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New York City, NYBiography
In the vast, impersonal machinery of eighteenth-century Atlantic slavery, names were often imposed rather than chosen. Classical names like Cato, Pompey, and Caesar were given to enslaved people by slaveholders who found a cruel irony — or perhaps a flattering self-image — in naming human property after the great men of republican Rome. The man recorded as Cato in the fragmentary documents of wartime New York came into history already bearing the mark of that system, his very name a testament to the power exercised over Black lives in colonial America. Whether he was enslaved or occupied the tenuous, heavily policed status of a nominally free Black person in New York, his world before the war was defined by restriction: municipal codes that limited movement after dark, prohibitions on gathering, the constant threat of arbitrary violence. New York City in the years before the Revolution held one of the largest enslaved populations of any northern colony, and Black residents — enslaved and free alike — navigated a landscape shaped by surveillance and coercion. When war came to that city, it did not liberate people like Cato from these structures. It added new ones.
The specific path by which Cato ended up aboard one of the British prison ships moored in Brooklyn's Wallabout Bay remains, like so much of his life, obscured by the historical record's deep indifference to the lives of Black individuals. What the surviving crew lists and prisoner accounts do tell us is that Black men served aboard American vessels during the Revolutionary War — as sailors, as laborers, sometimes as men seeking the precarious freedom that maritime work could offer those escaping slavery on land. Capture by the Royal Navy or by Loyalist privateers meant confinement aboard the notorious hulks, decommissioned warships converted into floating prisons. The most infamous of these, HMS Jersey, anchored in Wallabout Bay beginning around 1780 and became synonymous with suffering and death. Cato's name surfaces in the fragmentary documentation of this system: a notation in a crew list, a mark in a prisoner accounting. He was there. He endured conditions that killed an estimated 11,500 American captives over the course of the war — starvation rations of wormy bread, putrid water, rampant smallpox and dysentery, bodies stacked below decks in summer heat that turned the holds into ovens.
For Black prisoners on the hulks, the horrors that killed white captives were compounded by a terror unique to their position. British officers and Loyalist captors could — and did — sell Black prisoners into slavery in the West Indies, regardless of whether those men had been free before their capture. A white prisoner of war might hope for exchange, parole, or eventual release; a Black prisoner faced the possibility that his captivity would simply become permanent, that he would be converted from prisoner to property with no legal process and no recourse. Cato, whether he had been enslaved before the war or had sought freedom through naval service, confronted this reality every day of his imprisonment. He was fighting, if fighting is even the right word for mere survival under such conditions, not for an abstract political principle but for the bare continuity of his own life and whatever fragile autonomy he had managed to claim. The Revolution's grand rhetoric about liberty and natural rights existed at an almost unbridgeable distance from the wooden walls of his confinement, yet his suffering was as much a part of that Revolution's true cost as any battlefield sacrifice.
The name Cato survives in the historical record not as the anchor of a fully recoverable biography but as evidence — proof that the prison ships' victims included Black men whose presence the Revolution's later commemorators largely chose to forget. For more than a century, the story of the Wallabout Bay martyrs was told as a story about white patriots. Monuments were erected, bones were reinterred, speeches were given, and the Black men who suffered and died alongside their fellow captives were simply edited out of the narrative. Cato's name, fragmentary as its context remains, resists that erasure. It insists that we count him among those who paid the war's price. Today, as historians work to reconstruct the full human dimensions of the American Revolution, figures like Cato matter not because we can tell their complete stories but precisely because we cannot — because the gaps in the record are themselves historical facts, produced by the same systems of racial domination that put Cato on that ship. His presence in the archive, however faint, is an act of witness that two and a half centuries have not entirely silenced.
The prison ships of Wallabout Bay represent one of the greatest mass atrocities of the American Revolution, and they happened in what is now Brooklyn. Yet for generations, the story was told as though only white men suffered aboard those hulks. Cato's name — preserved in the fragmentary records of that nightmare — reminds students and visitors that New York's Black residents, enslaved and free, were not bystanders to the Revolution but were caught in its most brutal machinery. Walking the streets of lower Manhattan or standing in Fort Greene Park, where the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument rises above the remains of thousands, visitors should understand that people like Cato are among those dead. His story connects slavery, maritime labor, and wartime atrocity in a single life, showing how New York City's Revolution was shaped by race at every level.