New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  19. Thelma Foote, “Black Life in Colonial Manhattan, 1664–1785” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1991), pp. 30–41. Col. Laws of NY, 2:768–74.

  20. On the Coromantees, see John Thornton, “The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean,” Journal of Caribbean Studies 32 (1998): 161–78. On naming practices, see John Thornton, “Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns,” WMQ 50 (1993): 727–42, and Jerome S. Handler and JoAnn Jacoby, “Slave Names and Naming in Barbados, 1650–1830,” WMQ 53 (1996): 685–728.

  21. Donnan, Documents, 3:440. Rip Van Dam to the Lords of Trade, November 2, 1731, Docs. Col. NY, 6:32–33. NYWJ, April 15, 1734. On death rates, see Joseph C. Miller, The Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 440–41. And for a discussion of death rates during seasoning in Jamaica, see Vincent Brown, “Slavery and the Spirits of the Dead: Mortuary Politics in Jamaica, 1740–1834” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2002), pp. 11–65. 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”—Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade, 1700 to 1774,” WMQ 35 (1978): 383, 387. Although the cited data on the geographical origins of imported slaves is taken from 1715 to 1764, Lydon says that “these figures emphasize the years before 1743” (p. 383). Thornton and Heywood suggest that Lydon’s figures may overestimate the prevalence of “seasoned” Caribbean imports in the New York trade—John Thornton to author, e-mail June 1, 2004.

  22. Patrick M’Robert, A Tour through Part of the North Provinces of America (Edinburgh, 1776; New York: Arno Press, 1968), p. 5.

  23. Smith, Jr., History, 1:226. JA to CC, March 23, 1732, LPCC, 2:59.

  24. William Cosby to the Lords of Trade, December 18, 1732, Docs. Col. NY, 5:939. Cosby to the Lords of Trade, December 7, 1734, Docs. Col. NY, 6:24. Secretary Popple to Cosby, January 23, 1736, Docs. Col. NY, 6:39–40. JA to Alderman Perry, December 4, 1733, Rutherfurd Family Papers, NYHS, Box 1.

  25. Lewis Morris, Jr., to the Lords of Trade, July 19, 1729, Docs. Col. NY, 5:887. Memoirs of the Life and Ministerial Conduct . . . of the Late Lord Visc. Bolingbroke (London, 1752), p. 41. Philip Livingston to Jacob Wendell, October 17, 1737, Livingston Papers, MCNY. On the overlap between “faction” and “party,” see Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (New York: Knopf, 1974), chap. 2.

  The best accounts of the New York controversy, and of the larger context of the province’s factional politics, are to be found in Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics(New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 107–14; Kammen, Colonial New York; Stanley Nider Katz, Newcastle’s New York: Anglo-American Politics, 1732–1753 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). Kammen argued that “it is reasonable to assert that responsible opposition had a respectable genesis, in England and New York, during the 1730s” and concluded, “the fact and legitimacy of opposition developed in early New York” (pp. 201, 206). Bonomi maintained that the crisis of the 1730s challenged “some of the most fundamental assumptions of the imperial system—challenges which prefigured in basic ways the final rupture of 1776” (p. 135). For a more dismissive view, see Alan Tully, Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), who argues that “In attempting to import . . . ‘court/country’ models of political behavior from Great Britain in order to explain and give a larger legitimacy to their various cliques,” New York elites “exaggerated the very factiousness they tried to explain” (p. 213).

  26. Lewis Morris to the Lords of Trade, December 15, 1733, Col. Docs. NY, 5:957–59. NYG, October 7, 1734. Abigail Franks to Naphtali Franks, December 16, 1733, in Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer, eds., The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Jewish Colonial Correspondence. Letters of the Franks Family, 1733–1748 (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1968), pp. 17–18. DH to CC, January 24, 1734, LPCC, 2:104. NYG, March 18, 1734. See Bailyn, Origins of American Politics, pp. 125–27, for a discussion of the novelty of this argument.

  27. NYG, October 13, 1735. NYWJ, October 20, 1735. Archibald Kenney to CC, January 17, 1736, LPCC, 2:145–46. In 1734, when Daniel Horsmanden chaired a committee investigating a death threat received by James Alexander, he summoned Alexander to appear before the committee, which convened not at a room in City Hall but at Todd’s tavern. Alexander refused, fearing for his safety, since the man he suspected of threatening his life—Francis Harison—was a member of Horsmanden’s committee. Alexander was so terrified of entering the tavern that he proposed instead to walk along the bridge in front of Todd’s, so that Horsmanden, spying Alexander from Todd’s window, might realize that he wasn’t defying the summons so much as afraid to obey it—copy of a letter from JA to DH, February 11, 1734; Memorandum of Lewis Morris, Jr., March 13, 1734; James Alexander Papers, the John Peter Zenger Trial Collection, Manuscripts, NYPL. It was unusual for “Ladys” to attend taverns, not least because places where men talked politics were places where women were not. At Todd’s, Hamilton reported, “There were 13 gentlemen att table but not so much as one lady” (Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress, p. 173). Avoid “being a ‘party’ woman,” Cadwallader Colden advised his daughter Elizabeth in 1737; “a lady never looks more ridiculous to men of sense than when she sets herself up as a politician”—CC to Elizabeth Colden DeLancey, 1737, DeLancey Papers, Box 232, MCNY.

  28. “Articles of Complaint,” Doc. Col. NY, 5:975–78. Katz, Newcastle’s New York, p. 41. Lewis Morris to JA, February 24, 1735, in Stanley N. Katz, “A New York Mission to England: The London Letters of Lewis Morris to James Alexander, 1735 to 1736,” WMQ 28 ( July 1971): 451. On Cosby’s administration, see Katz, Newcastle’s New York, chaps. 2 and 4.

  29. Kammen, Colonial New York, p. 201.

  30. Inventory of the Estate of Governor John Montgomerie, 1732, Manuscripts Division, NYPL. The ad for the auction specified “Four Negro Men and Four Negro Women” (NYG, July 26, 1731). The women were Deliverance, Jenny, Betty, and Emanda. The men and boys were Andrew, Othello, Pompey, and Barbadoes.

  31. James Logan to JA, May 21, 1740, quoted in Hayes, The Library of John Montgomerie,p. 73.

  32. DH to CC, August 27, 1734, LPCC, 2:109–11. Lewis Morris to JA, February 24, 1735, in Katz, “A New York Mission to England,” p. 457.

  33. Smith, Jr., History, 1:226. DH to CC, April 2, 1735, NYHSC, LI (1918): 132. Lewis Morris to the Lords of Trade, December 15, 1733, Docs. Col. NY, 6:958.

  34. William Byrd II to DH, February 25, 1736, in Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, 2:475. The editors only tentatively identify Horsmanden as the recipient (three pages of the letter are missing, including the addressee), but the context seems to indicate him clearly.

  35. According to Horsmanden, Cosby promised him the recordership in 1734—DH to CC, August 27, 1734, LPCC, 2:109–11.

  36. The fullest treatment of Alexander is Ellen M. T. Russell’s “James Alexander, 1691–1756” (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1995). The description of the house Alexander built in 1739 is his great-granddaughter’s, quoted in Stokes, Iconography, 4:560.

  37. See the entry for Alexander in American National Biography, 11:271–72. James Alexander Papers, NYHS. On Mary’s shop, see Kate Van Winkle Keller and George A. Fogg, Country Dances from Colonial New York: James Alexander’s Notebook, 1730 (Boston: Country Dance Society, Boston Centre, 2000), pp. 5–6. For an example of Alexander tending the shop when his wife was busy taking care of a sick child, see JA to CC, June 28, 1729, LPCC, 1:287. On the prevalence and importance of woman-run shops in the city, and on Mary Alexander’s shop in
particular, see Zabin, “Places of Exchange,” chaps. 3 and 4.

  38. New-York Mercury, April 2, 1756. NYG, June 23, 1729.

  39. Yaff, who ran away from James Alexander in 1729, probably spoke English without a Dutch accent. If he was thirty-five years old when he left, he was born in New York around 1696, two years after Daniel Horsmanden was born in Purleigh, Essex, and five years after Alexander was born in Perthshire, in Scotland. Yaff’s mother was probably owned by Richard Ingoldesby, governor of New York from 1691 to 1692 and again from 1709 to 1710. NYG, August 24, 1730.

  40. Michael Blakey et al., “Biocultural Approaches to the Health and Demography of Africans in Colonial New York,” unpublished paper, World Archaeological Congress 4, University of Cape Town, 1999. The scholarship on the African-descended population of colonial New York is scattered. Early essays are principally concerned with slave codes. See Edwin Vernon Morgan, “Slavery in New York with Special Reference to New York City,” in Maud Wilder Goodwin et al., eds., Historic New York (1897; Port Washington, NY: Ira J. Friedman, 1969), I:3–29; William Renwick Riddell, “The Slave in Early New York,” JNH 13 (1928): 53–86; A. Judd Northrup, “Slavery in New York, a Historical Sketch,” State Library Bulletin 4 (Albany, 1900); Edwin Olson, “Social Aspects of Slave Life in New York,” JNH 26 (1941): 66–77; Edwin Olson, “The Slave Code in Colonial New York,” JNH 29 (1944): 147–65; and Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby, eds., The Negro in New York: An Informal Society History (New York: NYPL, 1967), pp. 1–30. A book-length study was published in 1966: McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York. See also Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, chap. 6. Two dissertations provide some of the fullest accounting: Foote, “Black Life,” and Kruger, “Born to Run.” NYWJ, September 25, 1749.

  41. Blakey, “Biocultural Approaches,” pp. 5–7. See also Foote, “Black Life,” chap. 2. New York Post-Boy, December 19, 1748. NYWJ, May 10, 1736.

  42. CC to Dr. Home, December 7, 1721, LPCC, 1:51; CC to Mrs. Cadwallader Colden, August 29, 1744, LPCC, 8:307.

  43. NYG, September 12, 1737. See also NYWJ, September 20, 1737, which at least mentioned a kind of remorse: “Since it is well known that Children will mimic, I think it very imprudent to leave such dangerous Instruments in their Reach.”

  44. CC to Mr. Jordan, March 26, 1717, LPCC, 1:39. Colden, who was at the time in Philadelphia, regretted that he couldn’t break this woman’s will himself: “Were it not for her Alusive [or Abusive] Tongue her sullenness & the Custome of the Country that will not allow us to use our Negroes as you doe in Barbados when they Displeas you I would not have parted with her But I doubt not she’l make as good a slave as any in the Island after a litle of your Discipline.”

  45. NYGP, May 4, 1747. On runaway literacy rates, see Foote, “Black Life,” p. 246.

  46. A dance called “The Beaus Strategem” is included in The Dancing Master (London, 1718), p. 169, and is “possibly the one which ended the play” (Kenny, The Works of George Farquhar, 2:137). Alexander recorded country dances in a notebook he kept in 1730; see Keller and Fogg, Country Dances from Colonial New York: James Alexander’s Notebook, 1730. Alexander’s noteboook did not include “Beaux Stratagem” but it did include “Recruiting Officer,” a dance inspired by Farquhar’s earlier comedy of the same name: “Cast off, Lady follow you, turn 2d Lady, the 2d man, fig. 3d C./meet set & cast up, cast down hands wt 3d C./Set & turn single hands back again.”

  47. Johnson quoted in Fifer, ed., Introduction to The Beaux’ Stratagem, p. xvii.

  48. Hogg’s bawdy remark about his wife is taken from Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress, p. 177. Hamilton lodged at the Hoggs’ house during his visits to New York. Caesar and Prince were later indicted for commiting a robbery at Abraham Myers Cohen’s house in the early morning hours of Sunday, March 1, and convicted.

  49. The King against Mary Lawrence, May 4, 1738, Mayor’s Court. “Mary Lawrence & Child” appear in the Poorhouse records by November 1738—“Church Wardens Accounts, 1738,” NYHS. An extensive description of the Poorhouse can be found in MCC, 4:307–11, March 31, 1736.

  Chapter Two

  1. NYWJ, March 9 and 16, 1741.

  2. On the fort, see Stokes, Iconography, 1:244. On its inadequacies, see, e.g., Montgomerie’s plea for the Assembly to give attention to the “miserable State of the Officers Barracks in the Fort,” quoted ibid., 4:516. Cosby himself most forcefully made the case for better fortifications in 1734, when various improvements were undertaken—see ibid., 4:537–38. By 1738, the Battery was still incomplete. Clarke wrote to the Lords of Trade on June 2, 1738, “In the town of New York is an old fort of very little defense cannon we have, but the carriages are good for little, we have ball but no powder. . . . There is a battery which commands the mouth of the harbour whereon may be mounted 50 cannon this is new having been built but three years but it wants finishing”—Docs. Col. NY, 6:120. Clarke and the Assembly battled over the appropriations for finishing construction of the Battery and repairing the barracks in August and September 1739—Stokes, Iconography, 4:560–61. The money fell short.

  3. NYG, February 4, 1729.

  4. Accounts of the fort fire are largely taken from Horsmanden but also from Clarke to the Lords of Trade, April 22, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:185–86. “A Law for the Better Preventing of Fire” included the provision “That the Inhabitant or owner of every House within this City that hath three Fire Places, provide two Leather Buckets, and every House of fewer Fire Places, one Leather Bucket; every Brewer six Leather Buckets; and every Baker three Leather Buckets”—NYWJ, February 20, 1738.

  5. Pennsylvania Gazette, December 20, 1733.

  6. Still, Mirror for Gotham, p. 25.

  7. Kalm, Travels, p. 132; Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress, p. 44; Still, Mirror for Gotham, pp. 15–16. By the end of the eighteenth century, New York City passed laws dictating that “no new houses can be built in it, or within a certain distance of it, of wood; nor any new roof made of, or old ones repaired with, shingles.” Mandating building with brick and stone greatly reduced the dangers posed by fires. Between 1500 and 1700, the number and extent of fires in cities grew in proportion to population, but between 1700 and 1900, cities kept growing while the number of fires declined—Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 143–50. William Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 1794–1795 (New York: NYHS), p. 62.

  8. On the use of the speaking trumpet for fire, see MCC, 4:228, October 11, 1734.

  9. MCC, 4:55–56, 82–83, 436–40, May 6, June 12, and November 18, 1731, September 19, 1738. On New York firefighting, see also David T. Valentine, Manual of the Corporation of the City of New-York for 1856 (New York, 1856), pp. 525–29; Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments (New York, 1887); and George W. Sheldon, The Story of the Volunteer Fire Department of the City of New York (New York, 1882). For eighteenth-century firefighting more broadly, see Benjamin L. Carp, “Fire of Liberty: Firefighters, Urban Voluntary Culture, and the Revolutionary Movement,” WMQ 58, no. 4 (2001): 781–818.

  10. Smith, Jr., History, 2:50.

  11. JA to David Provost, April 22, 1741, James Alexander Papers, Rutherfurd Family Papers, NYHS, Box 2.

  12. MCC, 5: 16–17, March 19, 1741.

  13. NYG, May 26, 1740; NYWJ, May 26, 1740. On Clarke’s character, see Smith, Jr., History,2:28–29. Clarke to the Lords of Trade, June 20, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:196. The plumber’s “Fire-pot” explanation was reported outside the city, too. See, e.g., the Boston Weekly News-Letter for April 9, 1741.

  14. NYG, December 10, 1733; NYWJ, February 4, 1734; NYWJ, November 28, 1737; NYWJ, January 14, 1740. Pennsylvania Gazette, February 4, 1734.

  15. Quick owned two slaves, “One Negro man Called Sam” and “One Negro woman,” but neither of them was ever accused of conspiracy (“Inventory & Apraisment of the Reall & Personall Estate of Jacobus Quick,” 1741, “Inventories of Estates, NYC and Vicinity, 1717–1844,” NYHS). Clarke to the Lords of Trade, June 20,
1741.

  16. American Weekly Mercury, April 9, 1741.

  17. JA to David Provost, April 22, 1741. American Weekly Mercury, April 9, 1741. George Clarke to the Lords of Trade, June 20, 1741.

  18. “Conspiratorial events—attributing events to the concerted designs of willful individuals—became a major means by which educated men in the early modern period ordered and gave meaning to their political world,” Gordon S. Wood has argued. After all, American revolutionaries’ belief that Parliamentary ministers were conspiring against them inspired a good number of them to revolt—Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” WMQ 39 (July 1982): 401–41. Wood attempted to historicize what Richard Hofstadter had labeled the “paranoid style in American politics” (The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays [New York, 1965]) and to insist that it was not particularly American but rather a mode of thinking common to the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. On conspiracy fears of American revolutionaries, see also Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

  19. Increase Mather, Burnings Bewailed (Boston, 1712).

  20. Richard Savage, “Of Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works,” written 1736, published 1737; reprinted in James G. Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 78–79. On the anxiety of empire more broadly, see Linda Colley. Captives: Britons, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 2002).

  21. On the 1712 revolt, see Governor Robert Hunter to the Lords of Trade, June 23, 1712, Docs. Col. NY, 5:341–42; Kenneth Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712,” New-YorkHistorical Society Quarterly 45 (1961): 43–74; Thelma Wills Foote, “ ‘Some Hard Usage’: The New York City Slave Revolt of 1712,” New York Folklore 18 (1992): 147–59; and, on the connections between 1712 and 1741, Eric W. Plaag, “ ‘Greater Guilt Than Theirs’: New York’s 1741 Slave Conspiracy in a Climate of Fear and Anxiety,” NYH 84 (2003): 275–99. On the role of Coromantees in the revolt, see Thornton, “The Coromantees,” pp. 161–78.