Conceived in Liberty (103 page)

Two years later, in 1708, a group of slaves in Newtown, Long Island, rebelled and killed seven whites. Four of the rebel slaves, including an Indian woman, were executed, the woman being burned by the authorities. A subsequent law in New York allowed judges to sentence local slaves to death in any manner they might deem best to attain public tranquility. The fear of slave rebellion was clearly acute among the white masters.

Early in 1712, a group of Negro slaves in New York City formed a massive plot for an armed uprising. In the spring, a group of about thirty of the slaves obtained arms and then set upon a party of whites, routing them and killing nine. Soldiers soon crushed the mutiny, however, arresting seventy Negroes as conspirators (one of whom was convicted after being once acquitted), and placing the city under arms. Twenty-one of the slaves were executed
en masse, the governor taking advantage of the new law to perform the execution in a particularly brutal manner, as “the most exemplary punishment... that could possibly be thought of....” Perhaps the most instructive lesson learned by the discerning was the brutality and savagery at the very core of the slave system. It is part of the Western heritage that when something unpleasant happens, a new law is passed in a hurried attempt to cure it. The new legislature therefore once more quickly tightened its laws punishing slave conspiracies.

By 1740, New York City had the substantial number of 2,000 Negro slaves among a total population of 12,000. The proportion soon reached one-third in Kings and Queens counties. In 1740, hysteria spread through the city over an alleged slave plot to poison the white water supply. For some time afterward, most New Yorkers allayed their fears by buying spring water from street vendors. The ensuing winter of 1740–41 was a hard one in New York, with the price of wheat and bread high, and much suffering among the poor. Fires began to rage frequently throughout the city, some perhaps set by Negro slaves and white sympathizers. The slaves, in accordance with the revolutionary nature of the weapon used, concentrated their arson on the homes and offices of government officials and on the barracks of the soldiery. Several suspicious fires also broke out in Hackensack, New Jersey, for which at least two slaves were themselves burned in retaliation.

The response to the fires was mass hysteria by the whites, expressed in indiscriminate arrests indulged in by the New York government. No fewer than one hundred and fifty slaves and twenty-five whites (including seventeen soldiers) were arrested. Interestingly enough, the main focus of white fear and hatred centered on a group of Spanish Negro prisoners of war, who, upon capture, had been sold from freedom into slavery in New York City. These Negroes were, understandably, particularly bitter at such treatment accorded to prisoners of war. As the greatest and most recent victims of injustice, they drew the hottest fire of the guilty whites. All of these Spanish Negroes were imprisoned in the wave of arrests.

In the mass arrests, city officials presumed to make a house-to-house search for “suspicious-looking” characters, who were ordered summarily arrested on suspicion. Eventually, every Negro at large was picked up by the police.

The hapless Negroes, beset by torture and by promise of relief for accusing others, could not find a single lawyer to defend them. One reason was that every lawyer in the city was directly associated with the prosecution. In his summing up, Prosecutor William Smith had the gall to denounce the base “ingratitude” of the mutinous Negroes. Four of the white prisoners were executed, including an innkeeper and his wife, as was a clergyman, the Reverend John Ury, accused of swearing in the conspirators. Ury stated that he was an Anglican minister, but the government insisted that he was a Spanish Jesuit priest, and a New York law of 1700 provided for the hanging of any
Roman Catholic priest found in the province. The attorney general, summing up the prosecution, took the occasion to denounce the iniquities of the Church of Rome. Refusing to believe that Ury was not a Catholic, New York carried out the execution. Of the slaves arrested, thirteen were burned alive, eighteen were hanged, and seventy banished to the West Indies. Every one of the unfortunate Spanish Negroes was killed; while waiting to be burned at the stake, a few Negroes were persuaded to “confess” and “tell the truth” (that is, implicate others) in exchange for a delay in the hope of a pardon. But their desperate maneuver was to be of no avail. The crowd became enraged when hearing of a delay and, at its insistence, the Negroes were immediately burned to death.

It is instructive to learn from the adamant prosecution of these alleged criminals that the main witness against them, a young white indentured servant named Mary Burton, was conceded by the court to be a liar and a perjurer. In addition, the trials were marked by so-called confessions extracted either by torture or by promises of large rewards for informing on others—methods which can hardly lend credence to their testimony. Indeed, the mass frenzy greatly resembled the Salem witch trials and, as in the Salem case, only when confessions (especially those of the star witness, Mary Burton) began to implicate well-known and wealthy people did the wave of arrests and executions suddenly subside.

One happy consequence of the New York slave frenzy was that it stamped the psyches of the residents with fear of further slave revolts, which led to a steady decline in the number of Negro slaves kept in New York City.

Land conflicts in New Jersey during the colonial period stemmed from its unique status of having numerous resident proprietors. Other proprietary colonies had one or a few feudal owners, remotely resident in England. Both West and East New Jersey, however, had numerous resident proprietors alert to their own interests, and when the provinces became a united Crown colony, the proprietors’ title to land still remained.

The bulk of the problem centered in East New Jersey, where the proprietors tended to hold onto their granted titles and tried to enforce quitrents rather than subdivide and sell the land quickly. The proprietors had trouble with two types of settlers: the recipients of the old Richard Nicolls patent during the mid-seventeenth century, and squatters, who believed no more was required for owning the land than settling and purchasing the tract from the Indians. The Nicolls patentees were largely in Elizabethtown, while the small farmers and squatters were farther west in the Oranges and in Hunterdon and Morris counties.

The East New Jersey Council of Proprietors began a concerted attempt to enforce their titles and quitrents during the late 1720s. Leading the proprietors were Lewis Morris and James Alexander. The proprietors received a severe setback when their attempt to eject an Elizabethtown settler was defeated after a jury trial in
Lithgow
v.
Schuyler
(1734). Foiled in their attempt to oust the Nicolls patentees, the proprietors decided to try to collect quitrents, which had accumulated to a total of 10,000 pounds in arrears.

The West New Jersey proprietors also began to crack down on squatter-settlers, especially in Hunterdon County. When agents of proprietor Daniel Coxe, Jr., tried to collect quitrents, the Hunterdon settlers drove them off with
arms, and threatened Coxe with assassination if he should persist in his harassment. The conflict intensified when Lewis Morris, the leader of the proprietors, became royal governor in 1738.
*
Morris quickly appointed his son, Robert Hunter Morris, to be chief justice of the province, and his daughter’s father-in-law, Richard Ashfield, to be receiver general of quitrents. The upper house was also packed by Lewis Morris with his fellow proprietors.

The determined Morris decided, in the 1740s, to try the Elizabethtown land cases in the Court of Chancery, where he himself was presiding judge. In reply, the Elizabethtown settlers petitioned the king about their grievances, but to no avail. Morris and the proprietors also began winning many ejectment cases against settlers on the fringe of Elizabethtown, as well as against squatters farther west who had purchased Indian titles. The Chancery case against the Elizabethtown settlers was filed in 1745, and the settlers appeared to be in dire straits. At this point, with tensions at fever pitch, one of the Elizabethtown leaders, Samuel Baldwin, was arrested for cutting timber on his own—but allegedly proprietary—land. The people’s anger exploded and a mob broke open the Newark jail and rescued Baldwin.

Four months later, Nehemiah Baldwin and others of the rioters were arrested in their turn. In response, a crowd armed with clubs appeared and rescued Baldwin. Shortly afterward, a mob of three hundred appeared at the Newark jail, facing thirty armed militia. Threatening to kill every militiaman if fired upon, the triumphant crowd succeeded in breaking in and rescuing all the prisoners.

The new Assembly of February 1746 sympathized with the rioters. In his opening address to the legislature, Governor Morris thundered that the riots were virtually “high treason” and “likely to end in rebellion.” Morris called for severe measures to quell the “revolution.” Morris and the proprietors introduced in the Council an amazing bill, modeled on an English law of 1715, providing that if twelve or more persons should meet and refuse to disperse if so ordered by a government official, they would then be declared felons and be summarily put to death.

The confrontation between the two forces continued to mount. The rebels presented a petition to the legislature, citing their Indian titles and calling for a stay of all judicial processes against them, while proprietor Samuel Nevill denounced the petition as infringing the Crown’s prerogative and its sovereignty over the soil of New Jersey. In a sense, Nevill was correct. The opposing libertarian theory of land ownership, espoused by the squatters, was eloquently set forth by a sympathizer in a New York newspaper. Going beyond Roger Williams’ simple theory of Indian ownership to what was essentially the John Locke labor theory of original landed property, the writer declared that, although the earth “was made for equal use of all, it may nevertheless be
appropriated by every individual. This is done by the improvement of any part of it lying vacant, which is thereupon distinguished from the great common of nature, and made the property of that man, who bestowed his labor in it; from whom it cannot afterward be taken, without breaking through the rules of natural justice; for thereby he would actually be deprived of the fruits of his industry.”
*

At this crucial point, Lewis Morris died. The proprietary still ran the governor’s post, however, since acting governor John Hamilton was none other than the president of the East New Jersey Council of Proprietors. Hamilton demanded a bill to suppress the rioters, but the Assembly paid no heed to his request. Instead, rioting spread during the summer throughout the province, and especially in Hunterdon County. The Assembly also refused to raise troops for war with France; John Low, Essex representative and a riot leader, pointing out that the armed force would soon be employed to suppress the riots at home. Threats of assassination were again made against Samuel Nevill, and the Somerset County jail was broken open by a mob and several prisoners released. Rioting was rapidly merging into open revolution. Governor Hamilton responded by intensifying the tyranny suffered by the settlers and the rest of the populace. Thus, he ordered the sheriff to arrest any tumultuous assembly and to keep them in jail until trial. And Robert Hunter Morris vainly asked the Crown to send troops from England to suppress the tenant rebellion.

In the spring of 1747 the successful rioters intensified their rebellion and began to assume the offensive. In Morris County, they began driving proprietors from their homes. In the spring Assembly, Hamilton admitted that the attempts at suppression had only succeeded in redoubling the rioting. Here was another example in history of the near impossibility of a government, relying only on its own resources, suppressing a popular revolution. The Assembly again ignored Hamilton’s threat to import counterrevolution by bringing in British troops. As the Assembly adjourned, the encouraged rioters broke into even more widespread rebellion, expecting that ultimately the king would be pressured into getting rid of the problem by granting the settlers their lands. In July, one of the most serious of the riots broke out in Perth Amboy, the main center of the resident Eastern proprietors. John Bainbridge, Jr., had been arrested for taking part in the Somerset County outbreak and was imprisoned in Perth Amboy jail. At this point, a rescue party of 150, armed with clubs and led by Edmund Bainbridge, Simon Wyckoff, and Amos Roberts, appeared at the courthouse, knocked down the sheriff and the mayor, broke open the jail, and jubilantly rode off with the prisoner.

The government called a grand jury for Middlesex County and Judge Samuel Nevill, one of the leading proprietors, charged the jury to indict
twenty of the rioters for high treason. The jury, however, “would hardly indict them for a riot.”

Within the midst of this revolutionary atmosphere, Jonathan Belcher assumed the post of governor. Belcher, a professional royal bureaucrat who had been governor of Massachusetts for a dozen years, could be expected, as a native of Massachusetts, to be unsympathetic to quitrents and feudal proprietorships. While sympathetic to the liberal position, Belcher denounced the rioters, who effected another dramatic jail rescue in Essex County soon after the governor assumed office. But Belcher’s momentary annoyance did not push him into a reactionary program; instead, he spoke in kindly fashion to a delegation of the rebels.

The Assembly was under firm control of the liberals, while the Council had been packed with proprietary appointees. The Council repeatedly urged harsh suppression of the rioters, and the proprietors called for making rioting a crime of high treason. The Assembly, while refusing to take such measures, was in an uncomfortable position; while liberal on the land question, it was too moderate and cautious to be radical or principled on the issue. When the radical rebels, after effecting a jail rescue in Hunterdon County in the autumn of 1747, proposed a great open march on the government in Burlington to demand defense against the depredations of the proprietors, the frightened Assembly joined the Council in denouncing such a march as an insult and contempt of the laws. Chagrined at this desertion by the supposedly sympathetic Assembly, the rebel settlers canceled the march. Indeed, the middle-of-the-road Assembly agreed to pass a very mild bill to suppress the riots—but without funds to enforce it—in exchange for a government pardon for all recanting rioters.