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THE GREEN BAG
THE NEW YORK NEGRO PLOT OF 1741 BY HENRY H. INGERSOLL IT was more than three decades after Joan of Arc had been cruelly and horribly burned at the stake in the public square of Rouen that a new trial was granted and formally -conducted, resulting in the com plete acquittal and triumphant rehabilita tion of the innocent Maid of Orleans. And three centuries later three years of ceaseless and chivalric struggle with the clerical fpower of France brought to Voltaire the noblest triumph (tho* empty it seems to us) of his long and active life — the reversal and erasure of the capital sentence of John Calas by the Parliament of Toulouse, full forty months after the body of the victim had been barbarously broken on the wheel for the alleged murder of his own son. This French mode of administering be lated justice, prevalent even to our day, as exemplified in the final acquittal of Drey fus, finds counterpart in Anglo-Saxon coun tries by the appeal to history for vindica tion (such as Robert Emmet made), and the historical reversal of judicial sentence by a later generation or century. Often, too, without the appeal, history assumes jurisdiction and summarily reviews and reverses legal judgments pronounced after due trial and conviction by the lawfully constituted authorities. The Salem witch persecution affords our best-known illustration of this, and the hanging of Mrs. Surratt the most recent in American history. Another one of unique interest, though rarely mentioned and not commonly known, is the' great "Negro Plot" of New York of 1740-41, of which and the judicial proceedings of the time, Mr. Ellis in his "History of Our Country," pronounces the following summary judg ment: "Although there was not the slightest evidence against the negroes, a panic
ensued, during which four white people and eighteen negroes were hanged, and thirteen of the latter burned to death at the stake." Thus by a single paragraph and without the semblance of judicial proceeding this historian summarily reviews and reverses regular court judgments and acquits thirty-three convicts, black and white, .one hundred and sixty years after their exe cution, and gives them en bloc and un named, historical status as martyrs to "popular prejudice and senseless panic." The historian's judgment may be right. Quien sabe? But this acquittal of the felons implies conviction of the city and its colonial tribunals of wholesale judicial murder; and makes a case of interest to twentieth century lawyers, warranting more than casual notice. Hildreth and Roberts and Lodge had previously, though in more moderate terms and guarded phrases, expressed a like opinion of the injustice of the judgments and execution, the latter comparing it with the Salem, witch-craft frenzy of fifty years earlier date; while Woodrow Wilson has more cautiously left his readers to decide for themselves the merits of the case upon a necessarily general and inadequate ac count of the six months of investigation and inquiry into the plot and all its details. Mere chance has brought me a copy of a contemporary publication (393 pp.) of all the gruesome incidents of this colonial episode, from which the reader is warranted in pronouncing the judgment of Master Ellis, not only summary, but rash and reckless, for there is much evidence, cir cumstantial and confessional, which, if credited, abundantly supports the verdict of the juries and the "observation" of the judicial author of the volume in his "Con clusion'": "That a plot there was, and as to the
