Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741

This article returns to the mysterious string of 13 fires that ripped through and alarmed New York City in the spring and summer of 1741, beginning with a conflagration that turned Fort George, one of British America's strongest fortifications, into ashes. In the days that followed, each blaze contributed to the mystery until the report of a slave running from the scene of the tenth fire persuaded the people of New York that the puzzling fires were really opening salvos in a massive slave insurrection. City officials acted quickly, interrogating more than 200 people, black and white, and soon uncovered what they believed to be a gang of dispossessed slaves and Irish indentured servants, who, it seems, had planned to burn New York City to the ground and kill their masters. Stunned by the boldness of the plot, authorities immediately began to investigate and to prosecute hundreds of alleged conspirators. Although authorities knew disgruntled indentured servants to be key conspirators, blame fell squarely on the city's large slave population. In the end, the colony of New York executed 30 slaves and 4 white ringleaders, publicly flogged 50 slaves, and transported over 70 more to the Caribbean slave markets, never to return.¹

Was there really a conspiracy to burn New York City in 1741? Unlike an uprising or rebellion, conspiracy was a crime of reckless speech rather than action, a verbal plan that threatened social order, and thus difficult to prove in any era. "Conspiracy lies in asserting and agreeing," Thomas Davis writes, "in 'loose talk' of doing a deed" ("Conspiracy and Credibility" 169). The recent controversy over the Vesey conspiracy of 1822 reminds us that while Anglo- American conspiracy law might set the limits on prohibitive speech, none of the legal niceties mattered much when whites thought they heard "loose talk" coming from slaves. When we read the official archive of a slave conspiracy, we encounter a written record authored by whites in a slave society, a culture of terror that defended white power at all costs. One method of defense was the mass execution of alleged slave conspirators, almost always made possible by a special class of laws. For instance, during the conspiracy panic in New York, the court relied exclusively on the law of Negro evidence, which had been designed to prosecute potential slave uprisings. Negro evidence was defined as the incriminating testimony of one slave against another—the court needed no other proof than this to sentence a slave to death in 1741.²

Prosecutors went to great lengths to acquire such testimony. Often the inducement was the King's mercy: either testify against coconspirators and earn a lesser punishment or face a capital charge and certain execution. Prosecutors employed coercive tactics like the threat of the gallows and hanging the dead bodies of the condemned in gibbets, offered "immunity" or protection in the form of a general pardon, and conducted dragnets, sweeping slaves off the streets for interrogation with the presumption of guilt. As a result of these practices, our view of the conspiracy trials must necessarily pass through an archive distorted by this violence; for the historian trying to sort out testimony according to degrees of coercion, connecting the dots in the ashes of 1741 is a treacherous, perhaps impossible, undertaking.

The search for a verdict based in unimpeachable evidence inspires the historiography of slave conspiracies, even when we know how white authorities elicited "facts." The historian who wishes to retry the New York Conspiracy trials is even further handicapped by a valuable missing archive, the supreme court records, destroyed with other judicial documents from the era, ironically enough, in a fire. Furthermore, there are few revealing letters, journals, or poems about the trials or executions, and colonial newspapers simply reported the plot's existence and then kept track of executions. A single "eyewitness" account remains, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the...