New York Burning Read online

  But death was not the end of it, at least for Caesar. His corpse was gibbeted, hung from chains, and displayed “on the Island near the Powder-House” in the Little Collect Pond, where it could be easily seen but not as easily smelled. The court, and Daniel Horsmanden most of all, hoped that this “Example and Punishment might break the Rest, and induce some of them to unfold this Mystery of Iniquity.”

  JOHN AND SARAH HUGHSON were arraigned on charges of conspiracy on the morning of Tuesday, May 12; Kerry’s arraignment was postponed until the following Friday. On May 13, and again on May 14, Mary Burton offered new details in depositions taken before Horsmanden and Philipse, naming several more slaves in the conspiracy. Kerry was examined again, too, but what she said “was not altogether satisfactory,” in large part because she continued to insist that the plotting had taken place at Romme’s tavern, rather than at Hughson’s.

  Frustrated by Kerry’s intractability, the court found a black man or, really, a boy, willing to turn king’s evidence. Sandy, ordered arrested and fetched from Albany (where he had recently been sold), arrived in New York on May 14. In the dungeon, he was jailed near to Francis, a “Spanish Negro” owned by a Dutch sea captain named Jasper Bosch. Francis had been in jail since that fateful Monday, April 6, when vigilantes rounded up every “Spanish Negro” they could find. Francis told Sandy “he would kill him if he told any Thing.” Eight days after Sandy was arrested, jailkeeper James Mills fetched him from the cellar. As Mills escorted Sandy to be brought up for questioning, “several Negroes winked” at him.

  Upstairs, the grand jury “for a long Time argued with him, to persuade him to speak the Truth.” Sandy refused to speak, saying that he had heard that during the 1712 inquiry, after “ the Negroes told all they knew, then the white People hanged them. ” But “the Grand Jury assured him, that it was false; for that the Negroes which confessed the Truth and made a Discovery, were certainly pardoned, and shipped off.” Promised his life, Sandy began to talk, naming fifteen slaves (including Francis and three more “Spanish Negroes”) who had planned to burn the city.

  Confessions by people in Sandy’s circumstances, like the testimony of crown witnesses who were criminals, became increasingly suspect over the course of the eighteenth century. In 1756, a landmark treatise, Law of Evidence,would declare: “Confession must be voluntary and without Compulsion.” Still, the courts were slow to change, and it wasn’t until the 1783 case Rex v. Warwickshall that English courts disallowed rewards and threats, finally decreeing: “A confession forced from the mind by the flattery of hope, or by the torture of fear, comes in so questionable a shape . . . that no credit ought to be given to it.”47

  Although this reform of English criminal courts took place long after New York’s Supreme Court of Judicature met in the spring and summer of 1741, stricter rules of evidence were already emerging in colonial courts, on the force of public sentiment. But such sentiment was rarely animated against the use of force or torment on jailed slaves. In Antigua in 1736, slaves charged with conspiracy were tortured: broken on the wheel, gibbeted alive. Even before men convicted in Antigua were brought to the gallows and the stake, many were already dead, from suffocation, blood loss, or massive internal injuries. In grim anticipation of the fate that awaited him, one black Antiguan tried to commit suicide in jail, stabbing himself nineteen times, but his outraged captors revived him and put him to death on the wheel, where his bones were slowly bent and then finally broken until he died of his wounds. As the Antigua prosecutors explained: “Of so great Concern was the Matter under our Consideration to the Island, that to enable us to make a full Discovery, an Act was pass’d for inflicting Torture on Persons suspected of the Plot.”

  In 1741, New York did not pass a law authorizing torture. Nor, in his Journal, did Horsmanden record a single instance of torture, or offer the slightest hint of physical abuse. Still, it would be preposterous to conclude from these silences that jailed black men in New York in 1741 were treated well. Jailkeeper Mills, who lived in a small garret apartment in City Hall, was both vicious and corrupt. Before he turned jailkeeper, he made his living pulling teeth. He was responsible for emptying prisoners’ “Ordure Tubbs” and supplying them with food, water, and the occasional bowl of rum punch; but as he himself had to pay the cost of “Victualling” prisoners and later present to the Common Council an account for reimbursement, he must have been sorely tempted to provide less food than he promised and pocket the difference in cash. Although he served as the city’s jailkeeper for all but three years between his appointment in 1738 and his death in 1771, Mills was, at one point, charged before the Supreme Court with mistreating prisoners, and, at another point, indicted by a grand jury for extortion. He weathered both scandals, if only because no one else could be found to do his job.48

  If not Horsmanden and Philipse themselves, Mills and the parade of magistrates who escorted prisoners and conducted interrogations may have beaten black suspects, even though no documents survive to count the blows. Court-sanctioned torture was amply and unabashedly documented in New York in 1712, when black men were broken on the wheel and roasted over a slow fire, and in Antigua in 1736, when they were starved to death and gibbeted alive. If court-sanctioned torture had been employed in 1741, it is hard to imagine that Horsmanden would have bothered to suppress the evidence of it, especially given that there seems to have been little public censure of Antigua’s exertions. On the other hand, the occasional bashing, beating, and whipping may have struck him as hardly worth noting, especially if it were conducted by the slaves’ own masters, either before or during their imprisonment. In short, there is every reason to believe but no way to prove that at least some slaves in that dungeon below City Hall were beaten, maybe very badly; just as there is every reason to believe but no way to prove that the court never ordered it.

  Sandy confessed on May 22. Before the day was through, one of the few black men named by Sandy who was not already in jail, Fortune, owned by the Englishman John Wilkins, was arrested and brought before the grand jury. Fortune fingered Quack, owned by John Roosevelt. Two days before the fire at the fort, he said, Quack told him “That the Fort would be burnt”; and when he met him the day after the fire, Quack had boasted, “ The Business is done.” During a second day of grand jury interrogation, on May 23, Fortune implicated Cuffee in the fire at Philipse’s storehouse.

  On May 28, Quack and Cuffee pled not guilty to “two Indictments, for a Conspiracy to burn the Town, and murder the Inhabitants; and for two actual Burnings, the House in the Fort, and Mr. Philipse’s Storehouse.” The next day, they left the dungeon and headed upstairs to the Supreme Court, where light filled the room, for the first conspiracy trial of 1741, “a Cause of very great Expectation.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Paper

  AT TEN O’CLOCK in the morning on Friday, May 29, at the peal of the bell in the cupola of City Hall, spectators stopped fidgeting, the crier called out “Oyes!,” Frederick Philipse raised his gavel, and Daniel Horsmanden picked up his quill. King v. Quack and Cuffee was about to begin.

  What happened next? Did Quack’s wife, Barbara, weep from the balcony? Did Cuffee wink at Mary Burton, who was waiting to be called as a witness?

  The trial of Quack and Cuffee, like nearly everything else that happened in City Hall, upstairs and down, between the opening of the Supreme Court on April 21 and its closing on August 31, 1741, is both richly documented and maddeningly unknowable. Of 133 days of arrests, interrogations, accusations, confessions, retractions, testimony, cross-examinations, judgments, verdicts, executions, pardons, threats, promises, whispers, cries of despair, and shrieks of pain, almost the sole surviving record is what Daniel Horsmanden included in his Journal of the Proceedingsin The Detection of the Conspiracy.

  The Supreme Court minutes disappeared during the American Revolution. Documents filed by the court were badly damaged in a devastating fire in 1911. James Alexander wrote to his stepson David Provost on April 22, and Elizabeth DeLan
cey, wife of the Chief Justice’s brother, Peter, wrote a revealing letter to her father, Cadwallader Colden, on June 1; but very few other letters survive. No slave left even a single scrap of paper describing what happened, at least not that has ever been found. Nor are the city’s newspapers any help. Almost the entire 1741 run of Bradford’s Gazette is missing. And Zenger’s Weekly Journal offered only scant reports, hampered by Horsmanden and Philipse, who kept the printer at arm’s length. “We are in Hopes that we have discovered the Foundation of this Plot,” Zenger reported on May 31, promising that “the Particulars shall be published as soon as they may be obtain’d of the Magistrates.” Soon afterwards, Zenger printed a column and a half summarizing the “horrible and wicked Conspiracy” uncovered by the grand jury; more details were emerging every day, “some of them so horrid that we may not publish them as yet.” On June 15, Zenger again pledged, “As soon as we can obtain a full Account of this Plot and Leave from the Magistrates we shall publish the same.” But no full account ever came; the judges never gave Zenger leave to print one.1

  Still, notwithstanding the chilling silences, Horsmanden’s Journal stands as one of the most complete trial records in early American history, even if, as Horsmanden admitted on the first page, his sources, too, were incomplete, and he himself had left much out:

  THE Reader must not expect in the following Sheets, a particular and minute Relation of every Formality, Question and Answer that pass’d upon the Trials, it may suffice, if he be assured he has the Substance; for indeed more cannot be expected, when it is considered, that we have no One here, as in our Mother Country, who make it a Business to take Notes upon such Occasions; or any others, that we know of, who are so dexterous at Short-Hand, as to be sufficiently qualified for such a Purpose; but he will be sure to have all that could be collected from the Notes that were taken by the Court, and Gentlemen at the Bar; with all which the Compiler has been furnished.

  Horsmanden began gathering papers relating to the conspiracy sometime after November 1741, when the Assembly paid him £250 to digest and prepare for printing all the laws of the colony. Instead of completing the assignment for which he had been paid, Horsmanden turned to the conspiracy. Smith, Jr., wrote in his History, “Of the digesting act, Mr. Horsmanden took no advantage, hoping greater gain by compiling the proceedings against the late conspirators.” He began with the minutes hurriedly taken down in the courtroom by a subordinate clerk, untrained in shorthand, probably George Joseph Moore. Frustrated by the incompleteness of the court minutes—and they were notoriously skimpy— Horsmanden interleaved them with documents filed by the grand jury and the officers of the court and whatever other notes and comments he could collect from anyone willing to share them. When Horsmanden wrote to Cadwallader Colden, begging for his recollections of events, Colden sent along some remarks, offering, “if you think this account of any use in what you design to publish in relation to the Negro Conspiracy you may freely do it in what shape you please.”2

  Horsmanden worked quickly. In July 1742, a New York printer, James Parker, distributed a broadside soliciting advanced subscriptions for the Journal, at 7 shillings each, promising that the work “is now almost ready for the Press.”3 Parker advertised “the whole Evidence and Proceedings, by Way of Journal,” and it was a journal, not a history, that Horsmanden intended. Although he had decided to arrange the documents “in the Order of Time,” he insisted that his chronological account was most decidedly not a history. Had he been writing a history, he would have considered himself at greater “Liberty to abstract the several Originals”—to summarize, condense, and interpret them. Instead, Horsmanden titled the work a Journal of the Proceedings, the standard label for official transcriptions of legislative, committee, and council meetings (like the annually printed Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly).

  Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracywas a daily record whose documentary purpose, he said, compelled him to reproduce the originals in unaltered form, with only the slightest editorial interventions: “lopping off from them, what, in print, he thought would be a superfluous Formality, such as The Deponent further saith, and such like, which he thought would have been a needless Incumbrance to the Book.” Indeed, Horsmanden had every reason to remain faithful to the originals: during his lifetime, they were stored at City Hall and at the Secretary’s Office in Fort George (rebuilt by November 1741), where they could be easily compared with the Journal. 4 That almost all of these originals have since been lost or virtually destroyed is hardly Daniel Horsmanden’s fault.

  Fortunately, a handful of the original documents, however badly burned, are still partially legible, and in June 1741, Governor Clarke had copies made of some of the earliest confessions and trial minutes, which he sent to the Lords of Trade. Today, they are stored in the National Archives at Kew, outside London. Of a badly damaged set of originals, then, there are two sets of reproductions: Horsmanden’s printed Journal and Clarke’s manuscript copies. Written as the events they describe were unfolding, Clarke’s copies are a better source than Horsmanden’s Journal, even though they are less complete. More important, they serve as yardstick by which to measure Horsmanden’s credibility as an editor. On the whole, they vindicate Horsmanden, whose Journal turns out to be exactly what he said it was: a lightly edited collection of rather conventional legal documents, or, as Clarke himself put it, “very little more than a Copy of the Court Entries.”5 Because Horsmanden shaped the proceedings as they were happening, he had little need to doctor the written record. But he did doctor it some, and that doctoring matters.

  AFTER PHILIPSE LOWERED his gavel, the trial of Quack and Cuffee began with the swearing of the jurors. Clarke’s transcript failed to list their names, and Horsmanden could remember only eight of the twelve: Samuel Weaver, an English tanner; John Shurmur; John Lashier; Charles Arding, an English tailor; George Witts; Thomas Bohenna; Daniel Bonett, a French cordwainer; and John Robins, an English currier. All whose occupations can be identified were artisans. Two, Weaver and Shurmur, owned slaves who would later be accused of conspiracy.

  Attorney General Richard Bradley then delivered an opening statement, which Horsmanden reproduced. Bradley had no affection for the men he was to prosecute. Years before, when his wife needed a servant, Bradley had written to a friend that he and his wife preferred German servants to slaves: “wee don’t like negroes.”6

  Bradley called Quack and Cuffee “Monsters in Iniquity,” and promised the jury that he would prove “CRIMES, Gentlemen, so astonishingly cruel and detestable; that one would think they could never have entered into the Minds, much less the Resolution, of any but a Conclave of Devils to execute.” Clarke’s transcript omits Bradley’s speech, indicating only that Bradley “enlarged on the heinousness of the offense,” a remark that, however clipped, is entirely consistent with Horsmanden’s account. At the trial, the court amanuensis was forced to summarize what he heard, but in 1742 Horsmanden must have copied Bradley’s own notes.

  After Bradley returned to his seat, Joseph Murray and William Smith, Council for the King, took turns examining nine white and two black witnesses, beginning with Mary Burton. Murray, at age forty-seven, was the senior member of the city bar. Smith was only three years younger, and almost Murray’s equal in experience. Both had ably prepared their witnesses. Burton repeated what she had said at her earlier depositions, that Cuffee had been to meetings at Hughson’s, where a plot was hatched, adding that one night at Hughson’s, Cuffee had said to her (according to the Clarke transcript) “that if all the white men were killed & she kept their Counsel he would have her for his wife.” Horsmanden included much the same testimony (“he intended to have her for a Wife”), but in the Journal Burton’s testimony continues: “she had a Dishclout in her Hand, which she dabbed in his Face, and he ran away,” a detail entirely lacking in the Clarke transcript. The dishcloth slap matters. With it, Burton both polished her own virtue and distinguished hersel
f from Peggy Kerry, prostitute to slaves, mother of a child “of a motley Complexion.” Maybe Horsmanden remembered the slap. Maybe he found it mentioned in Bradley’s notes. But by the time Horsmanden compiled his Journal, Burton had lost much of her credibility as a witness. Maybe Horsmanden invented that slap.

  In his Journal, Horsmanden separated the trials of Quack and Cuffee, presenting the testimony as though all of the witnesses against Cuffee were questioned first, and then brought back to the stand a second time to testify against Quack. Clarke’s transcript proves that, on the contrary, the two men were tried together, with each witness testifying just once.

  Horsmanden reproduced all of the whites’ testimony first, so that Mary Burton is followed by Arthur Price and seven other whites before the two black witnesses, Fortune and Sandy, take the stand. In the Clarke transcript, Sandy and Fortune directly follow Burton. Possibly Horsmanden altered the sequence in the interest of coherence, but the change had the effect of making “Negro Evidence” seem less important to the trial than it actually was. If the order of witnesses was Burton, Sandy, Fortune, Price (followed by the seven relatively insignificant white witnesses), then the prosecutors must have believed that what Sandy and Fortune could establish was crucial to the case. By placing Sandy and Fortune’s testimony last, Horsmanden made it appear ancillary.