Conspiracy trials race and class

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Conspiracy: The act of secretly planning to do something that is harmful or illegal (Merriam-Webster). In the winter of 1741, a robbery and a rash of fires broke out in New York City; they were the beginning of what would become known as, “The New York Conspiracy Trials.” The trials, presided over by three Supreme Court Justices, Chief Justice James DeLancey, Second Justice Frederick Philipse and Third Justice Daniel Horsmanden, who three years after the trials published his journals from the court proceedings, so that, as he said, people would stop trying to convince themselves that there had been no conspiracy at all (Zabin 5).
New York City, in the first half of the eighteenth century, was a growing seaport city, with people of many walks of life, comingling to create one of the most important trade cities in colonial America. With such a diverse representation of people living and working relatively close to one another, extenuating circumstances, fears, based on race and biases against the lower classes, many of its citizens were manipulated into a belief that an uprising was found out and suppressed.
New York City in colonial America was a very unique city, unlike the south, were large lavished plantations adorned the country side and classes did not mingle with each other, New York City’s inhabitants lived and worked relatively close to one another, having many different races and classes of people frequent the same establishments and interact with each other on a regular basis. Same as in modern times, “Taverns were ordinary and necessary elements of every port city. Drinking establishments could be anything from ornate two-story houses, offering drink in silver tankards to such esteemed customers as the governor and ...

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...em in place, one which was hard to see and even harder to control. Unlike slavery in the south, slaves in New York worked hand in hand with their masters in mixed-race shops. They had the ability leave the home to run errands’, to meet at local taverns to discuss current events or for entertainment. Like other cities in colonial America, elite whites controlled society through the use of fear, brute force and economic superiority, though better off than slaves, indentured servants where still subjected to the same treatment as slaves, though only temporarily.

Works Cited

Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. n.d. Web. 20 April 2014. .
Zabin, Serena R. The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741, Daniel Horsmanden's Journal of the Proceedings with Related Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. Book.

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