NEW YORK SLAVE INSURRECTION OF 1741

The 'New York Slave Insurrection,' also known as the 'Great Negro Plot of 1741' or 'The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741,' is the name given to a supposed plot by slaves and poor whites in the British colony of New York in 1741 to revolt and level New York City with a series of fires.
In March and April of 1741, a series of fires erupted in Lower Manhattan, the most significant one within the walls of Fort George, the home of the governor at the time. After another fire, this time at a warehouse, a slave was arrested after having been seen fleeing it. Two others were also arrested at this time, one of whom was a 16-year old white indentured servant, Mary Burton. In exchange for her freedom, she testified against the others as participants in a supposedly growing conspiracy of poor whites and blacks to burn the city, kill the white men, take the white women for themselves, and elect a new king and governor.
The two slaves were burned at the stake, and with "fire licking at their feet", confessed to burning the fort. They also named fifty others as co-conspirators. News of the "conspiracy" set off a stampede of arrests. At the height of the hysteria, nearly half the city's male slaves over sixteen were in jail. The number of arrests totaled 152 blacks and twenty whites. They were tried and convicted in a show trial. A supposed Catholic priest, John Ury, was suspected of instigating it.^[1]
Most of the convicted were hanged or burnt- how many is uncertain. The bodies of two supposed ringleaders, one black and one white, were gibbeted. Their corpses were left to rot in public. Seventy-two were deported from New York, sent to Newfoundland and to various islands in the West Indies and the Madeiras.

Background

The winter of 1740-1741 had been a miserable period in the city. There was an economic depression, a declining food and fuel supply, record low temperatures and snowfalls. Many people were in danger of starving and freezing to death. These conditions made many people angry at the government, especially the poor whites and slaves.^[2]
The tension between the whites and the blacks was great. So great, in fact, that, “A mere hint of restiveness among black New Yorkers could throw whites into a near panic” . In 1741, the fear of a slave revolt was very high because there had been slave revolts in South Carolina and in the Caribbean. In response to this, the whites (i.e., the government) banned slave meetings on street corners and limited the number of slaves who could be in a group at one time to three, and twelve at funerals, as well as cutting other rights.
The anger during the winter reminded many people of the feelings that the slaves had had twenty-nine years ago, during the fires of 1712. In 1712, “twenty-three Negro slaves met at about midnight in the orchard of one Mr. Cook, in the middle of town, for the purpose of destroying as many of the inhabitants as they could to revenge themselves for the hard usage they felt they had received from their masters” . The slaves all gathered with weapons such as guns, swords, knives, and hatchets to destroy and kill as many people and their property as possible. One of the slaves, Coffee, set fire to his master’s outhouse. The news of the fire spread through the town quickly, and an angry mob of townspeople marched to the scene. The slaves attacked the crowd, and soon nine whites were killed, and six were injured. The governor then executed twenty-one slaves.
Economic tensions were exacerbated by accusations that a series of fires that occurred were due to arson. Immediately after a slave was seen running from the scene, the slaves were accused of the crime. Of course, many people had already believed that the slaves were responsible for the fires, because of the economic tension that existed between them and the slaves; a tension exacerbated by the system of racism in place in the colonies by which whites were taught to feel universally superior to blacks.
In New York at the time, slaves would often learn the same trade as their masters. This created racial and economic tension between the slaves and the white tradesmen they competed against. For example, the governor of New York in 1737 told the legislature, “the artificers complain and with too much reason of the pernicious custom of breeding slaves to trades whereby the honest industrious tradesmen are reduced to poverty for want of employ, and many of them forced to leave us to seek their living in other countries.” Slaves could be rented out for labor for less than the rate of whites; some of the whites went out of business because of this and some even poor.

The Fires

On September 18, 1741 the governor’s house caught on fire, and soon the church connected to his house was ablaze too. They tried to save it, but the fire soon grew beyond control. The fire threatened to spread to another building, where all the city documents were kept. The governor ordered that the windows be smashed and the documents thrown out, to save them; they were later kept in the City Hall^[3]. Later, the fort at Battery Park also burned down. A week later, another fire broke out, but was put out quickly. The same thing happened next week at a warehouse. Three days later, a fire broke out in a cow stable. On the next day, a person walking past a wealthy neighborhood saw coals by the hay in a stable and put them out, saving the neighborhood.
As the amount of fires grew, so did the suspicion that the fires were not accidents but arson. Many whites believed that, but it was not proven. Then, on April 6th, a round of four fires broke out, and a black man was spotted running away. There was a white man who tried to catch him, and yelled out, “A negro, a negro.” The man’s cry was taken on quickly, and soon turned to, “The negroes are rising!” The slave running away was named Cuffee, and he was quickly captured and imprisoned. The fires were now believed to be a conspiracy.
The city council decided to launch an intense investigation, but in the two weeks they investigated, they did nothing but increase the anxiety of the townspeople. The council decided to turn the investigation to Daniel Horsmanden, the city recorder and a justice on the provincial supreme court. Horsmanden set up a grand jury that he, “directed to investigate whites who sold liquor to blacks- men like John Hughson.”

Conspiracy

John Hughson was a poor cobbler and illiterate that came to New York from Yonkers in the mid-1730s with his wife, Sarah, his daughter, and his mother-in-law. When he was unable to find work, he opened a tavern that offended his neighbors because he sold to clients with bad reputations. Hughson opened a new tavern in 1738 on the Hudson waterfront, near the Trinity Churchyard. The tavern soon became a rendezvous point for slaves, poor whites, free blacks, soldiers, and even the occasional young gentlemen. Hughson’s place also had stolen property and, “…city slaves laughingly referred to his place as ‘Oswego’, after the Indian trading post on Lake Ontario.” Though the constables watched his place constantly, they failed to catch him red-handed for thievery. Two weeks before the fire started, Hughson was arrested for receiving stolen goods from Caesar and Prince.
Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee were part of a club called the Geneva Club, which name allegedly originated from when they stole some Geneva, which is Dutch gin. They were punished with a whipping (although, at the time stealing was a crime which many slaves received death for). They decided to name themselves after their crime, and the name stuck.
Another person that was suspected was “Margaret Sorubiero, alias Salingburgh, alias Kerry, commonly called Peggy, or the Newfoundland Irish beauty.” She was prostitute to blacks, and the room she lived in was paid by Caesar, with whom she had a child.
Horsmanden had Hughson’s indentured servant, Mary Burton, testify against Hughson on theft charges. Horsmanden put lots of pressure on Mary to talk about the fires. Finally, Burton said the fires were a conspiracy between blacks and poor whites to burn down the town.

Horsmanden was very pleased when Mary Burton told him that there actually was a conspiracy between the whites and the blacks. He was so pleased, in fact, that he was convinced Mary Burton knew more information on the conspiracy. Mary Burton didn’t have a choice even if she didn’t know any more information because Horsmanden would throw her into jail. So Burton decided to tell him all about the conspiracy.
Mary Burton declared that the three members of the Geneva club met frequently at Hughson’s and they had talked about burning the fort and town, and the Hughsons had agreed to help them. Though her testimony did not prove that any crime was committed, the council was so scared that more fires would occur that they decided to believe her testimony. They then decided to reward £100 to any white person for useful information. To the free blacks and Indians, they gave £45, and to slaves, £20 and their freedom.
On May 2nd, the court found Caesar and Prince guilty of burglary and condemned them to death. The next day, 7 barns were lit on fire, and two blacks were caught and immediately burned at stake. On May 6th, the Hughsons and Peggy were found guilty of burglary charges. Peggy, “in fear of her life, decided to talk.” And Peggy was not the only one. Some of the blacks crammed up in the dungeons decided to talk. Two who didn’t talk were Caesar and Prince, who were hanged on May 11th.
Now that the Horsmanden had witnesses, he started the trials. The first trial was against Cuffee and Quack. Horsmanden made sure that the trials would all be guilty verdicts because all of the town’s lawyers were working for the prosecution, so the accused had virtually no chance of proving themselves innocent. At the end of their trial, Cuffee and Quack both were to be burned at stake. Right before they were going to be burned, they started yelling out the names of some fifty people. Horsmanden considered saving them as future witnesses, but was advised against it because of the rage of the crowd.
More trials followed quickly. Soon, the Hughsons and Peggy were sentenced to hang. At the height of the hysteria, as much as 50% of the city’s male population over sixteen was in jail . But Horsmanden thought that the conspiracy was missing something- a mastermind to plan it all. None of the Geneva club members fit the profile to be smart enough and neither was John Hughson. And Horsmanden had a candidate for the mastermind: John Ury.
John Ury had just arrived in town and he had been working as a school teacher and a private tutor. He was an expert in Latin, and that made him suspicious around the city. Horsmanden arrested him under the suspicion of being a Roman Catholic priest and a secret agent to the Spanish. Mary Burton, who was ever so informative, suddenly remembered Ury was one of the plotters of the conspiracy.
Ury was put on trial for the charges against him. He was really the only person with an organized defense against the prosecutors. He said he was just a rebel from the Church of England and had no knowledge of any conspiracy. But at the time of the trial, Horsmanden received the warning from the governor of Georgia that Spanish agents were coming to burn all the considerable towns in New England, which sealed Ury’s fate.
By the end of the trials, 160 blacks and 21 whites had been arrested, 17 blacks were hanged and so were four whites, 13 African were burned at stake, and 72 blacks were banished from New York.

In fiction

These events are crucial to the plot of Pete Hamill's novel ''Forever'' (2003).
In 2007, novelist Mat Johnson published ''The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York'', a historical fiction novel set amidst this event.

References

1. Timeline of the Prehistory and History of King's College, Columbia University.
2. Hoey, Edwin. (June 1974). Terror in New York—1741. ''American Heritage Magazine''
3.
★ Lepore, Jill - ''New York Burning; Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan'' ISBN 1-4000-4029-9

External links

★ A Forgotten "Witch Trial" of Colonial Slaves

★ The Power of Fear

★ “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch!”: Testimony from the Negro Plot Trials in New York, 1741

★ The Hysteria Fire: New York, 1741 Whole Earth Review, Winter 1999 - John V. Morris

★ Legacy: A Panicked Response To the 'Great Negro Plot'

★ A List of White Persons taken into Custody on Account of the 1741 Conspiracy
:PDF version

★ Terror in New York—1741 - Edwin Hoey, American Heritage Magazine, June 1974

★ CHAPTER VI. NEW YORK. NEGRO PLOT

★ "'Great Negro Plot' Tells of Manhattan on the Edge", ''News and Notes'', National Public Radio, February 7, 2007. (Links to RealPlayer or Windows Media audio)

★ "Rumors of a Slave Revolt", ''Leonard Lopate Show'', WNYC, February 28, 2007. (Links to MP3 audio)

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NEW YORK SLAVE INSURRECTION OF 1741

Background

The Fires

Conspiracy

In fiction

References

Further reading

External links

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