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” then dispatched militia to “drive the island.” Hunted down, six of the conspirators cut their own throats (one man killing his wife and himself) rather than be captured. Seventy others were arrested and brought back for trial before a special court convened by the governor. Twenty-three were convicted of murder, two others of attempted murder. Twenty were hanged outright. Three were burned to death—among them Tom, a bondsman of Nicholas Roosevelt, who was condemned to roast over a slow fire “in Torment for Eight or ten hours & Continue burning in the said fire untill he be dead and Consumed to Ashes.” Another, named Robin, was sentenced “to be hung up in chains alive and so to continue without any sustainance untill he be dead.” Still another, named Clause, was “broke alive upon a wheel.” Spread-eagled and fastened face upward on a wheel, he was laid flat on the ground in front of City Hall. A Dutch sailor (who said he’d seen the thing done in Rotterdam and knew how to go about it) then took a crowbar and over a period of many hours smashed the bones in Clause’s body, one by one, stopping now and again for refreshment at Jan Peterson’s Broad Street tavern. Clause finally expired at two o’clock the next morning, having suffered, as had the others, what Hunter assured the Lords of Trade were “the most exemplary punishments that could be possibly thought of.”

In the wake of the trials the Common Council ordered that no slave could travel about the city after dark without a lantern. (Elias Neau, the SPG catechist, was widely blamed for sowing discontent among the city’s slaves; the new lantern law was in part an attempt to cut attendance at his school, which held classes only at night.) The Assembly drafted a tough new slave code. Among other things, the law made manumission almost prohibitively expensive for masters and stipulated that no freed slave could henceforth own a house or land in the colony. But this merely codified the status quo. By the early eighteenth century very few free blacks remained on Manhattan; most of them lived on the fringes of the city on land granted them or their forebears by the Dutch West India Company.

The real legacy of the 1712 uprising was a new era of routinized brutality and official cynicism toward slaves. Crowds of townsfolk often gathered now to watch slaves hanged or burned to death for one offense or another. A slave girl named Rose was arrested “foar Damning the White Peoples Throats and Yours too (Speaking to a White Woman) and divers other Vile Expressions against the White People”; the magistrates gave her nine lashes at the whipping post, had her tied to a cart and dragged around town, gave her thirty-nine more lashes for good measure “on the Naked Back,” and then transported her to another colony. And when John van Zandt horsewhipped his slave to death in 1735 for being on the streets at night, an all-white coroner’s jury found that the “Correction given by the Master was not the Cause of his Death, but that it was by the Visitation of God.”

11

Recession, Revival, and Rebellion

By 1730, even as municipal officials prepared to receive the new city charter, New York was sliding into a deep recession. Part of the problem was that cheap flour from Pennsylvania had cut into New York’s share of the West Indian trade. Merchants and farmers, now heavily reliant on wheat production, responded by cutting prices—then expanded output in order to maintain their profits, glutting the market and driving prices still lower. At the same time, climaxing years of overproduction on West Indian plantations, the price of brown sugar at the London Custom House fell off sharply. Pressed by their creditors, numerous planters failed, and those who didn’t fail retrenched. Trade between the islands and the mainland colonies slumped for the first time in nearly two decades, then sagged further still when the Molasses Act of 1733 took effect. Being part of an international commercial network, it was clear, could bring severe dislocations as well as create opportunities. An alarmed Lieutenant Governor