Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Seven, Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Seven
Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is “Actual Citation from Book,” Complicity’s notes from Chapter Four.

SO MANY BLACKS were burned at the stake, hanged, beat to death by breaking every bone in their bodies, and killed in other ways by New Yorkers because they were afraid of slave uprisings. New Yorkers wanted to send a clear message that there would be no tolerating that kind of thing.

Too bad Northerners a hundred years later were ignorant of their own history.

If they had known their own history, maybe they would not have sent murderers like John Brown into the South to kill, rape and destroy then celebrate him as a hero for doing exactly what they had burned people at the stake for doing.

So much of the history that Northerners have believed about themselves with all their hearts is a lie as admitted by the New England authors of Complicity.

The Northern mythology about them being good to their slaves was quoted in Parts Two¹ and Three² of this series. As a refresher here’s Boston Globe columnist Francie Latour in Part Three from her article, “New England’s hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery”:

Slavery happened in the South, and it ended thanks to the North. Maybe we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn’t real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were practically family. We let them marry, we taught them to read, and soon enough, we freed them. New England is the home of abolitionists and underground railroads. In the story of slavery — and by extension, the story of race and racism in modern-day America — we’re the heroes. Aren’t we?³

What makes this so hypocritical is that Northerners brought all the slaves here with the Brits before them. Northern slave traders sailed from New York and New England, from Boston and other places to buy blacks captured by other blacks in never ending tribal warfare who were rounded up and waiting in the 40 plus slave forts on Africa’s west coast, places like Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone.

New Englanders packed them tight into ships hoping enough would survive to make them a profit. They chained them side by side to decks in the bowels of their burning hot ships with the stench of vomit, feces, urine and death, cooked in burning heat with no ventilation, no fresh air. That’s what captured Africans had to smell and breathe-in for months through the long Middle Passage through Hell and into slavery.

Blacks themselves began this trade of their own race in Africa. They held captives, chained in vaults in slave forts or castles, until ships came by to buy them.

Remember, slavery was so big a part of the North’s economy they were still vigorously slave trading throughout most of the nineteenth century despite it being outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808.

W. E. B. Du Bois in his book The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80 said Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.

In 1712, there were approximately 4,000 whites and 600 blacks, mostly slaves, in New York City:

Slavery was the bedrock of the city’s developing economy, and the labor of Africans who hauled wood and water, who worked on the waterfront, in warehouses, in bakeries, and in cooperages, making barrels and casks, was helping the young colony prosper.⁴

On April 6, 1712, in the early morning, 24 black men gathered, most of whom were “Coromantees, named for the slave fortress at Coromantine on the west coast of Africa, in what is now Ghana.” They had “axes, hatchets, guns and pistols.”⁵

Two lit an outhouse on fire and when whites came to put it out, the blacks attacked them, killed one and wounded eight.

The slaves “thought the witch doctor’s dust would make them invisible” but most were captured the next day. Six committed suicide but:

The city was in a panic. Seventy black men were arrested immediately and the Boston Weekly News-Letter reported that the uprising had put the ‘whole town . . . under arms.’⁶

The usual punishment was hanging “but because a slave insurrection—or even an act of rebellion by one or two enslaved people—posed such a threat to the social order, courts had almost unlimited latitude in deciding punishment. [Gov.] Hunter knew that the colony could not let the rebels off lightly”.⁷

Hunter assured his supervisors in London, the Lords of Trade, that “‘There has been the most exemplary punishment inflicted that could possibly be thought of.'”

Three slaves, Clause, Robin, and Quoco, were convicted of murdering Robin’s master, Adrian Hoghlandt:

Clause was tied to a wheel and, over a period of hours, his bones were smashed, one by one, with a crowbar, until he died. Robin was chained, strung up, and kept hanging without food or water until he died. Quaco was burned alive—in a slow fire so that his death took hours.⁸

Fort Amsterdam, later Fort George, “was built in the late 1620s with the labor of some of the first slaves who were brought to the colony.”⁹

Between 1712 and 1741, slaves doubled and slave laws got tougher:

In 1735, when a slave who violated his curfew was horsewhipped to death by his owner, an all-white jury declared that the cause of death was not the beating, but ‘Visitation by God.’¹⁰

By 1741, there were 1,800 slaves out of a total population of 10,000 with “new slave markets, named after prominent city slave traders” springing up on Wall Street.¹¹

Fort George was important to the city’s defenses because there were threats from Spain and France but it was deliberately burned in March 1741. Several other fires followed.

A notorious thief, the slave “Caesar Vaarck, or ‘Vaarck’s negro'” with a slave named Prince “stole silver candlesticks, coins, and some fancy cloth from a shop belonging to Robert and Rebecca Hogg.” Vaarck used to hang out at Hughson’s tavern owned by “John Hughson and his wife.” Vaarck had a “beautiful white mistress with red hair,” Peggy Kerry.¹²

A sixteen-year-old indentured servant working in Hughson’s, Mary Burton, testified against the slaves and Hughson. The prosecutor, Justice Daniel Horsmanden, “was trained for the law in England.” He was an English minister’s son.¹³

Horsmanden described Peggy Kerry as “‘a notorious prostitute, and also of the worst sort, a prostitute to Negroes.'” He castigated Hughson too for “confederating” with slaves.¹⁴

Another slave, Cuffee, was arrested as a conspirator and a jail informant got from him the name of the slave who had set the Fort George fire: Quack Roosevelt. Quack had become enraged when he was denied permission to see his wife who was a slave cook for the governor.

The slaves were tried without counsel but were allowed to call witnesses.

Caesar and Prince were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Caesar’s body, since he was ring leader, “was to hang in chains until it rotted.”¹⁵

Cuffee and Quack were tried together. Mary Burton’s testimony resulted in more slaves being brought in and more accusations:

As the court began to collect names and confessions, a teenage slave, Niblet’s Sandy, dropped a bombshell: the plan had been to burn the property of white men, then kill the whites as they tried to put down the fires. Sandy also claimed that Hughson was to become king, Caesar governor, and the black men were to take the murdered white men’s wives as their own.¹⁶

The conviction rate was 100% for the slaves on trial.

Attorney William Smith wrapped up the case:

‘Gentlemen, no scheme more monstrous could have been invented. . . . That the white men should all be killed, and the women become prey to the rapacious lust of these villains.!’¹⁷

The same thing as above is exactly what Denmark Vesey in Charleston was said to have planned. He was to have burned Charleston to the ground, killed all the white men and taken all the white women for himself and his plotters. He was executed July 2, 1822.

In less than a day, Quack and Cuffee were convicted and sentenced “to be burned at the stake the next afternoon.” It was said that, around three, “the two slaves were led to the stake. Upon seeing the huge piles of wood to be burned, the slaves ‘showed great terror in their countenances.'”¹⁸

The trials of John and Sarah Hughson and Peggy Kerry ended with convictions. Prosecutor William Smith said “Hughson’s crimes made him ‘blacker than a Negro'” They were all hanged.¹⁹

The total after the first week in July:

11 black men had been burned at the stake, and 10 blacks and 3 whites had been hanged. By the end of the month, 7 more black men would die.”²⁰

Mrs. Bradt’s Tom was the last death. He was “convicted of setting fire to an outhouse.” On March 13, 1742, he was hanged.

The prosecutor, Horsmanden, “wanted to burn Tom, but the other justices seem to have said ‘Enough.'”

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves

(Click Here to go to last week’s blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Six, Chapter Three: A Connecticut Slave)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/complicity-how-the-north-promoted-prolonged-and-profited-from-slavery-by-anne-farrow-joel-lang-and-jenifer-frank-of-the-hartford-courant-a-comprehensive-review-by-gene-kizer-jr-part-two-in/

² https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/complicity-how-the-north-promoted-prolonged-and-profited-from-slavery-by-anne-farrow-joel-lang-and-jenifer-frank-of-the-hartford-courant-a-comprehensive-review-by-gene-kizer-jr-part-three/

³ Francie Latour, “New England’s hidden history, More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery,” September 26, 2010, http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/26/new_englands_hidden_history/?page=full, pages 1-7, accessed 2-28-22.

⁴ Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 80.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 80-81.

⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 81.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 82.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 84.

¹³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 86.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 86-87.

¹⁵ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 88.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 89.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 91.

²⁰ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 92.