New York Burning. Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore
In the 1730s, white New Yorkers, led by James Alexander, conducted an experiment in political liberty, and defended their right to constitute an oppositional party as a political form not only not destructive of but actually essential to good and just government, a form especially necessary in the colonies as protection against the abuse of unchecked governors who, by becoming tyrants, made their subjects political “slaves.” In 1741, a phantom black political party –of real slaves – was discovered lurking in the shadows. Its discovery marked both the logical consequence of, and an end to Alexander’s experiments in political liberty. Having endured a white “City in a City” whose leader had gone unpunished, New Yorkers reckoned with their black “City in a City” by banishing, burning, and hanging its most threatening subjects.
The story of what happened in Manhattan in 1741, the subject of this short, dense and far-reaching account by historian and public intellectual Jill Lepore should be as familiar to Americans as the Salem witch trials a half-century earlier. I only first heard of it cryptically when it was mentioned as backdrop of the novel Golden Hill by Francis Spufford, which I read last year. The fact that such an enormous event is largely forgotten is only the first shocking detail of the story.
To give a quick summary: In the winter of 1741, there was a series of fires in Manhattan – then a town of 10,000 people. While fire was fairly common – flame was the major source of heat and light in buildings made of wood – the fact that so many happened so quickly and that they seemed to happen to the wealthiest members of the society sparked a rumor that the fires were part of a slave revolt. Investigations, threats of punishment and promises of pardon brought on a torrent of confessions from both slaves and working-class Irish immigrants and within a few months 34 men and women had been put to death – twenty-one hanged and thirteen burnt at the stake. Dozens more were sold away from the city (and their families) either as part of the pardon they received for confessing or because their owners feared losing their value if they were implicated.
While the conspiracy was found to be nonexistent within a few months – and it generated prominent comparison to the Salem tragedy – the story largely disappeared from history. This happened in part because the official account was controlled by the man chiefly responsible for the many miscarriages of justice and because the dead were largely enslaved Africans and African Americans. Lepore’s account is wonderfully detailed and thoughtfully puts the events in context. It is, also, dense and complex. This piece of history awaits its Arthur Miller – someone to move it from history to popular culture.
Lepore begins not with the fires, but with the trial of Peter Zenger a decade earlier. As you may remember from American history classes (Zenger’s story is remembered) John Peter Zenger ran a newspaper – The New-York Weekly Journal – that was closely associated with a faction that had organized in opposition to the crown-appointed governor of the colony, William Cosby. Zenger published a number of editorials that criticized and mocked the governor. Cosby seized his press, had the copies burned and arrested Zenger. In a landmark trial, Zenger was found not guilty because Cosby could not prove that the editorials were not true. Truth had never been a defense against libel and this became a landmark case in the development of a free press. It was also accompanied by many rhetorical attacks claiming that a too-powerful governor would “enslave” the people of New York.
The irony of that rhetoric seems to have been lost on its readers and Lepore’s first order of business is too revive it. She establishes that at the time – the mid 1730s – New York was a slave-town. Of the population of 10,000, fully 2,000 (20%) were enslaved. The enslaved were all of African descent, with some directly imported from present day Ghana, others traded through the West Indies and some through Spanish colonies in the South. This makes New York second only to Charlotte, North Carolina in the proportion of its population that is enslaved. Lepore does an excellent job of establishing the role and life of an urban slave, establishing their work loads, movement about the city, relationships to each other, to white indentured workers and to their owners. Clearly, this community was a giant part of the culture of the town and represented a lively, if somewhat underground, community.
Lepore uses a structure that approaches the so-called conspiracy from unexpected angles. An excellent example is her chapter on water in New York. While since the mid-nineteenth century, New York has been famous for the high quality of its water, in the eighteenth century, it was famous for the low quality of its water. The fact that the islands of the harbor are surrounded by tidal rivers combined with the low water table to make most of the water on the island brackish. The rapid growth of the city, and its terrible environmental practices, rendered most common backyard wells unusable after a short time. The city provided a series of municipal wells at street corners, but the contracts for maintaining these wells were trading chips in a system that was largely corrupt. As a result, the water from these wells was known to be discolored and smelly. While humans could subsist on ale and cider, travelers were warned that their horses would get sick if they passed through New York without taking proper precautions. This meant that the few landowners lucky and prudent enough to dig deep wells and tap into potable water found their wells became community meeting places as people came from all over the city with kegs to fill and cart home.
Of course, by people, I mean servants, most of whom were enslaved Africans. One prominent well was on the land belonging to Gerardus Comfort, a barrel maker who found that the water trade helped feed the barrel trade. His land was on the Hudson somewhat north of the most populated part of the city (a little south of the World Trade Center site). His well was next to Hughson’s Tavern, a popular spot for workers – enslaved and free – to gather. Slaves and free-servants carted barrels to Comfort’s well on a daily basis, stopping at Hughson’s for rest, refreshment and community.
Much of Lepore’s discussion of how the rumors of conspiracy started and were maintained is speculative. She operates on the logical assumption that a good deal of the written record is inaccurate. The official account was written by the lawyer who was chiefly responsible for the Grand Jury investigation of the conspiracy, the man who sentenced the thirty-four New Yorkers to death, Daniel Horsmanden. Horsmanden was an unpropertied man with large debts and aspirations of joining the upper classes. He was a minor political player in New York and his fortune was constantly entwined with being on the winning side of political arguments and sharing in the spoils winning accrued. While Lepore carefully documents the use of Comfort’s well and Hughson’s Tavern, she cannot know exactly what went on in that tavern. She speculates that slaves and servants may have spent their time complaining about their master’s and bragging that they would someday kill them and become masters themselves. She discusses African and West Indian cultural practices involving reversal celebrations – when servants and slaves would act out the roles of master and king, both to see how the other half lived and to mock it, and speculates that such a celebration may have taken place in the week before Christmas and New Years – just when the fires were taking place.
While some details of this speculation are more persuasive than others, it is not hard to imagine that when the fires broke out and the powerful whites went looking for something other than coincidence to blame, they had no trouble finding slaves who had expressed the desire to kill their masters and burn their city. When such comments came out in the investigation of the fire, a conspiracy to overthrow the entire city and name a black man king was born, and a full-blown effort to stamp out this revolution began. Dozens of slaves were brought in for questioning and while many held out, it was not hard to get confessions. As in the witch trials and later in the search for communists during the Cold War, the detail that made a confession valid and valuable was that it named new names – to get mercy you had to implicate someone previously not implicated. Because there had been several fires in several neighborhoods, proving that the conspiracy was real required implicating people from a wide variety of the city’s social and geographic circles.
That need for variety, and Horsmanden’s constant need to expand his inquiry, to root out the evil of insurrection, caused the nature of the conspiracy to mutate over the months of the investigation. Whenever the old evidence did not match the new evidence, the theory of who was behind the insurrection changed. Over the course of the spring and summer the plot morphed from one run by tavern keeper John Hughson, to one led by the slaves themselves, to an aspect of a larger plot to aid the Spanish takeover of North America, to a Catholic conspiracy to destroy Protestantism in America. Along the way, we learn of the subtleties of accepting testimony from slaves who might implicate whites, of how his practice of serving enslaved blacks affected the social standing of John Hughson (and his wife, who did the actual serving), we get an introduction to the politics involved when your city is a pawn in colonial wars, and see a little of the power of anti-Catholic feeling in New York.
As a result, Lepore’s really rather slim book (230 pages, though that does not include a hefty set of charts and footnotes) serves not just as the narrative of a horrific and lost incident in New York history, but also as a wonderful introduction to the daily society of that City at close to the dawn of its existence. It is by no means a light read, but it is well worth the effort.
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