Part 9 (1/2)
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 {204} 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; {205} 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.
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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 {207} 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 a.s.sembly, 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 {208} 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 fas.h.i.+onable quarter around Trinity Church were fairly ablaze with gay costumes. Men of fas.h.i.+on wore powdered wigs and c.o.c.ked 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 s.h.i.+ps which unloaded surrept.i.tiously along the water front.
The members of one cla.s.s 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 {209} out of place in New York, and from early times they had exhibited resentment and hatred toward the governing cla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sed 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 {210} apprehend all negroes who had a.s.sembled 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 {211} 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 {212} 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 const.i.tuted their chief terror.
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