Worse Than Salem
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Everyone knows about the Salem witch trials of 1692. Thanks in large part to Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” they offer a standing lesson about the dangers of paranoia and conspiracy thinking, so deeply ingrained in the American character. It is surprising, then, that most New Yorkers have never heard of the spectacular trials that convulsed the city in 1741, claiming 34 lives and entangling hundreds more in a web of fear and suspicion.
Like the Salem trials, the New York trials were sparked by the wild accusations of a teenage girl, and fueled by a chain reaction of denunciations and doubtful confessions. But in one respect, the New York case is still more significant than its famous predecessor. For while the witch-hatred that drove the Salem affair is now a superstition of the distant past, the victims in New York were black slaves, and their fate raises questions of race, class, and politics that remain central to American history.
In “New York Burning” (Alfred A. Knopf, 324 pages, $26.95) the renowned early-American historian Jill Lepore subjects the events of 1741 to a reconstruction at once factually rigorous and brilliantly imaginative. The book comes with several appendixes’ worth of statistical analysis devoted to colonial-era Manhattan, in which Ms. Lepore maps the city’s slave and free populations and tries to uncover patterns among the trials’ accusers and victims. But Ms. Lepore’s major subject is not facts but representations: how the slave trials were portrayed at the time, by whom, and from what motives.
Ms. Lepore’s focus on the rhetorical construction of the past is typical of today’s historians. But in this case, it is also inevitable, since the major source of evidence about the trials – a report written by Daniel Horsmanden, who served as judge and chief persecutor – is transparently biased. Ms. Lepore’s achievement in “New York Burning” is not to get behind the documentary record, which is impossible, but to read that record in surprising and perceptive new ways.
The events of 1741 quickly spiraled into fantasy and horror, but they began with a danger that was real enough. That year, a severe winter had frozen ships in New York Harbor and buried the streets under feet of snow; it had also dried out the timbers of buildings, making them especially vulnerable to fire. On March 18, the inevitable happened: A plumber who had been soldering leaky gutters on the roof of the governor’s mansion accidentally let some sparks escape, setting the house aflame.
Or so New Yorkers were willing to believe at first. But in the ensuing weeks, as a dozen more fires broke out in the compact and thriving city – at the time, New York had some 10,000 inhabitants, and its boundaries hadn’t yet pushed north of Chambers Street – people began to look for another explanation. They found it when, on April 6, a witness saw a slave named Cuffee fleeing the scene of a warehouse fire.
To make sense of what happened next, Ms. Lepore enters into the mental world of the American colonists, with its central assumption that “nothing ‘just happened’ …There was always a villain to be caught, a conspiracy to be detected. The century was lousy with intrigues.” For white Americans, the most fearful kind of conspiracy was a slave uprising, which would not only threaten their lives and property, but expose the hidden guilt of a society that loudly proclaimed its love of liberty. Slave uprisings happened often enough to make them a credible threat – just 30 years before, a band of New York slaves had killed nine whites.
So it was easy for Horsmanden, who emerges as the clear villain of Ms. Lepore’s book, to assume that a new slave conspiracy was behind the fires. Horsmanden was a luckless lawyer, unable to attract either clients or a wealthy wife in England, who carved out a niche for himself in New York as a political client of the governor. As a judge on the colony’s Supreme Court, he was regularly embroiled in the political battles Ms. Lepore details, including the famous John Peter Zenger trial, which had engrossed the city just six years before. By uncovering a massive plot to burn the city, Horsmanden hoped to consolidate both the government’s power and his own.
He couldn’t have done it, however, without Mary Burton, a 16-year-old servant, whose self-interested and fantastic accusations echo those of the girls at the center of the Salem witch trials. According to Burton, her employer, a shady figure named John Hughson who kept a tavern on the fringe of the city – about two blocks south of today’s World Trade Center site – had entered into a plot with dozens of black slaves. They meant to “burn the whole Town,” she testified, and “when as the white People come to extinguish it, they would kill and destroy them …when all this was done, Caesar [a slave and ringleader of the plot] should be Governor, and Hughson her master should be King.”
Improbable on its own terms, this accusation soon ramified into a ludicrously vast conspiracy, as the various slaves accused by Burton accused others in order to win a pardon or simply to avoid being burned at the stake. The “evidence” assembled by Horsmanden eventually implicated about half the adult male slaves in New York City – making the trial report, as Ms. Lepore shows, a remarkable resource for demographic studies – and disclosed four related conspiracies, which Ms. Lepore distinguishes with separate titles.
Beyond “Hughson’s Plot,” for which Hughson himself was executed, there was a wider “Negro Plot,” which spread among the slaves who congregated at a certain pump to fetch clean water for their masters’ tea. Then Horsmanden uncovered a “Spanish Plot,” involving black sailors who had been captured and sold into slavery in New York, despite their protestations that they were free Spanish subjects; these slaves, it was reported, hoped to deliver the city over to England’s perennial enemies, Spain and France. This led in turn to the “Priest’s Plot,” in which John Ury, an alleged Catholic priest (though he “professed himself a Protestant of the Church of England”), was accused of being the slaves’ real ringleader, and of promising to absolve them of their conspiratorial sins. Everything the 18th-century American feared – Spanish enemies, Catholic spies, and his own African slaves – had coalesced into a perfect storm of paranoia.
By the time it passed, in the summer of 1741, 13 blacks had been burnt alive; 17 blacks and four whites had been hanged; and the social fault lines of the colonial city had been laid bare for all to see. One document quoted by Ms. Lepore shows that the analogy to what happened in Salem did not go unremarked. An anonymous Massachusetts correspondent wrote to a prominent New Yorker that the “horrible executions among you upon this occasion puts me in mind of our New England Witchcraft in the year 1692 Which if I dont mistake New York justly reproached us for.” Ms. Lepore’s excellent study ensures that the “reproach” earned by the city in 1741 will not be forgotten again.