New York burning : liberty, slavery and conspiracy in eighteenth-century Manhattan /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A gripping tale and groundbreaking investigation of a mysterious, and largely forgotten, eighteenth-century slave plot to destroy New York City.Over a few weeks in 1741, ten fires blazed across Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw more evidence of a slave uprising. Tried and convicted before the colony's Supreme Court, thirteen black men were burned at the stake and seventeen were hanged. Four whites, the alleged ringleaders of the plot, were also hanged, and seven more were pardoned on condition that they never set foot in New York again. More than one hundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath City Hall, where many were forced to confess and name names, sending still more men to the gallows and to the stake.In a narrative rich with period detail and vivid description, Jill Lepore pieces together the events and the thinking that led white New Yorkers to make "bonfires of the Negroes." She reconstructs the harsh past of a city that slavery built-and almost destroyed. She explores the social and political climate of the 1730s and ?40s and examines the nature and tenor of the interactions between slaves and their masters. She shows too that the 1741 conspiracy can be understood only alongside a more famous episode from the city's past: the 1735 trial of the printer John Peter Zenger. And, weighing both new and old evidence, she makes clear how the threat of black rebellion made white political pluralism palatable.Lucid, probing, captivatingly written, New York Burning is a revelatory study of the ways in which slavery both destabilized and created American politics.

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Ice After ten feet of snow over Christmas, the skies cleared in January. In the brightening sun, poor widows and orphaned children hobbled through the snow to a house on Smith Street, across from the Black Horse Tavern, where a charity promised "To Feed the hungry & Cloath the naked," or at least those "in Real Need of Relief." But in February, the fierce weather returned. "We have now here a second Winter more Severe than it was some Weeks past," Zenger's Weekly Journal reported on February 2, the feast of Candlemas. "The Navigation of our River is again stopp'd by the Ice, and the poor in great want of Wood." At Peter DeLancey's farm outside the city, his "Spanish Negro" Antonio de St. Bendito, whose "Feet were frozen after the first great Snow," was still unable to walk. In the city, coals were passed out to the poor to help heat their humble homes. At John Hughson's tavern, his Irish servant girl, Mary Burton, dressed herself "in Man's Cloaths, put on Boots, and went with him in his Sleigh in the deep Snows of the Commons, to help him fetch Firewood for his Family." At David Machado's house, in the East Ward, his black slave Diana, driven to desperation by the ferocity of the cold and by the hopelessness of bondage, "took her own young Child from her Breast, and laid it in the Cold, that it froze to Death." The first week of February, New Yorkers stared helplessly from piers along the East River as a boat was "taken by a large Cake of Ice in our Harbour, and carried by it through the Narrows, and out of sight." Watchers wondered, but could not discover, what happened to the people on board. Six more ships lay frozen in Long Island Sound, and another, sails set, crashed against the ice, abandoned. Meanwhile, from Charleston, South Carolina, came the shocking news that slaves had nearly destroyed that city, burning three hundred houses to the ground. But this turned out to have been only a rumor. On February 9, Zenger printed a quiet retraction: "The report of the Negroes rising was groundless." Even while the weather worsened, there were still city pleasures to be had. "on Thursday, Feb. the 12th at the new Theatre in the Broad Way will be presented a Comedy call'd the Beaux Stratagem," announced a back-page ad in the New-York Weekly Journal, in the hard winter of 1741. Tickets for a box: 5 shillings; for the pit: 2 shillings and 6 pence. For those who ventured out by the light of lanterns to attend the New York debut of George Farquhar's late Restoration comedy, it was a cold walk down "the Broad Way," a wide, straight street, paved with cobbles, slick with snow, and thickly canopied with the overburdened, icy branches of the beech and locust trees that lined it. The theatre lay just across from the Bowling Green, a triangle of land at the wide base of Broadway fenced in in 1734 "for the Beauty & Ornament of the Said Street as well as for the Recreation & delight of the Inhabitants." An evening at the theatre must have been delightful distraction for those who could scare up the shillings, and whose boots were warm enough to keep frostbite at bay. The Beaux' Stratagem, first staged in London in 1707, was not only George Farquhar's best play but also the most successful comedy of the age. From its debut to the close of the eighteenth century, it was performed in London during every season but one; and in the 1730s alone, it was staged over a hundred times. The appeal of The Beaux' Stratagem to eighteenth-century audiences lay chiefly in its dizzying reversal of roles and fortunes. The play tells the tale of "two gentlemen of broken fortunes," Aimwell and Archer, on a trip to the town of Lichfield. Having spent their small inheritances on the pleasures of London, the two friends travel from town to town, each taking a turn at pretending to be his companion's servant in order to help his "master" impress and seduce gullible country women. In Lichfield, the ruse works well until Aimwell falls in love with Dorinda, the wealthy daughter of Lady Bountiful, and Archer is taken with Dorinda's married sister-in-law, Mrs. Sullen. Intrigues abound, as Aimwell decides to pass himself off as his elder brother, a viscount, in hopes of securing Dorinda's hand, while a host of still sillier characters-a dishonest innkeeper, Bonniface, and his clever daughter, Cherry; Lady Bountiful's dim-witted son, Squire Sullen; Sullen's dunderheaded servant, Scrub; an amorous French count; a nefarious French priest; and a gang of particularly feckless robbers-pursue their own schemes, stage their own impostures, and plot their own plots, their beaux' stratagem, leading Archer to conclude at the end of Act II, "We're like to have as many adventures in our inn as Don Quixote had in his." At the New Theatre on Broadway, New York's gentry-merchants, bureaucrats, lawyers, and naval officers-paid for the box seats. Everyone else-servants, artisans, sailors, soldiers, and a handful of free blacks-sat in the pit. Joe, the slave of dancing master Henry Holt, probably worked backstage. James Alexander, a Freemason, may have walked down the aisle in procession with his brother lodge members, to sit together in a row, as Masons liked to do. Attorney Joseph Murray, an avid collector of English drama who happened to live more or less across the street from the theatre, must surely have attended with his wife, Grace, daughter of the former governor, their clothes for the evening laid out, perhaps, by their housekeeper, Mrs. Dimmock; their handsome house's front steps swept clean of flurrying snow by one of the Murrays' slaves: Jack, Congo, Dido, Adam, or Caesar. Perhaps Cuba, one of attorney John Chambers's slaves, entered the theatre quietly, before the curtain rose, to place a warming pan beneath the skirt of her mistress, Chambers's wife, Anna. The playhouse on Broadway had much to offer in the way of conviviality, but the production on the night of the twelfth was not particularly polished; eighteenth-century New York, like the rest of the colonies, was a theatrical backwater. A 1709 decree by the Governor's Council had forbidden "play acting and prize-fighting," and the city's first recorded production did not take place until 1732, when another of Farquhar's comedies, The Recruiting Officer, was performed, with "the Part of Worthy acted by the ingenious Mr. Thomas Hearly," the mayor's barber and periwig maker. Nearly a decade later, the hairdressing thespian was no longer available. In 1741, for the New York debut of The Beaux' Stratagem, the part of Aimwell was "perform'd by a Person who never appear'd on any Stage before." Still, the crowd, coming in from the cold, must have relished Farquhar's comedy, at once a pretzel of plot twists, a farce of love and deceit (and of the deceitfulness of lovers), a slightly bawdy parody of eighteenth-century courtship, and a rather bold critique of marriage. In Act IV, after having been wooed by Aimwell and Archer, Dorinda and Mrs. Sullen compare their suitors: Dor: . . . my lover was upon his knees to me. Mrs. Sul: And mine was upon his tiptoes to me. Dor: Mine vowed to die for me. Mrs. Sul: Mine swore to die with me. Dor: Mine spoke the softest moving things. Mrs. Sul: Mine had his moving things too. Dor: Mine kissed my hand ten thousand times. Mrs. Sul: Mine has all that pleasure to come. Dor: Mine offered marriage. Mrs. Sul: O Lard! d'ye call that a moving thing? If Daniel Horsmanden attended the New Theatre on the night of February 12, he would have seen much that was familiar, uncomfortably familiar, in Aimwell and Archer, two men on the make, willing to say anything and to pass themselves off as wealthier than they were, plotting to marry rich women. Horsmanden was born in England in 1694, the eldest son of the rector of All Saints Church, in Purleigh, Essex. As a young man, he declined to inherit his father's position and determined instead on a legal career. In his twenties, while studying law in London, Horsmanden pursued his own beaux' stratagem on a trip to the fashionable resort town of Tunbridge Wells with his cousin, the Virginian William Byrd II, a widower in his forties who was desperately seeking a marriage alliance that might rescue him from debt. In Tunbridge Wells, Horsmanden courted "Miss B-n-y." Byrd, having recently failed to win the hand of Miss Mary Smith (in spite of boasting of his Virginia estate of 43,000 acres and 220 slaves), scouted about for another suitable wife while composing Tunbrigalia, a book of poems celebrating the charms of several pretty Englishwomen of his close acquaintance, including Horsmanden's older sisters, Susanna (or "Suky") and Ursula (delightfully known as "Nutty Horsmanden"): Thrice happy Wells! where Beauty's in such store, When could'st thou boast an Horsmanden, a Hoar, A Borrel, Lyndsey, Searle, and Thousands more? William Byrd fancied himself a wit: after he and Horsmanden returned to London, Byrd wrote a love letter for his tongue-tied cousin Daniel. When Horsmanden told Byrd he "was going to Tunbridge again to endeavor to get Miss B-n-y," Byrd "lent him thirty guineas for his expedition." But Byrd's pen and pocketbook failed to win Horsmanden his suit. The mysterious Miss B-n-y turned him down. In the 1710s, Horsmanden and Byrd dined together, drank together, attended the theatre together, and spent endless hours gossiping in London taverns and coffeehouses. And they went whoring together, as is made abundantly clear in Byrd's secret diary (written in an obscure shorthand and kept under lock and key), in entries like the one from June 26, 1718: "After dinner I put some things in order and then took a nap till 5 o'clock, when Daniel Horsmanden came and we went to the park, where we had appointed to meet some ladies but they failed. Then we went to Spring Gardens where we picked up two women and carried them into the arbor and ate some cold veal and about 10 o'clock we carried them to the bagnio, where we bathed and lay with them all night and I rogered mine twice and slept pretty well, but neglected my prayers." William Byrd neglected his prayers more than once; he was a shattered man, compulsively rogering whores. During these painful, dissolute years of Byrd's life, young Daniel Horsmanden was his boon companion. By the diary's end, it's difficult not to raise an eyebrow at the homonym in Tunbrigalia, "When could'st thou boast an Horsmanden, a Hoar . . . ?" Byrd, for all his sexual bravado, was mortified by his dependence on cheap prostitutes. He once wrote of himself, "The struggle between the Senate and the Plebeans in the Roman Commonwealth, or betweext the King and the Parliament in England, was never half so violent as the Civil war between this Hero's Principles and his Inclinations." Visiting prostitutes gave Byrd nightmares. In September 1719 he confided in his diary, "Daniel Horsmanden came again and we went to visit a whore but she was from home. . . . I dreamed I caused a coffin to be made for me to bury myself in but I changed my mind." What gave Byrd nightmares made Horsmanden sick. Six weeks after his first visit to a prostitute, the young law student was confined to his lodgings with "a sore leg." After another episode, he "had a swelled face." The "leg" might have been a euphemism: Horsmanden may have contracted syphilis, whose symptoms during the first two years after exposure include joint pain and markedly swollen glands-the "swelled face." In any event, Horsmanden's own rather tortured relationship with prostitutes, whom he tried in vain to give up, might explain why he didn't marry until 1747, at the age of fifty-three, and never fathered any children. In 1720, the year after William Byrd left England for Virginia, Horsmanden lost his fortune, what little was left of his inheritance, in the South Sea Bubble. It was an awful blow. He continued to study at the Inns of Court but failed to earn much of a living or to recover his considerable South Sea losses by practicing law. He was broke. Eventually, as Horsmanden later explained, "I was Oblig'd to leave England." In 1729, Horsmanden bought a book entitled A New Survey of the Globe, by Thomas Templeman. Templeman, true to an Englishman's sense of geography, reported only two kinds of information in his curious book: the size of landmasses and the distance of every important city in the world from London. Horsmanden, penniless and aimless, made his own survey of the globe, attempting to determine in what direction to head. He studied Templeman's figures closely. Finally, he decided to sail for Virginia, where his cousin William Byrd was a member of the Governor's Council. But Horsmanden failed in Virginia, too. He was unable to gain admission to the bar, and he left after less than two years. By 1731, Daniel Horsmanden was on his way to New York City. Miles from London: 3,471. "Have I been traversing the Ocean for so many weeks, to be sett down again in the country I quitted?" wondered another Englishman when he arrived in New York. "This cannot be a new town, in a new world, for such must be attended with many new objects, new faces, new manners, new customs, but here I can find nothing different from what I have quitted." More than three thousand miles from London, New York struck English visitors as uncannily familiar. "The dress and external appearance of the people is the same. The houses are in the stile we are accustomed to; within doors the furniture is all English or made after English fashions. The mode of living is the same." One visitor was flustered: "Where then shall I find any difference?" He found only one: "the greater number of the Blacks." There was, of course, another difference. Compared to London, New York was no city at all. It was only a mile long and half a mile wide. In population, New York in 1741 was second only to Boston among colonial cities (and neck and neck with Philadelphia), but against London it was a hamlet. By Thomas Templeman's reckoning, "London contains about 105,000 Houses, 840,000 Souls." In 1741, New York boasted more like 1,500 houses and 10,000 souls. But nearly 2,000 were the souls of black folk, and their numbers almost always grabbed travelers' attention. (There were probably only about 15,000 blacks in eighteenth-century London, less than 2 percent of the population, compared to New York's 20 percent.) Despite how almost entirely English the city may have at first appeared, New York was a jumble of cultures, languages, and religions. By 1731, it even had its own synagogue, the first in Britain's colonies. Peopled with Dutch, English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, and German settlers, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, and African slaves and "Spanish Negroes," New York was a frenzied, factious place. "The inhabitants of New York," a visiting English vicar observed, were more than half of them Dutch and therefore "habitually frugal, industrious, and parsimonious," but the rest were of so many "different nations, different languages, and different religions, it is almost impossible to give them any precise or determinate character." Excerpted from New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Prize-winning author Lepore (history, Harvard Univ.; The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity) offers new analysis of an episode in Colonial New York that revealed the city's racism, the so-called New York Conspiracy, or Negro Plot, of 1741. At the time, New York's pluralistic white community depended upon slaves, who constituted 20 percent of the population. When ten suspicious fires broke out, one white accuser claimed that they were set by black slaves, and the populace panicked at the perceived uprising. The trials resulted in 26 blacks and four whites being hanged or burned at the stake, with numerous other blacks punished with deportation. Lepore cites Thomas J. Davis's A Rumor of Revolt and Peter Hoffer's The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741 but aims for something different. She seeks to distinguish between the kind of liberty achieved by literate whites (e.g., freedom of the press) and the kinds of liberty that proved elusive for blacks. She also argues that the New York Conspiracy may in fact have been imagined by a white populace all too aware of its oppression of blacks and conversant with its own factional politics. Recommended for university history students and specialists, although it will also benefit the informed lay reader. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/05.]-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

With riveting prose and a richly imagined re-creation of a horrible but little-studied event, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Lepore (The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity) deftly recounts the circumstances surrounding a conspiracy in pre-Revolutionary Manhattan. In 1741, its teeming streets erupted into fire in at least 10 locations. At first, rival political parties blamed each other for the conflagrations, but they joined forces against black slaves when a young white woman named Mary Burton testified that she had witnessed several slaves conspiring to kill whites and gain their liberty. The colony's leaders arrested and tried at least 100 black men and women. Eventually, the colonial Supreme Court sentenced 30 men to death; 17 were hanged (along with the four supposed white ringleaders) and 13 burned at the stake, based solely on Burton's testimony. Out of fear, several slaves testified against others, and the bulk were sent into brutal slavery in the Caribbean. Drawing primarily on New York Supreme Court justice Daniel Horsmanden's Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and Other Slaves, Lepore demonstrates that whites' fear of black rebellion led them to blame any threat to the colony on the activity of slaves. In this first-rate social history, Lepore not only adroitly examines the case's travesty, questioning whether such a conspiracy ever existed, but also draws a splendid portrait of the struggles, prejudices and triumphs of a very young New York City in which fully "one in five inhabitants was enslaved." 17 illus., 1 map. (Aug. 29) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Lepore's well-crafted study thoughtfully explores the historical context of the most often overlooked but significant moment in the history of New York City (NYC): the 1741 slave conspiracy, when slaves, free blacks, and poor whites planned to burn every home on Manhattan before rampaging through the streets, killing, raping, and looting. The discovery of "the plot" led Colonial authorities to arrest over 180 people, stage dozens of trials, and hang or burn 34 people. Lepore's extensive research in archives from NYC to London allows her to examine what took place inside the courthouse through the lens of the British Atlantic World. She links "the plot" to the harsh conditions of the laboring population, political tensions in the Empire, a growing population of slaves and free blacks, and international conflicts. More than any other scholar, Lepore (Harvard Univ.) lends agency and voice to the African Americans--both slave and free--who labored in 18th-century NYC. When paired with Thelma W. Foote's tightly argued, theory-driven Black and White Manhattan (CH, Jul'05, 42-6690), this engaging study provides readers with the best current scholarship on race in Colonial NYC. Will appeal to general readers, and educators will find the evidence-filled appendixes useful in the classroom. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. T. D. Beal SUNY College at Oneonta

Booklist Review

Fear of a slave revolt convulsed New York City in 1741, and Lepore analyzes the course of events in this meticulous but accessible work of historical scholarship. Beginning with the proceedings of trials and executions compiled by the episode's chief inquisitor, Lepore then branches into contextual aspects of colonial America. She combines the cultural pattern of the slave system, political factionalism stemming from the famous John Peter Zenger libel trial of 1735, and the prevalent mindset that as far as enslaved black people (who constituted one-fifth of the city's population) were concerned, there were no coincidences, only conspiracies. Magistrate Daniel Horsmanden virtually personified this background; he mobilized to smoke out an insurrectionary intrigue after a spate of fires consumed several wealthy owners' buildings. Lepore's ensuing narrative of Horsmanden's industriousness is a stellar performance, explaining legal intricacies as it vivifies the anxiety rippling across the city as one confession instigated another and eventually conflated, in Horsmanden's apologia, into an all-purpose papist plot. Previously a recipient of the Bancroft Prize (for The Name of War, 1998), Lepore may once again win that prestigious honor in American history for this searing work. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2005 Booklist

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has written several books including Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Joe Gould's Teeth, and These Truths: A History of the United States.

(Bowker Author Biography)