New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan

"New York Burning is certainly not an uplifting book (as Island at the Center of the World , in most respects, is). It tells us about a five-week period in the 18th century when New Yorkers descended into fits of paranoia-driven violence against enslaved people and their associates. It’s a period that shows that New York was as culpable for slavery as Southern states. There was a kind of witch hunt, a persecution very similar to what had happened to women in Salem at the end of the 17th century, in 1692. In 1741, there were baseless accusations against enslaved people, and some white people as well, that they were plotting an uprising—even though there is no historical evidence that any uprising was ever planned. People were pressed to make confessions or to make accusations, virtually all of them specious. People were considered suspect for the flimsiest reasons. For instance, one enslaved person called Dr Harry was considered suspect because enslaved people were prevented from practising medicine, so his nickname put him in the crosshairs. It tells us a story that is literally embedded in New York City. The dozens of Black Americans who were burned or hung as a result of these specious accusations are interred in burial grounds at the tip of Manhattan. This period is part of our physical landscape. It is essential, in order to understand ourselves and our history, to know that New York is a complicated place; in as much as we see ourselves as tolerant, there were periods during which New Yorkers committed the same kinds of crimes as Southern places which we don’t see ourselves as comparable to at all."