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 next day:  said that he had never been to the house of John Romme; acknowledged that he had received a stolen silver spoon, given to his wife, and sold it to one Van Dype, a silversmith; that he never knew John Ury, etc.  Knowing Mary Burton was brought forward,—­as she always was when the trials began to lag,—­and accused Kane.  He earnestly denied the accusation at first, but finally confessed that he was at Hughson’s in reference to the plot on two several occasions, but was induced to go there “by Corker, Coffin, and Fagan.”  After his tongue got limbered up, and his memory refreshed, he criminated Ury.  He implicated Hughson’s father and three brothers, Hughson’s mother-in-law, an old fortune-teller, as being parties to the plot as sworn “to burn, and kill;” that Ury christened some of the Negroes, and even had the temerity to attempt to proselyte him, Kane; that Ury asked him if he could read Latin, could he read English; to both questions he answered no; that the man Coffin read to him, and descanted upon the benefits of being a Roman Catholic; that they could forgive sins, and save him from hell; and that if he had not gone away from their company they might have seduced him to be a Catholic; that one Conolly, on Governor’s