New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan

Over a few weeks in 1741, ten fires blazed across Manhattan as 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. More than one hundred black men and women were forced to confess and name names, sending still more men to the gallows and to the stake. In this book, Jill Lepore pieces together the events and the thinking that led white New Yorkers to make bonfires of the Negroes. 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.