The Great Negro Plot (7 page)

The destruction of public property was never a casual event in New York, regardless of the 1741 affair. Prior to 1750, 71
percent of those convicted of stealing got a good flogging for their efforts. Ten percent of these thieves were killed for
their crime. This would only get more severe as the century progressed, with 22 percent executed, 26 percent whipped, and
28 percent branded for their crime. Even if you made it out with both ears after being caught and punished, there were often
additional prices to pay. For example, not rarely, the letter
T
was burned into the thieves' forehead so that the world could see their guilt from then on.

So Cuffee had a fairly accurate idea what awaited him if they found him guilty, and that the word
if
was probably an overly optimistic one. There would be little weight given to his word, and even less to his human rights.
In fact, Cuffee would be held for eleven days before his interrogation would even begin. By then it was known that, in addition
to his initial identification and his presumed guilt, some whites had actually stepped forward and provided favorable depositions
as well.

"I was working with him, all day," a young man offered. "He only left me a moment before the second fire bell, so he couldn't
have lit the first fire."

"How was he acting?" the investigators asked incredulously. "Was there any suspicious behavior?"

"No, as I say, he was right here, working as always. Of course, when the first fire went up I asked him if he was going to
help with buckets at his master's storehouse, and the Negro declined, if you can believe it."

"He what?"

"He said, T've had enough of being out in the morning.' Just like that, and walked off for a rest. But then, the Negroes are
a lazy breed, you know."

Still other witnesses had Cuffee right at his master's door before the fire bell rang.
One
man who'd known Cuffee for years said that the slave was right next to him, watching the fire, but this fellow was old and
his eyesight was piss poor on a clear day. The Negroes all looked so much alike anyway, how could the ancient white man really
tell the difference? And even if all of the witnesses were correct and reliable, with slow burning, strategically placed embers,
it was impossible for a timeline to be drawn that could prove absolute innocence. Cuffee could have placed the coals there
early in the morning, or even the night before.

The difficulty of uncovering any good conspiracy is that, for all the suspicion one can have, its discovery still depends
largely on getting those involved in the actual events to talk. Of course, these are usually the individuals least likely
to blabber; even if they are not connected directly. Who would want to link themselves to a scheme so horrifying that any
whose name is mentioned might lose their life? So for investigators, ways must be found, methods and strategies discovered,
to get those involved to talk. There are those out there who might not even realize that they have a piece of information
that could connect into the puzzle. So a bounty was set, one that said much about the society of the period. For whites with
information, a reward of one hundred pounds was offered. For free Africans, mulattos, and Indians with information, it would
be forty-five pounds. For slaves, divulging information would mean freedom plus twenty pounds, with an additional twenty-five
pounds allocated for their masters. This, too, might serve as a seductive source of income among the lowest to better themselves,
as opposed to the opportunities for theft, advantaged by some during the latest pandemonium of the fires.

And there
had been
a lot of stealing of late. When better to make an illicit acquisition than during the chaos of smoke and fear, when prized
possessions were strewn by strangers' hands into the street? The theft of evacuated property was such a significant issue,
the need to enforce order among the colonists so strong, that the magistrates and militia were sent to search out every home
for stolen goods. While invading the space of people's houses, investigators were also encouraged to look for strangers to
the colony who might be secretly responsible for the madness—surely so much destruction could not be instigated solely by
one of New York's own. Yet in spite of the full onslaught of force, aside from one old slave, Cuba, and his equally elderly
wife, who were arrested for owning more than they could afford, nothing nefarious was discovered.

*    *    *

It is unknown whether Mrs. Abigail Earle collected her hundred pounds for the information, but the impudent Negro she heard
declaring, "
Fire, fire, scorch, scorch,
A LITTLE,
damn it,
BY AND BY," as his hands circled his head was identified as Quack (enslaved by Mr. Walter), and taken into custody.

After being summarily left to stew in his fear for a few days, Quack was brought to the magistrates for questioning.

"Slave Quack," began the interrogation, "you have been quoted as saying, 'Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, a little, damn it, by
and by' by a respected member of this community. There is no use denying it. So what say you to this line?"

"Oh, your honor. You know Quack didn't mean nothing by that; I love the Englishman. Matter of fact, I was remarking to my
mates about the taking of Porto Bello by that Admiral Vernon, what had just happened before. Fine seaman, he is, why he taught
them Spaniards something. Them Spaniards, they can't stand to a good Englishman, no sir. Like I was telling my associates,
Admiral Vernon just burned them off slow, one by one. That's how him and them admirals did it."

The court paused to look at itself, confused. This was not the answer they were expecting. Surely the recent adventures of
Admiral Vernon were something to marvel at, but still . . . the Negro had thrown them.

"A cunning excuse, slave Quack, this we will admit, but that is all the benefit we will give you. Perhaps some abler heads
have planted this story in yours?"

Quack shrugged, offering what he could only hope was a portrait of innocent confusion to the room.

"Fine. Fortunately, we have benefit of the presence of your slave companions on that day in our custody as well. So let's
see what these men of your own complexion have to say on the matter."

The other slaves were called for, and sheepishly they arrived, hands bound, petrified, shuffling forward as if blows were
imminent.

"You, the accused, what do you say in regard to the conversation you were so suspiciously engaged in?" the judge demanded
of them.

The oldest of the bunch, and the least frozen of the men, looked to his fellow prisoners before offering explanation.

"Well, sir, we was just walking about, marveling at how that Admiral Vernon was showing the Papists what's what. That this
was but a small feat to what this brave officer would do by and by and . . ."

The court looked on, impressed with the testimony. It could mean only this one thing, and they all knew it.

"Enough," the judge silenced him. Turning to Quack, who for the moment was daring to believe himself cleared of the evidence,
the judge continued. "Do you really expect this court to believe that your overheard comments are mere coincidence? Coming
as they do,
a mere eighteen days
after the fort was burned to the ground? This alone is enough to damn you, but your hands give more. As Mrs. Earle has described,
you lifted them up in the air and swept them in a circle around your head as you made this pronouncement. It is obvious that
you were talking about our fair colony, and the fires that would engulf us. The fact that you said 'by and by' gives testament
that there would be more to follow. Your laughter then comes back to haunt you now, does it not? You have shown the blackness
of your heart for all to witness. The gall, that you would not just talk of the white destruction, but rejoice in it! That
your stories match proves that this is an organized plot indeed. And a higher intelligence must be behind your actions."

The lieutenant governor ordered a watch kept that evening, and that watch would stay on guard through the spring and into
the summer. No precaution could be spared with the threat of revolt and rebellion so near.

ENEMIES OF THEIR OWN HOUSEHOLD

ASLAVE IN ITSELF is not a person, not a human being. Slaves are simply beasts, commodities. Even the way we brand them with
the stigmatizing noun
slave
as opposed to the literal adjective
enslaved
removes room for context and humanity.

The enslaved Africans of eighteenth-century New York left behind few records of their history, because, of course, that's
what their captors intended. To reach back to them, to identify their stories and herald their sorrow is an act of rebellion
in itself. To understand the Great Negro Plot, to discover the truth behind the innuendo of the time, we must move past the
European arrogance that defined the period, in order to view the Africans of New York themselves.

The single most important text in regard to the the Great Negro Plot is a book called
The New York Conspiracy,
written in 1744, only three years after the incident's conclusion. The book is an exhaustive, detailed account of the events,
offered in chronological order, and using actual trial proceedings, complete with depositions, confessions, and the notes
of the magistrates and lawyers. By itself, it is a fascinating and thorough look at a peculiar event in history. If
The New York Conspiracy
hadn't been compiled by colonist Daniel Horsmanden, the plot might have faded completely into historical footnote.

Horsmanden was the perfect person for the task. He was one of the main judges/prosecutors involved in the events, and the
court recorder. It would be difficult to find a more biased filter for information on the event at hand, yet because Daniel
Horsmanden was so confident that his full accounting of the facts would prove to the world the just nature of the court, he
delivered the text without any self-editing. Read carefully, the self-righteous Horsmanden often unwittingly incriminates
what he is trying to defend. His interpretation and choice of relayed events is shaped by his bias, and is usually self-serving
and transparent. That said, Horsmanden is generally honest, and the man does not shrink away from giving information that
exposes his position. Still, while central to understanding the events of the Great Negro Plot, Horsmanden's narrative is
heavily filtered through the white racial imagination of the period. It centers on dates and the orders of events, but doesn't
offer us the opportunity to ask questions beyond the interest of the prosecution. Nor does it offer us the chance to hear
the Africans' stories, only the ones they offered to a hostile court. To successfully skip beyond that court, to go directly
to the source of the African community of the period, we must speak directly to the dead themselves.

In 1991, two hundred and fifty years after the Great Negro Plot took place, construction began on a new federal office building
in lower Manhattan. Beneath the site of the proposed three-hundred-million-dollar project was discovered the three-hundred-year-old
African Burial Ground, which once provided a resting place for New York's enslaved community. While the burial ground's existence
was not a complete surprise—scholars of the city had never forgotten it was there—the exact location was enough of a mystery
that the federal agency proved unprepared for the discovery. This place of rest, which sat on what was once the northernmost
outskirts of the city, was in use from the late 1600s to 1796, although the African dead, much like the African living, were
never given much of a "rest" by their European neighbors. In fact, in the middle of the eighteenth century while the cemetery
was still in active use, whites built up pottery and tanning industries directly abutting it, using the site to dump their
toxic refuse. Worse, medical students at New York Hospital were known to regularly steal black corpses for use as cadavers.
After the cemetery was ordered closed, Dutch Americans built homes around the six-acre site and drilled outhouse ditches directly
into the African Burial Ground so that for generations they were, literally, defecating on the dead.

But things had changed in Manhattan since those bad old days. While the white majority still could not be counted on to treat
the African dead with reverence, the descendants of Africa were now strong enough to demand better. Initially, the federal
government was hoping to quickly abide by the rules of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and have their own archeologists
swiftly excavate the site so that they could begin construction overtop the cemetery—thus completely destroying it. What they
did not count on was a politically powerful, radicalized, astute black community that insisted, instead, that the government
comply with another part of the 1966 law that required basic preservation of the historic site, along with public commentary
and decision on how the landmark would be dealt. For once, the buried Africans had a stroke of good fortune, and it didn't
hurt their cause that the city of New York at the time was under the administration of its first black mayor.

What the old African Burial Ground provided to contemporary black New York City was a lost connection to its history, a chance
to grieve for the atrocities of the past and mourn for the nameless who came before them. With numerous blessing ceremonies,
candlelight vigils, and readings, it was an opportunity to reaffirm the dignity of the disrespected. For a community whose
culture and history were systematically stripped from them—particular their connection to Africa—it served as the missing
link to a forgotten past.

For historians, once the site was treated with the complete respect it deserved, the burial ground offered an immense bounty:
the chance to see firsthand the physical evidence of lives once denied their stories. The skeletal remains speak volumes.
For enslaved blacks, an American childhood was extremely harsh, with mortality rates twice that of whites in the colony. Half
of the skeletal children showed evidence of metabolic disease, indicating anemia, and growth retardation as well as defects
in dental enamel because of starvation and disease. Based on the research done on other African burial grounds, including
sites in Philadelphia, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, historians have already concluded that African-American slaves
during this period had the highest frequency of developmental defects of any observed human population, owing to malnutrition
and disease. A comparison study of the teeth from the site conducted by the official research team at Howard University, however,
found that the people at New York's African Burial Ground had less than half the adult instances of tooth defects as did the
slaves of other colonies. What this discovery suggests is that a large portion of the Africans living in Manhattan were not
native born, instead spending their childhood in Africa before being enslaved and shipped to the Americas. This is backed
up by the shipping records of the period, which show many direct importations from West Africa to New York, particularly of
those the Europeans called "Koromantines" or "Coromantees," slaves shipped from Fort Coromantee, off the coast of modern-day
Ghana. The other group identified in the 1712 revolt, the Pawpaw, were, more than likely, Africans taken from another large
slave port further east at Grand Popo, in modern-day Benin. Slave forts such as these served as way stations for people kidnapped
from a variety of different regions and ethnicities further inland, marched for weeks to be brought to the coast for sale.
While many enslaved shared larger ethnic affiliation (such as the widespread Akan people of the area), Coromantee and Pawpaw
were not ethnic groups, but corporate designations, referencing the people they had been kidnapped by. They were brand names
for the colonial buyers, like Sunkist or Chicken of the Sea.

The presence of Africa in colonial New York can also be seen in the names of its captives: Cuffee, Quash, Quack, and Quaco.
The syllables were deformed by the contemporary European tongue, yet still they remain decipherable. Despite the habit among
the Europeans of destroying the cultural vestiges of these African people, traditional names were often indulged and encouraged.
This was largely practical: How embarrassing would it be to name your bestial slave "Phillip" only to receive a letter the
next month that your brother had named his first son the same? Many of these slave names, like Quack, for instance, were actively
encouraged because the Europeans found them utterly comic. (The duck says: Quack, quack, quack.) However, these names are
actually the simply misunderstood derivations of Akan day names. In the Fanti dialect: Monday is Kwadjo; Tuesday, Kwabena;
Wednesday, Kwaku; Thursday, Yao; Friday, Kofi; Saturday, Kwame; and Sunday, Kwasi. Or, in the even more familiar Ashanti dialect
of Akan: Kojo, Kobina, Kwaku, Yao, Kofi, Kwame, and Kwesi. So, through the untrained ears of the Europeans, the names became
distorted: Kofi became Cuffee; Kwadjo became Quash; Kojo became Cato, Cajoe, or Cudjo; Kwaku became Quaco and Quack.

Further physical evidence was found at the African Burial Ground. Etched into the coffin lid of a particular statuesque colonial
African (who measured in at a whopping five foot nine) was the Sankofa, an Akan symbol literally meaning "Go and fetch," and
figuratively, "You must look to the past to understand the future." Other bodies were found to have been buried with great
care, along with quartz crystal beads and shells, that point to various African burial traditions.

Beyond the rotten, malformed teeth, the enslaved bodies unearthed at the African Burial Ground showed a multitude of signs
of hard use. The majority of the skeletons unearthed revealed evidence of muscle enlargements around the legs, arms, and neck:
a direct result of frequent strains due to heavy lifting, particularly the lifting of large weights balanced atop the skull
in traditional African style. These slaves were not simply being forced into an active physical lifestyle by their captors,
providing the foundation of domestic labor that built the colony, these Africans had been pushed to the limit of the human
capacity. The deep bone lesions evident in most of the unearthed skeletons are typically caused by muscle tears from overstraining
the human body. While the African technique of carrying objects on the head is an efficient, ancient practice, it seems that
in the colony it was pushed beyond any reasonable limits, evidenced by the frequent examples of arthritis in the neck. Six
of the remains uncovered at the African Burial Ground showed ring-shaped fractures at the base of the skull, resulting from
the spine shooting through and breaking a hole in the skull base, presumably from carrying staggering weights. This injury
would have resulted in death, these slaves crushed under the burden of their bondage.

This harsh physical treatment was in no way limited to the adult men in bondage. Both men's and women's bones evidenced large
muscle attachments as a result of harsh labor. While digging up the site, it was common for the Howard University technicians
to uncover bones so thick that they would have been wrongly identified as male if other evidence of gender hadn't been present.
Nor was the life of a slave any easier for young children. In fact, 50 percent of slave children died before the age of twelve,
and 35 percent of that group didn't even make it out of infancy. Rickets and porotic-hyperostosis caused by vitamin D deficiency
and anemia were common, as well as premature cranial closing. One child's body showed severe dental deformities probably caused
by its mother's sick pregnancy, as well as anemia and lesions on the bones from infections. The top bones in the skeleton's
neck were fused
solid
from carrying repeated heavy loads. Despite its harsh use in life, the corpse was interred gently in a pinned shroud by the
people of his community.

But what of the flesh that once stuck to these bones? Or the clothes that kept that flesh warm? Bones are well and good for
facts of life, but they don't offer a vision of the living people in question. For that, an excellent source of information
is again, ironically, the group who most actively ignored and obscured the Africans' humanity during their lifetimes: the
slave owners. Looking at the advertised notices for runaway slaves found in the newspapers of the day, we find detailed descriptions
of the slaves, their physical appearances, and habits.

For example, from August 26, 1734, in the
New-York Weekly Journal:

Run away from Johanna Kelsall of the City of New York, a Negroe Man known by the Name of Johnsey here in Town, but he writes
his Name Jonathan Stow, about 25 Years of Age, of short Stature, bandy Legs, blubber Lips, yellow Complexion, his Hair is
neither right Negro nor Indian, but between both, and pretty long, he had on when he went away a homespun jacket, a pair of
Trowsers, and a speckled Shirt.

Whoever takes up the said Negro and secures him, or brings him to his Mistress, shall have 40 Shillings Reward and all Reasonable
Charges paid by me.

So here we have a man who refuses to be named by those who enslave him, insisting instead on his own identity separate from
the one imposed on him. This is a man who displays a mix of ethnic features, most notably African. If his hair was neither
fully African nor Indian, did that mean he was a mix between the two? Considering his light skin color and New York's history,
it was more likely that Jonathan Stow was ethnically mixed with European blood as well. So was such a common mixture too shameful
to mention in the advert, or was this racial reality not even considered in lieu of the hypocrisy of the moment?

From December 19,1737, the
New-York Gazette:

Ran away from John Bell, of New York City, carpenter, one Negro woman Jenney, 14-15 years, born in
New York,
speaks English and some Dutch. She has a flat Nose, thick Lips, and full faced; had on when she went away, a Birds eyed Waistcoat
and Pettycoat of a darkish colour, and a Callico Waistcoat with a large red flower, and a broad stripe, a Callico Pettycoat
with small stripes and small red flowers. Whoever shall take up said Negro Wench and bring her to said John Bell, or secure
her and give Notice, so that he can have her again, shall have
Three Pounds
as a Reward, and all reasonable charges.