New York Burning
Page 32
The Trial Data
Having placed the people mentioned in Horsmanden’s Journal in the context of the population as a whole, I set about processing the trial transcript itself into database form. This part of the project was inspired by the innovative work of a Boston University graduate student, Sandra Heiler, who enlisted a team of graduate students in a seminar I taught in the fall of 2001 to tabulate trial records to test her hypothesis that the more people an accused person accused, the better his chances at escaping execution. Although in the end I decided not to use the database Heiler compiled, her project was my inspiration. 8
My work with the trial records attempted also to reconstruct tables generated by the court in 1741, including three manuscripts badly damaged by fire: “Names of negroes examined; places where examined; names of the negroes accused by them, and circumstances elicited by their testimony”; “Lists of negroes whose confessions are taken, with remarks”; and “Lists of negroes proposed to be transported, and of those proposed to be kept as witnesses.”9 I hoped that I would be able to frame queries to generate just these kinds of lists, to understand not only how the prosecution made its case but how it drew its conclusions, and with what results.
The Trial table contains a record for every legal proceeding during the investigation of the 1741 conspiracy, as recorded in Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal and totaling more than 1,200 records: every appointment to a jury, arrest, accusation, arraignment, plea, opening or closing statement to a jury, judgment, examination, confession, deposition, trial testimony, verdict, sentence, cross-examination, execution, discharge, and pardon, beginning with April 21, 1741, the opening of the Supreme Court session, and ending with August 29, 1741, John Ury’s execution. I also included a field called “trial transcript” into which I pasted the full text of confessions, testimony, and motions of the court, taken from a digital version of Horsmanden’s Journal, available at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Web site, “Slaves and the Courts.” The Trial table can be sorted by any of its fields, including date, trial participant, or trial event, and can also be used for searching by keyword through Horsmanden’s Journal. The Trial table is also keyed to the People table; for instance, the Trial record for Anthony Rutgers’s appointment to the grand jury on April 21, 1741, is linked to the People table to reveal that Rutgers was a Dutch baker from the North ward who served as an Assistant Alderman from 1727 to 1734, supported the Country party, and, in 1734, owned two houses in the North ward and a farm northwest of City Hall, assessed, altogether, at a value of £ 255, and that his nephew, Hermanus Rutgers, Jr., owned three slaves accused of conspiracy in 1741.
To track the emergence of certain details of the conspiracy over the course of the trials, I created a Trial Detail table of 771 records, indexed to the Trial table, with a record for each detail mentioned in every substantial statement before the court, out of a list I compiled of nearly one hundred such details, e.g., “dancing,” “priest,” “Christmas,” and “sharpening knives.” To track patterns of accusation, I created an Accused table, also indexed to the Trial table, containing records for all accusations made during the investigation. It contains nearly 2,500 records.
For each slave named in the investigation, I assigned one of nine Final Outcomes—coded 1 to 9 for increasing order of severity (see Tables 8–10):
Unknown
Confessed but not arrested
Mentioned but not accused
Accused but not arrested
Accused but not found
Discharged
Transported
Hanged
Burned
The Place Data
The Place table is a list, with description and location information of over three hundred places in the city in 1741, coded by type: arsenal, tavern, park, street, well, warehouse, etc. A field for “Occupant” is keyed to the People table. The goal of this part of the project was to reconstruct the look and feel of the city in 1741, and to trace networks of association among both slaves and slaveowners.
Although I had initially hoped to identify the owners and residents of the majority of the city’s 1,400 buildings, and thus index all buildings to the People table, that project proved both overwhelming and insufficiently relevant to my inquiry. Instead, I compiled locations and descriptions for key sites mentioned in Horsmanden’s Journal, or otherwise important in the city. Grim’s map, for instance, includes sixty named buildings or features, all entered into the Place database, along with any surviving details about date erected, owner, and description. Information about buildings and other places was also taken from I. N. Phelps Stokes’s monumental labor, the Landmark Map. I also entered all places in the database keyed to Stokes’s numbering system. Places were also keyed to William Burgis’s detailed engraving of the city, offering a view from the south in 1716–18.10
With this list in hand, I set about pinpointing the location of all of these places, relying extensively on five maps depicting New York between 1731 and 1754:
James Lyne. A Plan of the City of New York from an actual Survey Made by James Lyne, 1731. New York Public Library.
John Carwitham. A Plan of the City of New York, 1740. Holkham Hall, Norfolk, UK.
Mrs. Buchnerd. “Plan of the City of New York In the Year 1735.” New York Public Library.
David Grim. “Plan of the City and Environs of New York as they were in the years 1742 1743 & 1744.” New-York Historical Society.
Francis Maerschalck. A Plan of the City of New York from an Actual Survey, 1754. New-York Historical Society.
Because I wanted to be able to query and display some of my database data spatially, I then turned to a GIS software program called ArcView to reconstruct a map of the city circa 1741. Digital cartographer David Rumsey helped me begin by “geo-referencing” the Carwitham map; that is, he tacked a digital image of that map onto points of latitude and longitude so that this 1740 map can be manipulated, in the same way as any modern GIS map. Robert Chavez of Tufts University then geo-referenced the other four contemporary maps for me, while generously tutoring me in ArcView. Chavez also added to my ArcView files a map from my glove compartment, New York City, New York, Including Long Island: Downtown & Vicinity (AAA, 2001), to provide reference to the city as it stands today. Using ArcView, it is possible to look at all of these maps more or less simultaneously, as they are stacked in layers on top of one another, and a click of the mouse moves the user from one layer to the next. To these layers, I added several more, to allow the map program to better describe the city in 1741: layers for ward divisions, streets, parks, water, markets, public buildings, residential blocks, and taverns.
I had hoped that it would be possible for my database to “talk” to my map program, so that I could, for instance, easily import the 1730 tax list to ArcView to generate a detailed scatter map depicting the distribution of wealth that year, but that proved beyond my technical savvy (which was limited to begin with). Instead, I found that I had to re-enter records from my database by hand if I wanted to use them in ArcView. I did this for some of the more interesting data; for instance, to reveal that slaves and free blacks mentioned in the investigation came from all over the city, in roughly the same proportion as they existed in the population (for more on this result, see Table 5). But, given my technical limits, this kind of work proved more useful in displaying data—creating visual aids for lectures—than in answering questions. Meanwhile, the GIS part of the project allowed me to navigate eighteenth-century New York from my desktop, to walk down a digital Broadway, and see what there was to see, on a sunny day in the spring of 1741.
SOME FINDINGS
My database and digital map served as an elaborate filing system for my research, making it possible to easily look up any given person, event, or place. But querying the data also produced important findings. The tax data, for instance, taught me that the wealthiest New Yorkers owned the most slaves and that those slaves were clustered around the neighborhoods along the East River (Ta
ble 4). The same data also allowed me to learn a good deal about individual slaveowners, and to analyze the paths and Final Outcomes of those slaves and free blacks bound up in the conspiracy. Some of what resulted is reproduced in Appendices B and C. Eventually, I hope to make all of the data available on a Web site, so that scholars and students may frame their own queries, and draw their own conclusions. Meanwhile, below I offer a very small sample of other findings.
Wards
I was able to identify the wards of 149, or 70%, of the 214 slaves and free blacks named in the conspiracy. Their numbers are roughly proportionate to those in the general population, with one exception: no slaves from the Outward were named in the conspiracy, yet 10% of the city’s slaves lived there. Also, slaves from the Montgomerie and West wards—the poorest, most remote, and least densely populated wards—were slightly more likely to be involved than their presence in that population would have predicted (see Table 5).
I investigated whether slaves from certain wards fared better than others as they proceeded through the courts. Once again these outcomes proved to be, on the whole, proportionately scattered by ward (see Table 6).
With the rural Outward omitted, there is a positive correlation (0.7) between average tax assessment and percentage of blacks in the city population.
Ethnicity
I identified owner ethnicity for 168 of the 208 named slaves. Slaves owned by Dutch New Yorkers proved more likely, and those owned by English masters less likely, to be named in the conspiracy than their presence in the general population would have predicted, as shown in Table 7.
Wealth
Owner wealth—the assessed value of taxable property—was identified for 134 of the named slaves. This roughly correlates with the distribution of income among taxpayers. Final Outcomes were also proportionately scattered by owner wealth. A slaveowner’s wealth did not predict how his slave would fare in the courts, as shown in Table 8.
Party
I was able to identify party sympathies for the owners of only 74 named slaves. Of these, 57 were known supporters of the Country Party; 17 supported the Court Party. Almost half of those slaves owned by Country Party sympathizers were transported, compared to a fifth of those owned by supporters of the Court Party. Unfortunately, the available evidence made it easier for me to identify Country than Court Party members—the opposition was more likely to sign petitions— which renders these findings merely suggestive.
Accusations
One of the best predictors of an accused person’s Final Outcome was the number of people who had accused him or her. The more people who accused you, the worse your fate.
APPENDIX B
The Accused
APPENDIX C
The Owners
SOURCE NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS
Horsmanden’s Journal and the Manuscript Trial Transcripts
All quotations from Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal (cited as Horsmanden, Journal) are from the first edition, Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy FORMED BY Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, FOR Burning the City of NEW-YORK in AMERICA, and Murdering the Inhabitants (New York, 1744). A nineteenth-century reprint, The New York Conspiracy (New York, 1810), contains numerous errors, as does a modern edition edited by Thomas J. Davis, The New York Conspiracy (Boston: Beacon, 1971), based on the flawed 1810 edition. Serena Zabin, ed., The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741 (New York: Bedford, 2004), is based on the 1810 edition and is greatly abridged. The 1744 edition is available both on microfiche and in digital format through Readex’s Early American Imprints; the 1810 edition is available in digital format through the Library of Congress’s American Memory Web site, “Slaves and the Courts, 1740–1860.” Quotations from Horsmanden appear on nearly every page of this book, and the complete Journal is more readily available in digital than printed format. For these reasons, passages from Horsmanden’s Journal are not cited in the Notes but can easily be found in the digital editions.
As discussed in chapter 4, there are two sets of trial manuscripts from 1741. The first are the records held in the New York State Archives in Albany, described by E. B. O’Callaghan in his Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, Albany, N.Y. (Albany, 1866), Vol. 2, originally bound in Volume 74. That bound volume was badly damaged in the Albany Capitol fire of 1911, and the fragile records of the trials have rarely been consulted since, as handling might have destroyed them. In 2003–04, archivist James Folts arranged for many of those records to be digitally scanned and made them available to me, for which I am deeply grateful. They are cited as New York Colony Council Papers (NYCCP), with reference to O’Callaghan’s original index, by volume and page and in some cases with the added specification of r (recto) and v (verso), as the digital files have been titled.
The second set of manuscripts of the trial proceedings is held at The National Archives (formerly the PRO), Kew, in the Colonial Office Papers (CO), and was originally enclosed with a letter sent by George Clarke to the Lords of Trade, June 20, 1741. A transcript of Ury’s trial was enclosed with a letter from Clarke to the Lords of Trade on August 24, 1741. Both can be found in CO 5/1094, and are cited by that reference in the Notes. A somewhat unreliable set of manuscript copies of these trial minutes and confessions is held at the New-York Historical Society, Parish Transcripts, folder 163.
Slave Names
Horsmanden used parentheses and the possessive to identify slaves by their owners, as in “Cuffee (Philipse’s).” Some historians have copied this practice, while others have simply used the owner’s last name as if it were the slave’s last name, as in “Cuffee Philipse.” I have tried to avoid both of these conventions. Instead, in the text, I identify slaves’ owners at their slaves’ initial introduction and, in subsequent discussion, refer to those slaves by their first names only. Where that creates confusion, as in the case of many slaves with the same first name, I have used owners’ names in parentheses without the possessive, as in “Cuffee (Philipse).” Readers should refer to Appendices B and C for further clarification on any slave or slaveowner named in the text.
NOTES
Preface
1. NYWJ, November 19, 1733.
2. James Thomson, “Rule, Britannia,” in James Thomson, Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 422. Massachusetts Gazette, December 19, 1771.
3. Samuel Johnson, “Taxation Not Tryanny,” in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 10:454. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975, 1995), pp. 3–5.
4. Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America, trans. Adolph B. Benson (New York, 1937), 1:131 (cited hereafter as Kalm, Travels).
5. DH to CC, January 24, 1734, LPCC, 2:104. The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. William Roscoe (London, 1847), 5:376. Henry St. John Bolingbroke, Dissertation Upon Parties (London, 1735), Letter 1. Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 940–41. See also Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
6. George Clarke to the Lords of Trade, October 7, 1736, Docs. Col. NY, 6:80. Colden, “History of Cosby and Clarke,” p. 349. For Van Dam and Clarke’s rival administrations, see NYWJ, October 4, 1736.
7. DH to CC, December 22, 1736, LPCC, 2:164.
8. NYG, March 18, 1734.
9. George Clarke, Jr., to Lord De La Warr, June 20, 1740, Docs. Col. NY, 6:163. George Clarke to Duke of Newcastle, October 7, 1736, Docs. Col. NY, 6:79, 76.
10. Anonymous to CC, [July 23?], 1741, LPCC, 8:270–71.
11. Late eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century commentators on the history of colonial New York—everyone from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Theodore Roosevelt—rarely failed to mention the trials, if only to dismiss t
he conspiracy as the product of widespread hysteria among panicked white New Yorkers. This view also was voiced in the Preface to an 1810 reprint of Horsmanden’s Journal, which claimed that “no doubt can be had of the actual existence of a plot; but its extent could never have been so great as the terror of those times depicted” (Anonymous Preface to Daniel Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy [New York, 1810]). Of these early accounts, one of the most influential, surprisingly, is an 89-page unpublished paper by Walter Franklin Prince, “New York ‘Negro Plot’ of 1741,” housed at the NYPL. Parts of Prince’s deeply ahistorical essay were published as “The Great Slave Conspiracy Delusion: A Sketch of the Crowning Judicial Atrocity of American History,” [New Haven] Saturday Chronicle, June 28–August 23, 1902. For other early accounts, see also T. Wood Clarke, “The Negro Plot of 1741,” NYH 25 (1944): 167–81, and Henry H. Ingersoll, “The New York Plot of 1741,” The Green Bag 20 (1908). Much the same portrait of New Yorkers in “the grip of hysteria” resurfaced in the 1960s when Winthrop Jordan concluded, “It is impossible now to tell surely whether there was any legitimate basis for suspecting a slave conspiracy, though clearly contemporary suspicions swelled out of all proportion to reality”—Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968; New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 117–18. Herbert Aptheker agreed that the plot “provided hysteria leading to exaggeration of the extent of the actual conspiracy but that one existed is clear”—Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1951), p. 4. Edgar J. McManus, in his A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966), dismissed the plot as a consequence of the terror with which New Yorkers viewed their slaves. In an essay noteworthy for its reasoned and thorough assessment of earlier treatments of the conspiracy, Ferenc M. Szasz argued that a conspiracy existed, “But it was not a conspiracy organized by the slaves to burn the buildings and take over the town. Instead, there existed several small groups—perhaps in contact with one another, although this is not certain—all of which were plotting to rob the richer citizens of New York City”—Szasz, “The New York Slave Revolt of 1741: A Re-Examination,” NYH 48 (1967): 217.