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On the night of April 7, 1712, 23 black slaves met in an orchard on Maiden Lane in Manhattan. They had hatchets, guns and knives, and, according to historian Edward Ellis, they believed that “by launching a dramatic revolt, they [would] incite other slaves and massacre all the white people in town.”
Conditions for the slaves of this city were wretched. They were beaten and starved. Many lived under the most primitive conditions. The meeting on Maiden Lane was the culmination of years of hardship.
The assembled slaves torched several houses of white landowners. Then they turned on the white people who came rushing out of their homes, They shot and killed nine of the white slave holders.
On the night of April 7th, 23 black men set out in the night on Maiden Lane. They torched the house of a slave owner, and stabbed the fleeing victims of the fire. Over the course of the night they killed eight white people, and wounded a dozen more. The governor sounded a cannon to raise a militia, but the rebels scattered to the woods. They were all captured the next morning, except for six, who committed suicide rather than face trial.
Suicide may have been prudent, as the executions were the most grisly form of torture–slowly being burned alive, dragged through town by horses, suspended by chains until death by dehydration, or mutilated on “the wheel,” a process by which a man is rotated on a wheel and slammed with a sledgehammer on every part of his body. All 21 of the executed, which included four alleged co-conspirators, had their heads left on stakes in the middle of town for weeks afterwards.