Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [136]
During the unfortunate Ury’s trial, a hysterical warning arrived from Governor Oglethorpe of Georgia, saying that Spanish agents were “preparing to burn all the magazines and considerable towns in the English North America” and that some were priests “who pretended to be physicians, dancing masters, and other such kinds of occupations.” That sealed Ury’s fate, and he too was dispatched to the gallows at the end of August.
Gallows of the 1741 conspirators. Note also the stake with flames on it. Detail of a map drawn from memory by David Grim in 1813. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
By then, all told, some 160 blacks and twenty-one whites had been arrested. Four whites—John Hughson, Sarah Hughson, Peggy Kerry, and John Ury—were hanged, as were seventeen blacks; one white, sentenced to be hanged, escaped. Thirteen Africans were burned at the stake. Seventy-two were subsequently banished from the colony, twenty-seven to the Portuguese island of Madeira, and most of the rest to colonies in the West Indies.
But had there in fact been a conspiracy? Certainly the autumn and winter of 1740-41, the time when Hughson, Romme, and the Geneva Club allegedly began planning a rebellion, had been a miserable period in the city. To the effects of years of depression were added dwindling supplies of fuel and food, the result of record snowfalls and the lowest temperatures in memory. By February 1741 the Hudson was a solid mass of ice all the way up to Poughkeepsie, and huge drifts blanketed the smaller houses and shacks that were home to New York’s poorest inhabitants. Funds for the relief of the needy had already run out, and many were in imminent danger of freezing or starving to death. City bakers had gone on strike to protest what they considered the unfairly low price of bread set by the city. Zenger’s Weekly Journal reported that their refusal to bake caused “some Disturbance, and reduced some, notwithstanding their Riches, to a sudden want of Bread.” (Similar shortages had also led to rioting in Wales and England, the paper reported.)
Certainly the slaves were angry enough, particularly those forced to live apart from their spouses. Quack resented Lieutenant Governor Clarke for prohibiting him from visiting his wife, the governor’s cook, and he had had several fights with the fort’s sentry during repeated attempts to visit her. Quack might well have fired the governor’s house, as he confessed to doing. And the sailors and soldiers in town, particularly the Irish, had grievances of their own. Private Edward Murphy reportedly said, “Damn me if I won’t lend a hand to the fires as soon as anybody.” Moreover, this milling, interracial discontent might well have been brought into sharp focus by the recent outbreak of war. By 1741 so few troops remained in Fort George, one slave reportedly said, that only “an hundred and fifty men might take this city.” If the Spanish or French did come to their aid, they stood a reasonable chance of getting away with it.
The actual evidence, however, is less than convincing. John Hughson, Hughson’s wife, John Romme, and more than a few of the most important blacks denied to the very end that a conspiracy existed. Key witnesses against them—Mary Burton, Peggy Kerry, Hughson’s daughter, Sarah, an indentured servant named Arthur Price, the soldier William Kane—gave confused, frequently contradictory, and invariably self-serving testimony. Equally suspect were the sixty-odd “confessions” wrung out of terrorized slaves. Much of the trial testimony vital to the official conspiracy theory is likewise tainted. The presiding judges—Horsmanden, De Lancey, and Frederick