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Book Review
| Peter Charles Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. Pp. xiv + 190. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 0-7006-1245-9); $14.95 paper (ISBN 0-7006-1246-7).
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| The conspiracy of 1741 in New York City has always been listed in even the shortest catalogs of slave plots and revolts in United States. It has frequently been noted that the trials dragged on for months, that large numbers of slaves seem to have been involved, that four white persons were executed as participants, and that the numerous punishments were mercilessly brutal. For many years, scholars have been fascinated by the witch-hunt quality of the trials (as was a contemporary in Boston, who cautioned that they resembled earlier events in Salem), by the naming of names in the shadow of the gallows, and by the court's sentences, which included hangings and burnings alive—both spectacles attracting the public of course—as well as "transportation" overseas, especially to the West Indies. Based heavily on the well known contemporary Journal by New York's recorder and judge, Daniel Horsmanden (published in 1744, and also in a recent edition), Hoffer rightly stresses the importance of anti-Catholic feeling in the crisis, which emerged from the (mis?)identification of one of the white purported participants and the prevalent fear of impending war with Spain. |
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Given this gruesome theater, some historians have in the past concluded that the entire affair was merely another instance of panic among whites. The author contends, however, that the conspiracy was indeed real, even though some victims of the court's justice were probably innocent. An identical conclusion was reached nearly twenty years ago by Thomas J. Davis in his A Rumor of Revolt, the first book-length work of serious scholarship on the affair, which remains by far the best work on the subject. |
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The slave conspirators in New York City were tried according to established legal procedures and rules of evidence. In this sense, despite its witch-hunt aspects, the New York trials met legal requirements better than such trials as those in the historically controversial Vesey Conspiracy and, by a much wider margin, the extra-legal proceedings of the vigilante committee in Adams County, Mississippi, in 1861. As always, the trials of slaves in such times of crisis generate historical questions concerning whether today we are confronted with an actual slave conspiracy or the detritus of vicious white panic over mere rumors. Here, as elsewhere, what is needed is probing inquiry into the prevailing cultures of both sides in a specific historical situation. One combs the surviving records for the twin keys of specificity and consistency and one weighs as best as one can the weights of fear, self-perceptions, cultural reactions to physical and psychological pain, and the cultural contexts that shaped all the various idiosyncratic stances adopted by persons caught up in such maelstroms. No two such episodes of purported slave conspiracy were exactly alike. We distort and over homogenize if we assume that all black/slave versus white/master situations were as clear cut as America's racial line, and we similarly miss the mark if we allow ourselves to bifurcate the question simply into real black planning or unfounded white panic. |
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This current brief study is not designed for scholars of either history or the law. Rather, it seems aimed (as stated in one of the blurbs) at "teachers, students, and general readers." As such, it lacks documentation, even for quotations, though it does have a thorough bibliographical essay. Given this aim, the book is less than successful. It is flawed as an exciting or even an interesting story, since it imparts a flat flavor to the life and atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century New York City. The dramatic events that transpired in a oppressive cloud of raw fear, hostility, and appalling human brutality are recounted without drama. While for good reason this study stresses at the outset the legal novelty of chattel slavery in the British colonies, it exaggerates the influence of the slave laws of Barbados beyond South Carolina (and thence Georgia) to other colonies such as Virginia and, by implication, New York. The book's treatment of legal doctrines concerning slavery does not mention their firm foundation in the Common Law, going back at least to Bracton in the thirteenth century, which explained slavery as a legitimate treatment of persons captured in just wars, on grounds that the victim's life itself had been spared. |
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While this study gives a separate, helpful "chronology" of events, the index is so incomplete as to be dangerous, especially for student use. In addition, while several errors of fact are minor, others are not. Students, or anyone, can skip Minorca being identified as an "Atlantic island," but they will be seriously misinformed when told that the population of New York City was 19,000 in 1700 and rose to 117,100 in 1760, since the city's population in 1743 was only 11,000. The venue of the Great Conspiracy may have been a "city" then, but as a working social entity it was a face-to-face town. |
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| Winthrop D. Jordan
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| University of Mississippi |
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