New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  On June 8, the day Hughson was sentenced to death, Jack and Cook were tried for conspiracy, along with Robin, Jamaica, Caesar (Peck), and Cuffee (Gomez). With this trial, Attorney General Bradley launched a strategy he would successfully pursue for weeks to come: try as many slaves together as possible, to compensate for the uneven quality of evidence against any one of them; present witnesses, white or black, willing to place the accused at a meeting at either Hughson’s or Comfort’s, or better still, at both; and, in drawing out courtroom testimony, elide any distinctions between those witnesses and those meetings.

  Joseph Murray examined witnesses against Jamaica, Caesar, and Cuffee; John Chambers examined those against Jack and Cook and against his own slave, Robin. Mary Burton, who had never seen fit to mention either Comfort or his slaves in any of her previous statements, was happy to swear that “ Jack and Cook used to be at the Meetings at Hughson’s.” Sandy, Sarah, and Fortune, who had never been to Hughson’s, could only place the defendants at meetings at Comfort’s. Still, the combined evidence was damning enough. “’Twas agreed among them that Jack should be a Captain,” Sarah said; Sandy testified that “Cook was to be an Officer” and said he’d heard Caesar say that “he would kill the white Men, and drink their Blood to their good Healths.” The dying confessions of Quack and Cuffee were read aloud by a court clerk: Quack had accused Caesar and Cuffee of setting fire to Van Zant’s storehouse. Mary Burton had once heard Jamaica, a fiddler, delight in the plot to kill whites, saying “he would dance over them while they were roasting in the Flames; and said, he had been Slave long enough.”

  Robin, who had been in jail since April 13 when a search of the city revealed some (unspecified) items in his possession “improper for, and unbecoming the Condition of Slaves,” was accused of little more than this, and of having been at a meeting at Comfort’s. But Chambers, apparently, was determined to see his slave convicted, and sentenced to death, if only to avoid appearing partial in protecting his own property from destruction. Conducting their own defense, the prisoners “asked the Witnesses now & then a few trifling Questions; and denied all that was alledged against them.” Jamaica probably reminded the court that, in Quack’s dying confession, he had insisted that the fiddler was “not concern’d,” which gave the judges pause. Murray delivered a closing statement, and the jury, “after a short Stay,” found all six men guilty as charged. Jamaica was sentenced to be hanged; Jack, Cook, Robin, Caesar, and Cuffee were to be burned.

  That night, Jack began his three-day confession, eventually admitting to everything of which he stood accused. Yes, he had hosted the February meeting at Comfort’s, exactly as Sandy had said; and yes, he had been to John Hughson’s house; and yes, he had sworn to the plot, just as Mary Burton testified. Despite his “perfectly Negro and unintelligible” speech, Jack became the first black New Yorker to corroborate Burton’s story of the “Great Feast” at Hughson’s.

  Between April 21, when she told the grand jury of the plot, and June 8, when Jack confessed, Mary Burton had been the only eyewitness to describe what happened at Hughson’s feast, that humiliating night when she was forced to wait on slaves, even on Cuffee, who flirted with her.1 (Peggy Kerry had described a conspiracy, but had placed it in John Romme’s house.) Only after Jack corroborated Burton’s story and received a governor’s pardon did other jailed men begin to supply similar, indeed nearly identical, confessions. But into those formulaic confessions discrepancies continued to creep. Many men who confessed continued to tell tales of the kind of conspiring Sandy, Sarah, and Fortune had first described: chance, hushed encounters on street corners, out of whites’ earshot, and larger meetings at Jack’s, where whites almost never crossed the threshold.

  Prosecutors paid attention to what happened at Comfort’s. When Nichols and Lodge began collecting confessions, they made a table of “several Columns, viz. One for the Name of each Negro; another for his respective Owner; another for the Matter or Substance of the Confession; another for the Negroes they accused; and two others for the Place where sworn at, viz. Hughson’s or Comfort’s.” But then they simply put the differences between what happened at Hughson’s and at Comfort’s aside, except to conclude that these all-black meetings must have been directed, however remotely, by John Hughson himself, “that Grand Incendiary! That Arch Rebel against God, his King, and his Country!—That Devil Incarnate! ” The two columns of that table, “At Hughson’s” and “At Comfort’s,” were merged. Clinging to their conviction that blacks were incapable of authoring a plot, Bradley, with the complicity of the grand jury and, especially, of the justices on the bench, carefully wove into one what were really two different kinds of meetings. It remains to disentangle them, to unravel strands of fiction, from strands of truth.

  JACK KNEW EXACTLY when he had first heard of the conspiracy: at four in the afternoon on the first Monday in January. Ben (Marshall) “came to Comfort’s House to fetch Tea Water, where he left his Cag in the Shop, and went to Hughson’s House”; returning two hours later to pick up his keg, Ben said to Jack, “Countryman, I have heard some good News.” “What News?” asked Jack. “There were Spanish Negroes at Hughson’s, ” Ben said, and “they had Designs of taking this Country.” The following Sunday, Ben came back, and called, “Brother go to Hughson’s, all our Company is come down.” Jack “went with Ben thither, and went round the House, and went in at the back Door,” to Hughson’s “Great Feast”: “they sat all round the Table,” before “a Goose, a Quarter of Mutton, and a Fowl, two Loaves of Bread”; a tablecloth was laid and two bowls of punch were served. Hughson declared he would “be their KING”; and, when the meal was done, Mary Burton, servant to slaves, “took away the Dishes and Plates.”

  To Horsmanden and Philipse, who interrogated Jack, his confession’s value must have been immediately apparent: it served remarkably well as a bridge between “Hughson’s Plot” and what the prosecution called the “Negro Plot.” From Comfort’s pump, it seemed, it was but a short walk, and a slippery slope, to Hughson’s tavern. And, as the judges well knew, few black men in the city could plausibly deny that they had ever been to Comfort’s pump.

  Gerardus Comfort had settled in a remote part of the West Ward sometime in the 1720s (“Comfort’s Dock” first appears on a map dated 1730). With the help of his wife and children, and his slaves Cook, Jenny, and Jack, Comfort built a house, workshop, and barn; sank a well; and erected a dock, to which he rolled his newly made wooden barrels, smelling of pine forests after a hard rain, to sell to ship’s captains steering their vessels up and down the Hudson. In 1733, the shop and stable were destroyed in a fire that “burnt with great violence” and nearly destroyed the house, too, along with a ship being built in the yard.2 By that time, Comfort was already living in another house he owned on New Street, in the center of town. Nonetheless he rebuilt the house and shop on the river, and, perhaps frustrated by his inability to fight the fire, decided to dig a bigger well and to engineer a pump.

  Columns in the Ledger of Confessions. Courtesy of the New York State Archives, series A1894, New York Colony Council Papers, 74–88.

  As it happened, Comfort tapped into an underground spring that provided some of the best fresh water to be found on Manhattan Island, an act of hydrological serendipity that had at least one entirely unintended consequence: for years to come, all day and often into the night, slaves tied small boats to Comfort’s dock, or walked through the city to and from his house, carrying kegs, empty and full, in their arms, on their heads, on their backs, or pulling them in carts or sleighs. In a city with precious little water and no water pipes at all, New York’s slaves formed a kind of human aqueduct, ferrying tea water from Comfort’s pump to their owners’ kitchens, and into their kettles.

  What made New York a prosperous port—its deep saltwater rivers— made its drinking water lousy. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Manhattan’s water was already infamous: there was too little of it and what little there was tasted terrible. It made even visitin
g horses sick. Flowing under a granite island surrounded by saltwater rivers, much of the city’s groundwater was brackish; contaminated by a city populated by pigs, cows, and people, New York’s well water was so filthy that it stank.

  As the first European settlers on the island noted, the best drinking water was to be found at a place the Dutch named the Kolck and the English called the Collect, or the Fresh Water: a seventy-acre spring-fed pond some seventy feet deep. To the north of the Collect lay wooded, rocky hills, with plentiful fresh water; to the south, a low-lying flatland of brine-wet loam, swamps, and salt marshes. But it was to the south that the Dutch settled, far from the Kolck and the well-watered land beyond it. At the island’s swampy tip, they began building dikes, to make a strange place look like home. The Heere Gracht, the ditch that became Broad Street, was so deep that unmasted ships could sail all the way up to the wall, and so “almost through ye towne.” For water to use in their kitchens, the Dutch built rain cisterns and dug shallow wells in their yards, on their farms, and in the middle of their little city’s streets. Meanwhile, they threw their waste into the ditches, where hogs wallowed, and the groundwater worsened. When an English fleet arrived in 1664, Dutch soldiers garrisoning themselves in the fort found that they had not nearly enough water to survive a siege, especially since the fort lacked “either well or cistern.” Governor Stuyvesant had no choice but to surrender, for lack of water.

  By 1677, under English rule, the Common Council ordered the digging of the first public wells, lined with stone and sunk at well-traveled street corners; in 1696, these were placed under the supervision of city aldermen, charged with keeping the wells “Sweet Usefull and in Good repair.” But as the city’s population grew larger, its water grew filthier. The swamps bred mosquitoes, and these, along with the accreted muck on the streets, bred disease. In 1731, the Common Council ruled that all “Tubs of Dung, Close Stools or Pots of Ordure or Nastiness” were to be dumped in the river, but more than a few citizens still dumped them—or carelessly spilled them— in the streets. Yellow fever, cholera, and smallpox plagued the city with heartbreaking regularity (6 percent of the population died of smallpox in 1731) as contaminated street runoff seeped into cellars, since, as Cadwallader Colden observed, nearly every house stood on “moist slimy ground.”3

  What saved early eighteenth-century New Yorkers from still more sickness was that very few of them drank water straight from wells. Instead, they drank beer and they drank tea, both made from water that had been boiled. Unfortunately, however much healthier it became by heating, water from wells in the densely settled part of the city still tasted horrible. The poor drank it anyway, of course, while people living in the rural Outward, rich and poor, simply got their water from the Collect. But for wealthy city dwellers, the pump at Gerardus Comfort’s house offered the best and most convenient alternative, especially since they could afford to delegate to their slaves the backbreaking task of carrying kegs, morning and night.

  JOHN HUGHSON BECAME Gerardus Comfort’s next-door neighbor in 1738. Before then, Hughson lived along the docks in the South Ward, where he was a near neighbor of Daniel Horsmanden; they lived just a dozen buildings from each other. In May 1738, Hughson packed up his large family and his small belongings and moved well away from the densely settled part of the city. Perhaps he fled because a neighbor, a cooper named Francis Silvester, had complained that Hughson “kept a very disorderly House, and sold Liquor to, and entertained Negroes,” who had been seen dancing with Hughson’s wife and daughter. (Silvester’s own slaves may have been among Hughson’s guests.) 4 Hughson told Silvester that “his Wife was the chief Cause of having the Negroes at his House,” and that it was she who liked to live in town; he preferred to live in the country.

  Maybe Hughson, overcoming his wife’s objections, simply wanted to lead a quieter life. Maybe he found Silvester a nosy, annoying neighbor. Hughson himself appears to have had an abusive manner. In 1737, he insulted a man from the East Ward named Lancaster Symes. What Hughson said about Symes is not recorded, but Symes retained John Chambers as his lawyer and sued Hughson for defamation. The case was heard in the Supreme Court in January 1738. (Horsmanden, just recently appointed to the court, was absent on the day of the trial.) After hearing the evidence, James DeLancey and Frederick Philipse required Hughson to state “in open Court that the words spoken by him of the plaintiff were false Malicious & Scandalous and without any Just Grounds.” Hughson obliged, and Symes dropped his suit.5

  Maybe that spring, life in the city was getting too close, with men like Silvester and Symes nearby. But Daniel Horsmanden believed Hughson moved because his new house in the West Ward, next to Gerardus Comfort’s, was a better place to be a smuggler: “This House was more out of the Way, private and fit for Hughson’s Purposes on all Accounts, for caballing and Entertainment of Negroes, and with respect to receiving stolen Goods; it was said to be built with such Privacies in the several Rooms and Cellars as might conceal run Goods.”

  Hughson’s move also coincided with a significant change in the neighborhood that was his destination. In April 1738, the inhabitants of the West Ward had petitioned the Common Council “praying leave to Erect a Market House in the Broadway” where corn, grain, and meal could be sold. They pled hardship over the distance they had to walk to get to the Meal Market at the base of Wall Street, the only other place in the city where grain could be sold. They proposed building a 25- by 42-foot market “in the Publick Street of the Broadway in the Middle of the same fronting the Street in which his Honour the Chief Justice lives and Opposite to Crown Street.” The Common Council approved the request on April 13, and construction of the Broadway Market House, just across from James DeLancey’s mansion, began immediately.6 Anyone considering moving to a less densely populated part of the city in the spring of 1738 had good reason to consider the West Ward, since the Broadway Market would make that neighborhood newly convenient.

  But John Hughson had another reason to move. In January 1738, the principal members of the lodge of black Freemasons or the Geneva Club—Caesar, Cuffee, and Prince—were arrested and publicly whipped for robbing Richard Baker’s tavern. Three months later, Hughson packed his bags.

  John Hughson may well have been involved in the Baker robbery; he may have fenced the goods the black Masons stole in 1738; he played the same role in the burglary of Hogg’s shop in 1741. At the very least, he knew the men of the Geneva Club, and had hosted them at his house. (And Hughson also knew Baker; the two men served in the same militia company.) 7 Just after New Year’s 1738, days before the January robbery of Baker’s tavern, Joseph Murray’s slave Adam went to a cockfight at the city house of Adolph Philipse, where he met Hughson, Cuffee, Caesar, Prince, Othello, and several other black men. (Philipse was not at home.) As they were leaving by Philipse’s gate, Hughson asked Adam back to his house, and revealed to him the plot, telling him that Caesar, Prince, Cuffee, “and a great many more” were already involved.

  Daniel Horsmanden found this story, told by Adam in his 1741 confession, difficult to believe: “If what this Negro says is true, this hellish Plot was some Years a brooding before they attempted the Execution of it.” But Adam wasn’t the only slave to date the plot to 1738. Robert Todd’s slave Dundee talked about events “three Summers past,” the summer of 1738, when Dundee first began fetching water at Comfort’s well, the first summer that Hughson was Comfort’s neighbor. Something happened then, something important.

  What is more difficult to credit about Adam’s story is Hughson’s indiscretion. “If what this Negro says is true,” Horsmanden wrote, Hughson met Adam for the first time at a cockfight, where not a soul was sober, and, before the night was through, told him about a conspiracy “ to set Fire to the Houses of the Town, and to kill the white People.” This is the author of a secret plot?

  There are three possible explanations for Hughson’s indiscretion: (1) Adam was lying; (2) Hughson was drunk; or (3) Hughson was joking. Adam might well have lied in his confe
ssion, but this particular anecdote served no good purpose in securing his pardon; it was, if anything, a distraction from the matter at hand, confessing to conspiring in 1741, and it only diminished his credibility. Hughson may have had loose lips, but it strains credulity to believe that, even while drunk, he spoke sincerely about a plot to destroy the city to every black man he met for three years running without being betrayed or discovered. The evidence that he was joking, on the other hand, is promising. But getting the joke requires piecing together what can be known about the strange events of 1737 and early 1738, and the political context in which black and white Masons met in New York.

  EARLY IN 1737, James Alexander and other gentlemen of the Country Party established a Manhattan lodge of Freemasons. They met at the Black Horse Tavern, opposite Zenger’s printshop. Leadership in founding the lodge may have been provided by Henry Holt, the dancing master, who had recently come to New York from Charleston, South Carolina, where he was a member of that city’s first Masonic lodge.

  Although Masons were supposed to be “resolv’d against all Politicks,” the rise of the Masons coincided with a new political era in New York. When Clarke became lieutenant governor in 1736, he called for the first legislative elections since 1728. In elections held in May 1737, the Country Party gained a majority in the General Assembly. James Alexander was elected from New York City; Lewis Morris, Jr., won a seat from Westchester and became Speaker of the Assembly. When Clarke addressed the newly elected Assembly in April 1737, he declared, “We have the pleasure to see peace restored to this once divided Province.”8

  In June 1737, Morris, Jr., in his capacity as Speaker, appointed Zenger to print the Assembly’s proceedings. With this appointment, Zenger, who had been tried for seditious libel just two years before, became the official printer of the province, displacing William Bradford. In Zenger’s newspaper for June 27, he printed a dialogue between two New Yorkers. “ Hy ho, this is a strange World we live in! ” cries one. “Ay, replies another, I think so too; for here I see John Peter Zenger appointed to print the Votes of the Assembly, and if any Body had told me that, less than three Months since, I should have wanted Faith to believe it.” 9