[Footnote 50:  Ibid., pp. 370-372.]

In New Jersey in 1734 a slave at Raritan when jailed for drunkenness and insolence professed to reveal a plot for insurrection, whereupon he and a fellow slave were capitally convicted.  One of them escaped before execution, but the other was hanged.[51] In Pennsylvania as late as 1803 a negro plot at York was detected after nearly a dozen houses had been burnt and half as many attempts had been made to cause a general conflagration.  Many negroes were arrested; others outside made preparations to release them by force; and for several days a reign of terror prevailed.  Upon the restoration of quiet, twenty of the prisoners were punished for arson.[52]

[Footnote 51:  MS. transcript in the New York Public Library from the New York Gazette, Mch. 18, 1734.]

[Footnote 52:  E.R.  Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania, pp. 152, 153.]

In the Southern colonies there were no outbreaks in the seventeenth century and but two discoveries of plots, it seems, both in Virginia.  The first of these, 1663, in which indented white servants and negro slaves in Gloucester County were said to be jointly involved, was betrayed by one of the servants.  The colonial assembly showed its gratification not only by freeing the informer and giving him five thousand pounds of tobacco but by resolving in commemoration of “so transcendant a favour as the preserving all we have from so utter ruin,” “that the 13th. of September be annually kept holy, being the day those villains intended to put the plot in execution."[53] The other plot, of slaves alone, in the “Northern Neck” of the colony in 1687, appears to have been of no more than local concern.[54] The punishments meted out on either occasion are unknown.

[Footnote 53:  Hening, Virginia Statutes at Large, II, 204.]

[Footnote 54:  J.C.  Ballagh, History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902), p. 79.]

The eighteenth century, with its multiplication of slaves, saw somewhat more frequent plots in its early decades.  The discovery of one in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, in 1709 brought thirty-nine lashes to each of three slaves and fifty lashes to a free negro found to be cognizant, and presumably more drastic punishments to two other slaves who were held as ringleaders to await the governor’s order.  Still another slave who at least for the time being escaped the clutches of the law was proclaimed an outlaw.[55] The discovery of another plot in Gloucester and Middlesex Counties of the same colony in 1723 prompted the assembly to provide for the deportation to the West Indies of seven slave participants.[56]

[Footnote 55:  Calendar of Virginia State Papers, I, 129, 130.]

[Footnote 56:  Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1712-1726, p. 36.]