Looking Back at Forms of Protest During the Colonial Period with Baylee Browning-Atkinson. Part One: Methods of Resisting Enslavement and the 1741 Slave Uprising Conspiracy.

Immediately following the murder of Mr. George Floyd Americans took to the streets to voice their support, sorrow, frustration, anger, and disappointment in a manner and magnitude that people of my generation have not seen, and America has not seen, since the Civil Rights era.  In the midst of a global pandemic no less!  Current events have me thinking back to our early beginnings as a collection of provincial colonies clustered along the North American coast.  The First Amendment protects our most valuable rights: religion, speech, and the ability to protect these rights through peaceful assembly and petition.

Protests during the colonial period did not take the form of peaceful organized marches, and if they did I have not come across it yet.  Colonial era protests took many forms.  Many of the loudest protests were expressed through targeted acts of violence and vandalization of symbols or material objects, like the movements against insensitive and offensive statues by organizations such as Black Lives Matter, Decolonize This Place, and other smaller groups.  Larger and more sustained protests took the form of movements of conscientious lifestyle changes or individual acts of discontent or resistance.  What I have for you are examples of forms of protest from the early colonial period that I have come across and could share within a three part blog post series.

As I was writing I found that there is more to say than I originally anticipated and I would like to give each example, each protest, act of rebellion, and dissent as much attention and respect in the limited space that I have to share them.  These events were selected as examples of different forms of protest, rebellion, and dissent.  In this series we will go over slave resistance, land riots, smuggling and schemes of retribution, political upheaval, and collective acts of commercial and social protest.

Of all of the acts of protest that I will go over, the efforts of the enslaved to resist their condition and status within the colonial world is the most important in light of the current national conversation we are trying to have.  This is a conversation that has been going on in America since 1619.  While we are no longer a country of slavery, we are still a country built from that institution and we still struggle with this legacy today.  Through this one example of protest and resistance I will try to treat the subject with the respect and care that is owed to the enslaved men and women who were forced to build the physical and cultural infrastructure of our nation.

The Creole Ship Uprising

Behavioral disobedience was the more common form of resistance that the enslaved engaged in to resist their condition and protest their captivity.  These acts ranged from workplace sabotage such as breaking tools and mismanaging tasks, and disregarding slave codes or laws by “running away” visiting friends and loved ones held elsewhere, congregating for religious or social activities, and selling excess goods or products at the market.  More drastic forms of resistance included fight, flight, and suicide.  Rebellion was a common and deadly occurrence on the slave ships, or Guineaman, used to transport the captives to colonial ports.  Rebellion, disease, and suicide contributed to the deadly reputation of the transatlantic slave trade.  Death and suicide, the most drastic and final escapes from enslavement, were associated by several African cultures (such as the Igbo people) and many despairing individuals with a return to their homes and families in Africa.  Violent revolt was not unheard of, but not endemic as the slaveholders feared.

1762 illustration of New Yorkers fighting a blaze.

In March and April of 1741 a series of ten fires popped up across the city in a period of just three weeks.  The number and frequency of the fires sparked the fear that there was a slave revolt in the works.  Conspirators and a plot were quickly discovered.  Justice was swift and disproportionately severe.  Over the course of the trials hundreds of people, overwhelmingly but not exclusively enslaved men, were imprisoned.  At the conclusion approximately seventeen enslaved were hung, thirteen burned at the stake, and seventy sold from the city compared to four whites hung and seven deported or banished.

An enslaved man being burned at the stake after New York Conspiracy of 1741

In the early spring 1741 New York City was shaken by its second major slave uprising (the first was in 1712).  That summer Cadwallader Colden received a letter from an anonymous New Englander voiced concerns that the 1741 Slave Conspiracy, similar to the Salem Witch trials as it was, would subject New York to mockery as it had Salem.  The two events are comparable, in hysteria but not intensity.  Fear of revolt was a plague to every slave holder in colonial North America, from the Caribbean sugar islands, to the southern plantation fields, and to the Middle and New England homes, workshops, and homesteads.

City Hall, site of the “Negro Plot” trials of 1741. Many of the suspects and accused were housed in cells beneath this building.

Was there ever a plot, or was it just a conspiracy?  According to Jill Lepore, “given the history of the city’s [increasingly oppressive] slave codes, and the confessions of the slaves themselves, much evidence points to a plot hatched on street corners and in markets, the forging of an Akan-influenced brotherhood… and a political order that encouraged individual acts of vengeance, of cursing whites and setting fires, skirmishes in the daily, unwinnable war of slavery.”  The plot itself, as it was discovered by the official investigations, went through several stages of development, from a band of conspirators plotting in John Hughson’s tavern to kill all the whites and overthrow the government and social order, to a revolt involving the majority of the enslaved population and some discontented whites, and, finally, a popish plot.  It is plausible that at least one of the fires was started by a “black arsonist” protesting against their enslavement.  They would have had every reason to, considering the increased restrictions on their movements, actions, and ability to defend themselves in court, each of which was severely limited or rendered nonexistent by law by 1741.

The plot discovered by New York Justice Daniel was extracted through torture and intimidation, and pieced together from questionable evidence.  Horsmanden relied heavily on the testimonies of the enslaved early in the investigation, but this “negro evidence” (as it was termed) held no credit on its own, however it was obtained.  To support the testimonies of the enslaved, Horsmanden relied on the attestations of Mary Burton, an Irish servant at Hughson’s tavern who was paid for her cooperation.  Fires kindled suspicion, gatherings of enslaved and white laborers in taverns for talk and celebrations of Whitsuntide, or Pinkster would have sparked fear among the white population of conspiracy and revolt.

Further Reading:

• Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South by Michael A. Gomez

• The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker

• Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 by Emma Christopher

• “The Tightening Vise: Slavery and Freedom in British New York” by Jill Lepore, from Slavery in New York edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris

• New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore