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

New York Burning is perhaps best understood as a tale of mass hysteria, in which people project their own fears onto real life events and behave in a panicked, frenzied way. While Lepore does not dispute that unhappy slaves in 1741 might have set fire to homes, Lepore does suggest that fears of a widespread uprising—and in particular, Horsmanden’s belief that the fires stem from an international conspiracy—are overblown and detached from the reality of what occurred.

In Chapter 2, “Fire,” Lepore describes the speed at which panic can spread in a city like New York. 18th-century New York society is suffused with a mood of paranoia, with New Yorkers often suspecting that the city is full of “plotters lurking behind nearly every shadow” (51). This atmosphere of suspicion becomes combined with widespread anxieties surrounding New York’s slave population. New York newspapers frequently carry news of slave uprisings throughout the colonies, with the stories often suspiciously matching the genre conventions of popular fiction of rebellions. While some of these slave rebellions are true, more often than not, they are fabricated tales based upon rumors. Due to the number of these stories, New Yorkers are primed to suspect that slaves are always at the brink of revolt. As a result, the discovery that some slaves have been linked to the fires in 1741 sends New Yorkers into an uproar. Throughout the city, “New Yorkers began to cry, ‘The Negroes are rising!’” (50), and dozens of slaves are rounded up and thrown into jail.

The consequences of such hysteria is explored in Chapter 7 through the anonymous letter. Purporting to be sent by a Bostonian, the letter draws parallels between New York’s slave burnings and Massachusetts’s earlier Salem witch trials, in which hundreds of people are accused of partaking in witchcraft, and 19 individuals are executed. The letter writer argues that more often than not, fearful individuals can transform singular crimes into evidence of a massive conspiracy, leading to the arrest of innocent citizens. Further, confessions “obtain’d by foul means, by force or torment” (204) cannot be trusted, as an individual may falsely confess to try and avoid being burned at the stake. In the Salem witch trials, such mass hysteria leads to the innocent women being accused of witchcraft and burnt at the stake. While Lepore is unable to definitively say whether certain accused slaves were innocent, she does suggest that it is highly likely at least some of the slaves were unjustly convicted and sent to their deaths.