Volume 2, Chapter 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 headed toward freedom in New France.
In 1706, slave restiveness in King's County led Governor Edward Hyde, Lord Cornberry,
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
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
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.
The slaves soon crushed the mutiny, however, arresting 70 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
The 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 all 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 arrest indulged in by the New York government.
No fewer than 150 slaves and 25 whites, including 17 soldiers, were arrested. Interestingly
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
In terms 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 arrest, 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,
The set 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 Rev. 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 Uri 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
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 the truth.
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 arrest and
executions suddenly subside. One happy consequence of the New York slave
of 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.