Abstract
The story and commemorations celebrating the discovery of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot became intertwined with both real and imagined reports of eighteenth-century slave conspiracies. By familiarizing the story of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, annual Fifth of November commemorations provided a template for insurrectionary slaves and a rubric for rhetorically manufacturing supposed slave conspiracies. This chapter contributes to the growing body of scholarship devoted to the Gunpowder Plot’s influence in America by investigating the relationships between the plot’s formal legacy and fears of slave conspiracy in British America.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Cooper Institute, New York City,” Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, Part 2: 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America), 124.
- 2.
The most recent histories of the Gunpowder Plot are Alice Hogge, God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Doubleday, 1996); and Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). See also Francis Edwards, S.J., Guy Fawkes: The Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot? (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969).
- 3.
James Travers, Gunpowder: The Players Behind the Plot (Kew: The National Archives, 2005), 132–34.
- 4.
Richard F. Hardin, “The Early Poetry of the Gunpowder Plot: Myth in the Making,” English Literary Renaissance 22.1 (1992): 68.
- 5.
Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI. sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrevves, late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties special command (London, 1629), 89.
- 6.
See David Cressy, Bonfires & Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004); and Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 243–80.
- 7.
Thomas Vicars, Edom and Babylon Against Jerusalem (London: E. Purslow for Henry Seyle, 1633), 2–3.
- 8.
Richard Smith, The powder treason, propounded, by Sathan. Approved, by Antichrist. Enterprised, by papists. Practized, by traitors. Reveled, by an eagle. Expounded, by an oracle. Founded in hell. Confounded in heaven (London, c. 1615); Thomas Barlow, “To The Reader,” in James I, The Gunpowder-treason with a discourse of the manner of its discovery, and a perfect relation of the proceedings against those horrid conspirators…(London: Printed by Tho. Newcomb and H. Hills, 1679), 1–6.
- 9.
William Leigh, Queen Elizabeth Paralleled in her Princely vertues, with David, Iosua, and Hezekia (London, 1612).
- 10.
Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), 5.
- 11.
Joyce Chaplin notes, “The use of the word “gunpowder” to label the Catholic plot against King James in 1605 continued the English association among gunpowder, foreignness, and treachery.” See Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 91.
- 12.
For more on the scientific history of gunpowder, see William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Brenda J. Buchanan, “‘The Art and Mystery of Making Gunpowder’: The English Experience in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War through the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), 233–75.
- 13.
Thomas Harris, Popery and slavery display’d: containing the character of popery, and a relation of popish cruelties…to which are added, the demands of the pope and pretender, on this nation…(London: Printed for C. Corbett…[etc.], 1745), 30, 53.
- 14.
Jonathan Arac, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 220. Arac’s claim suggests that insurrectionary populations carried the threat of sudden, unexpected eruption, catastrophic to the landscape and social order. For the volcano’s relationship to shipboard slave revolts and rebellious masculinity, see Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
- 15.
Cressy, Bonfires & Bells, 146.
- 16.
Much has been said regarding the “patterns” of slave resistance. See David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen & Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, With Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), especially Part III, “Patterns of Slave Resistance.” Michael Craton discusses the Antigua Plot in relation to “The Barbadian pattern of slave resistance” in Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 115–25. For a reading of slave resistance in relation to Atlantic-world economy, see Douglas R. Egerton, “Slaves to the Marketplace: Economic Liberty and Black Rebelliousness,” Journal of the Early Republic 26, 4 (2006): 617–39. Also see Peter Wood’s chapter “Patterns of Black Resistance,” in Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974), 285–307.
- 17.
John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles [1584–1624] (London: I.D. and I.H.…, 1624), 197 (http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/smith/smith.html).
- 18.
Nicholas M. Beasley’s Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650–1780 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 47.
- 19.
Daniel Leeds, Leeds, 1713. The American Almanack for the Year of Christian Account 1713 (Newport and New York: William Bradford, 1712).
- 20.
Historians often discuss Pope’s Day alongside the rise of urban street politics leading up to the American Revolution. See Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 23–41; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 164–75; Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). Brendan McConville reconsiders these approaches in “Pope’s Day Revisited, ‘Popular’ Culture Reconsidered,” in Explorations in Early American Culture 4 (2000): 258–280. To date, the most comprehensive study of the Fifth of November’s rhetorical legacy in early America is Kevin Doyle’s “‘Rage and Fury Which Only Hell Could Inspire’: The Rhetoric and the Ritual of Gunpowder Treason in Early America” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2013).
- 21.
Atlantic Studies has renewed our interest in the processes through which people, ideas, beliefs, and customs extended from the metropole to the periphery. The foundational work is Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Introducing a recent work devoted to urban identity and the Atlantic world, Leonard von Morzé notes what draws the volume together is a collective investment in exploring “the interstitial connections, the links between local, urban, regional, and indeed national kinds of belonging.” See Urban Identity and the Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Fay and Leonard von Morzé (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
- 22.
The standard study of the Antigua plot is Gaspar’s Bondmen & Rebels.
- 23.
“Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman in Antigua to his Friend in Boston, dated October 18, 1736,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, 16 December 1736.
- 24.
“Extract of a Letter from Antigua,” 24 October 1736, reprinted in Virginia Gazette, 18 April 1737.
- 25.
My main source for the Antigua plot is “A full and particular Account of the Negro Plot in Antigoa, as reported by the Committee appointed by the Government there to enquire into the same,” which appeared in Peter Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal in 1737 from March 28 through April 25. The pages are not numbered.
- 26.
Eugene Genovese contends Catholicism provided Akan and Coromontee slaves with a set of religious tenets that corresponded more easily with West African beliefs than did Protestantism: “The West African belief in a pantheon of gods passed to drastically different political settings in the New World. Without doubt it syncretized much better with Catholic than with Protestant Christianity.” Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 210.
- 27.
Wood, Black Majority, 303. See also Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; New York: International Publishers, 1993), 85–86.
- 28.
For more on Afro-Catholicism, see Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 209–32, and Mark Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” The Journal of Southern History 67.3 (2001): 513–34.
- 29.
Gaspar citing Oruna D. Lara in Bondmen & Rebels, 262n.
- 30.
Brendan McConville maintains, “[T]his plan bears more than a superficial resemblance to Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up James I and Parliament,” that “[S]ince the conspirators were aware of the royal holidays, it is entirely possible they drew some inspiration from that conspiracy.” Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 179–80. Natalie Zacek also notes the conspirators may have “planned to take a leaf from Guy Fawkes’s book.” Natalie Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1660–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 38. See also Nicholas M. Beasley’s Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650–1780 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 47.
- 31.
Antigua was part of what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call a “Caribbean Cycle of Rebellion” rippling throughout Atlantic colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. Linebaugh and Rediker’s work investigates Atlantic-world proletarian rebellion, situating insurrections in British Caribbean colonies alongside those in French, Spanish and Dutch territories, as well as North American port cities like New York. They maintain the primarily African American revolts of the period branched out to include “other areas…and other actors.” See Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 193–198.
- 32.
The New York Conspiracy of 1741 and its subsequent trials have garnered a fair amount of scholarly attention. See Thomas Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York (New York: The Free Press, 1985); and Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). For the conspiracy’s Atlantic context, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 174–211. Graham Russell Hodges situates the plot in a “Thirty-Year Rebellion” in Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 91–98. Also see Andy Doolen’s reading of the conspiracy in the context of the War of Jenkins’s Ear in Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 1–39. For a reading of the role of black testimony in the rhetorical shaping of the plot, see Richard Bond, “Shaping a Conspiracy: Black Testimony in the 1741 New York Plot,” Early American Studies 5.1 (2007): 63–94.
- 33.
All page references are to Daniel Horsmanden, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America, and Murdering Inhabitants (New-York: Printed by James Parker, 1744).
- 34.
Qtd. in Wood, Black Majority, 299.
- 35.
Qtd. in Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 190.
- 36.
Serena Zabin, “Introduction,” The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741, Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings, with Related Documents, ed. Serena R. Zabin (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), 23. For an extended reading of the anti-Catholicism of the trials, see Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 142–49.
- 37.
Horsmanden, Daniel. The New-York conspiracy, or, A history of the Negro plot, with the journal of the proceedings against the conspirators at New-York in the years…(New York: Southwick & Pelsue, 1810), i–ii.
- 38.
Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 195.
- 39.
Alfred F. Young, “Ebenezer Mackintosh: Boston’s Captain General of the Liberty Tree,” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 22.
- 40.
Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible, 165.
- 41.
Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, 94.
- 42.
See Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 101.
- 43.
The Boston Post-Boy & Advertiser [Boston, MA], 11 November 1765.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bellomy, S. (2017). “Blazing Effects”: The 1605 Gunpowder Treason and the Rhetoric of Slave Conspiracy. In: von Morzé, L. (eds) Cities and the Circulation of Culture in the Atlantic World. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52606-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52606-9_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54129-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52606-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)