Negro slavery in a mild form prevailed in these early years in New York.  The cruel and accursed system had been early introduced into the colony.  Most of the slaves were domestic servants, very few being employed in the fields.  They were treated with personal kindness.  Still they were bondmen, deprived of liberty, of fair wages, and of any chance of rising in the world.  Such men cannot, by any possibility, be contented with their lot.  Mr. William L. Stone, in his very interesting History of New York, writes: 

“As far back as 1628, slaves constituted a portion of the population of New Amsterdam; and to such an extent had the traffic in them reached that, in 1709, a slave market was erected at the foot of Wall street, where all negroes who were to be hired or sold, stood in readiness for bidders.  Their introduction into the colony was hastened by the colonial establishment of the Dutch in Brazil and upon the coast of Guinea, and also by the capture of Spanish and Portuguese prizes with Africans on board.

“Several outbreaks had already happened among the negroes of New Amsterdam; and the whites lived in constant anticipation of trouble and danger from them.  Rumors of an intended insurrection real or imaginary, would circulate, as in the negro plot of 1712, and the whole city be thrown into a state of alarm.  Whether there was any real danger on these occasions, cannot now be known.  But the result was always the same.  The slaves always suffered, many dying by the fagot or the gallows.”

In the year 1741, a terrible panic agitated the whole city in apprehension of an insurrection of the slaves.  The most cruel laws had been passed to hold them firmly in bondage.  The city then contained ten thousand inhabitants, two thousand of whom were slaves.  If three of these, “black seed of Cain,” were found together, they were liable to be punished by forty lashes on the bare back.  The same punishment was inflicted upon a slave found walking with a club, outside of his master’s grounds without a permit.  Two justices could inflict any punishment, except amputation or death, upon any slave who should make an assault upon a Christian or a Jew.

A calaboose or jail for slaves stood on the Park Common.  Many of the leading merchants in New York were engaged in the slave trade.  Several fires had taken place, which led to the suspicion that the slaves had formed a plot to burn the city and massacre the inhabitants.  The panic was such that the community seemed bereft of reason.  A poor, weak, half-crazed servant-girl, Mary Burton, in a sailor’s boarding house, testified, after much importunity, that she had overheard some negroes conferring respecting setting the town on fire.

At first she confined her accusations to the blacks.  Then she began to criminate white people, bringing charges against her landlord, his wife and other white persons in the household.  In a History of this strange affair written at the time, by Daniel Horsmanden, one of the Justices of the Supreme Court, we read,