Reviewed by Patricia U. Bonomi | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Patricia U. Bonomi | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Patricia U. Bonomi, New York University

New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. By Jill Lepore. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. 347 pages. $26.95 (cloth).
Historians have been on the hunt for discrete episodes of the early American story that deliver narrative drama and historical significance, homing in on Indian captivity tales, the adventures of a midwife, and that sturdy favorite, the Salem witch trials. This same impulse has focused fresh attention on New York City and the "Great Negro Plot of 1741." That episode, which unfolded in the streets, taverns, and courtrooms of Manhattan, was as blood drenched and theatrical as any event in colonial America outside its battlefields.	1
The "Plot" started in the spring with a burglary, in which a white tavern owner, his household, and two slaves were implicated. It gathered momentum over the next several weeks when ten fires erupted. It spiraled higher with tangled rumors of a conspiracy of Manhattan blacks in league with working-class whites to overthrow the government and seize the city. It culminated six months later in a bedlam of accusations, confessions, and denials that led to the arrest of 20 whites and 152 blacks, the transportation of 84 slaves, the suicide of 1 jailed slave, the hanging of 4 whites and 17 blacks, and the burning at the stake of 13 blacks. A total of thirty-four people were executed, compared with the twenty killed in Salem.	2
Jill Lepore tells this story in gripping detail. Of necessity she has drawn heavily on the central account of this ghastly affair, Daniel Horsmanden's Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America, And Murdering the Inhabitants.¹ One of three judges on New York's Supreme Court, which conducted the trials, Horsmanden was also the main examiner of the accused and the key witnesses. He was the prime recorder of all legal proceedings, and he subsequently gathered the court documents for publication in his Journal. Every scholar who has approached this story has had to deal with Horsmanden's powerful hold on the narrative. None has searched more diligently for additional evidence than Lepore, whose probes included a visit to the New York State Library at Albany where she found a few scorched trial records that survived the library fire of 1911.	3
But Horsmanden's Journal remains the key document, and so Lepore's presentation of the textual evidence differs little from that of previous accounts, including the first book-length treatment, Thomas J. Davis's excellent A Rumor of Revolt.² In early 1741 a recession, a harsh winter, and above all Britain's recently declared war against Spain had put New Yorkers on edge. This followed the arrival in New York of up to twenty "Spanish Negroes," sailors captured from Spanish prizes who, though claiming to be freemen, had been sold as slaves to local owners. All writers, following Horsmanden, turn next to the burglary, a proven event—the culprits were caught with the stolen goods—and move on to the series of fires that broke out shortly thereafter. The fires, whether accidentally or deliberately set—here the truth begins to blur—led to charges against a number of slaves. These incidents alone might not have mobilized the full power of the law, given masters' dependence on the labor of their slaves. But as fires continued to flare a cry went up: "The Spanish Negroes; Take up the Spanish Negroes" (160). And, indeed, five were arrested for what would increasingly be seen by New Yorkers as a conspiracy against the state. Next a number of whites and blacks stepped forward to implicate scores of others as the episode escalated from a contradictory patchwork of charges, confessions, and refutations to an increasingly coherent narrative of planned insurrection. Toward the end it was further transformed into a Roman Catholic plot involving the Spanish Negroes, other blacks seduced by that "Hocus Pocus, bloody Religion" (192), as a prosecutor put it, and one John Ury, a mysterious priest and supposed ringleader who ended his days on the gallows.	. . .

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