New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  EVEN BEFORE the fires died to embers, New Yorkers began to wonder whether the city had suffered “in the merciless Flames of an Imaginary Plot.” More than a few began “to think it all a Dream, or a Fiction.” Some even “took the Liberty to arraign the Justice of the Proceedings, ” declaring “that there was no Plot at all!” Daniel Horsmanden, who had staked his reputation on the investigation, was outraged. Inspired by Alexander’s success in publishing the record of Zenger’s trial, Horsmanden decided to bring the evidence before the public. In 1744, he published his Journal of the Proceedingsin The Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for Burning the City of NEW-YORK in America, And Murdering the Inhabitants, containing (as advertised on its title page) “A Narrative of the Trials, Condemnations, Executions, and Behaviour of the several Criminals, at the Gallows and Stake, with their Speeches and Confessions; with Notes, Observations and Reflections occasionally interspersed throughout the Whole.” It is one of the most startling and vexing documents in early American history.

  Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal is many things: a diary, a mystery, a history, and maybe one of English literature’s first detective stories. By publishing it, Horsmanden hoped to persuade New Yorkers “of the Necessity there is, for every One that has Negroes, to keep a very watchful Eye over them, and not to indulge them with too great Liberties. ” More, he sought to illustrate the brilliance of his investigation of this “Master-piece of Villainy.” Yet Horsmanden has convinced his few modern readers of nothing so much as his own unreliability to report on a conspiracy hatched by people he considered “degenerated and debased below the Dignity of Humane Species.” On every page of the Journal, Horsmanden’s fiery racial hatred testifies to his inability to offer justice to each black man and woman who came before his court, making it all too easy to conclude that New Yorkers did indeed suffer “in the merciless Flames of an Imaginary Plot.”11

  But the plot cannot be so easily dismissed, just as Horsmanden’s Journal cannot be so carelessly tossed into the trash bin of history. To place both liberty and slavery, and not just one or the other, at the center of American history requires much more than a casual reading of what the Journal contains: page after page of what eighteenth-century lawyers called “Negro Evidence,” testimony elicited from slaves. “Negro & Spectre evidence will turn out alike,” that anonymous New Englander warned, predicting that the confessions of New York City’s slaves, like teenage girls’ visions of witches flying over Salem, would turn out to be nothing more than lies and delusions. By 1693, spectral evidence had become an embarrassment in Massachusetts courts; “Negro Evidence” was legally dubious from the beginning. But without recourse to such evidence, much of early American history, and especially of the tangled paradox of liberty and slavery, is probably unrecoverable. Getting to the truth of the 1741 conspiracy means taking the “Negro Evidence” in Horsmanden’s Journal seriously.

  Opening page of A Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy, 1744. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

  Daniel Horsmanden never failed to set his sights high, as a writer, as a politician, as a judge. His Journal was no exception. In it he boasted that the Supreme Court’s tireless inquiry into the events of 1741 solved the problem of evil, the “Mystery of Iniquity,” the biblical Mysterium iniquitatis,by which he meant the slave conspiracy. Like Horsmanden, I think there’s more to this mystery than the conspiracy. There’s the iniquity of slavery, and the mystery of why it thrived in Britain’s American colonies, even in the North, even among English settlers passionate about liberty. “LIBEERTY and SLAVERY! how amiable is one! how odious and abominable the other!” Perhaps the paradox, the mystery, of liberty and slavery can never be solved. But a lantern can be held up to it, on a walk that might begin at the slave market on Wall Street and end at the Negroes Burial Ground near the Collect Pond, a long, cold walk through the harsh and beautiful and unfamiliar past of what would become America’s most important city, a city that slavery built, and nearly destroyed.

  DAVID GRIM’S PLAN

  In this plan of Manhattan made in 1813, a seventy-six-year-old New Yorker

  named David Grim mapped the densely settled city of the 1740s—

  with some eleven hundred houses—complete with references to sixty landmarks,

  including the “Plot Negro’s burnt here,” the best remembered event of the

  mapmaker’s childhood. Grim was just four years old in 1741, but he had “a perfect

  idea of seing the Negroes chained to a stake, and there burned to death.”

  Detail from David Grim, “A Plan of the City and Environs of New York as they were in the years 1742 1743 & 1744,”

  1813. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

  PROLOGUE

  The Plot

  VEAL, DUCK, SALT PORK, a quarter of mutton, two loaves of bread, at least one goose, a flask of rum, two bowls of punch. It was a fine feast. Planks were balanced on low wooden tubs to make benches and a cloth was laid over three tables pushed together, like cobblestones down a narrow lane.

  The guests began arriving at four o’clock in the afternoon, on a bitterly cold Sunday in January 1741. They came from all over the city. Bastian trudged up from Jacobus Vaarck’s bakery on Broad Street. Captain John Marshall’s slave Ben headed north on Broadway and then west to Gerardus Comfort’s dock, where he called out to Comfort’s slave Jack, “Brother go to Hughson’s.” In the Trinity churchyard, Emanuel, owned by a cordwainer named Thomas Wendover, met Quash, who worked at a brewery on Maiden Lane, and together they walked along the waterside, staring out at the meringue of ice on the Hudson River, to John Hughson’s tavern on the edge of the city. 1

  It had been a doleful winter. The “hard winter,” it was called, the worst anyone could remember. And the “great snow” of that hardest of winters had come at Christmastime, three feet on a single night; seven more in the days that followed. “Our Streets are fill’d, with confused Heaps of Snow,” the New-York Weekly Journal reported on December 22. Two weeks later, a canoe carrying “one Woman and a Child at her Breast and 5 Men” was “Jamm’d in with the Ice” and driven to Coney Island, where its passengers died of the cold. The Hudson was frozen for thirty miles upriver, while in the harbor abandoned ships creaked, their masts rising up from the glacial sea like inverted icicles. Birds and squirrels froze to death. Cows and deer, “unable to browse or escape through the depth of the snow,” simply starved, their carcasses sinking under the white.

  Stuck in their city that winter, New Yorkers were marooned on the tip of their tiny island. They had barely cleared paths to walk down the streets and there was so much snow—drifts buried dozens of houses—that even sleds and sleighs were dangerous. In the winter of 1740–41, ten thousand New Yorkers, two thousand of them slaves, tried to stop shivering, and they failed. “While I am Writing in a Warm Room by a good Fire Side,” wrote a correspondent for John Peter Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal, “the Ink Freezes in the Pen.”2

  As Cato, owned by city alderman John Moore, trudged to Hughson’s that afternoon from his owner’s house at Whitehall Slip, on the East River, he must have ached for the warmth of the tavern. Cato had come by invitation, but by the time he arrived there were already forty or fifty guests in the parlor of what was a suspiciously large house for such a poor cobbler as the Englishman John Hughson. Nearly all of Hughson’s guests were men, men born into bondage in Jamaica, Antigua, or Barbados, and traded to New York, or born in Africa, kidnapped or captured in warfare, marched to the Guinea Coast, packed in cargo holds, shipped to the Caribbean, and finally sold at auction in New York, at the market on the dock at the base of Wall Street. A few were born slaves on the banks of the Hudson. Now, they all felt the chill seep out of their bones as they sat in Hughson’s house, listening to the popping and spitting of his fierce fire.

  Hughson, his wife Sarah, their daughter, and a lodger named Peggy Kerry sat at one e
nd of the table; next to them sat six dark-skinned Spanish-speaking sailors, “Spanish Negroes,” who had been sold into slavery after being captured by English privateers. Kerry, an Irish prostitute, was seven months pregnant, carrying a child fathered by Caesar, who was owned by John Vaarck, Bastian’s owner’s son. Hughson’s wife, Sarah, who had given birth to ten children, probably nursed a newborn. Ben sat “at the Head of the Table.” Jonneau, another of Jacobus Vaarck’s slaves, “stood at the Door a pretty while,” but when the meat was served, he came in and took a seat. The other men shifted their weight on the benches, making room, keeping warm. Finding no place for himself, Cato sat at a makeshift side table. “The Room was so full,” Emanuel said, “that several of the Negroes stood.”

  When Bastian entered the crowded tavern, he must have nearly fainted at the sight of the feast. Meat, by God. The slave of a baker, Bastian was better fed than many New Yorkers, but he, too, felt the hunger that plagued the city’s poor that winter, when even bakers ran out of grain. Later, in March, ravenous New Yorkers would taste flesh for the first time in months, when flocks of pigeons darkened the sky and were “taken in nets in such plenty” as to “greatly contribute to the relief of the poor.” No one understood why the pigeons arrived so early, migrating from the south six weeks sooner than usual, their craws still full of undigested Carolina rice. Nor did anyone wonder for long; instead, while the birds roasted on the spit, the poor gave thanks for one of the hard winter’s few mercies.

  Before Bastian, his mouth watering, could reach for the veal, or the duck, mutton, pork, or goose on John Hughson’s table, Caesar pointed a pistol at his chest. Would Bastian “join along with them to become their own Masters?” he demanded. “What would he have him join with him in?” Bastian asked. “In the Plot,” Caesar answered, “to take the Country.” At first Bastian refused. Caesar poured rum down his throat and warned that he “should not go alive out of the House.” Finally, Bastian, “very much daunted,” consented to the plot: to burn the city, kill the white men, and take the white women for their wives. He’s “but a weak-hearted Dog,” Caesar called over to Hughson, but “set his Name down.”

  OR AT LEAST that’s what Bastian, Jack, Cato, and Emanuel confessed when questioned by their masters, by magistrates, and by a grand jury, after being jailed in the dungeon below City Hall in the spring and summer of 1741. And they, and many others, confessed to more, much more. Not only at the “Great Feast” but on other days and nights, John Hughson had fed them lavishly, and served them drinks: cider, rum, punch, and beer. Juan, the Indian slave of a Dutch sailor, “drank a Mug of Beer, and paid for it”; more often the drinks were free. York, the slave of an English miller, said “ Hughson made him so drunk that he could not stand.” Cajoe, owned by a Portuguese Jewish merchant named Mordecai Gomez, complained that the drinks were spiked: Hughson mixed a mug of punch that was two-thirds rum “and made it so sweet, that he did not immediately feel the Strength of it.”

  At Hughson’s—they confessed—they played cards and dice. They held cockfights. They danced. A man named Fortune had heard “they had a Dance there every other Night,” with music supplied by African drummers from the city’s militia and fiddlers from as far away as Long Island. “After Supper, were dancing,” Joshua Sleydall’s slave Jack recalled, “and Mr. PHILIPSE’S Cuff plaid on the Fiddle.” Thomas Ellison’s slave Jamaica fiddled at Hughson’s, too, and Mary Burton, the Hughsons’ sixteen-year-old indentured servant, said that Jamaica promised to play his fiddle for the city’s whites “while they were roasting in the Flames; and said, he had been Slave long enough.”

  Hughson’s guests ate and drank, fiddled and played and danced, and they plotted. Jack, owned by attorney Joseph Murray, had barely entered the tavern when he heard talk “of burning the Houses and killing the white people, and of taking all the Gentlewomen for their Wives.” “After they had done dancing, they made a Bowl of Punch,” another man confessed. “And having for some Time drank, they said one to another, Let us set Fire to the Town and kill the white People.”

  Next they swore. There were inducements: Hughson told his guests that if they swore, “they should never want for Liquor whether they had Money or not.” And there were threats. “Boy will you stand by it?” Hughson asked York, a slave of Charles Crooke, the day after Christmas, in the warmth of the tavern. York said he would. Hughson said if he didn’t, “he would stick him with a Sword, and pointed to one in a Corner of the Room.” York said he would. “Boy, if you stand by it,” said Hughson, “you must kiss the Book.” York pressed his lips to it, and declared he would not be a coward. They swore oaths by God and by thunder “of Damnation to Eternityto the Failers.” They were “not so much as to tell a Cat or a Dog.” Vintner Robert Todd’s slave Dundee cursed, “The D—l fetch him, and the D—l d—n him if he did.”

  John Hughson kept a list. When Joseph Murray’s men Adam and Jack arrived at the tavern, Hughson “produced a Paper, and said it was an Agreement of the Blacks to kill the white Folks,” and added their names to it, the ink, no doubt, freezing in his pen. Primus, owned by a French distiller named James DeBrosses, said Hughson “put his Hand on a Paper, which he told him was a List of the Names of those who were to rise.” Hughson used it to call roll.

  Hughson swore, too. “By G-d, if they would be true to him, he would take this Country.” How would they do it? Albany, the slave of an English butcher’s widow, told Will, owned by a Dutch cordwainer, “he believed an Hundred and Fifty Men might take this City.” They were to begin by burning Fort George, the city’s crucial defensive outpost, behind the Half Moon Battery on the southern tip of the island. At this signal, each man was to kill his master and “such of the Negroes as would not assist them.” Hughson was collecting guns: he told Brash and Ben, slaves of the French merchants Peter and Augustus Jay (the father and grandfather of founding father John Jay), “that they should get what Guns, Swords and Pistols they could from their Master’s, and bring them to his House; but if they could not get any, that he could furnish them with them himself.” Still, guns were scarce. And knives were silent. Pedro, a “Spanish Negro” owned by Peter DePeyster, knew that “the Report of a Gun would immediately alarm the People, ” but with knives and swords, “they might stab many before they were found out.”

  Not every recruitment succeeded. “D—n it,” cursed Robin, when asked his opinion of the plot. “I’ll have nothing to say to it; if they burn their Backsides, they must sit down on the Blisters.” But most men eagerly agreed to cut their masters’ throats. Jack and Adam were keen to “destroy Mr. Murray, Mrs. Murray, and all the Family, with Knives.” Dundee volunteered “to cut his Mistress’s Throat in the Night.”

  After the butchery, the men would set fire to their masters’ houses. Some of the Spaniards “had black Stuff to set Houses on fire,” but live coals would serve just as well. A man named London agreed to burn down Peter Marschalk’s house (no mean trick, since Marschalk served as one of the city’s firemen). Dundee was to set fire to his owner’s tavern on Broad Street. Joe, owned by a dancing master, agreed to torch the city’s only theatre, on the corner of Broadway and Beaver. Asked to burn his master’s tall house on Broadway, Ben refused. “No, if they conquor’d the Place,” he said, he would keep that house “to live in himself.”

  Their owners dead, the city in flames, the men who pledged to the plot were to assemble just north of the fort, into companies under their appointed captains—Ben, Jack, York, Dundee, and Othello—and burn their way up Broadway.

  How would they know when to begin? “Now was the best Time to do something,” Hughson told his guests that winter, for it was a time of war. England’s war with Spain, the War of Jenkins’s Ear, had begun in the fall of 1739 and was even then merging with a broader conflict, the War of the Austrian Succession, pitting England against France. By autumn 1740, most of Manhattan’s force of British regulars and provincial soldiers had been sent to fight against the Spaniards off the coast of Cuba, leaving the island nearl
y defenseless. Not only were the city’s military ranks thinned, but the men who gathered at Hughson’s expected England’s enemies to come to their aid. At the “Great Feast” just after Christmas, they “agreed to wait a Month and half for the Spaniards and French to come,” and if they did not, “they were to do all themselves.”

  And to what end? “After they had conquered,” Hughson told Tom, the slave of a French silversmith, “they would know what it was to be free Men.”

  OF THE 152 enslaved and free black New Yorkers arrested in the spring and summer of 1741, 80—more than half—confessed to conspiring to destroy the city. (And one more man confessed who had never been arrested.) From those confessions, prosecutors pieced together a composite of what happened at Hughson’s. As Daniel Horsmanden was keen to point out, the confessions agreed both “minutely in the Circumstances of this Conspiracy”—the “Great Feast” at Christmas, the tablecloth, the rum punch, the veal—and broadly, in “the principal Things aimed at, the burningthe Town and assassinating the Inhabitants. ”

  It made for an effective prosecution. In his closing argument in the conspiracy’s first trial, attorney William Smith offered the jury a summary of this “most horrid conspiracy”: