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A review by savaging
New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore
4.0
This is a devastating book about slavery, race, and the law. Lepore looks at one event in New York City's history: a rash of fires in 1741, the legal conclusion that it was a plot by enslaved people to burn down the city, and the subsequent imprisonments, hangings, and burnings of the people convicted.
Lepore really gets into the details to try to understand what happened, which can at times feel tedious (there are a lot of internal party politics going on that surely are important to understanding the context for the legal system but simply can't keep my attention). But as I kept reading, the story told by the prosecutors dissolved. I expected to read between the lines to cheer on the "criminal element" here, but I didn't expect this horrifying possibility: the "conspiracy" could have just been a witch hunt spurred by the bad conscience of slave owners.
The only way for accused people to get free (or even to get a death by hanging instead of death by burning) was to give the prosecutors what they wanted, name names in a wider and more outlandish conspiracy. Like the Salem witch trials, the whole thing only ended when members of the owning class started to be named as conspirators as well.
Either way, makes you wish the place really had all burned down.
Reading this made me think a lot about the law and the use of law's authority. How frequently it's twisted to provide a neutral, objective-seeming authority to the worst injustices. Just a total nightmare.
Lepore really gets into the details to try to understand what happened, which can at times feel tedious (there are a lot of internal party politics going on that surely are important to understanding the context for the legal system but simply can't keep my attention). But as I kept reading, the story told by the prosecutors dissolved. I expected to read between the lines to cheer on the "criminal element" here, but I didn't expect this horrifying possibility: the "conspiracy" could have just been a witch hunt spurred by the bad conscience of slave owners.
The only way for accused people to get free (or even to get a death by hanging instead of death by burning) was to give the prosecutors what they wanted, name names in a wider and more outlandish conspiracy. Like the Salem witch trials, the whole thing only ended when members of the owning class started to be named as conspirators as well.
Either way, makes you wish the place really had all burned down.
Reading this made me think a lot about the law and the use of law's authority. How frequently it's twisted to provide a neutral, objective-seeming authority to the worst injustices. Just a total nightmare.