New York Burning

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  DAVID GRIM’S PLAN

  PROLOGUE - The Plot

  Foreword

  CHAPTER ONE - Ice

  CHAPTER TWO - Fire

  CHAPTER THREE - Stone

  CHAPTER FOUR - Paper

  CHAPTER FIVE - Water

  CHAPTER SIX - Blood

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Ink

  EPILOGUE - Dust

  APPENDIX A - Reconstructing New York City

  APPENDIX B - The Accused

  APPENDIX C - The Owners

  SOURCE NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS

  NOTES

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  OTHER BOOKS BY JILL LEPORE

  Copyright Page

  For Tim

  ACCLAIM FOR JILL LEPORE’S

  New York Burning

  Winner of the Anisfield Wolf Book Award and the New York City Book Award

  “Engaging. . . . [Lepore] has re-created a little-known but significant incident in Colonial history, skillfully unraveling the threads of conspiracies.”

  — The Boston Globe

  “A reconstruction at once factually rigorous and brilliantly imaginative.”

  —The New York Sun

  “Remarkable. . . . Lepore mixes in legal, political, religious and literary information.... A tour de force.”

  —The Winston-Salem Journal

  “Riveting. . . . [Lepore] draws a splendid portrait of the struggles, prejudices and triumphs of a very young New York City in which fully one in five inhabitants was enslaved. . . . First-rate social history.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Lepore . . . has chosen an exquisite puzzle for a historian. There is a load of colorful material detailing the events of 1741, but all of it is from one side. . . . The challenge is to tease out what isn’t here, to give voice to those whom history has rendered mute. She does this with great skill.”

  —The Nation

  “[Lepore] brings this terrifying period vividly to life. . . . A gripping read that shows how quickly fear spread through a city resting upon a terrible imbalance.”

  —The Star-Ledger (Newark)

  “A work of rigorous scholarship, but . . . also a pleasure to read, delivering the thrills of a complex historical mystery novel. . . . A fascinating take on a dark chapter in U.S. colonial history.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Meticulous but accessible work of historical scholarship. . . . A stellar performance.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Remarkable . . . intriguing. . . . Lepore is truly a master of her art and I sincerely look forward to her next efforts, for our understanding of complex issues will be all the clearer because she knows her field so well.”

  —John Davis, The Decatur Daily

  Liberty is to live upon one’s own Terms; Slavery is to live at the meer Mercy of another; and a Life of Slavery is to those who can bear it, a continual State of Uncertainty and Wretchedness, often an Apprehension of Violence, and often the lingering Dread of a violent Death.

  —John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon,

  Cato’s Letters, reprinted in Zenger’s New-York

  Weekly Journal, September 15, 1735

  Let by My specious Name no Tyrants rise, And cry, while they enslave, they civilize! Know LIBERTY and I are still the same, Congenial!—ever mingling Flame with Flame!

  —Richard Savage, “Of Public Spirit in Regard

  to Public Works,” 1737

  I know not which is the more astonishing, the extreme Folly, or the Wickedness of so base and shocking a Conspiracy; for as to any View of Liberty or Government you could propose to yourselves, upon the Success of burning the City, robbing, butchering, and destroying the Inhabitants; what could it be expected to end in . . . but your own Destruction?

  —Daniel Horsmanden, sentencing Quack and Cuffee

  to be burned at the stake, May 29, 1741

  I am a dead man.

  —Adam, from his jail cell, June 27, 1741

  Preface

  "LIBEERTY and SLAVERY! how amiable is one! how odious and abominable the other!” wrote James Alexander in the pages of the New-York Weekly Journal in 1733. When Alexander championed liberty and condemned slavery, he meant the liberty of the press and the slavery of tyranny. “No Nation Antient or Modern ever lost the Liberty of freely Speaking, Writing, or Publishing their Sentiments,” he warned, “but forthwith lost their Liberty in general and became Slaves.”1 By slaves, Alexander meant a nation ruled by a despot; he did not mean the two thousand men, women, and children who toiled as human chattel in the bustling city of eighteenth-century Manhattan, a number that included not only the five people who lived in Alexander’s own elegant house but also the one black man who had escaped from its attic, carrying a pass he had penned himself, in an act of forgery that defined, better than anything Alexander could put to paper, the liberty of freely writing.

  Political liberty was the most cherished blessing in the British realm, and political slavery its most dreaded specter. “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; / Britons never will be slaves,” wrote an English poet in 1740, in lines that became the empire’s anthem. But throughout that empire, and especially in its American colonies, dark-skinned people lived under worse than the slavery of tyranny; they lived in the slavery of human bondage. In the colonies, “liberty” and “slavery” tripped off tongues, and nearly slipped into meaninglessness. “Though Liberty and Slavery are words which incessantly vibrate on the ears of the Public,” wrote one colonist, “yet we have few terms in the English Vocabulary so generally misunderstood.”2 Everywhere, liberty was passionately celebrated, and slavery just as passionately condemned, by men like James Alexander, Americans who owned Africans.

  That calls for liberty came from a world of slavery has been named the central paradox of American history. Eighteenth-century observers did not fail to remark upon it. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Samuel Johnson famously complained in 1775, in a reply to American revolutionaries’ protest of parliamentary taxation. Nor have historians quieted their astonishment, and rightly so. “The paradox is American, and it behooves Americans to understand it if they would understand themselves,” wrote Edmund Morgan in 1975.3 Three decades and Thomas Jefferson’s twenty-three chromosomes later, Americans are now quite aware of the American paradox, but it remains, somehow, impossible to understand. That abject bondage contributed to the creation of the world’s first modern democracy, however true and even self-evident, is, finally, so painful a truth as to be nearly unfathomable.

  This book tells the story of how one kind of slavery made another kind of liberty possible in eighteenth-century New York, a place whose slave past has long been buried. It was a beautiful city, a crisscross of crooked cobblestone streets boasting both grand and petty charms: a grassy park at the Bowling Green, the stone arches at City Hall, beech trees shading Broadway like so many parasols, and, off rocky beaches, the best oysters anywhere. “I found it extremely pleasant to walk the town,” one visitor wrote in 1748, “for it seemed like a garden.”4 But on this granite island poking out like a sharp tooth between the Hudson and the East rivers, one in five inhabitants was enslaved, making Manhattan second only to Charleston, South Carolina, in a wretched calculus of urban unfreedom.

  New York was a slave city. Its most infamous episode is hardly known today: over a few short weeks in 1741, ten fires blazed across the city. Nearly two hundred slaves were suspected of conspiring to burn every building and murder every white. Tried and convicted before the colony’s Supreme Court, thirteen black men were burned at the stake
. Seventeen more were hanged, two of their dead bodies chained to posts not far from the Negroes Burial Ground, left to bloat and rot. One jailed man cut his own throat. Another eighty-four men and women were sold into yet more miserable, bone-crushing slavery in the Caribbean. Two white men and two white women, the alleged ringleaders, were hanged, one of them in chains; seven more white men were pardoned on condition that they never set foot in New York again.

  What happened in New York in 1741 is so horrifying—“Bonfires of the Negros,” one colonist called it—that it’s easy to be blinded by the brightness of the flames. But step back, let the fires flicker in the distance, and they cast their light not only on the 1741 slave conspiracy but on the American paradox, illuminating a far better known episode in New York’s past: the 1735 trial of the printer John Peter Zenger.

  IN 1732, a forty-two-year-old English gentleman named William Cosby arrived in New York, having been appointed governor by the king. New Yorkers soon learned, to their dismay, that their new governor ruled by a three-word philosophy: God damn ye. Rage at Cosby’s ill-considered appointment grew with his every abuse of the governorship. Determined to oust Cosby from power, James Alexander, a prominent lawyer, hired Zenger, a German immigrant, to publish an opposition newspaper. Alexander supplied scathing, unsigned editorials criticizing the governor’s administration; Zenger set the type. The first issue of Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal was printed in November 1733. Cosby could not, would not abide it. He assigned Daniel Horsmanden, an ambitious forty-year-old Englishman new to the city, to a committee charged with pointing out “the particular Seditious paragraphs” in Zenger’s newspaper. The governor then ordered the incendiary issues of Zenger’s newspaper burned, and had Zenger arrested for libel.

  Zenger was tried before the province’s Supreme Court in 1735. His attorney did not deny that Cosby was the object of the editorials in the New-York Weekly Journal. Instead, he argued, first, that Zenger was innocent because what he printed was true, and second, that freedom of the press was especially necessary in the colonies, where other checks against governors’ powers were weakened by their distance from England. It was an almost impossibly brilliant defense, which at once defied legal precedent—before the Zenger case, truth had never been a defense against libel—and had the effect of putting the governor on trial, just what Zenger’s attorney wanted, since William Cosby, God damn him, was a man no jury could love. Zenger was acquitted. The next year, James Alexander prepared and Zenger printed A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger, which was soon after reprinted in Boston and London. It made Zenger famous.

  But the trial of John Peter Zenger is merely the best-known episode in the political maelstrom that was early eighteenth-century New York. “We are in the midst of Party flames,” Daniel Horsmanden wryly observed in 1734, as Cosby’s high-handedness ignited the city. Horsmanden wrote in an age when political parties were considered sinister, invidious, and destructive of good government. As Alexander Pope put it in 1727, “Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few.” Or, as Viscount St. John Bolingbroke remarked in his 1733 “Dissertation upon Parties”: “The spirit of party . . . inspires animosity and breeds rancour.” Nor did the distaste for parties diminish over the course of the century. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” 5

  Parties they may have despised, but, with William Cosby in the governor’s office, New Yorkers formed them, dividing themselves between the opposition Country Party and the Court Party, loyal to the governor. Even Cosby’s death in March 1736 failed to extinguish New York’s “Party flames.” Alexander and his allies challenged the authority of Cosby’s successor, George Clarke, and established a rival government. Warned of a plot “to seize his person or kill him in the Attempt,” Clarke retreated to Fort George, at the southern tip of Manhattan, “& put the place in a posture of Defence.” In the eyes of one New Yorker, “we had all the appearance of a civil War.”6

  And then: nothing. No shots were fired. Nor was any peace ever brokered; the crisis did not so much resolve as it dissipated. Soon after barricading himself in Fort George, Clarke received orders from London confirming his appointment. The rival government was disbanded. By the end of 1736, Daniel Horsmanden could boast, “Zenger is perfectly Silent as to polliticks.” 7 Meanwhile, Clarke rewarded party loyalists: in 1737 he appointed Horsmanden to a vacant seat on the Supreme Court. But Clarke proved a more moderate man than his predecessor. By 1739, under his stewardship, the colony quieted.

  What happened in New York City in the 1730s was much more than a dispute over the freedom of the press. It was a debate about the nature of political opposition, during which New Yorkers briefly entertained the heretical idea that parties were “not only necessary in free Government, but of great Service to the Public.” As even a supporter of Cosby wrote in 1734, “Parties are a check upon one another, and by keeping the Ambition of one another within Bounds, serve to maintain the public Liberty.” 8 And it was, equally, a debate about the power of governors, the nature of empire, and the role of the law in defending Americans against arbitrary authority—the kind of authority that constituted tyranny, the kind of authority that made men slaves. James Alexander saw himself as a defender of the rule of law in a world that, because of its very great distance from England, had come to be ruled by men. His opposition was not so much a failure as a particularly spectacular stretch of road along a bumpy, crooked path full of detours that, over the course of the century, led to American independence. Because of it, New York became infamous for its “unruly spirit of independency.” Clarke, shocked, reported to his superiors in England that New Yorkers believe “if a Governor misbehave himself they may depose him and set up an other.” The leaders of the Country Party “trod very near” to what, in the 1730s, went by the name of treason.9 A generation later, their sons would call it revolution.

  IN EARLY 1741, less than two years after Clarke calmed the province, ten fires swept the city. Fort George was nearly destroyed; Clarke’s own mansion, inside the fort, burned to the ground. Daniel Horsmanden was convinced that the fires had been “set on Foot by some villainous Confederacy of latent Enemies amongst us,” a confederacy that sounded a good deal like a violent political party. But which enemies? No longer fearful that Country Party agitators were attempting to take his life, Clarke, at Horsmanden’s urging, turned his suspicion on the city’s slaves. With each new fire, panicked white New Yorkers cried from street corners, “The Negroes are rising!” Early evidence collected by a grand jury appointed by the Supreme Court hinted at a vast and elaborate conspiracy: on the outskirts of the city, in a tavern owned by a poor and obscure English cobbler named John Hughson, tens and possibly hundreds of black men had been meeting secretly, gathering weapons and plotting to burn the city, murder every white man, appoint Hughson their king, and elect a slave named Caesar governor.

  This political opposition was far more dangerous than anything led by James Alexander. The slave plot to depose one governor and set up another—a black governor—involved not newspapers and petitions but arson and murder. It had to be stopped. In the spring and summer of 1741, New York magistrates arrested 20 whites and 152 blacks. To Horsmanden, “it seemed very probable that most of the Negroes in Town were corrupted.” Eighty black men and one black woman confessed and named names, sending still more to the gallows and the stake.

  That summer, a New Englander wrote an anonymous letter to New York. “I am a stranger to you & to New York,” he began. But he had heard of “the bloody Tragedy” afflicting the city: the relentless cycle of arrests, accusations, hasty trials, executions, and more arrests. This “puts me in mind of our New England Witchcraft in the year 1692,” he remarked, “Which if I dont mistake New York justly reproached us for, & mockt at our Credulity about.”10

  Here was no idle observation. The 1741 New York conspiracy trials and the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials had much in common. Except tha
t what happened in New York in 1741 was worse, and has been almost entirely forgotten. In Salem, twenty people were executed, compared to New York’s thirty-four, and none of Salem’s witches was burned at the stake. However much it looks like Salem in 1692, what happened in New York in 1741 had more to do with revolution than witchcraft. And it is inseparable from the wrenching crisis of the 1730s, not least because the fires in 1741 included attacks on property owned by key members of the Court Party; lawyers from both sides of the aisle in the legal battles of the 1730s joined together to prosecute slaves in 1741; and slaves owned by prominent members of the Country Party proved especially vulnerable to prosecution.

  But the threads that tie together the crises of the 1730s and 1741 are longer than the list of participants. The 1741 conspiracy and the 1730s opposition party were two faces of the same coin. By the standards of the day, both faces were ugly, disfigured, deformed; they threatened the order of things. But one was very much more dangerous than the other: Alexander’s political party plotted to depose the governor; the city’s slaves, allegedly, plotted to kill him. The difference made Alexander’s opposition seem, relative to slave rebellion, harmless, and in so doing made the world safer for democracy, or at least, and less grandly, both more amenable to and more anxious about the gradual and halting rise of political parties.

  Whether enslaved men and women actually conspired in New York in 1741 is a question whose answer lies buried deep in the evidence, if it survives at all. It is worth excavating carefully. But even the specter of a slave conspiracy cast a dark shadow across the political landscape. Slavery was, always and everywhere, a political issue, but what happened in New York suggests that it exerted a more powerful influence on political life: slaves suspected of conspiracy constituted both a phantom political party and an ever-threatening revolution. In the 1730s and ’40s, the American Revolution was years away and the real emergence of political parties in the new United States, a fitful process at best, would have to wait until the last decade of the eighteenth century. (Indeed, one reason that colonists only embraced revolution with ambivalence and accepted parties by fits and starts may be that slavery alternately ignited and extinguished party flames: the threat of black rebellion made white political opposition palatable, even as it established its limits and helped heal the divisions it created. ) But during those fateful months in the spring and summer of 1741, New York’s Court Party, still reeling from the Country Party’s experiment in political opposition, attempted to douse party flames by burning black men at the stake. New York is not America, but what happened in that eighteenth-century slave city tells one story, and a profoundly troubling one, of how slavery destabilized—and created—American politics.