New York Burning Page 17

  Some suspects confessed more than once. And still the jail filled. Interrogated before a grand jury, before the Supreme Court, before Nichols and Lodge, and, in many cases, simply by their owners, who transcribed and often translated their confessions for the court, slaves sought to save their lives by confessing.

  “Could these be dreams?” Horsmanden asked of the confessions, anticipating his critics, “or is it more rational to conclude, from what has happen’d amongst us, that they were founded on Realities?” The question turns, in part, on the matter of authorship. Was Daniel Horsmanden the author of the confessions? Or is it possible that the condemned men who confessed were, by some measure, any measure, the authors of their own words?

  Horsmanden called himself “the Compiler” of his Journal, never its author. He also put only his title—“ the Recorder of the City of New-York”— not his name, on the book’s cover. Nor did he ever alert readers that the Recorder happened to be the Third Justice of the Supreme Court. The veil Horsmanden placed over his identity didn’t fool anyone in New York, but it did hide his role on the bench from readers outside the city. (And it later confused library cataloguers, who frequently misidentified the anonymous “Compiler” of the Journal as Simon Johnson, who held the role of Recorder from 1748 to 1766.)32

  But of course Horsmanden was more than a compiler or recorder. He issued the arrest warrants. He was the first interrogator of nearly every suspect. And he himself questioned Mary Burton, again and again, from the beginning. He also drafted crucial confessions in his own hand, made dozens of speeches from the bench, and wrote a Preface, Introduction, and Conclusion to the Journal that framed the entire proceedings for posterity. In 1741, and in the published record, the prosecution’s story—at least the story of the feast at Hughson’s—was a story of Horsmanden’s making.

  Faced with the question of who set the fires and why, Horsmanden led the investigation. In a post-providential, pre-Enlightenment world, he detected the work of criminals, not God, not nature. In an anxious empire, he found monstrous black creatures. In a rebellious province, he spotted political plotters. He traced their motives, limned their characters, and followed their fates. In the Journal, Horsmanden produced something that resembles an early English novel.

  The boundary between history and fiction at the time was decidedly blurred. Histories could be fancifully elaborated, and the first English novels, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), adapted the trappings of histories. But unlike most histories, novels had, at their heart, ordinary people trying to make sense of an extraordinary world. The novel emerged when the world looked most inexplicable— caught between the medieval and the modern—and placed, at its center, an individual plotting a course through life, making sense of the mysteries around him.

  That new techniques of criminal investigation emerged at the same time was hardly a coincidence, as the career of Henry Fielding shows. During the very years that he ran a criminal investigation agency in London, Fielding not only wrote social tracts closely related to his detective work, including An Enquiry into the Cause of the late Increase of Robbers (1751), but also novels, including Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751). Horsmanden, if he had had literary merit rather than political ambition, might have been an American Fielding.33

  But Horsmanden did not place himself at the center of his Journal, doggedly interrogating suspects, sifting through the evidence, putting together the pieces of the puzzle. His Journal lacks a protagonist. Because Horsmanden erased the evidence of his own role in the investigation whenever possible, the Journal tells the story not of an individual searching for truth but of truth revealed. Horsmanden’s role in the investigation can be uncovered, by careful reading and by placing the Journal alongside other evidence, like Horsmanden’s letters and the surviving court manuscripts. But Horsmanden himself did his best to bury it.

  He had every reason to hide. If, as critics charged as early as July 1741, New Yorkers had suffered “in the merciless Flames of an Imaginary Plot,” then Mary Burton, Arthur Price, Sandy, Fortune, and Jack had lied, innocent black men had died, and their owners had lost a rather vast investment in property. For Horsmanden to draw attention to his role in interrogating suspects would have made their testimony more dubious. In 1742, when he set about compiling documents, Horsmanden deleted himself from his own investigation. And, if only by reproducing each slave confession in its entirety, he attempted to stress slaves’ authorship not only of the plot but of their confessions.

  But that authorship was difficult to establish, not least because no slave actually wrote down his own confession. In the dungeon, Cuffee (Philipse) “read sometimes, and cried much.” When Scipio was interrogated by Nichols and Lodge, he held “his Bible in his Bosom, which he said he read in Gaol as often as he could.” Even those men who could read did not necessarily know how to write, since writing was a separate skill, much less frequently taught. From a slaveowner’s point of view, a slave who could write was dangerous. By writing, slaves could name and disguise themselves: one New Yorker liked to call her slave “Johnsey,” but he “writes his Name Jonathan Stow,” she warned in an ad for his return after he ran away.34 By writing, slaves could free themselves, forging passes. A man named Cesar ran away from John Moore in 1728: “He Reads and Writes English, and its believed, has got a sham Pass.” 35 By writing, slaves could revolt. They allegedly signed Hughson’s book, which pledged them to secrecy. And Hughson’s list, to which some slaves allegedly signed their own names, was crucial to the conspiracy, at least from the point of view of the investigation. Horsmanden suspected that more slaves than would admit to it were literate. “You say you cannot read,” Horsmanden said to Ben, sentencing him to death, “but so active and forward have you appeared in this Villainy, that a List of this black Band was committed to your Care.”

  The Ledger of Confessions. Courtesy of the New York State Archives, series A1894, New York Colony Council Papers, 74–99.

  To write was to defy bondage, so much so that, beginning with the earliest slave narratives, the quest for literacy proved central to an emerging African-American literary tradition. In a world in which literacy marked a kind of dividing line between “savagery” and “civilization,” writing and, more, authorship became crucial to blacks’ insistence on their own humanity.36 Later in the century, a handful of black writers became published authors: Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho. Each of these writers served, for Enlightenment philosophers, as “specimens of ingenuity,” empirical evidence, positive or negative, of the intellectual and artistic potential of blacks. As one eighteenth-century anti-slavery activist observed, “no literary performance would be better received by the humane and liberal people of England, than a vindication of African capacity by the pen of an African.”37

  The black author, the “specimen of ingenuity” best known to early eighteenth-century New Yorkers, was the black poet and mathematician Francis Williams. Williams was born to free parents in Jamaica in 1697. “Being a boy of unusual lively parts,” he “was pitched upon to be the subject of an experiment, which, it is said, the Duke of Montague was curious to make, in order to discover, whether, by proper cultivation, and a regular course of tuition at school and the university, a Negroe might not be found as capable of literature as a white person.” The duke had the boy sent to England, where he attended grammar school, then studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and in 1721 was admitted to study law at the Inns of Court in London (while Daniel Horsmanden was studying there). Williams wrote poetry in Latin, including verses in which he drew his own conclusions from Montague’s experiment:

  To all of human kind, benignant heaven (Since nought forbids) one common soul has given. This rule was ’stablished by th’Eternal Mind; Nor virtue’s self, nor prudence are confin’d To colour; none imbues the honest heart; To science none belongs, and none to art

  Despite Williams’s accomplishments, David Hume, in his 1741 essay on “
National Characters,” concluded:

  I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. . . . Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity. . . . In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.38

  Those who chose to found in Williams’s work evidence of blacks’ intellectual equality; those who didn’t want to acknowledge that equality found his work deficient.

  In Jamaica, Williams’s capacity for reason, which turned on his ability to speak and write, to be the author of his own life, determined whether “Negro Evidence” could be admitted against him in court. In 1708, Williams’s wealthy and prominent free black father, John Williams, had successfully petitioned the Jamaican Assembly to pass “An act to prevent slaves being evidence against John Williams, a free negro”—a law that essentially defined Williams and his family as whites, against whom “Negro Evidence” was inadmissible. 39 Hume may have considered Francis Williams a mere parrot, but in the Jamaican court of law he was a white man.

  Whether Francis Williams’s accomplishments were “slender” and whether he was, in effect, a “parrot” were hotly debated topics in England and its colonies, and not just at universities. When Dr. Alexander Hamilton stayed in New York in 1744, he found Williams the topic of conversation among the gentlemen drinking at Robert Todd’s tavern: “There, talking of a certain free negroe in Jamaica who was a man of estate, good sense, and education,” a visiting gentleman from that colony “gravely asked if that negroe’s parents were not whites, for he was sure that nothing good could come of the whole generation of blacks.” (Following this conversation, Hamilton returned to his room at Robert Hogg’s house and, “to pass away time,” picked up a book hot off the press and “read some of the Journal of Proceedings against the conspirators att New York.”)

  There was no African “man of letters” in eighteenth-century New York City. Not Jack, with his “perfectly Negro” speech. Not Cuffee, reading sometimes and crying much in his prison cell. Not Scipio, pressing his Bible to his breast. Not Ben, who kept the list but couldn’t read it. When these men spoke, they spoke on pain of death. They left not an inkblot behind.

  REMEMBERING THAT whites did not believe Africans could be authors helps explain why Daniel Horsmanden so desperately needed John Hughson, and why it was so crucial for Quack and Cuffee, in their dying confessions, to agree that Hughson was “the first Contriver and Promoter of the whole Plot” and “that they should never have thought of it, if he had not put it into their Heads.” From the court’s perspective, slaves who confessed were parrots; but they weren’t parroting Daniel Horsmanden, they were parroting John Hughson. As Attorney General Bradley told a jury during one slave trial: “Gentlemen, It cannot be imagined that these silly unthinking Creatures (Hughson’s black Guard) could of themselves have contrived and carried on so deep, so direful and destructive a Scheme.” Bradley and Horsmanden, again and again, called Hughson the “author” of the conspiracy; “wherefore,” the Attorney General declared, “it may justly be called HUGHSON’S PLOT.” Hughson was a thief and a smuggler, and he kept a “disorderly House.” But the court needed him to be more. As Bradley put it to the jury at Hughson’s trial: “Behold, the Author”!

  Francis Williams, the Jamaican Scholar, by anonymous Jamaican, British, or American painter, c. 1745. Courtesy of V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Unfortunately, John Hughson was a particularly implausible leader of a vast slave conspiracy. As for Hughson supplying hundreds of men with feasts and free drinks, even Horsmanden allowed, “ ’Tis somewhat amazing! how Hughson, a poor Cobler, with a Wife and House full of Children, and scarce any visible Business, or Means of Subsistence, should be able to support such extraordinary Generosity.” By July, Horsmanden would be forced to cast about for another main character, a white man who would make a better, more plausible “Author, and Abettor of all the late Conflagrations, Terrors, and Devastation that have befallen this City.”

  It was a “Maze of Obscurity,” to be sure. Burdened by the drudgery of fixing meaning, busy finding a main character to replace himself, Horsmanden lost control of the story. Those confessions have more tales to tell, and there were more plots being hatched than the one to burn the city, kill the white men, marry the white women, make Hughson king and Caesar governor. Meanwhile, the condemned men had every reason to collude with Horsmanden in agreeing that John Hughson was the author of their crimes. Even Horsmanden admitted that while Jack had committed the darkest of deeds, he “had more Wit than to be hanged for them.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Water

  ON THE EVE of the trial of Quack and Cuffee, a contradiction in the evidence had threatened to weaken the prosecution. Mary Burton stood by her story that dozens of black men met in the warmth of John Hughson’s tavern just after Christmas, where they ate and drank and plotted to burn down the city and name Caesar governor, and three slaves had confessed to knowing about a plot. But none of the three, Sandy, Fortune, and Sarah, had admitted to attending the meeting Mary Burton described. More troubling still, all three insisted, as Fortune put it, that they had “never heard of a House where they met; nor knew Hughson.”

  If Sandy, Fortune, and Sarah had never met John Hughson, the supposed “author” of the plot, nor seen his house, how and where had they conspired, in the bitter cold of that hardest of winters? They learned of the plot, they said, not from a poor white cobbler at his house at the edge of town but from other slaves, all over the city: down by the docks in the chilled stillness of sunrise; in darkened alleys at dusk; on snow-covered cobbled streets in the bleakness of day, slivers of sunlight low in the sky; at corner markets where hogs and oxen snorted steam and sacks of grain froze to the ground; and at icy wells and pumps, where they went, morning, noon, and night, balancing kegs on their heads, to fetch water for their masters’ tea.

  Fortune heard about the plot from Cuffee when he ran into him on New Street; and from Quack when he saw him “near Mrs. Carpenter’s ” and again “near Mrs. Richets’s.” Once, he had taken a walk with Quack on the Common, shoulders stiffened against the wind, and had snuck with him into the fort. Another time, he met him “at the Pump near the great Slip.” Sandy first learned of the conspiracy on an errand to Coenties Market, and he, too, had bumped into Quack and Cuffee on the street. Sandy told Sarah about the plot when they met “at the Pump in the Neighbourhood,” filling their kegs and casks, where Sandy cursed, his breath like a cloud, “G-d d—m all the white People,” promising, “if he had it in his Power, he would set them all on Fire.”

  That the prosecution’s “Negro Evidence” of whispering by water pumps did not altogether support Mary Burton’s story of feasting by Hughson’s fireside by no means derailed the conviction of Quack and Cuffee; the jury proved quite willing to overlook this baffling contradiction between white and black testimony. The discrepancy, in any event, was nicely addressed at Quack and Cuffee’s execution, when both condemned men obligingly agreed that Hughson “was the first Contriver and Promoter of the whole Plot” and “that they should never have thought of it, if he had not put it into their Heads.”

  While prosecutors prepared for John Hughson’s trial, the grand jury wisely turned its attention away from the scene at his tavern. Ignoring leads in earlier testimony about a conspiracy hatched out of doors, at docks, markets, wells, and street corners, investigators searched for another house where conspirators who had never met Hughson might have gathered. They found it on May 25, when Sandy told the grand jury that, while he had never been to Hughson’s, he often walked to Gerardus Comfort’s, next door, to pump water from Comfort’s well, stepping inside
the house to warm himself before beginning the bracing walk back to the Dock Ward. Once, passing Comfort’s house on a Sunday in February, “Jack called him in, where were about Twenty Negroes”; “upon his coming into the Room, they gave him Drink, and then asked him to burn Houses.”The grand jury, considerably relieved at having extracted from Sandy a story at least somewhat consistent with Mary Burton’s—a Sunday indoor assembly of slaves, drinking and talking about burning houses—had ordered the arrest of Jack, and another of Comfort’s slaves, the old African-born man named Cook. On May 30, at the stake, Quack lent support to Sandy’s testimony by naming Jack “a leading Man” in the plot. Two days later, Sandy added a compelling detail: at Comfort’s, Jack had once held up a glistening, sharpened knife and boasted “if it came a-cross a white Man’s Head, it would cut it off.”

  At his trial on June 4, John Hughson, unaware of how deeply his neighbor’s slaves had by now been implicated, called Gerardus Comfort as a defense witness. Comfort had little to say except that “he saw nothing amiss” at Hughson’s. Philipse and Horsmanden found this answer incredible, even contemptuous, and addressed Comfort directly in a heated exchange:

  COURT. Mr Comfort, you are a next door Neighbour to Hughson; you live opposite to him, and surely you must have seen Negroes go in and out there often, as the Witnesses have testified, that there were frequent Caballings with the Negroes there; pray what have you observed of the House since Hughson came to live there?

  COMFORT. I have seen nothing amiss; I have seen no Harm there.

  Sheepishly, Comfort volunteered that “he was often abroad, and went very seldom to his House.” But this, too, galled the judges, who found his extended absence—leaving his slaves unsupervised—appalling. Not surprisingly, Comfort’s testimony failed to loosen the noose around John Hughson’s neck.