by Mat Johnson
When McDonald spoke as much to the court, nothing was said about why Quack ran to find refuge in the kitchen after the ruckus had begun. No mention was made of the fact that Quack was not in actuality trying to storm the fort, but visit his wife. This was an investigation into neither the source nor the validity of the man's anger.
"Gentlemen," the prosecutor beseeched the court. "The monstrous ingratitude of this black tribe is what exceedingly aggravates their guilt. Their slavery among us is generally softened with great indulgence. They live without care, and are commonly better fed and clothed and put to less labour than the poor of most Christian countries."
Within the paradigm of the English language there are some acknowledged great words: Hypocrisy. Gall. Delusion. Perversion. Grotesquery.
Really, one can choose from any number of these words to give character to the views that were spewed on the part of the court that day. From a distance of centuries, however, their absurdity is overwhelming, breathtaking. What similar comments made by our own contemporary courts, politicians, and leaders of industry will strike similarly putrid chords centuries down the line? What will revolt our descendants as much as this bile meant to justify one of the greatest acts of inhumanity of the millennia?
"They are indeed slaves, but under the protection of the law, none can hurt them with impunity," the judge declared, as he and the court did just that. "They are really more happy in this place than in the midst of the continual plunder, cruelty, and rapine of their native countries. But notwithstanding all the kindness and tenderness with which they have been treated amongst us, yet this is the second attempt of the same kind, that this brutish and bloody species of mankind have made within one age."
The whites were indignant, generally confused. How could these black bastards be so ungrateful after all that had been done for them?
There were some things the jury would have no trouble deciding. They were out for mere minutes.
"You both now stand convicted of one of the most horrid and detestable pieces of villainy that ever Satan instilled into the heart of human creatures to put in practice," the third of the three judges took the initiative to address the now convicted. He was brimming with indignation at the Africans' lack of appreciation for the benevolence of their people's kidnapping, rape, and life imprisonment.
"Ye that were for destroying us without mercy, ye abject wretches, the outcasts of the nations of the earth, are treated here with tenderness and humanity. And I wish I could not say, with too great indulgence also, for you have grown wanton with excess liberty, and your idleness has proved your ruin, having given you the opportunities of forming this villainous and detestable conspiracy. A scheme compounded of the blackest and foulest vices, treachery, blood-thirstiness, and ingratitude. Be not deceived, God Almighty only can and will proportion punishments to men's offences."
The punishment of man assessed: Cuffee and Quack were to be taken the next day to the stake and burnt alive for their crimes against white people.
The crowd gathered for the execution was massive, overwhelming, boisterous. They had come to see blood, Negro blood, to see meat broiled on the bone. To witness the source of their suspicion and terror now burning itself in hateful fires. Despite the impending doom of the condemned, Cuffee and Quack's captors never ceased in trying to get the two men to confess to their crimes.
"Your eternal souls are in the balance," the white men in charge told them. "There is still a chance to save yourselves from such a horrific demise—or at least this day from it."
At about three o'clock, the two convicted were brought to the stake. The split wood was set out and piled high, ready to claim their bodies once they were tied above it. The people, many of whom had arrived hours before, were impatient, screaming at the top of their lungs for the show to begin, calling openly to the doomed men for retribution. Mr. Moore and Mr. John Roosevelt, a butcher at the Fly Market, led Cuffee and Quack to their fate, taking notice that both seemed as petrified about the upcoming event as the crowd seemed hungry for it. Sensing the two captives' willingness to talk, yet the reluctance of each to be the first to begin, their captors had the bright idea to break the two Africans up, and question them individually. It worked.
At the brink of being burned alive, and thinking that his fellow had already saved his own skin by declaiming freely, each man cracked, spewing desperate, last-second confessions. Their white captors struggled to hear their words over the bloodthirsty roar of the crowd. Dictating their admissions for prosperity as the mob screamed and waved for murder just beyond.
"John Hughson started everything," Quack cried, hoping against hope that this information would save him. " 'Twas Hughson that brought Caesar and Prince and Cuffee for the scheming of it, along and twenty others."
Those twenty other poor souls, the desperate Quack proceeded to doom one by one, providing their names to Butcher Roosevelt.
"Hughson wanted what the Negroes could bring to his house from the fires, bragging that he would bring in more enslaved by the boatload from the country to assist their plan."
Quack was asked, "What view did Hughson have in acting in this manner?"
"To make himself rich," came the African's desperate response. Quack said there were around fifty involved in the conspiracy, although he didn't have names for them all. For Sandy and Fortune, though, he had special admonishment.
"They were as involved as any, and that Sandy can name the Spanish Negroes who as a group had been involved."
As so many had accused him, Quack even admitted to the firing of the fort.
"At eight P.M. that night, with a lighted stick taken out of the servants' hall I did do it," Quack offered, convinced that nothing but a complete acceptance of guilt would do. "I went up the back stairs to a top bedroom, sticking it outside in a gutter."
Fearing for his own safety in this suspicious time, the sentry guard, John McDonald, emerged from the crowd and stormed the stage during the confession to demand his own name be cleared before these judges focused their mad gaze on him.
"Tell them! Tell them my own confession was honest," McDonald demanded of the condemned man.
"It was true, he told the truth," the broken Quack managed through his tears. "I also tried to light the fort up the night before the fire, on Saint Patrick's Day while the troops drank, but the firebrand I placed in the garret had failed to catch. But my wife, she is innocent. Please, sirs, she should be pardoned."
Cuffee's confession mirrored Quack's in regard to the guilt of Hughson, the size of the conspiracy, and the hypocritical nature of Fortune and Sandy, the latter of whom had ties to the Spanish Negroes. Cuffee added more to the post as well, including his own confession as to Philipse's storehouse.
"I ran from the boat I was working on when Adolph Philipse went to the coffeehouse, then sprint back to the storehouse with a lit ember held in my pocket inside an oyster shell. Then I placed it by the ropes and boards in the storehouse and then came running home again," he told them.
That was all good, but that was just the petty act of one slave toward his master, what of the great conspiracy?
"Many who had been planning are worried they will now be discovered because last winter a constable [Constable North, it was later identified] broke up our meeting at Hughson's and had seen all of us," Cuffee added.
In the end, as historical document, in the written accounts by their separate interrogators, Quack and Cuffee's confessions are so similar that it's clear that Butcher Roosevelt and Mr. Moore were checking each other's progress, putting them together to avoid contradiction.
Amid the yells and chaos, the stories given were considered satisfactory. As he had promised the terrified slaves, Mr. Moore asked the sheriff to delay the execution until the governor could be notified that the guilty parties were now turning into witnesses for the King. It seemed at last that Cuffee and Quack would be saved, having finally found a sliver of mercy in the white man's judicial system
While the crowd, ann
oyed by the delay, continued to roar, Mr. Moore met with His Honor to present this new situation. Unfortunately, before the two slaves could be removed from harm's way, the sheriff came to the decision that it didn't matter what the judge said or promised, informing Moore of his decision on his return.
"We can't do that," Moore argued. "We promised these boys we'd spare them if they talked."
"Do you see this crowd?" was the sheriff's argument. "Do you want to go out there and tell them their fun's been canceled?"
The mob wanted blood. Looking out at the ragtag assemblage, the brave officers of the court decided it would be in their best interest to give it to them.
So despite their confessions, it was back to the stake for Cuffee and Quack. Despite all their oath-breaking, backstabbing, and name-naming, the condemned had only bought themselves a few minutes more in their wretched existence.
The execution finally commenced, to the exuberant delight of the assembly who had come, after all, to rejoice in the spectacle, and the guilty relief of the cowards behind it. The wood was set ablaze, and the Africans' skin started roasting, as the men struggled on the stake to avoid the white cloud that enveloped and would suffocate them as their spirits left their scorched flesh.
Cuffee and Quack burned, painfully and publicly, betrayed and betrayers. They died, steamed by their own fluids, as they experienced a bit of that white benevolence that the court judge had just admonished them for spurning.
THIS IS THAT HUGHSON!
IF CAPTAIN LUSH dost not send us to our own country, we will ruin all the city. The first house we will burn will be his, spite him."
Sandy claimed he heard six of the Spanish Negroes saying as much as he was passing innocently by Captain Lush's home two weeks before the fort fire. It was in this way, he said, that he first discovered the plot.
"They did not see me, as I hid in a neighbor's doorway and listened," Sandy told the judges. His was an improbable story: Sandy contended that he had only just happened to be there, that the conspirators failed to check around them before having such a sensitive conversation, and even that these Spanish slaves would conspire in English.
After Saturday's excitement, Cuffee and Quack's charcoaled remains had cooled to the touch. The scent of meat that had been men lingered in the air causing still more tongues to loosen in the wake of its aroma. Monday began with a whole new round of storytelling, and Sandy was scrambling to pay for his life with any scrap of information in which the court might find interest. Now he told a grand tale of a conspiratorial meeting held by Jack at the home of his enslaver, Gerardus Comfort. This time Sandy just happened to be passing by when Jack called to him. To hear Sandy tell it, he was the quintessential innocent, an utterly passive fellow, fallen into the wrong crowd. In fact, he said he would not even drink with the others when offered.
In Sandy's version, six Spanish Negroes were present, along with a dozen other enslaved blacks, improbably packed into the small colonial room. Some of the names he recounted were of those already in jail or killed for their part, but there were some new names thrown in for good measure as well.
As the other conspirators looked on, Jack unfolded a dust cloth, revealing about a dozen knives. One by one, Sandy recalled, Jack started passing the knives around the room. The blades were old, poorly cared for, and covered in the brown decay of rust, looking like they'd been stored in a damp well for decades.
"What are these supposed to be? You couldn't cut porridge with this bunch," one of the enslaved complained.
Jack purportedly ignored the criticism, and kept delivering his favors across the room. "My knife is so sharp," he countered, "that if it came across a white man's head, it would cut it off."
Sandy said when Jack tried to hand him a blade, he told him, "If you want to fight, go to the Spaniards and not fight with your masters."
" Help me, we shall burn down the houses and take the city," Sandy swore Jack insisted of him.
Sandy told the court his response was to start crying.
" Damn you, do you cry?" Sandy said Jack responded. " I'll cut off your head in a hurry."
" He'd deserve it," Sandy recalled Sarah joined in, as the rest surrounded him,
"The plan will work and we will be victors," Jack insisted, "though I worry we won't have enough men till next year. So we shall do this as such: Each will burn down his own master's house before moving on to burn the rest," he instructed.
"We shall kill all the white men, and have their wives to ourselves," the others rejoiced.
" We must swear then, that if any of you discover, the first thunder that comes will strike you dead if you do not stand to your words," Sandy insisted Jack warned before the conspirators broke up and went their separate ways that evening.
Burk's Sarah, the only woman Sandy had named in the conspiracy, and the one of whom he had spoken so disparagingly, was pulled before the court for examination. Sarah's reaction to the line of questioning was to start uttering fierce denials.
According to Horsmanden, Sarah "threw herself into the most violent agitations; foamed at the mouth" as the judges tried to place her within the web of the plot. "A creature of outrageous spirit," Horsmanden pronounced her.
It wasn't until Sandy's denouncement of her was read back to the court that Sarah, realizing her predicament, joined in the spirit of things, and started naming slaves for the court to persecute next.
Fully aware what her fate would be if she did not cooperate, Sarah went from complete stalwart denial to naming more than thirty names over the course of the next few minutes. She named so many individuals that, when the group was read back to her, even she realized it wasn't even realistic, so promptly removed a dozen from the list.
By the end of the day on June i, 1741, fifty-six enslaved Africans had been incarcerated. Fifty-six people since the original arrests for that minor burglary now almost faded into the irrelevance. Each new person seized was made to understand that if they did not come up with a confession, they would pay the same price as the first four. Each new name named added to the court's list, meant the trial's scope was destined to keep growing.
And so it did.
Around the same time that June afternoon, the under-sheriff came down the hall with a message to the court recorder—none other than Daniel Horsmanden himself—that Hughson wanted to speak to one of the judges, he was finally ready to do some talking. Not sharing the information, Horsmanden chose to go to Hughson's jail cell himself a few hours later.
"What do you want with the judges?" Horsmanden demanded of him. He would not have these important gentlemen bothered, nor taken off track by mere unimportance.
"Is there a Bible? I desire to be sworn," Hughson said to him.
"No oath will be administered to you. If you have anything to say, you have free liberty to speak. You've lived a wicked life, John Hughson, doing wicked practices: debauching and corrupting of Negroes, and encouraging them to steal and pilfer from their masters and others. For shame, you showed your children so wicked an example, training them up in the highway to hell."
All this morality from a man who in later years would go on to marry a wealthy woman in her seventies just to pay off his personal debts.
"God will give you no mercy for this matter," Horsmanden concluded his lecture, telling the deflated Hughson the court would be offering no mercy either.
It was a screed that would ensure that no confession from John Hughson would follow, and none did. After Horsmanden's long speech had ended, Hughson was left to stare blankly at him through unseeing eyes.
Smiling softly, he now declared, "I know nothing of this conspiracy. With God as my witness."
* * *
John Hughson would have his voice heard soon enough, however, along with his wife, Sarah, and their daughter of the same name, as well as the tavern's boarder, Peggy Kerry. Just a few days later, on Thursday, the fourth of June, the group was escorted to court to face the charges against them.
"Not guilty," came back
their plea.
"You, the prisoners at the bar," the court clerk addressed them, "we must inform you that the law allows you the liberty of challenging peremptorily twenty of the jurors, if you have any dislike to them, and you need not give your reasons for doing so."
The prisoners decided amongst themselves that it would be John Hughson to do the challenging. Hughson, the only male, playing the role of patriarch, quickly showed how effective he would be in the group's defense when he decided to kick off the jury the lone young merchant amid a coterie of older, settled choices.
Peggy Kerry immediately objected to his action. "You've challenged one of the best of them all!" she fumed in disgust, causing laughter among the spectators close by enough to hear her.
The indictments were now set forth. The three adults stood accused of consorting with Negroes, gathering them in a conspiracy to burn the city down and kill its inhabitants. It was time for the case to begin in full. Rumors and accusations had flown freely in regard to John Hughson and his cohorts for months, but now the day of reckoning had finally arrived. The prosecutor knew the crowd's anticipation and preconceptions, knew how to harness them.
"Gentlemen," the prosecutor exhorted, "such a monster will this Hughson appear before you, that for the sake of the plunder he expected by setting in flames the King's house, and this whole city, and by effusion of the blood of his neighbors, he murderous and remorseless he! [sic] counseled and encourage the committing of all these most astonishing deeds of darkness, cruelty, and inhumanity—Infamous Hughson!"
The tiny hairs on the back of the neck of his listeners rose to attention at the enormity of it all.
"Gentlemen, this is that Hughson! Whose name and most detestable conspiracies will no doubt be had in everlasting remembrance, to his eternal reproach; and stand recorded to latest posterity. This is the man! This that grand incendiary! That arch rebel against God, his king, and his country! The Devil incarnate, and chief agent of the old Abaddon of the internal pit, and Geryon of darkness."
