• About this Book
• About the Author
• Read an Excerpt
• Author Q&A

Written by Jill Lepore

• Format: Hardcover, 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf
• On Sale: August 23, 2005
• Price: $26.95
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-4029-2 (1-4000-4029-9)

about this book

A gripping tale and groundbreaking investigation of a mysterious, and largely forgotten, eighteenth-century slave plot to destroy New York City.

Over a few weeks in 1741, ten fires blazed across Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw more evidence of a slave uprising. Tried and convicted before the colony’s Supreme Court, thirteen black men were burned at the stake and seventeen were hanged. Four whites, the alleged ringleaders of the plot, were also hanged, and seven more were pardoned on condition that they never set foot in New York again. More than one hundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath City Hall, where many were forced to confess and name names, sending still more men to the gallows and to the stake.

In a narrative rich with period detail and vivid description, Jill Lepore pieces together the events and the thinking that led white New Yorkers to make “bonfires of the Negroes.” She reconstructs the harsh past of a city that slavery built—and almost destroyed. She explores the social and political climate of the 1730s and ’40s and examines the nature and tenor of the interactions between slaves and their masters. She shows too that the 1741 conspiracy can be understood only alongside a more famous episode from the city’s past: the 1735 trial of the printer John Peter Zenger. And, weighing both new and old evidence, she makes clear how the threat of black rebellion made white political pluralism palatable.

Lucid, probing, captivatingly written, New York Burning is a revelatory study of the ways in which slavery both destabilized and created American politics.

Winner of the 2005 New York City Book Awards Book of the Year


“This is historical story-telling at its best—a powerful narrative built on scrupulous and creative research. Lepore unravels two mysteries in New York Burning: the slave plot and the documentary tangle around it. In the process she helps us understand why stories matter and how history can illuminate the present as well as the past. Readers will be moved by the terror of that New York winter and the blaze of her prose.” —Laurel Ulrich, author of The Age of Homespun, Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth

“Deep research and shrewd analysis undergird this tour de force of historical reconstruction.  The result is an absolute revelation of the life and times of early New York, including its darkest corners.  And something more... for now “the New York slave conspiracy” of 1741 takes its own place in our long and shameful national tradition of scapegoating—partway between the Salem witch-hunt in the 17th century and the torture scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in the 21st.” —John Demos, author of The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

“Jill Lepore jolts the reader: she captivatingly brings a colonial town to life—as the scene of a racial horror story. The enslaved seek dignity, but many pay on the gallows and at the stake for their white neighbors’ paranoia and ambition. Lepore's drama unfolds not in the South, but in New York City in 1741, reminding us that America's tortured racial past shadows us all.” —Melvin Patrick Ely, author of Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War

“Jill Lepore’s meticulous reconstruction casts new light on the well-known but still mysterious slave conspiracy of 1741 in New York City. A careful examination of the political and social context, coupled with new attention to the specific individuals involved, leads her to identify not one but four separate ‘conspiracies’ of varying degrees of likelihood. A fascinating study that will intrigue everyone interested in Early American history.“ —Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692