ficult to find room for them, nor could we
see any likelihood of stopping the impeachments." The Negroes turned
to accusing white persons, and seven or eight were arrested. The
sanitary condition of the prison now became a subject of grave
concern. The judges and lawyers consulted together, and agreed to
pardon some of the prisoners to make room in the jail. They also
thought it prudent to lump the confessions, and thereby facilitate
their work; but the confessions went on, and the jail filled up again.

The Spanish Negroes taken by an English privateer, and adjudged to
slavery by the admiralty court, were now taken up, tried, convicted,
and sentenced to be hung. Five others received sentence the same day.

The bloody work went on. The poor Negroes in the jail, in a state of
morbid desperation, turned upon each other the blistering tongue of
accusation. They knew that they were accusing each other
innocently,--as many confessed afterwards,--but this was the last
straw that these sinking people could see to catch at, and this they
did involuntarily. "Victims were required; and those who brought them
to the altar of Moloch, purchased their own safety, or, at least,
their lives."

On the 2d of July, one Will was produced before Chief-Justice James
DeLancy. He plead guilty, and was sentenced to be burnt to death on
the 4th of July. On the 6th of July, eleven plead guilty. One Dundee
implicates Dr. Hamilton with Hughson in giving Negroes rum and
swearing them to the plot. A white man by the name of William Nuill
deposed that a Negro--belonging to Edward Kelly, a butcher--named
London swore by God that if he should be arrested and cast into the
jail, he would hang or burn all the Negroes in New York, guilty or not
guilty. On this same day five Negroes were hanged. One of them was
"hung in chains" upon the same gibbet with Hughson. And the Christian
historian says "the town was amused" on account of a report that
Hughson had turned black and the Negro white! The vulgar and sickening
description of the condition of the bodies, in which Mr. Horsemanden
took evident relish, we withhold from the reader. It was rumored that
a Negro doctor had administered poison to the convicts, and hence the
change in the bodies after death.

In addition to the burning of the Negro Will, on the 4th of July, was
the sensation created by his accusing two white soldiers, Kane and
Kelly, with complicity in the conspiracy. Kane was examined the nex