Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York

Under Sloughter, Fletcher, Bellomont, and Cornbury the Assembly had voted revenues for a term of years. But when Cornbury appropriated to his own uses £1000 out of the £1800 granted for the defense of the frontiers and when in addition he pocketed £1500 of the funds appropriated for the protection of the mouth of the Hudson, the Assembly grew wary. Thereafter for four successive years it made only annual appropriations, and, wiser still by 1739, it voted supplies only in definite amounts for special purposes. Short-sighted the Assembly often was, sometimes in its parsimony leaving the borders unprotected and showing a disposition to take as much and to give as little as possible – a policy that was fraught with grave peril as the French and Indian War drew on apace.

The growing insubordination of the province gave more than one governor anxious thought. Governor Hunter wrote warningly to friends in England: "The colonies are infants at their mother's breasts and will wean themselves when they become of age." And Governor Clinton was so incensed by the contumacy of the Assembly that he said bluntly: "Every branch of this legislature may be criminal in the eyes of the law, and there is a power able to punish you and that will punish you if you provoke that power to do it by your behaviour. Otherwise you must think yourselves independent of the crown of Great Britain!"

CHAPTER XII
THE ZENGER TRIAL

Among the children of the Palatines imported by Governor Hunter in 1710 was a lad of thirteen by the name of John Peter Zenger. Instead of proceeding to the Palatine colony, his widowed mother and her little family remained in New York. There Peter was bound apprentice to William Bradford, then a well-known printer, for a term of eight years, at the end of which time he set up an office of his own. He evidently found himself hard pressed for the means of living, since one finds him in 1732 applying to the consistory of the Dutch Church of New York and proposing that, since he had so long played the organ without recompense, he might take up a voluntary subscription from the congregation and that the members of the consistory should head the paper as an example to others. The consistory agreed to allow him provisionally the sum of six pounds, New York currency, to be paid by the church masters and promised that they would speak with him further on the subject of his seeking subscriptions in the congregation, a favor for which John Peter was duly grateful.

Governor William Cosby, as he drove in his coach on a Sunday to Trinity Church, or as he walked in stately raiment, attended by a negro servant who carried his prayer-book on a velvet cushion, could have little dreamed that the young printer striding past him on his way to play the organ in the old Dutch Church was destined to be the instrument of His Excellency's downfall; but the time was not far off when this David, armed only with a blackened type of his printer's form, was to set forth against this Goliath. All flaming convictions have a tendency to cool into cant, and "the Freedom of the Press" has so long been a vote-catching phrase that it is hard nowadays to realize that it was once an expression of an ideal for which men were willing to die but which they scarcely hoped to achieve.

When Colonel Cosby, former Governor of Minorca, came over the seas in 1732, to become Governor of New York, he brought with him a none too savory reputation. All that he seemed to have learned in his former executive post was the art of conveying public funds to private uses. His government in New York sustained his reputation: it was as high-handed as it was corrupt. He burned deeds and strove to overthrow old land-patents, in order that fees for new ones might find their way into his pocket. "Cosby's Manor," a vast tract of land in the Mohawk Valley, bore testimony to the success of his methods in acquiring wealth.

Upon the death of Cosby's predecessor, John Montgomerie, in 1731, Rip van Dam, as president of the Council, had assumed control of the affairs of the province until the arrival of the new Governor. At the close of his term, which had lasted a little more than a year, the Council passed warrants giving Rip van Dam the salary and the fees of the office for the time of his service. When Cosby appeared he produced an order from the King commanding that the perquisites of the Governor during the interregnum be equally divided between him and Van Dam. On the authority of this document, Cosby demanded half of the salary which Van Dam had received. "Very well," answered the stalwart Dutchman, "but always provided that you share with me on the same authority the half of the emoluments which you have received during the same period."

The greedy Governor maintained that this was a very different matter. Nevertheless he was somewhat puzzled as to how to proceed legally with a view to filling his purse. Since he was himself Chancellor, he could not sue in chancery. He did not dare to bring a suit at common law, as he feared that a jury would give a verdict against him. Under these circumstances Cosby took advantage of a clause in the commissions of the judges of the Supreme Court which seemed to constitute them Barons of the Exchequer, and he therefore directed that an action against Van Dam be brought in the name of the King before that court. The Chief Justice, who had held office for eighteen years, was Lewis Morris. Van Dam's counsel promptly took exception to the jurisdiction of the court and Morris sustained their plea, whereupon Cosby removed Morris as Chief Justice. Cosby's party included De Lancey, Philipse, Bradley, and Harrison, while Alexander, Stuyvesant, Livingston, Cadwallader Golden, and most of the prominent citizens, supported Van Dam. The people of New York were now awakening to the fact that this was no petty quarrel between two men as to which should receive the larger share of government moneys, but that it involved the much larger question of whether citizens were to be denied recourse to impartial courts in the defense of their rights.

The only paper published in the province, the New York Weekly Gazette, established in 1725, was entirely in Cosby's interest, and the Van Dam party seemed powerless. They determined, however, to strike at least one blow for freedom, and as a first step they established in 1733 a paper known as the New York Weekly Journal, to be published by John Peter Zenger, but to be under the control of far abler men. Morris, Alexander, Smith, and Golden were the principal contributors to the new paper, and in a series of articles they vigorously criticized the Governor's administration, particularly his treatment of Van Dam. The Governor and Council in high dudgeon at once demanded the punishment of the publisher. They asked the Assembly to join them in prosecuting Zenger, but the request was laid upon the table. The Council then ordered the hangman to make a public bonfire of four numbers of the Weekly Journal; but the mayor and the aldermen declared the order illegal and refused to allow it to be carried out. Accordingly the offending numbers of the Journal were burned by a negro slave of the sheriff in the presence of Francis Harrison, the recorder, and some other partizans of Cosby, the magistrates declining to be present at the ceremony. Whatever satisfaction the Governor and his adherents could gain from the burning of these copies of the Journal was theirs; but their action served only to make them both more ridiculous and more despicable in the eyes of the people.

Not long after this episode Zenger was arrested upon order of the Council and thrown into the jail, which was at that time in the City Hall on the site of the present United States Sub-Treasury building on Wall Street. Zenger was denied the use of pens, ink, or paper. The grand jury refused to indict him. But Cosby's attorney-general filed an "information" against Zenger for "false, scandalous, malicious and seditious libels."

Public interest was now transferred from Van Dam to Zenger, and the people saw him as their representative, robbed of his right of free speech and imprisoned on an "information" which was in form and substance an indictment without action of a grand jury. Months elapsed while Zenger was kept in prison. His counsel, Smith and Alexander, attacked two judges of the court before which he was to be tried, on the ground that they were irregularly appointed, the commissions of two of them, Chief Justice De Lancey and Judge Philipse, running "during pleasure" instead of "during good behavior" and having been granted by the Governor without the advice or consent of his Council. The anger of the judges thus assailed was expressed by De Lancey, who replied: "You have brought it to that point, gentlemen, that either we must go from the bench or you from the bar," wherewith he summarily ordered the names of the two distinguished lawyers stricken from the list of attorneys.

This was obviously a heavy blow to Zenger, as the only other lawyer of note in New York was retained in the interests of Cosby and his faction. But Zenger's friends never ceased their determined efforts in his behalf, and Smith and Alexander remained active in counsel if not in court. Meanwhile the judges appointed an insignificant attorney, John Chambers by name, to act for Zenger and fancied that their intrigue was sure of success.

The trial came on before the Supreme Court sitting on August 4, 1735, De Lancey acting as Chief Justice, Philipse as second judge, and Bradley as attorney-general. Chambers pleaded "not guilty" on behalf of his client; but to the throng who crowded the court-room to suffocation, Zenger's case must have looked black indeed. There was no question that he had published the objectionable articles, and according to the English law of the day the truth of a libel could not be set up as a defense. It was even some years later that Lord Mansfield upheld the amazing doctrine that "the greater the truth the greater the libel." A part of the importance of the Zenger trial lies in its sweeping away in this part of the world the possibility of so monstrous a theory.

A great and overwhelming surprise, however, awaited the prosecutors of Zenger. The secret had been well kept and apparently every one was amazed when there appeared for the defense one Andrew Hamilton, a citizen of Philadelphia, of venerable age and the most noted and able lawyer in the colonies. From this moment he became the central figure of the trial and his address was followed with breathless interest. He touched upon his own age and feebleness with consummate tact and dramatic effect:

You see that I labour under the weight of years, and am borne down with great infirmities of body; yet, old and weak as I am, I should think it my duty, if required, to go to the utmost part of the land, where my service could be of use in assisting to quench the flame of prosecutions upon information set on foot by the government, to deprive a people of the right of remonstrating (and complaining too) of the arbitrary attempts of men in power. Men who injure and oppress the people under their administration provoke them to cry out and complain, and then make that very complaint the foundation for new oppressions and prosecutions. I wish I could say there were no instances of this kind. But to conclude: the question before the court, and you, gentlemen of the jury, is not of small nor private concern; it is not the cause of a poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequence affect every freeman that lives under a British government on the main of America! It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty, and I make no doubt but your upright conduct this day will not only entitle you to the love and esteem of your fellow-citizens, but every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honour you, as men who have baffled the attempt of tyranny, and by an impartial and uncorrupt verdict have laid a noble foundation for securing to ourselves, our posterity, and our neighbors, that to which nature and the laws of our country have given us a right – the liberty both of exposing and opposing arbitrary power … by speaking and writing truth!

With scathing irony he fell upon the theory that truth was no defense for libel:

If a libel is understood in the large and unlimited sense urged by Mr. Attorney, there is scarce a writing I know that may not be called a libel, or scarce any person safe from being called to account as a libeller; for Moses, meek as he was, libelled Cain, and who is it that has not libelled the devil? For according to Mr. Attorney, it is no justification to say that one has a bad name. Echard has libelled our good King William; Burnet has libelled among others, King Charles and King James; and Rapin has libelled them all. How must a man speak or write, or what must he hear, read, or sing? Or when must he laugh, so as to be secure from being taken up as a libeller? I sincerely believe that were some persons to go through the streets of New York nowadays and read a part of the Bible, if it were not known to be such, Mr. Attorney, with the help of his innuendoes, would easily turn it into a libel. As for instance, the sixteenth verse of the ninth chapter of Isaiah: The leaders of the people cause them to err, and they that are led by them are destroyed. But should Mr. Attorney go about to make this a libel, he would treat it thus: "The leaders of the people (innuendo, the governor and council of New York) cause them (innuendo, the people of this province) to err, and they (meaning the people of the province) are destroyed (innuendo, are deceived into the loss of their liberty)," which is the worst kind of destruction. Or, if some person should publicly repeat, in a manner not pleasing to his betters, the tenth and eleventh verses of the fifty-sixth chapter of the same book, there Mr. Attorney would have a large field to display his skill in the artful application of his innuendoes. The words are, "His watchmen are all blind, they are ignorant; yes, they are greedy dogs, that can never have enough." But to make them a libel, there is according to Mr. Attorney's doctrine, no more wanting but the aid of his skill in the right adapting of his innuendoes. As for instance, "His watchmen (innuendo, the governor's council and Assembly) are blind; they are ignorant (innuendo, will not see the dangerous designs of His Excellency); yea they (meaning the governor and council) are greedy dogs which can never have enough (innuendo, enough of riches and power)."

Thus Hamilton skillfully appealed to the independent principles of the jury. There was no note, satiric, pathetic, or patriotic, which he did not strike. Overwhelmed by the torrent of his eloquence, Bradley, the Attorney-General, scarcely attempted a reply. The Chief Justice stated that the jury might bring in a verdict on the fact of publication and leave it to the Court to decide whether it were libelous. But Hamilton was far too wary to be caught thus. "I know, may it please your Honor," said he, "the jury may do so; but I do likewise know that they may do otherwise. I know they have the right, beyond all dispute, to determine both the law and the fact, and where they do not doubt the law, they ought to do so." Nevertheless the Chief Justice charged the jury:

Gentlemen of the Jury: The great pains Mr. Hamilton has taken, to show you how little regard juries are to pay to the opinion of the judges, and his insisting so much upon the conduct of some judges in trials of this kind, is done, no doubt, with a design that you should take but very little notice of what I might say upon this occasion. I shall, therefore, only observe to you that, as the facts or words in the information are confessed; the only thing that can come in question before you is whether the words set forth in the information, make a libel. And that is a matter of law, no doubt, and which you may leave to the Court.

But the show of authority and the attempt at allurement were all in vain. The jury took but a few moments to deliberate and returned with the verdict of "not guilty." The roar of applause which shook the court-room was more than a tribute to the eloquence of the aged counsel who had accepted an unpopular case without fees because he felt that he was working for the cause of freedom. It was more than a tribute to the poor printer who had risked everything in the same cause. It was the spirit of the barons at Runnymede, of the Long Parliament, of the Revolution of 1688, of Patrick Henry of Virginia when he cried: "Give me liberty or give me death!"

The Court, divided between wrath and surprise, strove to check the wave of applause and threatened with imprisonment the leader of the cheers; but a son-in-law of ex-Chief Justice Lewis Morris succeeded in making himself heard, and declared that cheers were as lawful there as in Westminster Hall, where they had been loud enough over the acquittal of the seven bishops in 1688. Upon this the applause broke out again, and Hamilton was acclaimed the people's champion. A dinner was given in his honor and the freedom of the city was bestowed upon him. When he entered his barge for the return journey to Philadelphia, flags waved, cannon boomed, and hurrahs resounded from all quarters.

CHAPTER XIII
THE NEGRO PLOTS

As early as the eighteenth century New York had become a cosmopolitan town. Its population contained not only Dutch and English in nearly equal numbers, but also French, Swedes, Jews, Negroes, and sailors, travelers from every land. The settled portion of the city, according to a map of 1729, extended as far north as Beekman Street on the East Side and as far as Trinity Church on the West Side. A few blocks beyond the church lay Old Wind Mill Lane touching King's Farm, which was still open country. Here Broadway shook off all semblance to a town thoroughfare and became a dusty country road, meeting the post-road to Boston near the lower end of the rope walk. "The cittie of New York is a pleasant, well-compacted place," wrote Madam Knight, who journeyed on horseback from Boston over this post-road and who recorded her experiences in an entertaining journal. "The buildings brick generally, very stately and high, though not altogether like ours in Boston. The bricks in some of the houses are of divers coullers and laid in checkers, being glazed look very agreeable. The inside of them are neat to admiration."

Besides its welcoming houses set among spreading trees, New York possessed public buildings of dignity and distinction. There was Trinity Church, whose tall steeple was one of the first landmarks to catch the traveler's eye as he journeyed down the river from Albany. The new City Hall, dating from Bellomont's time and standing on a site at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, given by Colonel Abraham de Peyster, was also a source of pride. With its substantial wings and arched colonnade in the center it was quite imposing. Here the Assembly, Council, and Court sat. Here, too, were offices and a library. But the cellar was used as a dungeon and the attic as a common prison.

New markets and wharves told of the growing commerce of the city and province. On every hand were evidences of luxurious living. There were taverns and coffee-houses where gold flowed in abundant streams from the pockets of pirates and smugglers, and in the streets crest-emblazoned family coaches, while sedan chairs were borne by negro slaves along the narrow brick pathways in the center of the town. The dress of the people told the same story of prosperity. The streets of the fashionable quarter around Trinity Church were fairly ablaze with gay costumes. Men of fashion wore powdered wigs and cocked hats, cloth or velvet coats reaching to the knee, breeches, and low shoes with buckles. They carried swords, sometimes studded with jewels, and in their gloved hands they held snuff-boxes of costly material and elaborate design. The ladies who accompanied them were no less gaily dressed. One is described as wearing a gown of purple and gold, opening over a black velvet petticoat and short enough to show green silk stockings and morocco shoes embroidered in red. Another wore a flowered green and gold gown, over a scarlet and gold petticoat edged with silver. Everywhere were seen strange fabrics of oriental design coming from the holds of mysterious ships which unloaded surreptitiously along the water front.

The members of one class alone looked on all this prosperous life with sullen discontent – the negro slaves whose toil made possible the leisure of their owners. These strange, uncouth Africans seemed out of place in New York, and from early times they had exhibited resentment and hatred toward the governing classes, who in turn looked upon them with distrust. This smoldering discontent of the blacks aroused no little uneasiness and led to the adoption of laws which, especially in the cities, were marked by a brutality quite out of keeping with the usual moderation of the colony. When Mrs. Grant wrote later of negro servitude in Albany as "slavery softened into a smile," she spoke in the first place from a narrow observation of life in a cultivated family, and in the second place from scant knowledge of the events which had preceded the kind treatment of the negroes.

In 1684 an ordinance was passed declaring that no negroes or Indian slaves above the number of four should meet together on the Lord's Day or at any other time or at any place except on their master's service. They were not to go armed with guns, swords, clubs, or stones on penalty of ten lashes at the whipping-post. An act provided that no slave should go about the streets after nightfall anywhere south of the Collect without a lighted lantern "so as the light thereof could be plainly seen." A few years later Governor Cornbury ordered the justices of the peace in King's County to seize and apprehend all negroes who had assembled themselves in a riotous manner or had absconded from their masters.

In 1712, during the Administration of Governor Robert Hunter, a group of negroes, perhaps forty in number, formed a plot which justified the terror of their masters, though it was so mad that it could have originated only in savage minds. These blacks planned to destroy all the white people of the city, then numbering over six thousand. Meeting in an orchard the negroes set fire to a shed and then lurked about in the shadows, armed with every kind of weapon on which they could lay hands.

As the negroes had expected, all the citizens of the neighborhood, seeing the conflagration, came running to the spot to fight the flames. The blacks succeeded in killing nine men and wounding many more before the alarm reached the fort. Then of course the affair ended. The slaves fled to the forests at the northern end of the island; but the soldiers stationed sentries and then hunted down the negroes, beating the woods to be sure that none escaped. Six of the negroes, seeing that their doom was sealed, killed themselves, and the fate of the captives showed that they well knew what mercy to expect at the hands of the enraged whites. Twenty-one were put to death, one being broken on the wheel and several burned at the stake, while the rest were hanged.

After this experience of the danger attending the holding of slaves, the restrictions upon the negroes grew even more irksome and the treatment they received more that of outcasts. For instance, a slave must be buried by daylight, without pallbearers and with not more than a dozen negroes present as mourners.

In spite of bright spots in the picture the outlook grew constantly darker; a mistrust ready to develop on slight provocation into terror perturbed the whites; and every rumor was magnified till there reigned a panic as widespread as that caused by the reports of witchcraft in New England. At length in 1741 the storm burst. One March night, while a gale was sweeping the city, a fire was discovered on the roof of the Governor's house in the fort. Church bells sounded the alarm and firemen and engines hurried to the spot; but it was hopeless to try to extinguish the flames, which spread to the chapel and to the office of the secretary over the fort gate, where the records of the colony were stored. The barracks then caught fire, and in a little over an hour everything in the fort was destroyed, the hand-grenades exploding as they caught fire and spreading destruction in every direction.

A month later a fire broke out at night near the Vlei Market. A bucket brigade was formed and the fire was extinguished. On the same night the loft in a house on the west side of the town was found to be in flames, and coals were discovered between two straw beds occupied by a negro. The next day coals were found under the coach-house of John Murray on Broadway, and on the day following a fire broke out again near the Vlei Market. Thus the townsfolk were made certain that an incendiary plot was on foot. Of course every one's thoughts flew to the negro slaves as the conspirators, especially when a Mrs. Earle announced that she had overheard three negroes threatening to burn the town.

The authorities were as much alarmed as the populace and at once leaped to the conclusion that the blame for the incendiarism, of which they scarcely paused to investigate the evidence, was to be divided between the Roman Catholics and the negroes, who without reasonable grounds had so long constituted their chief terror.

The Common Council offered pardon and a reward of one hundred pounds to any conspirator who would reveal the story of the plot and the names of the criminals involved. Under the influence of this offer one Mary Burton, a servant in the employ of Hughson, the tavern-keeper, accused her master, her mistress, their daughter, and a woman of evil reputation known as Peggy Carey, or Kerry, as well as a number of negroes, of being implicated in the plot. She said that the negroes brought stolen goods to the tavern and were protected by Hughson, who had planned with them the burning and plundering of the city and the liberation of the slaves. On this unsupported evidence Peggy Carey and a number of negroes were condemned to execution, and under terror of death, or encouraged by the hope of pardon, these prisoners made numerous confessions implicating one another, until by the end of August twenty-four whites and one hundred and fifty-four negroes had been imprisoned. Four whites, including Hughson and Peggy Carey, were executed; fourteen negroes were burned at the stake; eighteen were hanged, seventy-one transported, and the remainder pardoned or discharged.

Accusations were also made that the Roman Catholics had stirred up the plot; and persons of reputation and standing were accused of complicity. The effect of the popular panic, which rendered impossible the calm weighing of evidence and extinguished any sense of proportion, is seen in the letters of Governor George Clarke. On June 20, 1741, he writes to the Lords of Trade as follows:

The fatal fire that consumed the buildings in the fort and great part of my substance (for my loss is not less than two thousand pounds), did not happen by accident as I at first apprehended, but was kindled by design, in the execution of a horrid Conspiracy to burn it and the whole town, and to Massacre the people; as appears evidently not only by the Confession of the Negro who set fire to it, in some part of the same gutter where the Plumber was to work, but also by the testimony of several witnesses. How many Conspirators there were we do not yet know; every day produces new discoveries, and I apprehend that in the town, if the truth were known, there are not many innocent Negro men… I do myself the honor to send your Lordships the minutes taken at the tryal of Quack who burned the fort, and of another Negro, who was tryed with him, and their confession at the stake; with some examinations, whereby your Lordships will see their designs; it was ridiculous to suppose that they could keep possession of the town, if they had destroyed the white people, yet the mischief they would have done in pursuit of their intention would nevertheless have been great… Whether, or how far, the hand of popery has been in this hellish conspiracy, I cannot yet discover; but there is room to suspect it, by what two of the Negroes have confessed, viz: that soon after they were spoke to, and had consented to be parties to it, they had some checks of conscience, which they said, would not suffer them to burn houses and kill the White people; whereupon those who drew them into the conspiracy told them, there was no sin or wickedness in it, and that if they would go to Huson's [Hughson's] house, they should find a man who would satisfy them; but they say they would not, nor did go. Margaret Keny [Kerry] was supposed to be a papist, and it is suspected that Huson and his wife were brought over to it. There was in town some time ago a man who is said to be a Romish Priest, who used to be at Huson's but has disappeared ever since the discovery of the conspiracy and is not now to be found.

Later in the summer the Governor recorded his suspicions as follows:

We then thought it [the] Plot was projected only by Huson [Hughson] and the Negroes; but it is now apparent that the hand of popery is in it, for a Romish Priest having been tryed, was upon full and clear evidence convicted of having a deep share in it… Where, by whom, or in what shape this plot was first projected is yet undiscovered; that which at present seems most probable is that Huson, an indigent fellow of a vile character, casting in his thoughts how to mend his circumstances, inticed some Negroes to rob their Masters and to bring the stolen [goods] to him on promise of reward when they were sold; but seeing that by this pilfering trade riches did not flow into him fast enough, and finding the Negroes fit instruments for any villainy, he then fell upon the schemes of burning the fort and town, and murdering the people, as the speediest way to enrich himself and them, and to gain their freedom, for that was the Negroes main inducement… The conspirators had hopes given them that the Spaniards would come hither and join with them early in the Spring; but if they failed of coming, then the business was to be done by the Conspirators without them; many of them were christen'd by the Priest, absolved from all their past sins and whatever they should do in the Plott; many of them sworn by him (others by Huson) to burn and destroy, and to be secret; wherein they were but too punctual; how weak soever the scheme may appear, it was plausible and strong enough to engage and hold the Negroes, and that was all that the Priest and Huson wanted; for had the fort taken fire in the night, as it was intended, the town was then to have been fired in several places at once; in which confusion much rich plunder might have been got and concealed; and if they had it in view too, to serve the enemy, they could not have done it more effectually; for this town being laid in ashes his Majesties forces in the West Indies might have suffered much for want of provisions, and perhaps been unable to proceed upon any expedition or piece of service from whence they might promise themselves great rewards; I doubt the business is pretty nigh at an end, for since the Priest has been apprehended, and some more white men named, great industry has been used throughout the town to discredit the witnesses and prejudice the people against them; and I am told it has had in a great measure its intended effect; I am sorry for it, for I do not think we are yet got near the bottom of it, where I doubt the principal conspirators lie concealed.