Knowledge Of Self
The Code of a Master [Knowledge the Understanding] there is only 360. There is a balance between dark and light, Power and restraint, and strength and knowledge. There is Power in the refined light. Victory is only found in bringing the culture into freedom. Power and strength are exercised through knowledge and wisdom to bring about an understanding seed that is also the star. To get back in balance, one must strike hard and fast. One must use Power to break the opponent. Power requires restraint to bring back harmony. Strike too hard, and chaos is born. Knowledge teaches the Power to keep balanced Equality.
In 1741, English colonists in New York City felt anxious. They worried about Spanish and French plans to gain control of North America. They felt threatened by a recent influx of Irish immigrants, whose Catholicism might incline them to accept jobs as Spanish spies. And, above all, they feared that the city's growing slave population, now numbering about 20% of the 11,000 residents of Manhattan and increasingly competing with white tradespeople for jobs, might revolt. When a series of thirteen fires broke out in March and April of 1741, English colonists suspected a Negro plot, perhaps one involving poor whites. As in Salem a half-century earlier, hysteria spread across colonial America, and soon New York City's jails were filled to overflowing. In the end, despite grave questions about the contours of the suspected conspiracy, thirty-four defendants were executed. Thirteen black men were burned at the stake, and seventeen more were hanged. In addition, four alleged white ringleaders--two men and two women--made trips to New York City's gallows.
On March 18, 1741, as the coldest New York winter anyone could remember neared its end, smoke began rising from the roof of Lieutenant Governor Clarke's mansion inside the stone walls of Fort George, the hilltop fort built in 1626 along the city's harbor that stood as the city's principal protection from foreign invaders. The city's alarm bell rang.
Two horse-drawn wagons carrying fire engines set off toward the fort, and a brigade formed in the Fort Garden to pass water buckets along to fight the fire. The fire, however, continued to spread. Flames leaped from the Lieutenant Governor's mansion to nearby barracks and a chapel, and then outside the fort, to the Secretary's Office, where an archive of important documents was housed. Ultimately, it wasn't the fire engines or the bucket brigade that saved the city from an even more devastating fire, but rather a timely rain. Nearly everyone initially assumed that the Fort George fire was an accident, perhaps caused by sparks from a fire pot carried by a plumber for soldering.
A week later, another fire broke out, this one belonging to a prominent sea captain. Then, again, exactly seven days later, a third fire. A dockside warehouse burned to the ground, along with everything in it. Suspicions mounted: three fires on three consecutive Wednesdays? New Yorkers began talking about arson.
The pace of fires picked up. Three days after the warehouse fire, a cow stable began burning in the East Ward and, even as that fire was being put out, there was "a second cry of fire," this one for a house on the city's West Side.
The following day, after a trail of coals was found leading from a house to a nearby haystack, nobody believed the rash of fires was an accident. On Monday, April 6, four new fires broke out. In the case of one of the fires, a disgruntled "Spanish Negro" (one of a group of men seized by the English after an attack on a Spanish ship, and then auctioned off as enslaved people in New York) came under strong suspicion. Soon, the cry of "Take up the Spanish Negroes!" reverberated from street to street.
Vigilantes soon succeeded in rounding up five "Spanish Negroes" and hauling them down to City Hall. The interrogation had barely begun when the fire alarm rang again, this time to signal a fire at another warehouse. A Dutch firefighter spotted an enslaved Black person named Cuffee fleeing the scene. As a mob described as "upwards of a thousand men" chased Cuffee, a new chant went up in the streets of New York City: "The Negroes are rising!" The roundup of Black people continued with renewed vigor. Many Negroes, unfortunate enough to be out on the streets of New York, found themselves soon sitting in jail under suspicion of arson.
In City Hall, with smoke visible from the windows, Recorder Daniel Horsmanden and city magistrates questioned the Spanish Negroes and the captured enslaved people. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Governor Clarke ordered the militia to patrol the city from dusk to dawn, a watch that would continue for the next three months.
Five days later, the Common Council posted notice of a 100-pound reward and a pardon for anyone who would identify persons "concerned in setting fire to any dwelling house or storehouse." The Council also voted to dispatch search parties to virtually all buildings in the city and to stop anyone carrying "bags or bundles." The search turned up little of value to the investigation.