Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XVI

Horsmanden's loathing of the black defendents--revealed consistently in remarks about their demeanor and way of speaking--and his certainty of their guilt leaps undimmed from his account, now more than two and a half centuries later.

Horsmanden's bias as he describes the defendents: Peggy Kerry, "a person of infamous character, a notorious prostitute, and also of the worst sort, a prostitute to Negroes" is stunning.

Hughson was treated in the same manner in Horsmanden's eyes: "That any white people should become so abandoned as to confederate with slaves in such an execrable and detestable purpose," he wrote "could not but be very amazing to everyone that heard it."

Mary Burton's testimony: Caesar, Prince and Cuffee had often talked about burning the fort and then the town, and that the Hughsons had promised to help was damning. Also, said the 16-year old girl, she'd heard Cuffee say that "a great many people had too much, and others too little," and he wanted to change that. (By making it clear that Hughson's tavern was the war room of a plot to burn down the city she was damning the Hughsons' too.)

Prince and Caesar were already in jail and Cuffee was there also at day's end. A jailhouse informant gave the frightened slave a sympathetic ear "over a bowl and a tankard of punch" and got the name of the man who set fire to the fort. Quack Roosevelt, who was owned by a prominent builder, was arrested that day, charged, as was Cuffee, with arson and conspiracy[/u].

Quack, having been denied permission to visit his wife, Barbara (a slave who was the governor's cook) had become enraged & set fire to Fort George. The informant also said that after revealing Quack's name, Cuffee refused to speak further and sat in his cell, crying.

It took one day only to convict Caesar and Prince of stealing from the Hoggs & another merchant, but it was their bad fortune to be tried for the theft at a time of growing public hysteria and at the beginning of what would become a huge conspiracy trial.

They had no counsel (and in any case, every lawyer in town had already agreed to aid the prosecutors). They were allowed to call witnesses, the two said nothing, I suppose, already knowing they were doomed.

Both men were quickly sentenced to hang. Caesar was presumed to be the leader in the thefts, his body was to hang in chains until it rotted.

Sounding resentful, Horsmanden recorded that the two "died very stubbornly," without confessing anything about the conspiracy, "although the proof against them was strong and clear concerning their guilt for that also."

Although Caesar and Prince were the first to be convicted and executed for tha 1741 events, the trial of Cuffee and Quack for conspiring to "kill and murder" city residents, set the tone in terms of the ferociousness of the trial.

As the court began to collect names and confessions, Niblet's Sandy, a teenage slave, dropped a bombshell: the plan had been to burn the property of the white men kill the whites as they tried to put out the fires and Sandy also claimed that Hughson was to become KING , Caesar Governor, and the black men were to take the murdered white men's wives as their own.

Thus, a huge escalation of what the grand jury had understood to be a plot by a handful of black men to burn a few city buildings now was "murther and rapine", and a very dramatic overturning of society's structure. For Horsmanden, every word confirmed the existence of a grand plot, and a huge case affirming his deepest belief that slaves were, above all, a danger to the community.

It's not surprising that the conviction rate was 100%, a figure without precedent in colonial jury trials.

The powerful language of the trial--the justices, witnesses--, even the onlookers reveals more than the fears of a city under siege: it speaks to the white society's distrust of a growing population its members depended on for labor.

Slaves were referred to as "black devils" who'd hatched a "hellish project in the cabinets of Hell." (Other sources used in this portion and previous entries include: Lerone Bennett's Before the Mayflower, pp 112-139, Scott's "Slave Insurrection in New York," (in a previous entry: "whole town .......under arms" quoting the Boston Weekly New-Letter, April 14, 1712, Iconography of Manhattan Island, Stokes, vol. 10, p.475, "Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch..." See Thomas Davis, Rumor of Revolt, p. 17, "a person of infamous character..." Horsmanden, Conspiracy, p.15,"That any white people..." Ibid., pp. 42-43, "died very stubbornly..."Ibid., pp.65-66.)

As the Cuffee and Quack's trial, Horsmanden's lengthy account gives reference only to testimony by the slaves that they were not guilty.

Other testimony shows the tension that existed between society's need for the work of the enslaved population & its divided feelings toward the people who provided it.

Adolphus Philipse, Cuffee's owner, said that the day the storehouse burned, he'd left Cuffee "sewing a sail for his boat", but he refused to testify about Cuffee's character. Quack's owner testified that on the day the fort burned, the slave had been "cutting away the ice out of the yard" the entire morning, and was out of his sight only while he ate breakfast.

Another man told the court he had hired Quack to help build the city's new battery, and that Quack had been a good worker and "minded his business very well," but character references had little impact on the brief trial. By day's end, the prosecution was already wrapping up its case. The summation, made by attorney William Smith, dramatic and long, designed to make New Yorkers feel good about their legal system, which had kept them safe until this "wicked and foolish plot".

"Gentlemen, no scheme more monstrous could have been invented...That the white men should all be killed, and the women become a prey to the rapacious lust of these villains!" He finished with a paen to slavery. "They are indeed slaves," said Smith, "but under the protection of the law."

The jury found the defendents guilty in just a few minutes and sentenced them to be burned at the stake the next afternoon. Quack and Cuffee's trial, conviction and sentencing had taken less than a day.

The next afternoon, a huge crowd gathered on the public commons, a low-lying marshy area. When they saw the the large piles of wood, the slaves "showed great terror in their countenances," Horsmanden noted. John Roosevelt, who'd stood by his slave as far as law allowed, had spoken up for him at his trial, stood by Quack at the stake while Cuffee stood alone. Scared, chained back-to-back, the condemned made separate confessions about their parts in the plot. JohBoth named other men who'd known of the conspiracy and had promised to destroy property.

John Hughson was the "contriver" of the plot to murder and plunder New Yorkers, they said in hopes of being spared death. Even Horsmanden thought the detailed confessions merited a reprieve, possibly even a pardon. The lieutenant governor approved a provisional stay of execution, and the government secretary raced back towards the commons with the news. But the large crowd grew restless when it appeared they might be cheated out of a burning at the stake and the officials feared a riot.

"For these reasons," Horsmanden wrote coolly, "the execution proceeded."

Quack's dying words were that his wife Barbara knew nothing of his plan to burn Fort George.

Before more black men, those named by Cuffee & Quack, could be tried, the misery of John and Sarah Hughson drew to a close.
 
Hughson was imperative to the prosecution because it was inconceivable to the judges that a group of slaves had devised this elaborate plot without white leadership. The tavern keeper was a danger to society, with his open door policy for blacks, with generous meals, etc. The court wanted to send a powerful message to white people who treated blacks as equals.

In his summation, Wm. Smith said Hughson's crimes made him "blacker than a Negro" and a scandal to his "complexion."

The judge sent the jury off with a jovial exhortation to be sure to find the defendants guilty, calling the evidence "so ample, so full, so clear and satisfactory."

The Hughsons and Peggy Kerry were hanged a stone's throw from the East River. At the last moment on the gallows, Peggy started to speak, but Sarah Hughson gave her a sharp shove and she fell silent.  (This has always puzzled me.  Would she have involved other whites or blacks? --Pie)

The initial goal of the investigation had been to find the ringleaders of the plot to burn Fort George and a few other city properties, not to surrender a large part of the city's skilled workforce. But the escalation of the trials resulted not only in the deaths of slaves but also in financial losses to their owners.

Gerardus Comfort, a cooper with business near Hughson's on the Hudson River, lost two slaves in the debacle of 1741, one to the stake and the other to banishment, despite his insistence in court that he'd seen "nothing amiss" at Hughson's tavern.

The jail cells at City Hall, then located on Wall Street, were full of black men, and the justices decided to suspend all other court business until they could get to the bottom of "Hughson's Plot". Pardons offered to all who would confess and tell what they knew pulled in droves of fearful blacks. The deadline for the pardon had to be extended.

"The trouble of examining criminals in general, may be easily guessed at," Horsmanden complained, "but the fatigue in that of Negroes, is not to be conceived, but by those that have undergone the drudgery."

Eleven blacks had been burned at the stake, 10 blacks and 3 whites had been hanged by the first week in July and by the end of the month, 7 more black men would die.

At this point, different prejudices were turning the plot in different directions. Charges were brought against 4 Spanish blacks who'd been part of the crew of the Spanish sloop brought in the harbor earlier in the year. And Horsmanden got ready to continue his prosecution, focusing next on Irish soldiers who'd been garrisoned at Fort George, as well as on other suspicious characters about the city.

John Ury, a Hughson tavern regular, suspected of helping the blacks in the plot and also suspected of being a Catholic priest, made an eloquent self-defense, but was hanged in late August.

By now the court was ready to bring the spectacle to a close: not only was the hysteria dying out, but Mary Burton, the "obscure drudge" with the prolific memory, started to name influential New Yorkers as plotters, Horsmanden himself hesitated, then moved quickly to suppress her testimony.

The questionings and detentions of black men continuef for some months, but the tribunal was losing its audience. The last death was that of Mrs. Bradt's Tom, convicted of setting fire to an outhouse. He was hanged on March 13, 1742. Horsmanden wanted to burn Tom, but the other justices seem to have had enough.

The Great Negro Plot terrified white New Yorkers,who failed to understand their slaves' hatred of bondage, and so made 1741 one to remember.

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South Part IV By Allen (Piewacket1861)