New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  The low fertility of their slaves failed to concern their owners. Indeed, on the New York City slave market, female sterility was a selling point: “To Be Sold, a young Wench about 29 years old, that drinks no strong Drink, and gets no Children, a very good Drudge.” Infant mortality was high, and infanticide not uncommon. In the hard winter of 1741, Diana put her newborn out to die in the snow. Five years earlier, the New-York Weekly Journal printed this chilling news: “Yesterday Morning was found in the Negroes Burial-place, a small Infant in a Wigg Box, and partly buried underGround.”41

  Discouraged and even prevented from having children of their own, black women in New York cared for their masters’ children. Cadwallader Colden’s wife asked him to buy “a negro Girl of about thirteen years old. . . . Chiefly to keep the children.” For whites, leaving the care of a black nurse and the company of black children marked a transition out of childhood. Of his eleven-year-old son, Colden wrote his wife: “I hope he no longer looks on himself as a Child & that he’l be ashamed to play about the Doors with the Negro Children.”42

  That young black women looked after white children did not mean they were necessarily beloved or even especially valued. Nowhere is this more brutally illustrated than in a short piece of local news printed on September 12, 1737: “Saturday last a Boy about 14 or 15 years old, in this City was handling a gun, a Negro Girl sitting in the yard, with a Child in her Arms, at the outside of the Window, the Boy, in a jesting manner said, I’ll shoot ye, and the Gun went off and shot the Negro’s Brains out.” But, the Gazette hastened to add, “the Child in her Arms [was] not hurt.” The boy went unpunished.43

  Those few black children born in New York generally lived with their mothers at least until weaning, and developed strong ties of family and friendship: as an adult, Cuffee (owned by Adolph Philipse) knew both his father and his brother; as a boy, attorney Joseph Murray’s slave Adam had played marbles with his friend Quack. But slave childhood was short, especially because New York slaveowners considered separating mothers and children as much a disciplinary as an economic necessity. Selling a thirty-three-year-old woman and one of her children to Barbados in 1717, Cadwallader Colden explained: “I could have sold her here to good advantage but I have several other of her Children which I value & I know if she should stay in this country she would spoil them.”44

  Most New York slaves who ran away went to visit family, to maintain ties their owners hoped to sever. About 10 percent of runaways were literate. Knowing how to write made running away easier: Yaff forged a pass. Other men relied on other guises. One ran off in a soldier’s clothing; another wore a wig. But one eighteen-year-old runaway had no hope of disguising himself as a free man: he wore “an Iron Ring about his Neck and one about his Leg, with a Chain from one to the other.”45 How he must have stumbled as he fled.

  BEFORE THE CURTAIN fell at the New Theatre on February 12, 1741, there was a dance, of the sort James Alexander carefully recorded in a small notebook he kept to help him remember dance steps, for he and his wife Mary loved to dance.46 The dance, the “Beaux Stratagem,” was, like all English country dances, a coming together, parting, and coming together again of paired couples, assembled in two lines. As it progresses, the couple at the top of the line exchanges places with the couple below, and so on, all the way to the bottom of the line so that, when the music stops, the couple at the top has moved to the bottom. The high become low, the low become high. And back again. In the final scene of The Beaux’ Stratagem, the lovers, Aimwell and Dorinda, and the divorcing couple, Squire and Mrs. Sullen, glide across the stage, while Archer delivers the play’s closing line:

  ’ Twould be hard to guess which of these parties is the better pleased, the couple joined, or the couple parted; the one rejoicing in hopes of an untasted happiness, and the other in their deliverance from an experienced misery.

  Applause broke out, and the audience stirred, gathering their coats, bracing for the cold walk home through the icy, lantern-lit city.

  New Yorkers who watched The Beaux’ Stratagem that night must have reveled in its celebration of romantic love, and the orderly pairing of couples expressed in this final dance. And if New York’s theatregoers were anything like the crowds in London, they relished the comic role reversals, especially that of the gentleman, Archer, posing as footman to his friend Aimwell. It was a difficult part to play well. When David Garrick took up the role in London, Samuel Johnson complained, “The gentleman should break out through the footman, which is not the case as he does it.” 47 A role reversal was only funny as pretense, not as transformation.

  New York’s theatregoers also cherished the plots-within-plots. And they must have laughed at one of the funniest scenes in the play, when Scrub, Squire Sullen’s stupid servant, pledges to uncover a plot: “Ay, sir, a plot, and a horrible plot. First, it must be a plot because there’s a woman in’t; secondly, it must be a plot because there’s a priest in’t; thirdly, it must be a plot because there’s French gold in’t; and fourthly, it must be a plot, because I don’t know what to make on’t.”

  WITHIN DAYS of the debut of The Beaux’ Stratagem, the “Great Negro Plot” began to unravel: first the gold (actually silver), then the woman, and only much later, months later, the priest.

  On Thursday, February 26, a young English sailor named Christopher Wilson, nicknamed “Yorkshire,” walked the short distance from his docked ship, a man-of-war called the Flamborough, to a shop owned by Robert Hogg. Hogg’s shop fronted Broad Street, just next to James Alexander’s sumptuously furnished house, but it had a side door that opened onto Jews’ Alley, a street known not only for its synagogue but for its “idle Houses,” frequented by sailors. Wilson bought some linen and paid with Spanish coins; Hogg’s wife made change for him by opening a drawer full of Spanish pieces-of-eight. “She soon reflected that she had done wrong in exposing her Money to an idle Boy in that manner . . . and immediately shut up the Bureau again, and made a Pretense of sending the Money out to a Neighbour’s to be weighed.”

  Rebecca Hogg was prone to hysterics (her husband believed that “a good mowing was a cure for such complaints”), but this time she was wise to be alarmed, although she would have been wiser still to have actually sent the money to her neighbor, Mary Alexander.48 Christopher Wilson, meanwhile, walked to the outskirts of town to John Hughson’s tavern to speak with Hughson and three black men he knew he would find there: Caesar, owned by the baker John Vaarck; Prince, owned by the merchant John Auboyneau; and Adolph Philipse’s Cuffee, a man who spoke English and Spanish, and could read and play the violin. Together, they hatched a plan to rob Hogg’s shop.

  On Saturday afternoon, Wilson returned to Hogg’s to buy rum. While Rebecca Hogg was busy with other customers, Wilson shoved back the bolt on the shop’s side door, undetected. Later that night, under cover of darkness, Caesar and Prince slipped in through the unbolted door and stole not only an abundance of coins but also “diverse Pieces of Linnen and other Goods” and “wrought Silver” worth more than £60. Caesar hid the coins in John Hughson’s cellar and buried the linen and silver plate under the kitchen floorboards at Vaarck’s house.

  In the morning, Sunday, Caesar went to Hughson’s to see the twenty-one-year-old Irishwoman Peggy Kerry, who only days before had given birth to his child, “a Babe largely partaking of a motley Complexion,” as Horsmanden described it. Horsmanden said Kerry “pretended to be married” but was actually “a Person of infamous Character, a notorious Prostitute, and also of the worst Sort, a Prostitute to Negroes.” For bearing a bastard, Peggy Kerry, if discovered, risked being sent to the city’s Poorhouse—a bleak brick building just north of the Common, crowded with beggars, captured runaways, “unruly and ungovernable Servants and Slaves,” and “parents of Bastard Children,” and equipped with a whipping post, fetters, and shackles. In 1738, in a summary judgment before a juryless municipal criminal court headed by the mayor and Recorder Daniel Horsmanden, another city prostitute, Mary Lawrence, had been stripped to t
he waist and received thirty-one lashes at the hands of the public whipper, after which she was sentenced to a year of hard labor at the Poorhouse.49

  The money Caesar stole may have been meant to help Peggy Kerry avoid this fate. He paid for her lodging and frequently slept with her at Hughson’s, climbing in through her window at night. As Peggy had only just delivered, Caesar worried about how she and the baby would fare, and how she could escape the Poorhouse. At Hughson’s, he offered Mary Burton “a Piece of Silver, which she supposed was to engage her to look after Peggy Kerry in her lying in,” but Burton refused. She would have “look’d after White People’s” infants, she told Caesar, but not Peggy’s “black Child.”

  Just before noon, Christopher Wilson returned to the scene of the crime to gossip with Rebecca Hogg. Betraying his comrades, he revealed to her that, earlier that morning, he’d seen just such a collection of coins as the ones she had lost at John Hughson’s house in the possession of a soldier named John Gwin. Rebecca Hogg sent for the magistrate, but James Mills, deputy sheriff and jailkeeper, and James Kannady, constable and wigmaker, searched Hughson’s house in vain. By nightfall, Mills learned that “John Gwin” was an alias Caesar sometimes used. Mills returned to the tavern and promptly arrested him. On Monday, Mills arrested Prince and brought John Hughson and his wife, Sarah, in for questioning. Sarah carried with her a nursing baby.

  Prince and the Hughsons denied everything.

  On Tuesday, March 3, sixteen-year-old Mary Burton walked to Ann Kannady’s house in the South Ward “to buy a Pound of Candles for her Master.” Ann Kannady, like Rebecca Hogg, ran a small shop. She sold Burton the candles and “gave her motherly good Advice,” promising her that if she told all, “she would get freed from her Master.”

  Burton, known for her “warm hasty Spirit,” “had a remarkable Glibness of Tongue, and uttered more Words than People of her supposed Education usually do.” To Ann Kannady, she dropped vague but ominous hints about a plot. Later that evening, James Mills and Ann and James Kannady went to Hughson’s. Burton pulled a silver coin out of her pocket and told them Caesar had given it to her on Sunday morning to buy her silence—or (as was reported in another version of the story) to pay her for caring for Kerry and her newborn.

  The next day, Wednesday, March 4, Burton offered her first deposition at City Hall. She talked about the stolen goods. She said nothing about a slave plot. But she did reveal that Caesar “usually slept with the said Peggy, which her Master and Mistress knew of.” Kerry was arrested but denied any knowledge of the robbery. So did Caesar, although he freely admitted to his relationship with Kerry. Meanwhile, John Hughson dug the coins out of his cellar, turned them in, and confessed to receiving stolen goods, only to refuse to sign his statement when it was read over to him. Instead, he called Burton “a vile, good-for-nothing Girl” who “had been got with Child by her former Master,” a charge that was never investigated.

  By the end of the day, Rebecca Hogg had her silver and linen back. Mary Burton, who feared “she shou’d be murdered or poisoned by the Hughsons and the Negroes,” was taken into protective custody and housed with Mills in his lodgings in the garret of City Hall. Caesar and Peggy Kerry were imprisoned in the dungeon below. (Possibly with their baby, who, if it hadn’t already died, would have been jailed with its mother. In any event, the baby was never mentioned again.) Prince and John and Sarah Hughson, with her own baby, were released on bail. Cuffee had yet to be accused. What remained unresolved—Burton’s fear of being poisoned, her unwillingness to help Kerry during her lying-in, Hughson’s calling Burton a “good-for-nothing Girl”—seemed as much a household squabble as a criminal case. A routine trial for burglary was set for the next regularly scheduled meeting of the provincial Supreme Court, the third Tuesday in April.

  But before that, the city would begin to burn.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fire

  SLOWLY, THE HARD WINTER began to melt. A sloop from South Carolina and a brigantine from Lisbon broke through the ice and into the harbor. On March 12, the Royal Ranger, a sleek ship that had sailed from Kingston in just four weeks, dropped anchor in New York. Her captain brought news of a grand fleet of more than thirty ships launched from Jamaica in January, in the chief engagement of the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the trade war between England and Spain that, the summer before, had nearly emptied New York of the ablest of its men.

  New Yorkers avidly followed news of the war, brought to the city in salty packets of wax-sealed letters written by homesick soldiers and sailors to anxious family and friends and delivered by the master of every ship that docked along the city’s wooden piers. James Alexander corresponded with his stepson, David Provost, a captain in Colonel William Gooch’s regiment in Jamaica. James DeLancey awaited letters from his brother-in-law, New York’s most celebrated and daring naval commander, Captain Peter Warren, who had married DeLancey’s sister Susannah in 1731. On March 16, Zenger’s Weekly Journal reported that Warren, on duty patrolling the Caribbean, had seized a French ship bound for Cartagena loaded with flour and iron, in whose hold he found concealed “the French contract for Supplying the Spaniards, with Provisions.” The document, proof of French collusion with Spain, seemed to make England’s declaring war with France all but inevitable, although news brought by a ship from London the same week reported that “the talk of a War with France, was not so hot as it had been.” 1

  Two days after the Weekly Journal reported on Warren’s exploits, while New Yorkers were still busy pondering the latest news of fleets, skirmishes, prizes, and lines of battle on the high seas, the city’s fort went up in flames. Fort George stood on a hill commanding a view of the harbor and the island of Manhattan. It was built as Fort Amsterdam in 1626; after the English took possession in 1664, it had as many names as England had monarchs: Fort James, Fort Anne, and, beginning in 1714, Fort George. Names were about all that England provided, except for soldiers; year after year, the fort suffered for lack of improvements; it was “but a weak place, and badly contrived.”2 In 1735, under pressure to improve the city’s defenses, William Cosby had directed the erection of a half-moon-shaped fortified wall along the water, dubbing it “George Augustus’ Royal Battery.” This, and the fort itself, were all that stood between the city and foreign invaders.

  At one o’clock on a gray, Wednesday afternoon, March 18, 1741, a great plume of smoke rose from the roof of Lieutenant Governor George Clarke’s mansion, just inside the fort’s thick stone walls. Nearly hidden behind the curtain of smoke, flames danced across the cedar-shingled roof while the bells at the fort’s chapel and at City Hall, heard throughout the city, sounded the doleful, urgent alarm. But New Yorkers could easily see that Clarke’s mansion would be utterly destroyed long before the stoutest horses hitched to wagons carrying fire engines could pull them two blocks south on Broad Street, then a block west on Beaver, from the engine house near City Hall. While the horses snorted, their steamy breath trailing like ribbon behind them, “great Numbers of People, Gentlemen and others” raced down the icy streets to the patch of snow-covered grass known as the Fort Garden.

  View of Fort George with the City of New York from the Southwest, by J. Carwitham, c. 1740. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

  Fire was the greatest danger facing an early modern city, as New Yorkers well knew. “Have not we heard of, and many of us seen great Conflagrations in the City of London, and other Cities?” a correspondent asked in the New York Gazette in 1729. In the Great Fire of London in 1666, more than thirteen thousand buildings were destroyed in five days. Much of Boston burned in 1711. Two thirds of Rennes was ruined in 1720. “Our News-Papers have almost every Month given us Melancholly Accounts of the half, the 3d. or some considerable Parts of large Cities are reduced to Ashes,” the Gazette reminded New Yorkers. “Petersburg and Copenhagen are late Instances of this; nor have we forgot the violent Conflagrations at Boston; and its to be fear’d our fate may be like others, if some better Oeconomy is not fallen on, to pre
vent such a Misfortune.” In 1729, New York’s firefighting had consisted of little more than a poorly enforced bucket law, far less than the measures taken in London and even some colonial cities, as the Gazette writer pointed out: “the City of Philadelphia (as young as it is) have had two Fire Engines for several years past; and its a Wonder to many that this City should so long neglect the getting of one or more of them.”3

  In 1731, in response to that impassioned plea, New York had passed “A Law for the Better Preventing of Fire,” providing for the purchase of two fire engines and a new bucket law: anyone who owned a house with one or two chimneys was required to hang a three-gallon leather bucket just by the front door, labeled with the owner’s name; houses with three or more chimneys needed two buckets, bakeries three, breweries six. When a fire alarm was sounded, these buckets were to be thrown into the street, to be picked up by the fastest runners and carried to the scene of the fire, where two lines were formed: one to pass full buckets from a pump, or the river, to the fire, and one to pass the empty buckets back.

  On March 18, when the alarm bell rang, buckets were grabbed and tossed, stacked and toted toward the billowing smoke at the southern end of the island. A bucket brigade lined up in the Fort Garden. “There were Rows made of People in the Garden, Negroes as well as white Men, from the Water Side thro’ the Sally Port, in order to hand Water along to the Fire,” a cordwainer named Isaac Gardner later recalled. Bucket by bucket, they fought the blaze. Meanwhile, soldiers rescued Clarke and his family and dragged his belongings out of the house, placing upturned chairs and charred tables and broken plates of china on the snow, a ghastly winter garden party.