A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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own property, a right that was unheard of in most other civilizations with the exception of Jamestown.
By 1664, Charles II of England had designs on expanding his territories in the New World south of Connecticut. The Dutch West India Company, which had pioneered and financed New Netherland as a colony and New Amsterdam as its capital on Manhattan Island, was caught off guard by the sudden aggressive stance of England.
The company had spent most of its time building relationships with trappers and natives—not in building military fortifications to protect the colony from a seaborne invasion from undetermined enemies. When four British warships appeared in the harbor in the summer of 1664, Peter Stuyvesant, then the governor of the colony, readily capitulated because he had no trained soldiers or enough weapons to fight the British.
One of the first things the new British owners of the colony did was rename it New York. What had been a Dutch outpost in the New World shipping beaver pelts to Europe was now a full-fledged English colony. Among the colonists in New York were about 150 black people, most of whom had not yet worked their way into freedom and likely had no illusions that their state in life would change under new management.
Over the next one hundred years, the British kept the remaining Dutch colonists and the newly arriving British settlers supplied with a steady flow of Africans who were purchased to act as laborers on small farms outside the city and inside the city as trained artisans, craftsmen, and house servants. According to census records, the percentages of blacks to whites in the city crept steadily upward from 14 percent in 1698 to 21 percent by 1756.
While the population of slaves on Manhattan Island steadily increased as the British imported them from Africa, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, the freedoms that slaves had enjoyed under Dutch rule gradually decreased. A 1730 law passed in New York made it illegal for three or more slaves to meet each other under penalty of getting forty lashes on a bare back. Another law, passed the following year, made it illegal for slaves to make noise on a public street. A law passed in 1740 made it illegal for slaves to buy or sell fruit.
What frightened white New Yorkers of the early eighteenth century was the distinct possibility that growing numbers of black slaves in the city and the Hudson River Valley would organize themselves into a formidable armed force. There fears were realized when the first successful slave revolt on the continent occurred on Manhattan in 1712.
On the night of April 6, up to fifty black men and women armed themselves with guns, knives, and hatchets stolen from their masters and then set fire to a farm building on Maiden Lane off Broadway. They lay in the darkness for the white settlers to rush to the scene of the fire. At least nine white settlers were killed in the ensuing melee. Apparently surprised at their easy success, the slaves retreated into the surrounding woods and barns rather than flee the island during the ensuing confusion and terror that now gripped the white community.
The next morning, the colonial militia rounded up virtually all the slaves on Manhattan and arrested and brought to trial more than seventy of them. New York’s governor Robert Hunter was sympathetic to what he perceived to be the slaves’ main grievances: that some masters had subjected them to “hard use,” but he also realized that if he did not punish the blacks, he would have a white revolt on his hands.
Twenty-five slaves were convicted of revolt and executed with twenty being mercifully hanged while three were slow roasted by fire and one was broken on a wheel. So many slaves were executed in such a cruel fashion that Hunter protested that most other civilized societies picked out only the ringleaders of slave revolts and executed them as an example to other slaves. The slave owners ignored their governor’s suggestion. They executed all the convicted.
When the slave owners ignored his advice to be lenient, Hunter observed that the only way to prevent future slave revolts in the colony was to stop importing slaves and start building a free white workforce.
That suggestion, intended for both white New Yorkers and New Englanders either who needed free labor or who enjoyed the status symbol of household slaves, was also ignored. Over the next thirty years, the number of slaves in New York City doubled until the slave population made up 20 percent of the population of the city.
Within thirty years, New York City would see—or at least the citizens would think they saw—another slave revolt.
In 1741, New Yorkers who were old enough to remember the events of 1712 must have recognized the similarities of what started happening during March and April. Over those weeks, nearly a dozen fires broke out in the occupied southern portion of the island, including one fire intended to burn the wooden palisades of Fort George (built on the site of today’s Battery Park).
White New Yorkers needed little persuasion to believe that the city’s slaves were up to their old arson tricks. Some of the fires were being set on the anniversaries of the 1712 fires.
Also fresh on the minds of New Yorkers were terrible stories still told of the 1739 Stono Rebellion near Charlestown (now Charleston), South Carolina. Down south, a mob of fifty rebelling slaves systematically hunted down and killed at least twenty-five whites, some of whom did not even own slaves.
Until the Stono attack, the white slave owners of South Carolina had trusted their slaves so much that they ignored government edicts that forbade the gathering of slaves or allowing them to grow their own food. The trigger for the rebellion was an impending crackdown on slave freedoms because slaves were hearing that the Spanish were granting freedom to any slaves from English Carolina who could make it to their colony in Florida.
Fear of more fires so concerned New York’s Common Council that they issued a secret order to search the entire city for “latent Enemies.” On Monday, April 13, 1741, the entire city was searched for evidence of fire-making materials or stolen goods. Every citizen (perhaps ten thousand people, both black and white) was accounted for to make sure that no foreign strangers had slipped into New York with the intention of burning it down.
When no strangers were found on whom to blame the fires, that left the people who had been the prime suspects all along—the black slaves. The militia had already rounded up a number of slaves before the search, including some who were the children of slaves who had been executed for the 1712 fires.
During a court inquest, some of the slaves testified that other slaves told them that if they burned down their masters’ homes, they would be set free. One of the court’s star witnesses was a white indentured servant, Mary Burton, who testified that the fires were the result of a joint conspiracy between black slaves and poor whites to burn down the city and kill the landowning whites so that the poor could inherit what was left.
The chief judge of the panel hearing the cases, Daniel Horsmanden, began to question other prisoners about a conspiracy. Soon the prisoners began to inform on each other and accuse others, white and black, about being part of the conspiracy. Judge Horsmanden accused a newly arrived schoolteacher, John Ury, with being a Spanish spy and the mastermind behind the slave revolt.
Horsmanden did not even wait for everyone accused to be tried before he started executing people. At least thirty blacks were hanged or burned alive. Four whites were hanged. More might have been executed but Horsmanden stopped the trial when his star witness, Mary Burton, began accusing family members of the judges of being in on the conspiracy.
The slave executions demonstrated that white New Yorkers were growing increasingly nervous about the intentions of the black people living among them. While the revolting slaves in 1712 had killed some whites, no white lives were lost at all in this latest conspiracy—if a conspiracy existed at all. The only evidence of a conspiracy were the fires set around the city and the word of Mary Burton, who eventually accused virtually everyone she knew of being behind a plot to burn down the city.
New York governor Hunter’s 1712 prediction that using slave labor would only create more slave rebellions had been proven true just thirty years later. Still, that did not lead to the abandonment of the slave trade. In fact, the importation of slaves into New York increased in numbers, but the source of those slaves changed. Three quarters of the slaves imported into the city before 1741 had been from the Bahamas and Jamaica.
Starting after 1741, slave importers