Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

en masse, the governor taking advantage of the new law to perform the execution
in a particularly brutal manner, as "the most exemplary punishment. . .
that could possibly be thought of. . . ." Perhaps the most instructive lesson
learned by the discerning was the brutality and savagery at the very core of
the slave system. It is part of the Western heritage that when something
unpleasant happens, a new law is passed in a hurried attempt to cure it. The
new legislature therefore once more quickly tightened its laws punishing slave
conspiracies.
By 1740, New York City had the substantial number of 2,000 Negro slaves
among a total population of 12,000. The proportion soon reached one-third
in Kings and Queens counties. In 1740, hysteria spread through the city over
an alleged slave plot to poison the white water supply. For some time afterward,
most New Yorkers allayed their fears by buying spring water from
street vendors. The ensuing winter of 1740-41 was a hard one in New York,
with the price of wheat and bread high, and much suffering among the poor.
Fires began to rage frequently throughout the city, some perhaps set by Negro
slaves and white sympathizers. The slaves, in accordance with the revolutionary
nature of the weapon used, concentrated their arson on the homes and
offices of government officials and on the barracks of the soldiery. Several suspicious
fires also broke out in Hackensack, New Jersey, for which at least two
slaves were themselves burned in retaliation.
The response to the fires was mass hysteria by the whites, expressed in
indiscriminate arrests indulged in by the New York government. No fewer
than one hundred and fifty slaves and twenty-five whites (including seventeen
soldiers) were arrested. Interestingly enough, the main focus of white fear
and hatred centered on a group of Spanish Negro prisoners of war, who, upon
capture, had been sold from freedom into slavery in New York City. These
Negroes were, understandably, particularly bitter at such treatment accorded
to prisoners of war. As the greatest and most recent victims of injustice, they
drew the hottest fire of the guilty whites. All of these Spanish Negroes were
imprisoned in the wave of arrests.
In the mass arrests, city officials presumed to make a house-to-house search
for "suspicious-looking" characters, who were ordered summarily arrested on
suspicion. Eventually, every Negro at large was picked up by the police.
The hapless Negroes, beset by torture and by promise of relief for accusing
others, could not find a single lawyer to defend them. One reason was that
every lawyer in the city was directly associated with the prosecution. In his
summing up, Prosecutor William Smith had the gall to denounce the base
"ingratitude" of the mutinous Negroes. Four of the white prisoners were
executed, including an innkeeper and his wife, as was a clergyman, the Reverend
John Ury, accused of swearing in the conspirators. Ury stated that he was
an Anglican minister, but the government insisted that he was a Spanish
Jesuit priest, and a New York law of 1700 provided for the hanging of any
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