New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Gentlemen,

  No Scheme more monstrous could have been invented; nor can any Thing be thought of more foolish, than the Motives that induced these Wretches to enter into it! What more ridiculous than that Hughson in Consequence of this Scheme, should become a King! Caesar . . . a Governor! That the White Men shou’d be all killed, and the Women become a Prey to the rapacious Lust of these Villains! That these Slaves should thereby establish themselves in Peace and Freedom in the plunder’d Wealth of their slaughter’d Masters! ’Tis hard to say whether the Wickedness or the Folly of this Design is the Greater: And had it not been in Part executed before it was discovered; we should with great Difficulty have been persuaded to believe it possible, that such a wicked and foolish Plot could be contrived by any Creatures in Human Shape.

  It was horrid. It was monstrous. It was wicked. It was inhuman. But it was also hackneyed.

  What those eighty-one New Yorkers confessed to was a plot dripping with plot, ripe to bursting with familiar characters and contrivances. Smith delivered his speech in the very era in which the novel was born; not surprisingly, his argument echoed conventions established not only in early English novels but also in England’s vast store of quasi-fictional tales of rogues and pirates, whores and mutinies, and ruthless gangs of highway robbers, as well as in a growing literature of alarming reports from the colonies of rebellious slaves and bloodthirsty Indians.3

  “What more ridiculous than that Hughson in Consequence of this Scheme, should become a King! Caesar . . . a Governor!” Ridiculous, but by no means unfamiliar. English ideas of what a slave plot looked like were fully elaborated as early as 1676, in a conspiracy detected by colonists in Barbados and related in a pamphlet published in London that same year. The island’s slaves had allegedly formed a conspiracy whose “grand design was to choose them a King,” who would lead them in killing white men, burning their houses, and taking white women as wives. In London, the account of the Barbados rebellion was sold stitched together with a narrative not of suspected but of actual rebellion: a violent Indian uprising in New England known as King Philip’s War. In 1675 and 1676 Philip, an Algonquian “king,” had plotted and conspired with Indian confederates to burn over half the towns in New England, killing one out of every ten colonists as they fled from houses set ablaze.

  The plot detected in Barbados in 1676 looked like an Indian war. But in 1741, William Smith more easily called to mind more recent slave plots, published accounts of which were readily at hand. In the spring of 1737, John Peter Zenger had printed in his New-York Weekly Journal the “ full and particular Account of the Negro Plot in Antigoa, as reported by the Committee appointed by the Government.” It was so long that Zenger used an extra small font to set it; even then, the tiny type cluttered the entire front page of three consecutive issues and spilled over several pages more. Readers of Zenger’s newspaper learned that in Antigua in 1736, black men “had formed and resolved to execute a Plot, whereby all the white Inhabitants of this Island were to be murdered, and a new Form of Government to be established by the Slaves among themselves, and they entirely to possess the Island.” Court, the leader of the conspiracy, “assumed among his Country Men . . . the Stile of KING.” During “Entertainments of Dancing, Gaming and Feasting,” he recruited conspirators who swore to a plot to set a fire to signal the start of the wholesale murder of the island’s whites.4

  Prosecutors called the 1736 Antigua conspiracy an “unparallel’d Hellish Plot,” but, hellish or not, it was hardly unparalleled. By 1741, it was utterly conventional. In Barbados in 1676, slave rebels sent signals using trumpets made of elephant tusks; in Antigua in 1736, dancing plotters swished an elephant’s tail. The New York confessions seem so formulaic that, if pachyderm tusks and tails were plausibly to be had on the banks of the Hudson, they might have made an appearance in John Hughson’s tavern, and in Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal.

  THAT SAID, there’s no need to travel a thousand miles and more from Manhattan to places as far away as Barbados and Antigua to find disorderly men drinking, feasting, dancing, crowning kings, and plotting to overthrow the government. New York’s slave plot bore a striking resemblance not only to earlier well-publicized Caribbean slave rebellions but also to what went on in New York’s own fashionable gentlemen’s clubs, just blocks away from John Hughson’s house.

  “New-York is one of the most social places on the continent,” wrote William Smith, Jr., in his 1757 History of the Province of New York; “the men collect themselves into weekly evening clubs.” 5 (Smith, Jr., was the son of the William Smith who prosecuted slaves in 1741.) By the early eighteenth century, club life was the central social activity of urban gentlemen. “By Clubs I mean those societies, which generally meet of an evening, either at some tavern or private house, to converse, or look at one another, smoke a pipe, drink a toast, be politic or dull, lively or frolicksome, to philosophize or triffle, argue or debate, talk over Religion, News, Scandal or bawdy, or spend the time in any other Sort of Clubbical amusement,” wrote the physician Alexander Hamilton in his “History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club,” a club he had founded in Annapolis in 1745. “The main Intent and purpose of the meeting of these Clubs, was to drink and be merry, and among them all, it was hail fellow, well met.” At “Royalist Clubs,” whoever could drink the most was crowned king, and held “an absolute power to command any of his Subjects, to drink as often and as much as he pleased,” although, as Hamilton wryly noted, “the Reigns of these monarchs were Commonly very short, for, they might perhaps hold up an hour or two, and then be fairly knocked under the table.”6

  When Hamilton visited New York in 1744, he dined with Daniel Horsmanden and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, James DeLancey, and other members of the Hungarian Club, which met at Robert Todd’s tavern on Broad Street, “next Door to the Coffee-house.” “There was nothing talked of but ladys and lovers, and a good deal of polite smutt,” Hamilton wrote in his diary after an evening at Todd’s at which two toasts were raised, “the first was to our dear selves, and the tenour of the other was my own health,” leading Hamilton to dub Todd’s place “the Selfish Club.” 7

  Gentlemen joining clubs had first to be initiated. After nightfall, they were taken into a private room, asked a series of questions, and required to write their names in the book of rules. Freemasons, a mystical gentlemen’s club whose first New York lodge was founded in 1737, required initiates to “kiss the book” to swear to secrecy. At Hamilton’s own club, in Annapolis, a club rule prohibited talk of politics, and if anyone dared raise a political topic, every man in the room was supposed to laugh “in order to divert the discourse.”8 But such was far from the case in New York, where even the taverns were divided along party lines. At Todd’s, Horsmanden, DeLancey, and other Court Party members convened meetings of the Governor’s Council. One block east, at the Black Horse Tavern on Smith Street, the General Assembly, dominated by the Country Party, held committee meetings, and it was there that James Alexander and his allies had plotted a strategy to remove Governor William Cosby from power. (Not for nothing was Zenger’s printshop just across the street, “opposite to the Sign of the Black Horse.”) In New York’s fashionable taverns, men who dared to speak of politics were never laughed into silence.

  DRINKING, FEASTING, kissing a book, swearing an oath, crowning a king, holding meetings, talking of politics, plotting a strategy. It was all uncannily like what Bastian said happened by the warm fire at Hughson’s tavern in the hard winter of 1741, when snow blanketed the city. Except that at Hughson’s, all the roles were perversely reversed. In a winter blighted by famine, black men feasted on veal and goose, as if they were gentlemen; they pledged themselves to a secret society, as if they were Freemasons; they plotted to appoint a new governor, as if they were party politicians; all the while flirting with young white women who laid a tablecloth before them and served them meat and poured them drinks. What Bastian and every man who confessed described was a world turned upside dow
n. A world where whites served blacks, the vulgar affected refinement, and slaves would be free.

  Maybe what looked to white New Yorkers like an “unparallel’d Hellish Plot” was in fact play, a topsy-turvy parody of gentlemen’s clubs and politicians and Freemasons so insulting and unsettling to whites, still reeling from their own experiment in political opposition, that they mistook it for rebellion. Or maybe it really was a rebellion, inspired in part by all the talk of liberty in the city’s newspapers and on the streets. Or maybe there never were any meetings at Hughson’s and the whole plot was merely the awful product of Daniel Horsmanden’s anguished imagination.

  Maybe. But the truth can only be found in telling the story from the beginning, since what is wit and what is not cannot be discerned at a distance. Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that although Horsmanden easily saw the political dimensions of the feast at John Hughson’s house— he called the slave conspirators “infernal Politicians”—the humor was lost on him. More, it troubled him. It bothered him so much that he was at pains to keep it out of the official proceedings. One of only a handful of lines Horsmanden expurgated when he copied the manuscript confessions for publication were the very last words uttered by Cato, owned by John Shurmur: if asked about the plot, the conspirators were to say “they were only Joking.”9 And out of all the slaves Horsmanden interrogated in 1741, no one vexed him so much as a man named Othello, owned by Chief Justice James DeLancey. When told about the plot and asked to join, Othello said he would, “and laughed.” What was so funny?

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ice

  AFTER TEN FEET OF SNOW over Christmas, the skies cleared in January. In the brightening sun, poor widows and orphaned children hobbled through the snow to a house on Smith Street, across from the Black Horse Tavern, where a charity promised “To Feed the HUNGRY & Cloath the NAKED,” or at least those “in Real Need of Relief.” But in February, the fierce weather returned. “We have now here a second Winter more Severe than it was some Weeks past,” Zenger’s Weekly Journal reported on February 2, the feast of Candlemas. “The Navigation of our River is again stopp’d by the Ice, and the poor in great want of Wood.” At Peter DeLancey’s farm outside the city, his “Spanish Negro” Antonio de St. Bendito, whose “Feet were frozen after the first great Snow,” was still unable to walk. In the city, coals were passed out to the poor to help heat their humble homes. At John Hughson’s tavern, his Irish servant girl, Mary Burton, dressed herself “in Man’s Cloaths, put on Boots, and went with him in his Sleigh in the deep Snows of the Commons, to help him fetch Firewood for his Family.” At David Machado’s house, in the East Ward, his black slave Diana, driven to desperation by the ferocity of the cold and by the hopelessness of bondage, “ took her own young Child from her Breast, and laid it in the Cold, that it froze to Death.”

  The first week of February, New Yorkers stared helplessly from piers along the East River as a boat was “taken by a large Cake of Ice in our Harbour, and carried by it through the Narrows, and out of sight.” Watchers wondered, but could not discover, what happened to the people on board. Six more ships lay frozen in Long Island Sound, and another, sails set, crashed against the ice, abandoned. Meanwhile, from Charleston, South Carolina, came the shocking news that slaves had nearly destroyed that city, burning three hundred houses to the ground. But this turned out to have been only a rumor. On February 9, Zenger printed a quiet retraction: “The report of the Negroes rising was groundless.”1

  Even while the weather worsened, there were still city pleasures to be had. “ON Thursday, Feb. the 12th at the new Theatre in the Broad Way will be presented a Comedy call’d the Beaux Stratagem,” announced a back-page ad in the New-York Weekly Journal, in the hard winter of 1741. Tickets for a box: 5 shillings; for the pit: 2 shillings and 6 pence.2

  For those who ventured out by the light of lanterns to attend the New York debut of George Farquhar’s late Restoration comedy, it was a cold walk down “the Broad Way,” a wide, straight street, paved with cobbles, slick with snow, and thickly canopied with the overburdened, icy branches of the beech and locust trees that lined it. The theatre lay just across from the Bowling Green, a triangle of land at the wide base of Broadway fenced in in 1734 “for the Beauty & Ornament of the Said Street as well as for the Recreation & delight of the Inhabitants.” 3

  An evening at the theatre must have been delightful distraction for those who could scare up the shillings, and whose boots were warm enough to keep frostbite at bay. The Beaux’ Stratagem, first staged in London in 1707, was not only George Farquhar’s best play but also the most successful comedy of the age. From its debut to the close of the eighteenth century, it was performed in London during every season but one; and in the 1730s alone, it was staged over a hundred times.4

  The appeal of The Beaux’ Stratagem to eighteenth-century audiences lay chiefly in its dizzying reversal of roles and fortunes. The play tells the tale of “two gentlemen of broken fortunes,” Aimwell and Archer, on a trip to the town of Lichfield. Having spent their small inheritances on the pleasures of London, the two friends travel from town to town, each taking a turn at pretending to be his companion’s servant in order to help his “master” impress and seduce gullible country women. In Lichfield, the ruse works well until Aimwell falls in love with Dorinda, the wealthy daughter of Lady Bountiful, and Archer is taken with Dorinda’s married sister-in-law, Mrs. Sullen. Intrigues abound, as Aimwell decides to pass himself off as his elder brother, a viscount, in hopes of securing Dorinda’s hand, while a host of still sillier characters—a dishonest innkeeper, Bonniface, and his clever daughter, Cherry; Lady Bountiful’s dim-witted son, Squire Sullen; Sullen’s dunderheaded servant, Scrub; an amorous French count; a nefarious French priest; and a gang of particularly feckless robbers—pursue their own schemes, stage their own impostures, and plot their own plots, their beaux’ stratagem, leading Archer to conclude at the end of Act II, “We’re like to have as many adventures in our inn as Don Quixote had in his.”

  At the New Theatre on Broadway, New York’s gentry—merchants, bureaucrats, lawyers, and naval officers—paid for the box seats. Everyone else—servants, artisans, sailors, soldiers, and a handful of free blacks—sat in the pit. Joe, the slave of dancing master Henry Holt, probably worked backstage. James Alexander, a Freemason, may have walked down the aisle in procession with his brother lodge members, to sit together in a row, as Masons liked to do. Attorney Joseph Murray, an avid collector of English drama who happened to live more or less across the street from the theatre, must surely have attended with his wife, Grace, daughter of the former governor, their clothes for the evening laid out, perhaps, by their housekeeper, Mrs. Dimmock; their handsome house’s front steps swept clean of flurrying snow by one of the Murrays’ slaves: Jack, Congo, Dido, Adam, or Caesar. Perhaps Cuba, one of attorney John Chambers’s slaves, entered the theatre quietly, before the curtain rose, to place a warming pan beneath the skirt of her mistress, Chambers’s wife, Anna.5

  The playhouse on Broadway had much to offer in the way of conviviality, but the production on the night of the twelfth was not particularly polished; eighteenth-century New York, like the rest of the colonies, was a theatrical backwater. A 1709 decree by the Governor’s Council had forbidden “play acting and prize-fighting,” and the city’s first recorded production did not take place until 1732, when another of Farquhar’s comedies, The Recruiting Officer, was performed, with “the Part of Worthy acted by the ingenious Mr. Thomas Hearly,” the mayor’s barber and periwig maker. Nearly a decade later, the hairdressing thespian was no longer available. In 1741, for the New York debut of The Beaux’ Stratagem, the part of Aimwell was “perform’d by a Person who never appear’d on any Stage before.”6

  Still, the crowd, coming in from the cold, must have relished Farquhar’s comedy, at once a pretzel of plot twists, a farce of love and deceit (and of the deceitfulness of lovers), a slightly bawdy parody of eighteenth-century courtship, and a rather bold critique of marriage. In
Act IV, after having been wooed by Aimwell and Archer, Dorinda and Mrs. Sullen compare their suitors:

  DOR: . . . my lover was upon his knees to me.

  MRS. SUL: And mine was upon his tiptoes to me.

  DOR: Mine vowed to die for me.

  MRS. SUL: Mine swore to die with me.

  DOR: Mine spoke the softest moving things.

  MRS. SUL: Mine had his moving things too.

  DOR: Mine kissed my hand ten thousand times.

  MRS. SUL: Mine has all that pleasure to come.

  DOR: Mine offered marriage.

  MRS. SUL: O Lard! d’ye call that a moving thing?

  If Daniel Horsmanden attended the New Theatre on the night of February 12, he would have seen much that was familiar, uncomfortably familiar, in Aimwell and Archer, two men on the make, willing to say anything and to pass themselves off as wealthier than they were, plotting to marry rich women. Horsmanden was born in England in 1694, the eldest son of the rector of All Saints Church, in Purleigh, Essex. As a young man, he declined to inherit his father’s position and determined instead on a legal career. In his twenties, while studying law in London, Horsmanden pursued his own beaux’ stratagem on a trip to the fashionable resort town of Tunbridge Wells with his cousin, the Virginian William Byrd II, a widower in his forties who was desperately seeking a marriage alliance that might rescue him from debt. In Tunbridge Wells, Horsmanden courted “Miss B-n-y.” Byrd, having recently failed to win the hand of Miss Mary Smith (in spite of boasting of his Virginia estate of 43,000 acres and 220 slaves), scouted about for another suitable wife while composing Tunbrigalia, a book of poems celebrating the charms of several pretty Englishwomen of his close acquaintance, including Horsmanden’s older sisters, Susanna (or “Suky”) and Ursula (delightfully known as “Nutty Horsmanden”):