New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Thrice happy Wells! where Beauty’s in such store, When could’st thou boast an Horsmanden, a Hoar, A Borrel, Lyndsey, Searle, and Thousands more?

  William Byrd fancied himself a wit: after he and Horsmanden returned to London, Byrd wrote a love letter for his tongue-tied cousin Daniel. When Horsmanden told Byrd he “was going to Tunbridge again to endeavor to get Miss B-n-y,” Byrd “lent him thirty guineas for his expedition.” But Byrd’s pen and pocketbook failed to win Horsmanden his suit. The mysterious Miss B-n-y turned him down.

  In the 1710s, Horsmanden and Byrd dined together, drank together, attended the theatre together, and spent endless hours gossiping in London taverns and coffeehouses. And they went whoring together, as is made abundantly clear in Byrd’s secret diary (written in an obscure shorthand and kept under lock and key), in entries like the one from June 26, 1718: “After dinner I put some things in order and then took a nap till 5 o’clock, when Daniel Horsmanden came and we went to the park, where we had appointed to meet some ladies but they failed. Then we went to Spring Gardens where we picked up two women and carried them into the arbor and ate some cold veal and about 10 o’clock we carried them to the bagnio, where we bathed and lay with them all night and I rogered mine twice and slept pretty well, but neglected my prayers.”7

  William Byrd neglected his prayers more than once; he was a shattered man, compulsively rogering whores. During these painful, dissolute years of Byrd’s life, young Daniel Horsmanden was his boon companion. By the diary’s end, it’s difficult not to raise an eyebrow at the homonym in Tunbrigalia, “When could’st thou boast an Horsmanden, a Hoar . . . ?”8

  Byrd, for all his sexual bravado, was mortified by his dependence on cheap prostitutes. He once wrote of himself, “The struggle between the Senate and the Plebeans in the Roman Commonwealth, or betweext the King and the Parliament in England, was never half so violent as the Civil war between this Hero’s Principles and his Inclinations.” Visiting prostitutes gave Byrd nightmares. In September 1719 he confided in his diary, “Daniel Horsmanden came again and we went to visit a whore but she was from home. . . . I dreamed I caused a coffin to be made for me to bury myself in but I changed my mind.” What gave Byrd nightmares made Horsmanden sick. Six weeks after his first visit to a prostitute, the young law student was confined to his lodgings with “a sore leg.” After another episode, he “had a swelled face.”9 The “leg” might have been a euphemism: Horsmanden may have contracted syphilis, whose symptoms during the first two years after exposure include joint pain and markedly swollen glands—the “swelled face.” In any event, Horsmanden’s own rather tortured relationship with prostitutes, whom he tried in vain to give up, might explain why he didn’t marry until 1747, at the age of fifty-three, and never fathered any children.

  In 1720, the year after William Byrd left England for Virginia, Horsmanden lost his fortune, what little was left of his inheritance, in the South Sea Bubble. It was an awful blow. He continued to study at the Inns of Court but failed to earn much of a living or to recover his considerable South Sea losses by practicing law. He was broke. Eventually, as Horsmanden later explained, “I was Oblig’d to leave England.”10

  In 1729, Horsmanden bought a book entitled A New Survey of the Globe, by Thomas Templeman. Templeman, true to an Englishman’s sense of geography, reported only two kinds of information in his curious book: the size of landmasses and the distance of every important city in the world from London. Horsmanden, penniless and aimless, made his own survey of the globe, attempting to determine in what direction to head. He studied Templeman’s figures closely. Finally, he decided to sail for Virginia, where his cousin William Byrd was a member of the Governor’s Council.

  Southwest Prospect of New York, 1756. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

  But Horsmanden failed in Virginia, too. He was unable to gain admission to the bar, and he left after less than two years.11 By 1731, Daniel Horsmanden was on his way to New York City. Miles from London: 3,471.

  “HAVE I BEEN traversing the Ocean for so many weeks, to be sett down again in the country I quitted?” wondered another Englishman when he arrived in New York. “This cannot be a new town, in a new world, for such must be attended with many new objects, new faces, new manners, new customs, but here I can find nothing different from what I have quitted.” More than three thousand miles from London, New York struck English visitors as uncannily familiar. “The dress and external appearance of the people is the same. The houses are in the stile we are accustomed to; within doors the furniture is all English or made after English fashions. The mode of living is the same.” One visitor was flustered: “Where then shall I find any difference?” He found only one: “the greater number of the Blacks.”12

  There was, of course, another difference. Compared to London, New York was no city at all. It was only a mile long and half a mile wide. In population, New York in 1741 was second only to Boston among colonial cities (and neck and neck with Philadelphia), but against London it was a hamlet. By Thomas Templeman’s reckoning, “London contains about 105,000 Houses, 840,000 Souls.” In 1741, New York boasted more like 1,500 houses and 10,000 souls.13 But nearly 2,000 were the souls of black folk, and their numbers almost always grabbed travelers’ attention. (There were probably only about 15,000 blacks in eighteenth-century London, less than 2 percent of the population, compared to New York’s 20 percent.)

  Despite how almost entirely English the city may have at first appeared, New York was a jumble of cultures, languages, and religions. By 1731, it even had its own synagogue, the first in Britain’s colonies. Peopled with Dutch, English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, and German settlers, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, and African slaves and “Spanish Negroes,” New York was a frenzied, factious place. “The inhabitants of New York,” a visiting English vicar observed, were more than half of them Dutch and therefore “habitually frugal, industrious, and parsimonious,” but the rest were of so many “different nations, different languages, and different religions, it is almost impossible to give them any precise or determinate character.”14

  The Dutch had settled Manhattan in 1626; in 1664, the English took possession, peacefully, of a motley city. “Our chiefest unhappiness here is too great a mixture of Nations, & English ye least part,” one Englishman complained in 1692.15 While the Dutch retained considerable political influence for decades, anglicization proceeded swiftly. By 1730, just under 40 percent of the city’s white population was Dutch, 8 percent French, 2 percent Jewish, and 1 percent German. Nearly 50 percent of the city’s whites were British, their origins recorded in the names they gave to their chattel slaves: among the black men suspected of conspiracy in 1741 were Scotland, Windsor, Sterling, London, York, Galloway, Cambridge, War-wick, Sussex, Worcester, Hereford, Dublin, and Dundee.

  Under the terms of its 1731 charter, the city of New York was divided into seven wards, unevenly populated: the fashionable and densely settled Dock, South, and East wards, along the bustling East River waterfront; the less well populated and less posh North and Montgomerie wards; the remote and isolated West Ward, along the Hudson River, where John Hughson kept his tavern; and the quite rural Outward of rolling farmlands to the northeast, divided into the Bowery and Harlem. Every January, ward tax collectors estimated the value of real and personal estates. In the well-heeled East Ward, where the average tax assessment was £26, blacks comprised 25 percent of the population; in the poorer Montgomerie Ward, where the average tax assessment was £10, blacks made up just 13 percent of the population. The richest New Yorkers, in short, owned the most slaves.16

  “The city of New-York consists principally of merchants, shopkeepers, and tradesman,” wrote William Smith, Jr., in 1757. City life was dominated by the port’s busy trade: at the height of the shipping season, when masts rose up in the harbor like a forest of trees, the ceaseless rumble of barrels pushed over cobblestones from slips along the water was deafening. Compared to other American cities, New York had a certain buzz. “I
found this city less in extent but, by the stirr and frequency upon the streets, more populous than Philadelphia,” wrote Dr. Alexander Hamilton. But much of the city, for all its buzz, still had the feel of the frontier; the year Horsmanden arrived, a panther was killed in the street.

  “With respect to riches, there is not so great an inequality amongst us, as is common in Boston and some other places,” Smith, Jr., boasted. But there were still paupers begging on the streets, starving families sheltered in the Poorhouse just beyond the Common, and debtors imprisoned in the garret of City Hall. And New Yorkers who were as debauched as Daniel Horsmanden had been in his youth could find whores—“a good choice of pritty lasses among them, both Dutch and English”—at the Half Moon Battery after sunset. In 1734, the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpaying New Yorkers owned 39 percent of the city’s taxable property, while the poorest 30 percent owned only 7 percent. But these figures don’t count households too poor to be included on the tax rolls, nor do they include slaves, who owned less than nothing. When Smith talked about the slight “inequality amongst us,” he meant among whites. Poor whites and slaves disagreed. The Irish prostitute Peggy Kerry said the goal of the plot hatched in 1741 was “to murder every one that had Money.” A slave named Cuffee said much the same thing. “A great many People had too much, and others too little,” complained Cuffee, whose master, Adolph Philipse, the seventy-six-year-old former Speaker of the provincial Assembly, kept a house in the city, where Cuffee lived, and also a vast estate in Westchester, Philipsburg Manor, where he kept twenty-seven slaves.17

  The Dutch began importing Africans to New York in the 1620s, mostly men and women from West and Central Africa they called “Angolans,” or sometimes “Congos,” farmers from the Kikongo-speaking Kingdom of Kongo and the Kimbundu-speaking Ndongo. Many of these people had first been taken captive during civil wars, both on the coast and in the African interior. After capture, they were sold to coastal Portuguese traders and seized by the Dutch when they pirated Portuguese trading vessels. In 1638, the Dutch began buying Africans directly; by the mid-seventeenth century, under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company, they conducted an extensive coastal slave trade, having captured several principal Portuguese trading forts. Still, the men and women they brought to New Amsterdam, many of whom spoke Portuguese as well as one or more African languages, bore names that bespoke their origins: Simon Congo, Paulo d’Angola, Anthony Portuguese. 18

  After the English took possession and renamed New York in 1664, they continued the Dutch policy of importing Africans as a source of cheap labor, but they turned, generally, to the Upper Guinea Coast, where the Royal African Company traded. “I should advise the sending for negros to Guinea,” the governor of New York wrote to the Lords of Trade in 1699, “I can cloath and feed ’em very comfortably for 9d. a piece pr. day sterling money, which is 3d. pr. day lesse than I require for the soldiers.” Before 1741, the English imported about one hundred and fifty slaves each year. It was cheaper for New York slave traders to import directly from Africa; buyers in New York paid customs duties of only 40 shillings “For every Negro and other Slave, of 4 years old, and upwards, imported directly from Africa,” compared to £4 (or 80 shillings) for those “From all other Places.” Despite this discount, less than 30 percent of slaves imported to New York before 1741 came directly from Africa, while 65 percent came from the English sugar islands, mainly Barbados and Antigua and above all Jamaica, which supplied 30 percent of the city’s slaves. (These places, too, became names: in the 1730s and ’40s, black men named Jamaica and Barbados walked the streets of New York.)

  Slaves came to New York in very small numbers, just a handful on any given ship, almost always on the return leg of voyages made by New York–based trading vessels. New York merchants exported grain and lumber to the Caribbean in exchange for sugar and sometimes slaves. Although Manhattan merchants preferred to be paid in bills of exchange, their West Indian trading partners preferred to pay in goods, and were especially likely to use the opportunity to rid themselves of unwanted slaves by sending them to New York. These unwanted slaves were either notoriously rebellious, or too sick or old to bear the backbreaking work of sugar cultivation. New York merchants, faced with slaves that were too expensive to re-export, but having, in the city, little use for their labor, often sold them to farmers in the countryside. A 1732 law decreed that any New Yorker who imported more than one slave (“to attend on their Person”) was required to pay the import duty; many merchants, having paid the duty, decided to keep a handful of slaves with them in the city in order to realize a profit by hiring them out, by the day, to fellow New Yorkers needing workers on the docks or on building projects.19

  Although, under the English, New York’s slaves generally came from the Caribbean, many were themselves new arrivals from the Akan-speaking region of what is now Ghana. The English usually called these Akan speakers “Coromantees.” A few retained Akan “day names,” given to mark the day of the week on which they were born: Quash (Kwesi, or Sunday), Cudjoe (Kwodwo, Monday), Quack (Kwedu, Wednesday), Cuffee (Kofi, Friday), and Quanimo (Kwame, Saturday). But just as often these names were anglicized: Cudjoe became Joe, Quack Jack. And many other African names, having no easily pronounceable English equivalent, did not survive at all.20 One man arrested in 1741 was named, simply, Africa.

  In the Caribbean, Africans were “seasoned”: exposed to the plague of diseases, and the sheer exhaustion, malnutrition, and despair that confronted them on sugar plantations. For every one hundred Africans seized in the African interior, only about sixty-four survived the journey to the coast and only about forty-eight or forty-nine made it across the Atlantic’s Middle Passage to arrive in the New World. Of those few, only between twenty-eight and thirty were still alive after a three- to four-year period of “seasoning.” Most of the West and Central Africans in early eighteenth-century New York had witnessed and endured extraordinary suffering. In the New World, faced with catastrophic mortality and profoundly disorienting separation from family and community, they forged new bonds that drew on linguistic and cultural similarities, and even on shared military experience (many Coromantees had been soldiers). While the Africans who ended up in New York came from dozens of independent states, Coromantees shared a common language and Angolans a broadly similar cultural background. In the New World, these bonds could transcend political divisions that had mattered more in Africa. Meanwhile, the very endurance of seasoned slaves in the face of demographic devastation only increased their value: on the New York slave market, having survived smallpox was a particular selling point, frequently mentioned in advertisements of slaves for sale, as in that for “a Young Negro Woman, about 20 Year old” who “had the small Pox in Barbados when a Child.”21

  In London, Daniel Horsmanden had lived in a world of ranks, ranks of title, ranks of learning, ranks of estate. But the chief division in that world marked the line between men of property and propertyless men. There were, of course, the miserably destitute, but even these souls owned at least their selves or, if they were servants, they expected to own their labor when their indentures expired. New York, like all slave societies, was different. “It rather hurts a European eye to see so many negro slaves upon the streets,” one Scottish traveler complained.22 In New York, Horsmanden found an entire class of people who had not even the property of their own flesh, and never would. They served, instead, as markers of other men’s wealth. Even their smallpox scars were counted by the shilling. Joseph Murray outfitted his liveried slave Adam with silver-buckled shoes. And four men arrested in the 1741 conspiracy—two of whom were hanged— had been named by their owners “Fortune.”

  “EVERY MAN of industry and integrity has it in his power to live well,” William Smith, Jr., wrote, speaking of white, not black, New Yorkers, “and many are the instances of persons, who came here distressed by their poverty, who now enjoy easy and plentiful fortunes.” In 1732, Daniel Horsmanden, thirty-eight and still a bachelor, landed in the city with very
little in his pocket, but he came with credentials, and with William Byrd’s recommendation for an appointment in the administration of the incoming governor, William Cosby, who had succeeded John Montgomerie. (Montgomerie died of an “Appolecktick fit” in the summer of 1731.) Almost as soon as Horsmanden arrived he was admitted to the bar, a distinction he had failed to achieve in either Virginia or London, and one which he greeted with pomp: in March 1732, Horsmanden contributed to “a good part of the Discourse of the toun” when he insisted on wearing his formal lawyer’s “barr gown,” an ostentation never before seen in New York.23

  On the day after William Cosby’s own arrival in the city the following August, his first public act was to have a man whipped for not moving his wagon out of the way of the governor’s coach quickly enough. His second move was no less audacious: Cosby attempted to claim half the salary of his predecessor, the Dutch merchant Rip Van Dam, who had served as interim governor in the thirteen months between Montgomerie’s death and Cosby’s arrival. Cosby appointed Horsmanden as one of his attorneys in this suit. When the learned sixty-two-year-old Chief Justice Lewis Morris ruled against him, Cosby summarily dismissed Morris from the bench, promoting thirty-year-old James DeLancey to his position. Meanwhile, Cosby recommended Horsmanden for a position on his Royal Council—a twelve-man appointed body that served at once as a governor’s cabinet and the upper house of the provincial legislature—and tried to remove James Alexander, Morris’s political ally. Alexander was “very unfit” for the Council, Cosby wrote to his superiors, the Lords of Trade in London, declaring that Alexander was “stuff’d with such a train of tricks and oppressions to gross for Your Lordships to hear.” (When the governor’s request was refused, he simply stopped sharing the Council’s meeting times with both Alexander and Van Dam, who also served on the Council.) Of Cosby’s flurry of appointments and dismissals Alexander wrote, “The Promoters of Justice & humanity are banish’d far from such an Administration and in their Room flattering Parasites Indigent wretches courting power & fit for the worst purposes are thrown into the Offices of power and trust.” 24