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On March 18, 1741, the soldiers of Fort George—Irish and non-Irish alike—were recuperating in the barracks from their hearty celebration of the Feast of St. Patrick the day before. The garrison was undermanned as well as under the weather, for the Empire was at war again. In the autumn of 1739, after years of heavy losses to Spanish privateers, West Indian planters demanded action from London. Walpole wanted to avoid costly foreign conflicts, but Pulteney roused Parliament to a declaration of war by waving around the pickled ear of one Captain Robert Jenkins—cut off, it was said, by an arrogant Spaniard who told him to give it to King George as a warning. The so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear reached New York during the summer of 1740, when an expedition of six hundred troops left the city for an assault on Cuba. Now, six months later, only a relative handful remained on Manhattan.

Shortly after noon on the eighteenth, smoke and flames poured from the governor’s house; soon the adjoining chapel was ablaze as well. A bucket brigade and the town’s recently purchased hand-pump fire engines failed to control the wind-whipped flames, and by late afternoon the Fort’s buildings were in cinders. Precisely a week later, on March 25, another fire broke out, at the home of Captain Peter Warren, brother-in-law of Chief Justice De Lancey, but this one was successfully contained. Another week passed, and then another fire incinerated Winant van Zant’s warehouse near the East River docks on April 1; astonishingly, given its contents of hay, fir, and pine, this conflagration too was kept from spreading farther. Three days later fire flared again, this time at a Maiden Lane cow stable filled with dried fodder. On the following day a passerby sniffed smoke and discovered coals burning at the base of a haystack in attorney Joseph Murray’s stables on lower Broadway, just in time to prevent the wealthy neighborhood from going up in flames.

Fires were common in the mid-eighteenth century, so the first catastrophe had aroused few suspicions. But as the number of incidents mounted, so did the conviction that they were the product not of accident but of arson. Perhaps (one council member hypothesized) “a combination of villains” was creating diversions, under cover of which they could make “a prey of their neighbor’s goods.” Most white residents suspected the slaves, however. All New York had heard about the massive uprising that had rocked Stono, South Carolina, in September 1739 and of the ongoing disturbances in that colony that culminated, in November 1740, in an apparent attempt to destroy Charleston by fire.

Then another round of fires broke out on April 6—four in one day. A black man was spotted near one of them, running. A white tried to catch him, yelling, “A negro, a negro.” The cry, swiftly taken up, soon turned into terrified screams of “The negroes are rising”! The man seen running—Adolph Philipse’s slave Cuffee—was quickly captured and incarcerated. This did nothing to quiet the hysteria. Crowds of white vigilantes rounded up more blacks and threw them in jail with Cuffee.

Although the City Council launched an intensive investigation, two weeks of examining the blacks in custody and searching for evidence of arson yielded nothing except increased anxiety among the white townspeople. The council now turned the inquiry over to Daniel Horsmanden. Horsmanden was the city’s recorder as well as a justice on the supreme court of the province (a position he had gained through loyalty to the late Governor Cosby). Horsmanden, who had long believed that New York was far too lax in its handling of slaves, set out to track down the conspirators he was sure were behind the fires.

A special grand jury was convened and directed to investigate whites who sold liquor to blacks—men like tavern keeper John Hughson. A poor and illiterate cobbler from Yonkers, Hughson had come down to New York in the mid-1730s with his wife, Sarah, his daughter, and his mother-in-law. Unable to find employment, he opened a tavern on the East River