New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Neau knew bondage. Upon his return to New York in 1699, he turned his attention to the spiritual condition of the city’s slaves. Although a member of the city’s French Huguenot church, Neau began corresponding with Anglican evangelical societies, developing a plan to convert New York’s slaves. In 1703, the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel offered Neau an annual salary of £50 to teach slaves, if he would affiliate with the city’s Anglican church, Trinity. Neau agreed, and founded the school the following year.18

  It was, at first, more plan than place. For years Neau simply went door-to-door, offering instruction. After that, a small group of slaves met at night in the attic of his house. “They were dull and sleepy, and remembered they must rise early the next Day, to their Labour.” Yet Neau had some success, and eventually boasted a handful of acolytes who had learned to read the Bible, recite catechisms and creeds from memory, and sing from psalm books. The number of his students varied, between fifteen and twenty-five a year, and some, Neau admitted, “came only for the books,” showing up to pick up tracts he was distributing and staying away when his bookshelf was empty.

  Then came the 1712 slave revolt. Several of the rebels were Neau’s converts, including a free black man, Peter the Porter; Mingo, owned by merchant John Barberie; and Caesar, owned by Peter Morin, a brazier. One New Yorker warned the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel that “the Persons whose Negroes have been found guilty are such as are declared opposers of Christianizing Negroes,” and hinted that this, and not their “hard usage,” formed the motivation for the slave rebellion.

  Neau had more credibly reported that the “Horrid Plott” had led New Yorkers to impute “the Rebellion of their Slaves to the Instructing of them.” On hearing the news, Neau’s funders replied, “It is to be hoped people will conceive better things than be led to believe Christianity makes men worse.” At every opportunity, Neau adamantly denied that the Gospel could incite slaves to question slavery, “as if the Christian Religion should not command Obedience to all Inferiors.” Still, New Yorkers seemed to think otherwise: “his School was blaimed as the main Occasion” of the plot, and for days, Neau could “hardly appear abroad.” When the Common Council issued its response to the revolt—an order forbidding slaves “to go about the Streets after Sun-set, without Lanthorns and Candles”—it was, “in Effect, forbidding them to go to Mr. Neau’s School, for none of them could get Lanthorns, or come to him before Sunset.”

  Neau’s school would have been closed were it not for the intervention of Governor Robert Hunter, who visited and, as Neau reported, “confirmed by himself that my Scholers have had no share in the Conspiracy of the Negroes.” Hunter publicly defended Neau, sent four of his own slaves to his school, and, in a printed proclamation, urged New Yorkers to send to his school “their Children and Servants, Negro and Indian Slaves.”

  Neau’s school survived, and even grew. Between 1704 and 1714, Neau instructed 134 blacks; 85 men and 49 women. In that time he baptized 54 of his pupils. In the year 1719 alone, he catechized 37 black men, 28 women, 12 boys, and 8 girls; of these, 85, 31 were baptized.19 After Neau died in 1722, he was succeeded, intermittently, by a series of lackluster schoolmasters. Their work, however, was undoubtedly aided, in 1727, by the publication of the Bishop of London’s Letter to the Masters and Mistresses of Families in the English Plantations abroad; Exhorting them to encourage and promote the Instruction of their Negroes in the Christian Faith. This pamphlet, widely distributed in New York and throughout the colonies, testified both to slaveowners’ considerable and continued unwillingness to convert their slaves and to “how small a Progress has been made . . . towards the delivering of those poor Creatures from the Pagan Darkness.” Consider slaves “not barely as Slaves, and upon the same Level with labouring Beasts,” the bishop urged his readers, “but as Men-Slaves and Women-Slaves, who have the same Frame and Faculties as your selves, and have Souls capable of being made eternally happy, and Reason and Understanding to receive Instruction.” The bishop also sought, like New York’s legislators, to reassure jittery slaveowners that baptism was no liberator: “Christianity and the embracing of the Gospel, does not make the least Alteration in Civil Property,” he proclaimed. “The Freedom which Christianity gives, is a Freedom from the Bondage of Sin and Satan, and from the Dominion of Mens Lusts and Passions and inordinate Desires; but as to their outward Condition, whatever that was before, whether bond or free, their being baptized, and becoming Christians, makes no manner of Change in it.” Nor was baptism likely to make slaves “more ungovernable”; to the contrary, “the Gospel every where enjoins, not only Diligence and Fidelity, but also Obedience, for Conscience Sake.” Christianity, the bishop insisted, in no way undermines slavery, first, because the brutality of enslaving human beings “is not to be compared to the Cruelty of keeping them in the State of Heathenism”; and second, because a Christian slave will require fewer, and less vicious, corrections, since “one great Reason why Severity is at all necessary to maintain Government, is the Want of Religion in those who are to be governed.”20

  But as New Yorkers understood very well, Scripture can counsel obedience, and it can counsel rebellion. In 1730, the New York Gazette reported news of “an Insurrection of the Negroes” in Virginia, occasioned by a report that the new governor “had Direction from his Majesty to free all baptized Negroes.” This inspired baptized slaves to claim their freedom, which, since their owners denied it, meant staging a rebellion. One enslaved Virginian apparently hid himself in a ship sailing from Williamsburg, “and being examin’d how he came on Board, said he was going Embassador from the Negroes to his Majesty King George.”21

  Beginning in the 1730s, New Yorkers grudgingly agreed to send a handful of their slaves to be educated by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel minister Richard Charlton. By November 1740, Charlton boasted “that the number of his Catechusans increases, and that the Spiritual Knowledge of some Negroes who attend him, is such as might make many White People Blush.”22

  Charlton had his successes and his failures. Meanwhile, the city was gripped by a religious revival that Charlton found loathsome, as the eighteenth century’s most popular evangelical, the Englishman George Whitefield, visited New York. In both England and America, the charismatic Whitefield preached to vast audiences—Samuel Johnson quipped that Whitefield “would be followed by crowds were he to wear a nightcap in the pulpit, or were he to preach from a tree.” In Boston, Whitefield’s revival meetings were so popular that four people were crushed to death when a meetinghouse balcony collapsed under the weight of the crowd. In New York in April and May 1740, and again in October and November of that year, he preached at the Commons “from a Scaffold, erected for that Purpose,” to five or six thousand of “all sorts of People.”23

  Whitefield preached salvation through rebirth and challenged the authority of clergy who had not been born again. His message, with its emphasis on individuals’ control over their own salvation, was notoriously appealing to black men and women, as the author of an anonymous poem noted:

  The Negroes too he’ll not forget, But tells them all to come; Invites the Black as well as White, And says for them there’s Room.24

  In 1740, just before Whitefield visited New York, Benjamin Franklin printed in Philadelphia an essay by Whitefield addressed to “Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina concerning the treatment of their Negroes,” in which he meditated on the subject of slavery. Whitefield, like the Bishop of London before him, sought to reassure slaveowners that conversion was no bar to bondage: “I challenge the whole World to produce a single Instance of a Negroe’s being made a thorough Christian, and thereby made a worse Servant. It cannot be.” Whitefield condemned slaveowners for treating their dogs better than their slaves, but he also deemed slavery potentially useful: “Your present and past bad Usage of them, however ill-designed, may thus far do them good, as to break their Wills, increase the Sense of their natural Misery, and conse
quently better dispose their Minds to accept the Redemption wrought out for them, by the Death and Obedience of Jesus Christ.”

  Despite its embrace of slavery as a piety-promoting kind of misery, Whitefield’s essay contained a more radical proposition, one that many slaveowners read as a defense of slave rebellion: “considering what Usage they commonly meet with, I have wondered, that we have not more Instances of Self-Murder among the Negroes, or that they have not more frequently rose up in Arms against their Owners. . . . And tho’ I heartily pray God they may never be permitted to get the upper Hand; yet should such a Thing be permitted by Providence, all good Men must acknowledge the Judgment would be just.”25

  Throughout the colonies, men blamed Whitefield for their rebellious slaves. Writing from Rhode Island, one minister catalogued “Distractions, occasioned by the Doctrines and Strange Doings of Mr. Whitefield’s Disciplines,” including “one negro Slave formerly whipt for fornicating with a white woman” who had devised a “new method of preaching to the Blacks, but in the Quaker way,” a performance he deemed “an open Burlesq upon that Religion.” In New York, Richard Charlton came to blame Whitefield for inspiring the 1741 conspiracy: “Whence it had its rise I will not presume to say; but this I can’t help declaring, that Mr. Whitefields letter to the people of Maryland etc gave great countenance to it, and I am Satisfied, that whoever carefully reads it will join in opinion with me; not that I sho’d think Mr Whitefield to be so extreamly wicked as to promote the destruction of this City, with its inhabitants; but the misfortune was that imprudence and indiscretion directed his pen, when he wrote that letter.” 26

  Like Neau three decades earlier, Charlton reported with relief that only one of the city slaves he had baptized had been convicted in the conspiracy. This was probably Scipio, who “had had a better Education than most of his Colour.” During interrogation, Scipio held “his Bible in his Bosom, which he said he read in Gaol as often as he could.” He said that as a child, his owner, attorney Richard Nichols, had sent him to school and taught him to read. Unlike nearly all his fellow inmates, Scipio “appear’d very penitent and sorry for what he had done,” Daniel Horsmanden wrote.

  Here was a perfect illustration of the bishop’s point: “the Gospel every where enjoins, not only Diligence and Fidelity, but also Obedience, for Conscience Sake.” Horsmanden considered Scipio one of the few men of conscience to be found among the men and women interrogated in 1741. But his piety, even if it was genuine, did little to calm white fears about what Christianity meant for slavery, and nothing to assuage their fears of Catholicism.

  THE WEEK THAT James DeLancey returned to New York and William Kane confessed, and that the court’s attention began to turn, quite entirely, to a Catholic conspiracy, black men started to recant their confessions. On Wednesday, July 1, Pedro, owned by the Dutch merchant Peter DePeyster, told Constable John Schultz that his confession, which he had made two days before, “was not true.” Will, that “expert at Plots,” had told him in prison “That he understood these Affairs very well, and that unless he the said Pedro did confess and bring in two or three, he would be either hanged or burnt.” The same day, a man named Jack, owned by the Dutch felt-maker Henry Breasted, told Schultz that he had falsely accused Hereford, a young boy, although Jack only offered this denial after Hereford’s owner, Samuel Myers Cohen, insisted on questioning Jack himself, and urged Schultz to warn him “that he should Care not to accuse any one unjustly.”

  The next day, London, owned by a butcher named Edward Kelly, confessed, and accused three men who had not already been arrested: Jack, owned by the Jewish merchant Judah Hayes; Quash, owned by the French silversmith Charles LeRoux; and York, owned by someone named Ludlow. But the day after that, Friday, July 3, William Nail, the English servant of a butcher named Thomas Cox, came to City Hall and deposed that before London was arrested on June 27, he had talked with him about the many “Negroes that were taken up on Account of the Plot,” during which conversation London swore, “By G-d, that if he . . . should be taken up on Account of the Plot, he would hang or burn all the Negroes in York, whether they were concerned or not.”

  The doubts cast over the confessions’ truthfulness did not end there. The next day, July 4, when Will was chained to the stake, he said it was Moore’s Cato, not him, who had told Pedro to lie, advising him to “say, he was to set his Master’s House on fire, which would make the Judges believe him.” On July 6, the two men arrested after London (Kelly) impeached them were “discharged by the Third Justice, pursuant to the Recommendation of the Grand Jury, who did not credit the Evidence” given by London. Three days later, a black man named Cambridge, who had confessed the same day as Pedro, and only after spending a month in jail, told Schultz, that he, too, had lied: “he had heard some Negroes talking together in the Jail, that if they did not confess, they should be hanged.” Cambridge said “That the Confession he had made before Messrs. Lodge and Nicholls, was intirely false.” Moreover, Cambridge said, “he did not know in what Part of the Town Hughson did live, nor did not remember to have heard of the Man ’til it was a common Talk over the Town and Country, that Hughson was concerned in a Plot with the Negroes.” 27

  “Negro Evidence” was fast losing its credibility. At just this stage in the investigation, on Friday, July 10, Othello was sentenced to be burned, never having been tried. Two days later, Othello, “ under Sentence of Death,” met with Daniel Horsmanden and offered another confession.28 He had been to Hughson’s, he now admitted, but he had refused to swear to the plot. Othello now supported the prevailing interpretation of a predominantly white, Catholic conspiracy: “He has seen many Soldiers at Hughson’s,” he said, although he could not “tell whether they knew or were concerned in the Plot.” Hughson told him that if he took part in the plot, “he would commit no Sin thereby: Othello understood, it would not hinder him from going to Heaven.” (This last remark sounded more like Whitefield, who said slave rebellion was justified and no sin, than like a priest, who could forgive the sin of rebellion.) But Othello added that since he had been in jail, Adam had “advised” him to confess “that he was to have killed his Master and Mistress, that that would be a Means of getting him off,” but that he had never agreed to do it.

  The growing evidence that black men in the dungeon had advised one another to lie failed to halt the proceedings. “A Criminal confesses himself guilty at his own Peril,” Horsmanden remarked, voicing English legal thought on the matter; “once he confesses his Guilt, it will be standing Evidenceagainst him.” A confession could never be unsaid. But there was more than common law behind the court’s decision to ignore the recantations. The accused might “flatter themselves ” that they deserve pardon, “as if for their Sakes, vile Wretches, the whole Town must run the Risque of their Houses being fired about their Ears, and having the Inhabitants butchered.” But the accused, “having once confessed their Guilt, a Recantation and Denial of it afterwards, will scarce be thought an Argument of sufficient Force to prove their Innocence.” Citing precedent in the trials of slaves accused of conspiracy in Antigua in 1736, Horsmanden concluded: “The Remark upon Negro Recantationsonce for all, is, That one can scarce be thoroughly satisfied when it is that they do speak Truth.”

  Yet the recanted confessions were not without effect. They began on Wednesday, July 1, just as James DeLancey made his return. With DeLancey in charge, investigators began processing slaves’ pardons and looking on slave confessions with a more critical eye, even starting to discharge men falsely accused and failing to arrest men charged in dubious confessions. Moving away from slaves, they turned their attention more squarely on whites, especially Irish soldiers and suspected priests. Othello himself told DeLancey that he had been urged to lie, to say that he had planned to kill him. But Othello’s story also raised the possibility that the entire plot had been a joke. When Adam first “asked him to be concerned; he (Othello ) said, he would, and laughed.” Horsmanden paid this no heed.

  THE LAST SLAVE TRIAL,
and the only one at which DeLancey presided, was held on Wednesday, July 15, a hot summer’s day. In the morning, the court processed the pardons of thirteen black men and one black woman Sarah. All were pardoned on condition of transportation.

  In the afternoon of July 15, a new jury was impaneled and eight black men—the only men left in prison who refused to plead guilty—were brought to trial. Mary Burton, William Kane, and six black men testified that they had seen the prisoners at Hughson’s. Murray, Smith, and Chambers conducted the prosecution. The jury found all eight men guilty.

  The next day, Philipse and Horsmanden sent a letter to Clarke stating their opinion that Othello was not entitled to the benefit of the proclamation of amnesty.29 That same day, at a meeting of Clarke’s Council, Clarke ruled that Othello could not be pardoned. DeLancey asked that Othello’s sentence be reduced, from burning to hanging, and Clarke granted the request. It must have given Othello some hope that his life might yet be spared. On Friday afternoon, Othello told Constable Schultz that “he could make very considerable Discoveries relating to the Conspiracy, which he had a Desire to communicate to” the Recorder. Schultz sent a message to Horsmanden later that night. Horsmanden went to City Hall the next morning, Saturday, July 18, and met with Othello. Othello added the names of two more Irish soldiers, Thomas Evans and James O’Brien, and said that “there were as many white People concerned as Negroes.” And he insisted, again, that “Adam persuaded him, since he came in Jail, to say, that he had agreed to kill his Master and Mistress; and that by saying so, he would get clear: But this was all false, he never engaged to do any such Thing, nor was it ever proposed to him by Hughson, or any one else; only Hughson told him, he must rise with the Mob, and kill the People in general,as the rest were to do.” Othello walked a thin line. To save his life, he had to corroborate the story of the plot at Hughson’s; but if he hoped to regain DeLancey’s favor and his continued intervention on behalf of his slave, he had to deny that he had ever agreed to actually murder the DeLanceys.