There were fires sweeping across New York City in the spring and summer of 1741. The first was at Fort George in Manhattan.The fire “supposedly began on the roof of the governor’s house and spread from there,” writes historian Thomas J. Davis, “consuming, in approximately an hour and a quarter, much of Fort George, the official seat of royal government.”
The fires were a mystery with no answer in sight. That is, until the tenth fire. Someone reported they’d seen a person—reportedly an enslaved man named Quack (some sources name him as Quaco)—leaving the scene of that fire. A white woman also claimed that she’d heard him saying, “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, a little, damn it, by-and-by.”
And that’s when the rumors began that this was the beginning of a nefarious plot. As historian Andy Doolen writes, the city concluded that “the puzzling fires were really opening salvos in a massive slave insurrection” and quickly leapt into action. According to Davis, officials heard that “many of the more than 2,000 slaves, and some other persons, had conspired to burn down the town and to murder most of its approximately 9,000 white inhabitants.”
According to Doolen, the state was also quick to punish the alleged conspirators. Thirty slaves and four white ringleaders were executed, and the state also “publicly flogged 50 slaves, and transported over 70 more to the Caribbean slave markets, never to return.”
But the question still lingers—was the plot even real?
This was a pivotal time in the city’s history. Historian Richard E. Bond explains the city was becoming a booming metropolis. Because of trans-Atlantic and intercolonial trade, shipping and related labor was a huge industry. By 1741, the population was around 11,000, and “an additional twenty thousand men and women lived within the agricultural hinterland that supplemented this burgeoning town.”
There was also an active slave trade that stretched throughout the city and into the Hudson River Valley, Long Island, and New Jersey. Once purchased and in their new homes, enslaved New Yorkers were required to travel the city in the possession of a travel pass from their enslavers. With these passes (and occasionally without), they were able to run errands, see friends, work, and attend religious services. All of this meant that seeing Black people on the streets at any time of day wasn’t unusual.