Note (return) — Chapter II

Prominent in the remarkable drama were John Hughson, a shoemaker and alehouse keeper; Sarah Hughson, his wife; John Romme, also a shoemaker and alehouse keeper; Margaret Kerry, alias Salinburgh, commonly known as Peggy; John Ury, a priest; and a number of Negroes, chief among whom were Cæsar, Prince, Cuffee, and Quack.50 Prominent among those who helped to work out the plot were Mary Burton, a white servant of Hughson's, sixteen years of age; Arthur Price, a young white man who at the time of the proceedings happened to be in prison on a charge of stealing; a young seaman named Wilson; and two white women, Mrs. Earle and Mrs. Hogg, the latter of whom assisted in the store kept by her husband, Robert Hogg. Hughson's house on the outskirts of the town was a resort for Negroes, and Hughson himself aided and abetted the Negro men in any crime that they might commit. Romme was of similar quality. Peggy was a prostitute, and it was Cæsar who paid for her board with the Hughsons. In the previous summer she had found lodging with these people, a little later she had removed to Romme's, and just before Christmas she had come back to Hughson's, and a few weeks thereafter she became a mother. At both the public houses the Negroes would engage in drinking and gambling; and importance also attaches to an organization of theirs known as the Geneva Society, which had angered some of the white citizens by its imitation of the rites and forms of freemasonry.