New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Firefighting in New York. Possibly Henry Dawkins, Certificate of the Hand-in-Hand Fire Company, ca. 1753. I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  From a hill at the edge of town, Robert Todd’s slave Dundee watched the fire with his friend Patrick, owned by William English. “Dundee said, he was sorry the Governor’s House was burnt; Patrick said he was not.” Instead, “he wished the Governor had been burnt in the middle of it.”

  When the last man was out, Clarke’s house burned with such fury “that no human power could extinguish it.”4 Not that every human power was marshaled. Gardner, who was standing next to Adolph Philipse’s Cuffee, said that “when the Buckets come to Cuffee, instead of handing them along to the next Man, he put them upon the Ground and overset them, by which Means the Ground, which was at first dry and hard, became so wet, that [Gardner] . . . was almost up to the Ankles in Mud.” And “when the Flames of the House blazed up very high,” Cuffee “huzzah’d, danced, whistled and sung.” Perhaps, on top of that hill, Patrick did the same.

  Colonists celebrated the bucket brigade as a triumph of brotherly solidarity. In contemporary illustrations, bucket brigadiers stand together like so many paper dolls, in quiet harmony. A 1733 editorial by “Pennsylvanus” in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette waxed poetic on the subject: “How pleasing must it be to a thinking Man to observe, that not a Fire happens in this Town, but soon after it is seen and cry’d out, the Place is crowded by active Men of different Ages, Professions and Titles; who, as of one Mind and Rank, apply themselves with all Vigilance and Resolution, according to their Abilities, to the hard Work of conquering the increasing Fire.” “Pennsylvanus” measured social order by the bucket: “here are brave Men, Men of Spirit and Humanity, good Citizens or Neighbours, capable and worthy of civil Society, and the Enjoyment of a happy Government.” Of “one Mind and Rank,” Philadelphians lining up to pass buckets “have a Reward in themselves, and they love one another.”

  Maybe that’s what happened in the City of Brotherly Love. Or maybe not. (One “vagabond Fellow” at a Philadelphia fire refused to pass pails and, “being smartly ask’d by an industrious young Man, why he did not lend a Hand to the Buckets, answer’d, He car’d not if all the Houses in Town were o’Fire: For which he received a Bucket of Water on his impudent Face.”)5 And in New York? “You black Dog,” Isaac Gardner hollered at Cuffee, “is this a Time for you to dance?” But Cuffee only laughed, whispered something to his friend Albany, standing on his other side, and kept dancing.

  While Cuffee danced, the flames spread from the roof of the Governor’s Mansion to the chapel and barracks. In a fierce wind, they threatened to blow even beyond the fort’s tall walls and to catch the roofs of the tightly packed houses lining the west side of Broadway, the “handsome Spacious Houses of the principal Inhabitants,” Joseph Murray’s mansion among them. 6 The whole city might be destroyed, left as desolate as the charred, smoking ruin that was London after the Great Fire.

  Eighteenth-century New York was an especially elegant city, known for its opulence and its grand “Broad Way,” one hundred feet wide, and its fine buildings, from Trinity Church, with its imposing stone steeple, to the majesty of City Hall, with its triple-arched arcade, to the boxy tower of the massive New Dutch Church. Some parts of the city still had “the general appearance of a Dutch-town,” with narrow houses, their gables facing the street, “just as is done in Holland,” built of brick of “divers Coullers and laid in Checkers.” Newer houses were built to English taste, and “in the Italian stile.” By eighteenth-century standards, Manhattan’s buildings were unusually tall, four or five stories high. On a granite island teeming with new arrivals too frightened to settle lands far beyond the street that was once a wall, New Yorkers, Dutch, English, and everyone else built upwards. Only slowly were they replacing thatch and wood buildings with stone and brick.7

  Meanwhile, the city’s tall wooden buildings, like those nearest to Fort George, spread fire swiftly. The first structure to the north of the fort was the clapboard Secretary’s Office, just over the fort gate. Clarke, desperate not only to halt the fire before it headed up Broadway but also to save the vast archive of documents stored in the Secretary’s Office, ordered men inside the building, calling out orders with a speaking trumpet. 8 Shattering the upper-floor windows, they threw down sheaf after sheaf of the governor’s papers—official commissions, private letters, newspapers, council records—only to watch them flutter and scatter, a white confetti wind. Almost as soon as the last pile of papers was thrown from the office, that building, too, began to burn. Finally, the engines arrived.

  The city had imported its first two engines in 1731, paying the hefty sum of £200 for “two Compleat fire Engines” of “Mr Newshams New Invention of the fourth and sixth Sizes with suctions, Leathern Pipes and Caps.” Richard Newsham, a London engineer, introduced the first modern fire engine in England in 1718. Twenty men working its foot treadles, while another team dumped buckets of water into its cistern, could power the Newsham Engine to pump 60 gallons per minute through a copper spout to which was attached a rather unwieldy wire-framed, leather-jacketed canvas suction hose. The Newsham was vastly better than no engine at all, and money well spent (the same model engine, with only slight modifications, was used until 1832). But it was cumbersome, and the hose leaked. Newsham engines also required trained men to work and maintain them. In 1736, the Common Council ordered the building of an engine house, attached to the Watch House on Broad Street, and the following year the Assembly passed a law providing for the appointment of volunteer firemen “to be ready at A Call both by Night as well as by day.” In 1738, thirty-five firemen were appointed by a “Law for Regulating and declaring the Duty of Firemen in the City of New York”: at the first alarm, “with all possible Expedition” they were to “Repair to the fire Engines and draw them to the place where such fire Shall happen” and “Work & Play the Said Fire Engines, and all Other Tools and Instruments at such Fire, with all their power, Strength, Skill and understanding.”9

  That power and, most of all, those tools and instruments were not always adequate. Although the stalwart firemen showed up and played the engines on the fire at the Secretary’s Office, the building was soon reduced to ashes.

  A thin drizzle began to fall. Rain tickled hands and faces, and sizzled on burning wood. There was a lull of relief. The rain picked up. But then long-forgotten hand grenades stored in the cellar of the Secretary’s Office suddenly exploded and citizens who had valiantly fought the fire now fled in fear, struck with the terrifying realization that the whole fort, with its stock of gunpowder, hay, pitch, tar, resin, and turpentine, might blow up. “The usual alertness of the inhabitants,” William Smith, Jr., wrote, “was checked by their dread of the explosion of the magazine.”10 The bucket brigade retreated. At least one soldier, Griffith Evans, was badly burned. In the chaos of paper and mud and flames and a stampeding crowd, one man lost a gold watch; the next week he would advertise for its return. Many more men lost their courage.

  And still Cuffee laughed.

  When the explosions stopped, and didn’t start up again, the men returned. Slowly, the leather buckets and the Newsham engines and, above all, the rain, soaked the fire out. “The Govrs house barracks & Sundry offices in the ffort were almost in an hour reduced to ashes during the time of a high wind which much Endangered the City,” James Alexander wrote to his stepson.11 Too late to save the fort, the rain, in the end, saved the city. New York would not follow London’s fate.

  By late afternoon, the weary crowd headed home. The drenched, shivering firemen collected all the buckets onto a cart and carried them to City Hall, for their owners to pick up in the morning. The Newshams were hauled back to the engine house on Broad Street. The fort’s thick timbers burned through the night, while captain of the militia Cornelius Van Horne, nicknamed “Major Drum,” zeal
ously paraded his seventy armed men up and down the streets, keeping watch that the fire didn’t blaze up again or spread beyond the embers inside the wrecked fort. Later, Horsmanden would argue that only Van Horne’s providential watch had thwarted the conspirators’ plans to set more fires that night, saving the city from apocalypse.

  The day Fort George burned was a day of utter desolation in New York, one from which the city did not easily or soon recover. For months afterward, Clarke would beg the Lords of Trade in London to send money to help pay for the damage and rebuild the fort, with little success, since the War of Jenkins’s Ear had emptied the imperial coffers. (Three years later, when Dr. Alexander Hamilton toured New York, he found the fort still entirely “in ruins.”) And there were more urgent problems, such as what to do with the rescued papers; what lessons could be learned from fighting the fire at the fort; and the mystery of how it had started.

  On March 19, the city’s Common Council held an emergency meeting at City Hall. Acting in his capacity as Recorder, and governor’s man, Daniel Horsmanden reported that “in the Dreadful Calamity Which happened Yesterday the Secretarys Office was Entirely Destroyed,” and he asked the aldermen to “Assign the Common Council Room for the Keeping the Publick Books and Records of the Province. During the present Exigency.” The books were moved to the Council Room on the second floor of City Hall that same day. Meanwhile, five aldermen were appointed to “a Committee to Inspect into the Ladders. Hooks and all other kind of Implements . . . Necessary for Extinguishing fire” and to make sure they were in proper repair. There was also a hint that, at the crucial hour, the good citizens of New York had not provided enough three-gallon leather buckets: before it adjourned, the Common Council placed an order for one hundred new leather fire buckets of its own, painted with the words “City of N. York.”12

  WHAT CAUSED THE FIRE at Fort George? At first, it appeared to have been an accident. Zenger’s Weekly Journal reported on March 23 that Clarke’s mansion had been ignited by a careless plumber using a soldering iron to fix a leak in a gutter that extended from the roof of the mansion to the roof of the chapel. “For some time after the fort was burned I had no other thoughts of it, than that it was an accident,” Clarke wrote to the Lords of Trade. George Clarke, sixty-five, was a seasoned politician. Born in England, he had come to New York in 1702, was appointed clerk of the Council three years later, and a member in 1716. “He had genius, but no other than a common writing school education,” according to William Smith, Jr. “Nor did he add to his stock by reading, for he was more intent upon improving his fortune than his mind,” not least because he had ten children to provide for. Calculating, but not without a strong sense of self-preservation, Clarke had attached himself to Cosby. But by spending most of Cosby’s administration at “his rural villa on the edge of Hempstead plains,” Clarke had left it to James DeLancey “to enjoy the praise or blame” of being Cosby’s henchman. After Cosby’s death in 1736, Clarke had done much to quiet the province and to please the populace: at the death of Clarke’s wife, Anne, in May 1740, he ordered that a loaf of bread be given to every poor New Yorker.

  George Clarke was said to have “a perfect command of his temper.” At first, he was willing to believe that the fire at the fort, which occasioned him considerable personal loss, was an unhappy accident. “No one imagined it was done on Purpose,” Horsmanden recalled. Instead, the plumber, “carrying his Fire-Pot with Coals to keep his Soddering-Iron hot, to perform his Work; and the Wind setting into the Gutter, ’twas thought, some Sparks had been blown out upon the Shingles of the House.” 13

  That explanation was reasonable enough. Fires were far from uncommon in New York City, and they were almost always accidental. In 1733, Gerardus Comfort’s workshop and stable, on the North River, had burned to the ground in a fire “occasioned by a Crack in the Oven (which being then heating to bake Bread for the Family).” The next year another New Yorker’s house was reduced to ashes by a kitchen chimney fire. In 1737, Rip Van Dam’s house went up in flames sparked “by the careless throwing of hot Ashes.” Chimneys ablaze in every building, lighted candles by every bed. Daily life was a fire hazard. A list of dangers printed in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette included many more: shovels full of live coals “carried out of one Room into another, or up or down Stairs”; “too shallow Hearths,” “wooden Mouldings on each side of the Fire Place,” and “foul Chimneys.”14 It was all too easy to believe that the plumber had let sparks fly from his pot to the governor’s roof.

  The plumber’s pot was plausible. But it didn’t last out the week.

  On Wednesday, March 25, a house near the Long Bridge, belonging to that daring seaman Captain Peter Warren, went up in flames. Unlike the Governor’s Mansion, Warren’s house was saved by the bucket brigade and the Newsham engines: the fire “was soon extinguished, without doing much Damage to the House.”

  Two fires after an especially cold winter (just the kind of weather that dries out wood) were not unusual, and, at first, the fire at Warren’s was attributed to a faulty chimney. But exactly a week later, a dockside warehouse owned by Dutch blockmaker Winant Van Zant burned to the ground, with everything in it. The fire at Van Zant’s, “an old Wooden Building, stored with Deal Boards, and Hay at one End,” seemed to have begun by “a Man’s smoking a Pipe there, which set Fire to the Hay.” But after three fires on three Wednesdays in a row, it was impossible not to wonder if this, too, were just another accident. And it was impossible not to wonder, what would the next Wednesday bring?

  New Yorkers didn’t have to wait that long. Three days later, two more fires broke out. The first, at dusk on Saturday, April 4, burned a haystack in a cow stable at the Fly Market in the East Ward, on Maiden Lane at Pearl Street, near the house of Dutch cordwainer Jacobus Quick. (The Fly Market’s name was a corruption of the Dutch vly, or “valley.”) Neighbors raced to respond to the alarm, buckets swinging. Clarke showed up, too. “I went constantly to every fire to give directions and to animate the people,” he told the Lords of Trade.15 Patrick and Dundee again watched the blaze together. “The Fires in Town were not half done yet,” Patrick warned. Just as the cow-stable fire was put out and weary citizens headed back to their homes, there was “a Second Cry of Fire, at the House of one Ben Thomas, next Door to Captain Sarly, on the West Side.” Thomas’s fire, too, was soon extinguished, not least because the leather buckets were already out on the streets. Now, for the first time, there was proof of arson: “Upon Examination, it was found, that Fire had been put between a Straw and another Bed laid together, whereon a Negro slept.”

  Early the next morning, Sunday, April 5, coals were found “under a Haystack, standing near the Coach-House and Stables of Joseph Murray, ” on lower Broadway. The coals had gone out on their own, “having only singed some Part of the Hay,” but a trail of coals and ashes led from the stables to a neighbor’s house, “which caused a Suspicion of the Negro that lived there.” That afternoon, a housewife named Abigail Earle was looking out the second-floor window of a house on Broadway when she saw “three Negroes” coming up the street. As they passed the house, one of them, a slave named Quack, owned by the butcher John Walter, shouted, “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, A LITTLE, Damn it, BY-AND-BY,” and then “threw up his Hands, and laughed.”

  Monday brought four more fires. At ten o’clock in the morning, the first alarm was sounded when a chimney in George Burns’s house, opposite the Fort Garden, began to burn. (Burns was a sergeant in a company of fusiliers.) Two hours later the roof of Mrs. Hilton’s house, on the east side of Captain Jacob Sarly’s house, went up in flames and, again, evidence pointed to arson; this time, to a man with a very good motive: Sarly’s slave Juan de la Silva, who had been seized by an English privateer, John Lush, during an attack on a Spanish ship on which De la Silva served as crew. (Sarly himself had also captained slave-trading ships.) Despite the dark-skinned Spanish sailors’ protests that they were subjects of Spain, and therefore prisoners of war, Lush’s “Spanish Negroes�
�� were auctioned as slaves in New York. It was said that they pledged to “burn Lush’s House, and tie Lush to a Beam, and roast him like a Piece of Beef.”

  Jacob Sarly’s neighbors charged the arson to De la Silva. More, they began to wonder if all of the recent fires had been set by Spanish prisoners wrongfully, or at best dubiously, sold into slavery. News spread that the “Spanish Negroes” had damned Sarly, who was, like Lush, a privateer, and said “that if the Captain would not send them to their own Country, they would ruin all the City.” “Take up the Spanish Negroes! ” went the cry from street to street. Bucket brigadiers turned into vigilantes and hunted down De la Silva and four other “Spanish Negroes” who had been captured by Lush in the fall of 1740: Antonio de la Cruz, Antonio de St. Bendito, Augustine Gutierrez, and Pablo Ventura Angel. All five were found and dragged to City Hall.

  At four o’clock, city magistrates assembled in the Council Room to interrogate the five men. But even as the magistrates took to their seats, another fire alarm was sounded. From City Hall’s long windows they saw smoke rising from Frederick Philipse’s warehouse on New Street and “a small Streak of Fire running up the Shingles, like Wild-Fire.” Before that fire could be put out, “there was another Cry of Fire; which diverted the People attending the Storehouse, to the new Alarm.” One fireman, Dutch gunsmith Jacobus Stoutenburgh, stayed behind at Philipse’s. From the top of the warehouse roof, where he was pulling off shingles, Stoutenburgh looked down inside the building and saw a black man wearing a blue coat lined with red: Adolph Philipse’s slave Cuffee.

  Cuffee, spying him, took flight. Stoutenburgh gave chase, climbing down through the laths, “but he was hindered by a Nail catching hold of his Breeches.” Hanging by his pants, Stoutenburgh watched helplessly as Cuffee escaped by jumping out of one of the end windows, “leaping over several Garden Fences,” and hiding in some old stables nearby. “ A Negro; a Negro!” Stoutenburgh hollered. Bucket brigaders who recognized the fleeing man changed the cry to “Cuff Philipse, Cuff Philipse!” A mob “of upwards of a Thousand Men” chased Cuffee to Adolph Philipse’s house, between Broad Street and Coenties Slip, where they grabbed him and carried him to jail, “borne upon the People’s Shoulders.”