CHAPTER XIII
THE NEGRO PLOTS
As early as the eighteenth century New York had become a cosmopolitan town. Its population contained not only Dutch and English in nearly equal numbers, but also French, Swedes, Jews, Negroes, and sailors, travelers from every land. The settled portion of the city, according to a map of 1729, extended as far north as Beekman Street on the East Side and as far as Trinity Church on the West Side. A few blocks beyond the church lay Old Wind Mill Lane touching King's Farm, which was still open country. Here Broadway shook off all semblance to a town thoroughfare and became a dusty country road, meeting the post-road to Boston near the lower end of the rope walk. "The cittie of New York is a pleasant, well-compacted place," wrote Madam Knight, who journeyed on horseback from Boston over this post-road and who recorded her experiences in an entertaining journal. "The buildings brick generally, very stately and high, though not altogether like ours in Boston. The bricks in some of the houses are of divers coullers and laid in checkers, being glazed look very agreeable. The inside of them are neat to admiration."
Besides its welcoming houses set among spreading trees, New York possessed public buildings of dignity and distinction. There was Trinity Church, whose tall steeple was one of the first landmarks to catch the traveler's eye as he journeyed down the river from Albany. The new City Hall, dating from Bellomont's time and standing on a site at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, given by Colonel Abraham de Peyster, was also a source of pride. With its substantial wings and arched colonnade in the center it was quite imposing. Here the Assembly, Council, and Court sat. Here, too, were offices and a library. But the cellar was used as a dungeon and the attic as a common prison.
New markets and wharves told of the growing commerce of the city and province. On every hand were evidences of luxurious living. There were taverns and coffee-houses where gold flowed in abundant streams from the pockets of pirates and smugglers, and in the streets crest-emblazoned family coaches, while sedan chairs were borne by negro slaves along the narrow brick pathways in the center of the town. The dress of the people told the same story of prosperity. The streets of the fashionable quarter around Trinity Church were fairly ablaze with gay costumes. Men of fashion wore powdered wigs and cocked hats, cloth or velvet coats reaching to the knee, breeches, and low shoes with buckles. They carried swords, sometimes studded with jewels, and in their gloved hands they held snuff-boxes of costly material and elaborate design. The ladies who accompanied them were no less gaily dressed. One is described as wearing a gown of purple and gold, opening over a black velvet petticoat and short enough to show green silk stockings and morocco shoes embroidered in red. Another wore a flowered green and gold gown, over a scarlet and gold petticoat edged with silver. Everywhere were seen strange fabrics of oriental design coming from the holds of mysterious ships which unloaded surreptitiously along the water front.
The members of one class alone looked on all this prosperous life with sullen discontent—the negro slaves whose toil made possible the leisure of their owners. These strange, uncouth Africans seemed out of place in New York, and from early times they had exhibited resentment and hatred toward the governing classes, who in turn looked upon them with distrust. This smoldering discontent of the blacks aroused no little uneasiness and led to the adoption of laws which, especially in the cities, were marked by a brutality quite out of keeping with the usual moderation of the colony. When Mrs. Grant wrote later of negro servitude in Albany as "slavery softened into a smile," she spoke in the first place from a narrow observation of life in a cultivated family, and in the second place from scant knowledge of the events which had preceded the kind treatment of the negroes.
In 1684 an ordinance was passed declaring that no negroes or Indian slaves above the number of four should meet together on the Lord's Day or at any other time or at any place except on their master's service. They were not to go armed with guns, swords, clubs, or stones on penalty of ten lashes at the whipping-post. An act provided that no slave should go about the streets after nightfall anywhere south of the Collect without a lighted lantern "so as the light thereof could be plainly seen." A few years later Governor Cornbury ordered the justices of the peace in King's County to seize and apprehend all negroes who had assembled themselves in a riotous manner or had absconded from their masters.
In 1712, during the Administration of Governor Robert Hunter, a group of negroes, perhaps forty in number, formed a plot which justified the terror of their masters, though it was so mad that it could have originated only in savage minds. These blacks planned to destroy all the white people of the city, then numbering over six thousand. Meeting in an orchard the negroes set fire to a shed and then lurked about in the shadows, armed with every kind of weapon on which they could lay hands.
As the negroes had expected, all the citizens of the neighborhood, seeing the conflagration, came running to the spot to fight the flames. The blacks succeeded in killing nine men and wounding many more before the alarm reached the fort. Then of course the affair ended. The slaves fled to the forests at the northern end of the island; but the soldiers stationed sentries and then hunted down the negroes, beating the woods to be sure that none escaped. Six of the negroes, seeing that their doom was sealed, killed themselves, and the fate of the captives showed that they well knew what mercy to expect at the hands of the enraged whites. Twenty-one were put to death, one being broken on the wheel and several burned at the stake, while the rest were hanged.
After this experience of the danger attending the holding of slaves, the restrictions upon the negroes grew even more irksome and the treatment they received more that of outcasts. For instance, a slave must be buried by daylight, without pallbearers and with not more than a dozen negroes present as mourners.