When in 1741 a rash of fires followed a theft in pre-revolutionary New York City, British colonial authorities came to suspect an elaborate conspiracy led by slaves and poor whites who intended to burn the city and hand it over to Britain’s Catholic foes. Within seven months, roughly 200 people were arrested, 17 were hanged, and 70 others were expelled from New York. This book abridges the transcript Justice Daniel Horsmanden kept of the trials. His record of the testimony of slaves and working-class whites provides extraordinary clues to the nature of race, class, and gender relationships in colonial New York City and raises questions about the nature and extent of the alleged conspiracy. Serena Zabin’s introduction provides context by describing slavery, tavern culture, and the legal system as well as explaining British tensions with France and Spain. Additional documents include newspaper accounts of the Antigua and Stono Rebellions and letters concerning the 1741 trials to help students make connections among these uprisings and the atmosphere of fear and suspicion they created. Document headnotes and glosses, lists of trial participants, a chronology of events, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index provide strong pedagogical support.

The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden's Journal of the Proceedings, with Related Documents (Bedford Series in History and Culture)

History

Zabin, Serena R.

Americas

Bedford/St.Martin's

America: A Concise History 3e & Pocket Guide to Writing in History 5e & Sovereignty and Goodness of God & Declaring Rights & New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741

Dumenil, Lynn

Henretta, James A.

Rakove, Jack N.

Brody, David

Rowlandson, Mary

Rampolla, Mary Lynn.

America: A Concise History 4e V1 & New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741 & Attitudes Toward Sex in Antebellum America & Narrative of the Life of ... (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

DOUGLASS, FREDERICK

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz

American Promise: A Compact History 4e & Reading the American Past V1 & V2 & New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741 & Southern Horrors and Other Writings

Johnson, Michael P.

Roark, James L.

Stage, Sarah

Cohen, Patricia Cline

Lawson, Alan

Hartmann, Susan M.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones

Wells, Ida B.

New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741 & Harlem Renaissance & Triangle Fire & How the Other Half Lives 2e

Riis, Jacob A.

Leviatin, David

Argersinger, Jo Ann

Ferguson, Jeffrey Brown

Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Early American Studies)

Before the American Revolution, the people who lived in British North America were not just colonists; they were also imperial subjects. To think of eighteenth-century New Yorkers as Britons rather than incipient Americans allows us fresh investigations into their world. How was the British Empire experienced by those who lived at its margins? How did the mundane affairs of ordinary New Yorkers affect the culture at the center of an enormous commercial empire?
Dangerous Economies is a history of New York culture and commerce in the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, when Britain was just beginning to catch up with its imperial rivals, France and Spain. In that sparsely populated city on the fringe of an empire, enslaved Africans rubbed elbows with white indentured servants while the elite strove to maintain ties with European genteel culture. The transience of the city's people, goods, and fortunes created a notably fluid society in which establishing one's own status or verifying another's was a challenge. New York's shifting imperial identity created new avenues for success but also made success harder to define and demonstrate socially.
Such a mobile urban milieu was the ideal breeding ground for crime and conspiracy, which became all too evident in 1741, when thirty slaves were executed and more than seventy other people were deported after being found guilty—on dubious evidence—of plotting a revolt. This sort of violent outburst was the unforeseen but unsurprising result of the seething culture that existed at the margins of the British Empire.

Business & Money

Economics

University of Pennsylvania Press

Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the South & New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741 & Black Americans in Revolutionary Era & Emancipation Proclamation & Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic

Northrup, David

FINKELMAN, Paul

Holton, Woody

Vorenberg, Michael

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