The Great Negro Plot (6 page)

THE SPANISH NEGROES

AT TEN A. M. on the morning of Monday, April 6, 1741, yet another fire broke out, this time at the home of Sergeant Burns,
starting supposedly in his chimney though he insisted the flue had been swept just days before. Then a fire broke out on the
roof of Mrs. Hilton's home on the corner of the Fly Market, another house that adjoined the residence of Captain Sarly, evidence
left behind that it, too, had been intentionally set.

Could anyone be surprised? Captain Sarly's neighbors seemed to be particularly unfortunate. Surely this could not be coincidence;
there are no coincidences in a world of fear.

"It's his slave, it must be. The black beast is always saying he should be a free man, isn't he?"

"The impertinence!"

"Saying he was kidnapped off his Spanish ship and enslaved. I heard Captain Sarly paid good money for him and the other Spanish
Negroes, from a reputable trader. Got a bill of sale and everything."

The enslaved, Juan, was soon caught on the street, and quickly surrounded. The crowd demanded an answer of him. "Talk, villain!
Do you or do you not know the source of these fires?"

"So now you care to know what I know," Juan responded. "I know you best look elsewhere." His tone read by the assembled mob
as pure insolence. Juan was less talkative after he'd been summarily beaten and dragged to jail.

It was a dirty, open secret that since the 1680s, when British privateers captured Spanish ships, a profitable habit was made
of selling darker-skinned sailors into slavery in New York. Juan was part of a group of Africans kidnapped, just a few years
before, by Captain Lush. Despite insistence of their free status, for lack of legal documentation, the group was declared
human property by the admiralty and sold into slavery in homes across Manhattan. Not surprisingly, these Spanish-speaking
Africans were notoriously bitter. When you included that the dark group spoke among themselves in a foreign tongue, that slave
or not, they were chosen citizens of a dominion of the Vatican and its papal plans, in the eyes of the white colonists of
New York City the Spanish Negroes were even less deserving of trust than the rest of the feared African hoard. If one of this
suspicious band was involved in the suspicious fire, surely the others were in cahoots as well.

"The Spanish Negroes! The Spanish Negroes!" was the call cried out by the frightened whites. "Take up the Spanish Negroes!"

And taken up they were.

To label a person (or group) a scapegoat implies a judgment of guilt or innocence. It implies a tacit accusation against the
accuser. It says what you are doing is blaming an innocent person, based solely on prejudice or convenience. But scapegoating
offers more subtle pleasures as well. Don't forget the release of fear provided, freedom from anxiety through the abandonment
of reason. The great thing about scapegoating is that you don't even have to believe its victim is responsible for the action
in question. You just have to pretend you do, and it still makes you feel better. No more fires to worry about here, we've
captured the Spanish Negroes now. The Spanish Negroes did it. The Spanish Negroes will pay for their crime. When you get hit,
you hit back—the question of whether you hit the right person, or for the right reasons, or whether the entire action will
have any effect on the situation is irrelevant. What's important is that the issue has been addressed. What's important is
that when there's a crime, someone pays for it—who pays matters less than the debt to society. As long as that debt is paid,
you can all rest, pacified. Because, let us acknowledge, it was never about the crime as much as your fear of it.

*    *    *

The Spanish Negroes were herded from across the colony, caught up and brought to City Hall for questioning by the magistrates.
It was a little after four in the afternoon, and the justices gathered from their workaday lives, for once not bothered to
be pulled from their commerce. The esteemed men were proceeding to the judicial building relieved, at last, to have someone
from whom they could demand an explanation—DING DING DING DING DING—yet another fire alarm bell frantically rang out.

Dear God, when would the horror cease?

Searching out the cause for alarm, scouring rooflines for the source of the smoke above, a small streak of flame was seen
running up the shingles of Colonel Philipse's roof.

"Blimey, from the look of it, this fire must have started on the side of the roof that faced
against
the wind," noted one white onlooker with dread.

The ignition point meant it was highly implausible, if not impossible, that this fire was a mere accident. Even more suspicious,
the fire seemed to have started strategically in the middle of three large wooden storehouses. These buildings had no chimneys
and were too far removed from any other structure to have been caused by a random spark. No, again, this must be arson. There
was no other explanation.

The colonists were still busy extinguishing this conflagration, which they had now concluded could only have been started
in the building's interior, when the cry of "FIRE!!!" was heard yet again. With the storehouse blaze virtually subdued, the
majority of the crowd ran off immediately in this new direction to tackle the next crisis. With the bulk of the crowd gone,
and the fire, for all intents and purposes, well contained, there were only a few colonists left at the storehouse to comb
over the dying embers. One of the men climbed on top of the building to extinguish anything left still burning directly from
that precarious vantage point. It was risky business, but expedient, dumping his bucket down on the last of the smoldering
embers.
Don't bloody fall,
was primarily what he was reminding himself, when through the smoke this brave soul noticed movement below. Behind the house,
shielded from the view of those still on the ground, he espied the dark visage of a man. And the ebony phantom was scurrying
away
from the fire. From his rooftop vantage, the colonist saw this dark apparition jump out of a storehouse window onto the ground
far below. Not just any man, the running man could now be seen clearly, and he was: a Negro! The African was hopping away
with desperate speed, hastily jumping over the fences of the small colonial yards as he fled.

"A Negro!" the white man on the roof called to the whites below.

Those on the ground looked up at him in confusion.

What are you going to do with a Negro? they seemed to be asking. Don't you mean, "A bucket of water, please"?

"A Negro! A Negro!" the man on the roof persisted in yelling down at them until the others finally seemed to get it.

"The Negroes are rising! The Negroes are rising!"

The chant now rose quickly through the crowd. Finally finding ready voices among them, ready believers. Word spreading almost
as rapidly as the fires had. Fear becoming fact even before the facts actually emerged. The cry of the
"Negro"
becoming more specific as whites who had just seen this suspect tearing through their yards joined the chorus with sure identification
of the culprit.

"Cuff Philipse, Cuff Philipse!" the mob chanted the fleeing black man's slave name.

He had been identified as none other than Cuffee, the enslaved of the prominent owner of the burned storehouse in question.

Soon the gathering mob stormed the house of Adolph Philipse in search of his human property. Cuffee was found at his master's
door, wide-eyed, a-gawk at the white crowd, in possible confusion and definite fear.

"What were you doing by the fire?"
they clamored.

"Why were you running? What were you running from?"

"Who else is involved?"

"Who is responsible?"

A barrage of questions were yelled, but opportunity afforded not one answer. Instead, the terrified Cuffee was dragged from
his enslaver's home as his muscles struggled for release. The mob grabbed frantically at pieces of him, hit whatever resisted.
It was thus that the battered Cuffee would arrive at the magistrates, borne on the shoulders of those who kept him alive only
for answers.

The Negroes are rising! What had been the frantic ranting of an excited, frightened man on a smoke-enveloped roof, haunted
the minds of the individuals who now comprised this new force of emotion that was the mob. The Negroes are rising!

Rising: being down, and trying to get up.

What a frightening prospect for those on top, indeed.

Isn't "the other" always a scary thing? That person you don't know, nor can decipher. The further their difference from your
own, the more alien their food, the smell of their breath, their perspiration, the odd way their mouth forms the most common
of words . . . the more they are something to fear, something to counter. The other is different, and that crime is obvious.
What other parts of its nature are hidden? Wouldn't the unknown be capable of the unimaginable?

It wasn't long before the mob had changed their focus to a new target. Who were the seditionists? they were forced to ask
themselves. The insurrection, such as it was, could not simply be emanating from the Spanish Negroes, that foreign, hostile
threat. Nor could such rebellion, under any stretch of the imagination, be limited to one slave. Not even a loathsome Negro,
such as Cuffee, no matter how ornery and foul his nature.

No! It was all of the black bastards, the enemy that lived in their very homes.

Blacks were an easy target to hit, particularly for an entity so indiscriminate. No need to wait for those already in captivity
to confess to their sins when there was an abundance of Africans walking the streets that could be yanked by their necks by
New York's concerned white citizens, molested into passivity, and booted through the doors of the local jail with the rest
of them.

Let chaos ensue. Let no black be spared, even those who had just minutes before been helping the colony by passing water buckets
and rescuing personal wealth they could never own. Being black on the streets of New York was enough to qualify for suspicion.
The disregarding of what little rights the slaves had was no great cost for the cessation of white fear. The Africans were
in this country solely to serve the Europeans anyway.

Cuffee was left to stew in his jail cell overnight before the official interrogation was to begin. It would have been a long
night, too, high on anxiety and extremely low on comfort. As one colonist described his own stay in these accommodations some
years later, "[N]othing but a bare floor to lay on—no covering—almost devour'd with all kinds of vermin." It could not even
be called a fleabag cell because that would imply there was an actual bag to sleep on. Not that Cuffee could really sleep
anyway, given the circumstance. Given what he knew must surely lay in front of him.

A prison in the colonial world is an expensive indulgence to spend on those in society least deserving of its funds. The cost
of the building alone was prohibitive, but when you added the cost of maintenance it became a complete extravagance. Food
had to be bought, prepared, and delivered. Fresh water had to be pumped and made available. Wood had to be chopped and stoked
on the coldest of winter nights. And of course, someone had to be paid to make sure those inside never got out. In a colony
based around commercial interests, where ambitious members of the British working class could scarcely be attracted to come
in the first place, finding a white man content to spend his life babysitting the low life was impractical. The modern prison
system that would be born decades later in that Quaker city to the south simply didn't exist yet. And even then, incarceration
was too damn expensive. As said, New York has always been a city based around making money. So New York had no real prison
in 1741, just the jail. Nobody had the time, or desire, to waste time policing, not if there was money to be made.

The criminal punishments of the era reflect that this was a colony that was economically focused, as opposed to morally driven.
Whites who committed societal misdemeanors were punished in their purses. If convicted, whites could post a bond of good behavior,
their fortunes being held ransom to ensure their future actions. Some were simply fined outright, occasionally losing their
entire estate for severe crimes. Those without means could find themselves sold into indentured servitude, literally working
off their debt to society. It always came down to money in New York, and what was most cost effective, boiling down to what
the majority of Europeans in this society cared about most. Money was the reason they had left their old lives a continent
away in the first place. But when it came to discipline for severe crimes, or discipline of enslaved Africans who were both
penniless and whose humanity was seen to be of the lowest sort along the Great Chain of Being, the realities of colonial punishment
were much more harsh. The punishments meted were physical, fast, and dramatic. That was the attraction of public torture and
execution. Instead of taking decades to punish a convicted criminal for his crime, the matter could be over in hours. Even
minutes.

For non-capital offenses, the common punishment was flogging with a rod, or whipping. That would do you. This would take place
in a public place, usually on a market day so you could get a good crowd for both the prisoner's humiliation and to serve
as a warning to others. In one instance of the period, constables marched an insolent slave through the entire metropolis,
giving him a lash at each intersection. Quite the tour of the city, it was. A far cry from a mere spanking, it was standard
for a flogging to last for at least thirty-nine lashes. Death from shock or infection happened all the time. The humiliation
alone was more than some could bear. In 1743, one sensitive would-be whipping post victim cut his own throat to avoid the
horror of the lash.

For many others, a pillorying was their equally morbid fate. Marched into stocks, the convicted was required to stick his
head, hands, and sometimes feet into the wooden pillory, which was then locked down in place. This made the pilloried fairly
accessible, not to mention vulnerable when the crowd started throwing rocks and animal shit at their head, which of course
the onlookers did. Once the crowd had exhausted its arsenal, then came the bad part. For the finale, they cut off the convict's
ear. This last bit was a true crowd-pleaser, provoking victorious cheers from the thrilled spectators. After that, they let
them go. It was possible afterward to still hear in that ear-hole okay (if it didn't get infected), but still. Nobody wants
to be known as the crooked arse with the hole in their head for the rest of their lives, do they?