IF CAPTAIN LUSH dost not send us to our own country, we will ruin all the city. The first house we will burn will be his, spite him."
Sandy claimed he heard six of the Spanish Negroes saying as much as he was passing innocently by Captain Lush's home two weeks before the fort fire. It was in this way, he said, that he first discovered the plot.
"They did not see me, as I hid in a neighbor's doorway and listened," Sandy told the judges. His was an improbable story: Sandy contended that he had only just happened to be there, that the conspirators failed to check around them before having such a sensitive conversation, and even that these Spanish slaves would conspire in English.
After Saturday's excitement, Cuffee and Quack's charcoaled remains had cooled to the touch. The scent of meat that had been men lingered in the air causing still more tongues to loosen in the wake of its aroma. Monday began with a whole new round of storytelling, and Sandy was scrambling to pay for his life with any scrap of information in which the court might find interest. Now he told a grand tale of a conspiratorial meeting held by Jack at the home of his enslaver, Gerardus Comfort. This time Sandy just happened to be passing by when Jack called to him. To hear Sandy tell it, he was the quintessential innocent, an utterly passive fellow, fallen into the wrong crowd. In fact, he said he would not even drink with the others when offered.
In Sandy's version, six Spanish Negroes were present, along with a dozen other enslaved blacks, improbably packed into the small colonial room. Some of the names he recounted were of those already in jail or killed for their part, but there were some new names thrown in for good measure as well.
As the other conspirators looked on, Jack unfolded a dust cloth, revealing about a dozen knives. One by one, Sandy recalled, Jack started passing the knives around the room. The blades were old, poorly cared for, and covered in the brown decay of rust, looking like they'd been stored in a damp well for decades.
"What are these supposed to be? You couldn't cut porridge with this bunch," one of the enslaved complained.
Jack purportedly ignored the criticism, and kept delivering his favors across the room. "My knife is so sharp," he countered, "that if it came across a white man's head, it would cut it off."
Sandy said when Jack tried to hand him a blade, he told him, "If you want to fight, go to the Spaniards and not fight with your masters."
" Help me, we shall burn down the houses and take the city," Sandy swore Jack insisted of him.
Sandy told the court his response was to start crying.
" Damn you, do you cry?" Sandy said Jack responded. " I'll cut off your head in a hurry."
" He'd deserve it," Sandy recalled Sarah joined in, as the rest surrounded him,
"The plan will work and we will be victors," Jack insisted, "though I worry we won't have enough men till next year. So we shall do this as such: Each will burn down his own master's house before moving on to burn the rest," he instructed.
"We shall kill all the white men, and have their wives to ourselves," the others rejoiced.
" We must swear then, that if any of you discover, the first thunder that comes will strike you dead if you do not stand to your words," Sandy insisted Jack warned before the conspirators broke up and went their separate ways that evening.
Burk's Sarah, the only woman Sandy had named in the conspiracy, and the one of whom he had spoken so disparagingly, was pulled before the court for examination. Sarah's reaction to the line of questioning was to start uttering fierce denials.
According to Horsmanden, Sarah "threw herself into the most violent agitations; foamed at the mouth" as the judges tried to place her within the web of the plot. "A creature of outrageous spirit," Horsmanden pronounced her.
It wasn't until Sandy's denouncement of her was read back to the court that Sarah, realizing her predicament, joined in the spirit of things, and started naming slaves for the court to persecute next.
Fully aware what her fate would be if she did not cooperate, Sarah went from complete stalwart denial to naming more than thirty names over the course of the next few minutes. She named so many individuals that, when the group was read back to her, even she realized it wasn't even realistic, so promptly removed a dozen from the list.
By the end of the day on June i, 1741, fifty-six enslaved Africans had been incarcerated. Fifty-six people since the original arrests for that minor burglary now almost faded into the irrelevance. Each new person seized was made to understand that if they did not come up with a confession, they would pay the same price as the first four. Each new name named added to the court's list, meant the trial's scope was destined to keep growing.
And so it did.
Around the same time that June afternoon, the under-sheriff came down the hall with a message to the court recorder—none other than Daniel Horsmanden himself—that Hughson wanted to speak to one of the judges, he was finally ready to do some talking. Not sharing the information, Horsmanden chose to go to Hughson's jail cell himself a few hours later.
"What do you want with the judges?" Horsmanden demanded of him. He would not have these important gentlemen bothered, nor taken off track by mere unimportance.
"Is there a Bible? I desire to be sworn," Hughson said to him.
"No oath will be administered to you. If you have anything to say, you have free liberty to speak. You've lived a wicked life, John Hughson, doing wicked practices: debauching and corrupting of Negroes, and encouraging them to steal and pilfer from their masters and others. For shame, you showed your children so wicked an example, training them up in the highway to hell."
All this morality from a man who in later years would go on to marry a wealthy woman in her seventies just to pay off his personal debts.
"God will give you no mercy for this matter," Horsmanden concluded his lecture, telling the deflated Hughson the court would be offering no mercy either.
It was a screed that would ensure that no confession from John Hughson would follow, and none did. After Horsmanden's long speech had ended, Hughson was left to stare blankly at him through unseeing eyes.
Smiling softly, he now declared, "I know nothing of this conspiracy. With God as my witness."
* * *
John Hughson would have his voice heard soon enough, however, along with his wife, Sarah, and their daughter of the same name, as well as the tavern's boarder, Peggy Kerry. Just a few days later, on Thursday, the fourth of June, the group was escorted to court to face the charges against them.
"Not guilty," came back their plea.
"You, the prisoners at the bar," the court clerk addressed them, "we must inform you that the law allows you the liberty of challenging peremptorily twenty of the jurors, if you have any dislike to them, and you need not give your reasons for doing so."
The prisoners decided amongst themselves that it would be John Hughson to do the challenging. Hughson, the only male, playing the role of patriarch, quickly showed how effective he would be in the group's defense when he decided to kick off the jury the lone young merchant amid a coterie of older, settled choices.
Peggy Kerry immediately objected to his action. "You've challenged one of the best of them all!" she fumed in disgust, causing laughter among the spectators close by enough to hear her.
The indictments were now set forth. The three adults stood accused of consorting with Negroes, gathering them in a conspiracy to burn the city down and kill its inhabitants. It was time for the case to begin in full. Rumors and accusations had flown freely in regard to John Hughson and his cohorts for months, but now the day of reckoning had finally arrived. The prosecutor knew the crowd's anticipation and preconceptions, knew how to harness them.
"Gentlemen," the prosecutor exhorted, "such a monster will this Hughson appear before you, that for the sake of the plunder he expected by setting in flames the King's house, and this whole city, and by effusion of the blood of his neighbors, he murderous and remorseless he! [sic] counseled and encourage the committing of all these most astonishing deeds of darkness, cruelty, and inhumanity—Infamous Hughson!"
The tiny hairs on the back of the neck of his listeners rose to attention at the enormity of it all.
"Gentlemen, this is that Hughson! Whose name and most detestable conspiracies will no doubt be had in everlasting remembrance, to his eternal reproach; and stand recorded to latest posterity. This is the man! This that grand incendiary! That arch rebel against God, his king, and his country! The Devil incarnate, and chief agent of the old Abaddon of the internal pit, and Geryon of darkness."
Because testimony from slaves against whites was inadmissible in court, the near-death confessions of Cuffee and Quack were technically worthless. Technicalities, however, could be worked in the prosecution's favor when court and prosecutor were one and the same. Most of the damning testimony naming Hughson as the lead conspirator had come from slaves Cuffee and Quack, but it had been told to white men. Mr. Moore and Butcher Roosevelt were now called to relay the secondhand evidence of Cuffee and Quack as if it was their own: that Hughson was the first contriver and promoter. That Mary Burton spoke the truth and could speak more.
Following directly upon these testimonies, constables Joseph North and Peter Lynch were called to the stand to speak about the night in which they interrupted a group at Hughson's Tavern, a night that Cuffee had mentioned in his dying words. The constables had seen all who were involved in the plot and could discover the entire group. The constables attested they had found Peggy Kerry serving blacks and drove off the meeting of Negroes with the lashes of their canes.
"There was a cabal of Negroes at Hughson's last Whitsuntide," the two constables related. "Ten, twelve, or fourteen of them." Fourteen slaves. Fourteen at the most were at Hughson's when they broke up the party. Yet Cuffee had said "all those involved" were there at the scene, and Cuffee's own forced confession had around fifty involved altogether—which built on the existing understanding that there had been twenty to thirty, as put forth by Mary Burton.
The Hughsons and Peggy Kerry listened to the testimony without any notable emotion or interference. It wasn't until Mary Burton took to the stand that the accused clan started to lose whatever minor sense of hope to which they might still have been clinging. Mary Burton told her usual tales, given in a now-perfected performance of sympathy. It was damning testimony, but the Hughsons didn't hear it: immediately after Mary Burton started giving her evidence, John and his wife started crying.
Not just crying, wailing. Wailing loudly and without shame. Demonstratively, for all to see, they hugged and kissed their daughter Sarah in utmost and heart-rending despair.
"I took great care in raising my daughter, as well as the rest of my children," John suddenly blurted to the court. "Teaching them to read the Bible, and breeding them up in the fear of the Lord."
Wife Sarah, for her part, at this moment brought her nursing infant from the crowd to her breast to invoke added empathy. The baby was ordered by the court to be taken away.
After such disturbance, Mary was ordered to resume her testimony and went on. She named additional names, telling of the many oaths to secrecy she had overheard.
"Hughson swore the Negroes into the plot," she said. "And the Hughsons swore themselves and Peggy. One of the Hugh-sons' daughters carried a Bible upstairs—"
"Now you are found out in a great lie!" Mrs. Hughson shouted at her through her tears. "For we never had a Bible in the world!"
The room got a good laugh out of that statement, the comment coining as it did minutes after her husband's biblical assertions.
Regardless of the momentary interruption, and lightness in the crowd, Mary Burton's testimony demanded their reattention.
"John Hughson handed out seven or eight guns and swords, gunpowder and shot included. The slaves were to cut their masters' and mistresses throats," Mary claimed. "Hughson was to be king and Caesar governor," Mary repeated to the jury. "They had sworn to kill me, to burn and destroy me if I made their scheme public, but that hasn't stopped me. They bribed me with silks and gold rings, but still they did not prevail."
Perhaps as damning as the words being spoken inside the courthouse at the moment was the action taking place outside. Some time after the trial began that day, yet another of Philipse's outbuildings was mysteriously set afire, this time a horse stable.
Again, the quick questions, and harder conclusions. Was it meant as distraction so that the nefarious gang might effect an escape? Were the hot brands that lit the blaze left by precarious accident, or was this act, too, part of the greater plan?
Whether calculated or not, the blaze did nothing to stop the trial's proceedings. Mary Burton was followed to the stand by Arthur Price, having warmed up on Negroes and now ready to give testifying against whites a try. Again came hearsay, second-party, slave testimony of questionable legality, yet again ignored by Hughson's band, who failed to challenge with questions of their own to in any way refute the evidence being given against them.
The witnesses called by the accused prisoners (for they, of course, were handling their own defense, able to afford no lawyer, nor, probably, capable to find one willing, even if they had the money) were completely ineffectual. One, the poor, white wife of a sailor, made the implausible claim that she had never seen any Negroes besides Cuffee at Hughson's at all during her two-month stay there. Another man, again white, said he saw Hughson serve alcohol to blacks, "but thought him a civil man." A final witness said he saw no harm in John Hughson but he "knew nothing of the character of Hughson's house."
Perhaps the most sympathetic testimony of the trial came from a witness for the King, a former neighbor who said he often chastised Hughson for his late-night revelries. The neighbor complained, after one such night of debauchery, he spoke once more to Hughson about the offending behavior.
"It's my wife, isn't it?" the witness reported Hughson told him. "She dragged me away from my quiet country life of farming and shoemaking for the chance at more money in the city, but my gains have been so small, and my family so large, that they soon run away with what we have. My wife, she's the chief cause of having the Negroes in the house."
"The witnesses declare," Horsmanden clarified for all still unable to discern, "the principal contriver of those mischiefs to be that wicked man, John Hughson, whose crimes have made him blacker than a Negro: the scandal of his complexion, and the disgrace of human nature! Whose name will descend with infamy to posterity!"
At that point, the judge informed the jury they had all the pertinent information needed, and that now they needed to make their decision.
"But on the other hand," the judge continued, "as the evidence against them seems to be so ample, so full, so clear and satisfactory, if you have no particular reason in your own breasts, in your own consciences, to discredit them, if that, I say, is not the case, if you have no reason to discredit them, then I make no doubt but you will discharge a good conscience, and find them guilty."
And so the jury did, wasting very little time at it.
John Hughson and his wife, Sarah, along with Peggy Kerry, were convicted of three guilty indictments, daughter Sarah of two. The self-righteous, racial indignation of the good white people of the city of New York was on full display as the sentence was handed down.
As it turned out, it was John Hughson's failure as a traitor to whiteness that was as much his crime as the more fanciful charges alleged against him.
"Yours are indeed as singular, and unheard of before, they are such as one would scarce believe any man capable of committing, especially any one who had heard of a God and a future state; for people who have been brought up and always lived in a Christian country, and also called themselves Christians, to be guilty not only of making Negro slaves their equals, but even their superiors, by waiting upon, keeping with, and entertaining them with meat, drink, and lodging, and what is much more amazing, to plot, conspire, consult, abet, and encourage these black seed of Cain to burn this city, and to kill and destroy us all. Good God!"
The three whites were sentenced to be hanged by the neck until "severely dead" on June 12, 1741. After death, the infamous John Hughson was still to receive special treatment. His corpse was to be removed from its noose and rehung in chains next to the body of his nefarious slave comrade.
Caesar's corpse silently awaited the company.
Four days later, on the day of his scheduled execution, Hugh-son declared from his jail cell, "I deserve death for the stealing of Hogg's property, but as to the rest! As for the rest I am innocent!"
It was good that John Hughson could agree, at least in part, to his sentence, but regardless, he was about to die. That much was obvious, foregone, and highly anticipated.
"Yet listen to my prophecy—a great sign from God will occur to prove me so," he insisted.
"Just come out of your cell, John Hughson," the guard ordered. "You will have all the audience you desire on this day."
John Hughson emerged from his cell with his head held high. Not simply to show his enduring pride, but also to show off his latest affectation: two shilling-size red marks on his face, one adorning each cheek. It was a painful bit of performance art, shoving his dirty and ragged fingernails into the tender flesh of his rum-softened face, but it was worth the effort. As the crowd turned out to watch the condemned be pulled down the road in open carriage, the sight of John's self-inflicted stigmata sent the spectators atitter with the spectacle. A great preview of things to come.
Finally given an opportunity to truly play to the crowd, Hughson made sure that the citizens of this New York would have a good look at him in his majesty, standing in his cart the whole way to his hanging. He had become a symbol, and knowing that performed as one literally.
"Sit your bloody arse down, are things not as bad as they can be?" his wife beseeched him, but he remained undaunted. One hand straight up in the air as high as he could manage, his forefinger pointing as a beacon, John Hughson became a vision to be remembered, as surely as he intended.
"Will you look at that, he marks his destination in the heavens above, making his peace with the God he knows," came a whisper through the crowd.
"Don't be a fool—he's signaling for his rescuers, for the revolution to begin!" Darting eyes swept the street searching for the first glimpse of the apocalyptic mob of armed Africans.
But none appeared. The wheels on the horse-drawn cart bounced forward on the uneven cobblestone road without halting. John Hughson kept his finger in the air, but no dark hordes would come to his rescue. The wheels on that cart did not stop until they reached the gallows.
His wife, Sarah, was resigned, immobile, "a lifeless trunk," as the coarse hemp rope was placed around her neck and then thrown over a stout tree limb. Despite her cooperation and confession, Peggy Kerry found herself right beside her. The crowd, for its part, roared. "We die as innocents," Peggy declared. "We know nothing of this conspiracy which has been imagined. It not be more true for our deaths."
And then the rope went taut, and the three had nothing more to say in the matter.
Legs kicked. Bodies spun. Pendular mortality giving its parting dance, and the crowd cheering at the sight of it. Quieting only to witness the next victims, slaves Albany, Curacao Dick, and Francis, fitted for their own nooses.
In death all motion stilled. John Hughson's lifeless body was cut down. As prescribed, only to be restrung in chains for permanent display alongside Caesar's. Mates in life, death, and history.