Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: Slave Rebellion, Conspiracy, and the First Great Awakening, 1729-1746

Home , Akwamu, Akyem, British Leeward Islands, Colony of Jamaica, Conventicle, Crop Over

by Justin James Pope

B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science, May 2000, Eckerd College M.A. in History, May 2005, University of Cincinnati M.Phil. in History, May 2008, The George Washington University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 31, 2014

Dissertation directed by

David J. Silverman Professor of History

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Justin Pope has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy January 10, 2014. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: Slave Rebellion, Conspiracy, and the Great Awakening, 1729-1746

Justin Pope

Dissertation Research Committee:

David J. Silverman, Professor of History, Dissertation Director

Denver Brunsman, Assistant Professor of History, Committee Member

Greg L. Childs, Assistant Professor of History, Committee Member

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Acknowledgments

I feel fortunate to thank the many friends and colleagues, institutions and universities that have helped me produce this dissertation. The considerable research for this project would not have been possible without the assistance of several organizations.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Maryland Historical Society, the

Cosmos Club Foundation of Washington, D.C., the Andrew Mellon Fellowship of the

Virginia Historical Society, the W. B. H. Dowse Fellowship of the Massachusetts

Historical Society, the Thompson Travel Grant from the George Washington University

History Department, and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Research Fellowship all provided critical funding for my archival research.

Like so many graduate students in early American history, I owe a special thanks to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The experience of the Barra Dissertation Fellowship and the opportunity to work with so many accomplished historians was much appreciated. My great thanks to Dan Richter and the staff at the McNeil Center for allowing me to be a part of that remarkable place. I am also very grateful for my Summer Research Fellowship at the John Carter Brown

Library at Brown University. Valerie Andrews was the consummate host, presenting all of the fellows with every opportunity to explore the vast archives at the library. Even when I mishandled a champagne glass and ended up in a hospital emergency room, Ms.

Andrews was waiting to rescue me in the wee hours of the night. I owe her and the staff great thanks for their assistance during a formative time in my research. Last, but certainly not least, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Completion

Fellowship provided a year of funding for writing that was invaluable for this project.

I have been mentored at every step by Professor David Silverman at George

Washington University. He is a great scholar and an inspiration to the graduate students who are fortunate enough to work with him. He is also a great friend. I would also like to thank the members of my Dissertation Committee, Denver Brunsman, Greg Childs,

Nemata Blyden, and Ira Berlin for their encouragement and insights. I only wish I had more time to learn from them all.

My colleagues and friends in the GWU History Department provided great support throughout the long process of my Ph.D. research. Michael Landis, Chris

Hickman, Shaadi Khoury, and so many others have become valuable friends that enriched my time in study. Their understanding of the struggles and victories in graduate life gave me great courage. I am also thankful for Nancy Campbell, whose love and friendship were invaluable to me.

The unfailing support of my family has held me up all my life. Thank you to

Joshua Seabolt and Claire Pope, James Pope and Deborah Larkin for believing in me. I am grateful.

Abstract of Dissertation

Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: Slave Rebellion, Conspiracy, and the First Great Awakening, 1729-1746

This dissertation is an argument for an era of slave unrest within the British

Atlantic Empire between the years 1729 and 1746. As the first full length, longitudinal study of the insurrections and slave conspiracies of the age, it approaches these events not as singular events in the histories of specific colonies, but rather as a shared moment in the history of the British provinces, when slaves in the Caribbean and mainland North

America threatened white authority with open rebellion and in turn, inspired heightened fears of insurrection among white Britons. This project reveals new evidence of early slave communication networks capable of spreading rumors of resistance throughout the

Caribbean and British mainland, demonstrates the deadly consequences of the period’s sharp rise in the slave trade, and examines the relationship between British fears of slave rebellion and British anti-Catholicism. Another major contribution from this project is its case for a powerful connection between racial anxiety and the rise of evangelical religion in Early America. Even as insurrection and panic shook the British colonies, thousands of Americans joined a new, emotional search for spiritual salvation known today as the

First Great Awakening. My study makes the unique argument that many evangelicals in the 1730s perceived slave rebellion as a sign that Britons had fallen out of favor with God and used these anxieties to galvanize spiritual conversion among the disaffected. In this way, slave unrest deeply influenced the growth of evangelical religion in the mainland provinces. In short, this study argues that the 1730s was a critical period in the Atlantic when slave rebellion and fears of conspiracy profoundly shaped the provinces of the

British Empire.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………….. iv Abstract of Dissertation …...... vi List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………...viii List of Tables ………………………………...... ix List of Graphs...... x List of Charts …………..………………………………………………………………. xi

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………… 1

Section One: The African Trade…………………………………………………………40 Chapter 1: “A New Guinea”...... 45 Chapter 2: “to stand by, and be true to each other”...... 101

Section Two: Communication….………………………………………………………176 Chapter 3: “Dangerous Spirtit of Liberty”...... 179 Chapter 4: “To Massacre and Destroy your own Estates” …...... 235

Section Three: Religion…..…………………………………………………………….306 Chapter 5: “Mystery of Iniquity”……………………...…...... 309 Chapter 6: “God’s Just Judgement”…………………...…...... 345

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………..390 Bibliography ……………...... 403

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List of Figures

Figure [1-1]: Figure 1-1: Henry Popple, (Composite Map of) A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements… (London, 1733) ...... xii

Figure [3-1]: “List of all Ships and Vessels belonging to Antigua” ...... 186

Figure [3-2]: Emanuel Bowen, “New and accurate map of the provinces of North and South Carolina” ...... 224

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List of Tables

Table [1-1]: Number of Transatlantic British Ships engaged in the Slave Trade to Mainland North America and the Caribbean, 1700 to 1750 …………………………… 55

Table [1-2]: Slave Disembarked in the British Transatlantic Slave Trade, Estimates by Region, 1700 to 1750 ………………………………………………………………….. 56

Table [1-3]: The Populations of British colonial America and the West Indies by Race ………………………………………………………………… Supplementary Files, 1

Table [1-4]: Percentage of Black Population in British Colonial America and the West Indies, 1700 to 1750 ……………………………………………………………………. 90

Table [1-5]: Populations in British Colonial Ports of Mainland America and the West Indies, 1700 to 1750 ……………………………………………...Supplementary Files, 2

Table [1-6]: Black Percentage of Total Population in British Colonies with Slave Conspiracies, 1700-1750 ……………………………………………………………….. 99

Table [2-1]: Estimates of Slaves Embarked from African Regions on British Vessels, 1690 to 1750 ………………………………………………………………………….. 109

Table [2-2]: British Voyages from West-Central African Ports to Principal Region of Slave Landing, 1710-1740 ……………………………………………………………. 126

Table [2-3]: Average Annual Decline in Slave Population (by percentage) …………. 134

Table [2-4]: Slaves Disembarked in the Caribbean from British vessels by African Region, 1700 to 1750 …………………………………………………………………. 140

Table [4-1] Shipping between American and British Ports, Annual Averages of Ships, 1685 and 1740..………...………………………………………………………. 239

Table [4-2] Reports of Black Unrest in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1729-1742 ………. 252

List of Graphs

Graph [1-1]: Transatlantic Numbers of Africans Carried into British Mainland America and the Caribbean on British vessels, 1675-1750 [in Thousands]..……………50

Graph [1-2]: Transatlantic Slave Trade into the British Caribbean, 1700 to 1750 (actual count).……………………………………………………………………………57

Graph [1-3]: Transatlantic Slaves Disembarked in South Carolina, 1700 to 1750 …… 61

Graph [1-4]: Slave Imports into the Mid-Atlantic and New England from the Caribbean, 1700-1750…...……………………………………………………………… 62

Graph [1-5]: Percentage of Black Population in Ports of British Colonial America and the West Indies, 1700 to 1750 ……………………………………………………... 93

Graph [1-6]: Black Populations of Somerset County, East Jersey, and Narragansett County, Rhode Island, 1700-1760 ……………………………………………………... 96

Graph [1-7]: Black Populations in Barbados and South Carolina, 1700-1780 ………… 98

List of Charts

Chart [1-1]: Transatlantic Slave Trade into British Mainland America, 1700 to 1750… 59

Chart [1-2]: Numbers of British Slaving Vessels in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1650 to 1750…...………………………………………………………………………. 66

Chart [2-1]: Number of Slaves Taken from African Regions Aboard British Vessels, 1700 to 1750 ………………………………………………………………………….. 109

Chart [2-2]: Slaves Disembarked in the Caribbean from British vessels by African Region, 1700 to 1750 …………………………………………………………………. 140

Chart [2-3]: Slaves Disembarked on Antigua by African Region, 1700 to 1750 …….. 141

Chart [2-4]: Percentage Slaves Disembarked into South Carolina by African 139 Coast, 1700 to 1750…………………………………………………………………… 144

Chart [2-5]: Slaves Disembarked into Virginia by African Region, 1700 to 1750 …....145

Figure 1-1: Henry Popple, (Composite Map of) A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements adjacent thereto… (London, 1733)1

1Henry Popple, (Composite Map of) A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements adjacent thereto… (London, 1733), David Rumsey Map Collection, Cartography Associates, http://www.davidrumsey.com.

xii

Introduction

In the late summer of 1736, Edward Trelawney received word from his king that he was to serve as the next governor of Jamaica. It was a prestigious appointment, an opportunity to preside over the wealthiest colony in the British West Indies and to reap the fees owed to the leading magistrate of a sugar island. Trelawney accepted the appointment, but he wrote a letter to the Secretary of State of the British Empire asking for a renewed commitment of soldiers and weaponry during his tenure in office. The newly appointed governor expressed the need for this build-up in no uncertain terms.

“The negroes in many of the British plantations,” he explained, “have of late been possessed of a dangerous spirit of liberty.”2

This dissertation is a study of the accuracy of Trelawney’s statement, an examination of the extent to which the many conspiracies and insurrections of the era were the result of a rebellious movement among the enslaved. Between 1729 and 1746, there was more slave unrest in the British provinces than in any other period before the

American Revolution. Not only were these events more common than ever before, haunting many colonies for years and leading directly to the death or banishment of thousands of people, but many violent episodes displayed a rare intensity, a more widespread and prolonged alarm than previous periods of unrest. Although colonial officials like Trelawney insisted that a “dangerous spirit of liberty” had inspired slaves to rebel, historians have wondered if the stories of widespread slave unrest were the imaginings of nervous white colonists, anxious over the fragile nature of their

2 Edward Trelawny to Duke of Newcastle, London, June 30, 1737, CO 137/56, ff. 74-84v., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: North America and the West Indies [hereafter CSPCS], Vol. 43 (1737), item 379, 191-192.

1 exploitative labor system. Equally possible, the number of conspiracies and insurrections may have been a simple coincidence of timing in the long history of American slavery.

In this project, I have sought to explain the forces behind the unrest of the age and to consider the consequences for the peoples of British America.

An Era of Unrest

The years between 1729 and 1746 presented a marked change in the history of

American slavery. Slave insurrections and conspiracies were already very old by the eighteenth century, but in this period they became inter-colonial and even Trans-Atlantic in scope. The outbreak of the First Jamaican Maroon War in 1729 and the Virginia insurrection of 1730 - important events that mark the beginning of this period - were confined within the boundaries of their colonies. News of these events was not. Rumors reverberated outward and became part of other conspiracies and insurrections in the

British Atlantic. By the late 1730s, word of emancipation and widespread rebellion had taken hold in slave communities from the eastern Caribbean to the shores of New

England. Planters and British authorities began to explain unrest not simply as an isolated problem within their respective provinces, but as part of conditions shared throughout British America.

The 1720s and 1730s are traditionally remembered in the history of the British

Empire as the era of “Walpole’s Peace,” a period of economic prosperity and a long pause in the wars with France and Spain that dominated the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Presided over by the Hanoverian Kings George I and George II and

2 led by Sir Robert Walpole, the leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons,

British commerce steadily expanded throughout the globe. Walpole’s administration was focused on prosperity and known for corruption, yet the Whigs practiced political maneuver instead of the violence of civil war that had troubled the previous century of

English government.3 Walpole and his Whigs faced political opposition from the Tories, a “country” party composed of landed gentry and disaffected gentlemen who were blocked from access to the king’s court. The Tories openly criticized the Walpole administration and used the press as a tool of political opposition.4 A new print culture benefited from this expansion of both commerce and political rivalry, extending beyond the British Isles to include the Atlantic colonies. Evangelical preachers also found a new voice in this era of pecuniary acquisitiveness, using these new avenues of commerce and communication to develop a religious movement remembered in America as the First

Great Awakening. Not until 1739, with the outbreak of war with Spain, did Walpole’s peace collapse in a new European conflict.

The period was far less peaceful in the American colonies. The 1720s and 1730s were marked by the anticipation of war with rival European powers. The rapid commercial and demographic expansion of the British Empire fueled conflicts along the borders of the North American provinces. In the American northeast, Wabanaki Indians waged intermittent wars on encroaching New England colonists. Massachusetts

Protestants explained the Wabanaki’s raids as the products of French Jesuit missionaries

3 A Critical History of the Administration of Sr Robert Walpole (London, 1743), 327-348; Eveline Cruickshanks, “The Political Management of Sir Robert Walpole,” in Britain in the Age of Walpole, ed. Jeremy Black (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1984), 25-26, 30-31. 4 Michael Harris, “Print and Politics in the Age of Walpole,” in Britain in the Age of Walpole, 190-192.

3 waging religious war for the soul of North America.5 Far to the south, along the border of the province of South Carolina, British planters continued to expand into Spanish

Florida. In 1733, the English founded a new colony called Georgia, named after King

George II, with the expressed intention of forming a more southern boundary that would protect the wealthy rice plantations of the coastal Low Country. The Spanish responded by offering freedom to slaves who could escape from British plantations.

The center of conflict in British America was not on the continent, however, but between the wealthy sugar islands of the Caribbean. Despite protests from the Spanish

Crown, British merchant vessels carried on an aggressive trade with the colonies of

Central and South America. Exchanging manufactured goods and slaves for precious gold and silver, British traders undermined monopolies granted to merchants of Spain.

The governors of the provinces of New Spain responded by commissioning Guarda

Costa, armed privateers, with orders to board and seize British merchant vessels illegally trading with Spanish possessions.6 The encounters between Spanish Guarda Costa and

British merchant vessels became increasingly violent throughout the 1730s. Captain-

General William Matthew of the Leeward Islands commissioned his own privateers to seek out and attack Spanish vessels and Jamaican mariners responded to attacks on their ships by murdering Spanish sailors.7 In one particular action, a Guarda Costa Captain captured and then severed the ear of a Captain William Jenkins for trading illegally along the Spanish Coast, an event that would be remembered as a cause for the War of Jenkin’s

5 Thomas S. Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England After Puritanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 97-114. 6 Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739-1748 (London: F. Cass, 1963), 14-28. 7 “A Letter from a Considerable Person at St Christopher.” July 29, 1736, CO 152/23, X 31, The National Archives (hereafter TNA).

Ear in 1739.8 It was in this environment of imperial competition and Quasi-War that slave unrest took hold in many of the colonies of British America.

The unrest that defined the period began in Jamaica. In 1728, the new colonial governor Robert Hunter arrived on the island with special instructions from the king to put the province in a state of defense.9 In those years, Jamaica sat on the western frontier of the British Caribbean, surrounded by larger French and Spanish colonies that left the sugar island vulnerable to invasion. A native-born black population known today as

Maroons, descendants of escaped slaves, lived free within the mountainous forests of the interior. In 1729, the Maroons raided a plantation on the east side of the island, wounding the white overseer and withdrawing with six enslaved women.10 When the newly appointed governor heard the news, he ordered a company of militia to pursue and punish the people he called “slaves in rebellion.” The Maroons ambushed and routed their pursuers. “The Assembly,” wrote Hunter to the Lords of Trade and Plantations,

“must be induced to provide better for their Security both from within and without.”11

Believing the Maroons represented an internal threat to the defense of the colony,

Governor Hunter asked the Assembly to launch an expedition of militia to destroy the

Maroon villages on the Windward (eastern) side of the island.12 The company of ninety- five militiamen and twenty-two baggage-handlers marched into the Blue Mountains and

8For an early account of “Jenkin’s ear,” see American Weekly Mercury, October 7, 1731. For a more balanced contemporary British discussion of the motivations of the Spanish, see “Notes of correspondence between the Lords [of Admiralty] and [Rear Admiral] Stewart as to Spanish depredations, the orders for reprisals, and the difficulties they will raise,” May 15, 1731, in R. G. Marsden, ed., Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2 vols. (Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 1999), 2: 278. 9Hunter to Board of Trade and Plantations (hereafter BT), Jan 15, 1728/9, CO 137/18, TNA. 10 Hunter to BT, Mar 12, 1729/30, CO 137/18, TNA. 11 Ibid. 12Gov to Council and Assembly, Jovis, 12 die Martii, [Mar 12, 1729/30], Journals of the Jamaican Assembly, Vol. II, 698-699.

5 after several weeks, reemerged again with a third of their force dead or wounded.13 Over the next nine years, the Maroons would inflict heavy losses on the white planters as they warred across the interior of Jamaica. When the Maroons defeated the militias, a kind of panic would ensue in Kingston and Spanish Town, with the government packing up records in the capital and old women “flying to the protection of the squadron for safety.”14 With more than ninety percent of the island population enslaved, each loss magnified the vulnerability of planters. After an especially decisive defeat in 1734, the

Jamaican Assembly officially warned their governor of the “greatest apprehension of a general rebellion.”15

The Maroons did not carry their war to other colonies, but word of their exploits traveled far. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean chronicled the defeat of the white colonists in Jamaica and often exaggerated the consequences. “It is wrote from

Jamaica,” reported London’s Evening Post in 1730, “100 white men being sent out against some Runaway Blacks, were all destroyed by those Negroes.”16 In his

Philadelphia Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin reported regularly on the conflict.

“The Rebellious Negroes there continue very trouble some” he explained in 1733, and quoting a letter in 1734 bemoaned “we can get no Body to stand before them.”17 The language used by Franklin and others conveyed the impression Jamaica was experiencing a slave rebellion rather than a war. The idea of a Maroon people was not yet at use in the

13 The Weekly Jamaica Courant, Wed June 24, 1730; Hunter to BT, Nov. 7, 1730, CO 137/19, TNA. 14 Bev Carey, The Maroon Story: the Authentic and Original History of the Maroons in the History of Jamaica, 1490-1880 (Kingston: Agouti Press, 1997), 285. 15 'America and West Indies: March 1734, 1-15', CSPCS, Volume 41: 1734-1735 (1953), 45-55. 16 Evening Post, Sept. 10, 1739, Issue 3300. 17 The Pennsylvania Gazette, June 14, 1733; The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 18, 1734.

Empire.18 Rather, the British described Maroons as “slaves in rebellion” or “Runaway

Negroes,” the same terms used to describe slave insurrectionists and conspirators throughout the era. The victories of the Maroons persisted on the largest of the British sugar islands and became part of a narrative of widespread slave rebellion in America. In the 1730s, it was a conflict white colonists appeared to be losing.

In the same year that the Maroon conflict exploded in Jamaica, slaves in Virginia began a different sort of rebellion against their British masters. In the early fall of 1730, a rumor took hold within the Chesapeake slave community that the King of England had ordered all baptized slaves freed in the American colonies. No such order had been issued by King George I and white officials were at a loss to explain its origin. “I have not been able to learn who was the first Author of it,” wrote Governor Gooch to the Lords of Trade and Plantations.19 The governor could not discover the rumor’s origin because it had originated around the hearths of slaves rather than in the halls of white planters.

The Commissary, James Blair, explained what happened next in a letter to the Bishop of

London: “There was a general rumour among them that they were to be set free. And when they saw nothing of it they grew angry and saucy, and met in the night time in great numbers, and talked of rising.”20 In ever larger meetings, slaves in Virginia met in the open, electing captains and demanding the governor honor the edict of the king. White militia attacked these meetings, scattering slaves and arresting others for punishment. In

October of 1730, in an event remembered as the Chesapeake Rebellion, white planters

18 Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 2. 19 Gooch to BT, Sept. 14, 1730, CO 5/1322, 156, in Gooch Official Correspondence, TR 16.1, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (hereafter CWF). 20James Blair to Bishop of London, Williamsburg, 14 May 1731, FPP/15, 110 SRN 575, Virginia Colonial Record Project (hereafter VCRP).

7 attacked a particularly large meeting of protesting slaves in Norfolk County.21 Though there was no mention of weapons, the slaves resisted and then fled southward into the

Dismal Swamp, where they "committed many outrages against the Christians." Only with the help of Pasquotank Indians were the white colonists able to hunt down the escaped men and women.22

Yet the rumor of royal emancipation did not die away. It appeared again in the quarters of slaves in the province of East Jersey in 1734. In Somerset County, near the

Raritan River, white planters claimed to have discovered a plot among several hundred slaves to murder their masters and then flee west to the Algonquian-speaking peoples in the mountains. According to white accounts of the purported conspiracy, the accused men believed that King George had freed all baptized slaves, but planters would neither allow black baptism nor would they free the Christian people they held in bondage.23

The sheriffs of East Jersey were ordered to mutilate the accused conspirators and colonial officials condemned and executed the supposed ring leader.24 The belief among the enslaved - that baptism was a right to be won and could lead to freedom – did not subside. Within just a few years, many enslaved people discovered a new opportunity to participate in Christian baptism during the First Great Awakening.

As white colonists in New Jersey sought to punish and intimidate the slave population, the most important rebellion of the era was unfolding in the Leeward Islands of the eastern Caribbean. In the fall of 1733, on the Danish Island of Saint John, a party

21 Gooch to BT, Feb. 12, 1730/31, CO 5/1322, ff. 161-163, TNA. 22 John Brickell, The Natural History of North Carolina: with an Account of the Trade, Manners, and Customs...(Dublin, 1743), 25. 23 The New York Gazette, Numb. 439, March 18 to March 25, 1734. 24 American Weekly Mercury, March 5th, 1734; Brendan McConville, The Kings Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006), 177-178.

8 of at least twelve African-born men surprised the soldiers of Fort Frederiksvaern in the dark of night. After killing all but one, they climbed the battlements and fired cannon out over Coral Bay, signaling the start of an island-wide slave insurrection.25 Newspapers throughout the British Atlantic reported that slaves had “entirely massacred all the white people on that island, Consisting of 200 families, with Great Cruelty.”26 Though Danish, the island was also occupied by Dutch and English planters and the close proximity of one island to another set the neighboring British provinces on edge. “The rising of the

Negroes on Saint John,” reported Boston’s Weekly Rehearsal, “has so alarmed our islands, that they keep 30 or 40 men every Night upon the Watch upon each island to prevent a Suprize.”27 Rumors circulated as far as London that success of slaves in Saint

John “had encouraged the Negroes of St. Kitts to rise,” referring to the British island of

Saint Christopher approximately ninety miles to the southeast.28 In the Bahamas to the north of the Leeward Islands, the newly appointed British governor declared he had discovered a conspiracy among the slaves in the capital of New Providence.29 Saint John was a little place, only 7 miles long from east to west, and its slave population too small to survive the continued European onslaught against their rebellion. In the late spring of

1734, after six months, French and Danish fighting men defeated the rebel slaves of Saint

John. Some of the insurrectionist may have escaped to Spanish islands by boat while the whites tortured and executed those fighters who remained.30

25 Pierre J. Pannet, Report on the Execrable Conspiracy Carried Out by the Amina Negroes on the Danish Island of St. Jan in America 1733, trans. and eds. Aimery P. Caron and Arnold R. Highfield (Christiansted, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands: Antilles Press, 1984), 12-13. 26 New England Weekly Journal, January 7, 1734. 27 Weekly Rehearsal, January 21, 1733/4. 28 Weekly Rehearsal, March 11, 1734. 29 Fitzwilliam to BT, B113, Sept 7, 1734, CO23/3 1731-1737, TNA. 30 Historian Waldemar Westergaard’s authoritative account of the end of the rebellion does not mention rebels escaping to Spanish islands, but contemporary British newspapers do mention an escape to “Cape

The eastern Caribbean continued to be restful for several more years. In the fall of 1736, two years after the defeat of the rebels in Saint John, British officials in Antigua announced “the happy Discovery of an accursed Negro Plot.”31 According to a special committee of investigators led by members of the Governor’s Council, the slave conspirators sought to kill leading white colonists on the island at an annual ball honoring the birthday of the king. In a plot reminiscent of the Guy Fawkes conspiracy from a century before, the slaves purportedly planned to fill the basement with gunpowder and detonate it. Once the plot was described by a magistrate, the officials began a process of interrogations and executions that quickly became murderous. Despite denying all guilt, the first slave leaders were condemned to be publicly broken on the wheel and their lieutenants burned alive or gibbeted, meaning they were strung up in cages until they starved to death. Only confessions saved a person from the most painful executions.

Many slaves sought to save their lives by offering the names of other supposed conspirators. By March of 1737, the British had executed eighty-eight black people and another forty-seven were ordered banished from the island.32 Captain-General William

Matthew learned from the island’s sailors of slave plots discovered in the neighboring

French island of Saint Bartholomew and in the Dutch colony of Saint Maarten. “The

France way.” "Boston, January 21," The Weekly Rehearsal, January 21, 1733/4. Waldemar Westergard, The Danish West Indies Under Company Rule (1671-1754) (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1917), 173-175. 31 Boston Gazette, Nov. 29, 1736. 32 The total number of banished slaves is difficult to ascertain. Governor Mathew sent a list of banishments that included a total of forty-five slaves to the Assembly on March 8, 1737. This list did not include Quau, who had been reprieved at the stake after promising to reveal information and Parmenio, a runaway slave owned by Henry Kipps who was later captured but managed to receive banishment after promising to discover a new conspiracy. Antigua Council Minutes, Mar 8, 1736/7, CO 9/11, TNA; Council Minutes, March 9, 1737, CO 9/11, TNA; “An Act for attaining several slaves who abscond and are fled from Justice and for the Banishment of other[sic] concerned in the conspiracy,” April 11, 1737, CO 8/6, TNA; “An Act for Banishing a Negro Man Slave called Parmenio belonging to Henry Kipps,” June 25, 1740, CO 8/8, TNA; David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 34-36, 226, n.25, 227, n.25.

Contagion,” wrote Matthew, “has spread farther among these Islands than I apprehend is discovered.”33

As the colonists in Antigua continued to massacre their slave population, South

Carolina emerged as the center of unrest on the American mainland. It was an anxious, violent province in the first half of the eighteenth century. Britons enslaved thousands of

American Indians in the early years of the province, contributing to the bloody war against the Yamasees and a broad coalition of indigenous peoples in 1715.34 With the outbreak of each new war in Europe, South Carolinians waged campaigns against the

Spanish in Saint Augustine, hoping to drive their rivals from the southern frontier.

Achieving a black majority of slaves by about 1708, white planters forced this population to work on the newly developed rice plantations concentrated in the Low Country marshlands along the coast.35 The Spanish watched warily as the population of South

Carolina grew larger and expanded southward. With the founding of Georgia in 1733, the Spanish King reasserted an edict of emancipation offered to any British slave who might escape to La Florida.36 There had already been purported slave conspiracies discovered in South Carolina in 1730 and 1732, but the Spanish invitation to British slaves was viewed by most planters as an act of open hostility.37 Slaves appeared to be

33Mathew to BT, Jan 17, 1736/7, CO 152/22, W88, TNA. 34William L. Ramsey, “‘Something Cloudy in Their Looks’: The Origins of the Yamasee War Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 90, No. 1 (Jun., 2003), 44-75. 35 Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 143. 36 Jane Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review, 95, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), 17. 37 Echo or Edinburgh Weekly Journal (Edinburgh, Scotland), Wednesday, December 16, 1730, Issue CII; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 183.

11 responding to the edict. There were reported “plots” discovered again in 1737 and more than three conspiracies reported in 1738 and 1739.38

It was in this tense environment that a group of African and Creole slaves attacked Hutchinson’s Store near the Western Stono River (modern day Wallace Creek) in September of 1739. Though accounts differ, most agree that the leaders were

Angolans. 39 The rebels struck in the dark of night, killing two clerks who guarded the warehouse and leaving their severed heads in the entry way while they plundered weapons and liquor. The rebels then killed a white plantation family and began marching west and south down the Pon Pon road, attacking six plantations and beating drums, calling out “liberty!” to enslaved people as they marched toward Saint Augustine.

Perhaps a hundred or more slaves joined the procession. In the late afternoon of the following day, near the Edisto River, the slave rebels were surprised by white militia originating from a nearby revivalist church that had received word of the rebellion. As many as two dozen slaves escaped across the river and were pursued by American

Indians and South Carolina planters. Over the next three years, South Carolina whites lived in perpetual fear of imminent slave rebellion. In 1740, a slave warned several white planters of a rumored plan to attack Charles Town. The militia ambushed nearly 200 conspirators in a field and executed fifty of the accused people.40 The last and greatest blow to the power of the white planters took place in the fall of 1740, when a terrible fire destroyed a third of the buildings in Charles Town.41

38 Aptheker, American Negro, 185-186; “Journal of William Stephens,” in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society. 9 vols, (Savannah, 1840-59), IV, 275 – 277. 39 Mark Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). 40 Boston Weekly News-Letter, July 3-10, 1740. 41 Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Charles Town, 22nd Nov, 1740, The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, Volume One: April 2, 1737-September 25, 1742 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press,

Though such violence had been decidedly concentrated in the Caribbean and southern mainland throughout the first half of the 1730s, this changed at the end of the decade. In Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic provinces of East Jersey and New York, white authorities passed new laws to prevent meetings of slaves. The burning of Council

President James Logan’s home by a slave named Hercules in 1737 evinced new concerns from the Quakers of Philadelphia. “The insolent Behaviour of the Negroes,” wrote

Logan, “which has of late been so much taken notice of, requires a strict hand to be kept over them.”42 Rumors of slave conspiracies throughout the Atlantic were gathered by printers and then dispersed throughout the North. In 1738, the Quakers of Nantucket

Island, off the coast of Cape Cod, reported that Christian Wampanoags, many of them servants to colonists, were plotting to rise and “destroy all the English” in a manner similar to that of slaves farther south.43 The report was false, but the fear it engendered among the Quaker population was very real. In the winter of 1740, just a few months after the Stono Rebellion, British authorities in Maryland announced they had thwarted a slave conspiracy in Prince George’s County near the Patuxent River. A young attorney in Annapolis reported the “plot was as bad as any I ever heard.”44 The British in

Maryland executed the convicted leader of the conspiracy and then hung his body in chains near a crossroads to intimidate the slave population.

The largest slave conspiracy in the north took place in New York City in the spring of 1741. It began with a series of fires, the first and most serious on the roof of the

1972), 271; Matthew Mulcahy, “The "Great Fire" of 1740 and the Politics of Disaster Relief in Colonial Charleston,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), 138-139. 42 Minutes of the Provincial Council of Philadelphia, From the Organization to the Termination of the Propietary Government, Volume IV (Harrisburg: Printed by Theo. Fenn & Co., 1851), 243-244. 43 Boston Evening Post, October 9, 1738. 44 Bordley to Harris, January 30, 1739, “Stephen Bordley Letterbook,” Maryland Historical Society.

13 governor’s mansion at Fort George, on March 18th. The wind carried the fire to the chapel and barracks, the stable and neighboring homes. Panicked New Yorkers tried to save the Provincial Secretary’s papers by throwing them out the window, littering the streets with the muddied proclamations of the British king.45 Over the next eighteen days, more fires sprouted from one end of the town to the next, with some buildings catching fire in different parts of the city at the same time. Coals were found smoldering in a haystack at one home and signs of arson were discovered at several others. One white woman claimed to have heard a black slave celebrating the fires, saying “Fire, Fire,

Scorch, Scorch, A Little, Damn it, By and By.”46 On April 17, 1741, the governor issued a proclamation offering a reward for any information concerning the fires. On April

22nd, a white teenage servant girl named Mary Burton claimed that her master, a white tavern keeper, was the leader of a slave conspiracy to burn the city and make himself king.47 Though the accused man denied the allegations to his death, Mary Burton’s accusations were soon followed by a myriad of confessions from an accused white prostitute and several male slaves, all of whom provided different stories about the fires.

“The chief talk now in Town is about the Negroes conspiracy,” wrote an excited young woman as constables tore through the meager quarters of slaves.48 The fear in New York spread into neighboring colonies. There were purported arson attempts in Hackensack,

New Jersey, where white officials executed two slaves for burning barns, and at least two

45 Daniel Horsmanden, 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 (New York: Printed by James Parker, at the New Printing- Office, 1744), 5. 46 Horsmanden, Journal, 7. 47 Horsmanden, Journal, 10, 12-14. 48Elizabeth DeLancey to Cadwallader Colden, June 1, 1741, in Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume III Additional Letters and Papers 1715-1748 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1937), 8:265.

14 murderous arson trials against slaves in Charles Town, South Carolina, where colonists insisted slaves were plotting to burn down the city. In New York, over the course of the summer of 1741, white colonists hanged or burned thirty-four people accused of conspiring in the port town and banished nearly a hundred others. The attorney general’s prosecution of the alleged conspirators changed over time, first describing the plot as a class conflict, then a slave uprising, and finally as a Catholic conspiracy allegedly led by a Jesuit priest in which slaves would form the advance guard of a Spanish invasion. By the end of the trials, the people of New York had committed an atrocity of justice that far outstripped the horrors of New England’s Salem Witch Trials of the previous generation.

It was no coincidence that colonists in New York City explained the conspiracy as a religious struggle pitting godly Protestants against devilish Catholics. The slave unrest of the period coincided with a powerful evangelical movement that swept through colonial America during the same years. In December of 1734, the Reverend John

Edwards witnessed in the town of Northampton a “Surprizing Work of God” among several of his congregants, each claiming they had been visited by the spirit of Christ and their souls saved. “And then a concern about the great things of religion began,”

Edwards would write two years later, “All seemed to be seized with a deep concern about their eternal salvation.”49 In his A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God

(1737), Edwards claimed that at least thirty-two communities in the Connecticut River valley had been swept up and converted by Christ. His faithful narratives inspired evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In England, the narrative attracted the

49 Jonathan Edwards, A faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in the conversion of many hundred souls in Northampton, and the neighbouring towns and villages of the county of Hampshire, in the province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New-England. Third Edition, (Boston: Printed & sold by S. Kneeland [and] T. Green, 1738).

15 attention of a young itinerant Anglican minister named George Whitefield, who was already known for his emotive open-air preaching and his ability to “awaken” souls to their imminent peril. In 1739, George Whitefield traveled to the American colonies and sparked a religious sensation in cities such as Philadelphia, where crowds of more than ten thousand people gathered to listen to the sermons of the traveling minister. These revivals are remembered today as the First Great Awakening.

Whitefield offered a critique of American slavery that quickly embroiled him in the racial fear and accusations of conspiracy that had taken hold in the colonies. He and his fellow evangelicals, eventually described as “New Lights,” criticized established ministers as unconverted and uninspired by Christ. “New Lights” insisted that salvation was possible despite race or rank and showed little of the deference to status customary throughout colonial America. In his letter To the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia,

North and South Carolina, Whitefield offered a critique of slavery in which he described planters as “Egyptian Pharaohs” punished with rebellion for the sin of denying baptism to slaves.50 The response of landed gentry and “Old Light” ministers to this critique was decidedly hostile. After the New York City conspiracy, Supreme Court Justice Daniel

Horsmanden believed that “Suspicious vagrant strolling preachers” had been responsible for the fires. A New Yorker wrote to London insisting that George Whitefield had

“raised up a bitter spirit in the Negroes against their masters.” For their part, Whitefield and the “New Lights” denied they had advocated for the rebellion of slaves.

As Whitefield and his revivalists were increasingly on the defensive for their role in slave unrest, the rebellions of the era reached their climax in Jamaica. Planters on the

50 George Whitefield, Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina (Philadelphia: Franklin, 1740), 16.

16 island had long feared widespread slave rebellion and yet throughout the First Maroon

War, no slave conspiracies were discovered by white colonists. Assemblymen insisted slaves were simply biding their time to see who won the conflict, “as all or most of them want but a favourable opportunity to withdraw from their servitude.”51 The planters might have been correct in their assessment. In 1739, Governor Trelawney successfully negotiated a treaty with the Maroons in which they would receive amnesty in return for expressing fealty to King George II. Most important to the planters, the Maroons also agreed to return all escaped slaves to their white owners. A palpable despair and anger emerged among the slaves. In March of 1740, less than six months after the treaty, slaves met in large crowds near Kingston and would not disperse until they were attacked by white militia on horses.52 The Maroons began working closely with white militias to control the slave population. In May of 1742, the Maroon leader, Cudjoe, delivered several slaves to the governor, claiming he had discovered a conspiracy among their number to rise in rebellion.53 The most elaborate alleged conspiracy took place three years later. In 1745, a male slave warned a local plantress that a slave rebellion was imminent. The governor called up militiamen, who, in turn, surprised a gathering of slaves supposedly preparing to start their rebellion. According to Franklin’s

Pennsylvania Gazette, the prisoners were hanged, burned, gibbeted, or banished by white authorities.54

51 'America and West Indies: December 1730, 24-31', Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 37: 1730 (1937), 410-424, “627.” 52 Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 148 53 Journal of the Jamaican Assembly, III, May 1, 1742. 54 Pennsylvania Gazette, April 12, 1745.

Jamaica’s last insurrection of the decade took place in 1746. In an act that evinced great desperation, a group of twenty African-born “Coromantee” and “Popo” slaves, most of whom were owned by the “King’s Navy Yard,” broke off from a palisades project on the eastern side of the island and began marching west. Showing little concern for their victims and with an expressed “design to kill all they met with” that would not join their ranks, they attacked black men and women on plantations before they ever met with colonists.55 In their wake, the “King’s Slaves” left a path of destruction through several burned out plantations. Within a few days of their rebellion, the African-born rebels met a force of Maroons and white militia in open battle. The

Maroons, the very people planters had described as “Negroes in Rebellion,” opened fire on the African peoples fighting for their freedom. The Maroons defeated the insurrectionists and the British publicly burned alive many of the slaves taken in the fighting.56

Then there was a quiet that descended upon the colonies of the Americas. Despite the ongoing war with France and Spain, there was little word of rebellion or conspiracy in the second half of the 1740s and noticeably less unrest. When rumors of unrest did arise, colonial authorities treated them with skepticism. “There has been a new rumor of the rising of the Negroes,” wrote New York’s Cadwallader Colden to his wife in 1747, “but upon enquiry no foundation can be found of it.”57 In South Carolina, a supposed slave conspiracy was dismissed after white authorities decided a planter had sewn false rumors

55 American Weekly Mercury, January 21, 1746. 56 Ibid. 57 Cadwallader Colden to Mrs. Colden, Letters of Cadwallader Colden, VIII, 345.

18 for his own ends.58 Looking back at the period years later, colonists struggled to explain what had happened. “There was no resisting the torrent of jealousy,” William Smith remembered from his childhood experience of the New York conspiracy, “when every man thought himself in danger from a foe in his own house.”59 Two centuries later, historian Herbert Aptheker still wondered at the sudden silence that descended upon

British America in those years. “There was a marked decline of organized rebellious activity on the part of Negro slaves,” wrote Aptheker, “Precisely why this is so the present writer is not certain.”60

Historians’ Treatment of the Era

What had caused this spate of unrest? Historians have never provided a satisfactory answer. For the most part, they have treated conspiracies and rebellions in the first half of the eighteenth century as singular events peculiar to the history of individual colonies.61 Scholars have approached the unrest of the period as not one thing, but many different things. For example, in New York Burning (2006), historian Jill

Lepore argues that political rivalries among white New Yorkers lay behind the conspiracy trials of 1741. New York’s governor and the Supreme Court, she argued,

58 Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Kingsport, Tenn.: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 122; Philip Morgan and George Terry, “Slavery in Microcosm: A Conspiracy Scare in Colonial South Carolina,” Southern Studies, 21, (1982), 142-143. 59 William Smith, “Continuation of the History of New York,” in Collections of the New York Historical Society, Volume IV (New York: J. Seymour, 1826), 60-61. 60Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 196. 61 This historiographical observation was first made by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 193.

19 prosecuted slaves owned by members of the opposing Country Party.62 More commonly, scholars have described the conspiracies within broad histories of individual colonies. In his influential Black Majority (1976), Peter Wood attributed the Stono River Slave

Rebellion of 1739 to social pressures from the growth of a black slave population in colonial South Carolina. For Wood, the insurrection of 1739 was the culmination of half- a-century of oppression and the increasingly cruel conditions of slavery born from the intensification of rice production in the Carolina Low-country.63 Both Lepore and Wood acknowledged the international events that influenced slave unrest, but in the end, conspiracy trials and insurrections were born from dynamics specific to individual colonies.

Historians have neglected the shared causes of unrest out of preoccupation with differences between slave societies in early America. Rejecting an older tradition of treating slavery as uniform and constant, historians working in the previous few decades have stressed that as a system of labor, slavery demonstrated remarkable variety between provinces. Scholars Ira Berlin and Phillip Morgan, for example, have long championed a comparative approach to the history of slavery that places labor at the center of the slave experience. 64 The work of slaves - the crops they produced and the things they built - had a powerful influence on the structure of their lives, from the dispersal of populations to

62 Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), xvii, 218-219. 63 Wood, Black Majority, 35-36, 308-309. 64Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Feb., 1980), 44-78; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998).

20 family life.65 With detailed, careful social histories, scholars used previously neglected records to recreate the stories of slaves on specific plantations in specific periods of time.

This important work has taught us a great deal about the diversity of the lives of slaves, but at the expense of broad questions about a black culture shared between colonies.

Perhaps just as important, many historians have simply denied that slave communication and coordination was possible between colonies in the 1730s and 1740s.

As far back as 1978, Peter Wood complained there had “been no successful longitudinal studies, analyzing periods of intensified slave resistance throughout the Atlantic community, such as the late 1730s or the early 1790s.”66 Wood’s student, Julius Scott, produced an influential dissertation in 1984 that reconstructed slave communication during the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth century. In the last twenty years,

Laurent Dubois and many others have created fascinating studies of the impact of the

Haitian Rebellion on the slave societies of the Caribbean and the North American continent, but few to none have addressed slave communication in the first half of the eighteenth century.67 Most scholars have assumed slave resistance in the earlier period was localized. As recently as 2006, Mark Smith asserted in his introduction to Stono:

65 The influence of working conditions on slave life in the Chesapeake is well-summarized by Allan Kulikoff. Allan Kulikoff, “The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700 to 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 35, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), 226-228. 66 Peter H. Wood, “’I did the Best I could for My Day’: The Study of Early Black History during the Second Reconstruction, 1960 to 1976,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 35, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), 216. 67The literature on slave unrest during the Age of Revolution is vast. See, for example, Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); Ira Berlin, Slavery and Freedom in the Era of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983); For a discussion of the influence of republican ideology in the wider Atlantic, see Julius Sherrard Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986) and for a contrarian view, David Geggus, "Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789- 1815," in A Turbulent Time: the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, eds. David Gaspar and David Geggus (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1997).

Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt, that it was "hardly" possible that slaves in the 1730s and 1740s could have "acted in concert." As he argues,

"communication networks, while more evolved among the dispossessed than we are sometimes apt to believe, were nonetheless too immature, too capricious to allow for that kind of coordination." This opinion has been widely shared among historians of this early unrest.68

Nevertheless, many scholars of early American slavery have wondered at the causes behind the conspiracies and insurrections of the 1730s and 1740s. In his groundbreaking American Negro Slave Revolts (1946), Herbert Aptheker tried to explain this period with his observation that slave rebellions seemed to come “in spasms and spurts, with what may be termed breathing spells or rest periods, of varying lengths, intervening.”69 This vague analogy provided little explanation for the causes of the unrest. The next generation of slavery historians also noted the tumultuousness of those decades. In his classic The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), David Brion

Davis described the unrest as “successive waves of panic.” He believes the conspiracies were not “imaginary,” but instead a logical response to the Spanish royal decree of 1733, which offered liberty to escaped British slaves who made their way to Spanish territories.70 Davis, like many scholars, only focused on the unrest from the American mainland, treating it separately from the events in the Caribbean. In a similar vein, David

Barry Gaspar argued that unrest in the West Indies – the insurrection on Saint John, conspiracy in Antigua, and Maroon War in Jamaica - all shared a similar cause. In his

68Lepore, New York Burning, 11-12; Smith, Stono, xii. 69Aptheker, American Negro, 196. 70 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 138-139.

22 article “A Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: Slave Rebellion in the West Indies during the

1730s,” Gaspar argued that the declining price of sugar in Europe caused an acute economic depression that helped fuel unrest on all three islands. Gaspar ended his article by stressing the need for a broader study of the shared causes of unrest between the mainland and the West Indies.71 As late as 2002, after editing a roundtable concerning slave conspiracy scares in the William and Mary Quarterly, Phillip Morgan suggested scholars “take another look at the late 1730s.”72

Perhaps because so few studies of slave unrest have been concerned with broader trends in the British Atlantic, historians have largely neglected the close relationship between the First Great Awakening and slave insurrection in the 1730s and 1740s. In

The Great Awakening (2006), Thomas Kidd’s widely acclaimed synthesis of the history of the First Great Awakening, he draws no connections between the racial fear of the era and the growth of evangelical religion in colonial America. Slave conspiracies receive scant attention in his work, but his historical subjects drew far more connections between the outbreak of rebellion and the judgment of God. Evangelicals used slave unrest in their sermons to galvanize congregations and “Old Light” detractors actually accused ministers of fomenting slave rebellion. In this project, I have demonstrated the powerful relationship between racial fear and the growth of evangelical religion in early America.

In 2000, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh published the most thorough study to date of the unrest of the 1730s and 1740s. In a chapter of their book The Many-

Headed Hydra (2000), the two historians described the unrest of the 1730s as a “cycle of

71 David Barry Gaspar, “A Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: Slave Rebellion in the West Indies during the 1730s,” Cimarrons I (1981): 79-91. 72 Philip D. Morgan, “Conspiracy Scares,” “Forum: The Making of a Slave Conspiracy, Part 2,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Jan., 2002), 159-166.

23 rebellion” sweeping through the Caribbean and mainland colonies.73 They argued the actors in this rebellion were not simply slaves, but instead the “outcasts of the nations of the earth,” a “motley proletariat” of “African slaves, Irish soldiers, and Hispanic sailors” rebelling together against planters and their bourgeois imperial allies. Linebaugh and

Rediker saw the “eighty separate cases of conspiracy, revolt, mutiny, and arson,” as a single rebellion against the exploitative forces of capital in the Atlantic World, a

“hurricane” of class resentment born from the empires of the western hemisphere. For their model of a conspiracy, they looked to the New York City conspiracy of 1741, arguing that the actions of conspirators there “took on their greatest and most subversive meaning.” At the heart of their interpretation of the conspiracy was an alliance between white and black labor.74

Linebaugh’s and Rediker’s interpretation of rebellion in the 1730s was deeply flawed. The idea of a class rebellion in the 1730s Atlantic World is tantalizing, but the the great weight of evidence argues against such a conclusion. In their attempt to imagine a Marxist Atlantic, Linbaugh and Rediker greatly overstated the extent of inter- racial alliances. New York was unique among the conspiracies and insurrections of the period in its execution of both white and black conspirators. Outside of that port, in fact, white laborers and black slaves were not convicted together in a single slave conspiracy or insurrection between the years 1729 and 1746. This is especially remarkable because white servants and black slaves worked closely together in most of the colonies of the

British Atlantic. In the newspapers of the era, there are accounts of Irish indentures running off with black slaves and certainly, during the sailor riots in Philadelphia and

73 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 193. 74 Ibid., 178-181.

Newport at the end of the period, both black and white mariners protested against the merchants of cities.75 Yet this level of cooperation was extraordinarily rare. In keeping with an observation made by historian Phillip Morgan, it should stand out as remarkable that in the entire British history of the Atlantic slave trade, there is not one recorded case of a white sailor joining slave rebels aboard the numerous shipboard insurrections of the

Middle Passage.76 The story of the unrest of the 1730s is, in fact, quite the opposite of the narrative provided by Linebaugh and Rediker. The problem for historians is not “why were black slaves and white laborers joined together in rebellion against the planter class,” but rather, “why were they not allied together in the 1730s?” As I demonstrate in this dissertation, fear of slave unrest united all classes of whites even as it divided black communities.

An equally significant problem lies in Linebaugh’s and Rediker’s interpretation of evidence. The two scholars presented all of the slave conspiracy evidence as fact, even when both contemporaries and generations of historical scholarship have raised serious questions about the accuracy of the evidence against conspirators. In some cases,

Linebaugh and Rediker described conspiracies as true when even British authorities dismissed accusations as false. Both Georgia’s “Red String Conspiracy” and the

Nantucket Indian conspiracy, which Linebaugh and Rediker describe as examples of rebellion, were retracted by white authorities almost immediately after they were

75 Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements fro Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 20; Charles R. Foy, “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713-1783” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4.1 (2006), 77. 76 Philip D. Morgan, “African Americans,” in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 2006), 154.

25 reported.77 In Georgia’s “Red String Conspiracy,” in which a group of Irish servants were accused of plotting to rebel and murder Georgian magistrates, the sheriff who had first written to General Oglethorpe later apologized, saying it had been a false rumor arising from three or four servants talking “in their cups.” The Nantucket Indian conspiracy, cited by Linebaugh and Rediker from a Boston evening newspaper, was actually retracted as a false report by the same printer a few weeks later (an act of early journalistic integrity almost unheard of during this period). Linebaugh and Rediker described both conspiracies as real without acknowledging the retractions.

Linebaugh and Rediker also ignored the tremendous problem of evidence that exists in the study of trial records from these conspiracies. In their insistence on class conflict in New York, for example, Linebaugh and Rediker directly quoted the testimony of witnesses who contradicted their own testimony or made coerced confessions. From

1741 up to the present day, the flimsy testimony of the teenage servant girl Mary Burton has cast significant doubt on the extent of the conspiracy in the New York slave trials.

The two scholars quoted the accusations made by Mary Burton against her master directly and used the testimony as evidence of class conflict. More problematic still, the methods used by British authorities in this period presumed that the accused were guilty.

In most conspiracy trials, once an accusation was made, British authorities promised slaves that if they did not confess and name their fellow conspirators, they would die by

77Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 193; for the retraction of the Nantucket conspiracy, see Boston Evening Post, October 16, 1738; Thomas Causton to James Oglethorpe, March 24, 1734/5, Savannah, in Kenneth Coleman and Milton Ready, The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: Original Papers, Correspondence to the Trustees, James Oglethorpe, and Others 1732-1735, Vol. 20 (Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1982), 284-285. After reporting news of a conspiracy among Irish servants to rise against the colony, Causton wrote again to Oglethorpe and explained that three or four property owners had been overheard planning to runaway instead of pay their debts, agreeing to wear a red string on the day of their escape. Causton dismissed the rumors and panic as resulting from servants being “in the cups.”

26 fire, breaking, or starvation. This pattern was most apparent in Antigua. Though

Linebaugh and Rediker cited the confessions of slaves from the island directly, contemporary officials admitted they had used torture and the promise of violent death to extract guilty testimony. The historians ignored the outright denial of the charges by dozens of enslaved people who were executed.

Even in the 1730s and 1740s, several British observers cast doubt on the accuracy of the confessions made by slaves and accused free persons. In fact, the documents we are forced to rely upon for an account of the trials in New York and Antigua were published defenses of the trial proceedings authored by judges accused of injustice and cruelty.78 These are important historical documents that provide insight into the world of eighteenth century colonial America, but they were also created with the stated intent to prove the guilt of the accused and the reality of a slave conspiracy. Linebaugh and

Rediker should not have accepted the charges of the judges without a good deal more skepticism. If historians were to use the same methodology for the Salem Witch Trials, we would be forced to conclude the devil really did possess the men and women executed in Massachusetts in 1692.

The Nature of Insurrection and Conspiracy in the 1730s

The problem of evidence is the greatest challenge to a study of slave unrest in the

1730s. Slaves left behind no account of their own from the years between 1729 and

1746. The autobiography of Oulaudah Equiano and other slave narratives belong to a

78 See, for example, the quotes from the testimony of Mary Burton that are credited to slaves, Linebaugh and Rediker, Many Headed Hydra, 176.

27 later generation. The experience and motivations of enslaved people in the period come to us entirely through the records of white British observers, nearly all of whom condemned slave rebellion and, with only a few exceptions, accepted the reports of conspiracies among the black population. Private correspondence and newspaper accounts were mostly based on rumor and hearsay. Printers accepted news from travelers and mariners from far away colonies and printed second-hand information as fact without confirmation. When we read through the scattered historical record, scholars are left to wonder what was real and what was imagined.

Historians have traditionally accepted most of the accounts of slave insurrections and conspiracies and placed them within a broader understanding of slave resistance.

Working within a framework first championed by W.E.B Dubois and later Herbert

Aptheker, these early scholars rejected the widely held popular belief that American slaves had passively accepted slavery by revealing the long tradition of work resistance and autonomy maintained by slaves against the abusive power of white slave owners.

Rebellions were placed within a spectrum of negotiation that began with stealing from planters and fostering a black market in goods and extended to running away or performing work slow-downs in protest against hard conditions. Historians described conspiracies and rebellions as but the most extreme of a variety of resistance against the oppression of slavery.79

This project is not a study of slave resistance. Insurrections and conspiracies in the 1730s were not negotiations between slaves and planters. They were, in fact, quite the opposite. Insurrections were moments when negotiations stopped, when the system of resistance broke down and slaves turned their cane knives and bills into weapons.

79 See, for example, Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 99.

Slave rebellions were an instance of slaves gathered together with the intent to obtain their liberty by force. To both white and black people in colonial America, these moments were quite obvious. The slave who broke into Hutchinson’s store in South

Carolina in the dark of night and raised his weapon against the white store clerk understood he was rebelling as sure as the clerk who fell beneath his blade. The same was true for the Danish magistrate who woke in the night to find armed slaves in his sleeping chamber on the island of Saint John in 1734. The African men who made him dance a jig before they ran him through with a sword had surely crossed the line from slaves to insurrectionists. The negotiations were over. A rebellion had begun.

Slave rebellions in the 1730s were different from the insurrections at the end of the eighteenth century. The historian Eugene Genovese has argued that slave insurrections took on two forms in the history of colonial America.80 In the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century, he referred to rebellions as “restorationist” in nature, meaning slaves did not reject the idea of enslavement but instead sought to rebel or escape their particular condition. The motivation of slaves was not universal human freedom, but instead an attempt to ameliorate their intolerable experience of slavery.

Genovese argued that only during the Haitian Rebellion, during the Age of Revolution, did slaves begin to articulate insurrection as a means of rejecting the idea of enslaving human beings. I have found Genovese’s analysis quite accurate for this era with only a few reservations. It is quite true that tensions within slave societies in this period often pitted rebel African slaves against creoles or Maroons, contributing to Genovese’s argument that black slaves did not yet share a revolutionary understanding of human

80 Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

29 freedom. However, the black movement for slave baptism was an early expression of the equality of the African soul to that of the European and was expressed by slaves as a right to be won.81 That black slaves insisted on baptism and sometimes fought for it in the

1730s was an early expression of human equality that served as an impetus for rebellion among the enslaved. As I argue in this dissertation, it was in the 1730s, rather than in the

1790s, that black people began to articulate to each other a shared cause against the oppression of slavery. An articulation of true revolutionary ideals would not mature until the end of the century.

Conspiracies were far more complicated than overt rebellions. As presented by colonists and traditionally treated by historians, a slave conspiracy was a coordinated plan by a group of slaves to obtain their liberty by force. It was “a plot,” an act of both sedition and premeditated murder, an attempt to gather together like-minded people to act in rebellion. In the British provinces, colonists accused slave conspirators of petit treason, a crime that included an act of murder by a servant against his lord or a wife against her husband. Conspirators were also sometimes charged with sedition against the king, what Thomas Davis has referred to as “loose talk by aggrieved and embittered men,” an act in and of itself unlawful in the colonies.82

But as observable event, a conspiracy was something else entirely. As I demonstrate in this dissertation, many of the conspiracies almost certainly did not occur as presented by British authorities. In this sense, a slave conspiracy was not necessarily a

81 Michael Gomez argues that Christianity “ultimately facilitated the transition to race” among the African- American population. Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 15. 82 Thomas J. Davis, “Conspiracy and Credibility: Look Who’s Talking, about What: Law Talk and Loose Talk,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 59, No. 1, (Jan. 2002), 168.

30 plot by the enslaved, but instead an accusation by colonial authorities. A “plot” was a colonial officials’ charge that a group of slaves were planning to obtain their liberty by force. Like an insurrection, it was the moment when negotiations broke down between master and slave, but in a conspiracy, it was the planter attacking his bondsmen. British colonists brought the full power of their empire against the enslaved people they suspected of conspiracy. White authorities hauled accused slaves from their erstwhile homes, presented them in chains before magistrates and justices of the peace and, despite the professed innocence of the accused, publicly executed the condemned in the most horrible conventions known to European tradition. Lack of evidence was no guarantee for the preservation of a slave’s life. The guilt or innocence of a slave was often subsumed for the larger purpose of intimidating a brutalized, restless black population.

For this reason, slave conspiracies almost always devolved into exhibitions of British power and rituals of public murder.

The methods used by British authorities to interrogate and coerce confessions from the accused prevent the historian from determining the accuracy of the conviction in many of the slave trials. I have treated the evidence for each case separately. In some conspiracy trials, it is possible to assume that slaves were agitating for their freedom and plotting rebellion. On rare occasions in South Carolina and Jamaica, for example, colonial authorities adopted a strategy of ambushing accused conspirators on the day of their gathering for insurrection. Where the white militia discovered hundreds of armed slaves in open meetings, we can assume there was indeed intent to rebel. In many other conspiracy trials, the evidence is too limited and often too contradictory to reach any certainty in our conclusions.

My approach to slave conspiracy trials has been heavily influenced by recent debates in the historiography of slave resistance. In 2001, the William and Mary

Quarterly published a series of articles addressing the problems of evidence in the

Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy trials of 1822.83 Historian Michael Johnson uncovered an early version of minutes from the trial that contradicted the final report published by the judges justifying the conviction of Denmark Vesey for plotting a slave rebellion.

Johnson’s approach to conspiracy trial evidence involved paying close attention to the development of a trial over time, noting the initial narrative of a conspiracy could be changed by the interrogation methods and assumptions of the court. Johnson questioned the approach of historians who celebrated Vesey’s revolutionary fervor while ignoring the black man’s protestations of innocence. Phillip Morgan, the editor of the William and

Mary Quarterly at the time, referred to the review as a “tour de force” and called on scholars to reevaluate slave conspiracies in several different time periods, including the late 1730s.

I have also been influenced by Peter Charles Hoffer’s approach to the New York

City slave conspiracy.84 Hoffer analyzed the “Great Negro Plot” as a legal history, noting most of the evidence was produced by the provincial Supreme Court and shaped by the demands of magistrates prosecuting the case within the confines of provincial British law.85 Explaining the legal process of slave trials and prosecution, Hoffer was especially insightful when discussing the choices made by British authorities and the precedents they used to arrive at guilty convictions. Though a considerable part of his study

83 Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., Vol. 58, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), 915-976. 84 Peter Charles Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, 2003). 85 Morgan, “Conspiracy Scares,” 159-166.

32 transcended the court room, his careful attention to the context of the available evidence has influenced my study of other conspiracy trials.

In the end, though, this is not a study of any one trial. It is the history of a period when a great many insurrections and conspiracies happened all at once and I have sought out evidence for the underlying causes. I have followed the example of Marc Bloch, who argued historians must search for evidence from “witnesses in spite of themselves.”86 I have adopted the approach of anthropologist Julius Scott, who searched for “hidden transcripts,” or interactions between subaltern groups that power holders do not see or hear.87 Accusations made by slaves against each other during a conspiracy trial can portray more about the tensions within a slave society than they can convince us of purported slave rebellion. An account of a ship wreck in a New England newspaper can illuminate the numbers of enslaved mariners traveling between colonies. An official’s casual observation that a slave brought him word of an insurrection can demonstrate the avenues of communication in the black Atlantic. The data collected from the

Transatlantic Slave Trade database, ship departures and arrivals, can tell us a great deal about the origins of insurrectionists and hint at motivations for enslaved people whose voices have been too long forgotten.

The Causes of the Unrest

The slave unrest of the age was the direct result of the expansion of the British colonial enterprise in the first half of the eighteenth century. White colonists intensified

86 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 61. 87 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

33 plantation production and pushed westward, bringing new ground in the West Indies and the mainland under cultivation. To profit from growing demand in labor, British merchants more than tripled the number of slave-carrying ships that crossed the ocean from western Africa to the Americas.88 These slave trading vessels were part of a widespread expansion in trade and shipping between 1675 and 1730, with transatlantic crossings increasing from near five hundred ships a year to fifteen hundred annually.89 In an era when news traveled only as fast as ships of sail, the growth of commerce improved communication, expanding the volume of news that could be carried between provinces by both white and black mariners. Newspapers contributed to a growing culture concerned with international events in the wider Atlantic. The slave unrest between the years 1729 and 1746 grew out of this expansion of commerce and communication. Over the course of the long decade, word of emancipation and widespread rebellion took hold in slave communities from the eastern Caribbean to the shores of New England. Planters and British authorities explained unrest not simply as an isolated problem within their respective provinces, but as part of conditions shared throughout British America.

The growth of the slave trade was a first and important cause of the unrest in the period. In Section One, I examine the relationship between the forced migration of tens of thousands of enslaved people and the insurrections and conspiracies of the era. During this period, the African slave trade increased in numbers never before seen in the colonies, dispersing slaves fresh from large wars in the western interior of Africa into the slave societies of the New World. An inter-colonial slave trade also flourished in this period, growing the numbers of American-born Creole slaves in the northern provinces of

88 The numbers for transatlantic slave voyages of British vessels are 66 voyages from 1701-10 and 202 voyages from 1731-1740. See Table 1 below. 89 Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 302.

34 the mid-Atlantic and New England. In Chapter One, I argue that these changes in demography increased the likelihood of both rebellion and accusations of conspiracy, but there are real limits to proving a causal relationship between population change and incidents of unrest. Provinces with similar proportions of slaves varied greatly in accusations of conspiracy and insurrection. Despite the complex relationship between demography and unrest, white Britons expressed fear of the enslaved black population.

Colonial elites sought to restrict the slave trade with high duties on slaves but were thwarted by British merchants. This conflict, born from the unrest of the 1730s, reverberated for decades throughout British America.

The slave trade created a different kind of conflict in the black communities of the

British Atlantic. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, enslaved African migrants competed against rival slave nations and American-born creoles in the destitute conditions of slave life. The conflicts that emerged between these peoples burst forth in the insurrections and conspiracies of the age. In Chapter Two, I argue that nearly every episode of unrest in the 1730s was, in part, a contest between slaves. Conspiracy trials in these years often depended on American-born slaves accusing an African or specific groups of Africans of plotting rebellion. The uprisings in Jamaica and Saint John devolved into violent conflicts between American-born slaves and separate nations of

Africans. Leaders who sought to unite black slaves were forced to form new ceremonies and traditions to overcome these differences. To make this point, I examine the coronation of Takyi, a mysterious event that began the conspiracy trials in Antigua in

1736. His failed ceremony was just such an attempt to overcome pervasive differences and unite the black community of Antigua. His failed ceremony and betrayal was

35 indicative of the powerful struggles between enslaved peoples that pervaded the conspiracies and insurrections of the era.

Section Two examines the role of communication in the conspiracies and insurrections of the period. Despite these profound tensions in black communities, enslaved people increasingly demonstrated a shared sense of purpose and a common cause. In the port towns of the British West Indies and the American mainland, slave communities were ever more aware of the rebellious activities of other enslaved peoples in colonial America. In Chapter Three, I argue that slave communication played a pivotal role in the slave unrest of the British provinces between the years 1729 and 1746. The shipping activity within the British Empire in the first half of the eighteenth century created avenues of slave communication. Black mariners moved between slave societies sharing stories of unrest in far off provinces and mobile slaves shared rumors along waterways and across oceans. The most provocative rumors were the stories of emancipation common throughout the 1730s. News of an opportunity for freedom allowed black people of diverse ancestry, both African and American born, to express common cause against the degradation of new world slavery. There was not one movement of slaves or one great revolution, but there were shared rumors of freedom that inspired episodes of unrest in many colonies.

The same rumors of unrest meant something very different to the general population of white Britons in the Americas. In Chapter Four, I argue that news of slave unrest, both real and imagined, created among white Britons a pervasive racial fear between the years 1729 and 1746. Most colonists had never witnessed such brutal and intense conspiracy trials. The colonies of Antigua, Saint Christopher, the Bahamas,

South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York all conducted their most violent executions during these years. Even colonies that had larger conspiracies in the second half of the eighteenth century, such as Jamaica or Bermuda, were still fraught with slave trials. Despite the differences in these many conspiracies, they were together one project; an attempt by the British to control and intimidate a restive slave population.

The stories carried by the expansion of trade greatly increased the intensity of communication between provinces. Printers gathered stories of unrest for their newspapers and disseminated it as sensational news. The intensity of slave conspiracies - the determination of colonial officials to interrogate more slaves and to commit elaborate executions - can be explained, in part, by this growing transatlantic climate of fear in the

1730s. The methods used by colonial officials – the creation of special investigative committees that coerced elaborate confessions from slaves – determined the duration of a conspiracy trial and the number of victims.

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of slave unrest in this era was its profound influence on the religious belief of colonial Americans. In Section Three, I examine the relationship between racial fear and spiritual uncertainty in the British Atlantic. The threat of war with Catholic Spain and France exasperated the fears of Protestants, but it was the rising tide of slave rebellion that brought the threat of “popery” to the forefront of

British colonial imagination. In Chapter Five, I argue that many British colonists understood the rebellion of their slaves as part of a larger, worldwide religious struggle between Protestant liberty and Catholic oppression. British colonists viewed enslaved

Africans and creoles as vulnerable to manipulation by their "papist" enemies. For many

37 planters in the 1730s, if a slave rebelled, "a priest was at the bottom of it."90 This religious worldview is best understood as anti-popery, a term most often used by historians of early modern England to describe a seventeenth-century Protestant ideology based on the rejection of papal power and the fear of subversion by the Church in Rome.

In the 1730s, this ideology enjoyed renewed fervor as an explanation for slave rebellion as British colonists increasingly came to suspect that both Catholic Spain and the Church in Rome plotted servile insurrection within Protestant colonies.

In Chapter Six, I argue that racial fear had an important influence on the First

Great Awakening in colonial America. During the long decade between 1729 and 1746,

Britons consistently explained slave rebellion as a sign of divine anger. In an era when the rationalism of the age of enlightenment had not yet gained full sway over the leading men of the American colonies, both British officials and religious leaders explained natural disasters and public calamities as evidence of divine judgment. To a degree that might surprise many historians, these Protestants described slave unrest as a catastrophe not unlike an earthquake or plague.

This religious interpretation of slave unrest became a powerful tool in the hands of the ministers of the First Great Awakening. Even as white colonists struggled to maintain the racial hierarchy of their growing empire, a religious movement led by evangelical Protestants challenged the authority of church leaders on both sides of the

British Atlantic. The itinerant ministers of this movement were revivalists, determined to inspire an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of wayward congregations. Many of the participants in this First Great Awakening shared a biblical view of slave rebellion,

90Horsmanden to Colden, August 7, 1741, in Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume II 1730- 1742 (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1919), 225-227. .

38 citing servile insurrection as proof of God’s displeasure with white colonists and their established churches. The itinerant ministers’ biblical interpretation of slave rebellion played an important role in the proliferation of evangelical religion in colonial America.

Evangelical leaders found a powerful, if highly controversial, sign of God’s anger in slave unrest and they used it to galvanize nervous congregations of white colonists. In this way, the actions of rebellious slaves influenced the growth of evangelical religion at a critical moment in the history of colonial America.

This dissertation is an argument for an era of slave unrest within the British

Empire. It approaches the slave conspiracies and insurrections between 1729 and 1746 not as singular events in the histories of specific colonies, but rather as a shared moment in the history of the British provinces, when slaves in the Caribbean and mainland North

America threatened white authority with open rebellion and in turn, inspired heightened fears of insurrection among white Britons. These moments of violence were very much a product of their age. They were shaped not by an Age of Revolution, but by impending war with Catholic France and Spain, led by slaves inspired by the cultures of Africa rather than the politics of Europe, and often explained as judgments of God rather than a revolution against the enslavement of human beings. The period between 1729 and 1746 was not an Age of Revolution, but it was an era of rebellion by the enslaved against their exploitation in the British Atlantic.

Section One:

The African Trade

“It is allowed on all Hands, that the Trade to Africa is the Branch which renders our American Colonies and Plantations so advantagious [sic].” - Malachy Postlethwayt, The National and Private Advantages of the African Trade Considered, (1746)1

“The late Massacre perpetrated by the Negros on the island of St. John’s, the very great head they are come to in the Island of Jamaica, and the general Melancholy Apprehensions of his Majesty’s Subjects in the West Indies, gives but too much room to fear there is some great Fatality attends the English Dominion in America, from the too great Number of that unchristian and barbarous People being imported…”

- Anonymous Contributor, The New York Gazette, 17342

“Woadi Dahome ade amme wo,” (You have eaten Dahomey, but it has not satisfied you)

- Traditional song of the Akwamu, Ghana3

1Malachy Postlethwayt, The National and Private Advantages of the African Trade Considered (London, 1746), B, in Kenneth Morgan, ed., The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, Volume Two, The Royal African Company (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 197. 2 The New York Gazette, Mar. 25, 1734. 3 Ivor Wilks, “Akwamu, 1650-1750: A Study of the Rise and Fall of a West African Empire (masters thesis, University of Wales, 1958), 32.

When the Akwamu captured their enemies they called it “eating” people, and during the dry season of 1709 they began “eating” the people of Labadi by the thousands.

A priest named Okpoti would remember the attack upon his West African village nearly forty years later.4 The Akwamu had surprised them at night, descending down from the north, an army of warriors painted in white mud.5 Okpoti and his people had tried to flee as the Akwamu took “anything they came across,” including over two thousand of his

“relatives, children, slaves, and children of slaves.”6 From their vantage on the walls of

Christiansborg castle, the Danes had looked out upon the destruction of the Labadi and done nothing. Although the villagers were “their own Negro subjects,” explained a

Danish slave trader, the Europeans hoped the raid would produce a fresh wave of captives for the ships waiting in the road.7 The people who survived the attack fled far to the east, across the river Volta. The villagers who did not escape found the terror and violence of the invasion was just the beginning.

There was a boy of about ten years of age who was captured that night or one very much like it. As a man, he would call himself Takyi, a stool name among his people. From Labadi, the Akwamu took him north, to the capital city of Nyanaoanse.

Most of the captives, especially the women and children of the Labadi, were put to work in the villages of the Akwamu cultivating the manioc root and millet that fed the king and

4 Okpoti’s account of the attack on his people was related to Ludewig Romer. Ludewig Romer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760), trans. Selena Axelrod Winsnes, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 128-129. 5 The custom of Gold Coast warriors painting themselves white for war was observed by both Willem Bosman (1704) and Romer (ca. 1745). Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London: 1705; orig. Dutch, 1704), 185; Romer, Reliable Account, 129. 6 Romer, Reliable Account, 129. 7 Romer, Relibale Account, 129.

41 his armies.8 Takyi was not among them. With several others, the Akwamu took him back south, down the forest trails to the coast and there sold him to the English. On the beach beneath the castle, among the long canoes, he stood on the shores of Africa for the last time. He could not have known then that he would become a leader in the land across the sea, a member of the “nation” the British would call the Coromantee. His people would play a pivotal role in the unrest of the age.

A year after Labadi fell, across the body of water the slave traders called the

“Western Ocean,” William Byrd II awoke from a nightmare. In his dream he had stood alone, looking up at the sky. “I saw a flaming star in the air at which I was much frightened,” he confided to his diary, “and called some others to see it but when they came it disappeared.” The planter saw in the dream a dire warning. “I fear this portends some judgment to this country,” he wrote, “or at least to myself.”9

Two months before his dream, in April of 1710, Byrd had sat in the Council of colonial Virginia when the sheriffs brought Scipio and Salvadore to Williamsburg in chains. They were slave conspirators, claimed the sheriffs of Surry and Isle of Wight

Counties, men who had together plotted to lead the enslaved in rebellion. With the newly appointed Lt. Governor Spotswood not yet arrived from England, it was left to William

Byrd and his fellow councilmen to determine the fate of the accused. The men who sat on the council in Williamsburg were a collection of the most powerful planters in

Virginia, gentry selected by Queen Anne to serve as advisors to her governor. They had everything to lose from a rebellion of slaves. Together, the councilmen ordered the

8 Ivor Wilks, “Akwamu,” 173; Stephanie E. Smallwood. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 27. 9 Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709-1712 (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1941), 167. Anthony Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 153-154.

42 conspirators tried in general court for high treason.10 Byrd noted in his diary that he attended the trial two days later and so he must have witnessed the moment when the judge condemned Scipio and Salvadore to die.11 The conspirators were to be hanged and then rent into quarters, with a different body part sent to eight different counties to be displayed prominently as a warning to all would-be insurrectionists.12

After the executions, Byrd returned home to his plantation but found his sleep troubled. He dreamed of a great comet that foretold the doom of his people, “a flaming star” that disappeared when he called for others to come see. Five days after his nightmare, he was still worrying in his diary over the providential sign of disfavor. In what form the judgment might arise, Byrd did not say, but the decapitated head of the slave Salvadore sat in Williamsburg, a warning of things to come.

Over the next thirty years, the lives of both William Byrd II and Takyi would be entangled in the conflicts that emerged from the growth of the slave trade in British colonial America. In their time, they called it “the African Trade,” a commerce in goods and people that fueled struggles on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Chapter One examines the great contradiction of British colonial America in the second quarter of the eighteenth century: White planters sought after and purchased ever larger numbers of slaves even as they increasingly struggled violently against them. The relationship between slave unrest and growing populations of enslaved migrants created a British

Atlantic built for unrest. Chapter Two explores the conflicts created within black slave

10 H.R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, Vol. 3 (Richmond: The Virginia State Library, 1925), 242-243. 11Wright and Tinling, The Secret Diary, 167. For a detailed discussion of the 1710 Virginia slave conspiracy, see Parent, Foul Means, 153. 12 McIlwaine, Executive Journals, 242-243.

43 communities by the sharp rise in slave trading in this period. The tensions between rival nations of slaves and Creoles exploded forth in the insurrections of the age.

Chapter One: “A New Guinea”

The British slave trade transformed the populations of colonial America in the first half of the eighteenth century. White planters intensified plantation production and pushed westward, bringing new ground in the West Indies and the North American mainland under cultivation. European colonists clamored for laborers – slave laborers – to harvest crops and work in the increasingly crowded harbors along the edges of the

Atlantic. To profit from this growing demand, British merchants more than tripled the number of slave-carrying ships that crossed the ocean from western Africa to the

Americas.103 In their holds, these deep-water vessels carried more people than ever before, increasing four-fold the number of slaves disembarked on the mainland between

1710 and 1740.104 The forced migration of so many people increased the proportions of black slaves in every British American colony except New Hampshire. Enslaved

Africans made up the majority of the populations of the West Indian colonies and South

Carolina by 1708. In the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake, enslaved people began to reproduce naturally, meaning the number of black births exceeded black deaths for the first time in the western hemisphere. A growing American-born slave population, called

“creoles” in the parlance of the eighteenth century, joined a new wave of Africans to create a larger enslaved work force. Even the northern colonies expanded their demand for slave labor, drawing heavily from the West Indies to foster an internal slave trade between provinces.

103 The numbers for transatlantic slave voyages of British vessels are 66 voyages from 1701-10 and 202 voyages from 1731-1740. See Table 1 below. 104 Transatlantic slave passengers shipped to the mainland in British vessels were 11,460 in 1710 increasing to 45,710 in 1740. See Table 2 below.

For the ministers and merchants of the British Isles, it was clear the “African

Trade” had become part of the foundation of their empire in the Americas. “Will not every British Planter in America, and every West-India Merchant in England,” wrote

Charles Hay to the House of Commons, “grant, that the Negroe Trade on the Coast of

Africa, is the chief and fundamental Support of the British Colonies and Plantations?”105

Most Britons agreed. They had celebrated the slave trade for a generation. In 1713, during the reign of Queen Anne, crowds of supporters marked the opening of the British slave trade to Spanish America with a torchlight procession through the night-time streets of London.106 By the early 1740s, Parliament could declare the trade “the most valuable one we have” and British economist Malachy Postlethwayt insisted it was “allowed on all

Hands, that the Trade to Africa is the Branch which renders our American Colonies and

Plantations so advantagious [sic].”107 In the year he published his pamphlet The National and Private Advantages of the African Trade Considered (1746), the population of the enslaved had reached proportions never before witnessed in the plantations of the

Americas.

105 Charles Hayes, The Importance of Effectually Supporting the Royal African Company of England, Impartially Consider’d… (London: M. Cooper, 1744), B2, in Kenneth Morgan, ed., The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, Volume Two, The Royal African Company (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 101. 106 The torchlight ceremony held by the South Sea Company is described briefly by both David Brion Davis and Hugh Thomas, but neither historian provides a citation for their evidence of the event. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), 131; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York: Simon Schuster, 1997), 236. 107Leo F. Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America (Washington, DC, 1924-41), II and III, as quoted in James A. Rawley with Stephen D. Behrendt, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, revised edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981, 2005), 142. Malachy Postlethwayt, The National and Private Advantages of the African Trade Considered (London: P. Knapton, 1746), B, in Morgan, ed., The British Transatlantic,197. The centrality of the slave trade to British Commerce was widely promoted in the public prints of the era. For additional examples, see Anonymous, The Case of the Royal African Company of England (London: Sam. Aris, 1730), D5-D6; John Bennett, Two Letters and Several Calculations on the Sugar Colonies and Trade (London: Printed for R. Montagu, 1738), passim.

Yet for colonists, the success of their trade in slaves created a sense of crisis.

They believed the importation of so many enslaved people was the principle explanation for the rising numbers of conspiracies and insurrections in the Americas. Each new rumor of a conspiracy or insurrection evoked white protestations against the slave trade.

“There is some great Fatality attends the English Dominion in America,” worried an anonymous contributor to the New York Gazette in 1734, “from the too great Number of that unchristian and barbarous People being imported.”108 As the rumors of far flung slave rebellion and slave conspiracies swept through colonial America, Britons believed that slave importation was behind the unrest. We are “aware of the Great Risque we run from an insurrection of our negroes,” wrote Charles Town slave merchant Robert

Pringle.109

This was the great contradiction – the paradox – of British colonial America in the first half of the eighteenth century. White planters sought after and purchased ever larger numbers of slaves even as they struggled violently against them. It was a problem quite different from what historian Edmund Morgan calls the “American Paradox,” the historical problem of reconciling the rise of liberty in America with the concurrent rise of slavery.110 Morgan described this paradox as a colonial American phenomenon that spanned two centuries, but the moral dilemma of holding slaves while proclaiming “all people are created equal” troubled American Revolutionaries and the generations of

Americans who followed far more than it concerned the people of the British Empire in

108 The New York Gazette, Numb. 439, March 18 to March 25, 1734. 109 Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Charles Town, 22nd November 1740, in Walter B. Edgar, ed., The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, Volume One: April 2, 1737-September 25, 1742 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 273. 110 Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Jun., 1972), 5-29.

47 the early 1700s. The colonists believed their liberties were the inheritance of all Britons, protected by their Protestant king and upheld through a constitution reaffirmed in their

Glorious Revolution of 1689.111 “Rule, Britannia,” wrote a famous poet in 1740, “Rule the waves, Britons never shall be slaves.”112 White colonists excluded people of African ancestry from the category of Briton as surely as they enslaved them throughout the provinces. The American paradox between 1700 and 1750 lay not in the colonists’ willingness to own slaves, but instead in their determination to import so many of the people they feared.

This contradiction plagued the landed gentry of the colonies between the years

1729 and 1746. Even as they demanded slaves for their plantations, they articulated increasing awareness of the dangers of coercing labor from so many enslaved people.

The gentry shared rumors of plots and revolts across the Atlantic Ocean and many blamed the unrest on the rising slave trade. The result of this communication was a political movement among the landed classes, oft-forgotten by historians, which sought to slow or stop the importation of slaves into the British colonies. Planters responded to news of unrest abroad by coordinating their efforts and copying the laws of their neighbors. Together, they settled on a policy of increasing taxes on slaves imported, duties that were intended “as an effective prohibition” on the African trade. In this shared response to the slave trade, the leading planters developed a sense of common

111 Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 7, 63-73, and passim. 112 The famous British patriotic song “Rule, Britannia” was first written as a poetic ode by James Thomson in his play “Alfred” but was soon set to music and widely celebrated throughout the British Empire. James Thomson, Works of James Thomson: With his Last Corrections and Improvements, Volume II (n.p., 1763), 191.

48 purpose and coordinated their efforts to protect themselves against new populations of enslaved people in British America.

The gentry had good reason to fear. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, they had built a British Atlantic conducive to widespread unrest. Comparing provinces between the years 1729 and 1746 reveals that rebellions and accusations of conspiracy were more likely in regions that saw dramatic increases to the proportion of slaves in the overall population. It is also quite obvious that changes in demography were only part of a complicated story of unrest. Comparing colonies reveals that very similar slave populations could vary dramatically in their choices to rebel and in the likelihood that anxious whites might accuse their bondsmen of conspiracy. The most important aspect of the slave trade in the first half of the eighteenth century was not simply that larger slave populations were more likely to rebel, but that the “African Trade” fostered conflict between planters and merchants, assemblies and councils, and between white colonists and black slaves.

The Rise of the British African Trade

Graph [1-1]: Transatlantic Numbers of Africans Carried into British Mainland America and the Caribbean on British vessels, 1675-1750 [in Thousands]113

“Like one of the patriarchs,” wrote William Byrd II, “I have my flocks and my herds, my bondsmen, and bond-women, and every soart of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence of everyone, but Providence.”114 From

Virginia in 1727, Byrd wrote to his English correspondents across the ocean with a confidence born from the wealth and status of the leading gentry of his day. He was a planter, a patriarch who claimed ownership of slaves and profited from the tobacco

113 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 26, 2012). 114 Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia 1684-1776 (Charlottesville, Va: The University Press of Virginia, 1977), 354-355.

50 agriculture that provided him with his position in planter society. His was inherited wealth, gained from his father’s land holdings and trading in all forms, including slaves from Africa. Byrd II came of age during the transformative years in the Chesapeake when planters aggressively sought to replace white servants with black slaves and he was the member of a small cadre of families that had come to dominate Virginia politics by the first quarter of the eighteenth century.115 He was also a prolific writer who kept up a steady correspondence across the ocean. His life has long been seen as emblematic of the wealthy landholder in colonial Virginia.116

Byrd spent most of his life in either Virginia or England, but his prosperity was the product of a broad expansion in commerce and slave trading that took place throughout British America and the West Indies in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Over his lifetime, the British became the consummate slave traders of the western hemisphere. Their ascent as leaders of the slave trade was rooted in the expansion of their colonial empire overseas: the demand for labor in the English plantations, the increasing volume of shipping between colonies, and the unique combination of state sponsorship and private enterprise that expanded what they had always called the

“African Trade.” The rise of the British slave trade was part of the colonial enterprise, an attempt by the British to satiate their need for labor in their colonies and to profit from the lucrative (so it was assumed) trade in human beings. By 1745, the growth in this commerce of people was tied to British imperial expansion. The slave trade was, as

115 For a book length study of this transition from Bacon’s Rebellion to the 1740s, see Anthony Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 116 See, for example, Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., The Great American Gentleman: William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, His Secret Diary for the years 1709-1712(New York: Putnam, 1963); Michael Zuckerman, “William Byrd’s Family,” Perspectives in American History 12 (1979), 253-311; Anthony Parent, Foul Means; and Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: the World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).

51 contemporary British economist Malachy Postlethwayt would explain, “the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion.”117

Historians might be surprised by the significance I place on the slave trade in the first half of the eighteenth century. Scholars who study this commerce in people generally focus either on the formative era of the seventeenth century or the latter years of the eighteenth century, when British slave trading reached its highest volume. In the

Oxford History of the British Empire, for example, David Richardson’s chapter on the history of the British slave trade placed little significance on the growth of the trade in the first half of the century. He noted the greatest volume in slave trading took place in the late 1760s.118 Historians of South Carolina and Virginia have consistently noted the sharp rise of slave imports in those colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century, but far fewer have stressed the increase in Jamaica, the mid-Atlantic, or New England.119 Their reasons for neglecting the first half of the eighteen century are obvious. The volume of slave shipments from 1700 to 1750 was less than that of 1750 to 1800. Over the course

117 This quote has become ubiquitous in studies of the transatlantic slave trade and yet I have not been able to identify the exact quote in the work of Postlethwayt. It is typically cited from Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 51, which in turn cites J.F. Rees, “The Phases of British Commercial Policy in the Eighteenth Century,” Economica (June, 1925), 143, who himself does not actually provide a citation. James A. Rawley and Stephen D. Behrendt attribute the quote to Malachy Postlethwayt, The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in North America (London: J. Robinson, 1745), passim., yet I have not actually found the exact quote in my version of the pamphlet (though the passim. designation is appropriate). While it is possible that another version of the pamphlet exists, it may be that the quote was misattributed by Rees, cited by Williams, and then quoted by historians ever since. For the quote being cited directly from Postlethwayt, see Rawley and Behrendt, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 212-213. 118David Richardson, “The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 442. 119 For the significance of slave imports into Virginia, see Allan Kulikoff, “A ‘Prolifick People:’ Black Population Growth in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1700-1790,” Southern Studies, Vol. 16, Issue 4, 1997, 391- 428. For South Carolina, see Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).

52 of the history of the British slave trade, the first half of the eighteenth century appears only as a high step on a long and infamous stairway.

But from the perspective of people in colonial America living in the first half of the eighteenth century - white and black, free and slave - the demographic shift in slave population meant a great deal. Never in the history of British colonial America had merchants transported so many slaves into the colonies. The numbers of new slaves altered the populations in every province, not only the American South. While in some of the northern mainland colonies the number of white emigrants equaled or surpassed that of black slaves, the volume of the trade insured that a population of coerced and abused laborers was a physical presence that strained the oppressive fabric of British

America. The slave trade in the first half of the eighteenth century was a powerful and transformative force.

William Byrd II was born into a Virginia already transitioning to a labor force reliant on African slavery. His English born father, Byrd I, had extensive land holdings in the province and had prospered in trading with American Indians. In 1676, when young Byrd II was only two years old, Nathaniel Bacon led an army of frustrated white servants and slaves in rebellion against the governor and leading planters.120 Byrd’s mother spirited him away to the eastern shore to escape the wrath of the disaffected poor.

After the failed rebellion, Byrd’s father joined with other gentry in actively importing both rum and slaves from the Caribbean into Virginia.121 His father joined the elite

120 Marion, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia 1684-1776, Volume II (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1977), 195, n.1. 121 Louis B. Wright, “William Byrd I and the Slave Trade,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Aug., 1945), 379-380.

53 governor’s Council and in keeping with his status in the province, sent young Byrd II to

England to study and live with his mother’s family, the Horsmandens.

At the end of the seventeenth century, men like Byrd I sought to profit from a demand for slaves that was far outstripping the monopolies imposed by the Stuart monarchy. Before 1689, the kings of England had followed a model of slave trading that embraced a state run monopoly, called the Royal African Company, for trading to Africa.

Despite blessings from the Stuarts and a great deal of investment from merchant interests, the Royal African Company quickly proved inadequate in satiating the terrible demand for labor in the late seventeenth-century plantations.122 Up until the Glorious Revolution, the Royal African Company carried an annual average of 6,100 slaves a year to the New

World, more than doubling the number of slaves in the Americas, yet planters complained bitterly over the inability of the RAC to satisfy demand.123 The “groans” of the planters against the monopoly began almost immediately and grew louder over time.

“We must have them; we cannot be without them,” wrote the Bajan planter Edward

Littleton of the slave supply. “How the Company and Agents Lord it over us, having us thus in their power,” he wrote, “We are forced to scramble for them in so shameful a manner, that one of the great burdens of our lives is the buying of negroes.”124 This competition for slaves was especially acute in Virginia in the 1680s and 1690s, as the

RAC neglected the Chesapeake for the larger markets of the Caribbean. With the

Glorious Revolution in 1689, the Royal African Company discovered that without the

122 Davies, Royal African Company, 312. 123 Rawley, Transatlantic Slave Trade, 135. 124 Edward Littleton, The groans of the plantations, or, A true account of their grievous and extreme sufferings by the heavy impositions upon sugar, and other hardships Relating more particularly to the island of Barbados (London: Printed by M. Clarke, 1689, reprinted 1698), 4-5.

54 support of the Stuart kings, many parliamentarians were less than friendly to the renewal of its charter.

In 1697, William Byrd I became what was then known as a “ten percenter,” a private slave trader outside of the monopoly who sought to send his own ship to Africa.

After the Glorious Revolution, private traders took advantage of the suspension of the monopoly and launched for the coast of West Africa. Between 1689 and 1697, English

“interlopers” outnumbered RAC ships by nearly four to one in the African slave trade.125

In 1697, the RAC negotiated a compromise that ended their monopoly but required every

English vessel visiting the coast of Africa to pay a 10 percent duty for maintenance of slave forts. 126 Slave traders like Byrd I could legally send ships to Africa, but they were easy prey for rival European powers. In 1699, William Byrd I’s slave ship the William and Jane was captured by a French privateer off the coast of West Africa. Byrd made his son his agent in London, tasked with the responsibility of petitioning the English government to retrieve his ship from the French Crown. Young Byrd II’s first experience in the halls of power came from his defense of his family’s trade in slaves.127

Table [1-1]: Number of Transatlantic British Ships engaged in the Slave Trade to Mainland North America and the Caribbean, 1700 to 1750128 Year Mainland North America Caribbean Totals 1701-1710 66 469 535 1711-1720 68 518 586 1721-1730 120 591 711 1731-1740 202 588 790 1741-1750 65 507 572 Totals 523 2,740 3,263

125 Rawley, Transatlantic Slave Trade, 140-141. 126Herbert Klein, “Slaves and Shipping in eighteenth century Virginia,” 384. For interlopers in the 1690s, see Davies, Royal African Company, 142-51. 127Wright, “William Byrd I and the Slave Trade,” 379-380. 128 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012).

Table [1-2]: Slave Disembarked in the British Transatlantic Slave Trade, Estimates by Region, 1700 to 1750129 Europe Mainland N. Amer. Brit. Carib. Fr. Carib. Dutch Amer. Danish W.I. Span. Americas Brazil Africa Totals 1700 0 974 17,033 0 0 0 1,318 0 0 19,326 1701-1710 0 13,035 106,455 4,877 0 113 1,390 0 0 125,870 1711-1720 0 11,213 115,294 115 0 0 10,194 979 0 137,796 1721-1730 532 28,251 144,730 0 0 0 12,260 138 259 186,170 1731-1740 2,631 55,120 135,807 321 500 0 6,548 444 166 201,537 1741-1750 0 15,841 119,465 3,000 45 290 4,186 0 90 142,918 Totals 3,163 124,434 638,785 8,313 546 403 35,896 1,561 516 813,616

The acquiescence of the Royal African Company to enterprising merchants and planters ushered in a new era for British slave trading at the opening of the eighteenth century. Over the next fifty years, the British “African Trade” surpassed all others. The summary above provides estimates of the slaves disembarked by British vessels into the various regions along the Atlantic littoral. The most dramatic increase in slave trading took place on the American mainland, where slave disembarkation increased more than four-fold between 1710 and 1740. In the British Caribbean, the increase in volume was less extreme, but estimates of the numbers of slaves disembarked still rose from 106,455 from 1701-1710, to 144,730 from 1721-1730, or an increase of 36 percent in slave trading volume. After the granting of the slave trading Assiento at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, the British also increased their slave trade to the Spanish

Americas, as shown above.

In the Caribbean, the British shifted their plantation complex westward, expanding the planter’s demand for slaves. The island of Barbados, so dominant in the seventeenth century, declined in sugar exports even as the Leeward Islands and Jamaica expanded both the number of plantations and their demand for black bondsmen. Between

129 Estimates Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces (accessed March 27, 2012).

1700 and 1725, exports of sugar increased the most in the Leewards, more than doubling the tonnage sent to England from 7,044 in 1700 to 16,748 in 1725.130 The British

Leewards doubled in population as well, though this increase was entirely in the slave population, with the white population actually declining from 8,300 in 1700 to 8,000 by

1750.131 Black majorities dominated in the Leewards to an extent that outstripped the mother colony of Barbados.

Graph [1-2]: Transatlantic Slave Trade into the British Caribbean, 1700 to 1750 (actual count)132

130 Richard B. Sheridan, “Caribbean Plantation Society, 1689-1748,” The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume II, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 400-401. 131 Sheridan, “Caribbean Plantation Society,” 401. 132 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012).

By far, Jamaica was the province with the most insatiable demand for slave labor in British America. With a geographic expanse thirty times the size of Barbados and the

Leewards combined, the westward Caribbean island was the principle destination for new planters and slave ships in the Caribbean during the first half of the eighteenth century.133

In 1700, Jamaica could not produce half the sugar produced in Barbados. By 1750,

Jamaica exported nearly three times the amount of the older colony.134 The development of so many new plantations fostered a desperate desire for slaves among the British gentry. Over the course of the first half of the eighteenth century, Jamaica carried more than 286,000 Africans into the colony [Graph 2]. A small percentage of these slaves were re-exported into Spanish America as part of an international slave trade during this period. Jamaica’s importance to the slave trade and the sugar trade would place the colony at the forefront of the attention of the British Empire between 1700 and 1750.

133 Sheridan, “Caribbean Plantation Society,” 401. 134 According to Sheridan’s estimates for sugar production, which are taken from Noel Deerr, Jamaica exported to England 4,874 tons of sugar in 1700 compared to 10,099 tons exported by Barbados. In 1748, Jamaica had nearly quadrupled its exports to 17,399 tons while the export tonnage of Barbados had actually declined to 6,442. Sheridan, “Caribbean Plantation Society,” Table 18.2, 401.

Chart [1-1]: Transatlantic Slave Trade into British Mainland America, 1700 to 1750135

During the same years, the southern mainland colonies each experienced a sharp rise in their demand for labor. In the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, the westward (and northern) migration of white colonists into the Piedmont put new regions under intensive cultivation of tobacco.136 This created a need for laborers at a time when the long declining migration of white servants reached new lows due to the imperial conflicts of King William’s War (1688-97) and Queen Anne’s War (1702-13).137 Even

135 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012). 136 Philip Morgan and Michael Nicholls provide a list of tithables from the Piedmont beginning in the late 1720s that chronicles this change. Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls, “Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 1720-1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), 215. 137 The importance of the decline of white servants is stressed most convincingly by Menard. Russell R. Menard, “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” in Menard, Migrants, Servants and Slaves: Unfree Labor in Colonial British America (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2001), 366-382.

59 as the migration of poor whites slowed into these regions, the land-rich gentry of Virginia continued to consolidate their holdings and wealth sufficient to afford larger numbers of black slaves that could be held for life.138 These conditions encouraged planters to complete the transition in their labor force from servants to slaves. During the peaceful years between 1698 and 1702, and after 1713, the planters of Virginia and Maryland rushed to purchase Africans. As Allan Kulikoff has noted, the years between 1700 and

1739 were exactly the years when the African slave trade to the Chesapeake peaked.139

William Byrd II returned to Virginia to become a planter during the early years of this expansion in Chesapeake slavery. His father had died in 1705 and despite a clear penchant for London society, he gave it up for his inheritance in land and slaves along the northern reaches of the tidewater. He married Lucy Parke, daughter of Daniel Parke, then the Captain General of the Leeward Islands, and assumed his place in the hierarchy of wealthy Virginia landholders. In just a few years, he took up his father’s position on the council of Virginia and with seven other leading gentry, sought to extend the power and authority he imposed over his plantation to all of Virginia. It was five years into his new life as a member of the Council when, in 1710, the sheriffs brought word of widespread slave conspiracy in Surry and Isle of Wight Counties. Byrd broke his usual mundane diary entries to record his dreams of a burning star, an inauspicious sign of a

“judgment” upon his country. But neither he nor his countrymen slowed their expansion of slavery.

138 Menard, “Transitions of African Slavery,” 43. 139 Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680- 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 65-66.

Graph [1-3]: Transatlantic Slaves Disembarked in South Carolina, 1700 to 1750140

As Byrd and his Council sought to expand their plantation system in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the planters of South Carolina were rapidly developing the coastal Low Country into a major new region of production and slave labor for the

British Empire. Beginning in the late 1690s, planters in South Carolina launched a rice monoculture that quickly proved more lucrative than any other crop available to the region. Like their sugar cultivating counterparts in the Caribbean, rice planters insisted that African slaves were the only labor force adequate for working in the brutal conditions of the Low Country. The profits from rice production provided the capital for

140 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 13, 2011).

61 the purchase of new slaves taken directly from Africa. Like Virginia and Maryland,

South Carolina increased the importation of enslaved Africans over the next four decades. By 1720, the colony had achieved a black majority. By the 1730s, slave importation had reached its highest levels in the first half of the eighteenth century.141

Graph [1-4]: Slave Imports into the Mid-Atlantic and New England from the Caribbean, 1700-1750142

It was during this same period that the provinces of the British northern mainland reached the pinnacle of their demand for slave labor in the colonial era. The northern colonies differed from the southern colonies in that slaves did not replace white servitude as a dominant form of labor. Rather, demand for labor was so great that rising levels of

141 Menard, “Transitions to African Slavery,” 42-43. 142 These estimates are based on those of Gregory O’Mally, “Beyond the Middle Passage: Slave Migration from the Caribbean to North America, 1619-1807,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 66, No. 1 (Jan., 2009), 125-172.

62 slave imports was equaled and often exceeded by the increase in immigration of white servants from the British Isles and German states.143 After 1720, merchants in

Pennsylvania developed a redemptioner system that carried tens of thousands of Palatines into the mid-Atlantic. Rural economies from Pennsylvania to New England were unable to develop the marketable surplus that made purchasing lifelong servants affordable and cost-effective, so black slaves remained only a marginal part of the overall labor economy. Still, the desire for labor on the dairy farms of the Narragansett Country of

Rhode Island or in the shipping ports of Philadelphia, New York, Newport, and Boston, fostered a growing demand for slaves. There was an inverse relationship between the importation of slaves and white servants in the northern colonies. During the economic depression of the 1730s, for example, both Boston and New York actually saw white migration decline and slave importation increase. As Gary Nash explains, economic hardship discouraged free white laborers from relocating in colonial ports.144 Merchants and farmers sought to increase production during periods when prices fell, borrowing to buy slaves.145 Only during the war years of the 1740s, did these northern ports witness a privateering boom that saw a dramatic increase in white labor and a decline in the number of slaves imported.

In this era, merchant vessels carried far more slaves in the inter-colonial trade between the islands and the northern mainland than were carried across the Atlantic from

143 Aaron S. Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigrationin the Era of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Jun., 1998),51. 144 Gary B. Nash, “The New York Census of 1737: A Critical Note on the Integration of Statistical and Literary Sources,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 36, No. 3 (Jul., 1979), 431. 145 “The busiest period of slave importing in the history of Massachusetts occurred in the late I720S and early I730s,” argues Desrochers. Robert E. Desrochers, Jr., “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704-1781” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 59, No. 3, Slaveries in theAtlantic World (Jul., 2002), 644, n.33.

Africa to America. Between 1700 and 1750, an estimated 80 percent of the slaves forcefully imported into the northern mainland colonies came from the Caribbean.146 The majority of people carried by this trade arrived in small groups of no more than five or ten per ship aboard vessels with other goods from the islands. Historians have long assumed that these Caribbean arrivals were mostly West Indian-born slaves, peoples sold off of plantations or exiled from colonies because of undesirable behavior. The habit of colonists to worry over “refuse negroes,” enslaved people considered either maimed or incorrigible who were sent north, created the impression among scholars that these slaves had been born in the West Indies. Greg O’Malley’s study of this inter-colonial trade suggests that the identity of northern bound slaves may have been quite different than historians have assumed. He finds most transatlantic slave trade vessels did not sell their entire cargo of people at their first stop in the islands. Many slave ships fed and watered slaves in Barbados and the Leewards and then carried on to the mainland where they would sell the people aboard ship. According to his calculations, more than 93 percent of the slaves arriving in mainland North America from the Caribbean may have been

African-born.147

Behind the growth of both monopoly and private slave trading was a broader expansion of shipping and commerce in the British Empire. Between 1675 and 1730, transatlantic crossings tripled from near five hundred a year to fifteen hundred.148 Slave trading vessels appear to have grown proportionately during this expansion of commerce,

146 O’Mally, “Beyond the Middle Passage,”135. 147 Ibid., 135. 148 Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 302.

64 though they were always a small part of a widespread imperial project.149 Between 1675 and 1680, the British averaged about 26 transatlantic slave ships a year, increasing to roughly 90 ships a year between 1736 and 1740. Merchants trading in slaves benefited from this growing volume of shipping as economies of scale lowered the cost of transporting goods and made the slave trade more profitable. It is hard to overstate this critical factor in the growth of the British slave trade. For the merchants and financiers of the slave trade, the profitability of the Middle Passage depended heavily on the costs of shipping. According to David Richardson and David Eltis, between 1675 and 1725, efficiency among all ships delivering slaves to the Americas improved by twenty-five percent.150 Ships of sail were able to lower costs by shrinking the numbers of crew per tonnage and by keeping larger numbers of slaves alive in the Middle Passage. This change in price over time has been cited by Eltis as the “single most important influence over the size and profitability of slave empires.”151

149 Even at the height of slave trading in 1775, ships clearing from London for Africa were barely more than three percent of the overall ships departing for foreign shores. The slave trade remained only a small portion of national income for English merchants as well, averaging about three percent. 150 David Eltis and David Richardson, “Productivity in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 32, Issue 4, Oct. 1995, 465-466. 151 Ibid., 466.

Chart [1-2]: Numbers of British Slaving Vessels in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1650 to 1750152

“Like one of the patriarchs,” wrote Byrd, “I have my flocks and my herds.”

Indeed, Byrd’s prosperity and power had grown alongside the empire of his people. Over his lifetime, the British had become the consummate slave traders of the western hemisphere. Between 1701 and 1750, the British had imported more than 675,000 people and nearly quadrupled their total slave imports into the Americas. This rapid expansion was a response to the demand for labor in the plantations, one that was ubiquitous throughout the Americas and fostered from the northern harbors of mainland America to the islands of the Caribbean. The expansion of the slave trade grew in proportion to

British imperial shipping between colonies and through the unique combination of state

152 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed June 7th, 2012).

66 sponsorship and private enterprise that expanded the “African Trade.” By the middle of the eighteenth century, Britons believed slaves were critical to the colonial enterprise; black labor was the “pillar” of American commerce.

The Fears of the Planters

“They import so many Negros hither,” fretted Byrd, “that I fear this colony will some time or other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea.”153 In the summer of

1736, it is doubtful that Byrd seriously worried that Virginia would soon become a new

West Africa, but his letter to the Earl of Egmont conveyed in no uncertain terms his concerns about the future welfare of his colony because of its growing slave populations.

“I am sensible,” he explained to the Earl, “of the many bad consequences of multiplying these Ethiopians amongst us.” Chief among his fears was a general rebellion, a revolt by the new Africans carried in chains into the province. “We have already at least

10,000 men of these descendants of Ham fit to bear arms,” he stated, “& their numbers increase every day as well by birth as importation. And in case there should arise a man of desperate courage amongst us, exasperated by a desperate fortune, he might with more advantage than Cataline, kindle a servile war.”154 The result, Byrd warned, would

“tinge our rivers as wide as they are with blood.”

Byrd’s letter to the Earl of Egmont was the product of an era of profound unease among the gentry of the British Atlantic Empire. His letters were not simply the

153 William Byrd II to John Perceval, July 12, 1736, in Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence, 487-489. 154 For reflections upon the influence of the “Curse of Noah” on early modern Christian thinking, see David Brion Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reflection,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), 8-9; Robin Blackburn, “The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), 90-94; David M. Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009).

67 ruminations of an anxious patriarch or a typical expression of white racial fear. Rather,

Byrd’s letter to England was an act of participation in a movement among the British elite on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, a call to action among the wealthiest planters and governors to slow the trade in slaves, before it was too late. His correspondent, the

Earl of Egmont, was but one of many English gentry deeply concerned with limiting the importation of slaves into American provinces. Beginning in the West Indies and growing over time, British gentry and colonial officials increasingly expressed deep misgivings over the expansion of the institution of slavery. These men were not abolitionists. They were the very people who profited from slave labor. But as leading land owners with the most to lose, they expressed growing concern that the slave populations were untenable. To slow the importation of African slaves, these officials settled upon a policy of import duties, heavy taxes levied on merchants and ship captains with the expressed intent of raising the price of enslaved people and thereby reducing slave imports. In their most ambitious project, a few wealthy English gentry sought to exclude the slave trade from their newest colony entirely, a project they called Georgia.

The British gentry faced powerful opposition to these import duties from merchants on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. With few exceptions, the investors in maritime commerce were uniformly against any imposition on their trade. They were joined in England by manufacturers and artisans in the towns of London, Bristol, and

Liverpool, a group that could levy enormous commercial influence in the halls of the

King. In Philadelphia and New York, merchants demonstrated less influence, but they still sought to sway lawmakers with money and dire warnings of the death of commerce.

Together, these interests formed a powerful lobby that regularly petitioned the king at the arrival of any news of duties passed in the individual provinces.

Though the merchants of England would prove most powerful, the gentry also faced less organized opposition from the middling and poorer planters represented in the colonial assemblies. Poorer planters resisted the importation of slave duties because it raised the prices of slaves. In the West Indies, this opposition consisted of smaller landholders who viewed the vast slave holdings of absentee landholders as an internal threat to the colonies. Rather than raise duties, they sought to tax absentee landholders whose plantations were viewed as overly large. In the mainland provinces, small planters resented the attempt of large slave owners to control slave imports. By far, the most avid small planter opposition to the movement came from Georgia. In that colony, the new migrants deeply resented the ban on slave imports imposed by the trustees.

Historians have traditionally studied slave import duties in the context of the

American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Their interest was born from the assertions of the colonists themselves. In 1775, the Virginia Gazette published an editorial blaming the slave trade on English merchants and the British King:

Our Assemblies have repeatedly passed acts laying heavy duties upon imported Negroes, by which they meant altogether to prevent the horrid traffick; but their humane intentions have been as often frustrated by the cruelty and covetousness of a set of English merchants, who prevailed upon the King to repeal our kind and merciful acts…155

Patriots in the American Revolution sought to absolve themselves from culpability in the slave trade by pointing out their many legislative attempts to tax and slow the “horrid traffick.” They claimed that English merchants and the King had been responsible for

155 The Virginia Gazette, June, 1775, quoted in Darold D. Wax, “Negro Import Duties in Colonial Virginia: A Study of British Commercial Policy and Local Public Policy,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 79, No. 1, Part One (Jan., 1971), 29.

69 overturning the colonial assemblies. Thomas Jefferson included similar accusations against King George III in his early draft of the Declaration of Independence, insisting the monarch had “waged cruel war against human nature itself … against a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” Despite “every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce,” the King of England had forced the colonies to abandon their laws and maintain the slave trade.156

In the first half of the twentieth century, many scholars had seen in the debate over slave import duties clear evidence confirming the accusations of the rebel colonists.

In his History of Slavery in Virginia (1902), James Ballagh, the most overt of patriotic historians, argued “No colony made a more strenuous and prolonged effort to prevent the imposition of negro slavery upon it, and no State a more earnest attempt to alleviate or rid itself of that burden than Virginia.”157 This assertion was incorrect, of course, but the idea received some support from scholars as noted as WEB Dubois and Lorenzo

Greene.158 There were many historians who accepted that colonists had tried to stop the slave trade with import duties.

In his sweeping The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, David Brion Davis refuted both Jefferson’s and Ballagh’s assertion that colonists had been unwilling participants in the slave trade. He looked back at the debate over import duties in the

1730s and concluded planters had made a half-hearted attempt to slow human trafficking.

156 A second attempt to impose duties on slaves in Virginia in the 1760s probably informed Jefferson’s draft. For a detailed discussion of the history of import duties and the American Revolution in Virginia, see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999), 66-73. 157 Both Davis and Wax cite this passage from Ballagh in their arguments on slave duties. James C. Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902), 11, quoted in Wax, “NegroImport Duties,” 30. 158 Wax, “Negro Import Duties in Virginia,”30.

Their efforts had been immediate reactions to slave rebellion that faded quickly and were at best hypocritical and at worst, blatant attempts to raise the value of their own slaves by lowering the numbers of people imported.159 Davis’s work is complemented by the articles of Darold Wax, who sees in the slave duties of Virginia and Pennsylvania the more basic colonial motive of trying to raise revenue. Like liquor and other goods, planters sought to tax slaves to relieve the burden of debt and fund public works.160

The colonists’ attempt to impose slave import duties was in fact part of a much larger movement taking place in the British Atlantic in the first half of the eighteenth century. The growth of the slave trade exacerbated the fears of white provincials and created tensions between the many classes of Britons in the Empire. The wealthy planters, many of whom had purchased scores of slaves for their own plantations, believed that ever larger populations of the enslaved could lead to servile insurrection.

The gentry saw in the increasing number of conspiracies and unrest the growing possibility of rebellion and they sought to coordinate with like-minded whites to control the rising numbers of slaves. The letters between officials and white colonists, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, bear testimony to their concerns about impending rebellion.

Davis is right to point out the obvious hypocrisy of slave owners in the American

Revolution bemoaning the slave trade, but in the 1730s, the movement to slow the importation of slaves was very real. It was a shared response to a widespread fear of rebellion.

159 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Cornell University Press, 1966), 140. 160 Darold Wax, "Negro Imports into Pennsylvania, 1720-1766," Pennsylvania History, 32 (1965), 254- 287; Wax, “Negro Import Duties in Colonial Virginia…,”35.

As the British slave trade carried tens of thousands of new slaves into colonial

America, British officials filled their correspondence with fearful observations about the growing population of the enslaved. “Our number of slaves augment dayly,” wrote

Jamaica’s Lt. Governor Thomas Hadasyd in 1703, “but to my great grief the number of white men dayly decrease…”161 The threat of growing slave populations was one of the first things Governor Spotswood addressed on his arrival to Virginia in 1710. “I would willingly whisper to you,” he warned the Assembly, “The Latter Sort (I mean our

Negroes) by Their Dayly Encrease Seem to be The Most Dangerous… freedom Wears a

Cap which Can Without a Tongue, Call Togather all Those who Long to Shake off the fetters of Slavery.”162 By the 1730s, British colonists throughout the empire had come to accept that there was a direct correlation between the growth of slave populations and unrest in colonies. From Antigua in 1737, slave conspiracy judges insisted “the vast superiority in number of the Blacks, to the white People” had been the “greatest” inducement to plot rebellion.163 The intellectual Benjamin Martin argued against populating the new colony of Georgia with slaves in 1741, insisting that the “greater the number of blacks…and the greater the disproportion is between them and her white people, the more danger she is liable to,” and this was reiterated by Charles Town merchant Robert Pringle, who worried over the growing population of South Carolina slaves.164 From New Jersey, an anonymous contributor to the New York Gazette summed up the fears of white colonists in 1734:

161 Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, Vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1932), 5. 162 H.R. McIlwaine et al., eds., Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1702-3 to 1705, 1705 to 1706, 1710 to 1712 (Richmond, VA: The Colonial Press, E. Waddey Co., 1912), 240. 163 A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua (Dublin: 1737), 14-15. 164 The belief that growing slave populations were a danger to white provincials was prevalent throughout the British Empire between 1730 and 1746. See, for example, from Jamaica, Governor Hunter to the

The late Massacre perpetrated by the Negros on the island of St. John’s, the very great head they are come to in the Island of Jamaica, and the general Melancholy Apprehensions of his Majesty’s Subjects in the West Indies, gives but too much room to fear there is some great Fatality attends the English Dominion in America, from the too great Number of that unchristian and barbarous People being imported…”165

As with planters and merchants throughout the provinces, the anonymous writer feared the slave trade had brought a “great Fatality” upon the “English Dominions in America.”

There were many early attempts to slow down or limit the importation of slaves into the Americas. Colonists on the mainland could look to precedents established by the planters of Barbados in their treatment of Irish prisoners of war from the 1640s. Though desperate for labor, the Bajan assemblies had sought to block the importation of Irish

Catholics into their colony through a series of Acts and impositions of duties on merchants transporting prisoners. As a sign of things to come, the Cromwellian government had ordered these laws repealed.166 On the mainland, it was Massachusetts that first began to use import duties to slow or block the importation of African slaves into their province. In 1705, the “Act for the Better Preventing of a Spurious and Mixt

Issue” imposed a four pound duty on the master of any vessel importing a slave into the colony. Though the act did not state its purpose, the title clearly indicated the

Council of Trade and Plantations, Jamaica, July 4, 1730 America and West Indies: July 1730, 1-5, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 37: 1730 (1937), 155-165; on South Carolina, [Benjamin Martyn], An Impartial Inquiry in the State and Utility of Colony of Georgia (London, 1741), in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, Vol. 1 (Savanna: 1840), 167; Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Nov. 22, 1740, Robert Pringle Letterbook, ibid.. 273. 165The New York Gazette, Mar. 18 to Mar. 25, 1734. 166 Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 40-41.

73 motivations were racial.167 A letter published in the Boston News-Letter the following year gave a better explanation for the duty. “The Importing of Negroes in this or the

Neighbouring Provinces is not so beneficial to the Crown or Country, as white servants would be,” the author argued, “For Negroes do not carry Arms to defend the Country as

Whites do.” Despite noting that black slaves would not contribute to the safety of the colony, the editorialist felt compelled to add “Negroes are generally Eye-Servants, great

Thieves, much addicted to Stealing, Lying, and Purloining.”168

For most of the colonies, imposing duties on the slave trade was at first an attempt to raise revenue but quickly became an attempt to curtail the trade in slaves. Wax argues the slave import duties were important tools for raising revenue. This was certainly true, but the important difference lay in the amount charged to slave traders. Maryland was in fact the first mainland colony to impose a duty in 1695, but the amount was only 20 shillings per slave at a time when slaves averaged near thirty pound sterling a piece.

Virginia followed with a similar duty in 1699 of 20s for a slave and 15s for indentured servants. Pennsylvania did likewise in 1700, imposing the same amount on slaves.

It was during Queen Anne’s War, in 1710, that white authorities began the first inter-colonial movement against the slave trade. In Virginia, near the lower James River, a slave named Will approached a planter named Robert Ruffin with a warning that a widespread slave rebellion was imminent. Ruffin sounded the alarm, warning white planters in the counties of Isle of Wight, James City, and Surry and throughout the

Tidewater that their lives were in danger. According to the testimony of Will and several accused conspirators taken up by Justices of the Peace, the accused rebels planned to rise

167 “Act for the Better Prevention of a Spurious and Mixt Issue, 1705,” in Donnan, Documents Illustrative, Vol. 3, 20. 168 “The Importation of Negroes into Massachusetts, 1706,” in Donnan, Documents Illustrative, Vol., 3, 21.

74 up against their masters and then escape to the Dismal Swamp along the southern boundary of Virginia. 169 The men implicated by Will and forced to confess epitomized the Chesapeake slave population in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The accused slave conspirators included an American Indian, a native African, and an

African-American, all supposedly coordinating between Virginia counties to rise together. The Justices of the Peace finally settled on two leaders to blame for the plot, an

American Indian named Salvadore and an African named Scipio.170

William Byrd may have been particularly struck by the implications of the conspiracy. He was attending Council in the late spring of 1710 when the sheriffs brought Scipio and Salvadore to the capital of Williamsburg in chains. Byrd recorded his attendance in Council and the decision made by his fellow members to try the two men for high treason against the Crown.171 The ruling of the court in Williamsburg was particularly brutal, requiring the men to be rendered into quarters and their separated body parts to be displayed in the three county seats and in Williambsburg.172

The conspiracy left an impression on the Virginia government and was one of the first issues of consequence encountered by Governor Spotswood when he arrived in the colony for the first time later that summer. Spotswood was met by a new law working its way through the Assembly which sought to impose a five pound sterling duty on each slave carried into the province. The new governor anticipated that it would be a problem for the queen. He immediately sent a note to the Assembly recommending a caution that

169 Parent, Foul Means, 151-154. 170 H.R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, Vol. 3 (Richmond: The Virginia State Library, 1925), 242-243. 171 Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709-1712 (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1941), 167. 172 McIlwane, Executive Journals, 242-243.

75 showed an Englishman’s awareness of the lobbying power of the mercantile elite. “I fear the high Duty Intended on Negro slaves May be Interpreted as a prohibition on that trade,” he warned the assembly in a message from Council, “I hope it may not be yet too

Late for you to make Some amendments That may shew you bear a just Deferene to her

Majesty’s Countenance.” The assembly replied that they had passed the law with the best attention to the good of the people and their queen, and they would make no adjustments.173

The Virginia conspiracy of 1710 had a direct influence on the governors and assemblies of several mainland colonies. Rhode Island passed a new slave import duty of three pounds sterling on each new slave disembarked.174 In South Carolina in 1711, the assemblies passed a new slave import duty of 4 pounds to raise money to fight an Indian war on the Carolina frontier. The timing of this law, passed just months after a similar one in Virginia, suggests the actions of the Low Country were informed by those of the

Chesapeake. Carolina’s Governor Gibbes explained to the assembly the duty was necessary to control the “large increase of negroes, who were beginning to exhibit a malicious disposition.”175 For the governor and his allies, the duties promised to help put down an insurrection of northern Indians while slowing the sharply rising rate of slave imports. The New Yorker Cadwallader Colden was paying attention to these new laws as he visited South Carolina at the time. “They have laid a duty of 6 pound a head,” he wrote to a Philadelphia merchant in Charles Town, “upon all Negroes that have been

173 “Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood to the House of Burgesses, 1710,” in Donnan, Documents Illustrative, 4, 91, n1. 174 “Act of the General Assembly, May 1732,” in Donnan, Documents Relative, 3, 122. 175 “Act for Governing Negroes, 1714,” in Donnan, Documents Illustrative, 4, 257, n2.

76 above 5 months in any of the plantations.”176 Colden was a member of the Colonial

Council with a good deal of influence, but by 1712, neither Philadelphia nor New York

City had yet implemented a duty on its slaves.

All of this changed in the summer of that year. The people of New York City awoke in the deep of night to the sound of fire bells ringing out the alarm. At the sight of the fire, an outhouse set ablaze, a band of twelve “Coromantee” and “Papaw” slaves waited in bush. As men arrived to put out the fire, the Africans fell upon them, killing nine white men and wounding six others over the course of the firelit ambush. For days after, the New York City colonists pursued their attackers, who managed to hide in the woods and barns of Manhattan island. When the British caught the Africans, they burned them, reprisals meant to be more brutal than the rising itself.177

In the neighboring colonies to both the north and south, the New York City insurrection represented a terrifying threat to white slave owners. Pennsylvania’s

Assembly cited the New York insurrection as the impetus for a new duty imposing a twenty pound sterling tax on all imported slaves.178 The Quaker Assemblymen of

Pennsylvania entitled their new law “An Act to Prevent the Importation of Negroes and

Indians into this Province.” Like its neighbors, New York gentry believed that the importation of slaves had sparked the rebellion. David Brion Davis argues that import duties were a response to rebellion, but we can see that they were also coordinated and anticipatory, a clear attempt in regions like Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Rhode

Island to stave off insurrection born from the slave trade.

176 “Act for Governing Negroes, 1714,” in Donnan, Documents Illustrative, 4, 257, n2. 177 Kenneth Scott, “The Slave Revolt in New York of 1712,” Historical Society of New York, 41, 6, 235. 178 Wax, “Negro Duties,” 32.

The prohibitive duties were themselves evidence of coordination between gentry throughout the British Atlantic to slow or stop the slave trade, but planters and merchants alike wrote a good deal to each other about the necessity of creating prohibitive duties.

So it was that Isaac Norris, the Philadelphia merchant, wrote to Thomas Green of South

Carolina after the passage of the slave duty in Philadelphia. “Negroes are prohibited,”

Norris explained to his correspondent.179 In 1715, John Dickinson of Philadelphia wrote to Joshua Crosby of Jamaica, informing him of the debate within the Pennsylvania assembly concerning slave imports.180 Dickinson, a merchant, complained bitterly of the duties imposed on his trade.

In the struggle between the gentry and merchants that emerged over the prohibition of the slave trade, the mainland colonists discovered allies in the planters of the West Indies. The British Caribbean colonies were unable to develop a naturally reproducing slave population nor was there limited land and monoculture of sugar attractive to white migrants. The planters depended heavily on Africans for labor. But the gentry of Antigua and especially Jamaica shared in their fear of a growing slave population. In the 1720s and 1730s, Jamaica’s answer to the threat of growing slave populations was to tax absentee landlords. Planters in Jamaica agreed with gentry on the mainland that the expansion of the slave trade was largely a burden thrust upon the provinces, but they blamed the irresponsible behavior of rich planters who relied too heavily on slave artisans and imported too many slaves. In a letter in London Magazine, a West Indian planter argued that an alliance between wealthy merchants and absentee planters had essentially crushed the sugar planters of Jamaica. Incredibly, the anonymous

179 Isaac Norris to Thomas Green, Aug. 6, 1712, Isaac Norris Letter Book, 1709-1716, as quoted in Wax, “Negro Duties Pennsylvania,” 31. 180 Dickinson to Crosby, Apr. 21, 1715, Jonathan Dickinson Letterbook, Library Company of Philadelphia.

78 planter claimed that the sugar growers wanted to be rid of all of their slaves.181 These sentiments appear to have been widely shared by the majority of planters who resided in

Jamaica. In 1728, they passed new legislation imposing heavy poll taxes on the slaves of absentee landlords.182 Perhaps the best articulation of the West Indian position on slave duties and the slave trade was published by an anonymous planter in London in the

1740s. The planter blamed the insurrections in Jamaica on the slave trade and he appealed to Parliament to stop the importation of slaves, which he claimed were destroying the sugar plantations.183 Like Virginia and the rest of the British Atlantic, the planter saw in the debate over the slave trade a fundamental conflict between the wealthiest planters and merchants, and the colonial gentry.

With these prohibitive duties, the colonists threatened to impede commerce in the

British Empire. The taxes imposed on slaves in the early eighteenth century were almost entirely placed on the masters of vessels and merchants who disembarked their slaves.

The provinces sought to protect their own slave trade by excusing slaves who were only in the colony for a limited amount of time, typically five months in Massachusetts and

Rhode Island and longer in South Carolina. The merchants of the British Atlantic protested loudly and aggressively against each of the duties. From London and Bristol, they paid agents to submit petitions to the British Board of Trade and the King.

In 1717, the merchants won a major victory through the King’s Order in Council prohibiting the imposition of duties by colonial legislatures on merchants within the

British Empire. The “trade and commerce,” insisted the King, were critical to the

181 London Magazine, VI, (April 1737), 191; Davis, Problem of Slavery, 138-141. 182 Hunter to BT, Feb 19, 1731/2, CO 137/20, TNA. 183 An Essay Concerning Slavery, and the Danger Jamaica Is expos’d to from the Too great Number of Slaves (London, [1747]), passim.

79 prosperity of the colonies.184 But the early strategy shared throughout the colonies appears to have been to place two-year time limits on most of the duties. The extirpation of the laws and the time it took for news to travel to the Lords of Trade gave merchants less time to lobby the court. This strategy worked for a time. When, in 1718, South

Carolina sought to create a new slave duty that would completely prohibit the trade by adding 40 pounds to each new slave, the merchants of London and England immediately petitioned the Board of Trade. The Lords refused to order the repeal of the law until they had received an explanation for its passing from the governor. They sent a request to the

Council of South Carolina. By the time the governor responded, the law had already been in place for more than a year and was subsequently repealed by the assembly before the Lords of Trade had issued a ruling.185

By the 1720s, it was clear the duties on slaves were not inhibiting either the purchasing of human chattel or the threat of slave rebellion. In 1723, a new conspiracy in

Virginia set the colony on edge. The leading gentry in the House of Burgesses sought to implement a new duty on liquor and slaves, both to raise new revenue to relieve colonial debt and to again slow the importation of more slaves. The duty was only an additional

40 shillings, but this time the middling planters resisted the law. When it passed by only two votes, it was apparent that only in the lower Tidewater, where the planters exercised their great political strength, had the gentry been able to muster the necessary votes.186

Robert Carter tried to explain this problem to Micajah Perry in England that “the small folks and middling buyers had been the only purchasers of slaves.”187

184 Parent, Foul Means, 175. 185 “Minutes of Meeting of the Lords Proprietor, 1719,” in Donnan, Documents Illustrative, 4, 262-263. 186 Parent, Foul Means, 176. 187 Ibid., 176.

The agents of the merchants of London and Bristol paid close attention to the voting on the act. Robert Cary, a leader of London merchants, claimed to be petitioning the Board of Trade on behalf of the middling slave owners that the duties would be “the

Ruin of the poorer planters.”188 The merchants found in the Board of Trade a new attitude toward commerce. With Robert Walpole taking over the government in 1722, the Lords were beginning a new and more aggressive commercial policy toward the colonies, one in which the administration sought to place the periphery of the empire under tighter economic control.189 In 1724, the Privy Council recommended the repeal of the Virginia Act.

By 1731, the merchant interest and the expressed will of King George II had defeated the movement to halt or slow the trade in slaves throughout British America, and yet the belief that the slave trade was a danger to the safety of the provinces had gained powerful new support among leading gentry reformers in England. For the colonists who feared the trade in slaves, the most important of these reformers were the

Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America. The Trustees incorporated the ideas of the movement against the slave trade in the formation of their new colony and in 1735 won a major victory in Parliament with the passage of the “Act for rendering the colony of Georgia more defensible..,” which outlawed the trade in slaves to their new colony of Georgia on the southern British frontier.

The Trustees joined together from a collection of philanthropic associations that had grown in number and support during the 1720s and 1730s. Their members were generally conservative-minded gentry or religious reformers concerned with what they

188 Parent, Foul Means, 175. 189 Ibid, 174.

81 considered political corruption and moral decay in the British Empire.190 They were also men who had profited directly from the commercial expansion overseen by Minister

Walpole. In 1729, the elderly Thomas Bray, the founder of the Society of the

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Society for the Propagation of

Christian Knowledge, sought to bring together leading reformers to carry on his many projects.191 Bray wanted to continue his advocacy for baptizing slaves and American

Indians and his long conceived project of creating a charity colony for the London poor.192 He recruited James Oglethorpe, an independent minded Tory and member of

Parliament, who had earned a reputation advocating for sailor’s rights and, in 1729, led a committee attempting to address the condition of debtor’s prisons in England.193 He had purchased a substantial amount of shares and held office in the slave trading Royal

African Company.194 Bray also recruited his longtime associate Sir John Percival, the future Earl of Egmont and a dedicated moral reformer.195 After Bray’s death in 1729,

“Bray’s Associates” focused their efforts on a new “charity colony” in the Americas.

Though the origins of the idea of the location for Georgia was never disclosed by the committee, in June of 1730 the Board of Trade ordered South Carolina Governor Johnson to build two forts on the Altamaha River, roughly forty miles from the modern-day

190Phinizy Spalding, “Oglethorpe’s Quest for an American Zion,” in Harvey H. Jackson and Phinizy Spalding, eds., Forty Years of Diversity: Essays on Colonial Georgia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 63-64. 191 Kenneth Coleman, “The Founding of Georgia,” in Jackson and Spalding, Forty Years, 7. 192 Ibid. 193 Spalding, “Oglethorpe’s Quest for an American Zion,” 62-65. 194 Wood explains that Oglethorpe held “high office” in the Royal African Company. Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730-1775 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 4. 195 Betty Wood, “The Earl of Egmont and the Georgia Colony,” in Jackson and Spalding, eds. Forty Years, 82-85.

Florida border. A little more than a week later, Oglethorpe recommended the disputed region to John Percival as a possible site for Georgia.196

The Trustees for the colony of Georgia began their project with the intention to forbid slavery and the slave trade to the colony. Oglethorpe insisted that for the colony to succeed, the colonists must “prohibit within their jurisdiction that abominable and destructive Custom of Slavery, by which the laboring Hands are rendered useless to the

Defence of the State.” Historian Betty Wood explains that the Trustees banned slavery not because of a sentiment of abolition, but because of a fear of its influence on the morals and industriousness of the poor who would be sent to colonize Georgia.197 John

Percival and James Oglethorpe also shared in the conviction that slavery would encourage large landholders to migrate into their fledgling colony and quickly overwhelm the small freeholding farmers they hoped to cultivate.198 In point of fact, the

Trustees dealt with slavery only briefly in their promotional literature, suggesting that they did not want to advertise their intention to ban the institution. In his unpublished

Some Account of the Design of the Trustees, for example, Oglethorpe explained that

Georgia “would prevent any future Massacre and make a stronger Barrier to the present

Settlement and keep the Negroe Slaves of South Carolina in awe.”199 The slaves “are now so numerous as to be dreadful even to their Masters,” he noted, but he never published the manuscript and in his shorter articles, he omitted the argument. In the halls of power, however, Oglethorpe and the Trustees used the issue of slavery very differently.

196 Coleman makes the observation that Oglethorpe was serving on a committee with two members of the Board of Trade at the same time and so it was probably these fellow committee members who informed him of the need for a fort. Coleman, “The Founding of Georgia,” 8. 197 Wood, “The Earl of Egmont and the Georgia Colony,” 86. 198 Spalding, “Oglethorpe’s Quest for an American Zion,” 69. 199 James Edward Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design of the Trustees for establishing Colonys in America, eds. Rodney Baine and Phinizy Spalding, (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 23.

The Trustees were able to ban slavery from their colony by arguing that large slave populations would be a dangerous threat on the Georgia frontier. With some limited funds in hand taken from charities for educating slaves overseas and armed with the political connections of Sir John Percival, the Trustees spent two years negotiating for the King’s permission to develop their colony.200 Oglethorpe and Percival offered to take up the defense of the Carolina frontier and insisted that only by banning slavery could they attract white settlers and prevent rebellion. The organization of the defense of the colony appears to have preoccupied King George II more than any other issue.201 The

Trustees were able to successfully gain royal permission for their charter in June of 1732.

Almost immediately upon settling the colony in 1733, however, white Georgia settlers began complaining against the ban on slaves.202 To prevent slavery from gaining a foothold, Oglethorpe decided to push for a new “Act for rendering the colony of Georgia more defensible..” in the British Parliament with the intention of placing a formidable ban on slavery in Georgia.

In their push for the passage of the act and in their arguments in defense of their ban on slavery, the Trustees and their supporters in Parliament adopted the arguments against the slave trade promoted by the gentry from overseas. Wood explains that for the

Trustees, the only way they could gain traction in England in their cause against slavery was to promote the argument that Spain would inspire slave insurrection in Georgia if the

King allowed the institution.203 Gone were the arguments concerning the effect of slavery on white morals and industry. Instead, the Trustees were able to gather support for their

200Wood, “The Earl of Egmont and the Georgia Colony,” 86-87. 201 Coleman, “The Founding of Georgia,” 9-10. 202 Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 15-17, 23-26. 203 Wood, “The Earl of Egmont and the Georgia Colony,” 86.

84 bill by insisting that slavery represented a danger to the provinces. Parliament passed the act by formally avoiding any condemnation of slavery and by placing into the law the obligation of all Georgia planters to return any slave caught escaping from South

Carolina.204 In the years that followed, Oglethorpe persisted in his insistence that slavery would corrupt the morals of white society, but his pamphleteer Benjamin Martyn adopted the more defensive language of the movement against the slave trade in the colonies. In his Impartial inquiry (1741), Martyn argued that slavery was “absolutely dangerous.”

The “Insurrections of Negroes in Jamaica and Antigua” demonstrated that slaves were

“all secret enemies.”205

The Trustees developed these arguments against the slave trade through a correspondence with planters and British officials overseas. By the early 1730s, Percival and Oglethorpe found supporters in their efforts against the slave trade from colonists from Massachusetts to South Carolina, men who sought to advise their policy.206 Some of the earliest surviving correspondence concerning the ban on slavery originated from

Samuel Eveleigh, a merchant from Charles Town, who sent a series of letters to James

Oglethorpe and the Trustees as he began doing business with the young province in 1733.

Exemplifying the attitude of the movement against the slave trade, Eveleigh accepted that a large slave population represented a dangerous threat to Georgia, but he also believed that white colonists could not succeed without black labor. When the Trustees wrote back in defense of their ban, Eveleigh responded that he had spoken to many planters in

204 “An Act for Rendering the Colony of Georgia More Defensible, by Prohibiting the Importation of Black Slaves, or negroes, in the same,” in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society Vol. 1 (Savannah, 1840), 37. 205Benjamin Martyn, An Impartial Inquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia (London, 1741). 206 Evidence for the Trustees opinions concerning slavery is limited because they only began directly addressing the complaints against their ban on slavery in the later 1730s and 1740s. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, Chapter II, passim.

South Carolina and “we are all here generally of Opinion, that Georgia can never be a place of any great Consequence without Negroes.”207 He suggested the province allow only two slaves per family. Surely, he insisted, colonists were “better acquainted in these

Affairs than the Gentmn. In Engd.”208

Despite the reservations of some South Carolinians, many other British colonists were more supportive. Governor Jonathan Belcher, who had already been chastised by the Board of Trade for allowing slave duties in his colony, gave his tacit support to the ban but worried instead over the limits to land ownership imposed by the Trustees.209 He was especially concerned that limiting land inheritance would encourage planters to leave

Georgia. Thomas Penn of Pennsylvania also supported the ban on slaves, but worried over the Trustees’ ban on rum, which he argued was necessary in a hot climate. Perhaps the most important letter, though, arrived from William Byrd II in 1736.

“They import so many Negroes hither,” wrote Byrd, “that I fear this colony should some time or other be confirmd by the name of New Guinea.” His letter arrived at a critical moment in the early history of colonial Georgia. Wood argues his letter played the “utmost significance” in Percival’s decision to carry on with the ban on slave trading in Georgia.210 At the moment of its arrival, Percival was worrying that only slavery might help the economy of his colony. Byrd’s insistence that slavery was dangerous and

207 Samuel Eveleigh to Mr. Martyn, January 20, 1734/5, Egmont Papers, 14200, p. 194, Phillipps Collection, University of Georgia Library, Athens, Georgia, as quoted in Darold D. Wax, “New Negroes Are Always in Demand”: The Slave Trade in Eighteenth-Century Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), 194. 208 Eveleigh to the Trustees, South Carolina, Apr. 6, 1733; Eveleigh to Martyn, South Carolina, Jan. 20, 1734/5, Egmont Papers, 14200, pt. 1, 25-27, 93-95, 114; Pt. 2, 193-195, as quoted in Wood, Slavery in colonial Georgia, 17-18, and 213, n.44. 209 Jonathan Belcher to Oglethorpe, May 25, 1734, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th Series, Vol. 7, (1894), 70; Thomas Penn to Oglethorpe, August 4, 1734, Egmont Papers, 14200, pt. I, 91, as quote in Spalding, “Oglethorpe’s Quest for an American Zion,” 73, 79, n.35. 210 Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 26.

86 corrupting reaffirmed Egmont’s determination to ban the trade in slaves to Georgia. “It were therefore worth the consideration of a British Parliament, my Lord,” wrote Byrd, “to put an end to this unchristian traffick of makeing merchandize of our fellow creatures.”211

For Byrd, the slave trade had become too dangerous. Despite profiting from the work of slave laborers all his life, the fear of impending insurrections born from the consequences of growing slave populations had led him to ally with Egmont and many others to stop or limit the importation of slaves into American provinces. Their attempts to levy import duties and to ban slavery in Georgia would ultimately fail, but in the process these British slaveholders had developed a shared consciousness of the growing threat of insurrection in mainland British America and the Caribbean. The gentry on both sides of the ocean – the planters and the Trustees of Georgia - had convinced each other and the King that growing slave populations were a threat to the British Empire.

The Relationship between Population and Slave Rebellion

It made sense, of course, that carrying more enslaved people into a colony would create a greater likelihood of rebellion. The evidence suggests that dramatic increases in slave importation did influence slave conspiracies and rebellions in the British Atlantic during the 1730s and 1740s. The British West Indian colonies maintained the highest level of slave imports of any American colonies and they also had the most slave unrest.

South Carolina was the only North American mainland colony with a majority slave population and it was the most restive province on the continent. Virginia planters increased slave importation dramatically in the years just before the insurrection of

211 Byrd to Percival, Virginia, the 12th of July, 1736, Correspondence, 488.

1730. New York City increased the proportions of slaves in port in the years before the conspiracy of 1741. If we halt our investigation there, then we can conclude that in both cases of open rebellion and accusations of conspiracy, the proportions of slaves and specifically the increase in the proportions of slaves in an overall population precipitated restiveness in British provinces during this period.

The problem with this demographic explanation for slave unrest is that many

British colonies and port towns with similar changes in slave populations were not restive at all. Charles Town was the most restive of all mainland British ports in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, yet its population of slaves remained static throughout the period. Planters in the provinces of Rhode Island and Montserrat dramatically increased the proportions of slaves in their populations but did not accuse slaves of conspiracy. Colonies with nearly identical proportions of slaves in a population, like South Carolina and Barbados, could have very different levels of unrest.

Slave conspiracy scares exploded in colonies with large black majorities and in colonies with relatively small populations of slaves, often at almost the exact same time. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the growth of the slave trade had made slave unrest more likely in the British Atlantic, but there were limits to the influence of demography.

Comparing the populations of colonies longitudinally – viewing provinces together at the same time – helps us judge the extent to which demography inspired unrest. It allows us to quantify the British Empire in the first half of the eighteenth century and measure the observations of white colonists who worried so much over the

88 growing population of slaves. The population charts that follow allow us to see the

British Atlantic as it appeared to the people who lived in the colonies at the time.

Table [1-4]: Percentage of Black Population in British Colonial America and the West Indies, 1700 to 1750 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 New Hampshire 2.6 2.6 1.8 1.9 2.1 2 Massachusetts 1.4 2.1 2.4 2.4 2 2.2 Rhode Island and Providence Plantations 5.1 5 4.6 9.7 9.5 10.1 Connecticut 1.7 1.9 1.9 2 2.9 2.7 New York 12 13 15.5 14.3 14.6 14.4 New Jersey 6 6.7 8 8 8.5 7.5 Pennsylvania 2.4 6.4 6.5 2.4 2.4 2.4 Delaware 5.5 13.7 13 5.2 5.2 5.2 Maryland 10.9 18.6 18.9 18.9 20.7 30.8 Virginia 28 29.5 30.3 35.1 36 45.4 North Carolina 3.9 6 14.1 20 21.3 27.1 South Carolina 42.8 42.4 70.4 69.4 72.2 61.5 Georgia 0 0 0 0 0 19.2 Bermuda 38.3 40.3 42 42 42.9 43 Bahamas 0 0 26.7 32.6 44.4 48 Jamaica 85.1 89.2 91.8 93 94.6 94.6 Antigua 79 80.1 84.2 86.7 87.5 89.8 St Christopher (St Kitts) 59.6 81.6 72.8 80.6 85.5 88.7 Montserrat 65.4 69.8 69.1 82.1 83.3 85.9 Nevis 76.7 77.4 80.9 82.7 87.7 89.5 Anguilla 61.6 71.4 Barbados 76.5 80.1 76.9 78.2 80.2 82.1

Changes in the size of slave populations did correspond with both insurrections and accusations of conspiracy in several colonies. In the Leeward Islands, British planters increased the importation of enslaved migrants into Antigua and the proportion of black slaves in the overall population in the years just before the 1736 conspiracy. In

1700, the slave population of the island was an estimated 10,100 people or seventy-nine percent of the overall population. In the years before 1740, that population had grown to

25,300 people, or nearly eighty-eight percent of the overall population of the island. The population of whites had actually been on the decline since about 1720 [See

Supplementary Materials, Table 1-3]. The other British Leeward Islands of St. Kitts,

Montserrat, Nevis, and Anguilla each saw similar changes in the proportion of slaves to the overall population [Table 1-4]. Jamaican planters also increased the number and proportions of slaves in their colonies. In 1700, eighty-five percent of the island’s population was enslaved. By 1740, 117,900 black people lived on the island making up ninety-five percent of the total population. At the end of the same decade, Jamaica had fewer white residents than in 1700 [See Supplementary Materials, Table 1-3]. The accusations of conspiracy in the Leeward Islands and the consistent unrest in Jamaica make more sense because of these numbers. The vulnerability of white planters to insurrection from so many coerced and bonded laborers may have made both accusations of conspiracy and insurrection more likely.

British slave owners created a similar situation in South Carolina. By the second decade of the eighteenth century, South Carolina had achieved the first black majority population on the mainland.212 In 1700, the British enslaved 2444 people in the province out of a total population of 5704 [See Supplementary Materials, Table 1-3]. By 1720, the rapid development of rice monoculture and the importation of thousands of African slaves had increased the black population by nearly five times over, to an enslaved population of 12,000 people. By 1740, slaves made up nearly seventy percent of the overall population of South Carolina [Table 1-4]. Though South Carolina had only one accusation of slave conspiracy throughout the decades of the 1720s, the province had more than eight in the decade between 1730 and 1740 and an outright rebellion near the

212 There is conflicting evidence concerning the year in which South Carolina achieved a Black Majority. In 1708, the South Carolina Governor and Council reported to the Board of Trade that there were 4,080 whites and 4,100 black slaves in the colony. Philip Morgan’s count of the white and black population in South Carolina found that by as late as 1710, white colonists still outnumbered black slaves. Peter Wood, Black Majority, Table 1, 144; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 61.

Stono River in 1739. The dramatic change in the slave population brought about by the slave trade corresponds well with the frequency of conspiracies and insurrections.

Similar growth in the slave trade precipitated the Virginia Insurrection of 1730.

Virginia was unique in the first quarter of the eighteenth century in its ability to create the first self-sustaining slave population in the western hemisphere. Virginia never achieved a black majority but it did maintain its highest proportion of slaves by the middle of the eighteenth century. The importation of thousands of enslaved Africans marked a dramatic rise from 16,390 black people in 1700 to a population of 40,000 by 1730 [See

Supplementary Materials, Table 1-3]. The proportion of slaves in the overall population rose from twenty-eight percent in 1700 to thirty percent in 1720, before leaping to 35 percent before 1730 because of the rising level of slave imports [Table 1-4]. Throughout the 1730s, as William Byrd II worried that his province might become a New Guinea, slave populations actually remained steady. After 1730, there were no new slave insurrections in Virginia until the era of the American Revolution.

Graph [1-5]: Percentage of Black Population in Ports of British Colonial America and the West Indies, 1700 to 1750

Changes in the slave populations of port towns demonstrated less certain connections between demography and restiveness. In the 1730s, white colonists in New

York County imported much higher numbers of slaves into their province from the West

Indies because of a shortage in white labor.213 The proportion of slaves in New York

City increased from 18.3 percent in 1730 to 24.8 percent in 1740 [Table 4]. This sharp increase in the proportion of enslaved people in the colony took place just before the New

York Conspiracy of 1741. Similar changes were taking place in Kingston, Jamaica in the decade before the open protests of slaves in 1740. But the most restive port town in the

British Atlantic of this period was Charles Town. At least three conspiracies took place around its environs between 1730 and 1740, though the population of slaves as a percentage of the overall town population appears to have actually declined between

1720 and 1730 before slowly rising to earlier levels [Table 4]. White colonists in

213 For a discussion of the estimates for the slave population in New York in the 1730s, see Nash, “New York Census,” 430.

Newport, Rhode Island, also purchased more slaves in this era, increasing the black population in town from ten percent of the overall population in 1710 to nearly eighteen percent by 1740. Rhode Island colonists did not accuse any slaves of conspiracy in this period. No accusations of slave conspiracy were reported in the colony. How do we explain the inconsistencies? The slave population of port towns mattered far less in determining accusations of unrest than the arrival of news. As noted in Section Two, rumors of opportunities for freedom and stories of unrest played a critical role in determining the timing of conspiracies and insurrections.

Like colonial ports, several British provinces dramatically increased their slave populations without people suffering accusations of conspiracy or rebellion. Planters on the island of Montserrat more than doubled the slave population on the island between

1700 and 1730, growing the overall black proportion of the population from sixty-five percent to near eighty-three percent by 1740 [Table 1-3]. On the mainland, planters in the provinces of North Carolina and Rhode Island both doubled the proportions of slaves in their populations during the first half of the eighteenth century but neither colony experienced any restiveness [Table 1-3].

Comparing the very similar populations of Rhode Island and East Jersey demonstrates the complications that can arise when relating demography to slave unrest.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, Somerset County in East Jersey and

Narragansett County in Rhode Island shared remarkably similar demography. In 1710,

Rhode Island’s Narragansett County maintained a black slave population of about seven percent of the total provincial population while New Jersey’s Somerset County had a black slave population of about ten percent of the total. By the mid-1730s, the two

94 counties had grown closer together in populations, with black slaves making up sixteen percent of the people in Narragansett and seventeen percent of Somerset’s population.

These were both counties comprised of what were then called plantations but what we would recognize as farms, with diverse crops and typically a heavy focus on grazing livestock for sale to port towns. Slaves were more isolated in both of these counties, with an average of four slaves living on a plantation in Narragansett and roughly 3 slaves living on a plantation in Somerset. The New Jersey county had a slightly higher percentage of males at fifty-eight percent as compared to the Rhode Island county’s fifty- five percent, but most of the numbers were remarkably close.214 Despite these similarities, the great divergence in their history would take place in 1734, when the planters of New Jersey’s Somerset County would claim to have discovered a conspiracy of “hundreds” of slaves supposedly planning to murder the local white population and then flee into the western mountains.

214 For statistics of Somerset County, see Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), Appendix, Table 1, and for numbers of slaves per plantation, 75; For statistics of Narragansett, see Robert K. Fitts, Inventing New England's Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 81-83.

Graph [1-6]: Black Populations of Somerset County, East Jersey, and Narragansett County, Rhode Island, 1700-1760215 Black Populations of Somerset County, East Jersey, and Narragansett County, Rhode Island 18 16 14

10 Narragansett County, Rhode Island 8

Population 6 Somerset County 4 2

Black PopulationBlack as percentageofTotal 0 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760

The presence of a slave conspiracy in New Jersey and the absence of such a conspiracy in Rhode Island shaped the way historians of these two counties explain the role of black populations. Despite remarkably similar demography, Hodges used slave statistics as a factor in precipitating revolt in New Jersey while Fitts used the same proportions of slave in Rhode Island to explain the absence of rebellion. In Root and

Branch, Hodges found that the growing slave numbers in New Jersey had played a significant role in the slave conspiracy in Somerset.216 Like most studies of unrest,

Hodges assumed the growing numbers of slaves’ precipitated revolt. Hodges history of slave revolt in New Jersey contrasts’ well with Robert Fitts’ interpretation for the lack of slave conspiracy in Narragansett. In his Inventing New England's Slave Paradise, Fitts

215 See Appendix A for statistics. 216 Hodges, Root and Branch, 99.

96 explains that though Narragansett had the “highest black and white ratio in New

England,” the fact that “whites still outnumbered blacks by a healthy margin” probably discouraged open revolt.217 Because each scholar focused only on a specific colony, almost identical black demographic data could be used to explain either the occasion of a slave conspiracy or the lack thereof.

Barbados remains the most important of the British colonies that did not report any conspiracies or insurrections. Between 1729 and 1746, the population of the

Windward Island closely resembled that of South Carolina, with more than eighty percent of the population enslaved in 1740 [Table 2]. Bajan planters imported thousands of

Africans into the colony over the course of the decade. White colonists on the island shared similar fears with those of their neighbors that the people they owned might rebel.

In 1737, after the Antigua conspiracy to the north, news of a great meeting of slaves south of Bridgetown caused a great deal of consternation among British authorities.

Whites dismissed the event as harmless, however, after speaking to slave leaders and learning it was a kind of giant public dinner.218 No conspiracy accusations emerged from the island. Historian Hilary Beckles explains the relative quiet of Barbados in the eighteenth century as the result of gender balance among the slave population.219

Between the years 1729 and 1746, we might add that despite the importation of Africans, the overall proportion of slaves in the population actually declined [Table 2]. Black majorities were less important in determining restiveness in Barbados than the stability of the slave population over time.

217 Fitts, Inventing New England's Slave Paradise, 116. 218 London Evening Post (London, England), Tuesday, March 29, 1737; Issue 1462. 219 Hilary Beckles, History of Barbados: From AmerIndian Settlement to Nation-State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 33-51.

Graph [1-7]: Black Populations in Barbados and South Carolina, 1700-1780

In Barbados and throughout the British Atlantic, the growth in the proportion of slaves in the overall population of the colony did play a role in the restiveness of a province. Comparing the populations of colonies longitudinally illustrates that the expansive slave trade contributed to the likelihood of accusations of conspiracy or rebellion. Though black majorities presented an ever-present threat to the white planter class, the changes wrought by the slave trade upon the proportions of a black population in a province contributed the most to restiveness in this era. Slave conspiracy scares exploded in colonies with large black majorities and in colonies with relatively small populations of slaves, often at almost the exact same time [Table 1-6]. The geographic extent of slave unrest in the British Atlantic during these years suggests that white anxieties and the slaves’ desire for freedom were not isolated to any one region or limited to whether slaves made up a black majority.

Table [1-6]: Black Percentage of Total Population in British Colonies with Slave Conspiracies, 1700-1750 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 Massachusetts 1.4 2.1 2.4 2.4 2 2.2 New York 12 13 15.5 14.3 14.6 14.4 New Jersey 6 6.7 8 8 8.5 7.5 Maryland 10.9 18.6 18.9 18.9 20.7 30.8 Virginia 28 29.5 30.3 35.1 36 45.4 South Carolina 42.8 42.4 70.4 69.4 72.2 61.5 Bermuda 38.3 40.3 42 42 42.9 43 Bahamas 0 0 26.7 32.6 44.4 48 Jamaica 85.1 89.2 91.8 93 94.6 94.6 Antigua 79 80.1 84.2 86.7 87.5 89.8 St Christopher (St Kitts) 59.6 81.6 72.8 80.6 85.5 88.7 Anguilla 61.6 71.4

Conclusion

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, British gentry like William Byrd

II had constructed a British Atlantic capable of breaking forth in widespread unrest.

Dramatically increasing the number of enslaved migrants into the populations of nearly every colony, the gentry purchased ever greater numbers of Africans even as they increasingly feared the growing population of black bondsmen. Despite the efforts of some Britons to slow the trade with duties on slaves, leading planters and officials failed to halt the African trade.

Comparing provinces between the years 1729 and 1746 reveals that rebellions and accusations of conspiracy were more likely in regions that saw dramatic increases to the proportion of slaves in the overall population. It is also quite obvious that changes in demography were only part of a complicated story of unrest. Comparing colonies reveals

99 that very similar slave populations could vary dramatically in their choices to rebel and in the likelihood that anxious whites might accuse their bondsmen of conspiracy. The most important aspect of the slave trade in the first half of the eighteenth century was not simply that larger slave populations were more likely to rebel, but that the “African

Trade” fostered conflict between planters and merchants, assemblies and councils, and between white colonists and black slaves.

100

Chapter 2: “to stand by, and be true to each other”

One of the most violent conspiracy trials in the history of British America began with a dance. On a Sunday afternoon in 1736, a crowd of perhaps two thousand black slaves gathered together in a field on the island of Antigua. They stood in a great half- circle in the Caribbean sun, a menagerie of Africans and creoles. A few white spectators looked on from a distance. At the center and before the crowd sat Takyi, on a small stool, wearing a felt hat with three feathers protruding. Behind him stood several well- known enslaved men, artisans, and masters, one of whom held a wicker shield, called an ikem, above Takyi’s head to keep him shaded from the sun. To his chagrin, Takyi had no umbrella.1

At the sudden call of drums, Takyi began his dance. On his left arm he carried a second wicker shield and in his right, a cutlass made of wood. The drummers called out and Takyi leapt forward swinging his cutlass and whirling along the edges of the people.

As he swung his wooden blade, the man called Tomboy, a slave who had never seen

Africa, waited in white face paint for his part in the ceremony. At the signal, Takyi stopped his dancing and turned to the native Antiguan. He flourished the cutlass and then pressed the wooden blade to Tomboy’s head, his ikem shield held between their bodies.

Takyi shouted out an oath. The brightly dressed men behind his stool called out “Takyi,

Takyi, Takyi, Coquo Takyi!” The men then placed a drum in the center of the semi-

1 A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua (Dublin: Printed by and for R. Reilly, on Cork-Hill, 1737), 6-9.

101 circle, and beside Takyi and Tomboy and before the crowd, stabbed the drum and tore it apart. With this, the dance was ended.2

British officials would later interpret the ceremony as an African declaration of war. Over the next six months, white colonists on the island executed eighty-eight black people – brutally - and banished another forty seven, all without a single act of violence on the part of the enslaved. In a report to the governor on the supposed slave plot, colonial magistrates described the dance as “one grand Test” of Takyi’s power over the nation they called the “coromantee.”3 Takyi’s goal, they claimed, was to “make proof of his numbers,” to show in broad daylight to all the Africans that he was the rightful ruler capable of leading a rebellion. The authorities called the ceremony an “ikem dance,” a

“military dance and shew” performed by a king who had “resolved upon a war with a neighboring state.”4 Tomboy was meant to serve as his “greatest general,” the other men his “Braffo” and “Asseng.” The colony’s investigation insisted that on the Gold Coast, the oath was “so certain a Declaration of War, that the neighboring Princes send to know against whom the war is intended.”5 The magistrates reported that some of the

Coromantees in the crowd tried to leap in and stop the ceremony fearing the “meaning might be discovered” by the colonists who watched the ceremony from afar. Colonists believed they had discovered in Takyi’s dance a hidden call to arms against the planters on the island.

Historian John Thornton has questioned this interpretation of Takyi’s ceremony.

In his article “War, the State, and Religious Norms in Coromantee Thought,” Thornton

2 A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy, 8-9. 3 Ibid., 6. 4 Ibid., 6. 5 Ibid., 9.

102 argues that Takyi was performing an Akan ennobling celebration, allowing a common- born man to advance himself politically by demonstrating his wealth.6 Thornton discovered a description of a ritual similar to that of Takyi’s in A New Account of Guinea,

Willem Bosman’s voluminous history of the Gold Coast published in 1704. Through the dance, Thornton argues, Takyi was trying to improve his status among the Coromantee people. He was not declaring war. Takyi made a similar claim when he was first questioned by authorities. He said his dance had been a harmless ceremony, and his white master, Thomas Kerby, had agreed. It was “an innocent play of Court’s Country,” the British assemblyman said.7

But Takyi’s dance was far more than a play. It was, instead, a political response to the crisis faced by slaves in the Leeward Islands. His ceremony was an attempt to organize the black population of the island around his authority. That day in the field,

Takyi offered to ameliorate the suffering that plagued the black people of Antigua. With each thrust of his ikem, his shield, he promised protection to the nation of the

Coromantee. By turning to Tomboy and offering him the oath, Takyi pledged black unity between creole and African men. The conspiracy trials that followed devolved into inquisitions that produced wild stories. The judges required accused slaves to make complete confessions and to implicate their fellow conspirators, promising painful executions to any person who denied the charges. Under such duress, accused slaves eventually described a gunpowder plot, reminiscent of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot in

6John Thornton, “War, the State, and Religious Norms in ‘Coromantee’ Thought: The Ideology of an African Nation,” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); John Thornton, “The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean,” Journal of Caribbean History Vol. 32, Issue 1-2, (1998), 169- 170. 7 Council Minutes, Arbuthnot Report, 8th Jan, 1736/7, 48, CO 9/10, TNA.

103

England, in which the conspirators supposedly planned to blow up the leading white colonists on the island at a ball celebrating the king’s birthday. Beyond the coerced confessions, there is little evidence that such a plot ever existed. Takyi’s dance, however, was very real. It was an attempt to confront the intense challenges of slavery and conflict that plagued the slaves of his time, an era when the peoples the British called “negroes” struggled against white planters and each other in the provinces of the Americas.

Such slave unrest, on Antigua and throughout the British Atlantic during this period, was shaped by crisis and conflict within black slave communities. Separated by ancestry and language, new waves of Africans from a dizzying array of African kingdoms met American-born black creoles suffering in the declining economic conditions of the 1730s. The conflicts that emerged between these peoples burst forth in the insurrections and conspiracies of the age. Every episode of unrest in the 1730s was, in part, a contest between African-born slaves and native-born creoles. Despite the fearful proclamations of white authorities, they never faced a unified threat from their slaves in this era. Instead, during the intense, violent instances of slave rebellion or in the more prolonged, anxious violence of a slave conspiracy trial, tensions within the slave community influenced who would rebel and who would bear witness against other slaves.

African-born slaves began nearly all of the slave rebellions between 1729 and

1746, yet the term African was illusory in this period. There are few examples of separate African peoples joining together to rebel during the long decade. Rather, British slaves rebelled according to their “nation,” the people with whom they shared an identity in the black communities of the enslaved. Rebellions began with a core group of slaves who spoke the same language and referred to each other as coming from the same

104

“country.” In the West Indies, the leaders of slave rebellions were the “Coromantee.” On the Danish island of Saint John, they were the “Aminas.” In colonial Louisiana, the slave rebels were the “Bambara.” In colonial South Carolina, the leaders of the Stono

Insurrection were said to be “Angolans.” In nearly every case, these “nations” had no exact equivalent in Africa.8 They were an amalgamation of peoples born from regions that shared common language and rituals, peoples that may have once been great enemies, who may at another time have sold their fellow “Coromantees” or “Angolans” to white slave traders on the coast. In the first half of the eighteenth century, these Old

World rivalries were subsumed in the terror of New World slavery.

These “nations” competed against each other and a population of black people born into slavery. The creoles, as they were known then, were part of the social hierarchy that structured life in the British colonies. As slaves, they were near the bottom, but many strove to improve their condition and to advance themselves through skills in trade or Christian religion. Some creoles sought to differentiate and remove themselves from the newly arrived “Country Negroes.” During insurrections, moments when slaves gathered together with the intent to obtain their liberty by force, American born slaves did not always identify with the Africans who sought to rebel. When pressed by “Country Negroes,” they would fight alongside planters, complicating the interpretation of an insurrection as simply a contest between the white master class and black slaves. The slave conspiracies bore out a similar pattern, with differences between slave communities leading to accusations of purported plotting to rebel. As the accused

8 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 103-104.

105 sought to name conspirators and save their own lives, they named rivals on other plantations or singled out people from other African nations.

In the story of Takyi’s dance and the conspiracy trial that followed, we can see the challenges confronted by slave leaders who sought to unify black people in the British colonies in the 1730s. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the massive influx of forced migrants from Africa created profound tensions in the communities of the enslaved. The painful process of creating one people, a “negro” people, around a shared

African ancestry and in opposition to their enslavement, was a long historical struggle that spanned centuries. In Takyi’s dance and the conspiracies and insurrections of the

1730s, we can see a formative moment in this long story, a period when new waves of

Africans struggled against both their condition as slaves and against an American-born slave population. The conflicts the erupted between these peoples shaped the conspiracies and insurrections of the era.

The Making of a Coromantee

For the British, it mattered a great deal that Takyi was a Coromantee. Colonial officials in the early eighteenth century often ascribed rebel tendencies to specific

“nations” of Africans. Despite the fact that slaves gathered on one ship might originate from scores of different kingdoms stretching more than a thousand miles into the interior of Africa, planters insisted they could discern specific characteristics that we would today call ethnicities, or shared traits within an identifiable group.9 Above all, the British believed the people they called the Coromantee, slaves taken from the Gold Coast, to be

9 Far a detailed discussion of ethnic identity and its transfer from Africa to America, see Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 6-8, passim.

106 the consummate African-born rebels. In 1701, Governor Christopher Codrington of

Antigua provided the most oft-cited description of this “nation” of slaves to the Lords of the Board of Trade:

They are not only the best and most faithful of our slaves, but are really all born Heroes. There is a difference between them and all other negroes beyond what ‘tis possible for your Lordship to conceive. There never was a rascal or coward of that nation, intrepid to the last degree, not a man of them but will stand to be cut to pieces without a sigh or groan, grateful and obedient to a kind master, but implacably revengeful when ill- treated.10

Codrington’s preference for Coromantees was shared by most English planters as was the belief that the Coromantee were especially dangerous and vengeful.11 The English slave trader William Snelgrave described the Coromantee in 1727 as “stout, stubborn people, who are never to be made easy,” exactly because they were the most likely to lead an insurrection aboard a Guineaman. “I knew many of these Cormantine Negroes despised

Punishment,” Snelgrave wrote, “and even Death Itself.”12

The planters had good reason to fear the enslaved peoples they called the

Coromantee. That nation of slaves led every African episode of unrest in the British

West Indies in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Coromantee fought alongside a nation the British called the “Pawpaws” in the New York insurrection of 1712 and in the Jamaica insurrection of 1746. On the North American mainland, the Stono Rebellion was said to have been led by nation called the Angolans. The British did not describe any other groups of African peoples fighting in rebellions in the period. The nations that

10 Codrington to BT, Dec 30, 1701, CO 152/4, 35, TNA. 11 Darold D. Wax, “Preferences for Slaves in Colonial America,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Oct., 1973), 391-394. 12 Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, Volume 2, (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1931), 354, 356.

107 produced slave rebels in the British colonies during the first half of the eighteenth century, then, were the Coromantees (Gold Coast), Pawpas (Slave Coast), and the

Angolans (Angola Coast).

The predominance of specific slave nations in rebellion requires an explanation.

The British carried tens of thousands of slaves from many different ports spanning from the coast of Senegambia to Madagascar.13 Though British vessels took the most people from the Gold Coast in the first half of the eighteenth century (30 percent), slaves from that region were followed closely in number by populations of slaves that did not appear in rebellions at all, including slaves from the Bight of Biafra (21 percent) and the Bight of

Benin (17 percent) (see Table 2-1 below). The Coromantee, the Gold Coast slaves, made up the largest group in the period, but the British took the second most slaves from the

Bight of Biafra. My research has not revealed any slaves from that coast to have been implicated in any rebellions or conspiracies during the period of this study. Senegambia,

Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast together sold more than 125,000 people to British vessels between 1690 and 1750, and yet they were not identified by the British in rebellions. With the 228,000 people taken from the Bight of Biafra, it is remarkable that

350,000 people from all these different coasts did not conspire or rise in the 1730s and

1740s. What was it about the Coromantee, the Pawpaws, and the Angolans that made them rebels?

13 In his The Atlantic Slave Trade, Philip Curtin divided Africa into eight distinct historical regions engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. Moving from north to south along the West African coast, these regions were Senegambia, Upper Guinea, the Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin (modern day Togo, Benin, and part of Nigeria west of the Niger Delta), the Bight of Biafra (modern day Nigeria east of the Niger Delta, Cameroon, Equatorial Guniea, and Gabon), West-Central Africa (modern day Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola), and southeastern Africa (including Madagascar). Phillip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

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Chart [2-1]: Number of Slaves Taken from African Regions Aboard British Vessels, 1700 to 175014

Table [2-1]: Estimates of Slaves Embarked from African Regions on British Vessels, 1690 to 175015 Senegambia andSierra off-shore Leone WindwardAtlantic Coast Gold Coast Bight of Benin Bight of Biafra West Central AfricaSouth-east and St. AfricaTotals Helena and Indian ocean islands 1690 136 0 0 0 1,359 718 624 304 3,141 1691-1700 13,603 2,671 0 27,356 34,801 23,172 14,386 507 116,495 1701-1710 11,334 1,217 1,019 59,647 40,102 16,610 21,948 0 151,877 1711-1720 12,801 2,606 0 78,161 40,599 15,034 9,633 8,574 167,409 1721-1730 18,868 8,604 2,018 79,246 41,921 35,725 36,553 3,256 226,192 1731-1740 19,484 1,222 7,057 57,773 14,560 50,892 92,413 527 243,929 1741-1750 10,081 5,794 6,102 27,840 6,018 85,933 33,463 0 175,232 Totals 86,307 22,114 16,196 330,023 179,361 228,084 209,020 13,169 1,084,275

The nations of slaves that became rebels were able to use their experience in statecraft and political organization to their advantage in the British Atlantic. The

14 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012). 15 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012).

109 kingdoms of the Gold Coast were increasingly led by rising classes of merchants and warriors who challenged older aristocrats with a new political order. These regions suffered from endemic and widespread warfare between rival kingdoms and were forced to develop rituals and customs to adapt new peoples into their ranks. The customs and rituals from these new orders were mechanisms for organization among slaves in the

New World.

In the Americas, the nations of slaves that led rebellions always made up the majority of Africans in their respective British province. The confidence born from numbers of people from the same nation appears to have played a critical role in the choice to rebel. The Coromantees were the largest African slave population in the British

West Indies and led all of the insurrections. In South Carolina, the nation of slaves called the Angolans led the Stono Rebellion. In Virginia, the insurrection of 1730 was a Creole led rebellion, emblematic of the inability of the smaller populations of Africans to organize at all. The combination of African experience and a majority among the population of the enslaved created rebels. All of these factors were evident in the life of the Coromantee called Tayki.

Takyi’s experience in Africa prepared him for rebellion in America. As a child, he was born into a society under pressure from intense violence and rapid political change. Between 1675 and 1750, the Gold Coast was a crowded region subsumed in wars between petty kingdoms that sought to consolidate their power at the expense of rivals. Behind these wars was a social upheaval brought about by the slave trade, a process of political formation that made Africans from these war-torn regions more astute as slave rebels. In a remarkable way, the peoples carried across the Atlantic Ocean in

110 slave ships continued the process of consolidation and conflict they had known in their

Old World. The slaves that would become rebels in the Americas were people who had been given the experience of both violence and political reinvention in western Africa.

The slave trade was the cause of this transformation among the people of the western coasts of Africa. At the end of the seventeenth century, the numbers of slaves exported from Western Africa began to rise rapidly. For the years between 1650 and

1700, more slaves were sold on the Atlantic coast than in the previous two hundred years combined.16 Between 1600 and 1650, current estimates show roughly 680,000 slaves were carried into the transatlantic trade. From 1650 to 1700, this number doubled to more than 1,200,000. By 1750, Europeans had transported an additional 2,500,000 slaves out of Africa.17

The expansion of the trade was a response to the rising prices for slaves along the

Atlantic coast of West Africa. The demand created by the plantations in the Americas coincided with the discovery of Brazilian gold in Minas Gerais, meaning that Portuguese ships competed with merchant vessels of Britain and other European powers hoping to provide human chattel to the labor hungry provinces in the western hemisphere.18 For

British slave traders, the rising competition on the coast was obvious. Captain William

Snelgrave noted the change in his own lifetime trading in the road of Whydah. “Whereas in the Year 1712, there went only 33 Ships from England to the Coast,” he explained, “in

16 Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: a History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 48. 17 Estimates Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces (accessed August 30th, 2012). 18 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 305-306.

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1726… there had been there the Year before above 200 Sail, to the great increase of

Navigation, and the advantage of our Plantations in America.”19

Facing increased demand and competition, European factors proved willing to pay higher prices for slaves, doubling and then quadrupling the prices in goods paid to

African merchants at the opening of the eighteenth century. This was true from

Senegambia on the western Atlantic coast to the river kingdoms of the Kongo and has been well documented by historians.20 Whereas a slave cost the Royal African Company

£1.72 sterling at the beginning of its trade in 1673, by 1703 slave prices averaged £10.24 sterling. Representatives of the RAC blamed these high rates on both competition and the acquisitiveness of African merchants.21 It was only the matter of a few coins, but for the peoples of West Africa, it was the difference between life and death.

The rising price of slaves created new economic incentives for African kings and merchants to sell their captives to Europeans. Slavery was indigenous and widespread in sub-Saharan Africa by the late seventeenth century. In the forest interior, slaves played both a role as agricultural producers and held value as chattel that could be sold. The absence of landed property in sub-Saharan Africa made slaves one of the only forms of revenue-producing property.22 “Slaves are, you might say, a form of money among these

19 William Snelgrave, A new account of Guinea, (London, 1754), 1-2. 20 For slave price changes in Senegambia, see Philip Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 156-160; For the changing prices of European factors on the Slave Coast, see Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550-1750 : the Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 168-179; For overall recognition of the price change, see Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 52-53; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 119, 305; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 296. 21 Donnan, Documents, Vol. 2, 56. 22Thornton, Africa and Africans, 74-75, 88-89.

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Africans,” wrote French slave trader Jean Barbot in the 1680s.23 Higher prices for slaves made it more profitable to trade a slave than to put him to work in agricultural production.24 The rising price of slaves also made transport from the interior to the coast far more profitable for African merchants. As Joseph Miller argues in Way of Death, rising slave prices in the Atlantic economy helped to finance the expansion of the slaving zone in central Africa.25 From the Gambia River to the Congo, the rising price of slaves allowed the trade to move into new frontiers, bringing Atlantic commodities to peoples far from the sea. By the early eighteenth century, slaves traded along the West-Central

African coast originated from regions more than a thousand miles away.26

The competition to gain access to Atlantic slave markets – to control the routes of this trade and to demand tribute from smaller states with access to the coast - helped to fuel the expansion of warfare in western Africa. Small kingdoms, and specifically the headmen of those kingdoms, could profit and expand by controlling the routes of trade.27

The ability to put a large, organized army on the field became crucial for the success of any state, and centralization allowed kings and merchants to demand tributes and duties from both African slave merchants and European traders.

23 P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones and Robin Law, eds., Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678-1712, Volumes I and II (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1972), 549. 24 Philip Curtin’s study of the Senegambia slave trade in the mid-eighteenth century calculated that feeding a slave with millet for one year cost an African owner more than a quarter of the total price a European might pay on the coast, and during a time of famine the cost of feeding a slave doubled. Philip Curtin, Economic Change, 169; Thornton, African and Africans, 120. 25 Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730-1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 130-131, and passim. 26 Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations, and New World Developments,” Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 18, Issue 1, (1997), 132. 27 Lovejoy, Transformations, 114; Kwame Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 31.

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When Takyi was born into a Ga village in Accra in 1701, his people had already suffered through the violence wrought by the slave trade on the Gold Coast. In the

1670s, Accra was one kingdom, ruled by King Okai Koi from the capital of Great Accra ten miles inland. Situated on good harborage, the kingdom had become a favorite place of trade for Europeans. As middlemen, the people of Accra had enjoyed great wealth and affluence, but the prosperity also created violent competition within the ranks of the aristocracy. Europeans sources, most of whom wrote decades after the events and relied on popular traditions, reported widespread rivalries and dissent within the ranks of the kingdom. Okai Koi’s father had been murdered by one of his chiefs and several of Okai

Koi’s commanders had grown increasingly wealthy from the slave trade, competing for power against the hereditary ruler on the Ga stool.28

These weaknesses invited the invasion of the Akwamu. The Akwamu people that descended down upon the Ga in 1677 were emblematic of the organized and warlike states that had developed along the routes of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Even during the period before the rise of the slave trade on the African Coast, Dutch mapmakers described the Akwamu as “diefchtich volck,” or a “predatory people,” exactly because the Akwamu had attempted to tax interior gold merchants attempting to reach Accra.29

Unlike the Ga and many of the coastal peoples in the mid-seventeenth century, for the

Akwamu, “the army was the chief instrument of foreign policy.”30 It consisted of large units of professional infantry that used bowmen and lances to overwhelm enemies.31 In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, they used thousands of musketeers in battle

28 Ivor Wilks, “Akwamu, 1650-1750: A Study of the Rise and Fall of a West African Empire,” (masters thesis, University of Wales, 1958), 40-45. 29 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 48. 30 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 48. 31 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 48, 54-56.

114 and fired cannons purchased from Europeans to intimidate rival Akan states to the west and east. Among the Akwamu, ceremonies of ennoblement became synonymous with rituals of war and nobles were no longer simply wealthy men, but warriors capable of leading companies of soldiers. The better organized army defeated the Ga King Okai Koi in battle and took his head, burning the capital to the ground. The Accra would no longer have a king. For the next sixty years, they were client states, ruled by the powerful King of Akwamu from afar and led locally by caboceers under the guidance of men who sat upon family stools.

Led by a powerful king with absolute authority over his army, the Akwamu sought to use their power to control the revenue arising from the Atlantic trade.32 After destroying Greater Accra in 1677, the Akwamu moved their capital southward to the interior market town of Abonze, once the northern border of Accra, and renamed it

Nyanaoase, or the “town under the mountain.”33 From their new capital, the Akwamu kings demanded taxes from the European castles and from the larger kingdoms to the north that sought to trade with the coast. In the 1690s, during the ascendance of the

Akwamu over the eastern half of the Gold Coast, Dutch factor Willem Bosman celebrated the “great kingdom of Aquamboe,” whose “King and his nobles are so very rich in gold and slaves.”34 They were a people that had achieved greatness through a singular focus on warfare waged to control trade from the Atlantic to the interior of

Africa.35

32 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 63-65. 33 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 41. 34Bosman, A New and Accurate Account, 70. 35 Ivor Wilks, “The Mossi and Akan States, 1500-1800,” in JFA Ajayi, ed., History of West Africa (New York: Longman Group, 1971), 438.

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The rise of the Akwamu and the destruction of the Accra followed a pattern repeated throughout the Gold Coast. The slave trade led to the erosion of older African states, competition and rivalry over trade routes and tribute, and the growth of new centralized political institutions. The rise of the British African trade, its rising demand and growth of shipping, were not benign influences on the coast of West Africa. Rather, the slave trade was a powerful force that fueled large armies of organized states as they conquered rival nations and sent millions of new slaves into the western world.

Takyi was born into a life arranged almost entirely around the Atlantic slave trade.36 By 1700, near the time of Takyi’s birth, three of the towns of Accra sat beneath

European slave castles, including James Town (English), Ussher Town (Dutch), and

Christianborg Castle (Danish).37 The presence of these slave forts dominated the lives of the people beneath their walls. The Accra Caboceers, or head mean, looked to the forts for both trade and protection and formed military alliances with the Europeans in their respective towns. In the early eighteenth century, British traveler William Smith noted that the Ga “can never well agree, each distinguishing themselves by titles of either

Englishmen or Dutchmen.”38 The Europeans came to view the Ga peoples beneath their walls as “their negroes,” and treated the separate towns as client states that could be marshaled to war during periods of competition for the slave trade.39 In 1700, the Ga people of Accra were trading thousands of people a year to the Europeans waiting in the roads.

36 John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12. 37 Ludewig Romer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 129, n.67. 38 William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London, 1744), 135. 39 See, for example, Romer’s discussion of the Ga communities living at Christiansborg Castle. Romer, Reliable Account, 148.

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The expansion in slave trading was a source of profound social disruption to the

Ga; it provided a commercial impetus for enslaving enemies that created new forms of wealth among the common classes of people, challenging the older hereditary political order of nobility.40 The Ga were led by hereditary leaders called mantses, men who sat upon leading family stools created by divine sanction. Mantses presided over courts and had the divine right to call Ga companies of free men, called asafo, to battle. Takyi’s grandfather or great uncle, as the man who sat upon the Takyi stool, would have born the title of mantse. The Oblempon, the wealthy ennobled men, purchased their family stools from the established mantse and demonstrated their status by surrounding themselves with slaves and their own people. The mantse represented older, hereditary wealth, sanctioned by fetish and ancestors, while the Oblempon represented the new wealth created by the slave trade.41 The differences between old authority and new power were apparent for all to see in Accra. Ga Oblempon rode in Akan style litters, carried by slaves, while mantses walked on the ground because of their guardianship of the land.42

Writing in 1704, the Dutch factor William Bosman wrote of the Gold Coast that “only the richest man is the most honored, without the least regard to nobility.”43 Though the title of King or Captain might descend from father to son, by 1700, “so much regard is had to

40 Patrick Manning, 'The impact of slave trade exports on the population of the western coast of Africa, I700-I850,' in S. Daget (ed.), Actes du colloque sur la traite des noirs (Paris/Nantes, 1988); John Thornton, “The Demographic Effect of the Slave Trade on Western Africa, 1500-1850,” in African Historical Demography: II (Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, 1981), 691-720; Thornton, Africa and Africans,72- 73; John K. Thornton, “War, the State, and Religious Norms,” 185-187. 41 Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 97-104. 42 Parker, Making the Town, 22. 43 Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London: 1705), 132.

117 his riches in slaves and money, that he who is plentifully stored with these, is often preferred to the Right Heir.”44

The changes in the towns of Accra and along the Gold Coast gave rise to the ennobling ceremony Takyi performed in Antigua in 1736. The “ikem,” or shield dance, was a ceremony allowing a commoner to become a noble, a rich man to become a political leader with the rights of a Ga Mantse. In their report to the Council of Antigua, the judges described the ceremony as a coronation ceremony in preparation for war.

Historian John Thornton disagrees, arguing the judges were mistaken. “Court was in fact taking a title of nobility created for mercantile wealth that would not have threatened the political order in his homeland,” insists Thornton, “and probably was not intended to threaten that in Antigua.”

Thornton bases his assessment of Takyi’s intentions from an account written by

Dutch slave trader William Bosman in 1704. Bosman described a shield ceremony he witnessed on the Gold Coast that Thornton correctly noted was quite similar to the description of Takyi’s dance in 1736. As Bosman explained in his 1704 publication A

New Account of Guinea:

A Negro thus far advanced in honor, usually makes himself master of first one and another shield…and is obliged to lye the first night with all his family in battle array in the open air; intimating that he will not be afraid of any danger or Hard-ship in Defence of his People. After which he passes the next and the remaining days of the feast, which are generally about eight, in shooting and martial exercises…But this festival is not so expensive as the former; for instead of making presents, as usual in that, he here on the contrary receives very valuable presents; and when he designs to divert himself, or go to the war, he is permitted to carry two Shields: a favor not allowed to any who hath not thus qualified himself.

44 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 133.

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In a report written by Magistrate Arbuthnot shortly before Takyi’s arrest, the Justice of the Peace described slaves blowing mysterious horns made of conch shells in the deep of night on the island of Antigua, not unlike the elephant’s teeth blown on the Gold Coast.

White constables and planters described slaves marching by the light of the moon and firing guns in open fields, activities that read as similar to the “shooting and martial exercises” described by Bosman above. Almost certainly, the Coromantees were ennobling Takyi on the day of his dance.

But the shield dance, as it was performed in Antigua in 1736, was much more threatening to planter authority than Thornton allows. The Ga people of Accra had no king. They were led by nobles in war and an ennobling ceremony was not a benign ritual. The Ga looked to the nobles and caboceers of the towns to serve as captains in battle; to the men who performed the shield dance to protect their people. As West

African historian Ray Kea explains, ennobling ceremonies had given way to shield ceremonies by the end of the seventeenth century, reflecting the increased militarization of ennobled men on the Gold Coast.45 In the chaotic period of the late seventeenth century, after the kingdom of Accra had fallen to enemies, wealthy Oblempon nobles like

Wetse Koju and Otu founded new sacred family stools that allowed them to become mantses of their towns.46 Ennobled men were war leaders and their shield ceremony was a “military dance and shew” designed to demonstrate the nobles ability to protect his people. Perhaps just as important, there is no reference in Bosman’s narrative to slaves ennobling themselves. Takyi was a slave in Antigua. Thornton’s argument that the

Coromantee’s dance “would not have threatened the political order in his homeland” is

45 Kea, Settlements, 103-104. 46 Parker, Making the Town, 22.

119 not correct at all. As a slave, Takyi’s dance would have challenged the very hierarchy of the Ga.

There is additional evidence that Takyi’s dance was more martial than Thornton allows. In William Bosman’s account of the ceremony, the use of two shields indicated the intention to go to war. “And when he designs to divert himself or go to war,” wrote

Bosman, “he is permitted to carry two Shields.” Though neither Thornton nor the judges in Antigua noted the significance, the detailed Narrative of the Conspiracy actually described Takyi bearing two shields as part of the ikem dance. In their description of

Takyi’s ceremony, the judges noted that his dance differed from that of Africa because

“there was no umbrella. But the place of that was supply’d by two Ikems.”47 It is a small distinction, the two shields instead of one, but according to Bosman, the presence of two shields signified warlike intentions. According to the judges, several of the Coromantee spectators in the crowd tried to intervene, “for to some who knew it, the thing appeared so audacious and terrible.”48

Takyi’s dance was a custom born from a West Africa devastated and remade by the vagaries of the slave trade. For the ennobled warrior, each thrust of the ceremonial sword was a promise of defense to a people besieged by the threat of great armies to the north and the looming walls of European fortresses on the horizon. Bosman wrote that the ceremony was a pledge that the noble would “not be afraid of any danger or Hard- ship in Defence of his People.” The presence of two shields, the ikems, was a sign that

Takyi was promising more to the slaves of Antigua than a demonstration of his wealth.

47 A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy, 8. 48 Ibid., 8.

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Takyi’s “military dance and shew” may have also been recognizable to the nation of slaves the British called Papaws, the close allies of the Coromantee in the American provinces. Many of the enslaved Popos were actually Ga and Akan speakers who had migrated east to live among the people of the Slave Coast on the Bight of Benin. When the Kingdom of Accra finally collapsed in 1680/1, a group of Ga fled east under the leadership of the youngest son of the beheaded Ga King, across the river Volta and into the Ewe speaking region known to Europeans as “Popo.”49 Finding new colonial settlements already established by the Akan speakers of Elmina, the Ga formed a small colony at the coastal village of Gliji, renamed Little Popo by the British.50 As the

Akwamu drove more peoples from the eastern Gold Coast, including the Adangme peoples along the river Volta who shared a linguistic heritage with the Ga, new waves of

Gold Coast people flooded into the western coast of the Bight of Benin during the

1680s.51 The king of Little Popo immediately began wars of conquest to the east, attacking the town of Hulagan, or Great Popo, and menacing the region.52 In British

America, the slaves from this region would be called “Popos” or “Pawpaws.” It would be no accident that the Popos would fight alongside Coromantees in the New York insurrection of 1712 and the Jamaica insurrection of 1746. The shared language and culture from the Gold Coast made them natural allies.

The other nations of slaves taken from the Bight of Benin provide a sharp contrast to the rebelliousness of the Pawpaw and the Coromantee. Europeans often described slaves from the Slave Coast as Ardra or Ardrasian, probably referring to the kingdom of

49 Wilks, “The Akwamu,” 48. 50 Law, Slave Coast, 25. 51 Law, Slave Coast, 243. 52 Law, Slave Coast, 16, 243-245.

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Allada which spoke a language from the Gbe-language group (including Ewe) used by the enslaved from the region.53 Whydah also sold a great many of the Lukumi (Yoruba), a much more populous people taken from the northern interior, along with the Fon, the people who made up the kingdom of Dahomey to the north.54 Thousands of other people mixed in with these miserable populations of slaves, most of them carried from the Sahel and scattered among the larger populations of nations sharing language and culture in the

Americas. Few to any of the members of this nation would be listed as rebels in the

British colonies.

These captive peoples and the large kingdoms through which they passed had responded to the transformation created by the slave trade in ways that were different from the Coromantee. The kingdom of Whydah, a slave trading mecca to the east of

Great and Little Popo, drove the “greatest Slave-Trade of any on the whole Continent.”55

Though the entire country contained no more than a hundred-thousand people, the merchants of Whydah shipped an average of nearly six thousand slaves a year during the first quarter of the century, making up about twenty-three percent of the total slaves carried out of Western Africa at the time.56 It was a kind of terminus of slave trading for the Bight of Benin, a “free port” where European ships from all nations found safe harbor

53 Law, The Slave Coast, 21-22. 54 Law, The Slave Coast, 22-23. 55 John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies (London: 1735), 111; Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 159. 56 These numbers are based on my calculations using the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Between 1700 and 1725, there were approximately 139,000 slaves embarked from Whydah and 611,242 slaves embarked from all of Western Africa, which includes all regions from Senegambia to West Central Africa. In his publication from 1735, John Atkins claimed that up to 20,000 slaves a year were taken from Whydah. In the Diligent, Robert Harms suggested that these numbers were probably between 16,000 and 20,000, which is too high. For the estimated population of Whydah in 1725, see Robin Law, The Slave Coast, 58-59. Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012); Robert Harms, The Diligent, 159; John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, 157.

122 and a ready supply of captives, so that slaves were brought to the kingdom from hundreds of miles away.

The kingdoms along the Slave Coast did not experience the same political upheaval as the Coromantee. The profit from European trade goods allowed the Kings of

Whydah and Alladah (to the east) to gain prestige through ostentatious show of wealth and to maintain his power by purchasing mercenaries and serving as a benefactor of courtiers. As in the Gold Coast, there was a new form of social mobility as well as a competition for political power in the ranks below the kings, but the centralization of authority traditional to the people of the Bight of Benin was only accelerated by the slave trade. As Robin Law explains, “the trade also benefited some sections of society more than others, increasing social inequalities generally” and profited the indigenous leadership well-placed to control revenue from the trade.57 In Whydah and throughout the

Slave Coast, the centralization of authority only increased the power of powerful kings.

Along the Gold Coast, wealth from the slave trade allowed commoners and merchants to advance themselves politically by inventing new customs and offices. For all the people along the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, warfare was endemic.58

Far to the south, through the Gulf of Guinea and past the Bight of Biafra, the last slave nation associated with open rebellion in British America in the first half of the eighteenth century emerged from West-Central Africa. After the South Carolina Stono

Rebellion of 1739, an anonymous official explained the insurrection by insisting that

“amongst the Negroe Slaves there are a people brought from the Kingdom of Angola in

Africa… and the Jesuits have a Mission and School in that Kingdom and many

57 Law, The Slave Coast, 221. 58 Law, The Slave Coast, 225-233.

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Thousands of the Negroes there profess the Roman Catholic Religion.”59 The anonymous Briton noted the close affiliation of the Portuguese and Spanish and suggested that the shared Catholic faith of the slaves may have encouraged their attempt to rise and escape to Spanish Florida. In his influential article “The African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” Thornthon accepts this assertion by the anonymous writer and argues that the rebels were probably Kongolese Christians captured from the Kingdom of

Kongo in the 1720s or 1730s.60 He explains that several conflicts were raging along the southern border of the Kingdom of Kongo in the 1730s that might have produced slaves for the traders in Cabinda.61

Outside of South Carolina, the British did not mention the “Angolas” in any other conspiracy or insurrection in their Atlantic provinces in the first half of the eighteenth century. During the complicated and extensive First Jamaican Maroon War, the Angolas were not mentioned at all. In fact, the British typically stereotyped the “Angolas” as idle in the eighteenth century. “Those of Congo and Angola are less set by,” wrote Reverend

William Smith of Nevis in 1745, "because the Plenty of Provision in their own… countries, renders them lazy, and consequently, not so able to endure Work and

Fatigue.”62 As historian Michael Gomez explains, the British stereotype of Angolas in the colonial period was docility rather than rebelliousness.63 That the “Angolas” were described as rebels in South Carolina in 1739 indicates that the particular circumstances of freedom in Spanish Florida may have served as a very strong impetus to Catholic

59 “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” in Mark Smith, ed., in Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 14. 60 Thornton, “African Dimension,” 1105-1106. 61 Thornton, “African Dimensions,” 1104. 62 William Smith, A Natural History of Nevis (Cambridge, 1745), 225. 63 Gomez, Exchanging, 136.

124 slaves. Thornton may be quite right concerning the Catholic Kongolese background of the rebels at Stono.

Most of the captive peoples originating from the West-Central African slave coast may have had more in common with the “nations” of slaves that did not lead rebellions and conspiracies in the first half of the eighteenth century. In the late 1720s, the British relied heavily on the Loango Coast and the independent polity of Cabinda for the purchase of West-Central African slaves.64 Cabinda was the most popular slave port for

British Guineamen trading to South Carolina. Though the British confined their West-

Central African slaving to the region along the Loango Coast, the majority of people enslaved and carried to the ports of West-Central Africa in the eighteenth century passed through the Kwango valley, roughly four hundred kilometers east and south of Cabinda.

The slave trade in this part of West-Central Africa was predatory and violent, forcing peoples distant from the coast to consolidate their villages and defend themselves against more organized aggressors moving along the riverine trade routes.65

64Joseph C. Miller, “Central Africa During the Era of the Slave Trade, c1490s-1850,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 56. John K. Thornton, “The African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), 1104. 65 Maureen Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 2003), 7-8; Miller, “Central Africa,” 56. Miller, “Central Africa,” 53, 56.

125

Table [2-2]: British Voyages from West-Central African Ports to Principal Region of Slave Landing, 1710-174066

Mainland Spanish North American America Caribbean Mainland Brazil Africa Totals

Other Spanish South British Other Central Rio de la Southeast Maryland Virginia Carolina Antigua St. Kitts Montserrat Barbados Jamaica Caribbean Caribbean America Plata Brazil Bight of Biafra West Central Africa and St. Helena Cabinda 1 3 9 1 4 1 16 1 1 11 48

Congo River 1 1 Loango 1 4 2 8 8 23

Malembo 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 12

Mayumba 1 1

Port unspecified 2 11 27 3 5 1 7 22 1 17 1 1 98 Totals 6 16 41 6 11 1 12 48 1 1 2 36 1 1 183

Most of the “Angola” slaves carried to Cabinda probably had not yet experienced the political change and state organization that had swept through the Gold Coast in the earlier period. Though many peoples spoke the shared Kikongo languages south of the

Congo River, by the 1720s and 1730s the slave trade to Cabinda was drawing in peoples from far to the east who spoke different languages and were more vulnerable exactly because they lived in desperate villages under less organized kingdoms.67 Enslaved peoples from the interior of West-Central Africa below the Congo River were taken from smaller communities organized around a dynamic ruler claiming legitimacy from his ability to defend his people.68 As Miller explains, “victims of the slave trade arrived in the Americas not with stable institutions of ‘state’ in their head but rather in metaphors of

66 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012). 67 Gomez, Exchanging, 144. 68 Miller, “Central Africa,” 42.

126 protective powers exercised by strong, personal patrons…”69 In the Americas, the nation of “Angolas,” unlike the “Coromantee,” would look back to these patrons in their home polities as perpetual leaders and ancestors. “I am the subject of the King of Congo,”

Angolan slaves would declare to the French during the Haitian Rebellion of the 1790s.70

Though some “Angolas” in the Americas organized themselves around a shared memory of a distant ruler, this was a far cry from the rituals of political advancement that so aided the nation of the Coromantee in their ability to organize.

The experiences of most of the Angolans bore many similarities to the enslaved peoples taken from coasts of Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast, and the

Bight of Biafra, all of which produced few rebel slave leaders during the period of this study. Violence produced by the slave trade was endemic in all these regions between

1690 and 1750, but the mechanisms for political transformation - the rituals of political advancement and reorganization common to the Gold Coast - was not nearly as common in these other regions.71 Slave trading was controlled by merchant networks that extended far into the continent preying on people with less experience in the dynamic political world created by the slave trade. These hundreds of villages sometimes waged small raids that produced slaves or practiced kidnapping. The polities sold people from farther north or excess agricultural laborers down the river southward. Merchants carried slaves in longboats and delivered them to the slave ships waiting in the roads. These captives, taken from small villages, had not experienced the political transformation of the Gold

Coast and West-Central Africa.72 Despite more than 228,000 people taken by the British

69 Ibid. 70 John K. Thornton, “I am the Subject of the King of Congo,” Journal of World History 4 (1993): 181-214. 71 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 84. 72 Ibid., 84-85, 59-60.

127 from these many coasts in the first half of the eighteenth century, they did not join other rebels in this period.

When Takyi was ten years old, the Akwamu attacked and destroyed his home.

Throughout his short life, the warlike nation to the north had menaced his people. In

1701, the new Akwamu King Ado sought to expand his territory and his power. Finding no room for maneuver against the powerful kingdom of Akim to the west, the Akwamu attacked Little Popo to the east and routed the Ga people who had fled from them a generation earlier.73 Going still farther, King Ado attacked the people of the Dahomey and destroyed their army. “Woadi Dahome ade ammee wo,” sang the Akwamu people to their king, “You have eaten Dahomey, but it has not satisfied you.”74

The Akwamu King Ado also sought to consolidate his client states under his control. Returning from the east, he led long processions of his wives and armed slaves through the Ga villages to the slave forts of the Danes and Dutch.75 His lack of soldiers suggested his lack of fear of the Accra. “The aquamboe Negroes are very haughty, arrogant and warlike,” observed Dutch slave trader Willem Bosman after King Ado’s visit, “the nations under their power, are miserably tormented with the daily plundering, or rather robbing visits, the aquamboean soldiers make them, they not daring to oppose

'em in the least for fear the king, who never fails severely to revenge his soldiers quarrels, should hear of it.”76 During the visit, the King of Akwamu called upon the Ga villages to supply auxiliaries to his army. In the campaigns of 1702 into Dahomey, the Accra

73 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 31-32. 74 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 32. 75 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 31. 76 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 65.

128 deserted during a particularly brutal epidemic of disease and hunger that swept through the army.77

In November of 1708, when Takyi was “about ten years old,” the Akwamu launched a surprise attack on the Ga from the north. The reason for the attack is not clear. Recording the account of his friend “Putti,” Danish slave trader Ludewig

Ferdinand Romer related the horror remembered by the Ga caboceer thirty years later.

The Akwamu had attacked his village of Labadia at night, Puti remembered, “killing and taking anything they came across.” Putti explained “that the number of people they took from him alone was over 2,000, namely his relatives, children, slaves and children of slaves.” Putti and his people had fled east, across the river Volta to the land of Little

Popo. The Akwamu had not stopped their invasion. Throughout the spring, they destroyed a total of four Ga villags, including Ningo, Tessing, Osu and Labadi. Romer noted that the people of Osu, who lived beneath the Danish slave castle, had tried to flee into the castle. The Danish commander of the fort had refused, not wanting to anger the

Akwamu by defending the Ga.

There is no evidence concerning the village in which Takyi was born, but it seems possible that he was from the ruined villages that the Akwamu destroyed up until April of

1709. According to Ivor Wilks, the Akwamu slaves were typically hauled north to the capital to be divided among soldiers and the king. The Akwamu sold their captives to many forts, including the English at Jamestown. In the years between 1709 and 1710, three British Guineaman ships took on cargoes of enslaved persons and sailed for the island of Antigua. Was Takyi aboard the Royal African Company vessel called the

Regard? The records of the RAC reveal that the ship departed from the Gold Coast on

77 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 32.

129

November 22, 1708, less than a month after the invasion had begun. At the time of its embarkation, The Regard carried in its hold 491 souls, including 90 children, an unusually high number for a British slave ship. If Takyi was aboard that ship, he witnessed 56 Gold Coast people die during the voyage. On February 4th, the Regard weighed anchor in Antigua.78

The Origins of the Conflicts Between Slaves

The African trade encouraged conflict in black communities in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The British planters introduced tens of thousands of forced migrants into colonial slave populations already competing for necessities in the depressed economic conditions of the era. The sharp decline in the prices of sugar and rum in Europe led planters to try to increase production even as they provided less for their slaves. At the same time, planters borrowed against future crops to import more

Africans for their labor. The growing desperation within black communities was exasperated by the massive influx of foreign slaves. New arrivals from Africa entered a

British hierarchical society in which they were known as “country negroes,” African-born slaves without knowledge of plantation life and white culture. In many cases, enslaved migrants from the interior of Africa could not communicate with their fellow shipmates nor with the American-born creoles on plantations. In Antigua, as in most British provinces in the 1730s, “country negroes” relied upon their own African people for alliances and even survival. As a result of the massive influx of forced migrants, the

78 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed May 19th, 2013).

130 black slave communities of the British Atlantic were fragmented into different groups, competing against each other between the years 1729 and 1746. For most slaves, both insurrections and conspiracy trials were moments of crisis, when hard choices had to be made concerning who would stand together. The tensions in black communities burst forth in these critical moments.

Herbert Aptheker once wrote the “first reason for slave rebellion was slavery,” and this was as true in the 1730s as it would be for later generations. Chattel slavery in the Americas was based on the enslavement of people of African ancestry who were held as permanent outsiders. “The slave,” Orlando Patterson explains, “was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside – ‘the domestic enemy.” He “did not and could not belong because he was the product of a hostile, alien culture.”79 Africans forced into this form of bondage, carried across the Atlantic Ocean and deposited on the shores of America, were especially vulnerable to a specific form of terror from their enslavement. Their practice of ancestral worship held that the spirit of the dead was maintained through their homeland. To be removed from Africa was to be removed from kinship, to be dispossessed of one’s ancestors for all time and to suffer eternal alienation.80 To be an American slave meant to suffer in this world and the next. The conflicts that emerged between 1729 and 1746 were all born from the sufferings imposed on New World slaves.

But the unrest reflected the broader changes taking place in the British Atlantic during the period. The British slave traders quadrupled the number of imported slaves into the Americas during a time in which plantations were reaching a new level of

79 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 39. 80 Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2008), 43.

131 efficiency in their exploitative labor. The growth of sugar monoculture in the West

Indies increased the demand for slaves and was answered by the arrival of tens of thousands of new Africans. The same was true in the plantations of the Low Country and in the tobacco fields of the Chesapeake. Newly arrived slaves were vulnerable to disease and susceptible to the rigorous work routines of the plantation system. Not surprisingly, it was in the decades between 1720 and 1750 that slave mortality on sugar and rice plantations reached its highest level in the eighteenth century.

Sugar planting accounted for a terrible mortality among the enslaved. The expansion of the plantation system was well developed by the first quarter of the eighteenth century but still expanding. In 1734, Governor Matthew of Antigua wrote to the Board of Trade complaining that only 24,408 acres of the more than 50,000 acres of manured land was under sugar cultivation.81 He blamed this on the want of slaves, but the truth was that sugar cultivation killed black laborers. Sugar cultivation had become more intensive and harsh. From January to May, the dry seasons in the Caribbean, slaves cut the cane almost continuously and hauled it to the sugar mills, where the wind or cattle turned the gin that crushed out the juice. The liquor was then boiled in cauldrons in special boiling houses. At times, mills could run up to nine months, the slaves getting less than six hours of sleep a night and working six days a week. From June to

December, the rainy season, slaves holed, planted, dunged and weeded the fields.82 As plantations became more efficient, the labor only intensified for slaves. At the same time, malnutrition was rampant. As a rule in the first half of the eighteenth century, planters provided only a small portion of food and expected slaves to provide the rest through

81 Mathew to BT, CO 152/20, f. 146, TNA. 82 Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Kingston: Canoe Press, 1994), 242-243.

132 personally cultivated fields. The intensification of sugar production cut down on time for food production and forced slaves to survive on barely enough calories to keep them working. Malnutrition led to exhaustion and vulnerability to disease.83

Mortality in the cane fields was exacerbated by the introduction of unseasoned

African slaves who were extremely vulnerable to the American disease environment. In

1740, Charles Leslie of Jamaica noted “almost half of the newly imported negroes die in the seasoning,” referring to the period of three years thought to be required for a slave to become acclimated to the tropical environment, and historical studies have generally supported his observation.84 In 1732, Rev. Robertson of Nevis sought to explain the high mortality of slaves in the islands:

The Loss in Slaves (not including those immediately from Guinea, of which about two fifths die in the Seasoning) may well, one Year with another, be reckoned at One in Fifteen; in dry Years when Provisions of the Country Growth are scarce, one in Seven in my plantations; and when the Small Pox…happens to be imported, it is incredible what Havock it makes among the Blacks.”85

Robertson did not stress over work, but he found the combination of disease and lack of provisioning to be murderous upon the black population of his plantations.

The mortality rates for slaves arriving in the 1720s and 1730s may have been the highest witnessed in the British colonies over the entire eighteenth and nineteenth century. Richard Sheridan argues the intensification of agriculture led to the growing fatalities among slaves throughout the British West Indies in the first half of the

83 Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 52. 84 Charles Leslie, A new and exact account of Jamaica (Edinburgh, 1739), 238. 85 Rev. Robert Robertson, A Detection of the State and Situation of the Present Sugar Planters (London: 1732), 42-43.

133 century.86 In Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica, the natural decline in overall population was close to four percent annually in these years. “It is computed in the West

Indies,” wrote philosopher David Hume in 1752, “that a stock of slaves grow worse five per cent every year, unless new slaves be bought…”87 His numbers were a bit too high, but contemporary white Britons were well aware of the tragic mortality in the islands.

Table [2-3]: Average Annual Decline in Slave Population (by percentage)88

Jamaica Barbados Leeward Islands 1676-1700 3 4.1 4 1701-1725 3.6 4.9 4.4 1726-1750 3.5 3.6 4.8

On the North American mainland, conditions on the rice and tobacco plantations in the second quarter of the eighteenth century were similar to sugar plantations in the

West Indies. As in the Leeward Islands and Jamaica, South Carolina planters’ expansion of rice monoculture led to the intensification of labor and high mortality rates for the enslaved. According to Edward Pearson, between 1709 and 1731 rice production increased from 600 to 10,000 tons per year. For labor, planters imported more than

20,000 new slaves by 1739.89 As in the West Indies, mortality rates among these new slaves were high. Philip Morgan estimates that as many as one in three died within the

86Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 244-248. 87 David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations (1752),” quoted in Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 244. 88Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 247, Table 11.1. 89 Edward A. Pearson, “Rebelling as Men,” in Mark Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2005), 93.

134 first year of their arrival in South Carolina.90 Though disease surely played a major factor in such a high rate of death, the labor of rice cultivation was brutal. Placing the creeks and marshland under cultivation required extensive, back breaking labor. The plantations of the 1730s were just completing an important transition from pastoral herding to rice agriculture, a transition he believes may have caused additional stress among the male slave populations forced to participate in the cultivation of this new crop.91

In the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, the labor of tobacco growing proved less destructive than that of sugar or rice. By 1720, the slave population had achieved natural increase, meaning the number of black births exceeded the number of black deaths. Still, the first half of the eighteenth century saw the largest number of

Africans imported into the Chesapeake during the colonial era. Nearly one in four of these forced migrants could expect to die before their first year of seasoning.92

The hardships born from the expansion of plantation agriculture and the disease environment were exacerbated by a widespread economic depression that swept through the British Atlantic in the early 1730s. The plantations of the West Indies glutted the markets of Europe, leading to a sharp decline in the price of sugar. This depression in the

West Indies was shared by the tobacco planters in the Chesapeake, whose luxury crop had already been in decline for decades. Except for Pennsylvania, which found a ready market for its grain in Europe, the colonies of the north followed the West Indies in the

90 Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black culture in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 445. 91 Pearson, “Rebelling as Men,” 93, 99. 92 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 444-445.

135 decline of demand for their shipping and goods. Economic hardship taxed the lowest classes the worst, and slaves were most vulnerable to deprivation.

The decline in the price of sugar and tobacco was the result of overproduction in the British colonies and competition from other empires. The falling prices were not due to a lack of consumption on the part of England. Between 1700 and 1731, English sugar consumption increased by 87 percent.93 Rather, the French and Portuguese were by the early eighteenth century supplying their own colonial sugar to the continental European market, limiting the re-exports of the British. Tobacco producers from Virginia found their crop under considerable competition from South America.

The falling prices of these commodities were felt not only by planters but also in the harbors of the north. Shipping in New York and Boston declined sharply in the 1730s with surprising consequences. White shipwrights and artisans, mariners and merchants fled the northern cities in the middle of the decade, returning to the British Isles to seek out new opportunities. By the second half of the 1730s, New Yorkers were replacing white labor with black bondsmen, increasing the slave population of the colony to its absolute peak in the eighteenth century.94

The consequences for the slave trade in the West Indies were surprisingly similar.

Instead of halting their importation of slaves, planters sought to produce more sugar by securing more labor. They borrowed extensively against their plantations and scrambled to purchase new waves of Africans. The effect of this economic depression was a steady decline in the white population from 5200 in 1724 to 3772 in 1734, while the number of

93 Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 426-427. 94 Gary B. Nash, “The New York Census of 1737: A Critical Note on the Integration of Statistical and Literary Sources,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. 36, No. 3 (Jul., 1979), 431.

136 slaves in the colony increased from 19,800 in 1724 to 24,408 1734.95 As in New York, slave imports increased and white migrants declined drastically throughout the

Caribbean. While this was good for the merchants of slave trading, it created greater hardship for the population of the enslaved.

The slaves of Antigua may have suffered more in the economic depression than any other people. Gaspar notes the Antiguans were particularly vulnerable to the declining price of sugar because they depended so much on the importation of food from the northern mainland.96 English imports increased in price as sugar prices declined.97

While Jamaican slaves had more land to cultivate and a ready supply of water, both white and black Antiguans looked to ships and trade to supply their islands. Evidence for growing hunger among the slaves exists in the Antiguan Council Minutes. In 1731, for example, the Council suggested that slave runaways were increasing on the island because they were “treated cruelly and underfed.”98

In the same year, Governor Gooch of Virginia wrote home to the Board of Trade that he feared the slaves of the Chesapeake were starving. Like the sugar islands, the tobacco colonies had suffered a long decline in their leading cash crop. The poor crop produced in 1730 provided less than either the middling or wealthier planters had hoped for. The result was widespread economic depression. “[The] Negroes go naked all winter,” wrote Virginia’s Governor Gooch to London in 1732, “[they] have not proper

95 David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America, (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 98-100. 96 David Barry Gaspar,”The Antiguan Slave Conspiracy of 1736: A Case Study of the Origins of Collective Resistance,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 35, No. 2. (Apr., 1978), 317. 97 Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 427-429. 98 Gaspar, “The Antiguan Slave Conspiracy,” 317.

137 tools to work with, and their Quarters for want of Nails are tumbling down.”99 The black communities of British America shared in a crisis of overwork, high mortality, general hunger, and widespread economic depression. Newly arrived African slaves were forced to adapt to these brutal conditions among a foreign people.

Language provided the first and perhaps most important barrier to integration for new arrivals. In the early eighteenth century, Africa held the most linguistically complex population of any continent.100 Language separated slaves even aboard the slave ship.

When, in 1725, Captain Snelgrave discovered the ship’s cooper murdered by Coromantee slaves in the dark of night, he did not fear the rest of the African captives, “for above one hundred of the Negroes then on board, being bought to Windward, did not understand a word of the Gold-Coast Language.”101 White observers of the slave population frequently commented on the language difficulties of the new slave population. In 1729, the Bishop of London noted that his missionaries to the colonies complained that the African slaves could not speak English and in 1740, Commissary Alexander Garden of South Carolina still noted the “many various ages, Nations, languages” of the “Body of Slaves.”102

Slaves arriving in the provinces in the 1730s could be completely isolated by their inability to communicate. The Chesapeake Bay region was particularly prone to isolating new African slaves because of the smaller plantation size and large body of English speaking creole slaves.103 In Maryland in the early 1730s, a Wolof man called Job remembered that he grew “desperate” and “disturbed” because of his “Ignorance of the

99 Gooch to BT, May 27, 1732, CO 1323/5, 12-13, TNA. 100 Moran, Slave Counterpoint, 561. 101 Snelgrave, A New Voyage to Guinea, 179. 102 Edmund Gibson, Two letters of the Lord Bishop of London (London, 1729), 15-16; Garden to SPG, May 6, 1740, B7/235, as quoted in Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 457. 103 Berlin, Many Thousands, 112-115.

138

English Language, which prevented him complaining, or telling his Case to any Person about him.”104 Edward Long of Jamaica wrote that slaves “who do not speak the dialect of slaves on the islands sometimes kill themselves in despair.”105 Surviving the despair of slavery required the ability to communicate.

Despite the barrier of language, newly arrived slaves were so common in many of the provincial populations that they quickly discovered their power in numbers. This was especially true for the Coromantee. Nations of African slaves were built around shared languages and custom. As Thornton argues, the nation of the Coromantee emerged from diverse and rival peoples in West Africa, but the ability to communicate through a shared language helped to foster a new black identity in the British colonies.106 Belonging to the nation of the Coromantee provided both community and opportunity for advancement among slaves in the British West Indies and the southern mainland.

104 Thomas Bluett, Some memoirs of the life of Job (London, 1734), 20. 105 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 397-398. 106 John Thornton, “The Coromantees,” 169-170.

139

Table [2-4]: Slaves Disembarked in the Caribbean from British vessels by African Region, 1700 to 1750107 Caribbean Spanish American MainlandTotals Senegambia and offshore Atlantic 3.50% 3.50% Sierra Leone 1.30% 1.30% Windward Coast 1.20% 1.20% Gold Coast 30.40% 30.40% Bight of Benin 14.60% 14.60% Bight of Biafra and Gulf of Guinea islands 15.90% 15.80% West Central Africa and St. Helena 12.60% 100.00% 12.70% Southeast Africa and Indian Ocean islands 0.40% 0.40% Other Africa 20.10% 20.10% Averages 100.00% 100.00% 100.00%

Chart [2-2]: Slaves Disembarked in the Caribbean from British vessels by African Region, 1700 to 1750108

107Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed Jan. 11, 2011) 108 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed Jan. 13, 2011).

140

Slaves from the Gold Coast made up the largest nation of enslaved Africans in the

British West Indies in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Coromantee made up thirty percent of all arrivals into the British islands, followed by the peoples from the

Bight of Biafra (15.9%), the Bight of Benin (14.6%), and West-Central Africa (12.6%)

[Table 2-4]. On the island of Antigua, slaves from the Gold Coast made up roughly 28 percent between 1700 and 1750. The next closest slave population came from the Bight of Benin, who made up less than seventeen percent of the arrivals on the island. The nation of Angolans made up less than ten percent of new Africans.

Chart [2-3]: Slaves Disembarked on Antigua by African Region, 1700 to 1750109

109 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed Jan. 10, 2011).

141

The Coromantee slaves of Antigua gained advantages in skill and authority because of their predominant majority on the island. Coromantee slaves appear to have competed directly with creoles for skilled labor positions and to have pushed out rival nations. The “List of Slaves Executed” and “List of Slaves Banished” from the Antigua

Judges Report reveals the dominance of Coromantee slaves in the Antigua labor force.

The convicted conspirators, those people executed or banished by white authorities, were almost all either slave artisans or drivers.110 Coopers, carpenters, coachmen, and waiting men dominated the lists of convicted slaves. The authors of the Antigua report noted the conspirators “were those born upon the Gold-Coast in Africa, whom we stile

Coramantees; and those born in one or other of the American Sugar-Colonies, whom we call Creoles.”111 The long list of names of the 135 slaves convicted for conspiracy reveals the preponderance of either English or Akan identities. Quamina, Cudjoe, Quaco,

Quash and Cuffee are obvious Akan day names. With only the exception of Quaw

[Guinea] and Okoo [Bight of Biafra], no other nations of Africans are identifiable in the list of 135 skilled laborers.112

The preponderance of English and Akan day names suggests that rival nations were excluded by both the Coromantees and the Creoles on the island. The first and most obvious explanation for the lack of accused conspirators from other nations is that neither

Creole nor Coromantee associated with them. Even as they were tortured by white colonists, accused slaves could only provide names of either Gold Coast or Antiguan-

110 A Genuine Narrative, A2-A3; Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 227. 111 A Genuine Narrative, A2. 112African Names Database, 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed Aug. 3, 2013).

142 born slaves.113 The second explanation for the exclusion of rivals is that the convicted conspirators were concerned with members of their own elevated slave class. There simply were far fewer artisans from rival nations on the island. Tomboy, a master- carpenter and supposed leader of the creoles, had chosen his own “Negroe Apprentices,” and it is likely that similar practices were common throughout the island.114 Despite the fact that nearly seventy-percent of Africans arriving in Antigua were not from the Gold

Coast, they were not listed as skilled artisans in the conspiracy. Even in the six years before the first accusations, at least nine hundreds slaves from West-Central Africa had arrived on the island.115 Coromantees and creoles presided over the most important positions available to slaves and they excluded all others.

Slave nations that maintained majorities in British provinces gained power over rival nations and Creoles. This is exemplified by the relationship between slave population and rebellion in the colonies. The Coromantees were the majority slave nation in all of the British West Indian provinces and they were said to have led each of the rebellions. In South Carolina, the Angolas at the Stono River Insurrection made up the largest number of disembarked captives into the colony during that period (42 percent) [Chart 2-4]. This occurred despite the considerable presence of Senegambians

(28 percent) and smaller presence of Coromantee slaves (7 percent) into South Carolina during that time. In Virginia, the planters would not blame the rebellion of 1730 on any nation of Africans, but it seems significant that the dominant people among the African enslaved were the Calabars (Bight of Biafra), the nation that was least involved in unrest

113 A Genuine Narrative, 20. 114 A Genuine Narrative, 4. 115 African Names Database, 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed Aug. 18, 2013).

143 in this period. Lacking the rituals of organization and large scale warfare, originating from disparate villages far in the interior of the continents, the slaves from the Bight of

Biafra may have found it more difficult to rise together.

Chart [2-4]: Percentage Slaves Disembarked into South Carolina by African Coast, 116

1700 to 1750

116 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012).

144

Chart [2-5]: Slaves Disembarked into Virginia by African Region, 1700 to 1750117

All of these figures suggest that slave nations gained confidence to rebel by maintaining large majorities over rival nations of Africans in the British provinces of the

West Indies and mainland North America. For these slave rebels and the people that would join, being African was not enough. The rebels looked to their nation, the people who originated from the same coast – spoke the same language and understood the same rituals – to develop their alliances. We can agree with a British observer writing of slaves in the West Indies in 1694, when he remarked ‘the safety of the Plantations depends upon having Negroes from all parts of Guiny, who not understanding each others

117 Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed March 30, 2012).

145 languages and Customs, do not, and cannot agree to Rebel, as they would do… when there are too many Negroes from one Country.”118

All was not well between Creoles and Coromantee either. The list of accused conspirators disguised the tensions that existed between these rival peoples. In their report of the conspiracy, the Antiguan Judges revealed that the Creoles had resolved “to make Slaves of the Coramantees, and Negroes of all other Nations, and to destroy Court, and all such who should refuse to submit to the Terms the Creoles should please to prescribe or impose.”119 The creole named Tomboy, they claimed, had planned to betray the Coromantee once the slaves captured the island. The account does not appear in the initial confessions and may very well have been a fabrication created by slaves under duress. But that it was spoken at all and accepted as truth by the judges suggests the underlying tensions that simmered between these two rival nations. For the planters in

Antigua, the creoles were the most “sensible, and able Body of our Slaves.”120

By the 1730s, the Creoles had distinct advantages over African slaves. The

Creoles understood the white ways of British planters better than all other members of the slave populations. They spoke better English and were brought up to the labor on plantations. On the mainland, where Creole populations grew quickest, planters entrusted

American-born slave with far more responsibility.121 In the Chesapeake colonies and the

Low Country, Creole slaves were the drivers and foremen, the blacksmiths and the coopers. Being an African-born slave still carried prestige in the first half of the

118 Some Considerations Humbly offered, against Granting the sole Trade to Guiny… to a Company with a Joint Stock, Harleian MSS, 7310/240, as quoted in Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 236. 119 Genuine Narrative, 6. 120 Genuine Narrative, 8. 121 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 216-217, 463-464.

146 eighteenth century, even on the mainland, so that creoles self-consciously gave their

American-born children African day names and young men were mocked by the elders for permitting themselves to be baptized Christians.122 But power rested increasingly in the hands of men and women born into slavery.

The motivations of Creoles were often different from that of rival Africans. In his history of the First Jamaican Maroon War, historian Orlando Patterson depicted the armies of Creoles who fought against Maroons as participants in a kind of racial treason.

The captain of the Black Shots was “appropriately” named Sambo, Patterson explained, and the Black Shots that killed maroons were “traitors.”123 But the Creoles may have viewed the world quite differently from their African rivals. Creoles had their own interests. Edward Long of Jamaica described Creoles as “proud, irascible, and artful” rather than trustworthy. He noted their patriotic “affection for the island that gave them birth” and a “veneration for the ancestors of great families.” More than Africans, they valued “their masters character and reputation …because they believe it reflects upon themselves and they compete with neighboring plantation slaves.” Long warned of the

Creoles “blind anger and brutal rage” and that “the greatest affront” to a “Creole Negroe” was to “curse his father, mother, or any of his progenitors.”124 The Creoles’ identification with the people his plantation and his colony made newly arrived Africans suspicious rivals.

Tensions between Creoles and the several African nations were ubiquitous throughout the plantation colonies. In Virginia in 1728, Robert King Carter felt that he

122 Berlin, Many Thousands, 112-115; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 459-460. 123 Campbell also refers to the slave guides who led Gregory to Cudjoe to make a peace treaty as “traitors,” 107. 124 Long, History of Jamaica, 407-413.

147 had to warn his Creole drivers not to harm his African field hands.125 In 1736, Antiguan- born slave women “rolled their eyes” when they learned Coromantees were attending their outdoor dinner. In 1739, after living in Jamaica for a decade, Charles Leslie wrote

“the Slaves are brought from several Places in Guiney, which are different from one another in Language, and consequently they can't converse freely.” The Englishman explained that the different groups of slaves “hate one another so mortally, that some of them would rather die by the Hands of the English, than join with other Africans in an

Attempt to shake off their Yoke.”126

The First Jamaican Maroon War

The First Maroon War in Jamaica was the largest internecine conflict in the

British Empire during the 1730s. Over a period of more than ten years, the descendants of escaped slaves fought against the combined forces of the British planters in a desperate struggle that engulfed the interior of the island. For the planters, the maroon war was at first simply an insurrection, a continuous struggle against escaped slaves who would not submit to white authority. White colonists on the island shared an obvious and immediate interest in suppressing both the maroons and all plantation slaves. The maroons could inspire slaves to rebel and rebellion could mean the end of the colonists’ lives and livelihood. White Jamaicans also shared an identity as Britons protected under the auspices of their King. As Britons, they spoke the same English language, prayed at their Parish Anglican Church, and accepted the legitimacy of the officials sent to rule.

125 Robert Carter to [], 1728, Robert Carter Letterbook, 1728-1750, Virginia Historical Society, as cited in Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 459. 126 Charles Leslie, A new and exact Account, 327.

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Coupled with the shared determination to control the slave population and the military might of their empire, it was a significant and intimidating advantage.

The black societies of Jamaica enjoyed no such advantage. The slave population and the maroon villages were not united together in common cause. Had even one tenth of the hundred thousand slaves on the island taken up arms, the rebels would have outnumbered the entire white population of eight thousand people. But like black communities throughout the British Empire in the 1730s, they were a people forced together from hundreds of African kingdoms or born into slavery in a number of

American colonies.127 These differences between black people in Jamaica became conflicts that exploded during the First Jamaican Maroon War.

This was true from the very beginning of maroonage on the island. During the conquest of Jamaica by the English in the 1650s, the escaped slave Lubola and his people chose an alliance with the invaders and waged war against rival Spanish Maroon villages.128 The Maroons shot Lubola in battle, but they had together set a precedent of internecine conflict. There is little sign that these tensions had abated in the early eighteenth century. By the 1720s, the Maroons had developed distinct villages in the interior of the island that exhibited strong ties to Gold Coast origins. To the Windward, or eastern side of the island, the maroons lived in several large but separate towns with

Nanny Town said to be the most powerful. Hidden in the Blue Mountains, Nanny Town attracted the attention of British colonial authorities throughout the war. The villages’ spiritual leader, Nanny, had taken the name of the mythological Akan trickster spider

127 Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665-1740,” in Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1979), 250. 128 Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 253-254.

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Ananse for her own, and sought to protect her people with magic. To the west, or leeward side of the island, the famed maroon Cudjoe (Kwadwo –Monday born) led a second and larger community of people. The Leeward Maroons occupied the remote

Cockpit country, a craggy and labyrinthine region in the north-western interior. Cudjoe exercised powerful authority over his people and organized his town and surrounding villages around lieutenants with Akan day names like his own.129

Though the maroons sought to use Gold Coast traditions to unite their communities, they did not recreate Africa in America. They were forced to build a very different life in the colony. Maroons suffered under vagaries specific to their conditions on the island. Their fear of re-enslavement forced them to live in the most difficult and remote regions. They planted and hunted and yet lived at a level of subsistence and isolation that would have been foreign to the crowded commercial centers of the Gold

Coast.130 Perhaps most important, the Maroon villages suffered from a lack of women that would have been quite rare on the coasts of Africa. This fact encouraged the maroons to raid plantations to liberate female slaves. It was just such a raid that began the First Jamaican Maroon War.

In 1729, the Windward Maroons raided a plantation on the north-eastern side of the island. They shot and wounded the plantation’s white overseer and then withdrew into the forests, escaping with six enslaved women.131 This was not a new challenge to

British authority. The fertile lowlands of the northeast had for many years been vulnerable to small raids from maroons. In response to the raid, a company of 38 white men and eight black slaves – assigned to carry baggage – launched a pursuit of the

129Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 345. 130 R.C. Dallas, The History of the Maroons, Vol. 1 (Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1803, reprinted 1968), 82-87. 131Hunter to BT, Mar 12, 1729/30,CO 137/18 1728-1730, S82, TNA.

150 maroon raiders. The pursuers quickly became the pursued. The Windward Maroons ambushed the Company in the Blue Mountains and sent the white militia and baggage slaves fleeing down from the mountain. In their wake, the militia left behind twelve men, lost or dead.132

When newly appointed Governor Robert Hunter learned of the defeat of the company, he ordered the creation of a “Grand Party,” an expedition of ninety-five militia men and twenty-five black baggage handlers with the expressed assignment to destroy the maroon villages. The king had ordered Governor Hunter to place the colony in a state of defense against Spanish invasion and he was determined to secure the island. “The

Assembly,” wrote Hunter to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, “must be induced to provide better for their Security both from within and without.”133 There was silence for weeks, and then the soldiers began appearing again in the town of Kingston. They spoke of ambushes, terrified and confused officers, and men so panicked they had drowned in the flooded rivers. “One fourth part of them are destroyed,” wrote Governor Hunter to his masters in England. In the halls of the king, the minutes of the meeting of the Board of Trade mentioned for the first time the concern that the success of the maroons could lead to a “general rebellion of the slaves.134

Over the next nine years, the Maroons would inflict heavy losses on the white planters as they warred across the interior of Jamaica. Governor Hunter and the

Assembly sought to create ever larger expeditions, each with orders to destroy the “Negro towns” of the Windward Maroons. Hunter attempted to raise funds to construct a series

132 Hunter to BT, Mar 12, 1729/30,CO 137/18 1728-1730, S82, TNA. 133 Hunter to BT, Mar 12, 1729/30,CO 137/18 1728-1730, S82, TNA. 134 Gov to Council and Assembly, Jovis, 12 die Martii, [Mar 12, 1729/30], Journals of the Jamaican Assembly, Vol. II, 698-699.

151 of barracks, or forts, along the interior of the north and to garrison these barracks with white and black soldiers.135 In 1731, an early expedition captured Nanny Town for three days, but the maroons simply fled their village once the fight had turned against them.

The company of militia burned the town and then retreated. Maroons responded to the destruction of their villages and their crops by raiding plantations throughout the north.

The violence escalated. Raids ended with white overseers or black slaves shot to death.

The maroons lit plantation homes on fire and slaughtered livestock.136 By 1733, the

British planters began to lose control of the war. The Windward maroons broke into smaller raiding parties that were difficult to find. Desperate for provisions, they raided plantations at will. Small companies sent out against them often found no one to fight.

At other times, the maroons ambushed their enemies so ferociously that soldiers and baggage slaves fled in a panic, leaving weeks’ worth of powder and shot behind.

In this declining condition, the governor and assembly sought to form yet another

“Grand Party” to attack the Windward Maroons. Taking advantage of the arrival of the navy, the assembly equipped one hundred soldiers and fifty sailors to attack the villages of the Blue Mountains. They also created a company of free blacks and armed more than

200 slaves to join in the expedition. On a late August afternoon in 1733, the maroons ambushed the “Grand Party” as it advanced toward Nanny Town. The fighting was by all accounts fierce, with eight of the white officers dying almost immediately and at least one of the maroon leaders falling in battle.137 Over time, the maroons proved to be far better fighters. The soldiers and sailors began to desert and then fled in mass. Captain

135 Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 58-59. 136 Campbell, The Maroons, 66-67. 137 Swanton Report, Sept 4, 1733, in Hunter to BT, Sept. 8, 1733, CO 137/20, TNA.

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Swanton, shot through the chest, gave orders that the baggage slaves should flee with their supplies as he and only eleven men – out of four hundred - prepared to fight to the last. By close of night, a heavy rain fell on the dead and dying and the Maroons withdrew, leaving the wounded Swanson and his men in the dark.138

When news arrived of the defeat of the Grand Party, a kind of panic swept through Kingston and Spanish Town. Government officials began packing up records in the capital and old women ran “flying to the protection of the squadron for safety.”139 In

1733, the British enslaved more than ninety percent of the island’s population, roughly one-hundred thousand people, all of whom must have learned of the victory of the

“negroes in rebellion.” The assembly issued an official statement to Governor Hunter warning of the “greatest apprehension of a general rebellion.”140 Planters filled their letters with despair. “God only knows what will be the Event of this Miscarriage,” wrote one planter to England, but he was sure the colony would soon be lost. “Its Gods Mercy they are not joined by our own Slaves;” wrote an assemblyman of the maroons, “if that should happen this country must be cut off.”141

Despite these significant victories, no unity emerged within the black population of the island. The Windward and Leeward Maroons fought their battles separately, demonstrating little coordination. Cudjoe, the undisputed leader of the Leeward Maroons in the Cockpit Country, sought to incorporate or destroy any rival settlements that emerged near his village. According to one account at the end of the war, Cudjoe had

138 Swanton Report, Sept 4, 1733, in Hunter to BT, Sept. 8, 1733, CO 137/20, TNA. 139 Bev Carey, The Maroon Story: the Authentic and Original History of the Maroons in the History of Jamaica, 1490-1880 (Kingston: Agouti Press, 1997), 285. 140 'America and West Indies: December 1730, 24-31,’ Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 37: 1730 (1937), 410-424, “627.” 141 Quoted in Campbell, The Maroons, 77.

153 attempted to adopt a separate band of Madagascar slaves into his community around the year 1720. But he had struggled to rule them and apparently killed several of their number.142 As the Maroon War progressed into the 1730s, Cudjoe harassed and intimidated rival settlements. In 1735, a captured slave reported that a small maroon village under the leadership of a “Captain Goome” was willing to surrender to planters in exchange for protection from Cudjoe, who “troubled him very much.” Captain Goomer

“could not sitt down in one place but was forced to goe Every day to a new one.”143 The

Windward Maroons of Nanny Town also discovered that Cudjoe was not willing to join in common cause against the planters. As Nanny Town became too dangerous for the

Windward Maroons, several hundred sought to cross the mountains and join Cudjoe for protection in 1735. According to an “anonymous account” written after the treaty,

Cudjoe refused to shelter the people from the eastern half of the island, blaming them for the war with the white planters and insisting that he would not have independent villages living in the cockpit country.144

These tensions between maroons also suggest the limits of shared membership in the Coromantee nation. Slaves from the Gold Coast dominated the slave populations of

Jamaica in the early eighteenth century and this should have created an important political and cultural unity among both maroons and plantation slaves. Between 1700 and 1750, slave traders to Jamaica carried more than twice as many slaves from the Gold

Coast than from any other region, making up roughly 32 percent of all Africans living in

Jamaica. Because of the incredible mortality among the Jamaican slave population, it is possible that tens of thousands of Gold Coast born slaves lived in Jamaica during the

142 Edward Long Papers, Add. Ms. 12431, as cited in Campbell, The Maroons, 45-46. 143 Ayscough to BT, Feb. 27, 1735, CO 137/21 TNA. 144 Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 269.

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Maroon War. Not surprisingly, there is some evidence of Coromantee runaways joining

Maroons over the course of war. During the victorious era of the maroons in 1734, forty

“Coromantines” rebelled in the parish of Saint Thomas and fled into the interior.145

Historians Orlando Patterson and Mavis Campbell use some of these instances to stress

African national unity during the First Maroon War, but these moments are important exactly because they were exceptions to the rule.146 The vast majority of Coromantee slaves, tens of thousands, did not join the maroon villages and did not rise in rebellion.

The lack of unity among the members of the Coromantee nation may in part be explained by the clear tensions between maroons and plantation slaves. The British descriptions of raids often included accounts of slaves killed in the violence. In 1732, the governor reported to the assembly an attack on the Barclay plantation in Saint Elizabeth, in which the maroons killed six slaves and took eight slaves with them, including one small child who the maroons bashed on a rock and left for dead.147 In a similar attack in

Saint Elizabeth parish that same year, maroons left two slaves dead and took eight others.148 In 1734, a planter and his two white overseers fled a plantation under attack by maroons in the northeastern corner of the island. In the process, the planter abandoned his wife. With two plantation slaves, she secured herself in a building and fought off repeated attacks by the Windward group.149 In this case as in many others, the plantations slaves clearly chose to fight against the maroons.

In most situations, though, plantations slaves appear to have sought a middle course between planters and maroons. British officials believed the slave populations

145 Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 268. 146 Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 268-269; Campbell, The Maroons, 80-81. 147 Hunter to Newcastle, June 1, 1732, CO 137/20. 148 Hunter to Newcastle, June 1, 1732, CO 137/20. 149 New York Weekly Journal, Jan. 20, 1734..

155 were biding their time to see if maroons would emerge victorious. As the assembly explained in their address to the governor, the slaves “want but a favourable opportunity to withdraw from their servitude.”150After the defeat of several of the grand parties in

1733 and 1734, the planters in the northeast announced they could no longer tolerate the

“Insolent behaviour of our own slaves.”151 On the plantations, slaves refused to do their work, “nor dare their master punish them for the least Disgust will probably cause them to make their Escape.”152 Though most slaves did not run away to the Maroons, slaves did sometimes sell the “rebellious negroes” gunpowder or goods in the slave markets.153

Perhaps the best example of the ambivalent attitude of the slaves toward the Maroons was expressed in actions of the slave Sam, as recounted by the slave Sarra in an examination by white authorities. According to Sarra, Sam had lived on Colonel Nedham’s plantation from which the Windward Maroon Cudjoe had fled. Sarra claimed that Sam hosted

Cudjoe on Nedham’s plantation over night and when Cudjoe asked Sam why he did not join the maroons, Sam answered “Master uses us goodee yet, but when he uses us ugly we’ll come.”154As Mavis Campbell notes, the slave Sam had made a conscious choice to live life on the plantation rather than live among the Windward Maroons.155

Despite the middle ground chosen by many enslaved people on the plantations, there were those among their number who were determined enemies of the maroons. By

1732, the planters were relying on companies of fighting slaves they called Black Shots.

The leaders of these slave companies were mostly creoles, black men born into slavery in

150 'America and West Indies: December 1730, 24-31', Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 37: 1730 (1937), 410-424, “627.” 151 Ayscough to BT, Feb. 27, 1735, CO 137/21. 152 John Gregory to BT, Feb. 20, 1734, CO 137/21, as quoted in Cambell, “The Maroons,” 80. 153 Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 269. 154 “Examination of Sarra,” October 1st, 1733, CO 137/21, TNA. 155 Campbell, The Maroons, 80-81.

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Jamaica with the ability to track and fight in the mountainous forests of the island. In

1732, two of the earliest successful expeditions sent against the Maroon villages included a majority of armed slaves and the campaign resulted in three villages taken. The heroics of the Black shot officer Sambo, who held his ground when the white officers ran away, led the Jamaican assembly to reward the creole with the command of four Black Shot companies who were sent out again by the governor.156 “You’ll think it strange but it is true,” wrote Governor Hunter to the Board of Trade in England, “my Chief Dependence in Case of an Attempt was upon the trusty Slaves for whom I had prepared Arms.”157 The

Black Shots proved murderous against the maroons. In 1733, the slave Cuffee shot to death Nanny in an attack on her village. In the same year, a creole named Scipio killed the dynamic Windward Maroon leader Kishee.158

The motivations of the Black Shot soldiers are not obvious in the historical record. Part of the limited evidence suggests that many creole Black Shots did not speak

African languages and did not share a culture with the decidedly Gold Coast-oriented maroons they faced in battle. The white officer, Ayscough, complained to the assembly in 1733 that the leader of the Black Shots could not speak the Coromantee language of the maroons.159 There were also financial rewards for fighting that may have motivated creoles who hoped to profit from the war. The governor and assembly offered money to slaves who served well and promised them the plunder taken from Maroon villages.160

Slaves who brought in the ears of dead maroons were offered cash prizes. Most important of all, however, was the promise of freedom. As a reward for his service in

156 Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 266. 157 Hunter to BT, Nov. 13, 1731, CO 137/19, TNA. 158 Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 261-262. 159 Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 263, n.10. 160 Campbell, The Maroons, 82.

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1733, for example, the Assembly passed an act that freed Sambo’s wife and children.161

These acts were very rare, but the possibility of freedom must have served as a powerful impetus for enslaved soldiers.

These many tensions between the black peoples of Jamaica were enshrined into law by the Maroon Treaty of 1739. Governor Edward Trelawney landed on the island with the intention of forming a treaty with the Maroons. Without the permission of the

Jamaican Assembly, he instructed militia colonel Guthrie, already involved in previous attempts to contact maroon villages, to march on Cudjoe and negotiate a peace. The

Treaty signed by Colonel Guthrie and Cudjoe promised that the British would accept the

“perfect state of Freedom and Liberty” of the Leeward Maroons in exchange for the maroons agreeing to accept the authority of King George. Most important to the planters, the Windward Maroons agreed to “take, kill, suppress, or destroy all Rebels wheresoever that be throughout this island; and to submit to the orders of the Commander and Chief on that Occasion.”162 In effect, Cudjoe and his men agreed to fight against all slave rebels and maroons.

The treaties allowed the planters to once again take control of the island.

Governor Trelawny sent new expeditions to the eastern Blue Mountains of Jamaica with instruction to burn villages and sue for peace, but the militia enjoyed the distinct advantage of fifty maroon fighting men from Cudjoe’s Town serving as rangers and guides. Within three months of the Leeward treaty, the villages of the Windward

Maroons had also negotiated a peace with the British Government.163 Trelawny insisted that the end of the war would open Jamaica to a new wave of planting. Indeed, looking

161 Campbell, The Maroons, 83. 162 Dallas, History of the Maroons, 59-60. 163 Campbell, The Maroons, 135.

158 back forty years later, Edward Long wrote that he dated “the flourishing state” of Jamaica

“from the ratification of the treaty; ever since which, the island has been increasing in plantations and opulence.”164

Among the slaves, there was great despair. The assembly had insisted that slaves were biding their time to wait to see who might win between the maroons and planters.

The treaties made it clear that the only real losers would be the slaves. The treaty had made the maroons the allies of the Britons and the official enemy of any slave who sought to escape his condition of slavery. In March of 1740, slaves met in large crowds near the capital of Spanish Town and would not disperse. According to Edward Long, the crowds met at night for days and elected captains to lead them. Fearing rebellion,

Governor Trelawny ordered the cavalry out against the crowds. The soldiers arrested slave leaders, executed some, and banished others.165

The Maroons began working closely with white militias to control the slave population. Cudjoe continued to enforce his will as brutally as the planters. Looking for bounties, Cudjoe’s Maroons killed so many runaway slaves that the Assembly passed new laws attempting to pay more for slaves taken alive. 166 In May of 1724, the Maroon leader Cudjoe appeared before Governor Trelawny with four captives, claiming he had discovered a conspiracy among his number to rise in rebellion. When Governor

Trelawney sought to appear magnanimous by pardoning the maroons and giving them back to Cudjoe, he publicly killed two of the men and sent the others back to the governor with instructions that they be sold off the island.

164 Long, History of Jamaica, 348. 165 Long, History of Jamaica, 348. 166 Journal of the Jamaican Assembly, III, May 1, 1742.

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The largest accusation of conspiracy emerged from a male slave named Hector in late January of 1745. He approached his white mistress warning that “diverse drivers on four or five plantations” were planning a slave rebellion in which she would be killed.

The location of the 1745 conspiracy was probably in Saint John Parish, part of modern day Saint Catherine Parish in southeastern Jamaica, near the old capital of Spanish

Town.167 According to a newspaper account in the Boston Evening Post, the white woman sent a message to her husband in town and when she received no reply, contacted her neighbor Simon Clarke, a member of the provincial council. Clarke rode to Spanish

Town and rushed in upon the Governor, who immediately and secretly called out his fighting men. The next day, the company of soldiers ambushed the conspirators in a field described by the informant as the rendezvous for the rebellion. According to Franklin’s

Pennsylvania Gazette, the militia captured “12 or 14” slaves, “and continu’d to take more of them by Degrees.” The wrath of the planters was terrible. Some of the conspirators were “hang’d, some burnt, some hung in Chains, and some sent off the island.”168

The violence of the Jamaican Maroon War and the despair that appears to have swept through the slave communities reached a terrible pitch in August of 1745. In an act that evinced great desperation, a group of twenty African-born “Coromantee” and

“Popo” slaves, most of whom were publicly owned by the “King’s Navy Yard,” broke off

167 The newspaper reports did not name the location, but they do mention Council Member “Simon Clark,” almost certainly Simon Clarke the baronet who was born and buried in Saint Catherine Parish, Middlesex, Jamaica. The location in Middlesex also corresponds well with the story that the planter was in town playing cards and received a note from his wife warning of the conspiracy. Spanish Town was located in Saint Catherine Parish and would have been quickly accessible with such a message. The slave informant Hector was said to be owned by Thomas Fuller, who appears in the Acts of Jamaica applying for improvements for his property in Saint John. For this reason, I assume that the conspiracy took place in Saint John. “13. An Act for… repairing, the road from Spring Garden… to Thomas Fuller’s plantation in Saint John,” Anno 13 – Georgio II, 1740,” in The Laws of Jamaica: 1681-1759. 168 Boston Evening Post, April 1, 1745; Pennsylvania Gazette, April 12, 1745.

160 from a palisades construction project on the eastern side of the island and began marching west, attacking plantations as they went. According the author of the letter from Saint

David’s Parish, the rebels set out with a “Design to kill all they met with.” They were led by a man called “King’s Cudjoe,” his name indicative both of a slave owned by the

Crown and, because of his day name, probably membership in the Coromantee nation.

The rebels killed a “Negro man” at the palisades, and then according to the writer, a “free

Fisherman Negro and four old Negro Women about a Mile from Bull-Bay.” The reasons for these killings were not explained by the author. The rebels continued westward, attacking the Innis plantation and killing the white overseer and “two or three slaves.” At the next plantation of a Mr. White, the insurrectionists killed three more slaves and burnt the plantation to the ground. By that time, planters had spread the alarm throughout the region. The author of the account described a second party of twenty more slaves who had “agreed to join” King Cudjoe’s rebels at the Palisades but were prevented by a

“breach” created by a storm.169

It was the Windward Maroons, the people once described by the planters as the

“Rebellious Negroes,” who destroyed the rebellion of the desperate Coromantee and

Papaw slaves of the king. “A few days later,” explained the author of the letter, King

Cudjoe’s party was “met by our friend Negroes (who had been formerly Rebels) under the command of one Colonel Bennet, of Spanish Town, who soon defeated them, killing four men and one woman and taking three women prisoner, the remaining Thirteen making their escape into St Thomas Paris on the back of Negro River.” In open battle, the people the Jamaicans now called “the friend Negroes,” opened fire on the African

169 American Weekly Mercury, Jan. 21, 1746.

161 peoples rebelling against their condition as slaves.170 Over the next weeks, the planters relied on the plantations slaves to finish the work of the Windward Maroons. Colonial authorities put a bounty of 5 pound for each dead rebel and 10 pound for each taken alive.

“The Other Twelve were soon after brought in or killed by the plantation Negroes,” wrote the Jamaican author, “Scarcely a day happening without one or other being brought in dead or alive.”171 The band of twenty slaves accused of seeking to join Cudjoe were also

“taken up.” The planters banished a few slaves who gave evidence against the others, but most were burned or hanged, their heads displayed along the newly cut roads constructed by slaves on the new plantations.

The violence of the insurrectionists suggests the differences and frustration that pervaded the slave communities in Jamaica by 1745. “Tis believed the cruelty with which Cudjoe’s party proceeded,” wrote the Jamaican author, “was the chief means for its being so soon quell’d, as it exasperated all the plantation negroes against them.”172 If the African born Coromantee and Papaw slaves killed as indiscriminately as the planters described, then this violence may indeed have incurred the wrath of other slaves. But the insurrection in St David’s Parish presented the chasm that had developed between the black communities of Jamaica by 1745. Coromantee slaves attacked and killed slaves on nearby plantations. The Windward Maroons, once the intrepid enemies of Spanish

Town, now fought alongside white officers serving under the British Crown. In the decades to come, there would be new conspiracies and insurrections in Jamaica, but there would be no alliance between the black communities of the island.

170 American Weekly Mercury, Jan. 21, 1746. 171 “Extract of a Private Letter from a gentleman in Jamaica, dated in St David’s Parish, Nov. 18 1745,” American Weekly Mercury, Jan 21, 1746. 172 Ibid.

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The Last Stand of the Akwamu

In 1730, as the First Jamaican Maroon swept over the island of Jamaica, another violent conflict raged on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the land of Takyi’s birth, on the Gold Coast of Africa, the kingdom of Akwamu collapsed before an invading army from the west. The nation of Akyem surprised Akwamu during a period of widespread discontent within the kingdom. Like the many victims of the warring state, the Akwamu people abandoned their capital and attempted to flee east and south, away from the invading army.173 The Ga people of Accra turned on their former masters, fighting alongside the Akyem soldiers and enslaving the Akwamu as they attempted to seek refuge among the European castles with which they had traded for so long.174 The

Ga sold their Akwamu to the European forts, including the Danish Fort Christiansborg.

Historian Ray Kea argues the Danish slave ships Haabet Galley and Countess of Laurwig were loaded with Akwamu slaves in 1731 and 1733, the two ships carrying together 357 people to the Danish Islands of Saint Thomas and Saint John in the Leeward Islands.175

The newly enslaved Akwamu captives arrived on the island of Saint John during a period of intense settlement. The island is six miles across and mountainous, with the most fertile regions on the leeward (western) side of the island. The Danes began moving from nearby Saint Thomas to Saint John in 1717. By 1733, there were 208 white settlers

173 Wilks, “Akwamu,” 48. 174 Romer, A Reliable Account, 128-129. 175 Ray A. Kea, “‘When I die, I shall return to my own land”: An “Amina” Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies, 1733-34,” in John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler, eds., The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society, Ghanain and Islamic in honor of Ivor Wilks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 168-169.

163 and 1,087 black slaves on the island of Saint John with approximately ten slaves on each plantation.176 Because the Danes lacked settlers, they invited Dutch, French and English planters to purchase land and raise sugar cane under the authority of the Danish West

Indian and Guinea Company. The planters scattered out over the island, maintaining small herds of cattle and aggressively planting sugar. They were encouraged by their

King in Denmark, who in 1729 passed an edict requiring all national refineries to use only Company sugar from the West Indies.177

On November 23, 1733, the Danish Magistrate John Reimert Soedtmann awoke to the sound of his breaking door in the early morning.178 The sources are silent as to whether the men who entered his room bore torches or entered the chamber in darkness, but the magistrate must have recognized his own slaves very quickly. They forced him to stand up and then stripped him naked.179 The men told Soetman to sing and then to dance, almost certainly in mimicry of the way the Guineamen captains had forced slaves to dance for exercise on the ship deck during the Middle Passage.180 The magistrate performed for his slaves, naked, in what must have been a pathetic show, and then one of the men ran a sword through his body. After he had fallen to the ground they severed his head and cut open his torso and “washed themselves in his blood.” The men took hold of his thirteen year old stepdaughter, name Hissing, and killed her. They laid her dead body on top of her stepfather before they left.181

176 Waldemar Westergaard, The Danish West Indies Under Company Rule (1671-1754) (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1917), 130. 177 Westergaard, Danish West Indies, 124-125. 178 Westergaard, Danish West Indies, 168. 179 Pierre J. Pannet, Report on the Execrable Conspiracy Carried Out by the Amina Negroes, trans. and eds. Aimery P. Caron and Arnold R. Highfield, (Christianstead, St. Croix: Antilles Press, 1984), 12. 180 Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3. 181 Pannet, Report, 12.

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As the Soetman’s died, a party of slaves carrying bundles of wood approached the entrance of Fortsberg, the garrison on the eastern side of the island of Saint John.

“Werdae?!” called out the sentry in the dark. “Company Negroes with wood,” answered the men. The sentry opened the doors and the slaves filed into the fort. From the bundles of wood, the slaves suddenly drew forth bills and cane knives. There were six soldiers in the fort that night. The lone survivor hid under his bed and then escaped while the rest of the soldiers died.182 The slaves, now freemen, raised the flag over the fort and fired the cannons out over Coral Bay. The Akwamu signaled the beginning of their conquest of the Danish island of Saint John. .

The slave rebellion on the island of Saint John was the first successful island-wide slave revolt in the western hemisphere, at least for a little over six months. Beginning their rebellion on November 23, 1733, the slave rebels managed to fight off four

European expeditions and to control, at various times, the length of the island. For the white Danes and their English and French allies, the insurrection was simply a “negro rebellion.” For the slaves who lived on Saint John, there were two struggles: the first a war against the planters and the second, a civil war between the Akwamus and the rest of the black population.

There is considerable evidence that the slave rebels on Saint John were led by

Akwamu men taken in the great war that destroyed their kingdom. The Danes described the rebels as mostly “Aminas,” their designation for the slaves from the Gold Coast, but

Danish historians have also noted several leaders of the insurrection were called

“Aquamboes.”183 Unlike the English, the Danes confined their slave trading to the

182 Westergaard, Danish West Indies, 168-169. 183 Pannet, Report, 17; Kea, “‘When I Die,’” 174-176.

165 monopoly of the Danish West India and Guinea Company, which carried slaves from

Christiansborg Castle in Accra directly to the Danish West Indian islands of Saint

Thomas and Saint John. In his article “When I Die I shall Return to my Own Land,”

Historian Ray A. Kea compared the Company records from Christiansborg Castle and the

Danish West Indies to establish the identity of the “Amina” slaves forcefully carried into

Saint John.184 The Danes called the slave leader of the rebellion King Juni, Kea explains, but in some of the sources noted his “bussel” [African] name was Jama. This matched well with a caboceer named Nyamma, who served on the court of the King of Akwamu and traded extensively with Fort Christiansborg in the 1720s. During the war of 1730,

Nyamma had commanded between 1000 and 2000 men for the Akwamu King as a rearguard before these last forces surrendered in 1732. Kea argues King Juni was probably taken in these last engagements and carried to Saint John in the spring of 1733.

Kea found many similar Akwamu names among the long list of Saint John rebels.185

The Saint John rebellion was to the planters a “negro rebellion,” but it was also an attempt by one nation of Africans to conquer and rule over others. From the very outset of rebellion, it was clear that the insurrectionists had excluded hundreds of the island slaves from their conspiracy. The first plantation attacked by the conquerors of the fort was defended only by slaves, the widow who owned the property residing on the neighboring island. “These Negroes, who had armed themselves defensively,” wrote

Pannet, “received the rebels with indescribable courage.”186 After cutting down several rebels and losing one of their own, the bondsmen retreated to a planter stronghold on the island. Slave men and women carried news of the rebellion to their plantations and

184 Kea, “‘When I Die,’” 168-170. 185 Kea, “‘When I Die,’” 176-179 186 Pannet, Report, 14.

166 warned white colonists from attempting to run to the garrison, the principle place of defense on the island.187 The insurrectionists had clearly not warned these resistant slaves of their intention to rebel.

The Saint John rebels did not find common cause with the rest of the black population on the island. The French planter, Pannet, who lived in Saint Thomas in

November of 1733, wrote that interrogations of captured rebels had revealed their intention to re-enslave the people of Saint John. “The Negroes from other nations were to be provided to them to do their labors and were to belong to them as slaves,” he explained, “This is the reason why they preserved all the sugar factories and other buildings.”188 Pannet claimed that the Saint John rebels had tried to coordinate their rebellion with the “Aminas” of Saint Thomas and the “Coromantee” on the nearby

English island of Tortola. As in Antigua, a shared African “nation” appears to have been more important than the idea of racial unity. In fact, the idea of race appears to have confused the rebels. In December, after only a couple weeks of freedom, several of the

Saint John insurrectionists approached the Dutch Captain Vessup as he was attempting to rescue goods from one of the Saint John plantations. They offered to trade “ten negroes” for powder and shot. According to Pannet, they also offered to make the white man their leader if he would help them conquer Saint Thomas. Captain Vessup accepted the “ten negroes” on “account” and promised to return with powder, then promptly sailed to Saint

Thomas with the story and his ten new slaves.189

As strange as these actions may have seemed to the Dutch Vessup and Frenchman

Pannet, the offer of trade and alliance was entirely in keeping with the Akwamu

187 Pannet, Report, 13-14. 188 Pannet, Report, 17. 189 Pannet, Report, 18.

167 experience with Europeans on the coast of Accra. For half a century, the Akwamu had traded rival black African slaves to white men for gunpowder. For decades, the Akwamu had fought alongside the Dutch or Danes in the small wars that had erupted along the

Gold Coast. It must have been a rude awakening for the Caboceer King Juni and his people to realize that on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, being Akwamu meant very little to the Danes. In the Americas, the Akwamus were black men and slaves and the

Europeans were white men and free. Race mattered a great deal to the Europeans on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean.

If the importance of racial difference to the Europeans was not made clear at the outset of the rebellion, it was made more than clear by the end of it. This racial unity among white Europeans was nowhere more evident than in the expeditions the Danes sent against the island of Saint John. Failing to secure their small colony with a small company of men sent from Saint Thomas, the Danes found the English planters of

Tortola more than willing to send their own militia to help the Danes secure the island.190

But the British planters believed that slave rebellion was something that could spread from island to island. “The rising of the Negroes on Saint John,” reported Boston’s

Weekly Rehearsal, “has so alarmed our islands, that they keep 30 or 40 men every Night upon the Watch upon each island to prevent a Suprize.”191 Ten weeks after the start of the insurrection, the English Captain Tallard sent a man-of-war from the British island of

Tortola with sixty men to aid in the reconquest of the island.192 An ambush drove his men back on to their ship. On March 7th, a British Captain Maddox from Saint Kitts

190 Westergaard, Danish West Indies, 171. 191 "Boston, January 21," The Weekly Rehearsal, January 21, 1733/4. 192 Westergaard, Danish West Indies, 171-172.

168 arrived on the island with fifty volunteers from Saint Kitts.193 The Danes drew up a contract with the British offering rewards in captive slaves, but another rebel ambush eleven days later killed three white men and wounded five more, scaring the men from

Saint Kitts away.194

The last stand of the Akwamu began on April 23, 1734. Two French barks arrived at the island of Saint Thomas with more than two hundred creoles armed and led by white French officers. The enthusiastic Danes responded by supplying seventy-four black slaves and thirty white Danish volunteers for the expedition.195 During the month of May, the French scoured the island, working night and day in large parties so that the rebel slaves could not escape. At the end of April, the insurrectionists had sought to surprise and ambush advanced expeditions and in bloody fighting, left behind three men before being beaten off by the Danes.196 As they sought to flee, it became obvious to the

French that the Akwamu were running out of gunpowder. The Saint John rebels used bows and arrows in several skirmishes. By mid-May, the French began discovering groups of rebel slaves that had taken their own life. A few rebels surrendered. On May

29th, the French discovered a large party of twenty-four slaves killed by their own hand.

They had broken their muskets and laid them at their feet. Together, they had died on a cliff, facing east toward the Gold Coast of Africa.197

193 Westergaard, Danish West Indies 172. 194 Westergaard, The Danish West Indies, 172. 195 Westergaard, The Danish West Indies, 175. 196 Westergaard, The Dansih West Indies, 174-175. 197 Kea, “‘When I Die,’” 178-179.

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The Trials of Takyi

There is no record of Takyi’s understanding of these events in the wider British

Atlantic. Reports of the Jamaican Maroon War were so common in the correspondence of the white authorities and in the British newspapers that he must have known something of the conflict in the west. One of the last reports of the war in Jamaica before the

Antigua conspiracy, carried to Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette by a sailor in the summer of 1735, described a “Body of Men Whites and Blacks” killing “rebellious Negroes in the

Cock Pitts.” The “English Negroes behaved bravely in order to suppress the Rebels,” noted the author of the report.198 News from the nearby island of Saint John, to the north, must have been as common. A letter from Antigua, written in 1734, reported that “the

Negroes on the Island of St. John's arose, and cut off the Whites, kill'd 42 Men, and a

Remnant fled into the Wilderness.” The white Antiguan was equally alarmed by the

“News of the Negroes at Kit's,” only half a day’s sail away, where the slaves had

“attempted the same in that Island, by setting Six Houses on Fire, but were prevented of their Design, by a Negro that had a peculiar Regard for his Master, disclosing the

Plot.”199 Could Takyi see the extent of the conflict that existed between black slave communities of the day, as we can from afar?

More than a week after Takyi’s dance on Otter’s pasture, on Monday, October 11,

1736, Magistrate Arbuthnot of Antigua learned of a supposed list of slave officers on the island. Arbuthnot explained in a report he later submitted to the Council and assembly that he had long suspected a slave conspiracy on the island because of the growing

198 Pennsylvania Gazette, July 17, 1735. 199 Pennsylvania Gazette, April 11, 1734.

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“insolence” of the slaves, but it was only after learning of a rumored “list of officers and soldiers” within the slave population that he decided to begin investigating the possibility of a slave conspiracy on the island. Arbuthnot announced to his fellow magistrates that he believed the island to be in the “Utmost Danger from the Slaves,” and he promptly issued a warrant for the search of slave quarters. That Monday evening, “News of the intended Search warrant” and “what he had publicly declar’d of the state of danger the island was in,” created a “Curiosity of the Town,” Arbuthnot later related to the council.200

The Constables came forward with stories the next day. Constable Morgan told

Arbuthnot that on October 5th, “he heard the blowing of a Conk Shell near his House… upon which got up Softly Open’d his Window and by the light of the Moon very plainly saw in the Cross Road by Wavell Smith House Upwards of One hundred Negro Men/so far as he Could Guess.” They had been armed, claimed the constable, some with

“Cutlasses brandishing them about and some few with Guns.” The constable admitted

“he was afraid to speak to them, or Call out to separate them.” Constable Hanson reported a similar experience two nights previous, on Sunday, October 10th. He had come upon a “great multitude” of slaves in the evening and tried to disperse them, attacking with his whip. As he struck them, one man had called back “God damn your

Blood I know you and will come up with you.”201

By the end of Tuesday, numerous white colonists were approaching Magistrate

Arbuthnot with stories about the slave named Court, who had conducted a “play” before thousands of Coromantee on a Sunday the week before. Slaves had been heard to say

200 Council Minutes, Arbuthnot Report, 8th Jan, 1736/7, CO 9/10, TNA. 201 Council Minutes, Arbuthnot Report, 8th Jan, 1736/7, CO 9/10, TNA.

171 that Court was king and had chanted “Tackey” over and over. Arbuthnot sought out

Court’s owner, Speaker of the Assembly Mr. Kerby, and learned from the planter that he

“had him near Thirty Years, that he was his head Slave, and had always behaved with great Fidelity and honesty.” Despite these assertions by Kerby, other white colonists had a “very bad Character” of Court, “That he was a Dark Designing, Ambitious Insolent

Fellow… and that Court had a greater Ascendants and Influence Over the Slaves of this

Island than any other Slave whatever particularly Over those of his Own Country, the

Coromantees who all paid him great Homage and Respect and stood in great awe of him.”202

That evening, Magistrate Arbuthnot sought out a Creole slave named Emanuel, “a faithfull Sensible Slave,” who might know the “Designs of the Slaves.” During the questioning, “Emanuel at Once Opened such a Scene/ without Seeming himself to know the meaning of it…As put it beyond all Doubt that a Conspiracy was formed and near ripe for Execution, and that Court was at the head of it.” Emanuel described the suspicious activities of the Coromantees and their preparation for a ceremony. The same evening, one white colonist reported to Magistrate Arbuthnot that a slave had suspiciously tried to buy gun powder for hunting and another white man described over hearing Court whispering with slaves behind a home in Saint John. The magistrate had already ordered the arrest of several slaves who had acted suspiciously and meant to question more, but he waited to arrest Court. On Friday, October 15th, Magistrate

Arbuthnot gave a special written report to the Antiguan Assembly, warning them of an

“accursed plot.”

202 Council Minutes, Arbuthnot Report, 8th Jan, 1736/7, 48, CO 9/10, TNA.

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Arbuthnot’s report of his initial suspicions has survived, but the transcripts of the confessions that he extracted from arrested slaves have not. Over the course of the week following his report to the Assembly, constables arrested slaves and extracted confessions. At some point, a Coromantee named Cuffee testified that he had overheard

Takyi and the Creole named Tomboy speaking of a conspiracy at the back gate of

Thomas Kerby’s home.203 According to Cuffee, they were plotting to blow up the governor and the leading planters of the island in a gunpowder plot.204 On October 19th, the assembly created a special court consisting of four justices of the peace. That very night, the four justices conducted a trial and convicted Court and Tomboy of an unspecified crime relating to conspiracy.205 Takyi was ordered to be executed the following morning.

The judges produced a report on the conspiracy nearly three months after the first trials that concluded that Takyi had led a conspiracy to blow up the leading planters on the island at a ball to commemorate the king. Their findings were based on the confessions that they had secured from slaves under duress and torture.206 Though the evidence from the trial has not survived, it seems unlikely that Takyi formed a gunpowder plot as claimed by the judges. Despite numerous searches of slave quarters all over the island and many confessions, white authorities never found the gunpowder required for such an explosion.207 Gunpowder was notoriously difficult to acquire in any large amount on Antigua, so much so that the Assembly required ship duties be paid in

203 A Genuine Narrative, 11. 204 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 21-22. 205 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 22. 206 A Genuine Narrative, 19-20 207 Sharples, “The Flames of Insurrection: Fearing Slave Conspiracy in Early America, 1670-1780” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010), 265-267.

173 gunpowder.208 Even one attempt by a slave to purchase powder on October 12th had immediately created suspicion among white colonists.209 The activities of slaves, the midnight meetings with weapons and the ennobling ceremony, helped convince the white

Antiguans of the far reaching plot. For their part, Takyi and Tomboy insisted on their innocence until the moment of their execution.

We can be certain, however, that Takyi’s dance was very real. On a Sunday afternoon before a menagerie of Coromantee and Creoles slaves, Takyi had stepped out before his people and pledged himself in their defense. He had turned to Tomboy, a

Creole and respected master-carpenter, and before all the slaves of the island, pressed his shield between their bodies and his blade against the face of his “Braffo.” He had danced the motions of the sword and moved to the beat of drum. The people had chanted his name. In that moment, he had brought a long suffering people together behind his leadership. His was a promise made to a divided people, an offer of protection and an acceptance of his pledge.

On October 20th, “King Court was brought to the Place of Execution,” wrote an anonymous white witness. “There [he] was laid extended on a wheel, seiz’d by the Wrists and Ancles, and so laid basking in the Sun for the full Space of an Hour and a

Quarter…when he begg’d Leave to plead.” When the justices gave their assent, he

“acknowledged every Thing that was alledged against him.” At noon, the British executed Takyi in the marketplace. After he died, the authorities ordered that his head be

208 Antigua Assembly Minutes, July 5th, 1735, CO 9/9, TNA. 209 Council Minutes, Arbuthnot Report, 8th Jan, 1736/7, 48, CO 9/10, TNA.

174 severed and placed on a pole and that his body be burned. Though he was brutalized and harmed, one account noted that a slave had preserved his green cap.210

Court’s execution was but the first of many more. For four months, white authorities exhorted confessions and killed slaves by breaking on the wheel, gibbeting, or burning people alive. The Britons eventually executed eighty-eight people and banished forty seven others.211

Then there were rumors of a new conspiracy, one in which slaves had met in anger over the killing of their king. According to the Report by the judges, the enslaved men and women had promised to “to stand by, and be true to each other.”212But the threat of executions and the promise of a painful death encouraged more confessions. The

British continued in their methods of interrogation and slaves confessed or died.

In their promise to “to stand by, and be true to each other,” the black people of

Antigua had tried to follow in the path of the Coromantee leader who wore the green hat and carried the shield. This was the great meaning of Takyi’s dance in September of

1736. We can see in his execution the challenges confronted by slave leaders who sought to unify black people in the British colonies in the 1730s. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the massive influx of forced migrants from Africa created profound tensions in the communities of the enslaved. The painful process of creating one people around a shared African ancestry and in opposition to their enslavement was a long historical struggle that spanned centuries. In Takyi’s dance and the conspiracies and insurrections of the 1730s, we can see a formative moment in this story.

210Virginia Gazette, Jan. 15, 1737; Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 22-23. 211 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 29-37. 212 A Genuine Narrative, 13.

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Section 2: Communication

“The contagion has spread farther among these islands than I apprehend is discovered.” - William Mathew to the Board of Trade, Antigua, 17371

“Countryman, I have heard some good news.” - Ben to Jack, Examination and Confession of Jack (Comfort’s), New York, 17412

“In the mean time excuse me and dont be offended, if out of Friendship to my poor Countrymen & compassion to the Negros (who are flesh & blood as well as we & ought to be treated with Humanity) I intreat you not to go on to Massacre & destroy your own Estates by making Bonfires of the Negros & perhaps thereby loading yourselves with greater Guilt than theirs.” - Letter from [Anonymous] to Cadwallader Colden, Massachusetts, 17413

1 Mathew to BT, Jan 17, 1736/7, CO 152/22, W88, TNA. 2 Daniel Horsmanden, 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 (New York, 1744), Appendix, 11-16., 63-64. 3 [Anonymous] to Cadwallader Colden, Boston (n.d.), in Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume III Additional Letters and Papers 1715-1748 (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1937), 269-272.

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William Mathew believed the slaves of the Caribbean were rising in rebellion.

From his plantation home on the island of Antigua, he could look west toward Otto's pasture where, only two days before, planters had burned two enslaved men alive, darkening the skies with smoke from execution fires. The burnings had been a warning to slaves in all directions, a punishment for conspiring against the British and their king.

Writing to the Lords of Trade and Plantations in England on January 17th, 1736, the man responsible for defense of the Leeward Islands insisted he sat in the middle of a conspiracy stretching beyond the shores of the island of Antigua. “The Contagion,”

Mathew wrote, "has spread farther among these Islands than I apprehend is discovered.”

The Captain General had just finished with the deposition of John Hanson, a British mariner only recently returned from the French islands to the north. “By an Enclosd

Affidavit... [the contagion] actually has taken Effect in St. Bartholomews, & is discovered in Anguilla & St. Martins.” If Mathew traced his finger along a map of the eastern Caribbean, he could see that slave rebellion appeared to be traveling with the currents, moving ominously toward the colonies of British North America.4

Captain General Willaim Mathew was but one of a great many Britons who reported rebel slaves coordinating their efforts between plantations and across the ocean between the years 1729 and 1746. But what was real and what was imagined? In

Chapter Three, I examine the extent to which slaves shared news and coordinated rebellion between British provinces in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. To

4For the location of Governor Mathew's plantation, see Robert Baker, "A New and Exact Map of the Island of Antigua in America," 1748, John Carter Brown Library (hereafter JCB); For slaves executed on March 15, 1736/7, see "A List of the Names of Negroes that were Executed for the late Conspiracy, Their Trades, To whom they belonged, the day and Manner of their Respective Execution," in Mathew to BT, May 26, 1737, CO 152/53, X7, TNA; Mathew to BT, Jan 17, 1736/7, CO 152/22, W88, TNA.

177 an extent little understood by historians, slaves shared news between provinces and responded to opportunities for freedom from abroad.

Chapter Four examines the consequences of similar avenues of communication between white Britons. Commerce and print culture allowed colonists to share rumors of insurrections and conspiracies to a degree never before known. Britons coordinated their efforts to control slave population even as they created an environment of heightened racial fear in the British Atlantic. The fierce determination of colonial officials to interrogate more slaves and commit elaborate, public executions can be explained, in part, by this growing transatlantic climate of fear in the 1730s. The methods of interrogation and coercion and the choices made by justices of the peace determined the extent to which a conspiracy might grow from an accusation into the egregious trials that stand out as some of the worst travesties of justice in early American history.

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Chapter 3: "Dangerous Spirit of Liberty"

Rumor and news played a pivotal role in the slave unrest of the British provinces between the years 1729 and 1746. Insurrections led by African slaves and conspiracy trials conducted by colonial authorities were no longer novel by the first quarter of the eighteenth century. As early as 1521, Wolof slaves from the coast of Senegambia had set a precedent for slave insurrection in the Americas. They had responded to their cruel treatment on a sugar plantation on the island of Hispaniola by killing their Spanish overseers and appealing to neighboring slaves to rise with them in rebellion.1 Over the next two centuries, insurrections continued to be decidedly local affairs, usually confined to a few plantations within an individual province. The isolated nature of this unrest began to change by the late 1720s. Communication within the British Empire allowed slaves to share news between colonies and across oceans. White officials insisted that rumors from abroad were the impetus for insurrection. Violent confrontations that were influenced by internal conditions within specific colonies, such as the First Jamaican

Maroon War or the slave insurrection on the Danish Island of Saint John in 1734, became news in the wider empire and contributed to stories of general unrest.

For the black slaves of the British Atlantic, the most provocative rumors were those that presented opportunities for freedom. Stories of emancipation were common throughout the 1730s and inspired unrest in the colonies. On the American mainland, black men and women spread the rumor that the British King George II had freed slaves baptized by the Church of England. Up and down the Atlantic coast, along the rivers of

1 Lynne Guitar, “Boiling it Down: Slavery on the First Commercial Sugarcane Ingenios in the Americas (Hispaniola, 1530-45),” in Jane G. Landers and Barry Robinson, eds., Slaves, Subjects and Subversives : Black in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 49-50.

179 the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and the Raritan Bay of New Jersey, slaves met in large numbers to organize against the white planters preventing their baptism. British officials believed that the Chesapeake rebellion of 1730 and the New Jersey conspiracy of 1734 were inspired by this story of a liberty granted by the British King. During the second half of the 1730s, news that the Spanish had offered sanctuary to escaped slaves in La

Florida provided another impetus for slave unrest. In South Carolina and as far north as

Boston, enslaved black people sought to escape to the Spanish south. These potent rumors were part of a larger pattern of slave rebelliousness in distant lands. News of the

First Maroon War in Jamaica mixed with reports of plots and conspiracies throughout the

Empire. In the port towns of the British West Indies and the American mainland, slave communities were ever more aware of the rebellious activities of other enslaved peoples in colonial America.

These avenues of slave communication were a product of the growing commercial activity within the British Empire in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Between 1675 and 1730, transatlantic crossings tripled from near five hundred a year to fifteen hundred.2 There were few innovations in shipping between 1675 and 1740, which meant that the growing number of migrants and the subsequent expansion of trade depended upon an increased volume of vessels traveling across oceans.3 In an age when news could only travel as fast as a ship of sail, the arrival of more ships meant the expansion of communication between colonies. Colonial American historians have long celebrated this growth of commerce as an important development in the making of a

2 Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 302. 3 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17.

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British American people. There has been less appreciation of the role of this commercial expansion in fostering a black British Atlantic in the first half of the eighteenth century.

It was in response to this news from abroad that black people began to express a common cause against slavery. The slave communities of colonial America were factious and complicated. In a period of colonial American history characterized by what

Ira Berlin has called “Africanization,” when enslaved migrants from Africa were forcefully carried into the colonies in unprecedented numbers, the tensions between rival

African nations and creoles could often explode into violence.4 News of an opportunity for freedom allowed black people of diverse ancestry, both African- and American-born, to express common cause against the degradation of new world slavery. There was not one movement of slaves or one great revolution, but there were rumors and many episodes of unrest. There was a call and a response, down the rivers and across the wide waters of the ocean, and in these actions the black Atlantic took a great step forward.

Routes of Communication

The journeys of slaves along coastal waterways and between British colonies created a complex and extensive network of communication. In his study of African-

American seamen Black Jacks (1997), historian W. Jeffrey Bolster provides a graphic description of the inter-connected routes of these many mariners at the end of the eighteenth century, during the Age of Revolution. He asks the reader to imagine a map of the Caribbean archipelago:

4 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 97, 102, especially 107.

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From each island radiate short spokes that dead-end, like antennae: the out and back voyages of daily fisherman. Each island, too, is encircled by loops from point to point along its shore: the coastal trips of slave boatmen. Bold lines connect virtually every island to others: the inter-island voyages of black and white crews and runaway slaves. Finally, even more prominent lines arrive at most islands from (and depart to) African, American, and European ports: international voyages on which blacks sailed.5

Bolster’s depiction of black maritime activity captures the overlapping routes of commerce that brought slaves together. Like most scholars of the British Black Atlantic,

Bolster was more concerned with the late eighteenth century, but nearly sixty years before the American and French Revolutions, enslaved men and women lived within their own distinctive Atlantic World.6

Black communication in the British Atlantic closely followed the routes of trade.

Exchanging news in the second quarter of the eighteenth century depended upon the mobility of slaves, whether between plantations or across oceans, and the labors of black people determined the extent of contact between regions. This was especially true for black sailors. In regions where white labor was scarce, such as the Caribbean and

Bermuda, slaves had far more opportunities to work aboard vessels and travel between provinces. Enslaved mariners moved in and out of smaller black diasporas shaped by geography and coastal trade.

5 W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African-American Sailors in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 21. 6 The literature on slave unrest during the Age of Revolution is vast. See, for example, Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); Ira Berlin, Slavery and Freedom in the Era of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983); For a discussion of the influence of republican ideology in the wider Atlantic, see Julius Sherrard Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986) and for a contrarian view, David Geggus, "Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789- 1815," in A Turbulent Time: the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, eds. David Gaspar and David Geggus (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1997).

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Black Mariners

In 1738, Royal Officer Don Manuel de Montiano ordered a proclamation read in the Spanish town of Saint Augustine, Florida. With “Beat of drum,” the town crier moved out from the shadow of the walls of the still unfinished Castillo fortress and down the streets of the garrison port. When near enough to the harbor to be heard by sailors and dockside laborers, the crier announced the Spanish would provide “Liberty and

Protection to all Slaves that should desert thither from any English Colonies.”7 There were Englishmen within earshot to hear the proclamation, but according to a report later made by South Carolinians, the audience for the crier was not the white ship captains and sailors trading along the harbor. Instead, the Spanish intentionally announced their proclamation to the “many Negroes belonging to English Vessels that carried thither

Supplies of Provisions &c. had the Opportunity of hearing it.”8 Don Montiano spoke directly to the group of people most likely to spread news of emancipation and protection to the slave societies of the British colonies. The “Negroes belonging to English

Vessels” were the black sailors of the Atlantic, a people that traveled between colonies and played a critical role in the spread of slave resistance during this period of intensified unrest.

Significant evidence suggests black mariners made up between twenty-five and forty percent of all seamen aboard maritime vessels based in the colonies of the British

7 The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, Volume IV (Atlanta, GA: Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1906), 247-248. 8 A.S. Salley, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina. 22 vols. (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1907-1949), 1741-1742, 83.

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Caribbean and Bermuda between 1720 and 1743. Black crews aboard ships based in mainland colonies made up a much smaller percentage, but scattered references to black sailors suggest that at least in Rhode Island, there were a great many slaves aboard ship.

Because historians have understood so little about the extent of this important population in the first half of the eighteenth century, it is worthwhile to explore the evidence in detail.9

Records for slave mariners in this period are quite rare, but at least three critical documents produced by royal governors offer evidence for the extensive numbers of black sailors aboard ships at sea. In 1720, Governor Hamilton of Antigua produced a list of all ships at port and a description of their crews. On the right hand edge of his list he drew a firm line, creating columns labeled "white" and "negro" and listing the number of each group aboard each ship. His numbers reveal that "negro" sailors made up about 98 of 235 crewmen. No black people worked on the largest brigantines and snows, but they did make up about twenty-five percent of the crews of sloops, deep-sea vessels that made the bulk of the carrying trade between colonies. Sloops were the most popular ship on the island. On one fifteen-ton sloop, the Plunkett, the entire crew consisted of four black sailors and no whites.10 On smaller boats or droghers, typically used to move goods around and between the Leeward Islands, blacks outnumbered white sailors by about three to one. In short, the lists provided by Governor Hamilton in 1720 indicate that

9 For studies of black mariners in this period, see Bolster, Black Jacks,: African-American Sailors in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Charles R. Foy, “Ports of Slavery, Ports of Freedom: How slaves used northern seaports' maritime industry to escape and create trans-Atlantic identities, 1713—1783” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2008); Julius Sherrard Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986). 10 David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 110.

184 slaves dominated the local carrying trade and made up about a quarter of the deep sea crews working on sloops.11

In 1743, Governor Trelawney of Jamaica provided numbers for black mariners in

Kingston almost identical to those of Antigua twenty-three years earlier. His census of

North American ships at anchor found crews comprised of 41 black and 135 white sailors. At near twenty-three percent, this number appears remarkably close to the percentage of black sailors who worked aboard deep sea sloops in Antigua in 1720.12

Despite the fact that these two reports spanned more than twenty three years and were written by different governors at opposite ends of the Caribbean, the comparable number aboard ship suggest that black mariners represented about a quarter of the sailors aboard

Caribbean owned ships in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

Black sailors made up a larger percentage of sailing vessels in the island colony of

Bermuda, located approximately 640 miles east of North Carolina. In 1733, the island's

Governor Pitt counted 200 white sailors and 150 slaves aboard local vessels, putting the percentage of Bermuda slave mariners above forty percent. Because the ocean-going carrying trade was so extensive in Bermuda, it is likely that the vast majority of these black mariners crewed ships that traveled throughout the Atlantic Ocean.13

11 British authorities did not differentiate in these documents between free black and slave mariners, making it difficult to determine the status of those people described simply as "negro." However, the very small numbers of free black men in the Caribbean during the 1730s suggest that they would have been quite outnumbered by slave crews aboard most vessels. In Antigua in 1707, for example, there were only 18 free blacks in the colony as compared to a population of 12,892 slaves. Perhaps most telling, the fact that white authorities grouped both free and slave together as "negroes" reveals the shared racial status of these laborers. “List of all Ships and Vessels belonging to Antigua including the number of Seamen belonging to each respective Vessel Together with the Built and Burthen of each of them Commencing the eight day of August 1718 & ending the eighth May 1720,” Hamilton to BT, Aug 22, 1720, encl. 62, CO 152/13, Q51, TNA. 12 Trelawney to Lords of Admiralty, December 21, 1743, ADM 1/3917, TNA. 13"Answers to Queries," Pitt to BT, May 25, 1733,CO 37/12 1727-1737, TNA.

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Figure [3-1]: “List of all Ships and Vessels belonging to Antigua including the number of Seamen belonging to each respective Vessel Together with the Built and Burthen of each of them Commencing the eight day of August 1718 & ending the eighth May 1720.” Note that the headings at the top of the page, second and third columns from left, read “Number of white men” and “Number of Negroes.” Bermudian slaves were the consummate black sailors of the British Empire during the 1730s. Tobacco agriculture had declined on the island by the late seventeenth century, so that white colonists abandoned plantations for ships and made sailing the labor of their slaves. The Bermuda sloop emerged as a favorite carrying vessel because

186 of the native cedar construction of its hull and shallow draft, which allowed for trade far up inland rivers.14 As Philip Morgan explains in his article “Maritime Slavery,” Atlantic islands that did not develop a sugar trade put far more of their slaves to work on boats and ships.15 The fact that slaves worked aboard so many of these ocean-going vessels meant that they had access to a variety of plantations in the mainland and West Indian colonies. Perhaps no other British colonial slave society ranged so far. Bermuda slave mariners could be found aboard sloops on the slave coast of Whydah in Africa, in the harbors of the French West Indies, and anchored along the crowded docks of Boston.16

On the continent, the number of black mariners on ocean-going vessels is less clear from the time period of this study. Colonial governors simply did not respond to the queries of the Lords of Trade in the same manner as Caribbean governors Hamilton and Trelawney. South Carolina’s overseas trade in rice provided limited opportunities for black mariners to work in the colony. After 1736, Charles Town cleared more ships for Britain than any other port in mainland North America.17 Though the population of

Charles Town was only about 6800 people in 1742, the number of ships that weighed anchor in its deep water harbor equaled the clearances of the much larger towns of

Philadelphia and New York.18 Ships from the northern ports more often stopped in the harbor during their passage south than on their return. Up until the mid-1730s, according to Ian Steele, the highest number of entries arrived from West Indian islands, near

14 Michael T. Jarvis, "Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 59, No. 3, (Jul., 2002): 593-594. 15 Philip Morgan, “Maritime Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition Vol. 31, Issue 3, 2010: 316. 16 See for example, two white sailors and two black sailors rescued from a Bermuda schooner off the coast of New York, American Weekly Mercury, Sept. 12, 1734. 17 Steele, The English Atlantic, 34. 18 Ibid., 33.

187 twenty-five percent of all vessels, to trade sugar for rice.19 Charles Town was the closest sail between the Caribbean islands and a key source of provisions for the slave-heavy populations of the West Indies. Because the port dominated trade in South Carolina, providing a deep water harbor between the broad Ashely and Cooper Rivers, the town was a critical point of communication for the British mainland southeast.20 The increasing importance of the port for exchange of news was made evident by the establishment of the first newspaper, the South Carolina Gazette, in 1733 and the inclusion of the colony in the mainland postal route by 1738.21

Despite the extensive shipping of Charles Town, the merchants of the province maintained few deep-water vessels of their own in the first half of the eighteenth century.

This meant that vessels in their harbors were predominantly manned by sailors from other ports.22 Local black watermen ferried goods from ships anchored in the harbor into the interior of the province, directly coming into contact with white sailors from Britain or the mixed-race crews of the Caribbean. Black pilots commanded a special amount of respect for their ability to guide arriving ships and patroons enjoyed the autonomy of commanding their vessels as they moved between town and plantation.23 In 1737, during a period of pronounced and growing slave unrest in the colony, a white Grand Jury bemoaned “Negroes going in Boats and Canoes up the Country trading in a clandestine manner.”24

19 Ibid. 20 Kenneth Morgan, “Slave Sales in Colonial Charleston,” The English Historical Review, Vol. 113, No. 453 (Sep., 1998): 909. 21 Steel, The English Atlantic, 33-34. 22Bolster, Black Jacks, 21-22. 23 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 337-338. 24 Nov. 5, 1737, South Carolina Gazette, as quoted in Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 339.

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South Carolina merchants appeared to fear the mobility that sailing aboard deep water vessels might provide their slaves.25 Unlike New England slave owners who sometimes hired out slaves to ships, rice merchant Robert Pringle worried over the lack of sailors available to carry his shipment of rice to London without suggesting slave watermen instead. The Richard had been detained, he explained to a correspondent in

London in 1741, “purely for want of sailors.”26 Pringle maintained his own slave watermen in port, however. Writing to Captain John Evans of Boston, he sent "Four

Stout Negro Men to assist" the New Englander‘s stranded ship and guide it to Charles

Town. Pringle’s slaves were "used to be upon the Water,” he said, “& understand to

Work on Shipboard."27 The rice merchant asked that the Boston captain provide the men food and drink, “as I have agreed with them.” By the 1770s, Charles Town merchants owned far more merchant vessels, but they appear to have maintained their reticence concerning allowing slaves to sail on the wider seas.28

Like Charles Town, the tobacco merchants of the Chesapeake maintained few deep-water vessels of their own. In response to a questionnaire from the Lords of Trade and Plantations in 1730, Governor Gooch explained that the entire fleet “consists of one

Ship, Six Brigantines, and Sixteen Sloops, which are all that usually go to Sea.” He noted that “shallops” or small vessels were “constantly employed in the Bay and in transporting

25 Bolster, Black Jacks, 22. 26 Robert Pringle to Richard Partridge, Charles Town, 29th January 1742/3, in Walter B. Edgar, ed., The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, 1737-1745, Volume 1 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 491. 27 Pringle to Partridge, Charles Town, 29th January 1742/3, Letterbook Volume 1, 489; For slaves in North Carolina, see David S. Celeski, The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 28 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 339-340.

189 the Country’s commoditys from one River to another,” but “their Crews can’t properly be termed Seamen; being for the most part Planters with Negros and other Servants.”29

As Gooch sought to explain to England, plantation settlement in both Virginia and

Maryland was organized around the river systems springing from the broad Chesapeake

Bay. After his journey through North Carolina and Virginia in the 1730s, John Brickell explained that “[Rivers] make very necessary Vessels for carriage of their Commodities by Water, which are called in these parts Periaugers or Canoes.” Along these waterways,

“Vessels likewise they carry Goods, Horses, and other Cattle from one Plantation to another over large and spacious Rivers.”30 As in South Carolina, planters depended on pettiaugers and canoes to transfer their goods along creeks and narrower rivers, but the

Chesapeake differed in that trade was not so concentrated in a single port as it was in

Charles Town to the south. Large plantations maintained their own small docks to deposit their hogsheads of tobacco aboard sloops waiting in the broad rivers of the James,

York, and Rappahannock. The largest and most important port town of Norfolk, located at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and with the large harbor of Hampton Roads, was still quite small. “Norfolk has most ayr of a town of any in Virginia,” wrote William

Byrd in 1726, “There were then near 20 Brigantines and Sloops riding at the Wharves, and ofterntimes they have more.” Byrd explained that Norfolk “Trade is Chiefly to the

West-Indies.”31

29 Gooch to BT, July 23, 1730, CO 5/1322, ff. 68-74, TNA. 30 John Brickell, M.D., The Natural History of North Carolina, First Published at Dublin for the Author, in 1737 (Murfreesboro, NC: Johnson Publishing Company, 1968), 260-261. 31 William Byrd, Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. by William K. Boyd (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 36.

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Virginia’s maritime slaves were largely confined to the Chesapeake, but the extent of riverine travel increased significantly with the passage of the Tobacco

Inspection Act in May of 1730.32 Promoted by Governor Gooch, the law required all tobacco planters to transport their hogsheads of tobacco to specific inspection sites where government inspectors would ensure quality and provide a royal stamp. Gooch noted that

"planters and negroes" operated the small sloops that moved tobacco from riverside to warehouses for inspection and this created an opportunity for slave watermen. In the late fall and early winter, black waterman sailed to the inspection sites along the rivers and

Chesapeake Bay, where they met with other laborers as the tobacco was inspected and sold.33

The limits imposed on slave watermen in the Chesapeake found no parallel in the large port towns of the northern colonies. The mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania and

New York, and the New England ports of Newport and Boston, maintained a considerable number of slave sailors, who, like the slaves of Bermuda and the West

Indies, had a presence aboard colonial owned deep-sea vessels. Historian Charles Foy, who has done a considerable amount of research on black sailors in the northern ports in the eighteenth century, found that slave mariners were the most common occupation of fugitive slaves in the newspaper advertisements of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New

York between the years 1720 and 1782.34 White mariners who owned slaves were likely to take their slaves with them to sea. In Suffolk County, Massachusetts, for example, eighteen percent of male slaves were owned by sailors and most would have been

32 “An Act for Amending the Staples of Tobacco,” in William Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session… (Richmond, VA: Franklin Press, 1820), Vol. 4, 247. 33 Bolster, Black Jacks, 24. 34 Foy, "Ports of Slavery,” 388.

191 involved in some form of ship work.35 Rhode Island maintained many black men aboard its crews of privateers. Slaves often made up more than a third of a crew on ocean going vessels from that colony. An article published in the Boston Gazette in 1734, for example, described a Rhode Island sloop shipwrecked in Spanish Florida. Aboard the vessel were nine white sailors and five black. Spanish allied Indians killed four of the white men but made captives of the three black sailors "to make money of 'em."36 The famed privateer Revenge left Newport, Rhode Island in 1741, with four black men aboard its crew of forty-five.37 It is difficult to determine the exact numbers of black mariners aboard the vessels based in these colonies, but the trade of the British Empire sent them to the far off ports of Europe and the Caribbean.

Many of the slave conspiracies of the 1730s bore witness to the almost ubiquitous presence of black mariners in the avenues of communication that conveyed rumor and news. In most accusations against these sailors, it is not at all clear that they conspired to rebel, only that they bore a proud autonomy that put them into contact with a great many people. The slaves accused were men like Jack, the boatman from Antigua, who complained to a white woman on the night of October 10th, 1736, “What Do the

Baccararas mean by Punishing the Slaves?” When the woman warned he could be taken up, Jack proclaimed he did not care, and when she replied “Court is king and you are to be one of his officers?” he replied, “Court is King and I am to be one of his generals.”

Escaping aboard boat for a day, he was promptly jailed by the magistrate when he returned.38

35 Bolster, Black Jacks, 242 n.1. 36 Boston Gazette, Mar. 18, 1734. 37 Bolster, Black Jacks, 32. 38 Antigua Council Minutes, Arbuthnot Report, 8th Jan, 1736/7, CO 9/10, TNA.

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Slave mariners were directly accused of spreading rumors between colonies. Less than a month after the last slaves had died by fire in the New York City slave conspiracy of 1741, the arrival of Manhattan vessels in Bermuda sparked a rumor that the island’s black mariners had somehow been involved in the New York conspiracy. On September

1, 1741, Governor Alured Popple of Bermuda "communicated to the council" a letter purportedly written by black New Yorkers to conspirators on the small island. The author of the letter, “Negro” Joseph Hilton, warned black Bermudian Benjamin Hunt that

"timese were very dead in New York and that they were hanging six or seven negroes of a day." Hilton warned that "free Joe and Charles Cuff" should not come to the city, because they were "named and would be taken up."39 The letter was not produced for the government. The governor asked the council's advice on how to proceed. They responded that the governor should send for Captain Morgan, whose ship had supposedly brought the letter from the mainland. Standing before the council, the Captain "declared he knew not of any such letter coming in his Sloop but that he knew all the Negroes therein named and afterwards withdrew." Perplexed, the governor and council penned a letter to New York, asking Lt. Governor Clarke if the mariners had been implicated in the slave conspiracy. Nine months later, Clarke responded from New York that he knew of no such men and that the interrogations had now ended.40

The complicated episode demonstrates a great deal about the difficulties of tracing the relationship of black mariners to slave conspiracy. The enslaved sailors Joe and Charles Cuff were familiar with black society in colonial New York City, at least

39 Council Minutes of Bermuda, August 4, 1741, 2-3 Bermuda Historical Quarterly (hereafter BHQ), Spring 1970, Vol. XXVII, No. 1. 40 Council Minutes of Bermuda, Sept 1, 1741, 3-4, BHQ, Spring 1970, Vol. XXVII, No. 1; Council Minutes of Bermuda, April 6, 1742, 35-36, BHQ Summer 1971, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2.

193 enough to be warned to avoid the port by a friend in the colony, but their involvement in the conspiracy is far from certain. The black author warned that the two mariners were

"threatened" and might be "taken up," but it is much less clear whether that indicated any kind of actual involvement in the supposed slave plot in New York. The mobility of slave mariners emanated throughout the letter, but direct evidence of rebellion is far less clear. In the fearful heat of the New York conspiracy trials, Joseph Hilton might have simply been warning his friends to stay away from the city.

During the hot month of August in 1741, while slaves burned in New York City and rumors of a suspicious letter circulate through Bermuda, an enslaved boatswain supposedly set fire to the roof of a Charles Town home with "malicious and evil Intent of burning down the remaining Part" of the port city. Only a few months earlier, the city of

Charles Town had been swept by a massive fire and white colonists had expressed repeated fears that the fires had been started by slaves.41 The accused man was a boatswain or "bos'un," a leader among enslaved sailors, responsible for the crews handling of sails and rigging. This boatswain supposedly "looked upon every white Man he should meet as his declared Enemy."42 On the evidence of an old slave woman named

Jenny and the man's eventual confession, British authorities burned the boatswain alive.

As historian Peter Wood noted of this incident, the attempted act of arson occurred five days after the South Carolina Gazette printed the news of the New York slave conspiracy, indicating at the least that word of the fires to the north had reached the city.

In collusion with his fellow suffering slaves, the convicted boatswain may have been

41 Kenneth Scott, “Sufferers in the Charleston Fire of 1740,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Oct., 1963), 203-211. 42Lorenzo Greene mistakenly described this conviction for arson taking place in Charles Town, Massachusetts, instead of South Carolina. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Atheneum Press, 1942, 2nd ed. 1968), 161-162. Boston Gazette, October 5th, 1741.

194 trying to coordinate his attempt to burn down Charles Town with the supposed act of slave arson against Fort George in New York City. At the very least, if he really did declare “every white Man he should meet as his declared Enemy,” he should be described as a determined person resentful of his treatment as a slave. As in Bermuda and New

York City, black sailors appear to have been at the center of many accusations of conspiracy that swept through the colonies during the 1730s.43

Enslaved sailors entered in and out of regions of black communication between the years 1729 and 1746. As part of the crews aboard deep-sea trading vessels, they were a critical component of the growing inter-colonial slave community and a population that we can quantifiably measure. And yet in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, responses to rumors were often more confined to specific geographic regions. The

British black Atlantic in the 1730s resembled a collection of overlapping diasporas rather than a single, transnational unit. Black sailors moved through these regions and played a considerable role, but they were only a small number of people among many thousands that traveled in these places.

The Leeward Islands

British authorities believed the archipelago of islands on the eastern edge of the

Caribbean was especially vulnerable to slave coordination. Writing in January 1737 during the secret trials and public executions of Antigua slaves, Captain-General William

Matthew wrote a letter of warning home to England. “The Contagion,” wrote Mathew of the slave conspiracy, “is spread further among these islands than I apprehend is

43 Peter Wood, Black Majority, 296-297.

195 discovered.”44 Mathew had learned from mariner John Hanson of a supposed rebellion on the island of Saint Bartholomew and of a conspiracy on the French side of the island of Saint Martin. The Captain-General had Hanson swear in an affidavit that while in

Saint Martin, an island divided by the Dutch and French, Hanson and his brother had read a letter from the French Governor describing the arrest of slave conspirators.45

According to Hanson, the French governor had learned of an ongoing slave rebellion on the nearby possession of Saint Bartholomew to the north, in which eleven white colonists had been killed, but the governor could not send soldiers to help because of his own impending slave conspiracy. Hanson claimed that the slaves of Anguilla had intended to rise on the 26th of December in solidarity, but the arrest of the slaves in Saint Martin had stopped the rebellion.46 The accuracy of Hanson’s account is questionable. I have discovered no such rebellion in recent histories of the French Caribbean and the extent of the hearsay suggests the events as he related should be treated with skepticism.

The white British rumor of slave conspiracy did, however, accurately reflect the inter-connected slave communities that existed in the Leeward Islands during the 1730s.

In the age of sail, the British described the islands of the Lesser Antilles in relationship to the trade winds, which blew from the northeast. The islands south of Montserrat were designated as Windward, or closer to the origins of the wind, while the island of

Montserrat and those to the north and west were called Leeward. By 1736, the Leeward

Islands constituted one British colony, comprised of Antigua, Barbuda, Saint Christopher

(Saint Kitts), Nevis, Anguilla, and Montserrat, all together stretching more than one

44 Mathew to BT, Jan 17, 1736/7, CO 152/22, W88, TNA. 45 The affidavit of John Hanson was sent as an attachment to Mathew’s letter and is available in the record. Mathew to BT, Jan 17, 1736/7, CO 152/22, W88, TNA. 46 Ibid.

196 hundred miles from the capitol of Antigua north and west.47 The path of the conspiracy between islands described by Mathew and Hanson matched the direction news would travel by sail. The trades blowing from the northeast allowed vessels sailing northwest to ride perpendicular to the wind.

Contemporary British observers remarked on the close connections between the

Leeward Islands. Writing a history of Jamaica in 1740, four years after the Antigua slave conspiracy, Caribbean planter James Knight explained that the Leeward Islands were especially vulnerable to coordinated rebellion because of their close proximity and dense populations of slaves. Black rebels had a high “probability of success” in their insurrections because of the easy travel between and across colonies.48 Knight was a contemporary observer with a good deal of experience in the islands. Many other observations originated accidentally out of the complaints of English and British planters.

For more than forty years before the Antigua slave conspiracy, planters passed laws attempting to prevent slaves from running away to other islands. In 1694, Captain

Samuel Horne of Saint Kitts complained to the assembly that several of his French-born slaves had escaped, and the rest “hath been [sic] Severall plotts contrivances &

Combinations” to flee together off the island.49 The Dutch at Saint Eustatius were

“intolerable neighbors,” complained Governor Douglas in 1712, for the crime of

“protecting our Negroes deserters,” who had been fleeing Antigua.50 In 1722, Montserrat passed a law ordering all planters to keep their boats stowed away to prevent slaves from

47 Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), 4-6. 48 James Knight, “History of Jamaica,” Vol. 2: 79, as quoted in Sharples, “Fires of Insurrection,” 280. 49 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 183. 50 Ibid., 205.

197 stealing them and traveling between colonies.51 As far north and west as Vieques, or Crab

Island off the coast of Puerto Rico, British slaves gathered to hunt wild cattle and live free from the Leeward Islands.52

The archaeological record also bears witness to a trade network that existed between the slaves of the Leeward Islands during this period. The archaeology of early

Caribbean slavery is not extensive because of the poverty of enslaved people, but excavations have revealed the exchange of slave-crafted pottery between most of the

Leeward Islands and extending all the way to Anguilla in the north during the eighteenth century. Archaeologist James Petersen and his colleagues explain that clay in several

Afro-Caribbean ceramics found in Anguilla and Saint Martin appear to have origins in

Montserrat and Saint Christopher.53 Slave-made ceramics dated roughly from the middle of the eighteenth century and discovered in Barbuda were probably made in Antigua.

Borrowing from archeological evidence discovered in Dutch Saint Eustatius and Nevis,

Petersen and his colleagues have reconstructed an extensive network of locally made

Afro-Caribbean exchange during this period.54 All of this suggests a trade in goods between slaves in the Leeward Islands.

Perhaps the simplest evidence for slave communication between the islands is the black boatmen listed by Governor Hamilton in 1720. Though the Antiguan described thirty sloops on the island, he also noted there were 22 boats. Seventeen of these boats listed only one white sailor on board and five had no white person in the crew at all.55

51 Ibid., 201. 52 Ibid., 205 53 James Petersen, David Watters, and Desmond Nicholson, “Continuity and Syncretism in Afro-Caribbean Ceramics from the Northern Lesser Antilles,” in Jay B. Haviser, African Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999), 180-182. 54Ibid., 179-183. 55 Answers to Queries," Pitt to BT, May 25, 1733,CO 37/12 1727-1737, TNA.

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Every boat listed was worked by slaves. Boats were intended for sailing short distances around or between the islands.56 These vessels gave slaves tremendous autonomy to communicate throughout the Leewards.

The “contagion” of slave unrest feared by Captain-General Mathew had seemed a reality in the Leeward Islands just three years before the Antigua conspiracy. In 1733, the slave population on the Danish West Indian island of Saint John had successfully performed the first island-wide rebellion. Capturing Saint John, the rebels appeared to planters to be poised to spread their insurrection throughout the northwest end of the

Leeward Island chain. The Danish island of Saint John, ruled by the Akwamu of the

Gold Coast in the winter of 1733, sat three miles west of British Tortola and little more than two miles east of Danish Saint Thomas. In December of 1733, the Frenchman

Pierre Pannet of Saint Thomas wrote that the trials of captured Saint John rebels revealed

“that, after succeeding with the St. Jean revolt, they, in concert with the Amina Negroes of this island, would have brought about our complete ruin and would have then worked on Tortola.”57 According to the Frenchman, the African nation of “Aminas,”

[Coromantee to the English] hoped to take the three islands in succession. Pannet also related that several Saint John rebels had approached an English Captain Vessup while he was on the island, and the Captain claimed the Aminas offered to make the white man their leader if he would take them across the water.58 “It is easy to see how grand was the design of these wretches,” wrote Pannet as the rebellion continued three miles away.59

56 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 110. 57 Pierre J. Pannet, Report on the Execrable Conspiracy Carried Out by the Amina Negroes on the Danish Island of St. Jan in America 1733, trans. and ed. by Aimery P. Caron and Arnold R. Highfield (St. Croix, US Virgin Islands: Antilles Press, 1984), 17. 58 Ibid., 18. 59 Ibid., 17.

199

The Danish Governor on Saint Thomas wrote to the French for help. “As

Christians,” he wrote, “you can not allow slaves to triumph over us and to render us victims of their rebellion.”60 Both the French and British sent soldiers to Danish aid. As the French official Gardelin explained to his superiors later, “It is in the interest of all the islands that slaves who dare revolt against Whites be punished; if the St John rebels are allowed to escape, it would constitute an example which might inspire the spirit of revolt among the negroes of all the islands.”61

The British believed the rebellion had inspired the slaves of the Leewards. As the insurrection swept through Saint John, Captain General Mathew reported to London that black men and women on nearby Nevis had supposedly learned of the Danish rebellion from traveling French slaves.62 “This day we had News of the Negroes of St. John holding possession thereof still,” wrote an anonymous Antiguan to Boston in January of

1734, “This has encouraged the Negroes at St. Kitts, and the Week before last they attempted the same in that Island, by setting six Houses on fire, but were prevented of their Design, by a Negro that had a peculiar Regard for his Master, who disclosed the

Plot.”63 The evidence that slaves set fire to houses or plotted to rise in Saint Kitts is remarkably limited. The April meeting of the Saint Kitts Common Council, after no meetings in January and a series of brief February meetings without mention of conspiracy, noted the receipt of an urgent letter from Governor Mathew in Antigua. The

60 Gardelin to Champigny, March 21, 1734, in Aimery P. Caron and Arnold R. Highfield, eds., The French Intervention in the St. John Slave Revolt of 1733-34 (Occasional Paper No. 8, Bureau of Libraries, Museums, and Archaeological Services, St. Thomas, 1981), 23, as quoted in Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in an Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 24. 61 D’Orgueville to Minister, June 21, 1734, in Caron and Highfield, eds, French Intervention, 35, as quoted in Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, 24. 62Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, (Baton Rouge and London: Louisian State University Press, 1979), 24. 63 Boston News Letter, Mar. 7th, 1734.

200

Saint Kitts Council passed a series of resolutions for defense, the first in years, but the brief record does not mention a conspiracy.64

Because the slaves on the surrounding islands have left behind no account of their response to the Saint John Rebellion, we are limited to the accusations of white colonists.

There were certainly limits to the black response to the insurrection. Even on the island of Saint John, the Akwamu could not inspire enough slaves to fight on their side to hold the island. They fought a determined force of desperate white planters and black slave unwilling to rebel. As waves of armed black creoles and European sailors swept across

Saint John over the ensuing months, the insurrectionists ran out of gunpowder and broke their weapons.65 According to the British, "most of the Negroes that were scattered about upon the Island, took all the Canoes and other small Craft they could find, and quitted the

Place." British newspapers reported that fleeing slaves had "gone to Cape Fransway," referring to Cape Francaise on the northern coast of Saint Domingue.66 The accounts of the end of the rising by Danes and from other British sources relate a different outcome.67

While the colonists “flea’d” or burned many of the rebels they captured, other free men and women escaped to prominent escarpments on the edge of the island.68 In the 1690s, an African-born Amina slave had once told a Danish official he had no fear of death, for

“When I die, I shall return to my own country.”69 At the end of the rebellion on Saint

64 Antigua Minutes of Council, April 4, 1734, CO 241/3, TNA. 65 Waldemar Westergaard, The Danish West Indies Under Company Rule 1671-1754 (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1917), 174-176. 66 Weekly Rehearsal, Jan. 21, 1734. 67 Westergaard, Danish West Indies, 174-175. 68 Weekly Rehearsal, Jan. 21, 1734. 69 Ray A. Kea, “When I die, I shall return to my own land”: An “Amina” Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies, 1733-1734,” in The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society, Ghanaian and Islamic in honor of Ivor Wilks, eds. John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 159-161.

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John, several of the last rebels committed suicide in great circles, facing east toward the

Gold Coast of Africa.

The actions of the enslaved people of Saint John suggest the possibilities and perhaps the limits of slave communication on the island. We are only left with the actions of the slave rebels and the observations of anxious white planters. The opinions of black Caribbean people have not been preserved. Still, planters were contemporary observers of a world we wish to understand. As the Reverend Robert Robertson of Nevis explained to the Bishop of London in 1730, “However they May Disguise it,” he wrote,

“[Slaves] hate their Masters and wish them destroyed.”70

The First Jamaican Diaspora

Far to the west, a second region of black communication had taken shape in the colony of Jamaica. The island was thirty times the size of Barbados and the Leewards combined and the principle destination for new planters and slave ships in the Caribbean during the first half of the eighteenth century.71 The large expanse of the island made black communication distinctive and quite different from the Leeward Islands to the east.

Already in the 1730s, Jamaican slaves circulated in two diasporas, the first a decidedly contained, internal island-wide network of roads and markets, mountain trails and western rivers that connected plantations. The second diaspora stretched as far as New

York and London, where news of events in Jamaica could inspire violence far away.

70 Reverend Robert Robertson of Nevis, A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London (London, 1730), 12-13. 71 Ibid.

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The First Jamaican Maroon War that raged throughout the island from roughly

1729 to 1739 never actually became a general slave rebellion. In the 1730s, the British held more than ninety percent of the island’s population in slavery, roughly one-hundred thousand people. The significant victories of the maroons over white colonial militias led the assemblies to warn their governor of the “greatest apprehension of a general rebellion,” warnings repeated in the halls of the Lords of Trade and Plantations in

England.72 As I argued in Chapter Two, black slaves in Jamaica did not express a shared sense of purpose and identity during the 1730s, at least not compared to the British. The deep divisions between nations of Africans and creoles exploded in the violence of the war. But the limits on slave communication may have also inhibited organization in the

1730s.

During that decade, the slave communities of Jamaica were connected mostly by coastal travel and a very limited network of roads. Because the colony was so large -

English settlement only began in earnest at the end of the seventeenth century - much of

Jamaica had not been cleared for planting and was still forested in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The research of archaeologist Mark Hauser into the roads demonstrates that as late as 1744, the road system had hardly changed on the island from

1678. A southern road stretched from Kingston in the mid-southeast to Negril on the west coast and another road from Kingston directly north along the edge of the Blue

Mountains to Saint Anne’s Bay in the center of the northern coast. Outside of narrow

72 'America and West Indies: December 1730, 24-31', Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 37: 1730 (1937), 410-424, “627”; Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655- 1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 101.

203 forest trails, no other roads were available for travel.73 Addressing the assembly in 1745 and looking back at the First Jamaican Maroon War, Governor Trelawny credited the survival of Jamaica on the inability of slaves to communicate across the island. “The

Negroes can have no communication together,” he explained, “or if they had it, would be almost impossible… to execute their designs.” As Edward Long noted years later, the defeat of the Maroons actually allowed planters to intensify development.74 As early as

1757, the road system throughout the island was much more extensive, creating at least twelve new avenues for travel across Jamaica.75 Was it a coincidence that the largest

Caribbean insurrection before the Haitian Rebellion, “Tackey’s Revolt,” swept through

Jamaica in 1760?

As in many colonies, the great meetings of slaves took place in the markets of

Jamaica. Sunday market day, the traditional Protestant Sabbath day in which slaves were excused from their labors, played an important role in the formation of black society in the Caribbean. On these days, slaves could congregate free from the supervision of their masters. Hauser’s archaeological study of the black markets of Jamaica in the eighteenth century has established the considerable amount of trade taking place between slaves from different parts of the island. His depiction of the growth of slave markets throughout the island skips from 1707, when there were only four markets around

Kingston, to the 1770s, where fully thirteen separate markets stretched along the coasts of

73 Mark Hauser, An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-Century America (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2008), 72. 74 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, Volume II (London: Printed for T. Lowndes in Fleet-Street, 1774), 348. 75 Hauser, An Archaeology, 72.

204 the colony. Between 1729 and 1746, there were four markets located around Kingston with perhaps one or two on the west coast and another two in the center north.76

Planters recognized these Sunday festivals as a dangerous threat to their plantation slave system. In Jamaica, rebellious maroons moved through the "black" markets, searching for supplies in their ongoing war with the white plantation elite. As

Jamaican Edward Long explained, "It is well known that many of them resorted every

Sunday amongst the vast crowds that assemble there from all parts of the country."77

Long feared that besides the trade in fowl and fruits, maroons secured the critical gunpowder necessary for slave resistance. As early as 1730, the Jamaican Assembly passed laws for "better regulating slaves, and rendering free negroes and mulattoes more useful, and preventing hawking and peddling."78 Yet Jamaican authorities also worried that slaves were securing more from the markets than simply food and gunpowder. In the same year, the Assembly passed another law, this one "for preventing communication or trade with rebellious negroes." Jamaican planters feared that market days were opportunities for plotting unrest.79

The markets of Kingston and Spanish Town were the sight of the first full rebellious meeting of slaves in 1740. The maroon treaties of 1739 established the maroons as legitimate, client peoples of the British Empire on the condition that the formerly “rebellious negroes” would police the enslaved black population. The assembly had insisted that slaves were biding their time to wait to see who might win between the

76 Hauser, An Archaeology, 44-46. 77 Edward Long Papers, Add. Ms. 12431, as quoted in Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, pp. 59- 60. 78 Journals of the Jamaican Assembly, "Sabbati, 28 die Martii,"Volume II, 707. 79 Journals of the Jamaican Assembly, "Martis, 23 die Junii," 712;

205 maroons and planters.80 In March of 1740, slaves met in large crowds in the markets of the capital Spanish Town and refused to disperse when ordered by the constables.

According to Edward Long, the crowds met at night for days and elected captains to lead.

Fearing rebellion, Governor Trelawny ordered the cavalry out against the meetings. The soldiers arrested slave leaders. White officials ordered the agitators executed and banished others.81

Whatever the limits of communication within the interior of the island in the

1730s, the Jamaican diaspora was surprisingly extensive during the same period. In

1704, British North American shipping at Jamaica consisted of only 31 ships a year at harbor in Port Royal. By 1729, the same port was averaging 95 mainland ships at anchor.82 Ships entered from November to May and departed by the end of crop-over in early August.83 As Governor Trelawny demonstrated to the Lords of Trade and Plantation in 1743, his census of North American ships at anchor found that twenty-three percent of the sailors aboard ships were enslaved.84 There were also a great deal of boatmen on the island and they did demonstrate the capacity to sometimes travel to other islands. During the maroon war, Major John Richardson complained bitterly "that it became of late so frequent for Negroes to go off for the island of Cuba, that for some weeks last, several

80 'America and West Indies: December 1730, 24-31', Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 37: 1730 (1937), 410-424, “627.” 81 Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 148.

82 Steele, The English Atlantic, 287 83 This is my interpretation of Steele’s table of entries and clearances in 1687. Steele, The English Atlantic, 287. 84 Trelawney to Lords of Admiralty, December 21, 1743, 1/3917, BNA ADM; Foy, "Seeking Freedom," 54.

206 had stole off in canoes."85 The northern Jamaican parishes of St. Ann and St. Mary maintained an illicit trade in cattle with Spanish coastal traders, making the escape all the easier. But for the most part, Jamaica’s black diaspora stretched much farther, far away to London and New York.

In December of 1744, a slave conspiracy in the southeast corner of the island produced an unlikely hero for the white plantocracy. An enslaved man approached his

British mistress with an urgent warning that slaves on the nearby plantations were about to rise in rebellion. The location of the 1744 conspiracy was probably in Saint John

Parish, part of modern day Saint Catherine Parish near the old capital of Spanish Town.86

For the account of the conspiracy, we must rely upon the provincial newspapers of the northern colonies, several of which printed conflicting details. In a version printed by the

Boston Evening Post, the slave informant was a female servant who sought to save her mistress.87 In an early version of the story in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, the informant was a man, and the colonial records of Jamaica do indeed demonstrate that the Assembly awarded a slave with freedom for his part in revealing the conspiracy.88

In the Boston Evening Post’s account of the conspiracy, the white plantress was told by her female slave that “diverse drivers on four or five plantations” were planning a slave rebellion in which she would be killed. The white woman sent a message to her

85 Quoted from Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 54. 86 The newspaper reports did not name the location, but they do mention Council Member “Simon Clark,” almost certainly Simon Clarke the baronet who was born and buried in Saint Catherine Parish, Middlesex, Jamaica. The location in Middlesex also corresponds well with the story that the planter was in town playing cards and received a note from his wife warning of the conspiracy. Spanish Town was located in Saint Catherine Parish and would have been quickly accessible with such a message. The slave informant Hector was said to be owned by Thomas Fuller, who appears in the Acts of Jamaica applying for improvements for his property in Saint John. For this reason, I assume that the conspiracy took place in Saint John. “13. An Act for… repairing, the road from Spring Garden… to Thomas Fuller’s plantation in Saint John,” Anno 13 – Georgio II, 1740,” in The Laws of Jamaica: 1681-1759. 87 Boston Evening Post, April 1, 1745. 88 Pennsylvania Gazette, April 12, 1745.

207 husband in town and when she received no reply, contacted her neighbor “Sir Simon

Clark,” probably the same Simon Clarke who sat on the Council of Jamaica. Clarke rode to Spanish Town and rushed to tell the governor, who immediately and secretly called out his fighting men. The next day, the company of soldiers ambushed the conspirators in a field described by the informant as the rendezvous for the rebellion.89 According to

Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, the militia captured “12 or 14” slaves, “and continu’d to take more of them by Degrees.” Some of the conspirators were “hang’d, some burnt, some hung in Chains, and some sent off the island.”90

The conspiracy is interesting because so many of the details are supported by additional evidence. Sir Simon Clarke was a Baronet and an actual planter on the island.

The accused slave conspirators were actually caught in an open field, at least according to the accounts, just as the enslaved informant had warned.91 Assembly minutes also reveal the identity of the man who betrayed the conspiracy. His name was Hector, a slave owned by Thomas Fuller. The assembly manumitted Hector as a reward for service. The historian Jason Sharples notes that Hector’s story did not end with the conspiracy. He feared “daily danger” from the other slaves for his betrayal of the conspiracy to the whites and complained that slaves “often assaulted him.”92

To escape the persecution of other slaves in Jamaica, Hector changed his name to

Thomas Edwards and as a free man, moved to England. But even as a free black Man in

London, Hector found that he could not escape his reputation as a slave informant. In the

British Isles, black people ostracized him for his role in revealing the conspiracy to the

89 Boston Evening Post, April 1, 1745. 90 Pennsylvania Gazette, April 12, 1745. 91Pennsylvania Gazette, April 12, 1745. 92 Jamaica Legislative Council Minutes, 21 Dec. 1744, CO 140/31, TNA, as cited in Sharples, “Fires of Insurrection,” 121.

208 whites and persecuted him.93 Not long after moving to England, Hector was miserable and came back home. No matter how far he traveled in the British Atlantic, he could not escape the condemnation of black Jamaicans.

Hector’s petition suggests that the black Atlantic was changing by the mid-1740s.

Despite the violent differences that had emerged during the First Jamaican Maroon war between maroons and plantation slaves and between African nations and creoles, in the black diaspora of the Atlantic Jamaicans were developing a shared sense of purpose and cause with the enslaved on the island. These people could not tolerate Hector, a black slave who betrayed conspirators to his mistress. Perhaps some black men in London knew the accused conspirators that the British had killed and sought vengeance on

Hector. Or perhaps Jamaicans simply could not tolerate the betrayal. Either way, it says a great deal that even in far off England, black Jamaicans ostracized Hector for his actions. Hector appears to have been deemed a race traitor, a black man who sided with the planters against black slaves.

Three years before Hector chose to reveal a conspiracy to his white slave owner in

Saint Catherine Parish, an enslaved Jamaican named Jack sat before the Supreme Court justices of the colony of New York attempting to save his own life. He had been a popular man among the slaves of the port of New York and a compatriot to many black

Jamaicans sold aboard ship and carried into the town.94 Jack had presided over the center of slave communication: the fresh water well on his master’s property that supplied the

93 “Petition of Thomas Edwards, late slave to Thomas Fuller Esquire of Jamaica,” 1744, CO 137/48/92, as cited in Sharples, “Fires of Insurrection,” 121. 94 I base this statement on Jack’s descriptions of his interactions with the slaves Ben and Jamaica and many others. Based on the willingness of his fellow white artisans to translate for Jack and because “they had a desire of being by when he was examined,” it appears that Jack had a strong working relationship with his fellow coopers. By all accounts, he did a great deal of visiting and hosting black people who attended the well. Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 63-65.

209 best drinking water in southern Manhattan. Slaves from throughout the island had congregated at the well daily, visiting and sharing news.

That afternoon, June 8th, 1745, the Supreme Court condemned Jack to be burned alive for conspiring to set the city of New York on fire. His accusers, two slave men named Quack and Cuffee, had included Jack in their dying confessions at the stake and as dead men, had left the Jamaican with few options for refuting their claims.95 After the court ruled Jack burn the next day, he returned to his jail cell and announced to the guards that if the judges would spare his life, “he would discover all that he knew of the conspiracy.”96 In his testimony, he claimed to know a great deal.

For the Justices, the first problem with Jack’s confession was that they could not understand it. His “dialect was so perfectly Negro and unintelligible,” wrote Justice

Daniel Horsmanden, “‘twas thought, that ‘twould be impossible to make any Thing of him without the Help of an Interpreter.”97 In an early example of the development of the distinctive Jamaican dialect, the justices had to engage an interpreter to make sense of his testimony. Jill Lepore suggests that Jack may have been born in Africa before his transfer to Jamaica and then to New York. Perhaps his Akan accent made him hard to understand, she speculates.98 It is possible, but Jack demonstrated little of the hesitance of a native-African speaker uncomfortable with a foreign tongue. Jack was a talker. He hosted slaves from throughout the city on a daily basis and when he confessed to the justices, he spent three days telling them stories and filling journals.99 He entertained the white men as well. “His master live in Tall House Broadway,” Jack said of his Jamaican

95 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 62-63. 96 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 63. 97 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 63. 98 Lepore, New York Burning, 110-111. 99 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 63.

210 friend, “Ben ride de fat horse.”100 Finding the saying entertaining, Horsmanden made the rare footnote in his published journal of the proceedings and quoted Jack’s dialect directly.101

But there was nothing amusing about the situation for Jack. His testimony was life or death. To save himself from burning the next day, he had to confess to the accusations made by slaves and accuse others in a believable way. “He was advised not to flatter himself with the Hopes of Life,” wrote Judge Horsmanden, “without he would do the utmost in his Power to deserve it.” Jack replied by looking “very serious,” noted the Judge approvingly.102 But we know better. The coercive situation made his confession completely unreliable and though the justices accepted it as evidence, we should not. And yet at the same time, his confession did reveal a hidden transcript, a network of contact and communication among the slaves.

In nearly every confession that emerges concerning Jack, he is described as a conveyer of news. “Countryman, I have some good news,” Jack remembered Ben saying to him at his master’s well.103 “What news?” Jack remembered asking the slave Cato on the night of one of the fires.104 As Lepore explains, Jack’s role among the slaves of New

York was as a collector of news.105 We might imagine him as an oral newspaper man, not unlike printer John Peter Zenger who collected rumors from seamen for his New York

Weekly Journal just on the opposite side of town. This point was highlighted by the justices at the time. In his introduction of Jack in his Journal of the Proceedings,

100 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 63. 101 Lepore, New York Burning, 111 102 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 63. 103 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 63-64. 104 Ibid. 105 Jill Lepore makes this astute point concerning the role of Jack in conveying news in Manhattan. Lepore, New York Burning, 148.

211

Horsmanden described him as a Captain, and noted “there was a Well in his Yard whereto many Negroes resorted every Day; Morning and Afternoon, to fetch Tea

Water… and Hughson [the supposed leader of the plot], no doubt, thought he had carried a great Point when he had seduced Capt. Jack.”106

“Captain Jack” bore a special place in the slave community because he presided over the center of commerce and communication at Comfort’s well. As many historians of New York City have noted, the water of colonial Manhattan was notoriously foul.107

Slaves from throughout the city could beg off from their labors to fetch tea water for their masters and in the process, visit with black people from throughout the city. For the wealthy of New York, their slaves had to walk from the merchant houses of the East

Ward across the port town to Gerardus Comfort’s house near the Hudson River.108 Many of the conspirators accused by the justices, Cuffee and Adam, Caesar and another slave named Jack, were all described as regulars at the well.109 London, an enslaved mariner, confessed that his master had sent him ashore to fetch water at the well, as had at least ten other confessed or accused conspirators.110 Their presence did not make the accusations of conspiracy true, but it did demonstrate the mobility of slaves and the importance of the meeting place. Well aware of the importance of Comfort’s well as a center for black communication in New York, a Grand Jury on June 12th, just two days after Jack’s confession, asked the assembly to ban slaves from traveling across the city for water.111

106 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 63. 107 Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000),26- 27. Lepore, New York Burning, 135-136. 108 Foy, “Ports of Slavery,” 96-97. 109 Foy lists these slaves as participating in gathering tea water. Foy, Ports of Slavery, 96-98. 110 The count of conspirators mentioning tea water is my own. Lepore, New York Burning, 144. 111 Lepore, New York Burning, 144.

212

In New York, Jack played a pivotal role in the meeting places of slaves. His proximity to the well allowed him to develop close relationships with other Jamaicans and many of the enslaved people of the city. His central place at the center of news had also ensnared him in the conspiracy accusations in New York in 1741. In the interrogations, it is worth noting that Jack’s confession played a pivotal role in the conspiracy. He was the first person to confirm every accusation of the young white servant girl Mary Burton and he implicated many of his fellow slaves.112 He had been accused alongside five other people, one of them tellingly named Jamaica.113 Robin,

Cook, Caesar, and Cuffee refused to confess and were all chained to stakes and publicly burned by the British.114 Jack and Jamaica confessed and were banished into the wider black Atlantic.

The White Toad of Bermuda

The markets and fresh water wells were critical meeting places for black communities in the 1730s, and at the same time they provided connections for a wider

Atlantic World. The possibilities for trade and exchange were on full display during the

Bermudian trial of Sarah Bassett in 1730. Like so many slave conspiracies, it is difficult to determine with any certainty the accuracy of the accusations made against her. In the trial, however, British officials identified a specific foreign weapon that Sarah Bassett had used to poison a white family on the island. In 1730, the discovery of a single, dried

112 Lepore, New York Burning, 142, 113 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 62. 114 Horsmanden, “A List of Negroes Committed on Account of the Conspiracy,” Journal of the Proceedings, 11-16.

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“white toade” on the Atlantic island proved that the geographic mobility of Bermudian slave mariners could pose a significant threat to their British masters.115

The "white toade" emerged from the Bermuda slave poisoning conspiracies of

1730. In the winter of the previous year, the family of white mariner Thomas Foster became terribly ill, including his wife Sarah and the house slave Nancey. However, the other household slave girl, Beck, seemed unaffected by illness. At some point during the spring, white officials accused young Beck of poisoning the Foster family. She, in turn, confessed that the previous December, her grandmother, Sarah Bassett, had helped her poison the household.116

In the trial transcript, young Beck described the poisons her grandmother carried into the Foster kitchen in December of 1729, in two "ragges," one containing "ratsbane and manchioneel root" of a "reddish colour" and the other "white werewith to poyson her said master." The white substance, young Beck explained, was a "white toade."

Supposedly, elderly Sarah Bassett gave specific instructions to Beck to hide the items of

"reddish colour" in the "out-lett of ye kitchen" where they would cause a "wasting sickness." The white toad was to be placed in the "victuels" of Beck's master and mistress. According to her testimony, Beck followed her grandmother's instructions, but soon thereafter, the sickly slave Nancey discovered the ratsbane hidden in the kitchen, whereupon Beck fell under suspicion.

The "white toade" described by the young woman's testimony suggests that a traditional African weapon had been carried into the colony by a slave mariner. There

115 Jarvis, “Maritime Masters,” 593-594. 116 Bermuda Book of Assizes, AZ 102-6, 1726-35, 220-224, "Trial of Sarah Bassett."; Clarence V.H. Maxwell, "'The Horrid Villainy': Sarah Bassett and the Poisoning Conspiracies in Bermuda, 1727-1730," Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 21, No. 3, December 2000, 48-74 (Published by Frank Cass London): 187-188.

214 were no indigenous white toads in Bermuda. However, as noted by the historian

Clarence Maxwell, poisonous toads were used in ceremonies among Akan speaking peoples in the tropical forests of West Africa and carried into the voodoo traditions of

San Domingue. In the early twentieth century, Caribbean practitioners used a pale toad indigenous to South America for a number of ceremonies. According to anthropologist

E. Wade Davis, the skin of the toad contains toxins that serve, in small doses, as muscle relaxants. A large dose is capable of causing respiratory failure. Administering the toad's skin through food, as Sarah Bassett supposedly instructed her granddaughter to do, would probably have caused a severe reaction.117

Poisoning was well established in eighteenth-century West Africa and carried into eighteenth century British slave societies. European governors in African slave forts worried incessantly about the poisoning of their food and as Danish factor Ludewig

Romer noted in the 1740s, "these black heathens seek to revenge themselves when they think they have been treated unjustly." Among the Twi speaking Asante people, abayifo spiritual healers were thought to be masters of poisonings and harmful charms. These

African holy men believed tthey lived between the earth and the spirit world, providing protection or punishing enemies. In the colonies, these practitioners were known as

"obeah." British planter Edward Long observed of Jamaican slaves that the "most sensible among them fear the supernatural powers of the African obeah-men, or pretended conjurers." Slaves often feared "those mortal effects of magic, which are only

117 E. Wade Davis, "The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie: On the Pharmacology of Black Magic," Caribbean Review, 12/3 (Summer 1983): 18 as cited in Maxwell, “Horrid Villainy,”55.

215 the natural operation of some poisonous juice, or preparation, dexterously administered by these villains."118

If there really was a white toad used in the Bermuda poisoning conspiracy, then it was almost certainly brought to the colony by a slave mariner who believed he was arming a spiritual practitioner against her enemies. It was not something that Sarah

Bassett could have asked for lightly. The person who purchased the item would have easily been able to discover, or at least suspect, its usage. Whoever carried it had to be trusted. The toad would have had to been captured or cultivated in the tropical forests of

West Africa or northern South America, purchased in the slave markets of towns like

Paramaraibo, on the Surinam River of Dutch Guyana, or in the markets of Elmina, on the southern coast of West Africa. We can only surmise the origins of the poisonous toad, yet its very presence on the island of Bermuda suggests a trade in poisons, between slave societies and through the hands of black mariners.

In the summer of 1730, British authorities burned the elderly Sarah Bassett alive for petit treason. The judge had ordered her to be killed on Crow Lane, a road that sat above a crowded bay. Certainly, he wanted to set a terrifying example. Yet the public killing did not have the desired effect. Over the next year, several new poisoning conspiracies swept through the colonies. White colonists executed one slave and most likely banished several others, yet details of the conspiracies have not emerged because

118 Ludewig Ferdinand Romer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 162-163; Edward Long, The History of Jamaica: Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government (London: T. Lowndes, 1774) reprinted by (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), Vol. 2, 416; For a discussion of Obeah, see Maxwell, “Horrid Villainy,” 49-50.

216 authorities did not hold trials.119 Perhaps stories of white toads emerged again as more people fell ill. There could have been other obeah women in the colonies, handing out poisonous amphibians from throughout the black societies of the Atlantic.120

The Emancipation Rumors

In the summer of 1730, British authorities in Virginia learned that many black people had come to believe that King George II had issued a proclamation ordering freedom for baptized slaves. Slave resistance blossomed throughout Virginia and perhaps south into the Carolinas and north into New Jersey. The rumors appear to have been so widespread and widely believed among slaves that the King of England was forced to issue a proclamation, heavily published in the newspapers of northern colonies, declaring that baptized slaves were not to be made free at all. The rumor appears to have been extensive. At least in one case, it would lead a slave to declare publicly to the king for the rights of "all the negroes."

The origin of the rumor is hard to explain, exactly because it originated within the plantation slave communities of Virginia. Even the first instance of white discovery is difficult to locate. Historian Anthony Parent has suggested that the rumor began with the return of former Governor Alexander Spotswood to the Chesapeake. Spotswood had advocated for the better treatment of slaves, yet he was hardly a champion of black

119 Book of Assizes, AZ 102-6, 1726-35, pp. 241-242, Bermuda Archives; Pitt to BT, Jan 27, 1730/1, L75, Bermuda Archives. 120 Maxwell suggested that Bassett was burned because white colonists thought that she was a witch. In fact, slaves were burned for treason throughout the British Atlantic during the 1730s, with painful executions chosen specifically to terrify the slave population. Maxwell, “Horrid Villainy,” 64.

217 freedom. He owned large slave plantations of his own. The rumor must have also, somehow, originated within the ongoing debate surrounding the baptism of slaves.121

Black laborers had long been aware of the tensions between white planters and the Church of England over baptism. Planters had argued against slave baptism, out of the opinion that it would make slaves less manageable and that it was irreligious to enslave another Christian. Despite the insistence by church authorities that slavery was endorsed by the bible, planters stayed reticent. In 1723, slaves had already attempted to take the issue into their own hands. In one of the earliest documents written by a slave in

British America, an enslaved Virginian had written a brief letter to the Bishop of London to "Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg." In the letter, the author explained that enslaved blacks lived in "Sevarity and Sorrowfull Sarvice." They were "hard used on

Every Account," kept in ignorance of the teaching of the bible, denied holy matrimony, and "to be plain they doo Look no more upon us then if we ware dogs." The anonymous author apologized for his "riting" was "vary bad," but he hoped the Bishop would forgive him as he was just a "poor Slave that writt it and has no other time but Sunday."122 If the letter demonstrated anything, it was that in 1723 Virginia, freedom had become deeply interwoven in the minds of slaves with the rites of Christianity and baptism.

At some point in 1730, the rumor of baptism and monarchial freedom began to circulate throughout the Chesapeake. In a letter home after the outbreak of rebellion,

121 Anthony Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 160. 122 Gibson, Edmund Two letters of the Lord Bishop of London (London, 1729), 22-26; David Humphreys, An account of the endeavours used by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to instruct the Negroes slaves in New York (London, 1730, reprinted in Philadelphia, 1768), 3-5; An American Pastor, Two sermons, preached to the congregation of black slaves, at the parish church of S.P. in the province of Maryland. By an American pastor (London, 1749), iii-vi; Thomas Ingersoll, “‘Release us out of this Cruell Bondegg,”: An Appeal from Virgnia in 1723,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 51, Issue 4, (Oct 1994), 777-82.

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Governor Gooch explained to the Lords of Trade that black slaves began holding secret, mysterious meetings throughout the month of September. Slaves began disappearing from plantations. The rumor, Gooch explained, was "sufficient to incite them to rebellion." In mid October, several hundred slaves gathered in the Norfolk and Princess

Anne Counties, supposedly with an intention toward open rebellion. Significantly, the slaves appear to have chosen a meeting ground at the very southeast corner of the colony, along the waters of the Chesapeake. Perhaps they were gathering news or deliberately massing along a route of communication. The Commissary to the Bishop of London,

James Blair, explained in a letter to the Bishop of London what happened next. Little concerned with the issue of baptism, Anglican Blair explained that "there was a general rumour among them that they were to be set free. And when they saw nothing of it they grew angry and saucy, and met in the night time in great numbers, and talked of rising."

In some places the slaves held elections and chose leaders. However, "by patroulling; and whipping al that were found abroad at unseasonable hours," planters "quietly broke all this design," and several of the "Ring-leaders" were hanged. Apparently, several hundred slaves in the southeastern most part of the colony made it into the Dismal

Swamp, where slaves "committed many outrages against the Christians." Only with the help of Pasquotank Indians were the white colonists able to hunt down the rebels.123

The failure of the rebellion did not lead to the end of a rumor of monarchial emancipation. Slaves fostered rebellion across colony lines. Slave gatherings persisted up and down the eastern seaboard. In Charles Town, at the end of August, 1730, slaves were said to be gathering in a "huge meeting" just outside of town. In a letter published

123 Gooch to Bishop of London, May 28, 1731, FPP/15, 111, as cited in Parent, Foul Means, 161; Blair to Bishop of London, June 28, 1729, FPP/15, 109, VCRP; John Brickell, The Natural History of North Carolina: with an Account of the Trade, Manners, and Customs... (1737) (New York: 1969), 25.

219 later in Boston, the plot was said to have been designed to combine both plantation and city slaves against the capital, thus the location on the fringes of the two slave societies.

The author of the letter was painfully silent about the motivations of the slaves, so we can only speculate on the relationship between the conspiracies. But the open organization of the plot, the near exact timing during the early fall harvest season in 1730, the proximity to the shipping channels, and the obvious intention to galvanize a huge population as opposed to a local plantation population all suggest that the slaves of South Carolina were acting in ways very similar to the communities in the north.124

The evidence is clearer for the spread of rumor into New Jersey. In 1734, British authorities accused a group of slaves in Somerville, East Jersey, of plotting to rebel and flee the Indians. Apparently, the leaders of the conspiracy professed belief that King

George had freed them, but the planters would not let them go. They looked to the

Governor of New York, who had supposedly been given the emancipation order, but the white people in the colony would not let the governor issue the order. Though the plot supposedly involved hundreds of slaves, it was just one drunk slave who bragged about the plans to a white man. Arrests quickly followed. Some slaves were discovered to have poison in their possession and these prisoners were mutilated by British authorities.

Confessions pointed to one ring leader who officials promptly executed.125

Somehow, the rumor of monarchial emancipation had spread into the slave societies of New Jersey. Because East Jersey lay in the route of the trade winds, between the Chesapeake and New England, it is quite likely that word had spread by vessel. By the time it reached New Jersey in 1734, slaves in Somerville no longer believed that

124 Boston Weekly News-Letter, Oct. 22, 1730. 125 American Weekly Mercury, March 5th, 1734; Brendan McConville, The Kings Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 177-178.

220 baptism would be required by the king for freedom. The story had evolved and changed over time. No matter that the rumor had changed, it still served to galvanize slaves throughout the eastern seaboard of the British mainland colonies.

South Carolina and the Stono Rebellion

News and rumors from abroad inspired slaves to organize and rise up against planter authority between the years 1729 and 1746. Of particular importance was word that the Spanish Empire had offered freedom to British slaves who escaped to their provinces and agreed to Catholic baptism. Black mariners infused rumors of rebellion and emancipation into these environments of resistance and planter fear. Perhaps no rumor galvanized slaves more in this period than the promise of freedom in the Catholic

Spanish colonies. This opportunity circulated widely between slave societies, by word of mouth, from the eastern Leeward Islands to the harbors of Boston. At key moments, black mariners appear to have been deeply involved. In 1738, South Carolina Captain

Caleb Davis stopped at port in Spanish St. Augustine to trade rice with the hard pressed garrison colony and to enquire after his runaway slaves. To his mortification, the captain recognized several of his own runaway slaves in the population of the port town.

According to an account related by William Stephens of Georgia, Captain Davis tried to call out to his runaway black bondsmen. The emancipated slaves responded with

221 laughter. Surely, the slave mariners who accompanied Captain Davis back to Charles

Town had stories to share with South Carolina slaves.126

The emancipation rumor, proclaimed by Don Manuel de Montiano in 1738, had been a well-placed source of tension for decades. The Spanish edict of freedom dated at least as far back as 1664, when Danish slaves from St. Croix had escaped to the island of

Puerto Rico. The Spanish governor refused to return the fugitives, arguing that the King of Spain would not abandon "those who sought his protection.” The Spanish Council of the Indies then issued a decree that fugitive slaves would be freed as long as they were baptized in the Catholic faith and swore their allegiance. Over the next two centuries,

Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Spanish Florida would all offer shelter to the slaves of their

Protestant enemies. In Jamaica, Edward Long railed against the Spanish, whose

“thievery of negroes” to Cuba created congregations of “Catholics without any knowledge of their religion.” Governor Hunter joined Long in his sentiments, believing that maroons had a secret correspondence with Spanish allies. In 1716, Governor

Hamilton of Antigua argued that British expansion westward in the Antilles would not work, simply because so many slaves would abandon plantations for Puerto Rico. For their own part, the Spanish established a separate settlement in Puerto Rico for refugee

British slaves in 1716. This pattern continued in Spanish Florida, where the Governors of

St. Augustine offered refuge to British slaves seeking freedom and created the settlement town of Pueblo de Gracia Real de Santa Terese de Mose in 1738.127

126 The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 39 vols. (Atlanta 1904-16), Vol. IV, 247-248; Commons House Journal, July 1, 1741, in A.S. Salley, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina. 22 vols. (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1907-1949), 1741-1742, 83. 127 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 205; Edward Long, History of Jamaica, pp. 85-89; Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 61; Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999). In a fascinating exchange in 1750, British Governor Fleming complained to the acting Governor of Puerto Rico, Don Estivan Bravo de Rivero, about the policy of harboring British slaves.

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As old as this policy was, it gained new importance under the Florida

Governorship of Seignior Don Manuel de Montiano, who successfully lobbied the King of Spain to pronounce a new edict in 1733, offering freedom to slaves in the British colonies of the southern mainland. British slaves had been running to St. Augustine since the seventeenth century, in keeping with freedom offered by the Spanish Council of the

Indies. Yet it was under Governor Montiano that a new edict was proclaimed with monarchial authority in the colony of Florida. It was also under Governor Montiano that

Captain Davis witnessed the ceremony in the streets in 1738, almost certainly for the benefit of his enslaved crew.128

The entire British colonial mainland writhed with these rumors of freedom in

Spanish Florida. South Carolina had long feared slave conspiracies and rebellions because of its growing black majority, but upon the return of Captain Davis, the councils of South Carolina and Georgia worried that the drums of St Augustine would beat war into the hearts of their slaves. They were correct. Shortly after the return of Captain

Davis and his crew of enslaved mariners, larger conspiracies began to erupt in South

Carolina. In just one year, between Captain Davis's visit to St. Augustine declaration of war against the Spanish Empire, planters claimed to have discovered at least four major conspiracies. In November of 1738, planters arrested a group of slaves in Charles Town for plotting an insurrection. The same month, several South Carolinian slaves, attempting to flee to Georgia, fought and killed a group of white Georgia settlers in their

Rivero replied that slaves went to Puerto Rico "in search of the Catholick Religion," and that it was his responsibility to save them. Governor Fleming responded that slaves did not desert Antigua because of religion, but because of the freedom offered by the Spanish. He argued that if the British offered freedom to Spanish slaves, they too would seek out protestant colonies. Debate is described in Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 206-207. 128 Wood, Black Majority, 305-306.

223 path. During the winter, on February 8th, 1738, planters discovered a huge conspiracy supposedly spanning several large plantations in Winnyaw, South Carolina, and only two weeks later, word reached the council of purported plots in Purysburgh. Trials for these several conspiracies do not exist and it is difficult to verify their authenticity because of the possibility of planter fear run riot. However, the limited evidence suggests that the plantations were boiling with rebellion.129

Figure [3-2]: Emanuel Bowen, “New and accurate map of the provinces of North and South Carolina, Georgia etc. ...” in A complete system of Geography, (London, W. Innys, 1747). This excerpt from the larger map shows the geography between Charles Town and Savannah as it was known to contemporaries between 1729 and 1746. Note the cartographer’s focus on rivers and sounds and the lack of roads.

129 South Carolina Gazette, 1738; Boston Gazette, 1739; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 186-187; Wood, Black Majority, 308-319; An Irish Regiment also mutinied in Georgia during this period. The relationship between this event and slave resistance is discussed in Chapter Four.

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The power of freedom in Spanish Florida was nowhere more pronounced than in the Stono Rebellion of September, 1739, where more than a hundred slaves burned as many as seven plantations and killed twenty one white settlers. British planters implicated "Roman Catholick" Angolan slaves, trained by "Jesuit Missions" in Africa, and argued that the entire rebellion had been a response to the edict of Havana. The violence in South Carolina only seemed to increase. In the summer of 1740, a local slave revealed a major conspiracy, of "greater danger than any of the former," to his white master. The South Carolinians laid a trap, so that when the conspirators gathered between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers with a supposed plan to descend on Charles

Town, white colonists ambushed them. The British hanged at least ten of the leaders on the spot.130

The rumor of Spanish freedom was not isolated to South Carolina and Georgia.

Word spread up the eastern colonial seaboard, through the slave societies of the British

Atlantic. As early as 1721, eleven slaves stole the sloop of a Massachusetts mariner and tried to go south toward St. Augustine, only to be stranded off the coast of New Jersey.131

In New York in 1732, a crew of slaves aboard an oyster boat hijacked the vessel and tried to do the same, as did a crew aboard a sloop owned by Captain Cannon. In Boston in

130 Bull to BT, Charleston, October 5, 1739, CO 5/388, TNA; “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the into the Causes of the Disappointment of Success in the Late Expedition against St. Augustine...” in J.H. Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1736-1739 (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1953), 83-84; Mark Smith, ed., Stono, 28-29; Wood, Black Majority, 322. 131 American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 7, 1721, Issue 60, page 2.

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1743, an entire slave crew stole a small sail boat and tried to make another long trip to St.

Augustine. They also did not make it.132

While it is certainly difficult to establish the actual path of news, we can be fairly certain that word of Spanish emancipation galvanized slave populations. In the case of the black crew of Captain Davis, it is quite possible that these mariners carried the news of the drumming proclamation back with them to South Carolina. Certainly, this was the intention of Governor Don Manuel de Montiano, who appears to have brought about the ceremony. The intensity of slave resistance, the escalation over the next year, suggests that the enslaved sailors of Davis witnessed the freedom of their comrades and listened to the promise of freedom from the King of Spain.

The Banished

Perhaps no mobile group of slaves terrified British planters more than the leaders of slave uprisings. This was certainly the case in Virginia in 1723, when British authorities passed a law ordering convicted conspirators Bambeo Tom, Robin, Sanco, and four others to be transported "to the said islands of Barbadoes, Jamaica, or some other

Island in the West Indies." Tellingly, after hanging and burning four of the ringleaders of a supposed conspiracy in 1729, the assembly of Antigua tellingly ordered that ten other conspirators be sent to "a place from whence they cannot carry on a Correspondence with the Negros of this Island." Clearly, British planters feared their slaves would stay in contact even if sent to neighboring colonies. Nevertheless, seven years later, Governor

132American Weekly Mercury, Oct 12, 1732; American Weekly Mercury, April 8, 1736; New-York Gazette, Jan. 30, 1732.

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Mathew learned that the banished conspirators were still within his own jurisdiction, working a plantation on nearby St. Kitts. 133

The two largest slave conspiracies scattered hundreds of slaves throughout the

Atlantic. Seven years after the first Antigua conspiracy of 1729, colonists learned of a new plot among their slaves. After conducting brutal interrogations, confining slaves to crowded jails, and ultimately executing eighty-nine black people with breaking or fire,

British authorities banished several hundred more "rebellious negroes" from the island.

In a surprising number of incidences, many of these slaves reappeared as rebels in other colonies. In 1736, a slave named Billy was just one of many conspirators sent out of

Antigua. During the summer of 1741, Billy may have reappeared in New York City.

Confessions placed a slave named Will at the center of the supposed waterfront plot, who supposedly had bragged about his previous involvement in the Antigua conspiracy five years before. Because no slave named Will appears in any of the lists of banished slaves in Antigua, we can surmise that Will was probably Billy, who had simply chosen a different nickname upon his banishment. An implication of his involvement in the

Antigua conspiracy was enough for the judges. They burned Antigua Will in the month of July. Another banished Antigua slave named John Hector appeared in a Danish island conspiracy in 1753. The Danes labeled him an incorrigible troublemaker and broke him on the wheel. In 1745, a Jamaican slave conspiracy resulted in the arrest of a small group of conspirators. One of those taken up, a man named Hanover, was found to be the same

133 William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, From the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1616 (Richmond, Franklin Press, 1820), Volume IV, 1723, “An Act for the Transportation of Dick and other Negro Slaves,” 257-259; “An Act for the Banishment of Several Negroe Slaves Concern’d in the late Conspiracy,” March 8, 1728/9, CO 8/6 1727/8-1737; Council Minutes, Jan 24, 1728/9, CO 9/6 (1725-1729); Council Minutes, Jan 28th, 1728/9, CO 9/6 (1725-1729); Council Minutes, Feb 28th, 1728/9, CO 9/6 (1725-1729); Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 210.

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Hanover who had fled arrest in New York City in 1741. Governor Trelawney of Jamaica ordered that Hanover be delivered to authorities in New York. Hanover arrived in New

York, in chains, during the first week of February, 1746. These banished slaves from

Antigua and New York may have participated in numerous uprisings, watched as their allies died, and then carried these experiences and resentments to other colonies. 134

The Journey of Hanover

In February of 1745, Hanover stood on the deck of the brigantine Mary Anne looking out at New York City. He was at that time twice condemned, first as a chattel slave to be bought and sold for all his life and then again as a prisoner accused of conspiring against the British king.135 He had escaped New York City and fled south, but in Jamaica the British had found Hanover and taken him up and carried him back to the cold winter waters of New York, back to the city that had made “bonfires of the negroes” four years before.136 From the Mary Anne, he could look north and west toward the execution sight, where the British had burned the accused conspirators alive. The huge crowd had pushed and shouted at the prisoners. The executioners had bound the men to stakes with heavy chains and set the kindling on fire.137 Looking toward New York City,

134Waldemar Westergaard, “Account of the Negro Rebellion on St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1759,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 11, No. 1, (Jan., 1926), 55; Zabin, New York Conspiracy Trials, 130-131. 135The term “twice condemned” is taken from Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). 136 The phrase "bonfire of the negroes" can be found in Anonymous Letter to Cadwallader Colden, Province of the Massachusetts Bay, 1741, in Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume III Additional Letters and Papers 1715-1748 (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1937), 269-272. 137 Lepore, New York Burning, 104-105.

228 waiting to be rowed to shore, surely Hanover must have wondered if he was finally to share their fate.

Over the previous sixteen years, Hanover had lived through a period of intense violence and even open warfare between black slaves and white colonists in the provinces of the British Empire. During the long decade between 1729 and 1746,

Hanover experienced the “First Jamaican Maroon War,” was accused and indicted by

New Yorkers during the conspiracy trials of 1741, and was arrested again in Jamaica during a slave conspiracy in 1744. These were the events he probably witnessed firsthand. The British Atlantic provinces were rife with rumors of black rebellion in those years, whether real in the form of open insurrections or simply anticipated, as accusations made by colonial authorities against alleged conspirators. Hanover’s life was profoundly shaped by this unrest.

We can only guess at his life in Jamaica. Like so many of the enslaved in this dissertation, he left behind no written words of his own, no record of his birth or death.

But the man called Hanover was owned by a white New Yorker named Henry Cruger, a young merchant who had left for Jamaica in the early 1730s build up a sugar trading house on the far-off island.138 It is not certain where his master lived, but a merchant would have been drawn to Kingston. Hanover lived those years surrounded by the

138 The “Cruger Family Bible” records that in 1731, Henry Cruger “Saild from NYork in Sloop Mary Capt. Jacoby Kip for Jamaica to settle in the island.” Cruger married Elizabeth Harris of Lignaeum, Jamaica, in December of 1736. According to the bible, Elizabeth married Henry Cruger three days after the death of her father and two weeks after the death of her older brother, making her the only living survivor of her family and the sole heir of her father’s estate. Hanover may very well have been included as part of the Harris estate. The will of Doctor Harris is listed in the Probate Record index of the Island Record Office in Twickenham Park, Jamaica, but the staff was unable to identify the will in the records because of the difficulty in paleography. Future research in Jamaica may reveal whether Henry Cruger acquired Hanover through the marriage and inheritance of Elizabeth Harris. Jeannie Floyd Jones Robison, Henrietta Collins Bartlett, Genealogical records: manuscript entries of births, deaths and marriages taken from family Bibles, 1581-1917 (Colonial Dames of the State of New York, 1917), C-62.

229 consequences of the First Jamaican Maroon War. Rumors of great maroon victories in the interior accumulated over the years. In 1733, he would have watched as the remnants of the “Grand Party” flooded back into Kingston, their companies and white Captain

Swanson abandoned to the maroons. “God only knows what will be the Event of this

Miscarriage,” one planter had written to England, “Its Gods Mercy they are not joined by our own Slaves;” Did Henry Cruger express his worries the same way? During the despair that inevitably haunted the life of a slave, did Hanover consider fleeing into the

Blue Mountains and joining the “Negroes in Rebellion?” Hanover must have considered his own choices should the predicted slave rebellion take hold on the island. But it was not yet time for him to make such a choice. In 1738, Henry Cruger moved his new

Jamaican wife and their household back to New York.139 The records are lost, but it is very likely that Cruger brought Hanover to the northern mainland at that time.

Three years later, in the spring of 1741, a series of fires swept through New York

City. The first and most serious began on the roof of the “King’s House,” the governor’s mansion in Fort George, on March 18th. The wind carried the fire to the chapel and barracks, the stable and neighboring homes. Panicked New Yorkers threw the Provincial

Secretary’s papers out the windows, littering the streets with the muddied proclamations of the British King.140 Over the next eighteen days, more fires sprouted from one end of the town to the next, with some buildings catching fire in different parts of the city at the same time. Coals were found smoldering in a haystack at one home and signs of arson were discovered at several others. One white woman claimed to have heard a black slave

139 Robison and Bartlett, Genealogical records, C-62. 140 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 5.

230 celebrating the fires, saying “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, A Little, Damn it, By and By.”141

On April 17, 1741, the governor issued a proclamation offering a reward for any information concerning the fires. On April 22nd, a white teenage servant girl claimed that her master was the leader of a slave conspiracy to burn the city and make himself king.142 Though her white master denied the allegations to his death, her accusations were soon followed by a myriad of confessions and accusations from an accused prostitute and several slaves, all of whom provided different stories about the fires.

Again, Hanover found himself in a colony gripped by fear of slave rebellion.

“The chief talk now in Town is about the Negroes conspiracy,” wrote an excited young woman as constables tore through the meager quarters of slaves.143 In stolen moments, between the labor of hauling tea-water or the work on Cruger’s wharf, Hanover could have heard the rumors of the trials taking hold of the city. What the enslaved men said to each other is mostly lost, but we can hear echoes of their fears in the recorded testimony.

When the Grand Jury brought the accused seventeen year-old slave Sawney before the court, he argued “That the time before, After that the Negroes told all they knew, the white people hanged them.” The Grand Jury countered that if Sawney “would speak the truth, and make a free and honest confession, the Governor would pardon him … and this was the time to save his life by making a free and ingenuous confession.”144 Sawney, like scores of men who would follow, did indeed make an ingenuous confession and name others. By June 22, after two months of trials and after the execution of seventeen people by rope and fire, the justices called forth a man called Pompey from the dungeon. In his

141 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 7. 142 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 10, 12-14. 143Elizabeth DeLancey to Cadwallader Colden, June 1, 1741, in Letters and Papers, 265. 144 Horsmanden, Journa of the Proceedings, 72.

231 long list of accusations against other slaves, Pompey said he had spoken of the conspiracy to “H. Cruger’s Hanover, and he agreed.”145 Two months after the first confessions, a fellow slave had finally named Hanover. But when the Grand Jury indicted him – when the constables came knocking at the Cruger door - the man called

Hanover was gone.

The recorded history of Hanover might have ended there if not for a report in

Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette printed four years later. In February of 1745, the newspaper told a story of a recent slave conspiracy in Jamaica. An enslaved man named Hector had approached his mistress, warning that “head Drivers on four or five plantations” had invited him to join a plot to rise together and kill “all the white people” in their Parish. According to the Gazette, the slave was “shocked” that his mistress might be murdered and warned her of the impending rebellion to save her life.

As the Jamaican militia arrested and hauled the accused conspirators before the

Justices of the Peace, the island’s Governor Trelawny poured over his newly purchased account of the New York City slave conspiracy of 1741. Reading over the list of slaves

“indicted but not to be found” at the back of the narrative, Governor Trelawney saw the name “H. Cruger’s Hanover,” and knew that the same Hanover was living in Jamaica.

The newspaper did not explain how the Governor was able to identify Hanover.

Trelawney “caused him to be apprehended and sent him” to New York for trial.146 As the smoke of burning men rose over the island of Jamaica, the brigantine Mary Anne

145 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 89. 146 Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 26, 1745. The story was first printed in Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury, 20 Feb. 1745, and then in the Boston Evening Post, 4 Mar. 1745.

232 weighed anchor, carrying Hanover northward to face the wrath of the men of the mainland colonies.

As I have written this dissertation, I have often imagined standing next to the man called Hanover when the Mary Anne anchored in the East River in the winter of 1745, the moment when he looked again at the port of New York. I would want to listen to him, to hear his story. Had he truly conspired with the rebels of New York City? During his long journeys south, what were the people saying? Did they know of the rebellions and conspiracies taking place in so many of the provinces? Did Hanover know the Spanish were offering liberty to any British slave who could escape to the country called “La

Florida?” Had he heard the rumor that King George had freed all the baptized slaves – that the planters were simply keeping the story suppressed to hold black men in bondage

– and that some slaves had tried to rise and claim their liberty? Did he know of the insurrection on Saint John, where the Akwamu had taken the island and held it against so many expeditions of the whites from the surrounding islands? What did it mean to him, a man twice condemned, to hear of these hopeful things in his violent world? Of course,

Hanover cannot answer such questions. We must try to remember his age on our own.

One more important piece of evidence is worth noting from the historical record of this age. A London newspaper related an account of a Captain Wills who had, in

1730, just returned from a tobacco voyage on the shores of the Chesapeake. Having taken on his cargo, his ship Amity prepared to weigh anchor when the crew discovered a

“Negro who had hidden himself in his Ship.” The slave appears to have been no mariner, nor a fugitive trying to flee from plantation life. Instead, when the Captain asked why the

233 black man had stowed aboard, he responded that “he was going Embassador from the

Negroes to his Majesty King George.”

In this brief account there is great meaning. The enslaved man’s response was born from the monarchial emancipation rumor of 1730. It was an attempt to appeal to a king as a subject; to appeal for protection of liberties as any white English colonist could expect in the British Empire. And yet it was also something more. It was an expression of a shared cause and a shared purpose; to go as an "Embassador" for all the “Negroes.”

Like the anonymous author who had appealed to the head of the Anglican church to

“release us from the this cruel bondage,” the stow away sought to appeal for all black people living under the power of the British King. This was an expression of the “double consciousness” observed by WEB DuBois and Paul Gilroy, an experience at the heart of the Black Atlantic. The “Embassador” desired to be both black and British, and of course, free. Tellingly, at the order of the white captain, "his Excellency was turn'd ashore and whipt thro' every County to the Place from whence he came."147

But the "Embassador to the Negroes" had already left the place from whence he came. He was no longer an Asante or Ga, a Congolese or Dahome man. He was not simply a creole or African born slave. He was a "negro," a person who shared a fate with slaves throughout the colonies of British America. In this moment as in so many others, the rumors and news of the 1730s shaped the history of the Black Atlantic.

147 Evening Post, Sept. 17, 1730

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Chapter Four: “To Massacre, and Destroy your Own Estates”

Slave conspiracies were more common in the British Atlantic between the years

1729 and 1746 than in any other period before the American Revolution. There were at least thirty-one such episodes, real or imagined, in the British colonies of the American mainland and West Indies, ranging geographically from New York to the Leeward

Islands and from Bermuda to Jamaica in the western Caribbean. Though the details of these crises varied between colonies, they were together one overarching colonial project; an attempt by the British to control and intimidate a large, restive slave population.

In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, groups of black slaves in several regions of the British Atlantic sought to escape their bondage. Rumors of opportunities for freedom traveled between slave communities and encouraged black people of diverse ancestry, both African and American-born, to challenge the plantocracy. King George and his ministers worked closely with colonial officials to coordinate the defense of the provinces against the threat of insurrection. Governors and assemblies shared laws and adopted special courts of oyer and terminer in a concerted effort to control and intimidate black populations. In every colony, white people from all classes sought to control enslaved people in the provinces.

By sharing rumors of these conspiracies, white Britons created an environment of heightened racial fear in the British Atlantic. The era’s expansion of shipping and commerce greatly increased the intensity of communication between growing colonial populations. Mariners carried stories of far-off conspiracies back and forth across the

Atlantic. Printers gathered stories of unrest for their newspapers and disseminated it as

235 sensational news. The fierce determination of colonial officials to interrogate more slaves and commit elaborate, public executions can be explained, in part, by this growing transatlantic climate of fear in the 1730s.

These conspiracy trials created imagined plots that were as much a product of the court as they were any reflection on the actual activities of slaves. The violence cannot simply be explained as an oppressive response to slave restiveness. The methods of interrogation and coercion used by colonial justices of the peace forced slaves to develop elaborate confessions to escape from the torturous executions promised by officials. Like the Witch Trials in New England in 1692, white judges allowed witnesses to invent stories of a subversive culture that threatened the colonial hierarchy. The accused were forced to implicate other conspirators to save their own lives. The results were, first, wild stories of gunpowder plots and shadowy priests moving through the slave populations inciting rebellion, and then murderous punishment of would-be black rebels by white authorities. White racial panic and violent retribution against subversive slaves were among the defining characteristics of the British Atlantic during the 1730s and 40s.

A Trans-Atlantic Climate of Fear

England was far away from the troubles in the Americas, but the distance did not comfort Edward Trelawny in June of 1737. He had learned the previous summer he was to be the next governor of Jamaica.1 Over the winter he had read a memorial from the

1 For a concise summary of Edward Trelawny’s life, see Kenneth Morgan, “Trelawny, Edward (bap. 1699, d. 1754),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27686 (accessed July 31, 2013).

236 colony’s President of Council to the King pleading for help to suppress the “slaves in rebellion.”2 By mid-summer, Trelawny was writing to the Secretary of State, the Duke of

Newcastle, asking for more soldiers for his tenure on the island. “There is nowhere that wants troops more than Jamaica,” he wrote, “and no place of such importance to this kingdom.” He saw the West Indies as a region on the brink of general slave rebellion.

“The negroes in many of the British plantations,” wrote Trelawny, “have of late been possessed of a dangerous spirit of liberty. They have actually risen in Antigua and have threatened to do it in the rest of the sugar-plantations. Should the negroes in subjection at

Jamaica fall into the same way of thinking, Jamaica must instantly be lost to the whites.”3

This “dangerous spirit of liberty” – the idea that slaves were rising throughout the

Caribbean – was as much a product of the news circulating in London as it was an accurate representation of events on the sugar islands. Trelawny, after all, had not yet traveled to the West Indies. He did not arrive in Jamaica until 1738.4 Historians who have quoted his observations concerning widespread unrest in the West Indies have never noted that he was still in England when he wrote his letter to the Secretary of State.5 His belief in imminent and general slave rebellion was based on the rumors and correspondence of Britons in the summer of 1737. His letter represented the popular understanding in London of events in the West Indies.

2 Trelawny cited the letter from President Gregory directly in his letter. 'America and West Indies: March 1737, 16-25', Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 43: 1737 (1963), 74-93. Date accessed: 31 July 2013. 3 Edward Trelawny to Duke of Newcastle, London, June 30, 1737, CO 137/56, ff. 74-84v., CSPCS Vol. 43 (1737), item 379, 191-192. 4 Morgan, “Trelawny, Edward,” in Oxford Dictionary. 5 Rediker and Linebaugh, for example, write “Governor Edward Trelawny of Jamaica, who had witnessed firsthand the numerous risings that climaxed in the Maroon War, saw clear political meanings in the rebellions, which for him expressed a “Dangerous Spirit of Liberty.” Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000), 194. See also David Barry Gaspar, “A Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: Slave Rebellion in the West Indies during the 1730s,” Cimarrons I (1981): 79.

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In the 1730s, British people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean believed that the slaves in the Americas were rising in rebellion. News shared between colonies created a narrative of regular – almost monthly – reports of slaves attempting to rebel across the colonies. These reports were sometimes issued by officials to the home government in

England, the product of interrogations and slave trials. More often, word of conspiracies were simply stories carried from port to port by mariners. These stories arrived in the form of newspapers, an important innovation of the period, or by spoken word. In the ports of the British Empire, these stories accumulated and were disseminated by printers and sailors back across the water. Over the course of the long decade between 1729 and

1746, white Britons developed a climate of fear in the Americas anticipating imminent slave rebellion.

Commerce and shipping played the most important role in expanding communication between colonies and Great Britain. The frequency of shipping determined the volume of news that traveled across the Atlantic. Broadly, transatlantic annual crossing increased from about five hundred a year in the 1670s to 1500 a year by the late 1730s.6 Ships laden with sugar from the islands arriving in England increased from 143 vessels a year in 1685 to 323 a year in 1740 [Table 4.1]. American tobacco shipments to Great Britain, emerging primarily from the Chesapeake, increased from an average 221 ships a year in 1685 to 316 in 1739 [Table 4.1]. Perhaps just as important, inter-colonial trade grew drastically in the first half of the eighteenth century. The annual average of North American ships arriving in Jamaica more than doubled from 40 in 1685 to 95 in 1740. British West Indian shipping to New York more than tripled in the same

6 Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2002), 302.

238 time period [Table 4.1]. The coastwise trade – small vessels trading along the coasts of colonies – also increased a great deal. As economic historians McCusker and Menard explain, the coastwise trade rivaled that of the trans-Atlantic in some colonies after the middle of the century.7 There were exceptions, of course. Barbados annual average shipping entries actually decreased from 1685 to 1740 and the number of Boston vessels trading with the West Indies changed little over the course of the period. Despite these limits, the “centrality of trade” in colonial American life played a critical role in transmitting stories of slave unrest in the British Atlantic.8

Table [4-1]: Shipping between American and British Ports, Annual Averages of Ships, 1685 and 1740. 1685 1701 1740

English Imports of Colonial Sugar, annual shipping 143 323 British North American owned Ships entering Jamaican Ports 40 95 Shipping Entries at Barbados 326 337 Charles Town Shipping Clearances To All Ports 146 207 American Tobacco Shipments to Great Britain 221 316 Boston Shipping Entries from all Ports 218 555 Boston Shipping Enties from the West Indies 123 105 Boston Shipping Entries from North America 46 347 New York Shipping Entries 78 243 New York Shipping Entries from the West Indies 38 104 Source: Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1674-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986), Appendix: Table 2.4, Table 2.6, Table 2.2, Table 2.7, Table 3.1, Table 4.2, Table 4.5, Table 4.6, Table 4.7, Table 4.10.

The British added one very important innovation to slave conspiracies in the eighteenth century: the newspaper report. 9 It grew from a Protestant print tradition and the commercial opportunities for advertising born from the seventeenth-century English

7 John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985, reprinted 1991), 78-79. 8 McCusker and Menard, The Economy, 78. 9 Steele, The English Atlantic, 133.

239 empire. In 1695, the English Parliament and King William III allowed the Licensing Act and pre-publishing censorship to expire and printers took great advantage.10 By 1712, there were at least twenty newspapers operating in London alone and their apprentices sought new opportunities in far off ports.11 In the colonies, the Boston News-Letter was the only newspaper between 1704 and 1719, but in the latter year James Franklin produced the first edition of the Boston Gazette and Andrew Bradford, in Philadelphia, began his American Weekly Mercury.12 In the Caribbean, the Weekly Jamaica Courant was first published in 1722 and printer Samuel Keemer produced the first copy of the

Barbados Gazette in 1731. In 1736, fourteen printers were creating newspapers in seven

British colonies (excluding the newspapers in Rhode Island and Maryland that had closed in 1733 and 1734).13

The volume of news and newspapers was a revelation in the first half of the eighteenth century. There simply had never been so many written sources of public information available for consumption. As early as 1712, the British Mercury of London complained of the “furious itch of Novelty” and the “immoderate Appetite for

Intelligence” that had taken hold of London society.14 Printers quickly moved to advertise their ability to obtain the “freshest posts.” In 1728, the London Evening Post announced that it had so many foreign contacts and “such a large correspondence” that it

10 Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins of the Modern English Press (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1987), 19. 11 Ibid., 19-20. 12 David A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 14-16. 13 For a chronological list of newspapers and printers, see Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994), 267- 268. 14 British Mercury, Saturday, August 2, 1712 as cited in Harris, London Newspapers, 155.

240 could not possibly “report all the advices it received.”15 Only the most important news would be printed for the reader. The colonies followed suit. By the 1730s, most

American newspapers had in their title some declaration like that of Thomas Fleet’s New

England Weekly Journal, which contained “the Most Remarkable Occurrences Foreign and Domestic.”16

The culture of news reading infused the social life of literate men throughout the

British Empire. The first half of the eighteenth century was the age of the coffee-house in London. Middle and upper-class men gathered in these establishments to debate politics and conduct business.17 The coffee-houses advertised full collections of daily and weekly newspapers to draw customers. In 1726, a lobby of London coffee-house owners published a pamphlet complaining that each house spent nearly twenty-pounds sterling a year on over-priced newspapers for their establishments.18 The colonies followed suit combining news and coffee. In the same year as the London pamphlet,

Thomas Selby of Boston advertised his new coffee-house in the Boston Gazette, claiming that he went through “great pains” to secure the “London and Boston newspapers for the

Entertainment of the Publick.”19 These forums for news and the broad interest in newspaper reading provided the infrastructure for reporting rumors.

The newspapers printed between 1729 and 1746 provide the best documentary record of rumor of slave conspiracy. Historians have sometimes made the mistake of treating these accounts as evidence of actual events, which is problematic, instead of

15 British Journal, Saturday, September 11, 1725, 156, as quoted in Harris, London Newspapers, 157. 16 New England Weekly Journal, June 23, 1741, Numb. 740. 17 Brian Cowan, “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, Critical Networks (Spring, 2004), 345-346. 18 The Case of the Coffee-men of London and Westminster (London, 1726), as cited in Harris, London Newspapers, 31. 19 Boston Gazette, June, 1726, no. 341-343, as quoted in Steele, The English Atlantic, 158.

241 appreciating newspapers as accurate representations of the stories early Americans told each other.20 In their newspapers, printers documented the ways in which slave conspiracies were reported in the British Empire.21

The methods used by early American printers present a unique opportunity to follow stories as they traveled throughout the British Atlantic. Printers in the provinces obtained their news in only two ways. They either copied documents given to them or they reported news by the spoken word. In both cases, the gathering of news was largely a passive affair.22 Colonial printers in the 1730s could not be away from their press and relied on others to deliver gossip and letters to their door. They invited the public to share the “most authentic and freshest advices from abroad” in their shops.23 For the most part, printers preferred to copy news from outside the colony. Their rampant plagiarism helps us to trace a rumor to its origins on either side of the water. Newspapers documented the arrival of a story and the speed with which that story was disseminated to other places.

Rumors of conspiracy followed the complicated routes of trade. The reporting of the Virginia insurrection of 1730 is a good example. On Thursday, September 17, the

Evening Post of London first reported that a tobacco ship called the Amity had departed from Virginia after an “Insurrection of the Negroes about Williamsburgh.” The ship’s

Captain Wills discovered a black man aboard ship, who claimed that he “was going

20 See, for example, Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1943, fifth edition, 1987), chapter VIII; Rediker and Linebaugh, Many-Headed Hydra, chapter VI. 21 Early American historians have long struggled to demonstrate the influence of newspapers on the public, especially in the case of the American Revolution. Clark, The Public Prints, 252; Stephen Botein, “’Mere Mechanicks,’ and an Open Press,” in The Press and the American Revolution, eds. Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench, (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1980),11-58. 22 Clark, The Public Prints, 211-212. 23 Weekly Rehearsal, Aug. 11, 1735.

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Ambassador from the Negroes to King George.”24 The exact wording of the original story was printed in the London Evening Post on that same Thursday, September 17, then picked up in the Daily Journal the following day, Friday, and reprinted again in the

London Journal and the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal on Saturday, September

19.25 By the end of the next week, a total of six London newspapers had spread the story verbatim concerning the “Ambassador” of the negroes. Two months later, on November

23, the story appeared for the first time in the colonies. The Boston New England Weekly

Journal reported the same story from Virginia in the exact language of the London prints.

The Boston paper spelled ambassador with an “E” [Embassador] and dated the story

“Sept. 19,” indicating that they probably copied the only paper to use that spelling on that date, London’s Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal.26 On December 15, Benjamin

Franklin copied the Boston version of the report in his Pennsylvania Gazette.27

The story of the Virginia insurrection and the stowaway slave followed the routes of commerce between colony and metropole. Captain Wills of the Amity had departed directly from the Chesapeake in mid-summer with a load of tobacco and arrived in

London in September. In the city, printers of the Evening Post and London Evening Post reported his story and over the following week, rival printers copied the account. A New

England bound ship departed from London sometime after Friday, September 19, and after a six-eight week sail, arrived with a printed edition of the Universal Spectator and

Weekly Journal in Boston, in time for the printer of the New England Weekly Journal to

24 Evening Post (1709) (London, England), Thursday, September 17, 1730; Issue 3303. 25 London Evening Post (London, England), Thursday, September 17, 1730; Issue 435; Daily Journal (London, England), Friday, September 18, 1730; Issue 3027; London Journal (1720) (London, England), Saturday, September 19, 1730; Issue 581; Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal (London, England), Saturday, September 19, 1730; Issue CII; British Journal (1729) (London, England), Saturday, September 26, 1730; Issue 143. 26 New England Weekly Journal, Nov. 23, 1730, Iss. CXCII. 27 Pennsylvania Gazette, Dec. 15, 1730.

243 copy the paper by the November 23 deadline. An edition of the New England newspaper was then carried down to Philadelphia, where the story was printed again on December

15 by Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. News of slave unrest did not move directly from colony to colony. The path was determined by the carrying trade back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.28

These complicated avenues of communication between printers could easily produce misleading and false rumors. “It is wrote from Jamaica,” reported London’s

Evening Post in September of 1730, “that 100 white men being sent out against some

Run-away Blacks, were all destroyed by those Negroes…” Printers copied the story in at least three other London newspapers that same week and it appeared in Boston’s New

England Weekly Journal in early December and Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette by mid-

December.29 The Jamaican Maroons had indeed routed the militia, but no more than a third of the 94 man party had been lost in the Blue Mountains.30 Reports surrounding the

Charles Town fire in November, 1740, were far more egregious. When news of the massive fire arrived in Boston in January of 1741, the Boston Evening Post and the

Boston Weekly News Letter first reported that during the fire, “the Negroes rose upon the

Whites, which made it believed that those Rebels set the town of fire, to favour their designs.” Slaves were not involved in the fires and had not attacked any one. The latter

28 The importance of commercial trading routes in the dissemination of rumor was also demonstrated by a report of the Virginia Insurrection in Edinburgh, Scotland at the same time. The printer of the Echo or Edinburgh Weekly Journal reported a slightly different account of events in the Chesapeake, describing a widespread work slowdown as a black protest at the refusal of planters to allow slave baptism. The report from Captain Wills of the Amity never appeared in their paper. The Scottish merchants in Virginia carried on their own tobacco trade with the British Isles and so also maintained their own rumors of slave unrest. Echo or Edinburgh Weekly Journal (Edinburgh, Scotland), Wednesday, September 30, 1730; Issue XCI. 29 Evening Post (1709) (London, England), Thursday, September 10, 1730; Issue 3300; London Journal (1720) (London, England), Saturday, September 12, 1730; Issue 580; Read's Weekly Journal Or British Gazetteer (London, England), Saturday, September 12, 1730; Issue 286; Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal (London, England), Saturday, September 12, 1730; Issue CI; New England Weekly Journal, December 7, 1730; Pennsylvania Gazette, December 15, 1730. 30 Hunter to Board of Trade, July 4, 1730, CO 137/18 1728-1730, TNA.

244 paper reprinted a retraction in the next edition, but for most of the month of January, the people of Massachusetts believed that the slaves in Charles Town had attacked the colonists during the widespread fire.31

Printers made choices about the news they reported. In London, Richard Nutt’s

London Evening Post was the first and most likely newspaper to report rumors of slave unrest in the colonies with the Evening Post close behind. William Rayner, the printer of the Craftsman, only reported incidents of slave unrest from the West Indies and ignored every incident from the mainland.32 In Boston, Timothy Green’s New England Weekly

Journal and Thomas Fleet’s two papers, the Weekly Rehearsal and the Boston Evening-

Post, consistently reported the most slave conspiracies. Fleet was especially interested in

American turmoil and sensational stories. In the first edition of his Weekly Rehearsal, he announced that he wanted his paper to be as “Useful and entertaining as any of the Papers now published.”33 In 1735, Fleet wrote that he planned to “collect and publish not only the most fresh and authentic Advices from abroad, but also what occurs among our selves or Neighbours, worthy the Publick View.”34 He apparently deemed rumors of slave unrest worthy of the “publick view.”

Printers also exhibited little sympathy for the pain and suffering of slaves. One struggles to find a critique in colonial newspapers of the cruelties against slaves. Typical was an anecdote meant to be humorous in the Boston Gazette in 1734. Told from the perspective of a plow horse, it reported that the animal being led by “A Negro Boy,

31Boston Evening-Post, Jan. 12, 1741; Boston Weekly News Letter, Jan. 22, 1741; South Carolina Gazette, January 1-8, 1741. 32 Rayner was repeatedly hauled before the magistrate for allowing non-jurors and other dissenters to publish at his shop. Harris, London Newspapers, 96-97. 33 Weekly Rehearsal, April 2, 1733. 34 Weekly Rehearsal, August 11, 1735.

245 belonging to Mr. Sellers, being … hungry, took hold the Boy’s Ear, and bit it off, close to his head. But I cannot tell whether he eat it afterwards, or not [sic].”35 London readers of the account of the “ambassador from the Negroes” in Virginia were meant to laugh that

“his Excellency was turned ashore, and whipt thro' every County to the Place from whence he came [sic].”36 They could read in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737 that in Antigua:

One of these miserable Creatures during his Confinement by some Method or other had got a Knife, but being Handcuff'd and pinion'd, so as not to be able to come at his Throat, stabb'd himself in 7 or 8 Places; but the Pain of his Wounds caused him to make some unusual Noise, whereby he was discover'd and immediately brought to the Wheel and broke. On Friday last arrived here Capt. Bodin in 6 Weeks from Lisbon…37

Franklin had actually copied the account of the Antigua prisoner attempting to commit suicide from a newspaper in New York, but it was his choice to continue casually with the news from Lisbon, Portugal. The Boston Weekly Post-Boy described South Carolina planters placing “heads on poles as a terror to other Negroes” and nearly every story of slave unrest ended with a quick description of slaves being burned or gibbeted alive.38

Printers of newspapers worked closely with government officials in their reporting of conspiracies and insurrections. Newspapermen were financially beholden to governors and colonial assemblies because of lucrative government printing contracts and political alliances with benefactors.39 In London, Samuel Buckley’s The Daily Courant was the special repository of news from the Duke of Newcastle, the British Secretary of

35 Boston Gazette, June 17, 1734. This account is cited by the newspaper as occurring in Maryland. 36 Evening Post (1709) (London, England), Thursday, September 17, 1730; Issue 330; Pennsylvania Gazette, December 15, 1730. 37 Ibid., March 3, 1737. 38 Boston Post-Boy, November (?), 1739. American Weekly Mercury, April 4-12, 1745. 39 Jeffery A. Smith, “Impartiality and Revolutionary Ideology: Editorial Policies of the South-Carolina Gazette, 1732-1745,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 49, No. 4. (Nov., 1983), 513.

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State.40 Buckley was the first London printer to report the Natchez Revolt in Louisiana and the Saint John’s Rebellion in 1734, though most of the slave conspiracies went unreported in his paper.41 In the colonies, financial and political alliances did not stop printers from insisting upon their right to print dissenting opinions. Lewis Timothy, a former apprentice of Benjamin Franklin, insisted in his South Carolina Gazette in 1734 that if liberty of the press would be “attacked,” only “slavery and ruin” would follow.42

During the Stono Rebellion, however, his family was more than willing to forego printing any news of the largest insurrection the colony had ever known. John Peter Zenger’s famous defense of free speech against the governor of New York in 1734 has long attracted the attention of historians interested in the origins of a free press in colonial

America, but no such controversies emerged between the politically dissident printer and the “Court” faction of the Lieutenant Governor in New York in 1741.43 Zenger’s New-

York Weekly Journal reported the “Negro Plot” in New York in a manner similar to slave conspiracies and insurrections in the West Indies.44 There appears to have been little disagreement between officials and the press concerning the methods taken to suppress black unrest.

Over the course of the decade, the news fueled the anxieties of colonists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A contributor to the New York Gazette demonstrated the extent to which colonists increasingly shared a sense of being besieged by rebelling slaves. In 1734, printer William Bradford took the rare step of placing on the entire front

40 Harris, London Newspapers, 156. 41 Daily Courant (London, England), Mar. 6, 1730, Issue 8862; Daily Courant (London, England), Feb. 13, 1734, Issue 5572. 42 South Carolina Gazette, February 2, 1734; Smith, Impartiality, 515. 43 Alison Olson, “The Zenger Case Revisited: Satire, Sedition and Political Debate in Eighteenth Century New York,” Early American Literature, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2000), 223-245. 44 New York Weekly Journal, Jan. 20, 1734; New York Weekly Journal, Mar. 28, 1737; New York Weekly Journal, May 31, 1741.

247 page of his paper an anonymous contributor’s account of a slave conspiracy in New

Jersey. The author of the report explained that he had been a witness at “some of the

Examinations of those Negroes.” The “Design of these Negros,” he explained, was to

“Rise at Midnight, Cut the throats of their Masters and Sons,” “Plunder and Ravish” the women, and “set all their Houses and Barns on Fire.”45 According to the account, the conspirators then planned to “Kill all the draught Horses,” and take the best saddle horses for “their flight towards the Indians in the French Interest.”46 In his conclusion of his account of the conspiracy, the witness drew on the news of unrest from throughout the

Americas to explain the dangers to New Jersey and Pennsylvania:

How very necessary it is for every Colony to make proper Laws and Ordinances for their own Security, and against the Attempts of these barbarous Monsters (by some so much indulged). I would also have each and every one of us to remember, and not forget the great Calamity and Disolation [sic] there was in the City of New-York some years since, by the Negroes rising there, and murdering many good innocent People… The late Massacre perpetrated by the Negroes in the Island of St. John’s, the very great head they are come to in the Island of Jamaica, and the general Melancholy Apprehensions of his Majesty’s Subjects in the West Indies, gives but too much room to fear there is some great Fatality attends the English Dominions in America, from the too great Number of that unchristian and barbarous People being imported…47

45 The New-York Gazette, Mar. 18- Mar. 25, 1734, No. 439. Another version of this account, written by the same author, was printed by Bradford’s brother Andrew in the American Weekly Mercury in Philadelphia. American Weekly Mercury, Mar. 5, 1734. 46 The conspiracy reference to slaves fleeing to “Indians in the French interest” is very indicative of a dispute between the Shawnee and British colonists in the 1730s. The French were actively courting the Shawnees at the time by providing them with gunpowder and weapons to fight the Flatheads [Catawba] to the south. In 1732, a Shawnee chief sent a missive to Governor Gordon saying that he feared the anger of the British because several runaway slaves had been living among his people. Council Minutes, August 10th, 1737,Minutes of the Provincial Council of Philadelphia, 16 Vols. (Harrisburg: Printed by Theo. Fenn & Co., 1851), Vol. 4, 233-235; “Message Shawnee Chiefs to Gov. Gordon, 1732” Pennsylvania Archives, 1st Series, Volume I: 1644-1747, 329-330; For a reference to Shawnees and Iroquois harboring runaways and sometimes selling them, see “Saml Blunston to Robert Charles, Message From Indians, 1731,” Pennsylvania Archives, Vol. I: 1644-1747, 295. 47 The New-York Gazette, Mar. 18- Mar. 25, 1734, No. 439.

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The author of the report demonstrated an acute familiarity with the current state of slave unrest in the British colonies as it stood in 1734. He knew the news as it had been reported up to that moment. He described the “great Calamity and Disolation [sic]” of the New York Slave insurrection of 1712, an important reference in a New York newspaper. He continued by describing “the late Massacre perpetrated by the Negroes in the island of St. John,” an event that had been reported in New York since the spring of that year. He noted the “very great head they are come to in Jamaica,” referring to the

Maroon War, a topic chronicled for at least four years in New York papers and a subject of great interest to John Peter Zenger in his New-York Weekly Journal. The “Melancholy

Apprehensions of his Majesty’s Subjects in the West Indies” was most likely a reference to a report printed in New York in the winter of 1734, stating that in the Leeward Islands,

“The Rising of the Negroes at St. John’s, has so alarmed our islands, that they keep 30 or

40 Men every Night upon the Watch upon each island, to prevent a surprise.”48 All of these accounts indicated a shared threat to the colonies. “Some great Fatality attends the

English dominions in America,” warned the anonymous author, from the growing populations of slaves. As early as 1734, well before the sensational conspiracy trials in

Antigua and New York, the anonymous contributor to the New York Gazette already feared the rising tide of general slave rebellion.

The Jamaican Maroon War played a subtle role in this widespread uneasiness among colonists. The concern that the largest and most important British sugar island might be lost to a combined force of “Rebellious Negroes” began first among British officials on Jamaica. In a 1730 “Humble Address to the Crown,” Governor Hunter and

48 That report originated from the account of a ship captain from Anguilla given to Thomas Fleet in Boston. The Weekly Rehearsal, 1734.

249 his council warned their King that the defeat of the militia “hath Encouraged our Slaves to that Degree that we are under the greatest Apprehension of a General Insurrection.”

The Board of Trade shared similar concerns with the Duke of Newcastle in the fall of that year.49 British officials reiterated the constant threat of near imminent defeat at the hands of the “Rebellious Negroes” for the next seven years.50 Governor Edward Trelawny’s warning to the Duke of Newcastle, that a “dangerous spirit of liberty” could “deliver the island to the blacks” had strong precedents before 1737.51

The ongoing Jamaican Maroon War emerged in the nervous correspondence of the leading planters in the colonies. In the summer of 1729, as Governor Hunter was just beginning his new campaigns against the Maroons in the Caribbean, Governor Gooch learned of “a number of Negroes, about fifteen,” who had fled with arms and ammunition from a plantation on the James River and sought to set up a maroon village in the

Shenandoah Mountains. A Virginia expedition attacked the new settlement, and as

Gooch explained to the Board of Trade, “prevented for this time a design which might have proved as dangerous to this Country, as is that of the Negroes in the Mountains of

Jamaica to the Inhabitants of that Island.”52 In a letter to England written in July of 1736,

William Byrd II argued that slave importation to Virginia should be halted, “lest they prove as troublesome & dangerous every where, as they have been lately in Jamaica.”

49 “The Humble Address and Representation of the Governor and Council of Jamaica to the Crown, November 27, 1730, CO 137/18, TNA; “Paper Relating the Affairs of Jamaica,” Board of Trade to Newcastle, October 7, 1730, CO 137/47, TNA. 50 For examples of Jamaicans warning of general rebellion on the island, see Journal of the Jamaican Assembly, Vol. 3, Martis, 4 die Januarii [Jan 4, 1731/2], 46-47; 'America and West Indies: December 1730, 24-31', Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 37: 1730 (1937), 410-424, “627.” 'America and West Indies: March 1734, 1-15', Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 41: 1734-1735 (1953), 45-55. 51 'America and West Indies: June 1737, 1-30', Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 43: 1737 (1963), 174-192. 52 Gooch to Board of Trade, June 29, 1729, CO 5/1322 M-241 SR417 ff. 10-13, TNA.

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Byrd noted “We have mountains in Virginia too, to which they may retire as safely, and do as much mischief as they do in Jamaica.”53 Six months later in Antigua, council member and planter Valentine Morris sought to defend the ongoing slave conspiracy trials by tracing the long history of conspiracy and violence against Englishmen. He looked back to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Barbados conspiracy of 1692, and stressed the violence of the Jamaican Maroon War that he described as ongoing in the island colony to the west.54 He won his argument and the trials continued. Even long after the conflict, the violence of the “slaves in rebellion” in Jamaica lingered in the memory of West Indians. In defense of the murderous slave conspiracy trials on the

Danish Island of Saint Croix in 1759, Engelbret Hesselberg sought to use the violence of the Jamaica Maroon War to justify the cruelty exacted on Danish slaves. Hesselberg warned that the “perpetual attacks of the negroes” had forced the English to make a treaty with the Maroons in 1738 [the year was actually 1739].55

It is hard to measure the extent to which reporting of the Jamaican Maroon War shaped the anxieties of colonists in port towns. The regularity with which Benjamin

Franklin reported news from Jamaica in his Pennsylvania Gazette demonstrates the extent to which the Maroon War dominated rumors of unrest [Table []]. Between 1730 and 1735, Franklin related at least thirteen violent contests between the militia and the

Maroons, reports that far outstripped any other conflicts in the first half of the decade.

53 Byrd to John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, Virginia, July 12th, 1736, in The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684-1776, ed., Marion Tinling (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1977), 488. 54 “Memorandum,” Council Minutes, January 24, 1737, CO 9/10, 127, TNA; Jason Sharples, “The Flames of Insurrection: Fearing Slave Conspiracy in Early America, 1670-1780,” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010), 93. 55 Waldemar Westergaard, “Account of the Negro Rebellion on St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1759,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1926), 53; Sharples, “Flames of Insurrection,” 97.

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Colonists read of events that sounded very similar to insurrections. A printed letter from a “Gentleman in Jamaica” on April 18, 1734, served as a good example:

Our rebellious Negroes are so numerous that they attack us every where, and are not afraid of our greatest Force. About ten Days ago they attacked near 100 Men, most Soldiers, carried away their Arms, Provisions, and what Plunder they pleased; most of our People fled; we can get no Body to stand before them.56

Did the idea of “rebellious Negroes,” “so numerous that they attack us every where,” influence the fears of Philadelphia’s white colonists?

Table [4-2]: Reports of Black Unrest in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1729-1742.57

Date Colony Event 1729 April 10 Antigua Conspiracy 1730 Oct. 29 South Carolina Conspiracy 1730 Dec. 15 Virginia Insurrection 1730 Dec. 15 Jamaica Maroons Destroy Militia 1731 April 8 Jamaica Soldiers Sent to Fight Maroons 1732 Mar. 16 Jamaica Maroons Destroy Militia 1732 Nov 2 Jamaica Militia kills 40 Maroons 1732 Nov 30 Jamaica Militia destroys Maroon Town 1733 June 14 Jamaica "Rebellious Negroes" retake Town 1734 Jan 8 St. John Slaves "Massacre all the white people" 1734 Feb. 20 St. John Number of white people killed 60 1734 Feb. 27 New Jersey Conspiracy, Causes 1734 April 11 St. John Insurrection 1734 April 11 St. Kitts Conspiracy, Homes set on fire 1734 April 18 Jamaica "Our Rebellious Negroes Attack us Everywhere" 1734 May 30 Jamaica 1000 men raised, "Negroes very Insolent" 1734 Aug 29 Jamaica 200 Militia kill 40 Maroons 1735 Feb 25 Jamaica Militia attacks Nanny Town 1735 Mar. 4 Jamaica 1600 soldiers in pursuit of "Rebellious Negroes" 1735 Mar 20 St John Insurrection Ends 1735 July 17 Jamaica Militia and "English Negroes" battle Maroons 1735 Aug 28 Jamaica Militia kills or takes 25 Maroons 1736 Dec. 2 Antigua Conspiracy 1736 Dec 16 Antigua Conspiracy, "Negroes Rising in Battle against us"

56 Pennsylvania Gazette, April 18, 1734. 57 By Reports of Black Unrest,” I mean very broadly accusations of conspiracy, open rebellion, and Maroon War. The purpose of the above Table is to demonstrate the frequency with which the Pennsylvania Gazette reported open conflict and rebellion against white colonists. I have excluded reports of slave crimes, such as acts of murder and arson, which were also reported in the newspaper.

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1737 Mar. 3 Antigua "60 Negroes executed" 1737 Mar. 24 Antigua Report of the Committee 1737 Mar 31 Antigua Report of the Committee, cont. 1737 Sept. 8 Pennsylvania Sampson tried for burning President's House 1739 Aug 30 Jamaica Maroons Brought in for Treaty 1739 Nov 8 South Carolina Insurrection 1739 Dec 6 South Carolina Insurrection 1740 June 26 South Carolina Conspiracy 1741 April 9 New York Fires in the City, "Negroes suspected" 1741 June 4 New York Conspiracy, "Two Negroes Burnt here" 1741 June 11 New York Conspiracy, "Four Negroes were burnt alive" 1741 June 18 New York Conspiracy 1741 June 25 New York Conspiracy, "All of them die hardened" 1741 July 2 New York Conspiracy, "Vigilance of our Magistrates 1741 July 9 New York Conspiracy, One man hanged is found alive 1741 July 16 New York Conspiracy 1741 July 23 New York Conspiracy, Six Negroes Executed 1741 July 30 New York Conspiracy, 1741 Aug 6 New York Conspiracy, John Ury A Romish Priest 1741 Aug 20 New York Conspiracy, Spanish Negro Executed 1741 Sept 10 New York Defense of John Ury 1741 Sept 17 South Carolina Bosun attempts to burn down city 1742 Mar 25 New York Conspiracy, Recanted

The news of conflict between white and black people in the British Atlantic was particularly dire just before two important incidents of black restiveness in the

Pennsylvania and New Jersey region. Both events occurred right after extensive stories from the distant Caribbean. There were 2055 black people in Pennsylvania in 1740, or roughly 2.5 percent of the colony’s population, and perhaps as many as 4366 black people in New Jersey, nearly all of whom were slaves [See Supplementary Files, Table

1.3]. Philadelphia’s slave population made up about 8.5 percent of the city’s total number of people.58 In January of 1734, Franklin had been reporting the Maroon War in

Jamaica for four years when news of the insurrection on Saint John arrived in the city. In the January 8 edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin printed news of the island

58 The population figures for Philadelphia before the American Revolution have not survived. My estimate of the population of slaves in the city is based on a comparison to Boston at the time, which was 8.5 percent. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania both maintained populations of slaves at a little over 2 percent at the time and their two largest cities were comparable in size. See Appendix A for the population figures.

253 rebellion for the first time. In an account he copied from a New York newspaper printed

December 9, readers learned that rebels on the island of Saint John had “entirely

Massacred all the white people.”59 His report indicates that news of the Saint John insurrection was circulating the mid-Atlantic between December and January. Sometime before January 21, 1734, officials in east Jersey declared they had discovered a slave conspiracy in Somerset County, near the Raritan River.60 Over the next month, Franklin and Andrew Bradford of Philadelphia’s America Weekly Mercury printed opinion essays that debated whether the factional political fighting in New York had inspired the conspiracy.61 Perhaps they should have considered whether the rampant news of slave violence in the wider Atlantic was influencing events at home.

Philadelphia appears to have been equally on edge in the late summer of 1737. In

August, colonial officials charged a slave named Sampson with intentionally burning down a house owned by Council President James Logan, who was the acting governor of the colony at the time. “The insolent Behaviour of the Negroes in and about the city,” exclaimed the President to the Pennsylvania Council, “which has of late been so much taken notice of, requires a strict hand to be kept over them.”62 Logan’s concerns over the growing “insolence” of slaves may have reflected restiveness in the Philadelphia black population that summer, but it is equally likely the act of arson was interpreted through the shared anxieties of white colonists in the British colonies.63 News of the conspiracy

59 Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan. 8, 1734. 60 Weekly Rehearsal, 1734. 61 American Weekly Mercury, Mar. 5, 1734; Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 27, 1734. 62 Pennsylvania Council Minutes, September 3d, 1737, Minutes of the Provincial Council of Philadelphia, Volume IV (Harrisburg: Printed by Theo. Fenn & Co., 1851.), 243-244. 63 Fear of slaves in Philadelphia continued well into 1738. A Philadelphia essayist worried the decadence of slaves, with their “silk gloves and petticoats, good Holland and cambric, laced shoes with silkclocked stockings, silver watches on their fobs and five pounds in their pockets, going to taverns, calling for bottles of wine and fresh lime punch” would ignite the “horrors of a servile insurrection upon the defenceless town

254 in Antigua, reported in five separate stories in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette throughout the spring, described hundreds of slaves holding secret meetings in their

“accursed Negro plot” [Table 4-2].64 In March of that year, Franklin dedicated half of two separate editions of his paper to publishing the detailed report of the Committee that tried the Antigua slaves. In this anxious environment, a trial held by Philadelphia Justices of the Peace condemned Sampson to be burned in punishment for arson.65 A group of

Quakers submitted a petition for Sampson to be spared but President Logan, a Quaker himself, argued the burning of Sampson would set an example for all the city’s slaves. In the end, the council compromised and banished Sampson to a “State not subject to or depending on the Crown of Great Britain.”66

The relationship between the arrival of news of slave unrest and accusations of slave conspiracy emerged again and again throughout the 1730s. The evidence was decidedly circumstantial. In the summer of 1734, for example, Governor Fitzwilliam assumed command of the province of the Bahamas, just north of the Leeward Islands.

The combined forces of the French and Danes had just defeated the Akwamu rebels on the island of Saint John a few months earlier. Printers in London and throughout the colonies had reported a slave conspiracy on the British island of Saint Christopher, in which “News of the Negroes at the Island of St. John’s holding Possession thereof still…

as a result of these unseemly liberties.” As quoted in Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Philadelphia: A History of the City and its People: A Record of 225 years, Volume I, (Philadelphia: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912), 162. 64 Pennsylvania Gazette, Dec. 16, 1736. 65 Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept. 1 and Sept. 8, 1737. 66 Pennsylvania Council Minutes, December 12th, 1737,Minutes of the Provincial Council of Philadelphia, Volume IV (Harrisburg: Printed by Theo. Fenn & Co., 1851), 259.

255 has encouraged the Negroes on Saint Kitts and the Week before last, they attempted the same in that Island.”67

Almost immediately upon his arrival in the Bahamas, on September 8, Governor

Fitzwilliam wrote to the Board of Trade that he had “discovered a Conspiracy among a great number of our Slaves.” In his account, a captured runaway slave accused of murder and held in irons had announced to the guards that he was one of the leaders of an impending slave conspiracy to rise and “kill the white inhabitants” of the Bahamas. The informant named his co-conspirators and the governor had them taken into custody, “but they are sullen,” he wrote, “and as yet will confess nothing more than that they have heard other Negroes talk of a Rising in general.”68 At the same time, a terrible fever raged through the island. “Most of the principle inhabitants are dead of a contagion,” wrote

Fitzwilliam, “I can scarce hear any thing but of people being either taken Sick or

Dead.”69 No records of the trials that followed remain, but the violence on Saint John and the vulnerability created by an epidemic may have made Governor Fitzwilliam more than willing to accept the accusations of a condemned runaway slave negotiating for his life.70

The idea that slave unrest was spreading gained increasing currency among colonists following the conspiracies in Antigua in 1736 and New York in 1741. During the Antigua conspiracy, Captain General William Matthew’s report to England “the

Contagion has spread further among these islands than I apprehend is discovered” was

67 Boston News-Letter, Mar. 7, 1734. 68Fitzwilliam to BT, B113, Sept 7, 1734, CO 23/3 1731-1737, TNA. 69 Fitzwilliam to Henry Luscelles, B114, Sept 5, 1734, CO23/3 1731-1737, TNA. 70 Michael Craton describes this conspiracy as a failed attempt at slave rebellion. Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People Volume One From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1992), 138-139.

256 similar to the account from a private correspondent in South Carolina writing to England at the same time. The anonymous author of the letter recounted “there had been 80

Negroes executed” in Antigua and the conspiracy had apparently inspired the slaves on the French islands. The “Negroes in the island of Bartholomew had rose and kill’d ten

White People,” he explained, but the French had “subdued them.” The South Carolinian also reported that as Charles Town had learned the news from the Leewards, another ship

“arriv’d at the same time from Barbados,” where a “great Number of Negroes assembled themselves within a Mile or two of Bridge-Town.” By order of the Bajan President, “all the Justices of the Peace” assembled to interrogate the island’s slaves and learn the meaning of the meetings. “Some People suspect,” wrote the South Carolinian, “that those Insurrections of the Negroes are countenanced by a certain Power.”71 He did not explain who that certain power might be, though the writer clearly assumed the London reader would know.72

The arrival of the news of the New York conspiracy in the spring of 1741 elicited reactions from white Britons throughout the Atlantic. In July, the Common Council of

Norfolk Virginia, issued new resolves ordering all townsmen to go armed to religious services and public meetings to prevent “insurrections and invasions.”73 In Bermuda, rumors of a suspicious letter written by New York slaves to black Bermuda mariners inspired the island’s Colonial Council to call the captain of the vessel from New York to appear before the meeting. Learning that the slave mariners accused of carrying the letter

71 London Evening Post (London, England), Tuesday, March 29, 1737; Issue 1462. 72 The South Carolinian was probably referring to the Spanish Monarchy because of the growing tensions with Spain. The word “power,” however, could also be a reference to Catholicism as an expression of anti- popery. 73 “At a Common Council held the 7th day of July 1741..” Brent Tarter, ed., The Order Book and Related Papers of the Common Hall of the Borough of Norfolk, Virginia, 1736-1798 (Richmond, VA: Virginia State Library, 1979), 57-58.

257 had indeed sailed on the captain’s ship, the Council wrote a letter to the Lt. Governor of

New York, offering to arrest Bermudian slaves and send them to the mainland for trial.74

In Charles Town, five days after the first report of the New York conspiracy fires in the

South Carolina Gazette, white officials charged a black boatswain sailor with attempting to burn down the city.75 The colonists burned the convicted man alive. The exact relationship between the arrival of news and the actions of colonists and slaves are sometimes obscure, but stories of the New York conspiracy were contributing to the anxieties of Britons in these provinces.

Regions of slave unrest produced more than just news. Tumultuous provinces produced exiles, men and women abandoning restive provinces to escape the fear and violence. “We are in a great deal of Trouble in this Island,” wrote an Antiguan to

London in January of 1737, “the Burning of Negroes, hanging them on Gibbets alive,

Racking them upon the Wheel, &c. takes up almost all our time… there has been destroy’d sixty fine sensible Negroe Men…I am almost dead with watching and warding, as are many more.” After long descriptions of the violence he had witnessed and committed, the writer concluded by noting “our Island is in [such] a poor miserable

Condition, that I wish I could get any Sort of Employ in England.”76 Many planters began to flee Antigua in 1737. Richard Sheridan notes the 1737 sugar crop in Antigua was two-

74 Council Minutes of Bermuda, Sept 1, 1741, 3-4, Bermuda Historical Quarterly Spring 1970, Vol. XXVII, No. 1; Council Minutes of Bermuda, April 6, 1742, 35-36, Bermuda Historical Quarterly Summer 1971, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2. 75 Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Atheneum Press, 1942, 2nd ed. 1968), 161-162; Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 296-297; Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept. 17, 1741. 76 London Evening Post Mar. 19, 1737, Issue 1458.

258 thirds below the annual average for the decade.77 “Some of the principal Gentlemen there with their Families,” wrote a correspondent, “are making Provision to leave the

Island, believing the Negroes will accomplish their Designs sooner or later.”78

One of these Antiguan planters, George Thomas, gained an appointment as

Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania from the Penn family and arrived in Philadelphia in

August of 1738.79 Within a year, he was embroiled with the Quaker dominated

Pennsylvania Assembly over the need to raise money for arming and training the militia.

In 1742, he joined with the merchants of Philadelphia to petition the king to intercede against the assembly. In their “Humble Petition,” the merchants warned “without a well regulated Militia,” the colony would be “too feeble to repel an Insurrection of our Slaves, already grown very numerous, shou'd they attempt the Destruction of the Inhabitants, as they have done in some of the Neighbouring Colonys.”80 The governor’s experience in

Antigua and the fears ignited by the conspiracy in New York created an alliance against the Quakers of the city.

Many other restive provinces must have produced exiles. “Several of my principal Parishioners” wrote Parson Andrew Leslie of South Carolina in 1740, “being apprehensive of Danger from ye Rebels Still outstanding carried their Families to Town for Safety.” Writing from the St Paul’s Parish in the region of the Stono Rebellion,

Leslie feared he would soon be out of work. “If ye Humour of moving continues a little

77 Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the West Indies, 1623-1775 (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, 1974, reprint 1994), 429. 78 Quoted in Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 40. Gaspar cites the New England Weekly Journal, April 12, 1737, but I could not find the report in that addition. 79 William C. Armor, Lives of the Governors of Pennsylvania, with the Incidental History of the State, From 1609 to 1872 (Philadelphia: James K. Simon, 1872), 141. 80 "The Humble Petition of diverse Merchants..." Board of Trade Papers, Proprieties (1697-1776), XV 91740-1742), T. 57, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

259 longer, I shall have but a Small Congregation in Church.”81 New Yorker Henry Cruger abandoned his merchant house in Kingston, Jamaica, while the Maroon War still raged on the island. He returned to his family home in New York in 1738 with his slave

Hanover. Three years later, Hanover was forced to flee the city after being accused during the murderous conspiracy trials of the summer of 1741.82 There is a great deal of potential for future research into the migrations of colonists attempting to flee unrest in the British provinces during these years.

The Nantucket Conspiracy

The best examples of the growing climate of fear in the 1730s British Atlantic emerge from regions where there were almost no slaves at all. In 1738, a rare quiet year in this period of rumor and rebellion, a story with an eerie resemblance to other plots appeared in the Boston Evening Post:

We have an Account from Nantucket, That the Indians upon that Island had some Time since entred [sic] into a Conspiracy to destroy all the English, by first setting Fire to their Houses, in the Night, and then falling upon them with their Fire Arms, Etc. But this horrid Plot was discovered by an honest Indian Fellow, who could by no means be prevailed upon to join the rest of the Indians in this most barbaraous undertaking.83

81 Andrew Leslie to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, January 7, 1739/40, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Record, microfilm, reel 5, 19-20, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC, in Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 19. 82 Jeannie Floyd Jones Robison, Henrietta Collins Bartlett, Genealogical records: manuscript entries of births, deaths and marriages taken from family Bibles, 1581-1917 (Colonial Dames of the State of New York, 1917), C-62. See Chapter Three. 83 Boston Evening Post, October 9th, 1738.

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In his newspaper, printer Thomas Fleet described a conspiracy of Indians on the small island of Nantucket that strongly resembled rumors of slave conspiracy throughout the

British provinces. His “Account,” almost certainly originating from a mariner traveling in the waters off the coast, described Indians planning to “destroy all the English,” preparing to set fire to homes, and to attack with “Fire Arms.” Fleet described an “honest

Indian” betraying the “barbarous undertaking” before the Indians could put it into effect.

The Nantucket Indian Conspiracy demonstrates the incredible influence the rising tide of rumored unrest had gained among Britons by 1738. There was no planned conspiracy on the island of Nantucket. An elderly and reportedly drunken Wampanoag

Indian woman had threatened several colonists with vengeance and the story had taken hold throughout the entire population. Boston newspapers even printed a rare retraction of the conspiracy weeks later. However, the very weak origins of the rumor did not stop the story from circulating throughout the British Atlantic. Within weeks, colonists in

New York and Philadelphia were reporting that the Wampanoag were rising on the islands of New England and London newspapers were disseminating the Boston Evening

Post’s account throughout the empire. How had this happened?

The Nantucket Indian conspiracy was in fact an imagined slave conspiracy, an example of the discourse of slave uprisings taking hold first in Nantucket and then through the avenues of communication that had come to fruition in the 1730s. The

Wampanoag Indians on Nantucket were protestant Christians, a people that had rejected the overtures of the mainland Wampanoag King Phillip to rise against the English more than fifty years before the accusations of 1738.84 They had lived in peace with the

84 Edward Byers, The Nation of Nantucket: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660-1820, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 22-25, 70-72.

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English inhabitants, who greatly outnumbered them, for nearly a hundred years. Because no similar accusations of conspiracy were made towards praying Indians in southeastern

Massachusetts during the eighteenth century, the timing of this conspiracy implies that something greater than local tensions informed Nantucketers’ fears. The accusations made against the Wampanoag also bore the pattern and structure of nearly all slave conspiracies in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in that a group of conspirators had planned to set the houses of the English on fire but an “honest fellow” from among the

Indians had saved the colonists just in time. The same sort of “honest fellow” foiled conspiracies in Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, the Bahamas, South Carolina, Maryland,

New Jersey, and later New York. We can be certain that in Nantucket, no such “honest fellow” existed.85

In some ways, Nantucket represented the British Atlantic in microcosm in the

1730s. The expansion of whaling on the island was a response to the growing commercial opportunities created by British commerce. The economic opportunities encouraged English colonists to settle on the island and to search for labor in whaling.

By the 1730s, the English were forcing Wampanoags to work on their boats by exploiting

Indian poverty and indebtedness. The sharp rise in the white population eroded the

Indians’ land base, spread epidemic disease, and produced relentless native poverty.

Collusion between white store owners who extended the Indians credit, white judges who forced Indians to pay off that credit, and powerful white whaling merchants who bought

85 Historians have never placed the Nantucket Indian conspiracy within the wider context of Atlantic slave uprisings. For the most part, only local histories of Nantucket Island have even noted the conspiracy, and these studies explain the event as a struggle between small groups of people in a very small place. For a description of the conspiracy based on the newspaper accounts, see Nathaniel Philbrick, Abram’s Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island (Nantucket, MA: Mill Hill Press, 1998), 174-176.

262 up Indian debts at bargain rates, forced Nantucket Indians into dangerous labor at sea with little recourse under the increasingly powerful British colonial government. The

Indians of Nantucket became bonded laborers. In this environment, on 1738, a rumor of an Indian uprising on Nantucket took hold among the white colonists of the island.

The accounts of the conspiracy in the newspapers were very different from an oral history taken from an elderly woman on the island in the late nineteenth century. Eliza

Mitchell remembered a story told to her when she was a little girl by an old woman who claimed to have witnessed the conspiracy when she was a child. “She heard her father tell her Mother She need not retire or undress the Children,” Mitchell related to a local historian, “because there was trouble brewing with the Indians… the two Tribes, had prepared all the means they could muster, & would make an attack on that night.” From the perspective of a child, the little girl learned that the men were preparing to march on the Indians and all of the white families were to gather together, under guard, in case of attack. “So, after many fears, and some tears, the families gathered their little ones close around them, club'd together, well as they could, and, She, a child, laid her head on her

Mothers Cap, and after a time, slept soundly, as children will.” While she had slept, the men of Nantucket, many presumably Quakers, marched on the Wampanoags of the island, going “several different ways through fogs, darkness, until almost daylight.” The companies of men found no Indians gathered together and no preparations for war. “All was still, and not the least indication of any disturbance could be discovered, so they returned to their homes, & reported as much to the anxious ones,” she remembered. 86

86“Personal Reminiscences of Mrs. Eliza W. Mitchell,” MS23, 1895, Nantucket Historical Society.

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The white colonists’ preparations for suppressing an uprising left the people of

Nantucket deeply unsettled. When the colonists sought to determine the original source of the rumor, they discovered that the Wampanoag who had first related the story had been paid with money for the news, and had been “stupefied with Liquor procured with the money given him” for three days. For their part, the Nantucket Indians were “so indignant, they bestirred themselves at once, and found who the culprit was, & were so highly incensed toward him, they came near tearing him in pieces.” The colonists held a meeting and “felt averse to having any one again punish'd at the Whipping Post. But, not so with his own Tribe, and the Clamor was so great, that it was finally settled that 30

Lashes should be inflicted…” After the whipping, the Wampanoag informant “was proclaimed an outcast among his people.”87

It is very likely that Eliza Mitchell’s account was also mistaken in one important detail. The retraction printed in the October 16, 1738, edition of the Boston Evening Post explained that a “drunken Indian Woman... in liquor,” had “reported such things,” but examination by a Justice of the Peace could make nothing more of it than a intoxicated story.88 This small contemporary detail, so out of keeping with the previous rumors and embarrassing to the colony of Nantucket, was probably from the same accurate source that had brought news that there was no conspiracy on the island. A “drunken Indian woman” had described the conspiracy to the English. Generations of Nantucket colonists had pushed the memory of whipping an elderly woman at the town whipping post from their story. No wonder the whipping post was never used again.

87 Mitchell, “Personal Reminiscences,” NHS. 88 Boston Evening Post, October 16, 1738.

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The rumor of the Nantucket Indian conspiracy in the wider Atlantic was another story entirely. It began, we must assume, on the island itself, spread by colonists and carried to the port town of Boston. On Monday, October 9th, 1738, master printer

Thomas Fleet assembled the report for his newspaper. It took a lot of work. His Boston

Evening Post was due to his subscribers by night fall, and the Sabbath, just the day before, had prevented early preparation. He had to set the type all day, making ready to print sheet after sheet for drying and folding.89 But he did not work alone. His young apprentices and journeymen joined him, throwing open the doors and flooding the printing house with the market noise of Cornhill Street in the port town of Boston.90

Pinching the long metal type between thumb and forefinger, the printer slowly filled the composing stick, letting the letters become words, the words become phrases, and the phrases become a horrid vision: “From Nantucket…Indians…a conspiracy... to destroy all the English…” One wonders if his hands shook. He certainly knew his readers’ would.

Fleet’s apprentices dropped The Boston Evening Post on the doorsteps of subscribers in the dark of night. Others folded and stuffed copies in the leather pouches of mail carriers, watching the riders disappear down the rough roads of the British

Empire.91 The rumor quickly spread down the Post Road (now Route 1) linking New

England to New York and Britain’s other mainland colonies. Within six days of the news breaking in Boston, on October 15th, the article was reprinted in its entirety in the New-

89 Charles E. Clarke, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 84-87. 90 Boston Evening Post, October 9th, 1738. At bottom of second page, customers are invited to meet the printer on Cornhill Street with all of their business. 91 Clark, Public Prints, p. 202.

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York Weekly Journal of New York City.92 The people of New York read that on nearby

Nantucket Island, Wampanoag Indians had “some time since” joined in a “conspiracy to destroy all the English,” first planning to burn down homes by cover of night, then to fall upon the white inhabitants in the ensuing panic.93

Two days later, in Philadelphia, a young printer named Benjamin Franklin reproduced the rumor in his Pennsylvania Gazette, making a critical mistake. He claimed the uprising was on Martha’s Vineyard, a neighboring island, which also contained whaling Wampanoags harboring their own longstanding grievances against the English.94

A person reading the account would have believed that an entirely different group of

American Indians had been discovered plotting to kill an entirely different group of colonists. Because of this mistake, we can be certain that the rumor came to the printer by word of mouth, outpacing the couriers of Boston, changing as it traveled on the roads and waters of commerce.

In two months, the story had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. It appeared for the first time in London on December 7. The earliest account came to the printer of the London

Evening Post as a spoken story. He described an Indian conspiracy outside of Boston,

“near Non-Tucker,” clearly unfamiliar with Nantucket and the geography of New

England.95 His brief account and mistake was reprinted in the Common Sense or The

Englishman's Journal and Read's Weekly Journal Or British Gazetteer, both on

December 9th.96 These printed stories were in turn posted in coffee houses, distributed to

92 New-York Weekly Journal, October 15th, 1738. 93 Boston Evening Post, October 9th, 1738. 94 This observation is made by Philbrick, Abram’s Eyes, 175. 95 London Evening Post (London, England), Thursday, December 7, 1738; Issue 1727. 96 Common Sense or The Englishman's Journal (London, England), Saturday, December 9, 1738; Issue 97; Read's Weekly Journal Or British Gazetteer (London, England), Saturday, December 9, 1738; Issue 744.

266 subscribes in town and villages, and carried again across the Atlantic to the provinces.

Only the Daily Gazetteer bothered to print the retraction issued by Thomas Fleet in a small corner of his newspaper on October 16th.

The Nantucket conspiracy demonstrates the extent to which slave conspiracies could be manufactured in the colonies during the 1730s. British fears that the

Wampanoag might rise up against their oppressors made colonists extremely vulnerable to the suggestion by an Indian informant, motivated by resentment or reward, that a conspiracy was imminent. Once the story took hold among colonists, printer Thomas

Fleet and many others improved the rumor, casting it in a format with which they were more than familiar, the trope of the planned insurrection by fire and salvation revealed in time by the one “honest fellow.” The avenues of communication between colonies did the rest. By 1738, at least, colonists from Nantucket to Barbados, and from London to

Jamaica, were ready to believe another impending conspiracy had taken hold in an

American colony.

The Nantucket Indian conspiracy became part of a wider story of rebellion in the

British Atlantic. Britons added it to their long and growing list of unrest in the Americas.

Historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh did the same thing, incorporating the

Nantucket conspiracy into their list of Atlantic wide insurrections throughout the

Americas in the 1730s. In their Many-Headed Hydra, the Wampanoags became part of a

“motley proletariat,” determined to defeat bourgeois capitalism by rising in rebellion against merchants and planters.97 Almost certainly, the American Indians of Nantucket did no such thing.

97 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 193.

267

The Methods that created Massacres

It was in this environment of heightened insecurity that colonists accused hundreds of enslaved people of plotting to rise in rebellion. As common as the conspiracy trials were in these years, they varied drastically in their outcome. Only five out of thirty-one conspiracies resulted in the British executing more than two slaves.

With the exception of a small Antigua conspiracy in 1729, all of the deadliest conspiracy trials took place after 1735, in the second half of the decade. The intensity of the trials in the latter part of the 1730s, as colonists gathered and then disseminated news through port towns, suggests growing anxieties weighed upon the white public. Despite these fears, the large majority of conspiracy trials did not produce the wave of egregious killings that took place in Jamaica, South Carolina, Antigua and New York.

The most violent conspiracy trials can be split into two types of incidents. In

South Carolina in 1740 and in Jamaica in 1745, colonial officials learned of impending conspiracies from planters who had been warned of the supposed danger by a slave. In these incidences, authorities adopted the unusual strategy of ambushing the planned gathering of accused conspirators instead of simply conducting arrests. The militias discovered mass meetings of slaves, just as they suspected, and set about condemning and executing people immediately. The laws of the two colonies required Justices of the

Peace to try the assembled slaves in ad hoc slave courts, typically called freeholders courts. The minutes of these special trials were not taken or the records have not survived. Georgia pamphleteer Benjamin Martyn related that two hundred slaves were

268 discovered in the open field in South Carolina in 1740. The Justices ordered fifty slaves hanged, “ten a day,” to “intimidate the other Negroes.”98 In the case of Jamaica, newspaper reports citing an “Extract from a letter from Jamaica” described authorities discovering “a great many Negros, took 12 or 14 of them, and continu’d to more of them by Degrees as some have been hang’d, some burnt, some hung in chains [gibbeted], and some sent off the island [banished].”99 In both South Carolina and Jamaica, the wrath of the militias was terrible and the duration of their trials brief and brutal.

The trials in Antigua and New York were a different matter. In both 1736 and

1741, the authorities found no one in open rebellion. Instead, governors and assemblies formed special committees of officials tasked with interrogating slaves and discovering the extent of the “accursed Negro plot.” In Antigua, on October 19, 1736, the legislature appointed four justices of the peace, including the attorney general and members of council and assembly, “Sworn to act according to their knowledge, their Consciences, and the Laws,” to conduct both interrogations and formal trials “of such Slaves as they shall think there is Matter enough against..”100 On October 23, the assembly passed a new act allowing the committee to investigate all slaves and to use “pains or tortures.”

The assembly justified the new law by noting the growing threat from slaves, “Rebellions and Treasons being of late more frequent among Slaves than heretofore this being the

Second plot formed in this Island within these Seven years.”101 Over the next four months, the committees ordered the execution of 88 people and banished another 48 to

98 [Benjamin Martyn], An Impartial Inquiry in the State and Utility of Colony of Georgia (London, 1741), 38. 99 Boston Evening Post, April 1, 1745. 100 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 21-22. 101 Ibid.

269 foreign provinces.102 In New York, four years later, the colony appointed a Grand Jury to investigate the conspiracy, interrogating slaves in secure meetings closed to the public.

The Supreme Court conducted the public trials.103 They had similar results to those of

Antigua four years earlier. Over less than four months, colonists executed thirty-four people and banished another eighty-four men and women.104

These were the most murderous trials. In all twenty-six of the other conspiracies, the executions did not exceed two people and in most cases, only one. This was true throughout a remarkable range of British provinces, including the Leeward Islands and

Bermuda, Maryland, New Jersey, and even at a different time in New York. What was the difference between a conspiracy that ended with one convicted conspirator and the mass killings that emerged in these other places?

The simple answer is that the decisions of governors and their councils determined the extent of a conspiracy in any given colony. They chose the course of conspiracy trials indirectly by deciding whether or not to create special investigative committees and they decided the outcome directly by determining when the interrogations of these committees would stop. The burden lay on governors and judges to decide when the trials had run their course. During each slave conspiracy, there were several critical moments when confessing witnesses produced new versions of the conspiracy and accused new people. The governor and his officials had to decide what to believe. Their choices decided the outcome of the trials.

102 Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 34-36, 103 Peter Charles Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2003), 78. 104 Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, Appendix; Lepore, New York Burning, xii.

270

By 1730, most British colonies had enshrined slave conspiracy into law. Unlike the French and Spanish Empires that maintained general slave codes based on old Roman law, each English province passed its own code for governing slaves. The most important was the Barbados “Act for the better ordering and governing negroes” [1661], a comprehensive statute designed to control and regulate slave populations on the island.105 In the act, planters singled out “Negroes and other slaves” for possessing

“Wild and Salvage Natures” that justified separate treatment under the island’s law.106

The 1661 law and the 1688 revised version essentially made a slave conspiracy “any gathering of slaves in which a crime was discussed.”107 Barbados set a precedent for other colonies. Jamaica (1664) and the Leeward Islands (1697) adopted similar codes for slave conspiracy before the end of the seventeenth century.108 The mainland colonies of

Maryland (1717), New Jersey (1712) and New York (1712) did the same.109 Virginians charged slave conspirators with treason until 1723, when a unique law defined conspiracy as six or more slaves who “consult, advise, or conspire, to rebel or make insurrection, or… plot or conspire the murder of any person or persons.”110 In many other cases, slaves

105 Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy, 24-25. 106 “An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” The laws of Barbados collected in one volume by William Rawlin, of the Middle-Temple, London, Esquire, and now clerk of the Assembly of the said island.(London : Printed for William Rawlin ..., MDCXCIX, 1699), 156. 107 This quote is taken from Peter Charles Hoffer. I was not able to locate the text of the 1661 law as it was replaced with the new “Act for the Governing of Negroes” in 1688 and so not included in the Laws of Barbados (1699). My reading of the 1688 law does not make this definition as clear as Hoffer implies. The law equates conspiracy with insurrection and sets out special martial laws for either crime. Conspiracy of slaves is not specifically defined within the 1688 act. For a discussion of the implications of the Barbados slave code on slave conspiracy, see Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy, 24. 108 David Barry Gaspar, “With a Rod of Iron: Barbados Slave Laws as a Model for Jamaica, South Carolina, and Antigua, 1661-1697,” in Comparative Boundaries: A Comprehensive History of Black People in the Diaspora, eds. Darlene Clark Hine and Bradley J. Nicholson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); Bradley Nicholson, “Legal Borrowing and the Origins of Slave Law in the British Colonies,” The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), 52; Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy, 18, 24. 109 Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy, 24-25. 110 William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, From the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1616 (Richmond, Franklin Press, 1820), Volume IV, 126;

271 accused of conspiracy might be charged with committing petit treason [a master betraying a servant] or arson, both laws which represented betrayal and usually included the capital punishment of burning.

There was a strong precedent for colonies to form special and extraordinary committees after the discovery of a slave conspiracy. In the 1688 “Act for Governing

Negroes,” Barbados required its governor to create a special council if “any Negroes or other Slaves” should “make Mutiny or Insurrection” or “hold any Council or

Conspiracy.”111 The governor was to select any four officers from the militia, which might include men from his Common Council or the Assembly, “to meet in Council, and to proceed by the Marshal Law against the Actors, Contrivers, Raisers, Fomenters and

Concealers of such Mutiny or Rebellion, and them punish by Death or other Pains.”112

With the full powers of martial law, the special council was tasked with finding the

“Contrivers” and punishing them with “Death or other Pains.” Four years after Barbados officials signed the law, the incredible powers of this special Council became quite clear.

The Barbados conspiracy of 1692 lasted for more than a month and led to the interrogation of two or three hundred slaves.113 The Barbados Assembly formed its own investigative committee, the “Commission of Inquiry,” to complement the martial law council, who in turn helped identify and interrogate numerous accused slaves.114 The end result was ninety-five people executed [“a great many burn’d”], and at least forty-two

Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 88; Anthony Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 129. 111 “An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” The laws of Barbados, 162. 112 Ibid. 113 Jerome Handler and Hilary Beckles described the conspiracies as intended insurrections. J. Handler, “Slave revolts and conspiracies in seventeenth-century Barbados,” New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West- Indische Gids 56 (1982), no: 1/2, 23; Beckles, Black Rebellion, 44-46. 114 Beckles, Black Rebellion, 44.

272 men castrated.115 The special martial law council and the investigative committees proved very effective in delivering accused conspirators and exhorting confessions.

The English method of prosecuting slave conspiracy trials depended on witnesses and confessions. If the authorities believed the witness, then there was little the accused could do to prevent a conviction. Conspiracy, however, was not like other slave crimes.

By its very nature, it involved a pact with others. In Barbados in 1692, an informant had overhead slaves Ben and Sambo discussing a “wicked design.” The special council ordered them gibbeted until they starved or confessed. After just four days, both men offered to confess and name their fellow conspirators. Sambo died from the gibbeting before he could speak. Ben named “most of the chief officers.”116 This was a typical outcome. English authorities required convicted slaves to implicate their fellow conspirators in order to be considered for mercy. There were many exceptions. Slaves often denied the charges to their death and the colonists resurrected egregious methods of execution from early modern Europe, like breaking on the wheel, to make an example of the unrepentant slave. But when faced with burning alive chained to a stake or the possibility of banishment to another colony, many of the accused were willing to confess to the crime and name others. Judge Josiah Smith pointed to this problem in his letter to

Cadwallader Cotton in 1741. “Any body” he explained, “would chuse rather to be hanged than to be burnt.”117

Most colonies did not adopt the Barbados method of special councils for interrogating slave conspirators. By the 1730s, provinces with large populations of slaves

115 Handler, “Slave Revolts,” 24-25. 116 Handler, “Slave Revolts,” 23-24. 117 Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume III Additional Letters and Papers 1715-1748 (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1937), 272-273.

273 had adopted Barbados’ separate innovation, the “freeholder court,” as the means by which slave conspirators were tried. Evolving from the 1661 slave codes, slaves were denied juries and instead were to be tried by two justices of the peace and any “Three

Able, Good and Legal free-holders of the Place nearest where the said Crimes were committed.”118 In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, freeholder courts were used by all the colonies in the British West Indies and in South Carolina and Virginia.119

Pennsylvania adopted freeholders courts in 1700 and New York and New Jersey followed suit after 1712.120 Bermuda adopted the freeholders’ court in 1730 to deal with the poisoning conspiracies that swept through the island. The New England colonies and

Maryland did not create special courts for slaves, but instead, in the case of Maryland, tried slaves in the County Court.121

The freeholders courts were by their very nature quick to pass sentence. The

Barbados law of 1688 instructed the courts to be assembled “with all convenient speed” nearest “where the crimes were committed” and to order punishments on the spot.122

Virginia followed with the creation of their slave court of oyer and terminer [literally to hear and determine] in 1692, as part of the “Act for the more speedy prosecution of

118 “An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” 160-161. 119 In Virginia, freeholders courts were referred to as Courts of Oyer and Terminer for slaves. They were were enacted in 1692 as part of the “Act for the more speedy prosecution of slaves committing capital crimes.” Peter Charles Hoffer and William B. Scott, eds., Criminal Proceedings in Colonial Virginia, American Historical Association, American Legal Records, X (Athens, GA: 1984), xliv-lii. 120 For Pennsylvania, see Frank M. Eastman, Courts and Lawyers of Pennsylvania: A History, 1623-1923, Volume I (New York: The American Historical Society, Inc., 1922), Chapter XVI, "Court for the Trial of Negroes,” 173-175. For the creation of freeholders courts in New York and New Jersey, see Hoffer, Great New York Conspiracy, 18, 25. 121 Maryland did allow a version of the freeholder system by allowing a magistrate or any justice of the peace to give a slave forty lashes for thefts and burglary. “A Supplementary ACT to the Act relating to Servants and Slaves,” Lib. LL., Nº 4. fol. 377, reproduced in William Hand Browne, Edward C. Papenfuse, et. al. eds., Archives of Maryland, 215+ volumes, (Baltimore and Annapolis, Md., 1883-), 75: 18-20 (hereinafter cited as Archives of Maryland). This series is ongoing and available on line at http://archivesofmaryland.net where volumes, collectively or individually, can be searched electronically. 122 “An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” 160-161.

274 slaves committing Capitall Crimes.” Slaves had to be tried quickly, the law explained, in order to make other slaves “affrighted to commit the like crimes.”123 Because the freeholders courts were ad hoc in nature and quick to pass judgment, they did not produce the interrogations and elaborate confessions of the special committees created by governor. Magistrates heard evidence and passed summary judgment. In some cases, justices of the peace could even be discerning, excusing slaves for lack of immediate evidence. Historian Philip Schwarz shows that courts of oyer and terminer in the

Virginia county of Spotsylvania, for example, had a higher conviction rate of free whites

(66.7 percent) than of black slaves (60 percent).124 This depended on the crime, however.

In cases of conspiracy, in which very few whites were ever charged in the history of colonial Virginia, the slave conviction rate was more than eighty-nine percent of the time.125 As the Virginia Act of 1692 explained, the courts justices of the peace endeavored to make slaves “affrighted to commit like crimes.”

For the most part, the officials on the Freeholder courts were responsible for condemning slave conspirators between the years 1729 and 1746. Justices of the Peace tried poison conspirators in Bermuda in 1730, the slaves in the Virginia rebellion of 1730, the accused conspirators in South Carolina in 1730, 1734, 1737, and 1740. Freeholders probably tried the conspirators in New Jersey in 1734 (the records are lost), and most other incidents of accused plotting in colonial America. The freeholders courts also probably tried the slave conspirators discovered in the open fields in South Carolina in

123 Act for the more speedy prosecution of slaves committing capital crimes,” in Hening, The Statutes at Large, II, 270, 481-482, as quoted in Schwarz, Twice Condemned, 17. 124 Schwarz, Twice Condemned, 48-49. 125 Ibid., 45-46.

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1740 and Jamaica in 1745.126 The fast pace of trials and executions in the field suggests that justices of the peace and freeholders, probably militia men, did the sentencing.

Justices of the Peace and the assembled freeholders ordered brutal executions, but they were quick and dirty, designed for “speedy prosecution of slaves.” Fearing imminent rebellion, the planters sought to make an example of the accused men they had found in an open meeting.

With two established systems for prosecuting slaves, governors and their officials had to make a choice concerning the methods they would use to determine the extent of a conspiracy. Did they believe the conspiracy was widespread and imminent? Did they trust that trials in the courts would end the threat of insurrection? Without doubt, the climate of fear in the second half of the 1730s weighed on the decisions of authorities.

Comparing the decisions of officials in Maryland in 1740 and New York in 1741 demonstrates the extent to which the choices made by officials determined the outcomes of the conspiracy trials.

The Prince George’s County Conspiracy of 1740

Four months after the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina and a little more than a year before the trials in Manhattan, officials in Annapolis believed they had uncovered a conspiracy consisting of at least two hundred slaves. The Maryland conspiracy had the potential to explode in either rebellion or violent spectacles of public execution. The choices made by officials determined that it did not.

126 I am making this assumption because no trial record exists in either case. The minutes of the South Carolina Common Council and the South Carolina Assembly do not show the creation of any special committees.

276

The Prince George’s County slave conspiracy was a critical moment in the history of Maryland. It serves as one of the only incidents of slave conspiracy in the history of the colony and it was almost certainly shaped by news of events from outside the colony.

The first accusations of conspiracy emerged less than three months after news of the

Stono Rebellion arrived in Maryland and a few weeks after George Whitefield gave his first sermons near Annapolis. It also took place during the first proclamations of war with Catholic Spain. When word arrived in the capital that two hundred slaves had been planning to rise up on the Patuxent river and attack Annapolis, colonists mustered the miltia and the governor dispatched volunteers to secure the County. Like the conspiracies sweeping through so many of the colonies in the period, it is hard to determine what was real and what was imagined. Because very few scholars have ever noticed the conspiracy, it is worthwhile to explore the event in full. 127

Sometime around January 23, 1740, the sheriff of Prince George’s County sent word to the governor in the capital of Annapolis that he had discovered a conspiracy among the slaves in the southern half of the county. The accused slave “officers” and their “king” were owned by four families, all living on adjoining plantations in the hundreds near the Patuxent river. The sheriff had already arrested six of the accused conspirators and was holding them in the county jail at Upper Marlboro, the county seat, while searching for more conspirators. Governor Sam Ogle dispatched twelve militia

127The Prince George’s County conspiracy has emerged in several studies of colonial American slavery. In American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), Herbert Aptheker briefly described the conspiracy within his chronological discussion of slave rebellions in colonial America. Allan Kulikoff gave the issue similar consideration in his excellent Tobacco and Slaves (1986), summarizing the conspiracy in a single paragraph and making observations about the location and identity of the slaves involved. Local histories have sometimes noted the event as well, but always briefly. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 189-190; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 329-330; For an example of a local history’s treatment of the episode, see Walter B. Norris, Annapolis: Its Colonial and Naval Story (New York: Thomas Crowell Company, 1925).

277 men to reinforce the sheriff and called up the militia to defend the capital. White men marched through the streets and guards were posted at the powder magazine to prepare for an insurrection.

The evidence for the Prince George’s slave conspiracy begins a week after word of the conspiracy first arrived in the colony. It is in the form of a letter written by

Stephen Bordley, a young lawyer in Annapolis, who wrote the only detailed account of the conspiracy to a friend on the eastern shore. “We have lately discovered a conspiracy among the Negroes in Prince George’s County to Rise and Massacre all ye Inhabitants on this Shore,” he wrote. Bordley was clearly familiar with other conspiracies in the

Atlantic, noting “ye scheme was as well laid as any as any of the kind that I ever heard of.” According to the young lawyer, the conspirators were to meet on a Sunday and choose a king, and then retire to their plantations until dark. After the colonists were asleep, the slaves “were to destroy all those of their Several families Negro Women and all Except ye Young White Women only, whom they intended to keep for their Wives.”

Stealing weapons, the conspirators were said to have planned to march on to Annapolis and “cutt the throats of Men Women and Children Excepting none but ye White Young

Women.” According to the white attorney, the conspirators “expected… all the negroes far and near would flock in to them,” and with the larger force they would “Cutt off all the Surviving families.” When a British colonial force from a neighboring colony attacked the insurrectionists, the conspirators planned to “pack up all worth carrying, to

Drive the Country, & their white wives to settle back in the Woods…”128

In the second part of the letter, Bordley offered details concerning the discovery of the conspirators. Rain had delayed their meeting on Sunday, Bordley explained, and

128Stephen Bordley Letterbooks, January 30th, 1739/40, Maryland Historical Society.

278 then “a good fellow of the number belonging to Mr. Brooke finding they were Resolved to kill his Master among the Rest, Informed him of it which blew up the design…” The revelation from the slave informant led to the arrest of “six of them (among whom is their

King and they say a Clever Sensible fellow between 40 & 50 years old),” all of whom were arrested and held in the County jail. The discovery seemed providential, not the least because an enslaved woman had tried to warn her mistress of the plot days before the discovery. “A negro Woman lying a bed in a quarter overheard Several of ye Negroe fellows talking in their Country language concerning this very affair, & she accordingly told her Mistress, of it next morning, but could not gain belief,” Bordley wrote, “foolish

Woman! that sooner than give her self ye trouble of looking into the affair wd run ye hazard of haing her throat Cutt! but perhaps she had a mind for a black husband.”129

The leader was a middle-aged slave named Jack Ransom.

The record from the trial lists Jack Ransom as the slave of the Widow Jane

Brooke.130 From this brief notation, much can be learned about the leader of the conspiracy. As with all slave conspiracies during this period, it is not possible to know what was real and what was imagined. Unlike the Nantucket conspiracy, however, the account of the plot by Stephen Bordley matches very well with the documentary evidence of Jack Ransom’s life. He was indeed “40 or 50 years old” and he was probably a

“clever fellow,” heading the plantation of twenty slaves. His mistress, Jane Brooke, was almost certainly the woman warned by her female slave of the impending conspiracy.

The Brooke plantations sat in the southeast corner of Prince George’s County, within the Mattapany and Mount Calvert Hundreds, about ten miles southeast of modern

129Ibid. 130Prince George’s County Court, Liber X, 566, Maryland State Archives.

279 day Washington, D.C.131 The land was some of the earliest settled in the county and very near the Patuxent River. This was important, because access to water was critical for planters of tobacco, who required waterways to transport their heavy “hogsheads” along the maritime highways of British commerce. The earliest families into the county dominated land ownership and access to water, and so it was with the Brooke family.132

The widow Jane Brooke had been married to Captain Clement Brooke.133 Clement was the youngest son of a large and powerful family and inherited a substantial amount of acreage in an area that would become Prince George’s County in 1696.134 The Brookes marked the landscape with their name, so that they grew tobacco in Brooke field and shipped their hogsheads down Brooke creek.135 Together, Clement and Jane Brooke owned at least twenty-one slaves in the years leading up to the conspiracy, eight of whom were women and at least four children. Jack Ransom had been one of those slaves for at least half his life.136

Ransom’s name indicates that he was not born on the Brooke plantation. In 1717, a middling white planter named George Ransom succumbed to illness and died in Prince

George’s County. In his will, he left to his four sons his estate, including an inventory of all his possessions. In the long list of goods, beneath clothes and livestock, reads the inscription “one negro fellow called Jack.”137 The white man who made the inventory priced him at thirty pounds sterling. During the conspiracy of 1740, the only known

131 Calendar of Maryland State Papers: The Black Books, (Hall of Records Commission, Annapolis: 1943), 22, 40. 132 Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 98. 133 Thomas Hollowak, ed. Maryland Genealogies: A Consolidation of Articles from the Maryland Historical Magazine, In Two Volumes (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1980) Vol 1, 95-105; 134 MSA Prerogative Court, Wills, 25th October 1676, Maryland State Archives. 135 Hienton, “Map of Land Grants in PG County.” 136 Kulikoff describes the two brothers struggling with their Jesuit kin over the inheritance. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 258. 137 Accounts, Prince George’s, Liber 1, folio 9, Maryland State Archives.

280 description of Jack Ransom states that he was a “clever fellow, between 40 and 50 years.” This would mean that he would have been anywhere between 17 and 27 at the time of George Ransom’s death, within the age to be described by a white appraiser as a

“fellow,” rather than a “lad” or “boy.” There were no other slaves listed in the plantation inventory. Chattel records of slave sales are quite rare for this period, but it is likely that the “fellow called Jack” was sold to a neighboring plantation. Quite possibly, Jack

Ransom took the name of his old master when he left.138

Jack Ransom and the slaves on the Brooke plantation were not cut off from the rest of the world. Tobacco growing did not facilitate large towns or cities, but the people who lived on the plantations regularly met together for social occasions. This was most true on Sundays. The hundreds of Mattapany and Mount Calvert lay within St Paul’s

Parish, a district of the Church of England. Parish records demonstrate that the Brooke and their neighboring families dominated church service attendance.139

The accused slave conspirators emerged from the relationships developed between neighboring plantations.140 Their alliances closely resembled the alliances of their white owners. The second conspirator listed in the March Court hearing was

“Negro” George, also owned by Widow Jane Brooke. The third conspirator was Frank, owned by Thomas Blanford, who lived to the north of the Brooke plantation. Will, owned by Hyde Hoxton, the son-in law of Jane Brooke, lived nearby to the south, as did

Peter, owned by Richard Lee. Stephen Bordley described the arrest of six men and the imminent arrest of eight to ten more, but only the four men would be tried alongside Jack

138Stephen Bordley Letterbooks,1738-1740, 30th Jany 1739/40, Maryland Historical Society. 139 Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 330; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 252; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 524-526. 140 Calendar of Maryland State Papers, 40, 44.

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Ransom when he was accused before the March Court of Prince George’s County. 141

Together, their close proximity suggests that they would have spoken together often and developed a familiarity and trust.

The oppression and degradation of the colonial slave system reached terrible heights during the tumultuous 1730s. The decline of tobacco prices created extensive desperation among poor and middling planters, and their slaves suffered all the more for their owner’s poverty. During one such downturn in 1732, Virginia’s Governor Gooch wrote to London that the “Negroes go naked all winter, have not proper tools to work with, and their Quarters for want of Nails are tumbling down.” Wealthy planters like the

Brookes may have suffered less than smaller planters, but most hardships fell back against the slaves. Shoddier clothing, poorer food, and more labor could all be expected.

Even if Jack Ransom was able to be fed and clothed, he would have seen poorer slaves suffering in Prince George’s County. 142

The Brooke family experienced hardships of their own during this period. By

1737, Jane Brooke had suffered the loss of her eldest son and her husband. The senior

Captain Clement Brooke, who had executed his son’s will just five years before, died at the age of sixty years.143 He left to the Widow Jane six children, a great deal of land, and twenty-one enslaved people. The shock of the responsibility of managing at least part of the plantation must have been difficult. As a plantress, she had to find a way to coerce

141Prince George’s County Court, Liber X, 566, Maryland State Archives. 142 Gooch to Board of Trade May 27, 1732 in Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 85; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 84-86; 143 Prince George’s County Court, Land Records, Liber Q 196, Maryland State Archives; Wills, Prince George Liber 20, folio 436; Accounts, Prince Geo Liber 12, folio 148; Wills, Prince George Liber 21, folio 797.

282 labor from the people she enslaved. The coming troubles would prove she was not up to the task.

By the late 1730s, the hardships of the tobacco recession coupled with the vast number of African slaves imported into the colony began to upset the oppressive social order. Government documents chronicle rising fear and oppression on the part of white colonists and an increase in lawlessness among slaves. In 1737, the assembly passed an

“Act for the more Effectual Punishment of Negroes & other Slaves…” The Assembly of

Maryland declared that “the Laws in force for the Punishment of Slaves are found

Insufficient to Prevent their Committing very great Crimes &Disorders” and that a

“Provision is Necessary to keep them in Proper Bounds & Due order.” Any slave that conspired to “Rebel or Raise an Insurrection,” murder or poison any person, “rape a white woman,” or burn any “house or houses” was to be executed without benefit of clergy. 144 Slaves could be used to testify in trials if it pleased a jury, but false testimony would result in the ears being “cropt” and thirty nine lashes.

What is most interesting about this act is that it anticipated violence rather than reacted to it. The Maryland Assembly was clearly expecting poisonings, lawlessness, faulty testimony and insurrection, despite the fact that the conspiracy was still over two years away. There had never been a known slave conspiracy against the Maryland colonial government and poisonings were extremely rare. The obvious conclusion is that the Maryland Assembly was reacting to slave uprisings in the Caribbean. The insurrection on St Johns, the fires in St Kitts, and the massive slave conspiracy on the island of Antigua in 1736, had raised the fears of British colonists throughout the Empire.

144Archives of Maryland, Vol 40, Assembly Proceedings, April 26-May 28, 1737, 92; Kulikoff , Tobacco and Slaves, 329-330.

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If the leaders of Maryland were anticipating slave uprisings, they did not have long to wait.

For most of the 1730s, the records display little if any slave unrest in the colony.

Then in May of 1738, a group of slaves were arrested for conspiring to murder their white master. British authorities convicted a woman named “Negro” Bess for instigating the plot and sentenced to death. Sometime that same spring, several slaves in Prince

George’s County broke out of jail for an unknown offense and began raiding the frontier edges of the colony. The governor’s council ordered the sheriff to use all means necessary to capture the rebel slaves. Within a year, by August of 1739, at least seven more enslaved people were sentenced to die for poisoning, murder, and robbery.145

As slave unrest grew in the province, word from abroad became increasingly dire for colonists. Rumors of slave revolts were joined by rumors of a British war with Spain and France. As Governor Ogle warned the Maryland Assembly, France “is become a near and formidable Neighbour to the British Plantations, and seems to have it in her

Power to invade most of them.” 146 While France threatened from the west, rumors in

Annapolis warned of a Spanish attack from the sea. Daily the colonists of Maryland waited to hear of news of war from Europe. In September of 1739, just a few months before the Maryland conspiracy, the colony of South Carolina witnessed one of the largest slave insurrections in colonial American history.147

145 Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926-33), 32-37; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 191-192. 146Archives of Maryland, Vol 40, 425, Maryland State Archives; Stephen Bordley Letterbooks, 4 Sept 1738, Maryland Historical Society. 147Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005).

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It was in this tense environment that the Brooke family learned of the impending conspiracy. In January, a slave approached one of the sons of the widow Brooke with word of the impending insurrection. Though the widow had ignored the warning from her female slave, the son reported the conspiracy to the sheriff of Prince Georges

County.148 The planters and the sheriff arrested the conspirators quickly. Learning of the arrests, Ransom attempted to flee, but he was hunted down and jailed in Upper Marlboro with the men from the Mattapeny Hundred. In the county prison, the four accused conspirators, George and Frank, Will and Peter, confessed to the crime of conspiracy and gave depositions naming Jack Ransom as the leader of the plot.149 The British arrested another enslaved man as well, but he died soon after his arrest for unexplained reasons.

The sheriff sent the depositions to Governor Ogle and no doubt these documents and the stories shared by residents in the capital shaped the account by Stephen Bordley. 150

Governor Ogle responded quickly to the arrival of news of an impending insurrection. He dispatched twelve men to Prince George’s County to reinforce the jail and called up the local militia. In January of 1740, the colonial council was not in session and the assembly was not due to meet for months. Governor Ogle left behind few records of his thoughts at the time, but it is evident from Bordley’s letter that the leading official in the colony was attempting to mobilize the population. “We are now at last

Contriving Wayes and means to Secure the Council House & Magazine by a Mighty

Watch,” wrote Bordley a week after word of the conspiracy had arrived in Annapolis,

“Arms and Ammunition are now disposed into every one’s hands, and the time Come

(alas- the day to which I never thought to see!) of my being mad a Soldier.” Bordley

148 Stephen Bordley Letterbooks, January 30th, 1739/40, Maryland Historical Society. 149 Archives of Maryland, Vol 28, 188, Maryland State Archives. 150 Stephen Bordley Letterbooks, January 30th, 1739/40, Maryland Historical Society.

285 could laugh at himself, but he was proud of the forces arming against the supposed insurrections. “Col Gale is the Capt of our Independt Troop, & Rogers of the foot,” he wrote his friend, “We can Muster 40 Good horse at ¼ of an hours warning with as many bold daring fellows on the [torn] of them, And 60 foot & all Completely Armed.”151 In a period of less than a week, the governor had organized the men of Annapolis into a company of men prepared to wage war against a feared army of slaves. The rebellious army of insurrectionists never appeared.

Governor Ogle remained convinced of the imminent peril of slave insurrection for several months. In a speech he gave at the first meeting of the Maryland Assembly in

March of that year, he explained what he believed had been at stake in the purported conspiracy. “There is no need of exaggerating the Danger we lately escaped from the horrid Conspiracy of Our Negroes,” he said, “it being very certain, if they had carried their Design into Execution, We should have been put to the cruel Necessity of defending

Our own Lives at the Expence of many of theirs, and the entire ruin of numbers of

Particular Families.”152 He called on the colony to raise funds for defense and to purchase new arms for militias and fortifications.

Despite the prevalence of his fears, Governor Ogle chose not to declare martial law or create an extraordinary committee. He did conduct an investigation. In their response to the governor’s speech, the upper house praised the “vigilant Care and

Attention your Excellency on this Occasion manifested… in giving proper Directions for an Enquiry, encouraging Discoveries, and ordering Prosecutions against the Accused, by

151 Stephen Bordley Letterbooks, January 30th, 1739/40, Maryland Historical Society. 152 Archives of Maryland, Volume 40 Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly April 26, 1737 - June 5, 1740, Assembly Proceedings, April 23- -June 5, 1740, 425.

286 which Means the Ringleader has been brought to Justice.”153 The governor appears to have ordered a commission for a court of oyer and terminer for Prince George’s County, not unlike a freeholders court, with two local planters assigned to “hear and determine” alongside the sheriff.154 But the governor and his officials did not arrest anyone else and they did not require George and Will, Frank and Peter to accuse any of the other “two hundred” slaves in Prince George’s County. The governor could have insisted on the names of the other conspirators. He could have ordered the confessed conspirators be burned alive, as they were burned in Antigua and New York, Jamaica and South

Carolina, unless they implicated the slaves on their plantations. Instead, the governor ordered the slaves tried in the county court in March, as they would have been tried for any capital offense in the province.

The governor left behind no explanation for his decision. His actions upon the arrival of news of the conspiracy suggest he fully believed in the possibility of an insurrection. Annapolis was an anxious place in late January, but once the governor saw no army of slave descending down upon the colony, he may have simply chosen to prosecute the accused conspirators with the evidence that he had. After his death in

1752, the Maryland Gazette printed an obituary describing him as a governor long noted for his “good sense” and “benevolent disposition.” These qualities may have prevented the egregious killing of slaves that took place in Antigua in 1736 and New York in 1741.

His choices also prevented the widespread dissemination of the rumor of an impending conspiracy throughout the British Atlantic. Unlike the conspiracies in New

153 Archives of Maryland, Volume 40, Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly April 26, 1737 - June 5, 1740, Assembly Proceedings, April 23- -June 5, 1740, 428. 154 Governor and Council Records, Commission Record, S1080 1726-1826 First Book in Series, 63, Janry 22d. Maryland State Archives.

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York and Antigua, the Maryland conspiracy received far less attention in colonial

American newspapers. The New England Weekly Journal printed a very brief account of the conspiracy on March 18, 1740, after receiving a letter from Annapolis dated in

February.155 On June 5, 1740, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette printed Governor Samuel

Ogle’s speech to the assembly, in which he warned the colony “should have been put to the cruel Necessity of defending Our own Lives at the Expence of many of theirs,” if the conspiracy had succeeded. 156 The governor’s description of white colonists battling black slaves to the death was big news. The fact that there had been no burnings and no graphic confessions was no news at all.

But the British did execute a man for the crime of conspiracy. Standing before the bar in Upper Marlboro before the crowd that always gathered on court day, Jack

Ransom learned that he had “Voluntarily Maliciously feloniously Seditiously &

Traitorously” conspired with “other divers Negroes” to “Rebel & rise in insurrection.”

He and his fellow conspirators “not having the fear of God before them but Being moved

& Seduced by ye Instigation of ye Devil” had “Seditiously Wickedly Diabolically

Horridly” planned to murder “Liege Subjects of our Lord ye King” and “Destroy ye

Government thereof.”157 The clerk recorded only the charges with a single sentence recording Jack Ransom’s response. Before sentencing, Ransom was asked if he had anything left to say. He “had nothing left to say that had not already been said.” Nothing of his defense has survived.158

155 New England Weekly Journal, Mar. 18, 1740. 156 Pennsylvania Gazette, June 5, 1740. 157 Prince George’s County Court Records, Liber X, 574, MSA. 158 Prince George’s County Court Records, Liber X, 573-577, Maryland State Archives.

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The British hanged Jack Ransom on the gallows on April 4th, 1740. After he was dead, authorities ordered his body gibbeted near a crossroads in Upper Marlboro – near

Maryland Route 4 today - so that all slaves might be warned of the price for conspiring against the authority of the British Empire.159 The men who had conspired with him were pardoned and went back to their plantations in the southern corner of the county.160

The New York Conspiracy

The outcome was very different in the New York City conspiracy of 1741.

British authorities, including Lieutenant Governor George Clarke and the acting Supreme

Court Justices, made critical choices in the examination of witnesses and accused conspirators. The British ordered members of a Grand Jury to investigate mysterious fires and they proved more than willing to accept the questionable testimony of a teenage servant girl over contradictory evidence from several witnesses. The provincial Supreme

Court coerced confessions from accused white and black conspirators with promises of violent death to anyone who did not corroborate the testimony of early witnesses. In the end, the culmination of these choices led the British to burn thirteen black men and hang twenty-one other people. They sentenced another ninety-one supposed co-conspirators to banishment.161

The error in the methods of the court were first discovered by a colonial magistrate living in Plymouth, Massachusetts. In August of 1741, at the height of the

159 Governor and Council Records, Commission Record, First Book in Series, 63, Maryland State Archives. 160 Prince George’s County Court Records, Liber X, pg. 574; ibid., pgs 574-580. 161 Daniel Horsmanden, 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. (New York, 1744), Appendix, 11-16.

289 execution and after New York authorities had already hanged or burned thirty-one people, Colonial Council member Cadwallader Colden received an anonymous letter in the mail.162 “I am a stranger to you and to New York,” the letter began, “& so must beg pardon for the mistakes I may be guilty of in the subsequent attempt; The Design whereof is to endeavour the putting an end to the bloody Tragedy that… is acting amongst you in regard to the poor Negros & the Whites too.” As he read the letter, it became clear to

Colden that the anonymous author was casting doubt on the possibility of a conspiracy that had consumed the people of New York for more than three months.

The anonymous correspondent insisted that the conspiracy trials in New York had become witch trials, like those in Salem in 1692. Explaining that he had read of New

York executing five slaves in one day in the “Boston News letters dated July 13th,” the incident had put him “in mind of our New England Witchcraft in the year 1692 Which if

I don’t mistake New York justly reproached us for… It makes me suspect that your present case, & ours heretofore are much the same, and that Negro and Spectre Evidence will turn out alike.” The letter-writer explained that magistrates in the witch trials had

“near 50 Confessors, who accused multitudes of others, alledging Time & Place, &

Various other circumstances to render their Confessions credible…” but these testimonies had not been “worth a Straw; for many times they are obtain’d by foul means, by force or torment… For any body would chuse rather to be hanged than to be burnt.”163

Today, we know that the author of the letter was Josiah Cotton, a magistrate from

Plymouth, Massachusetts, and he was quite sincere in his concern that New Yorkers were

162 This number is based on my count of people executed before August, according to Horsmanden’s list at the back of his Journal. Daniel Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 11-16. 163 [Anonymous] to Colden, n.d. [August, 1741], in Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume III Additional Letters and Papers 1715-1748 (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1937), 269-273.

290 recreating the New England witch trials. The judge maintained a private diary where he recorded his great fear that sins of Protestant colonists against their slaves would incur the wrath of God. “The last days are surely come,” he wrote in his diary on January 8,

1742, “for ye times are perilous confusions over ye whole known world, Wars & rumours of Wars.” He blamed the troubles of his time on the sins of his people. “May we not in these things read our Sin in our Punishment,” he wrote, “God has justly expected more and better fruit from us, but we have brought forth little.” Noting the events of the previous year, he recorded in his diary that he had written “to a Gentleman” in New

York, where “ye Summer past has been ye Scene of a terrible tragedy; the Negros plotting, or rather ye people there imagining they designed ye destruction of yt City.”164

Josiah Cotton understood the critical similarities between the New York slave conspiracy trials and the New England Witch trials. He recognized the environment of fear that produced the trials. “It is true I have heard something of your Forts being burnt,” Cotton wrote to Colden, and he wondered at the “other Feats” that had “petrified their hearts.” As a magistrate in Plymouth, he also understood the similarities in the methods used by the Salem and New York courts to produce evidence. Coerced evidence, whether in the form of confessions from slaves or descriptions of a spirit in someone’s image, was not “worth a straw” because it was obtained by “foul means.”

Cotton even drew parallels between the conspiracy trials in Antigua, in 1736, and the trials in New York. “A few mad fellows may have designed revenge for ye Cruelty & inhumanity they have met with which to rise in ye English plantations,” wrote Cotton,

164 Professor Douglas Winiarski discovered Josiah Cotton’s notes about the letter in the judges memoirs at the Massachusetts Historical Society some time after 2006. Cotton recorded a version of the letter in his diary and noted that he had sent that version to the New England Weekly-Journal. Josiah Cotton Diary, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, Massachusetts Historical Society, 303-307.

291 which was similar to “another tremendous & unreasonable a Massore at Antego.”165 In the Caribbean as in Massachusetts and New York, the methods of the authorities had become “tremendous & unreasonable.”

Upon receipt of the letter, Cadwallader Colden could have tried to stop the remaining trials and executions. He was a member of the Colonial Council of New York.

He was also a leading intellectual in colonial America with a reputation for learning and reason.166 But by the time Colden received the letter, colonial authorities had already executed too many people. The letter unnerved Colden enough that he shared the letter with the lieutenant governor and suggested publishing records of the trial to guard against

“the prevailing of such an opinion.”167 Like so many of his British cohort, he refused to question the proceedings. He failed to see the obvious failure in the methods of the judges that was so clear to the magistrate from Plymouth. How had authorities created such murderous trials?

The largest slave conspiracy in the north began with a series of fires, the first and most serious on the roof of the governor’s mansion at Fort George, on March 18th. The wind carried the fire to the chapel and barracks, the stable and neighboring buildings. In their court documents, British New Yorker’s called Fort George the “King’s House,” and it was not simply a nickname. Fort George was the stronghold for the Hanoverian Kings in New York and New Jersey. It was the residence of the provincial governor and the bastion of defense for the city. As the fires spread on March 18th, panicked New Yorkers

165 Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, 303-307, Massachusetts Historical Society. 166 “Colden, Cadwallader (1689–1776),” Paul Tonks in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5840 (accessed August 2, 2013). 167 [Anonymous] to Colden, Letters and Papers, 272-273.

292 tried to save the provincial secretary’s papers by throwing them out the window, littering the streets with the muddied proclamations of the British sovereign.168

At first, New Yorkers assumed the fires were accidental, but soon they thought otherwise. Over the next eighteen days, more fires sprouted from one end of the town to the next, with some buildings catching fire in different parts of the city at the same time.

Coals were found smoldering in a haystack at one home and signs of arson were discovered at several others. One white woman claimed to have heard a black slave celebrating the fires, saying “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, A Little, Damn it, By and By.”169

On Monday, April 6, four fires swept through the city in a single day. While attempting to put out a warehouse fire by tearing shingles from the roof, a Dutch gunsmith saw a black man inside the building, a slave the Dutchman would later identify as Cuffee. The black man ran from the warehouse and the Dutchman cried out after him “A Negro! A

Negro!” Overheard by the bucket brigade, the cry became the “Negroes are rising! The

Negroes are rising!” a panic that quickly spread through the town.170

The fires brought white Britons together in their determination to discover a slave conspiracy. This is in some ways surprising. The capital of the province had a well- deserved reputation as a politically “factious” place in 1741, with white landed men sharply divided into either the “court party,” whose members enjoyed the lieutenant governor’s patronage, or the “country” party, who enjoyed a majority in the assembly and resisted the agenda of the King’s appointee. Though Jill Lepore argues these political factions played a distinctive role in determining which slaves were accused and in pitting

168 Horsmanden, Journal, 5. 169 Horsmanden, Journal, 7. 170 Horsmanden, Journal, 8.

293 white opponents against each other, the situation was almost exactly the opposite.171 Fear of black unrest in the 1730s united all classes of white Britons, including most officials.172 The prosecution of conspirators brought together “all the gentlemen of the law.”173 Prosecutors William Smith and James Alexander were long-time opponents of the governor’s faction and leaders of the “Country Party,” while their fellow prosecutor,

Attorney General Bradley, was a client and ally of Governor Clarke.174 Far from prosecuting the slaves of his rival, Chief Justice James Delancey watched his personal slave Othello hanged publicly by order of the very justices he had helped to appoint.175

In his New York Weekly Journal, John Peter Zenger never cast doubt on the actions of the court, some of whom had attempted to charge him with sedition and libel seven years earlier. The remarkable and sudden unity between these factious groups suggests the power of racial fear could overwhelm any political dispute.176

Had there been more dissent among white authorities – had officials been more willing to discredit witnesses put forth by political opponents – then perhaps someone might have challenged the young indentured servant girl Mary Burton when she first came forward claiming to have knowledge of the fires. She was sixteen-years old and an indentured servant to a disreputable tavern keeper when she told the Grand Jury that she had secret knowledge about a conspiracy. She may have also been afraid for her life. At the time, she was the lead witness against her master in a burglary trial. John Hughson, the white tavern keeper, had hidden gold coins and linens stolen by the slaves Caesar and

171 Brendan McConville, “Of Slavery and Sources New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), 284-286; Lepore, New York Burning, xvii. 172 Hoffer, Great New York Conspiracy, 78. 173 Horsmanden, Journal, 14. 174 Hoffer, Great New York Conspiracy, 77-78. 175 McConville, “Of Slavery,” 284-285. 176 Hoffer, Great New York Conspiracy, 78.

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Prince in February of 1741. Hughson housed Peggy Kerry, an Irish prostitute seven months pregnant with Caesar’s child, who had worked with Hughson to hide the stolen goods. On March 4th, Mary Burton gave a detailed testimony in which she implicated the thief Caesar, his lover Kerry, and her master Hughson in the robbery. For his part, after

Burton implicated him, Hughson admitted receiving the goods from Peggy Kerry.177 And then the fires began to sweep through the city.

On April 17, 1741, the governor issued a proclamation offering a one hundred pound reward for any information concerning the late great fires.178 Five days later,

Burton announced to the grand jury that her master, John Hughson, was not only a thief, but the leader of a slave conspiracy to burn the city and make himself king.179 She made the accusation at the beginning of her testimony in the burglary investigation. As she was being sworn, she said she would only tell the grand jury about the stolen goods, “but would say nothing about the fires.” The grand jury was stunned. “This Expression thus, as it were Providentially, slipping from the Evidence,” wrote Justice Horsmanden, “much alarmed the Grand Jury.”180 But of course, there was nothing providential about Mary

Burton announcing to the grand jury that she knew the conspirators behind the fires. She offered her account to the grand jury five days after the one-hundred pound reward had been offered by the lieutenant governor. She may have also been trying to make sure she never returned to John Hughson’s tavern again.

The story that she told bears all the marks of a fabrication. Though Hughson and his wife denied the allegation to their death, the grand jury found her utterly believable.

177 Horsmanden, Journal, 3. 178 Horsmanden, Journal, 10. 179 Horsmanden, Journal, 10, 12-14. 180 Horsmanden, Journal, 13-14.

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She first accused the three slaves already in jail, Caesar and Prince (from the robbery) and Cuffee (from the warehouse fire), of planning an insurrection identical to the New

York revolt of 1712. Burton told the grand jury “That at the Meetings of the Three

Negroes, Caesar Prince, and Cuffee, at her Master’s House, they used to say, That when they set Fire to the Town, they would do it in the Night, and as the white People came to extinguish it, they would kill and destroy them.” She insisted that Hughson kept weapons in his tavern (though none were found) and that she had seen “twenty or thirty Negroes at one Time.” She did not accuse the other slaves in her deposition, saying only that

Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee had bragged they “had a number sufficient to stand by them.”

Cuffee, she said, “had complained that a great many People had too much, and others too little.” She claimed the Hughsons and Peggy Kerry had agreed to “assist them if they could.” Most of all, Burton needed the continued protection of the Grand Jury. Hughson had said he would poison her if she revealed the robbery, she explained, and the slaves she accused had promised to“burn her whenever they met her.” At the end of her story, the grand jury asked if she ever “saw any other white person when they talk’d of burning the town.” Burton said she had not.181

Mary Burton made up a story that led, directly or indirectly, to the deaths of thirty-four people. Whatever conspiratorial talk she had overheard at the Hughson’s

Tavern, she changed her story repeatedly as the trials progressed. The judges first visited the prostitute Peggy Kerry in prison and offered to lobby the governor for a pardon if she confessed. Kerry replied “That if she should accuse any Body of any such Thing, she must accuse innocent persons, and WRONG HER OWN SOUL[sic].” But on May 7th, after her conviction for theft had “alarmed her so,” she dictated a confession to the jail

181 Horsmanden, Journal, 13-14

296 secretary describing a new plot. The conspiracy, as related by Peggy Kerry, had taken place at the tavern of John Romme, Hughson’s rival, and had involved herself and eight slaves, but not the accused slave Caear [the father of her child] nor the Hughsons. The tavern keeper John Romme had very publicly fled the city on suspicion of selling stolen goods and this was well known at the time of her confession.182 The conspirators had planned to set the city on fire and commit a robbery, Kerry claimed, and to kill “every one that had money.”183

Mary Burton responded to Kerry’s story with a new deposition, this one implicating several new slaves who she said had taken an oath required by Hughson to

“kill all the white people.” That she had not mentioned them in the first deposition did not matter at all to the justices. She had not seen Romme take the oath, Burton explained, but she had seen him meeting secretly with Hughson and she knew the two men had hidden stolen goods together.184 The justices arrested the slaves accused by Peggy Kerry and brought them before Burton, asking if they were the men at Hughson’s tavern. She said she had not seen them at the tavern. Instead of casting doubt on the testimony of

Burton or the confession of Kerry, Justice Horsmanden noted that it “seemed to add strength to what Peggy had declared in her examination, that the scheme was carrying on at Romme’s as well as Hughson’s.”185

The course of the interrogations and trials quickly devolved into a predictable pattern. The people initially accused by Mary Burton first denied the allegations and then, when condemned, offered up elaborate confessions implicating new people. The

182 Horsmanden, Journal, 31. 183 Horsmanden, Journal, 12. 184 Horsmanden, Journal, 29. 185 Horsmanden, Journal, 24.

297 newly accused conspirators were then brought before Burton, who would suddenly remember them participating in conspiratorial activity with Hughson. Burton and Kerry both accused the incarcerated slave Cuffee of leading the conspirators at the tavern. It was a convenient charge, because the constables had jailed Cuffee after he was seen fleeing the warehouse fire weeks earlier. After the two women called him the leader of the plot, he confessed to the charges but insisted that an enslaved man named Quack had actually burnt Fort George. In her next deposition, Mary Burton remembered that Quack had often stood on the front door of Hughson’s tavern with Caesar and Prince and Cuffee, but never entered.186 In the same deposition, she remembered that a slave named Jamaica

– whom she had not mentioned in her first account – “used to be very forward in the meetings in talks about the conspiracy.” Jamaica said he would “dance and play over the whites while they were roasting.”187 At every stage of the trials, Mary Burton worked aggressively to remain a key witness.

Burton faced a tall task in keeping ahead of the confessions as the trials expanded rapidly to include nearly two hundred people. The justices had learned of a new account of the conspiracy volunteered by a young slave informant owned by a Mrs. Carpenter.

The unnamed informant said that a seventeen year old slave named Sawney was part of the conspiracy to burn Fort George. Sawney had been sent by his master to Albany to be sold and was returned to the city. When the Grand Jury brought the accused seventeen year-old slave Sawney before the court, he refused to talk, explaining “That the time before,” by which he meant the slave uprising in 1712, “After that the Negroes told all they knew, the white people hanged them.” The Grand Jury countered that if Sawney

186 Horsmanden, Journal, 27. 187Thomas J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York (New York: Free Press, 1985), 116.

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“would speak the truth, and make a free and honest confession, the Governor would pardon him … and this was the time to save his life by making a free and ingenuous confession.”188 Sawney, like scores of men who would follow, did indeed make an ingenuous confession. He implicated nearly a dozen slaves in the conspiracy, describing where each person had committed arson. The stories he related were very different from that of Burton. He described slaves meeting in small groups on corners at moments between their labors or beside Comfort’s well in the city.189 In his telling, white people were uninvolved in the conspiracy, except insofar as they were a source of slave resentment. The greatest difference in his account was made evident when Horsmanden asked him about Hughson’s tavern. Sawney said he had never been there.190

After a month of interrogations, the judges faced a bewildering number of purported conspiracies. The first was a class rebellion led by a white tavern keeper and exposed by a young white servant girl. It somehow included the rival tavern of John

Romme and the accusations of the prostitute Peggy Kerry, though her story differed greatly from that of Burton. The second conspiracy was a slave arson plot described in detail by a seventeen-year old boy, who did not know anything about Hughson or Mary

Burton. The stories were filled with contradictions and most, if not all of the witnesses had to be lying. Despite the discrepancies, the Grand Jury and the justices accepted all of the allegations and continued with the trials.

Why did officials believe Mary Burton’s testimony and these dubious confessions? The first and most obvious reason is that New York was already participating in the environment of racial fear within the wider British Atlantic. New

188 Horsmanden, Journal, 25, 33. 189 Lepore, New York Burning, 129-130. 190 Horsmanden, Journal, 34-35.

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Yorkers had already experienced slave insurrection in 1712, a memory prescient in the testimony of Mary Burton and many others.191 Rumors of widespread unrest in the

American provinces passed regularly through the port town and were well-documented in the New York Gazette (1725-44) and the New York Weekly Journal ( 1733-1751). The war mattered as well. New York had sent six hundred soldiers to the Caribbean the previous year and the absence of those troops became all the more apparent when the garrison had burned in March. The colony was vulnerable to insurrection from within and invasion from without.192

The fires and the accusations of arson had also created a firm belief in the minds of Lieutenant Governor Clarke and the leading men in the colony that there was a great

“Mystery of Iniquity” to destroy the town. “Notice of the several Fires which had lately happened in this City,” explained the mayor and common council on April 11, “the

Frequency of them and the Causes yet undiscovered; must necessarily conclude, that they were occasioned and set on Foot by some villainous Confederacy of latent Enemies.”193

Their assumption was that slaves were behind the arson from the beginning.194

The second reason is that the grand jury was given the express charge of uncovering a biracial conspiracy based on Burton’s testimony. Because of their methods, this is exactly what they found. As Horsmanden explained, the “Judges summoned the

Gentlemen of the Law in Town” to decide on the legal methods “most proper to be taken upon this Emergency.” They decided together, “That though there was an Act of the

191 Eric W. Plaag, “‘Greater Guilt Than Theirs’: New York’s 1741 Slave Conspiracy in a Climate of Fear and Anxiety,” New York Historical Quarterly 84 (2003 ), 275-99. 192 Lt. Governor Clarke to BT, June 20, 1741, in Documents Relatve to the Colonial History of the State of New York; Procured in Holland, England, and France, edited by E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany, 1854). Vol. 6, 197-198. 193 Horsmanden, Journal, 9. 194 Horsmanden, Journal, 9-10.

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Province for Trying Negroes… yet as it was a Scheme of Villainy in which White People were confederated with them” the Supreme Court should try the case.195 They decided to forego the freeholders courts, which were only for trying slaves, and instead to direct a

Grand Jury of seventeen leading men to discover the truth of the horrid plot. Like the

Witch Trials in New England fifty years earlier, the officials believed that they had to extract confessions in order to determine the extent of the conspiracy. “How can a

Discovery of such works of Darkness be expected but from some of the Confederates themselves?” asked Justice Horsmanden.196

The grand jury’s use of threats to conduct interrogations produced the conspiracy they anticipated. After the court condemned Jack to burn on June 7, he announced to the guards that if the judges would spare his life, “he would discover all that he knew of the conspiracy.”197 While his “fellow criminals were carrying from the City Hall to their

Execution,” Justice Horsmanden advised Jack “not to flatter himself with the hopes of

Life, without he would do the utmost in his Power to deserve it.” Jack “looked very serious, and at length began to open.”198 Jack confessed to everything and was the first slave to admit to attending to conspiracy meetings described by Burton. But simply confessing was not enough. The justices had to believe it. Despite her confession, the

British hanged Peggy Kerry because her testimony “was not altogether satisfactory.”199

They burned Cuffee and Quack and Will despite their confessions. In a telling passage in his Journal of the Proceedings, Justice Horsmanden explained that the grand jury believed it could determine honesty from the demeanor of the witness. “Cork was

195 Horsemanden, Journal, 14. 196 Ibid. 197 Horsmanden, Journal, 63. 198 Ibid. 199 Horsmanden, Journal, 29.

301 unfortunately of a countenance ill-favored,” explained Horsmanden of one of the slave witnesses, “[but] upon his being interrogated concerning the Conspiracy; he shewed such a cheerful, open honest smile… that every one…jump’d in the same Observation and

Opinion, That they never saw the Fellow look so handsom; Such an efficacy have Truth and Innocence.” At the same time, he explained that “Patrick’s Visage Betrayed his guilt.” The accused slave exhibited “all the Symptoms of the most inveterate Malice and

Resentment.”200

Part of the problem was the prejudices and insecurities of the men who led the conspiracy trials. Their choices ultimately determined the course of the conspiracy. A great deal has been written on Justice Daniel Horsmanden, the leader of the investigation by the grand jury and the author of our principle evidence for the trial. He was the least secure of the justices on the supreme court, a well-educated but nearly impoverished official determined to improve his position in the colony. During the trials, he appears to have been the greatest defender of Mary Burton and determined to expose the white collaborators who had plotted with the slaves. Less has been written about James

DeLancey, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who was absent for the better part of the trials. Horsmanden noted that during Mary Burton’s testimony against the Irish soldier Kane, Chief Justice Delancey “who was a stranger to the Transactions concerning the Detection of the Conspiracy (having been absent…)” stopped Burton in the middle of her testimony. He “thought proper to admonish the Witness in an awful and solemn

Manner, concerning the Nature of an Oath, and the Consequences of taking a false one, more especially as it affected a Man’s Life.”201On first meeting Horsmanden’s star

200 Horsmanden, Journal, 24. 201 Horsmanden, Journal, 126.

302 witness, DeLancey doubted her. Lepore notes that DeLancey immediately sent the list of slaves to be pardoned to the lieutenant governor and may have moved the direction of the trials toward prosecuting Catholics.202

At the end of his letter to Colden in August of 1741, Josiah Cotton had predicted that the trials would only end when “some of higher degree & better circumstances &

Characters are accused (which finished our Salem Witchcraft).”203 By the end of July,

1741, Burton began to accuse some leading people of the town. She “named several

Persons which she said had been seen at Hughsons… of known Credits, Fortunes, and

Reputations, and of Religious Principles superior to a suspicion of being concerned.”204

In a letter to Colden written in August, Horsmanden explained that the town had turned on Mary Burton. “The great Clamor has been raised against her,” he wrote, “& now, by

Some, she must be esteemed to be a person of no credit.” On the streets of the town,

“great pains has been taken by Some amoung us, to bring a discredit upon Mary Burton the Original Witness, whom providence one would think had designed for the happy

Instrument of all this Discovery.”205 It took Burton more than a year to collect the one hundred pounds from the Common Council of the city. After she received the money, she disappeared from the historical record.

In New York, the climate of fear produced by rumors of slave unrest and widespread arson infused colonial officials with the determination to discover a widespread conspiracy. After Burton presented the officials with a story of a well laid plot, they chose to create a grand jury with the expressed intention of revealing the

202 Lepore, New York Burning, 175-176. 203 Letters and Papers, 272-273. 204 Quoted without citation in Lepore, New York Burning, 200-201. 205 Horsmanden to Colden, Aug 7, 1741, Collections of the New York Historical Society, 51 (1918), 225- 226.

303 conspiracy she described. The methods used by the grand jury and the court, the requirement to confess or face brutal executions, produced the conspiracy that the court required.

Conclusion

“In the meantime,” wrote Josiah Cotton in 1741, “excuse me and don’t be offended, if out of friendship to my poor Countrymen & compassion to the Negroes (who are flesh & blood as well as we & ought to be treated with Humanity) I intreat you not to go on to Massacre & destroy your own Estates by making Bonfires of the Negroes.”206

But of course, that is exactly what British colonists had done. They had marked their land with the charred stakes of public burnings and the hanging cages that swung precariously out over the edges of their harbors. They had displayed the dead along the crossroads of their counties and filled the very wind with the smoke of burning people. It made sense, perhaps, that the commercial centers of the empire, the harbors and roads, were visibly marked by the cages and stakes that represented the violence conducted against the enslaved. The British had constructed a new empire around coerced labor and intimidation.

The slave conspiracy trials between the years 1729 and 1746 were products of this growing empire. The commercial shipping between colonies fostered communication of rumor and a shared climate of fear throughout the British Atlantic. Printers gathered stories of unrest for their newspapers and disseminated it as sensational news. The

206 Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume III Additional Letters and Papers 1715-1748 (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1937), 273.

304 intensity of slave conspiracies can be explained, in part, by the growing transatlantic anxieties of colonists created by the avenues of communication in the 1730s.

The shared British fear of slave unrest helps to explain the volume and intensity of trials during this period. Governors and assemblies shared laws and adopted special courts of oyer and terminer in a concerted effort to control and intimidate black populations. The methods of interrogation and coercion used by colonial justices of the peace forced slaves to develop elaborate confessions to escape from the torturous executions promised by officials. As in the Witch Trials in New England in 1692, white judges allowed witnesses to invent stories of a subversive culture that challenged the colonial hierarchy. The accused were forced to implicate other conspirators to save their own lives.

These trials created imagined conspiracies that were as much a product of the court as they were any reflection on the actual activities of slaves. By the end of the decade, the anxieties of colonists and the collected determination of British officials to discover conspiracy and prosecute rebels produced the murderous conspiracy trials in

Antigua and New York. The choices made by governors and justices of the peace, the decision to exhort confessions to prove their suspicions or to halt conspiracy trials after the first discoveries, determined the extent to which slave conspiracy trials would develop into mass executions. The final result of this period was a wave of conspiracy accusations and egregious trials that extended throughout colonial America.

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Section 3: Religion

On November 18th, 1740, a terrible fire swept through Charles Town, South

Carolina. It began at two p.m. and the sparks from the fire took to the wind, traveling north and west, alighting on the wooden shingled roofs of the homes and warehouses along the Cooper River.1 Though he lived far from the conflagration, Robert Pringle discovered smoke rising from the “top” of his house an hour after the first banging of the fire bell.2 Soon the entire roof was ablaze as were all the neighboring buildings on his street. Pringle sought to save the wares in his shop on the first floor of his house, “seeing the goods taken out there,” while his wife ran through the upper floors trying to save their household belongings, the fire so hot her clothes “Catch’d fire.” Weighed down by his

“Books and papers [and] most of what little plate we had,” he led his wife and slaves to a vessel on the wharf. They weighed anchor and pushed off into the current as the fire consumed the ships near the shore. Pringle and his household watched more than three hundred houses burn into the night.

For the wealthy slave merchant, the terror of the fires was made worse by widespread rumors that slaves had set Charles Town ablaze. People in the streets shared conflicting stories that black arsonists were trying to burn down the port or that rebel slaves were attacking townsmen. This confusion was captured in the reports of sailors who weighed anchor that evening and sailed to the harbors of the north. When news of the “Great Fire” arrived in Boston in January of 1741, the Boston Evening Post and the

1 Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Charles Town, 22nd Nov, 1740, in The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, Volume One: April 2, 1737-September 25, 1742 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 271; Matthew Mulcahy, “The ‘Great Fire’ of 1740 and the Politics of Disaster Relief in Colonial Charleston,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), 138-139. 2 Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Charles Town, 22nd Nov, 1740, The Letterbook, 271.

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Boston Weekly News Letter reported that in South Carolina, “the Negroes rose upon the

Whites, which made it believed that those Rebels set the town of fire.”3 In South

Carolina, the fear of impending rebellion continued to torment Robert Pringle. “You’ll please excuse this Incorrect Confus’d Scrawl,” wrote Pringle to England four days after the fire, “being at present very much fatigued… It came so suddenly upon us as well as the great Risque we Run from an Insurrection of our Negroes which we were very apprehensive off.”4

News of the great fire in Charles Town reached Saint Helena Parish the following day. At his plantation home, Hugh Bryan contemplated the meaning of the calamity and fear that had swept through the largest southern port in British America. Only in the previous month, he had lost his young wife, his “sincere friend,” to a burning fever. On her death bed, she had exhorted Bryan to "follow Whitefield,” the evangelical preacher visiting the colony, for “God will bless him, wherever he goes.”5 At home on his plantation and reflecting on the news from Charles Town, Bryan felt certain that God had a quarrel with the people of South Carolina. On November 20th, he began to write a letter addressed to the inhabitants of his province. “Surely God’s Just Judgments are upon us,” wrote Bryan, “Is there Evil befallen to a City, and the Lord hath not done it?” He “hath at diverse Times been scourging of us by Drought; by Diseases on Man and Beast; [and] by repeated Insurrections of our slaves…”6 The letter, which he would soon see printed in the South Carolina Gazette, which launch an intense debate concerning the relationship between slave rebellion and the wrath of God.

3 Boston Evening-Post, Jan. 12, 1741; Boston Weekly News Letter, Jan. 22, 1741. 4 Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Charles Town, 22nd Nov, 1740, The Letterbook, 271. 5 Harvey Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina,” William & Mary Quarterly 43 (October 1986), 600. 6 South Carolina Gazette, January 1-8, 1741.

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Between the years 1729 and 1746, many colonists expressed a growing conviction that slave unrest was part of a larger religious struggle taking place throughout the British

Atlantic. White Britons understood this rebellion of slaves not just as a rejection of their oppressive racial order, as scholars have traditionally argued, but also as part of a larger, worldwide religious struggle between Protestant liberty and Catholic oppression. In

Chapter Five, I argue that Protestant fear of Catholics became interwoven with white fears of black slaves. To a degree that was unique in the history of early America, many

Protestant colonists explained slave rebellion as the product of Jesuit manipulation, an extension of the centuries old Protestant Reformation. In Chapter Six, I examine the relationship between slave unrest and the First Great Awakening. Evangelical leaders found a powerful, if highly controversial, sign of God’s anger in slave unrest and they used it to galvanize nervous congregations of white colonists. In this way, the actions of rebellious slaves influenced the growth of evangelical religion at a critical moment in the history of colonial America.

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Chapter Five: A ‘Mystery of Iniquity’

The last person executed in the New York City slave conspiracy of 1741 was not a slave. Rather, he was a white Englishman and self-described Latin teacher named John

Ury. In the fall of the previous year, he had traveled up from Philadelphia to New York, peddling his literacy and classical education to middling artisans on the periphery of the

British Empire. Ury was a stranger, with a “poor and mean Appearance in his Habit,” whose poverty and hunger, perhaps more than his learning, prompted craftsmen to offer him meals and small payment in exchange for tutoring their children. 1

He may have also been a Nonjuring minister, a dissenting Anglican who refused to acknowledge the British King as the spiritual leader of the Church of England. He claimed as much while waiting in his cell for execution, recounting to visitors that in his youth he had discovered the teachings of the English religious non-conformist Samuel

Clarke.2 One witness testified that Ury had admitted to being jailed in England for publishing a tract critical of the King's Church.3 Beyond these few details, not much is known about the Latin teacher. He left behind scant evidence. His acquaintances knew little about him and during his brief, impoverished time in New York he made few allies among the town elite. In another time, in a different summer, the provincial authorities might have accepted that John Ury was just what he claimed: a religious dissenter searching for employment in the port towns of the continent. But in 1741, white

1Daniel Horsmanden, ournal 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. (New York, 1744), 164, 323. Joseph Webb testified that he and Corker felt obliged to house and employ Ury, in part, because of his “mean” appearance. 2Thomas J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The "Great Negro Plot" in Colonial New York (New York: Macmillan, Inc., 1985), 228-229. 3Serena R. Zabin, ed., The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the proceedings with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2004), 142.

309 colonists in New York arrived at a far more menacing conclusion. They came to believe that John Ury was a “Roman” priest, a Catholic emissary of the Pope sent to lead their slaves in rebellion, and so he had to die.

By mid-summer of 1741, New York provincial authorities were certain that a priest had incited their slaves to insurrection. It made sense to them. At the trial of John

Ury, prosecutor William Smith explained to judge and jury that if he could convince them of a “popish plot, then the mystery of this iniquity, which has so much puzzled us, is unveiled, and our admiration ceases.”4 Upon learning of John Ury’s conviction,

Lieutenant Governor Clarke wrote home to England "it is now clear that the hand of popery is in it,” and Judge Daniel Horsmanden crowed that “tho’ the Mystery of Iniquity had been unfolding by very Small and Slow Degrees” it had “at length been discovered that popery was at the Bottom.”5 That the evidence against John Ury was quite sparse and even absurd seemed to matter little. For many New Yorkers, the final trial of the slave conspiracy explained “all the mischiefs we have suffered;” the burned out ruins of Fort

George, the months of rumors and trials, the terrible executions of slaves; it was all the result of a religious insurrection led by a “Romish” priest against their Protestant city.6

The trial and execution of John Ury has made far less sense to historians. Over the last two centuries, scholars have come to see this final episode of the New York City slave conspiracy as the product of a kind of local hysteria that reached its zenith by the summer of 1741. As early as 1756, young New York historian William Smith, Jr. argued

4Horsmanden, Journal, 170. 5Lt. Gov Clark to Board of Trade, New York, Aug. 24, 1741 in Documents Relatve to the Colonial History of the State of New York, ed. by E.B. O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, Printers. 1854), 225; Horsmanden to Cadwallader Colden, Aug. 7, 1741, Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume II 1730-1742 (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1919), 226. 6 Horsmanden, Journal, 170.

310 that white colonists had arrested Ury in a fit of madness. It was a kind of “infection,” he claimed, a “torrent of jealousy, when every man thought himself in danger from a foe in his own house.” When “the ferments of the hour had subsided,” the fate of John Ury was

“lamented by some and regretted by many.”7 In the early nineteenth-century, the anonymous editor of a new edition of the Journal of the Proceedings of the conspiracy agreed that a panic had taken hold in the colony, but he credited the arrest of John Ury to the “rancorous hatred that prevailed against the Roman Catholics.”8 He argued that New

Yorkers had inherited this hatred of Catholic priests from England and that the vulnerability of New Yorkers to invasion made them especially prone to fear. Despite numerous studies of the conspiracy, historians have generally accepted this two- hundred year old explanation for the trial of John Ury. Serena Zabin, Peter Charles Hoffer, and

Jill Lepore all explain the final episode of the New York City slave conspiracy as the product of violent war and long held traditions of anti-catholicism.9

These interpretations of the last episode of the New York City slave conspiracy are right to call attention to the British tradition of anti-catholicism and the context of war

7Smith, Jr.’s father was the lead prosecutor in John Ury’s trial; William Smith, Jr. The History of the Province of New York, Vol. II, Michael Kammen, ed., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) 53. 8Anonymous, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings, by Daniel Horsmanden (New York: 1810). 9 For a late nineteenth century interpretation, see Theodore Roosevelt, New York (New York: 1903), 100- 101, in which he describes the Ury trial as a kind of “panic” and expression of “religious bigotry,” though Roosevelt accepted that Ury was a Catholic priest; For mid-twentieth century interpretations of John Ury’s arrest, see Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1951), 4; For more recent scholarship, see Zabin, ed., The New York Conspiracy Trials, 23, Peter Charles Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 131-132, and Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 279-281; The exception might be a study produced by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, who in their chapter on the New York City slave conspiracy paid almost no attention to the trial of John Ury at all. They argued that the conspiracy had been a class struggle between a “motley proletariat” and a white planter class and disregarded the anti- Catholic explanation offered by the provincial authorities at the time. This seems problematic, because Linebaugh and Rediker directly quoted observations made by Judge Horsmanden concerning class struggle while disregarding his evidence for the religious motivations for rebellion, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 192.

311 with Spain, but they miss a critical element – the unprecedent merging of anti-

Catholicism and fear of slaves in a broad Atlantic setting. New Yorkers never previously explained slave resistance as the product of Catholic intrigue. During the New York City slave revolt of 1712, in which slaves set a home on fire in the dark of night and then fell on white New Yorkers as they rushed to put out the blaze, no priest had been accused and no Catholics arrested. Though engaged in Queen Anne’s War with France and Spain at the time of the 1712 revolt, provincial authorities do not appear to have discussed

“popery” as a possible cause of rebellion. New York Protestants had long seen Jesuits as a potential threat, even passing a statute in 1699 threatening them with death if they entered the colony, yet no one had ever been prosecuted for the crime, at least, not until the slave conspiracy of 1741. Hoffer and Zabin, along with many other historians, have noted this anomaly but never adequately explained it. Last, while there may indeed have been a panic in New York during the summer of 1741, it was not simply a local event, as most historians have treated it. White New Yorkers shared their fear of a Catholic led slave insurrection with many colonies in the British Atlantic during this period.10

The trial and execution of John Ury was the culmination of a much larger wave of religious fear that swept through the British provinces during the long decade of the

1730s. The threat of war with Spain certainly exasperated fear of Catholic subversion, but it was the rising tide of slave rebellion that brought the threat of “popery” to the forefront of British colonial imagination. The 1730s witnessed a wave of slave insurrections and conspiracies that rolled up from the islands of the eastern Caribbean and as far north as New England. Many British colonists understood this rebellion of their slaves not just as a rejection of their oppressive racial order, as scholars have

10 Zabin, New York Conspiracy, 23; Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy, 131-132.

312 traditionally argued, but also as part of a larger, worldwide religious struggle between

Protestant liberty and Catholic oppression. British colonists viewed enslaved Africans and creoles as vulnerable to manipulation by their "papist" enemies. For many planters in the 1730s, if a slave rebelled, "a priest was at the bottom of it."11

This religious worldview is best understood as anti-popery, a term most often used by historians of early modern England to describe a seventeenth-century Protestant ideology based on the rejection of papal power and the fear of subversion by the Church in Rome. Anti-papists believed in widespread Catholic conspiracy against their

Protestant faith. At moments of external threat or popular fear, they searched for strangers and foreigners who might be subverting their “true religion” by plotting assassination, civil uprising, arson, and other forms of terror. In the 1730s, this ideology enjoyed renewed fervor as an explanation for slave rebellion as British colonists increasingly came to suspect that both Catholic Spain and the Church in Rome plotted servile insurrection within Protestant colonies. Historians should take this worldview seriously. Colonists certainly did. They acted on these fears. In the case of New York, the convergence of anti-popery and fear of slave uprisings led to one of the greatest travesties of justice in the history of the British colonies. By the end of the conspiracy,

Protestants had executed thirty-four people and banished ninety-one more from the city.

12 Fear of "popery" prompted British persecution of strangers, accusations against neighbors, and a genuine belief that slaves were rising because of the machinations of the

Pope in Rome. Like the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution, we should understand the 1730s as an intense period of anti-popery in the British Atlantic.

11 Horsmanden to Colden, Aug. 7, 1741, Letters and Papers, 226. 12 Horsmanden, Journal, “Appendix,” 11-16.

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During the anti-papist conspiracies of the 1730s and 40s, British governors and officials made critical choices that determined the extent to which strangers would be charged with anti-popery. Robin Clifton and Peter Lake have both argued that in the seventeenth-century, anti-popery was quite often a populist affair, fueled by riots from the lowest levels of seventeenth-century English society. 13 In the conspiracies of the

1730s, there were few incidents of mob violence against Catholics during slave unrest.

Instead. British officials made choices about whether or not to blame Catholics with little reference to popular opinion. At the same time, at least in New York, anti-popery unified both upper and lower class Protestants behind a shared explanation for foreign war and domestic insurrection.

Prosecutorial anti-popery took hold in the New York City slave conspiracy only at the end of the trials. It was an explanation for slave rebellion brought into the colony from abroad. The wind and seas of the wide Atlantic carried rumors of papal conspiracy on the lips of sailors and fearful news in the dispatches of British Empire. Consequently, by late June of 1741, the port town of New York writhed with fears of “papists.” The story of John Ury’s trial and execution is best told as the direct result of the anti-papist sentiment that gripped the British Atlantic in that era.

Catholics and Slave Rebellion

13 Robin Clifton, “Fear of Popery,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell, (London, 1973), 144-167; Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England, (London: Longman Press, 1989), 79.

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It was a letter from abroad that sparked the hunt for a priest. A few days before

June 18th, 1741, a messenger carrying the letter left his ship at anchor and came ashore on

Manhattan Island. It was a terrible time to enter the city. If he arrived at the crowded docks of the East River, close to the meat market and near Queen Street, his eyes might have wandered up the coastline, past the gabled Dutch houses and the open beach, to the suspended iron gibbet that held the dead body of white tavern keeper John Hughson.14

According to the testimony of his maidservant, Hughson and his fellow conspirators had complained “a great many people had too much, and others too little,” and thus organized slaves throughout the winter to launch a rebellion.15 At his trial on June 4th, the prosecutor called John Hughson “the chief contriver, abetter and encourager of all this mystery of iniquity.” 16

As he made his way through the city, the messenger might have passed the jail, where more than sixty slaves sat crowded in the dark, awaiting trial. “The times is very dead,” a free black man had written from New York that summer, and indeed, if the messenger walked the streets on June 12th, he could have seen dark plumes of smoke rising above the tops of buildings as Francis, Curacao Dick, and Albany were burned alive by white authorities.17 Only a believable confession could save imprisoned slaves from a similar fate.

14 For a map of the city during this period, see David Grim, “A Plan of the City and Environs of New York as they were in the years 1742, 1743, & 1744,” 1813, Collections of the Historical Society of New York. I also have enjoyed using an interactive map created as part of the Slavery in New York exhibit at the New York Historical Society, British Colonial New York 1741,(2005), available at www.slaveryinnewyork.org. 15 Hormanden, Journal, 13. 16Horsmanden, Journal, 55. 17 Council Minutes of Bermuda, August 4, 1741, pp. 2-3, Bermuda Historical Quarterly Spring 1970, Vol. XXVII, No. 1; Council Minutes of Bermuda, Sept 1, 1741, 3-4, Bermuda Historical Quarterly, Spring 1970, Vol. XXVII, No. 1; Horsmanden, Journal, Appendix, 12-16.

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The messenger would have seen other signs of fire as he walked across the southernmost end of the city. One of the waterfront warehouses near the East River had burned in early April, as had houses on either side of Captain Sarly’s home. Just before the fires, the captain had purchased a Spanish slave named Wan (Juan). When neighbors rushed to put out the mysterious fires on either side of his house, they had little doubt who was to blame, crying out “the Spanish Negroes; take up the Spanish negroes.”18 At the western side of town, the messenger might have been surprised to find the burned out shell of the governor’s mansion, the ruined walls of Fort George, the devastation of the

King’s Chapel. These structures had caught fire mysteriously on March 18th, the first of ten buildings that had burned over a period of two weeks. With the “King’s House” in shambles, the messenger would have had to ask around before he could place his urgent letter into the hands of Lieutenant Governor Clarke.

The letter had been written by General Oglethorpe, commander of the British forces in Georgia, on the militarized border with Spanish Florida. It warned of a popish conspiracy Atlantic in scope. On May 16th, the general had finished interrogating a

Spanish prisoner captured by Indians outside of St. Augustine. He wrote Clarke:

[The Spanish prisoner] mentioned many particulars in his examination before our magistrates; Some intelligence I had of a villanous{sic} design of a very extraordinary nature, and if true very important, Vizt that the Spaniards had Emmissary to burn all the magazines and considerable Towns in the English North America, and thereby to prevent the subsisting of the great expedition and fleet in the West Indies; and for this purpose many priests were employ’d who pretended to be Physicians, Dancing masters and other such kinds of occupations, and under that pretence to get admittance and confidence in families as I could not give much Credit to these advices, since the thing was too horrid for any Prince to order; I asked him concerning them but he would not own he knew any thing of them.19

18 Horsmanden, Journal, 7. 19Clarke to BT, June 20, 1741, Documents Relative, 198-199.

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After finishing the letter from Oglethorpe, Lieutenant Governor Clarke had to make a critical choice. He could warn his Council and magistrates to be on guard against newly arrived strangers in the city or he could dismiss the prisoner’s advices as false, as

Oglethorpe had recommended. Like numerous governors throughout the previous decade, Clarke had learned of a suspected papist plot in the midst of slave rebellion. And like British leaders throughout the region, the choices he made about how to prosecute

Catholics would have profound consequences for the lives of many people. In the 1730s, the British increasingly came to associate slave conspiracies and insurrections with papists and priests.

During the First Maroon War in Jamaica, Governor Hunter and many other

British colonists came to believe that “papists” were the real enemies fostering the success of the island’s “rebellious negroes.” In 1731, Hunter faced the most severe crisis of his tenure in the troubled colony. The great victories of the Maroons and their increased depredations on the windward plantations sent the small, ineffective white militias retreating to Spanish Town, essentially abandoning the sugar planters to slave rebellion. It became increasingly clear to the white Jamaican Assembly that they were outnumbered and unable to defeat the "dangerous spirit of liberty" among their slaves. 20

One planter noted that “no man in the north” dared to punish a slave for fear they might escape to the maroons.21

In light of their ongoing struggle against the “Runaway Negroes,” many leading white Jamaicans began to explain the success of their determined enemy in terms of a

20 Representation of Council and Assembly to Lords Commissioners, Mar 11, 1733/4, CO 137/21, TNA; Smith's Account enclosed in J Gregory to BT, Feb 20, 1733/4, CO 137/21, TNA. 21 Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 80.

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Catholic plot. Governor Hunter strongly believed that maroons had a secret correspondence with Spanish allies. Major John Richardson complained bitterly "that it became of late so frequent for Negroes to go off for the island of Cuba, that for some weeks last, several had stole off in canoes." The northern Jamaican parishes of St. Ann and St. Mary maintained an illicit trade in cattle with Spanish coastal traders, making the escape all the easier. Writing his history years later, Jamaican Edward Long would rail against the Spanish, whose "thievery of negroes" to Cuba created congregations of

"Catholics without any knowledge of their religion." But there was a split in Jamaican sentiment. In the Assembly, planters asserted that there were simply too many slaves on the island and not enough white men to plant the ground and own property. Their attempt to rectify the problem by importing poor Scottish and Irish servants brought attitudes concerning Catholic subversion to the forefront of Jamaican government and

British policy.22

The Jamaican Assembly passed a series of legislative measures designed to offer free plantations to white Britons who would agree to settle on the mountainous island.

Despite the maroon war, the supposed need for a white population and new white recruits for the militia, Hunter refused, demanding that the settlement include a "Protestant Act."

The Act required all importers and buyers of indentured servants to guarantee the importees were Protestants or pay a 50 pound penalty. In a letter home to his masters the

Lords of Trade, Governor Hunter explained his refusal by blaming the conditions of the island on Irish “papists.” According to him, the militias had failed because so many were

Irishmen. “They are a lazy useless sort of people who come cheap and serve for

Deficiencys,” he argued, “and their hearts are not with us.” Hunter explained that he

22Mavis Campbell, Maroons of Jamaica, 61; Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 85-89.

318 viewed Catholics as "more a security risk than an aid" in solving the country's internal security problem. The governor “impugned” Catholic loyalty when he reflected that he could not be certain that they would not fight on the side of the enemies out of religious sentiments, if the circumstances arose.” For Hunter, slaves were far more dependable.

“You'll think it strange but it is true,” he explained in his letter home, “my Chief

Dependences in Case of an Attempt” on the island by Spain or France “was upon the trusty Slaves for whom I had prepared Arms.” He wrote this statement as the militias fell back before the determined maroons.23

Despite the wishes of the governor, the assembly repealed his Protestant Act, claiming that it would be difficult to implement and hard to secure Protestant whites for the island. When Hunter appealed to the Lords of Trade in Britain to support his attempt to prevent Catholic settlement, the British Empire took the position of the governor. In far off London, they wrote that a Protestant Act “would be a seasonable check on the

Growth of Popery in Jamaica."24

Governor Hunter’s fear of Catholic subversion in Jamaica bears sharp contrast to his counterpart in the Leeward Islands. As the Jamaican Maroon War continued unabated in the western Caribbean, Captain General William Mathew learned in

November of 1736 that hundreds of slaves in Antigua had supposedly plotted to blow him up and conquer the island. According to the confessions exacted by magistrates, a confederacy of African “Coromantees” and native born creoles planned to collect

23Hunter to BT, Nov 13, 1731, CO 137/19, TNA; Unsigned Memo., Some Consideration Relating to the Present State of Jamaica..., October 26, 1734, CO 137/47, TNA; Hunter to BT, July 17, 1729, CO 137/47, TNA. 24Some Consideration Relating to the Present State of Jamaica..., October 26, 1734, CO 137/47, TNA; Hunter to BT, Nov 13, 1731, CO 137/19, TNA; Campbell, Maroons of Jamaica, 85-87; For a discussion of earlier attitudes toward the Irish in the Caribbean, see Hilary Beckles, “A ‘Rioutous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644-1713,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 47, (Oct. 1990), 503-522.

319 gunpowder under the home of Christopher Dunbar at a time when the leading gentry of the city, including Governor Mathew, would be gathered at the house to commemorate the birth of King George II. As stated in the official report of the Antigua judges, as soon as the explosion ripped through the home, “all the white inhabitants of this Island were to be murdered, and a new form of Government to be established by the Slaves among themselves, and they intirely to possess the Island.”25

Whether real or fabricated in some tortured confession, the slaves described a plan that seemed infused with anti-popery. The conspiracy clearly resembled the famed

“Gunpowder Treason Plot” of the Catholic conspirator Guy Fawkes and his allies from more than a century before. In that conspiracy, disaffected “papists” packed kegs of gunpowder under the English House of Lords on the fifth of November with the intention of destroying the Protestant leadership. British slaves in Antigua would have been well aware of the “Gunpowder Treason Plot” because of Pope’s Day, the holiday commemorating the event celebrated each year throughout the Empire.26 The occasion was so clearly indicative of Guy Fawke’s Day that even the French noticed. Governor

Charles de Brunier of Guadeloupe chided the Protestants from his island to south, noting that the English had perhaps spoken of the Gunpowder Plot too often in the slaves’ presence.27

Though other governors might well have assumed that a priest was at the bottom of the conspiracy, Mathew appears to have been utterly unconcerned with the religious

25 A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua (Dublin: [1737]). 26Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 178-180. 27 Oruno D. Lara, "Le Proces de resistance des negres de Guadeloupe: Guerilla et conspirations des negres cimarrons, 1736-1738," Cimarrons 1 (1981): 60, quoted in David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America, (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 262, n.6.

320 implications of the slave rebellion. For months, he presided over one of the most brutal slave trials and executions ever committed in the British Atlantic. The judges at the trial celebrated his “Protection and Encouragement, as well as good Advices” as they interrogated and condemned so many enslaved people. 28 William Mathew’s correspondence demonstrated his conviction that there was a slave conspiracy and that he had to keep the Leeward Islands in “the best Posture of Defence.” He clamored against threats from the French, annually reported rampant news of war, and angrily complained at the least intrusion of the Spanish. He believed the British Leeward Islands were surrounded by Catholic enemies. And yet, Mathew never led a hunt for Catholics and never blamed the supposed slave rebellion on “papist subversion.” Unlike provincial authorities in Jamaica and the continental mainland, Mathew did not practice anti- popery.29

The lack of anti-popery in the Antigua slave conspiracy suggests that the choices made by leading British authorities deeply influenced the extent to which Catholics were blamed for slave uprisings. Perhaps these choices simply reflected the religious proclivities and background of officials. Comparing Robert Hunter of Jamaica to

William Mathew is illustrative. Hunter was a Scottish Anglican born in Edinburgh in the seventeenth century, a region with a tradition of tensions between Protestants and

Catholics. He served as an officer under the Duke of Marlborough in the War of the

Spanish Succession and was held prisoner by the French for two years.30 Throughout his

28 A Genuine Narrative, 17. 29For Mathew’s extensive correspondence concerning defense against ‘domestic’ and foreign enemies, see for example Mathew to BT, Jan 17, 1736/7, CO 152/22, W88, TNA, and Mathew to BT, May 26, 1737, CO 152/53, X7, TNA. 30Mary Lou Lustig, “Hunter, Robert (1666–1734),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online edition edited by Lawrence Goldman, January 2008. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14228 (accessed November 1, 2013).

321 time in Jamaica, he demonstrated consistent fears of “papist” subversion. His obvious unwillingness to accept white Catholic planters put him at odds with the elected

Assembly of the island. Unlike other British planters in the Caribbean, the religion of settlers seems to have mattered as much or more to Robert Hunter as race. Perhaps it was not an accident that Governor Hunter would make the first official suggestion that a treaty of peace might be made with the “Rebellious Negroes” in Jamaica.31

Captain General Mathew had quite a different background. His father, Sir

William Mathew, had served as Captain General of the Leeward Islands in the first decade of the eighteenth-century and the younger Mathew appears to have been raised in the Caribbean. Though an Anglican, his correspondence reveals little about his religious proclivities. As an acting governor in the islands for more than thirty years, he oversaw the British Catholic colony of Montserrat with no apparent bias against the faith of the

Irish on that island. Contemporary Protestant observers of the Caribbean often noted a lack of religious enthusiasm among “creole” British planters and stressed the importance of racial hierarchy to the white population. On Antigua, the proportion of black slaves to whites was approximately nine to one. Perhaps, like the white planters in the Jamaican

Assembly, Governor Mathew simply was more concerned with protecting the racial privileges of the white minority. A Caribbean born white creole might have been less inclined to believe white Catholic subversion behind slave rebellion. His choices during the Antigua slave conspiracy would suggest this conclusion.32

31Campbell, Maroons of Jamaica, 58. 32For a discussion of the preservation of white privilege among West Indian Britons, see Jack P. Greene “Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World , ed. by John Elliot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

322

While the Antigua slave conspiracy and the First Jamaican Maroon War were perhaps the most heavily reported incidents of slave resistance in the British Atlantic, the

Caribbean was not the most prominent region for anti-popery. Rather, the conviction that

“papists” were behind the rebellion of British slaves held greatest sway along the contested Georgia frontier between St. Augustine and South Carolina. In this region,

English proprietors attempted to insert a strictly Protestant proprietary colony of Georgia into the war torn boundary between British and Spanish Empires. The Catholic response was a renewed edict offering freedom to British-owned slaves who might escape to

Spanish territory. It was a situation ripe for rumors of Catholic subversion and slave rebellion.

The Trustees obtained a charter for the proprietary colony of Georgia with the expressed intent of forming a Protestant bulwark between slaves in South Carolina and

Catholic Florida to the south. It was a decidedly anti-papist venture. Led by the Earl of

Egmont, they banned slavery, explaining that foreign enemies could “Encourage and

Support” the “Tumults and Rebellions” of slaves, then banned the free exercise of religion for “papists.”33 Even before settlement, the Trustees worried incessantly that

Catholic spies might somehow infiltrate the colony. As early as November, 1732, the

Earl of Egmont recorded in his journal “some trustees are doubtful for fear of papists,” and the minutes of the Trustees recorded nervous discussions concerning suppliers of their new colony who might sell news to the Spanish in Saint Augustine.34

33James Ross McCain, Georgia as a Proprietary Province: The Execution of a Trust (Boston: Richard P. Badger, 1917), 231; “An Act for rendering the Colony of Georgia more Defencible by Prohibiting the Importation and use of Black Slaves or Negroes into the Same,” Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, Vol I., (Atlanta: The Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1904), 50. 34 “Journal of the Earl of Egmont,” Nov. 30, 1732, Colonial Records of Georgia, 88.

323

This sentiment of the English leadership infected the Georgian colony. Within two years, disaffected colonists wrote long letters accusing unpopular sheriffs, bailiffs and ship captains of suspected Popery.35 William Stephens despised the “great hypocrite” constable Robert Potter, and slandered him by claiming that Potter called himself “a Dissenter; but it is generally suspected he had not Title to the Word Protestant, for it is certain he was bread a Roman Catholic in Ireland, and many People do not scruple to say that he is actually in Orders under that Church.”36 Reverend Samuel

Quincy, minister of the Episcopal Church in Savannah, wrote home to England in 1735,

“I have endeavour’d to inform myself… whether we have any designing persons of the

Romish Communion.” He hoped that daily bible readings might “be a means of discovering them, because, as I have heard it observd, they frequently mix themselves with Such young Societies.” Throughout the 1730s, Georgians appear to have been particularly concerned with Catholic subversion. 37

As Georgians accused each other in an environment of fear, slaves from South

Carolina sought to escape across the province for the promise of freedom in Spanish

Florida. Though the Spanish edict offering emancipation to Protestant slaves originated in Puerto Rico in 1664, it had only been haphazardly employed against the British on the

Spanish frontier. This changed in 1733, the same year as the founding of Georgia, when

Florida Governor Seignior Don Manuel de Montiano successfully lobbied the King of

Spain to pronounce a new edict offering freedom to slaves in the British colonies of the southern mainland. As a result, South Carolina and Georgia convulsed with rumors of

35 Col Rec. Ga. Vol. XX Vol. IV, Nov. 16th 1737, 26-27. 36 “Journal of William Stephens,” Dec. 20, 1739, Colonial Records of Georgia, 472. 37 Marmaduke Hamilton and D.B. Floyd Papers, M.S. 1308, Box 35, Folder 421Georgia Historical Society.

324 slave uprisings. During the winter of 1738 alone, planters claimed to discover at least four major slave conspiracies. In Georgia, a group of fleeing South Carolinian slaves fought and killed several white settlers as they tried to force their way to Spanish freedom.38

Along this contested border, slave rebellion became increasingly interwoven with anti-popery. British planters in South Carolina and Georgia explained the rebellions of their slaves not simply as the result of a growing black majority and the rejection of a cruel racial order, but also as the result of a Catholic plot led by priests. Of course, there was nothing imagined about the Spanish policy to liberate British slaves. The edict was real and slaves responded to the opportunity, risking their lives to escape to Florida. But anti-papist thinking took the Spanish offer of freedom further. Many British planters saw the power of Rome behind the edict from St. Augustine. They believed that priests moved through the swamps, inciting slaves in rebellion. They even increasingly asserted that their slaves were old world Catholics, dangerous rebels trained by Jesuits in foreign missions. This is nowhere more apparent than in the British explanations of the Stono

Rebellion.39

In September of 1739, more than a hundred slaves rebelled along the Stono River in the lowlands of South Carolina, burning out seven plantations and heading west and south toward the freedom of Spanish St. Augustine. In the most detailed contemporary description of the rebellion, an anonymous letter writer explained that twenty “Angola

Negroes” had launched the insurrection and only later been joined by “several slaves.”

38 Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 305-306; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 186-187. 39 Wood, Black Majority, 308-319.

325

The author of the letter explained that these slaves were “brought from the Kingdom of

Angola in Africa” and trained by Jesuits who had a “mission and school in the Kingdom and many Thousands negroes there profess the Roman Catholick Religion.” The letter insisted “the King of Spain (then at Peace with Great Britain) promised Protection and

Freedom to all Negroes Slaves that would resort thither,” and stressed that “Spanish

Emissaries” had inspired slaves to rise up against the British.40

In a fascinating essay, historian John Thornton relied on this letter to reconstruct the identity and motivations of slaves in the Stono Insurrection. Accepting that the rebellion was initiated by “Angolans,” he argued the insurrectionists were probably

Kongolese soldiers defeated and enslaved in the mid-1730s along the Angolan coast of central Africa and carried on British slave ships directly to South Carolina. Thornton used his substantial research into the history of central west Africa to assert that indeed, as the anonymous author had suggested, Kongolese soldiers were practicing Catholics familiar with the mission systems of the Portuguese. The slaves who launched the Stono

Rebellion, Thornton argued, were Jesuit-trained Catholics, determined to find safety within the boundaries of Spanish Florida.41

Many of the insurrectionists in the Stono Rebellion may have indeed been

Catholic Kongolese soldiers fighting for freedom, but the document upon which

Thornton relied was very much a work of British colonial propaganda. It was an anti- papist explanation for the rebellion that competed with other contemporary ideas about the forces at work behind slave rebellion. The anonymous letter was written for a public

40 “An Account of the Negro Insurrection in South Carolina,” Colonial Records of the State of Georgia (Atlanta: 1913), vol. 22, pt. 2, 232-236. 41 John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct., 1991): 1101-1113.

326 outside of Georgia and South Carolina and was in fact published in the popular

Gentleman’s Magazine, in England, in 1740. The argument of the letter was simple: the

Catholics had directly caused the slave rebellion that ended with the gruesome death of more than twenty white people in South Carolina. The narrative of the letter explained that the King of Spain had sent emissaries into South Carolina to seduce slaves to rebel.

Foreign Catholic Angolans, trained by Jesuits, had started the insurrection at Stono and burned plantations. When the white militia actually caught up to the insurgents, “they did not torture one Negro, but only put them to an easy death.” By placing the responsibility for insurrection upon Catholics, this letter displaced prevalent South

Carolinian explanations for the Stono revolt. Contemporary accounts described slaves as overworked, inspired by the opportunity of a new declaration of war between Spain and

France, or quite simply angry enemies locked in a life or death struggle against their white masters. But in the anonymous letter, the British were not responsible for the rebellion. The Catholics had caused the insurrection.42

The anti-papist explanation for the Stono Rebellion grew over time. The earliest documents concerning the uprising suggested that Spanish spies had incited slaves to rebel. By the summer of 1741, a “priest” had caused the insurrection. We can trace the evolution of the idea. On July 29th, a bit more than a month before the Stono Rebellion,

Colonel William Stephens recorded in his journal that a spy had been discovered in

Savannah, Georgia. The stranger claimed to be a “Jew practicing Surgery and Physick,” but according to Stephens, the small population of Jews living in the colony said he did

42 “An Account of the Negro Insurrection,” 232-236; “Extract of a Leter from S. Carolina, dated October 2,” Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 10, 127-129; Mark Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt, (University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 3, 7, 11. The only other contemporary document that mentions Angolans (that I know of) was also a letter, quite short, and published in newspapers in the northern colonies, Boston Gazette, Oct 29, 1739.

327 not appear to be of their religion. Though the stranger claimed he had not recently been in neighboring South Carolina, he was searched and several of the papers seemed to indicate that he had been in Charles Town a few weeks earlier. Stephens said “there was sufficient reason for suspecting strongly he was no better than a Spy,” and so the magistrates placed the stranger in jail. After the Stono Rebellion, Stephens congratulated himself for his insistence that the man be held, though “some people” had called it a

“groundless suspicion.”43

Two years later, in the summer of 1741, a committee from the South Carolina

Assembly produced a report explaining the causes behind the Stono Rebellion. They reported “in the very month in which the above [Stono] Insurrection was made,” General

Oglethorpe had sent a letter to South Carolina explaining the “Magistrates of Georgia had seized a Spaniard whom he took to be a Priest.” In his journal two years before, William

Stephens had never referred to the captured spy as a priest. He had been a Spaniard, an enemy, but not a priest. Yet General Oglethorpe, writing from the Georgian borderland between Britain and Spain, believed that the spy must be a priest in disguise. According to the South Carolina Assembly, Oglethorpe and the Georgia Magistrates “thought from what they had discovered that he was employed by the Spaniards to procure a general insurrection of the Negroes.” Thus, in the official report, the Stono Rebellion had become a Catholic plot.44

Other colonies experienced smaller episodes of anti-popery and slave conspiracy.

In 1740, a Maryland slave conspiracy led to accusations of betrayal and popery between

43 “The Journal of William Stephens,” 412-413. 44 “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Causes of the Disappointment of Success in the Late Expedition against St. Augustine,”July 1, 1741, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1953), 84.

328 the Upper and Lower Houses of the Assembly. In January, Governor Ogle of Maryland learned of a supposed slave conspiracy in Prince George’s County, near modern day

Washington, DC, where slaves planned to surprise plantations along the Patuxent river during a winter night then descend upon Annapolis. After the trials and the hanging of the accused slave leader in a gibbet, the governor made an urgent speech to both houses of the Maryland Assembly, explaining “There is no need of exaggerating the Danger we lately escaped from the horrid Conspiracy of Our Negroes.” In a call for better defense of the colony, he asked the houses to approve new expenditures for arms and ammunition. The lower house resisted further taxes, which prompted the upper house to accuse their rivals of “thinking yourselves fortunate and safe” from both insurrection and invasion because they were “Roman Catholicks.” The upper house insinuated that

Catholics in the lower house of the Assembly did not feel subject to the rebellion of slaves. The ensuing political maelstrom resulted in a deadlocked assembly that did not pass legislation for defense. In that instance, the upper house, rather than Governor Ogle, had interjected anti-papist suspicions into the Maryland slave conspiracy.45

The letter that New York City Lieutenant Governor Clarke read in 1741 was very much the product of an anti-papist sentiment deeply tied to slave rebellions in the British

Atlantic. A decade of slave violence in the Caribbean and on the southern frontier of mainland North America had fused slave resistance to a religious worldview that explained this violence as a struggle between Protestant and Catholic. British governors like Oglethorpe, Mathew, and Hunter had determined the course of anti-popery

45 Governor and Council Records, Commission Record, First Book in Series, 64, Maryland State Archives; Assembly Proceedings, April 23- -June 5, 1740, 443-450, Maryland State Archives. Prince George’s County Court Records, Liber X, pgs. 573-577, Maryland State Archives; Stephen Bordley Letterbooks, 1738-1740, 30th Jany 1739/40, Maryland Historical Society.

329 persecutions, influenced perhaps by their own predilections toward Catholics. Certainly not every British colonist feared Catholic conspiracy, but it would seem that the rumors of Catholic plotting persisted, gaining force as they passed out of the southeastern borderlands and into the hands of Lieutenant Governor Clarke. He made his decision.

The letter that arrived in mid-June deeply influenced the provincial authorities of the city of New York. Almost overnight, the explanation for slave rebellion transformed from a racial plot bent on the destruction and plunder of white inhabitants to a “popish” scheme to destroy the Protestants of the city. As late as June 10th, the prosecutor had placed full responsibility on John Hughson. To make the case, magistrates had exacted dozens of slave confessions and spurious white testimonials implicating Hughson and more than a hundred people in the conspiracy. Not once had anyone mentioned a priest.

In fact, we can date the arrival of the letter by the changes it created in confessions. On

June 18th, the imprisoned slave Tom testified before the grand jury that when he had told his fellow conspirators that plotting to kill the white people was a sin, Cuffee had said

“there was a man that he knew, that could forgive him.” With the reference to absolution, the idea of a priest had officially entered the conspiracy. Constables fanned out across the city.46

In this climate of fear, as justices of the peace searched taverns and homes for priests and imprisoned slaves hinted at the presence of a mysterious man offering absolution, someone began to whisper that John Ury was a papist. Since November of the previous year, he had lived in the home of Mr. Croker, who fed him and offered lodging in exchange for teaching him children Latin. While watching the “fighting cocks,” Ury had also befriended John Webb. Both men found work for the teacher by

46 Horsmanden, Journal, 84.

330 promoting his lessons to friends. As Ury explained at his trial, it was John Webb who first warned “that the eyes of the city were fixed on me, and that I was suspected to be a

Priest.” Ury had replied that his “innocency” would protect him, and posted an advertisement for grammar school classes in the local newspaper. But one wonders if he sat awake at night, in the dark, thinking about the human bonfires and the hangings of the previous weeks. Perhaps he wondered how the city authorities could believe him a papist. On June 24th, he was taken into custody, and “not giving a satisfactory Account of himself, was committed to the City Jail.”47

A History of Catholic Panics

The prosecution of John Ury hinged on linking New York’s slave unrest to a worldwide Catholic plot against Protestantism. On July 29, 1741, the Latin Teacher stood alone before the Supreme Court of the British province. In keeping with colonial law, Ury had no legal representation. Across the room, the four best legal minds in the colony stood for the prosecution. Attorney General Bradley opened the trial, explaining that to understand why "the prisoner was actually concerned in the plot to burn the king's house and this city and murder the inhabitants," one need only see Ury as a member of

"that murderous" faith, that held it "not only lawful but meritorious to kill and destroy all that differ in opinion from them, if it may in anyways serve the interest of their detestable religion." Bradley then placed the Catholic Church on trial. He argued, “the Church of

Rome has artfully devised to get an absolute dominion over the consciences, that they may the more easily pick the pockets of credulous people. Witness the pretended pardons and indulgences of that deceitful church...” or transubstantiation, “which is so big with

47 Horsmanden, Journal, 162-163; Horsmanden Journal, 94; Zabin, New York Conspiracy, 121-122.

331 absurdities that it is shocking to the common sense and reason of mankind.” Reaching a crescendo, he cried out “Blasphemous wretches! For hereby they endeavor to exalt themselves above God himself....” According to the attorney general, Catholics had

“many other juggling tricks" in their "hocus-pocus, bloody religion.” He finished by asking the jury to find Ury guilty "for your oaths sake and for your own country's peace and future safety.” Thus, the prosecutors of British colonial New York accused not just

John Ury, but the Catholic Church itself with the New York slave conspiracy of 1741.

Unfortunately for Ury, he stood in the place of Rome. 48

The accusations made by prosecutor Attorney General Bradley contained loud echoes of anti-popery from seventeenth-century England. There was a powerful, longstanding English tradition accusing the Catholic Church of plotting political and civil terror in Protestant dominions, particularly Britain. Anti-papists believe that the Church hated Britain’s spiritual liberty and enlightened rationalism. It yearned for revenge for

Henry VIII’s break with Rome and confiscation of its rich estates. It wanted to appropriate the power of the expanding British Empire. And it would stop at nothing to achieve its ends. The soldiers of this oppression were priests, foreigners sent forth from

Rome.49

Certainly these ideas were still prevalent in the British Empire before and after the

New York City conspiracy of 1741. In the annual religious holidays of "Pope's Day" or the celebration of the king's birthday, the public celebrated their national identity by burning images of papists. The most important ritual of this sort was November 5th, the date of Guy Fawkes infamous Catholic gunpowder plot to blow up English Parliament. It

48 Horsmanden Journal, 162-163; Lepore, New York Burning, 192; Thomas J Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York (New York: Free Press, 1985), 207. 49 Lake, “Anti-Popery,” 73-74, 79.

332 was intensely anti-papist. Throughout the British Atlantic World, “Pope's Day” began with a transcribed Anglican sermon from the Book of Common Prayer. The priest of the

Church of England was to preach to his congregation "O God, whose name is excellent... who on this day didst miraculously preserve our church and state form the secret contrivance and hellish malice of popish conspirators…”50 Following church, Protestants could participate in the wildly popular parades where they might express anti-popery.51

In 1714 Chichester England, townspeople waited until it grew “Duskish,” then on a wide platform supported by ten men, carried out effigies of the pretender and the Pope, bedecked in jewels and followed by a dancing devil, who whispered in their ears. “At a large Bonfire,” the devil grabbed the effigies and threw them in the fire to the joy of the crowd. Similar ceremonies could be found annually in England and throughout the colonies of the British Atlantic.52

As important as the anti-papist ceremonies were to a shared British identity in the eighteenth century, they do not account for the development of an ant-papist explanation for slave revolt in the 1730s. Throughout the early eighteenth century, anti-papist explanations for rebellion were rare. No priests were arrested following the South

Carolina slave conspiracy of 1720, nor were there accusations of a “Gunpowder Treason

Plot” in later Antigua slave conspiracies. There was no similar New York trial of a priest

50 Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), 35-38. 51The Virginia Almanack for the year of our Lord God…1741 (Williamsburg, VA, 1741) and Nathaniel Ames, An Astronomical Diary; or, an Almanack for the Year of Our Lord Christ 1737, Nov 5 (Boston, 1737), as cited in McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 56-62. 52 Flying Post, or the Post-Master, 30 October, 1714.

333 in the first half of the eighteenth-century. The trial of John Ury drew on historic rather than recent precedents, as if the fear of Guy Fawkes and James II had been resurrected.53

Indeed, New York’s treatment of John Ury bears close resemblance to English panics over Catholic plots during the era of the English Civil War a century earlier. Peter

Lake has argued that in this earlier period the popish threat provided a “foreign and corrupt origin and explanation for conflict.” During periods of violence and uncertainty, anti-popery organized “disparate phenomena into a unitary thing or force.” This bricolage may have been equally characteristic of anti-papist sentiment in New York City during the trial of John Ury. A Catholic plot in New York explained the external threat of the Spanish and the internal threat of slave rebellion. Anti-popery united seemingly disparate phenomena, providing a powerful explanation for the rebellion of slaves.54

The idea that papists could subvert British colonies through slave uprisings brought about a new wave of anti-popery in the colonies similar to that of the previous century. According to historians such as Robin Clifton, the “Catholic panics” of the

English Civil War were the result of a foreign threat from abroad combined with fears of a subversive Catholic element at home. In the English Civil War, rioting Englishmen feared the domestic population of Catholics in their midst. The actual potential for papist uprisings was much less in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic because the populations of white Catholics was so small. The threat of popery came from the proximity of Catholic powers on the frontiers that could invade at any time. But the idea that papists could mobilize British slaves posed a new threat for Protestants. Large slave

53 Robin Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution,” Past and Present, no. 52 (1971), 36-37. Clifton argues theological debate did not produce the kind of hysteria associated with anti- popery. 54 Clifton, “Popular Fear,” 51-55; Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery,” 81-83.

334 conspiracies, like the one in New York in 1741, called for an anti-papist explanation for revolt.55

The trial of John Ury closely follows the pattern of seventeenth-century Catholic panics during the English Civil War. Clifton argues that most of these earlier episodes had patterned characteristics. Most of the panics occurred following news of disaster or strange incidents. Waterside towns that served as centers of communication, where pamphlets and news circulated, were much more likely to experience unrest. Though the threat was seen as international in scope, participants almost always looked for a suspicious local, an outsider or stranger, who could be a suspected priest. Strange behavior or private ceremonies were often seen as signs of “popery.” And the effect of rumor depended on the attitude of men in positions of local responsibility.

The last episode New York City conspiracy followed a remarkably similar pattern. The burning of Fort George and the rumors of slave rebellion created a crisis in

New York before the discovery of the Catholic plot. Oglethorpe’s letter introduced news of international papist conspiracy and the decision by Clarke to share the letter and support a search for a Catholic priest, had changed the nature of the confessions and the entire conspiracy. The prejudice of seventeenth-century anti-popery, then, appears to have been quite similar to the expressions of anti-Catholicism in the panics of mid- seventeenth century England.56

At trial on July 29th, the testimony and evidence against Ury would complete the pattern described by Clifton. White colonists would present the Latin teacher as a stranger, with suspicious habits and a strange religion. Worse, the same indentured

55 Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery,” 82. 56 Clifton, “Popular Fear,” 42-52.

335 servant that had doomed more than two dozen slaves and the family of John Hughson would appear again, offering the critical testimony that would kill John Ury.

The day after the Latin teacher was arrested, young Mary Burton appeared before the magistrates, offering new testimony concerning her memory of the secret meetings of the previous winter. The sixteen year old indentured servant had first come forward in

April, responding to the one hundred pound reward for information concerning the burning of the King's Fort. She had implicated her master John Hughson and dozens of slaves, all of whom had already been executed or banished. Though she had testified on

April 22, two months before, that "she never saw any white Person in Company when they talk'd of burning the Town, but her Master, her Mistress, and Peggy," on June 25th,

Mary Burton suddenly remembered John Ury at the cabals of the conspirators.

Obviously aware of her contradiction, she carefully reasserted that she had never seen

John Ury actually discussing the conspiracy, but his "Actions and Behaviour" signified

"Consent." She also testified that Ury had offered to forgive her sins, thus proving he was a priest. This testimony was critical to the case against Ury. By colonial law, slaves could not testify against any white person. Despite her age and low social condition,

Mary Burton's status as a white woman allowed her to give key evidence in the king's case against Ury.57

At the trial, Mary Burton’s testimony bordered on the absurd. She claimed that when she had been waiting on the Hughson family and John Ury in a private room, they had all tempted her to take an oath. When she asked about the nature of the oath, they would not explain, but only offered her silk and gold rings. One night, she claimed that

57Horsmanden Journal, 9; Zabin, New York Cospiracy, 122; Horsmanden Journal, 12-13; Lepore, New York Burning, 177.

336

Ury and the Hughsons had all gathered behind a closed door. When she had peeked under, she saw Ury holding a book “and there was a black Ring on the Floor, and Things in it, that seemed to look like rats.” On a different occasion, she claimed she saw several slaves gathered around Ury as he read from a book in a language she did not understand.

On a nearby table “was a black Thing like a Child.” Her most oft repeated testimony referred to Ury’s abilitiy to forgive sins. When she said “God forgive me,” she claimed that Ury had responded that “he could forgive sins as well as God.” In this last bit of testimony, she changed her story slightly from her previous deposition a month earlier.

Originally, she had explained that “some of the Negroes had behaved rudely towards her,” and she had sworn at them, then said “God forgive me.” Ury had responded “that he could forgive her a great deal more sins than that.58

The Catholic concept of absolution clearly fascinated the Protestants of colonial

New York. After Tom made the first reference on June 18th, numerous white testimonials and slave confessions described a mysterious man at Hughson’s Tavern who said he could forgive sins. Protestant ideology rejected the idea that absolution could assuage the guilt of a crime. At the trial, Attorney General Bradley had complained that

Catholics hoped to “exalt themselves above God himself,” through many of their “hocus pocus” practices. Certainly, the prisoners who gave this testimony understood that the

Protestant white judge and jury were searching for such evidence. In the case of Mary

Burton, she may not have known much else about Catholics. Her descriptions of black circles on the floor filled with rats sounds more like a pagan ritual than a Catholic ceremony. But the idea of absolution may have been mentioned so often for another reason. The concept of being forgiven and absolved surely meant a great deal to a fearful

58 Horsmanden, Journal, 96, 157-158.

337 imprisoned slaves and scared white servants as they sat before magistrates demanding confessions.59

Throughout the trial, the prosecutors questioned witnesses concerning Ury’s religious practices and suspicious customs that seemed to suggest he might be a papist.

Judge Horsmanden had noted that Ury had first come to the attention of the justices because he participated in a conventicle, or informal worship meeting in people’s homes.

These services were not illegal in Protestant New York, but they suggested something subversive. Several witnesses had attended his meetings and some claimed that Ury did not say the name of King George in prayers. Sometimes, Mr. Croker admitted, Ury had gone upstairs with a candle, in the day time, and locked the door. And perhaps most incriminating, Ury had asked Webb to build him a small triangular shelf for his room, where “on each side there was a place to hold a candle.” The Latin teacher occasionally purchased wafers from the local confectioner. One witness claimed that Ury had privately told him that he took a sacrament at the altar and made prayers. Sometimes Ury defended Catholics. The prosecutor questioned both Webb and Croker about Ury’s relationships with slaves, and both men claimed that Ury had condemned black baptism, arguing that “slaves were not proper objects of salvation.” The prosecutor must have been disappointed.60

The prosecution clearly hoped to associate John Ury with ritual and idolatry. As

Peter Lake has explained, anti-papists argued that the worship of God had been subverted by the Catholic worship of idols and the deification of saints. Something as simple as the purchase of wafers by Ury could suggest that he practiced transubstantiation, or the

59 Lake, “Anti-popery,” 75; See for example Horsmanden, Journal, 96, 103, 132. 60 Horsmanden, Journal, 93-94; Horsmanden, Journal, 163-164.

338 ritualized transformation of bread into the body of Christ. Attorney General Bradley had attacked transubstantiation at the beginning of Ury’s trial. Protestants argued the

Catholic Church corrupted God’s word. During the trial, they searched for signs of that corruption in Ury.61

Ury had told many people in New York that he was a nonjuring minister, a religious dissenter that refused to acknowledge the British King as the head of the Church of England. They were a dissenting denomination of clergy and laymen, a group of

Jacobites who refused to take the oath of abjuration and insisted upon the independence of the church concerning matters of religion. At the same time, they refused to be disloyal to King George. It is easy to imagine that a nonjuring minister could have been perceived as a religious outside in New York. Perhaps too, judging from testimony made by acquaintances, Ury sometimes practiced Catholic sacraments and even accepted some

Catholic doctrine.62

But perhaps the quality that made John Ury most suspicious to anti-papist authorities was his status as a stranger and outsider capable of subverting the Protestant order. The greatest fear of an anti-papist was that of Roman Catholics lingering undercover amid Protestants, waiting for their moment to pounce. Early English parliamentarians were so fearful of the hidden papist that they proposed laws requiring

Catholics to wear yellow caps and slippers. In mid-seventeenth century England, anti- papists immediately assumed that disturbances and moments of crisis were the work of a priest and so they searched for a stranger to fulfill that role. In the trial of John Ury, his mysterious background and lack of support from leading people in the community made

61 Lake, “Anti-popery,” 73-74; Horsmanden, Journal, 156. 62Horsmanden, Journal, 163-167; J.H. Overton, The NonJurors: Their Lives,Principles, and Writings (New York, 1903), 2-11.

339 him both suspicious and vulnerable to allegations of popery. His sectarianism probably hurt him as well. Robin Clifton explains that anti-papists often accused various dissenting Protestants of popery in the mid-seventeenth century, including Quakers and

Presbyterians. Simply being an outsider, socially or religiously, made one a suspicious target during a supposed Catholic plot.63

Even as anti-popery led to the persecution of outsiders, it also unified the people of New York. Lake, in his seminal study of seventeenth-century anti-popery, has argued that fears of Catholic subversion could create in English Protestants “cathartically unifying local action,” where people of different classes who might otherwise be socially or politically estranged, could united behind against an “inherently un-English or alien force.” In the notoriously factious city of New York, the prosecuting attorneys William

Smith and James Alexander were politically estranged and quite at odds with the supreme court justices Delancey and Horsmanden. Lieutenant Governor Clarke would have little to do with James Alexander. However, all of these men appear to have cooperated during the trial of John Ury. Historian Jill Lepore struggled to explain the unity of these rival factions during the conspiracy. Both white solidarity against slave rebellion and the ability of anti-popery to unite Protestants against an external Catholic threat may well explain the lack of infighting during the trials. The New York City slave conspiracy also formed unlikely alliances over lines of class and gender. As the star witness of the trials, young Mary Burton was aggressively defended by Judge Horsmanden both during the trials and in the correspondence of the leading men of the colony. White carpenters and

63 Clifton, “Popular Fear,” 33.

340 confectioners, leading planters and supreme court justices all united to prosecute threatening papists from abroad.64

In John Ury’s trial, the prosecution also submitted a copy of the letter of General

Oglethorpe, from Georgia, describing the intelligence concerning the "papist plot" to lead slaves in insurrection. As a document that literally transferred anti-papist sentiment from colony to colony, it was fascinating. The letter had been composed on the Georgian frontier, sparked the search and arrest of John Ury, and been forwarded by Clarke to

England. Thus had news from abroad influenced the anti-papist conspiracy in New York.

John Ury did very poorly in the trial. Over a period of nine hours, a parade of anti-papist accusations and observations steadily built a vague, conspiratorial case against the Latin teacher. The prosecutor had described the bloody nature of Catholics and the priest’s evil intent to lead slaves in rebellion. All manner of white New Yorkers offered vague testimony against him. Mary Burton and a school teacher, Protestant neighbors and members of his conventicle all offered testimony tinged with Popery. Ury was an outsider. He practiced strange ceremonies, whether in the almost unbelievable rituals described by Mary Burton or in the simpler practice of eating wafers before his odd triangular table. He defended Catholics publicly and seemed mysteriously subversive in his refusal to pray to the British king. The Latin teacher only briefly cross examined the witnesses and failed to challenge inconsistencies in the testimony.

At the end of the trial, William Smith, Sr., another prosecutor and father of the famed New York historian, attempted to explain the importance of convicting John Ury

64 Lake, “Anti-popery,” 94-95; Smith, The History, xix; Brendan McConville, “Of Slavery and Sources,” Reviews in American History Vol. 34, no. 3, (2006) 281-290. The argument contrasts sharply with the conclusions of Jill Lepore, who explained the New York City slave conspiracy as a product of political factionalism in the city, Lepore, New York Burning, 12-13.

341 for the rebellion of the city’s slaves. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if the evidence you have heard is sufficient to produce a general conviction that the late fires in the city… are the effects of a Spanish and popish plot, then the mystery of this iniquity, which has so puzzled us, is unveiled.” As Smith would explain, it was important for the city to understand and accept that the slave conspiracy had been a popish plot. It fit with a

Protestant explanation for slave revolt. It reasserted the social order and made religious sense of widespread war and rebellion that had finally come home to New York. At last, one of the leading men of the city placed the decision to blame slave uprisings before his white peers of the city. Their verdict was guilty. It had taken fifteen minutes of deliberation.65

Conclusion

At the gallows in late August, John Ury stepped on to a cart led by oxen and stood before the people of New York. He prayed aloud that God might help those witnesses who had testified against him and see that their testimony was false. “With a very composed countenance,” he read aloud a speech that he had prepared over the last weeks of his life. He explained that he was “going to suffer Ignominy an Pain” but that he accepted it as God’s will. He raised his hands to heaven and professed “I am innocent of what is laid to my charge.” He asserted that he did not believe it was “in the power of

Man to forgive sin” and that he never had attended meetings at Hughson’s tavern nor been involved in the conspiracy. At the end, he asked the onlookers to “behold me launching into eternity” and to remember their own mortality. He asked the people of

65 Zabin, New York Conspiracy, 144-146.

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New York to repent to God for their sins. Then he “pulled off his wig” and his friend

Webb helped him place the noose about his neck and tie a handkerchief over his eyes.

He adjusted a cap on his head. Finally, “the cart drove away, and he dyed.”66

Peter Lake has argued that the power of anti-popery was based on its ability to explain and control the anxieties of English Protestants. Certainly in the late 1730s

British Atlantic, Protestant colonists faced a very real threat from Catholic France and

Spain. Slaves did rebel in numerous colonies, some because of the freedom offered by

Spanish Florida. But the anti-popery practiced in the British colonies of the Caribbean and mainland North America went farther. It imagined deviance and subversion where there was very little. It created a foreign “other” among many of the most vulnerable in the British population, even as it unified both powerful and poor white Protestants behind a religious explanation for racial violence and conflict. This pattern is nowhere more evident than in the New York City slave conspiracy of 1741.67

His death was the culmination of a wave of anti-popery and slave rebellion that swept through the British provinces during the long decade of the 1730s. Like many colonists, white Protestant New Yorkers understood the rebellion of their slaves not just as a rejection of their oppressive racial order, but also as part of a larger, worldwide religious struggle between Protestant liberty and Catholic oppression. Still, anti-popery was something carried into New York City during the slave conspiracy of 1741. It took hold of the colony quite late. During a moment of intense fear, shared with numerous other colonies, white New Yorkers searched for strangers and foreigners who might be subverting their “true religion.” In the 1730s, this ideology enjoyed renewed fervor as an

66 Boston Newsletter, Sept 3, 1741; Horsmanden, Journal, 174. 67 Lake, “Anti-popery,” 80, 82.

343 explanation for slave rebellion. Even as they arrested others, fear of "popery" unified white Protestants behind a shared explanation for foreign war and domestic insurrection.

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Chapter Six: “God’s Just Judgment”

The violence between colonists and slaves left a curse upon the land.1 As the long decade between 1729 and 1746 wore on, the provinces were littered with ruined places where whites and blacks had struggled against each other and died. In 1740, the end of the First Maroon War opened new lands to white settlers in Jamaica. Families arriving on the near abandoned windward side of the island passed fallow fields and burned out cabins where planters had fled from the raids of maroons.2 Crossing the Blue Mountains to Kingston, travelers could stop to examine the skeletal remnants of the “Grand Party” of sailors and soldiers shot to death by the “negroes in rebellion” in August of 1733.3

On the mainland, in South Carolina, the cursed place was a long road stretching south from the western bank of the Stono River. It began with the desolation of the

Godfrey plantation house, a family that had garnered so much wrath from local slaves that rebels had traveled east, away from their liberty, just to attack and kill the planter and

1 I use the term curse in reference to the biblical story of the Curse of Cain. “The Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.’” Genesis 4:10-11. 2 In 1740, Governor Trelwawny wrote to the Board of Trade with news of the Leeward Treaty with the Maroons, explaining “Many who have began Plantations expos’d to that danger have been forced to abandon them.” In a letter written in November of 1741, Trelawny wrote that since the Maroon Treaties, “sixteen families with servants and slaves have come from the Leeward Islands to Manchioneal,” on the northeastern shore of the island. King George II issued a proclamation two years later, announcing that Jamaica was offering "all New Comers being Protestants" free land, tools for a year, and provisions for settlers and slaves if they would settle on the island. The King ordered the Governor of Pennsylvania, and presumably others, to announce the availability of land in their respective provinces. Trelawny to Board of Trade, Mar. 30, 1739, C.O 137/23, TNA; Trelawny to Board of Trade, Nov. 21, 1741, CO 137/23, TNA; Whitehall to Governor Thomas, July 19, 1744, The Pennsylvania Archives, 1st Series, Volume I: 1644- 1747, 659-660. 3 For a summarized account of that action, see Chapter 3. An account of the wounded and dead from the Grand Party is also provided in Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal (Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1988), 76-77.

345 his children.4 Down the length of the Pon Pon road, the charred remains of plantation houses and the burial plots of their white tenants bore silent testimony to the vengeance of the slaves of Stono. The planters’ vengeance marked the land as well. To the south and west, near the Edisto River, the white militia had decorated the road with the heads of the slaves they had killed in an open field at the end of a bloody afternoon.5

Execution sites left a different kind of curse upon the land. In Bermuda, most everyone traveling to the colony passed through the crossroads at Crow’s Lane, at the center of the inner harbor, where magistrates had burned the elderly Sarah Bassett alive in 1730. In the eastern Caribbean, on the outskirts of Saint John’s, Antigua, the cursed place was a burned out patch of Otter’s pasture, once a favorite meeting ground for slaves on Sunday that had become the site of the burning and hanging of eighty-eight convicted conspirators. And then there were the gibbets, the hanging cages where Britons displayed executed slaves. By the beginning of the 1740s, there were gibbets hanging in the ports of Kingston, Saint John, Charles Town, Norfolk, Upper Marlboro, and

Manhattan Island.6 These places sent a clear message that if black slaves dared to challenge their subordination, white authorities with the full backing of the state would answer with unrestrained brutality.

British visitors sought out these places and wondered at the violence. In 1744,

Scottish physician Alexander Hamilton traveled up from Annapolis, Maryland to New

York City as part of his tour of the northern colonies. On a summer evening, a local

4 My interpretation of the actions of the slaves is described in Chapter Three. It originates from my reading of “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, ed. Allen D. Candler, et al. (Atlanta: Byrd, 1913), vol. 22, pt. 2, 232-236. 5 Boston Post Boy, Nov. 5, 1739. 6 The executed bodies of slaves were exhibited by colonies for unspecified periods of time, some gibbets presumably hanging for years. For references to slaves gibbeted in respective ports, see Boston Weekly News-Letter, Nov. 1, 1739, in Mark Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 12.

346 gentleman invited him to view the “ruins” of Fort George where the conspirators had supposedly set the King’s House on fire. He walked along the burned out foundations of the governor’s mansion and climbed the newly reconstructed battery to admire the view.

His host told him “to walk out after dusk upon this platform was a good way for a stranger to fit himself with a courtesan,” the ruins becoming the favorite haunt of prostitutes.7 In the taverns, Hamilton mingled with two Jamaican travelers and a stranger from Curacao and listened as they debated whether an African could ever become a gentleman, the man from Curacao insisting “nothing good could come from the whole generation of blacks.” When he could find the time over the next few days, the Scottish physician stole away and “read out the Journal of the Proceedings,” the freshly printed narrative of the New York slave conspiracy written by Judge Daniel Horsmanden.8 What had happened in that frontier place?

Britons offered competing explanations to explain the violence that had taken hold in their American provinces. “The Danger… [was] plainly owing to the too great

Numbers of Negroes in proportion to our white persons,” wrote an anonymous Jamaican in a pamphlet published in 1747. “This wicked Conspiracy took its Rise from too much

Lenity and Indulgence of Masters to their Slaves,” Antigua justices reported to their governor in 1737.9 “It is now apparent that the Hand of Popery is in it,” wrote Lt.

Governor George Clarke to the Lords of Trade in 1741, for he was certain that the Jesuits had sought to betray both South Carolina and New York to the Spanish by inciting slaves to rebel. “To serve the enemy they could not have done it more effectually,” he

7Alexander Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, edited by Carl Bridenbaugh (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 46. 8 Ibid., 48, 49. 9 A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negroes at Antigua (Dublin, [1737]), 18.

347 explained, “for this town being laid in Ashes his Majesties forces in the West Indies might have suffered much for want of provisions.”10 The lieutenant governor of New

York insisted there must have been some greater conspiracy at work – a Catholic plot - to explain the violence that had gripped the Americas.

And yet by the opening of the 1740s, many Protestant religious leaders offered a biblical explanation for the rebellion of their slaves and the brutal executions of so many people. These men and women looked out upon the ruined places in their colonies and saw in the destruction the wrath of an angry God. “Surely God’s Just Judgements are upon us,” wrote the evangelical Hugh Bryan in November of 1740, “Is there evil befallen a city, and the lord hath not done it?” The answer for the South Carolina planter, as with many religious men and women, was that slave unrest was a divine punishment delivered upon an unrepentant people.

During the long decade between 1729 and 1746, Britons consistently explained slave rebellion as a sign of divine anger. In an era when the rationalism of the age of enlightenment had not yet gained full sway over the leading men of the American colonies, both British officials and religious leaders explained natural disasters and public calamities as evidence of supernatural displeasure. To a degree that might surprise many historians, these Protestants described slave unrest as a catastrophe of divine origin not unlike an earthquake or plague. After an episode of slave unrest, governors proclaimed days of public fasting and prayer and ministers offered supplications to Christ to assuage the anger of God. Following the discovery of a conspiracy by colonial magistrates, governors sometimes ordered days of thanksgiving for mercy and protection.

10 Lieutenant-Gov Clark to the Lords of Trade, New York, August the 24th, 1741, Documents Relatve to the Colonial History of the State of New York; Procured in Holland, England, and France, edited by E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, Printers. 1854). Volume 6, 1734-1755, 201-203.

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Throughout British America, Protestants looked to “providence” to explain their salvation from their slaves.

British Atlantic. The itinerant ministers of this movement were revivalists, determined to inspire an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of wayward congregations. These evangelicals traveled throughout the colonies, speaking in churches or in open fields, exhorting their congregations to repent for their sins and to open themselves to a rebirth in Christ. Many of the participants in this First Great Awakening shared a biblical view of slave rebellion, citing servile insurrection as proof of God’s displeasure with white colonists and their established churches.

The itinerant ministers’ biblical interpretation of slave rebellion played an important role in the proliferation of evangelical religion in colonial America. Slave unrest shook the religious foundations of British colonists during a period of pervasive uneasiness over the wellbeing of the provinces. Evangelical leaders found a powerful, if highly controversial, sign of God’s anger in slave unrest and they used it to galvanize nervous congregations of white colonists. In this way, the actions of rebellious slaves influenced the growth of evangelical religion at a critical moment in the history of colonial America. Historians have often explained the colonial anxieties that preceded the

First Great Awakening as the reaction to new consumerism or the heightened pace of

349 migration, imperial warfare or the growth of print culture.11 But there was also another powerful element that contributed to widespread unease: white British fear that God was using slaves, an internal enemy, as a rod to chastise the people.

The relationship between the First Great Awakening and slave unrest has never been fully understood by historians. Scholars have focused most of their attention on the print controversy concerning slave baptism that emerged between white Protestants in this period. Evangelical preachers promoted the conversion of African Americans and opened the doors of dissenting churches to the enslaved.12 Planters and many colonial officials worried that the message of spiritual equality could inspire black people to challenge the social order and they accused revivalists of fomenting dissent among slaves.13 In a series of pamphlets and newspapers, “New Light” evangelicals sought to promote slave baptism even as they defended themselves against accusations of encouraging unrest. “Anglo-American evangelical leaders usually did not think that the egalitarian implication of their gospel would have substantial social implications for

Africans,” writes Thomas Kidd. In his recent synthesis, The Great Awakening, Kidd sums up generations of scholarship that has focused on the influence of evangelicals on slaves in the 1730s and 1740s, arguing that the religious movement presented the first real opportunity for many black people in the British colonies to participate in the covenant with Christ. “Early American white evangelicals’ commitment to

11 Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Updated Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 132; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), xvii- xviii; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 11-16. 12Bonomi, Under the Cope, viii-xi. 13 See, for example, Richard Charlton’s accusations against George Whitefield following slave conspiracy in New York in 1741 in Richard Charlton to the Secretary, N.Y., Oct. 30, 1741, SPG MSS. (Transcripts) B9, no. 62, Library of Congress.

350 evangelization set in motion… the nearly wholesale conversion of African Americans to some form of evangelical Christianity,” he argues.14

And yet the actions of slaves had a powerful influence on evangelicals and their white congregations as well. The ruined places in the American colonies and the widespread fear of impending rebellion contributed to a growing uneasiness among white

Britons. The belief that slave unrest was visited upon an unrepentant people by a vengeful God became an important tool for revivalist ministers, a group of men determined to awake their congregations to the consequences of their wayward lives.

Colonists were “sinners in the hand of an angry God,” and they need only look out upon the ruins of their provinces to understand the consequences of neglecting their souls.15

Slave Unrest as a Judgment of God

Josiah Cotton saw the hand of God in the actions of his slaves. In January of

1740, the Plymouth civil magistrate recorded in his diary that his man-slave Quominah had run away. “May we not read our sin in our punishment?” Cotton asked his diary,

“we have often deserted ye service of our heavenly benefactor, & now wonder he permits our Servants to wonder.”16 Over the next year and a half, the magistrate worried in each entry of his diary over the absence of his “Negro man.” “Man appoints and God disappoints,” Cotton wrote in 1741, “I had always some secret hopes yt he [Quominah] would of his own accord return again, considering ye priviledges & liberty he here

14 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 213-214. 15 Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the hands of an angry God (Boston: T. Green, 1741). 16 Josiah Cotton, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, April 19, 1739, 281, Massachusetts Historical Society.

351 enjoyed, & his two Children left in our hands.”17 In the summer, Cotton learned that a black man had been taken up by the constable in Fairfield, Connecticut, nearly two hundred miles away, and so the magistrate sent his son, Theophilus, to see if the slave might be the man they owned. When Theophilus returned with the news that it was not

Quominah held in the jail, Cotton bemoaned the fruitless journey.18 In May of 1742,

Quominah finally returned to Plymouth after eighteen months living in Boston. The Lord had “been dealing mercifully by us beyond expectation,” Cotton proclaimed, “Grant it may be in mercy to him & us; The Circumstances of our family, I pray God may it be in mercy to us.”19 His prayers answered, Cotton never speculated in his diary on the reason

Quominah had chosen to run away.

Cotton’s religious response to the actions of his slave was quite typical of white colonists in the 1730s and 1740s. Many influential British Protestants of the period explained slave resistance as a sign of God’s anger. Cotton’s diary serves as an especially important piece of evidence, however, because he provided personal interpretations of the events of his day. Most of the very rare colonial diaries that have survived from the 1730s and 1740s read like daybooks, offering basic and repetitive accounts of the day’s occurrences. Cotton sought to interpret the meaning of events - impending war with France and Spain, the revivals of the Great Awakening, and the New

York City Slave conspiracy of 1741 – and in so doing exemplified the complex intellectual shift that was underway among leading American colonists in the period.

The colonial explanations for slave unrest reflected the tensions between rationalism and religion in colonial America during the second quarter of the eighteenth

17 Josiah Cotton, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, April 19, 1739, 289, MHS. 18 Josiah Cotton, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, April 19, 1739, 295-296, MHS. 19 Josiah Cotton, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, April 19, 1739, 310, MHS.

352 century. By that time, the learned men of Great Britain no longer accepted what historian

Keith Thomas calls the “invisible world” of spirits and miracles.20 Men of rank and elevated class adopted a skepticism and fundamental belief that the world was rational and therefore explainable. As Douglas Winiarski notes, “English standards of polite discourse no longer tolerated discussions of wonders and prodigies.”21 In 1721, the famed minister Cotton Mather’s attempt to promote smallpox inoculation in Boston exemplified this shift in colonial American thinking. As a much younger man, Mather had defended the magistrates in Salem during the egregious witch trials of 1692. But he spent the next thirty years participating in the growing intellectual discourse on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and in 1721, he advocated for prevention of a disease that had long been understood as a visitation from God. Mather’s opponents in Boston (which included Benjamin Franklin’s older brother) argued that inoculation interfered with

God’s punishment upon a sinful people, but the minister refuted this argument in print, insisting that human understanding of medicine was part of a biblical process of reconciliation with the Lord.22

Ten years later, Josiah Cotton of Plymouth sought to use similar language to refute the superstitions of local villagers. The magistrate’s family owned a valuable piece of property in Plymouth that locals claimed was visibly haunted by spirits. Cotton wrote ministers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean asking for the most recent works that refuted the idea of witchcraft and haunting. In the early 1730s, he wrote “Some

20 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, NY: Scribner, 1971), 587-588. 21 Douglas L. Winiarski, “‘Pale Blewish Lights’ and a Dead Man's Groan: Tales of the Supernatural from Eighteenth-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), 500. 22 Robert Tindol, “Getting the Pox off All Their Houses: Cotton Mather and the Rhetoric of Puritan Science,” Early American Literature (0012-8163), 2011, Volume 46, Issue 1, 2-8.

353

Observations Concerning Witches, Spirits, and Apparitions,” in which he sought to demonstrate the falsity and danger of superstitions among New England people.23

Despite their adoption of enlightenment rationalism, men like Cotton and Mather lived within a religious worldview that interpreted slave unrest as a visitation from God.

Their intellectual tradition in Massachusetts emerged from the Reformed Protestant churches of England, congregations of Calvinists that believed God had predestined some people for salvation and others to damnation. Members of these colonial churches searched for signs of the New Birth, the moment in which they felt God’s grace enter their heart and could be assured of their salvation. Reformed Protestants believed there were times when their congregations could fall away from Christ; when the state of religion would decline and sink to a new low.24 To reawaken the people, God scourged them with biblical punishments such as plagues or earthquakes. During these tribulations, the chosen elect would be visited by an outpouring of divine grace and reassured of their salvation. Reformed Protestants called these religious events revivals, and sometimes awakenings, and they created salvation histories of the church that celebrated and anticipated moments of divine mercy.

The men and women of the Reformed Protestant tradition were conditioned by their faith to interpret slave unrest as a scourge sent by God. Historian Frank Lambert explains that members of these churches interpreted events in the context of a belief in recurring patterns of “religious decay,” then divine punishment, followed by revival and showering of God’s grace.25 Ministers and religious writers authored jeremiads, “sermons lamenting the waning of piety,” and in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

23 Winiarski, “Pale Blewish Lights,” 510-516. 24 Lambert, Inventing, 22-23. 25 Lambert, Inventing, 25-27.

354 created an entire literary genre of jeremiads that bemoaned the moral decline of their age.26 Religious leaders warned of God’s wrath for the religious declension they saw all around them. Slave unrest became yet another example of divine anger to these congregations.

By the 1730s, Reformed Protestant congregations were scattered throughout the

British Atlantic and heavily concentrated in New England and the Middle Colonies of

Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Their separate churches included English

Puritans (called Congregationalists in the eighteenth century), Scottish Presbyterians,

Dutch Reformed and the German Reformed churches, each of which anticipated periods of the “surprising works of God.”27 As Lambert explains, the regions with the largest populations of Reformed Protestants were the most likely to see large revivals in the First

Great Awakening.28 Not surprisingly, we can add that these same places were most likely to have a population that interpreted slave unrest as divine in origin. Outside of

New England and the Middle Colonies, there were Reformed Protestant churches scattered in numerous colonies, but they were heavily outnumbered by the Anglican

Church.

Even Anglicans, who otherwise perceived God as being less interventionist than their Reformed counterparts, tended to ascribe worldly calamities to providence.

Anglicanism “gave Christianity its primary shape in eighteenth-century colonial

American society,” argues historian Jon Butler, which meant that the practices of the official state church worked closely with colonial governors to “maintain Christian

26 Ibid., 35. 27 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 8. 28 Ibid., 22-23.

355 practice and belief among the entire population.”29 During periods of calamity, such as earthquakes and plagues, the provincial governor – acting in his capacity as the representative of the British King – declared days of “humiliation,” public fasting and prayer to assuage the wrath of an angry God. Parish ministers assembled their congregations and led public prayers in which they begged Christ for mercy or offered thanksgiving. The practice of praying to God for mercy was shared throughout the colonies under the broad practices of the Church of England.

And there were no shortages of calamities in colonial America. Nearly the entire capital city of Port Royal, Jamaica, had sunk into the sea during the great earthquake of

1692, more than five thousand people drowned by the tsunami that swept inland. “The

Time they expect Earthquakes is in February or March,” wrote the Scottish traveler

Charles Leslie in 1739. He noted that the usually irreligious Jamaicans held their days of public prayer very serious during that time of year. “They have suffered much by such violent shocks” he wrote, “and observe several Days in a very solemn Manner.”30

Hurricanes were another kind of terror. After the murderous hurricane of 1722, the governor of Jamaica offered a proclamation in which he tried to explain the intense suffering of the people on the island. “The Divine Majesty’s afflicting Dispensations to his People is to reclaime them from Sin,” read his proclamatioin, “and that repentance of

Sin, prevents the Continuance of God’s Severe Judgements.”31 The people of Jamaica

29 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 165. 30 Charles Leslie, A new and exact account of Jamaica (Edinburgh: Printed by R. Fleming, for A. Kincaid and sold by him, and other Booksellers in Town, 1739), 24. 31 Henry Barham, Account of Jamaica (London, 1722), 271, as quoted in Nicholas M. Beasley, “Ritual Time in British Plantation Colonies, 1650-1780,” Church History, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Sep., 2007), 565.

356 were ordered to fast, with all work closed and the shops and punch houses shuttered to pray for God’s forgiveness.

In the eastern Caribbean, the prayers were most often focused on pleading with

God to protect the crops and provide rain to the water deprived Leeward Islands. In

March of 1726, the Lieutenant Governor of Antigua ordered a day of “fasting and humiliation to avert God’s judgment now impending and to implore his mercy.” At the behest of the lieutenant governor, the parish priests implored Christ for rain.32 When in rained on May 23, the lieutenant governor ordered a day of national thanksgiving to God.

Ten years later, the “Blast” (an Aphids disease) swept through the cane fields of Antigua.

In July of 1736, Governor William Mathew ordered a general day of fasting to “deprecate

God’s anger” and save the sugar crop for the year.33 Across the water, a drought in Saint

Christopher led to a similar national day of “humiliation” and fasting in 1741.34

The practice of attributing calamities to divine anger was as common on the mainland as it was in the islands. In Virginia, even caterpillars were attributed to the wrath of an angry God. On April 1, 1729, the Council of Virginia called for a “day of fasting and humiliation to implore the mercy of Almighty God” due to the “calamitous outbreak of caterpillars.”35 The insects threatened the tobacco crop that late spring, leading to the widespread assumption that God had sent a locust-like plague among the people. The effects of disease were far more terrible upon colonial American populations. This was especially true for the people of South Carolina. During a period

32 Antigua Council Minutes, March 11, 1725/6, CO 9/6 (1725-1729), TNA. 33 Antigua Council Minutes, July 15th, 1736, CO 9/9, TNA. 34 Saint Christopher Council Minutes, May 29, 1741, CO 241/4, TNA. 35 Virginia Council Minutes, April 1, 1729, in H.R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, Vol. 4 (October 25, 1721-October 28, 1739) (Richmond: The Virginia State Library, 1930), 195.

357 of widespread deaths from smallpox in June of 1738, Governor William Bull publicly declared a “Day of publick Fasting and Humiliation throughout this Province, requiring all Ministers of the Gospel and their Congregations to pay a due Regard thereunto."36 The

Church of England treated episodes of disease as a special sign of God’s wrath throughout the 1730s.

Many leading members of the Church of England interpreted slave unrest as yet another kind of calamity, a visitation of God’s wrath upon a sinful people. Following the trials and executions of convicted slave conspirators, British authorities sometimes ordered days of fasting and prayer for entire provinces, in much the same way that they prayed for rain in times of drought, for a good tobacco crop in times of blight, or for mercy during episodes of violent earthquakes.37 So it was that the governor of the island of Bermuda ordered a day of Thanksgiving to God following the trial and execution of alleged slave poisoning conspirators in the summer of 1731.38 “We acknowledge and adore our great Creator’s Infinite mercy in timely discovering ye Imenint [sic] danger the inhabitants of these islands were in be yhe[sic] ministring of poison to many,” wrote the members of the Grand Inquest to their governor. The leading Britons on the inquest blamed the “Excrable practices” of “Whoreing and debauchery” among the wealthy and

“Common unthinking people,” which “but justly draw on our heads the Anger of the

Allmighty God.”39 Over the next ten years, the Bermudians continued to fear that God might visit their sinful colony with more slave poisoning conspiracies. We “greatly fear that some impending judgement must attend such a land,” members of a grand inquest

36 South Carolina Gazette, 29 June 1738. 37 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 10-12. 38 Book of Assizes, AZ 102-6, 1726-35, 251-252, Bermuda National Archives, Hamilton, Bermuda. 39 Ibid., 251-252.

358 reported to the governor in 1734, and in 1737, the grand inquest begged for “mercy from the creator,” fearing the “caballing of negroes” would soon lead to more poisonings.40

Bermuda’s population was almost ninety percent Anglican by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, indicating that the interpretation of slave unrest as a judgment meted out for sin was possible among congregations of Anglicans as well as Reformed

Protestants.41

Anglican Commissary William May drew similar conclusions concerning the

First Jamaican Maroon War. In his letter to the Bishop of London, May expressed his belief that God would use the Maroons to punish the planters of Jamaica for their sins.

“We have been at a vast Expence here in fitting out Parties to Subdue the Rebellious

Negroes which have proved unsuccessful,” wrote May from Jamaica in 1733, “which makes me think that God Almighty will at length make use of Them as Instruments to

Punish the People of this Island.” William May believed that white Jamaicans were deserving of punishment at the hands of “Rebellious Negroes,” for “that Scandalous and

Detestable Vice of keeping Negro Concubines.”42 The Anglican missionary explained the violent conflict not as a contest for freedom between colonists and slaves, but as an expression of God’s punishment upon planters for prostitution.

In several cases, members of the Church of England described the discovery of a conspiracy as evidence of divine mercy. Instead of bemoaning their sins, leading Britons offered prayers to God in thanksgiving. In 1737, an Antigua resident claimed that

40 Book of Assizes, June 7, 1734, AZ 102/6, 1726-35, Bermuda National Archives, 451-452; Book of Assizes, 1735-41, AZ 102/7, June 7, 1737, Bermuda National Archives, 145-147. 41 Boyd Schlenther explains that after 1725, nearly ninety percent of Bermudians adhered to the Church of England. Boyd Stanley Schlenther, “Religious Faith and Commercial Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume II, the Eighteenth Century, P.J Marshall, et. al., eds., (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 130. 42 William May to Bp. of London, Kingston, Jamaica, 11 April 1733, FFP [Fulham Palace Papers, 14] 83, in the Virginia Colonial Records Project [hereafter VCRP], SRN 577.

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“divine Providence” had interposed to save the colonists from the conspiracy of their slaves, a point which the authors of the official government report agreed, proclaiming

“to whom shall our Deliverance be ascribed but to God, the Father of all Mercies; he cast a Mist before the Eyes of our Enemies!”43 In September of 1741, the lieutenant governor of New York drew similar conclusions. In a public declaration, he proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for the divine favor shown the province. God had offered “deliverance from the destruction threatened by the late conspiracy.”44 Such a declaration of divine intervention treated slave uprisings as calamities, like earthquakes and plagues, and both governors and clergy offered thanksgiving for what they described as God’s protection from their slaves.

Despite these public declarations of divine intervention, it is not at all clear that most Anglican colonists accepted that slave unrest was sent among their people by an angry God. The rational skepticism that had influenced Cotton Mather and Josiah Cotton was prevalent among leading colonial officials and upper-class Britons in the provinces, most of whom were Anglican. “Anglican theology typically combined rationalism, moralism and piety,” explains Butler, “within limits, the world was comprehensible.”45

For Anglicans, “the Almighty worked in a more predictable way,” writes Frank Lambert,

“through the ordinary means of regular church services and sacraments.”46 In general, members of the Church of England did not anticipate periods of religious decline or expect spiritual revivals throughout the population. A religious culture that did not

43 South Carolina Gazette, Dec. 4, 1736, quoted in David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A study of Master Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 5; A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Negro Conspiracy in Antigua (Dublin, 1737), 14. 44 Daniel Horsmanden, 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 (New York, 1744), 177. 45 Butler, Awash, 167-168. 46 Lambert, Inventing, 24-25.

360 anticipate God’s anger and a growing focus on rationalism discouraged a biblical interpretation of slave unrest.

Though British officials sometimes proclaimed slave unrest a visitation from God, they also offered worldly explanations in their council chambers and in their correspondence with England. “There was a general rumour among them that they were to be set free,” wrote Anglican Commissary James Blair of the slaves in Virginia, “And when they saw nothing came of it, they grew angry and saucy, and met in the night time in great numbers, and talked of rising.”47 To the Lords of Trade and Plantations,

Jamaican Governor Trelawny described a “Dangerous Spirit of Liberty” among the slaves of the West Indies and Governor William Mathew of Antigua insisted that the slave rebels were part of a “contagion” of rebellion that had “spread further among these islands than I apprehend is discovered.” Lieutenant Governor William Bull of South

Carolina ascribed the “Desertion of Our Negroes” to a “Certain Proclamation published by the King of Spain’s Order at Saint Augustine.”48 None of the officials offered a religious explanation for the rebellion of slaves in their correspondence to government.

Many of the middling classes of Anglicans may have also been skeptical of a religious interpretation of slave unrest. The Anglican congregations in the provinces of the West Indies and American south maintained a reputation for disinterested church membership and a lack of piety in the first half of the eighteenth century.49 “There is at this day,” wrote Bishop George Berkeley in 1725, “but little sense of religion… in the

47 James Blair to Bishop of London, Williamsburg, 14 May 1731, FPP/15, 110 SRN 575 VCRP. 48 Lt. Gov. William Bull to BT, Charleston, October 5, 1739, CO, no. 5/388. 49 For the colonial American south, see Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 97-98. For the eastern Caribbean, see Natalie Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776 (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010), 121-123.

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English colonies settled on the continent of America, and in the islands.”50 The colonies of the West Indies did not experience a Great Awakening like mainland British North

America and visitors from hotbeds of religious revival, like New England, were quick to point out the godlessness of the Caribbean. “I should be Glad to Encourage the

Settlement of One of Your Serious, & solidly Ingenious Young Divines here,” wrote

Hugh Hall from Barbados in 1720, “but indeed there’s that Lukewarm Christianity, even among some of its Strictest Professors, that any Place of Divine Worship is Shamefully

Unfrequented by Them, as really ye several Churches in ye Island are.”51 Anglican minister Robert Robertson of Nevis wrote that the people on the island would “have the minister go to church, but will not go themselves.”52 Writing of his experiences in the

Leeward Islands in the 1740s, Christian Poole complained that the island churches were

“thinly visited” and the people “Strangers to the Duty of worshipping God.”53 The extent to which Anglican congregants concerned themselves with the religious interpretations of their clergy is not clear.

For the most part, leading Anglicans in the southern mainland colonies had become rationalists by the 1730s. The gentry had “shifted the emphasis from an interventionist God to one whose greatest gift to humankind was natural reason,” writes

Patricia Bonomi.54 In Virginia and in heavily populated parishes of Maryland and South

Carolina, Anglican church attendance combined the sacred and the secular, with leading gentry exhibiting their status at Sunday services through seating and dress and the

50 George Berkeley, A proposal for the better supplying of churches in our foreign plantations (London: 1725), A2. 51 Letter from Hugh Hall, Jr. (Barbados) to [Benjamin] Colman, 30 Mar. 1720, Hugh Hall papers, Massachusetts Historical Society [hereafter MHS]. 52 Robert Robertson, A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London (London: John Wilford, 1730). 53 Christian Poole, The Beneficient Bee or, Traveller’s Companion (London: E. Duncomb, 1753), 353, 315. 54 Bonomi, Under the Cope, 99.

362 members of congregations attending horse racing or comparing tobacco prices before and after ceremonies. Planters like William Byrd II of Virginia attended Anglican services in the fall and spring and prayed almost daily, but he also stressed the importance of the

“Law of nature” in his prolific writings. “I believe that God made man,” he wrote in his diary in 1710, “and inspired him with a reasonable soul to distinguish between Good and

Evil.” At home on his plantation in the evening, Byrd listened to his wife and sister-in- law engage in a “fierce dispute about the infallibility of the Bible.”This was a far cry from the anxieties over divine election that pervaded the minds of the Calvinists to the north. And yet even as the Byrd family submitted their Anglican faith to rational skepticism, they also shared in the tendency to treat calamity as an act of God. When disease killed several of his slaves in the 1730s, Byrd expressed the belief in his diary that his “people” had been killed as a punishment for his sins.

Like William Byrd II, Britons in the Church of England shared with Reformed

Protestants a belief that public calamity could be visited upon a sinful people by an angry

God. Between the years 1729 and 1746, Anglicans sometimes attributed slave unrest to divine punishment and ordered days of fasting or thanksgiving to assuage the Lord’s vengeance. But, by and large, members of the Church of England were still more likely to articulate “natural” explanations of slave unrest, adopting a rational skepticism that sought to discover the “Law of Nature.” Perhaps most important of all, Anglicans lacked the fundamental anticipation of religious declension and spiritual revival that infused the

Calvinism of the Reformed Protestant churches to the north.

Members of Reformed Protestant churches interpreted the events of the day very differently. As Kidd has noted, “to expect revival, one had to experience despair,” and

363 the Congregationalists of Massachusetts had specialized in religious insecurity for more than a century.55 Church leaders had made several attempts at religious renewal since at least 1670 an there were many smaller revivals in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.56 Episodes such as the great New England earthquake of 1727 terrified congregants in Massachusetts and filled town churches with dread over the wrath of

God.57 Such localized events could galvanize Reformed Protestant congregations for months or even years in specific regions, but the emotional conversion experience inevitably declined.

It was in Boston, in 1723, that a local Congregationalist minister first preached slave rebellion as the wrath of God visited upon a sinful people. Like Charles Town in

1740 and New York City in 1741, fire had consumed several houses in Boston during the spring of 1723. On April 15, Governor Drummer issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of the city, explaining that the fires had been “designedly and industriously kindled by some villanous and desperate Negroes, or other dissolute people, as appears by the

Confession of some of them.” The governor “vehemently Suspected” that slaves had

“entered into a wicked & horrid Combination to burn and destroy the said Town.”

Offering a reward for information leading to their arrest, he ordered that the streets be cleared and five guard towers constructed.58 In a plan that would have fascinated the twentieth-century theorist Foucault, the guard towers were to be turned inwards, to watch over the streets of Boston and protect the people from their resident slaves.

55 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 1. 56 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 105-118. 57 Thomas Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven, 2004), 162-165. 58 “Proclamation of Governor Drummer,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol 14, No. 1, January 1860, 36.

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Sitting in the pews of the Old South Church, young congregant Samuel Dexter listened to Reverend Joseph Sewall preach on the divine judgments brought against the town of Boston. “I went to B: [Boston] Lecture,” Dexter wrote in his diary on April 18th,

“Mr. Sewal preached from ye 4 Psal: 4. Stand in Awe & sin not. He made an Excellent discourse, particularly occasioned by ye Late fires yt have broke out in Boston, supposed to be purposely set by ye Negroes.” The reverend Joseph Sewall insisted that God had sought to punish the people of the town for their sins. “Ye Lord seems to have a

Controversy with his People & is makeing some of ye vilest Instruments a scourge to us,”

Dexter wrote of Sewall’s sermon, “Do we do our duty to ym. The Lord make us more

Watchfull & Carefull.” For young Dexter, the enslaved black residents of Boston were

“ye vilest instruments” sent to scourge the people of Massachusetts.59 Slave rebellion led him to reflect upon the “duty” of the people of Boston, but not at all upon the institution of slavery.

Between 1723 and 1739, Reformed Protestants rarely mentioned slave unrest in their sermons and diaries. Dissenters expressed a growing sense that they lived in a time of spiritual decline, but their writings revealed concern with their own locality. Without slave unrest nearby, it was not viewed as a sign of judgment upon their people. Nervous

Calvinists interpreted signs of spiritual distress in the growing waywardness of their congregations and the sinful behavior of their own communities rather than in struggles abroad. Bonomi describes a pervading fear of “being corrupted by secular forces” as a central concern of many church leaders in the years before the First Great Awakening.

Commercial growth and subsequent economic depression created uncertainty among

59 “The Diary of Samuel Dexter,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol 14, No. 1, January 1860, 36.

365 populations in New England and the mid-Atlantic and fed anxieties of decline. This was especially true in the first half of the decade, when ministers were still heavily focused on the sins of their local communities.

The best example of the general state of mind of Reformed Protestants emerges from the official election day sermons given before the General Assembly of

Massachusetts. “The Powerful Love of the World, and Exorbitant Reach after Riches,” preached Joseph Wigglesworth, “which is becoming the reigning Temper in Persons of all Ranks in our Land, is alone enough to awaken our concerns for abandon’d, slighted, and forgotten Religion.” In his sermon An Essay for Reviving Religion given before the

General Assembly in 1732, Wigglesworth chose a scriptural passage “containing the

Description of a Church of Christ sunk into the most woeful Religious Decays,” and bemoaned a whole host of “iniquities and vices” among the people, including “pride,”

“scornfulness,” “ungovernableness in youth,” “Carnality,” “Passionate love of the world,” and “Lewd manners.” He explained that “God's method in bringing on

Reformations, is ordinarily in a great measure by pouring out a general Spirit of

Supplication upon the revolted People,” and he called out for a revival of religion in the province.60 Wigglesworth did not see world events as the cause of decline, but the

“revolt” of his people by sinning against God.

The most well-known account of revival in the 1730s also focused on personal sins and general waywardness as signs of spiritual decline. In his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Works of God (1735) Jonathan Edwards noted that the 1720s and early

1730s had been a “far more degenerate time” in the town of Northampton,

60 Samuel Wigglesworth, An Essay for Reviving Religion (Boston, [1733]),13- 20.

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Massachusetts, than in the previous generation.61 The members of his church “seemed to be at that time very insensible of the things of religion, and engaged in other cares and pursuits.” The youth of the town were “much addicted to night-walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices.”62 The need for revival was evident in the absence of religious conviction in his congregants, rather than in the wider events of the world.

Reformed Protestants’ more localized concerns of spiritual decline increasingly gave way to widespread anticipation of a biblical punishment delivered upon the colonies. By the end of the decade, international events seemed far more ominous to ministers and congregants in dissenting churches. Kidd describes rumors of war with the

Catholic kingdoms of France and Spain as “creating fears among many colonists that

Catholic powers would destroy them.” Protestants sought reassurance of God’s favor in the church. Kidd stresses the role of this religious threat throughout the 1720s and 1730s, but in fact these concerns were remarkably absent from the manuscripts of dissenters concerned with spiritual revival throughout most of the decade. Declarations of war with

Catholic Spain in 1739 provided new evidence to dissenters of their impending judgment.

Descriptions of imminent scourging became far more common in the correspondence of Reformed Church members at the beginning of the war. “There seems to be a scourge prepared for us,” wrote Pennsylvania Quaker James Logan in 1740, “that

I doubt we shall feel unmercifully laid on.”63 The President of the Council of

Pennsylvania confided to his English friend Thomas Story that he feared God might

61 Edwards on Revivals: Containing a faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in the conversion of many hundred souls in Northampton, Massachusetts, A. D. 1735. Also, Thoughts on the revival of religion in New England, 1742, and the way in which it ought to be acknowledged and promoted (New York, NY: Dunning & Spalding, 1832), 33-34. 62 Ibid., 33-34. 63 James Logan to Thomas Story, Philadelphia, 8 Nov, 1740, in Norman Penney, ed., Correspondence of James Logan and Thomas Story, 1724-1741, (Philadelphia: Friends Historical Association, 1927), 80.

367 punish the British people in the war against Spain. “As to the public concerns of

Pennsylvania, I perceive they are in a perplexed condition, as are all the nations in the world of the Christian name,” replied the Quaker minister Thomas Story from England,

“which seems to portend that Heaven is displeased with us mortals, of all ranks and names, for our apostacy and transgressions, which doubtless are great, numerous, and provoking.” Story anticipated that the nations of the earth would be “dashed to pieces one upon another, with such other additional corrections as may please the Creator, Governor, and Judge of the world in judgement and mercy to inflict, as famine, pestilence, and the like.”64

The sermons and personal diaries of New England revivalists reflected these same growing tensions. “I am convinced that God has a great controversy with New England,” wrote evangelical David Hall in his diary in 1740, “He calls us to great searching of heart: he sends war: Sore Sickness. And seems to be sending ye Evil arrows of famine.”65

Ministers preaching from the Old South Church consistently warned congregants of

“God’s just judgments.” Though the notes from sermons are frustratingly vague, the famed Reverend Thomas Prince would, in the spring of 1739, preach that the people

“lived in a time of great dangers & defections" and should pray for “a double portion of

Spirit to wh is in other Christians.” Prince would weekly warn his congregants that in

“our times of trouble and danger” they should pray for forgiveness to God, though he provided few examples of his specific fears.66 In the evening sermons, Reverend Joseph

64 Thomas Story to James Logan, London, 12th Month, 26th, 1740, in Wilson Armistead, ed., Memoirs of James Logan; A Distinguished Scholar and Christian Legislator; (London: Charles Gilpin, Bishopsgate Street Without., 1851), 166-168. 65 David Hall Diaries, 1740-1789, March 7th, 1740, Massachusetts Historical Society. 66 “Notes on sermons delivered at Boston’s Old South Church, 1738-1740,” Mar 4 1738/9 PM Tho. Prince 2 Kings 2, Massachusetts Historical Society.

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Sewall would assure congregants “our afflictions are orderd by God," and that the Lord’s

Judgments were sent to make men submissive under heavenly trials.67 What these heavenly trials were, exactly, were not explained.

By 1741, Magistrate Josiah Cotton of Plymouth, Massachusetts, shared with his fellow congregants a general fear that a great scourging would soon be realized among the people of his colony. “The Last Days are surely come,” he wrote in his diary, “for ye times are perilous confusions over ye whole known world, Wars & rumours of Wars.”

The magistrate saw ominous signs in the conflicts in Europe and the terrible winter that had gripped New England the previous year. “And may we not read our Sin in our punishment,” wrote Cotton, “we have been too fond of Gold, & behold it is turned to dross...” The magistrate recorded a letter sent to him by a friend, who believed the

“affairs of ye publick viz: the pride of our fashions, ye intemperance in our living, ye great contempt of authority, & ye deplorable state of our trade” all anticipated that “such a Cloud is gathering & spreading over this & ye neighbouring Provinces, as presents to us with some dark and hideous prospects.”

In all of these “perilous confusions,” Cotton saw the most terrible in a slave conspiracy that had emerged in the neighboring colony to the south. “New York in ye

Summer past has been ye Scene of a terrible tragedy,” he wrote, “the Negros plotting, or rather ye people there imagining they designed ye destruction of yt City, they thereupon burned, Hanged & Transported multitudes of their Negros.”68 Word of the burning of so many slaves had troubled him. He had followed the stories in the weekly Boston Gazette and expressed disbelief that magistrates could continue with the executions, especially

67 Ibid., June 17, 1739, PM, Doctor Sewall preaches from 39 Psalm 9, Massachusetts Historical Society. 68 Josiah Cotton, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, April 19, 1739, 303, Massachusetts Historical Society.

369 after reading the defense of the “Romish Priest” John Ury, “for who alive can think yt reads his defence & dying Declaration, but yt he was as innocent as ye child unborn.”69

And so Cotton authored the most scathing critique of a colonial slave conspiracy trial to emerge from his time. In his letter to New York council member Cadwallader

Colden, the Plymouth magistrate articulated both the rationalism of his age and the

Reformed Protestant tradition in which he believed. Cotton challenged the methods used by officials in exhorting evidence from slaves, comparing the practice to courts using

“spectre evidence” (that is, testimony that a spirit in the form of a particular person had been tormenting others) to convict men and (mostly) women of witchcraft. Working from his own study of superstition among Plymouth villagers, he insisted that such forms of evidence were “not worth a straw,” for they “are obtained by foul means by force or hire,” and unlikely to obtain the truth.70 Cotton worried over the pervasive brutality against slaves, suggesting that “possibly there have been some murmurings amongst ye

Negros” because of “ye Cruelty & inhumanity they have met with which is on rise in ye

English plantations & not long since occasion such another tremendous & unreasonable a

Massore at Antego.” But it seemed to him as likely for “Witches to fly in ye air” as for

“ye blacks.. should attempt ye destruction of a city.” At the end of the letter,

Cotton urged Colden to show mercy, “For we have too much reason to fear yt ye divine vengeance does & will pursue for ye ill treatment to ye bodies & poor Souls of our poor S

& ye meaner sort of people,” and he implored the New Yorker to remember he would be

69 Josiah Cotton, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, April 19, 1739, 304, Massachusetts Historical Society. 70 Josiah Cotton, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, April 19, 1739, 305, Massachusetts Historical Society.

370 judged by a “higher tribunal.”71 He must have deemed such a warning necessary. Colden was an Anglican, after all.

By the early 1740s, Cotton joined with his fellow dissenters in his belief that spiritual decline had invited the wrath of an angry God. Like Britons in many colonies of the British Empire, he believed that slave unrest had become yet another sign that the world was prepared for a great scourging. The times were “perilous confusions” in

Massachusetts, and the slave conspiracy in New York had only added to his certainty that

God had a quarrel with his people. “But may we not in these things read our Sin in our

Punishment,” he asked. He feared divine punishment for his people.

Only one piece of news recorded in his diary appears to have garnered his excitement. In the Boston Gazette (“ye best or ye most communicative of ye publick prints”), he had read “frequent accounts” of “a famous extraordinary Minister of ye

Church of England about 25 years old who draws all men after him, many Thousands attending on his Sermons at once.” He was so popular, Cotton wrote, “yt he is forc’t to resort to ye fields for space sufficient to contain his numerous auditories.” Cotton worried that the Church of England, “to which he belongs & wherein he received orders neglect

& contemn him,” but they could not quiet the “main subject of his discourse, viz. regeneration & holiness of life & heart.” He noted that the latest accounts said “his orders are for Georgia from whence he has made an excursion to N. York,” and in

Massachusetts, he was “expected here next summer.”72 Cotton could rejoice. George

Whitefield was coming.

71 Ibid., 307. 72 Josiah Cotton’s first described George Whitefield in this January 8, 1740 entry in his memoir, well before his first discussion of slave conspiracy in New York. He was clearly already excited about

371

The Great Awakening and Slave Unrest

If there was one person who did the most to carry the biblical interpretation of slave rebellion throughout the British Empire, it was the itinerant minister George

Whitefield. Giving thousands of sermons and traveling constantly throughout the English speaking world, Whitefield used a dramatic style of preaching that fascinated congregations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. His great gift for oratory and his passion for awaking religious devotion allowed him to bridge the diverse religious communities that comprised the British provinces in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Whitefield connected revivals. He joined evangelical ministers, newspapermen, and many colonial supporters who together worked to inspire religious conversion throughout the provinces. As Kidd has noted, we “cannot discount the role that simple hard work played in generating the awakenings.”73 Whitefield did a great deal of that work.

Whitefield played a critical role in spreading the idea that slave unrest was a visitation from God. Many leading Anglican colonists had already articulated fears of divine wrath, but these critiques were usually confined to a specific locale or region that had experienced slave unrest. In the two largest slave holding colonies on the mainland,

Virginia and South Carolina, this critique had been entirely absent. For their part,

Reformed Protestants in the 1730s rarely mentioned slave unrest as a judgment sent by

God because most of these congregations did not live in colonies with incidents of

Whitefield before his darker ruminations about the times in the following years.. Josiah Cotton, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, 1726-1756, April 19, 1739, 279, Massachusetts Historical Society. 73 Kidd, The Great Awakening, xviii.

372 rebellion. Only in 1723, after the fires in Boston, had congregants worried that God had sought to “scourge” white colonists with their slaves. In his sermons to colonists and his

Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina (1740),

Whitefield directly challenged Anglicans and Reformed Protestants with his charge that slave unrest was a sign of God’s displeasure upon all slave holders in the provinces.

The famous itinerant minister’s critique of these colonies was carried throughout the British Atlantic by the prolific “public prints” of the age. Lambert argues the transatlantic revivals of the long decade between 1735 and 1746 were actually the product of new systems of Atlantic communication between Protestants on both sides of the ocean. The rapid growth of print culture in the British Isles and the American colonies proved fertile ground for promoting religious revivals in Europe and in the

Americas.74 The revivals created “extraordinary religious noise” that encouraged large events and created the sense that something incredible was taking place.75 If there was

“extraordinary religious noise” in the colonies, there was also extraordinary noise about slave insurrection. Rumors of slave unrest were reported on the same printed pages as news of revival and by the early 1740s, the debate about their relationship had entered the discourse in several public prints. Whitefield’s celebrity ensured that his critique of slavery would play a central role in these publications.

The Great Awakening was born from this transatlantic communication. In

December of 1733, the Reverend John Edwards witnessed in the town of Northampton a

“Surprizing Work of God” among several of his congregants, each claiming they had been visited by the spirit of Christ and their souls saved. “And then a concern about the

74 Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,”112-113. 75 Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 89.

373 great things of religion began,” Edwards would write two years later, “All seemed to be seized with a deep concern about their eternal salvation.”76 In his A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God (1735), Edwards claimed that at least thirty-two communities in the Connecticut River valley had been swept up and converted by Christ.

Printers in New England aggressively printed his account of a growing revival and the narrative was soon reproduced in the presses of the British Isles. Evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were inspired by the account.

In England, the narrative attracted the attention of the young aspiring minister

George Whitefield. He had already adopted a strong Calvinist belief in election and encountered God’s grace through a conversion experience. Despite his doctrinal bent toward a dissenting church, Whitefield still chose to take the Anglican orders of a deacon in 1736, a momentous decision for the future of revivals in America. His membership in the Church of England opened the doors of churches throughout the colonies even as he preached Calvinist beliefs to congregants. In England, Whitefield quickly became known for his emotive open-air preaching and his ability to “awaken” souls to their imminent peril and he expressed a strong desire to travel to the provinces. After a short stay in

Georgia and South Carolina in 1738, Whitefield returned to the American colonies in

1739 for a longer two-year visit. He sparked a religious sensation in cities such as

Philadelphia, where crowds of more than ten thousand people gathered to listen to the sermons of the traveling minister.77

76 Jonathan Edwards, A faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in the conversion of many hundred souls in Northampton, and the neighbouring towns and villages of the county of Hampshire, in the province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New-England. Third Edition, (Boston, 1738). 77 Benjamin Franklin conducted a typically clever experiment in Philadelphia during one of Whitefield’s outdoor sermons. He observed the distance with which people in a crowd could hear Whitefield speak and then calculated the amount of people that could fit within that distance. His calculations suggested that up to twenty-five thousand people could hear Whitefield’s sermons outdoors. J.A. Leo Lemay and P.M. Zall,

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It was on one such evangelical journey through the colonies of the south that his view of slave rebellion appears to have taken shape. Writing in his journal on December

15th, 1739, Whitefield found the province of North Carolina to be a Godless place. He insisted “in these parts satan seems to lead people captive at his will… the commonality is made up of Negroes and convicts, and if they pretend to serve God, their masters,

Pharaoh like, cry out, ‘Ye are idle, ye are idle.’”78 For the itinerant minister, the great crime of the planters was not in slavery but in their refusal to allow the Christian baptism of their bonded people. The planters were Egyptian pharaohs holding the people of Israel in bondage. Like the Egyptians of old, British planters appeared to be preventing slaves from sharing in the covenant of God.

Two weeks later, Whitefield experienced the fear of slave rebellion. He had arrived with several companions in northern South Carolina only four months after the

Stono Rebellion of 1739.79 According to Whitefield’s journal entry on January 2nd, 1740, as the evening grew dark in the swamps of the Low Country, he and his traveling companions accidentally missed a “gentleman’s house” where they had planned to stay the night. Continuing down the road, they encountered a hut crowded with black people sitting by a fire. When Whitefield’s companions asked directions, the people inside said they were newcomers and did not know the location of the “gentleman’s house.”

Something about their response made Whitefield’s companions nervous. They

eds., Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: an Authoritative Text, Tackgrounds, Criticism (New York, NY: Norton, 1986), 105-107. 78 George Whitefield to ____, 15 December 1739, Letters of George Whitefield, For the Period 1734-1742 (Edinburgh, UK: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1976), 138. 79 George Whitefield, George Whitefield’s Journals: A New Edition Containing Fuller Material than any Hitherto Published (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1960), 354-355.

375 speculated, irrationally, that the men inside were probably escaped rebels from the Stono

Rebellion, a slave revolt that had taken place far to the south.

Fear took hold of the evangelical minister’s party. Together, they “mended their pace,” galloping down the dark road imagining pursuit. The horsemen soon saw another light ahead, but fearing more rebel slaves, took a dangerous turn into the Live Oak swamp. Whitefield described peering through the mossy trees, watching black men dance around a “great fire.” After a long, fearful ride, the evangelical minister arrived at the home of a wealthy planter, who was familiar with the slaves and explained “upon what occasion they were in those places in which we found them.” Writing in his journal, Whitefield revealed that he finally felt “much comfort, after we had ridden nearly three score miles, and as we thought, in great peril of our lives.”80

Though it seems a minor incident, especially compared to the desperate violence of the Stono Rebellion a few months before, something changed in the preaching of

Whitefield. On his first visit to Charles Town in the late summer of 1738, Whitefield had complimented Charles Town, praising the “neatness of the buildings” and describing head Anglican clergymen Commissary Alexander Garden as a “good soldier of Christ.”81

But his journey by land through Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas affected his view of the southern colonies. Four days after his experience in the swamp, Whitefield was preaching in Josiah Smith’s Charles Town Church, warning the people of South Carolina of their impending doom. It amazed him that congregants could be so “polite” after

80 Whitefield, George Whitefield’s Journals, 354-355; Andrew Lee Feight, “The Good and the Just: Slavery and the Development of Evangelical Protestantism in the American South, 1700-1830,” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2001), 31-32. 81 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 69.

376 experiencing the “Divine judgments lately sent amongst them.”82 Frustrated, Whitefield continued to give sermons to dissenter congregations. On January 29, 1740, he wrote his powerful and controversial Letters to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and

South-Carolina providing a critique of British slave societies and expounding on the relationship between rebellion and divine wrath.

“For near this two years last past,” Whitefield wrote, “[God] has been in a remarkable manner contending with the people of South Carolina. Their houses have been depopulated with the smallpox and fever, and their own Slaves have rose up in arms against them.” Whitefield expressed surprise that slaves did not rebel in all of the colonies more often. “Considering what Usage they commonly meet with,” he wrote, “I have wondered, that we have not more instances of Self-Murder among the Negroes, or that they have not more frequently rose-up in Arms against their owners.”83 Whitefield took pity on the slaves, but he did not advocate for their abolition. “Enslaving or misusing their Bodies, would comparatively speaking, be an inconsiderable Evil,” he insisted, “were proper care taken of their souls.” The great sin against the slaves was that

“most of you, on Purpose, keep your Negroes ignorant of Christianity.”84 The minister then stretched out his accusations to include all the provinces that had experienced slave unrest. “These judgments are undoubtedly sent abroad, not only that the Inhabitants of that, but of other Provinces, should learn righteousness: And unless you all repent, you must in like manner Expect to perish.”85 These were hard words for a people suffering

82 Ibid. 83 George Whitefield, Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina (Philadelphia: Franklin, 1740), 14. 84 Ibid., 14-15. 85 Whitefield, Letter to the Inhabitants, 16.

377 drought, plague, and rebellion, and yet Whitefield insisted that God’s “judgments” were upon the slave owners of British America.

Whitefield’s critique of British slavery created a controversy in the American colonies. Three months after he wrote the letter, Benjamin Franklin printed the Letter to the Inhabitants in a large pamphlet entitled Three Letters from the Reverend Mr. G.

Whitefield. Franklin also decided to print the Letter to the Inhabitants in two issues of his popular Pennsylvania Gazette, on April 10th and 17th of 1740.86 The Letter to the

Inhabitants was reprinted by the New England Weekly Journal in Boston, Massachusetts, in the April 29 issue of the newspaper. Most surprising was the numbers of newspapers that did not print the Letter to the Inhabitants. Whitefield’s activities appeared in 236 separate colonial news articles in 1740, more than in any other year of his life, and his letters describing the revivals were sensational news.87 The decision of so many printers to avoid the letter suggests the anticipation of a growing controversy.

The strongest printed response to Whitefield’s Letter to the Inhabitants emerged from the Anglican clergy of South Carolina. The young itinerant minister had openly challenged Charles Town’s Commissary Alexander Garden by declaring in his printed journal that “if it be asked why there is so little religion in the Church of England, it may be answered, the missionaries… lead very bad examples,” and complaining “Mr. Garden, the present Commissary, is strict in the outward discipline of the Church,” but there was

“no stirring among the dry bones.”88 After accusing the Bishop of not preaching

86 Pennsylvania Gazette, April 10, 1740; Pennsylvania Gazette, April 17, 1740. 87 Lisa Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 149. 88George Whitefield, A Continuation of the Reverend Whitefield’s Journal (London, 1740), 86.

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“justification by faith alone,” the publication of the Letter to the Inhabitants appears to have finally provoked a response from the Bishop.

In Six Letters to the Rev. George Whitefield (1740), Garden challenged

Whitefield’s assertion that slave unrest was a visitation from God. He first questioned accused Whitefield of pretending to be a messenger from God. “But what is it you

MUST thus inform them of? Why, that you THINK God has a Quarrel with them,” wrote Garden, “Had God sent you charged with this special Message[?]” Garden then admitted that cruelty and abuse of slaves was wrong, stating “God will have Quarrel with any of the Human Race” who abuse others, but he rejected the idea that slaves were mistreated in the colonies. “The Generality of Owners use their slaves with all due

Humanity,” he insisted. Garden found Whitefield’s argument that the slaves could rise

“both sinful, and dangerous to the publick,” and refused to reprint them in his own tract.

“More virulence and Falsehood cannot be contained in so few Lines,” Garden stated dismissively.89 The Commissaries response to Whitefield was reprinted in several editions, in South Carolina and Massachusetts as well as London.90

Evangelicals rose to the defense of George Whitefield. When New Englander

Alexander Croswell read Garden’s criticisms, he published a stinging critique of the

Church of England’s “persecution” of men with “flaming zeal to promote the highest

Degrees of piety.”91 But Commissary Garden’s critique of Whitefield’s argument concerning divine judgment and slave unrest appears to have gained momentum in the colonies. In January of 1741, John Peter Zenger of New York reprinted several of

89 Alexander Garden, Six Letters to the Rev. George Whitefield (Boston, Mass., 1740), 51-52. 90 I have only been able to locate editions from Boston. Boston printer Thomas Fleet’s version was labeled a second edition and is the most often cited. 91 Andrew Croswell, An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Gardens Three First Letters to the Rev. Mr. Whitefield (Boston, MA: 1741), 50.

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Whitefield’s arguments from his letter in a pamphlet entitled The Querist: The Rev. Mr.

Whitefield, the Rev. Mr. Barden’s Letter and the Causits (1741).92 After the slave conspiracy of 1741 later that year, Anglican missionary Richard Charlton blamed

Whitefield’s “imprudence and indiscretion” for the fires in New York.93

The strongest response to George Whitefield’s sermons on slavery emerged from dissenting church members in South Carolina. These Reformed Protestants were already part of the religious tradition that anticipated biblical punishments as part of the spiritual decline and revival of God’s chosen elect. As early as 1710, members of the Church of

England comprised less than half (42.5 percent) of the population of South Carolina and were outnumbered by Presbyterians (45 percent), Baptists (10 percent), and Quakers (2.5 percent).94 Many of these dissenting churches were more than familiar with the consequences of slave unrest. During the Stono Rebellion of September 9, 1739, the

Presbyterian congregation in the settlement of Wiltown Bluff had on that Sunday been listening to the dissenting Reverend Archibald Stobo when a Mr. Golightly burst into the service.95 He announced to the congregation that the slaves had risen in revolt.96 The

Presbyterian men of that church became the center of the militia that attacked the Stono rebels near the Edisto River and brutally executed so many of the insurgents at the end of the fighting.97 In Charles Town and its environs, Whitefield discovered Reformed

92 I was unable to locate a copy of the Querist. The pamphlet is noted in Thomas J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: ‘The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York’ (New York: Free Press, 1985), 304n8. 93 Charlton to SPG, Secretary, 30 October 1741, SPG Manuscripts, B9, no. 62, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, as quoted in Davis, Rumor of Revolt, 304n8. 94 Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1983, reprinted 1997), 210. 95 George Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina (Columbia: Duffie and Chapman, 1870) 227-228. 96 Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church, 228. 97 Feight, The Good and the Just, 23.

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Protestants congregations deeply receptive to George Whitefield’s interpretation of God’s wrath.

Many of dissenters allied with Whitefield in South Carolina shared important connections with dissenters in northern provinces. The Reverend Josiah Smith had been trained at Harvard College in Massachusetts. Though he had begun his ministry in

Bermuda, Smith had taken a position as minister to the Cainhoy Congregation outside of

Charles Town.98 The minister John Osgood, head of an Independent church in

Dorchester, South Carolina, had also graduated from Harvard in 1733.99 Even the printers of the South Carolina Gazette, Elizabeth and Peter Timothy, had been sponsored and financed by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.100 These men and women promoted an interpretation of slave rebellion that was shared throughout many corners of the

British Atlantic.

But perhaps the South Carolinian most affected by Whitefield’s sermons was native born. Hugh Bryan was a wealthy planter and slave holder from St. Helena parish that had suffered through long bouts of spiritual uncertainty. As a young man, he had been captured by American Indians during the Yamasee War of 1715 and held for a year.

During his captivity, he was given a Bible by an Indian woman and he had found succor in its reading until he was traded to the Spanish in Saint Augustine.101 Historian Harvey

Jackson suggests that Bryan and his fellow planters near Beaufort had developed a

98 Ibid., 43-44. 99 William Howland Kenney, III, “Alexander Garden and George Whitefield: The Significance of Revivalism in South Carolina 1738-1741,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), 9. 100 Lisa Smith, The First Great Awakening, 76. 101 Hugh Bryan, Living Christianity delineated, in the diaries and letters of two eminently pious persons lately deceased; viz. Mr. Hugh Bryan, and Mrs. Mary Hutson, both of South-Carolina. With a Preface by the Reverend Mr. John Conder, and the Reverend Mr. Thomas Gibbons… (London, Printed for J. Buckland, 1760), 2-3.

381 heightened sense of insecurity from the violence that pervaded the region throughout the period.102 Years after his return to South Carolina, Bryan married the much younger

Catherine Barnwell, a pious Anglican who was “born again of God” during a “severe fit of sickness” in 1739.103 Hugh and Catherine Bryan attended George Whitefield’s sermons in Bethesda, Georgia, in June of 1740, and after listening to the itinerant minister, Hugh Bryan spent a tortured day and night until he received an “assurance of

God’s favour” in his soul.104 Whitefield wrote of Hugh Bryan as his “new convert,” and throughout the late summer and early fall of the year, Bryan and his wife sought to proselytize to neighboring planters in their parish.105

On November 18th, 1740, a terrible fire swept through Charles Town. The fire bells first began to bang an alarm at two p.m. and within an hour, shops and warehouses all along the Cooper River were engulfed by flame.106 As ships raised anchor to escape the inferno, townsmen and sailors used grappling hooks and rope to tear down buildings in the path of the fire. 107 At the onset of evening dark, the flames were still consuming more than a third of homes in the largest port town in the southern colonies. During the blaze, a false rumor began to circulate through the panicked populations that slaves had started the fire.108 The story changed as it passed from one person to the next. Ships sailing for New England shared different rumors with printers in the north: slaves had

102 Harvey Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina,” William & Mary Quarterly 43 (October 1986), 596-597. 103 Hugh Bryan, Living Christianity, 8-10. 104 Ibid., 28-30. 105 Jackson, “Hugh Bryan,” 599-600. 106 Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Charles Town, 22nd Nov, 1740, The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, Volume One: April 2, 1737-September 25, 1742 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 271; Matthew Mulcahy, “The "Great Fire" of 1740 and the Politics of Disaster Relief in Colonial Charleston,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), 138-139. 107 Kenneth Scott, “Sufferers in the Charleston Fire of 1740,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 206. 108 Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Charles Town, 22nd Nov, 1740, The Letterbook, 273.

382 attacked the Carolina colonists when they had attempted to put out the blaze.109 Over the next few days, the white colonists of Charles Town feared an imminent rebellion from their slaves.110

The news of the fire reached Bryan on his Saint Helena plantation some time the following evening.111 It came at a sorrowful time in his life. His young wife Catherine had died of an illness in October. “My loss in her is great,” Bryan wrote to his daughter,

“she was my sincere friend.”112 On her deathbed, she exhorted Bryan to "follow

Whitefield” for “God will bless him, wherever he goes.”113 At home on his plantation and reflecting on the news from Charles Town, Bryan felt certain that God had a quarrel with the people of South Carolina. On November 20th, he began to write a letter addressed to the inhabitants of his province.

“Surely God’s Just Judgments are upon us,” wrote Bryan, “Is there Evil befallen to a City, and the Lord hath not done it?” Determined to assuage the wrath of an angry

God, the evangelical Bryan authored a letter to the people of South Carolina explaining the divine origin of their sufferings. He argued that the Lord “hath at diverse Times been scourging of us by Drought; by Diseases on Man and Beast; [and] by repeated

Insurrections of our slaves…”114 The members of the protestant churches had not understood “the Absolute necessity of being Born again of God.” They had been misled by a corrupt Anglican clergy who had no “Bowels of Love, no Pity for poor perishing

109 Boston Evening-Post, Jan. 12, 1741; Boston Weekly News Letter, Jan. 22, 1741. 110 Four days after the fire, Robert Pringle wrote that the people still were aware of the “great Risque we Run from an Insurrection of our Negroes which we were very apprehensive off.” Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, Charles Town, 22nd Nov, 1740, The Letterbook, 273. 111 The time of arrival is conjecture. The fire began in the middle of the afternoon on November 18 and Bryan dated his original letter to the South Carolina Gazette as November 20. 112 Bryan to Daughter, October 14, 1740, in Living Christianity, 31. 113 Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement,” 600. 114 South Carolina Gazette, January 1-8, 1741.

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Souls, that are wandering in worse that Egyptian[sic] Darkness.” He argued “as are the people, so are the priests,” and insisted the religious leaders of South Carolina should repent and open their hearts to Christ.115 This attack on the clergy of the Church of

England might have become just another example of the religious debate between “New

Light” ministers and “Old Light” clergy if Bryan had not taken the entire issue one step to further. “O! that our KING wou'd humble himself,” he wrote, “lest his Principalities shou'd come down, even the Crown of his Glory; for GOD regardeth not Princes, except their Thrones are established in Righteousness.” Blaming the sins of the public for slave rebellion was one thing. Blaming the unrest on King George II was quite another.

Bryan did not write the letter alone. His description of calamity sent by God was born from his own tradition in the Church of England after years of colonial officials declaring days of fasting and humiliation to assuage God’s wrath. His description of a great scourging by insurrectionary slaves visited upon an unrepentant people was part of the Reformed Protestant tradition of which the evangelical planter was now a part. And the references to “Egyptian Darkness” were borrowed from the sermons of George

Whitefield. In fact, many of the passages in the letter may have been written by

Whitefield. Bryan shared his letter with his brother, Jonathan, who then carried it to

Whitefield, asking that he “correct” it.116 On January 8th, 1741, Peter Timothy printed

Bryan’s “Letter to a Friend” in the South Carolina Gazette, offering an explanation for fires and rebellion that challenged the authority of the Church of England.117

115 Ibid. 116 Kenney, “Alexander Garden and George Whitefield,” 14. 117 Harvey Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina,” William & Mary Quarterly 43 (October 1986), 594-614.

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Bryan’s letter to the South Carolina Gazette has emerged as a pivotal moment in the history of the First Great Awakening. Within days of its publication, colonial authorities arrested Bryan, printer Peter Timothy, and the famous Whitefield for libel against the king’s Church of England.118 In response, dissenters and evangelicals throughout the British Atlantic accused South Carolina of religious persecution.

Historians have written a great deal about this episode, noting that Bryan’s “Letter to a

Friend” directly challenged the religious authority of the Church of England.119 What has received far less attention is the beginning of Hugh Bryan’s letter: the premise that God had inspired the slaves of South Carolina to rise in rebellion.

Though Bryan wrote the letter published in the South Carolina Gazette, ministers of dissenting churches throughout South Carolina were already preaching sermons arguing that the fires and slave unrest represented the wrath of God. It was Smith who submitted articles in the South Carolina Gazette publicly defending the radical positions of Whitefield and Bryan.120 Though more reticent about the controversial relationship between slavery and the wrath of God, in his published sermon The Burning of Sodom, the evangelical minister argued that the fire that had consumed Charles Town in 1740 was yet more evidence of God’s vengeance upon a sinful people.121 His colleague John

Evans was less reticent. “‘Tis not very long that Barbarous nations, a people of fierce and savage countenance whose language you did not understand, came upon you,” preached Evans, referring to the Yamassee War of 1715, “And after that your own slaves

118 South Carolina Gazette, January 15, 1741. For an account of this arrest, see Jackson, Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement, 119 See, for example, Kenney, “Alexander Garden and George Whitefield,” 1-16; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘The Grand Prophet,’ Hugh Bryan: Early Evangelicalism's Challenge to the Establishment and Slavery in the Colonial South, The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 238-250. 120 Kidd, Great Awakening, 72-73. 121 Josiah Smith, The Burning of Sodom. With It’s Moral Causes… (Boston: D. Fowle, 1741).

385 rose up against you in a very fierce and tragical scene.” He demanded of his congregation, “Is it not Time for each of us to enquire, who has brought these Evils upon us, and to ask Is it not I?”122

The arrest of Whitefield threw the sermons of the evangelicals into the widespread transatlantic print culture of the British Empire. Josiah Smith’s sermon The

Burning of Sodom was published by Franklin in Philadelphia, while John Evans National

Ingratitude Lamented was printed in Charles Town but almost certainly was meant for an evangelical audience in other provinces. Because of the growing communication networks of the period, “New Lights” in New England and Philadelphia could easily read of the progress of evangelical religion in the southern colonies and view news of God’s wrath upon the people of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina.

The controversy ended when Whitefield sailed from Charles Town on January

16th. All three of the arrested men had posted bail and though they were to be tried in the next session, there is no known record of a trial.123 Historian William Kenney suggests that the religiously tolerant officials of South Carolina had no intention of convicting

George Whitefield, especially since authorities in the British Isles and all the other provinces had offered so much support for his sermons.124Aboard ship, Whitefield wrote a letter to Hugh and Jonathan Bryan encouraging them in their labors to redeem the people of South Carolina.125

122 Josiah Smith, The Burning of Sodom; John Evans, National Ingratitude Lamented: Being the Substance of a sermon Preach’d at the Old Meeting House in Charles-Town in South-Carolina, September 14th, 1744, A Day of Publick Fast (Charles-Town, S. C.: Peter Timothy, 1745), 28-29. 123 Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement,” 603. 124 Kenney, “Alexander Garden and George Whitefield,” 15-16. 125 Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement,” 603n21.

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By January of 1741, Whitefield had already managed to spread his biblical interpretation of slave rebellion throughout the British Empire. Many leading Anglican colonists had articulated fears that slave unrest was evidence of divine wrath, but these concerns had been limited to specific locales. In his sermons to colonists and his Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina (1740), Whitefield had directly challenged Anglicans and Reformed Protestants with his charge that slave unrest was a sign of God’s displeasure upon all slave holders in the provinces. He had introduced this interpretation of God’s anger directly into South Carolina and inspired

Reformed Protestants with a new interpretation of the meaning behind their great despair.

Through his fame and promotion of print culture, these ideas had been disseminated throughout the British Atlantic. Whitefield played a critical role in spreading the idea that slave unrest was a visitation from God.

Conclusion

This biblical interpretation of slave rebellion suggests that the actions of enslaved people shook the religious foundations of British colonists and profoundly influenced their sense of wellbeing. If a Christian Congregation searched for signs of God’s favor, a slave rebellion, like a plague or fire, could very well be seen as divine wrath, an angry punishment upon a sinful people. In the 1730s, evangelical leaders found a powerful, if highly controversial, sign of God’s anger in slave rebellion and they used the actions of slaves to galvanize nervous congregations.

387

The revivalist interpretation of slave unrest had important consequences for colonial America. Evangelicals like Whitefield were able to use the rebellious actions of the enslaved to galvanize the public toward religious conversion. Rebellious slaves posed a direct challenge to the racial hierarchy established by the British system of slavery and created powerful insecurities among white colonists. These anxieties, which should have naturally created doubts over the egregious abuses of bonded peoples, instead were directed at the personal sins of congregants and the lack of emotional conversion in their communities. The evangelicals explained slave unrest as divine punishment for a host of sins unrelated to the sin of slavery. This perspective drew attention away from actual slave grievances. Though Whitefield complained about the abuses wrought upon slaves by their masters, his answer was slave baptism rather than freedom for enslaved people. In many cases, the actions of rebellious slaves benefited the growth of evangelical religion rather than the aspirations of people desiring their liberty.

The colonial interpretation of slave unrest as a visitation from God represents an important window into the minds of protestant Americans in the first half of the eighteenth century. During a period of tremendous growth in the slave trade and generations before the humanism of the enlightenment had gained sway over many of the

American people, human bondage was still accepted as the norm in the colonies of the

British Empire. Most of the religious leaders who interpreted slave rebellion as the wrath of God did not express doubts about the institution of slavery nor did they promote abolition. George Whitefield and Hugh Bryan were themselves slave owners.126 Rather,

126 Alan Gallay, “The origins of Slaveholders’ Paternalism, George Whitefield, the Bryan Family, and the Great Awakening in the South," Journal of Southern History, 53 (August 1987), 369-394.

388 evangelicals believed that Christ visited slave rebellions upon an unrepentant people.

The fact that so many colonists could interpret slave insurrection in this way should remind us of the great chasm of time between ourselves and our subjects. In our studies of the First Great Awakening, we should remember that white fear of rebellious slaves played an important role in the growth of evangelical religion in colonial America.

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Conclusion: “most undeserved and inexpressibly Great Deliverance”

In the late summer of 1746, the people of Boston gathered in their churches to celebrate King George II’s most recent victory over his Catholic enemies. The news of the Duke of Cumberland’s defeat of Charles Stuart at the battle of Culloden, Scotland, assured the townspeople that the British Protestant interest would survive the great war that had slowly enveloped both Europe and the Americas. In his Thanksgiving Day sermon to the large congregation at South Church, Pastor Thomas Prince chose to begin with a passage from the Bible’s Book of Ezra. “And after all that is come upon us for our evil Deeds, and for our great Trespass,” he read aloud, “seeing that Thou our God has punished us less than our Iniquities deserve, and has given us such Deliverance as this… should we again brake thy Commandments…?” Prince explained that like the ancient

Israelites, the Lord had “righteously chastised” the British people with “various

Judgments.” Though their “inveterate and Popish enemies both without and within the

Kingdom” had been “restless to enslave and ruin us,” the Britons had survived through

God’s “most undeserved and inexpressibly Great Deliverance.” The pastor exhorted his congregation to remember the Lord’s mercy and to forego their breaking of his commandments lest they “justly move Him to display his Anger in their utter Ruin.”1

Prince was warning his parishioners not to be self-satisfied, a condition to which they might have thought themselves to be entitled. After all, challenges to their colonial project had been defeated at every turn. Though the Spanish had managed to stymie invasions in the Caribbean and Saint Augustine, British victories at Puerto Bello (1739)

1 Thomas Prince, A Sermon Delivered at the South Church in Boston (Boston, 1746), 5-6, 12.

390 and French Louisburg (1745) had expanded the Protestant Empire.2 In the British Isles, loyalists to King George II sang “Rule Britannia” in their theatres and London economists authored new broadsides arguing for expansion of plantation trade. The empire seemed poised for a new burst of economic growth.

It was in 1746 that Malachy Postlethwayt authored The National and Private

Advantages of the African Trade Considered, in which he advocated for renewed British support for the Royal African Company. In his pamphlet, he insisted that the “Trade to

Africa is the Branch which renders our American Colonies and Plantations so advantagious to Great Britain.”3 British colonists shared with Postlethwayt a renewed fervor for enslaving Africans after 1746. In what was perhaps the surest sign of a return to business as usual, the South Carolina Assembly allowed the prohibitive duties on the slave trade to expire in 1744. In that year, four slave vessels arrived in Charles Town.

By 1754, the governor of South Carolina reported to the Board of Trade that slave ships were delivering “upwards of 2000 negroes” to the colony a year.4

The new support for the African trade represented a broad consensus between

Britons that the threat of general rebellion had subsided. Slave restiveness and accusations of conspiracy dropped off sharply in the British provinces after 1746. “There was a marked decline of organized rebellious activity on the part of Negro slaves,” noted

Herbert Aptheker of this period, “Precisely why this is so the present writer is not

2An Impartial Representation of the Conduct of the Several Powers of Europe Engaged in the Late War (London, 1749), I, 47-65. 3 Malachy Postlethwayt, The National and Private Advantages of the African Trade Considered (London, 1746), 1. 4 James Glen to BT, Aug. 26, 1754, as quoted in Darold D. Wax, “‘The Great Risque We Run’: The Aftermath of Slave Rebellion at Stono, South Carolina, 1739-1745,” Journal of Negro History 67, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), 144.

391 certain.”5 But after examining the causes of unrest in this era, the quiet that descended upon most of the slave societies of the American and West Indian provinces seems far less mysterious.

In the West Indies, the divisions within slave communities had proven to be too much for any rebels to overcome. As demonstrated in Chapters One and Two, the

African trade had built a plantation complex capable of widespread rebellion by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, but black communities were contentious and divided. African nations and creoles often struggled against each other in this era. In

Jamaica, the success of the Maroons after the outbreak of war in 1729 and the rising proportion of slaves in the population represented a real opportunity for an alliance of black people against planters. Yet rivalries within the black ranks prevented the general rebellion white Britons feared. The Maroon Treaty of 1739 enshrined these differences into law, creating an alliance between planters and maroons against the general slave population. In the 1740s, the Maroons revealed slave conspiracies to planters and crushed the insurrection of 1740 and 1746. In the decades that followed and especially during Tacky’s Revolt during the Seven Years War, the Maroons continued to play a decisive role in suppressing slave unrest on the island.6 British planters had allied themselves with the most formidable fighters in Jamaica and used them against African nations of slaves.

In the eastern Caribbean, on the island of Saint John, the inability of rebels to unite large communities of black people ruined any hope for victory. The Danish and

British slave trade introduced new waves of Akwamu warriors on to Saint John, many of

5Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 196. 6 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo- Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 170–2.

392 whom attempted to wage war rather than accept slavery. However, their movement was in vain. Despite a shared language with many of their fellow “Aminas” from the Gold

Coast, the aggressive Akwamu were unable to unite black people on the island or inspire general unrest in the neighboring Leewards. The combined onslaught of Danish, British and French forces beat back the efforts of the Akwamu and their allies who did rise, ending the only island-wide rebellion in the Caribbean up to that time. The Europeans’ extirpation of the rebels quelled slave unrest in the Virgin Islands for a generation.7

The rumors of freedom that had inspired slaves in colonial America had also run their course by 1746. As argued in Chapter Three, slave mobility and communication in the British Atlantic had developed to the extent that black people could pass rumors of freedom between provinces. In the early 1730s, slaves in Virginia and later New Jersey shared news that King George II had freed all enslaved Christians. The rumor had proven false and planters had attacked or arrested those slaves who had tried to organize open protests and challenge colonial authorities. The British debate over slave baptism— the underlying cause of the story of royal emancipation—had also become less contentious. The Bishop of London and his Anglican missionaries, evangelicals and

Moravians, were all actively spreading the Gospel to slaves by the mid-1740s. Though planters resisted allowing their slaves to be baptized and some Africans demonstrated little enthusiasm, by the end of the period slaves in many North American mainland colonies were attending Protestant services.8 The rumor that King George would free

7 Waldemar Westergaard, “Account of the Negro Rebellion on St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1759,” Journal of Negro history, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1926), 50-61. 8 Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion : African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 80-117; Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

393 baptized slaves had faded away by 1746 and would not emerge again in the British colonies before the American Revolution.9

There was also a notable decline in both insurrections and accusations of conspiracy in South Carolina in the early 1740s. The Spanish king’s edict of liberty for runaway British slaves persisted as a rumor of freedom much longer than the baptism stories of Virginia and New Jersey. Even with the cessation of hostilities between Spain and Great Britain in 1748, the Spanish continued with their edict until the end of the

Seven Years War in 1763.10 But British invasions of Saint Augustine discouraged large groups of slaves from attempting the long trek through Georgia and Florida. General

Oglethorpe led sieges and invasions of the Spanish province in 1740, 1742, and 1743.

“The Siege of Augustine, and the continual incursions since made by his Excellency,” wrote British officer Edward Kimbrel in 1743, “[has]…spoil’d their usual Methods of decoying our Negroes from Carolina, and elsewhere; whence, in Numbers, they used to desert to them….”11 British and American Indian raids up to the Castillo of Saint

Augustine blocked the passage south for any army of rebel slaves. Hope for some black bondsmen did not die away completely. As late as 1749, planters were still complaining that black runaways were fleeing to the Spanish, but there was nothing akin to another

Stono Rebellion in the years that followed.12

Throughout the British Atlantic, white colonial officials accused fewer slaves of conspiracy after the mid-1740s. As argued in Chapter Four, news of slave unrest had

9 Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: the Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 176-178. 10 Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999), 39- 46. 11 Edward Kimber, A relation, or Journal, of a late expedition (London, 1744), 30. 12 Landers, Black Society, 46.

394 created among white colonists a pervasive climate of racial fear during this era. These anxieties explain the choices made by officials to force confessions from slaves and to commit brutal executions on scant evidence. British conspiracy trials in Jamaica,

Antigua, South Carolina and New York produced hundreds of victims and banished many others. After 1746, British colonists demonstrated a clear unwillingness to prosecute conspiracy trials as they had just a few years previous. When rumors of unrest did arise, colonial authorities treated them with skepticism. “There has been a new rumor of the rising of the Negroes,” wrote New York’s Cadwallader Colden to his wife in 1747,

“but upon enquiry no foundation can be found of it.”13 In South Carolina, a supposed slave conspiracy was dismissed after white authorities decided a planter had sowed false rumors for his own ends.14

Part of the reason for the decline in conspiracy trials came from growing British condemnation of the mass executions ordered by colonial officials. As early as January of 1737, at the height of the trials in Antigua, council members and assemblymen were contesting the findings of judges and attempting to halt the executions.15 Contributors to

Fog’s Journal and Gentleman’s Magazine in London questioned the necessity of killing so many black bondsmen instead of some more merciful (and economical) punishment.16

In New York, Judge Daniel Horsmanden complained that people said of his key witness,

Mary Burton, she was the “Wickedest of Mortals, to bring so many Innocents to this

13 Cadwallader Colden to Mrs. Colden, Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume III Additional Letters and Papers 1715-1748 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1937), 345. 14 Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Kingsport, Tenn.: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 122; Philip Morgan and George Terry, “Slavery in Microcosm: A Conspiracy Scare in Colonial South Carolina,” Southern Studies, Issue: v. 21(2) 1982, 142- 143. 15 Council Minutes, Judges to Council, Jan 31st, 1736/7, CO 9/10, TNA. 16 The Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1, 1737.

395 shameful, miserable and untimely end.”17 John Ury’s written defense against charges of conspiracy was published as a broadside by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and in many New England newspapers. “Who alive can think yt reads his defence & dying

Declaration,” wrote Josiah Cotton after reading the broadside, “but yt he was as innocent as ye child unborn.”18 The growing skepticism in the north was on full display in 1742, less than a year after the trials, when constables arrested a slave named Tom for attempting to burn down a house. He promised the judges that he would reveal a broad slave conspiracy in return for clemency. Though Judge Horsmanden and Lt. Governor

Clarke were eager to begin interrogations, other colonists refused to believe the accused slave and eventually Tom confessed that he had acted alone.19 In response to growing criticism, judges in both Antigua and New York authored and published defenses of their proceedings for dissemination in the British Atlantic.

But the most important reason for the declining number of conspiracy accusations was the victories of colonial forces both at home and abroad. After 1746, the climate of fear was receding before the onslaught of British arms. The much feared

“general rebellion” of slaves had never emerged in the provinces.20 Planters had defeated insurrections in Jamaica and South Carolina and violently suppressed every public protest led by people of African descent. Spanish and French invasions had failed on the southern mainland and never emerged in the West Indies. On the day of National

17 Horsmanden, Daniel. 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 Inhabitant.(New York, 1744), 200. 18 Josiah Cotton, January 8, 1741/2, Josiah Cotton Memoirs, Massachusetts Historical Society. 19 Lepore, New York Burning, 212-213. 20 The Jamaican Assembly warned the Governor of the island of a “General Rebellion” of slaves in 1734. “America and West Indies: March 1734, 1-15”, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 41: 1734-1735 (1953), 45-55.

396

Thanksgiving in August of 1746, Pastor Thomas Prince could only wonder at God’s

“most undeserved and inexpressibly Great Deliverance” of the British people.

In the years that followed, white Britons looked back at this period of racial and religious fear and treated it as strange and distant. “Sometime ago the People of this

Province were Annually alarmed with accounts of intended Invasions,” wrote South

Carolinian James Glen in 1748, “…even in time of profound Peace they were made believe that the Spaniards had prepared Embarkations for that purpose…. Sometimes the

Negroes were to rise & cut their Masters Throats at other times the Indians were confederating to destroy us.”21 Glen celebrated the newfound peace. “There was no resisting the torrent of jealousy,” William Smith remembered from his childhood experience of the New York conspiracy, “when every man thought himself in danger from a foe in his own house.”22

For some, the memories of fear and violence lasted a lifetime. In 1813, an old engineer named David Grim presented to the New York Historical Society a plan of the colonial city as he remembered it from the years “1742, 1743, & 1744.”23 He had lived to see the colony of New York declare its independence and witnessed the birth of a new republic. But he wanted the people of his young country to remember the city as it had been. In remarkable detail, the seventy-six year old man depicted more than eleven- hundred houses and sixty landmarks.24 In the center of the map, Grim drew a small image of several silhouetted figures atop a pyre. “Plot Negroes burnt here,” he wrote into

21 James Glen to BT, Feb. 3, 1748, CO 5/372, The National Archives. 22 William Smith, “Continuation of the History of New York,” in Collections of the New York Historical Society, Volume IV (New York: Printed for the Society by J. Seymour, 1826), 60-61. 23David Grim, “A Plan of the City and Environs of New York as they were in the years 1742, 1743, & 1744,” 1813, Collections of the Historical Society of New York. 24 Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 2.

397 his legend. He had only been a child of four-years old when he witnessed the execution of the slaves in New York, but he wrote on the back of the map that he had the “perfect idea of seeing the Negroes chained to a stake, and there burned to death.”25Grim sought to help the new generations of Americans remember a period of racial fear in the city that had been long forgotten.

Contributions to the Field of Colonial American History

Like the old engineer of New York, this dissertation reveals a period of history that has been little understood. As the first full-length longitudinal study of these conflicts, it is an argument for an era of slave unrest within the British Atlantic Empire nearly sixty years before the Age of Revolution. It approaches the slave conspiracies and insurrections between 1729 and 1746 not as singular events in the histories of specific colonies, but rather as a shared moment in the history of the British provinces, when slaves in the Caribbean and mainland North America threatened white authority with open rebellion and in turn, inspired heightened fears of insurrection among white Britons.

This project demonstrates that a Black Atlantic existed and flourished in British colonial America and the West Indies in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In

1978, historian Peter Wood complained there had “been no successful longitudinal studies, analyzing periods of intensified slave resistance throughout the Atlantic

25 I.N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island: 1498-1909 (New York: Arno Press Inc., 1967), 270-271.

398 community, such as the late 1730s or the early 1790s.”26 Though many scholars have heeded his call by studying slave communication in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, few have addressed the earlier period.27 My findings reveal, first, the surprising numbers of enslaved mariners aboard British vessels in colonial America and the West Indies and, second, that a communication network between slave communities was well developed by the 1730s. The rumors of freedom that inspired several episodes of unrest in this period were spread along these routes of communication.

This discovery will contribute a great deal to the new history of a Black Atlantic.

In his influential The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy re-conceptualizes the cultural history of this diaspora by arguing that the black experience was uniquely transnational.28

Gilroy explains that black people in Europe and the Americas had developed a “double consciousness,” an identity in which they were part of a political nation but also separated by an African ancestry, and this shared consciousness created the Black

Atlantic.29 This dissertation reveals an important step in this historical process. Gilroy focuses most of his attention on the centuries after the Age of Revolution, but the evidence suggests that black people in the British provinces were communicating rumors

26 Peter H. Wood, “’I did the Best I could for My Day’: The Study of Early Black History during the Second Reconstruction, 1960 to 1976,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 35, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), 216. 27The literature on slave unrest during the Age of Revolution is vast. See, for example, Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); Ira Berlin, Slavery and Freedom in the Era of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983); For a discussion of the influence of republican ideology in the wider Atlantic, see Julius Sherrard Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986) and for a contrarian view, David Geggus, "Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789- 1815," in A Turbulent Time: the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, eds. David Gaspar and David Geggus (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1997). 28 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4, 15-16. 29 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1, 30, 114-127.

399 of freedom and demonstrating a shared sense of purpose against slavery generations earlier than previously understood. The “double consciousness” that defined the Black

Atlantic was taking shape in the early eighteenth century.

My research into the British slave trade has also revealed the deeply unsettling effect of this human trade on colonial America in this period. Ira Berlin refers to the influence of the slave trade on the North American colonies in the eighteenth century as

“Africanization,” a process by which the British introduced large numbers of enslaved migrants from Africa into communities of American-born slaves.30 This process was far more painful and contentious for black people than historians have previously understood. The African trade created rivalries and conflicts in these communities that played a violent role in the unrest of the era. It also created a paradox for white planters.

Even as they imported more African people, the gentry expressed a growing anxiety that the proportions of slaves in their colonies were untenable. Insurrections and accusations of conspiracy were the result.

This dissertation has also made a significant contribution to the field of American religious history. My findings argue that slave unrest had an important influence on the

First Great Awakening in colonial America. Though anxieties over slave unrest pervaded the lives of colonists in the same years that revivals swept through the colonies, historians have overlooked the significant connections between the two movements of this era. To a degree that will surprise many historians, Protestants in the 1730s and 1740s described slave unrest as providential judgment, much as they did with Indian wars in the

30 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 97, 102, especially 107.

400 seventeenth century.31 This biblical interpretation of slave rebellion played an important role in the proliferation of evangelical religion in colonial America. Evangelical leaders found a powerful, if highly controversial, sign of God’s anger in slave unrest and they used it to galvanize nervous congregations of white colonists. Revealing this discourse in the sermons and correspondence of leading ministers in this era, I have demonstrated the powerful relationship between racial fear and the growth of evangelical religion in early

America.

While I have revealed new evidence in the history of the Black Atlantic and the

First Great Awakening in colonial America, I have also sought to reconcile significant disagreements in the methodologies used by historians of slave conspiracies. Over the past two decades, scholars have practiced two radically different approaches to trial documents. They have either accepted the records from conspiracy trials as proof of rebellion or they have rejected the trials as too untrustworthy because of the methods of coercion used by white officials.32 I have reconciled these two methodologies by treating coerced confessions with grave skepticism. Instead I search for evidence from

“witnesses in spite of themselves.”33 In the New Jersey conspiracy of 1734, for example, the evidence that slaves conspired to murder white families in their sleep was limited to confessions produced by a Freeholders Court. But the same reports noted the conspiracy was discovered when a slave accused a white colonist of refusing to follow the order of emancipation from King George. The similarity of this emancipation rumor with those

31 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American identity (New York: Knopf, 1998). 32 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), Chapter Six; Philip D. Morgan, “Conspiracy Scares,” “Forum: The Making of a Slave Conspiracy, Part 2,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Jan., 2002), 159-166. 33 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 61.

401 generated in the Chesapeake demonstrates the transmission of news between black communities along the eastern seaboard. Throughout this dissertation, my methodology cast skepticism on coerced confessions even as I searched for evidence in conspiracy trials that could be compared and confirmed by other sources. Historians in the field of colonial America will benefit from adopting a similar approach to conspiracy trials.

Perhaps the most significant contribution of this dissertation to the field of colonial American history is that it demonstrates that the insurrections and accusations of conspiracy in this era were a direct consequence of the changes taking place in the British

Atlantic Empire in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. For the most part, historians have treated conspiracies and rebellions in this era as singular events peculiar to the history of individual colonies.34 Scholars have approached the unrest of the period as not one thing, but many different things. In fact, the very success of the British colonial enterprise produced the insurrections and accusations of conspiracy in this age.

The Britons grew in power in the western hemisphere through the expansion of commerce and planting, the rise of shipping and the slave trade, and the print culture that disseminated news throughout the colonies. But this dissertation has shown that these same forces spread the racial antagonisms born from British Atlantic slavery throughout the American and West Indian provinces in the years between 1729 and 1746. The conflicts between white colonists and slaves, Africans and Creoles, and Protestants and

Catholics burst forth in this British Atlantic World.

34 This historiographical observation was first made by Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra. 193.

402

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5. Dissertations and Theses

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Sharples, Jason. “The Flames of Insurrection: Fearing Slave Conspiracy in Early America, 1670-1780.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010.

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