New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  And still, across the city, panicked citizens fled their houses in confusion. The women, especially, were “exceedingly frightened . . . so that some Fainted, others Miscarried and one Died of the fright.” 16 From street to street New Yorkers began to cry, “The Negroes are rising!”

  NOW, EVEN THE most skeptical of men turned suspicious. “Within these five weeks we have had above a Dozen of allarms with fire in this City,” James Alexander wrote to his stepson. “Five of these fires happening in one day, with many other strange causes of Suspicion render it likely that all or most of them have bene on purpose.” Clarke had once believed the fires were accidental, “but when three or four and once I think five houses were set on fire in a day and some of them apparently by design,” he explained, “I soon changed my thoughts and set myself heartily to work to find out the villainy.”

  Briefly, New Yorkers entertained the possibility of witchcraft. A woman in the city had made “a Prophecy” before several of the fires, including the four fires on Monday, April 6. “The Aldermen of this City made strict enquiry after this Woman,” one New Yorker wrote to a friend in Philadelphia, “but can’t find her out.” But with Cuffee’s arrest, the witch was forgotten and never mentioned again. Clarke, for one, was relieved that it had taken so long for New Yorkers to conclude “The Negroes are rising!”: “had the suspicion obtained, when those fires begun that the negroes were at the bottom of it, the whole town might have been laid in ashes, for men in that case would have been more intent upon guarding themselves and their families, than upon extinguishing the fires.”17

  The frequency of the fires convinced Clarke and Alexander—and most everyone else—that they were more than accidents. But how, exactly, did suspicion come to fall on the city’s slaves?

  Nothing “just happened” in the early eighteenth century. There was always a villain to be caught, a conspiracy to be detected. The century was lousy with intrigues. Nearly everyone, and enlightened, reasonable people most of all, spotted plotters lurking behind nearly every shadow, and arsonists in the flicker of almost every flame. This was, in many ways, a departure from the providential thinking that ruled the minds of previous generations.18 Even into the eighteenth century, providential thinkers like the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay explained fires as God’s will. In a 1711 sermon entitled Burnings Bewailed, the Puritan minister Increase Mather sought to explain “the sins which provoke the Lord to kindle fires” like the one that had just attacked his city. 19 In New York, where people subscribed to a more familiar, more recognizably “modern” sensibility, blaming the fires in the early spring of 1741 on a vengeful God never occurred to anyone.

  That left them groping for an explanation. They could take little comfort in a premodern providentialism. Terrible things no longer happened simply because God willed them to happen; they happened because someone caused them to happen. The trick was to figure out just who was behind it all, to track down conspirators. The island of England nearly sank into the sea under the weight of plotting papists, levelers, and anarchists. The colonies were riddled with political plotters, too, nearly all of them men who challenged or usurped the authority of royally appointed governors: Nathaniel Bacon in Virginia in 1675, Jacob Leisler in New York in 1690, James Alexander and Lewis Morris in New York in the 1730s. In 1710, irate Antiguan assemblymen had had their governor murdered.

  But in the New World, there were also different villains: dark-skinned peoples whose land or liberty, or both, had been taken away. In an empire acquired by conquest and built by slaves, English colonists in the New World had the unnerving and unrelenting impression that they were being watched, and despised, always, and that plots were forever being hatched against them, plots of arson and murder and revolution. Worse even than this consuming fear was the suspicion, only rarely voiced, that the plotters might have right on their side—a point made by the English poet Richard Savage in his 1737 poem “Of Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works”:

  Do you the neighb’ring blameless Indian aid, Culture what he neglects, not His invade; Dare not, oh dare not, with ambitious View, Force or demand Subjection, never due. Let by My specious Name no Tyrants rise, And cry, while they enslave, they civilize! Know LIBERTY and I are still the same, Congenial!—ever mingling Flame with Flame! Why must I Afric’s sable Children see Vended for Slaves, though form’d by Nature free, The nameless Tortures cruel Minds invent, Those to subject, whom Nature equal meant? If these you dare, albeit unjust Success Empow’rs you now unpunish’d to oppress, Revolving Empire you and yours may doom, (Rome all subdued, yet Vandals vanquish’d Rome) Yes, Empire may revolve, give Them the Day, And Yoke may Yoke, and Blood may Blood repay.20

  Sometimes, Empire did revolve, and Blood did Blood repay. Slaves murdered their masters, and chopped their corpses up with axes. Indians attacked English towns, and burned them to the ground. The paranoid style of American colonial life might just as easily be termed a realistic assessment of the perils of empire. New Yorkers themselves had seen blood in the streets. On March 25, 1712, a group of New York slaves had met at night to complain about “hard usage” from their masters. Sucking the blood of one another’s hands, they pledged to a plot to destroy the city and murder every white. On the night of April 6, between twenty-five and fifty black men and women, many of them Coromantees, met at midnight, carrying guns, swords, knives, and hatchets. They set fire to a building, and when whites raced to the scene, “the slaves fired and killed them.” Adrian Hoghlandt’s slave Robin stabbed him in the back. Nicholas Roosevelt’s slave Tom shot Andries Beekman in the chest. Peter the Porter, owned by Andries Marschalk, killed young Joris Marschalk with a dagger blow to his breast. Before the butchery ended, nine whites had been killed and six more wounded.

  Governor Robert Hunter commanded the cannon at Fort George fired to alarm the city and “order’d a detachment from the fort under a proper officer to march against them, but the slaves made their retreat into the woods, by the favour of the night.” The next day, Hunter ordered the New York and Westchester militias to “drive the Island.” Sweeping Manhattan, the troops captured nearly all of the rebels, although a handful, six men, had sufficient time and fortitude to kill themselves before the soldiers found them. “Had it not been for the Garrison there,” most New Yorkers believed, the city “would have been reduced to ashes, and the greatest part of the inhabitants murdered.”21

  New Yorkers knew, too, about more recent rebellions. They knew about a slave conspiracy at the Danish island of St. John’s in 1733, in which more than ninety African-born slaves took control of the island and held it for over six months. They followed the news of a slave plot in Antigua in 1736; in 1737, Zenger’s Weekly Journal had reprinted a full account of the investigation into the conspiracy. They knew about the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739, in which a group of nearly a hundred armed slaves killed some twenty whites before being defeated by a local militia company. And everyone in New York had heard about what had happened in Jamaica, where, in the 1720s and 1730s, large bands of runaway slaves, led by a charismatic leader named Cudjoe, established rebel towns and fought off repeated efforts to conquer them. Cudjoe’s forces not only held their positions, they gained territory. “The Numerous Rebellious Negroes there are very Turbulent, and almost every where Attack the Inhabitants without Fear,” reported the Weekly Journal in April 1734, “and no Body of Men can be got to withstand their wicked and malitious Designs.” The next month, the New York Gazette noted that the rebels live “with as much freedom as if they were Settlers.” Repeated attacks finally forced the British authorities to sign a peace treaty with Cudjoe in March 1739; this secured for him and all of his followers not only their freedom but also the 1,500 acres of the territory they had conquered. 22 It was a tremendous victory that must have humiliated Englishmen everywhere and sparked the imagination of every slave who heard tell of it.

  New Yorkers avidly followed the news from Jamaica in particular not least because Robert Hunter, who served as gover
nor of Jamaica from 1727 until his death in 1734, had been governor of New York from 1710 to 1719. From Jamaica Hunter corresponded with many of his former acquaintances in New York, including his close friend James Alexander, who also served as his personal attorney, and even ordinary New Yorkers took an interest in Hunter’s troubles. Jamaica was also the single largest supplier of New York’s slaves.23

  But even if Zenger had never printed an account of the Antigua revolt, even if Robert Hunter had never written to James Alexander, New Yorkers would have heard of the wave of slave rebellions across the Atlantic in the 1730s. From the depths of cargo holds, Caribbean slaves sold in New York brought stories of these uprisings with them. In the 1730s, dozens of black Caribbeans traveled to New York in ships owned by New York merchants whose slaves would be accused of conspiracy in 1741. Those merchants included Rip Van Dam, Peter and Augustus Jay, Nathaniel Marston, William Walton, John Moore, Obadiah Hunt, John Groesbeck, Abraham Van Horne, Mordecai Gomez, John and Henry Cruger, David Provost, Jasper Bosch, Winant Van Zant, Cornelius Kortreicht, David Clarkson, and John Tiebout. And the men who captained slave-trading ships owned slaves accused in 1741, too: Jacob Phoenix, Jaspar Farmer, John Lush, Jacob Sarly. In all, at least thirty-nine of the black New Yorkers accused in 1741 were owned by men directly involved in the Caribbean slave trade.24 And many more belonged to widows of ships’ captains and brothers and cousins of slave merchants: the Bayard, Kiersted, DePeyster, and DeLancey families were all involved in the trade.

  Blacks who came to New York from the Caribbean brought with them tales of rebellion. And more than a few brought experience of it. Will, sold to a New York watchmaker, “understood these Affairs very well”: in 1733, he had joined the revolt at St. John’s; three years later, he had pledged to the plot in Antigua. In both places, he had saved his life by testifying against his supposed co-conspirators. From St. John’s he was transported to Antigua; from Antigua he was shipped to New York, probably on Garrett Van Horne’s sloop the Albany, which docked in New York in May 1737, carrying five slaves for sale. “The Negroes here were Cowards,” Will was said to have complained after he arrived in Manhattan, “for that they had no Hearts as those at Antigua.” “Will was very expert at Plots,” Horsmanden remarked, “for this was the third Time he had engaged in them.”25

  BLOOD DID BLOOD REPAY. There were real plots. But almost as often, the plots were imagined. And the circulation of colonial newspapers only further fueled the rumors. In the fall of 1738, English colonists on the island of Nantucket detected “a Conspiracy to destroy all the English, by first setting Fire to their Houses, in the Night, and then falling upon them with their Fire Arms.”The plot was led by “the Indians upon that Island,” whose explanation for “this cruel Attempt” was “that the English at first took the Land from their Ancestors by Force, and have kept it ever since, without giving them any valuable Consideration for it.” It made sense to the English colonists who spread the story—news of the plot appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette—because they lived in an age, and in a place, obsessed with just this kind of conspiracy. But a week later, the PennsylvaniaGazette retracted the story: “The News that we had . . . that the Indians of the Island Nantucket had lately contriv’d a horrid Scheme to set Fire to the Houses of the English Inhabitants in the Night, and kill as many as they could, is wholly contradicted. . . . This Report arose by a drunken Indian Woman of that Island, who being in Liquor, reported such Things.” The horrible scheme was “but a drunken Story.”26

  If a single drunken Indian woman could come up with a plot and a completely plausible justification so compelling that it terrified an entire island of English colonists and was reported up and down the Atlantic seaboard, even though there were no fires on Nantucket that fall, the degree of panic inspired by actual fires like the ten that blazed across New York in March and April 1741 is hard to imagine.

  Conspiracies were horrifying, but the fear of them also ran so deep in the culture that it made for a good joke, as when Scrub in The Beaux’ Stratagempledges 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.” It was just this kind of obsession with conspiracy that Jonathan Swift mocked in Gulliver’s Travels in 1726: Gulliver, on a visit to the Grand Academy of Lagado, finds a professor who shows him “a large Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots and Conspiracies against the Governments”:

  He advised great Statesmen to examine into the Dyet of all suspected Persons; their times of eating; upon which side they lay in Bed; with which hand they wiped their Posteriors; take a strict View of their Excrements, and from the Colour, the Odour, the Taste, the Consistence, the Crudeness, or Maturity of Digestion, form a Judgement of their Thoughts and Designs. Because Men are never so Serious, Thoughtful, and Intent, as when they are at Stool, which he found by frequent Experiment: For in such Conjunctures, when he used meerly as a Trial to consider which was the best way of murdering the King, his Ordure would have A Tincture of Green, but quite different when he thought only of raising an Insurrection or burning the Metropolis. 27

  Plots to burn the metropolis flowed freely across the Atlantic, and up and down the seaboard. When they were true, they were terrifying. When they were delusions, they were droll. In June 1738, New Yorkers received word that Jamaicans had been deluded by “a Discovery of a Plot concerted by the Negroes at Kingston, but by good Information, we find it to be no more than an intended Meeting, to drink to the Memory of an old Negro Felow, dead some Time agoe, whom they used to call their King.” New Yorkers, Zenger’s Weekly Journal reported, “have been amus’d” by the Jamaicans’ credulity.28 Mistaking black men drinking and toasting a black man “King” for a deadly plot? Now that was funny.

  IN NEW YORK, the first response to suspicious fire was the three-gallon leather buckets, the unwieldy Newsham engines, the rallying of the heroic, harmonious men of the bucket brigade. But for all the city’s bucket laws and tireless firemen, New York suffered from an uncontainable flammability: the savagery of slavery. While smoke was still rising from the ashes, New York’s second response to suspicious fire was, almost always, to place curbs on slaves’ liberties. In 1730, on the same day that the provincial Assembly voted an act authorizing funds for the purchase of fire engines for New York City, it also passed “An Act for the more effectual preventing and punishing the conspiracy and insurrection of negro and other slaves and for the better regulating them.” In December 1736, the New York Gazette reported that “a Fire broke in the Stable of Mr. John Roosevelt over against the Fly-Market in this City, it burn’d the said Stable, his Bolting-house, Chockalet-Engine-house and part of his Linseed-Oyl Mill-house; the fire also took hold of three dwelling Houses.” At first, it was unclear what might have caused it: “How the Fire came is uncertain as yet.” But by January 1737, the Gazette reported that there was now “a strong Suspicion that some Negroes perpetrated so vile a piece of Wickedness.” Two slave women were interrogated and arrested.29 Later that month, the Common Council passed a law “that no Negro, Mullatto or Indian Slave, shall appear in the Streets of this City, above an hour after Sun-set without a Candle and Lanthorn, on Penalty of being Whipt at the Publick Whipping Post.”

  The body of legislation that constituted New York’s “Negro Law” is a brutal testament to the difficulty of enslaving human beings, especially in cities. New York’s slave codes were almost entirely concerned with curtailing the ability of enslaved people to move at will, and to gather, for fear that they might decide, especially when drunk, that slavery was not to be borne and one way to end it would be to burn the city down. A 1702 “Act for Regulateing of Slaves,” the governor reported, had “become absolutely necessary through the great insolency that sort of people are grown to.” So much anti-conspiracy legislation was passed under th
e first half century of English rule that in 1730 Governor John Montgomerie recommended that all such acts be repealed and replaced with a simpler law, on the grounds that it would be better if magistrates had “a plain rule to walk by.” Under the terms of Montgomerie’s act, which consolidated provincial slave codes passed in 1702, 1708, and 1712, it was not only illegal for slaves to have or use “any gun Pistoll sword Club or any other Kind of Weapon”; it was also illegal for more than three slaves to meet anywhere, at any time, unless it was “in some servile imployment for their Master or Mistress.”

  While the provincial Assembly attempted to legislate against the broad possibility of slave insurrection, the city’s Common Council was more concerned with everyday opportunities for conspiring. The first New York City slave code adopted under English rule, “A Proclamation Prohibiteing ye Intertainment of Negers,” was passed in 1680: it forbade whites from selling “Wine Rumm and other Strong Liquors” to slaves. Laws adopted by the city’s Common Council between 1680 and 1740 made it illegal for slaves to “Absent themselves from their Masters Houses or Plantacions on the Lords Day” without a written pass; to gamble in the streets for money; to ride “their Masters Horses to Water . . . Swiftly, Hastily, Precipately or disorderly”; to buy or sell produce in city streets or markets; or to be in the streets after sunset without a lantern or lighted candle.30 What was supposed to have happened at John Hughson’s tavern just after Christmas in 1740—dozens of slaves walking to the outskirts of town, on a Sunday night, to drink rum punch served by whites—violated just about every law on the books.