New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan
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A vivid narrative of the fires of 1741, the "Bonfires of the Negroes," and the alleged slave conspiracy to destroy the city, kill all the white men, and take all the white women as mistresses. Over a few weeks in 1741, thirteen fires blazed across New York City. With each new fire, panicked whites cried from street corners, "The Negroes are rising!" Thirteen black men were burned at the stake, and seventeen more were hanged. Of more than a hundred black men and women thrown into a dungeon underneath City Hall, more than seventy-seven confessed and named names, sending still more men to the gallows and the stake, and still others to bone-crushing slavery in the Caribbean. Although the New York conspiracy trials have much in common with the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, they were much worse-and have almost been forgotten. Historian Jill Lepore reconstructs the harsh and unfamiliar past of a city that slavery built and nearly destroyed. She provides vivid descriptions of the way slaves and their masters lived and interacted, explores the social and political climate of the times, and reveals how slavery both destabilized and created American politics.The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley… Jill Lepore has written a vivid and convincing account of the "plot" and its aftermath. For the general reader, the principal interest of New York Burning lies in the story of the slaves and their prosecutors, and the account Lepore presents of life in Manhattan in that day.
PrefacexiPrologue: The Plot5Chapter 1Ice15Chapter 2Fire40Chapter 3Stone64Chapter 4Paper93Chapter 5Water129Chapter 6Blood170Chapter 7Ink198Epilogue: Dust221Appendices233Source Notes and Abbreviations275Notes279Acknowledgments309Index311
