The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  During the 1730s and early 1740s, the “Spirit of Liberty” erupted again and again, in almost all of the slave societies of the Americas, especially where Coromantee slaves were concentrated. Major conspiracies unfolded in Virginia, South Carolina, Bermuda, and Louisiana (New Orleans) in the year 1730 alone. The last of these featured a man named Samba, who had already led an unsuccessful revolt against a French slave-trading fort on the coast of Africa and a mutiny aboard a slave ship before the authorities of New Orleans broke his body on the wheel. The slaves of New Orleans were not intimidated by the terror, however, for they rose again in 1732. The following year witnessed rebellions in South Carolina, Jamaica, St. John (Danish Virgin Islands), and Dutch Guyana. In 1734 came plots and actions in the Bahama Islands, St. Kitts, South Carolina again, and New Jersey, the latter two inspired by the rising at St. John. In 1735–36 a vast slave conspiracy was uncovered in Antigua, and other rebellions soon followed on the smaller islands of St. Bartholomew, St. Martin’s, Anguilla, and Guadeloupe. In 1737 and again in 1738, Charleston experienced new upheavals. In the spring of 1738, meanwhile, “several slaves broke out of a jail in Prince George’s County, Maryland, united themselves with a group of outlying Negroes and proceeded to wage a small-scale guerilla war.” The following year, a considerable number of slaves plotted to raid a storehouse of arms and munitions in Annapolis, Maryland, to “destroy his Majestys Subjects within this Province, and to possess themselves of the whole country.” Failing that, they planned “to settle back in the Woods.” Later in 1739, the Stono Rebellion convulsed South Carolina. Here the slaves burned houses as they fought their way toward freedom in Spanish Florida. Yet another rebellion broke out in Charleston in June 1740, involving 150 to 200 slaves, fifty of whom were hanged for their daring.42

  Intensifying these events—and holding aloft a beacon of possibility-was the decade-long Maroon War of Jamaica. Beginning in the late 1720s, slaves escaped to the interior of Jamaica in swelling numbers, returned to the plantations in nocturnal raids, and seized livestock, tools, and sometimes other slaves to take back to their secluded and inaccessible maroon communities in the mountains. Over the next ten years the maroons created a major crisis in the plantation system, especially in the northern and northeastern regions of the island, where they repeatedly forced small, marginal planters to abandon their estates and sell off their slaves, some to New York. Writing in 1739, Charles Leslie claimed that the maroons had “increased to such a Degree, as many Times to make the Island tremble.” Others agreed: Jamaica was in “a tottering state.”43

  One of the reasons that the maroons were so dangerous to the rulers of England’s prize colonial possession was that they were in touch with the government of Spain by way of Cuba, which was, after all, only a canoe ride away off the northern shore of Jamaica. There were not only rumors but actual testimony that the maroons had contacted the Spanish authorities, “offering to hand over the island [of Jamaica] to Spain when they had taken it over, on condition that the Spaniards guarantee their freedom.”44 The maroons may have been confident that they would eventually take over the island themselves, but they also knew that an external attack by Spain, coupled with their own uprising from within, represented an undeniably powerful combination. The authorities of Jamaica certainly did not deny it. Indeed, in 1739 and 1740 they made peace, first with the Leeward Maroons under the firm leadership of Cudjo, then with the Windward Maroons, giving both groups land and autonomy in exchange for their promise to return all future runaway slaves and, perhaps most crucially, to fight against foreign invaders. Its primary enemy within thus neutralized, Great Britain declared war on Spain a mere three months later.45

  A similar long-term struggle was taking place deep in the rain forests of Suriname, where maroons battled Dutch settlers who, according to Governor Mauricius, struggled to slay the hydra of resistance. A rising tide of rebellion in the Dutch colonies expressed itself in what another official called, in 1740, the intolerable “insolence of the Coloreds and Blacks, freedmen as well as slaves,” and in the subversive gatherings of soldiers, sailors, and slaves in waterfront taverns to smoke, drink, gamble, trade, and plot who knew what other dreaded cooperative ventures. Indeed, Dutch authorities were complaining about this explosive combination of workers in the spring of 1741, precisely when the same kinds of people were making trouble in New York.46

  Maroon leader Cudjo signs a treaty with the English authorities, 1739; R.C. Dallas, The History of the Maroons, from their Origin to the Establishment of their Chief Tribe at Sierra Leone (1803), vol. 1.

  The famines of 1728–29 and 1740–41 and their respective diasporas added an Irish dimension to the cycle of rebellion. Of special importance was the “Red String Conspiracy,” which took place in Savannah, Georgia, in March 1736 and foreshadowed the events in New York five years later. A gang of forty to fifty transported Irish felons met in a low tippling house, where they traded in stolen goods and formed “plots and treasonable Designs against the Colony,” even as the elites worried about “the Spaniards or French Instigations.” Eventually they designed to burn the town, kill the white men, save their women, and then meet up with a band of nomadic Indians with whom they would make their escape, perhaps to join the German-Cherokee Christian Gottlieb Priber, who was building a “City of Refuge,” a communist society for runaway African slaves and European indentured servants as well as Native Americans. The rebels in Savannah would know each other by a “Red string about the Right Wrist.” The plot was foiled but nonetheless threw the young colony into “great confusion.” Such events were not uncommon, as noted by Kerby A. Miller: “On numerous occasions in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, colonial officials in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New York and the West Indies feared that Irish ‘papists’ were plotting insurrection with negro slaves or foreign enemies.”47

  Arson was a common instrument of destruction within the cycle of rebellion, not least because fire was the most accessible of weapons among the dispossessed, especially for those who worked with it in the normal course of their daily life.48 On the island of Danish St. John in 1733, slaves entered Fort Christiansvaern, killed several soldiers, and set fires to signal a general rising. In Somerset, New Jersey, in 1734, slaves conspired to kill their masters, torch their houses and barns, saddle their horses, and fly “towards the Indians in the French Interest.” In the Red String Conspiracy, as we have noted, Irish workers planned to burn Savannah and escape to freedom. It was reported in October 1738 that a group of Native Americans, some of whom were whalemen, had plotted in Nantucket “to set Fire to the Houses of the English Inhabitants in the night, and then to fall upon them Arm’d, and kill as many as they could.”49 The slaves who led the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739 burned several houses as they made their way toward St. Augustine and freedom among the Spanish. More ominously still, a suspicious fire devastated Charleston on November 18, 1740, consuming more than three hundred buildings and doing, in all, several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of damage. Flames continued throughout 1741 to haunt the ports and towns of New York, Boston, Charleston, and Hackensack, New Jersey.50

  Fire also figured in prophecies, rumors, and tales. George Whitefield’s friend Hugh Bryan of South Carolina wrote to his fellow slaveowners in early 1741 that the “repeated Insurrections of our Slaves” and the frequency of fires were proof of the great itinerant’s dire prophecy that “God’s just judgments are upon us.” The big planters of South Carolina responded to this pious apostasy in their midst by arresting both Bryan and Whitefield for libel. Two weeks later—on Saint Patrick’s Day, when arson was to ignite New York—a Grand Jury condemned Bryan, who taught Christianity to his own slaves, for his “sundry enthusiastic Prophecies of the Destruction of Charles-Town, and deliverance of the Negroes from their Servitude.”51 The tales would continue in 1742, with Daniel Horsmanden’s reporting “several pretended prophecies of negroes, that Charles-Town in South-Carolina, and the city of New York, were to be burnt d
own on the twenty-fifth of March next.” The timing suggested that slaves were planning new fireworks to commemorate the earlier acts of revolutionary arson. Horsmanden knew that “there were yet remaining among us, many of the associates in that execrable confederacy, who might yet be hardy enough to persist in the same wicked purposes, and make new attempts.” New attempts were in fact made in February and March 1742, as some New Yorkers tried to make good the prophecies. Fire remained a weapon of liberation. If it threatened apocalypse, a new world might yet arise from the ashes.52

  PATTERNS OF TRADE

  When Dr. Alexander Hamilton arrived in New York on June 15, 1744, three years after the failed insurrection, the first thing he noticed was the forest of ships’ masts in the harbor: the city truly had “a great deal of shipping.” He made his way from the waterfront northward to Broad Street, where he lodged at the home of merchant Robert Hogg. This was the place where the sailor Christopher Wilson had stolen a cache of coins, the search for which by the authorities had eventually unraveled the larger conspiracy. Here Hamilton read Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings, then inspected the work of the rebels firsthand: “The castle, or fort, is now in ruins, having been burnt down four [sic] years agoe by the conspirators.” Little did Hamilton realize that what he saw as he gazed upon the charred rubble of Fort George had its origin in what he had observed when he first entered the city: in New York’s ships along the wharves and farther out at sea.53

  A key to the events of 1741 lay in the structure of New York’s commerce, which was, as Hamilton quickly understood, the driving force in this city of merchants and maritime workers. During the first half of the eighteenth century, New York’s trade was not triangular but rather bilateral, a shuttling from Manhattan down the North American coast to the West Indies and back. In the half century surrounding 1740 (1715–65), roughly three out of four voyages followed the coastal/Caribbean route, plying southward to Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina and even more commonly to Caribbean destinations, especially the English and Dutch islands, Jamaica and Curaçao in particular, and to a lesser extent the French and Spanish colonies, to and from which they regularly smuggled commodities of various kinds. Cadwallader Colden had noted in 1723 that New York’s greatest remittances went to Curaçao and Jamaica.54

  The conspiracy turned, however, not on what went out in New York’s ships but rather on what came home in them. And what came home in them, again and again and again, from coastal and especially from Caribbean ports, was slaves. The primacy of the West Indies in New York’s trade meant that the islands provided the vast majority of the city’s slaves to achieve a balance of trade. According to statistics complied by Professor James G. Lydon from the naval officers’ record lists and the inspector general’s ledgers, in the dozen years before 1741, four out of five slaves (79.5 percent) came to New York from the Caribbean (the bulk of them from Jamaica), while another 6 percent came from the ports of the southern mainland colonies. They arrived in lots of three or four on small vessels of thirty to forty tons’ carrying capacity, most to be sold at the Meal Market on the lower east side of Manhattan. Fewer than one in seven of New York’s slaves came directly from Africa in the big slave ships that spent months gathering a “cargo” and months more in the Atlantic crossing. Some of New York’s bondmen and bondwomen had been sent from the coastal/Caribbean trade routes on special order, and some on consignment; others were what the slave traders called “refuse negroes,” with physical “defects” that prevented their sale in the South.55

  Most crucial for our purposes—and most alarming to a great many New Yorkers—was that many of the slaves who came to New York had a history, often a secret history, of making trouble. West Indian planters sold to New York’s traders slaves who possessed “turbulent and unruly tempers” and often some experience in resistance. In the red wake of many a plot or insurrecrion in plantation America came a mini-diaspora, in which the leaders of the events were sold off, frequently away from their families and communities, to buyers in other parts of the Atlantic. Such was the practice on Antigua in 1736, when eighty-eight slaves were executed for taking part in a conspiracy, and another forty-seven sold and shipped off the island. The same program was followed on Jamaica, on Bermuda, and elsewhere, as it would be in New York after the fires of 1741.56

  New York was hardly alone in receiving such malefactors: all of the northern seaports, including Newport and Boston, served as markets of last resort in the regional trade in slaves. The governors of both Massachusetts and Rhode Island complained bitterly of the problem in the early eighteenth century, the governor of the former claiming that the traders sent “usually the worst servants they have,” including slaves who had accumulated records of violent resistance to their condition. As Edgar J. McManus has written, “Since some colonies permitted masters to export slaves convicted of major crimes, including arson and murder, the intercolonial trade involved serious risks for importing colonies like New York. How many of these slaves were channeled into New York cannot be estimated precisely, but the number was probably large.” Governor Rip Van Dam cautioned in the early 1730s that a majority of the slaves imported from the South posed a serious threat to the safety of New York. Governor Cosby objected in 1734 to the “too great Importation of Negroes and Convicts”; a “Negro” and a “Convict” were often one and the same person.57

  The New York Assembly acknowledged the problem by passing a resolution that warned the buyers of slaves against “refuse Negroes and such malefactors as would have suffered death in the places whence they came had not the avarice of the owners saved them from public justice.” Indeed, the assemblymen deemed the matter so serious that they did not stop at a warning; they also imposed a special duty on slaves imported indirectly—that is, from the Caribbean and coastal America—which was twice as high as the duty on slaves imported directly from Africa. The purpose of this policy was, writes Lydon, “largely to discourage importation of recalcitrant blacks from other colonies.”58

  Daniel Horsmanden knew that rebellious slaves imported from other English colonies had played a major role in the conspiracy In “a modest hint to our brethren in the West Indies, and the more neighboring English colonies,” he explained how he and his fellow New Yorkers had properly transported seventy-seven rebels to other, non-English parts of the Atlantic. He asked other rulers within the British empire to note “how tender we have been of their peace and security, by using all the precaution in our power, that none of our rogues should be imposed upon them.” Horsmanden was quietly complaining that his brother gentlemen in coastal and Caribbean America had imposed their rogues on New York, thereby undermining the colony’s peace and security. Governor Trelawny, whose Jamaican planters had sent north many of the slaves in question, got the message. After reading Horsmanden’s published account of the trial, which identified the slave named Hanover as having been involved in the plot but now being missing, Trelawny personally found Hanover among the 112,000 slaves in Jamaica and promptly returned him to New York. Both Trelawny and Horsmanden understood that it was impossible to import slaves without also importing the experience of opposition to slavery. It was in this literal sense that the insurrection was promoted by those whom Horsmanden called “the outcasts of the nations of the earth.”59

  One of these outcasts was a slave named Will, whose life illustrated the connections among insurrection, diaspora, trade, and new insurrection as it represented one long, Atlantic ruling-class nightmare. In 1733, Will had participated in the slave revolt on Danish St. John, in which a gang of rebels carried concealed cane bills (knives) into Fort Christiansvaern, killed several soldiers, and took control of the island’s central military installation. They held the fort for seven months, until the imperial powers put aside their differences and organized a joint expedition to defeat the mostly Coromantee rebels, who had in the meantime damaged or destroyed forty-eight plantations. In the aftermath, 146 slaves were implicated in the rising, and twenty-seven of those executed. It was a
lleged, in New York, that during this rising Will had killed several white men with his own hands. Will was banished from St. John, sold to a planter on the island of Antigua.

  Will did not wait long before beginning to plot again, for in 1735 the Akan-speaking slaves of Antigua combined with creole slaves in a plan to seize the island and make it their own. Unlike the rebels of St. John, the insurgents of Antigua never reached the stage of open action. An informer disclosed their plot, after which they were immediately rounded up and arrested. Imprisoned again and knowing that his failure to reform meant certain death, Will saved his own neck by turning state’s witness, giving evidence against numerous slaves and earning, briefly, a traitor’s reputation as he watched eighty-eight of his comrades be hanged, burned, and broken on the wheel. Along with forty-six others, Will was banished, sold this time to someone in New York, sold again to a new owner in Providence, Rhode Island, and then sold back once more to New York.

  Will played a pivotal part in the New York Conspiracy, bringing his West Indian expertise to bear. He was, after all, “very expert at plots, for this was the third time he had engaged in them,” as the court was at pains to point out. Will met, at Hughson’s and other places, with the slaves and the Irish soldiers, no doubt telling the gripping, bloody tales of his earlier exploits and explaining precisely what had gone wrong. He held up the courage of the plotters on Antigua as an example, claiming that “the negroes here were cowards” and “had no hearts as those at Antigua.” The plan of attack on Fort George may have owed something to Will’s experience at Fort Christiansvaern. Will even showed the other rebels how to make a dark lanthorn, “a light that no body should see it,” which made the nighttime work of conspiracy easier.60