May 10, 2006
Beyond Salem: It Happened in New York Posted by Ellen Feldman at 11:30 AM EST Joshua Zeitz’s perceptive comments about the contagious hysteria of displaced fear in both the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy years bring to mind the recently published New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, by the Bancroft award winner Jill Lepore. Lepore explores a largely forgotten chapter in New York history during which rumors of a slave plot spread as rapidly and treacherously as the fires that gave birth to them. Although Lepore makes a connection between these events and the famous freedom-of-the-press trial of Peter Zenger in 1735, she also likens the episode to the Salem witch trials almost half a century earlier. In fact, an anonymous letter from Boston warned New Yorkers against “making Bonfires of the Negros & perhaps thereby loading yourselves with greater Guilt than theirs.” The city fathers were enraged at this sniping from their New England brothers. In 1741, one in five inhabitants in Manhattan was enslaved, making the city, in the words of the author, “second only to Charleston, South Carolina, in a wretched calculus of urban unfreedom.” In this urban racial tinderbox, after a brutally cold winter, ten fires raged during five weeks in March and April. As New Yorkers grew more fearful of where and when conflagration would break out next, rumors of a slave plot against white inhabitants spread. An account the previous February of a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, that burned 300 houses to the ground and nearly destroyed the city only fanned the embers of suspicion, while the retraction by Peter Zenger shortly after, assuring his readers that “The report of the Negroes rising [in Charleston] was groundless,” did nothing to douse the terror. Presently a 16-year-old white indentured servant, Mary Burton, stepped forward with a vivid account of poisonous plots to murder white men, marry their women, and appropriate their wealth. “The happy instrument of all this discovery,” as Burton was called at the time, named names, including the white tavern keeper who was the brains behind the scheme. Surely, colonial white New Yorkers told one another, Negro slaves were not smart enough to hatch such a conspiracy. Burton was not the only one to implicate others. More than a hundred black men and women were imprisoned in a dungeon beneath City Hall, where, not surprisingly, many traded confessions for leniency. Ironically, as Lepore points out, the Enlightenment was behind this readiness to recognize a slave conspiracy. An earlier age might have blamed the fires on God’s vengeance or fate, but now there had to be a rational reason for events. Our main source of information for this scandalous episode is the journal of the self-serving and unreliable judge in the case, Daniel Horsmanden, which Lepore deconstructs brilliantly without dismissing entirely. She also brings to life the sights and smells and sounds, the manners and customs and culture of the infant city. The casualty count of the alleged New York uprising of 1741 was greater than that of the Salem witch trials. Thirteen black men were burned at the stake, seventeen blacks and four whites hanged, seven citizens banished from the city, and those countless others imprisoned beneath City Hall. New York Burning is a meticulously researched, beautifully written account of a shameful moment in New York’s history. It illuminates the different meanings liberty assumed in the fledgling colonies for whites and for blacks. It also reveals the bloody toll fear, both rational and irrational, can take on a populace.
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