Secondary Source
“Manhattan had the second largest urban slave population in North America, behind only Charleston, South Carolina, and this shaped the episode’s emotive environment. . . . Almost all Black males older than sixteen came in for questioning—from Mayor John Cruger’s Deptford to Chief Justice James DeLancey’s Othello to former alderman Johannes Roosevelt’s Quack. (Roosevelt was a forebear of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, Teddy and Eleanor.)
Some Blacks stubbornly said little or nothing. But over the weeks many talked, saying whatever they thought would spare them. Some of what was said explained the blazes. Quack admitted to starting the fire at the Fort, for example, enraged that Acting Governor George Clarke forbade Quack from visiting his wife, the enslaved cook at the governor’s house. Like most enslaved couples in the city, Quack and his wife lived in separate households as they were held by different slaveholders.
What officials called ‘confessions’ shocked Whites who had no notion of what Blacks felt and thought. Learning what Blacks did outside of working hours and, especially, what they did at night—gathering illegally, grumbling against slavery and their individual slaveholders, organizing crime, and doing their own deals to ease their lives as best they could—had Whites aghast. Prosecutors bundled the confessions into one grand conspiracy. That singular vision projected the city as a smoldering ruin, its valuables looted, its White men slaughtered, its White women ravished, and its enslaved people gleefully sailing away to French or Spanish arms.”
- Thomas J. Davis, Historian, “The Great Negro Plot of 1741,” 2021