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

“This book tells the story of how one kind of slavery made another kind of liberty possible in eighteenth-century New York, a place whose slave past has long been buried.”

In New York Burning’s Preface, Lepore outlines how one of the fundamental contradictions her book will explore is that of America’s dual relationships to slavery and liberty. For Lepore, these two categories cannot be separated from each other when considering American history, and America’s emphasis on personal independence and liberty must be understood together with its practice of human bondage.

“‘After they had conquered,’ Hughson told Tom, the slave of a French silversmith, ‘they would know what it was to be free Men.’”

In this quote, Hughson explains to a slave the desired purpose of the planned rebellion: to grant the slaves a taste of the freedom they had been denied. As slaves, African Americans are denied any recognition by their owners of being human, as they are denied any rights and are forced to follow the desires of their masters.

“Maybe what looked to white New Yorkers like an ‘unparallel’d Hellish Plot’ was in fact play, a topsy-turvy parody of gentlemen’s clubs […] Or maybe it really was a rebellion, inspired in part by all the talk of liberty in the city’s newspapers […] [or maybe] the whole plot was merely the awful product of Daniel Horsmanden’s anguished imagination.”

Early on in New York Burning, Lepore introduces the idea that the slave plot as described in Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal may in fact have been imagined, or a joke gone out of hand. As none of the accused slaves left accounts of the plot, and the only historical evidence comes from Horsmanden, Lepore suggests that the full truth of the 1741 fires may never be known.