New York Slave Rebellion

People

Robert Hunter

On the night of April 6, 1712, approximately 23 to 27 enslaved Africans and Native Americans gathered in the orchard of Mr. Crook on Maiden Lane in New York City, at what was then the northern edge of settled Manhattan. Most of the rebels were Coromantee (Akan) people from the Gold Coast of modern-day Ghana and Pawpaw (Popo) people from the Slave Coast of modern-day Togo and Benin, many of whom had been recently brought to New York directly from Africa. Before the revolt, the conspirators had performed a blood oath ceremony and received protective powder from a practitioner of African spiritual medicine believed to make them invulnerable to white men's weapons. Armed with guns, swords, hatchets, and knives, they set fire to an outbuilding at the home of Peter Van Tilburgh on Maiden Lane, then ambushed the white colonists who rushed to extinguish the blaze. Nine white people were killed and six were wounded before residents alerted Governor Robert Hunter at the fort on the southern tip of Manhattan. Soldiers and militia pursued the rebels northward into a wooded swamp near what is now Canal Street. Six of the enslaved men killed themselves rather than be captured. The reprisals were savage and deliberate. More than 70 Black people were arrested, though many had no connection to the revolt. Approximately 23 to 27 were convicted. Twenty-one were executed by methods designed to terrorize the enslaved population into submission: some were burned alive at the stake, one was broken on the wheel, one was hung alive in chains in the town until dead, one was starved to death in chains, and the rest were hanged. One convicted woman who was pregnant was kept alive until she gave birth, then executed. Governor Hunter, who oversaw the trials, acknowledged that "more have suffered than we can find were active in this bloody affair" and reprieved several of the accused. Mars, Hosea, and John eventually received royal pardons from Queen Anne. But the revolt's most lasting damage was legal. The New York Assembly passed a sweeping new slave code requiring slaveholders who freed their enslaved people to pay a bond of 200 pounds per person, far more than the market price of a slave, effectively making manumission impossible. No Black person freed after 1712 could own a house or pass belongings to their children. Gatherings of three or more enslaved people without permission were banned. The code guaranteed the perpetual enslavement of Black people in New York for generations. The revolt also cast a long shadow over the colony. Twenty-nine years later, when a series of fires broke out across Manhattan in 1741, white New Yorkers immediately recalled 1712. The resulting panic, known as the New York Conspiracy of 1741, led to the execution of 34 people (13 Black men burned alive, 17 Black men hanged, 4 white people hanged) and the deportation of 84 to Caribbean slavery, in what many historians believe was largely a product of mass hysteria fueled by the memory of the 1712 revolt.