The United States of Paranoia (12 page)

Were any of those people guilty? Well,
someone
was setting fires. But if it’s reasonable to conclude that the confessions contained some truth, there are also good reasons not to take them entirely at face value. In addition to the credibility issues already mentioned, there was the questionable testimony of jailhouse informants, who repeatedly announced that one prisoner or another had confided the criminal details that he or she would not admit to the authorities. Such witnesses may have been telling the truth, but they also wanted their own punishments lessened, and they had an obvious incentive to say whatever officials wanted to hear.

There is also the possibility that testimony was extracted with torture, making the search for truth even cloudier. Several prisoners recanted their confessions, adding yet more doubt. The confessions weren’t always consistent with one another either, and some of the details weren’t very plausible. Could Hughson really afford to repeatedly provide the conspirators with free feasts? How credible is it that Cuffee could have sabotaged a fire line and danced a gleeful jig on the first day of the blazes, yet not attract the authorities’ attention till nearly three weeks later? The Geneva Club probably existed, and it may well have engaged in the quasi-Masonic rituals attributed to it, though not necessarily with a straight face. But was it really a centralized conspiracy with dozens of members organized into multiple lodges? Or had some petty crooks simply decided to give their little gang a name?

The official story became even less believable when the state fingered a tutor named John Ury as a Spanish spy, a clandestine Catholic priest, and the ringmaster of the terror. Ury steadfastly denied that he was Catholic—at that point in New York history, Catholicism was illegal—but several witnesses insisted that he was. One claimed that he and other rebels would “pray in private after the popish fashion; and that he used to forgive them their sins for burning the town, and destroying and cutting of the people’s throats.”
12
Ury gradually replaced Hughson (who by then had been executed) as the chief white villain in the plot, and the prosecution reoriented its rhetoric toward the evils of the Enemy Outside in the Vatican. For Catholics, prosecutor William Smith announced, “the most unnatural crimes, such as treason and murder, when done in obedience to the Pope . . . will merit heaven.”
13

It wasn’t implausible to suggest that the Spanish would want to encourage a slave rebellion in New York. Spain did have a history of enticing slaves to its side with promises of liberation. But the evidence against Ury was weak, and the accusers’ account of his alleged activities was drenched in anti-Catholic fantasies. The purported priest put up a serious defense, and public opinion was not nearly as united against him as it was against the other defendants. Still, it took the jury only about fifteen minutes to find him guilty. Then Ury too was put to death.

What really caused the fires that burned Manhattan in 1741? Many historians over the years have dismissed the entire conspiracy as a fiction or reduced it to a more modest attempt (or several scattered attempts) to use the fires as a cover for burglaries.
14
More recently, some scholars have taken the confessions as largely accurate but have transferred their sympathies to the rebels.
15
What’s clear is that prosecutors came to the trials with a preestablished framework for their fears and that they worked hard to fit the evidence to the story they imagined. The only thing that managed to seriously shake up the narrative was Ury, and that was possible because they had easy access to another preestablished framework, one built around long-standing worries about Vatican conspiracies and bolstered by the fact that England was at war with a Catholic power.

Today the trials look like a cautionary tale about unchecked authority and the need for basic legal rights. But for the authorities in 1741, the lesson to be learned was that slaves had too much freedom. When Horsmanden produced his book-length defense of the crackdown, he declared up front that his chief motive for writing was to persuade “every one that has negroes, to keep a very watchful eye over them, and not to indulge them with too great liberties, which we find they make use of to the worst purposes, caballing and confederating together in mischief.”
16
During the trials, the grand jury was urged to “make diligent enquiry into the œconomy and behaviour of all the mean ale-houses and tipling-houses within this city; and to mark out all such to this court, who make it a practice (and a most wicked and pernicious one it is) of entertaining negroes, and the scum and dregs of white people in conjunction.”
17

That wasn’t unusual. Insurrection panics were usually followed by calls for new restrictions on slaves’ ability to meet, move freely, educate themselves, and bear arms; by demands for similar restrictions on free blacks or even for their deportation; by proposals to pump up the powers of the slave patrols; and by cries against the places, such as Hughson’s tavern, where black Americans might plot in secret.

White fears intensified after the Western Hemisphere’s one successful slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804. After the revolt, every single slave state in the United States passed legislation to prevent Haitian immigration. The federal government imposed an embargo on trade with the black republic. In Virginia, a printer who had published the island nation’s declaration of independence was charged with inciting an insurrection and imprisoned for eight months. In the same state, Gabriel’s Rebellion of 1800 was rumored to have been led by Haitian agitators. One Virginia town petitioned the legislature for action after grumblings among the city’s free blacks reached officials’ ears: In Haiti, they said, “such language among the free people of colour” had led to the revolt “that totally annihilated the whites.”
18

You didn’t need an actual revolution to set off an insurrection panic. You didn’t even need a series of crimes, such as the Manhattan fires, that could plausibly be blamed on revolutionaries. There doesn’t seem to have been a good reason to suspect that a real revolt was imminent in Augusta, Georgia, in 1810 (or possibly 1811) when a cavalry trumpeter reportedly set off an uproar by drunkenly sounding his horn. According to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, who wrote about the event a decade later, the other militiamen thought they’d heard a signal for the slaves to rise, so they captured a black man, whipped him severely, and threatened to kill him, at which point the prisoner identified another slave as the owner of a horn. The instrument in question was covered with cobwebs, Johnson reported, but the slave was nonetheless arrested and quickly condemned to death.
19

Even an actual insurgency wasn’t necessarily all that it seemed to be. The legal historian Peter Hoffer has made a reasonable case that the Stono revolt in South Carolina was not a preplanned uprising but a break-in that evolved into a rebellion after the burglars killed two white men they encountered along the way.
20
In other words, it might not have been the product of a conspiracy at all, or at least not a conspiracy to do more than to take some goods from a storehouse.

Rebellion scares broke out during economic downturns, during fears of foreign invasion, and during times of intensified abolitionist agitation; rumbles about a coming Christmas uprising swept the South from Delaware to Texas in 1856, when the new Republican Party, founded in part on opposition to slavery, ran its first presidential campaign. In general, the anthropologist George Baca has commented, it was “during moments of conflict between white political factions” that “rumors of conspiracy seem to have been more likely to be accepted as true.”
21
Spiritual upheaval unleashed some of the same anxieties. The Second Great Awakening didn’t merely inspire fears of the Enemy Within; when the excitement caught on among American blacks, whites worried that camp meetings could be a cover for plotting revolts. The authorities sometimes suppressed independent black churches with the same vigor that the New York government brought to suppressing places such as Hughson’s tavern. In Booker’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1802, suspicion fell on the
Catawba
Meeting House, a Baptist church; false reports circulated that “quantities of arms and ammunition” had been “found concealed” in the church building and that therefore the worshippers were plotting a “horrid massacre of the whites.”
22

The typical insurrection panic was not induced by a ruling-class conspiracy any more than it was a reaction to a real conspiracy of slaves. Rebellion scares helped the governing caste by fostering white solidarity and discouraging intrawhite conflict; but it was also important, from the rulers’ point of view, that this solidarity be channeled into legal repression rather than riotous violence that the authorities couldn’t control. Sometimes such channeling took a while.

When Harriet Jacobs, a slave who escaped to the North, recalled the aftermath of a genuine conspiracy—Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Virginia—she described the ensuing search of the slaves’ homes as “a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge.”
23
By Jacobs’s account, the investigators went on a rampage: “All day long these unfeeling wretches went round, like a troop of demons, terrifying and tormenting the helpless. At night, they formed themselves into patrol bands, and went wherever they chose among the colored people, acting out their brutal will. Many women hid themselves in woods and swamps, to keep out of their way. If any of the husbands or fathers told of these outrages, they were tied up to the public whipping post, and cruelly scourged for telling lies about white men. The consternation was universal. No two people that had the slightest tinge of color in their faces dared to be seen talking together.”
24
It didn’t end until “the white citizens found that their own property was not safe from the lawless rabble they had summoned to protect them.”
25

In Baca’s words, “the widening sense of panic gave poor whites license to harm or even kill slaves, inflicting real property damage on the planter class.”
26
Even a slave owner could be charged with complicity in the plot if, out of caution, sympathy, or just a desire to protect his property, he defended an accused slave. Poor whites were, in their way, viewed as another beast below.

“Conspiracy” itself, as a criminal charge, was shaped by the fear of insurrection. The colonies expanded the concept, Hoffer wrote, applying it to any “gatherings of slaves at which a crime was discussed. No attempt to carry out the deed by any of the slaves was necessary to institute the prosecution. All the slaves present (passive as well as active participants in the conversation) were equally liable under the law.” If the patrons at Hughson’s tavern engaged in some loose talk about killing their masters and overthrowing the government, they were guilty of conspiracy as far as the law was concerned, whether or not they progressed past the talking stage. “Conspiracy prosecutions,” Hoffer concluded, “turned crimes merely imagined or anticipated by the master class into opportunities to punish those slaves who dared to speak aloud of resistance to slavery.”
27
As more plots were discovered or imagined, the law continued to evolve: North Carolina, for example, responded to the insurrection panics of 1802 by tightening the definition of “conspiracy” to cover plots with as few as two participants.

As in the trial of John Ury, anxious whites imagined alliances between the Enemy Below and the Enemy Outside. Since blacks were widely presumed to be stupid, whites found it useful to portray them as the puppets of wily northern abolitionists or some other alien force; since blacks were widely presumed to be content with their lot, whites found it useful to accuse those aliens of transforming happy workers into a bestial mob. The archetypal figure was John Brown, an abolitionist who really did attempt to lead a slave rebellion; when Brown raided Harpers Ferry in 1859, the revolt panics that ensued often included a hunt for subversive outsiders. (In Jefferson County, Virginia, the government announced that any “strangers” who could not “give a satisfactory account of themselves” would be arrested.)
28
But abolitionists had been playing the Devil role long before Brown came around. By 1859, they had already been blamed for everything from the Haitian Revolution to the fact that plantation slaves sometimes ran away.

Mark Twain spoofed southerners’ fears in
Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy
, a novel he never completed, in which Tom persuades Huck and Jim that forming a secret society would be a great prank. Recounts Huck:

[H]e had struck a splendid idea. It was to get the people in a sweat about the ablitionists. It was the very time for it. We knowed that for more than two weeks past there was whispers going around about strangers being seen in the woods over on the Illinois side, and then disappearing, and then seen again; and everybody reckoned it was ablitionists laying for a chance to run off some of our niggers to freedom. They hadn’t run off any yet, and most likely they warn’t even thinking about it and warn’t abolitionists anyway; but in them days a stranger couldn’t show himself and not start an uneasiness unless he told all about his business straight off and proved it hadn’t any harm in it.
29

Before long Tom Sawyer is forging messages for the fictional Sons of Freedom and donning blackface to pose as a runaway. Antebellum wackiness ensues.

Back in the real world, more or less, one of the most memorable panics starred an outsider who
wasn’t
an abolitionist, though abolitionists were alleged to be a part of his plot. In that case the purported mastermind was John Murrell, a man known as the Great Western Land Pirate and widely believed to be the head of the
Mystic
Clan, a network of criminals that Twain later described as a “majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn to do his evil will.”
30
The Clan was believed to hatch its conspiracies in—of course—the wilderness. “They held their ‘Grand Council’ in the deep, dark woods of the Mississippi bottom,” one writer later recalled. There was said to be a vast tree in that swamp, seventy-five feet around and capable of holding twenty-four horses within it; and it was there, “in its great hollow, that John A. Murrell and his Clansmen met in grand council, and formed their dark plots, and concocted their hellish plans.”
31
You thought you were reading a crime story, but that was just a mask: It was a fairy tale all along.