Cato

The man recorded as Cato existed at the intersection of two of the most brutal systems of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world: racial slavery and the organized violence of modern war. Whether enslaved or nominally free, Black individuals bearing classical names like Cato occupied marginal and precarious positions in colonial New York, subject to the authority of slaveholders, municipal codes, and the informal violence of a society built on their labor. When the British occupied New York in September 1776 and the city became a theater of war, those already on the social margins faced new and compounded dangers.

The fragmentary records that survive from the prison ships and military logs of occupied New York occasionally preserve names — Cato among them — without the biographical detail that allows confident reconstruction of individual experience. What those records do reveal is that Black men served in the crews of American vessels, were captured by the British, and were confined aboard the hulks moored in Wallabout Bay. The conditions aboard ships like the Jersey were lethal: overcrowding, disease, starvation, and deliberate neglect killed thousands of captives over the course of the war. For Black prisoners, the threat of re-enslavement by their captors added a dimension of terror that white prisoners did not face.

The name Cato endures not as the biography of a single recoverable person but as a placeholder for thousands of Black lives that the Revolution's official histories largely omitted. His presence in the historical record, however fragmentary, insists that the suffering of New York's prison ships was not confined to the white colonists whose experience filled later memoirs and commemorations. His story — or the outline where a story should be — is part of the full account of what American independence cost.