New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan

“‘After they had conquered,’ Hughson told Tom, the slave of a French silversmith, ‘they would know what it was to be free Men.’”

In this quote, Hughson explains to a slave the desired purpose of the planned rebellion: to grant the slaves a taste of the freedom they had been denied. As slaves, African Americans are denied any recognition by their owners of being human, as they are denied any rights and are forced to follow the desires of their masters.

“Maybe what looked to white New Yorkers like an ‘unparallel’d Hellish Plot’ was in fact play, a topsy-turvy parody of gentlemen’s clubs […] Or maybe it really was a rebellion, inspired in part by all the talk of liberty in the city’s newspapers […] [or maybe] the whole plot was merely the awful product of Daniel Horsmanden’s anguished imagination.”

Early on in New York Burning, Lepore introduces the idea that the slave plot as described in Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal may in fact have been imagined, or a joke gone out of hand. As none of the accused slaves left accounts of the plot, and the only historical evidence comes from Horsmanden, Lepore suggests that the full truth of the 1741 fires may never be known.

“With Cosby in the Governor’s Mansion, New York politics moved beyond the conventional wisdom of the perils of party, advancing the innovative argument that parties were a necessary evil and, even more radically, that they were a necessary good, preserving not tyranny but liberty.”

In 18th-century England, the notion of political parties has a negative connotation, suggesting groups of individuals that seek to take charge of government for their own selfish purposes. However, in contemporaneous New York, political parties signifies a new idea of government, in which open debate and free exchange of ideas become political ideals.

“To read over Montgomerie’s library catalogue is to be reminded that New Yorkers lived in a world of enlightenment […] To read the list of their slaves’ names is to place that world of ideas against the reality of human bondage.”

Lepore describes an estate auction of New York’s recently deceased Governor John Montgomerie, where books of political philosophy are auctioned off alongside Montgomerie’s slaves. This episode illustrates the fundamental hypocrisy of New York 18th-century society—that individuals involved in debates about political liberty could partake in the brutality of treating human beings as property.

“And still, across the city, panicked citizens fled their houses in confusion […] From street to street New Yorkers began to cry, ‘The Negroes are rising!’”

Within this passage, Lepore illustrates the speed at which panic can overtake a group of people and push them into a frenzy. Although only a few slaves are suspected of the fires, New Yorkers immediately jump to the conclusion that a full-out slave rebellion is underway, leading to many New Yorkers fleeing the city and dozens of slaves being arrested with little evidence.

“In New York, where people subscribed to a more familiar, more recognizably ‘modern’ sensibility, blaming the fires in the early spring of 1741 on a vengeful God never occurred to anyone.”

In 18th-century America, many individuals subscribe to “providential thinking” (51), in which natural accidents and other problems are explained as being caused by God’s will. In the comparatively “modern” New York, individuals instead choose to blame accidents such as fires on imagined plotters, believing that society runs rife with individuals conspiring to overtake the government.

“New York’s slave codes were almost entirely concerned with curtailing the ability of enslaved people to move at will, and to gather, for fear that they might decide, especially when drunk, that slavery was not to be borne and one way to end it would be to burn the city down.”

Many New Yorkers are keenly aware of the brutality of slavery, and they live with the constant anxiety that their slaves will one day rise-up and revolt. As a result, laws are passed to keep slaves from conversing and forming community—a difficulty in a city where slaves frequently have to move independently to accomplish work for their masters.

“The [Supreme] court’s authority, vulnerable to partisan machinations from the beginning, was badly bruised in the legal and political battles of the 1730s. By 1741, the authority of its judges, and its independence from the governor, remained open questions.”

During the 1730s, the New York Supreme Court’s is damaged by the trial of John Peter Zenger. During the trial, the Governor William Cosby attempts to persuade the Supreme Court to find Zenger guilty of libel for publishing negative descriptions of Cosby in his newspaper. Lepore argues that this political controversy influences Horsmanden and the rest of the Supreme Court’s actions during the 1741 trial, as Horsmanden hopes to use the slave rebellion as a means of rebuilding public trust in the Court.

“Most shocking of all, ‘when all this was done, Caesar should be Governor, and Hughson her Master should be King.’ The wheel would turn, the empire would revolve.”

In her deposition to the Supreme Court, Mary Burton describes the supposed slave rebellion being hatched at Hughson’s tavern, claiming the end result to be that the black slave Caesar would be the new Governor of New York. The Supreme Court justices are particularly shocked by this detail of the plot, as the idea of a black man being placed in a position of political power runs completely contradictory to their belief in the racial hierarchy of the British Empire.

“In the Journal, Horsmanden referred, again and again, to ‘the Judges’ to provide cover for activities that were largely his […] Horsmanden, alone, interrogated nearly every suspect, before anyone else had a chance to.”

In response to mounting criticism that the slave plot had been a fiction, Horsmanden publishes his Journal, hoping that the release of the court documents will prove the truth of the slave plot. However, Horsmanden deliberately tries to hide his role in the Journal, mischaracterizing the interrogations so that readers do not realize that Horsmanden had been the only individual conducting interrogations of witnesses.

“The defense was hopeless; the most interesting thing about it is that Quack and Cuffee, who were legally not even people, were given the opportunity to conduct it, as the prosecution was keen to point out.”

Throughout her descriptions of the slave trials, Lepore continually gestures towards the paradoxes of a legal system built upon slavery. Even though, in the eyes of the law, Quack and Cuffee are not considered to be human beings, they are still allowed to mount their own defense. However, Lepore suggests that this defense was always doomed, as no white Justice or Jury would ever believe it given their status as slaves.

“Confronted with Jack’s ‘unintelligible’ speech, Philipse and Horsmanden sought the aid of two of Gerardus Comfort’s sons-in-law, who said ‘they could make a shift to understand his Language.’ Slowly, Jack’s confession took shape: his speech was translated, transcribed, and transformed.”

The confession of the slave Jack is one of the most crucial pieces of evidence in Horsmanden’s investigation, providing important testimony that links the slave plot to Hughson’s tavern. Yet, due to Jack’s English dialect, Horsmanden is unable to understand Jack’s own words. Instead, Jack’s confession translated and then summarized by Horsmanden, in the process becoming deeply manipulated from Jack’s original words.

“In a post-providential, pre-Enlightenment world, [Horsmanden] detected the work of criminals, not God, not nature. In an anxious empire, he found monstrous black creatures. In a rebellious province, he spotted political plotters […] In the Journal, Horsmanden produced something that resembles an early English novel.”

In this passage, Lepore argues that in his investigation and subsequent journal, Horsmanden projected his own fears and fantasies onto the actual crimes he was investigating. As such, Lepore believes that his Journal is more revealing of the societal anxieties of 18th-century America than it is of the actual cause of the 1741 fires.

“In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”

This passage comes from writings by the philosopher David Hume, in an essay arguing that black people are mentally inferior to whites. Hume acknowledges that there are educated black men, yet he is unable to believe that black men could actually be intelligent. Instead, Hume suggesting that such a black person must be simply repeating words they had heard with no comprehension, as a parrot does.

“The plot the prosecution labeled “Hughson’s Plot,” then, began in 1737 and was, essentially, a prank that grew out of proportion […] This plot was real—it happened—but it was also fake; it was meant as mockery.”

In Chapter 5, Lepore argues that Hughson’s initiations and supposed plot are nothing more than an attempt to mock New York’s powerful freemasons. Yet, while Lepore acknowledges that the plot may have begun as a joke, she also argues that it was “real,” as the joke leads to some slaves actually deciding to revolt against their masters.

“[T]he ‘Negro Plot,’ hatched at Jack’s, on street corners, and in markets, was the forging of an Akan-influenced brotherhood and a political order that encouraged individual and collective acts of vengeance, of cursing whites and setting fires, skirmishes in the daily, unwinnable war of slavery.”

Lepore argues that through the “Negro Plot,” many of New York’s slaves forge a community that bridges their disparate geographic and ethnic backgrounds. Through the initiation and rituals—inspired by rituals used by Africa’s Akan people—these slaves build bonds and envision a world beyond slavery, in which they are afforded the same freedoms as all other human beings.

“[The Supreme Court] arrived at a rather astonishing solution: they would try the ‘Spanish Negroes’ on two separate indictments; on one, as slaves, and on the other, as free men.”

During the investigation, a group of so-called “Spanish Negroes” are tried. These individuals are Spanish sailors captured during war, who have been sold into slavery despite claiming that in Spain they are free men. As slaves and free men receive different rights in court, the Supreme Court decides to bring the sailors to trial simultaneously as slaves and as free men.

“To be a priest was to be false, cruel, wanton, lecherous, deceitful, treacherous, ruthless, and bloodthirsty. To be a priest was to forgive sins, and thereby to exonerate the evilest of deeds among the basest of peoples.”

18th-century New Yorkers are deeply suspicious of Catholicism and of Catholic priests, with laws banning priests from practicing. The New Yorker’s fears stem from the ability of Catholic priests to forgive sin, as many believe priests will use this to encourage sinners to do evil, or to incite rebellion amongst slaves.

“Will, that ‘expert at Plots,’ had told him in prison ‘That he understood these Affairs very well, and that unless he the said Pedro did confess and bring in two or three, he would be either hanged or burnt.”

In this passage, a slave Pedro explains that his confession had not been true, and that he had been advised to falsely confess by a fellow slave. Pedro is one of numerous slaves who recant their confessions following the trial. In spite of the numerous retractions, however, Horsmanden refuses to believe that slaves might have falsified testimony, or that his belief in a slave rebellion is overblown.

“To execute slaves was to burn money. Mary Burton was cursed on every street corner.”

Following the conclusion of Horsmanden’s trial, many New Yorkers proclaim the trial to be a sham, and angrily accost Burton for her role in the trial. Rather than being motivated by empathy for the executed slaves, many of these New Yorkers are actually aggravated by the fact that the trial resulted in a loss of their property.

“Which with the former horrible executions among you upon this occasion puts me in mind of our New England Witchcraft in the year 1692 […] But I am humbly of the Opinion that such Confessions […] are not worth a straw; for many times they are obtain’d by foul means, by force or torment.”

Once the trial is concluded, a letter is delivered from an anonymous Bostonian, comparing the trial to the infamous Salem Witch trials. The letter writer suggests that both investigations may be the product of a mass hysteria, and argues that confessions obtained under threat of death are likely to be falsified.

“Whoever its author, the letter sent to Colden quite remarkably illustrates the range of thinking about slavery and race in the northern colonies in 1741. In a world where it was possible to burn black men at the stake as monsters, it was also possible to see them as humans unjustly oppressed, whose rebellion would be just in the eyes of God.”

Despite the fact that many New Yorkers partake in the practice of human slavery, Lepore notes that such views on slavery are not held by everyone in the colonies. In contrast, many Americans—including the anonymous letter writer—had begun to actively question the institution of slavery, refusing to believe the racist logic that black people are not full human beings.

“All that slaves could legally hand down to their children was their status. What slaves inherited was slavery.”

In the Epilogue, Lepore explores how the institution of slavery follows slaves into their death. Slaves are barred from owning property and are thus barred from writing wills or bestowing any form of material inheritance to their children. In many cases, slaves’ children are taken from them and sold, leaving slaves with no contact with their kin.