On the night of April 6, 1712, a group of enslaved Africans in New York City set fire to a building and attacked white colonists who rushed to the scene, killing nine and wounding several others. The revolt was instigated by African-born slaves who used their indigenous religious practices to organize resistance. In the aftermath, twenty-one rebels were executed, some by burning, and the colony enacted stricter slave codes that limited the movement and assembly of Black residents. The uprising marked one of the earliest large-scale slave revolts in Britain's North American colonies and revealed the deep tensions within the urban slave system.

The 1712 revolt and its brutal suppression became a cautionary tale in colonial writings and later abolitionist literature. The event appears in historical chronicles and was referenced by 19th-century African American poets and activists as evidence of Black resistance against oppression. The rebellion's memory helped shape the early American literary imagination of slave insurrection, influencing works like Lydia Maria Child's abolitionist fiction and the slave narratives that followed.