The Slave Revolt of 1712: The Provision and Omission of Justice in Early New York
Geof Huth
This is a story about a failed struggle for freedom,¹ but it is also a story about archives — one about their value and about their limitations to show us the past.
My attempt here is, first, to show the culture of these early inhabitants of Manhattan — not merely tell the stories that illustrate that culture. Second, I’m trying to understand this story without resorting to sources outside these records. Mine is a thought experiment, one that interrogates the value of archives as the historical record. I’m trying to determine what these archives actually do for us. As an archivist, I’ll be telling this story through the court records of early New York, trying to discover what the record unintentionally tells us, and assessing the authenticity and reliability of that record.
The event I am examining we generally call a revolt, but I give it another name, because this revolt was truly a short-lived and failed revolution. It was an unsuccessful battle for freedom by an enslaved people or, maybe, peoples — for the people fighting and dying for freedom were black, indigenous, mixed race, men, and women.
As archivists, we know the record is not simply the encrustation of truth, but we also know that truth can come to us through the record. So my goal is to find whatever truth I can.
This minute book is the only source of information I have used for this account. It comes from the Court of General and Quarter Sessions of the Peace, a defunct county-level criminal court.² It is wrapped in vellum and written in the hand of its age. This alone helps us accept this book as authentic, as truly what it says it is, and other evidence supports that conclusion, including its provenance. These records came from the court itself. They were transferred to the custody of the New York County Commissioner of Records probably near 1855, and in 1942 they were transferred to the custody of the New York County Clerk.
But how reliable is this record? How believable are the facts presented within its pages? For the most part, quite so — as a record of how people were judged and what decisions the jury made. But we know little about how and why the jury made those verdicts, and we don’t know exactly what information they left out or why, but we can see the shapes of absences within its pages: We do not usually know when the convicted were executed. We do not know many of the details of the killings that initiated the trials. We do not really know, in the end, if the verdicts were fair, even by the standards of that time.
I discovered evidence of the slave revolt accidentally in the index at the front of these minutes. This phrase jumped out at me:
Negro slaves for ye: Murder of
Seven times repeated, a magical and portentous number. These cases of murder were sandwiched between a case of assault and one for keeping a disorderly house (meaning, a house of prostitution). That there were many slaves in New York at the time was no surprise. New York was a big slave state, for a northern one. Blacks and slaves do not often appear in these minute books, and when they do, they are usually nameless, usually bit actors, but always central to the story. The minutes refer to them when others are accused of crimes, such as entertaining slaves, allowing them to drink alcohol in their “tippling houses,” or selling something to them. Slaves were those people from whom society kept not just freedoms, but also any pleasures.³ Note that these slaves were not contained in one spot, as slaves were on plantations. The slaves of early New York often had to move about in the city to complete their tasks, and that is how they became entangled in crimes of pleasure.
Murders were rare in this society, and indictments of slaves were rarer still — so this is not a usual story from this version of Manhattan.
The entries in this book documenting this revolution begin on page 212 and end on page 248, taking up only 37 pages. Within those few pages is the story of the punishments meted out for the insurrection, but the book doesn’t treat this event as a revolt at all. It simply presents charges of murder and records punishments and acquittals. The book reflects its makers, so it merely demonstrates the operation of the state against individuals, not the action of one people against another people. White New Yorkers running the trials must have seen this battle for what it was — an attempt at revolution, and one that frightened them, that caused even them to worry for their lives.
The court does not make that case, yet this volume of minutes remains one of the major ways to see back to this revolution. To understand what transpired, we must interpret the formulaic text of the book’s entries, while knowing few details of the killings or the human struggle for freedom that led to those. This struggle or revolt or uprising is kept secret by the court clerks who wrote in this volume, yet it is obvious to us now. We can read even what is not written in the volume.
What you need to know about this minute book is that it is engrossed. In short, this means it was written after the fact, after the trial. The original practice of this court (and of other courts of this era) was to write hurried and rudimentary minutes during its proceedings and to transcribe those later — when they would complete the record by adding the required juridical language and detail and by writing the entries out in clean, clear, crisp script. (The rough minutes for these years, by the way, no longer exist, so we do not know what information the original scrawled notes contained.) The minutes in this book, these engrossed minutes, are written in full, but entries don’t always appear in chronological order, leading to possible questions of reliability. Yet is it truly important that a rewriting of a text be written into a book in chronological order? To assume it is, are we merely substituting our contemporary inclinations for those of centuries ago? It is hard to be sure, but maybe the order of entries also helped indicate the relative importance to this society of each case heard.
A set of “memoranda” for the trials cluster after the entries outlining the trials themselves. I have not found other instances of memoranda elsewhere in the minutes of this or any other court, which may indicate these trials were so unusual the courts created or revived practices specifically to address these cases. The memoranda detail each individual case from indictment to sentencing, so they provide the entire story arc of a case in one densely written spot. Only these memoranda give us any details of the killings people are accused of, such as weapons employed in the killings. We don’t see this information elsewhere in the minutes or in any other records.
One of these memoranda recounts the first case in the series of related trials held before the court, that of Clause, Robin, Quaco, and Sam. This trial began on the 11th of April 1712, merely four days after the revolt itself, which we know because the memorandum tells us the murder occurred on that day “in the Eleventh year of the Reign of our Soveraign Lady Anne.” What we also know — though we don’t ever quite know why — is that this is the most important trial, apparently because it was the most egregious killing. We assume this because this case came first and because of the various and unusually barbaric methods the colony employed to execute most of these men:
Clause be broke alive upon a wheel and so to Continue languishing until he be dead and his head and Quarters to be at the Queens [sic] disposal
Robin be hung up in Chains alive and so to Continue without any sustenance
until he be dead and Consumed
Quaco be burnt with fire until he be dead and Consumed
Sam be hanged by the neck until he be dead
The most serious crime was tried first. The most serious criminals were executed in the worst ways. The minutes tell us this without mentioning these facts.
The slaves were almost always executed off stage, their actual deaths unrecorded in the minutes. Only occasionally is an execution noted in the margins of the volume, but we are always told how the accused will die — because “Guilty” is merely the finding of the court. The manner of execution is the true sentence.
In most cases, death is by hanging. In select cases, a more serious punishment of slow burning is employed: “burned with a slow fire that he may Continue in Torment for Eight or ten hours & Continue burning . . . until he be dead and Consumed to Ashes.” The details of the punishments mattered because they indicated the severity of the crime. The details feel like vengeance. Only in the case of Clause was anyone broken on a wheel, his head and quarters offered to the Queen. His was a painful and gruesome manner of death, suggesting he was the ringleader of the group, even though no evidence is given anywhere implicating Clause. Robin, though, receives probably what is the worst death, and possibly because the court identified him as the killer, though never mentioning it: to hang by chains, exposed to the elements, likely splayed by his arms, until he starved to death.
Which brings us to Justice. To the colony’s credit, it did practice some form of justice. Not every slave indicted by the grand jury was found guilty; of those charged, just over a half were convicted. It is ironic, though, that a society grudgingly recognizing the humanity of those within it who were not white would accuse these slaves of acting “Traytereously.” The slaves received no protection from the Crown. They had no country to betray, yet they still could somehow be tried as traitors. We could never have hoped for fairness when those being tried were already slaves.
Still, we can glimpse in these records the process of creating a system of justice. Grand juries convened to review evidence of crimes: the dates of actions and names of the accused, the type of weapon used (a gun or knife) and its monetary value (because everything in this capitalistic society was measured in cash), the length and breadth of the mortal wound (an example of the court’s early forays into forensics), and the time it took death to arrive (always given as “immediately,” though likely never so). The accused could also plead “Not Guilty” and give exculpatory statements, so the accused had a voice in their trials.
Justice was swift, if not quite true.
Because of the scarcity of evidence presented in the minutes, it is difficult to identify reasons for the court’s decisions. I used this table, and another more detailed table, to organize and evaluate the data on these trials. Using these tools, I could quickly determine that
21 of 39 people indicted were found guilty.
All of those were black, two of them women.
Each of the three Indian slaves was acquitted, as was the one slave identified as mulatto.
Half the women were exonerated.
Interest in the trials, or the strength of the cases themselves, petered out by the end, and the last three people indicted appear to have carried greater status than the others. Since no owner was listed for any them, they must have been free, and they had surnames, or the approximation of such: John Harris, Peter the Porter, and Peter the Doctor. The first was acquitted and paid his own fees, and according to the records, the two Peters were simply “not tried.” These results at the very end of the trials appear to support the idea that the most serious cases were tried first, and the least important were saved for the end — and essentially abandoned.
While reviewing these cases, I looked for possible biasing factors in the jury’s decisions. I tried to determine if the juries treated female slaves more generously. They did not: about half of the men and exactly half of the women were convicted. I wondered if the slaves of widows received better treatment, and these slaves were acquitted at a slightly higher rate than other slaves. This suggests these slaves may have been spared to allow them to continue to care for those widows. No Indian slave was found guilty, which may be a sign of leniency to this group or an indication that black male slaves led this revolt.
In most trials, some slaves were found guilty and others not, which suggests that juries did deliberate. They did not merely convict everyone charged with murder. What we don’t know is whether the verdicts were truly determined by an examination of the facts as presented or if the most important factor in play was the identity and status of the slave owner — either the one killed or the one whose slaves were on trial. We cannot merely assume justice when we learn that in two trials all the defendants were found guilty when in another trial every slave accused of Joris Maerschalek’s killing was either found not guilty or not even tried.
Most interestingly, none of Jacob Regnier’s five slaves was found guilty, even though they were tried in three separate trials and even though one was charged with three murders, more than anyone else accused. This was also the only case where multiple indicted slaves owned by a single person were all acquitted. These cases may be signs of bias or innocence or luck. It seems likely, however, that these results indicate some of these men were powerful in their community, powerful enough to keep and secure their property in the face of murder charges or powerful enough to ensure they were avenged even after death.
This is a Supreme Court of Judicature Circuit Court panel of jurors from 1792, so this is a record from a different court and concerning an entirely unrelated case, but it is illuminating in this context. Because most court records are civil records that focus on men of privilege, these records sometimes take the form of a congregation of silences, rather than sequences of words or the telltale footprints of ink on paper.
Black and Indian inhabitants of New York do appear on the pages of New York’s early court records but only when charged with a crime or when others treated them as humans. The regulation of order required these people be depersoned, uncitizened, invisible, but it was not just race that divided people into categories of power. This panel of jurors demonstrates men had agency, that men of acceptable race and stature could sit in judgment of others. For that reason, the records record these white men, and we know who they were, where they lived, what they did as a trade. We know little about the women, who rarely appear on these pages (and usually for running a disorderly house). Women cannot sit as jurors, and in this culture woman lose the last name they have left (their first) when their husbands die and their first names are replaced with “Widow.” In these criminal cases, we are told essentially nothing about the men and women charged with murder. They are as hidden and silent as widows, yet more so.
This is the volume that contains the records of the slave trials. As you can see, it is brittle and fragmented. In some cases, words along the edges of the pages are missing, but the text is still clear. Its signal from the past is still clear, just a bit hazy, yet it is incomplete. It tells one slender thread of the story very well, but it hews to a narrow path, and its details are evasive. We must make sense of the text on our own, via the context of the era and the minutes themselves, by processing the data within, by holding the text up to the light to see through it into the past. We must take this disarrayed past and give it structure. We have to find the connections between events. In the end, these minutes do not quite recount the history of this time; they merely reveal something of its aura.
The novelist William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But much of the past is past, irrevocably so. Records can tell us only so much before going silent.
The only pasts that remain are the remembered and the recorded pasts — and a less often considered past: the echoed past, one we live every day but don’t necessarily see the outlines of, one built up by the history that preceded us, one invisible but still palpable. This past is the continuation of a culture, how a society may change yet still drag all the ills of its preoccupations and preconceptions into the present.
That is the past we live every day. It is muffled a bit by time and erosion, but we all still live huddled at the very bottom of Manhattan — our viewshed: the ocean that stretches back to Europe. And we just might never leave.
[1] This essay was originally presented as a talk at the Archivists Round Table of New York’s Archives Week Symposium held on 17 October 2019. I based that talk on an earlier talk covering multiple stories from the archives of the New York County Clerk’s Division of Old Records, which I presented at the Researching New York conference in Albany, New York, on 16 November 2018. That talk was entitled “The Courts as the Eyes of Culture: The Process of Dehumanization in Colonial New York,” which was part of a session entitled “Coups from the Courts: The Historical Importance of New York’s Legal Records.” Because this essay is based on a public presentation, it is extra-illustrated with the images of records I displayed as part of that second presentation.
[2] You might be surprised, however, to learn that this court, operating under the simplified title Court of General Sessions, ceased operations only in 1962.
[3] In this essay, as I did in the presentations that preceded it, I generally refer to enslaved people as “slaves” and to their enslavers as “slave owners.” An attendee at the Archivists Round Table Symposium asked me if I was familiar with the contemporary practice of using the terms “enslaved person” and “enslavers” in place of the terms I used, and she also asked why I used the terms I did. I noted I was familiar with that practice and that I used those terms intentionally. I said I used “slave” because it is unleavened, because it hurts me to say it, and because we need to feel pain when we discuss this grave injustice, the enslavement of other humans by our white predecessors. I explained I wanted to feel pain every time I said the word. I also noted that “enslaved person” feels like a euphemism to me, because “enslaved” does not feel as painful to me, and that is because nouns usually carry more weight than adjectives. I did not use the term “enslaved person” because the human element cannot be removed from the word “slave.” To be a slave, one must be a person. I noted that, when I read the stories of these people, I always felt the horror of humans struggling to be free in the face of certain defeat and of their languishing towards death while hung, but not hanged, from a tree to die a drawn-out and excruciating death. I feel their humanity, I imagine their pain, and “slave” makes me feel those more sharply. Similarly, I did not use the word “enslaver,” because “slave owner” is more painful to me. That term baldly identifies the fact that the laws and mores of our country allowed the legal ownership of humans — for centuries — so I use this term to dishonor those slaveholders, those people who believed they could own another person.
Geof Huth is the Chief Records Officer and Chief Law Librarian, New York State Unified Court System.
