In the Northern colonies the only signal disturbances were those of 1712 and 1741 at New York, both of which were more notable for the frenzy of the public than for the formidableness of the menace.  Anxiety had been recurrent among the whites, particularly since the founding of a mission school by Elias Neau in 1704 as an agent of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.  The plot was brewed by some Coromantee and Paw Paw negroes who had procured the services of a conjuror to make them invulnerable; and it may have been joined by several Spanish or Portuguese Indians or mestizoes who had been captured at sea and unwarrantably, as they contended, reduced to slavery.  The rebels to the number of twenty-three provided themselves with guns, hatchets, knives and swords, and chose the dark of the moon in the small hours of an April night to set a house afire and slaughter the citizens as they flocked thither.  But their gunfire caused the governor to send soldiers from the Battery with such speed that only nine whites had been killed and several others wounded when the plotters were routed.  Six of these killed themselves to escape capture; but when the woods were beaten and the town searched next day and an emergency court sat upon the cases, more captives were capitally sentenced than the whole conspiracy had comprised.  The prosecuting officer, indeed, hounded one of the prisoners through three trials, to win a final conviction after two acquittals.  The maxim that no one may twice be put in jeopardy for the same offense evidently did not apply to slaves in that colony.  Of those convicted one was broken on the wheel, another hanged alive in chains; nineteen more were executed on the gallows or at the stake, one of these being sentenced “to be burned with a slow fire, that he may continue in torment for eight or ten hours and continue burning in said fire until he be dead and consumed to ashes”; and several others were saved only by the royal governor’s reprieve and the queen’s eventual pardon.  Such animosity was exhibited by the citizens toward the “catechetical school” that for some time its teacher hardly dared show himself on the streets.  The furor gradually subsided, however, and Mr. Neau continued his work for a dozen years longer, and others carried it on after his death.[47]

[Footnote 47:  E.B.  O’Callaghan ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, V, 341, 342, 346, 356, 357, 371; New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, XXI, 162, 163; New Orleans Daily Delta, April 1, 1849; J.A.  Doyle, English Colonies in America (New York, 1907), V, pp. 258, 259.]