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Search - Rumor of Revolt

Rumor of Revolt
Author: Thomas J. Davis

In New York City on March 18th a spectacular blaze swept through the colonial capital's administrative center at Fort George. Destroying the royal governor's house and all the fort's main buildings, its flames left one soldier dead and sent lower Manhattan's terrified residents scurrying to save their lives and property. A week l... more »ater, in the shadow of the blackened fort, fire struck the home of the brother-in-law of the colonial chief justice. The next week an East River warehouse burned. Then, within days, half a dozen other fires broke out.

Scores of arrests followed signs of arson and suspicions that slaves had had a hand in the fires and the thefts that accompanied them. A five-month investigation began, and officials searched all houses in the city, seeking stolen goods and "strangers and suspicious persons." Discovery of massive illicit black gatherings at a white-owned tavern off upper Broadway escalated white fears and fed rumors of rebellion. And in an atmosphere of alarm and hysteria a series of tense conspiracy trials began.

A Rumor of Revolt offers the first full account of this startling but little known episode from the underside of America's colonial past. With a historian's eye for time and place and a novelist's sense of sweep and detail, T.J. Davis brings to life the accused and accusers, slaves and slaveholders it ensnared in a grim judicial imbroglio.

Here, among others, are the slave called Caesar-angry, recalcitrant, and ready to take what he wanted; the tavern-owner John Hughson, whose association with Caesar and others like him led to his being labeled the "devil incarnate"; the itinerant schoolteacher John Ury, branded a Catholic priest and the ringleader of "so deep, so direful and destructive a scheme" that officials doubted blacks alone could have devised it; the young indentured servant Mary Burton, who became the prosecution's star witness; and the ambitious Judge Daniel Horsmanden, Esq., who spearheaded the investigation and denounced al slaves as "enemies of their own household-"

Davis uncovers an early New York City that, surprisingly, ranked second only to Charleston, South Carolina in slave population- It as a place where slave resentment smoldered and black crime was a constant worry. Where Dutch wealth clashed with English power ari the Irish suffered suspicion and scorn. Where Catholics worshipped only in secret and the Spanish were hated foes, suspected, no less, of conspiring with the Pope for world domination.

The city seethed with racial and ethnic tension, religious bigotry and social discord. It was a powder keg, and Davis shows how a lingering depression, a record-cold winter, and an unpopular war combined to ignite the fuse.

The explosion proved deadly: thirteen blacks burned at the stake, seventeen blacks and four whites hanged-including Caesar, Hughson, and Ury. Drawing on court records, newspaper reports, other contemporary evidence, and the best historical scholarship, Davis probes the social assumptions and the legal and political realities that triggered this brutal execution of justice. Ultimately, however, he allows the harrowing tale of the "Great Negro Plot," and the investigative and courtroom drama that lie at its heart, to unfold-and speak-for itself.

ISBN-13: 9780029077405
ISBN-10: 0029077400
Publication Date: 7/1985
Pages: 320
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: The Free Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

History >> Americas >> United States >> Colonial Period >> General
History >> Americas >> United States >> State & Local
Nonfiction >> Current Events >> Conspiracy Theories

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