The Great Negro Plot (13 page)

"Do you see this crowd?" was the sheriff's argument. "Do
you
want to go out there and tell them their fun's been canceled?"

The mob wanted blood. Looking out at the ragtag assemblage, the brave officers of the court decided it would be in their best
interest to give it to them.

So despite their confessions, it was back to the stake for Cuffee and Quack. Despite all their oath-breaking, backstabbing,
and name-naming, the condemned had only bought themselves a few minutes more in their wretched existence.

The execution finally commenced, to the exuberant delight of the assembly who had come, after all, to rejoice in the spectacle,
and the guilty relief of the cowards behind it. The wood was set ablaze, and the Africans' skin started roasting, as the men
struggled on the stake to avoid the white cloud that enveloped and would suffocate them as their spirits left their scorched
flesh.

Cuffee and Quack burned, painfully and publicly, betrayed and betrayers. They died, steamed by their own fluids, as they experienced
a bit of that white benevolence that the court judge had just admonished them for spurning.

THIS IS THAT HUGHSON!

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."