The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  For Will and many others, New York was a sort of penal colony in disguise; southern and West Indian planters had surreptitiously made it so. But New York’s rulers found them out, discovering in their midst an unknowable but significant number of slaves who were experienced in the ways of resistance. As it happened, New York’s merchants had been importing not only sugar, molasses, and slaves on their vessels but the literally explosive class relations of the slaveowning regions to the south—regions that had for several years witnessed a ferocious cycle of rebellion that featured prominently both arson and insurrection. The importation of such experience of rebellion—and the dawning recognition of its dangers—constituted the rational basis of New York’s hysteria in 1741.

  INSURRECTION AND IMPERIAL RIVALRY

  Many of the conditions for insurrection were present in New York in 1741. The city’s ruling class was divided and squabbling; a hard winter had caused misery for many; and war had broken out with Spain, increasing hardship all around and weakening military defenses when six hundred able-bodied men were shipped overseas to support the war effort. One conspirator, London, had advised some of his fellow insurrectionists that “now was the best time to do something, it being war time.” Moreover, as we have seen, New York’s slave traders had inadvertently brought to the city a motley crew of experienced veterans—insurrectionists such as Will, who brought their knowledge of the Caribbean cycle of rebellion of the 1730s and 1740s, and soldiers such as William Kane, Juan de la Sylva, and the numerous Coromantees, who brought their knowledge of war and military organization from Ireland, Cuba, and West Africa.61

  Even though Albany believed “an hundred and fifty men might take this city” (he chose roughly the same number that had been involved in the uprising in Will’s St. John), the plotters knew from the beginning that the success of their insurrection would depend on support—local (in New York), regional (in the surrounding countryside), and international (from Britain’s imperial rivals, Spain and France). Hughson saw the insurrection as a rising of the mob, wherein early successes would draw more supporters to the cause. Another source of support would be people, both black and white, from the outlying areas, especially “country negroes” such as Jamaica and several sailors who had attended meetings at Hughson’s. Comfort’s Jack had brought his rural relatives into the plot. Peg Kerry explained that the urban rebels “were to be joined by the country negroes” after the fires were set. Arson did indeed light up the countryside on Long Island and in New Jersey after the burning of Fort George.62

  The most important assistance would come from Britain’s imperial enemies, France or particularly Spain, for like the maroons of Jamaica, the rebels in New York planned to link their uprising from within to an invasion from without. The New York Weekly Journal made the point clearly: “The Spanish Negroes (of which there are many in this Place) were deeply concerned and active in the Business; and whatever Encouragement or Assurances they might receive from abroad, or hellish incendiaries at home, they were perswaded that an Attempt on this Province would be made by the Spaniards and French, for whom they agreed to wait some Time; and if it should happen that such an Attempt should be made, and our Enemies invade us, they were to rise and join with them.” A leader among the African Americans in the plot, Bastian, had the same understanding: “They had a parcel of good hands, Spanish Negroes, five or six of them (then present) who would join with the York Negroes: that they expected that war would be proclaimed in a little time against the French, and that the French and Spaniards would come here.” Trial records indicate that at least ten other conspirators saw matters the same way. Primus had heard that the French and Spanish were coming and that the rebels would assist them in taking the city. Kortrecht’s Caesar heard from Jack that “the Spaniards were coming here, and the negroes were going to rise, and would help the Spaniards.” Scipio also expected the French and the Spanish to invade, “and then would be a fair opportunity”: “they might all be free men.” The fires might be the beacon of insurrection, signaling to a Spanish flotilla offshore that the time for attack had arrived; or perhaps Spain would learn about the destruction of Fort George and then decide on its own to invade. The soldiers and sailors of New Spain would help the rebels to seize the city (which had, after all, already changed imperial hands once, from Dutch to English, in recent memory), or failing that, they would “carry them off into another country, and make them a free people.” In any case, the rebels would win freedom for themselves, and Spain would protect that freedom.63

  The references to Spain, in New York and throughout the cycle of rebellion of the 1730s and 1740s, bespoke a truth well understood at the time but seldom emphasized since. The slaves of the anglophone Atlantic often saw Spain as a liberator, not least because of the tradition of Spanish abolitionism. When Bastian told other conspirators that Spain might guarantee their eventual freedom, it was no idle fantasy, for Spain had already done just that for many people of African descent in the New World. Indeed, the Hispanic sailors were, by their own claims to freedom, living, breathing instances of liberation, there to confirm the possibilities that lay in New Spain. It was widely known that the Spanish king had aggressively enticed the slaves of English masters with royal cédulas in 1733 and 1740, promising first limited freedom and then full freedom to anyone who escaped an English for a Spanish settlement. New Spain’s officials in Florida followed through on the promise by creating an official maroon village on the northern edge of their settlement, called Gracia Real Santa Teresa de Mose, where a hundred runaways, mostly from Carolina, were settled and transformed into a first line of defense against English attacks from the north. Spain had also for years been encouraging the maroons of Britain’s Caribbean colonies, as New York’s many Jamaican slaves knew well. It was an accident of history, though a fateful one, that Afro-Cubans and Afro-Jamaicans conversed about freedom in New York in 1741, just as they had done when communicating across the waters between Cuba and Jamaica in the 1730s.64

  More important still was that Spanish officials consciously planned to use agents such as the Hispanic sailors to foster slave revolt in English dominions in North America by late 1742, or perhaps even earlier. Juan Francisco de Güemes, governor general of Cuba, wrote to Manuel de Montiano, governor of Florida, to explain an imminent military action: three thousand Cuban soldiers would attack South Carolina between April and June 1742, unleashing a force of “negroes of all languages” to filter through the countryside, promising land and freedom to the slaves of English masters and inciting revolt throughout the province. The agitators and organizers of insurrection were to be not priests, as the paranoid Protestants of New York thought, but rather former slaves, who would operate through precisely the kinds of networks that existed in New York.65

  And yet the insurrection in New York failed. It is impossible to know exactly what went wrong, but there is evidence to suggest that Quack burned the fort several weeks too early, catching everyone off guard and causing the carefully laid plans to unfold in a chaotic series of small fires, as the rebels did what they could to carry out the long-plotted uprising. Quack had been voted by his fellow conspirators “to be the person who should fire the fort” because his wife worked there as cook for the governor, which meant that he had the requisite knowledge of and access to that most strategic of places. Unfortunately for the rebels, Quack soon got into trouble with the authorities; he was prohibited from visiting his wife and banned from the fort. Acting in anger and apparently motivated by a desire for personal revenge, Quack broke discipline and set the first fire prematurely, on March 17. Several sources—including one rebel’s saying to another who set a fire, “You should not have done it till we were all ready”—indicated that the fires were scheduled to be set instead in early May, at the very moment when a flotilla of five Spanish privateers arrived off the coast, having captured eight prize vessels along the way and in so doing panicked the rulers of New York. The ships’ arrival coincided with the trials of John Hughson, Peg Ke
rry, Cuffee, and Quack.66

  REBELLION OF THE HANGED

  The multiracial waterfront posed a political problem for New York’s rulers. The cooperative nature of work in the port had created dangerous insurrectionary connections between slaves of African descent—men such as Gwin and Cuffee—and “the most flagitious, degenerated, and abandoned, and scum and dregs of the white population,” represented by John Hughson and Peg Kerry. The love story alluded to at the outset of this chapter was an instance of the human solidarity that developed in the plot. Colonel Thomas Rainborough had warned at Putney that care must be taken to choose the right mother and father. Solidarity was not restricted to the genetic nuclear family, nor could it be so restricted among “outcasts.” As Francis spoke of the “sisters” of her spiritual community, so the Irish soldiers called one another “brother.” The love of John Gwin and Peg Kerry thus paralleled a broader alliance.67

  The authorities approached the solidarity with a trident in hand, each of its points carefully sharpened to puncture the prevailing multiracial practices and bonds of proletarian life in Atlantic New York. First they went after the taverns and other settings where “cabals” of poor whites and blacks could be formed and subversive plans disseminated. Next they self-consciously recomposed the proletariat of New York to make it more difficult for workers along the waterfront to find among themselves sources of unity. And finally, they endeavored to teach racial lessons to New York’s people of European descent, promoting a white identity that would transcend and unify the city’s fractious ethnic divisions. Let us treat these three major consequences of the conspiracy of 1741 in turn.

  Both during and after the trials for conspiracy, New York’s men in ruffles attacked the city’s low tippling houses, criminalizing black-white cooperation and controlling the sites where multiracial conspiracies might unfold. Horsmanden urged “diligent inquiry into the economy and behaviour of all the mean ale-houses and tipling house within this city,” especially those that entertained “negroes, and the scum and dregs of white people in conjunction.” Such establishments encouraged theft and debauchery, but even worse, they provided “opportunities for the most loose, debased and abandoned wretches amongst us to cabal and confederate together, and ripen themselves in these schools of mischief, for the execution of the most daring and detestable counterprizes: I fear there are yet many of these houses amongst us, and they are the bane and pest of the city; it was such that gave the opportunity of breeding this most horrid and execrable conspiracy.” Horsmanden was right: mean alehouses such as Hughson’s, where the wretched of many colors and nations gathered, were indeed schools. These were places where such people told their Atlantic tales, yarns, and stories, their oral histories and lore of insurrection.68

  The second major policy change was not a matter of governmental action but rather a series of private business decisions taken by the merchants of New York. In what may constitute the strongest evidence of the related Caribbean and insurrectionary dimensions of the conspiracy, the city’s big merchants responded to the upheaval by restructuring their slave trade, sending many more of their ships directly to Africa, and many fewer down the coastal/Caribbean route, in search of slaves. Partly this was a response to a growing demand for slaves in South Carolina and Jamaica after the economic slump of the 1730s had passed. But it was also a collective recognition by merchants that their earlier business practices had endangered their own base of accumulation. Before 1741 they had imported seven out of every ten slaves from the regions to the south, and only three of ten from Africa. After 1741 they reversed the ratio, bringing seven of ten slaves directly from Africa and only three of ten from plantation regions to their south. As James G. Lydon has written, “The full range of reasons for this shift from dependence upon indirect sources to direct importations from Africa is difficult to establish, but the slave plot at New York in 1741 appears to have been quite important.” Fears about the importation of “incorrigible slaves,” or “malcontents,” concludes Lydon, “may well have dictated this shift in the city’s trading pattern.” New York merchants realized that the commodity was not always what it seemed: they had imported aboard their ships not just the scarred, beaten bodies of West Indian slaves but within those another bloody body of ideas and practices of insurrection. They would, in recognition of this fundamental fact, seek to recompose the proletariat of New York, counting at least in part on the linguistic and cultural barriers of African ethnicity to ensure social peace.69

  The third major response to the events of 1741 was the promotion of a white identity designed to cut across and unite a variety of ethnicities. Of course many New Yorkers, people in ruffles as well as negrophobic artisans, had long taken whiteness for granted. But to those who gathered at Hughson’s, the “white people” were, in code or cant, the rich, the people with money, not simply the ones with a particular phenotype of skin color. Racial typing in New York remained fluid, open, often ambiguous. The lovers John Gwin and Peg Kerry typified and exploited the ambiguity: Gwin used an Irish name, pretending to be a soldier at Fort George; “Negro Peg” complained about “that bitch” Mary Burton, who had implicated her in several thefts and thereby “made me as black as the rest.” The slave Tom described his recruitment into the conspiracy in a way that would have been impossible a generation later: “The white men wanted him to join to help kill the white people.”70 The “white” David Johnson rose before an assembly at Hughson’s, can of punch in hand, and pledged “to burn the town, and kill as many white people as he could.”71

  Ruling whites reacted to the racial fluidity within the conspiracy with terror and mercy, the combination of which was meant to produce new discipline and a different solidarity. First they demonized the people of European descent who were involved in the plot: Hughson and his ilk were said to be “monsters in nature,” the very “disgrace of their complexion”; indeed, they were “much worse than the negroes.” Hughson himself was “blacker than a negro”: he was “the scandal of his complexion, and the disgrace of human nature!” Such language predicted a violent fate, and four Euramericans were accordingly hanged; others were forced into military service in the West Indies, and still others banished from the province. Another six, however, were quietly and mercifully discharged by the court, almost without comment. The decision to let them go was expressed in a simple notation in the trial records: “No person appearing to prosecute.” This, too, was a message for and about “whites.” New York’s rulers thus divided and weakened the proletariat as they unified and strengthened a fictive community based on whiteness.72

  And yet when Horsmanden and his like tried to use the trial and the executions to popularize lessons about race, about the unifying advantages of whiteness, the rebels, even in death, refused to cooperate. After Hughson was hanged, his corpse was gibbeted so as to offer moral instruction to anyone who dared to betray his or her race. So, too, was the corpse of John Gwin/Caesar strung up in chains, so that people of African descent would think at least twice before challenging the system of slavery in New York. Both, so the message went, would be punished into the afterlife. But curious things began to happen. Within three weeks after the hanging, Hughson’s remains—his “face, hands, neck, and feet”—had turned “a deep shining black,” while the hair of his “beard and neck (his head could not be seen for he had a cap on) was curling like the wool of a negro’s beard and head.” Moreover, “the features of his face” had assumed “the symmetry of a negro beauty; the nose broad and flat, the nostrils open and extended, the mouth wide, lips full and thick.” Gwin/Caesar, in contrast, in life “one of the darkest hue of his kind,” had in death undergone the opposite transformation: his face “was at the time somewhat bleached or turned whitish.”

  In the end, it was said, “Hughson was turned negro, and Vaarck’s Caesar a white”; they had “changed colours.” New Yorkers “were amazed at these appearances”—and not least of all Daniel Horsmanden, who once upon a time had described an impossible task by sa
ying, “The Ethiopian might as soon change his skin.” Word of what had happened to the bodies of Hughson and Gwin spread far and wide, “engaged the attention of many, and drew numbers of all ranks, who had curiosity, to the gibbets, for several days running, in order to be convinced by their own eyes, of the reality of things so confidently reported to be.” Seeing was believing, and many accounted the transformations “wondrous phenomenons.” Others spectators “were ready to resolve them into miracles.” Rebels to the end, Gwin and Hughson thus took some last revenge against the white people in wigs and ruffles. Even their dead bodies were capable of subversion.73

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Motley Crew in the American Revolution

  IN OCTOBER 1765 a mob of sailors wearing blackface and masks, armed with clubs and cutlasses, visited the home of a wealthy Charleston merchant named Henry Laurens. Eighty strong and warm with drink and anger, they had come to protest the Stamp Act, recently passed by Parliament to raise tax revenues in the American colonies. Responding to the rumor that Laurens had stored in his home the stamped paper everyone would be forced to buy in order to conduct the business of daily life, they chanted, “Liberty, Liberty, & Stamp’d Paper,” and demanded that he turn it over so that they could destroy it in an act of defiance. Laurens was rattled, as he later explained: they “not only menaced very loudly but now & then handled me pretty uncouthly.” Finally convinced that Laurens did not have the paper, the men dispersed across the waterfront, shedding their disguises and straggling into the smoky taverns and bare boardinghouses, onto the damp wharves and creaky ships.