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Prosecution of the alleged conspirators also disclosed the numerous points of contact and mutuality between the city’s slaves and its burgeoning population of poor whites. Witness after witness reported blacks and whites as partners in crime, partners in drink, partners in bed, partners in survival, partners in their contempt of the rich and well-born few who dressed in ruffles and ran the town—a vast, restless, interracial underworld.

One response by municipal authorities to these discoveries was to demand increased vigilance on the part of slaveowners. Another was to insist on closing down the sleazy disorderly houses whose owners, like Hughson, observed the “most wicked and pernicious practice . . . of entertaining negroes, and the scum and dregs of white people in conjunction.” Yet another was to accuse “Suspicious, Vagrant, Stroling Preachers” of stirring up the lower classes, especially “Youths and Negroes.” George Whitefield’s tumultuous revivals in 1739 and 1740 drew particular criticism in this regard. As one SPG missionary put it, Whitefield’s “impudence and indiscretion” in advocating the conversion of blacks to Christianity—still a very unpopular idea among slaveowners—gave “great countenance” to the plot. Even Ury was said to have blamed “all the disturbances” on “the great encouragement the negroes had received from Mr. Whitefield.”

But the ultimate response, one on which prosecutors often fell back in their final summations, was to drown out the noise of class conflict by beating the drums of racial hatred. Bradley berated city slaves as “silly unthinking creatures.” Horsmanden called them “cannibals.” Not only did they dare to think of killing white men, Smith ranted, but they intended to make white women the victims of their “rapacious lust” as well. “The monstrous ingratitude of this black tribe is what exceedingly aggravates their guilt,” he added. As for Hughson, he “could not be content to live by the gains of honest industry, but must be rich at the expense of the blood and ruin of his fellow citizens! miserable wretch!” His crimes “have made him blacker than a negro.”

It was indeed mysterious, Horsmanden reported, that the rotting cadavers of Hughson and Caesar, after hanging on the gibbet in the summer sun for several weeks, had changed color—the former becoming “a deep shining black, rather blacker than the negro placed by him, who was one of the darkest hue of his kind,” while the latter “somewhat bleached or turned whitish.” Crowds gathered to ponder the meaning of these “wonderous phenomenons,” and “many of the spectators were ready to resolve them into miracles.”

Mindful that many slaves implicated in the “conspiracy” had come by way of the West Indies, white New Yorkers concluded they would be safer with chattel imported directly from Africa, a decision that in time would significantly alter the composition of the city’s servile population. The mass deportation of male slaves also helped transform the city’s gender balance. During the depression the outmigration of unemployed artisans and seamen had changed the sex ratio from 117 white men for every 100 white women in 1731 to 91:100 in 1731, then to 89:100 in 1741—producing a substantial excess of white women. At the same time, male-heavy slave imports had continued. While in 1731 there had been 99 black men for every 100 black women, by 1737 the ratio was 111:100, and by 1741 it was 119:100—a substantial excess of black men. Demographics like these, together with well-known sexual alliances between black men and white women, like that of Caesar and Peggy, had given rise during the hysteria to lurid fantasies of bondsmen seizing white mistresses. The post-hysteria shift in slaveholders’ preferences from males to females, together with the opposition of white male artisans to the use of skilled black labor, had by 1746 diminished black males to under 47 percent of the African population.

New York didn’t soon forget the “Great Negro Plot” of 1741. A printed version of Ury’s last words from the gallows was a standing