by Noel Rae
Another witness, who lived next door, also complained of the way Hughson had kept “a very disorderly house, and sold liquor to, and entertained Negroes there; he had often seen many of them there at a time, at nights as well as in the day time. Once in particular he remembers, in the evening, he saw a great many of them in the room dancing to a fiddle, and Hughson’s wife and daughter along with them.”
Mr. Comfort’s slave, Jack, also testified that one Sunday afternoon he had met a friend, Ben, also a slave, who said “‘Brother, go to Hughson’s. All our company is come down.’ He went with Ben thither, and went round the house and went in at the back door; when he came there they all sat round the table, and had a goose, a quarter of mutton, a fowl, and two loaves of bread. Hughson took a flask of rum out of a case and set it on the table, and two bowls of punch were made. Two or three tables were put together to make it long. Hughson’s daughter brought in the victuals, and just as he came in Sarah brought the cloth and laid it. Peggy came downstairs and sat down by Hughson’s wife at the table, and ate with them; when they were eating they began all to talk about setting the houses on fire …”
Fueled no doubt by the bowls of punch, a lot of wild talk followed—“when the whole city was on fire they were all to meet together and destroy the people as fast as they came out; they were to have penknives to cut their throats.” Hughson said that “he would go before and be their king,” and then “they all swore; some said d—n, some said by G-d, and other oaths; a Spanish Negro swore by thunder; Hughson swore by G-d, if they would be true to him he would take this country.”
Whether all this heated talk, acquisition of penknives to cut throats and downing of bowls of punch really amounted to a conspiracy was doubted by many at the time, and many more since, but not by Horsmanden, the other judges or the jury. Hughson, his wife, his daughter Sarah, and Peggy were all sentenced to be hanged, Hughson’s body then to hang in chains, as a warning to others and as a mark of contempt. Sarah later confessed, and for thus implicitly confirming the rightness of the verdict, was pardoned. The other three “protested their innocence to the last.” A total of eighteen Negroes were hanged, thirteen were burned at the stake, and seventy were transported out of the colony to “the dominion of some foreign prince or state,” rather than to any of the English colonies in the West Indies—a nicety which just went to show “how tender we have been of their peace and security, by using all the precaution in our power that none of our rogues should be imposed on them.”
In fairness to Horsmanden and his judicial colleagues it should be mentioned that some thirty years earlier there had been another Negro conspiracy, one whose reality no one could doubt. According to the governor’s official report, it began at midnight on April 6, 1712, when about two dozen Negro slaves, “some provided with fire-arms, some with swords and others with knives and hatchets” met in an orchard in the middle of the town. “One Coffee, a Negro slave to one Vantilburgh, set fire to an outhouse of his master’s, and then repairing to the place where the rest were, they all sallied out together with their arms and marched to the fire. By this time the noise of the fire spreading through the town, the people began to flock to it. Upon the approach of several, the slaves fired and killed them. The noise of the guns gave the alarm, and some escaping their shot soon published the cause of the fire, which was the reason that not above nine Christians were killed, and about five or six wounded.” On hearing the news, the governor “ordered a detachment from the fort under a proper officer to march against them, but the slaves made their retreat into the woods, by favour of the night. Having ordered sentries the next day in the most proper places on the island to prevent their escape, I caused the day following the militia of this town and of the county of west Chester to drive the island, and by this means and strict searches of the town, we found all that had put the design into execution. Six of these having first laid violent hands upon themselves, the rest were forthwith brought to trial before the justices of this place, who are authorized by Act of Assembly to hold a court in such cases. In that court were twenty-seven condemned, whereof twenty-one were executed, one being a woman with child her execution by that means suspended. Some were burnt, others were hanged, one broke on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town, so that there has been the most exemplary punishment inflicted that could be possibly thought of.”
PENNSYLVANIA
FOR SALE: “A likely negro Wench about fifteen Years old, has had the Smallpox, been in the Country above a Year and talks English. Enquire of the Printer hereof.” Also “A likely negro Girl, about 14 Years of Age, bred in the Country but fit for either Town or Country Business. Enquire of the Printer hereof.”
“Hereof” was the Pennsylvania Gazette, and the Printer thereof was Benjamin Franklin, who had taken over the paper in 1732, at the age of twenty-six. Along with advertisements for likely Negro wenches, he also ran notices for runaways, white as well as black, the former being indentured servants unwilling to serve out their time—rather like Franklin himself, who had been bound as an apprentice when he skipped out of Boston nine years earlier.
Another advertisement was for “a very likely Negro Woman” who “can wash and iron very well, cook victuals, sew, spin on the linen wheel, milk cows, and do all sorts of House-work well. She has a Boy of about Two Years old, which is to go with her.” Also for sale was “another very likely Boy, aged about Six Years, who is the Son of the above-said Woman. He will be sold with his Mother, or by himself, as the Buyer pleases.” Since he was free to decline printing the advertisement, Franklin presumably saw nothing wrong with selling away from his mother a boy of six. Not long after, writing in favor of a plan to raise a militia, he urged that it would be a defense not only against the French and Indians, but also against “the wanton and unbridled rage, rapine and lust of Negroes.”
But, just as he was to evolve from a fervent supporter of the British Empire to a no less fervent supporter of American Independence, so Franklin was to discard his early prejudices and end his days as President of Pennsylvania’s Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Here are some of the steps on his road from acceptance to rejection:
Ever the pragmatist, he began by questioning the economic justification. “’Tis an ill-grounded opinion that by the labour of slaves America may possibly vie in cheapness of manufactures with Britain,” he wrote in 1755 in Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. “The labour of slaves can never be so cheap here as the labour of working men is in Britain. Anyone may compute it. Interest of money is in the colonies from six to ten per cent. Slaves, one with another, cost £30 per head. Reckon then the interest of the first purchase of a slave, the insurance or risque on his life, his cloathing and diet, expenses in his sickness and loss of time, loss by his neglect of business (neglect is natural to the man who is not to be benefited by his own care or diligence), expense of a driver to keep him at work, and his pilfering from time to time, almost every slave being by nature a thief, and compare the whole amount with the wages of a manufacturer of iron or wool in England, you will see that labour is much cheaper there than it can ever be by Negroes here.” (Twenty years later, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith would make the same point: “The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much and to labour as little as possible.”) Another Observation held that slaves “pejorate [degrade] the families that use them; the white children become proud, disgusted with labour, and being educated in idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living.”
In 1757 Franklin went to London as agent for the Pennsylvania assembly in its dispute with the rich and selfish Penn family, who refused to pay any taxes on their vast landholdings. He left behind his homely wife, Deborah, to manage his affairs, but took with him his son, William, and two slaves as domestic servants, King and Peter
. Before leaving, Franklin drew up manumission papers for both in case he died while abroad, but it was not long before King, who had “often been in mischief,” manumitted himself by running away. Franklin did not try to reclaim him, but later reported to Deborah that King had fallen on his feet. He was now living in the country, “where he had been taken in the service of a lady that was very fond of the merit of making him a Christian, and contributing to his education and improvement.” The lady “sent him to school, has him taught to read and write, to play the violin and the French horn, with some other accomplishments more useful in a servant.” That is the last we hear of King. As to Peter, he “behaves as well as I can expect. We rub on pretty comfortably.”
While in London Franklin was asked by the Rev. John Waring, secretary of the philanthropy known as The Associates of Dr. Bray, to help establish a school in Philadelphia to educate and Christianize black children. Franklin exerted himself, and the school opened a year later with thirty pupils. On his return to Philadelphia, he paid it a visit and wrote to the Rev. Waring that, “I was on the whole much pleased; and from what I then saw, have conceived a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race than I had ever before entertained. Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children.” Soon after, in a revised edition of Observations, the statement about “almost every slave being by nature a thief,” became “almost every slave being from the nature of slavery a thief.”
Then came some backsliding. In 1770, back in London, Franklin wrote A Conversation Between an Englishman, a Scotchman and an American on the Subject of Slavery, in response to the English abolitionist, Granville Sharp, who had recently criticized Americans for owning slaves. In the Conversation, Franklin has the American agree with some of Sharp’s strictures, but others were “too severe.” Many regions had few or no slaves and “in truth, there is not, take North-America through, one family in a hundred that has a slave in it. Many thousands there abhor the slave trade as much as Mr. Sharp.” It was unfair to blame the whole country. For example, “if one man in a hundred in England were dishonest, would it be right from thence to characterize the nation, and say the English are rogues and thieves? But farther, of those who do keep slaves, all are not tyrants and oppressors. Many treat their slaves with great humanity, and provide full as well for them in sickness as in health.” Also, “Remember, sir, that she [England] began the slave trade,” and ever since had been forcing slaves on unwilling colonials. “Several laws heretofore made in our colonies to discourage the importation of slaves by laying a heavy duty, payable by the importer, have been disapproved and repealed by your government here, as being prejudicial, forsooth, to the interests of the Africa Company.”
In fact, the Portuguese, not the English, began the Atlantic slave trade; few traders can force customers to buy goods they do not want; in Philadelphia about one household in twelve, not one in a hundred, had a domestic slave; the proposed duty was not so much to discourage the importation of slaves as to keep up the price of those raised at home. But worse was to come, for when the Englishman complains of “the severe laws you have made,” the American replies that the severity of laws must be in proportion to the “wickedness of the people to be governed. Perhaps you may imagine the Negroes to be a mild-tempered, tractable kind of people. Some of them indeed are so. But the majority are of a plotting disposition, dark and sullen, malicious, revengeful and cruel in the highest degree.”
But the aberration was temporary, and two years later Franklin was writing to the London Chronicle decrying “the constant butchery of the human species by this pestilent, detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men.” Then, while in Paris to enlist French support for the American cause, he circulated A Thought Concerning the Sugar Islands in which he wrote that “when he considered the wars made in Africa for prisoners to raise sugar in America, the numbers slain in those wars, the numbers that, being crowded in ships, perish in the transportation, and the numbers that die under the severities of slavery, he could scarce look on a morsel of sugar without conceiving it spotted with human blood.”
In November, 1789, soon after his final return to Philadelphia, he published an Address to the Public, in which he argued that “slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature,” that mere abolition would not be enough; positive, remedial action would also be needed. “To instruct, to advise, to qualify those who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty; to promote in them habits of industry; to furnish them with employments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances; and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life: these are the great outline of the annexed plan …” As might be expected of him, the plan was quite specific, with an emphasis on education and job training. Still energetic at the age of eighty-four, Franklin would surely have pushed the scheme ahead, but he had only a few months to live.
Another Pennsylvanian abolitionist was also called Benjamin, but in every other way different from the worldly and successful Franklin. This was Benjamin Lay, a hunchback not much more than four feet tall, with a pigeon-chest and long beard that as he aged became snow-white. Born in England in 1682, he had spent some time in Barbados, which was clearly the wrong place for him, and eventually settled in the country near Philadelphia. There he and his wife, who was about the same height, lived a life of extreme simplicity: their dwelling was sometimes described as a cottage and sometimes as a cave; their diet was entirely vegetarian; Lay wove his own cloth and made his own clothes, but because indigo was the product of slave labor, he refused to dye them, leaving them a distinctive pale yellow; he once nearly killed himself by trying to follow the example of Jesus and fasting for forty days and forty nights.
Barely four feet tall, hunchbacked, and with arms longer than his spindly legs, Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) was a forceful polemicist in his campaign against fellow Quakers who owned slaves, a campaign he eventually won. Benjamin Franklin was a great admirer, and kept a portrait of Lay in his living room.
Lay was a Quaker, but at the time of his arrival this sect, while well-established, had not yet officially declared against slavery. This led to a number of run-ins, as when he flouted the Society’s rule that nothing was to be published without being approved by the Overseers of the Press. Although he described himself as a man of “very mean capacity and little learning,” Lay nevertheless wrote a book, All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. It was printed by Benjamin Franklin, who though a friend and admirer—he kept a portrait of Lay in his living room—was careful not to put his name on the book as the printer thereof. Franklin also did some editing to tidy up Lay’s ranting, but clearly not enough. “For custom in sin hides, covers, as it were takes away the guilt of sin,” ran a typical passage. “Long custom, the conveniency of slaves working for us, waiting and tending continually on us, besides the washing, cleaning, scouring, cooking very nicely, fine and curious, sewing, knitting, darning, almost ever at hand and command; and in other places milking, churning, cheese-making, and all the drudgery in dairy and kitchen, within doors and without. And the proud, dainty, lazy daughters sit with their hands before ’em, like some of the worst sort of gentlewomen, and if they want a trifle, rather than rise from their seats, call the poor slave from her drudgery to come and wait upon them. These things have been the utter ruin of more than a few, and yet encouraged by their own parents, for whom my spirit is grieved, and some of which were and are preachers in great repute, as well as others.”
As for slaves, “were they at liberty, as we are; had the same education, learning, conversation, books, sweet communion in our religious assemblies, they would exceed many of their tyrant masters in piety, virtue and godliness.” But instead of being allowed to live virtuous lives, they had to “plow, sow, thresh, winnow, split rails, cut wood, clear land, make ditches and fences, fodder cattle, run and fetch up the hor
ses, or fine curious pacing mares, for young Madam and Sir to ride about on, impudently and proudly gossiping from house to house, stuffing their lazy ungodly bellies …”
Lay also favored direct action. Several times he was forcibly ejected from Quaker meetings for disruptive conduct; when that happened, rather than depart, he would lie on the ground just outside the doorway until the meeting was over, so that those leaving had to step over his body. After his wife died, he demonstrated his disapproval of drinking tea, in itself a luxury and usually taken with slave-made sugar, by standing in the market-place of the local town with a chest containing his late wife’s china which he then smashed to pieces with a hammer.
Lay’s most famous direct action took place at a meeting of the Society of Friends, held at Burlington in New Jersey. “Having previously prepared a sufficient quantity of the juice of pokeberry [a bright-red, strong-smelling, poisonous berry that leaves a permanent stain] to fill a bladder, he contrived to conceal it within the cover of a large folio volume, the leaves of which were removed. He then put on a military coat, and belted a small sword by his side; over the whole of this dress he threw his great-coat, which was made in the most ample manner, and secured it upon himself with a single button. Thus equipped, he entered the Meeting House”—where swords and military coats were taboo, but large volumes, presumably Bibles, were welcome—“and placed himself in a conspicuous position, from which he addressed the audience in substance as follows:
“‘Oh all you Negro masters who are contentedly holding your fellow creatures in a state of slavery during life, well knowing the cruel sufferings these innocent captives undergo in their state of bondage … and especially you who profess to do unto all men as you would they should do unto you, and yet, in direct opposition to any principle of reason, humanity and religion, you are forcibly retaining your fellow men, from one generation to another, in a state of unconditional servitude; you might as well throw off the plain coat, as I do’—here he loosed the button, and the great-coat falling behind him, his warlike appearance was exhibited to his astonished audience, and proceeded—‘It would be as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard, if you should thrust a sword through their hearts, as I do through this book.’ He then drew his sword and pierced the bladder, sprinkling its contents over those who sat near him.”
