JACOB LEISLER’S death that rain-swept day of May 16, 1691, was not in vain. However much he may have overreached himself, he taught the poor and oppressed not to kneel before the rich and royal. He divided the electorate into two parties—popular and aristocratic. Agreeing on practically nothing, they split the city for years to come. But their everlasting quarrels prevented the British governors from gaining undisputed mastery of the colony.
Governor Henry Sloughter’s first act after Leisler’s arrest and before his execution was to issue writs for the election of a representative assembly. It met in a Pearl Street tavern on April 9, 1961. This date marks the beginning of continuous constitutional government in New York. The party opposing Leisler won a majority of representatives, and the governor named as members of his council the most bitter enemies of Leisler.
Sloughter died so suddenly the following July that it was rumored he had been poisoned. Six doctors examined his body; this was the first autopsy ever held here. Finding a high alcoholic content in the corpse and learning that the governor suffered from delirium tremens before his death, they concluded that he had died after a drunken debauch.
The council chose Major Richard Ingoldsby to take charge of things until the arrival of the new governor, Benjamin Fletcher. Heavyset, florid, and greedy, Fletcher did not appear until August of the following year. Anti-Leislerians welcomed him with a great parade. From that year, 1692, dates New York’s custom of honoring notables and celebrating important events with impressive parades.
After Fletcher had taken office, his handsome six-horse carriage was seen everywhere, carrying Mrs. Fletcher and her daughters, gowned in the latest European finery. The new governor was an opportunist, little concerned about the colonists. At the time the chief source of riches was land, and Fletcher gave property to his favorites. By bribing him, a wealthy man could get any real estate he wanted. Because only propertied men could vote, Fletcher not only swindled honest people out of their land but also reduced most of them to tenant farmers.
During his regime the city lost its bolting monopoly. In 1678, when the first Bolting Act was passed, the city owned only 3 ships, 7 sloops, and 8 small boats, while the city revenue came to only 2,000 pounds a year. In 1694, when the last act was repealed, the city boasted 60 ships, 62 sloops, and 40 boats. Then too, its annual revenue had risen to 5,000 pounds, and the number of houses had doubled.
As the result of pressure from other communities, the manufacture and packaging of flour and bread were thrown open to all competitors. Within two years bread became scarce in the city. Bakers couldn’t buy flour cheaply enough to bake it for their customers at the former prices. An inventory revealed that only a week’s supply of wheat, flour, and bread was on hand for the city’s nearly 7,000 inhabitants.
Such was the genesis of three significant trends: (1) Strife between Leislerians and anti-Leislerians split the citizens into popular and aristocratic parties. (2) Fletcher’s venality inaugurated a corrupt alliance between bad politics and big business. (3) The Bolting Acts and their repeal set city against country and country against city.
Most prominent families were related by marriage—sometimes doubly and trebly connected. Class distinctions were emphasized by clothing. A gentleman might bedeck himself in green silk breeches trimmed with silver and gold thread, a gold-embroidered blue coat, a lace shirt, scarlet and blue hose, a powdered and pompadoured wig, and a silver-hilted sword. Even upper-class schoolboys owned three pairs of gloves and wore gold or silver buttons and blue or red stockings. New York’s gaudy fashions contrasted sharply with the drab garb of New England Puritans.
A Boston gentlewoman visiting New York at this time had a sharp eye for ladies’ fashions. She considered the local Englishwomen more chic than their Dutch counterparts. The Dutch vrouws favored loose gowns with unlaced waists. Wealthy Dutch females prided themselves on their ornamental headdress, the jewels on their fingers, and their earrings.
New Yorkers loved fun. They whipped about the countryside in sleighs during the winter, enjoyed drinking in smoky taverns, almost entirely ignored the Sabbath, and consumed huge quantities of good food. A delicacy of the day was orange butter, made according to this recipe: “Take new cream two gallons, beat it up to a thicknesse, then add half a pint of orange-flower-water, and as much red wine, and so being become the thicknesse of butter it has both the colour and smell of butter.” Drunkenness was common. At a City Hall dinner honoring Mayor Stephanus Van Cortlandt, he became so intoxicated and merry that he snatched off his hat and wig, skewered them on the tip of his sword, set fire to them, and waved them happily over the banquet table.
Despite the heavy drinking done by men, divorce was rare. A very few divorces did occur in the 1670’s, but in the century preceding the Revolutionary War not a single divorce was granted in the colony of New York. In fact, there was no way of dissolving a marriage except by a special act of the legislature. Most weddings were performed by justices of the peace instead of by ministers.
In 1693 the Church of England became the colony’s official religion. Two years later, though, a local Anglican chaplain complained that only 90 families adhered to the English Church. There were 20 Jewish families, 260 Huguenot families, 45 families of Dutch Lutherans, 1,754 families subscribing to the Dutch Reformed Church, and 1,365 families of English Dissenters. Dissenters meant all Protestant groups disputing the authority of the Anglican Church.
Only six Catholics lived here in 1696. For more than three-quarters of a century after the flight of Dongan, Nicholson, and the Jesuit fathers, the few remaining Catholics lacked a place of worship and lived in fear of persecution. The war between England’s Protestant king and France’s Catholic king so agitated New Yorkers that in 1691 they banned “Romish forms of worship” here. Even worse was to come.
Fearful that the French would descend from Canada and attack New York, the British in America, helped by the colonists, launched expeditions against New France in 1693, 1709, and 1711, only to fail each time. The British knew that many leading French explorers were Jesuit priests and believed that they tried to incite Indians against the English colonies.
Because of this, on August 9, 1700, the province of New York enacted a law that all Jesuits, priests, or any other ecclesiastics ordained by the Pope must leave before November 1, 1700. Any who remained after that date, taught Catholic doctrines, used Catholic rites, or granted absolution “shall be deemed and accounted an incendiary and disturber of the public peace and safety and an enemy to the true Christian religion and shall be adjudged to suffer perpetual imprisonment.” Any Jesuit who escaped from prison and then was recaptured would be put to death. Any citizen who knowingly hid a priest could be fined 200 pounds.
This cruel law was really passed for political and military reasons. As one historian said, “In directing severe penalties against the priests, the legislators fancied they were warding off the blows of tomahawks.”
Upstate New York from the Hudson westward to the Genesee River was the home of a powerful Indian confederation, known to the French as the Iroquois and to the English as the Five Nations. It consisted of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes. In 1715 the Tuscarora tribe, fleeing northward from the Carolinas, was admitted to limited privileges within the confederation, which then became known as the Six Nations.
About 1700 the Five Nations stood at the peak of their power. They watched the growing Anglo-French rivalry for control of North America. New York was most directly affected because of its long border along the southern edge of New France. The Iroquois chiefs, skilled in diplomacy, realized that they held the balance of power and tried to play the British and French off against each other, winning first this concession and then that.
New York City took part in these abortive invasions of Canada. In 1693 the city sent 150 soldiers to Albany, and although the expedition failed, the men were received with honors when they returned. In 1709 supplies were gathered here; men, ships, horses, and wagons were requisitioned; and 20 carpenters built boats and canoes. Although this project was abandoned, New York had to issue paper money to pay the debts accumulated. Again in 1711, preparations for war whipped the city into a frenzy, markets being taken over for the construction of boats, but this invasion, too, came to nothing.
In 1693 the lower tip of Manhattan was named the Battery. A battery, of course, is an emplacement where artillery is mounted. To defend the city, Governor Fletcher constructed an emplacement on the rocks along the waterfront from what is now the foot of Greenwich Street to the corner of the present Whitehall and State streets. This southwestern tip of the island commanded the approach to the Hudson River. Ninety-two cannon were mounted in firing position. Fletcher also ordered the fort repaired once again. Decade after decade the fort needed attention because it was maintained by men ignorant of military engineering and because funds earmarked for the stronghold often were spent on other projects.
Turning from war to peace, Fletcher helped the first printer set up shop in New York. He had heard of a Quaker, named William Bradford, the official printer of Pennsylvania. Bradford got into trouble in Philadelphia because of a book he published. Tried and acquitted, he was so harassed by authorities that he decided to return to England. When Fletcher learned of this, he induced the New York council to pass a resolution offering forty pounds a year to a royal printer of the colony of New York. Bradford accepted the position.
He began operating New York’s first printing press at 81 Pearl Street on April 10, 1693. Besides printing city laws, he published lawbooks and other volumes. One of his first was a fifty-one page booklet entitled A Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University, Concerning His Conversation and Behavior in the World. This was an odd choice because New York contained no college, let alone a university.
In 1696 Governor Fletcher ordered Bradford to reprint an issue of the London Gazette that reported progress in England’s war with France. The same year Parliament passed another Navigation Act. New Yorkers were now told to buy all their manufactured goods from England or through England. These items could be brought here only in English-built ships skippered by English captains and worked by crews three-quarters of whom must be English-born. New Yorkers were forbidden to engage in manufacturing. In addition, because English authorities wanted to protect farmers in the homeland, only a fraction of the crops harvested in New York would be purchased. Yet the colonists were not allowed direct trade with any other nation.
All this added up to a boycott penalizing and paralyzing the city’s trade. But wealthy merchants found ways to evade the laws. They felt justified in cheating the king of revenue whenever they could turn a profit. As a result, smuggling became an accepted way of life. Another factor favored contraband trade. England was so busy warring on France that it could not patrol the seas in the New World.
This situation led to the birth of the privateer—the owner of a private vessel preying on naval and merchant ships of an enemy in time of war. Any government official could issue a letter of marque to a privateer. These letters authorized the privateers to capture enemy ships. The word “marque” comes from the French and Provençal marca, meaning seizure or reprisal.
Unhappily for the English king, privateers were often men of easy conscience; they did not discriminate among enemy ships, neutral ships, or even ships belonging to their own kind. They halted, boarded, and plundered any craft that might be laden with treasure. Thus, many privateers became out-and-out pirates.
King William’s warships were so busy in French waters that the Indian Ocean was left virtually unguarded, and it was there that the richest prizes were taken. Ships owned by the English and Dutch East India companies plied between their homelands and India. Now, with increasing frequency, pirates fell on them, killing and plundering.
After a pirate had captured one or more ships and taken aboard all the treasure he could carry, he sailed for New York. Here he would pull out of his pocket a tattered letter of marque and swear that he had acted as a lawful privateer in seizing this Oriental loot from a French ship. New York merchants, eager to buy goods denied them by the English Navigation Acts, never asked questions about the origin of a cargo.
Thus did New York City become the world’s principal market for the sale of pirates’ wares. The freebooters knew that if they put into leading European ports, they themselves might be seized; their ships, impounded; their cargoes, confiscated. In New York, however, they were greeted warmly by colonists hungry for trade. For more than a decade the city’s streets swarmed with swashbuckling pirates clad in blue coats trimmed with pearl buttons and gold lace, white knee breeches, and embroidered hose, with jeweled daggers flashing from their belts. They swilled liquor in taverns, spun lurid adventure stories, and tipped everyone from the potboy to the governor.
Governor Fletcher had found a new kind of graft. Although he was the king’s man, he sold protection to the pirates. He controlled the harbor and cooperated with greedy merchants. Three thousand miles of water protected him from interference by home authorities busy prosecuting the war with France.
Local shops displayed Oriental rugs, carved teakwood tables, ivory fans, and vases of hammered silver and brass. New Yorkers became familiar with strange gold and silver coins—Arabian dinars, Hindustani mohurs, Greek byzants, French louis d’or, and Spanish doubloons. Excited by the influx of such wonderful wares and currency, local merchants sent their own ships to the island of Madagascar, where pirates had established their own colony.
Of course, voyaging between New York and Madagascar was risky business. Local ships might fall prey to other pirates or be captured by English or Dutch frigates as receivers of stolen goods. But the profits were too juicy to resist. A big cask of wine cost 19 pounds here, but Madagascar pirates were willing to pay 300 pounds. A gallon of rum worth only 2 shillings here brought 3 pounds there. In 7 years one New York merchant made $500,000 by trading with pirates. This Red Sea trade, as it was called, became the foundation of many a New York fortune lasting to the present day. Some of the city’s current society leaders are descendants of black marketeers.
Many pirates and privateers who traded here were educated and well bred. Not only did they walk the streets safely, thanks to Governor Fletcher, but they also dined in wealthy homes and danced with eligible belles. In this category was the most notorious pirate of them all—Captain Kidd.
Born in Scotland about 1645 and thought to be the son of a Presbyterian minister, William Kidd went to sea, became an able mariner, sailed all over the world, and finally rose to the rank of captain. Eventually he owned several ships of his own. Not a breath of scandal tarnished his name when he came to New York to live, in 1691. Everyone knew that he was a privateer because he paid fees to the king through the governor. Nonetheless, he was a highly respected citizen. Kidd served with credit against the French in the West Indies, chased a hostile privateer off the New York coast, and received 150 pounds from the city council. He helped build the first Trinity Church and bought a large lot for himself on the north side of Wall Street.
The year of his arrival, Captain Kidd married the beautiful and twice-widowed Sarah Oort Cox. His wedding certificate styled him Gentleman. The newlyweds settled down in a handsome stone house one block east of Hanover Square, then a fashionable part of town. They owned 104 ounces of silverware, and Mrs. Kidd boasted the first big Turkish rug ever seen in New York. Their other household items included a dozen Turkey-work chairs, a dozen double-nailed leather chairs, two dozen single-nailed leather chairs, one oval table, three chests of drawers, four feather beds, three chafing dishes, four brass candlesticks, three barrels of cider, and a fine wine cellar.
The Leislerian party in the city accused Governor Fletcher of complicity with pirates and accepting bribes from them. He protested his innocence. Then various East Indian governments, irked by the piracy practiced at the expense of their subjects, threatened reprisals against the English East India Company. In turn, this firm complained to the British government. About the same time King William began to wonder why the prosperous colony of New York produced such scanty revenues.
After a discussion with Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, and with other Privy Council members, the king decided to act. He would replace Fletcher with Bellomont and send his new governor to New York with explicit orders to stamp out piracy. The king also planned to outfit a frigate and dispatch it to the Indian Ocean to protect legitimate English merchantmen and appease the angry Indians.
Visiting London just then were Captain Kidd and a respected New York merchant, named Robert Livingston. Bellomont told Livingston about the king’s proposed expedition. The New Yorker then suggested to the nobleman that Captain Kidd, “a bold and honest man,” should lead it. Bellomont reported this recommendation to the king. On October 10, 1695, an agreement was signed in London between Bellomont, on the one part, and Livingston and Kidd, on the other.
The king was to get 10 percent of all profits from Kidd’s foray into the Indian Ocean, with the balance to be divided between Bellomont, Livingston, and Kidd. Bellomont and a syndicate of rich men financed four-fifths of the venture, the rest being paid by the other two partners. Kidd was ordered to render a strict account of all his prizes. Livingston posted a bond guaranteeing that Kidd would live up to the contract. From the king Captain Kidd received a commission to arrest and bring to trial all pirates he captured, plus a letter of marque entitling him to seize French vessels.
Kidd then outfitted a 275-ton 36-gun frigate, the Adventure Galley, and hired enough crewmen to sail her from Plymouth to New York. Here he recruited a full complement of sailors, buttoned himself into the handsome uniform of a British naval officer, and bade farewell to his wife and small daughter. Escorted by merchants and public officials, Captain Kidd marched to Wall Street and the East River, where he boarded his cannon-bristling ship and set sail for the Indian Ocean.
Bellomont, the colony’s new governor, didn’t arrive here until 1698. Immediately the nobleman aligned himself with the Leislerians, the democrats. He began cracking down on pirates and on New York merchants working hand in hand with them. The more deeply Bellomont probed, the more convinced he became that many local aristocrats had accumulated their wealth dishonestly.
While this aristocrat battled aristocrats, New Yorkers learned of Captain Kidd’s astonishing behavior. The pirate hunter had turned pirate. Finding no French ships in the Indian Ocean, he captured native trading vessels, pretending they held French passes and so were fair prizes. Furthermore, he attacked and plundered ships indiscriminately. Sailors landing on the quays of London and New York told blood-chilling stories about Captain Kidd’s raising the dreaded black flag, burning ships, plundering the Madagascar coast, setting fire to homes, pillaging, and slaughtering. It was said that he tortured Moors and Christians, Englishmen and Americans, until they revealed the site of hidden treasures.
All this, of course, embarrassed King William and Governor Bellomont, who issued orders for Kidd’s arrest. Kidd abandoned the Adventure Galley and sailed for America in one of his prizes, named the Quedagh Merchant. Upon landing in the West Indies, he deserted this ship as well, transferred his booty to a sloop, and proceeded to Gardiners Island at the eastern end of Long Island.
There have arisen many legends about what Kidd did next. Apparently he buried part of his treasure on the island, and from there he wrote to Bellomont, professing innocence. Kidd was arrested, sent to England, and tried for the murder of one of his sailors and also for piracy. Found guilty on all charges, he was hanged at Execution Dock in London on May 23, 1701. His wife and daughter continued to live in New York.
With the opening of the eighteenth century the province of New York, despite its prosperity, lagged behind Connecticut and Massachusetts. In wealth and population Connecticut was at least twice as great as New York. Massachusetts also grew faster and built more ships than New York and prided itself on Boston, undeniably the largest city on the American continent. Nevertheless, changes continued to take place here. New streets were laid out, and for the first time the city assumed responsibility for cleaning streets. The first bridge across the Harlem River linked Manhattan and the Bronx. The city’s few paupers had to wear badges identifying them as indigents. Stinking tanning vats were driven even farther north. A second City Hall was built, and the first Trinity Church was erected.
Within the province of New York the Church of England was set up, at first in just the four counties of New York, Queens, Richmond, and Westchester. By royal charter the parish of Trinity Church was created, and New York property owners elected wardens and vestrymen to administer the parish’s temporal affairs. They voted to tax all citizens, regardless of religion, to pay for an Anglican clergyman. Trinity’s first rector was the Reverend William Vesey; a New York street is named for him.
Trinity is important in the city’s history. The mother of other churches in the area, it became perhaps the wealthiest parish in the world because it was granted a large tract of valuable land. This property was the target of lawsuits, filed one after another for more than a century.
Now, however, a church building was needed. Because the Church of England was the established religion here, this structure was quasi-public. Everyone of means, including Jews, donated funds for its erection. The government also allowed Trinity to seize all unclaimed shipwrecks off the New York coast and permitted it to claim stranded whales for conversion into oil and whalebone.
This first Trinity Church went up on the west side of Broadway at the head of Wall Street, on the site now occupied by the third and present Trinity. It was first used for religious services on March 13, 1698. A squat barnlike structure, 148 feet long and 72 feet wide, the church faced the Hudson River rather than Broadway. It received a steeple many years later.
Time and weather had taken their toll of the building at 71-73 Pearl Street which, since 1653, had served as the first City Hall. The five-story structure became so dilapidated and dangerous that the council and courts moved into temporary quarters elsewhere. Obviously a new City Hall was needed. Nearly all of the north side of Wall Street was owned in alternate sections by Colonel Nicholas Bayard and Abraham De Peyster. To the city De Peyster gave a strip of his land as a site for a new public structure. The lot was on the northeast corner of Wall and Nassau streets, where the Subtreasury Building now stands. The cornerstone of the second City Hall was laid in 1699, and the building was completed the following year.
Wrangling continued between the common people and the aristocrats. Governor Bellomont, firmly behind the Leislerians, did all in his power to break up the huge estates of the landed aristocracy. This was fiercely resented by Colonel Bayard, who, besides being a property owner, had once served as mayor. Bayard allegedly tried to stir the local troops to rebellion, and he mailed stinging criticisms of the governor to the authorities in London. For this he was arrested, charged with high treason, found guilty, and condemned to death. Before he could be executed, however, Governor Bellomont died of natural causes. Bellomont was succeeded by Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, who set Bayard free.
Of all New York’s governors, Cornbury was by far the most eccentric and perverted. One prominent citizen compared him to a maggot. Although Cornbury had a wife and seven children, he dressed in women’s clothes, pranced on the ramparts, and minced through the streets until he was dragged out of sight by his own shamefaced soldiers. It is conceivable that the governor was a transvestite, a latent homosexual who satisfied his subconscious desires by masquerading as a female.
Cornbury’s efforts to mask his homosexuality led him into fetishism—adoration of a localized part of the body. He fell madly in love with his wife’s ear. Then he fell out of love with Lady Cornbury’s ear and cast lascivious eyes elsewhere, neglecting his wife and withholding her pin money. As a result, she begged and stole, and she borrowed gowns and coats from other ladies, which she never returned.
She had the only carriage in town, and when the rattle of wheels was heard, New York’s society leaders peeped through curtains and cried, “There comes my lady!” Then they would hide their valuables. Whatever Lady Cornbury admired during a visit, she always sent for the following day. She also forced the daughters of best families to sew for her.
Besides the dissolute behavior of the governor and his wife, the townspeople had to endure a natural holocaust. In the summer of 1702 the first great epidemic struck the city: a scourge of yellow fever. Many terror-stricken citizens fled from Manhattan to Staten Island and New Jersey. Governor Cornbury removed his wife and children to Long Island. In a few weeks more than 500 New Yorkers died of yellow fever.
In 1707 New York was visited by an Irish preacher, the Reverend Francis Makemie, called the Father of American Presbyterianism. When he and a companion, named John Hampton, preached here, Governor Cornbury had them arrested. Although the charge against Hampton was not pressed, Makemie was accused of being “a Jack-of-all-trades, doctor, merchant, attorney, preacher, and—worst of all—a disturber of governments.” At his trial he was defended by three able lawyers, one of whom argued defiantly: “We have no established church here. We have liberty of conscience by an act of assembly made in William and Mary’s reign. This province is made up chiefly of dissenters and persons not of English birth.” The court acquitted Makemie but required him to pay costs of eighty-three pounds. The case ended the prosecution of Protestant Dissenters, but for years to come Catholics and Jews still suffered inequities.
Cornbury’s inepitude, depravity, and grafting resulted in his dismissal. Then he was arrested for debt and thrown into prison here. Released after his father’s death had enabled him to discharge his obligations, he left for England and died there. For a second time Lieutenant Governor Richard Ingoldsby served temporarily as the governor until a successor could be found. The choice fell on Robert Hunter, who arrived in 1710. A soldier, courtier, scholar, and wit, Hunter knew many of England’s leading men of letters. Shortly after landing he wrote to Jonathan Swift, the satirist, that “this is the finest air to live upon in the universe.”
Just before this the armies of Louis XIV of France had overrun the Rhineland in Germany, and many inhabitants, called Palatines, fled to England. Queen Anne paid the fare for 40 of the refugees, who continued to New York, landing on Governors Island in 1708. When Governor Hunter arrived, he led a fleet bringing 3,000 more of these displaced persons to the city. Thus began the first big wave of German immigration. Most Palatines settled on the Hudson River north of New York City, hoping to manufacture masts, tar, and other naval stores for England’s warships. They proved totally unfit for this kind of work.
The number of Negro slaves had increased. There are no reliable figures about the proportion of colored to white people in the city, but it is known that all wealthy whites owned slaves, some as many as fifty. Even people of moderate means had three to six household slaves, whom they regarded as impersonally as they did chairs and tables. In 1711 a slave market opened at the eastern end of Wall Street.
The Negroes were treated so badly that they became sullen. Tension developed between them and their masters. A Negro woman and an Indian man were burned at the stake in New York City for murdering their master, mistress, and five children. Negroes were not encouraged to embrace Christianity because most whites believed they lacked souls. For two years one slave unavailingly begged his master for permission to be baptized. Marriages between Negroes were performed by mutual consent and did not receive the blessing of the Church. After colored people died, they were buried in a potter’s field without religious rites. About the only white man who showed concern for them was a Frenchman, Elias Neau. He opened a school for Negroes.
About 1 A.M. on April 7, 1712, twenty-three Negroes gathered in an orchard in Maiden Lane. They were armed with guns, hatchets, and knives. By launching a dramatic revolt, they hoped to incite other slaves and massacre all the white people in town. After a whispered conference under the trees, two Negroes sneaked to the nearby home of Peter Van Tilburgh. One of them was owned by Van Tilburgh and nursed a grudge against him. Swiftly they set fire to the main house and an outhouse and raced back to the orchard. As the flames reached to the sky, all twenty-three conspirators marched toward the fire, their weapons at the ready. The eerie light and crackling flames soon aroused nearby householders, who jumped out of bed and sped to the scene. They were jumped by the, armed Negroes, who killed nine of them and wounded five or six others.
Governor Hunter was awakened and told that the slaves had revolted. He ordered a cannon fired from the fort to alert the townspeople and dispatched soldiers to the disturbed area. When the regulars appeared, the Negroes faded into the shadows, broke, and ran, slaying one or two other whites during their retreat. Some quaking rebels found refuge within deep woods; others, inside barns; and still others, in reed-thick marshlands. Hunter realized that they could not be spotted that night. He posted sentries at the Harlem River bridge, at the ferry slip to Brooklyn, and elsewhere so that the Negroes would be unable to slip off the island of Manhattan. After daybreak the regular soldiers, aided by the militia, beat bushes and swamps and searched barns until all the culprits were flushed from cover—All, that is, except six, who killed themselves rather than endure the terrible fate awaiting them.
The town churned with rage and fear. White people told one another that this never would have happened if Elias Neau hadn’t opened a school for Negroes and stuffed their minds with inflammatory ideas. What need had Negroes of education? All they had to know was to do as they were told, work hard, and keep their places. The kindhearted Neau was abused so shrilly that for a while he hardly dared appear in public.
Then, as with one diseased mind, the white colonists settled down to the punishment of the colored revolutionaries. The seventeen surviving rebels, together with four more slaves who were implicated, were arrested, tried, and convicted. One was a pregnant woman, so her sentence was suspended. Another woman, however, was hanged. Some Negroes turned state’s evidence by confessing that they had known about the plot. They were banished from the province after they had testified at the trials.
The others were tortured and killed. A slave, named Robin, who had stabbed his master in the back was suspended alive in chains without food or water until he expired after days of unspeakable anguish. A couple of Negroes, one of them owned by Nicholas Roosevelt, were burned alive over a slow fire. The acrid odor of singed flesh irritated the nostrils of spectators during the eight to ten hours the Negroes suffered. Another slave, who had wounded a constable, was stripped to the waist, tied to the end of a cart in front of City Hall, dragged through lower Manhattan, and lashed bloodily ten times at every street corner.
One prisoner was broken on the wheel. His eyeballs bulging in terror, he was bound, face up, on a large cartwheel set on a platform. Then the wheel was raised to an inclined position so that every on-looker could have a clear view. After that, the public executioner picked up a sledgehammer, raised it high above his head, and slammed it down on one bound arm. Slowly, deliberately, panistakingly, the hammer rose and fell, rose and fell, blow after thudding blow, smashing to pulp the arms and legs of the shrieking black man. Now the attack was directed to the trembling torso until one murderous whack over the heart killed the condemned. Twenty-one Negroes were executed.