Flight and Arrival

By the time Auguste returned to La Rochelle from Africa in 1685 or 1686, the increasingly tenuous world of French Protestantism had collapsed, its loyal adherents in flight. The circumstances of Huguenot life, however, had not always been so grim. The Edict of Nantes, promulgated in 1598 by the French king Henry IV, allowed French Protestants to continue worshipping under the Calvinist doctrines that had gained currency earlier in the sixteenth century as the Protestant Reformation grew in strength. Yet toleration began to erode in the 1660s. Louis XIV and his ministers calculatedly constricted Huguenot religious and secular life. They forbade Protestant churches from holding national meetings, shuttered churches that could not supply evidence of having opened prior to the 1598 Edict of Nantes, imposed restrictions on Huguenot schools, prohibited Protestants from practicing law, and denied Protestant doctors the right to treat Catholics. Perhaps Pierre Jay decided to send his son for an English education and then to Africa for mercantile work to prepare him for the inevitable and dramatic constriction of Huguenot religious and secular opportunities. In October 1685, Louis XIV intensified anti-Protestant terror already underway by revoking the Edict of Nantes. Although most of Louis’s eight hundred thousand Protestant subjects knuckled under to the effort to compel Catholic conversion, the stream of Huguenots pouring out of France swelled after 1685. In all, an estimated two hundred thousand Huguenots fled France because of Louis XIV’s persecutions—including Pierre Jay and his family.⁴

Before revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Pierre anticipated this final blow, arranging for his family in early 1685 to flee to London, a Protestant city in a Protestant country. According to John Jay’s written account, Pierre was able to send many of the family’s possessions to the English capital and to depart with a cargo of iron. These arrangements allowed the Jays to avoid even temporary penury, unlike some of their less fortunate fellow refugees.⁵

Auguste took a less typical path to safety. Returning to La Rochelle from Africa after his family had already departed and finding the religious situation untenable, he boarded a ship that took him to Charles Town, South Carolina, the primary port of an English proprietary colony barely more than two decades old. Auguste was not alone among Huguenots in seeking refuge outside Europe. Thousands traveled to English and Dutch possessions, with those bound for English colonies often stopping first in England. Of the approximately two thousand Huguenot refugees who came to the North American colonies, about five hundred went to South Carolina, many of them merchants and artisans by trade. The Carolina proprietors had actively recruited Huguenots with French-language pamphlets extolling economic prospects in the colony. Charles Town’s population in 1685 was not even one thousand, so Huguenots quickly made up a significant proportion of the port city’s residents, even as some spread out to the hinterland to take up agricultural pursuits.⁶

Huguenots enjoyed remarkable success in South Carolina, integrating into a political and economic structure increasingly organized around slaveholding. As early as 1700, two-thirds of estates of deceased Huguenots listed slaves. Discrimination against Huguenots was mitigated in part because, as white Protestants, they could identify and be identified as part of the dominant group fending off potential dangers from Native Americans and the emerging Black slave majority. As the colony’s fortunes rose rapidly with the adaptation of rice as a staple crop and the accelerating importation of slaves to do the brutal work of irrigation and harvesting in the swampy lowlands, Huguenots amassed land and slaves at a pace that exceeded that of their English fellow colonists.⁷

Auguste Jay did not stay in South Carolina long enough to enjoy the opportunities pursued by his former countrymen, although his quick departure had no connection to the presence of slavery. Huguenot Calvinist teachings did not prohibit slaveholding among French émigrés; indeed, part of the appeal for the Huguenot arrivals in South Carolina was the chance to acquire land and slaves. Had Auguste remained in Charleston, given his family’s wealth and connections, as well as his talent, he likely would have experienced material success along with the fellowship of French expatriates. According to family lore, however, Auguste had a great dislike of the hot climate of South Carolina; he found prospects wanting in the recently established city of Philadelphia, which lacked a Huguenot community, and chose to settle instead in New York. Along with Boston, New York was a major destination of French Protestant refugees.⁸

His new and permanent home, although not destined to become a plantation slave society like South Carolina, incorporated enslaved Africans from its early decades as a Dutch colony. Enslaved people were a critical part of the labor force both during the Dutch and the early English period, and the system of slavery grew more stringent in the years following the English capture of New Netherland in 1664. By the time Auguste arrived in the 1680s, freedom through conversion to Christianity and working for the Dutch West India Company was but a memory, and the path to Black freedom had begun to narrow. The numbers of slaves and their percentage of the total population, meanwhile, were also on the rise—from approximately eight hundred people of African descent in 1664, making up one-tenth of the colonial population, to more than two thousand slaves in 1698, or approximately 12 percent of the population.⁹

Ascent, Assimilation, Enslavement

Auguste, who changed his name to Augustus, correctly anticipated that New York was the kind of place where a well-connected Huguenot merchant with an English education might succeed. But he had certainly not picked a stable or simple society as a place to begin his ascent. From its earliest Dutch days, the colony exhibited a diversity that contemporaries could hardly fail to notice and that has caught the attention of historians ever since. Dutch authorities, some more grudgingly than others, supervised a province containing Belgian Walloons, English Puritans, Scandinavians, Germans, Sephardic Jews, as well as African slaves.

New York in the 1680s roiled with religious and ethnic conflict that echoed the contests for authority that had sent Augustus and his fellow Huguenots into exile. James II, the newly installed king of England, was a Catholic determined to impose imperial order, though not his religious faith, over many of his North American colonies. His plan included creating a single Dominion of New England, which would place every colony north of Pennsylvania under a unified administrative structure. This reorganization stoked resentment among colonists who were highly suspicious of the motives of the Catholic king and who resented the loss of autonomy that the Dominion entailed. When news filtered back from England of the so-called Glorious Revolution, in which James’s daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange crossed the English Channel to reclaim the realm for Protestantism and parliamentary government, American colonists, including New Yorkers, wasted little time toppling the colonial officials whom James had set over them.¹⁰

The political crisis that ensued in New York revealed the deep ethnic fissures and religious passions that Augustus Jay would have to interpret and negotiate to succeed in his new home. A militia captain and merchant named Jacob Leisler, himself a militant German Calvinist immigrant, jumped headlong into the political vacuum. He saw himself as an avenger and guardian against the sort of anti-Protestant atrocities perpetrated by the likes of Louis XIV on the Huguenots. He and his more politically radical colleague Jacob Milbourne rallied poorer, more ordinary Dutch inhabitants to their banner, some of whom continued to harbor resentment at the increasing English cultural dominance in the province. The anti-elite tone of the Leisler movement alarmed the merchant class, including many merchants of Dutch ancestry. During Leisler’s Rebellion, Huguenots, like the Dutch, split along lines of class and wealth—the poorer Huguenots identifying with Leisler’s anti-Catholicism, the richer ones disturbed by the populism that led to the violent harassment of New York City’s merchant elite. These elites were well pleased when the new monarchs William and Mary rejected any affinity for the Leislerians; indeed, the king’s newly appointed governor saw to it that Leisler and Milbourne were hung for their transgressions, a far cry from the result that the impassioned Protestant leaders had imagined. Commercial, political, and social stability—not a pan-Atlantic Protestant religious campaign—animated the English crown in the wake of James II’s failed regime.¹¹

Augustus’s economic ambitions and his social affiliations in the coming years suggest that this victim of Catholic persecution was less interested in settling religious or cultural scores than in taking advantage of opportunities for commercial success and social mobility. In 1697, Augustus married Anna Marie Bayard, whose uncle Nicholas Bayard had been one of Leisler’s staunchest detractors and who bore the brunt of lower-status Dutch residents’ resentment for Leisler’s ultimate undoing. Of French Protestant extraction, the Bayards had settled in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century before coming to New York. Anne Marie was a grandniece of the famed former Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had owned many slaves. It was a match that brought Augustus wealth, status, and affiliation with some of the most important families in the colony.¹²

Augustus, like other Huguenots, was also able to take advantage of the international Huguenot trading networks that the post–Edict of Nantes diaspora facilitated even as he assimilated into English New York. In the eighteenth century, the Jays would enjoy a particularly close trading relationship with Stephen Peloquin of Bristol, England, who had married Augustus’s sister in England. Augustus’s marriage into the Anglicizing Dutch elite did not compromise such networks, but rather expanded them in an age when having cultural and familial ties made it much easier to maintain the trust and credit necessary for fruitful long-distance commercial relationships.¹³

Yet, like many French Protestants in the Anglo-American colonies, Augustus did not feel constrained by a loyalty to explicitly Huguenot institutions. The Huguenot church, of which Augustus was a member, actually grew by 1695 to be the second largest in New York City, two years before his marriage to Anna Marie. Even so, their wedding took place in the Dutch church, a sign of his denominational flexibility; the couple baptized some of their children in the French and others in the Dutch church. In the 1720s, Augustus broke with the Huguenot church after a scandal involving its minister Louis Rou. Rou married a fourteen-year-old after his first wife passed away, a move that provoked attempts by lay leaders to remove him and provided the pretext for Jay to decamp to the Trinity Church. Established in 1697, Trinity served as the flagship of New York’s established Anglican Church and became one of Manhattan’s landmark structures. Augustus embraced his new religious affiliation, serving as a member of Trinity’s vestry from 1727–1746, further confirming his elite status and cultural anglicization.¹⁴

In the years before Augustus joined Trinity, the Anglican congregation had attempted to bring Africans into the congregation. Elias Neau operated a school from 1703 until his death in 1722 for the purpose of converting slaves to Christianity under the auspices of the Anglican Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Like Jay, Neau was a Huguenot refugee who came to Manhattan to pursue his ambitions as a merchant. He found his way into the Anglican Church after surviving the harrowing experience of being captured by French privateers, serving as an enslaved oarsman on a French galley ship, and then spending more than two years in a French prison. When Neau finally returned to New York, his strong religious convictions led him to become an official representative of the SPG and to launch his school.

Although Neau was hardly an abolitionist pioneer, his story indicates the potential and the limitations of liberalizing approaches to slavery among the geographically mobile, culturally malleable class of mercantile New York Huguenots like Jay. Both African slaves and European masters had reasons to be skeptical of the school. Slaves found that the binary cosmology of sin and salvation resonated poorly with the Akan spiritual worldview that many brought with them from West Africa. Masters feared the spread of notions of spiritual equality to their slaves and worried that converts to Christianity might claim a right to freedom. Neau, himself a slave owner, worked with the provincial legislature to pass a law affirming that baptism did not make slaves free. Yet Neau’s persistence in spreading the gospel to slaves showed some results. He reported instructing more than two hundred enslaved students during his two decades of teaching. No other New York church in these decades or for many years afterward took a similar interest in the spiritual lives of slaves. Although Jay’s name does not appear on the list of masters whose slaves attended the school or received baptism, his wife’s uncle Col. Bayard had a slave catechized by Neau. Tantalizing but inconclusive as to Augustus’s opinions about slave conversion is a December 1722 appeal by officers of Trinity Church for the SPG to dispatch a new catechist to replace the recently deceased Neau. The request drew attention to “a vast increase of Children & Indians & Negro servants who cannot without such assistance be so well instructed in the Principles of Christianity.”¹⁵ The Jays’ new church was not indifferent to the spiritual identity of nonwhites while not questioning the institution of slavery itself.

Neau’s mission notwithstanding, the priorities for white New Yorkers regarding slavery were profit, exploitation, and control. As in South Carolina, New York Huguenots embraced slaveholding. French Protestants in the rural Westchester County town of New Rochelle, founded by Huguenots, and those in New York City were more likely to hold slaves than were Dutch and English New Yorkers. In 1698, slaves comprised more than 18 percent of the population of New Rochelle, where almost one-quarter of the white households owned slaves. In New York City, half the Huguenot households owned slaves. The disproportionate percentage of Huguenots who were merchants might account for their high levels of participation in the ranks of slaveholders. Slaveholding may be seen as reflecting the widely held desire among Huguenots to join other New Yorkers in holding important levers of economic advancement and social status.¹⁶

The spectacular rise of sugar production in the West Indies during the early decades of the eighteenth century gave the Manhattan port a significant boost, to the benefit of merchants such as Augustus Jay. New York businesses supplied the grains, meat, and naval stores that West Indians demanded and refined sugar. Merchants, including Augustus Jay, profited from the business generated by such exchanges; an estimated 50 percent of ships embarking and entering into Manhattan’s harbor in the early eighteenth century came or went to the West Indies, and others carried goods between colonies that would eventually find their way to the sugar-producing islands. Even a merchant primarily oriented toward European trade would gain from the increased wealth and the multiplication and broadening of opportunities that a lively West Indian trade generated for the city.¹⁷

The slave trade itself also was a source of profit. Augustus served a merchant apprenticeship with Frederick Philipse, a prominent member of the ethnically Dutch, Anglicized elite and a member of the governor’s council who had butted heads with Jacob Leisler. Philipse owned slave ships that made nine African voyages between 1685 and 1700. In most instances, his vessels traveled all the way to Madagascar and the southeast coast of Africa and then delivered their human cargo to New York and elsewhere. Philipse boarded approximately twelve hundred slaves to the Americas during this period, of which one-sixth may have died along the way.¹⁸

In one dramatic documented instance, Augustus Jay facilitated, or at least attempted to, Philipse’s enterprises off the East African coast, scheming to mix the legal business of slave trading with the illegal business of trading with pirates. Philipse enlisted Augustus Jay to help him sell some of the nonhuman East India trade goods that he had acquired from his pirate connections. Frederick Philipse’s son Adolph, aboard the New York Merchant, met Augustus, who was on board Philipse’s ship the Frederick, to make a nighttime transfer of cargo. Augustus then sailed to Hamburg, Germany, where the dubious cargo would have been sold, if not for the intervention of a British diplomat there. Meanwhile approximately seventy slaves sailed legally to New York.¹⁹

This was the world in which Augustus Jay made his fortune, one built on networks of trust, trade, and even intrigue. Whatever the extent of his involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, the burgeoning trade with the West Indies presented Augustus with opportunities to import slaves from the Caribbean as part of his mercantile business. In 1717, a ship he owned with three others brought four slaves into New York. Another ship, the Mary, which he co-owned with his son-in-law Pierre Valette and two others, carried sixty-four slaves from Jamaica in four voyages, two in 1725 and two in 1727. The last of these voyages alone brought thirty slaves. The human cargo’s arrival in spring and summer may have made the adjustment from the climate of the tropics to that of the mainland less severe, but yet another departure and sea-borne exposure added to the suffering of the enslaved.²⁰

Augustus’s trans-shipment of Jamaican slaves met a demand for slave labor and a sustained eighteenth-century quest by New York merchants for slave trade profits. In the six decades prior to the American Revolution, an estimated 151 slaving voyages connected New York to Africa, 60 of which likely imported slaves from Africa into New York, with others transporting slaves to the West Indies. Most of the voyages bringing Africans directly to New York occurred from the late 1740s forward. Commerce with the sugar islands of the West Indies was undeniably a huge economic boon, but only a tiny proportion, likely less than 2 percent, of New York shipping tonnage involved trade with Africa. Still, in large cargoes from Africa or small lots from the West Indies, this trade made a significant impact on the size and composition of the province’s slave population. Likely, more than 7,000 slaves entered New York between 1701 and 1774, perhaps 2,800 of whom came straight from Africa.²¹ Those who remained in New York City or were born to enslaved parents there suffered from the port’s brutal working conditions and from minimal attention to their nutritional and health needs. The majority, who worked in the countryside, could anticipate a life of drudgery in the house and field under the watchful eyes of their white masters.²²

Like most slave regimes, New York’s was built on conflict and the sharpening of lines. Only people of African descent and, at least in theory, Indians born out of state could be enslaved. Indentured servants had time-limited contracts and protection from abusive masters that slaves did not enjoy. Slaves could not engage in commerce or gather together in groups of more than three. They could be publicly whipped and in certain cases executed. Legislators limited manumissions and curtailed interactions between slaves and free Blacks.²³

If there was any illusion that slaves accepted the full raft of legal disabilities imposed on them by New York’s white authorities or their masters’ exploitive ownership, that illusion was dramatically shattered in April 1712. An estimated twenty-four Manhattan slaves launched the first major slave insurrection in mainland English North America. Under the leadership of men recently imported from Africa’s Gold Coast, the slaves put an outhouse to flames and then assaulted the whites who rushed to fight the fire, using guns and blades they had secretly accumulated. Two Huguenots were among the nine whites killed, including Augustus Grasset who was run through the neck with a knife.

After subduing the rebels, some who escaped capture through suicide, authorities undertook a brutal judicial repression. A dragnet of arrests led to more than twenty executions, most by hanging, but also by burning at the stake of one slave, the starvation in chains of another, and even the breaking of a slave named Clause on the wheel. In the revolt’s aftermath, city and provincial authorities tightened already stringent laws and added further impediments to manumission. Many white New Yorkers blamed the Huguenot-turned-Anglican catechist Neau for stoking the flames of resistance and sought to limit his future enrollment by restricting the ability of slaves to move around the city at night, the only time they had to attend his school. Although teaching Christianity to slaves retained enough support to keep the school open, no one in authority in New York raised the more basic question about whether people, converted or otherwise, should be slaves at all.²⁴

Bound and Unbound

As Augustus and Anna Marie Jay’s children came of age, the family continued to integrate into a provincial elite and an economic order dependent on slavery in myriad ways. Augustus’s second daughter Marie married Pierre Valette, whose brother was a wealthy Jamaican. Augustus’s third daughter François and his only son Peter married siblings in the Van Cortlandt family, prominent New Yorkers to whom they were already related through their mother. Jacobus Van Cortlandt, the father of spouses Frederick (Françoise) and Mary (Peter), traded for West Indian slaves, selling them in New York City and to nearby farmers. The Van Cortlandts in turn were related to the Philipse family, one of the province’s wealthiest families, with extensive slaveholdings in New York, as well as the West Indies, and, as we have seen, for a time a vigorous presence in the Africa–to–New York slave trade.²⁵

By the time Peter Jay married Mary Van Cortlandt in 1728, he was already active in his father’s international trading business, having traveled to England and elsewhere in Europe to strengthen ties with the family’s transatlantic connections. He soon would also join his father in the Trinity vestry.²⁶ Peter’s ledger from 1725 shows trading activities with Bristol, England; Jamaica; Surinam; and Barbados. Foodstuffs were a key part of his business, as was bringing finished goods from England to the New York and New Jersey hinterland. The Indian trade in animal skins also figured in his exchanges.

Peter Jay joined his father and brothers-in-law Pierre Valette and Frederick Van Cortlandt in at least one investment that brought slaves into New York. Between 1730 and 1733, their co-owned vessel, the Dolphin, carried forty-seven enslaved people northward from Jamaica, Barbados, Curaçao, and Antigua. Customs records show that the Dolphin imported two more slaves in 1740. As on Augustus’s sloop the Mary in the 1720s, the slaves trans-shipped on the Dolphin were likely recent arrivals from Africa, enduring one more disorienting leg of their brutal journey. Thrown in with trade goods such as casks of rum and sugar, human cargo originally shipped to the Americas from the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra, or West Central Africa were another means by which merchants like the Jays could elevate their profits by filling their brig with return goods from the West Indies.²⁷

The trans-shipping of slaves was not a passive investment. Indeed, Peter’s role in trafficking in children found its way into his ledger. An entry from the mid-1720s noted a payment for “15 Spanish Pistols & a Negro Boy from Jamaica.” The Spanish coins could presumably be used in another transaction, but he may have kept the boy for his own household. Peter also appears to have facilitated the sale of “a Negro girl” to a Martin Hoffman in Esopus, a town up the Hudson River in Ulster County. If not central to their business, the mercantile economy that slavery and the slave trade made possible was central to Peter’s and Augustus’s prosperity.²⁸

Services provided by the enslaved were also essential features of life among the city’s mercantile elite. As the proportion of Black Manhattanites increased to 20 percent of the population during the first decades of the eighteenth century and surged past two thousand in total, they formed a network of dockworkers, artisanal laborers, and domestic servants. In an age where something as simple as getting water for tea required a trip to the pump and some heavy lifting, and virtually every act of cooking and cleaning had to be done by hand, there was no end to the work that a master could command a slave to do. The Jays and Van Cortlandts were surely no different in this regard from other white Manhattanites of means. Peter’s ledger records a payment due to his father-in-law Jacobus Van Cortlandt for “one year’s Lodging & boarding & Washing of himself, his white Servt: & three Negro slaves.”²⁹

Slaveholders like the Jays, Philipses, Roosevelts, and DeLanceys, however, did not and could not exert unlimited control over their slaves. Mobility was a key aspect of their utility. Not only did slaves have to get to and from places of work but they also had to run errands; fetch wood, water, and foodstuffs for their masters; dispose of waste; and carry messages on their masters’ behalf. When there was less work to be done, in the evenings and on Sundays, slaves, ignoring laws to the contrary, gathered to socialize with one another and with other members of the lower class in this polyglot Atlantic port. Slaves caroused with alcohol to lift their spirits and divert their psychological and physical pain, but they also plotted organized theft and fencing rings. African New Yorkers also maintained communal and religious rituals of their own, some around burial rites and others involving the maintenance of organized secret societies, an adaptation of West African practices.³⁰

The irrepressible human urge to defy authority made Manhattan’s slaves an incendiary and potentially revolutionary threat to the comfortable world that the Jays and their more prominent relatives had made for themselves. After a series of fires broke out in March 1741, authorities uncovered what they believed to be a widespread conspiracy among the city’s slaves not only to burn down the city but also to seize control of it. In the most lurid version, the slaves planned to kill their male masters and take their former female masters for wives.

Conditions in New York earlier in the winter of 1741 had stoked white fears of vulnerability to this sort of challenge from the margins of society. The colony’s elites were riven by political factions over how much authority the royal governor should exercise. The winter of 1740–41 had choked with ice the harbor and rivers on which the city relied for trade, setting everyone further on edge. Meanwhile, Great Britain and Spain had been at war since 1739, making New York a target of the British Empire’s Catholic rival. Just two years before, South Carolina’s slaves, taking advantage of English–Spanish tensions, launched a rebellion. The suspicious fires in March 1741 sparked an intensive investigation for the culprits.³¹

A special court was called to track down and punish the alleged plotters, and it quickly seized on four key leaders among the Black population: Caesar Varick, Prince Auboyneau, Quaco Roosevelt, and Cuffee Philipse. The court, led by city recorder Daniel Horsmanden, pieced together a conspiracy that would also ensnare white tavern keeper John Hughson and, ultimately, John Ury, supposedly a crypto-Catholic priest with base sectarian motives, as white masterminds of the alleged plot. The trials produced terrifying results. By the time the investigation ended, New York’s authorities had executed thirty slaves and transported more than eighty out of the colony.³² Peter Jay’s slave Brash was one of those sent to the Portuguese-held island of Madeira.

The stories of Brash and of Augustus Jay’s slave Ben reveal how difficult it is to separate fact from judicially coerced fiction, while at the same time indicating that Manhattan’s urban milieu provided opportunities to defy the law and perhaps contemplate rebellion. On June 25, 1741, Brash informed a judge that, a year before, Ben had brought him to Hughson’s home, where Brash learned from the two of them of a plan “to rise against the town, to burn the houses and to kill the people.” Hughson, according to Brash’s testimony, got Ben and Brash to “swear that they would set their master’s houses on fire, and murder their masters and mistresses,” having them kiss a book that he produced for the purposes of this bloody oath. Ben recruited a slave named Jack to the plot and later four others whom he named as well. Hughson wanted Ben and Brash to steal weapons from their masters, but the best Brash came up with was a knife from another master’s cook.³³

Brash’s admission may have saved his life, which is one of the reasons to suspect its veracity. By the time he confessed, sixteen slaves already had been hung or burned at the stake for their alleged roles in the revolutionary conspiracy. Another reason to question Brash’s story is that Ben at the time of the investigation was no longer in New York, having been shipped off to Madeira before matters came to a head. Yet, at least two slaves who testified after Brash also fingered Ben as an instigator. Toby recalled a meeting at Hughson’s house near Christmastime, when Ben tricked him into kissing the book that pledged him “to fight the white people.” Ben, claimed Toby, also boasted that they had already collected arms for the struggle, asking the witness to “bring him a pistol to Mr. Jay’s garden.” Thousands of miles away, Ben could neither deny nor contradict any of these claims. Then again, it is not clear that a slave’s denial would be taken seriously. Certainly, Brash reached that conclusion. At first he pled not guilty before quickly changing his mind.³⁴

A straightforward acceptance of Brash’s confession is not possible. Horsmanden himself compiled the official record of the case, on which historians must draw, editing it to justify his actions. Some at the time and since have judged the entire conspiracy to be the figment of an overheated white imagination—a proverbial witch hunt around which white elites could coalesce their power.³⁵

Before dismissing the evidence against Brash, Ben, and dozens of others, it is worth considering what the case tells us about the Manhattan world that the Jays and their slaves inhabited in the 1740s. Brash, Ben, and other slaves participated in or at least knew about an interracial lower-class culture operating beyond the supervision of their masters. The first person to identify Brash as a conspirator was Margaret Kerry, a white prostitute who had a child by Caesar Varick, one of the alleged plot’s leaders. The illiterate Kerry named Brash as part of a group of about a dozen Blacks who gathered to drink at the home of white shoemaker John Romme, whose kitchen doubled as a dram shop. Resentments of class as well as race seemed to drive the plans. According to Kerry’s deposition, “They proposed, to burn the fort first, and afterwards the city; and then steal, rob and carry all the money and goods they could procure, and was to be carried to Romme’s and were to be joined by the country negroes; and that they were to murder everyone that had money.” Romme’s wife Elizabeth, in denying she knew anything about a conspiracy, confirmed her home as the venue for interracial socializing. She admitted that some of the Blacks named by Kerry had been to her home, but others including “Mr. Jay’s Brash” had never visited; yet, presented by the judges with some of the individual accused, “she distinguished them every one” and “called them by their names.” Hughson’s servant Mary Burton also reported Brash and Ben’s presence and involvement in her employer’s plot.³⁶

The African Americans hauled before the court seemed familiar with one another; even if we discount the pressure to name names, no one denied the existence of the social networks by which slaves, mostly but not exclusively men, knew each other and for whom they worked. On June 1, Sandy named “Mr. Jay’s Brash” as part of a gathering of twenty conspirators present at a meeting in slave owner Gerardus Comfort’s house. On June 5, a slave named Sarah also listed “Mr. Jay’s Brash” as part of the core group of conspirators. Two other witnesses, by contrast, when asked about Brash’s presence at planning meetings, indicated that the slave was not there, having already named several others who had participated in the gatherings. Blacks traveled in circles beyond their masters’ reach or supervision.³⁷

In Ben’s and Brash’s social world, resentment of slavery in general and of masters in particular seems not only plausible but likely. Although not identified as the very top lieutenants of the plot, by some accounts Brash and Ben were among its leaders. But whatever Ben or Brash specifically did or did not say, plan, or do, slaves gathered illegally and likely discussed throwing off their bondage. Even if some of the oath-swearing threats were just bragging and ritual expressions of hostility, the antagonism toward masters was real enough. If there was a plan afoot for Black liberation, slaves were neither following orders nor being used as pawns in a white game.³⁸

Brash’s fate—exile instead of execution—spoke to the dilemma faced by the master class amid the panic. If there was some truth or at least the possibility of truth to a conspiracy by the enslaved to wreak havoc in Manhattan, white authorities would inevitably feel compelled to investigate further, signal their resolve, and mete out some punishment. But where to draw the line? The killing and banishments were extensive and brutal. Still, if the judges had to order the killing or transportation of every possible Black conspirator, they would have almost emptied the town of slaves. To the men and women who relied on slave labor, that result certainly would be unacceptable. Meanwhile, even the zealous Horsmanden, who believed in a vast, pernicious interracial conspiracy, understood the need for some restraint, if only to secure Black testimony that would produce additional indictments. The confessions of Brash and a few others made them good witnesses; indeed, they had testified on the promise that they would be spared death. Thus, commented Horsmanden, “Their escape could not be avoided, though their crimes merited a more severe fate” (see Figure 1).³⁹

Peter Jay may have preferred the comparative leniency of transporting Brash out of New York as a punishment for his slave. The record hints that Jay may have been skeptical of mass slave disloyalty as a real source of danger. Four weeks prior to Brash’s confession, Horsmanden noted that Jay and a group of other masters had been asked to testify at their slave’s request. Horsmanden declined to include the substance of Jay’s testimony, dismissing it as supplying “nothing more material”—presumably meaning that what Jay said did not help build a case for conspiracy. A month after Brash’s confession, Peter Jay was impaneled as a grand juror in the proceeding, around the same time that the court pivoted toward the prosecution of the alleged Roman Catholic mastermind of the plot, the unfortunate John Ury.⁴⁰

Even if the court ultimately turned to a religious rather than a racial enemy, the trials, executions, and deportations of 1741 represented a brief but fateful war by authorities against the city’s enslaved population. If there was any doubt that whites could marshal the strength to enforce their system of brutal inequality and routine exploitation, the trials that Horsmanden orchestrated made that point. Although the iron fist of authority did not end all thoughts of resistance by New York slaves, the message that the white elites were prepared to use their full power and authority against the slave community surely was received loud and clear. If Jay family slaves Ben and Brash were reunited in Madeira, they might even have discussed that fact.

Slave Country

The ice, fire, and blood of 1741 did not deter the thirty-seven-year-old merchant Peter Jay from expanding his business operations in Manhattan. That autumn, he contracted to have a new two-story storehouse of white oak built for him there.⁴¹ At least for the moment, hope trumped fear.

The events of 1741 also did not produce among whites a rethinking of slavery as either a system fundamentally too dangerous to maintain or one too morally compromised to defend. Although the number of slave ships with the primary disembarkation point of New York dipped in the 1740s and New York City’s slave population remained static for a time, slaveholding and slave trading did not cease. In the 1750s, slave importations shot up dramatically, making that decade the colony’s most active one for slave trading in the flourishing port.⁴²

In the mid-1740s, however, Peter Jay reconsidered his commitment to city life and to mercantile affairs. Through his wife Mary and his father-in-law Jacobus Van Cortlandt, Peter had begun acquiring land in Westchester County, the sprawling county to the north of Manhattan and situated between the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. Meanwhile, family circumstances and a discomfort with the disruptions to trade caused by ongoing imperial warfare prompted Peter to move to a 400-acre farm on the Long Island Sound in Rye, New York. That same year, 1745, Mary Van Cortlandt Jay was about to give birth to their sixth child, not counting two who died in their first year. Their brood was a troubled one. Their first daughter Eve was emotionally unstable; their first son Augustus had a severe learning disability; their third son Peter and their second daughter Anna Maricka permanently lost their sight after exposure to a 1739 smallpox epidemic. For a family of means like the Jays, these problems seemed more manageable in a rural than an urban setting.⁴³

One aspect of life that Peter and Mary Jay would not leave behind by moving to the country was slavery. Richard Morris transported slaves up to Westchester from the West Indies. Frederick Philipse purportedly landed some of his Madagascar slaves directly in Rye during the late seventeenth century, establishing the county as home to some of colonial New York’s largest individual slaveholders. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the number of slaves in the county hovered in the lower hundreds, enough to make up 10 percent or more of Westchester’s total population. Censuses taken in the quarter-century after the Jays’ arrival show the numbers of slaves growing substantially, surpassing 1,000 for the first time in the 1749 count and peaking at 3,430 in 1771, or more than 15 percent of the county’s population.⁴⁴

Slavery in Rye exhibited the institution’s general brutality. The town contained a little stone structure where “refractory slaves” were confined. In 1739, the town appointed a whipper, who did his work near the Anglican church where the Jays would have worshipped.⁴⁵

Chief among Rye’s slaveholders was Peter Jay. Of the sixty-three slaveholding families listed in 1755, most owned one or two slaves older than fourteen years of age. According to census taker James Horton, Jay owned three males and five females. The Jays and their neighbors likely owned enslaved children who went uncounted.⁴⁶ Like their marriages and their landholdings, the enslaved people whom Peter owned marked the Jay family’s social ascendancy since Augustus’s arrival in the late seventeenth century.

In 1751, Augustus Jay died at the advanced age of 86. In a single lifetime, the family had gone from French mercantile prosperity, to persecution-induced flight, to entrepreneurship and assimilation in an urban outpost of a growing British Empire, to a wealthy rural slaveholding lifestyle. The enslaved in their midst had endured far more jarring journeys, without the prosperous ending. Brash and Ben perhaps finished their lives in Madeira, an island far closer to the land of their African origins than Manhattan—but nowhere close to enjoying the freedom they may have imagined or realizing the revenge they perhaps craved. Like the Jays, Brash and Ben’s lives interwove themes of persecution and displacement.

As for Augustus’s young grandson John Jay, the eighth child of Peter and Mary, he would soon enough go back to Manhattan to develop his talents and vocation—and there witness the beginnings of a rebellion that would shake the world far more than the crushing repression of 1741. In time, John would contribute mightily to that rebellion, fusing the Jay name to a new nation and its revolutionary ideals. But it was in the Westchester countryside that the future statesman would first learn the ways of masters and slaves, of privilege and privation, and of freedom and bondage.