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DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajh021 American Literary History 16(3), © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved.

Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741 Andy Doolen

This article returns to the mysterious string of 13 fires that ripped through and alarmed New York City in the spring and sum- mer of 1741, beginning with a conflagration that turned Fort George, one of British America’s strongest fortifications, into ashes. In the days that followed, each blaze contributed to the mystery until the report of a slave running from the scene of the tenth fire per- suaded the people of New York that the puzzling fires were really opening salvos in a massive slave insurrection. City officials acted quickly, interrogating more than 200 people, black and white, and soon uncovered what they believed to be a gang of dispossessed slaves and Irish indentured servants, who, it seems, had planned to burn New York City to the ground and kill their masters. Stunned by the boldness of the plot, authorities immediately began to investi- gate and to prosecute hundreds of alleged conspirators. Although authorities knew disgruntled indentured servants to be key conspir- ators, blame fell squarely on the city’s large slave population. In the end, the colony of New York executed 30 slaves and 4 white ring- leaders, publicly flogged 50 slaves, and transported over 70 more to the Caribbean slave markets, never to return.1

Was there really a conspiracy to burn New York City in 1741? Unlike an uprising or rebellion, conspiracy was a crime of reckless speech rather than action, a verbal plan that threatened social order, and thus difficult to prove in any era. “Conspiracy lies in asserting and agreeing,” Thomas Davis writes, “in ‘loose talk’ of doing a deed” (“Conspiracy and Credibility” 169). The recent controversy over the Vesey conspiracy of 1822 reminds us that while Anglo- American conspiracy law might set the limits on prohibitive speech, none of the legal niceties mattered much when whites thought they heard “loose talk” coming from slaves. When we read the official archive of a slave conspiracy, we encounter a written record authored by whites in a slave society, a culture of terror that

When we read the official archive of a slave conspiracy, we encounter a written record authored by whites in a slave society, a culture of terror that defended white power at all costs.

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defended white power at all costs. One method of defense was the mass execution of alleged slave conspirators, almost always made possible by a special class of laws. For instance, during the conspi- racy panic in New York, the court relied exclusively on the law of Negro evidence, which had been designed to prosecute potential slave uprisings. Negro evidence was defined as the incriminating testimony of one slave against another—the court needed no other proof than this to sentence a slave to death in 1741.2

Prosecutors went to great lengths to acquire such testimony. Often the inducement was the King’s mercy: either testify against coconspirators and earn a lesser punishment or face a capital charge and certain execution. Prosecutors employed coercive tactics like the threat of the gallows and hanging the dead bodies of the con- demned in gibbets, offered “immunity” or protection in the form of a general pardon, and conducted dragnets, sweeping slaves off the streets for interrogation with the presumption of guilt. As a result of these practices, our view of the conspiracy trials must necessarily pass through an archive distorted by this violence; for the historian trying to sort out testimony according to degrees of coercion, connecting the dots in the ashes of 1741 is a treacherous, perhaps impossible, undertaking.

The search for a verdict based in unimpeachable evidence inspires the historiography of slave conspiracies, even when we know how white authorities elicited “facts.” The historian who wishes to retry the New York Conspiracy trials is even further handicapped by a valuable missing archive, the supreme court records, destroyed with other judicial documents from the era, ironically enough, in a fire. Furthermore, there are few revealing letters, journals, or poems about the trials or executions, and colonial newspapers simply reported the plot’s existence and then kept track of executions. A single “eyewit- ness” account remains, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy, written by Daniel Horsmanden, the city’s recorder and one of the three judges at the trials. He compiled his documentary account from the prosecutors’ notes, his memory of the suspects’ examinations, addresses to the court by prosecutors and defendants, and both his firsthand reflections on the motivations of particular sus- pects and his proud commentary on the court’s timely vigilance. His “official” record of the proceedings has always been the heart of all investigations into what really took place in 1741. Publishing this record in 1744 as a way to silence public criticism of the court, Justice Horsmanden wanted to justify the court’s verdicts and punishments. To put it simply, this deeply flawed text—which Philip Morgan calls an “exercise in post-hoc justification of a controversial prosecution”—is the key piece of evidence in all subsequent historical examinations of the New York Conspiracy trials (164).

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Thus, although even the finest historians readily regard this mine as contaminated by the court’s practices of intimidation, coer- cion, and torture, they still descend into it to extract raw materials for interpretation. Some historians believe that no slave conspiracy occurred in New York in 1741 but that there may have been a conspir- acy among the prosecutors, whose deep-rooted racism and fear of African Americans escalated the violence into a witch hunt. A second perspective holds that what prosecutors saw as a vast conspiracy to overthrow English authority was actually loosely affiliated gangs who set fires as a way to cover their crimes. A third, and related, perspective claims that a vast conspiracy did exist, although leaders were not interested in establishing their own government. Instead, disgruntled slaves desired personal freedoms, and reacted against the master class by joining whites in stealing from the rich and setting their homes on fire. Finally, a fourth perspective believes that there was a conspiracy in 1741 to overthrow the imperial administration and take over the colony. From any perspective, the historian must find a way to resolve the problem of tainted evidence. There is only Horsmanden’s problematic text; no bodies of murdered white people, no organized escape to the northern frontier, no slave caught with a torch, and most important, no confessions from those thought to be the principle conspirators. In A Rumor of Revolt, Davis resolves the lack of reliable evidence by choosing to write an historical fiction that necessarily takes its dialogue, central characters, and motiv- ations from Horsmanden’s account. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh create a fascinating narrative of heroic slaves carrying their knowledge of insurrection into all parts of a fluid Atlantic world in a “Caribbean cycle of rebellion” (193), which finally reached New York City in 1741. Even if one considers this a possible cause for a revolutionary conspiracy, the only proof of its effects were mys- terious fires, forced confessions, and a suspect historical text. Finally, Peter Charles Hoffer, swayed by Horsmanden’s insider per- spective, simply decides to accept the representation of events as “at least partially true” (8) and avoid the troublesome facts of coercion, torture, and false confessions. Like other historians before them, these can only construct their case from circumstantial evidence. Sooner or later everybody returns to Justice Horsmanden’s under- standing and memory of the critical evidence, of the conspirators themselves, and of their confessions and motivations.3

This article, then, goes in a different direction and elects not to sift through the evidence in the hopes of convicting the true culprits or determining the extent to which a conspiracy existed. On the con- trary, I am interested less in the planning of conspiracy, more in how the events of 1741 converge with an imperial conflict known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Positioning Horsmanden’s documentary history

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in this international context, my investigation considers how white panic, caused by conspiracy and war, shaped public perception of the fires. Two years before signs of a plot appeared in New York, the colony embraced this imperial war fought between England and Spain over “American” trade routes in the West Indies; from the beginning, a bellicose patriotism of empire, sweeping England and her colonies, characterized the War of Jenkins’ Ear. By the time of the first fire in 1741, rumors of slave insurrections in other colonies had already alarmed New York, while war hysteria made many colon- ists suspicious of the slave population’s loyalty to England. Many wondered if their slaves were covert enemies who might join forces with Spain upon an invasion.4

Read alongside the War of Jenkins’ Ear, Justice Horsmanden’s text becomes something more than a prosecutor’s dubious justifi- cation of the trials and, instead, offers us an unforeseen opportunity to understand the effects of England’s global ambition on colonial identity. In New York the war led the prosecutors to suspect the city’s slaves—approximately 20 percent of the population in 1741— as being involved in an international conspiracy to overthrow the colony. Instead of a documentary history of the trials, I want to sug- gest that Horsmanden’s text is a war narrative; it tells a story about how an evil Spanish empire, enticing the enslaved with promises of freedom, turned New York’s once loyal, obedient, and dutiful slaves into fierce enemies of the state. In my reading the war and the con- spiracy scare work together to reinforce white racial solidarity in New York.

My investigation of this dynamic will begin with an analysis of the conceptual strategies Justice Horsmanden uses as he composes his official record of the conspiracy trials. How does Justice Horsmanden attempt to stabilize a racial hierarchy unsettled by the war and charges of conspiracy? How does historical writing define, support, and/or escalate the terror that rules all slave cultures, particularly one mired in an acute crisis? The next two sections investigate how the War of Jenkins’ Ear might have shaped Horsmanden’s historical understanding of the conspiracy. Vexed by what it considered to be a war on two fronts—Spain on the Atlantic frontier and slave rebels within the colony—New York experienced a militarism that made a white identity the only safe identity. How did New York’s own imperial fantasies of Caribbean colonies help to transform the local conspiracy scare into a geopolitical crisis connected to the fears of a Spanish invasion? How did the war’s Caribbean theater of action shape racial formation in New York?

These strands come together in the final section, which explains why Horsmanden’s history is left open, unfinished, the threat of insurrection still hovering over the city. The refusal to end

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the narrative, to claim a world free of conspirators, is the political content of the form itself, the action of a colonial official attempting to rebuild social order by warning the public of imminent disaster. This crafted insecurity is our own cautionary tale. It is a sign of a fractured colonial discourse that, once threatened, will work com- pulsively toward a single aim: to govern the shadowy territory between fact and fiction, innocence and guilt, white and black, and in the process reconstitute its dominance. While Horsemanden attempts to construct a history of the trials that monopolizes the evidence, this article explores his failure to tell a story of a colony safe from future threats.

1. Artful Chronicle

During New York’s political wars of the 1730s, Horsmanden rose to prominence because he was skilled at using the written word to defend Governor Cosby’s imperial administration against a rival group led by Lewis Morris, chief justice of the provincial court. When the administration grew irritated with the opposition’s crit- icism, it charged the opposition’s public voice, the New York Weekly Journal, and its editor, John Peter Zenger, with publishing seditious material. Governor Cosby appointed Horsmanden to a council as a political attack dog “to point out . . . the particular seditious para- graphs” in the opposition press (Dictionary 249). Zenger’s eventual acquittal made the trial a milestone in defining the legal freedom of the press as well as the limits of imperial power. Despite the acquittal, Horsmanden established a reputation as a skillful partisan and was handsomely rewarded with a special license from the governor to purchase 6,000 acres along the Hudson River near Albany.

Nobody considers the New York Conspiracy Trials to be a milestone on the grand march toward American constitutionalism, perhaps because of the court’s unprecedented assault on the col- ony’s slaves; nevertheless, both cases reveal a new power of print in the American colonies. As Michael Warner remarks, official docu- ments “metonymically represented the aura of imperial adminis- tration” (18) and opposition could potentially disrupt the “networks of power uniting the colonies and deriving from the English courts” (19). At the height of the conspiracy trials, there was no public resistance to either the prosecution or the administration, but, as the sense of panic diminished during the two years following the trials, critics began to question the court’s actions. Attempting to reinforce their political authority, the imperial administration enlisted Justice Horsmanden to publish a spirited defense and strengthen colonial authority.

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After Zenger, the conspiracy trials accelerated Horsmanden’s rise to prominence. Appearing before the common council in April 1741, he was one of the first public officials to argue that the random fires were actually a conspiracy to overthrow the city; while sitting on the Supreme Court, he directed the prosecution, interrogated defendants, and sentenced those found guilty. His partisanship poses a problem for Horsmanden the author. Attempting to put to rest any doubts that his personal involvement might unfairly influence his opinions, Horsmanden reassures the reader that he will represent the proceedings in an objective, neutral form. “[A] journal would give more satisfaction,” he writes, “inasmuch as in such a kind of pro- cess, the depositions and examinations themselves, which were the ground-work of the proceedings, would appear at large” (5). Lacking a controlling narrator, the chronicle form (what he refers to as a “journal”) promises the reader a clear view of the evidence. Simply by exhibiting the “ground-work” of depositions, testimony, confes- sions, and summations in chronological order, Horsmanden believes the chronicle will unfold the “most natural view of the whole” and make skeptics “undeceived” (5).

More than any piece of evidence, the chronicle’s narrative con- dition persuades Horsmanden’s readers that justice was done in 1741. A prominent narrator, such as Edward Gibbons, Francis Parkman, or Lewis Mumford, defines the “history proper,” a form of history writing that Horsmanden calls “historical relation.” Con- sequently, the chronicle form is often viewed as possessing fewer signs of narration or fiction-making. This objective pose, however, can be the chronicle’s most persuasive feature because the narrator’s apparent neutrality works to conceal the artfulness of the narrative’s construction.5 With this in mind, one can see the outlines of the coherent story that Horsmanden’s chronicle fashions out of a murky historical field. Every culture cultivates particular story types that help a people make sense of the past. In the eighteenth-century colonial world, the insurrection story captured white fears of a slave uprising. In New York, the insurrection story resonated in historical memory, beginning with the 1712 slave uprising, dotted with the many real episodes of slave insurrections and failed plots in the North American colonies as well as the many rumors and half-truths, and capped with the puzzling fires of 1741. As with contemporary reports by government officials and media outlets about terrorist attacks and the semiotic range of color-coded alerts, it hardly mattered if the slave conspiracy was real or imagined—this ambiguity, and the sen- sation it evokes of imminent danger, gave the story its explanatory effect. The insurrection story, with its gripping story line of racial antagonism and terrifying imagery, helped white colonists rationalize an inchoate fear caused by both the fires and the war.

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Fiction-making was precisely what critics accused the courts of doing, which explains why Horsmanden stresses his role as the dutiful city Recorder. He gathers the prosecutors’ notes, transcribes the court’s official statements, and creates a simple calendar for the events. Yet, underlying his “judicial realism” is the insurrection story, and we see signs of it in his first step in composing the chronicle. With the unproven fear of insurrection driving the court’s interpre- tation, he takes control of historical time, a move that also has the effect of inscribing the court’s disciplinary power. The most basic element of the chronicle form—the mere act of selecting and propel- ling details through a chronological cycle—compromises his neutral stance by sowing the first seeds as well as the first impressions of a plot: the first-day, second-day chronology is the flashing red light of a conspiracy that inevitably grows into a security threat with each passing day. Because Horsmanden aims to identify the origins of the plot, the first detail also happens to evoke the final threat of a poten- tial slave conspiracy. A group of slaves walk down the street after yet another mysterious fire in the spring of 1741, and a white woman, Mrs. Earle, looking out her window, overhears one of them, Quack, boast “with a vaporing sort of an air, ‘Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, A LITTLE, damn it, BY-AND-BY,’ and then [he] threw up his hands and laughed” (27). The sequential ordering of events is fundamental to the chronicle’s rhetorical effectiveness; as the curse is presented as evidence, it acts as a secret code in the narrative, something the testimony that follows will inevitably decipher. Beginning with this first suspicion of a plot and tracing the gradual accretion of rumors as they become verifiable truth, the chronicle has the effect of re-creating and highlighting the suspense felt by the public during the year of the trials.

At this point, the sequence has already signaled the chronicle’s polemic because local culture possesses knowledge of the underlying story type; no narrator needs to interrupt and explain the curse’s meaning. Fire may have been a handy weapon for the insurrectionary slave, but it was legendary in the white imagination. A mysterious fire could often appear to whites, even if only as a nagging doubt, as the first assault in a race war. The curse of “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch” was particularly alarming to New Yorkers because arson had been the slaves’ weapon in the 1712 Revolt. Thus the curse does not prophesize a swift inferno but a city terrorized in degrees, bit by bit and day by day; it is heightened by “damn it, BY-AND-BY,” a terrifying threat precisely because of its ambiguity. Moving beyond the temporality of a threat realized immediately, in a little while, or in the future, the “by-and-by” also suggests that the threat may never come, that it resides solely in an overwrought imagination. Because the trials lacked both confessions from the alleged arsonists and direct

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physical evidence, this opening narrative is critical for Horsmanden because it provides an interpretive frame for the court reports that come next.

Like any good storyteller, Horsmanden lets the reader hear as well as see the symbolic origin of the conspiracy, and he allows the image of Quack’s resistance to remain. He goes as far as to punc- tuate the slave rebel’s curse with the unnerving sound of his laugh. Laughter, like the torch, constitutes a sign of resistance to white power, precisely the effect Horsmanden is aiming for in these early pages. At this point he is content to allow the image of resistance to remain without contesting it and robbing Quack of his temporary agency. “Laughter is a free instrument in their hands,” Mikhail Bakhtin declared famously about medieval peasants, and for the sake of his plot Horsmanden will let the sound reverberate. The nar- rative’s opening requires the sensation of three slaves dreaming of burning the city and then reveling in it, a folkloric image bent on massacring the city’s white people.

2. War and Conspiracy: Patriotism

If indeed the conspiracy really happened, then Justice Horsmanden’s chronicle was undoubtedly written by the court and for an anxious public. The problem of context is a fundamental issue for historians studying the New York Conspiracy. Rediker and Linebaugh’s recent interpretation is based on their conviction that slave resistance made the 1730s a pivotal period in slavery’s history: “The magnitude of the upheaval was, in comparative terms, extra- ordinary, encompassing more than eighty separate cases of conspiracy, revolt, mutiny, and arson—a figure probably six or seven times greater than the number of similar events that occurred in either the dozen years before 1730 or the dozen after 1742” (193). On the other hand, Morgan believes that the ideology and practice of white supremacy in a slave society should make us feel less certain about our accounting of racial unrest. He cites the “near-hysterical propor- tions” of whites when faced with rumors of rebellion, suggesting this history of conspiracy scares “may well reveal less a ‘cycle of rebellion,’ as Linebaugh and Rediker would have it, than a time of acute social tensions when rumors fed on themselves and whites” (166). Although we can be fairly certain about an insurrection, like the one that occurred along the Stono River in South Carolina in 1739, how do we distinguish the real from the imagined conspira- cies or judge degrees of truth in a coerced confession?

Doubts about the New York Conspiracy have made it a neglected event in our national history. Set in a Northern colony with

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no real slave hero like Denmark Vesey or Nat Turner, lacking all original trial transcripts, and influenced by war hysteria, the New York Conspiracy has been classified as a minor historical case. Although some might view New York’s incomplete archive as a seri- ous disadvantage, the Vesey Conspiracy illustrates how court records can actually constrict historical investigations. New York’s missing archive may be an advantage, particularly since we can never forget, when encountering Horsmanden’s portal to the conspiracy, the imag- inary component of his history. Thus, the New York Conspiracy affords us the opportunity to understand how white power trans- formed an inchoate fear of a slave uprising into a narrative that terri- fied the public. In Charleston, as in New York, some part of the “upheaval” occurred in the white public’s imagination; as Davis ulti- mately concludes, it is the “various perceptions of that peril on which the historian may fruitfully focus” (“Conspiracy and Credibility” 173).

The insurrection story itself organized these perceptions of racial unrest; although each story type is generic in a fundamental sense, in New York in 1741 the presence of Spanish sabotage became part of the emerging plot. Depicting the city’s crisis as a guerilla battle in a war for empire, Horsmanden represents the magis- trates as true patriots whose vigilance saved the city. This dominant motif celebrates patriotic union and white solidarity simultaneously, both as overall effects of the war. Wars between England and other European powers rarely fostered solidarity among North American colonies. In fact, the English colonies—after a century of colonia- lism, of competing for precious export markets, of fighting countless Indian wars—were often pitted against each other in competition for native allies, land, labor, settlers, and resources. American partici- pation in the war effort marked the first time England had called upon her colonies to contribute money, troops, and other support to a foreign war away from their homes. For the first time in a genera- tion, the North American colonies experienced an emerging sense of solidarity as they went to war against a rival empire.

The first years of the war produced a constant flow of informa- tion in North American newspapers, private correspondence, combat reportage, and government documents that intensified the common purpose against the Spanish. The War of Jenkins’ Ear came at a pivotal moment in the British Empire, when English merchants at home and in the colonies were pushing into new markets and antagonizing the Spanish Guarda Costa. On the North American mainland, colonists peered into the glow of this “American” war and imagined fertile islands, like Cuba, that they would transform into free English colo- nies. While having the tactical aim of controlling Spanish markets and trade routes, British imperial ideology interpreted every open market, every commodity exported to England, as physical extensions of

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English liberty. English patriots proclaimed that Spanish tyranny, which encompassed all the evils of a long detested rival, undercut these essential freedoms. Indeed, for over a decade Whig patriots had characterized such depravity as the “death of liberty” (187), and talk of seizing Spanish islands became a remedy for reaffirming the nationalist ideals of “honor, justice, Property, and Laws” (Shields 179). Construed within the crucible of war, English hawks translated liberty as freedom of trade in the Caribbean, a freedom they accused Spain of attacking. For many mainland supporters of the War of Jenkins’ Ear—whether driven blindly by profit, by a firm belief in English imperialism, or by a combination of the two—taking Spanish warships and territories would strengthen the empire by removing Spanish corruption while expanding English liberty to the edges of the American frontier.6

This new patriotism of empire transformed the racial climate in New York City; when the fort burned to the ground, followed by the governor’s home, people were conditioned to see a Spanish-led conspiracy rather than an accidental overturning of a lantern, a home- grown group of disgruntled slaves, or a local gang of thieves. For example, one potent image circulating in reports on the war was of slave forces fighting on both sides, reports that surely caused many New Yorkers to worry about war’s potential effects upon the slave population. The Caribbean practice of using slave militias in armed conflict made mainland observers fearful that the example of orga- nized, fighting slaves might spread to plantations and colonies (Pares 253). This fear appeared to come true when authorities in South Carolina reported that slaves involved in Stono’s Rebellion, before their capture, were making their way toward the Spanish out- post at Saint Augustine. Despite the long distance from the border war between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, New York worried about a Stono-style rebellion spreading to their city, particularly after authorities suspected a plot in New Jersey in 1740, and the New York Gazette published new reports of yet another outbreak of a slave uprising in South Carolina that same year. Finally, one won- ders if colonists were thinking about their own efforts at undercut- ting Spanish rule; the English imagined many “schemes of liberation in Spanish America,” most of which involved inciting racial groups, such as the Creoles, Africans, or Indians, against each other or directing them against the Spanish government (Pares 72).

The particular insurrection story emerging from this context was not regional but international in scope, including a scenario in which slaves would rise up when Spain’s ships appeared on the hori- zon.7 When Horsmanden reports on the early signs of the conspir- acy—the overheard curse of “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch”—he refrains from direct commentary. But as Wayne Booth remarks,

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“authors often [conceal] their commentary by dramatizing it as scenery or symbol” (196), and the chronicle’s setting of a curse in a peaceful cityscape forecasts violence. The three original conspirators walk below Mrs. Earle’s window on the Sabbath, a sacred and patriotic day that also contains within it the promise of a fateful reckoning: “This Sunday as three negroes were walking up the Broadway towards the English church, about service time” (Horsmanden 27). The sequence expresses the peacefulness of the community gathering as families in faithful worship, but the movement of the three slaves divides the scene into black and white. Sunday was the day colonists feared vengeful slaves would choose for insurrection, and the three advancing black figures appear bent on massacring the white people, defenseless in the church. The inaugural motif of a peaceful city about to be attacked by fanatics masked in blackness, servitude, and feigned loyalty forecasts the conclusion of the courts that the religious fanati- cism of Spanish Catholics had directed the slaves down Broadway that morning toward the seat of English Anglican authority.

The rhetoric of delayed coding often conceals authoritative discourse; when used to evoke a setting it is particularly effective in revealing the bloodshed buried beneath a pastoral scene. The curse initiates the threat, which is fully disclosed in the chronicle’s next significant sequence. After relating the mysteriousness of the rash of fires, the chronicle reports on an accelerating series of images. Yet another fire, then a public cry to “take up the Spanish Negroes” (28), and soon after, in the “by-and-by,” the Spanish slaves are “rising” (29). The prophesy of “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch” has become evident, pointing to a Spanish plot, precisely what American colon- ists feared during the war. Weaving together conspiracy with war, Horsmanden’s chronicle ultimately ends up channeling the colony’s surging patriotism in ways that support colonial authority. “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch” is a warning, given by Horsmanden, that reminds citizens that their lack of vigilance had almost let the ori- ginal three conspirators slip free. Not yet arrived at the point in the narrative when legal documents will outline the “facts” of conspir- acy, the audience must face the most persuasive evidence—the suspense and vulnerability created with the elements of a patriotic fiction.

The real meaning of Horsmanden’s warning only becomes clear when it is viewed within the context of the war and juxtaposed with its first hero, Admiral Edward Vernon, who guaranteed his superiors that he could take the Spanish stronghold of Porto Bello, Panama, with only six ships. Admiral Vernon’s bold prediction and improbable victory began the war for the colonists and made him the symbolic figurehead for regaining English honor. (So impressed was Captain Lawrence Washington by the admiral’s valor that, upon

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returning home from the war, Washington named his plantation after Vernon.) The opening story Horsmanden tells of the vengeful slaves gradually mixes the geopolitical with the domestic; it becomes just as much about imperial war as about a slave conspir- acy and converts the slave’s secret code into the complete outlines of the conspiracy. Before Horsmanden can conclude this plot, how- ever, he must first revisit his earlier representation of Quack’s resist- ance and establish interpretive control over him.

Quack had been in “confinement for some days” (30), Horsmanden writes, before prosecutors, busy with other interroga- tions, returned to press him for an interpretation of “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch.” Mimicking the colonist’s patriotism, Quack claims he and his mates were simply paying tribute to Admiral Vernon’s heroism. Colonists could not see the conspiracy through this ruse, Horsmanden suggests, because of their enthusiasm for the war: “But it being soon after we had news of admiral Vernon’s taking Porto Bello, he [Quack] had contrived a cunning excuse, or some abler heads for him . . . that they were talking of admiral Vernon’s taking Porto Bello; and that he thereupon signified to his companions, that he thought that was but a small feat to what this brave officer would do by-and-by, to annoy the Spaniards, or words tantamount; so that it happened Quack was enlarged from his confinement for some time” (30; emphasis added).

Horsmanden finds this is the key moment, when colonists could have stopped the conspiracy before it started. In one sense, Quack embodies the anti-imperial practices of the colonial subject who deploys his own power against the state’s attempts to dominate him. Refusing to recognize the colonizer’s ultimate authority and claim on truth, indeed mocking it with his laughter and intelligence, Quack defeats his interrogators by posing as a British patriot. In the process, his strategy reinscribes the signs of white power, reinterpret- ing his laugh as a cheer for English victory in the “by-and-by.” White power is heavily invested in the stereotype of an insurrectionary slave who waits to wage war on behalf of Spain, but in professing his admiration for England and disregard for Spain, Quack’s hybri- dity, at once slave and patriot, confounds it. Horsmanden says as much, suggesting that Quack’s mimicry of the English colonist had pre- vented them from detecting the conspiracy, which Quack conceals behind his fugitive word play.

Yet this same play frees Quack for a time. When no narrator sur- faces to contest Quack’s laughter, unlike earlier in the chronicle, Horsmanden moves to undermine the earlier representation of the rebel’s subversiveness. As evidence of Quack’s cunning, Horsmanden points to the slave’s calculated use of the “by-and-by” and counters it with a claim that is actually a temporal space of reckless plotting.

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However, a rash of new fires removes the ambiguity and for Horsmanden reveals the lie. The court’s opinion moves against Quack, and now they “were apt to put a different construction upon Quack’s words and behaviour; that he thereby meant, ‘that the fires which we had seen already, were nothing to what we should have by-and-by, for that then we should have all the city in flames, and he would rejoice at it;’ for it was said he lifted up his hands, and spread them with a circular sweep over his head, after he had pronounced the words (by-and-by) and then concluded with a loud laugh” (31; emphasis added). The lingering impression of Quack’s resistance to colonial authority is short-lived. The narrator’s authoritative voice meets Quack’s antagonistic rhetoric, camouflaging what the narrator deems his true intent. Unlike the earlier representation of Quack’s resistance, Horsmanden now intrudes and provides the correct inter- pretation of the “by-and-by.” Lacking a confession from Quack, Horsmanden mimics the slave in a way that conveys to the reader what Quack “thereby meant” by the curse. Benedict Anderson stresses these moments of “reversed ventriloquism” in colonial dis- course, when nationalists desire to speak for the dead (198). These moments are integral to the self-conscious construction of a national narrative that must wrest control of Quack’s cryptic prophesy, find meaning in it, and explain the “silence of the dead” (198). Horsmanden not only tells us what Quack really meant but also increases the sound of his laughter (“loud” this time) and adds ritualistic details of Quack lifting up his outstretched hands and making a diabolical “circular sweep over his head” in anticipation of celebrating the city’s destruction.

Finally, Horsmanden’s reversed ventriloquism highlights the paradox of national identification that was taking place in New York in 1741 in two interrelated ways. As Bernard Bailyn and Morgan point out, global wars were a “primary crucible in forging British national sentiment” in the colonies, but patriotic fervor often increased along with acculturation, when colonists began to feel their distance from England (13). Despite Horsmanden’s refutation and Quack’s execution, the residue of his antagonism remains in the text. He is a figure of mimicry, and as Homi Bhabha and other post- colonial theorists have recognized, such an antagonistic figure prob- lematizes racial and national priority. The slave talking the talk of patriotism turns the nationalist discourse of 1741 into a crisis of belonging. Faced with the slave’s ironic patriotism, the colonizer no longer feels secure in his English identity because the war brings to the surface the anxieties of national identification. Consequently, Horsmanden’s ventriloquism both gives an inside view of Quack’s state of mind and garners sympathy for a prosecution faced with such dissimulation; perhaps even more important, he substitutes the

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invented dialogue for a missing confession. At a time when all iden- tities must be secured—none more so than the guilty slave rebel— the slave’s attempt to appropriate a national identity threatens the colonizer’s foundational narrative of whiteness. In the words of Bhabha, the “ ‘national’ is no longer naturalizable” (87).

3. War and Conspiracy: Race Traitor

In mid-eighteenth-century New York, everyday acts of slave resistance happened along Manhattan’s wharfs, where many slaves labored alongside soldiers and Irish laborers. Notorious for criminal activity, the waterfront was also a place of interracial, international exchange, since Africans, Irish, English, West Indian, and Dutch met in taverns to drink drams of rum, fraternize, gamble, and fence stolen goods. Not surprisingly, public officials first interpreted the fires of 1741 as the deeds of a conspiracy of criminals, whose only aim was to steal from the rich. In the beginning of the investigation, prosecutors focused on a tavern owner named John Hughson, well known both for selling rum to slaves and for running a brothel. When prosecutors questioned his employee, a 16-year-old inden- tured servant named Mary Burton, about goods stolen from the Hoggs residence, she said that “she would acquaint them with what she knew relating to the stolen goods from Mr. Hogg’s but would say nothing about the fires” (Horsmanden 38).

Determined to discover what she was concealing, prosecutors took aim at her resolve with promises of freedom from her master, a 100-pound reward, and the King’s mercy; when bribes did not work, they threatened her with imprisonment and the gallows. She became the star witness for the prosecution, accusing Hughson of being the ringleader in a vast conspiracy to burn the city to the ground, free the slaves, and install himself as king. Burton also test- ified that two slaves, Caesar and Prince, were the leaders of Hugh- son’s “black guard” and that Hughson had promised them the opportunity to murder white people, to loot their homes, and to serve as commanders in what would be their colony’s new military. In addition to Hughson, Caesar, and Prince, the prosecution charged Hughson’s wife, Sarah, and Margaret Kerry, who worked the brothel at Hughson’s tavern. She was also known as Peggy, the “Newfound- land Irish beauty,” and “Negro Peg,” a nickname stemming from her relationship with Caesar.

The two slaves, Caesar and Prince, were executed for theft. To try them for conspiracy would take too long, the magistrates deter- mined, and they gambled that a swift and terrifying execution would break the case open: “[It] might break the knot, and induce some of

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them to unfold this mystery of iniquity, in hopes thereby to recom- mend themselves to mercy” (66). As an additional inducement, their rotting corpses were hung in chains well into the summer, but their example failed to coerce any of their supposed confederates to “break the knot” of conspiracy. A little over a month later, John and Sarah Hughson were executed, and his body was displayed next to his “black guard.” Peggy was next, much to her surprise, since she believed that her cooperation with the prosecution had earned her a pardon, and before being led to the gallows she told Justice Frederick Philipse that she had given false testimony. Despite her admission, she was executed. The pace of executions accelerated. In an attempt to inspire more “Negro evidence,” the court condemned Quack and an alleged coconspirator named Cuffee to be burned alive, an extra- ordinary punishment in the mid-eighteenth-century; on their way through the crowd and toward the stake, they screamed for mercy, claiming Burton knew even more than she had testified to. If the con- demned offered to confess, they might earn a lesser punishment. Per- haps Quack and Cuffee considered this way out when they were being chained to the stake. As the fire burned around their bound bodies, an official recorded their last words but did not stop the execution. Prosecutors then took their testimony to Burton, who produced even more white evidence—what prosecutors conveniently labeled as testi- mony given by white colonists—so much that the court authorized a mass arrest of the city’s slave population.

Six weeks into the trials, the prosecution was having trouble extracting confessions; when the jails became overcrowded and the city’s slaves learned of their precarious situation—one incriminating statement away from execution—Governor Clarke announced a proclamation offering pardon and transportation to those who con- fessed to the conspiracy. Clarke’s proclamation produced 67 more slave confessions (Szasz 221). The confessions contained inaccur- acies, contradictions, obvious falsehoods, and a willingness to please the magistrates so the confessors might remain alive. Clarke’s proc- lamation of general pardon on 19 June was designed to bolster a flag- ging investigation with evidence of a merciful and just court, as well as to restore the public’s confidence in the imperial administration.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the important role that confession played in an eighteenth-century capital case, particularly in the public’s acceptance of the verdicts. In an era predating forensic sciences, confession sanctioned the guilty verdict, reflected praise on the magistrates, and justified the punishment. Thus, the court’s failure to obtain confessions from the principle conspirators led to one remarkable episode in which the public wondered whether the dead bodies of Caesar and Hughson were protesting against the court’s verdicts. Rotting in their chains that summer, their black and

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white corpses appeared to exchange colors. Hughson’s features had taken on, Horsmanden writes, a “deep shining black, rather blacker than the Negroe placed by him,” his hair curling up, his face dis- playing the “symmetry of Negroe beauty; the nose broad and flat, the nostrils open and extended, the mouth wide, lips full and thick . . . his body swelled to a gigantic size” (273). On the contrary, Caesar, “one of the head Negroe conspirators” had his face turn “somewhat bleached or turned whitish” (273). This apparent metamorphosis of white man to black, black man to white, posed a serious danger to official authority, since the bodies potentially communicated inno- cence to spectators. Justice Horsmanden would have to find a way to counter this alternate knowledge of the plot.

In the eighteenth century, public execution was an event in which the crowd actively participated by bearing witness, interpreting signs, and, if the punishment was deemed unjust, empathizing with the victim. It also turned the criminal into the central actor in the production, the stake-side declaration of guilt a chance to earn God’s forgiveness and to initiate deliverance for a community afflicted by the criminal’s sin. Horsmanden remembers Hughson as a puzzling text: showing no remorse, he walked to the gallows like a prizefighter, predicting the miraculous appearance of a sign that would prove his innocence, all of it a bold performance against the court. The crowd marveled at the red spots suddenly appearing on both his cheeks (Was it a miracle?) and took note of his body lang- uage as he neared the stake, holding one arm up in the air, palm outstretched, expectantly (274–76).

Yet he was not saved, offered no dying confession as proof of his guilt, and his corpse became less the universal judgement deli- vered by the magistrate than a text of dangerous uncertainty. Rotting in gibbets, his body began to signify and drew curious New Yorkers to the scaffold: “It occasioned a remark, that Hughson and he had changed colours. The beholders were amazed at these appearances; the report of them engaged the attention of many, and drew numbers of all ranks, who had curiosity, to the gibbets, for several days running, in order to be convinced by their own eyes, of the reality of things so confidently reported to be, at least wondrous phenomenons . . . many of the spectators were ready to resolve them into miracles; however others not so hasty, though surprised at the sights, were willing to account for them in a natural way, so that they adminis- tered matter for much speculation” (273). Penal torture provided the same moments of speculation as an execution. The spectacle of Hughson and Caesar hung in gibbets, because they never confessed guilt, produced interpretations that endangered popular belief in the court’s actions. The scene forces the state to lose control, even if only temporarily, of the enunciatory power of a standard form of

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torture.8 Writing after the fact, Horsmanden offers two interpre- tations of the metamorphosis of Hughson’s body, the miraculous and the natural. Forced to reject any belief that might question the court’s authority or honor, Justice Horsmanden intervenes to expro- priate (precisely the action taken by a state to deprive one of pro- perty) Hughson’s ambiguous racial identity.

Remarkably, this gallows scene represents Horsmanden’s tacit admission that Hughson’s execution has cast suspicion both on the court’s legal authority and on its power to create believable fictions of guilt and innocence. Whenever his control over the narrative slips, Horsmanden draws upon the power of the court and colonial slave codes. Hughson’s corpse transforms the gallows, a stage the court believed would showcase proof of its final authority, into a dan- gerous site of racial ambiguity, and Horsemanden’s interpretive work must duplicate the racial fault line upon which the entire pros- ecution has built its case. In her genealogy of the civil body in colo- nial America, Joan Dayan claims that ideologies of white supremacy took the dead as seriously as the living, effectively reducing a living person to a “civil body” that was no more than a “fabricated” corpse. I want to draw upon this insight to explain how Horsmanden supple- ments penal torture with a critical explanation of the white crimi- nal’s intrinsic blackness. This fiction of white supremacy, as Dayan suggests, is “threatened by what one could not always see but must always fear: the black blood that would not only pollute progeny, but infect the very heart of the nation” (9). Outside the courtroom, Justice Horsmanden attempts to stabilize political and legal authority by fabricating the white criminal’s transformation into a legally powerless slave.

Here Horsmanden’s narrator stakes a claim for authority. In this crisis of interpretation, he must counter the sudden resistance to the court’s authority; what had been the narrator’s more subtle signs of his intrusion give way to a controlling presence. Horsmanden must reject the gallows’ racial ambiguity with his own summation to this extralegal episode. He rejects outright the popular belief in supernatural intervention because he hopes to convince the audience of reasonable inference, that poison has blackened the body, a devi- ous plan by conspirators to die in silence as martyrs to their cause. In other words, denied a confession, Horsmanden argues that Hughson’s new color is the exact physical evidence the court had suspected but failed to uncover during its prosecution of the conspirators. Because of the popular belief in the body’s supernatural or miraculous meta- morphosis, he fixes it in the physical world by accusing a free African- American doctor from Long Island of providing Hughson and other prominent conspirators with lethal doses of poison to be ingested if captured by the English.

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If the chronicle form is supposed to provide a regular order of events without commentary by a narrator, this unusual imposition is revealing. Justice Horsmanden has drawn upon a legend told in histories of popish plots, which explains away the absence of any real evidence, the missing confessions, with a convenient story of a fanatic who will die as a martyr for the cause rather than confess the truth. Similar to the use of DNA in contemporary trials, the poison in Hughson’s interpretation becomes universal: it explains all, the blackness, the red spots on Hughson’s cheeks, and his monstrous corpse, seemingly alive as it grows bloated and putrid underneath the late summer sun. As a result, Horsmanden’s summation, its attempt to reposition the reader within the state’s jurisdiction, rides on the narrator’s “realistic” representation of Hughson’s body. The historical account is hostile to the crowd’s belief in mystery and, by implication, in the conversion of Hughson’s body. It is the inevitable moment in all chronicles when a silent narrator, confronted with the disintegration of the very authority that sanctions his voice, insists on his right to speak.

By exorcising the supernatural, Justice Horsmanden restores the chronicle’s verisimilitude, but this requires him to raise, and then answer, a contradiction implicit in his quasi-judicial summation: Why would Hughson take poison if he expected to be rescued on his way to the gallows? Unable to give an answer based in the workings of the physical world, Horsmanden resorts to a false racial symbolic that represents blackness as evil. In fact, he claims that Hughson’s prophesy was fulfilled and had affirmed the trials’ facts. Hughson predicted that “some remarkable sign would happen to him, to shew (or signify) his innocence; and if his corpse becoming monstrous in size, and his complexion (for once to use a vulgar similitude) as black as the d—l, can be deemed remarkable signs or tokens of his innocence! then some may imagine it has happened according to his expectation” (276). In other words, a sign had indeed arrived and it was the color of Hughson’s corpse, black as the devil, that, iron- ically, displayed his true colors to the public. Horsmanden introduces the metaphysical, exactly what he had been denouncing, but his mocking tone announces his summation over, the metaphysical nothing but a rhetorical flourish. He combats Hughson’s prophesy with irony, interpreting innocence not as freedom from guilt but as a benign condition when one no longer possesses the ability to injure.

Moreover, the literary construction of Hughson’s metamor- phosis into a “black devil” relies on the trope of metonymy. Also operating along this figurative axis was the concept of Negro evi- dence, the linchpin in the prosecution’s use of the conspiracy law. Rather than classifying Hughson from above—the realm of the symbol, the royal and divine—Horsmanden’s rhetoric proves

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Hughson’s blackness through his contiguous relationship with Caesar. Hughson has to be more than a metaphorical “black devil”; the effect of conspiracy with slaves has to make him appear black, since his whiteness protected him from the law of Negro evidence. This scene’s metonymic play of racial signifiers—the white man slowly turns black, in parts, his straight hair curling up, his face acquiring black “symmetry,” the thin nose “broad and flat”— produces a racial hybrid that fractures the identity of the colonizer and challenges its power to represent and judge.

As judge and author, Horsmanden both denies the condemned the opportunity to signify on the gallows and presumes, in a moment of crisis, the right of categorization. With Hughson and Caesar seemingly exchanging colors, Horsmanden hopes to depict the con- fusion in a way that will defuse an explosive situation. If he tries to save or recuperate Hughson’s whiteness, then the “mirror” would reflect a deauthorized state power, so he expropriates Hughson’s whiteness and turns him black. For additional support Horsmanden includes a passage from Attorney General William Smith’s summa- tion: “John Hughson, whose crimes have made him blacker than a negro: the scandal of his complexion, and the disgrace of human nature!” (137). Arguing against a type of racial ambivalence that endangers national loyalty and white supremacy, Horsmanden teaches white colonists, particularly those of the laboring ranks, about the dangers of being a race traitor. Only a white skin could free you from the arbitrary power of the law of Negro evidence.

Horsmanden’s concern with the colony’s unstable racial hier- archy has much to do with the War of Jenkins’ Ear and public anxiety about the colony’s vulnerable port and borders. When rumors of Spanish involvement in the conspiracy began to spread in early June, prosecutors turned their attention to five Spanish sailors— Antonio de St. Bendito, Antonio de la Cruz, Pablo Ventura Angel, Juan de la Sylva, and Augustine Gutierez—captured the previous year. Ignoring the sailors’ protestations that they were free and sovereign subjects of Spain, the court of admiralty declared them slaves, which made them a valuable prize rather than prisoners of war. There was no mention of them in the preliminary stages of the conspiracy trials, until one day a witness testified about inflammable “black stuff” that the Spaniards supposedly possessed. A few days later, on 17 June, prosecutors asked Burton, the star witness, if she wished to add anything to her original testimony. Her memory seemingly prompted by this new concern, she now remembered that Hughson and Quack talked of their Spanish partners, who were to be the vanguard of the Spanish invasion. That same day, perhaps spying a chance at freedom, two slaves—Jack and Bastian—repeated the same story, and the magistrates rewarded them with a pardon.

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Taken together, the conversion narratives of Hughson and the five Spanish sailors enable Horsmanden to dramatize the legal machinery, but the set of narratives also function in the public sphere of colonial identity formation. His representation of Hughson’s corpse makes a political metaphor out of Negro evidence so that he can convince readers of the criminal’s guilt and just execution. In the case of the Spanish sailors, the narrator again falls silent, and in his place Horsmanden simply records the court’s charge to the jury. Their indictment is “grounded upon an act of assembly, supposing them to be slaves, by which act the testimony of one negro slave shall be legal evidence against another. But it has been made a ques- tion whether these prisoners, now before us, are slaves or not; and the prisoners themselves pretend to be free subjects of the King of Spain, with whom we are now at war, and from whom they have been taken and made prize” (185). Whereas the function of Hughson’s conversion was to help rebuild the city’s shattered racial hierarchy, the story of the Spanish sailors introduces a new dynamic in the for- mation of English imported culture. The passage comes at a critical point in the history since, hereafter, interrogations begin to produce evidence that Spain organized the conspiracy. Precisely at this junc- ture the official voice of the court is substituted for the narrator. The voice both shifts the site of identity construction to the Caribbean frontier and connects racial and national belonging. Without the war, perhaps they would have been Spanish gentlemen, “free sub- jects.” But war imports the threat on the Caribbean frontier into the city, making their claim on freedom, in the court’s point of view, a weak pretense. It remains unclear in the jury charge whether it was their color, nationality, or a combination of the two that transforms them into prize slaves and, eventually, into living corpses. Aware of the Spaniard’s racial ambiguity, the court informs the jury that only by seeing them as black can they sentence them to death: “[I]f you take them . . . to be slaves, all the negro evidence which has been given upon this trial against them, is legal evidence” (186). The case of the five Spanish sailors cuts two ways: it highlights the effects of imperial war on colonial race formation and it demonstrates how racialized identities occupied multiple frontiers.

4. War and Conspiracy: State of Emergency

In addition to the geopolitical struggle for trade and open markets, long-standing religious differences heightened imperial conflict in the eighteenth century. Conflicts between Protestants and Roman Catholics had caused centuries of civil war in Europe, and Protestant settlers in British North America persecuted Catholics for

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a wide range of alleged offenses, such as devil worship, possessing firearms, and plotting against English authority. During times of war, the English fear of Roman Catholics was a mixture of both reli- gious bigotry and political distrust of a population that refused to swear allegiance to the Church of England. In New York, the War of Jenkins’ Ear generated the old fear of a papal conspiracy. Colonists suspected that the Catholic powers of Spain and France were recruiting Roman Catholics who would conspire against English rule. Prosecu- tors in 1741 had waited for proof of papal involvement in the con- spiracy and they believed they found it in the person of John Ury. For months newspapers circulated warnings of disguised priests traveling as dancing masters and schoolteachers who were plotting uprisings in North American cities. On 24 June, prosecutors, acting on intel- ligence that “there had of late been Popish priests lurking about the town,” arrested Ury, a teacher of Latin and Greek and suspected of being a Roman Catholic priest (211). Working on a hunch of Catholic involvement, prosecutors had broadened the scope of the conspiracy so they could potentially connect Hughson and his slave forces with their Spanish accomplices. After the arrest of the suspected priest, such a strategy took the conspiracy trials in an unanticipated direc- tion and they quickly came to a halt.9

It should come as no surprise that Burton, after hearing a rumor that Ury had publicly impugned her testimony, returned to court and identified him as the plot’s principle architect. He had been at Hughson’s, always whispering with the other conspirators, she said, and he performed ceremonies with strange oaths, offered to hear confessions and to forgive sins, and he kept holy robes and built an altar in his room. In order to sentence him to death, Ferenc Szasz writes, “[t]he magistrates resurrected an old law of William III’s time which provided severe penalties for being a priest in New York” (223).10 By the end of June, prosecutors believed the infilt- ration of Catholic saboteurs was at the root of the crisis, the only context in which to connect Hughson, the “black guard,” the Spanish sailors, and Ury. “Could these be dreams,” Horsmanden finally asks, “or is it more rational to conclude, from what has happened amongst us, that they were founded on realities?” (432). Some colonists rejected the justice’s appeal to reason and wondered, as Horsmanden suggests, if in fact the conspiracy had been a bad dream; they seemed to have grown weary of the trials and suspicious of Burton. After implicating Ury, she responded to her critics by accusing them, claiming, as Horsmanden remembers, “that there were some people in ruffles (a phrase as was understood to mean persons of better fashion than ordinary) that were concerned” (440). Her new accusations against colonists of “known credit, fortunes and repu- tations” (440) immediately ended the trials.11 The jails emptied,

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slaves returned to their masters, and the court came under heavy criticism. Davis observes that “[i]n the end, critics pilloried the prosecutors’ means, methods, and motives. What the prosecutors offered as confessions were among the most criticized elements, as critics challenged accuracy and authenticity” (“Conspiracy and Credibility” 173).

Horsmanden published A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy because of the court’s need to provide a definitive justification of their verdicts. The scandalous conclusion to the trials tarnished the court’s reputation; Horsmanden’s decision to publish the history in chronicle form, with its conventional inde- terminate ending, was the best strategy for claiming the court’s final triumph. There is no ending—neither Burton’s accusations against colonists “in ruffles” nor Ury’s execution—and Horsmanden selects a fitting image that highlights the international dimensions of the conspiracy. The ships that transported banished slaves to the West Indies had returned with “many particulars of intelligence concerning the conspiracy,” he warns; “this city and people were not yet out of danger from this hellish confederacy” (386). Representing the final erasure of colonial borders caused by slaves and Roman Catholics joining forces, the ships carry news that depicts both the dangerous loss of order and of national solidarity: he cites “several pretended prophecies of negroes that Charles-Town in South Carolina, and the city of New York, were to be burnt down on the twenty-fifth of March next” (387). The southern border of South Carolina now cuts through Manhattan. Horsmanden next introduces an official direc- tive from Governor Clarke, a letter of warning delivered to every town and public official in New York. In it Clarke states that “from the many undoubted informations I have received . . . the insolence of the negroes is as great, if not greater than ever. . . . I doubt there are too many yet remaining among us who were of the late conspir- acy, and though we have felled the tree, I fear it is not entirely rooted up” (388). Finally, Horsmanden illustrates Clarke’s suspi- cions of another conspiracy by listing a string of recent fires, alleg- edly started by slaves and Spanish agents, throughout North America. The example of a local slave named Tom provides Horsmanden with a useful fiction. Inspired by the “villainous confederacy of last year,” Tom allegedly set fire to a house. His subsequent execution, Horsmanden remarks, confirms Clarke’s “apprehensions . . . concerning the danger which still threatened us from the conspirators remaining amongst us” (389).

Although Horsmanden’s documentary account began with a chronological sequence of days and trial documents, it ends with enemies still lurking outside the text’s borders. It is not just the insurrection story and its cast of plotting slaves that undermines his

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attempt at judicial realism—so, too, does the court’s conviction that the conspiracy was part of the larger war with Spain. Although the trials took place during a period of patriotic fervor for the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the publication of Horsmanden’s history in 1744 occurs long after this enthusiasm had waned. Horsmanden tries to recapture this feeling of emergency, since it had dominated interpret- ations of the fires and galvanized the master class against their own slaves. Thus, the main subject of the narrative is no longer a merciful and impartial legal system but a threatened white public. No longer interested in documenting the progress of the trials, since the trials have ended, the narrator surfaces as a way to prolong the state of emergency that paralyzed the public during the trials.12

In this context, the uncertain conclusion takes on serious impli- cations for race relations after 1741. The inconclusive ending makes textual disorder commensurate with dangerous conspirators hiding within the city, a potent symbol of a colony still under duress. What had begun with the chronicler’s promise to give the reader a “most natural view of the whole” has now become decidedly unnatural and unreal. Depicting the city’s slaves as a continuing internal security threat, connected to both Spain and South Carolina’s troublesome slave population, the conclusion creates a danger that can only be combated by public obedience to English authority. This strategy was not only central to the state’s rhetoric of terror during the trials but also to Horsmanden’s chronicle.

If it silences critics once and for all, Horsmanden must find a way to craft uncertainty and maintain the colony’s sense of disorder. He sustains an image of a city under siege in the final pages by stress- ing two metaphors of colonial fragmentation. First, Horsmanden encodes the public’s terror in the metaphor of the city’s decimated architecture. The uncontested fact in the trials is the sequence of the buildings burned: first, Fort George; second, the governor’s mansion; third, the houses of the political and social leaders; finally, the enduring threat to the Anglican church. Each violated structure represents a column of English authority—the military, the law, free trade and commerce, and religion—and the metaphor comes to represent what many have come to accept as the real. Representative of English culture and government, the buildings convey a sense of national loyalty that challenges skeptics. Recognizing that the chronicle also exists within this metaphoric realm, Horsmanden makes his history equivalent with the decimated symbols of English authority. Until Fort George and the governor’s house are rebuilt, he suggests, the ashes signify the “daily evidence and moments of [the plot], still before our eyes” (442). Spiteful of dissent, and of the lin- gering doubts about the star witness, Horsmanden deploys a deci- mated English city in denouncing those readers who suspect a

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miscarriage of justice. Ultimately the truth of the chronicle is located in the colony’s patriotic ruins.

There is an alternative conclusion, however, one that we have not been led to expect from the sequential unfolding of the evidence; this one articulates a cynical vision of colonists and slaves locked in eternal combat. The second metaphor used to articulate the state of emergency is a ledger that lists all the slaves implicated in the con- spiracy. Presented in lists of neat columns—each one, from right to left, giving the names of the slaves, their masters, and a mark desig- nating whether the accused was committed, arraigned, convicted, confessed, burnt, hanged, transported, or discharged—the accounting gives a distinct impression of the state’s power, its ability to force order out of chaos. Although not as dramatic as the “naked terror” of the executed slave’s head on a pike in 1712 or bodies displayed in gibbets in 1741, the ledger exerts its own force as metaphor of terror. One hundred fifty-six slaves and free blacks were committed, 17 executed by hanging, 13 burnt at the stake, and 70 deported to West Indian slave markets and plantations. If the spectacles of torture in 1712 and 1741 were primarily directed toward the local slave population, the ledger also attempts to secure the allegiance of white colonists. Nevertheless, this ritualistic purging of the scape- goat has only secured the colony temporarily, since Horsmanden guarantees that the threat of an international conspiracy still remains. The ledger creates a fleeting symbolic space, where English authority seemingly protects the city from foreign threats, but the list both supports and undermines the border between secur- ity and insecurity. As a demonstration of colonial authority, and the clean logic of its justice and accountability, the ledger supports Horsmanden’s guarantee of a future insurrection. His guarantee, delivered first in the preface, joins the final ledger in framing the history. The last passage of the preface claims the history will “awaken us from that supine security, which again too generally prevails, and put us upon our guard, lest the enemy should be yet within our doors” (12). In the aftermath of the trials, Horsmanden tells white colonists to maintain a constant and collective state of emergency.

In short, the ledger resolves the mass of incomplete, contradic- tory, and false accusations into a unified statement of guilt. What I find intriguing here is not the list of the executed (Horsmanden represents these crucial rituals in the text) but those slaves banished from the colony. Since the executions relied upon a logic of conta- gion, the function of the banishment ritual was to protect that logic. If accused conspirators were allowed to remain, they would chal- lenge the legitimacy of colonial authority, so the court, unable to execute 70 more alleged conspirators, devises an equivalent legal

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fiction to disarm the threat. The special law of Negro evidence—the key legal instrument of terror in the trials—produces an existence perhaps as terrifying as execution; the law causes the civil deaths of those slaves and free African Americans who were lucky enough to survive the lottery of executions by severing their connections to their homes, loved ones, and even the half-freedoms of New York. Cast out into the West Indian plantations and slave markets, the ban- ished take their place in a pantheon of fugitive slaves who haunt the colonists’ self-fashioning of natural liberty over the next decades leading up to the American Revolution.

The chronicle ends fittingly with the symbolic ledger, a sign of the reciprocity between terror and narrative. The problem of inter- pretation still remains, as it does in all cultures of terror, but none of the guilty will emerge to contest Horsmanden’s narrative and his representation of a city finally purged of its slave enemies. The chronicle does the symbolic work of cleansing fugitive threats to the English colonial city, but such action does not lead to enlightenment or resolve long-standing social problems. The banished represent the permanent danger embodied by those slaves who remain in New York City. This has tragic consequences after 1741 because white panic will deepen racial polarization with every rumor of unrest. The convergence of the conspiracy scare and the War of Jenkins’ Ear irrevocably changed the city, for both its white and black sur- vivors as well as its detached onlookers. Obviously, in the wake of the conspiracy scare, the state would subject slaves to even more restric- tions on mobility and personal conduct. Yet white colonists, despite their racial privileges, would also feel the effects of imperial authority reach into their own private lives and social gatherings. For example, in 1744, the year Horsmanden published A Journal of the Proceed- ings in the Detection of the Conspiracy, Dr. Alexander Hamilton stayed in New York City for a time while traveling through the North American colonies. He found that the conspiracy had even ruined the English cup of tea: “It is a very rich place. . . . [T]hey have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the Negro conspiracy, certain people have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the Negroes went for tea water that they held their cabals and consultations, and therefore they have a law now that no negroes shall be seen upon the streets without a lantern after dark” (241–42). This traveler’s anecdote about his inconvenience sheds light on how terror can shape even the mundane events of everyday life in an eighteenth-century colony. Apparently slaves had freely gone on errands into the wilderness for tea water before the conspir- acy, but in the wake of the trials the state denied them this liberty

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because of rumors that these trips had concealed their planning of the insurrection. In addition to this restriction, the city decided to enforce an ordinance—it had been on the books since the 1730s— that made it a crime for slaves to be out at night without a lantern. Such piecemeal legislation represented white power reconstituting itself against a slave population that was more of an international threat than it had been before the first fires in the spring of 1741. Perhaps there is no suitable historical vantage point from which to speculate about whether the resurgence of imperial power after the trials made New York’s colonists feel more isolated and “Ameri- can” rather than safely “English.” What one can say is that the feel- ings of white panic were channeled into new laws, new customs, and new commerce. Hamilton notes how such tension gave one com- pany the business of carting barreled water into the city; New York- ers, still believing in their narrow deliverance, were willing to live with the brackish taste and slavery’s coercive values.

Notes

1. For the history of slavery in colonial New York, see Aptheker; Carroll; Hodges; Kammen; Jordan; McManus; and Burrows and Wallace.

2. In addition to Horsmanden’s documentation of the legal workings of “Negro evidence,” see Olson and Nordstrom. For comprehensive study of colonial slave law, see Higginbotham and Watson. Watson documents both the local development of slave statutes and the tendency of colonies to appropriate particular codes from each other.

3. Davis deserves much of the credit for reviving interest in the New York Slave Conspiracy. For other early and important commentators, see Aptheker; Jordan; Launitz-Schurer; and Szasz. Recent interpretations include Hoffer; Moses; and Rediker and Linebaugh. Serena Zabin’s The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings (2004) is an abridged version of Horsmanden’s text designed for classroom use, but this article went into print before I could consult it. Finally, Jill Lepore’s study of the conspiracy trials, New York Burning: Liberty and Slavery in an 18th Century City, is due to be published in 2005.

4. My analysis of the effects of imperial warfare on colonial culture is indebted to George Lipsitz’s “Whiteness and War.” Lipsitz examines the dual function of US military action over the past five decades. Armed conflicts function geopolitically and domestically in order to control contested markets and raw materials, as well as to reinforce white citizenship. Nationalist rhetoric, military spectacles, and patriotic displays compliment military ventures and reveal the “particular rewards of white identity” (70–71). As I see it, the historical seeds of Lipsitz’s insight are buried in the formative decade of the 1740s, when imperial warfare contributed to the production of a nascent “American” identity.

American Literary History 403

5. Hayden White has argued that all historical narratives, even chronicles, are “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found” and that the historian, more poet than scientist, uses a combination of tropes—metaphor, meton- ymy, synecdoche, and irony—to craft the narrative’s style and perspective. More- over, at the root of every history is a specific plot structure, rooted in historical consciousness, which converts the historical details into a narrative. For White this “emplotment,” which all historical writing must undergo, is “precisely the way that [Northrop] Frye has suggested is the case with ‘fictions’ in general” (Content 83). White, however, disagrees with Frye on a key point. White believes the fictional aspect of historical writing, rather than producing a “bastard genre,” is precisely what distinguishes all histories and gives them their “explanatory effect” (83). There is no consensus on the proper number or types of plot structures, although both White and Frye believe in a limited number. Unlike White and Frye, I am not concerned with classifying a particular plot structure as Romantic, comic, tragic, or satirical (or some combination of the four) or with matching a pregeneric structure with its classical or Judeo-Christian precursor. Although both White and Frye trace underlying plot structures and story types back to a “deep level of consciousness,” my primary aim is to locate these fictive elements in sociopolitical discourse, or the realm of public consciousness (White, Content 82). Despite this distinction, White’s approach to historical writing as well as Frye’s approach to historical myths are useful aids in understanding the role the imagination plays in writing history. See White, “Historical Text as Literary Artifact.”

6. English Captain Robert Jenkins’s severed ear gave English hawks a pretext for action. As a way to garner support, they staged a national emergency; appearing before parliament, Captain Jenkins removed his severed ear from his handkerchief, held the symbol of Spanish depravity above his head, and listened to approving shouts of “No search! No search!” As Francis Berkeley remarks, Jenkins’s perfor- mance “stirred [England] to a high pitch of excitement” (48). The detail about the handkerchief comes from Peckham (88–89). For other studies of the war and its effects on the North American colonies, see Harkness; Leach; and Devine.

7. For a study of the economic foundations of eighteenth-century warfare in the West Indies, see Pares. For a larger study of Stono’s Rebellion and the history of slavery in South Carolina, see Peter Wood, who makes the observation that New York’s treatment of its own slave population was influenced by the eruption of rebellion in South Carolina.

8. Cotton Mather’s Pillars of Salt (1699) transformed into text what was significant social ritual in the American colonies and helped to spawn a publishing revolution by which the gallows confession became a highly popular text. See also Slotkin. For a larger study of execution as one of New England’s most significant rituals, see Hall.

9. There is much work to be done on the role religious differences played in the events of 1741. For a recent interpretation of the trial of John Ury, see Hoffer 130–51. I would disagree with his claim that the Ury trial brought an international dimension to the conspiracy trials. From the beginning the war with Spain rendered this local crisis into a global conflict.

10. Szasz notes that the word “popery” first appears four months after the trials began and after 60 witnesses testified. “What had been Black Magic in Salem in 1692,” Szasz writes, “became the Black Conspiracy in New York fifty years later” (223).

404 Reading and Writing Terror

11. For many historians this conclusion to the investigations resembles what occurred in Salem. Szasz is representative of this school of thought, aptly remarking that “[t]hese fresh accusations served the same purpose in New York as had the accusation of Governor Phips’s wife in Salem. The trials ceased abruptly” (225).

12. Underlying my discussion of what Walter Benjamin calls a “state of siege” is Michael Taussig’s use of Benjamin to describe the disciplinary power when the state deliberately uses disorder, uncertainty, and paranoia as tools of social control.

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