8. Slavery in New York

Of all the Northern colonies, New York had the most trouble with Negro slave rebellions. In 1702, New York found it necessary to outlaw any assembly of slaves or even to allow their testimony in court, in view of frequent confederations of slaves to plan escapes from their fate. However, in a remarkable bit of loading the legal dice, the testimony of slaves was to be acceptable when acting as informers on their fellows! Three years later, the death penalty was decreed for all runaway slaves found more than forty miles north of Albany, and hence heading toward freedom in New France. In 1706, slave restiveness in Kings County led Governor Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, to issue a proclamation ordering the justices of the peace to seize all Negroes who had “assembled themselves in a riotous manner” or had run away. If any Negroes refused to submit, then the officials were to “fire on them, kill or destroy them, if they cannot otherwise be taken....”

Two years later, in 1708, a group of slaves in Newtown, Long Island, rebelled and killed seven whites. Four of the rebel slaves, including an Indian woman, were executed, the woman being burned by the authorities. A subsequent law in New York allowed judges to sentence local slaves to death in any manner they might deem best to attain public tranquility. The fear of slave rebellion was clearly acute among the white masters.

Early in 1712, a group of Negro slaves in New York City formed a massive plot for an armed uprising. In the spring, a group of about thirty of the slaves obtained arms and then set upon a party of whites, routing them and killing nine. Soldiers soon crushed the mutiny, however, arresting seventy Negroes as conspirators (one of whom was convicted after being once acquitted), and placing the city under arms. Twenty-one of the slaves were executed en masse, the governor taking advantage of the new law to perform the execution in a particularly brutal manner, as “the most exemplary punishment... that could possibly be thought of....” Perhaps the most instructive lesson learned by the discerning was the brutality and savagery at the very core of the slave system. It is part of the Western heritage that when something unpleasant happens, a new law is passed in a hurried attempt to cure it. The new legislature therefore once more quickly tightened its laws punishing slave conspiracies.

By 1740, New York City had the substantial number of 2,000 Negro slaves among a total population of 12,000. The proportion soon reached one-third in Kings and Queens counties. In 1740, hysteria spread through the city over an alleged slave plot to poison the white water supply. For some time afterward, most New Yorkers allayed their fears by buying spring water from street vendors. The ensuing winter of 1740–41 was a hard one in New York, with the price of wheat and bread high, and much suffering among the poor. Fires began to rage frequently throughout the city, some perhaps set by Negro slaves and white sympathizers. The slaves, in accordance with the revolutionary nature of the weapon used, concentrated their arson on the homes and offices of government officials and on the barracks of the soldiery. Several suspicious fires also broke out in Hackensack, New Jersey, for which at least two slaves were themselves burned in retaliation.

The response to the fires was mass hysteria by the whites, expressed in indiscriminate arrests indulged in by the New York government. No fewer than one hundred and fifty slaves and twenty-five whites (including seventeen soldiers) were arrested. Interestingly enough, the main focus of white fear and hatred centered on a group of Spanish Negro prisoners of war, who, upon capture, had been sold from freedom into slavery in New York City. These Negroes were, understandably, particularly bitter at such treatment accorded to prisoners of war. As the greatest and most recent victims of injustice, they drew the hottest fire of the guilty whites. All of these Spanish Negroes were imprisoned in the wave of arrests.

In the mass arrests, city officials presumed to make a house-to-house search for “suspicious-looking” characters, who were ordered summarily arrested on suspicion. Eventually, every Negro at large was picked up by the police.

The hapless Negroes, beset by torture and by promise of relief for accusing others, could not find a single lawyer to defend them. One reason was that every lawyer in the city was directly associated with the prosecution. In his summing up, Prosecutor William Smith had the gall to denounce the base “ingratitude” of the mutinous Negroes. Four of the white prisoners were executed, including an innkeeper and his wife, as was a clergyman, the Reverend John Ury, accused of swearing in the conspirators. Ury stated that he was an Anglican minister, but the government insisted that he was a Spanish Jesuit priest, and a New York law of 1700 provided for the hanging of any Roman Catholic priest found in the province. The attorney general, summing up the prosecution, took the occasion to denounce the iniquities of the Church of Rome. Refusing to believe that Ury was not a Catholic, New York carried out the execution. Of the slaves arrested, thirteen were burned alive, eighteen were hanged, and seventy banished to the West Indies. Every one of the unfortunate Spanish Negroes was killed; while waiting to be burned at the stake, a few Negroes were persuaded to “confess” and “tell the truth” (that is, implicate others) in exchange for a delay in the hope of a pardon. But their desperate maneuver was to be of no avail. The crowd became enraged when hearing of a delay and, at its insistence, the Negroes were immediately burned to death.

It is instructive to learn from the adamant prosecution of these alleged criminals that the main witness against them, a young white indentured servant named Mary Burton, was conceded by the court to be a liar and a perjurer. In addition, the trials were marked by so-called confessions extracted either by torture or by promises of large rewards for informing on others—methods which can hardly lend credence to their testimony. Indeed, the mass frenzy greatly resembled the Salem witch trials and, as in the Salem case, only when confessions (especially those of the star witness, Mary Burton) began to implicate well-known and wealthy people did the wave of arrests and executions suddenly subside.

One happy consequence of the New York slave frenzy was that it stamped the psyches of the residents with fear of further slave revolts, which led to a steady decline in the number of Negro slaves kept in New York City.