As in Captain Kidd’s day, a thin line separated privateering from its unsavory half-brother, piracy. Like pirates of old, some privateers raided neutral ships or beat and tortured captured crew and passengers, especially when they thought rough treatment would force captives to reveal where treasure was hidden aboard ship. One New York privateer captain, John Lush, gained a special reputation for his piratical behavior. Lush’s sloop Stephen and Elizabeth, manned by one hundred men, prowled the Caribbean in 1739–1740 for Spanish prizes, which he towed into Charleston and Manhattan, where the proceeds from the looted cocoa, indigo, slaves, and pieces of eight were distributed among the captain and crew. Lush took part of his largesse in human cargo; nineteen “negroes and mulattoes” seized by him were condemned as prizes by Judge Morris. Rumors soon surfaced that Lush had tortured a Spanish crewman in order to get him to divulge the location of gold on his ship; when confronted with the allegation, Lush dryly responded that he “had not realized that you could use a Spaniard too cruel.” Other charges would soon circulate as well: allegations that the seized “slaves” had in fact been free sailors before their capture. Regardless of the stories passing from mouth to mouth on the East River docks, the captain played his role to the hilt. “When Lush landed,” the New York Weekly Journal reported in April 1740, “he was rowed to shore by his men in rich laced and embroidered clothes taken from the Spaniards.” As successful businessmen who embodied wartime prosperity, Lush and other privateers found their alleged breaches of honor and humanity were quickly forgotten by most townspeople in the streets and auction rooms of Manhattan.36
In the late winter and spring of 1741, as privateering sloops came and went in the waters of the Upper Bay, and at a moment when hundreds of redcoats and militia volunteers were off fighting the Spaniards in a major Caribbean offensive, a strange and disturbing series of events began to unfold in New York City. Ten fires, at first seemingly random and accidental, broke out over the course of three weeks in March and April. While no lives were lost, several homes and warehouses were badly burned. Hardest hit was Fort George, where on March 18 the barracks, chapel, and governor’s house burned to the ground despite the efforts of a bucket brigade and the city’s two water-pumping fire engines. Next to the little-understood smallpox and yellow fever epidemics that periodically swept the city, nothing struck fear in the hearts of New Yorkers like fire: with hundreds of buildings and roofs at least partly constructed of wood, the town could become an inferno in a matter of minutes.
By April 5, uneasiness was turning into panic. While looking out her window onto Broadway that day, Abigail Earle overheard Quack, the slave of butcher John Walter, laughingly exclaim to a fellow slave, “fire, fire, scorch, scorch, A LITTLE, damn it, by-and-by.” When four blazes broke out the following day, furious mobs ran through the streets yelling, “The Negroes are rising!” Then, on April 21, Mary Burton, a white teenage servant in a waterfront tavern popular among slaves and soldiers from Fort George, offered authorities a remarkable confession: her employer, John Hughson, was the head of a slave conspiracy “to burn the whole town . . . the Negroes were to cut their masters’ and mistresses’ throats; and when all this was done, Hughson was to be king, and Caesar [a local slave] governor.”37
New York had been a slave-owning city from its inception, but New Yorkers had never resolved the complications of owning other human beings. Enslaved African men and women toiled in households and workshops for their white masters; most lived in their owners’ homes, sleeping in kitchens or garrets. Some wed slaves of other owners and created families that were spread between different neighborhoods. As they served their owners, African New Yorkers concealed their own customs, ethnic traditions, and resentments. In 1712, the resentments exploded: a group of about thirty slaves, many of them belonging to the Coromantee (Akan) people of Ghana, who were known for their military tradition, rebelled, killing nine whites and wounding six before they were captured and executed. The rebellion brought harsher laws, designed to keep blacks under constant scrutiny by whites. But the need to move around the city, often beyond the purview of watching eyes, was essential to the daily labor that masters expected their enslaved servants, laborers, and assistants to perform, thus defeating the intent of the laws. In 1741, one in every five New Yorkers—a total of two thousand men, women, and children—was enslaved. Present in about half the city’s white households, dwelling in every part of town, slaves made up almost one-third of New York’s workforce. In short, slaves were everywhere.38
Armed with Burton’s allegations against the tavern owner and his cohorts, the city’s judicial authorities swung into action, commencing a roundup of slave suspects that continued through the spring and summer months. As New Yorkers erected shoreline beacon poles at Rockaway and the Narrows to warn of possible Spanish invasion that spring, eleven slaves convicted of arson were burned at the stake; five other prisoners, including the white “king” Hughson and his wife, were hanged after being convicted of conspiracy.
As the jail in City Hall filled with dozens of suspects, however, it became clear that those slaves who confessed to complicity in the plot, and named other coconspirators, often had their lives spared. Suspects quickly learned the advisability of cooperating with their interrogators. By midsummer, details of an “unparalleled and hellish conspiracy” were emerging from the testimony of numerous slaves. Some prisoners testified that the plotters had calculated that a Spanish and French invasion was imminent and, arming themselves with stolen swords and guns, had planned to turn over the city to the invaders; when no invasion fleet materialized, they had decided to “kill all the white men, and have their wives for themselves.” Prosecutors and judges focused on the alleged treachery of the “Spanish Negroes,” who stubbornly insisted in court that they had been free Spanish seamen before being captured by Lush and other privateers. Witnesses reported that Hughson had promised “to tie Lush to a beam and roast him like a piece of beef.”
For many frightened New Yorkers, the pieces were all falling into place. The New York plot—“one of the most horrid and detestable pieces of villainy that ever Satan instilled into the heart of human creatures,” Judge Daniel Horsmanden called it—was no doubt part of a global Catholic conspiracy to incite these “latent enemies amongst us,” “these enemies of their own household,” to literally stab their masters in the back.39
Horsmanden, one of three Supreme Court Justices, refused to believe that black slaves—“these silly unthinking creatures”—or a mere tavern keeper like Hughson was capable of launching such a shrewd plot. “There is scarce a plot but a priest is at the bottom of it,” Horsmanden concluded, and the city authorities began a roundup of suspected secret Catholics. Four Irish-born soldiers from Fort George were arrested; to save himself, one of them “confessed” that a plot was afoot to burn down Trinity Church, the city’s bastion of English Protestantism. John Ury, an eccentric teacher of Latin and Greek recently arrived in the city, was arrested and accused of being a secret priest and the true ringleader of a diabolical Spanish or French plot, launched with Vatican approval, to burn New York. Horsmanden, for one, persuaded himself that a joint Catholic-slave uprising, originally planned for St. Patrick’s Day, had been coordinated by “our foreign and domestic enemies” to destroy the seaport and prevent the city’s ships from bringing food and supplies to British armies and navies fighting Spain in the West Indies. Ury’s protests of innocence could not save him from conviction or the gallows. By the time he was hanged on August 29, he joined thirty black men, two white women, and one white man (Hughson) who had already met their end; eighty-four other slaves, including many who had confessed, were ultimately banished by being sold outside the colony.40
We will never know fully the true nature and extent of the “Negro Plot” of 1741. Some scholars have argued that militant slaves probably did plan an uprising, to coincide with a hoped-for Spanish or French invasion. More likely is the possibility that a small number of slaves set some of the fires as
limited acts of resistance, rather than hatching the murderous plot imagined by panicking whites and sworn to by coerced suspects. Engaged in an imperial, global, and ultimately religious war, protected by flimsy local defenses, ever mindful of enemy privateers and the attacking fleets they might lead into the harbor, propertied white New Yorkers found it easy to detect enemies all around them: plebeian Irish soldiers in the fort, lowly tavern keepers on the waterfront, hidden priests, their own duplicitous slaves. An unrelenting Daniel Horsmanden continued to insist that the lesson of 1741 was “to awaken us from that supine security . . . lest the enemy should be yet within our doors.”41
“Latent enemies amongst us.” An enslaved African is hanged on the eighteenth-century city’s outskirts. Lithograph by George Hayward, Ye Execution of Goff ye Neger of Mr Hochins on ye Commons, 1860. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
Over the two decades following the events of 1741, New Yorkers would enjoy only seven full years of peace, as the British Empire fought and concluded one war against the Spanish and French, and then in 1756 commenced another one. By late 1760, however, British victories had settled the fate of Canada, vanquishing the looming French presence to the north. As redcoats and sailors left New York City by the hundreds in 1761 and 1762, off to conquer the French islands of Martinique and Dominica and to besiege Havana, New Yorkers could congratulate themselves on having survived five colonial wars without ever setting eyes on an enemy armada sailing up the bay or down the Hudson.42
Yet for all New Yorkers’ relief, the end of the cycle of imperial wars left the city an abruptly poorer place. The removal of troops and fleets was one key factor in an economic slump that now hit New York and the other colonial ports hard. To make matters worse, Parliament decided to reorganize and increase its taxation and commercial regulation of the colonies in order to recoup some of the war’s expenses and to fund the continued British military presence on the frontier.43
Like other American colonists, New Yorkers now brought a range of escalating grievances to their concerns about their place in the empire. Merchants and lawyers championed “smuggling” as free trade, arguing that freedom of the seas was a social good Parliament dare not strangle. Militiamen who had felt the disdain of British regulars on the Canadian front returned home to view redcoats with new eyes. Men who had learned how to fight on privateers—New Yorkers Alexander McDougall, Isaac Sears, and George Clinton among them—had taken the measure of British allies as well as French foes. McDougall and Sears would soon be leading a group called the Sons of Liberty. And young Clinton would go on to serve as New York’s revolutionary governor and under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as vice president of a nation no New Yorker could yet imagine at the conclusion of five wars for the empire.44
CHAPTER 4
Demons of Discord
The Revolutionary War, 1775–1783
Accompanied by officers and sentries, George Washington inspected his army’s handiwork in lower Manhattan’s narrow streets. It was mid-April 1776, and New York was swarming with thousands of soldiers pledged to fight king and Parliament. Log barricades now extended across Wall Street, Crown Street, and a dozen other waterfront thoroughfares, while redoubts of freshly turned earth sheltered artillery batteries along the wharves and on the crests of hills beyond the city’s outskirts. Washington’s second in command, General Charles Lee, had followed his orders conscientiously, arriving in Manhattan with a thousand Continental soldiers and militiamen in order to turn the city into “a disputable field of battle against any force.” Lee, known for his political radicalism and his hatred of British loyalists, had ordered New York City’s male population to help in the effort. Mustered every morning by a fife and drum corps, one thousand civilians—leather-aproned artisans, merchants and shopkeepers, slaves delivered up by their masters—took their turn at the shovel and the axe. One of Washington’s generals noted approvingly that the wealthiest men “worked so long, to set an example, that the blood rushed out of their fingers.”1
If Washington feared that these defenses might prove flimsy against the full brunt of the British Empire’s might, he most likely kept those fears to himself. The general was still learning to command an army whose ranks were filled with amateur soldiers. One year earlier, in April 1775, war had broken out when British troops had faced minutemen at Lexington and Concord. Two months later, Washington assumed command of the American troops surrounding Boston’s peninsula, where the British commander, General William Howe, had entrenched his army after the Battle of Bunker Hill. When Howe put his troops on transport ships and sailed away in March 1776, Washington strongly suspected that Howe’s next landfall would be Manhattan Island. By that time, Washington had already sent Lee south to prepare New York City for invasion. In fact, Howe’s destination was Halifax, Nova Scotia, but Washington’s foreboding was correct: Halifax was merely a provisioning station and rendezvous for the grand expeditionary force Howe was mobilizing for an assault on Manhattan.
Washington had consulted with the Continental Congress before marching and shipping his entire army two hundred miles south from Massachusetts. Washington believed strongly that New York City was crucial to American victory in the war. Congress agreed. Writing to the general from Philadelphia, John Adams concurred that New York was “a kind of key to the whole continent.” In believing this, Washington and Adams were merely echoing what had been obvious in North American and European strategic thinking for a century. Whoever controlled the Hudson River between its southern terminus at New York City and its northern borderland in Canada not only possessed one of the continent’s great water highways but also held the natural boundary separating New England from the Middle and Southern colonies. For Howe to seize New York City would raise the specter of an impregnable British line stretching from Manhattan to Montreal and Quebec, geographically cutting the revolution in two and making it that much easier to quash.2
With congressional consent secured, Washington made New York his new base of operations. By his own arrival there on April 13, over fourteen thousand American troops—most of them veterans of the Boston campaign—had already filled makeshift camps in and around the city, while thousands more were making their way on foot or by boat from Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley. The city awed Washington’s soldiers, most of them farm boys who had never encountered a place so large or so cosmopolitan. Ensign Caleb Clap from Massachusetts was intrigued by the services he attended in the city’s synagogue and Lutheran church. Clap’s commanding officer, Colonel Loammi Baldwin, a young land surveyor from Woburn, wrote to his wife of another of the city’s attractions: the “bitchfoxly jades, jills, hags, strums, prostitutes” he encountered while on duty in the city’s brothel district west of Trinity Church. The soldiers commandeered houses, many of them abandoned by fleeing civilians, and hunkered down in barns and tents from Paulus Hook on the New Jersey shore to Red Hook on the Long Island shore. “Our tent living is not very pleasant,” wrote Philip Fithian, a young army chaplain with a New Jersey regiment stationed at Red Hook. “Every shower wets us. . . . But we must grow inured to these necessary hardships.”3
By the 1770s, New York was a city of over twenty thousand, home to a jostling array of peoples and interest groups; its rural environs across the harbor and in northern Manhattan consisted of tidy farms and small hamlets linked to the city by roads and waterways. The town had continued to grow through the mid-century cycle of war and peace, extending north beyond Stuyvesant’s old defensive wall, which had fallen into disrepair by 1699 and soon disappeared as New Yorkers used its wood and stone for new buildings. On some blocks, elegant brick townhouses had replaced wooden Dutch cottages; church steeples and the masts of cargo ships now towered over wharves and winding thoroughfares. “Here is found Dutch neatness, combined with English taste and architecture,” an admiring immigrant observed. In Manhattan’s streets one saw Germans and Jews and heard English spoken with a Scottish burr or Irish b
rogue; newcomers mingled with the native sons and daughters of intermarried Dutch, English, and French Protestant families.4
But the city Washington and his troops entered had become a deeply divided community. For a decade, while the city continued to grow, New Yorkers had grappled with a succession of parliamentary enactments many viewed as economically burdensome, as affronts to their tradition of self-determination within the British Empire, and ultimately as proof of an English plot to force Americans “to wear the yoke of slavery, and suffer it to be riveted about their necks,” as John Holt’s weekly New York Journal put it. In response, New Yorkers had taken to the streets in a series of demonstrations, besieging Fort George in protest against the Stamp Act in November 1765, trading blows with angry redcoats at Golden Hill near the East River in January 1770, and dumping tea into the harbor in emulation of Boston’s patriots in April 1774. “What demon of discord blows the coals in that devoted province I know not,” an exasperated William Pitt commented in 1768 after reading a petition denouncing Parliament’s trade policies signed by 240 Manhattan merchants.5
The Sons of Liberty—the semisecret society of patriots who, from 1765 onwards, organized the street rallies in New York and elsewhere—drew most of their numbers from the craftsmen, seamen, and laborers of the city’s workshops and wharves. The leaders of these “Liberty Boys” were Isaac Sears and Alexander McDougall, privateer captains during the French and Indian War. Sears and McDougall were men on the make, individuals aspiring to wealth and influence. But they were also heirs to a vernacular tradition that posited the common laboring people, the “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” as the true source and ultimate repository of virtue. While artisans and seamen were well aware that men of their station were expected to leave decision making to their “betters,” some Liberty Boys brought to the patriotic movement a willingness to confront men who sported powdered wigs and knee breeches.6
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