New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  At Chambers Street, across from a grassy quadrangle set aside for the reburial at 290 Broadway, the wagons came to a halt. The coffins were unloaded, one by one. The crowd grew restless. An older black woman wearing a purple headdress, who had perched silently on top of one of the wagons during the procession, suddenly shouted: “They will not rest, they will not rest, until we are repaid!” All eyes turned to her. “They owe us!” she called. “They owe us! They owe us!” And the crowd hollered back: “Reparations!” “They owe us!” The crowd: “Reparations!” “They owe us!” The crowd: “Reparations NOW!”

  IN ONE SMALL wooden coffin buried at 290 Broadway are the remains of a middle-aged woman who died sometime before 1742. She was born in Africa. Two of her front teeth had been chiseled, one into the shape of an hourglass, one to a point. When her coffin was opened in 1992, her remains were marked “Burial 340.” One hundred and eleven beads were found along her pelvic bone; they had once been strung and wrapped around her waist.14

  Most of the beads found with Burial 340 were made of glass, blue and green and turquoise, the color of the ocean over which she had traveled and of the river she must cross. Glass beads like these were manufactured in Venice and Amsterdam and traded, for slaves, on the African coast. Two of the beads were cowrie shells, from Africa. One was amber. Another, a large black bead, was manufactured by the Iroquois, sometime between 1682 and 1750.

  Waist beads were used in many parts of Africa in the eighteenth century, and carried different meanings in different cultures. They indicated status and wealth; they were thought to possess erotic power, and to encourage fertility. Beads were often heirloomed, passed from one generation to the next. In many African cultures, it was quite unusual to actually bury them.

  And yet the woman named only Burial 340 was buried with her beads. Without a will, without a pen, without property, without paper, maybe this is how she handed down her history. She brought it with her, for safekeeping, across the river of death.

  Bead scholars know much more about European beads than they do about African beads, just as it’s much easier to find out what books Daniel Horsmanden owned than it is to discover what music African drummers drummed at John Hughson’s tavern in 1741. Because beads, like ideas, are heirloomed, passed along from one generation to another, they aggravate archeologists; they evade analysis. And because beads, like ideas, are strung together, a strand is more than the sum of its beads, just as a plot is more than the sum of its elements.

  Even if bead scholars could trace every single bead on the strand found in Burial 340 to its place of manufacture, they wouldn’t know what those beads meant to the woman who wore them, even after death. In this, those beads are much like the details of the 1741 slave confessions. Here a wound turquoise bead, probably from Venice, traded by slave merchants to slave vendors in Ghana; here kissing Hughson’s book, taken from Freemasonry; here a drawn blue bead, possibly Iroquois; here a tablecloth, connoting refinement; here a cowrie shell, from West Africa; here a slave conspiracy that looked like a political party.

  Oh, but those beads, some of them are centuries old, and they come from all over the world. Who knows how they came into this woman’s hands or how she carried them, across the Atlantic, on that miserable Middle Passage? But still I strain to hear, over the calls for reparations, over the rumble of barrels being pushed over cobblestones, the rattle of that long string of blue beads, wound around the waist of a woman of middle age, hidden, jangling under her clothes, as she walks down Maiden Lane.

  APPENDIX A

  Reconstructing New York City

  When I first set about to write about the New York City slave conspiracy of 1741, I began, of course, by reading Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings. I then decided that the three most promising avenues for gaining any new understanding of the events Horsmanden documented were (1) to restore the Journal, and Horsmanden himself, to their cultural and political context, to avoid misreading the text; (2) to locate other contemporary sources, so as not to be forced to rely exclusively on Horsmanden’s account, as other scholars have; and (3) to reconstruct the population of the city of New York, again, to avoid overreliance on Horsmanden’s Journal. How I pursued the first two of these avenues is made explicit in each chapter of this book. How I pursued the third avenue is the subject of this appendix.

  At the very end of his Journal, Daniel Horsmanden included a five-page “LIST of NEGROES committed on Account of the Conspiracy. ” This list is the best surviving inventory of the black population of mid-eighteenth-century New York City, and yet it has never been used as a census. When I began my research, I decided that using that list as a starting point, I would attempt to reckon with the world in which those men and women lived and died, and to find out more about them than their names and fates, not only by conducting a close literary and cultural reading of the Journal but also by reconstructing the city itself, using the traditional sources of social history: censuses, tax lists, court records, and maps. In undertaking this project, I was inspired both by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s landmark study of the 1692 witchcraft trials, Salem Possessed, and by my own graduate students’ hunches about the 1741 conspiracy: almost every one of my students who picked up Horsmanden’s Journal seemed to want to count something—bowls of punch, slaves with African names, confessions made on Wednesdays.1 I decided to try counting everything.

  Daniel Horsmanden wrote lists; I built a database. To reconstruct the city, I designed a database to store information about the people, places, and events of 1741. There are many different data tables in the database, but three form its backbone.

  The first page of Horsmanden’s List of Negroes. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

  The People table is a directory of city residents; the Trial table is a chronology of legal proceedings; and the Place table is an inventory of the city’s buildings, streets, and meeting places. Each data table is keyed to all the others; the database is “relational.” With this data in hand, I then reconstructed the city spatially, using GIS mapping.

  One of my aims in building this database was to detect patterns in the conspiracy, the fires, the confessions, and the trials that were otherwise unobservable simply by reading Horsmanden’s Journal. As it turned out, I did discover important patterns, many of which informed my argument, especially in distinguishing among the four plots—Hughson’s Plot, the “Negro Plot,” the Spanish Plot, and the Priest’s Plot—and in tracing their emergence over the course of the investigation. But reconstructing the city proved as much an end itself as a means to another end. The database took me to the streets, introducing me to the people and places of eighteenth-century New York. When I set about to write, I found myself referring to my database constantly: How long did it take to walk from Hogg’s to Hughson’s? What kind of people lived on Broadway? How many coopers worked in the West Ward? The database helped shape and refine my argument, but it also helped me to understand the city.

  SOURCES AND METHODS

  The People Data

  The People table is a list of nearly 3,000 city residents, with fields for name, occupation, ethnicity, wealth, ward, party, and a host of other variables. I began by creating records for the 214 slaves and free blacks and 458 whites mentioned in Horsmanden’s Journal. I then created records for people who appeared on the tax rolls, to place the trial participants in the context of the population as a whole. But before examining this data, it will be helpful to first discuss the population as described by city censuses.

  Censuses

  New York City censuses, providing population totals divided by race and sometimes by age and ward, are available for 1698, 1703, 1712, 1723, 1731, 1737, 1746, 1749, 1756, and 1771.2 Because no census survives for 1741, I estimated the population for that year using an exponential growth model: p(t) = exp (a*t+b) where p is population and t is time in years. This model is at best an approximation, since it assumes a constant rate of growth (a), but it is actually a relatively good fi
t with the surviving data. The extant census totals produce an average annual growth rate of 2.07% for whites and 2.29% for blacks. (The growth of the black population was due to continued importation of slaves rather than to natural increase.) Table 1 compares the actual census figures with those produced by the exponential growth model. The model white population for 1737 is the poorest fit, but its overestimation of the white population is well explained by a severe economic depression during the period 1731–37, which was marked by significant outmigration of whites. Elsewhere, the exponential growth model is a good fit for the surviving censuses, and suggests that the population of New York in 1741 was about 10,538: 8,709 whites and 1,829 blacks.

  Population density varied considerably from ward to ward, as demonstrated in the detailed census return for 1737.

  From E. B. O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New-York (Albany, 1851), 4:186. Arithmetic errors from the original returns, left intact by O’Callaghan, have been corrected here.

  Tax Assessment Rolls

  Censuses that identify individuals by name and list households by age and race are woefully lacking for mid-eighteenth-century New York. A census listing the names of white male heads of household is available for 1703 and in the first federal census in 1790, but neither is of any real use in reconstructing the city’s population in 1741. And the city’s first directory was not published until 1786. Because individuals are not named in any surviving censuses from 1703 to 1790, I relied on tax lists to identify individuals—although, again, only white property owners. New York City tax assessment rolls for the early eighteenth century are extant through 1734. The 1730 tax assessment roll, containing the name, ward, property description, assessment, and landlord for each of 1,902 taxpayers, was entered in the database by research assistant Kathryn Lindquist, from an available transcription.

  In a Tax table in my database, programmed to populate the relevant fields in the People table, Lindquist entered the 1730 tax roll, containing the name, ward, property description, wealth, and landlord for each of 1,902 taxpayers.3 The tax lists are arranged by ward and reveal that wealth, like population, varied by neighborhood. In her extensive analysis of the 1730 tax list in Before the Melting Pot, for instance, Joyce Goodfriend omits the Outward on the grounds that it was rural rather than urban. City officials also commonly excluded the Outward from city regulations, defining behavior “within this City on the South side of the fresh Water.”4 But I generally chose to include this ward because its neighborhoods, Harlem and the Bowery, were crucial sites of slave “frolicks” and also housed the city’s small population of free blacks.

  As a guide to the population of New York in 1741, the 1730 tax list is invaluable, but it presents an obvious problem: it is eleven years out of date. Moreover, the 1730 tax list does not include Montgomerie ward, which wasn’t created until the city was granted a new charter in 1731. To better approximate the population in 1741, the manuscript 1734 tax list was also entered into the database. Most people taxed in 1734 had also been taxed in 1730, but key individuals who do not show up on the 1730 tax list do turn up in 1734, including, for instance, Daniel Horsmanden, who arrived in New York in 1732. Between the two tax lists, there is only small variation in either individual or total wealth (total wealth in 1730 was £34,910; in 1734, £36,029). And the overwhelming majority of taxpayers did not change residences between 1730 and 1734, undoubtedly because the most transient New Yorkers were also the poorest and did not own enough property to appear on either tax roll. That there was little change over the four years between 1730 and 1734 makes me reasonably confident in using the 1734 tax list to describe the city in 1741. In general, however, where I assigned residential wards to particular slaveowners, I tried to find evidence beyond the 1734 tax list to corroborate that assignment.

  While the tax lists are useful in painting a portrait of the population of the city as a whole, they also provide details about individuals mentioned in the Journal. The two tax lists allowed me to identify property-holding city residents by both ward and wealth. And although neither tax list includes street addresses, tax assessors assessed property on a door-by-door basis, and proximity on the tax rolls reflects geographic proximity. The tax lists also provided a route to learning taxpayers’ occupations and ethnicity when Joyce Goodfriend generously shared her painstaking identification of over two thirds of the 1730 taxpayers, which I then entered into my People database. 5

  Party Politics

  After suspecting a link between the slave conspiracy and the Zenger trial, I began tracking party affiliations and entering them into a field in the People table. To the extent possible, individual residents of New York City who were also among the 458 white trial participants were identified as Court Party or Country Party sympathizers, based on elections, petitions, and other documents, including:

  “Names of those agreeing to sustain Colonel Morris,” James Alexander Papers, Rutherfurd Collection, New-York Historical Society, Box 2, p. 75. This is a list of 296 men who supported Lewis Morris.

  Candidates for elected office with known party affiliations, especially in the 1734 Common Council elections and the 1737 Assembly elections.

  The Zenger jury.

  Signers of a petition on behalf of James Alexander, Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675– 1776 (MCC), 4:314.

  Members of the grand jury who found in favor of Alexander’s good character, MCC, 4:326.

  A list of men prepared to pay Zenger’s bail, November 23, 1734, James Alexander Papers, the John Peter Zenger Trial Collection, New York Public Library.

  Enslaved New Yorkers

  While tax lists provide information about slaveowners, they are less revealing about slaves. And, although census totals document the number of blacks living in New York, and identify them by ward, age, and sex, there is no name census for slaves in the city, except for a provincial one taken in 1755, from which the New York City records are entirely missing.6 The black men and women mentioned in Horsmanden’s Journal offer the best name census available. I entered all of these named and anonymous individuals into the database, keyed to their owners. As the names were in many cases almost all that I knew about some slaves, I classified them by type: African, Biblical, Classical, Dutch, English, Literary, Masters (for slaves who appeared to have been named after former owners), Nouns, Place, Spanish, and Unclassifiable, and entered this data as a field in the People table.

  I then built two related tables containing the names of (1) slaves who participated in the 1712 revolt; and (2) runaways, also classified by type. Participants in the 1712 revolt are taken from Kenneth Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 45 (1961): 62–67. Research assistant Paul McMorrow located and photocopied advertisements for runaway slaves in five newspapers, spanning the years 1725 to 1752:

  New York Gazette, 1725–44

  New-York Weekly Journal, 1733–51

  New York Weekly Post-Boy, 1743–47

  New-York Evening Post, 1744–52

  New York Gazette, 1747–52

  A total of 253 ads for runaway slaves and servants appeared in New York City newspapers from 1733 to 1752. Since many of these ads were placed by owners outside New York who suspected their slaves or servants might have run to the city, most were not relevant to my inquiry. Only 21 were advertisements for runaway slaves from New York City.

  In order to compare the distribution of name types across these populations, I used the 1755 slave census, containing the names of slaves outside New York City as a control population. If it represents a reasonable approximation of the names of slaves living in Manhattan itself, the results are telling: while slaves with African names represent only 4% of the general population, they represent 8% of those named in the 1741 conspiracy, 14% of the city’s runaways, and 19% of those involved in the 1712 revolt. Five of the thirteen men burned at the stake in 1741, or 38%, had African names.

  Beyond these sources, muc
h of what can be derived about the nature of the enslaved population comes from what we know about the slave trade itself, which, although it does not have a place in the database, is worth discussing here. James G. Lydon has offered a “minimum estimate” that at least 6,800 Africans were imported into the colony of New York between 1700 and 1774, 2,800 directly from Africa and 4,000 from the West Indies and other parts of North America, although “a maximum figure of 7,400 might be justified.” The nature and extent of the slave trade changed dramatically after the pivotal events of 1741. Before 1741, an average of 150 slaves was imported to the colony each year; after 1741, that number dropped to 60. Before 1741, 70% of slaves imported to New York came from other parts of the Americas: of these about 30% came from Jamaica, and another 25% from Africa. Another 35% came from elsewhere in the West Indies: Barbados, Antigua, St. Eustatia, St. Thomas, Curaçao, Bermuda, and St. Kitts. Less than 3% came from South Carolina (although this data is taken from 1715 to 1764, Lydon says that “these figures emphasize the years before 1743”; after that year, 70% came directly from Africa). African historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood suggest that Lydon’s figures may overestimate the prevalence of “seasoned” Caribbean imports in the early New York trade, but until more research is conducted on extant shipping records in New York, London, and Albany, Lydon’s figures are by far the best available.

  According to Lydon’s data, taken from the naval and customs records as well as newspaper reports, there was very little slave trading in New York before 1748. But about a quarter or a third of the city’s community of three or four hundred merchants took part in the trade. Where possible, I have identified which New York merchants were involved in that trade, and entered that information in the People table.7