The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (review)

Once an obscure bit of trivia known only faintly even to early American specialists, the New York slave conspiracy trials of 1741 are enjoying a scholarly resurgence. Several recent books, as well as others on the way (including this reviewer's), reexamine the series of trials that ended in the execution of thirty blacks and four whites at the stake and the scaffold. Hoffer has written an excellent basic legal history of the 1741 New York conspiracy trials. Following Davis, Hoffer argues that most of the accused slaves were indeed conspirators, at least in the technical sense, because the colonial definition of slave conspiracy was so broad.¹ As Hoffer clearly explains, slaves only needed to talk about revolt in order to be guilty of conspiracy, whereas whites needed to act on what they said.

The intersections between history and law form the intellectual core and are the strongest parts of the book. Hoffer is sensitive to the relationship between legal technicalities and the reasons why New York juries were so willing to convict. The accused slaves had relatively ample freedom of movement, which made their ability to carry out their threats seem that much more credible. Thus, Hoffer argues, "It was not the words themselves but the context of their utterance that led the authorities to prosecute and the jury to vote to convict" (120).

In the first chapter, on slave law, which is particularly interesting and accessible, Hoffer lays special emphasis on the centrality of law to slavery. Colonial slave law grew out of English criminal law, but what distinguished the two was the problem of conspiracy. "Conspiracy became the axle around which the whole of slave criminal law turned" (23). This observation makes the 1741 trials fundamental to understanding slavery in North America.

In an attempt to make these slave trials relevant to a modern audience, Hoffer uses the preface and conclusion to draw an explicit comparison to the legal fallout from the terrorist attacks of September 11. Such parallels may seem facile, but Hoffer elucidates several cogent analogs, especially the paranoid interpretation of casual conversation. On the other hand, the complete absence of footnotes in the book hampers its utility.

Hoffer avoids anachronism and speculation, especially when offering his revealing interpretations of legal maneuvers, but his caution sometimes comes at the cost of any real answers or any full analysis. Our main source for these events is an account of the trials written three years later by one of the presiding judges. Because Hoffer is often coy about how much of this source he believes, he avoids the biggest question of all: How does one assess the evidence of an interested and biased participant? The bibliographical essay provides an admirable general note on reading evidence and the problems of limit and bias, but elsewhere Hoffer only infrequently demonstrates how he applies these principles to a problematical source. He shows, for example, how confessions might have been coerced, but he rarely explains why he believes one slave's testimony rather than another's. For the most part, however, his meticulously close readings effectively navigate a dense and often confusing chapter in the history of eighteenth-century slavery.