Upon the
restoration of quiet, twenty of the prisoners were punished for arson.[52]
[Footnote 51: MS. transcript in the New York Public Library from the New
York _Gazette_, Mch. 18, 1734.]
[Footnote 52: E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, pp. 152, 153.]
In the Southern colonies there were no outbreaks in the seventeenth century
and but two discoveries of plots, it seems, both in Virginia. The first
of these, 1663, in which indented white servants and negro slaves in
Gloucester County were said to be jointly involved, was betrayed by one of
the servants. The colonial assembly showed its gratification not only by
freeing the informer and giving him five thousand pounds of tobacco but by
resolving in commemoration of "so transcendant a favour as the preserving
all we have from so utter ruin," "that the 13th. of September be annually
kept holy, being the day those villains intended to put the plot in
execution."[53] The other plot, of slaves alone, in the "Northern Neck" of
the colony in 1687, appears to have been of no more than local concern.[54]
The punishments meted out on either occasion are unknown.
[Footnote 53: Hening, _Virginia Statutes at Large_, II, 204.
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