ESCAPE TO NEW YORK

  “It has become apparent that we must now restate our problems and begin a fresh attack upon the whole subject.”- Dr. Winthrop Jon Van Leuven Osterhout    

         A week after Dick Jennings went to check on the property in question, a drunken black man everybody in Sugar Loaf knew as “Jack,” fell into a woodpile outside Sarah Lobdell’s tavern, trying to sleep off an awful bender. His rough hands were split and bloodied from exposure and his head throbbed as he burrowed into the frozen pile, pulling his tattered coat tightly around his shoulders. It was no use. Drunk as he was, it was too cold to attain the unconsciousness he desperately sought.The cold won out. Lifting his unsteady frame out of the split wood, as a couple of little boys taunted him with sticks and war whoops, he steadied himself on the porch rail and looked off to the south. Then, he stumbled down the King’s Highway towards Newburgh. Apart from the filthy faced kids, now throwing their sticks at his back, nobody took any notice. Within 24 hours he would be on board a sloop loaded with milled lumber, bound for NY city, relieved to be rid of Sugar Loaf and everybody connected to the Jennings family.   

     Jack hadn’t slept for two nights, and now he was on high alert keeping watch for ice with a flickering lantern, stationed on the ship’s bow. The captain was shorthanded and the black sailor seemed to know his business, so he trusted him with the watch. The pilot guided the boat in and out of large flows at Jack’s sharp commands, the channel shrinking and widening, sailing south down the North River towards the Atlantic. The skeleton crew slept through the night, until just before dawn, when the boat docked around the tip of Manhattan at Fulton St. and made preparations to unload. The Ulster County timber would be hoisted onto wagons distributed at construction sites throughout the city, and then the sloop would return up river for another load. 

    The captain told Jack to go below decks and get some breakfast, after he had fetched some fresh water and rum on shore. Jack was starting to feel better, the sway of the boat, the familiar smells of the sea, within spitting distance, had calmed him. He had a folded paper tucked in his pocket with the address of an Irishman somewhere in the city scrawled in light script. Jack couldn’t read, so he showed it to the captain who shrugged and pointed off towards rising glare. “Walk north and look for Bowery Hill. I don’t recognize the name. Turn right when you see 6th street. Fetch that water and rum and then be on your way. You done a good job with the flow ice, sure you don’t want to hire on?” Jack took the kettle and jug, smiled and shook his head. He was hoping to be back at sea before the sun set the next day.

       Some have Jack Hodges born in Philadelphia, but most put his birth in Lancaster, PA. in the year 1763. This puts his age at 55 years (not the 35 he would later testified to on the stand) after he pointed the business end of a flintlock musket at the head of my  uncle and pulled the trigger. Both his parents were said to have been "African and free.” We have no record of their names, only referred to in court documents by the all encompassing parlance of the time- "Ignorant and Poor.” 

      Of all the characters surrounding Richard Jennings, and his murder, Jack Hodges is pivotal. His life of survival as a free black man in North America spanned the revolution, through the War of 1812, the slave trade, (which he participated in) from the time he was a 10 year old waiting boy on board The Lydia, a Dutch West India market slaver, to a prisoner sitting in the Goshen gaol, awaiting the executioner. The white people who Jack Hodges knew and interacted with (as well as those exploiting and manipulating him through his trial) would become major players in a drama much larger than a hanging in an upstate apple orchard. Familiar NY names like Van Buren, Wisner, Seward, Clinton, and of course Jennings, would connect Hodges and his victim through a bizarre spider web of historical circumstance. On the surface it was a small affair, petty and nasty, but would become a much larger touchstone through pioneer tabloid reporting and the dubious filter of revisionist history.