New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  But the Country Party’s victory was by no means complete, and despite Clarke’s optimistic address to the Assembly, the province, or at least the city, remained divided. In the May Assembly elections, the race between Adolph Philipse, of the Court Party, and Cornelius Van Horne, of the Country Party, had been too close to call. A by-election was held at City Hall on September 10. Philipse, with 413 votes, beat Van Horne, with 399. But Sheriff William Cosby, Jr., son of the former governor, was widely suspected of manipulating the returns. Describing the by-election, Cadwallader Colden wrote to his wife, “The sick the lame and the blind were all carried to vote they were carried out of Prison and out of the poor house to vote such a strugle I never saw and such a hurraing that above one half of the men in town are so hoarse that they cannot speak.” Four hundred and fifty people signed a petition sent to Clarke, maintaining “That wee have this day seen or heard of the most Barefaced Villany Committed by Willm Cosby Esqr present high Sheriff of this Citty & County . . . in the Face of the world in Declareing Adolphe Philipse to be chosen Representative.” On September 16, the Assembly voted to investigate the election. After a lengthy inquiry, Philipse was declared the legitimate victor on October 10.10

  Meanwhile, party politics continued to be waged at the city’s two principal taverns, as committees of the Country Party assemblymen met at the Black Horse Tavern and committees of Clarke’s Court Party Council retired to Todd’s tavern. But now the Black Horse was newly associated with Masonry, which quickly became a target of partisan warfare. In his New York Gazette in August 1737, William Bradford reprinted an essay from the London Magazine arguing that Englishmen should not tolerate Masonic lodges, “dark and clandestine Assemblies where Plots against the State may be carried on under the Pretence of Brotherly Love and Good-Fellowship.” 11

  On November 14, 1737, Alexander retaliated, printing a bizarre classified ad in Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal:

  TAKEN Out of the House of Mr. Todd, a small Silver Square, a Level, a Plumb-Rule, and Silver Pen, and other Utensils belonging to the Lodge of Free Masons in New-York, Whoever brings them to the Printer hereof shall be handsomely rewarded, and no Questions ask’d.12

  The Square, the Level, and the Plumb are the “three Immovable Jewels” of a Masonic lodge, and also the “working tools” given to Masons of the second degree of Masonry, Fellow of the Craft. What were they doing at Robert Todd’s tavern, if the Masons met at the Black Horse? Most likely, the ad was itself a joke. (When a Masonic lodge was established in Charleston, South Carolina, the city’s newspaper reported the event as the arrival of the ship Freemason from Providence.)13 Maybe Alexander, whose political party had risen to prominence in the Assembly, taunted his Court Party adversaries by implying that the mantle of Masonry had been stolen from them.

  Bradford responded by publishing an anti-Masonic letter, which complained: “All other Societies that have appeared in the World have published their Principles and Practices, and when they meet set open their Meeting-house Doors for all that will come in and see and hear them, but this Society called Free Masons, meet with their Doors shut, and a Guard at the outside to prevent any to approach to hear and see what they are doing.” In an attempt to undermine Masonry, Bradford went so far as to print the Masons’ sacred secret oath in his November 28 Gazette:

  I, A.B., Hereby solemnly Vow and Swear in the Presence of Almighty God and this Right Worshipful Assembly, That I will Hail and Conceal, and never Reveal the Secrets or Secrecy of Masons or Masonry, that shall be revealed unto me; unless to a True and Lawful Brother, after due Examination, or in a just and Worshipful Lodge of Brothers and Fellows well met. I further more Promise and Vow, That I will not Write them, Print them, Carve them, or Engrave them, or cause them to be Written, Printed, Marked, Carved, or Engraved on Wood or Stone, so as the Visible Character or Impression of a letter may appear, whereby it may be unlawfully obtained. All this under no less Penalty than to have my Throat cut, my Tongue taken from the Roof of my Mouth, my Heart pluck’d from under my Left Breast, them to be buried in the Sands of the Sea, the Length of a Cable Rope from Shore, where the Tide ebbs and flows twice in 24 Hours, my Body to be burnt to Ashes and to be scatter’d upon the Face of the Earth, so that there shall be no more Remembrance of me among Masons. So help me God.14

  At just about this time, in the late fall of 1737, Caesar, Prince, Cuffee, and others met together and hatched a plan to rob Richard Baker’s tavern, and allegedly formed a black Freemasons lodge. Just after New Year’s, they gathered, with John Hughson, for a cockfight at Adolph Philipse’s house. Hughson asked Adam to swear by his book to a plot “to set Fire to the Houses of the Town, and to kill the white People,” and told him that Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee were already involved. On January 21, 1738, the white Masons held a procession, which Alexander reported in Zenger’s Weekly Journal. One week later, Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee robbed Baker of his gin, after which they took to calling themselves the Geneva Club. Within days, they were arrested and confessed. As one of them, probably Cuffee, was being carried to the whipping post, he cried: “ Make Room for a Free MASON.” In Bradford’s Gazette in January and February 1738, a Court Party writer, probably Horsmanden, used the Geneva Club to satirize Masonry, at which Alexander took considerable offense. Three months later, John Hughson moved to the edge of town.

  ALTHOUGH FREEMASONS trace their ancestry to medieval stonecutters’ guilds, the society’s known history began in London around 1720, and Masonry first became popular in the colonies in 1736. Mockery swiftly followed. In the 1730s and 1740s, a group calling itself “The Scald Society of Miserable Masons” took to the streets in both London and Boston, riding backward on asses, while prose and poem satires of Masonry filled page after page of British and colonial newspapers and almanacs. Benjamin Franklin, himself a Mason, liked to point out that the Masons’ “Grand Secret is, That they have no Secret at all.” Alexander Hamilton, also a Mason, mocked his own brothers in his “History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club.” Peppered with bawdy jokes about the club’s “longstanding members,” Hamilton’s “History” was essentially an affectionate farce of Freemasonry.15

  But mocking Masons could be dangerous. In January 1738, while Bradford’s New York Gazette mocked New York’s “Dishonourable Society of Black Masons,” Philadelphians were reckoning with the repercussions of a fatal prank played on a young man named Daniel Rees, a would-be Mason. One evening in June 1737, Evan Jones, a Philadelphia apothecary, and several of his friends conducted a mock Masonic initiation on Rees, Jones’s apprentice. Jones, who was not a Mason (although Rees thought he was), required his apprentice to read a blasphemous oath and, while Rees was blindfolded, bid him “kiss the book,” presenting him not with a Bible but with the naked backside of one of Jones’s friends. Soon afterward, Jones met Benjamin Franklin in a tavern and told him about the prank. Franklin was so amused that he took a copy of the oath home with him and read it to friends. That night, young Rees, still unaware that he was being played with, attended another mock initiation, where, in a dark room, Jones and his friends held pans of flaming brandy under their chins to make their faces appear gruesome. Jones spilled his pan’s contents on Rees, badly burning him. Rees died within days. In January 1738, while in New York Cuffee at the whipping post cried out, “ Make Room for a Free MASON,” Evan Jones was tried for manslaughter in Philadelphia, and found guilty.

  Rees’s death caused a stir in Philadelphia, not least because Franklin’s rival, Andrew Bradford, the printer of the American Weekly Mercury (and the son of New York’s William Bradford), called Franklin complicit in the boy’s death, a charge Franklin nervously denied.16 William Bradford’s reprinting, in August 1737, of an anti-Masonic essay was, no doubt, partly inspired by the events surrounding Rees’s death in June: by printing it, Bradford supported his son’s assault on Franklin. And when William Bradford printed the Masons’ oath in his Gazette in November 1737, he did so largely to expose and demystify Masonry, so that gulli
ble men like Daniel Rees might not be so gullible in future. The Gazette’s scalding satire of the New York black Masons, which William Bradford printed in January 1738, just at the time of Jones’s trial, was as much an attack on Benjamin Franklin as on James Alexander. Back in Philadelphia, meanwhile, Andrew Bradford reprinted the story of New York’s black Masons in the American Weekly Mercury on February 14, the same day he attacked Franklin. In this, Bradford fils did his father a good turn, supporting him in his rivalry with Zenger.

  Into this highly charged debate involving rival printers and playful, dangerous, even fatal pranks about politics and Masonry stepped John Hughson. Just after the ad for the stolen Masons’ tools ran in Zenger’s Weekly Journal, just after William Bradford printed the Masons’ secret oath in the New York Gazette, just at the time of the Evan Jones trial, John Hughson shared the secret of a plot with black men he had only just met, took them to his house, and initiated them. It can hardly have been a coincidence.

  John Hughson was a cobbler, tavernkeeper, and petty criminal who fenced stolen goods. Maybe Hughson found Masonry ridiculous, fancy gentlemen in ruffles wearing artisans’ aprons and swearing oaths of spooky secrecy, and mocked it mercilessly, parodying Masonic rituals and pledges. But he was probably just as ignorant of Masonry as Daniel Rees had been: all that he knew was what he learned from the newspaper, for Hughson, like Cuffee, could read. Maybe Cuffee and Hughson thought Evan Jones’s prank funny, and when they met gullible young recruits like Adam, eagerly swore them into a fake fraternity. When Cuffee, Caesar, and Prince were arrested for robbing Baker’s tavern, they spilled the story about the mock Masonry, which allowed Horsmanden, in the Gazette, to put their story to his own political ends.

  The plot the prosecution labeled “Hughson’s Plot,” then, began in 1737 and was, essentially, a prank that grew out of proportion. At meetings at Cuffee’s and at Hughson’s, Hughson, Cuffee, Caesar, and Prince parodied gentlemen’s clubs and conducted mock Masonic initiations. This plot was real—it happened—but it was also fake; it was meant as mockery. But what Hughson could not have realized was that what may have been, for him, playing at plotting had tapped into his companions’ much deeper well of hatred of whites, of traditions of rebellion, and of grievances against slavery. Consider one final detail about the goings-on in New York in the fall of 1737: that September, a black girl was tending a white infant in a yard in front of a house when a white boy, about fourteen or fifteen years old, playing with a gun, leaned out the window and in a jesting manner said, “I’ll shoot ye.” And then he shot her brains out.

  WHEN JOHN HUGHSON moved in May 1738, he settled in a house just down the hill from Gerardus Comfort’s house; and in June 1741, after Hughson was convicted and Comfort’s slave Jack confessed, the proximity of their two houses preoccupied the prosecution. As soon as Jack said that Ben “came to Comfort’s House to fetch Tea Water, where he left his Cag in the Shop, and went to Hughson’s House,” Comfort’s tea water seeped into nearly every confession. London, owned by Captain Roger French, said he “was sent ashore for Water” at Comfort’s when his ship docked on the river. Dundee had been getting water at Comfort’s well for three summers (he must have hauled enormous quantities, since his owner, Robert Todd, was also a vintner and used Comfort’s water to make wine). Under interrogation, the city’s slaves found it difficult to deny knowing Jack. And, as interrogators might well argue, if they knew Jack, they must have known Hughson. Harry (Kipp), Pedro (DePeyster), Jack (Sleydall), Cato (Cowley), and Fortune (Clarkson) all confessed that they went “to Comfort’s for Tea Water,” and ended up calling “for a Dram at Hughson’s.”

  Meanwhile, the judges, prosecutors, and grand jurors now recalled that Sandy, Sarah, and Fortune, in their earliest confessions, had all also mentioned fetching water. By June 12, tea water flooded the investigation so thoroughly that the grand jury asked the Assembly to pass three laws. The first two targeted men like John Hughson: one was “to limit the Number of Publick Houses within the City of New-York . . . and to prohibit them to sell any sort of strong Liquors to Negroes”; and the second aimed “to prohibit the receiving any goods from Negroes, upon any pretence whatsoever, unless by express leave or License from their Masters in Writing.” But a third law targeted slaves: the grand jury asked the Assembly to pass “a Law to restrain Negroes from fetching Tea-Water on Sundays.”17

  In the years following the conspiracy trials, it would prove nearly impossible to stop tavernkeepers from serving liquor to slaves, or smugglers from trading with them, but New York’s tea-water supply system was wholly restructured in the wake of the investigation. In November 1741, the Assembly passed “An Act for mending & keeping in Repair the Publick Wells and Pumps in the City of New York,” under which aldermen were required to appoint overseers and inspect every well or pump in their wards. In 1742, the city’s Common Council passed a law dictating that “no Negro Molatto or Indian Slave: within this City . . . Shall on any Lords Day or Sunday Presume to fetch any water: other than from the Next well or pump: to the place of their Abode.”18 Lest wealthy New Yorkers in fashionable districts be forced to drink tea brewed with the brackish, slimy water found in their neighborhood wells, “Tea-Water Men,” white men, began carrying and selling water from remote pumps like the one at Comfort’s. By the time Dr. Hamilton visited the city in 1744, white “Tea-Water Men” walked the streets, hawking water by the keg and cupful. “Ever since the negroe conspiracy,” Hamilton explained, “certain people have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water that they held their caballs and consultations.”19

  What happened at Comfort’s—what the prosecution called the “Negro Plot”—was both like and unlike what happened at Hughson’s. At Comfort’s, Tickle said, “the Talk there was the same as at Hughson’s. ” And it was just as crowded—“There were two Rooms full of ’em, some were in the Kitchen and some in the Shop.” The house itself was small, according to Jack: “the Kitchen and Shop join to each other; the Doors into each went out into the Street, or into the Yard; so that to go from one to the other, you must go either into the Yard, or on the Dock.” In either room, or spilling out into the yard or dock, men plotted—“Quack was pitched upon to set fire to the Fort”—and they drank—Jack offered them drams. But Jack was not as generous a host as John Hughson: there was no table, no bread, no meat. Instead of feasting, the conspirators in Comfort’s well-stocked workshop sharpened their knives. “Every one in the Shop had Knives,” York said, “and they were sharpening of them; and they were to cut white Men’s Heads off.” Some men went outside, to sharpen their blades on “a brown Stone that lay in the Yard.”

  At Hughson’s, plotters swore among whites—the Hughsons, Mary Burton, Peggy Kerry. At the meetings at Comfort’s, only blacks were allowed. Gerardus Comfort “was often abroad, and went very seldom to his House”; most likely, he spent much of his time at his house on New Street.20 Nor was John Hughson to be found among the guests at Jack’s. Nor Mary Burton, nor Peggy Kerry, nor the two Sarah Hughsons. At Gerardus Comfort’s house on the Hudson, there were almost never any whites at all, with the infrequent exception of Comfort’s sons-in-law, and when they were there, Jack and the black men and women who visited him kept silent. Once, Dundee arrived at Comfort’s to find “That Jack was at work in the Shop, but his young Master was there; and so they could not speak together.”

  Jack not only supplied water for slaves who came to fetch it, he sold them the casks in which they carried it. Comfort, after all, was a cooper, and Jack ran a cooper’s shop. There is strong evidence that he managed a considerable business. In September 1737, “sundry Coopers of the City of New-York” presented a petition to the Assembly “complaining that several considerable Merchants of the same City, employ great Numbers of Negroes in that Occupation, not only to supply their own Occasions of Casks, but sell and dispose thereof to other Merc
hants.” In November of that year, the Assembly recommended “that Negroes may be supprest of having the Benefit of poor Labourers and Tradesmen.”21

  Perhaps because weaving, metalworking, and woodworking were important African crafts, black artisans in New York clustered in two types of trade: tailoring (including weaving) and carpentry (including coopering). As white artisans saw it, black tradesmen threatened their livelihood. And the city was full of them, like the “Two very good Negro Men Slaves Taylors, and one Negro Man Slave, a Butcher and Sawyer” or the “Negro Man named Scipio, a Cooper, about 22 years old,” advertised in 1730. In 1733, “a Negro Man Slave, named Andrew Saxon, a very black tall Fellow,” ran away from Jacobus Van Cortlandt. He “speaks very good English,” Van Cortlandt wrote in the ad for his return, and “is a Carpenter and Cooper by Trade, and has Tools for both Trades with him.” 22 New York merchants who traded with the Caribbean profited by their unwanted cargo by hiring them out for day labor, and skilled slaves brought better wages home to their masters. But what profited white merchants threatened white artisans.

  The city’s white coopers were clustered in the North Ward, and were also among the least wealthy taxpayers in the city; their average wealth assessment in 1730 was £20, compared to £35 for a silversmith, £46 for a gentleman, £24 for a baker. But Gerardus Comfort’s assessment in 1730 and again in 1734 was £91, quite possibly because he managed to keep his labor costs very low by relying almost exclusively on slaves.23