The United States of Paranoia (11 page)

Fear of fictional homosexual conspiracies led the government to conspire against homosexuals; fear of real repression led gay organizations to adopt the trappings of a conspiracy. In one such group, the Mattachine Society of Washington, Johnson wrote, “The secretary could only keep two sets of membership records and they were only open to MSW officers. Anyone who ‘breached the security’ of the organization could be expelled by a two-thirds vote of the membership. Pseudonyms were the norm, not only in meeting minutes and publications, but also in conversations at meetings.”
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All this in turn inspired yet more paranoia among the gay-hunters. When the Mattachine Society of Washington’s founder, Frank Kameny, testified to a congressional committee in 1962, he informed his interrogators that the group’s mailing list had only about a hundred names on it. That was inconceivable to congressmen such as John Dowdy, a Texas Democrat who had assumed that the society was an arm of a “national and international organization” with “up in the millions” of members.
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The committee was puzzled further by the fact that Kameny believed that there were a quarter-million homosexuals in the city—not because they doubted that there were so many, but because he didn’t have each one’s contact information. The investigators assumed, Johnson wrote, “that homosexuals were inherently drawn to the same clique and would somehow all be on the same mailing list.”
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Antigay paranoia isn’t as widespread now as it was then, but it has hardly disappeared. In 2012, a bishop in Maryland’s Hope Christian Church called same-sex marriage “a Satanic plot to destroy our seed.”
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In the same state, the antigay activist Michael Peroutka raised the specter of body snatchers. “You see, homosexuals can’t reproduce,” he explained. “So they must recruit. The best place to recruit is in schools where they can have unfettered access to
children
. . . . [W]hat is being pushed is nothing short of government-authorized perversion of Maryland children.”
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The great gay conspiracy never existed: Sexual subcultures may resemble secret societies in some ways, but they have no cell structure, no hierarchy, no Homintern. But gay
people
are very real, and they often have had good reasons to conduct their love lives covertly. Imagine a descendant of Goodman Brown working in Washington in 1945—perhaps he’s lending a hand with the war effort—and wandering one warm night into the same-sex pickup spot that was Lafayette Park. He has left his wife at home, naturally. A devilish older gentleman strikes up a conversation, and the longer it goes on, the more guilt Brown feels. He spots some seemingly respectable people that he knows, en route to some private revelry in the bushes. He tells himself nervously that he has entered a hidden world with its own secret signs. And he’s absolutely right.

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THE BEAST BELOW

Rumors flew about that black bands, numbering in the scores, even hundreds, were fanning out in all directions. Messengers galloped hither and yon to warn villages of approaching rebels. Invariably the rumors proved false—but no matter, an explanation was ready to hand. Black informers, it always turned out, had luckily alerted the white people to their impending doom, days or just hours beforehand, and the ringleaders were now safely in jail, the others having melted into the shadows. Yet everyone was warned to stay vigilant, no matter how normally the slaves were behaving in the quarters and fields.

—Bertram Wyatt-Brown
1

H
ere’s the story:

It wasn’t a long walk from the respectable neighborhoods of New York City to the grimier world of the waterfront, where sailors, slaves, and thieves gathered in taverns to drink, dance, roll dice, and draw up plans for revolutionary terror. The plotters were members of the Geneva Club, a secret society modeled on the Masonic orders of the gentlemen the Genevans were pledged to destroy. There were at least two lodges within the club: Smith’s Fly Boys, who met at John Hughson’s pub by the North River; and the Long Bridge Boys, who met at John Romme’s place by the Battery.
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There were other meeting spots too, such as Gerardus Comfort’s house near the docks, where more than twenty seditious slaves assembled one Sunday in 1741. They “whetted their knives on a stone,” one woman later recalled, “some complaining, that their knives were rusty and blunt, and some said, that their knives were sharp enough to cut off a white man’s head: That they would kill the white Men, and have the white Women for their Wives.”
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Then there was the winter bacchanal hosted by Hughson, a white cobbler and barkeep who trafficked in stolen goods on the side. It was against the law to entertain slaves without their owners’ permission or for more than three slaves to meet after dark, but Hughson regularly opened his doors to far more slaves than that, at all hours and without bothering to ask their masters’ consent. On that day he laid out a banquet for the conspirators: a goose, a fowl, a quarter of mutton, two loaves of bread, two bowls of rum punch. As they feasted, a slave named Ben announced that he had the run of his master’s house and that when it was time to rise up he could easily steal a gun. Then Ben asked another slave, called Quash, what role he’d take in the rebellion. Quash replied that he didn’t care, but he could kill three, four, five white men before the day ended.

One by one, the others declared their plans for the revolution. One slave said he would kill his mistress first and then go out to the streets to fight. Another pledged to burn his master’s stables. Many men promised to steal weapons or to set their masters’ houses on fire. And then they all swore themselves to a pact. The next evening they gathered again, and while Ben played the fiddle they danced and drank deep into the night.

There were many meetings, many oaths, many plans. Romme knew some black men in the countryside who could read; he would write to them about the plot, he promised, and they would recruit a horde to descend on the city. There was talk that the Spanish were planning an invasion of New York. The rebels agreed that if the Spaniards came they would combine forces with the invaders, timing their uprising to coincide with the attack.

After the revolt, they whispered, Manhattan would be turned upside down. Hughson would be king, a slave named Caesar would be governor, and the insurgents would divide the city’s wealth. A “great many people had too much, and others too little,” a slave called Cuffee liked to say. His “master had a great deal of money,” Cuffee continued, “but in a short time, he should have less.”
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They set the first fire at Fort George on March 18, 1741, and it left the governor’s mansion in cinders. The second came on March 25 at the home of a prominent naval officer. There was a fire at a storehouse on April 1, and April 4 brought two more fires in two separate structures. On April 5, someone found some coals under a haystack, and a woman overheard three slaves talking on the street. “
Fire, fire, scorch, scorch
, A LITTLE,
goddamn it
, BY-AND-BY,” one of them said, and then he laughed.
5

There were four more fires the next day. As citizens scrambled to suppress the flames, someone spotted Cuffee leaping from the window of a burning storehouse. The witness called out,
“A negro, a negro!”
As the cry spread, it became a general alarm:
The Negroes were rising
.
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People started remembering something they’d seen on the first day of the fires, as Fort George burned. New Yorkers, both black and white, had formed bucket lines from the port to the blaze. But when the buckets came to Cuffee, he dumped them on the ground rather than passing them along. And as the flames burned high, the defiant slave started to dance with joy, whistling and singing and shouting
“Huzzah!”

Or that’s the story, anyway.

There really was a wave of fires in New York in early 1741. There may well have been a revolutionary conspiracy behind them, though there isn’t a consensus on that. But there’s no disputing the colonial government’s reaction to the blazes. At least thirty-four people—thirty black, four white—were executed for their purported parts in the plot, with thirteen burned at the stake. Another ninety-one were exiled from the city. One committed suicide behind bars.
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It was a bloody exorcism, and the exorcists were deeply frightened men. About 20 percent of Manhattan was black in 1741, far more than any city in Europe. The specter of a slave revolt haunted the city fathers, and they were even more terrified by the thought of a slave revolt aided by the sort of lowlife whites they associated with places like Hughson’s pub. You can get a sense of the fear that seized the city from the title of a book published three years later by Daniel Horsmanden, a judge at the trials:
A Journal of the Proceedings In the Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by some White People, in conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for burning the City of New-York in America and murdering the Inhabitants
.

It didn’t take long for second thoughts to sink in, and skeptics were soon comparing the prosecutions to the Salem witch trials. But the crackdown’s defenders had comparisons of their own to offer. Slaves had already rioted in New York in 1712. Just two years before the Manhattan fires, in the Stono Rebellion of 1739, South Carolina slaves had used both arms and arson against the whites. Several rebellions had broken out in Britain’s Caribbean possessions, and many more had been either detected in advance or imagined by nervous members of the planter class. In Barbados, where five-sixths of the population was enslaved, the authorities executed thirty-six Africans in 1675 for purportedly planning to burn the plantations and exterminate the white men. By some accounts the rebels intended to kill the white women too, while others believed, in the words of one anonymous pamphleteer, that “they intended to spare the lives of the Fairest and Handsomest Women . . . to be Converted to their own use.”
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The Barbados crackdown took place while King Philip’s War was raging in New England, and the two events were soon linked in the public mind. One early account of the Barbados conspiracy declared matter-of-factly that New Englanders had “tasted of the same Cup” when Philip “Revolted without Cause.”
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But as the real and imaginary slave conspiracies kept coming, a more distinct tale coalesced: the myth of the Enemy Below. In this story, as with the Enemy Within, the community’s foe is found inside the city’s gates. But these conspirators are not indistinguishable from everyone else. They hold a distinct position at the bottom of the social pyramid, which they aim to overturn. They are alien but familiar, with a well-defined place in society, perhaps even an essential role in the economy. If the Enemy Within can be imagined as a mob whose members have been seduced or conned into losing their individuality, the Enemy Below is presumed to be not quite human in the first place. It is a bestial force with monstrous appetites: a collective id eager to rape, burn, loot, and massacre.

Needless to say, the fact that the accusations in New York conformed to a formula doesn’t mean that the charges were all false. There are good reasons to expect some similarities among uprisings. It’s natural, for example, for slaves to turn to fire as a weapon, since it is both extremely destructive and easy to acquire. But because the story formula was well known, it was also natural for the authorities to interpret the evidence to fit the well-worn tale. Once the investigators decided they were seeing a slave insurrection, they knew what to look for, and once the prisoners understood what was expected in their confessions, they provided the necessary details.

The result in Manhattan was as good a distillation of the Enemy Below myth as you’ll find—or at least it was until June 1741. Then it became a case study in how a conspiracy narrative can suddenly shift shape, as prosecutors convinced themselves that the real power behind the slaves was that familiar Enemy Outside, the Catholic Church.

The Manhattan story begins with a much smaller conspiracy: not to burn down the city but to rob a shop. A teenage sailor named Christopher Wilson had spotted some valuable pieces of eight in a store as the merchant’s wife made change. Wilson mentioned the money to some of the drinkers at Hughson’s pub, and a group of them then burglarized the place.

One of the most distinctive coins was subsequently spotted in the possession of the slave Caesar, a Hughson’s regular. Soon several members of the tavern crowd were arrested, and others were hauled in for questioning. One of the people questioned was Hughson’s disgruntled indentured servant, sixteen-year-old Mary Burton, who charged her white master and various black confederates with complicity in the burglary.

Meanwhile, the fires had started. Officials took the first blaze for an accident, but with each structure that caught fire their suspicions grew. There were suggestions that burglars had been burning buildings to distract people while they stole from their houses. (And indeed, some robberies did take place while homeowners were occupied with firefighting.) Then rumors of a grander plot started circulating. Remember the woman who thought she overheard three slaves on the street speaking suspiciously about the fires. Remember the fear that took hold when Cuffee was spotted jumping from a burning storehouse, the cry that the slaves were rising. A crowd chased Cuffee to his master’s house and then dragged him off to jail. By the end of the night, several more black men had been arrested.

On April 8, according to Horsmanden’s book, the city council concluded that there was a “villainous confederacy of latent enemies amongst us”
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and ordered a general search of all the houses in Manhattan. The governor had the militia “dispersed through the city, and sentries of them posted at the ends of the streets to guard all avenues, with orders to stop all suspected persons that should be observed carrying bags or bundles, or removing goods from house to house, in order for their examination.”
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He also offered a reward to anyone able to furnish information about the plot.

Two weeks later, Burton was brought in for more questioning about the robbery. She informed her interrogators that she would talk about the larceny case but would say nothing at all about the fires. That implied, of course, that she knew something about the fires, and a fierce series of questions about the blazes followed. Burton’s declarations of reluctance faded away, and soon she was recounting a vast plot to burn down the city, overthrow the government, and install her boss as king.

As all that was going on, Great Britain and Spain were in the second year of the conflict known today as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and Britain’s New York colony was rife with rumors that the Spanish were going to attack. Manhattan, meanwhile, had just been through a period of deep political division, including mass opposition to the rule of Governor William Cosby and continued partisan sniping in the wake of Cosby’s death. The specter of a revolt allowed the political class both to overcome those divisions and to find a focus for their fears. That consensus would not last forever. But as the grand jury began to try the accused, who had no attorneys and did not enjoy the legal rights that Americans expect to enjoy today, the elites of New York were set on suppressing a domestic threat.

It was under such circumstances, with a war at the colony’s doors and suspicions of subversion within, that the Salem authorities had thrown themselves into a witch hunt. And it was at that moment that events in Manhattan started to resemble the Salem trials. Several prisoners were quickly condemned to death. It became clear that the best way to avoid the same fate was to confess, and it became clear that one way to impress the authorities with your sincerity was to name some more conspirators. So even the innocent had an incentive to declare themselves guilty, to offer a story that fit the prosecutors’ preconceptions, and, by fingering others, to inflate the size of the purported plot.