New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  New York, like most American colonies, had suffered under corrupt governors before. Governors “do not come here to take the air,” one New Yorker remarked; instead, they come “either to repair a shattered fortune, or acquire an Estate.” Almost from its birth, New York had been notoriously factious, as clusters of wealthy men, often connected by family ties, had rallied themselves both for and against earlier governors, forming what some called “factions” and others “parties.” In late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought, the distinction between “faction” and “party” was slight. Viscount Bolingbroke wrote that “The creeds of parties vary like those of sects; but all Factions have the same motive, which never implies more or less than a lust of dominion.” “Faction” was a more despicable form of “party,” but both implied a potentially violent challenge to the existing government, and thus overlapped with “sedition” and “treason.” In England, where there were Tories and Whigs, competing factions were sometimes called “parties”: in New York, those in power were typically called the “Court Party,” those not in power the “Country Party.”25 “It is the Governour’s desire to be of No Party,” Cosby’s few defenders insisted. But William Cosby fueled partisan passion like no other governor before him: “No Man was ever so universally hated as he is,” Morris remarked. “We have a Perfect war here,” New Yorker Abigail Franks wrote to her son in London in 1733; or, as Daniel Horsmanden put it a few months later, “We are in the midst of Party flames.” With Cosby in the Governor’s Mansion, New York politics moved beyond the conventional wisdom of the perils of party, advancing the innovative argument that parties were a necessary evil and, even more radically, that they were a necessary good, preserving not tyranny but liberty. By 1734 the view, almost unheard of in England, that parties might be necessary for liberty, was printed in the pages of the New York Gazette:

  A free Government cannot but be subject to Parties, Cabals, and Intrigues: This perhaps may be form’d into an Objection against free Governments by the Advocates for absolute Power, but for that Reason it is of no Weight . . . some Opposition, tho’ it proceed not entirely from a public Spirit, is not only necessary in free Government, but of great Service to the Public. Parties are a check upon one another, and by keeping the Ambition of one another within Bounds, serve to maintain the public Liberty. Opposition is the Life and Soul of public Zeal, which without it would flag, and decay for want of an Opportunity to exert itself. It rouses and animates the Heart, raises Emulation, quickens and improves the Capacity, gives Birth often to national Integrity, and instead of clogging, regulates and keeps in their just and proper Motion the Wheels of Government.26

  In the 1730s, newly willing to tolerate and even to celebrate parties, New Yorkers consolidated their two political parties through meetings held at separate city taverns. The Country Party men met at the Black Horse Tavern at the south corner of Smith and Garden streets, to plot against William Cosby, while Court Party men gathered at Robert Todd’s tavern on Broad Street, two doors north of the Exchange Coffeehouse on Broad, between Water and Pearl streets, to toast His Excellency. In October 1735, on the occasion of Cosby’s return from a trip to Albany, his supporters held “a very splendid Entertainment” for him at Todd’s, complete with an illumination display. Not to be outdone, Cosby’s opponents, the very next night, held a ball at the Black Horse for Rip Van Dam, with as much elegant food, as many toasts, and just as many lanterns. In January 1736, the two taverns again held rival balls, this time marking the Prince of Wales’s birthday: at Todd’s on Monday, at the Black Horse on Tuesday. One weary New Yorker scoffed, “They are happy that have the least to doe on either side.”27

  INTO THIS MAELSTROM came Daniel Horsmanden, who quickly became a target for partisan attacks. Rip Van Dam included Horsmanden’s appointment as Article 14 on a list of grievances against Cosby, challenging Horsmanden’s appointment on the grounds that he was “a Man of no visible estate in this Province and in necessitous circumstances.” Lewis Morris understood all too well that Van Dam’s complaint against Horsmanden’s appointment “lookes like pique,” but it was nonetheless legitimate, since the law required that Council members be “not necessitous people or much in debt.” 28 And Daniel Horsmanden was a man who, until he married a wealthy widow in 1747, was hardly ever “not necessitous.”

  Horsmanden arrived in New York decidedly short of cash. Not long after landing in the city, he had attended a public auction of the estate of the governor whom Cosby had been sent to replace, John Montgomerie. For £6, Horsmanden outfitted himself with gentlemanly attire: Montgomerie’s sword belt, and three new ruffled shirts, which he bought on credit. Unlike his peers, Horsmanden could ill afford to buy any of the late governor’s luxurious household goods, his card tables, beaver hats, parrot cages, silver pistols, feather bolsters, and over 2,000 gallons of Madeira. (Montgomerie had been a wealthy man; as governor of New York, he held the most lucrative governorship in the colonies, a position full of perks; simply for the honorific title of commander of Fort George, he pocketed £2,600 a year.) 29 James Alexander spent £70 on Montgomerie’s wine, cloth, and plateware, while James DeLancey spent more than £140 on curtains, bed lace, and leather chairs. (DeLancey, who had lent the city the £1,000 necessary to draw up the new city charter in 1731, was possibly the wealthiest man in the colonies.) Of these housewares, Horsmanden bought not so much as a spoon.

  Slaves were sold at the Montgomerie auction, too. Cosby himself dominated the bidding on Montgomerie’s slaves, carrying away Betty for £56, Jenny, £30, and “2 Cradles for Negroes,” while DeLancey’s brother-in-law, Captain Peter Warren, won the bid for “a Negro Boy Named Othello” at £36.30 Horsmanden could hardly have afforded one.

  From Montgomerie’s library Horsmanden did buy a handful of law books, including John Calvin’s Lexicon Juridicum, a history of Japan, and Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimage. But he ruefully passed over the governor’s impressive collection of history and belles lettres: Defoe and Plutarch, Swift and Shakespeare, Hobbes and Machiavelli, Pope and Milton, Homer and Plato. Joseph Murray bought volume after volume of plays and poetry and fiction. James DeLancey bought a stack of law books and a copy of James Harrington’s utopia, The Commonwealth of Oceana. The young lawyer John Chambers bought Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d, and a copy of Cato’s Letters— the collected essays of the English political theorists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. James Alexander bought more books than anyone else in the city, including The History of the Art of Printingand John Toland’s The Art of Governing by Partys (not a how-to-manual but a meditation on the “ill effects of partys on the people in general, the king in particular, and all our foren affairs”). Alexander, a dedicated collector and avid reader, also bought the collected works of Rabelais, the philosophy of Bacon, and dozens more histories, dictionaries, and law books, disappointed only that he had been outbid by his law partner, William Smith, for two folio volumes of Cicero (asked to sell them, Smith refused, on the admirable grounds that he “loved Books better than Money”). Alexander hired a cartman to crate and carry his sixty-four titles. 31 Horsmanden stuck his books in a sack and headed home.

  To read over Montgomerie’s library catalogue is to be reminded that New Yorkers lived in a world of enlightenment, of exuberance in the arts, of confidence in man’s capacity to reason the ways of nature and of nature’s God, and of ardent embrace of political liberty in the face of tyranny’s slavery. To read the list of their slaves’ names is to place that world of ideas against the reality of human bondage: at Montgomerie’s auction, where Shakespeare’s Works were sold, a young boy named Othello was offered to the highest bidder. And while James Alexander read Julius Caesar, Joseph Murray read Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko about a Coromantee slave rebellion in Dutch Surinam, and John Chambers read Cato’s Letters, slaves named Caesar and Oroonoko and dozens of Catos walked the streets of New York.

  TWO YEARS IN the city failed to improve Daniel Horsmanden’s finances. By 1734 he owned a modes
t house (assessed at £30) in the South Ward, a garden (£20) in the North Ward, and personal property totaling £20. For a gentleman, it wasn’t much. Although he had been admitted to the bar, he hadn’t found many clients and was “Eclipsed by his Contemporaries Alexander Murray Smith and Chambers who ingrossed all the Business.” To improve his position, Horsmanden actively courted the province’s surveyor-general, Cadwallader Colden, in an attempt to secure a land grant through a series of machinations so bold that, while he eventually gained a stake in 6,000 acres near Albany, he almost lost Cosby’s favor. By the mid-1730s, Horsmanden had earned a reputation as “a Person unsafe to Converse with.” Lewis Morris suspected Horsmanden of falsely reporting to England that he, Morris, “was dead & applying for his place,” a charge Horsmanden denied, complaining that the mere suspicion of it had given Morris’s son “Such a Spleen against me that nothing less than my Destruction could, I Suppose Satisfy his Resentment.”32 Meanwhile, as a consequence of yet another imprudent investment “as my Ill Stars would have it,” as Horsmanden put it, he fell into debt to Morris’s son-in-law, Richard Ashfield. “Mr Horsmanden . . . is a Gentleman of breeding and sence,” Lewis Morris wrote to the Lords of Trade, “but has no real Estate that is known, & I fear no personal neither, that being all mortgaged to a gentleman of my acquaintance, and payable this month, which, how he will discharge is a mistery I wish he may be able to discover, he having no means known but his practice to do it, and (tho’ a Barister) that is not much.”

  In 1734, Ashfield sued Horsmanden, demanding payment within twenty-four hours and threatening to sell the books Horsmanden had given him as security. (Ashfield, apparently, loved money better than books.) Cosby intervened, promising to pay Ashfield and sparing Horsmanden the indignity of debtor’s prison. The governor’s last-minute rescue wasn’t as gratifying to his henchman as it might have been; by now Horsmanden had come to agree with Lewis Morris’s judgment that Cosby was essentially a “mad man”; even Horsmanden nicknamed his patron “Machiaval.”33

  In 1735, the desperate Daniel Horsmanden did what any Aimwell or Archer might: he courted a wealthy widow. “We have as various reports of your fate with the widdow there, as there are about peace & war in England,” his cousin William Byrd wrote to him in early 1736. Byrd tried to lure Horsmanden back to Virginia, since the death of two lawyers there had finally “made room at the bar,” but Horsmanden was unreceptive. “All these allurements I laid in your way,” Byrd wrote, “but to as little purpose as Peg Smart us’d to spread her charms at Tunbridge.” 34 In 1735, Cosby, rescuing Horsmanden from debt, named him to the powerful and lucrative office of City Recorder. It was no mean clerical job. The Recorder was attorney for the Corporation of the City of New York and the only unelected member of the city’s Common Council, second in authority only to the mayor. As the crucial link between the provincial and municipal government, the Recorder was, in effect, the governor’s man in City Hall.35 By the time Horsmanden received Byrd’s letter, he had far too much at stake in New York to flee to Virginia, and he could ill afford to start again.

  IN THE FINAL, romping act of The Beaux’ Stratagem, the two scheming gentlemen rescue their lovers from a gang of robbers, prove their undying devotion, and reveal their true identities, only to discover that Aimwell’s older brother has died, leaving our hero his title—turning him into “Lord Aimwell” after all—and making it possible for him to marry Dorinda. Role reversals that began as impostures turn true. Meanwhile, Lady Bountiful’s brother convinces the loathsome Squire Sullen to divorce his delightful, wealthy wife so that she can wed Archer, who, she now realizes, is no footman but a gentleman. All of which leads Archer to muse, not without cause, “This night’s adventure has proved strangely lucky to us all.”

  In the 1730s, Daniel Horsmanden was not nearly so fortunate: no dying brother left him a fortune; no rich widow was willing to marry him. Unlike his chief political rival, James Alexander, Horsmanden found neither love nor fortune in New York. The year Van Dam objected to Horsmanden’s appointment to Cosby’s Council on the grounds that Horsmanden was “in necessitous circumstances,” James Alexander ranked as the wealthiest lawyer and the second wealthiest taxpayer in the city. In 1734, Alexander owned two houses and a stable in the Dock Ward (valued at £265) and a much smaller house (£20) in the East Ward. Many of the province’s wealthiest men lived outside the city: Lewis Morris in his manor at his 1,000-acre estate, Morrisania; Cadwallader Colden in his 3,000-acre country seat, Coldengham; Frederick Philipse at Philipsburg Manor. Alexander, unlike these men, was an inveterate urbanite. In 1739 he would build for himself another house in the Dock Ward, on Broad Street, with a garden extending to Jews’ Alley (so named because it led to the synagogue), a house “sumptuously furnished” after the finest English fashion: “There was the great dining room and the lesser dining room, the room hung with blue and gold leather, the green and gold room, the little front parlour and the little back parlour and the great tapestry room above stairs; besides red rooms and green rooms and chintz rooms up stairs and down, furnished with damask hangings, costly carpets and buffets set off with massive plate.” 36

  James Alexander was a very rich man indeed. Born in Scotland in 1691, he had arrived in New York in 1715, was admitted to the bar in 1720, appointed to the Governor’s Council in 1721, and greatly improved his position that same year by marrying the widow Mary Spratt Provost, by whom he had seven children. Mary brought two sons to the marriage, along with her late husband’s import business, which she continued to run out of a shop in Alexander’s house, even during bouts of illness. “If she is able to crawl she will be in the shop,” Alexander once wrote of his wife. During breaks in his own business, Alexander occasionally tended the shop as well. By 1745, his fortune was estimated at £100,000.37

  James Alexander, by John Wollaston, c. 1750. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

  Alexander, a stout, rosy-cheeked man with a dimpled chin and a contented smile, was the astute and learned owner of the best library in the province and a founding member of Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society. “In these parts of the World,” one contemporary remarked, “few men surpass him either in the Natural sagacity and Strength of his Intellectual powers or in his Literary Acquirements.” James Alexander was also a slaveowner. In June 1729, one of Alexander’s six slaves, a “Negroe Man named Yaff, about 35 Years old,” ran away. In an ad placed in the New York Gazette, Alexander offered £4 reward for “whoever takes up the said Negroe, and secures him so that his said Master may have him again.” It was a hefty sum—the going rate for runaway slaves was 40 shillings—one that is justified in Alexander’s description of Yaff’s usefulness: “He was born in this Country, and reads and writes. He is a sensible cunning Fellow.”38

  Alexander’s papers—his letters, account books, receipts, and journals, and even swatches of fabric sold at his wife’s shop—are collected at the New York Public Library and the New-York Historical Society, most of them donated by his great-grandson, Lewis Morris Alexander, in 1884. They fill folder after folder, box upon box. Even his great-grandson’s name tells a story about the family’s history. Against this vast archive stand the 107 words of Alexander’s ad for Yaff in the New York Gazette on June 23, 1729:

  Run away about the ninth of this Instant June from James Alexander of New-York, a Negroe Man named Yaff, about 35 Years old; he formerly belonged to Mr. Trent and before him to Coll. Ingoldsvy; he was seen at Elizabeth-Town after he run away with a gray Coat trimmed with Red, and an old white Fustian Coat: He was born in this Country, and reads and writes. He is a sensible cunning Fellow, and probably has got a pass forged. Whoever takes up the said Negroe, and secures him so that his said Master may have him again, shall have four Pounds Reward, and all reasonable Charges.

  But for this brief biography, Yaff might never have entered the historical record at all. He was unusual in this, and in three other respects: he was born in New York, he could read and write
, and he ran away.

  Most blacks in colonial New York were born someplace else. They bore marks of both the Old World and the New. One 1730 runaway bore them literally: he was “remarkably Scarrified over the Fore head”—with ornamental African facial scarring, an Old World adornment—and “branded R N,” for “runaway,” upon his shoulder, a New World punishment. (He was also barely clothed, his owner having given him “a Pair of trowsers only.”)39 Even without scars, many African-born New Yorkers were easy to spot: they had teeth chiseled to the shape of a point, or an hourglass— signs of beauty, signs of belonging.

  Maybe the two men named “Albany” and the seven men named “York” accused of conspiracy in 1741 were born in the colony, too. But they, like Yaff, were in a distinct minority. New York’s black population did not grow by natural increase until the end of the colonial period. Young women, and especially “seasoned” adolescent girls, were highly sought after. In 1737, women of childbearing age constituted 35 percent of the city’s black population. But they bore very few children, partly because at least the African-born among them breast-fed their children until age three or four. Most enslaved women were dead by forty, and their mortality rates peaked between the ages of thirty and thirty-four; they died of disease or complications of childbirth, exacerbated by poor nutrition and years of toil. Some were simply driven mad. In 1749, “a Negro Girl of about 15 Years of Age,” who “had been for sometime disordered in her Sences,” fell or, more likely, jumped “out of a Garret Window three Story, of which unhappy fall she was so Bruised, that she dyed in a few Hours.” 40