New York at War (13 page)

The most controversial and covert financial opportunity war offered was that of trading with the enemy. From the inception of their commerce with the West Indies, New York merchants had recognized that Jamaica, Barbados, and other English islands were not the only markets beckoning to them. New Yorkers exchanged their flour, grain, and lumber for sugar, molasses, and slaves on Spanish and French islands, often for better prices than they could get in the English colonies and in flagrant disregard of English measures that sought to regulate or prohibit such trade. War turned such smuggling into a form of aiding the enemy, of outright treason in the eyes of English admirals and parliamentarians, but skyrocketing prices on the enemy’s islands proved too tempting to Manhattan businessmen like Thomas Lynch, James de Peyster, Waddell Cunningham, and dozens of others. To the north, supplying the French at Louisbourg on the Canadian coast with food, canvas, and gunpowder also proved profitable. But by doing so, a writer in the
New-York Mercury
complained in 1756, Manhattan merchants were providing the French “with everything necessary for our destruction.”
²⁸

Some also found a useful cover for trade in the prisoner exchanges fostered by both mid-century wars. Each conflict brought a stream of prisoners of war to Manhattan: French and Spanish sailors, French troops captured in Canada, Catholic families expelled from Nova Scotia. Each enemy prisoner was poised to collect information about the city’s defenses, and local officials were eager to rid themselves of potential spies who, moreover, had to be fed and housed. But in authorizing New York shipowners to carry prisoners to Saint Domingue and to bring back British prisoners of war, royal governors sparked a lucrative trade in which captains filled their holds with valuable trade goods. A small group of French merchants, who managed to stay in the city despite fears of wartime subversion and espionage, covertly provided ship captains with passports and licenses facilitating this trade with the enemy.
²⁹

The fortunes of war did not lift everyone equally. Higher wartime insurance rates on shipping cut into profits from overseas trade, hurting some merchants (including smaller traders) while benefiting those who sold insurance. Wartime inflation burdened the city’s poorest people—widowed, orphaned, ill, disabled, or aged laborers, servants, seamen, soldiers, lesser tradesmen, and their families. “What must our poor suffer!” the New York
Post Boy
lamented during the winter of 1747, after noting steeply rising prices for poultry, butter, and firewood. Carpenters and shipwrights, meanwhile, hated being “impressed” by the army to build bateaux (small boats used in the Canadian campaigns) at fixed prices. The threat of actual impressment, however, was very real: most despised and feared in both war and peace was the press gang, the detachment of Royal Navy sailors who rounded up seamen, waterfront workers, and even landsmen for forced labor on His Majesty’s warships at low pay under miserable conditions for what might become a lifetime of service.
³⁰

War drained off some of the city’s poorer or transient men, like nineteen-year-old German-born tailor Jacob Murweis, twenty-year-old stonecutter and native New Yorker Mathew Sindown, forty-seven-year-old laborer Walter Murphy from Dublin, and forty-year-old Scotsman John Ramsey, who wryly described himself to a recruiter as “an old smuggler.” In 1759 these men enlisted in newly formed colonial regiments that the legislature raised for one of the repeated assaults on Canada. High bounties and wages attracted enlistees. So did patriotism, which motivated at least some of the seven hundred men who enlisted for frontier duty after news arrived in town of the disastrous loss to the French at Fort William Henry on Lake George in 1757. But the prospect of risking one’s life to French bullets, Indian tomahawks, or disease in a remote wilderness clearly deterred many men who had something to live for in New York City.
³¹

For rich and poor, privateering was one of the most attractive opportunities the wartime city offered. As the scale of each successive imperial conflict grew, so did the number of privateering vessels sailing from East River docks: from seventeen during Queen Anne’s War to seventy-three during the French and Indian War, the latter number unrivaled by any other port. In a given year, a thousand men might be on board New York privateers. “The country is drained of many able bodied men,” Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey explained to William Pitt in 1758, “by almost a kind of madness to go a privateering.” Members of some mercantile families, like the Beekmans and Van Hornes, got into the habit of launching privateers from war to war and generation to generation. They recruited crewmen through word of mouth on the waterfront or through advertisements in that new urban vehicle of information, the newspaper (New York’s first weekly, the
Gazette
, had begun publication in 1725). For seasoned seamen, accustomed to low pay, hard labor, and the hazards of life at sea, privateering made obvious economic sense. The only group kept from privateering was that half of the population consisting of women: when, in 1743, a woman trying to pass as a man was discovered shipping out on the
Castor and Pollux
, the crew ducked her in the water from the yard arm and then tarred her “from head to foot.”
³²

Once furnished with an official letter of marque from the royal governor, New York sloops and brigs, well-armed with cannon and men, usually headed south for the cruising grounds north of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, where they had the maximum chance of catching rich French and Spanish prizes. But privateering could be dangerous. Out of 108 New York privateering vessels in the two mid-century wars, 25 never returned home; hundreds of crewmen died, were wounded, or ended up languishing in French and Spanish prisons.
³³

In the face of the many risks that accompanied privateering, crew members focused on the rewards. Privateers returned to New York harbor with captured cargo ships loaded with European textiles, wine, and hardware. Even more lucrative were the ships seized while carrying sugar, molasses, rum, coffee, cocoa, or indigo from the West Indies to Europe. Enslaved Africans were another valuable commodity ripe for pillaging. The return of privateers with their prizes was a stirring event that brought thousands of New Yorkers out to the wharves along Dock Street to look and cheer. Merchants now learned whether their investments had paid off (indeed, the speculative trading of shares in privateers, driven by news of the shifting fortunes of given vessels still plying the Caribbean, became one of New York’s earliest securities markets). Sometimes the results were spectacular, as in the Great Capture of August 1744, when the privateers
Royal Hester
,
Polly
,
Clinton
, and
Mary Anne
entered the harbor with six captured French vessels and their freight valued at 24,000 pounds sterling. The vessels “saluted the town with near 50 guns to the rejoicing of the inhabitants.”
³⁴

Once anchored off Manhattan, prize vessels and their cargoes had to be “condemned” in the city’s Vice Admiralty Court, where Justice Lewis Morris Jr., a friend of the merchants through thick and thin, ensured that most prizes quickly became the legal property of the New Yorkers who had captured them—an outcome that also guaranteed hefty fees to Morris and a small army of attorneys, registrars, and appraisers, as well as to the auctioneers who offered the looted merchandise for sale. Most privateering contracts stipulated that, after costs, the vessels’ owners would receive one-third of prize revenues, with the remaining two-thirds divided among officers and crew.
³⁵

As in Captain Kidd’s day, a thin line separated privateering from its unsavory half-brother, piracy. Like pirates of old, some privateers raided neutral ships or beat and tortured captured crew and passengers, especially when they thought rough treatment would force captives to reveal where treasure was hidden aboard ship. One New York privateer captain, John Lush, gained a special reputation for his piratical behavior. Lush’s sloop
Stephen and Elizabeth
, manned by one hundred men, prowled the Caribbean in 1739–1740 for Spanish prizes, which he towed into Charleston and Manhattan, where the proceeds from the looted cocoa, indigo, slaves, and pieces of eight were distributed among the captain and crew. Lush took part of his largesse in human cargo; nineteen “negroes and mulattoes” seized by him were condemned as prizes by Judge Morris. Rumors soon surfaced that Lush had tortured a Spanish crewman in order to get him to divulge the location of gold on his ship; when confronted with the allegation, Lush dryly responded that he “had not realized that you could use a Spaniard too cruel.” Other charges would soon circulate as well: allegations that the seized “slaves” had in fact been free sailors before their capture. Regardless of the stories passing from mouth to mouth on the East River docks, the captain played his role to the hilt. “When Lush landed,” the New York
Weekly Journal
reported in April 1740, “he was rowed to shore by his men in rich laced and embroidered clothes taken from the Spaniards.” As successful businessmen who embodied wartime prosperity, Lush and other privateers found their alleged breaches of honor and humanity were quickly forgotten by most townspeople in the streets and auction rooms of Manhattan.
³⁶

In the late winter and spring of 1741, as privateering sloops came and went in the waters of the Upper Bay, and at a moment when hundreds of redcoats and militia volunteers were off fighting the Spaniards in a major Caribbean offensive, a strange and disturbing series of events began to unfold in New York City. Ten fires, at first seemingly random and accidental, broke out over the course of three weeks in March and April. While no lives were lost, several homes and warehouses were badly burned. Hardest hit was Fort George, where on March 18 the barracks, chapel, and governor’s house burned to the ground despite the efforts of a bucket brigade and the city’s two water-pumping fire engines. Next to the little-understood smallpox and yellow fever epidemics that periodically swept the city, nothing struck fear in the hearts of New Yorkers like fire: with hundreds of buildings and roofs at least partly constructed of wood, the town could become an inferno in a matter of minutes.

By April 5, uneasiness was turning into panic. While looking out her window onto Broadway that day, Abigail Earle overheard Quack, the slave of butcher John Walter, laughingly exclaim to a fellow slave, “fire, fire, scorch, scorch, A LITTLE, damn it, by-and-by.” When four blazes broke out the following day, furious mobs ran through the streets yelling, “The Negroes are rising!” Then, on April 21, Mary Burton, a white teenage servant in a waterfront tavern popular among slaves and soldiers from Fort George, offered authorities a remarkable confession: her employer, John Hughson, was the head of a slave conspiracy “to burn the whole town . . . the Negroes were to cut their masters’ and mistresses’ throats; and when all this was done, Hughson was to be king, and Caesar [a local slave] governor.”
³⁷

New York had been a slave-owning city from its inception, but New Yorkers had never resolved the complications of owning other human beings. Enslaved African men and women toiled in households and workshops for their white masters; most lived in their owners’ homes, sleeping in kitchens or garrets. Some wed slaves of other owners and created families that were spread between different neighborhoods. As they served their owners, African New Yorkers concealed their own customs, ethnic traditions, and resentments. In 1712, the resentments exploded: a group of about thirty slaves, many of them belonging to the Coromantee (Akan) people of Ghana, who were known for their military tradition, rebelled, killing nine whites and wounding six before they were captured and executed. The rebellion brought harsher laws, designed to keep blacks under constant scrutiny by whites. But the need to move around the city, often beyond the purview of watching eyes, was essential to the daily labor that masters expected their enslaved servants, laborers, and assistants to perform, thus defeating the intent of the laws. In 1741, one in every five New Yorkers—a total of two thousand men, women, and children—was enslaved. Present in about half the city’s white households, dwelling in every part of town, slaves made up almost one-third of New York’s workforce. In short, slaves were everywhere.
³⁸

Armed with Burton’s allegations against the tavern owner and his cohorts, the city’s judicial authorities swung into action, commencing a roundup of slave suspects that continued through the spring and summer months. As New Yorkers erected shoreline beacon poles at Rockaway and the Narrows to warn of possible Spanish invasion that spring, eleven slaves convicted of arson were burned at the stake; five other prisoners, including the white “king” Hughson and his wife, were hanged after being convicted of conspiracy.

As the jail in City Hall filled with dozens of suspects, however, it became clear that those slaves who confessed to complicity in the plot, and named other coconspirators, often had their lives spared. Suspects quickly learned the advisability of cooperating with their interrogators. By midsummer, details of an “unparalleled and hellish conspiracy” were emerging from the testimony of numerous slaves. Some prisoners testified that the plotters had calculated that a Spanish and French invasion was imminent and, arming themselves with stolen swords and guns, had planned to turn over the city to the invaders; when no invasion fleet materialized, they had decided to “kill all the white men, and have their wives for themselves.” Prosecutors and judges focused on the alleged treachery of the “Spanish Negroes,” who stubbornly insisted in court that they had been free Spanish seamen before being captured by Lush and other privateers. Witnesses reported that Hughson had promised “to tie Lush to a beam and roast him like a piece of beef.”