Roughly one fifth of New York City's…
February 1788 CE
The construction of New York City, under both the Dutch and the English, had been accomplished largely with slave labor.
Due to their low social standing, the bodies of slaves can only be buried outside the city limits.
Most often they are interred in a small number of plots north of Chambers Street, across the street from the Pauper's Cemetery, often with several bodies to a grave, in a site known as the "Negroes Burying Ground", today marked by the African Burial Ground National Monument.
Both cemeteries are located close to Columbia College, which houses the city's only school of medicine.
Due to taboos associated with the violation of corpses, procuring cadavers for study is difficult, and many students and doctors exhume bodies from the nearby graveyards due to the socially marginalized status of their occupants.
“Resurrection”, as body-snatching or grave-robbing is called, is the cheapest, surest way to obtain the remains of the newly deceased, especially in the winter when bodies decay at a slower rate.
Because there is, at this time, no known method of preserving an entire corpse, thefts are performed hastily, often in winter to slow the rate of decomposition.
In the winter of 1788, the number of corpses being exhumed by students had increased substantially.
The activities of medical students and physicians, who are known colloquially as Resurrectionists in the Black cemetery, had been noticed by a group of freedmen who, on February 3rd, petition the Common Council to take action against it.
The petition is largely ignored, and no effort is made to stop the unlicensed exhumations.
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