New York Conspiracy of 1741

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The Conspiracy of 1741, also known as the Negro Plot of 1741 or the Slave Insurrection of 1741, was a supposed plot by slaves and poor whites in the British colony of New York in 1741 to revolt and level New York City with a series of fires.

In March and April of 1741, a series of fires erupted in Lower Manhattan, the most significant one within the walls of Fort George, the home of the governor at the time. After another fire, this time at a warehouse, a slave was arrested after having been seen fleeing it. Two others were also arrested at this time, one of whom was a 16-year old white indentured servant, Mary Burton. In exchange for her freedom, she testified against the others as participants in a supposedly growing conspiracy of poor whites and blacks to burn the city, kill the white men, take the white women for themselves, and elect a new king and governor.

The two slaves were burned at the stake, and just before their deaths they confessed to burning the fort. They also named fifty others as co-conspirators. News of the "conspiracy" set off a stampede of arrests. At the height of the hysteria, nearly half the city's male slaves over sixteen were in jail. The number of arrests totaled 152 blacks and 20 whites. They were tried and convicted in a show trial. A supposed Catholic priest, John Ury, was suspected of instigating it.[1]

Most of the convicted were hanged or burnt - how many is uncertain. The bodies of two supposed ringleaders, one black and one white, were gibbeted. Their corpses were left to rot in public. Seventy-two were deported from New York, sent to Newfoundland and to various islands in the West Indies and the Madeiras.

Contents

[edit] Background

In the New York Slave Revolt of 1712, “twenty-three Negro slaves met at about midnight in the orchard of one Mr. Cook, in the middle of town, for the purpose of destroying as many of the inhabitants as they could to revenge themselves for the hard usage they felt they had received from their masters”.[who?] The slaves all gathered with weapons such as guns, swords, knives, and hatchets to destroy and kill as many people and their property as possible. One of the slaves, Cuffee, set fire to his master’s outhouse. The news of the fire spread through the town quickly, and an angry mob of townspeople marched to the scene. The slaves attacked the crowd, and soon nine whites were killed, and six were injured. The governor then executed twenty-one slaves. Between 1687 and 1741 a slave plot erupted on average every two and one half years.

In New York at the time, slaves would often learn the same trade as their masters. This created racial and economic tension between the slaves and the white tradesmen they competed against. For example, the governor of New York in 1737 told the legislature, “the artificers complain and with too much reason of the pernicious custom of breeding slaves to trades whereby the honest industrious tradesmen are reduced to poverty for want of employ, and many of them forced to leave us to seek their living in other countries.”[2] Slaves could be rented out for labor for less than the rate of whites; some of the whites went out of business because of this and some even poor.

The winter of 1740-1741 had been a miserable period in the city. There was an economic depression, a declining food and fuel supply, record low temperatures and snowfall. Many people were in danger of starving and freezing to death. These conditions made many people angry at the government, especially the poor whites and slaves.[3] The tension between the whites and the blacks was great. So great, in fact, that, “A mere hint of restiveness among black New Yorkers could throw whites into a near panic”.[citation needed] In 1741, the fear of a slave revolt was very high because there had been slave revolts in South Carolina and in the Caribbean. England was at war with Spain (War of Jenkins' Ear) and the Spanish had offered freedom to any slave who joined their cause. Troops normally stationed in New York City had been sent south to attack Cuba. The anger during the winter reminded many people of the feelings that the slaves had had twenty-nine years ago, during the Slave Revolt of 1712. In response to this, the government banned slave meetings on street corners and limited the number of slaves who could be in a group at one time to three, and twelve at funerals, as well as cutting other rights.

[edit] The Fires

On September 18, 1741, the governor’s house caught on fire, and soon the church connected to his house was ablaze too. They tried to save it, but the fire soon grew beyond control. The fire threatened to spread to another building, where all the city documents were kept. The governor ordered that the windows be smashed and the documents thrown out to save them; they were later kept in the City Hall.[4] Later, the fort at the Battery also burned down. A week later another fire broke out, but was put out quickly. The same thing happened the next week at a warehouse. Three days later a fire broke out in a cow stable. On the next day a person walking past a wealthy neighborhood saw coals by the hay in a stable and put them out, saving the neighborhood.

As the number of fires grew, so did the suspicion among whites that the fires were not accidents but arson. Then, on April 6, a round of four fires broke out, and a black man was spotted running away. A white man tried to catch him and yelled out, “A negro, a negro.” The man’s cry was taken on quickly, and soon turned to, “The negroes are rising!” The slave running away was named Cuffee, and he was quickly captured and imprisoned. The fires were now believed to be a conspiracy.

The city council decided to launch an investigation, which had the effect of increasing the anxiety of the white townspeople. The council decided to turn the investigation to Daniel Horsmanden, the city recorder and a justice on the provincial supreme court. Horsmanden set up a grand jury that he “directed to investigate whites who sold liquor to blacks- men like John Hughson.”[who?]

[edit] Conspiracy

John Hughson was a poor cobbler and illiterate that came to New York from Yonkers in the mid-1730s with his wife, his daughter, and his mother-in-law. When he was unable to find work, he opened a tavern that offended his neighbors because he sold to clients with bad reputations. Hughson opened a new tavern in 1738 on the Hudson River waterfront, near the Trinity Churchyard. The tavern soon became a rendezvous point for slaves, poor whites, free blacks, and soldiers. Hughson’s place also had stolen property and, “city slaves laughingly referred to his place as ‘Oswego’, after the Indian trading post on Lake Ontario.”[who?] Though the constables watched his place constantly, they failed to catch him red-handed for thievery. Two weeks before the fire started, Hughson was arrested for receiving stolen goods from Caesar and Prince.

Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee were part of a club called the Geneva Club, a name which referred to an incident in which they stole some "Geneva", or Dutch gin, for which they were punished with a whipping. Another person who was suspected was “Margaret Sorubiero, alias Salingburgh, alias Kerry, commonly called Peggy, or the Newfoundland Irish beauty.”[who?] She was prostitute to blacks, and the room she lived in was paid by Caesar, with whom she had a child.

Horsmanden had Hughson’s indentured servant, Mary Burton, testify against Hughson on theft charges. Horsmanden put a lot of pressure on Burton to talk about the fires. Finally, Burton said the fires were a conspiracy between blacks and poor whites to burn down the town.

Horsmanden was very pleased when Burton told him that there was a conspiracy between the whites and the blacks. He was convinced, however, that Burton knew more about the conspiracy than she had told him. He threatened to throw her in jail if she didn't tell him more, so she told him about the conspiracy.

Burton declared that the three members of the Geneva Club met frequently at Hughson’s and they had talked about burning the fort and town, and the Hughsons had agreed to help them. Though her testimony did not prove that any crime had been committed, the council was so scared that more fires would occur that they decided to believe her testimony. They also decided to pay a reward to anybody who provided useful information about the conspiracy: £100 to a white person, £45 to a free black or Indian, and £20 and freedom to a slave.

On May 2, the court found Caesar and Prince guilty of burglary and condemned them to death. The next day 7 barns caught fire, and two blacks were caught and immediately burned at stake. On May 6, the Hughsons and Peggy were found guilty of burglary charges. Peggy, “in fear of her life, decided to talk.”[who?] Some of the blacks who had been imprisoned in the dungeons also decided to talk. Two who didn’t talk were Caesar and Prince, who were hanged on May 11.

[edit] Trials

Now that Horsmanden had witnesses, he started the trials. Cuffee and Quack were the first to be tried. They were convicted and burned at stake. Immediately before being burned they confessed and gave the names of fifty of their conspirators. Moore ask to save them as future witnesses, but the officers of the court decided against it because of the rage of the crowd.

More trials followed quickly and the Hughsons and Peggy were sentenced to hang. At the height of the hysteria half of the city’s male population over sixteen was implicated in the plot.[5]. Several of the slaves argued that they were not legally enslaved because they were Spanish sailors captured in the ongoing war. After their trial, the former Spanish sailors were sold to slave traders heading for the West Indies.

But Horsmanden thought that the conspiracy was missing something - a mastermind who had planned it all. He didn't think John Hughson or any of the Geneva Club members were smart enough. Instead, Horsmanden came to believe that John Ury was responsible. Ury had just arrived in town and had been working as a school teacher and a private tutor. He was an expert in Latin, which made him suspicious around the city. Horsmanden arrested him under the suspicion of being a Roman Catholic priest and a secret agent to the Spanish. Burton suddenly remembered that Ury had been one of the plotters of the conspiracy.

Ury was put on trial. His defense was that he was a rebel from the Church of England and had no knowledge of any conspiracy. But at the time of the trial, Horsmanden had received a warning from the governor of Georgia that Spanish agents were coming to burn all the considerable towns in New England, which sealed Ury’s fate.

When Burton began naming as conspirators members of the upper class and family members of the judges themselves the conspiracy case was finally closed. Those slaves and whites still in jail were released.[6]

By the end of the trials, 160 blacks and 21 whites had been arrested, 17 blacks and four whites were hanged, 13 blacks were burned at stake,[citation needed] and 70 blacks were banished from New York.

[edit] In fiction

These events are crucial to the plot of Pete Hamill's novel Forever (2003).

In 2007, novelist Mat Johnson published The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York, a historical fiction set amidst this event.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Timeline of the Prehistory and History of King's College, Columbia University.
  2. ^ Johnson, p. 27
  3. ^ Hoey, Edwin. (June 1974). Terror in New York—1741. American Heritage Magazine
  4. ^ Lepore, Jill - New York Burning; Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan ISBN 1-4000-4029-9
  5. ^ Johnson, p.177
  6. ^ Johnson p.207

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

  • “African Americans.” World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book Inc, 2001.
  • Bond, Richard E. "Shaping a Conspiracy: Black Testimony in the 1741 New York." In Early American Studies, vol. 5, n. 1 (Spring 2007). University of Pennsylvania Press: ISSN 1543-4273
  • Berrol, Selma Cantor. The Empire City: New York and Its People, 1624-1996. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1997 ISBN 0275957950
  • Burrows, Edwin G. and Wallace, Mike - Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 ISBN 0--19-514049-4
  • Christensen, Gardello Dano[1]. Colonial New York. New York: Thomas Nelson Press Inc., 1969.
  • Davis, Thomas J., A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York ISBN 0-02-907740-0
  • Hoffer, Peter Charles - The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime and Colonial Law ISBN 0-7006-1246-7
  • Horsmanden, Daniel. The New York conspiracy trials of 1741 : Daniel Horsmanden's Journal of the proceedings with related documents ISBN 0-312-40216-3
  • Horsmanden, Daniel. The trial of John Ury for being an ecclesiastical person, made by authority pretended from the See of Rome, and coming into and abiding in the province of New York, and with being one of the conspirators in the Negro plot to burn the city of New York, 1741
  • Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: DaCapo Press, Inc., 1991 ISBN 030680431X
  • Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History. Millwood, NJ: K+O Press, 1975. ISBN 0195107799
  • Lepore, Jill - New York Burning; Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan ISBN 1-4000-4029-9
  • Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. "'The Outcasts of the Nations of the Earth,'" in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8070-5006-7
  • “New York City.” World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book Inc, 2001.
  • Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006. ISBN 0-313-33271-1
  • Williams, George W. - History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1. Project Gutenberg EBook

[edit] External links

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