New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  Parker had been apprenticed to William Bradford in 1727, when he was thirteen years old, just after Zenger left Bradford’s printshop to set up his own. In 1733, Parker ran away from his master, but eventually returned to New York to complete his service. In 1741, Benjamin Franklin helped Parker set up his own shop in New York, serving as a silent partner. (Franklin supplied a press and 400 pounds of type.) Parker specifically set up shop on the promise of printing the digest of the province’s laws that Horsmanden had, in November 1741, been hired to compile, and he was disappointed—and financially imperiled—when “that Job dropt through.” After Horsmanden abandoned the task to which he had been assigned in favor of compiling a journal of the proceedings in the detection of the conspiracy, Parker had no choice but to take on the job.

  By the time the manuscript was finally ready for publication, in the spring of 1744, Parker had become the official government printer. 18 He apparently determined to produce a particularly stunning book. On May 14, 1744, Parker placed an ad in his newspaper, the New York Weekly Post-Boy:“Those Gentlemen that live in Town, who have subscribed for this Journal, are desired to send for their Books to the Printer thereof.” Anyone who hadn’t subscribed was out of luck: “As there are but few more printed than what are engaged for, any Person that intends to purchase them, must apply speedily.”

  In the Journal, Parker flaunted his skill and showcased his type. The books subscribers picked up were in large format, and rather spectacularly decorated with intricate, fanciful borders. Horsmanden’s personal copy was bound with crimson morocco, its edges gilted, and its inside cover adorned with his armorial bookplate.19

  Horsmanden was “expecting a large Sale.” But he was to be sorely disappointed. Parker sold fewer than fifty copies before a London printer brought out a much smaller and cheaper edition in 1747, denying Parker the opportunity to export what he could not sell in the colonies. Still, it wasn’t Parker who suffered the loss. His failure to move his inventory went “to the Damage of the Author several Hundred Pounds.” 20 Horsmanden had paid for his Journal to be printed, out of the £250 paid him by the Assembly to compile a digest of the colony’s laws, and its failure came at the cost of his reputation.

  Not long after the Journal’s publication, Daniel Horsmanden, who had struggled with debt his whole life, found himself in even more dire straits. In 1745 he asked the Assembly for more money to complete the work for which he had originally been paid; but the Assembly denied his request, perhaps because by now the new governor, George Clinton, had begun to complain of the Assembly’s practice of “giving to Mr Horsmanden sums of money for extraordinary services, without that either he or the Assembly acquainted the Govr with any of the particulars of those services.”21

  Clinton’s appointment in 1743 set about a realignment of New York’s politics. James DeLancey, long allied with the colonies’ governors, feuded with Clinton and led a powerful opposition against him, with strong support in the Assembly. In the first years after Clinton’s arrival, Horsmanden attempted to straddle the fence, boasting that he “had the Confidence of both Mr. Clinton and the Assembly & wrote the Speeches” of both sides. But in 1747, Horsmanden took DeLancey’s side in a dispute with Clinton and became the mouthpiece of DeLancey’s opposition. Clinton, accusing Horsmanden of being “the chief contriver and actor in that faction, and being likewise of no estate in the Country and much in debt, whereby he may be too much exposed to temptations,” stripped Horsmanden of all of his political appointments, removing him from both the Supreme Court and the Governor’s Council, and replacing him as Recorder.22

  Subscription notice for Horsmanden’s Journal. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

  Horsmanden, left with no income, was “cast upon the private bounty of the party by whom he was employed, applauded, and ruined.” Faced with the prospect of debtor’s prison, he reinvented himself as a champion of political liberty and a defender of the freedom of the press. He became a political hack, writing essays in newspapers and pamphlets opposing Clinton’s use of arbitrary authority, and viciously attacking Cadwallader Colden, the governor’s defender. (Colden damned Horsmanden as an “infamous scribler” and, in 1748, warned the governor never to reappoint Horsmanden to any of his offices, to which Clinton replied that there was “no condition which ever shall induce me to restore Horsmanden.”) So quickly did Horsmanden earn a reputation as a critic of executive power that, in January 1748, a newspaper reply to one of Horsmanden’s essays took the form of a fake advertisement for a book in press, on “the whole Art and Mystery of abusing Governors”:

  To publish by subscription,

  An Abridgement of the learned Don Daniel Scriblerus, who lately, with great Accuracy and Judgment, wrote himself out of Bread, into a beggarly Dependence upon his Friends and Assembly-Men. All that is necessary for the present Generation, or useful to Posterity, in the Representation, Remonstrance, the angry Answers to Messages, and the long tautological Letter to the Governor, will be comprised in a small Octavo, about the Size of a Child’s Primmer; wherein will be illustrated the whole Art and Mystery of abusing Governors, in order to gain Popularity, and keep up the Spirit of Levelling; besides some other Arcana in Politics hitherto unknown. This Book will be very useful for small Politicians, Boutefeus, and fractious Assembly Men, but more especially to such as may hereafter become Tutors, or Hackney-Writers to an Assembly.23

  While Horsmanden became an expert in “the Spirit of Levelling,” James DeLancey was appointed lieutenant governor by the king, much to Governor Clinton’s dismay. Refusing to allow DeLancey to take office, Clinton simply pocketed his commission, and only handed it to him in 1753, when he was leaving New York to be replaced by a new governor, Sir Danvers Osborne. And, just as he was leaving the colony, Clinton reinstated Horsmanden to the third seat on the Supreme Court. When Osborne, grieving his wife’s recent death, killed himself within a week of taking office, DeLancey assumed the governorship, and Horsmanden found himself once again in the favor of those in power. DeLancey restored him to the Governor’s Council in 1755.24

  The vicissitudes of Horsmanden’s career in the 1740s and 1750s reveal the volatility of New York’s factional politics at midcentury. That Horsmanden could join the opposition so easily, and return to power almost overnight, and that the city’s political alignment could so dramatically shift with the appointment of a new governor, all testify to the tenuousness of political alliances. In 1747, when Governor Clinton stripped him of all his offices, Horsmanden came to understand the arbitrary power of colonial governors and became an expert at critiquing it. Far from England, where checks against such power were to be sought, Horsmanden, like DeLancey, found himself driven to political opposition through the power of print, and to the embrace of faction and party. But when they returned to power, both men proved willing and eager to exert that same arbitrary authority themselves, to enjoy all of its privileges, and to display, once again, an intolerance for opposition.

  The shallow factionalism that characterized New York politics before the 1730s, and returned in the 1740s and 1750s, bore little resemblance to the far bolder embrace of party that had marked the years surrounding Zenger’s trial, when even a writer for the Court Party New York Gazette had argued that “Parties . . . serve to maintain the public Liberty” and that “Opposition is the Life and Soul of public Zeal” which, “instead of clogging, regulates and keeps in their just and proper Motion the Wheels of Government.”25 Ideas such as those found little purchase in the 1740s and 1750s, when men like DeLancey and Horsmanden, keen to lead the opposition when they were out of power, were just as eager to silence it when they reclaimed the seat of government.

  It is impossible to understand how faction and party worked in New York, and could have been embraced with both such passion and such shallowness, without considering slavery, and how real and imagined slave conspirators functioned as a phantom political party. A faction, Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1642 in De Cive, is “a multitude of subje
cts” who have made “Pacts, or Leagues of mutuall defence between themselves against all men, not excepting those who have the supreme power in the City”: “A faction therefore is as it were a City in a City.”26 He might have been describing New York City’s slaves in the hard winter of 1741, cursing whites at tea-water pumps, sharpening knives at Comfort’s, talking about burning the city down and cutting the throats of their masters. Whether Quack and Cuffee, Jack and Othello ever actually planned to destroy New York or set a single fire, they were undoubtedly, by Hobbes’s definition, a faction, a “City in a City.”

  In the 1730s, white New Yorkers, led by James Alexander, conducted an experiment in political liberty, and defended their right to constitute an oppositional party as a political form not only not destructive of but actually essential to good and just government, a form especially necessary in the colonies as protection against the abuse of unchecked governors who, by becoming tyrants, made their subjects political “slaves.” In 1741, a phantom black political party—of real slaves—was discovered lurking in the shadows. Its discovery marked both the logical consequence of and an end to Alexander’s experiment in political liberty. Having endured a white “City in a City” whose leaders had gone unpunished, New Yorkers reckoned with their black “City in a City” by banishing, burning, and hanging its most threatening subjects.

  In eighteenth-century New York, slavery made liberty possible, one kind of liberty, when the threat of slave conspiracy rendered white political opposition palatable, when burning black men at the stake made what James Alexander had written and John Peter Zenger had printed seem harmless. But slavery also, paradoxically, worked to suppress political experimentation by extinguishing “Party flames,” and helping to heal and therefore erase party divisions. Yet, however white New Yorkers understood their relationship to their governors and their king, their ideas about forming parties and waging revolutions were shaped by their fear of slave conspiracy, just as slave rebellions, and the emerging anti-slavery and later abolitionist movements themselves, were always shaped by colonial and American ideas about political opposition and political liberty. While they ebbed and flowed, fear of black rebellion and the embrace of opposition, like liberty and slavery, traveled with the same tide.

  This was what had animated Horsmanden’s investigation from the beginning. The conspiracy Mary Burton first described, in her astonishing deposition of April 22—Hughson’s Plot, of men meeting in a tavern plotting to replace the governor—looked to him so much like a blacker version of the Country Party of the 1730s that he dedicated himself to the task of exposing these “latent Enemies.” That lawyers and grand jurors and ordinary New Yorkers went along with him for so long, through the public executions of thirty black men, is a testament both to the credibility of the other plot the confessions ultimately described—the “Negro Plot”—and to the pervasiveness of the city’s simmering racial and political tensions. Even as the evidence Horsmanden uncovered took him further from the plot described by Burton, he remained wedded to a story with implications for faction and party, sedition and insurrection. In July, he reluctantly yielded to James DeLancey in shifting the focus of the investigation to the all-encompassing Priest’s Plot, but in his Journal, which gave center stage to Hughson’s Plot, Horsmanden made his political point: a slave conspiracy is like a political party, only even more sinister.

  AND WHAT OF Daniel Horsmanden and his Journal? For a time, both the man (“Don Daniel Scriblerus”) and his book became objects of ridicule. In 1744, when Clarke was asked about “Mr. Horsmanden’s History of the Negro Conspiracy,” he joked, “I am sure the Author of the History had no Hand in the Plott.”27 In 1748, Horsmanden’s printer cut by a third the price of those copies still left on his shelves, announcing that “as he has been a considerable Loser by printing that Book, he proposes to sell ’em very cheap.”

  Written as a “standing Memorial” to the danger of giving slaves an “Excess of Liberty,” Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy was remaindered, at 3 shillings a copy.

  EPILOGUE

  Dust

  ON A MISERABLY COLD DAY in February 1777, Daniel Horsmanden, eighty-three years old, aching and brittle-boned, drafted his will. “I give my Soul to God,” he began. His earthly estate he scattered; he had no children to inherit it. To Elizabeth Sherbrook, the wife of his American executor, he left his beloved “Chariot and Horses.” To his sixteen-year-old Virginia goddaughter, Maria Horsmanden Byrd, daughter of William Byrd with whom he had caroused in his youth, Horsmanden left £500. The £2,500 of South Sea stock he had inherited from his unmarried sister Ursula, better known as “Nutty,” he distributed among an English bishop’s fund; the caretaker of a farm he owned in England; and his sister-in-law Lucretia, widow of his brother Samuel, who had been vicar of Purleigh, the place Horsmanden would have had if he had not decided to pursue a career in law.

  The rest of the estate he left to charity. Horsmanden gave £500 to King’s College (now Columbia University), founded in 1754. His largest bequest, £1,500, went to “the Rector and Inhabitants of New York in Communion with the Church of England,” to be used to buy a pulpit and desk for Trinity Church and to help rebuild the Rector’s House and the church’s charity school.1 It was as much a political statement as an act of generosity. In the chaos of the Revolution, Trinity was still the Church of England, and Horsmanden was a Loyalist to the awful end of his days.

  American independence devastated Daniel Horsmanden. Like other New Yorkers loyal to the crown, Horsmanden was tempted to flee in June 1775, when Washington rode through the city en route to Boston and Cambridge to take command of the Continental Army. Loyalists left New York by the thousands—for England, for Nova Scotia, for the countryside, for the nearest British ship. Those who stayed behind risked being taunted and beaten by vigilantes or investigated and arrested by the patriots’ Committee for the Detection of Conspiracies, established to track down Tories.

  Horsmanden might have retreated to his country home in Flatbush; his presence was no longer needed in New York. He had been Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Province of New York since 1763, but he took his seat on that bench for the last time in October 1775. Once New York called itself a state, the provincial court was dismantled. Horsmanden’s hard-won chief justiceship, the consuming ambition of his political career, became just another casualty of revolution.

  No longer needed at City Hall, and with a country home waiting for him, Horsmanden was nevertheless trapped in the city; his second wife, Ann, was desperately ill, too ill to move, “dying under the excrutiating Tortures of a cancered Breast.” In the spring of 1776, William Smith, son of Zenger’s attorney, visited the Horsmandens in the city and pled with them “to retire from the Metropolis,” to no avail. “I spent two Hours with him & his Wife,” Smith recalled, “moved with Compassion for Persons whose Minds were sunk below their Adversities, supported neither by the Consolations of Religion nor Philosophy. Intent upon a Retrospect of what they were once, I could not elevate their Hopes by any Prospect of the Future. His Age & her Cancer presented Death to their View as at the Door and involved them in a Gloom, which Nothing I offered, could illuminate or dispel.”2

  In the spring of 1776, William Smith, Jr., may well have been Daniel Horsmanden’s only visitor. He had no fondness for Horsmanden, who generally appeared to sensible men as a scheming opportunist, always eager for a loan. Only by marrying the wealthy and aged widow, Mary Reade Vesey, in 1748, had Horsmanden avoided debtor’s prison. (Horsmanden was fifty-four when he married; Reade must have been in her seventies. She had married her first husband in 1698, when Horsmanden was only four years old.) “Until his marriage with Mrs. Vesey,” Smith wrote, “Mr. Horsmanden was an object of pity; toasted, indeed, as the man who dared to be honest in the worst of times, but at a loss for his meals, and, by the importunity of his creditors, hourly exposed to the horrors of a jail.” In 1753, Governor Clinton restored him to his positio
n as Third Justice. Seven years later, Mary Horsmanden died, leaving Horsmanden the bulk of her estate.3

  In 1763, Horsmanden, at age sixty-nine, was promoted to Chief Justice. That same year, he married Ann Jevon, this time for love. “Would you believe it Daddy Horsmanden has entered the Lists with Miss Jevon,” one New Yorker remarked, “& is as Juvinile a Bridegroom as you could desire to see of above three score and ten.” In this, as in much that characterized his later years, Horsmanden had become an object of ridicule. “Mr Horsmanden has set all the Town a laughing at his intended Marriage with Miss Jevan,” another New Yorker wrote, adding, “Many are the Jests this Occasions, it has made even the Dull witty.”4

  Horsmanden had also become physically frail and appeared, for years, to be nearing death. “Old Horsey’s Life has been . . . despaired of,” wrote William Smith, Jr., in 1769, when Horsmanden became ill. “Horsey” was no accidental nickname. Horsmanden was known for his equine enthusiasm; his ostentatious coach-and-six was one of only a handful in the city, and absurdly extravagant. In 1771, hooligans attacked it: “The coach was destroyed & the poor horses lost their tails.” Horsmanden, who by now had great difficulty walking, was left to rely on his smaller chariot, pulled by mortifyingly tailless horses.5