Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  Young men from the mainland also went to the West Indies to find wealthy creole wives with whom they could increase their property and enlarge their commercial networks. Philip Livingston, son of the first lord of the manor, dispatched his sons, William and Henry, to Antigua and Jamaica. Peter and Philip Livingston both worked in Jamaica. The younger Philip Livingston met his wife in Jamaica, as did Henry Cruger Sr. His sons Tileman and Nicholas Cruger married women from Curaçao and St. Croix, respectively. Armed with family wealth and often college educations, these young traders headed south to expand their fortunes. Other merchant sons were also in the Caribbean. Gedney Clarke Jr. was in Barbados, William Lloyd operated in Jamaica, DePeyster and Duyckinck houses opened in Curaçao, and David Beekman kept a plantation and merchant house in St. Croix.12

  THE BLOODY JOURNEY TO PROSPERITY

  In the late summer of 1730 John Walter of New York and Arnot Schuyler of New Jersey contracted with Captain Jasper Farmar for a slaving mission. They had just finished building Catherine, and they registered it within weeks of its maiden voyage. Farmar piloted the ship to the Angola coast, where European and American traders were partnering with the dominant kingships, supplying them with arms and keeping up with their demands for and tastes in foreign goods. Trade shifted these coastal economies from fishing and agriculture to slaving. New York merchants were regular clients who made Angola the most important trading center in West Africa by the latter part of the eighteenth century. Atlantic merchants carried more than two and a half million people from this region, about 40 percent of all the enslaved Africans traded that century. Farmar returned on September 27, 1731, paying dues on one hundred and thirty people at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and New York City, but Catherine could hold almost twice as many captives as he reported. The captain logged the deaths of thirty African people.13

  Even the statistics from well-documented journeys are imperfect. Deaths that occurred before ships departed Africa often went unrecorded, transatlantic mortality rates were high and the causes of death frequently unnoted, and merchants routinely underreported their human cargoes to avoid duties in the Americas. Enslaved people were physically and emotionally compromised by the time they were loaded into ships, having survived violent acquisitions from kidnappings and raids. Long marches to the coast and confinement while local dealers waited for slave ships left captives malnourished and ill.14

  Lengthy imprisonments in narrow, cramped, and filthy holds accelerated the spread of diseases during return voyages that lasted several weeks. The poor diet provided the captives delivered few nutrients. A year before Catherine’s first voyage, a ship’s surgeon had complained that mashed beans or peas mixed with salted, rotting fish and fed, sometimes forcibly, to the Africans on his ships further undermined their health. Dehydration was a primary cause of death. A pint of water, a standard daily ration, and water from meals failed to compensate for the loss of water from perspiration, vomiting, and diarrhea. Physical exhaustion and dehydration could bring changes in mental health ranging from depression to delirium. Medical technologies enhanced these threats to life. Common treatments such as bleeding, purging, and administering enemas compounded dehydration, sapped nutrients, and further weakened victims. Those who survived transport found themselves in British plantations where they confronted frequent epidemics and innumerable other risks.15

  Farmar’s notes suggest a combination of problems during his journeys. In August 1732 John Walter partnered with John, Peter, and Adoniah Schuyler to send Catherine on a second slaving expedition, again under Captain Farmar’s command. Skilled captains were prized, and Farmar had proved himself worthy. Patrolling the coast of Angola, Farmar and the crew bought 257 children, women, and men, although he paid duties on only half that number when he returned to New Jersey in July 1733. His log also contains the death record for the last five months of the mission. It begins, “Died One Woman Slave” and continues: “a man slave … a woman … a Boy … a fine Manboy … a fine young man … a man … a man … a man … a man … a girl … a man … a man … a Large Boy … a Boy … a Boy … a girl … a young man … a young woman … 2 boys … a Boy … 2 Boys … 3 Men [and] 1 Boy … a Girl … a Boy.” Farmar, Walter, and the Schuylers’ enterprise killed thirty people, including several people who died after the ship reached Perth Amboy.16

  MERCHANT METROPOLIS

  The unfree population of the Mid-Atlantic and New England grew with this trade. The number of black people in New York City had doubled to more than fifteen hundred between the end of Royal African’s monopoly and the launch of Captain Farmar’s first slaving voyage. In April 1712, thirty enslaved Africans and a few Spanish Indians revolted in New York City and killed nine white people. The rebels included people recently imported from Africa and a larger number of slaves born in the American colonies. The “Spanish Indians” were captives from Native nations allied to Spain during the colonial wars in Florida and the Caribbean. The government responded to the uprising with punishments designed to terrorize unfree people and laws to protect against future rebellions. The Common Council set curfews on enslaved adults. It imposed penalties on masters and mistresses who failed to properly govern their slaves. The colony sought to keep cash and weapons out of the hands of slaves. Colonists were prohibited from privately trading or contracting with enslaved people. Africans were forbidden from gathering in groups greater than three. Legislators also displayed a growing mistrust of free black people, whom they described as a constant source of danger. The black population continued to grow. A decade after Jasper Farmar’s first Africa voyage there were more than two thousand people of African descent in Manhattan, a fifth of the city’s population.17

  On a Sunday early in February 1741, several enslaved black men pitched pennies in Captain Jasper Farmar’s yard. Jack (Farmar) organized the game, but, according to later testimony, it was a ruse that Kingston (unknown), Peter (Tudor), York (Debrosse), Tom (Bradt), Oronoko (Marston), and their partners used to coordinate one branch of a conspiracy that shocked New York City. Philip (Duyckink) admitted to being there but swore that he had heard no talk of revolt or of “the Long-Island negroes coming over to assist the New-York negroes in killing the white people.” Tom testified that Jack had forced him into the plot. Jack confessed to gambling but denied the conspiracy. Jasper Farmar undoubtedly was surprised to discover that his slave and his house were at the center of a massive intrigue. A decade after his first Africa voyage, Captain Farmar lived comfortably on Manhattan island. He had brought hundreds of enslaved Africans into the New York market in less than three years, and he owned several human beings.18

  On March 18 a fire burned the roof of the governor’s residence in Fort George. Exactly one week later, the roof of a house in the southwest district of the city burned. On April 1, another week later, a fire destroyed Winant Van Zant’s warehouse on the east side of the city. On Saturday, April 4, townspeople rushed to a fire in a cow stable on the west side of town. Just as they brought it under control, they were called to a blaze in the loft of Ben Thomas’s house. The following morning someone found coals under a haystack near Joseph Murray’s coach house on Broadway. On Monday morning a fire erupted in the chimney of a house at Fort Garden. At noon residents saved a house near the Fly Market from burning. That afternoon flames shot up the side of one of Adolph Philipse’s storehouses.19

  Scholars have vigorously debated the existence of this plot. Rivalries and lingering grievances among the elite influenced the events. Justice Daniel Horsmanden, who published the only complete account of the trials, seized upon the alleged conspiracy to raise his political profile. White people’s insecurities and vulnerabilities predisposed them to fear and see a conspiracy in the events of March and April. Residents of the city had suffered food shortages following a severe winter, depressed commerce, and a drain on manpower and resources due to the Anglo-Spanish War in the Caribbean. A succession of revolts and conspiracies heightened their fears. Many New Yorkers remembered the uprising of 17
12, and authorities investigated another plot less than a decade later. In the 1730s slaves rebelled in St. John’s and Jamaica. In 1734 enslaved people in Somerset County, New Jersey, plotted to rise up against their owners. They planned to cut the throats of the white men and take horses and supplies for an escape to Indian country. New Yorkers also followed the deadly revolts in Antigua in 1736 and South Carolina in 1739.20

  “There yet continues a great Suspicion of the Negroes, as well as of other bad People lurking about this Town, which causes the Military Watch to be continued here,” warned Lieutenant Governor George Clarke, who was convinced that “the late Fires in this City were kindled by wicked People.” Rumors of a slave uprising swept the city, fueled by allegations that black people had been overheard cursing the white inhabitants. “The chief talk now in Town is about the Negroes conspiracy,” Elizabeth DeLancey reported to her father, Cadwallader Colden. The lord of Coldengham also received a letter from an anonymous source in Massachusetts warning that New York was repeating the New England tragedy of 1692 when Puritans hustled innocent women to their deaths during a wave of hysteria over witchcraft. “I intreat you not to go on to Massacre & destroy your own Estates by making Bonfires of the Negros,” the author pleaded, “& perhaps thereby loading yourselves with greater Guilt than theirs.”21

  As white residents’ anxieties about a general slave uprising peaked, the city’s traders were completing several slaving ventures. As the Africans were allegedly conspiring, John Walter and Arnot Schuyler—who had hired Captain Farmar—brought the Arent into port. Peter Van Brugh Livingston’s sloop Sea Nymph approached Manhattan, having already stopped in South Carolina, just as New York’s white population was beginning to panic. On Saturday, April 11, Mayor John Cruger summoned the Common Council to investigate the fires and rumors, approve rewards for any white persons providing evidence of arson or conspiracy, grant freedom and cash to any slaves who brought such evidence (a provision that also compensated their owners), and pay any free black person, mulatto, or Indian coming forward with information. The following week, a ship from St. Christopher came into port with slaves for the merchants Edward Little, William Craft, and Nathaniel Marston.22

  On April 21 the New York Supreme Court of Judicature summoned a grand jury, comprising seventeen merchants—including several men who soon became founders, trustees, and patrons of the colleges in New York and New Jersey—to examine evidence and testimony taken during the past weeks. Officials interrogated and arrested Africans belonging to the colony’s most prominent families: Jay, Van Horne, Philipse, Gomez, Cruger, Clarkson, Rutgers, Schuyler, Duane, DePeyster, Bayard, Roosevelt, Van Cortlandt, and Livingston. Elizabeth DeLancey later alerted her father of the conviction of Philipse and Roosevelt slaves. Othello (DeLancey) was hanged on July 18 for enlisting others in the plot and acting as captain of one branch of the scheme. That same week, newspapers excoriated the boldness of several black men and an Indian at their executions: “On Saturday last five lusty jolly Negros and one Spanish Indian were hang’d on account of the said Plot, and one pretended Negro Doctor was burnt. One of those that were hang’d behaved with such unparalel’d Impenitence and Impudence as greatly to amaze the Spectators.”23

  In the backdrop of the furor, vessels carrying enslaved Africans streamed into New York’s harbor. Between the jury’s April 21 impaneling and the end of the trials on August 29, at least twenty slaving vessels docked in New York. Philip Livingston, Philip Van Cortlandt, Stephen Bayard, David Gomez, Peter Van Brugh Livingston, and Mordecai Nunez dominated that summer’s commerce. Merchants also testified during the trials, but the threats to the colony did little to reshape their decisions. Peter Van Brugh Livingston even used a technicality to avoid service.24

  White New Yorkers gained some solace from the sight of slaves being tried before a jury of masters. The people had been subjected to “many frights and terrors,” Justice Frederick Philipse reminded the jury. Justice Philipse tried dozens of enslaved people, including Cuffee (Philipse), who was accused of setting fire to a storehouse belonging to the judge’s uncle and boasting that he was going to free the family of its fortune. Cuffee was also part of a group of black men who held cockfights on Adolph Philipse’s land, where they planned parts of the rebellion.25

  A revolt would not be likely to spare the Philipses. The grandson of the first lord of Philipsburg, the chief justice had inherited an empire. He was born in Barbados, where his father, Philip Philipse, died while managing the family’s business. To secure his grandson’s future, the elder Frederick Philipse gave his namesake his “Joncker’s” (Yonkers) plantation:

  I give grant devise and bequeath to Fredrick Filipse my grandson born in Barbados … all those lands and meadows called the Joncker’s plantation, together with all and singular houses, mills, mill dams, Orchards, gardens, Negroes, Negroes children, cattle, horses, swine, and whatever else belongs to me within that patent.26

  He also received the family seat in Manhattan, a string of properties and estates stretching north to Putnam County, and the King’s Bridge, a toll bridge that his grandfather had built in 1693 to span Spuyten Duyvil Creek and link Manhattan island to the mainland at the Bronx. Besides the Yonkers slaves, he inherited several of his grandfather’s personal servants: “a Negroe man called Harry with his wife and child, a Negroe man called Peter, [and] a Negro man called Wan [perhaps Juan].” He got the boat Joncker and a quarter of his family’s commercial ships. Adolph Philipse acquired a full share of the shipping enterprise and houses, lots, lands, meadows, warehouses, and mills along the Hudson River, including much of Putnam County. His father had also left him numerous enslaved people: “the Negroe man called Symon, Charles, Towerhill, Samson, Claes, Billy, Mingo, Hendrik, Bahynne, and Hector, the Negroe boy Peter, the Indian woman called Hannah and her child, the Negroe woman Susan the younger and the Negroe woman Mary.” Adolph’s sisters, Eva Van Cortlandt and Anne French, took parts of the shipping business, warehouses, Manhattan houses, and lands.27

  Slave traders controlled the bench and the jury during the 1741 trials, proceedings that they used to calm public outrage and reassert merchant rule. The traders responsible for the colony’s insecurities vetted the danger and credibility of those threats. The families who exposed the colony to conspiracies and rebellions directed the legal proceedings. Thirteen enslaved black people were burned and eighteen were hanged. Officials also hanged two white women and two white men. The court exiled a small group of white people and sold dozens of enslaved black men and women out of the colony.28

  ORDINARY HORRIFIC AFFAIRS OF TRADE

  In the aftermath of the proceedings, slaving in the colony receded briefly. The following summer, six slave ships docked in Manhattan, a fraction of the number that arrived before the conspiracy. The trepidation soon eased. On June 18 the brigantine Ancram entered New York harbor from St. Kitts, completing a voyage for Robert Livingston Jr. The Cuylers and Crugers had also capitalized on their investments, adding their slave ships to the numerous arrivals of the other merchants. The Cuylers’ Happy returned to New York City from Jamaica with a cargo of enslaved people, while the Crugers received a shipment of Africans out of St. Christopher on the Mary. Henry Cuyler partnered with Philip and Robert Livingston, whose Oswego carried fourteen bound people from Jamaica. King George II compensated Governor Clarke for his services and losses with a £4,000 payment drawn from duties on Barbados and the Leeward Islands. In the following decade New York’s leading Atlantic merchants put more ships to sea and fully reestablished the Africa trade. This was more than a normalization of commerce. It reflected the activity of the family networks that undergirded the Atlantic system and the city’s integration into and dependence upon a dangerous and brutal trade.29

  One of the younger Philip Livingston’s investments is instructive. On May 13, 1751, the New-York Gazette announced that children, women, and men were to be sold from the Wolf at the Meal Market at 10:00 A.M. the following Friday. The sloop’s arrival, the advertiseme
nt, and the customs records obscure frightful events. The Wolf left New York City in September 1749 and reached the African coast in mid-November. Competition between Dutch, English, Portuguese, French, and American slavers and shortages of healthy captives prolonged the journey. Captain Gurnay Wall patrolled the shore for fourteen months, hopping from port to port, trading rum and other goods for small numbers of people. Dozens of human beings were imprisoned belowdecks as Wall tried to fill every space. “We know we are destined to stay till we do purchase a full complement,” sighed Dr. William Chancellor, the ship’s surgeon.30

  A ship was a moving jurisdiction. Besides setting terms with owners and investors, captains had the administrative tasks of hiring sailors, fixing wages, taking on provisions, establishing daily routines, and maintaining order. Piloting ships into waters patrolled by pirates and filled with other risks tested technical skill and nautical knowledge, employee management, and personal courage. Captains established regulations, judged infractions, and imposed punishments. In the first week of his 1709 voyage to Barbados, the captain of the Thomas and Elizabeth instructed the young Harvard graduate and historian Thomas Prince to write a code of conduct for the ship. Prince assigned corporal punishments for infractions that included missing religious services, drunkenness, dereliction, and profanity. Disease could destroy a journey, and captains either needed the services of skilled surgeons or acquainted themselves with the medical arts. At times they presided at the funerals of their crewmen or officers. In the summer of 1733 a Captain Moore lost his Harvard-trained surgeon to a fever during a return from Guinea. On the African coast, slave ships became jails with hundreds of people incarcerated on board. A successful voyage required guarding against innumerable external threats to the endeavor while constantly taking the pulse of the crew and the slaves to protect against mutinies and insurrections.31