Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XVII

By the early 18th century, when North America had a growing population of free blacks and a greater awareness of their human rights, events were recast as an overreaction to the fires and general hard times. After the Civil War, although racism outlived slavery, the outbreak was regarded as limited in scope because slaves were not thought capable of organizing a plot so potentially lethal.

But Daniel Horsmanden, his race hatred aside, may have been right all along. He believed the slaves' plot to destroy city property was comprehensive, well-planned, and known to many men. Modern scholars tend to agree.

The plot might have succeeded had not Quack Roosevelt set fire to Fort George earlier than planned. The Spanish slaves, wrongfully enslaved, were trained in the use of incendiary materials, and they knew that hostile Spain would have five ships off the East Coast in May. With the British colony's defenses in ruins, Spanish bombardment on top of a city in flames could have meant a different ending for the slaves' revolt.

During those cold months in early 1741, Horsmanden's detailed account proved that blacks talked constantly about freedom.

Horsmanden's accounts reflect slaves' bottomless anger. Jamaica, a young fiddler owned by a Thomas Ellison, said he "would dance over [the white people] while they were roasting in the flames." He'd been a slave long enough, the boy said. Though at first, sentenced to hang, Jamaica was banished to the Portuguese island of Madeira.

City fathers in 1741 were convinced that New York's problem was the slaves themselves. They reacted to the fires in the same narrow-minded way they'd responded to the rebellion in 1712. So they decided to further limit opportunities for the slaves to gather. After the trials, the deaths and deportations, of more than 100 people, slaves were no longer permitted to draw fresh water from city wells. Instead, great municipal wagons were hauled around dispensing water. (A visitor later commented that N.Y. water tasted brackish and hard.) And, to better meet any future threat of arson, the city bought 100 new fire buckets.

 The American Revolution created the first serious stirrings of abolitionist sentiment, and also mothballed Newport, Rhode Island's slave fleet. The town hadn't undergone a change of conscience, it had been occupied by the British. But war had interrupted the slave trade, which had dwindled from a prewar peak of several thousand slaves a year to a few hundred.

That trade was about to rebound in full force.

 
Although the previous few posts have not told any further information about the topic at hand,  I wanted to share with you the story of how events unfolded in the "Great Negro Revolt of 1741- New York". It showed me the blacks' folly in starting the fires and the mass hysteria that, once out of control, caused their deaths.

I don't know if the horrible way some of the slaves died (burning at the stake) was common for WHITES found guilty in mid-1700's in other parts of the country. (I know about the Salem witch trials but had thought this was a completely separate incident.) And the pronouncement of one that he was to be hanged and left there until his corpse rotted shows how utterly barbaric these people were in the 1700s.

I also wanted to show how this one Justice, Horsmanden, and his hatred completely dominated their trials and that there was absolutely no way for the blacks to have ever had a fair trial in New York.

Rhode Island's slave fleet had been scaled down during the British occupation from the prewar peak of several thousand slaves per year to a few hundred.

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum