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The Common Council set curfews on enslaved adults. It imposed penalties on masters and mistresses who failed to properly govern their slaves. The colony sought to keep cash and weapons out of the hands of slaves. Colonists were prohibited from privately trading or contracting with enslaved people. Africans were forbidden from gathering in groups greater than three. Legislators also displayed a growing mistrust of free black people, whom they described as a constant source of danger. The black population continued to grow. A decade after Jasper Farmar’s first Africa voyage there were more than two thousand people of African descent in Manhattan, a fifth of the city’s population. 17
    On a Sunday early in February 1741, several enslaved black men pitched pennies in Captain Jasper Farmar’s yard. Jack (Farmar)organized the game, but, according to later testimony, it was a ruse that Kingston (unknown), Peter (Tudor), York (Debrosse), Tom (Bradt), Oronoko (Marston), and their partners used to coordinate one branch of a conspiracy that shocked New York City. Philip (Duyckink) admitted to being there but swore that he had heard no talk of revolt or of “the Long-Island negroes coming over to assist the New-York negroes in killing the white people.” Tom testified that Jack had forced him into the plot. Jack confessed to gambling but denied the conspiracy. Jasper Farmar undoubtedly was surprised to discover that his slave and his house were at the center of a massive intrigue. A decade after his first Africa voyage, Captain Farmar lived comfortably on Manhattan island. He had brought hundreds of enslaved Africans into the New York market in less than three years, and he owned several human beings. 18
    On March 18 a fire burned the roof of the governor’s residence in Fort George. Exactly one week later, the roof of a house in the southwest district of the city burned. On April 1, another week later, a fire destroyed Winant Van Zant’s warehouse on the east side of the city. On Saturday, April 4, townspeople rushed to a fire in a cow stable on the west side of town. Just as they brought it under control, they were called to a blaze in the loft of Ben Thomas’s house. The following morning someone found coals under a haystack near Joseph Murray’s coach house on Broadway. On Monday morning a fire erupted in the chimney of a house at Fort Garden. At noon residents saved a house near the Fly Market from burning. That afternoon flames shot up the side of one of Adolph Philipse’s storehouses. 19
    Scholars have vigorously debated the existence of this plot. Rivalries and lingering grievances among the elite influenced the events. Justice Daniel Horsmanden, who published the only complete account of the trials, seized upon the alleged conspiracy to raise his political profile. White people’s insecurities and vulnerabilities predisposed them to fear and see a conspiracy in the events of March and April. Residents of the city had suffered food shortages following a severe winter, depressed commerce, and a drain on manpower and resources due to the Anglo-Spanish War in the Caribbean. A succession of revolts and conspiracies heightened their fears. Many New Yorkers remembered the uprising of1712, and authorities investigated another plot less than a decade later. In the 1730s slaves rebelled in St. John’s and Jamaica. In 1734 enslaved people in Somerset County, New Jersey, plotted to rise up against their owners. They planned to cut the throats of the white men and take horses and supplies for an escape to Indian country. New Yorkers also followed the deadly revolts in Antigua in 1736 and South Carolina in 1739. 20
    â€œThere yet continues a great Suspicion of the Negroes, as well as of other bad People lurking about this Town, which causes the Military Watch to be continued here,” warned Lieutenant Governor George Clarke, who was convinced that “the late Fires in this City were