The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  67. Horsmanden, Journal, 82, 411.

  68. Ibid., 389, 411–12. The authorities also regulated the city’s wells, where drawers of water had exchanged plans and news of the insurrection.

  69. Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade,” 378, 388. For a similar response by South Carolina’s slave traders and owners, see Darold D. Wax, “‘The Great Risque We Run’: The Aftermath of Slave Rebellion at Stono, South Carolina, 1739–1745,” Journal of Negro History 67 (1982): 136–47.

  70. “Petition of Sundry Coopers of New York touching Negroes in the Trade,” 1743, Parish Transcripts, folder 156, f. 1; Horsmanden, Journal, 19, 16; 309; 49; 311. It is important to remember that “white” as a cultural definition was relatively new, having made its first official appearance in the North American continent (in Virginia) only in 1680. The dichotomy of white and black began slowly to replace the older dichotomies of cultural difference such as English/African, Christian/pagan or heathen, and civilized/savage. See Jordan, White over Black, 95.

  71. Horsmanden, Journal, 346; 284; 81; 101; 282; 54; 311, 309.

  72. Ibid., 12, 82, 137, 383, 419, 431. The long-term successes of teaching “whiteness” in New York can be seen in the publication history of the legal documents surrounding the trials. The first edition of Horsmanden’s collection was, as noted above, entitled A 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. Originally published in New York in 1744 and republished in London in 1747, the volume, through its title, made “Some White People” central actors in the conspiracy and refused, moreover, to make “negro” and “slave” perfect equivalents, for there were “other” slaves (Indians, to be precise) also involved in the plot. The next edition, which appeared in 1810, was called The New-York Conspiracy, or a History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings against the Conspirators at New-York in the Years 1741–2. Later in the nineteenth century, the event came to be known as simply the Great Negro Plot, the very name of which thus erased the participation of the conspirators of European (or Native American) descent.

  73. Horsmanden, Journal, 273, 11, 276.

  Chapter Seven

  1. Henry Laurens to J. B., Esq., 26 Oct. 1765, Laurens to John Lewis Gervais, 29 January 1766, and Laurens to James Grant, 31 January 1766, all in George C. Rogers, Jr., David R. Chesnutt, and Peggy J. Clark, eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens (Columbia, S. C: University of South Carolina Press, 1968–), 5:38–40, 53–54, 60; Bull quoted in Pauline Maier, “The Charleston Mob and the Evolution of Popular Politics in Revolutionary South Carolina, 1765–1784,” Perspectives in American History 4 (1970): 176.

  2. Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter WMQ), 3d ser, 25 (1968): 371–407; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 5.

  3. Dora Mae Clark, “The Impressment of Seamen in the American Colonies,” Essaysin Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by His Students (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1931), 217; Richard Pares, “The Manning of the Navy in the West Indies, 1702–1763,” Royal Historical Society Transactions 20 (1937): 48–49; Daniel Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 162.

  4. Peter Warren to the Duke of Newcastle, 18 June 1745, in Julian Gwyn, ed., The Royal Navy and North America: The Warren Papers, 1736–1752 (London: Navy Records Society, 1973), 126.

  5. Charles Knowles to ?, 15 October 1744, Admiralty Papers (hereafter ADM) 1/2007, f. 135, Public Record Office, London; “The Memorial of Captain Charles Knowles” (1743), ADM 1/2006; Peter Warren to Thomas Corbert, 2 June 1746, in Gwyn, ed., The Warren Papers, 262.

  6. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936, 1970), 2:330–31; William Shirley to Lords of Trade, 1 December 1747, Shirley to Duke of Newcastle, 31 December 1747, Shirley to Josiah Willard, 19 November 1747, all in Charles Henry Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts and Military Commander of America, 1731–1760 (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 1:415, 416, 417, 418, 421, 422; John Lax and William Pencak, “The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740s in Massachusetts,” Perspectives in American History 19 (1976): 182, 186 (Knowles quoted, our emphasis), 205, 214; Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), 41, 39; William Roughead, ed., Trial of Captain Porteous (Toronto: Canada Law Book Co., 1909), 103.

  7. Lax and Pencak, “The Knowles Riot,” 199; John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Palo Alto, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1936), 15–16.

  8. Independent Advertiser, 4 January 1748; Shirley to Lords of Trade, 1 December 1747, in Correspondence of William Shirley, 1:412; Resolution of the Boston Town Meeting, 20 November 1747, and Resolution of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, 19 November 1747, both in the Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 21 December 1747; Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts Bay, 2:332; William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North America (Boston, 1749), 254–55; Independent Advertiser, 28 August 1749; Amicus Patriae, An Address to the Inhabitants of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay in New-England; More Especially, To the Inhabitants of New England; Occasioned by the late Illegal and Unwarrantable Attack upon their Liberties (Boston, 1747), 4.

  9. Independent Advertiser, 8 February 1748; 6 March 1749; 18 April 1748; 25 January 1748; 14 March 1748; 11 January 1748.

  10. Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (Boston, 1750), reprinted in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution: 1750–1776, vol. 1, 1750–1765 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 213–247; Charles W. Akers, Called unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew, 1720–1766 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 53, 67, 84.

  11. Lord Colvill to Philip Stephens, 9 September 1764 and 30 November 1764, ADM 1/482, ff. 386, 417–419; Neil R. Stout, “Manning the Royal Navy in North America, 1763–1775,” American Neptune 23 (1963): 175.

  12. Rear Admiral Colvill to Mr. Stephens, 26 July 1764, in John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England (Providence: Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1861), 6:428–29; Thomas Hill, “Remarks on board His Maj [esty]’s Schooner St. John in Newport Harbour Rhode Island,” ADM 1/482, f. 372; Thomas Langhorne to Lord Colvill, 11 August 1764, ADM 1/482, f. 377. See also Newport Mercury, 23 July 1764; Colvill to Stephens, 12 January 1765, ADM 1/482, f. 432.

  13. Governor Samuel Ward to Captain Charles Antrobus, 12 July 1765, in Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, 6:447; Lords of Admiralty to Mr. Secretary Conway, 20 March 1766, in Joseph Redington, ed., Calendar of Home Office Papers of the Reign of George III, 1766–1768 (London, 1879), 2:26; Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts Bay, 3:138; Donna J. Spindel, “Law and Disorder: The North Carolina Stamp Act Crisis,” North Carolina Historical Review 57 (1980): 10–11; Pennsylvania Journal, 26 December 1765; Adair and Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin, 69; Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets,” 392; David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760–1776 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1958), 157; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 63.

  14. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “strike”; C. R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations, 1717–1800 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 154–70; Oliver M. Dickerson, The N
avigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), 218–19.

  15. J. Cunningham, An Essay on Trade and Commerce (London, 1770), 52, 58. On Wilkes, see Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 162–69; George Rude, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763–1774 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

  16. Nauticus, The Rights of the Sailors Vindicated, In Answer to a Letter of Junius, on the 5th of October, wherein he asserts The Necessity and Legality of pressing men into the Service of the Navy (London, 1772); William Ander Smith, “Anglo-Colonial Society and the Mob, 1740–1775” (Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School and University Center, 1965), 108; Nicholas Rogers, “Liberty Road: Opposition to Impressment in Britain during the War of American Independence,” in Colin Howell and Richard Twomey, eds., Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991), 53–75.

  17. Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp (1820); Edward Lascelles, Granville Sharp and the Freedom of Slaves in England (London: Oxford University Press, 1928); John Fielding, Penal Laws (London, 1768).

  18. R. Barrie Rose, “A Liverpool Sailors’ Strike in the Eighteenth Century,” Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 68 (1958): 85, 89, 85–92; “Extract of a Letter from Liverpool, Sept. 1, 1775,” The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 5 September 1775, republished in Richard Brooke, Liverpool as it was during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth century, 1775 to 1800 (Liverpool, 1853), 332.

  19. A Letter To the Right Honourable The Earl of T—e: or, the Case of J—W—s, Esquire (London, 1768), 22, 39; Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 161; Adair and Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin, 56; The Trial at Large of James Hill . . ., Commonly known by the Name of John the Painter . . ., 2d edition (London, 1777).

  20. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island; Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government (London, 1774), 2:462; Mervyn Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture (London: Pluto, 1988), chap. 4.

  21. Douglas Hall, ed., In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 106; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 125–39.

  22. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:460; Hall, ed., In Miserable Slavery, 98. Sailors in the Royal Navy, it should be noted, did apparently assist in putting down the rebellion in a couple of areas. See Craton, Testing the Chains, 136, 132–33.

  23. J. Philmore, Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade (London, 1760), 9, 7, 8, 10, 14; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), and idem, “New Sidelights on Early Antislavery Radicalism,” WMQ, 3d ser., 28 (1971): 585–94.

  24. Philmore, Two Dialogues, 45, 51, 54; Anthony Benezet, A Short Account of that Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes . . . (Philadelphia, 1762); idem, Some Historical Account of Guinea (Philadelphia, 1771); D. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 332.

  25. James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764), republished in Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1:419–82; Boston News-Letter, 19 June, 10 July, 18 September, and 30 October 1760, 2 February 1761.

  26. Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 10:247, 272, 314–16; Adair and Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin, 35.

  27. Craton, Testing the Chains, 138, 139, 140; O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 73.

  28. See Peter Wood, “‘Taking Care of Business’ in Revolutionary South Carolina: Republicanism and the Slave Society,” in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 276, and idem, “‘The Dream Deferred’: Black Freedom Struggles on the Eve of White Independence,” in Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 170, 172–73, 174–75; Jeffrey J. Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802,” WMQ, 3d ser., 37 (1980): 85–86; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943, 1974), 87, 200–202; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 14.

  29. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 38, 61–62, 202.

  30. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 72; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 84; Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets,” 375; Shane White, “‘We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings’: Free Blacks in New York City, 1783–1810,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 453–54; Ira Dye, “Early American Merchant Seafarers,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120 (1976): 358; Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History, new ser., 1 (1984): 200; Wood, “‘Taking Care of Business,’” in Crow and Tise, eds., The Southern Experience, 276; Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness,” 85; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 18 June and 23 June 1775, in Papers of Laurens, 10:184, 191.

  31. F. Nwabueze Okoye, “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries,” WMQ, 3d ser., 37 (1980): 12; Anthony Benezet to Granville Sharp, 29 March 1773, in Roger Bruns, ed., Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688–1788 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977), 263.

  32. John M. Bumsted and Charles E. Clark, “New England’s Tom Paine: John Allen and the Spirit of Liberty,” WMQ, 3d ser., 21 (1964): 570; Bruns, ed., Am I Not a Man and a Brother, 257–62; Thomas Paine, “African Slavery in America” (1775), in Philip S. Foner, The Collected Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 17, 19. Wood, “The Dream Deferred,” 168, 181.

  33. Sharon Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Indentured Servitude in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 101–2; Morgan, “Black Life,” 206–7, 219.

  34. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, “Political Mobs and the American Revolution, 1765–1776,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 99 (1955): 244–50; Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets”; Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” WMQ, 3d ser., 27 (1970): 3–35; Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977).

  35. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts Bay, 2:332; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1955), 309; Jeremiah Morgan to Francis Fauquier, 11 September 1767, ADM 1/2116; Miller, Sam Adams, 142; Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets,” 386, 391; Colden to General Gage, 8 July 1765, in Colden Letterbooks, Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, 1760–1765, Collections of the New-York Historical Society (1877), 23; Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 113.

  36. Oliver Morton Dickerson, ed., Boston Under Military Rule, 1768–1769, as revealed in A Journal of the Times (Boston: Chapman and Grimes, Mount Vernon Press, 1936), entry for 4 May 1769, 94, 95, 110; John Allen, Oration on the Beauties of Liberty (1773), in Bruns, ed., Am I Not a Man, 258, 259 (emphasis in original).

  37. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 366; Schlesinger, “Politica
l Mobs,” 244; Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 162, 208, 231–39; Adair and Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin, 51.

  38. Hutchinson quoted in Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 66; Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics, 105; Redington, ed., Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1:610; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 196; Lloyd I. Rudolph, “The Eighteenth-Century Mob in America and Europe,” American Quarterly 11 (1959): 452; Spindel, “Law and Disorder,” 8; Pennsylvania Journal, 21 November and 26 December 1765; Alfred F. Young, “English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,” in Margaret Jacob and James Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 193–94; Gage quoted in Schlesinger, “Political Mobs,” 246.

  39. Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets,” 398; Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics, 156, 159, 164.

  40. Lee R. Boyer, “Lobster Backs, Liberty Boys, and Laborers in the Streets: New York’s Golden Hill and Nassau Street Riots,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 57 (1973): 289–308; Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970); L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., Legal Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 3:266; Hoerder, Crowd Action, chap. 13.