New York Burning

by Jill Lepore

  23. Bruce M. Wilkenfeld, “New York City Neighborhoods, 1730,” NYH (1976): 173. In 1730, of forty-two coopers in the city, eighteen were in the North Ward, twelve in the East, four in the West, four in the South, and two each in Dock and Outward (p. 174). Bruce Martin Wilkenfeld, The Social and Economic Structure of the City of New York, 1695–1796 (New York: Arno Press, 1978), p. 92.

  24. John Thornton, “War, the State, and Religious Norms in ‘Coromantee’ Thought: The Ideology of an African Nation,” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: BecomingColonial in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 192–93.

  25. Thornton, “The Coromantees,” pp. 170–72.

  26. For the data on Akan names, see Appendix A.

  27. Thornton, “War, the State, and Religious Norms,” pp. 193–99.

  28. Black Freemasonry may have played a role in the Haitian Revolution in 1791, and some scholars have suggested that eighteenth-century elements of Haitian voudou, sometimes called “a sort of religious and dancing masonry,” found their way into mainstream Masonry. See Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000), esp. p. 856.

  29. Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress, pp. 175–76.

  30. See Lisa C. Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 205–7. On slave mobility in antebellum cities, see Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

  31. Kruger, “Born to Run,” pp. 93, 128–64. See also Olson, “Social Aspects of Slave Life,” pp. 66–67. JA to CC, July 25, 1730, LPCC, 2:16. CC to Captain Van Pelt, in North Carolina, December 17, 1726, LPCC, 1:59.

  32. Kruger identified family as the motivation in forty-five of sixty-nine runs, where the motivation was known—Kruger, “Born to Run,” pp. 234–35.

  33. Wilkenfeld, in “New York City Neighborhoods, 1730,” argues that neighborhoods clustered whites by religion, wealth, and occupation: “Thus, over two-thirds of the shipwrights and half the tailors were to be found in the East Ward; silversmiths and coopers clustered in the North Ward; blacksmiths were concentrated in the nearby regions of the Out Ward” (p. 173).

  34. The 1737 census counted 39 percent of the total population as black males over the age of ten. My population growth model puts the total black population in 1741 at 1,833; if the age and sex distribution remained constant between 1737 and 1741, that would make for 715 black men over the age of ten in 1741. But black males between ages ten and twenty were not likely to have participated in the conspiracy; only a handful were called “boys,” and this seems to have been a term indicating black men’s lowly status rather than their age. In 1746, the year of the next surviving census, the percentage of children under age sixteen in the total population was 43 percent. The execution and transportation of large numbers of black men in 1741 in part accounts for this discrepancy, but the different age brackets probably account for most of it. If a similar child-to-adult ratio pertained in 1741, then 862 of the 1,833 blacks in the city were adults. If the 1737 sex ratio applied in 1741, then 456 of these 862 black adults were men over age sixteen. On the age structure and the percentage of children in the population, see Kruger, “Born to Run,” esp. pp. 1167–68.

  35. NYG, October 8, 1733; NYWJ, April 15, 1734. November 18, 1731, MCC, 4:77.

  36. Thomas F. DeVoe, The Market Book (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 1:93.

  37. “An Act for the more effectual preventing and punishing the Conspiracy of Negro and other slaves, for the better regulating them and for repealing the Acts herein mentioned relating hereto,” Col. Laws of NY, 2:679–88; “A Law for Regulating Negro’s & Slaves in the Night Time,” MCC, 4:51–52; “A Law for the Observation of the Lords Day Called Sunday,” MCC, 4:79; “A Law for Punishing Slaves who Shall Ride Disorderly through the Streets,” MCC, 4:89–90; “A Law to Prohibit Negroes and Other Slaves Vending Indian Corn Peaches or any other Fruit with this City,” MCC, 4:497–98.

  38. Quoted in Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, pp. 3–4, 17.

  39. The reference to “Negro Peg” comes from the Boston Weekly News-Letter, June 25, 1741. On the Carr case, see Foote, “Black Life,” pp. 270–71. On Anne Carr in the Poorhouse, see “Church Wardens Accounts, 1738,” NYHS.

  40. 1734 Tax Assessment Rolls. NYWJ, January 28, 1734, and NYG, January 21 and 28, 1734. For another series of episodes of sexual violence, see NYG, July 18, 1737: “We hear that 1st Week a Negro Man attempted to Force his Mistress, for which he is committed to Prison, and to be brought to his Tryal. Another Negro made an attempt upon a Girl about eight years of age. The Master of the Negro deliver’d him up to the Childs Father to be corrected as he thought proper. And its said he has had suitable Correction. A third Negro for the like Crime is committed to Gaol, and put in Irons, in order to receive due Punishment.”

  41. The King against Martha Cash, Mayor’s Court, February 1, 1737.

  42. At his first trial on May 6, Hughson successfully challenged the impaneling of Joseph North as a juror.

  43. Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Knopf, 1996). In an analysis of slave conspiracies and revolts between 1649 and 1833 in the British Caribbean, Robert Dirks argues that 35 percent were hatched or took place in December—Dirks, “Resource Fluctuations and Competitive Transformations in West Indian Slave Societies,” in C. D. Laughlin and I. A. Brady, eds., Extinction and Survival in Human Populations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 160–66.

  44. Shane White, “ ‘It Was a Proud Day’: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834,” Journal of American History 81 (1994): 13–50; and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 95.

  45. Quoted in Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), p. 320 n. 48.

  46. NYG, March 11 and April 7, 1740. Howard M. Chapin, Privateering in King George’s War, 1739–1748 (Providence, RI: E. A. Johnson Co., 1928), pp. 131–33. On the status of black sailors, see also Zabin, “Places of Exchange,” chap. 2. She concludes that the “Spanish Negroes” were “unwittingly drawn into the slave conspiracy” (p. 81).

  47. A rare exception was the case of Joseph, “declared free (in the absence of other testimony)” in 1762. See Charles Merrill Hough, Reports of Cases in the Vice Admiralty of the Province of New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), pp. 199–200.

  48. Deposition of Oliver Short, January 23, 1741, Admiralty Court Records, James Alexander Papers, NYHS, Box 53, folder 1. On Benjamin Kiersted, see also Chapin, Privateeringin King George’s War, pp. 138–39. Alexander clearly played a role in Kiersted’s case, as Short’s deposition survives among his papers.

  49. George Clarke to the Duke of Newcastle, February 25, 1741, Doc. Hist. NY, 6:179. Hough, Reports of Cases, pp. 20–21.

  50. Wood, Black Majority, pp. 312, 314.

  51. George Clarke to the Lords of Trade, June 20, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:197.

  52. NYWJ, June 22, 1741.

  53. That Alexander was in the city during most of the proceedings, and actively involved in civil cases before the Supreme Court, is confirmed by case logs and his correspondence for the period. See, e.g., JA to [Joseph Murray?], March 25, 1741 (Box 1, folder 5). On June 4, Alexander wrote a letter from Perth Amboy (Box 1, folder 2), and in his Supreme Court Register for July 1741 he refers to an extension given to a case “because of my absence in jersey” in June. But that absence appears to have been brief because he was certainly in court on June 11, as he mentions that date in his Register, and again during the “Spanish Negroes’ ” trial on June 17, and he wrote a letter from New York on June 30, 1741 (Supreme Court Register, 1721, 1742, pp. 49–56; JA to Richard Bradley, Box 1, folder 1). See also JA, Docket for New York Supreme Court, Box 49, folder 5.

  Chapter Six


  1. Kalm, Travels, pp. 125–32.

  2. Minutes of the Council, April 27, 1741, CO 412/221, PRO.

  3. Julian Gwyn, “Money Lending in New England: The Case of Admiral Sir Peter Warren and His Heirs, 1739–1805,” New England Quarterly 44 (March 1971): 121.

  4. “Scope and Content of Captain Peter Warren, Squirrel, New York,” September 16, 1740, ADM 106/930/199, PRO; “Scope and Content of Captain Peter Warren, Squirrel, New York Leaving NY for Great Britain,” August 19, 1741, ADM 191, PRO. Warren appears to have owned a sizable number of slaves. See “The Estate of Peter Warren Deceas’d,” Warren Papers, NYHS, no. 18, which mentions, for 1741, “sending 2 Negro’s to York.” And also “Coll. William Johnson Due to the Estate of Sir Peter Warren,” ibid., no. 19, which mentions, from 1739, “19 Negro Slaves” sent by Warren to Johnson.

  5. NYWJ, July 6, 1741.

  6. George Clarke to the Lords of Trade, June 20, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:198.

  7. A number of ships carrying slaves to be transported out of the colony are recorded in the PRO’s Naval Records, although the total reported there does not add up to the number recorded by Horsmanden. Fifty slave departures are reported, as follows: July 9, 1741, on the Mayflower, Robert Beatty, master, carrying “8 transport Negros” to Madeira; July 15, 1741, on the Catherine, John Stout, master, “13 Transport Negros” bound for Madeira and Lisbon; July 18, 1741, on the Sarah, Abraham Brasher, master, “2 Transport Negros” bound for Newfoundland; July 31, 1741, on the Stephen & Elisa, Richard Langdon, master, “2 Transport Negros” bound for Curaçoa; July 31, 1741, on the Stephen, Elias Rice, master, carrying “with 20 Transport Negros” for St. Eustatia; August 15, on the William & Mary, Jacob Kiersted, master, owned by Jacob and William Walton, carrying “5 Transport Negros” to Madeira— Naval Office Records for New York, pp. 176–80, CO 5/1226.

  8. DH to CC, August 7, 1741, LPCC, 2:224–28.

  9. George Clarke to the Lords of Trade, June 20, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:198.

  10. In his Journal, Horsmanden notes that Burton’s June 25 deposition was “Taken before one of the Judges,” but the original deposition bears only Burton’s mark and Horsmanden’s signature. The same is true for addenda to the deposition added June 27 and June 29, the latter of which reads, “Taken before me the 29th day of June 1741 Danl Horsmanden.” NYCCP, 74–84a(2)-r.

  11. On the eighteenth-century spread of Masonry through the British Army, see Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs, “ ‘The Essential Link’: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1751–1918” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2000), esp. pp. 63–70.

  12. The ad for Jones appeared in the NYWJ, July 13, 20, 27, and August 24, 1741. He ran away on July 11. Wilson, Horsmanden said, had “Acquaintance with two white Servants belonging to Gentlemen who lodged at Mr. Hogg’s House.”

  13. NYG, October 8, 1733. Linebaugh and Rediker see the Irish as “another cell in New York’s insurrectionary movement”—Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, pp. 186–88.

  14. NYWJ, March 30, 1741.

  15. Pierre Jurieu (1637–1713) wrote dozens of anti-Catholic tracts and histories.

  16. Farquhar, Beaux’ Stratagem, Act III, scene iii.

  17. Thornton, “Central African Names,” pp. 729–30. “Lawes . . . 1664,” NYHSC 1 (1809): 322–23; Laws of New York (New York, 1757), p. 69; Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, April 27, 1699, Docs. Col. NY, 4:510–11; “An Act to Incourage the Baptizing of Negro, Indian and Mulatto Slaves,” Col. Laws of NY, 1:597–98.

  18. Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in a New World Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 161–69.

  19. “A List of Slaves taught by Mr. Neau since the year 1704, Enclosed in his Letter of the 10 November 1714,” Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) Letterbooks, LOC, series A, Vol. 10, 220–23. “A List of Negroes Taught by Mr Neau December the 23 1719,” ibid., Vol. 14, pp. 141–43.

  20. David Humphreys, An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagationof the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1730), pp. 232–44; Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 55–63. William Taylor to Elias Neau, November 6, 1712, and Elias Neau to William Taylor, October 15, 1712, in Letters and Reports of Missionaries and Other Correspondents, SPG Papers, LOC, series A, Vol. 7 (1711–12), Box 5450, pp. 276–77 and 226–27.

  21. NYG, November 30, 1730.

  22. Summary of Charlton to the SPG, November 11, 1740; summary dated March 20, 1741, SPG General Meeting Journals, Vol. 8 (1738–39/1741–42); Transcript, Box 5503, 231, SPG Papers, LOC.

  23. See Stokes, Iconography, 4:563.

  24. Anonymous, “A Poem, on the Joyful News of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield’s Visit to Boston,” 1754, in Basker, ed., Amazing Grace, p. 109.

  25. George Whitefield, Three Letters from the Reverend Mr. G. Whitefield (Philadelphia, 1740), pp. 13–16. See also Alan Gallay, “The Great Sellout: George Whitefield on Slavery,” in Winfred B. Moore, Jr., and Joseph F. Tripp, eds., Looking South: Chapters in the Story of an American Region (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). See also Whitefield’s sermons discussed in NYWJ, March 10, 1740, and NYG, February 12, 1740.

  26. James Mascoparran to Philip Bearcroft, May 4, 1741, SPG Papers, LOC, Vol. 9, Box 5473; Richard Charlton to Philip Bearcroft, October 30, 1741, ibid.

  27. Cambridge’s recanting, Horsmanden says, took place on June 9, but he includes it in the day’s events for July 10. As Cambridge did not confess until June 30, “June” must be a mistake for July.

  28. Again, in the Journal, Horsmanden indicates only that Othello confessed “Before One of the Judges,” but the original MS confession reads “before me Danl Horsmanden.” NYCCP, 74:121:b:v.

  29. Frederick Philipse and Daniel Horsmanden to George Clarke, July 16, 1741, NYCCP, 74:128a and b.

  30. For Harry’s confession, see NYCCP, 74:129a:4.

  31. NYWJ, July 27, 1741.

  32. George Clarke to the Lords of Trade, August 24, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:202.

  33. NYWJ, August 17, 1741.

  34. NYWJ, August 31, 1741.

  Chapter Seven

  1. DH to CC, August 7, 1741, LPCC, 2:224–28.

  2. On August 24, Clarke reported to the Lords of Trade, “great industry has been used through out the town to discredit the witnesses and prejudice the people against them.” In this, as in everything relating to the conspiracy, Clarke took his lead from Horsmanden— George Clarke to the Lords of Trade, August 24, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:202.

  3. MCC, 5:23, July 28, 1741; 5:31, October 7, 1741; 5:67, October 22, 1742; 5:50, March 22, 1742; and 5:86, March 30, 1743. Clarke to the Lords of Trade, August 24, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:203. Clarke to the Duke of Newcastle, October 19, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:205. Clarke to the Lords of Trade, December 15, 1741, Docs. Col. NY, 6:209. MCC, 5:67, October 22, 1742.

  4. Anonymous to CC, [July 23?] 1741, LLPC, 8:270–71. Anonymous to Elizabeth DeLancey, undated, c. July 1741, LPCC, 8:269–72. CC to Clarke, August 15, 1741, LPCC, 8:272–73.

  5. George Clarke to CC, August 18, 1741, LPCC, 8:273–74.

  6. Thomas Hutchinson, A History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1767), 2:400–401.

  7. Miller quoted in Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 287. My thanks to Norton for her invaluable assistance in thinking about the links between 1692 and 1741.

  8. John Hale, A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (Boston, 1702). The complete text reads as follows: “that which chiefly carried on this matter to such an height, was the increasing of confessors till they amounted to near about Fifty: and four or six of them upon their tryals owned their guilt of this crime, and were condemned for the same, but not Executed. And many of the confessors confirmed their confessions with very strong circumstances: As their exact agreement with the accus
ations of the afflicted; their punctual agreement with their fellow confessors; their relating the times when they covenanted with Satan, and the reasons that moved them thereunto; their Witch meetings, and that they had their mock Sacraments of Baptism and the Supper, in some of them; their signing the Devils book.”

  9. Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (1950; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965); J. William Frost, ed., The Quaker Origins of Antislavery (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1980). The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, ed. Phillips P. Moulton (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1971), pp. 200, 93.

  10. In the first edition of this book, I speculated that the author of the letter was the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Judicial Court, Benjamin Lynde. Lynde’s son was one of the boundary dispute commissioners, Benjamin Lynde, Jr. Lynde the elder was born in Boston in 1666 and admitted to Harvard in 1682, where he quickly became a master of Latin and Greek. In 1692, while spectral evidence damned witches to their deaths in Salem, Lynde was in London, studying law at the Inns of Court. He returned to Massachusetts in 1697 and, two years later, married Mary Browne and settled in her home town: Salem. (Lynde’s wife’s father, William Browne, was Judge of Common Pleas for Essex, and her uncle, Jonathan Corwin, had been a judge during the witchcraft trials.) In 1712, Lynde was appointed to the Superior Court and three years later began living in a house on the corner of Salem’s Essex and Liberty Streets, given to his wife by her father, but previously owned by William Hathorne, another witchcraft judge (and ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne). In this house, Lynde discovered the manuscript confession of one of the afflicted girls, Abigail Hobbs, which he later shared with a historian compiling a history of Massachusetts.

  In 1728, Benjamin Lynde, Sr., was promoted to Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Judicial Court. In 1734, while New Yorkers burned a black man at the stake for attempted rape, Lynde presided over a similar case in Boston, where a black man named London was charged with rape. Lynde sentenced him to hang. Although Lynde headed a court more merciful to slaves than New York’s bench, he was himself a slave owner. In 1736 he purchased for his own use a “a negro boy about 12 years old,” to whom he gave the name “Scipio.” But Lynde also was deeply engaged with and even sympathetic with the idea that slavery was an evil. That same year that he bought Scipio, Lynde presided at the admiralty court trial of John Barns, a slave trader accused of murdering a black boy on board his ship. Lynde recounted the cast at considerable length in his diary, reporting that Barns’ lawyer had argued “that the negro boy was a slave, and, as master of the cargo, the said Barns might do what he would with him, even to the taking away his life.” Lynde, presiding over a court without a jury, found Barns guilty of murder. Lynde also prided himself on his generosity to his two slaves, Scipio and William. On March 24, 1741, he wrote in his diary, “Scip. Being sick with a great cold and pleuritic pain in his left breast, Dr. Cabot blooded him for the better.” One week later he wrote,—“My son B[enjami]n goes with my Rosy [a horse] to the Ipswich Court”—that is, to the first meeting of the boundary-dispute commission. On May 27, slaves in Salem celebrated Negro Election Day, which Lynde noted in his diary, recording the gifts of cash he gave to his two slaves, Scipio and William: “Election; Negro’s halloday here at Salem; give Scip. 5s and Wm 2s. 6d.” Lynde knew about role reversals and topsy-turvy rituals. (The Diaries of Benjamin Lynde and of Benjamin Lynde, Jr. [Boston, 1880]: 88-9, 61, 116, 109, 84, 106.)