The crowd would not wait

What happened

The winter of 1740-41 was hard in New York. Bread was dear, fires kept breaking out, and in March the governor's house burned. The city answered with mass arrests: one hundred and fifty slaves and twenty-five whites. The first two tried, Cuffee and Quack, were sentenced to be chained to a stake and burnt to death. On 30 May, about three o'clock, they were brought out with the wood piled around them. Officials told each man the other was already talking, and each confessed in the hope of a reprieve. The sheriff tried to lead them back to the jail. The crowd turned unruly, and fearing a riot he gave them up to the stake. Daniel Horsmanden, one of the judges, recorded that the people were "very impatient to have done." Rothbard says the whole affair greatly resembled the Salem witch trials: the main witness, a young indentured servant named Mary Burton, was conceded by the court to be a liar and a perjurer, and the confessions were extracted by torture or by promises of reward. In all, thirteen were burned alive, eighteen hanged and seventy banished to the West Indies. The frenzy stopped only when the accusations began to reach rich and well-known people.