In all, 26 homes were lost, and only a heavy rain and sleet storm kept the entire city from burning. The fire spread quickly, and by the time it burned out the next morning, most of the block bordered by Broadway, Maiden Lane, and James and State streets was destroyed. On the night of the 17th, Bet and Dean took live coals from the Douw house, placed them in a lantern, and accompanied Pomp to the Gansevoort stable, where Pomp put the coals in a pile of hay. Sanders had a jeweler friend who offered Pomp a watch if he set fire to Gansevoort’s house and store, on Market Street (now Broadway) between State Street and Maiden Lane. His whole mind seemed to have been centered in that direction, and the unexpected bursting of his high hopes and expectations, caused him to become a viper and to return the sting.” This, as it might naturally be supposed, came with crushing weight upon the feelings of a young man, proud in spirit and exalted in his future expectation. Munsell writes, “Tradition asserts that a young man named Sanders, residing in Schenectady, had been paying marked attention to the only daughter of Leonard Gansevoort, and that, from a just, real, or imaginary cause, he had either been jilted by that young lady, or been quietly informed by her father, that his visits to his house were unsolicited and very annoying. Pomp told the girls that two white men had “a grudge” against a prominent Albany merchant named Leonard Gansevoort. Van Rensselaer and Dinah, or Dean, property of Volkert Douw. On that date, Pompey (also known as Pomp), a slave belonging to the estate of Matthew Visscher, met two teenage slave girls: Bet, owned by Philip S. North Pearl Street Albany in the 1800s | Wikimedia Commons | Photo by James Eights Pomp’s circumstanceĪccording to a 1977 article in the Journal of Black Studies, the sparks for the fire were ignited on November 14. Nevertheless, when the fire burned out and justice - such as it was - was served, three slaves were hanged. But the Albany fire seems not to have been an act of insurrection so much as a mercenary act of vengeance. A large insurrection in 1792 in what is now Haiti had many Americans worried. “Most were house servants.” Slave revolts were much in the news in the 1790s. “This wasn’t a plantation economy, but urban slaves couldn’t move around,” says Tony Opalka, the Albany city historian. According to the 1790 census, the city of Albany had a population of about 3,500, of which 572 were slaves and 26 were “free persons of color.” Although slaves in the North tended to have more freedom than in the South, their lives were still harsh. It is an unfortunate truth that slavery was both common and legal in the North until the early 1800s. It is, however, even more historic for another reason: It was set by three slaves. The 1793 conflagration was the first big fire recorded in Albany, which in itself makes it noteworthy. Cities from San Francisco to Chicago to London burned to the ground, victims of highly flammable building materials and lack of firefighting equipment and know-how. The cry of fire was perhaps the most frightening sound for any city dweller to hear throughout most of urban history. So begins the recounting of Albany’s worst fire by historian Joel Munsell in his 1860s Collections on the History of Albany. The greater portion of the then quiet church-going people of the day had retired to rest, and were slumbering upon their pillows, when they were awakened by the alarming cry of fire.” “Sunday, the 17th of November 1793, was a day long remembered by the inhabitants of this city, and the few who still linger among us retain a vivid recollection of the scenes enacted during that night. 1789 etching of Dutch rowhouses in Albany | Library of Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Struggles for abolition in the North, historic legal proceedings, and tragedy surround this 1793 fire in Albany, New York’s capital.
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