A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ years, New York City would see—or at least the citizens would think they saw—another slave revolt.

      In 1741, New Yorkers who were old enough to remember the events of 1712 must have recognized the similarities of what started happening during March and April. Over those weeks, nearly a dozen fires broke out in the occupied southern portion of the island, including one fire intended to burn the wooden palisades of Fort George (built on the site of today’s Battery Park).

      White New Yorkers needed little persuasion to believe that the city’s slaves were up to their old arson tricks. Some of the fires were being set on the anniversaries of the 1712 fires.

      Also fresh on the minds of New Yorkers were terrible stories still told of the 1739 Stono Rebellion near Charlestown (now Charleston), South Carolina. Down south, a mob of fifty rebelling slaves systematically hunted down and killed at least twenty-five whites, some of whom did not even own slaves.

      Until the Stono attack, the white slave owners of South Carolina had trusted their slaves so much that they ignored government edicts that forbade the gathering of slaves or allowing them to grow their own food. The trigger for the rebellion was an impending crackdown on slave freedoms because slaves were hearing that the Spanish were granting freedom to any slaves from English Carolina who could make it to their colony in Florida.

      Fear of more fires so concerned New York’s Common Council that they issued a secret order to search the entire city for “latent Enemies.” On Monday, April 13, 1741, the entire city was searched for evidence of fire-making materials or stolen goods. Every citizen (perhaps ten thousand people, both black and white) was accounted for to make sure that no foreign strangers had slipped into New York with the intention of burning it down.

      When no strangers were found on whom to blame the fires, that left the people who had been the prime suspects all along—the black slaves. The militia had already rounded up a number of slaves before the search, including some who were the children of slaves who had been executed for the 1712 fires.

      During a court inquest, some of the slaves testified that other slaves told them that if they burned down their masters’ homes, they would be set free. One of the court’s star witnesses was a white indentured servant, Mary Burton, who testified that the fires were the result of a joint conspiracy between black slaves and poor whites to burn down the city and kill the landowning whites so that the poor could inherit what was left.

      The chief judge of the panel hearing the cases, Daniel Horsmanden, began to question other prisoners about a conspiracy. Soon the prisoners began to inform on each other and accuse others, white and black, about being part of the conspiracy. Judge Horsmanden accused a newly arrived schoolteacher, John Ury, with being a Spanish spy and the mastermind behind the slave revolt.

      Horsmanden did not even wait for everyone accused to be tried before he started executing people. At least thirty blacks were hanged or burned alive. Four whites were hanged. More might have been executed but Horsmanden stopped the trial when his star witness, Mary Burton, began accusing family members of the judges of being in on the conspiracy.

      The slave executions demonstrated that white New Yorkers were growing increasingly nervous about the intentions of the black people living among them. While the revolting slaves in 1712 had killed some whites, no white lives were lost at all in this latest conspiracy—if a conspiracy existed at all. The only evidence of a conspiracy were the fires set around the city and the word of Mary Burton, who eventually accused virtually everyone she knew of being behind a plot to burn down the city.

      New York governor Hunter’s 1712 prediction that using slave labor would only create more slave rebellions had been proven true just thirty years later. Still, that did not lead to the abandonment of the slave trade. In fact, the importation of slaves into New York increased in numbers, but the source of those slaves changed. Three quarters of the slaves imported into the city before 1741 had been from the Bahamas and Jamaica.

      Starting after 1741, slave importers increasingly used Africa as a source for slaves rather than the Caribbean islands, believing that slaves taken directly from the continent would speak different languages than those who had lived for years in the Caribbean. Perhaps more importantly, those African slaves would have no knowledge of the Caribbean slave revolts.

      The tremendous profits (upwards of 100 percent of an investment for a single voyage) of slaving voyages were a temptation that proved too hard to resist to many New York merchants who had expertise with sailing and shipping. Estimates range as high as one third of the city’s merchants being engaged in the slave trade by 1750.

      From 1732 through 1754 more than 35 percent of the city’s new immigrants were listed as slaves. Since it was a common practice for many slavers to off-load their cargoes on Long Island in order to avoid the colony’s tax collectors who were waiting at the official port of entry, it is possible that up to one half of the colony’s immigrants in the mid-eighteenth century were slaves.

      Slave owners in New England and New York differed from Southern slave owners in their use of slaves. Southern slaveholders looked on slaves as a permanent workforce, a resource to be used until they were too old to work. When that happened, the slaves became house servants. Southern slave women were encouraged to have children who would be born into slavery and eventually grow old enough to work.

      While around five hundred thousand slaves landed in all the English American colonies in the 180 years before the slave trade was officially outlawed in 1808, more than 4 million slaves lived in the American South in 1861. Almost all of those were native-born Americans with a tiny fraction arriving from Africa, landed by slavers willing to take the chance on being detected by the United States Navy.

      New Yorkers thought of slaves as a disposable commodity. In the late 1990s, Howard University in Washington, D.C., conducted an exhaustive study of the bones found in the African Burial Ground west of Manhattan’s City Hall, the traditional burial ground for the city’s slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The bones revealed that both men and women had lifted heavy weights most of their adult lives, leading to severe bone stresses. That fact indicated to researchers that New York City’s slave owners believed the slave population could always be replenished with the arrival of another slave ship as “slaveholders showed no desire to possess young Africans or to ‘breed’ their captives. They only needed them to keep the market’s products and profits flowing.”

      So many New York slavers got into the slaving business and so many voyages were successful that supply eventually overran demand and the wholesale price of slaves dropped by more than 50 percent by the end of the 1750s. But instead of lessening the demand for slaves, the lower cost encouraged more potential New York owners to make purchases. New York became an even more popular port of call, trailing only Charleston, South Carolina, for the volume of imported slaves.

      As the eighteenth century faded and the nineteenth century dawned, so did the senses of lawmakers who questioned the need for domestic slavery and the international slave trade on religious, legal, and economic grounds. The Northern states had begun considering the thorny questions of abolishing slavery within their borders in the mid-eighteenth century, even as they allowed the international trade between Africa, Cuba, and the Caribbean to continue from their seaports. New York State passed a law abolishing slavery in 1799 with provisions that allowed owners to free or sell their slaves slowly so that they would not lose their investment.

      Most slaves seemed to have been sold. According to the U.S. Census, the percentage of slaves in New York State in 1790 dropped by more than two thirds by the 1830 Census, indicating a huge transfer of bodies to places where slavery was still legal.

      Congress finally passed a law abolishing the slave trade after 1808. Passing the law was one thing; enforcing it was another, particularly since most of СКАЧАТЬ