Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Roman Catholic priest found in the province. The attorney general, summing
up the prosecution, took the occasion to denounce the iniquities of the Church
of Rome. Refusing to believe that Ury was not a Catholic, New York carried
out the execution. Of the slaves arrested, thirteen were burned alive, eighteen
were hanged, and seventy banished to the West Indies. Every one of the
unfortunate Spanish Negroes was killed; while waiting to be burned at the
stake, a few Negroes were persuaded to "confess" and "tell the truth" (that
is, implicate others) in exchange for a delay in the hope of a pardon. But
their desperate maneuver was to be of no avail. The crowd became enraged
when hearing of a delay and, at its insistence, the Negroes were immediately
burned to death.
It is instructive to learn from the adamant prosecution of these alleged
criminals that the main witness against them, a young white indentured servant
named Mary Burton, was conceded by the court to be a liar and a perjurer.
In addition, the trials were marked by so-called confessions extracted
either by torture or by promises of large rewards for informing on others—
methods which can hardly lend credence to their testimony. Indeed, the mass
frenzy greatly resembled the Salem witch trials and, as in the Salem case, only
when confessions (especially those of the star witness, Mary Burton) began to
implicate well-known and wealthy people did the wave of arrests and executions
suddenly subside.
One happy consequence of the New York slave frenzy was that it stamped
the psyches of the residents with fear of further slave revolts, which led to a
steady decline in the number of Negro slaves kept in New York City.