| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. By Jill Lepore. (New York: Knopf, 2005. xx, 323 pp. $26.95, ISBN 1-4000-4029-9.)
Jill Lepore's New York Burning retells the story of a 1741 crime spree by a corps of disaffected slaves and their alleged white allies, the trials that ensued, and the sanguinary punishments exacted. The tale has already had its legal chroniclers (starting in 1744), and Lepore does not try to engage the most recent of these accounts. Instead, she places the events in a richly textured world of political plots and plotters of all kinds. Nor has Lepore produced another of the microhistories so fashionable among contemporary students of colonial criminality. Instead, her story jumps back and forth in time and place over the course of a century and the span of the Atlantic world. She also examines the primary sources with great care, providing a kind of literary detective story within the larger narrative.	1
Although the slave defendants appear throughout the book, Lepore's most important and original findings are not so concerned with them as with the whites' response. "It is impossible to understand how faction and party worked in New York ... without considering slavery, and how real and imagined slave conspirators functioned as a phantom political party" (p. 219). They were an extreme and unanticipated consequence of James Alexander's "experiment in political liberty." In short, "in eighteenth-century New York, slavery made liberty possible" (ibid.).	. . .

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