| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law. By Peter Charles Hoffer. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. xiv, 190 pp. Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1245-9. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-7006-1246-7.)

Reexamination of American slave revolts and a burgeoning literature about early African American black life in the North have inspired Peter Charles Hoffer, a legal historian, to peer at the slave conspiracy of 1741 in New York City. The conspiracy has a unique historiography. Accepted as a genuine threat for nearly a century after the mass trials and executions that terminated it, the plot was viewed during the abolitionist period as an example of white hysteria and careless muttering by slaves. Over the next century and a half, most scholars dismissed the cabal as a non-event chiefly notable for shameful legal murder. W. E. B. Du Bois provided an alternative view, describing it as "knots of conspirators" (Economic Cooperation among Negroes, 1915, p. 25). In the early 1970s, T. J. Davis, reprinting the city recorder Daniel Horsmanden's account of the plot, directed attention to the slaves' behavior, a method picked up by Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, and myself, in various ways. Horsmanden's transcript of the trials is the major account of the trial. Doubters of the conspiracy's existence have always derided Horsmanden's motives and objectivity. Both were suspicious, but his account itself is one of the key documents of urban, colonial slavery. Sadly, it is out of print.

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