Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [135]
On May 1 the court found Caesar and Prince guilty of burglary and condemned them to death. The next day, just across the river in Hackensack, New Jersey, seven barns were set ablaze; two blacks were caught and immediately burned at the stake. On May 6 the Hughsons and Peggy were found guilty of receiving stolen goods, and Peggy, in fear of her life, decided to talk. So did some of the blacks crammed in the dungeons below City Hall. Two who didn’t confess to anything were Caesar and Prince: on May 11 they were hanged for burglary. Caesar’s corpse was then dangled from a platform near the city’s powder house, on the little island between the two arms of the Fresh Water Pond.
Now, “witnesses” in hand and with the backing of the mayor, governor, and Common Council, Horsmanden proceeded to trial against Cuffee and Quack, a slave belonging to butcher John Roosevelt. He summoned all the town’s lawyers and got each of them, including William Smith and James Alexander, to agree to assist Attorney General Richard Bradley with the prosecution. Eleven witnesses were called for the prosecution. They reported on conversations they’d overheard, such as the time Cuffee declared “that a great many people had too much, and others too little, that his old master”—Adolph Philipse, wealthy merchant, speaker of the Assembly, and prominent supporter of Governor Cosby—“had a great deal of money, but that, in a short time, he should have less.” The defendants, who had no legal counsel, called witnesses, including their owners, who offered at best limited support to avoid rousing the wrath of their neighbors. The jury returned a guilty verdict in minutes, and Horsmanden instantly pronounced sentence—death by fire the following day. Chained to the stake, faggots piled at their feet, Cuffee and Quack both confessed to burning the fort. They also began naming names, eventually accusing some fifty others of complicity. Horsmanden, thrilled, considered saving them as future witnesses. But the crowd was howling, and the sheriff said it would be unwise to stop. So, as Horsmanden later recounted, “the executions proceeded.” The two screaming men, having bought but a few extra hours of life, were soon engulfed in flames.
Trials followed quickly now. The Hughsons and Peggy were sentenced to hang, with John Hughson’s body to be suspended in chains next to Caesar’s rotting corpse. More verdicts, more burnings, more confessions, more verdicts. At the height of the hysteria, nearly half the city’s male slaves over sixteen years of age were in jail.
From Horsmanden’s point of view, however, something was still lacking: a white mastermind who could be held accountable for the whole diabolical conspiracy (given that Africans, in his view, clearly lacked the intelligence for such a scheme, and the illiterate Hughson didn’t quite fit the bill). As candidate for head conspirator, Horsmanden nominated John Ury. Only recently arrived in town, Ury had been working as a private tutor and schoolmaster. Because his expertise in Latin made him conspicuous around town, he now found himself under arrest on the suspicion of being a Roman Catholic priest and a secret agent of the Spanish. Arrested with Ury were several soldiers from the garrison—among them Peter Connolly, Edward Kelly, Edward Murphy, and Andrew Ryan—who were also suspected of being Catholics and conspirators. The everobliging Mary Burton now remembered that Ury, too, had been among the plotters at Hughson’s; William Kane, another of the soldiers, offered a corroborative confession.
Ury’s grand scheme, the prosecution now proposed, had been to have Hughson purchase