Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [134]
In 1738 Hughson opened a new tavern on the Hudson River waterfront, not far from the Trinity churchyard. This establishment, like its predecessor, acquired immediate notoriety as a rendezvous for slaves, free blacks, poor whites, soldiers from the nearby fort, and even (as rumor had it) the occasional “young gentleman” inclined to after-hours carousing and gaming. (In the winter of 1740–41, after constables raided his tavern, Hughson had been convicted of illegally “entertaining Negro slaves” but let off as a first offender.) Hughson’s also became the residence of one “Margaret Sorubiero, alias Salingburgh, alias Kerry, commonly called Peggy, or the Newfoundland Irish beauty,” said to be a prostitute “of the worst sort, a prostitute to negroes.” Her room and board was paid by a slave of baker John Vaarck, named Caesar, by whom Peggy had recently had a child.
Hughson also fenced stolen property. He got to be so well known in this line of work that city slaves laughingly referred to his place as “Oswego,” after the Indian trading post on Lake Ontario. Although the constables had their eye on him, they had as yet failed to catch him red-handed. Nor had they caught John Romme, a publican-shoemaker and friend of Hughson’s whose tavern stood on the Battery near Fort George. Like Hughson, Romme trafficked in stolen goods—protected, perhaps, by his kinship with a member of the Common Council and connections in the right places. Yet he too had been heard to speak bitterly of “how well the rich people at this place lived” and likewise advised slaves to “burn the houses of them that have the most money, and kill them all, as the negroes would have done their masters and mistresses formerly”—an obvious allusion to the abortive 1712 uprising.
Two weeks before the fire in the fort, Hughson had been arrested for receiving goods stolen by Caesar and Prince (slave of merchant John Auboyneau) from Rebecca Hogg’s general store on Broad Street. The crime came unraveled when on March 3 the Hughsons’ sixteen-year-old indentured servant, Mary Burton, had been enticed to give evidence against John, Sarah, and Peggy by a promise to free her from her indenture.
Caesar and Prince were arrested—and not for the first time. The two, along with Cuffee, had been caught stealing barrels of Geneva (Dutch gin) back in 1736 and denounced as “the ringleaders of a confederacy of negroes who robbed, pilfered and stole whenever they had opportunity.” Caesar and Prince had faced the death penalty then—burglary committed by slaves was a capital crime—but had been let off with a public whipping. They had carried on, however, boldly assuming the name “Geneva Club.” (According to one observer they had even had the “impudence to assume the style and title of Free Masons, in imitation of a society here: which was looked upon to be a gross affront to the provincial grand master and gentlemen of the fraternity. . . and was very ill accepted.”) Caesar languished in jail; the Hughsons and Prince were freed on bail; and all were awaiting trial on burglary-related charges when the fires started.
Horsmanden’s grand jury now called Mary Burton to testify. She confirmed her earlier account of the Hogg burglary but refused to talk about the fires. When ordered jailed for contempt, however, she quickly agreed to cooperate and proceeded to describe what she said was a conspiracy between slaves and poor whites to burn the city. To Horsmanden’s delight, Burton declared that the three Geneva Club members had met frequently at Hughson’s, that they had often talked of burning the fort and town, and that the Hughsons had agreed to help. Though Burton’s testimony didn’t prove that