Legacy: A Panicked Response To the 'Great Negro Plot'

By George Dewan | Staff Writer

Thirteen black men burned to death at the stake. Seventeen black men hanged. Two white men and two white women also hanged. All thirty-four were executed in New York City between May 11 and August 29, 1741, as part of the episode early New Yorkers called the ``Great Negro Plot,'' or the ``New York Conspiracy.''
-- Thomas J. Davis, ``A Rumor of Revolt''

In the spring and summer of 1741, New York City's white residents panicked over what they saw as an imminent slave insurrection by its growing black population, augmented by ``country slaves'' from western Long Island. The beginning was low-keyed, without any great portent of things to come. In late February of 1741 there was a middle-of-the-night burglary at the Broad Street shop of merchant Robert Hogg. Taken were a pair of silver candlesticks, some linen and a sack of silver coins. Arrested the next day and charged with the crime was a black slave named Caesar.

At the time, one out of every five residents of the city was a black slave. There were restrictive laws controlling slave activities on the books, but they were loosely enforced. New Yorkers still remembered a slave insurrection in 1712 involving arson and the murder of nine whites that resulted in the execution of 19 black slaves.

Caesar had been arrested at John Hughson's tavern on upper Broadway, where the slave's mistress, a white prostitute named Peggy Kerry, hung out. Hughson and his wife, Sarah, both white, came under immediate suspicion as receivers of the stolen goods. Investigators got lucky when they questioned a 16-year-old, white, indentured servant of the Hughsons named Mary Burton, who claimed to know something about the robbery, but said, ``I'll be murdered or poisoned by the Hughsons and the negroes for what I should tell you.''

Mary was held in protective custody and her tongue was loosened with promises of getting her released from her indenture. She accused the Hughsons of receiving stolen property from the slaves, and when the goods were found, the Hughsons were in trouble.

A new element was thrust into the escalating tensions when, on March 18, the first of a series of suspicious fires broke out in the city. The city council raised the possibility of a conspiracy of arsonists, and suspicions grew that black slaves were responsible. Four fires were set on April 6. As cries of ``The Negroes are rising!'' filled the air, mobs of angry white citizens roamed the streets to round up black slaves. Nearly a hundred were hauled off to jail.

Then, out of the blue, came a connection to the February burglary. It was provided to the grand jury by none other than Mary Burton. Now she accused the Hughsons, Kerry, Caesar and other slaves of plotting to burn the city and massacre the whites. ``In their common conversations they used to say that when all this was done, Caesar should be governor, and Hughson, my master, king,'' Mary told the jury.

With her damning testimony, many New Yorkers thought that 1712 was about to repeat itself.

Caesar and another slave named Prince were found guilty of burglary, and on May 11 they were both hanged. Two more slaves, Cuffee and Quack, were hanged on May 30, but not before they had accused dozens of others of being in on a conspiracy. Mary Burton spun wilder and wilder stories, making more accusations. Though her testimony was riddled with inconsistencies, no one seemed to care. Writing it all down, the prosecuting officials cast their net wider and wider.

Scores of alleged conspirators were hauled in and interrogated. Hughson, his wife and Kerry were tried on June 4 and found guilty of conspiracy. They were hanged eight days later.

One of the alleged conspirators was a slave from Brooklyn named Doctor Harry, who was accused of bringing poison to Hughson's tavern for blacks to use on themselves if convicted. He denied ever being at Hughson's, but was burned at the stake on July 18.

Other Long Island slaves were later implicated by testimony of a city slave named Jack, who said he once proposed burning a white man's shed. ``In firing the shed, that'll fire the whole town,'' Jack said. ``And then the Negroes in town, with the Negroes that'll come from Long Island, will murder the white people.''

The arrests and trials and executions continued through the summer, until, on the last day of August, the paroxysm of fear, anger and suspicion virtually ended with the hanging of a white schoolteacher, John Ury. He was officially found guilty of conspiracy, but he was really tried because he was thought to be a Catholic priest, which he wasn't. Catholics were often discriminated against in the strongly Protestant city. What got Ury in trouble was his ability to read Latin.

Mary Burton got her reward from the city on Sept. 2, 1742. It totaled 100 pounds sterling, enough to pay off her indenture and set herself free, with 81 pounds left over.

Most historians agree that there was no grand slave conspiracy. But there were real racial problems in New York City in 1741, and they exploded in the conspiracy trials, which some have compared to the Salem witch trials of 1692.

``New York's officials indulged themselves and the public in acting out their fears,'' Davis, a history professor at Arizona State University, wrote recently in his book. ``They simply deceived themselves by systematizing real disorders into a single scheme where all the enemies of the English world suddenly surfaced.''