by Jill Lepore
By 1776, the Chief Justice had long since outlived his contemporaries, and he made few youthful friends in his later years. James Alexander died in 1756, Frederick Philipse in 1751, Richard Bradley in 1752, George Clarke and James DeLancey in 1760, John Chambers in 1765, William Smith, Sr., in 1769. Cadwallader Colden, who had served as lieutenant governor of the province during the 1760s and 1770s, died in September 1776. None of these men had met mortality as bereft of solace and companionship as Daniel Horsmanden. James Alexander had five children, DeLancey six, Clarke ten, Colden eleven, Smith fifteen. Horsmanden had none. Joseph Murray, too, never had children, but when he died in 1757 at the age of sixty-three, he enjoyed a wide acquaintance and the esteem of his colleagues; he was lauded in his obituary as “a Gentleman of the strictest Integrity, Fidelity and Honour.” Daniel Horsmanden lived out his final days in a world that despised him.
Soon after visiting Horsmanden, William Smith, Jr., himself a Loyalist, was banished by the patriots’ Committee for the Detection of Conspiracies. He fled to Canada. Horsmanden, alone but for his dying wife, watched with sadness as Washington returned from Boston and put James Alexander’s fifty-year-old son William, a brigadier general, in command of the Continental Army’s defense of the city. Washington commandeered “Frog Hall,” Horsmanden’s house on what is now West 44th Street (a house his second wife had brought to the marriage), for use as a hospital.6 At the beginning of July, Horsmanden heard the shattering news that the Continental Congress had endorsed the Declaration of Independence; New York delegate Lewis Morris, Jr., son of Horsmanden’s old adversary, was among the signers. Horsmanden may have roused himself from his gloom to witness the shocking events of July 9: when the Declaration was read to William Alexander’s troops assembled on the Common, they marched down Broadway to the Bowling Green, pulled down a massive equestrian statue of King George, and staked its head on a pole. It must have seemed to Horsmanden that the “unruly spirit of independency” manifest in New York in the tumultuous 1730s had grown monstrous. The Alexanders and the Morrises had won. Now had the world truly turned upside down.
Suffering in spirit, Horsmanden by no means escaped the physical indignities that befell those who resisted the Revolution. That summer, the Chief Justice was kidnapped “by a party of ruffians” and carried into the country to be jeered at, and possibly lynched, “but he proved so troublesome on the journey, that they chose to leave him on the side of the road.” Somehow, Horsmanden made his way back to the city. He found no peace there. At the end of the summer, the patriots’ Committee for the Detection of Conspiracies summoned him, feeble and friendless, to City Hall “to appear before them & deliver up his Arms.” Miles Sherbrook, an English merchant who had business dealings with Horsmanden, took pity on him and, “compassionating his Desertion and Solitude, led him by the Hand out of the Capital.” Sherbrook escorted Horsmanden and his wife safely to Flatbush. It was in payment for this kindness, undoubtedly, that Horsmanden made Sherbrook executor of his estate and left his chariot to Sherbrook’s wife, Elizabeth, who may have helped care for Ann during the journey. Ann died the following spring.7
Meanwhile, the battle for New York began, as much a civil war as a fight for independence. James DeLancey’s younger brother Oliver, brigadier general and the senior Loyalist officer in the British Army, fought with the redcoats in the Battle of Long Island. William Alexander helped his men escape the British after the Battle of Brooklyn in August (although Alexander was himself captured). In the end, Washington’s troops failed to halt the invasion, and New York City fell to the British in September 1776. Before retreating, Washington considered burning the city, but held back. Someone else, apparently, did the job for him. On the night of September 21, 1776, after the British had gained the city, fires once again raged across Manhattan, and proved far more devastating than the blazes of 1741. Trinity Church, where James DeLancey’s body had gone to its final rest in a vault beneath the center aisle, burned to the ground. (Horsmanden’s bequest, in his will written five months later, aimed to aid rebuilding efforts.) Five hundred buildings, more than a quarter of the city, were reduced to ashes. “The Number of Fires which appeared at the same Time at very distant Parts . . . afford too fatal a Proof of an Intention to destroy this City,” a British commandant reported.8 An investigation was begun. Two hundred patriots were arrested and questioned on suspicion of arson, and an American spy, Nathan Hale, was hanged, regretting that he had but one life to lose for his country.
In October, Daniel Horsmanden, now a widower, wearily returned to the charred city, seeking refuge under the British occupation; his name led the list of nine hundred signers of a pledge of allegiance delivered to the British commanders in City Hall. Along the road, Horsmanden’s carriage passed hundreds of African-American slaves traveling to the city from all over the countryside, seeking the freedom promised to all those who volunteered to serve in the British Army.
In February 1777, from British-held New York, Horsmanden set about writing his will, and prepared for death. Yet one more humiliation awaited him. In April, Horsmanden learned that a committee led by Gouverneur Morris, another son of Lewis Morris, had drafted a state constitution, whose Article 24—“the judges of the Supreme Court . . . [shall] hold their offices . . . until they shall have respectively attained the age of sixty years”—was a thinly veiled indictment of Horsmanden’s stubborn and widely criticized refusal to step down from the bench well into his eighties, even as senility weakened his judgment and infirmity interrupted his attendance.
Horsmanden lingered for a year and a half, in solitary despair. And then, one day, he went out “for his usual ride but was struck by a Palsy in the Evening and continued speechless from that Moment.” 9 The victim of a stroke, Daniel Horsmanden died on September 23, 1778. Two days later, a small procession carried his coffin to the Trinity churchyard, a man-made hill of over 100,000 human remains piled layer upon layer, rising high above street level, and ever shifting. In the shadow of a church in ruins, Horsmanden’s coffin was lowered into a shallow grave. His headstone has since sunk underground, in the unhurried quicksand of time.
DANIEL HORSMANDEN owned no slaves. If he had, he would have listed them in his will, along with his other personal property. New Yorkers preferred to keep their slaves, like their real estate and movables, in the family. Such, after all, is the chief purpose of writing a will: to hand on property from one generation to the next, to maintain and consolidate wealth across history. In his 1740 will, Abraham Van Horne, who was not only a slaveowner but an active slave trader, decreed: “All my Negro Slaves are to be sold to the highest Bidder among my Children, to prevent their falling into the Hand of Strangers.” (Before Van Horne died in 1741, he lost two of those slaves in the conspiracy that year: London fled prosecution and was never found; Bridgewater pled guilty and was shipped out of the colonies.) The family auction was the most common means of distributing slaves, but Hermanus Rutgers, Jr., whose son’s slaves Quash and Galloway were executed for conspiracy in 1741, wrote in his will in 1750: “My negro woman Isabel shall have the liberty of choosing her master,” presumably from among Rutgers’s children. Some men left the dispersal to their wives to decide. In August 1741, Samuel Myers Cohen left all of his slaves to his wife, including Hereford, who had been released from jail only weeks before. (Windsor, another of Cohen’s slaves, pled guilty and had already been transported.) When the widow Jane Gilbert drafted her will in 1751, she bequeathed to her daughter “a negro wench and her two children,” possibly the wife and children of Pompey, who had been shipped to Madeira in 1741 and never saw his family again.10
Only a handful of New Yorkers used their wills to free their slaves, but Joseph Murray, who had prosecuted so many black men to their deaths in 1741, was among them. In 1741, Murray’s slaves Adam and Jack said that Caesar had refused to participate in the conspiracy. In his 1757 will, Murray ordered: “My negro Cesar and his mother are to be free, and to have £20 yearly for support.” This, by any measure
of its time, constituted an extraordinary act of generosity, and one that must have raised eyebrows. Perhaps Caesar was more than Murray’s slave. Perhaps he was his only son.
Slaves appear everywhere in New York City wills, except as their authors, since enslaved human beings could not legally own property. Nor did they always know where their children were, or how to find them. With rare exception, enslaved men and women did not pass wealth from one generation to the next, to be maintained and consolidated across history. All that slaves could legally hand down to their children was their status. What slaves inherited was slavery.
When slaves died in eighteenth-century New York, they were buried in the Negroes Burial Ground, six desolate acres of marshy ravine just north of the Common, just south of the Collect, set aside for the purpose after Trinity Church banned blacks from its graveyard in 1697. The thirty black men hanged or burned to death in 1741 had but a short distance to travel to their graves, if they were allowed the dignity of a proper burial; the gallows and the stake were a stone’s throw from the burial ground. When Othello was hanged on July 18, 1741, whatever family he left behind probably released him from the hangman’s rope, wrapped him in linen, affixed the shroud with straight brass pins, and eased the body into a narrow wooden coffin. They may have tossed shells or beads into the coffin or delicately placed coins over his eyes to pay for his passage across the river of death.
With so many of the city’s black men dead or gone or still in jail, Othello’s friends and family would have been hard-pressed to find men to carry the coffin. Perhaps they managed to haul it onto a cart and drive it to the burial ground. Earlier in the century the Common Council, fearing that funerals might provide opportunities for plotting a rebellion, had passed a law requiring that slaves be buried by daylight. (Night funerals are common in West Africa.) Mourners, bearing no pall, might have carried Othello’s coffin to the grave. The Common Council, believing that palls conferred too much dignity on the occasion, ruled: “if any Slave shall hereafter, presume to hold up A Pawl or be A Pawl Bearer at the Funeral of any Slave, such slave shall be Publickly whipped at the Publick Whipping Post.”
At the grave, Othello’s coffin might have been lowered into the dirt with his head pointing to the west so that when he awoke he would sit up to face the rising sun. Mourners gathered in a circle around the grave. Early in the century, large parties of men, women, and children gathered at funerals, which alarmed the Common Council: “Great Numbers of slaves Assembling & Meeting together at their Funerals, under pretext whereof they have great Opportunities of Plotting and Confederating together to do Mischief.” By 1731, the Council ruled that there were to be no more than twelve mourners at a slave funeral; violators were to be whipped. 11
At the graveside, the handful of mourners could have wailed for Othello, for the beauty of his life and the staggering sadness of his death. They might have beat drums and passed an infant over the grave, to remind them that life goes on. Before Othello’s body was lowered into the ground, they may have danced or walked clockwise around the grave shaft, pacing the circle of life and death.
Death, for Othello and the people who mourned him, was not an end but another beginning, a journey to a different kind of life. Only a proper burial, however, could send Othello to a place where he could watch over future generations. Only a proper burial could transform the merely dead into exalted ancestors. In West Africa, secret societies, mortuary societies like the Mmuo, made sure that proper burial rites were followed. New York slaves’ secret societies might have played the same role.12 If so, one of the most profound tragedies to the black community in 1741 may have been the loss of the very men who ensured the proper burial of the dead.
Twenty thousand men, women, and children were buried in the Negroes Burial Ground before it was closed in 1795, when the land was sold for house lots. It was not that the burial ground was no longer needed: there were still thousands of enslaved and free blacks in New York at the end of the century (slavery was not completely abolished in New York until the very late date of 1827). But, as the city grew, the burial ground, once at the edge of the city, found itself at its center, and developers were unwilling to leave it alone. Early in the nineteenth century, the ravine was leveled with twenty feet of fill and the first of several generations of buildings was raised on top of the abandoned burial ground. Eventually, the graveyard’s very existence was forgotten, along with most of the city’s slave past. Twenty thousand bodies, twenty feet under the growing metropolis, rested, unremembered, for nearly two centuries.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1991, archeologists came to survey the site in preparation for the construction of a thirty-four-story federal office building. They found bones—many more bones than they had expected. They had consulted maps and knew about the burial ground, but they hadn’t understood the topography: they didn’t know how deep the ravine had been, and never guessed the bodies could have remained so wholly undisturbed. In the months following, 408 burials were excavated, catalogued, and preserved. As an archive of colonial African-American life, this was by far the most valuable set of remains and artifacts ever found. Among the coins and shells, shroud pins and bits of pottery, archeologists found identical cufflinks buried with several adult men—ornamented with a Freemasonry motif. Set into the lid of one coffin were ninety-two iron nails which looked, some said, like a heart or, said others, like the Sankofa symbol, used by the Akan people of Ghana to represent the idea of turning one’s head to the past. These graves had stories to tell.
“Each individual burial can talk to us,” said one city archeologist, Daniel Pagano. “The way the tendons grow tell us who was a carpenter, who rode horses, who was a butcher.” The history of New York would have to be rewritten. “We have nothing else that speaks out of their mouths,” said an anthropologist, Sherrill Wilson.13
Meanwhile, African-American activists, led by New York’s black mayor, David Dinkins, protested that disinterring the remains constituted an unforgivable violation of the dignity of their ancestors. “If this was the Pilgrims’ graves, this wouldn’t have happened,” said one protestor. In the winter and spring of 1992, activists made a series of demands: that the excavations stop; that only black archeologists serve on the project; and that the remains already disturbed be reburied as soon as possible. After a protracted struggle, those demands were met: the human remains were sent to Howard University, while the artifacts found in the burials remained in New York, for further study and in preparation for reburial. Dinkins, contemplating the importance of the site, compared the burial ground, now a National Historic Landmark, to Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island. “The African Burial Ground,” he said, “is the irrefutable testimony to the contributions and suffering of our ancestors.”
That testimony, unfortunately, was heard only behind closed doors. The research progressed slowly, and secretively. Researchers refused to grant access to the remains and artifacts to outside scholars and scientists and would not publish their own findings. The promised reburial was postponed again and again, as Howard University scientists locked heads with funding agencies. Then, on September 11, 2001, the artifacts, stored in the basement of 6 World Trade Center, were nearly destroyed when hijacked planes crashed into the twin towers. They were saved only when Ground Zero workers rescued one hundred boxes before 6 World Trade Center, crushed in the initial explosion, collapsed. Perhaps that brush with destruction lent new urgency to the calls for reburial, which was then accelerated, in advance of the publication of the research (which means that by the time the research is published, the remains and artifacts can no longer be consulted for verification).
On a clear, windy day in October 2003, 408 sets of remains and artifacts, boxed in tiny wooden coffins made in Africa, arrived by boat at the Wall Street pier, near where arriving Africans were once auctioned. Drummers and singers, including the Harlem Boys Choir, greeted them. David Dinkins, Jesse Jackson, and a litany of other public figures spoke from a soundstage, but for most spectators, corra
lled beyond a rope barrier, the speeches were utterly inaudible, distinguishable only as an angry rumble punctuated by muffled applause.
When the speeches stopped, the tiny coffins were loaded on horse-drawn wagons parked along South Street. Black New Yorkers—toddlers, grandmothers, businessmen—approached, tentatively, to touch the coffins, to caress them, reaching into their own past, mourning the dead and the horror of slavery. But those still moments of intimacy, of prayer and reckoning, were drowned in a sea of flickering flashbulbs, jostling camera crews, and the calculated chaos of what quickly became a political rally. Journalists and photographers prowled the street for subjects to interview, finding always the most vocal of the self-styled “Descendant Community,” who spoke less about the people who were being laid to rest that day than about twenty-first-century African-American economic inequality. A mustached black man in a black wool turtleneck, leaning on a coffin-bearing wagon, told a bleached-blond television reporter in a fur coat, “If every black adult in the country died today, leaving everything to his or her children, the children would have nothing. Zero. Less than Zero. But if every white American adult died and left everything to his or her kids, they’d inherit $4 trillion. That’s what we have lost. That’s what we have lost.”
Hired livery drivers in top hats mounted the wide-wheeled wagons, tugged at their horses’ reins, and the procession began, up Wall Street toward Broadway to Chambers Street. (Lower Manhattan’s street names are an index to the men of law who prosecuted thirty slaves to their deaths in 1741: Chambers Street, Murray Street, Delancey Street. There is no Horsmanden Street.) The mood was more furious than joyful, more suspicious than sacred. A woman in the crowd, following the wagons, complained to a friend, “And did the mayor give the kids the day off from school for this? Did he close the schools today? No, they won again.” A man nearby interjected, “They don’t want us to know this. They don’t want us to know.” Together they walked, complaining of the final conspiracy, the conspiracy of history.
