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Book Review
| Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, New York: Knopf/Vintage Books, 2005. Pp. 323. $26.95 cloth (ISBN 1-4000-4029-9); $15.95 paper (ISBN 1-4000-3226-1).
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| New York succumbed to crisis in 1741. Old strains overwhelmed the colony's heart. Troubles, domestic and foreign, had laid siege throughout the 1730s. Emotions flared especially in the provincial capital. The town fancied itself as New York City. Confined to Manhattan Island's southern tip, it housed the governor, garrison, legislature, and about 9,000 whites and 2,000 blacks, almost all enslaved. Contentious politics had pushed New Yorkers, long known as a factious people, to the brink of shedding each others' blood in the streets. The two dominant factions—the Court and Country parties—formed rival governments in 1736, and "we had all the appearance of a civil War," a worried New Yorker at the time noted. |
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Unpopular royal governor William Cosby fomented much of the strife. His ill-fated attempt to silence his opposition in 1735 by prosecuting New-York Weekly Journal printer John Peter Zenger for seditious libel was simultaneously a high- and low-water mark. The flood of rhetoric Cosby's heavy-handed governance unloosed flowed with talk of liberty and slavery, Bancroft Prize-winner Jill Lepore emphasizes in her study of the maelstrom she situates as a prism revealing the nature of political opposition in early America. She casts her story as "a profoundly troubling one, of how slavery destabilized—and created—American politics" (xviii). |
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Lepore adroitly mixes long established historiography with fresh detective recreation. She fashions something of a multi-directional intersection. The traffic runs with a long view of the development of colonial American political ideology, identity, and community. It pauses on peculiarities of New York and its local events of the 1730s and in 1741. The flow traces directions Leonard Levy, Stanley Katz, and others opened on Zenger's trial as a way station to developing American thinking about the law of libel, sedition, free speech, and a free press. Patricia U. Bonomi's A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (1971) marks another lane. So do Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975) and Donald L. Robinson's Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (1971). Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and Gordon S. Wood's article in the 1982 William and Mary Quarterly, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," also suggest lanes. My own A Rumor of Revolt: The "Great Negro Plot" in Colonial New York (1985) and other work on the 1741 conspiracy episode mark further lanes. |
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Such old works form an often unacknowledged framework for the story Lepore retells of ten fires in March and April 1741 that in short order sent New York City into a frenzy that led to thirteen blacks being burned at the stake and seventeen being hanged, along with four whites. The central charge featured conspiracy. |
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Lepore re-creates the agitated atmosphere. With evocative language her seven quaintly titled chapters metaphorically move her plot through Pharaonic-like plagues of Ice, Fire, Stone, Paper, Water, Blood, and Ink. She ends with an epilogue titled Dust. Her focus falls not so much on the underlying action in 1741 as on its political reflections. She shows interest in arrested and executed slaves, for example, less in themselves than in who owned them. She features antagonism between two lawyers—the Country faction's James Alexander and the Court faction's Daniel Horsmanden. |
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The 1741 episode's primary historical recorder, Horsmanden was a chief investigator and principal proponent of the theory that the rash of fires marked the opening assault of an abominable conspiracy of Spanish spies, slaves, Catholics and other traitorous whites to burn down New York City and murder its loyal white residents. As third justice of New York's three-man Supreme Court of Judicature, Horsmanden also sat as a presiding trial judge in prosecutions that produced the thirty-four executions. |
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Lepore reads the specter of slave conspiracy as a shadow on New York's political landscape. "Slavery was," she argues, "always and everywhere, a political issue" (xvii). And that is what she pursues. "[W]hat happened in New York suggests that [slavery] exerted a more powerful influence on political life: slaves suspected of conspiracy constituted both a phantom political party and an ever-threatening revolution," she argues (xvii). With blacks cast as murderous enemies, whites could emerge united in community, she suggests. |
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Lepore's multi-textured political plot stretches the local mystery of a fascinating episode and true early American tragedy into a bit of master narrative on the coming American Revolution with its ultimate promise of an enduring Constitution aimed to secure "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." Heavy with irony and paradox, Lepore's contrasts are eye-catching. Yet for all her meticulous re-envisionings of New York City in 1741, she recovers less fresh social and political context than she suggests. Her ambitious recreation thins notably in stretching what she touts as the "'unruly spirit of independency' manifest in New York in the tumultuous 1730s" through 1741 and on to the 1770s to assert that "in eighteenth-century New York, slavery made liberty possible" (224, 219). |
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| T. J. Davis
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| Arizona State University |
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