Samuel Fraunces

There is a tradition that Samuel Fraunces was of French ancestry and came from the West Indies. Haiti, Martinique, and the possibility that he was related to a Fraunces family in Barbados. Although his surname implies that he was of French extraction, there is no evidence that he spoke with a French accent. There is also no record of where he learned his skills as a cook, caterer, and restaurateur. ==Taverns==

(formerly the Oliver Delancey Mansion), Pearl & Dock Streets, New York City. The first documentation of Fraunces's presence in New York City was in February 1755, when he registered as a British subject and "Innholder." The following year he was issued a tavern license, but where he worked for the next two years is unidentified. He opened this as the Sign of Queen Charlotte Tavern, but within a year it was better known as the Queen's Head Tavern (possibly due to the queen's portrait on a painted sign). Although the tavern featured five lodging-rooms, it was better known as a place for private meetings, parties and receptions, and card-playing. He returned to New York City in early 1768, and sold the Free Mason's Arms. He resumed operation of his tavern in the former Delancey mansion in 1770. Spring Hill – a villa along the Hudson River under lease to Major Thomas James – was heavily vandalized in the November 1765 Stamp Act Riot. Fraunces leased the property, opening it in 1767 as a summer resort: Vaux-Hall Pleasure Garden, (named for London's Vauxhall Gardens). He later exhibited seventy miniature wax figures from the Bible, and life-size wax statues of King George III and Queen Charlotte. He operated Vaux-Hall through Summer 1773; in October, he auctioned its contents and sold the property. Fraunces continued to operate the Queen's Head Tavern through the early years of the Revolutionary War, but fled when the British captured New York City in September 1776. ==Revolutionary War==

A month after the April 19, 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, the Royal Navy ship of the line Asia sailed into New York Harbor. On August 23, a group of Patriots stole the cannons from the fort on The Battery, which prompted Asia to bombard the city with cannon fire that night. There were no deaths, but injuries and damage to buildings, including Fraunces Tavern. Philip Freneau wrote a poem about the bombardment, "Hugh Gaines Life," that included the couplet: "At first we supposed it was only a sham. Till she drove a round ball through the roof of Black Sam." The tavern was used for more than entertainment during the Revolutionary War. Fraunces rented out office space, and meetings of the New York Provincial Congress were held there. In April 1776, General Washington was present at a court-martial conducted at the tavern. Washington's headquarters, April 17 to August 27, 1776, was Richmond Hill, a villa two miles north of the tavern. Fraunces later swore that he discovered and foiled an assassination plot against Washington. British Occupation of New York City (September 1776 - November 1783) British troops captured lower Manhattan on September 15, 1776, and soon occupied all of what is now New York City. Fraunces overheard British officers toasting Continental Army general Benedict Arnold, and sent a warning (through Tuers) that Arnold was a traitor. Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, but British forces continued to occupy New York City until 1783. Fraunces's tavern was the meeting place for negotiations between American and British commissioners to end the 7-year occupation. In May 1783, peace negotiations were held at the DeWint House in Tappan, New York, where Fraunces provided meals for General Washington, British General Sir Guy Carleton, and both their staffs. Carleton's Book of Negroes – a ledger listing some 3,000 fugitive slaves who had fled to the British and been promised freedom in return for their service – was compiled at the former Fraunces Tavern between April 26 and November 30, 1783. The "Black Loyalists" were settled in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. The British evacuation from New York City was celebrated by patriots with a November 25, 1783 dinner at the tavern. At a December 4, 1783 dinner in the tavern's Long Room, Washington said an emotional farewell to his officers and made his famous toast: "With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you: I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy, as you former ones have been glorious and honorable." ==Memorial to Congress==

In a March 5, 1785 memorial (sworn petition) to the U.S. Congress, Fraunces sought compensation for his service to the country in foiling an assassination plot against Washington, supplying provisions to American prisoners, and providing intelligence on British troops: That your Memorialist, being from Principle attached to the Cause of America, removed from the City of New York previous to its being taken Possession of by the British Forces, into Elizabeth Town in the State of New Jersey. That he was their [sic] made Prisoner by the Enemy who after plundering his Family of almost every necessary brought him to the City of New York. That he was the Person that first discovered the Conspiracy which was formed in the Year 1776 against the Life of his Excellency General Washington and that the Suspicions Which were Entertained of his agency in that Important Discovery accationed [sic, occasioned] a public Enquiry after he was made a Prisoner on which the want of positive Proof alone preserved his Life. That your Memorialist though for many Years before the War a Respectable Innholder in this City submitted to serve for some time in the Menial Office of Cook in the Family of [British] General [James] Robertson without any Pay or Perquisite whatever, Except for the Priveledge [sic] of disposing of the Remnants of the Table which he appropriated towards the Comfort of the American Prisoners within the City in whom the Exercise of the Commonest Acts of Humanity was at that time Considered a Crime of the deepest Dye. That in this Station and other Periods of the War, he served with zeal, and at the Hazard of his Life, the Cause of America, not only by supplying Prisoners with Money, Food, and Raiments and facilitating their Escapes but by performing Services of a Confidential Nature and of the utmost Importance to the Operations of the American Army. That your Memorialist in Consequence of the heavy Advances he has made to American Prisoners (the far greater part of which is not yet Reimbursed) and other solid Proof of his Zeal for the Cause of Freedom, is now reduced to so Critical a Situation as to see himself, his Wife and a numerous Family on the Precipice of Beggary unless the Generous and humane Hand of you Honorable House should be Extended to himself. Congress's report on Fraunces's memorial acknowledged his role as "instrumental in discovering and defeating" the assassination plot. For debts incurred during the Revolutionary War, Congress awarded him £2000, The State of New York awarded him £200, and Congress paid $1,625 to lease his tavern for two years to house federal government offices. Two weeks after the lease was signed, Fraunces sold the tavern and retired to a farm in Monmouth County, New Jersey. ==Presidential households==

in New York City in Philadelphia George Washington got to know Fraunces during the Revolutionary War. The household staff at the Philadelphia President's House was slightly larger, about 24 servants, initially including 8 enslaved Africans from Mount Vernon. Washington grew dissatisfied with his steward in Philadelphia, and persuaded Fraunces to come out of retirement again. Fraunces at first expressed skepticism about cooking alongside Washington's enslaved cook from Mount Vernon, Hercules, but they appear to have worked smoothly together. Fraunces headed the Philadelphia presidential household for three years, from May 1791 to June 1794. Following his retirement from the presidential household, Fraunces operated a tavern on 2nd Street in Philadelphia for a year. In June 1795, he assumed proprietorship of the Tun Tavern, at 59 South Water Street. ==Personal life==

Fraunces may have had a first wife named Mary Carlile. He married Elizabeth Dally at Trinity Church, Manhattan on November 30, 1757. They had seven children: Andrew Gautier Fraunces, Elizabeth Fraunces Thompson, when he published a pamphlet denouncing Alexander Hamilton for his financial dealings. Some of the other children ran hotels or boardinghouses. Fraunces died in Philadelphia a year after retiring from the presidential household. A death notice appeared in the Gazette of the United States on October 13, 1795: DIED - On Saturday Evening last, MR. SAMUEL FRAUNCES, aged 73 years. By his death, Society has sustained the loss of an honest man, and the Poor a valuable friend." Fraunces was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Peter's Church, Philadelphia. and was listed as an "Inn keeper" at 59 South Water Street in the 1795 Philadelphia Directory. ==Racial Identity and Slaveholding==

18th Century Fraunces employed servants, including indentured servants, and held enslaved Africans in bondage in New York City. The 1790 United States census for New York listed Samuel Fraunces as a free white male, with four free white women, and one slave in his household. 19th Century In 1838, Samuel Cooper, a supposed witness to Washington's 1783 farewell dinner to his officers at Fraunces Tavern -- fifty-five years earlier -- called Fraunces "a negro man." Sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois—co-founder of the NAACP and founding editor of its monthly magazine—reprinted much of Haskin's article in the December, 1916 issue of The Crisis, under the headline "COLORED". Du Bois may have added the article's introduction and the comments interspersed between its quoted sections (added comments underlined below): It is always comparatively easy to deny the accomplishments of colored folk by the simple expedient of forgetting that those who have done anything were colored. Who has not heard of Fraunces Tavern down at the Battery in New York? Frederick J. Haskin, writing in the Washington, D. C. Evening Star says: “George Washington and nearly all of his officers came here when he bade them his famous farewell, while at the time that 'Black Sam' Fraunces dispensed good dinners here nearly every one of any consequence in New York came to dine.” Black Sam Fraunces, mind you, although the “black” is usually omitted. “The place got its name and its real start in life in 1757 when it was purchased by a thrifty West Indian Negro, Samuel Fraunces, who was commonly known as 'Black Sam' and who seems to have been a cook and caterer of talent if not genius. A consideration of the story of Fraunces Tavern shows that the place of cooks in history has been overlooked and underestimated. It is they who bring great men together and cause great events to be planned and set on foot. Thus the Sons of Liberty and their vigilance committee got together at Black Sam’s and planned to throw England’s tea overboard before they would pay a tax on it; and here met the famous committee in correspondence, of which we never heard before, but which, according to the History Club, which quotes Woodrow Wilson, was the real beginning and origin of the Continental Congress and so the seed from which our great and glorious republic sprang.” There is romance that goes with the place, too: “But it appears that plots against liberty as well as for it were fomented at Black Sam’s. For in 1776 there were men in England who saw that the great personality of Washington was one of the greatest dangers to England’s hold upon the colonies, and these men were not above removing the danger as best they could. "So it happened that a frequenter of Black Sam’s place was a young Englishman named Hickey, who had deserted from the British army and enlisted as an American volunteer. Because he was a clever man, despite his bad record, he had become one of General Washington’s bodyguard. "This man was the king-pin in a plot to assassinate Washington, and the first step in the plan was for him to win the help of the general’s housekeeper. This person was none other than the young and attractive West Indian girl, Phoebe Fraunces, daughter of Black Sam. The murderer first won her heart and made her his mistress. Then he let her know his plan and the part she was to play. There is no record of the struggle that took place in the mind of Phoebe Fraunces when she found that the man she loved was the appointed murderer of her master. But the fact remains that she revealed the plot to Washington and saw her lover hanged." Thirty-eight years later, Dr. F. E. Norman, a Chicago dentist and Black man, wrote to Du Bois, asking him to resolve the question of Fraunces's racial identity: "Samuel Fraunces was a cook without a peer. He was born in the West Indies. The elite of New York wined and dined at this hostelry. … I want to know if Fraunces was a Negro, or one of African descent." Du Bois responded with the results of his research (which were inconclusive on racial identity), on October 1, 1954. Also in the 1950s, Troy Saul McCurley, a Virginia newspaper editor and the widow of John Fraunces McCurley, assembled a large cache of historical documents and references consistent with Samuel Fraunces having been white. She deposited copies of her research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the New York Historical Society, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum. Her husband had been a descendant of Samuel Fraunces, and they named their daughter Elizabeth Fraunces McCurley, calling her "Fraun". In the 1980s, historian and Samuel Fraunces biographer Kym S. Rice found no 18th-century references to his having been Black. In 2011, Jennifer Patton, Director of Education at the Fraunces Tavern Museum in New York City, wrote: "The use of " black" as a prefix to a nickname was not uncommon in the 18th century and did not necessarily indicate African heritage of an individual. For instance, Admiral Richard Lord Howe (1762- 1799), one of Britain's best known and respected seamen – and a white man – was commonly called "Black Dick," a nickname his brother Sir William Howe gave to him as descriptive of the Admiral's swarthy complexion." Patton concluded: "The issue of Samuel Fraunces' racial identity is still a passionate topic of discussion to this very day. As debate rallies on for conclusive evidence, the actual truth is that we may never know for sure." ==Portraits==

, New York City. For more than a century, this portrait was identified as depicting Samuel Fraunces. New evidence presented in 2017 strongly suggests that it depicts a member of the court of Prussian ruler Frederick the Great. Purchased at auction for the Sons of the Revolution, it was unveiled at their December 4, 1913 annual meeting. The painting came from the collection of Anna E. Macy of Riveredge, New Jersey, and was auctioned at Merwin Sales Company, November 17, 1913. ==Phoebe Fraunces legend==

, Washington's headquarters in Manhattan, April – August, 1776 The legend tells that the life of General George Washington was saved during the Revolutionary War by a daughter of Samuel Fraunces named Phoebe. Thomas Hickey, one of Washington's life guards, became romantically involved with Phoebe and enlisted her in a plot to poison the general's food. Phoebe reported Hickey to Washington (or to her father, who then told Washington), and pretended to play along with the plot. Hickey was caught red-handed poisoning the general's food, and was court-martialed and hanged. Following Custis's death, Lossing edited his writings for publication as Recollections and Private Memoirs of George Washington (1860). He repeated the story again a decade later in his Washington and the American Republic (1870):Washington was very fond of green peas, and it was agreed that when a dish of them was ready for the general's table, Hickey should put the poison in it. Meanwhile the housekeeper disclosed the plot to the general. The peas were poisoned. Washington made some excuse for sending the dish away, and Hickey was soon afterward arrested. The peas were given to some hens, in his presence, when they immediately sickened and died.[*]Hickey and his associates of the guard, were arrested immediately after dinner, on the twenty-third; and, according to a letter written at New York the next day, "the general's housekeeper was taken up," on suspicion of being an accomplice. She was the daughter of Samuel Fraunces, a noted innkeeper at that time ... It was chiefly on the testimony of this woman that Hickey was arrested, tried, and condemned.[*]''These facts were related to a friend of the writer (Mr. W.J. Davis), by the late Peter Embury, of New York, who resided in the city at the time, was well acquainted with the general's housekeeper, and was present at the execution of Hickey.'' In the patriotic build-up to the 1876 Centennial Celebration, Lossing's story was retold in ''Scribner's Monthly Magazine'', but with Samuel Fraunces's previously anonymous daughter identified as "Phoebe":A daughter of "Black Sam," Phoebe Fraunces, was Washington's housekeeper when he had his headquarters in New York in the spring of 1776, and was the means of defeating a conspiracy against his life. One part of the plan was the poisoning of the American commander. Its immediate agent was to be Thomas Hickey, a deserter from the British army, who had become a member of Washington's body guard. Fortunately the conspirator fell desperately in love with Phoebe Fraunces, and made her his confidant. She revealed the plot to her father, and at an opportune moment the dénouement came. Hickey was arrested and tried by court-martial. A few days afterward he was hanged ... The legend was retold 56 years later in the 1932 bicentennial celebration of George Washington's birth. Unaccountably, the location of the supposed events was changed from Richmond Hill to Fraunces Tavern. Disputed claims The story that Washington had been the target of an assassination plot by poisoning was published in England as early as 1778: "Advise is received from America that two persons, a man and a woman who lived as servants with General Washington, have been executed in the presence of the army for conspiring to poison their master." — The Ipswich Journal, October 31, 1778. Rice's research In the 1980s, Fraunces biographer Kym S. Rice published new evidence discrediting the Phoebe Fraunces legend. Initially, his housekeeper there was a widow named Mary Smith. Washington apparently dined at the Queen's Head Tavern at least twice, on April 13, with his aides: "Dinner at Sam's - [£]5.3.6", and on June 6, (probably with Martha Washington): "Saml Frances, Alias Black Sam - for Dinner - [£]3.14.0". On June 15, one of his life guards, Thomas Hickey, was arrested on charges of "attempt[ing] to pass counterfeit Bills of Credit" and held in jail until trial. Washington approved mass arrests of suspected Loyalists for the night of June 23–24, and among those arrested was his housekeeper, Mary Smith. Samuel Fraunces also was arrested that night, but eventually released for lack of evidence. Smith later fled to England, where she received a £20 Loyalist pension from the British government. In a 1785 petition to Congress, Fraunces swore that he had thwarted an assassination plot against Washington. Rice suggests that confusion created by Thompson's name may have led Lossing, writing 84 years after the events, to misidentify Fraunces's daughter Elizabeth as Washington's housekeeper: But thirteen years later she married Atcheson Thompson, and became, coincidentally, another Elizabeth Thompson. ==In popular culture==

and Samuel Fraunces, the latter as an African American (using blackface). • Bergen Celebration, a 1910 historical pageant celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of Jersey City. In a reenactment of the Jane Tuers legend, Fraunces was portrayed by a white student in blackface. • Dinner for the General, a 1953 teleplay by Reginald Lawrence for Hallmark Hall of Fame, Season 2, Episode 2-26, aired on NBC, February 22, 1953—a teenaged Phoebe Fraunces falls desperately in love with Thomas Hickey, and is horrified when she uncovers his plot to poison General Washington. • ''Washington's Farewell to His Officers, a 1955 teleplay by Goodman Ace for You Are There'', aired on CBS, February 27, 1955—Samuel Fraunces serves a banquet for General Washington and his officers at the end of the Revolutionary War. • The Ballot and Me, a 1956 play by Langston Hughes, featured a free-black Samuel Fraunces as a character. • Lossing's Phoebe Fraunces legend was largely forgotten, until it was re-introduced in Judith Berry Griffin's 1977 children's book, Phoebe and the General (later renamed Phoebe the Spy). The fictional 13-year-old Phoebe character is Samuel Fraunces's daughter, and he tells her that he's overheard something about an assassination plot against Washington. Phoebe sees Thomas Hickey sprinkle something on the general's food, and she throws a plate of poisoned peas out the window, where chickens eat them and fall down dead. Hickey is immediately arrested, and Fraunces and Phoebe are commended by General Washington. • Who Is Carrie? a 1984 historical novel for young adults by Christopher and James Lincoln Collier—Carrie is an enslaved kitchenmaid working for Samuel Fraunces. • Beyond Harlem, History of Black New York Downtown, a 2005 teleplay by Dara Frazier for NYC Media. • Shades of War, a 2006 off-Broadway play by Dara Frazier-Harper, portrays Samuel Fraunces as a free-black, ultra-rich, Michael Bloomberg-like character. • The Book of Negroes, a 2007 novel by Lawrence Hill about the life of slaves during the American Revolution, portrays Samuel Fraunces as a freed mulatto from Jamaica who runs his namesake tavern, participates in historical events, and later moves to Mount Vernon to run George Washington's household. • Rough Crossings, a 2007 BBC "drama documentary" based on a book by Simon Schama, portrays both Samuel Fraunces and the "fictional" Phoebe Fraunces as free-blacks. It faced criticism on several fronts. • Fraunces is portrayed by an African-American actor in a 2010 video at the President's House Memorial in Philadelphia. • Charles L. Blockson, a Philadelphia local historian, wrote a 2013 book on Samuel Fraunces. He cites twentieth-century sources describing Fraunces as "Negro," "coloured", "Haitian Negro," "mulatto", "fastidious old Negro," and "swarthy," ==Legacy==

• Fraunces Tavern, at Pearl & Broad Streets in New York City, is a national historic landmark and museum • Fraunces created a tableau of wax figurines and seashells as a gift for Martha Washington. It survives at Tudor Place, the Washington, D.C. home of her granddaughter. • A Pennsylvania state historical marker at 2nd & Dock Streets in Philadelphia marks the location of the first tavern Fraunces operated after leaving Washington's presidential household • On June 26, 2010, St. Peter's Church, Philadelphia honored Fraunces by inscribing his name on an obelisk in the churchyard ==Notes==