, Journal, 360; Daniel Horsmanden to George Clarke, 20 May 1746, in Minutes of the Council in Assembly, Parish Transcripts, New-York Historical Society, ff. 24–25. William D. Piersen has aptly written, “It sometimes seemed to conservatives that the worst fears of [The Reverend H. A.] Brockwell and [the Reverend Charles] Chauncey had come true, and the old antinomian heresy had returned in a black light whereby slaves in a state of grace thought themselves above the law of their masters.” See his Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 71.

  40. Originally published in the Weekly Miscellany, 27 June 1741, and republished in the New Weekly Miscellany, 15 August 1741, and in Scots Magazine, August 1741, 367–368. Whitefield himself worried that his preaching had incited insurrection, and in his anonymously published Letter to the Negroes Lately Converted to Christ in America (London, 1743), he told slaves that it was better to die than to disobey one’s master. In subsequenr years he would become a slaveowner and campaign for the legalization of slavery in Georgia, thereby making peace with the Devil. See Gallay, “The Great Sellout,” in Moore and Tripp, eds., Looking South, 24–27, and Stephen J. Stein, “George Whitefield and Slavery: Some New Evidence,” Church History 42 (1973): 243–56.

  41. Writing on the historiography of slavery, Peter H. Wood observed, “There have been no successful longitudinal studies analyzing periods of intensive slave resistance throughout the Atlantic community, such as the late 1730s or the early 1790s.” See his “‘I Did the Best I Could for My Day’: The Study of Early Black History during the Second Reconstruction, 1960 to 1976,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 35 (1978): 185–225. Two fine studies on the subject have since been written: David Barry Gaspar, “A Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: Slave Rebellion in the West Indies during the 1730s,” Cimarrons 1 (1981): 79–91, and Julius Sherrard Scort III, “The Common Wind: Currenrs of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986).

  42. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943, 1974), 80, 191, 191–92, 189; American Weekly Mercury, 26 February–5 March 1734; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 308–26; “A Ranger’s Report of Travels with General Oglethorpe, 1739–1742,” in Newton Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 223.

  43. Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica (Edinburgh, 1739), 80; Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, Mass: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 76, 6, 59–61.

  44. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Slave Resistance in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), cites the Journals of the House of Assembly, Jamaica, 3:98, 100. See also Campbell, Maroons of Jamaica, 54, 61, 78, 101, 143–44.

  45. Craton, Testing the Chains, 90; Campbell, Maroons of Jamaica, 151.

  46. Richard Price, ed., To Slay the Hydra: Dutch Colonial Perspectives on the Saramaka Wars (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma, 1983), 15; Cornelius Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and the Guianas, 1680–1791 (Assen/Maastricht, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1985), 541, 554, 676.

  47. Coleman and Ready, eds., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, vol. 20, quotations at 365, 271, 366, 241, 246, 272, 284, 285, 270–71, 246; James Oglethorpe to George Clarke, 22 April 1743, Parish Transcripts, f. 20; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 146–47. For other instances of Irish resistance, see A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua, 15; Boston News-Letter, 24 May 1739; Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 187; Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, and Revolutionary America, 49; Boston Evening-Post, 7 January 1745; Philip D. Morgan and George D. Terry, “Slavery in Microcosm: A Conspiracy Scare in Colonial South Carolina,” Southern Studies 21 (1982): 121–45. On Priber, see Verner W. Crane, “A Lost Utopia of the First American Frontier,” Sewanee Review 27 (1919): 48–60, and two articles by Knox Mellon, Jr.: “Christian Priber and the Jesuit Myth,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 61 (1960): 75–81, and “Christian Priber’s Cherokee ‘Kingdom of Paradise,’” Georgia Historical Quarterly 57 (1973): 310–31.

  48. Gwin, Bastian, and Jonneau belonged to the baker John Vaarck; Tom, to the baker Divertie Bradt; Pablo, to the brewer Frederick Becker; and Primus, to the distiller James Debrosses. It was observed in court that a “baker’s servants, from the nature of their business . . . have always a command of fire.” See Horsmanden, Journal, 390. On arson in colonial New England, see Lawrence W. Towner, “A Good Master Well Served: A Social History of Servitude in Massachusetts, 1620–1750” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1955), 279.

  49. Gaspar, “A Dangerous Spirit of Liberty,” 87; American Weekly Mercury, 26 February–5 March 1734; Coleman and Ready, Colonial Records of Georgia, 20:241, 246, 258, 270; American Weekly Mercury, 19–26 May and 23–30 June 1737; New England Weekly Journal, 10 October 1738.

  50. South Carolina Gazette, 11–18 August 1739; Boston News-Letter, 20 November 1740; American Weekly Mercury, 22–29 January 1741; London Evening Post, 10 January 1741; Boston Gazette, 29 June-6 July 1741; Boston News-Letter, 7–14 May 1741; American Weekly Mercury, 10–17 September 1741; Boston News-Letter, 1 October 1741; Morgan and Terry, “Slavery in Microcosm,” 122.

  51. South Carolina Gazette, 1–7 January 1741, as quoted in Gallay, “The Great Sellout,” in Moore and Tripp, eds., Looking South, 23 (it was finally concluded that the fire in Charleston was not set by slaves); J. H. Easterby, R. Nicholas Oldsberg, and Terry W. Lipscomb, eds., The Colonial Laws of South Carolina: The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly (Columbia, S. C, 1951–), 3:461–62, quoted in Gallay, “The Great Sellout,” 24.

  52. Horsmanden, Journal, 387. On the design against the city on the anniversary of the burning of Fort George, see the Minutes of the Council in Assembly, 18 March 1742, Parish Transcripts, folder 162, f. 171.

  53. Bridenbaugh, Gentleman’s Progress, 41, 44, 46 (quotation), 48, 221.

  54. William I. Davisson and Lawrence J. Bradley, “New York Maritime Trade: Ship Voyage Patterns, 1715–1765,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 35 (1971): 309–17; Colden quoted in Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 169. See also Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, 220.

  55. James G. Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade, 1700 to 1774,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 35 (1978): 375–94; Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review 85 (1980): 49, 50; McManus, History of Negro Slavery, 27.

  56. Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 35–37.

  57. Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade,” 35; McManus, History of Negro Slavery, 35; Governor Rip Van Dam to the Lords of Trade, 2 November 1731, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 5:927–28; Governor William Cosby to House of Assembly, April 1734, Parish Transcripts, ff. 30–31. See also two articles by Darold D. Wax, “Negro Resistance to the Early American Slave Trade,” Journal of Negro History 61 (1966): 13–14, and “Preferences for Slaves in Colonial America,” Journal of Negro History 58 (1973): 374–89. Some of the complaining was hypocritical, as New York’s merchants carried slaves of “marked unruliness” to the “southern colonies to be sold.” See McKee, Labor in Colonial New York, 123.

  58. McManus, History of Negro Slavery, 35; Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade,” 385; James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 334.

  59. Horsmande
n, Journal, 9–10, 107; Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 February 1745.

  60. Horsmanden, Journal, 212; Ray A. Kea, “‘When I die, I shall return to my own land’: An ‘Amina’ Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies, 1733–1734,” in John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler, eds., The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society Ghanaian and Islamic in Honor or Ivor Wilks (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 159–93.

  61. Horsmanden, Journal, 267.

  62. Ibid., 259, 319, 70, 249, 118, 54, 419, 59–60, 283; Clarke to Lords of Trade, 20 June 1741, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 6:197.

  63. New York Weekly Journal, 23 June 1741; Horsmanden, Journal, 271, 269, 266, 224, 210–11, 290; 61, 98, 166, 282, 297, 440.

  64. Jane Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 9–30; idem, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62 (1984): 296–313; John J. TePaske, “The Fugitive Slave: Intercolonial Rivalry and Spanish Slave Policy, 1687–1764,” in Samuel Proctor, ed., Eighteenth-Century Florida and Its Borderlands (Gainesville, Fla.: The University Presses of Florida, 1975), 1–12.

  65. Guemes to Montiano, 2 June 1742, and (for more evidence of the plan of Spanish authorities to use North American slaves) Montiano to Jose de Campillo, 12 March 1742, both in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society 7 (1913): 33–34, 26 (these are translations of original documents located in the General Archives of the Indies in Seville). See also Larry E. Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier: The Military Colonization of Georgia, 1733–1749 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 151, 242.

  66. On early May timing for the rising, see Boston News-Letter, 7–14 May 1741, and American Weekly Mercury, 7 May 1741; Horsmanden, Journal, III. On Quack’s grudge, see T. J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt, 90, 148; on Spanish privateers, see Daily Gazette, 7 July 1741, and Carl E. Swanson, Predators and Prizes: American Privateering And Imperial Warfare, 1739–1748 (Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 144, 148. The New York Assembly acknowledged the privateering threat by voting a special allowance of four hundred pounds to defend the city.