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By Root 8101 0

reminder of the panic that had gripped the city, and it was rumored for years that Hughson’s ghost haunted his place of execution. When renewed political squabbling began to dissolve the united front forged by racial and religious fear, critics of the governor’s party hinted that Horsmanden had imagined the whole conspiracy and committed judicial murder. Stung by such rumors, he defended himself by writing a book. It appeared in 1744 bearing the unwieldy if accurate title of A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants.

12

War and Wealth

While New York recovered from the “Great Negro Plot,” the Anglo-Spanish war that began in 1739 grew wider. By 1743 both Prussia and France were fighting alongside Spain, and virtually all Europe and America had plunged into a conflict, at once dynastic and imperial, known to His Majesty’s American subjects as King George’s War. Peace returned in 1748, without a clear-cut victory for either side, and hostilities soon resumed.

In 1754 a detachment of Virginia troops under young Colonel George Washington surrendered to French forces on the frontier near what is now Pittsburgh. When General Edward Braddock’s attempt to repulse the French ended in a humiliating disaster, Britain declared war—this time with the intention of driving France out of North America once and for all. The war went badly, however, until George II brought in William Pitt, arguably the most brilliant wartime leader in British history. Between 1757 and 1761 the French were expelled from India and Canada, a French invasion fleet was smashed in the English Channel, and choice sugar islands in the French West Indies passed into British hands. Pitt might have achieved even more, but George II died in 1760. His twenty-two-year-old grandson, George III, was eager for peace and forced Pitt’s resignation in 1761. Two years later, the fighting was ended by the Treaty of Paris. To Europeans, it would be remembered as the Seven Years War. Americans called it the French and Indian War.

Throughout these twenty-odd years of conflict, New York’s strategic proximity to Canada—Montreal lay only three hundred miles to the north along the Hudson-Champlain corridor—kept the city in a state of almost constant alert. French raiding parties struck as far south as Saratoga and Albany during King George’s War, and during the French and Indian War heavy fighting erupted around Lakes George and Champlain as well as on the shores of Lake Ontario. Often (as in 1741) New Yorkers believed themselves in imminent danger of attack. Militia companies camped on the Common, drilling incessantly, and in 1745 municipal authorities took the precaution of erecting a palisade along the northern perimeter of the town (raising the necessary funds by a public lottery). Made of fourteen-foot-long cedar logs set in a three-foot-deep trench, the barrier zigzagged from Cherry Street and James Slip on the East River to present-day Chambers Street on the Hudson, broken by only four gates and guarded by six blockhouses. This second city wall, like the first a century earlier, was a grim reminder that New York’s fortunes often hinged on events unfolding oceans away from Manhattan.

SPOILS OF WAR

Even gentlemen of the mercantile “interest,” always leery of getting entangled in imperial conflicts to the detriment of trade, conceded that both King George’s War and the French and Indian War were good for business. (“War is declared in England—Universal joy among the merchants,” William Smith wrote in his diary in 1756.) Legislative bodies in New York and other colonies spent unprecedented amounts of money on military operations, while the British government poured troops into the colonies in numbers that staggered contemporary imaginations. The first contingent arrived in 1756, when a thousand soldiers set up winter camp in the city after losing to the French at Oswego. When the barracks in the fort proved