“Please note that this work is very preliminary and in very rough form. It forms the
basis for a talk on aspects of Jamaica rather than being a polished text. Please bear
this in mind when reading the paper." T.B
POWER, AUTHORITY AND AGENCY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CARIBBEAN
For a long time, I have been dissatisfied with the overwhelming tendency
within studies of slavery to place all slave behaviour and all master actions within the
framework of slave resistance. It is not so much that I do not believe that slaves did
not resist slavery – they obviously did, in both small and large ways, as the large
literature shaped within the paradigm of slave resistance has shown over and over
again, nor that slave resistance is not an important topic of study, both for
understanding slaves and for understanding the world in which the objects of slave
resistance, white masters, operated. The problem, however, is that viewing slavery
almost solely through the prism of slave resistance – which I would argue is a very
strong theme in slavery studies – obscures as much as it illuminates. The current
historiography of slavery persists in seeing slaves either as victims of oppression or as
determined rebels whose “every willed response … could be interpreted as
resistance.” But as the author of this statement, David Barry Gaspar, adds, “such
responses could also be interpreted as adaptation.” Moreover, we may know that
slaves performed acts that intentionally and systematically hampered the plantation
system on a day-to-day basis, but it is difficult to distinguish between acts that were
active examples of nonacceptance of the slave system and acts that signified
individual failings or criminality. If everything that did not directly aid planter
oppression of slaves can be seen as resistance, then, as Michel-Ralph Trouillet
laments, it is hard to know whether resistance “stands for an empirical generalisation,
an analytical category, or a vague yet fashionable label for unrelated situations.1
In my recent book on the life, time and diaries of an eighteenth century slave
overseer called Thomas Thistlewood I struggled with, but did not escape, what I see
as the constraints of always seeing slavery within the paradigm of slave resistance,
with slaves as either heroes or as victims but as nothing else besides these two
conditions. I did make some attempt, in a chapter on slave women, to try and think
differently about slavery and slave resistance by employing the strategies enunciated
by Michel de Certeau in fascinating work on how to examine difference and
disagreement in ordinary life published in the early 1980s. De Certeau theorised
differences between strategies of resistance and strategies of opposition. He argued
that resistance is only possible when the dominated group or dominated individuals
act outside of the system of domination that encloses them. Resistance requires an
“elsewhere” from which the system may be perceived But slaves’ struggle against
domination occurred in everyday life, including the domain of permissible activities.
These everyday practices of resistance interrupted and defined the constraints of life
under slavery and exploited openings in the system for the benefit of slaves. They
took place, however, by necessity within the system, on ground defined by the
controllers of slavery, and were undertaken without any hope of ultimate success. The
tactics of slaves in everyday practice (and we can define a tactic as “a calculated
action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority,
then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of the tactic is
David Barry Gaspar, “Working the System: Antigua Slaves and Their Struggle to Live,” Slavery and
Abolition, 13 (1992), 134-35; Michel-Ralph Trouillot, “In the Shadow of the West: Power, Resistance,
and Creolization in the making of the Caribbean Region,” in Wim Hoogbergen, ed., Born out of
Resistance: On Caribbean Cultural Creativity (Utrecht, Netherlands: ISOR-Publications, 1995), 9.
1
the space of the other.”) involved exploiting “the gaps which the particular
combination of circumstances open in the control of the propriety power,” but the
small victories that resulted from these internal manipulations of the established order
were ephemeral since slaves had no space in which they could maintain what they had
won. Theorising everyday practices that disrupted slavery as opposition rather than
resistance allows us to acknowledge the strength of masters’ domination and
recognise that it was nearly impossible for slaves hoping to survive under slavery to
break down that dominance. Forms of power determine the practices that are possible
within a given field of action. In eighteenth century Jamaica, as I hoped I showed,
vast asymmetries of power existed, with masters having a large preponderance of
power, meaning that their dominance was sufficiently powerful except at moments of
extreme disrupture, such as in the middle of slave rebellion, that the weapons used
against their masters were the tools and tactics of people excluded from the locus of
the “political proper.”2
What I was trying to understand, if only dimly, is how we can look at slaves
such as Thistlewood’s long-term mistress, Phibbah, and see them as resisting slavery
when they seem to be collaborating or accommodating with whites, indeed even
assisting them in their strategies of dominance over slaves. I wanted to argue that the
practical impossibility of rebellion, given master control of the sources of power and
their ready willingness to exercise violent power on slaves who transgressed made
questions of how much agency slaves possessed rather nebulous. Slaves, in effect, had
hardly any agency with which they could confront masters in any direct confrontation.
Instead, they had to gain what they wanted in indirect means, through negotiation and
through compromise with whites in ways that provided whites with some meaning in
Michel de Certeau, “On the Oppositional Tactics of Everyday Life,” Social Text, 3 (1980), 3-43,
idem, The Practices of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 38.
2
recompense for slaves achieving their ambitions. The odds were so stacked in favour
of masters that slave actions did not constitute resistance in any real sense. They may
have opposed masters’ policies and battled, sometimes successfully, to counter
actions and customs they considered unfair or undesirable, but they had no chance of
overturning the system, save through violent revolution, which was risky to try and
devastating if it failed, as it invariably did. Slave “resistance” therefore, I argue,
needed to be conceptually rethought as “opposition” as de Certeau envisaged
“opposition”. That opposition can be defined as internal manipulation of the
established order that disrupted but did not threaten or transform the system within
which slaves were trapped.
Yet as should be plain from the last few sentences, my distaste for certain
aspects of how historians view resistance and their indifference to the realities of
power relations on slave plantations does not mean that I was able to escape the
conceptual prison of viewing all slave action through the prism of slave resistance. I
would hope that I was reasonably sensitive to the constraints and possibilities that
slaves faced when contemplating resisting slavery and hope, moreover, that my work
does not suggest that I believe that slave resistance was easy nor that slaves in the
Caribbean should be condemned for not doing more to overthrow white rule and
establish their own freedom. I cited Eugene Genovese with approval in regard to a
statement he made about slave resistance in the Old South that I believe applies to the
West Indies as well: “The slaves of the Old South should not have to answer for their
failure to mount more frequent and effective revolts; they should be honored for
having tried at all under the most discouraging circumstances.”3 But I think it is fair to
say that I assumed that the ultimate ambition of slaves was to rise up against their
3
Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 594.
masters and seize freedom, even if they accepted, albeit reluctantly and conditionally,
that they were slaves and that masters had the right to force them to do what they
wanted, given the asymmetries of power that existed between slaves and masters. I
assumed both the reality of slave resistance and also the ideological importance of
resistance as a key determinant of slave behaviour. As I stated, “slaves did not like
being slaves [and] actively resisted both slavery as a system and those aspects of
enslavement they particularly disliked. Thus, though twitching at the restrictions that
the straitjacket of slave resistance as an historiographical necessity occasioned, I
wrote my account of white-black interactions in Jamaica within a traditional
historiography where all slave actions were viewed as in some ways or other
resistance to slavery and to white power.
Since writing this book, I have been reconsidering whether or not I was too
timid in following a thesis of the ubiquity of slave resistance that I had serious
concerns about. What would have happened if I had couched my work in a context
where slave resistance was less overwhelming as a working imperative in interpreting
slave behaviour? What would happen if I gave serious thought to the significance of
agency within slavery by slaves themselves? What new models of slave behaviour
and slave culture would I need to construct in order to escape the confines of all
slavery being slave resistance? This paper is an attempt to show my embryonic
thoughts on how we might view resistance, power and agency in slavery and on what
I think slaves really wanted out of slavery and out of their condition as slaves. It is
very much work in progress and many of my ideas are drawn from work I envisage
myself doing in the future rather than from work I have done already.
I was galvanised into attempting to rethink some of the fundamental
frameworks within which I and most other students of Caribbean and North American
slavery and planter society place their findings by an acute, confrontational and rather
unfair review by Peter Coclanis of Ira Berlin’s very important survey of colonial and
antebellum slavery, Generations of Captivity.4 Coclanis praises Berlin for his
productivity, his scholarly generosity and for his useful attention to temporal change
as a usually ignored factor in the development and character of slavery. But he takes
Berlin to task for what he sees as an all too typical concern with agency, attributing to
Berlin, by implication if not explicitly, a variety of “politically correct” attitudes and
inheritances that Berlin probably does not hold. Berlin, he believes, is the Parmenides
of slavery studies (having previously compared him to Heraclitus, who believed the
world was in a constant state of change), with the constant theme in his work being
the importance of slave agency. Parmenides, of course, believed in immutable
structures rather than constant change. Berlin sums up his argument thus: “in the face
of the violence and power of a rather faceless and undifferentiated cadre of
slaveowners … African American bondmen and bondwomen struggled consistently
and heroically with whatever tools they had at their disposal to resist the dictates and
prerogatives of their masters.” Resistance and agency are consequently constants in
his work, as they are, Coclanis argues, also constant in a host of other, lesser, works,
shaped, he believes by the uber-figure of John Blassingame, whose enormously
influential The Slave Community presupposes resistance as normative behaviour
among slaves.5 Berlin and others, he claim, concentrate so much upon small triumphs
of agency that the bigger picture – the ability of powerful masters to create a stable
and economically vital plantation regime – goes virtually unnoticed. Hardly anyone,
4
Ira Berlin, Generations of captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003); Peter Coclanis, “The Captivity of a Generation,” WMQ, LXI (2004),
544-56.
5
Coclanis, “The Captivity of a Generation,” 550; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community:
Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York, 1979).
he laments, studies slaveholders anymore, excepting William K. Scarborough’s
Masters of the Big House from this indictment.6
Coclanis launches into this scattershot attack on what he says as Berlin’s naive
and irresponsible fixation with slavery mainly because he sees Berlin as the front man
for, as he puts it, “the scholarship of a rather faceless and undifferentiated cadre of
historians” who, in their eagerness, for political reasons, to find slaves “doing” things
that broke down planter hegemony, have created what Coclanis considers to be work
that is “imbalanced, partial (in more than one sense of the word), lacking in formal
rigor, and lacking even more in historical empathy and imagination.” These limited
scholars have shouted down other scholars concerned with the forces and relations of
production who have asked questions on the efficiency of slave labour, the
determinants of slave-labour organisation and the business dimensions of the slave
trade. In an unfortunate phrase, he claims that these scholars (clearly referring to
Robert Fogel and his students versed in cliometric techniques) have been “maumaued” into silence.
Obviously, Coclanis is on a campaign and like a modern day Cervantes is
wildly tilting at all sorts of windmills, especially the windmills belonging to the
biggest names in the slavery game (if I can extend the metaphor past its point of
utility).7 He doesn’t like the whole drift of slave studies towards celebrating black
achievement and towards a moral reductionism that sees slave master relationships
purely in terms of a black-good white-bad morality play. I wouldn’t want to take his
diatribe too seriously and am not convinced by his argument that scholars’ fascination
6
William K. Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth Century
South (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana University Press, 2003).
7
For other works by Coclanis attacking the “agency” genre, see Peter Coclanis, “Thirty-Six Views of
Mount Morgan: Slave Counterpoint in Context,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, C (1999), 35567 and “Slavery, African-American Agency and the World We Have Lost,” Georgia Historical
Quarterly, LXXIX (1995), 873-84.
with slave agency lies in part with the fact that many members of the last generation
of slavery scholars came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and extrapolate backward.
Nor do I think agree that scholars’ belief in the importance of slave agency can be
explained by their inability to see the reality of the brutalities of power relations in
slavery because such realities are so alien to the “middle class, suburban sensibility
characteristic of the modern academy - a capacious, volitional world in which
everything is thought possible and anything goes,” although I have found when
discussing Thomas Thistlewood’s sex life that many scholars evince a mixture of
prurience and prudishness that betrays an innocence about actual sex practices in the
present and the past that is endearingly naive. For the most cringing expressions of
middle class distance from slave life that I know, you could worse than turn to the
introduction of Fogel and Engerman’s celebrated Time on the Cross, the book that is
Coclanis’s preferred choice to Blassingame as what should be slavery scholars’ first
historiographical starting point. Moreover, his attacks on Ira Berlin are both extreme
and unfair. He may be a convenient target as he is certainly the dean of slavery studies
in North America and thus the putative leader in developing historiographical trends
but, as anyone who reads his work carefully will attest, a concern with slave agency
ranks well down his list of major themes. In addition, he is far from indifferent to the
stark asymmetries in bargaining power and to the reality of planters using extreme
coercive force as a method of disciplining slaves. A central theme of both his recent
syntheses of early American slavery has been the transformative power of the
plantation revolution on slave life and in that transformation it is very clear that
planter desire trumped slave agency by a wide margin.
Nevertheless, Coclanis makes some valid points that I think need to be
carefully considered. We do need to give more attention to the “raw, brutal power
asymmetries built into slavery.” We do have to be mindful of partiality and of reading
everything within slavery as if all slaves at all times were obsessed with challenging
the system they were trapped in. as he argues, “It’s one thing to pull for the subaltern
group; it’s another to treat every individual subaltern as heroic and every individual
action as bearing political weight.” One thing that became very clear when examining
the lives of individuals detailed in Thistlewood’s diaries is that, taking into account
biases in the source material that hide what slaves actually thought and did from our
gaze, it is a mistake to see all as heroic or even as united around any common causes.
This came out most strongly in an appreciation of Lincoln, a slave who had been with
Thistlewood from 1756 and was still his slave at Thistlewood’s death in 1786. We
know a lot about Lincoln not only because Lincoln was Thistlewood’s slave for so
long but also because there was a curious kind of mutual dependency between the two
men. As Douglas Hall, another Thistlewood analyst, notes, “one senses a mutual
understanding which might have even touched upon affection” between two aspiring
patriarchs, two men with many “amorous attachments” and between two flawed but
interesting individuals.8 What a study of Lincoln’s life as revealed in Thistlewood’s
diaries reveals is that Lincoln was a decidedly unheroic survivor, someone with the
full range of human characteristics. At times, he was trustworthy; at other times not.
He was a talented hunter and fisherman who did not always do as he was told. He was
a lover with a wandering eye and a tendency for domestic abuse. He was also a
respected long-term resident of the slave community who on occasion violated other
slaves’ respect and trust through unwise actions and small betrayals. Neither Quashie
nor rebel, he managed to scrape together the lineaments of a fulfilling life from the
unpromising conditions of plantation life in eighteenth-century Jamaica. His humanity
8
marks him out. An African, he nevertheless adapted to European mores, using
European technology, participating in the market economy and adopting English as a
language. I argue that in his and Thistlewood’s constantly renegotiated battle over
how much a slave had to submit to a master’s will and how much a master had to
recognise his dependency on his supposed inferior, we see a real-life model of
Hegel’s dialectic of dependence and independence, of losing and finding one’s
identity in the consciousness of another person.9 I argued also that in their battles and
negotiations, Thistlewood and Lincoln demonstrated the futility and absurdity of
masters’ assertions of total power. I should also have added that it also shows the
conceptual redundancy of seeing slaves as seeking to resist slavery at all times. We
might try and place Lincoln’s actions within a paradigm of resistance but it would
violate the meaning behind Lincoln’s actions. Lincoln never sought to escape slavery
but instead tried to ameliorate the worst features of slavery and attempted, rather
successfully as it turned out, to gain a measure of economic and cultural autonomy
within a strongly African and communal framework.
Lincoln did not challenge slavery, except in the most indirect ways. In this
way, he was similar to the large majority of slaves who accepted, albeit reluctantly
and conditionally, enslavement. We need to recognise the inescapable fact of master
power, their monopoly over power and force, and their willingness to use that power
to terrify their charges and solidify their rule. One thing I learned from Thistlewood’s
diaries is that we underestimate planter power at our peril. Despite manifest
deficiencies in how they organised their society and despite their small numbers,
whites in Jamaica and in other West Indian societies managed to successfully keep
most slaves most of the time from active rebellion and prevented most slaves from
9
G.W.F. Hegel, the Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
less serious forms of resistance such as running away most of the time as well. The
West Indies enjoyed more slave rebellions than the antebellum South but, as is well
known, only the drawn out saga of the Haitian revolution resulted in a form of
successful rebellion. Most other revolts, including Tacky’s revolt in 1760 in Jamaica,
were contained with relative ease.
How do we explain whites’ success in preserving their brutal system of
domination in the face of clear hatred of white rule by blacks and despite an
overwhelming numerical predominance of blacks? In Mastery, Tyranny and Desire I
suggested that one of the primary explanations for white success at keeping blacks
down was their ready recourse to strategies of terror. Jamaican slavery was especially
brutal even by the elevated standards of New World cruelty and planters like
Thistlewood revelled in devising sadistic methods of inflicting pain and humiliation
into their frequent punishments of slaves. I also concentrated on other methods
whereby planters controlled slaves and argued in particular that slaves found it
difficult to rise up against their masters because of conflicted feelings about how such
resistance might affect slave property rights. I would like here, however, to focus on
violence and terror in order to point out its particular nature and to show that the
particular form that terror took in Jamaica had unintended consequences for how
whites envisioned themselves and their relationships with blacks. Violence took a
certain shape in the eighteenth century Caribbean that undermined white rule as much
as it allowed white dominance to flourish.
What is interesting about white exercise of power in Jamaica is not so much its
excessive brutality – eighteenth century Europe and Africa were violent places where
miscreants were punished by floggings and capital punishment for a whole range of
offences – but is how white Jamaicans did not base their exercise of power on a shred
fiction of equality before the law, as in England, or on the rights of property, which
could be theoretically enjoyed by the poorest citizen as much as by the richest. White
Jamaicans did not recognise that either principle applied to blacks but instead created
a police state where whites enjoyed a form of absolutism based on their monopoly
both of the coercive powers of the state and also the ideological advantages of having
white skin. There was no pretence that whites governed through any form of consent.
Indeed, blacks were imagined to be so far outside the social system that it was
impossible to conceive of ways whereby any fiction that slaves consented to their
treatment was possible. White Jamaicans were absolutist tyrants with a torturer’s
charter that allowed them to whatever they wanted without anyone being able to stop
their depredations. As the historian Bryan Edwards put it, the occasional planter
kindness “affords but a feeble restraint against the corrupt passions and infirmities of
our nature, the hardness of avarice, the pride of power, the sallies of anger, and the
thirst for revenge.”10
The most telling justification of white absolutism that I know of is a chilling
statement by a St Domingue planter, Nicholas Lejeune, who was arrested for
excessive cruelty to a number of slave women, cruelty that went well beyond the
normal and customary boundaries of behaviour that governed white punishment of
blacks. Lejeune was clearly a sadistic psychopath, as a detailing of what he did to his
slaves would attest, but was unrepentant about what he did, arguing that “My cause in
this matter becomes the cause of every colon.” His assumption, which was common
among masters, was that slaves not only “harbor[ed] an implacable hatred in his
heart” of white people but would seek freedom and “visit upon us all the hurt of
which he is capable.” The only way to prevent that was to ensure that he was “chained
10
Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, 2:169-70.
down by terror” because having “the consciousness of absolute power” that masters
maintained “over his person” he dared do nothing. But, Lejeune concluded, “Remove
this bit, he will dare everything.” The slave had to be oppressed and terrified because
“if we do not make his chains as proportionate to the dangers that we run with him, if
we let loose his hatred from the present state in which it is stifled, what can prevent
him from attempting to break the chains?” That had to be prevented at all costs, even
if it allowed psychopaths like Lejeune free reign to do as he pleased.11
What this suggests is a different conception of the law than that which
pertained in Europe. Punishment in Europe might be barbaric but the spectacle of trial
and punishment was designed to promote cohesion, community and shame. The ritual
of punishment represented the supposed common discipline of all to a single rule of
law. In West Indian societies, the purpose of punishment was to demonstrate white
authority, to enshrine racial difference as the principal determinant shaping justice for
individuals and to valorise slaveholders’ private penal power. Slaves were usually
punished on the plantation at the private initiative of slave masters. Nevertheless,
slaveholders occasionally sent slaves to court, as Thomas Thistlewood did in 1752
when he had a slave, Congo Sam, arraigned in court for attempted murder, after
Congo Sam had surprised him and nearly killed him. They sent them to court less
because they believed slaves were entitled to a trial and to justice (few received it) but
because the ritual of the majesty of the court served to enforce the subordination and
deference of slaves to all white people and confirmed to planters that their power to
punish was legitimate and that here was another arena where they could demonstrate
their racial superiority. The ritual was not about justice; it was about theatre and
performance. The drama of punishment, more importantly, was performed differently
11
in Jamaica than in Britain. In Britain, the shaming of the person to be punished was
extremely important, which is why the pillory was a common part of the performance.
It suggested not only that “public punishment performed the wider function of
determining moral boundaries” but also that the crowd watching and participating in
the shaming ritual played an important role in a carefully managed spectacle that
dramatised the majesty of the law and affirmed the cohesion of the community as a
body committed to all people having access to that majesty. Slaves were not subject to
shaming punishments, presumably because whites believed that slaves by definition
were shameless and thus could not be shamed. Instead, the purpose of punishment to
emphasise power and difference and to reinforce through intimidation the absolute
power that masters had over all slaves.12
Moreover, as Diana Paton notes, slave masters continued practices
increasingly out of favour in England whereby the punishment of the slave involved
routine infliction of pain on the body of the conflict through physical mutilation and
permanent marking. Punishment on the plantation customarily involved flogging.
Punishments meted out in slave courts customarily involved not only flogging but
also the slitting open of nostrils, the amputation of ears and occasionally other body
parts and various other attacks on slave bodies, all done with a particular attention to
how such mutilations and tortures were staged.13 Thomas Thistlewood’s diaries
provide ample evidence of such punishments. In March 1765, for example,
Thistlewood gave evidence against his slave, Plato, a persistent runaway, who was
found guilty and “Sentenced to have 100 lashes at 4 difft places on the Bay … and to
have his right Ear cut off.” In 1753, several slaves belonging to his employer were
sent to court after running away. One was hung and two had “both ears Cropp’d, both
12
13
Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 469; Viotta da Costa, Crowns of Glory, 231.
Diana Paton.
nostrils Slitt and mark’d in both Cheeks.” The one who was hung had his head
removed and place on a pole on Thistlewood’s plantation where it stayed as a grim
reminder of white power for four months. Slaves were especially likely to be punished
if they were found to practise obeah or gathered together in large numbers. In 1771,
Thistlewood noted that “Frazier’s Beck, on Thursday last, [was] tried for having a
Supper and a great number of Negroes at her house last Saturday night.” her
punishment was to have “her ear Slit, 39 lashes under the gallows and 39 again
against the Long Stores.” Punishments for slaves caught in rebellion were particularly
gruesome. Thistlewood was caught up in the middle of Tacky’s revolt in 1760. The
aftermath of the failed rebellion saw over 1000 executions and 500 transportations.
The executions themselves were grizzly affairs, including slaves being burnt by slow
fires, hangings and gibbeting alive. It may also have occasioned the first use of
electricity as a form of punishment, although the results were less impressive than
intended. A contemporary commentator noted that white attempted “various
Experiments ... with Electrical machines and magic Lanthorns, which produced very
little Effects, except on one who, after receiving many severe Shocks, acknowledged
his Master’s Obeah exceeded his own.”14
What is also significant about how whites punished blacks in Jamaica is that
exemplary punishment and execution was not accompanied by carnivalesque dramas
of state authority, as in Europe.15 Executions were “sporadic, localised
demonstrations” that took place with a minimum of ceremony. Thistlewood’s
neighbour, the historian William Beckford noted that “a negro is often condemned in
14
House of Commons Sessional Papers, 69:219.
Thomas W. Laqueur, "Crowds, Carnivals, and the English State in English Executions, 1604--1868,"
in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier,
David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge, 1989), 305--355
15
one hour, and receives execution in the next.”16 Whites killed blacks in the same way
that they buried them: with an absences of fuss and with no more emotion than if they
were disposing of an animal. One of the customs that disturbed Thistlewood on first
arrival, although he got over it, was how slaves were buried. [add] Jamaicans, both
black and white, got accustomed to seeing slaves being executed while they were
doing other business with few people paying attention. Thistlewood several times
notes that he saw executions but the impression he gives is that these were not
attended by many people and were just part of normal life. He describes, for example,
that he went to Savanna-la-Mar to post some letters and talk with the local
comptroller in 1767. On the way home, he casually passed a place where “they were
hanging two rebel Negroes.” The executions of the major rebels in Tacky’s revolt
probably occasioned more interest but even then that interest was more idle curiosity
in what was happening rather than interest in a carefully planned and staged spectacle.
Thistlewood describes how William Grove’s Apongo, or Wager, whom Thistlewood
considered “the King of the Rebels,” was condemned to “hang in Chains 3 days then
be took down and burnt.” Thistlewood saw Apongo “gibbeted alive” in Savanna La
Mar and wandered over to ask him whether he knew “any of our Negroes.” Apongo
replied that “he knew Lewie and wished him good bye.” The way that Thistlewood
records this episode suggests that Apongo was languishing in the gibbet unattended
and unwatched while most people went about their business.
The specificity of the “detailed and finely calibrated language” of how
executions and mutilations were to be taken place and the lack of ceremony involved
in the actual executions and mutilations themselves suggests two things.17 First, as
Paton argues, it indicates that the punishments meted out to slaves extended and
16
17
William Beckford, Remarks Upon the Situation of the Negroes in Jamaica (London, 1788), 93.
Paton, “Punishment, Crime and the Bodies of Slaves,” 940.
racialised the English legal principle of “petit treason.” Under this theory, any
subordinate (wife, child, servant, slave) who murdered a person who had legitimate
authority over him or her was guilty of a crime analogous to treason. It was a short
step from this definition to conceptualising all slave violations of order that harmed
the interests of whites as constituting treason, and deserving to be punished in the
manner that treason was dealt with. Treason remained almost the sole crime that
required bodily mutilation. As Paton notes, “the punishments involving destruction of
the convicts' bodies communicated specific meanings for the English planters who
designed them. In English penal tradition, attacks on convicts' bodily integrity had
come to signify by the eighteenth century that the convict was a traitor, a rebel against
legitimate authority.”18 Second, it suggests, as Vincent Brown argues, that whites in
Jamaica were mostly concerned with using what he calls spectacular terror to harness
the power of the dead through symbolic use of dead slaves’ body parts as a means of
showing off the power of slave masters rather than with shoring up community
cohesion through communal rituals or spectacles of punishment. They projected their
power symbolically through spectacular punishments committed on the bodies of the
dead. Placing severed heads on poles, leaving men to rot in gibbets and nailing
severed ears to places of significance conveyed multiple meanings to the white
perpetrators and to the blacks who were supposed to draw lessons from such fetishing.
Whites harnessed, Brown asserts, following a line of argument suggested by Michel
Foucault and developed most effectively by Katherine Verdery, “the other-worldly
and the sacred to specific bodies, places and narratives, and those to the social power
of the rulers.”19
18
ibid, 931, 938.
Vincent Brown, “Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society,” Slavery and
Abolition, 24 (2003), 27-29; Kathleen Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies; ReBurial and
Socialist Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
19
Let’s deal with the equation of slavery with treason. What is interesting is less
that slaves committing crimes quickly became denoted as traitors - that seems easily
explicable through a shared belief that an attack on a person with legitimate authority
by a dependent undermined the basis of social order in the same way that an attack on
people with political authority undermined the basis of political order. It is also easy
to see how societies developing racially exclusive legal and social systems would
come round to the conclusion that all white people were invested with legal authority
and thus that a crime against a white person was a crime against all whites and against
social order generally because of the implicit risk that a such a crime that went
unpunished would lead to slave rebellion and the overthrow of white power. As we
shall see, whites believed (I would argue erroneously) that slaves’ ultimate ambition
was freedom and that they only needed the opportunity to strike in order to gain such
freedom. Lejeune again spells out the thinking most clearly: “There is not one planter
who has not seen with concern the daring walk of my Negroes ... it is only force and
violence that restrains him...if we let loose his hatred from the present state in which it
is stifled, what can prevent him from attempting to break the chains? The bird locked
in his cage profits from the slightest negligence to escape.” If this is what slaves
desired then white society was only safe if the slave “was chained down with
terror.”20
What I find more interesting, and more difficult to explicate, are the
assumptions from flow from equating slavery with treason. Very specific disabling
devices accompanied treason in European law. The three principal incidents that
followed an attainder for treason or felony subsequent to death were forfeiture of all
20
Speech of Nicolas Lejeune, a coffee planter in Plaisance, St.Domingue, to the Superior Council of Le
cap, 1788, defending himself on a charge that he had tortured to death four slave women by burning
them, cited in Jacques Thibau, Le temps de Saint-Domingue: L’Eslavage et la Revolution francaise
(Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Lattes, 1989), 17-93.
property, corruption of blood, and the more or less complete extinction of civil rights
for all those connected to the body or the blood of the person committing treason.
William Blackstone stated the following when discussing the legal consequences of
treason:
“when a criminal is not fit to live upon the earth but is to be exterminated as a
monster ... the law sets a note of infamy upon him, puts him out of its
protection and takes no further care of him barely to see him executed. He is
then called attaint, attinctus, stained or blackened.”21
For Blackstone, natural liberty was a “residuum” and someone committing treason
had forfeited that residuum, which had to be ferreted out as a stain out of the very
body of the person who had corrupted the civil and natural world. The traitor became
“blackened” and an official non-person, his blood “tainted” by crime. If this view is
held, then it is not perhaps surprising that the actual execution of a traitor would
proceed without ceremony because, as Joan Dayan puts it, “the image of the
“blackened” person, disabled but not dead, remained a more terrifying example of
punishment than the executed body.”22
The hardest part of the sentence of treason to understand is how treason is
connected with corruption of blood, a term with longstanding biblical roots best
outlined in the curse in Psalm 109 to the enemies of David and his descendants:
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be
blotted out.
Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the Lord; and let not the sin
of his mother be blotted out.
21
22
William Blackstone, 4:380.
Joan Dayan, “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies,” Neplantla: Views from South 2 (2001), 7.
Let them be before the Lord continually, that he may cut off the memory of
them from the earth.
Philologists suggest that the connection of corrupted blood with treason arises from a
probable mistake. The Oxford English Dictionary defines corruption of blood as “the
effect of attainder upon a person attainted, by which his blood was held to have
become tainted or corrupted by his crime, so that he and his descendants lost all rights
of rank and title; in consequence of which he could no longer retain possession of
land that he had held, nor leave it to his heirs, nor could his descendants inherit from
him.” It considers that what became the gist of attainder – corruption of blood – came
from a false derivation of attainder in taint or stain. (Attainder is derived from the
Latin tango – to touch, strike, and attack –while taint is derived from the Latin tinguo
– to dye or colour).23 As Dayan suggests what we are looking at is cross-fertilisation
of terms, not sequentiality.
I am not at all clear how this process of cross-fertilization works – it is above
my pay-grade, as Dick Cheney is fond of saying – but I do find it significant that in
the early modern world thinking on treason and thinking on race coincided over the
concept of corruption of blood. As a number of scholars have detailed, the Iberians
who first shaped racial theories in the New World increasingly linked black blood,
slavery and impurity. Spanish racial systems were partly inspired by the Spanish
concept of limpieza de sangra, which originally referred to the status of having
unsullied “Old Christian” ancestry, free of Jewish, Muslim and heretical antecedents
and which increasingly linked such notions of impurity with blackness, using the
Curse of Ham as justification for seeing blacks as perpetually stained and thus
condemned to perpetual servitude. Tainted blood was significant for early modern
23
Ibid, 7-8.
people who believed, as Michel Foucault has argued, that blood had a central
symbolic function as a signifier of where a person fitted within a largely birthdetermined system of social hierarchies as well as its role as a symbol of the
relationship between the king and his subjects, which Foucault sees as rooted in the
sovereign’s power of life and death over its subjects. Such notions had a long history:
the idea of a divinely ordained social order in which noble status was transmitted
through blood was a fundamental support of kingship in medieval Europe. By the
second half of the sixteenth century, moreover, “race” had began to be used
interchangeably in western European countries with “blood” to express the notion of
“family” or “lineage” with all except the descendants of old noble families being
considered to harbour a “stain” that confirmed them as inferior. Slave masters, too,
had the power of life and death over their charges. They also were receptive to
ideologies that presupposed that natural qualities were transmitted by blood through
one generation to the next.24 I am not yet sure of how all these ideas of whites treating
slaves as if they were traitors by definition, traitors having attainted blood, and
attainted blood being connected with developing notions of race all fit together but it
seems to me that there is some connection that helps us better understand how white
planters conceptualised their use of excessive brutality towards blacks. It suggests
also that at the core of planter attitudes towards slaves lies pre-modern sensibilities
informed by ancient Christian concepts that masters were only dimly aware were in
Maria Elena Martinez, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and
Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” WMQ, 3d Ser., LXI (2004), 483-86; Ruth Pike, Linajudos
and Conversos n Seville; Greed and Prejudice in sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain (New
York, 2000); Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical
Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” WMQ, 3d Ser., LIV (1997), 103-42; James H.
Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” WMQ, 3d Se., (1997), 143-66; Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1990), 135-50; Robert Bartlett,
The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, 19930,
221-42; and Guillaume Aubert, “`The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French
Atlantic World,” WMQ, LXI (2004), 443.
24
the back of their minds. Their punishment of slaves thus connects with a range of
discourses over race that were both modern and very ancient.
That tension between rationality and atavism is even more apparent when we
consider how slave masters employed the instruments of what Vincent Brown calls
spiritual terror to aid their domination of blacks. Brown convincingly demonstrates
that masters asserted their right to rule by using their monopoly over physical force to
try and terrorize the spiritual imaginations of the enslaved. They did so especially
through employing dead bodies, as outlined above, as “awesome icons of their
power.” Brown argues that “even more menacingly, managers and overseers extended
the spectacular to the magical.” They cut off the heads of slaves who had committed
slaves, for example, not just to show their willingness to shock slaves by violating
African understanding of what was proper and decent but also to demonstrate their
power by resorting to symbolic actions that Africans would understand that made
sense mostly in the realms of magic and the supernatural. One of the earliest accounts
of how Englishmen interacted with Africans comes from Richard Ligon’s description
of Barbadian society in 1657. There, he relates how a prominent Barbadian planter,
Colonel Walrond, prevented his slaves from committing suicide by chopping of the
head of a slave, affixing it to a post, ordering his slaves to solemnly proceed around it,
and announcing to his slaves that "they were in a main errour, in thinking that they
went into their own Countreys, after they were dead; for, this man’s head was here, as
they were all witnesses of; and how was that possible, the body could go without a
head.” Ligon believed the slaves were convinced by this “sad, yet lively, spectacle.”25
Whether this application of spiritual power did indeed “strike a greater terror
in the other slaves” is difficult to assess. Brown is sceptical that Africans were
Brown, “Spiritual Terror,” 24; Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados
(London, 1657), 17 [check].
25
impressed by such ghoulish displays. As is clear from studies of slave obeah, African
slaves had their own methods of instilling terror into other Africans. Brown is mostly
interested in how obeah acted “as a counter-hegemonic practice and ideology” that
harnessed the ideology of the dead bodies of slaves to obeahman’s own political
authority. Although he is aware that shamans practising witchcraft, or obeah, were
highly ambivalent figures because, according to Peter Geschiere shamans can only
heal because they have killed, and because, as Ralph Austen, a sceptic about the
efficacy of witchcraft as a form of resistance, asserts, witches in African culture
“appropriat [e] the scarce resources of others while collaborating with an arbitrary and
destructive external power,” he concludes that obeah was a potentially powerful
weapon of resistance that “emboldened the enslaved to resist the supremacy of their
masters,” by giving slaves an alternative model of magical power that masters were
unable to control.26
I see Brown’s point that the routinization of terrifying spectacles enhanced the
sacred authority of those opposed to serving the plantocracy as slaves, although what
this statement suggests is that Brown is as unable as I have been to view slavery from
other than the prison of slavery as slave resistance. What interests me more is what
effect a strategy of harnessing African symbols of terror to white power structures had
on how whites saw their own legitimacy. A strategy of spiritual terror allied to
extreme physical brutality compromised masters in several ways. Most obviously,
trying to shape punishments so that they made sense to Africans by recasting them in
African forms pushed whites dangerously close to the disaster of Africanisation.
There is an obvious reason why planters like Thistlewood stopped concerning
Ralph A. Austen, “The Moral Economy of Witchcraft; An Essay in Comparative History,2 in Jean
Comaroff and John Comaroff, eds., Modernity and its Malcontents; Ritual and Power in Postcolonial
Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 99-105; Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of
Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, trans. Peter Geschiere and Janet Roitman,
(1995; Charlottesville, University of Virginia, 1997), 196.
26
themselves with understanding African cosmologies after a short residence in the
island. If to understand is in art to forgive, then understanding African society and
values would implicate whites in participating in African culture. They needed to
understand Africans in order to rule them. If understanding, however, turned to
identification, then they risked a much greater project, which was the transformation
of European into a civilised and European country. It was bad enough, as Edward
Long realised (who himself made some attempt to understand African behaviour, if
explicitly from standpoint that Africans were both other and savages) that whites
could not resist the lures of African women. It was even worse if they started to think
like Africans – which is what was implied by devising punishments that made sense
mostly to Africans, which were watched by Africans rather than Europeans (which is
what whites intended when they argued that punishments ought to take place “in the
neighbourhood” where it “might stroke a greater terror than their bare hearing of its
being acted at a distance”), and which did not involve the panoply of ritualistic
features designed to implicate all whites in the action as members of community
united in disgust at black criminality.27
I have not worked out these thoughts in much detail, as the above paragraph
makes obvious. But it does suggest that I need to devote more attention to the various
forms of knowledge that were circulating in eighteenth century Jamaica and which
shaped both how whites viewed slaves and, more importantly, in my opinion, how
they viewed themselves. It is clear that several kinds of knowledges were circulating
in early Jamaica and that “novel understandings of the relationship between dead
bodies, haunting spirits and political authority” developed as a result of white black
Edward Long, History of Jamaica …; “Petition from Carpenter’s Mountain, St. Elizabeth, 14 may
1731,” JHA 3:8.
27
interactions.28 These “novel understandings” alarmed white Jamaicans as they came
to realise that slaves’ alternative sources of knowledge and authority could be used, as
in Tacky’s revolt in 1760 and later in the Haitian Revolution, to challenge white
authority. As Brown argues, whites stopped thinking of obeah and witchcraft as
generally harmless and as bizarre features of slave life and after 1760 began to see
obeah as an extremely dangerous practice that needed to be rooted out. It is significant
that in the raft of legislation passed in 1761 to prevent Tacky’s revolt from
reoccurring the three things that whites focused on were controlling slaves’ ability to
move between estates and meet with each other, restricting the rights of free coloureds
and ensuring that they were distinguished firmly as a class from whites and punishing
with death the practice of obeah.29 It is curious, however, that as whites tried to access
black forms of cultural and religious knowledge, they were remarkably indifferent to
a major source of spiritual power – that invested in Christianity – which could have
been used both to terrify slaves and to challenge African cosmologies directly by
asserting that Christian power was much more powerful than African power. White
indifference to Christian values was legendary – there is much evidence that many
whites favoured forms of freethinking and that when they viewed the Anglican
Church, they saw it mainly as a useful socio-political organisation that provided
support to the white community, and to the white community alone.30 Surprisingly, at
least in the eighteenth century in Jamaica, they did not use Christianity as a way of
appropriating and imprisoning the spiritual authority of the enslaved. It may suggest
that they were as much tied into a discourse of modernity as premodernity, supporting
Paul Gilroy’s contention that slavery and white brutality were integral parts of a
Brown, “Spiritual Terror,” 24.
Ibid, 38-39; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 138.
28
29
30
developing modernity rather than a survival from an atavistic past. Thistlewood’s
sophisticated acceptance of Enlightenment scientific and social conceits and
indifference and possible intolerance to established religion, especially Christian
notions of the supernatural and transcendence, gives some credence to Gilroy’s
contention.31
Those whites who concerned themselves with what their seemingly irresistible
slide into Africanisation implied about themselves as white people – J.B. Moreton
noted that “like wax softened by heat” men coming to Jamaica “melt[ed] into
[Jamaican] manners and customs” – were also worried by a more obvious signal of
approaching barbarity or incivility. It might have been necessary to employ a whole
panoply of ritualised violence to keep blacks in check, as Lejeune suggests, but the
viciousness and sadism of what whites did to blacks could not but give sensitive
thinkers pause. Whites were forced to admit that outside observers were correct in
their estimation that “no country exceeds them in their treatment of slaves.” Reading
Thistlewood’s diaries is to enter into a world of uncompromising savagery. In public,
Thistlewood may have been a man who, as his obituary in the Cornwall Chronicle
states, “”, but in private he subjected his slaves to repeated sexual assaults, frequent
floggings and to humiliating ordeals such as picketing a woman on a bottle and
Derby’s dose, where a slave was forced to defecate into the mouth of another slave
that belie his image as an Enlightened and companionable man. Whites transfigured
slaves into monsters as can be seen in their slave codes which embody a philosophy
of denaturalisation [add from Dayan] but their actions indicated, not only to modern
observers but also to contemporaries, that it was themselves who were becoming
monsters of inhumanity. The savagery of their treatment of rebelling slaves in
31
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 5354.
Tacky’s revolt shocked newcomers. Bryan Edwards wrote in 1792 that seeing the
punishments given out to rebels in 1760 alarmed him: “I felt a shock at a scene which
presented itself to me on my arrival, that has not yet lost its impression. If it had, a
paper which I wrote on occasion of a miserable wretch that was burnt, and which has
since appeared in a great number of different publications, would stand in judgment
against me.” But although Edwards “felt the utmost indignation and horror at such
extraordinary punishments,” he came to realise, he argued, that such punishments
were justified, given the crimes those “wretches” had committed as part of their
strategy to “take over the country.” He noted that these “fierce and warlike savages”
killed whites “in a savage manner and literally drank their blood mixed with rum.”32
Other whites habituated themselves to white savagery in alarming ways. Henry Coor,
for example, testified about the desensitising effect that long-term exposure to the
realities of slave life had on whites. He remembered that 2at my first coming to the
island, a common flogging of a Negro would have put me in a tremble.” Long
acquaintance with slavery had made violence “by degrees and custom … so habitual,
that I thought no more of seeing a Black man’s head cut off, than I should now think
of a butcher cutting off the head of his calf.”33 Even William Knob recognised the
effect that living in “the land of sin, disease, and death, where Satan reigns” had on
even the most refined white sensibilities. Four years into his stay in Jamaica, he
worried, “I am fearful of becoming habituated to its horror; sincerely do I hope I
never may.”34 It was horrifying for white men to realise that the true voice of the
white Creole was not Edward Long or Bryan Edwards or the sophisticated gentlemen
who participated in scientific and horticultural societies in the flourishing colony of St
Domingue but was Nicholas Lejeune. Lejeune was arrested for murder because his
32
Bryan Edwards, Poems Written Chiefly in the West Indies (Kingston, 1792), 67-8.
Testimony of Henry Coor, House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, 82:99.
34
Get original source from Sheila Duncker’s MA.
33
behaviour went well beyond what even whites in St. Domingue considered
condonable behaviour. He sexually exploited, tortured and murdered slave women
and revelled in what he had done. His speech defending his conduct after his acquittal
concentrated on how it was necessary for whites to band together to protect the
privileges of whiteness and argued that only through exerting absolute power that
slaves could be kept in their “birdcage.” It was not for these arguments that he was
arrested. After all in 1771 the French Crown in St Domingue had itself declared that
“It is only by leaving to the masters a power that is nearly absolute, that it will be
possible to keep so large a number of men in that state of submission which is made
necessary by their numerical superiority over the whites. If some masters abuse their
power, they must be reproved in secret, so that the slaves may always be kept in the
belief that the master can do no wrong in his dealings with them.”35
What got Lejeune arrested was that he clearly derived enjoyment from his
psychopathic activities and that he was living a philosophy of psychopathy that
violated all norms of Christian and civilised behaviour. The rulers of St. Domingue,
just like the rulers of Jamaica in the early nineteenth century who prosecuted a mass
murderer called Lewis Hartman who killed at least 19 slaves for purposes of personal
gratification, decided that even white man’s license to treat slaves as they pleased was
not sufficient license to allow socially deranged behaviour to proceed unpunished.
Lejeune was a sadist, clearly, and the philosophy he followed resembled that of the
infamous Marquis de Sade, whose 120 Days of Sodom preached a doctrine that
pushed to the limits the idea of the human and which gloried in ridiculing the
humanitarian idealism of Rousseau as a sham and in revelling in debauchery,
pornography and in the pleasure of reducing a human being to a thing. I don’t know
35
From Dayan.
enough about the marquis de Sade and what he was proposing and I am not aware of
any direct links between Sade and slavery in the French Antilles but I am tempted by
Joan Dayan’s suggestion that Sade’s apologia for the pleasures of absolute despotism
had its sources in the emblematic Creole planters, “dedicated to the heady interests of
pleasure, greed and abandon.” It may also allow for fruitful entrees into the problem
of reconciling planter savagery with modernity.36
Lejeune’s justification for his conduct may not explain why he was arrested
but does allow us insights into how whites thought blacks thought about them and
about how best to keep blacks from thinking of supplanting them. Lejeune justifies his
pursuit of terror in two ways. First, he assumes that “the unhappy condition of the
Negro leads him naturally to detest us” and that “we”, in other words, all whites have
to stick together if blacks were not destroy them. In short, he assumes a complete
racial division between white and blacks with blacks wanting to do unto whites as
whites did unto them. Race is thus the key division in slave society and racial
difference cannot be eradicated or overcome. Either whites are in charge or blacks:
the two races cannot live together as equals. Lejeune echoes a growing trend in St
Domingue in the third quarter of the eighteenth century to become ever more racially
exclusive. In 1767, a ministerial directive decreed that the “first stain” of slavery
extended to “all their descendants” and could not be “erased by the gift of freedom.”
In 1771, administrators agreed that in order to maintain a feeling of inferiority in “the
heart of slaves,” it was necessary to maintain racial distinctions “even after liberty is
granted” so that blacks would understand that their “colour is condemned to
servitude” and nothing – not freedom nor wealth – could ever make blacks equal to
their masters. The controversial essayist Hilliard d’Auberteuil went even further,
36
Joan Dayan, Haiti and the Gods, ; idem, .
arguing that “between white men there must be no distinction other than that which
results from their jobs and personal merits; in the Colony there must be neither
Grands, nor nobles, nor body of the people; there should only be ingénues, freedmen,
slaves and the laws; there must be no preference in families, no right of
primogeniture.”37 Second, he assumes that the natural desire of blacks is to break the
chains that bind them and secure freedom, bought, he imagines “with the blood of
their masters.” This belief, too, was common among whites. The poem that Bryan
Edwards regretted in later life as being too kind to the rebel slave he saw burnt in
1760 melodramatically had the victim address his wife with the words “In freedom’s
cause I bar’d my breast – In freedom’s cause I die.”38
As far as I can read slave attitudes to whites and to slavery, I think that
Lejeune was correct in his first assumption but incorrect in his second. Evidence from
the slave rebellions that occurred in the eighteenth century Caribbean suggests that
Lejeune and other thinkers, notably Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia, were
correct in thinking that what slaves wanted when they rebelled was racial war and that
their objective was to supplant the rule of whites with that of blacks. Edward Long’s
interpretation of Tacky’s Revolt was that the aim of the rebels was “the entire
extirpation of the white inhabitants; the enslaving of all such Negroes as might refuse
to join them; and the partition of the island into smaller principalities in the African
mode, to be distributed among their leaders and head men.” What Tacky and his
rebels seemed to envision was the creation of an African kingdom, controlled by the
Coromantins where Europeans would come as commercial supplicants and where
Jews would act as middlemen. Long outlines a conversation that a rebel had with a
Michel-Rene Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Considerations sur l’etat present de la colonie Françoise de
Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez Grange, 1776-7), 2:48-50, cited in Gene E. Ogle, “`The Eternal
Power of Reason’ and `The Superiority of Whites’: Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Colonial Enlightenment,”
French Colonial History 3 (2003), 41.
38
Edwards, Poems, 37.
37
Jew in Savanna-la-Mar that has the ring of truth about it, even bearing in mind Long’s
intense anti-Semitism and racism. Long outlines how the rebel told his Jewish guard
that the Jews and the Coromantins ought to combine to drive the whites out of the
country, as both hated the whites, take over the plantations and “make sugar and rum,
and bring them to market” where sailors, who “do not oppose us, [as] they care not
who is in possession of the country, Black or White.” The Akan soldiers who served
Tacky may have been influenced by the example of the Maroons of western Jamaica,
who had carved out a semi-autonomous kingdom for themselves in the first half of the
eighteenth century. They wanted the same sort of arrangement, as did the slaves of
Berbice – another colony with large communities of maroons nearby who served as a
ready example of black freedom – who revolted in 1763. On 2 April 1763 the two
rebel leaders in Berbice, Coffy and Akkara, sent a note to the fort outlining their
demands:
Coffy, Governor of the Negroes of Berbice and Captain Akkara send their
greetings to your late Honourable. We don’t want war; we see clearly that you
do want war. … The Governor of Berbice [Coffy] asks Your Honour that
Your Honour will come and speak with him; don’t be afraid! But if you won’t
come, we will fight as long as one Christian remains in Berbice. The
Governor will give Your Honour half of Berbice, and all the negroes will go
high up the river, but don’t think they will remain slaves. Those negroes that
you Honour has on the ships, they can remain slaves.39
What is noticeable in this statement is that Coffy and Akkara did not want to
end slavery – they envisioned it continuing unabated – but that they wanted Berbice to
be rid of whites and to be turned into an African kingdom. They were royalists, not
39
Rodway, History of British Guiana, vol.1, pp.192-193.
republicans; upholders of hierarchies, including hierarchies supported by slaves, not
advocates of freedom. The slaves who overthrew French rule in St Domingue seem to
me to share similar views.
Prior to the great conflagration that destroyed St Domingue beginning in 1791,
St Domingue had been largely free from serious slave rebellion. What little we know
about slave life in the island before 1791 suggests, moreover, that when slaves
envisioned revolt, they did not do so in terms of freedom as defined by white Jacobins
in the French revolution. Rather, the model for rebellion was the example of
Makandal, a slave whose exploits became legendary and who was burnt to death in le
cap in January 1758, wearing a sign that read “Seducer, Profaner, Poisoner.”
Makandal terrified whites because he used the weapon of poison to destroy livestock,
slaves he considered enemies and masters from his base among maroons in hills. He
terrified them also because he was an adept at voodoo and because he used magic and
religion to preach racial hatred. His most famous trick, at least as recorded in a later
account of his life, was to lace three scarves in a vase of water – one yellow, one
white and one black – and to pull out the black scarf, declaring that “Here, finally, are
those who will remain masters of the island: it is the black scarf.2 a 1779 memoir
presented Makandal as a “Mohammed at the head of a thousand exiled refugees” who
would lead a rebellion that would massacre all the whites in the colony. Significantly,
Makandal was burnt for witchcraft, for “mingling holy things in the composition and
usage of allegedly magical packets.”40
The earliest stages of the Haitian Revolution suggest that slaves were much
more influenced in formulating their reaction to the political conflict in the colony
engendered by disputes between whites and free coloureds over events in France by
40
Laurent DuBois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 51-55.
religious ideas such as those that Makandal espoused and by political ideologies of
kingship derived from West African political models than they were by western
notions of freedom. When blacks did revolt, as in the famous Bois-Caiman ceremony
near Le Cap on 21 August 1791, religious symbolism played a great part. In that
ceremony, the first black rebel leader of revolutionary St Domingue was a religious
leader called Boukman. Whites argued that the cause of slave rebellion was “the
genius of liberty.”41 But if we pay attention what we know slaves to have actually
said, liberty seems to be low down their list of priorities. Insurgent leaders tended to
couch their demands with reference to the authority of the King of France, whom they
may have seen as both protector and liberator and whom many falsely believed had
authorised slaves to have three days of freedom per week to work on their own land.
They were seldom receptive to Republicanism. Instead, they envisioned, like the
slaves of Berbice and Jamaica, whites being overthrown in favour of an African
kingdom. They had a powerful incentive to be royalists, as they wanted to forge
alliances with the Spanish rulers of neighbouring Santo Domingo. More importantly,
kingship was the form of government that most African –born slaves understood best
and identified with most. The Republican commissioner Leger Felicite Sonthonax
wrote that “the most stupid of Africans” could understand the “simple” idea of a
king, while “even the most sophisticated of them” could not “conceive of the idea of a
republic.” A slave leader, Macaya, who sacked Le Cap in June 1793, expressed his
idea of kingship as follows when rejecting the entreaties of French republicans to
become republican: “I am the subject of three kings, o the King of Congo, master of
all the blacks; of the King of France, who represents my father; of the King of Spain
who represents my mother. These three Kings are the descendants of those who, led
41
Ibid, 105.
by a star, came to adore God made Man.” As far as we can tell, the St Domingue
slave rebels wanted to advance the cause of that first King, the King of Congo, by
“extirpating the whites. As one merchant put it, “they are spurred on by the desire of
plunder, carnage, and conflagration, and not by the spirit of liberty, as some folks
pretend.” The abolition of slavery was a very low priority. Indeed, the most important
black leaders, including Toussaint L’Ouverture, materially supported Spanish efforts
to maintain slavery in Santo Domingo for several years after the conflict began. When
emancipation came, it came very suddenly and at the instigation of the metropolis, in
the form of Jacobin commissars, Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel, who declared all
slaves immediately free between August and November 1794. Rebel leaders
responded not by rejoicing but by proudly declaring that they remained loyal to the
king of Spain and to all kings – kings having ruled since the “beginning of the
world.”42
Eventually, the most important rebel leader, Toussaint, did convert to
republicanism and, as DuBois argues, “struggled to lay the foundation of a kind of
order that had never before been seen or even really imagined.” His first words of
introduction to the people of St Domingue signalled his intentions: “I am Toussaint
Louverture. My name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want
Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint Domingue. I work to bring them into
existence.” Historians, notably C.L.R. James, who termed Toussaint “the first and
greatest of West Indians,” emphasised the second declaration – that seeking Liberty
and Equality. Certainly, Toussaint was singular in his racial vision whereby black and
white would work together to create a prosperous St Domingue. But the first
statement, that seeking vengeance, is just as noteworthy. Toussaint is an historically
42
Ibid, 103-8, 160-66; Robert Louis Stein, Leger Felicite Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the
Revolution (London, 1985), 98; John Thornton, “`I am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African
Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History, 4 (1993), 181.
complex figure, as much a creature of legend as fact. His vision was a remarkable one
in an age where race was becoming ever more a rigid marker of status and condition.
He brought a measure of prosperity, albeit briefly, to a ravaged island, and
considerable order and peace, claiming in 1802 that the island had reached a “degree
of splendour that had never been seen before.” But even if we take the most generous
view of Toussaint, which is what most historians customarily do and agree with
DuBois that Louverture was committed to defending liberty at all costs, it is clear that
he defended liberty by becoming himself a dictator and “the colony that he ruled
over” became “a society based on social hierarchy, forced labor, and violent
repression.” When he left the island, many blacks were happy to see him go. The
revolution had destroyed him. He had betrayed the liberator of the slaves, Sonthonax,
had executed his nephew and heir for supposedly wanting to re-establish slavery an
had invaded his erstwhile ally, Santo Domingo, on the very weakest of pretexts. His
constitution of 1801 and his November Proclamation in 1801 showed what a tyrant he
had become, embedding all power in his own person and transforming St Domingue
into a police state. None of these things probably bothered the ordinary slave. But his
insistence that the old order had to be maintained in order to keep St Domingue
prosperous and his unwillingness to allow ex-slaves to define for themselves what
they considered to be freedom alienated him from his fellow countrymen. Ex-slaves
were to continue as plantation labourers. Indeed, their situation was in some ways to
be worse than under slavery, as they were now exposed to the ideals of discipline and
the methods of punishment that Toussaint had employed in the army. Their status as
plantation labourers was made permanent and immutable, with plantations labourers
unable to move off their place of work or undertake any other occupation. They may
not have been slaves, as they had a right to the profits of the plantations they worked
but the freedom they had was defined in very specific terms: “Every plantation is a
factory that requires the union of cultivators and workers; it is the tranquil refuge of
an active and loyal family, whose father it necessarily the owner of the soil or his
representative.” But it was a “tranquil refuge” from which one could not escape. As
Dubois aptly puts it, to defend freedom, they had to surrender their freedom to the
new state.43
But even if Toussaint had not slipped into dictatorship, there were powerful
forces working against both him and, more importantly, his vision of a racially equal
St Domingue. Toussaint’s opponents, black and white, tended to view events through
the prism of race, demonstrating that most had not moved from the racially polarised
battles that first characterised conflict in St Domingue. Napoleon Bonaparte decided
to destroy Louverture’s regime in order to return freedpeople to slaves. He presented
his intentions as “a crusade of civilized people of the West against the black
barbarism that was on the rise in America.” Although he made some statements that
suggest he was prepared to recognise that slaves were now free and could not be
returned to slavery – “The French nation will never place shackles on men it has
recognised as free,” he explained – his major motivation seems to have been racial
hatred – “I am for the whites because I am white; I have no other reason and that one
is good.” His racism convinced the previously race-blind Toussaint that race was
desirable. “The whites of France and of the colony, united together, want to take our
freedom from us,” he wrote, adding, “Beware of the whites; they will betray you if
they can.” His lieutenant, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, needed no encouragement. Unlike
Toussaint, Dessalines had never imagined that whites and blacks could live together.
43
Ibid, 170-250; C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo
Revolution (New York, 1963), 4; David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, Ind.,
2002); Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (Paris, 1989); Carolyn Fick, The making of Haiti: The
Saint Domingue Revolution from below (Knoxville, 1990).
Those whites that served in his army he killed and he perpetrated a series of
massacres on those whites unfortunate to fall into his path on his way to final triumph
in 1803. Dessalines returned to older ways of fighting tan did Toussaint, encouraging
his troops to think of fighting in African terms, which included a propensity towards
seeing battle in supernatural and magical ways. It was not a surprise, then, that
following his victory over the French, he rejected a first, moderate, constitution in
favour of a bloodthirsty text that declared eternal enmity to France and promised
vengeance against all foes of the new regime. These foes were white. Dessalines
ordered that most of the remaining whites in the island be killed and that those few
who were deserving of protection, because they had rejected slavery, were to be
naturalised as citizens of the new country of Haiti. But in an ironic reversal of the old
regime, which had been developing ever stricter racial laws demarcating white from
black, Dessalines declared that “no white, no matter what his nation” could own
property in Haiti and that in the interests of eliminating all distinctions of “colour” in
the nation, all Haitians would be considered black. Haiti was to be a black kingdom,
with Dessalines and later Henri Christophe, as kings and emperors. Colour trumped
all else.44
But not all blacks shared Dessalines’ nihilistic vision. For many slaves,
freedom was a much more prosaic affair than either Toussaint or Dessalines
imagined. Here is the slave Philipeau writing to his mistress in late 1792 from a
plantation in the north of St Domingue. After declaring that he is black but “true and
loyal,” he declared that he had become manager of her plantation and was now her
humble servant. He concluded, “We are slaves and your subjects, and we give
ourselves over to work as we should, but humanity must interest itself in our fate.” In
44
Ibid, 256, 261, 266, 270-1, 295-301.
short, he expected now to be able to negotiate over the terms and conditions that
governed his life and the lives of the slaves now under his charge directly with his
mistress. They wanted, in particular, a space of their own and some control over how
they worked and over the ways in which they worked.45
What Philipeau wanted is, I suggest, closer to what most slaves expected from
their lives as slaves. They did not expect, or want, to be free, in the sense that
Enlightenment Europeans understood freedom. They were well aware that freedom
once given could always be taken away and that even if one was free, whites could
conceptualise blackness in such a way as to make their colour debilitating. Instead of
freedom, I think that slaves were more interested in the protection of their customary
rights and of all the privileges and expectations they had worked very hard to acquire
in their lives as plantation labourers. It is very difficult to understand what ordinary
slaves wanted out of slavery, because sources, even those as rich as the Thistlewood
diaries, do not allow us to hear the voices of slaves unmediated by white
interpretation. But a study of one rich source from early nineteenth century Berbice
does give us a chance to hear slave voices and slave views about their lives and what
they wanted from their lives in almost unmediated form.
These records are the Fiscal Records of British Guiana, made between 1819
and 1832 and preserved in ten or so large volumes at the Public Record Office. The
Fiscal was an office inherited from the Dutch who previously owned Berbice and was
essentially a sort of protector of slaves with equitable functions that allowed him to
entertain slave complaints and adjudicate either in favour of the slave or against her.
A lot could be said about these records but the main point for our purposes is that they
Gabriel Debien, “Sur les plantations Mauger a l’Arbonite (Saint Domingue 1763-1803), in Enquetes
et Documents: Nantes, Afrique, Amerique (Nantes, 1981), 298-99.
45
contain a wealth of direct testimony from slaves telling about what slaves complained
about and what they wanted remedied from their lives.
What is immediately clear is that they did not conceive of their relationships
with their masters and managers within the context of slave resistance, as it is
customarily understood. They certainly did not shape their complaints and concerns
within a language of freedom, contrary to what white slave owners like Bryan
Edwards and Nicholas Lejeune imagined. Freedom was not a universal aspiration for
slaves and most Berbice slaves did not want to be free. Or, more specifically, they did
not want to be free if being free meant being isolated from family and friends and
outside of slave community life. As Orlando Patterson reminds us, in “almost all nonWestern slaveholding societies there was no such status as a “free” person,” and that
“there was no word for freedom in most non-Western languages before contact with
Western peoples.”46 Joseph Miller confirms this general principle in his extensive
study of the Imbangala people of Angola, concluding that “the slave/free dichotomy,
familiar to Western heirs of the Enlightenment would not appear so obvious to the
Imbangala, since in Kasanje all status was seen as involuntary and no individual
considered himself as free in any sense close to Western theoretical notions of
freedom.”47
The statements that Berbice slaves made for themselves when making
complaints to the Fiscal suggest that they too did not work within a universe where
freedom was possible or desirable. What they wanted were more limited
improvements in their working conditions. Here is Louis, making a complaint.
I am not lazy nor a runaway, I am willing to work, but Mrs. Fraser deprives
me of my holidays and Sundays … I have no time to get my food till she goes
46
47
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 27.
Joseph C. Miller, “Imbangala Lineage Slavery,” in Miers and Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa, 24.
to sleep … I get one ration of rice for four days. I get neither cassava nor
plantains with it. When the allowance of fish is given, she throws it to me with
the left hand, she can’t bear to see me with her eyes nor will she allow me to
keep a fowl or two.48
Louis is not seeking “theoretical freedom” but is placing his complaints within
a shared understanding by planters and slaves about what it is fair for slaves to expect
and what it is not. He is not working within a discourse of resistance so much as with
de Certeau’s concept of tactical opposition. His complaints could be repeated many
times. Time and time again slaves making complaints emphasised that they were
willing to work but that they were upset at violations of customary norms, such as not
receiving the agreed amount of food, being treated as children rather than adults and
being ruled by people who did not “know how to deal with Negroes.” John
Blassingame thought of the plantation as “a battlefield where slaves fought masters
for physical and psychological advantage”49 But most plantations were not
battlegrounds in Berbice: 74 percent of all plantations with 65 percent of slaves did
not face a complaint from slaves in nine years. The nearly 1000 complaints slaves
made came from a minority of estates (26 percent) and revolved almost entirely over
slaves not being able to do what they wanted within a context when they accepted the
reality of slavery. The basic rules – slaves were meant to work, managers and owners
were meant to provide things that slaves thought they were entitled to in return for
that work – were seldom in dispute. What were disputed were the interpretation, detail
and emphasis of such rules that separated workers and managers. Once these were
sorted out, slaves usually agreed to continue serving as slaves. In Berbice, they did
not need to stay as slaves. They could always run off into the bush, which surrounded
48
49
Lean ft 90.
the small colony and which extended down to the Amazon. But going to the bush was
an unattractive option for most slaves. They equated going bush with suicide or death.
Swift from Welgelegen, for example, complained that his manager was always telling
him, “You may go and hang yourself, drown yourself, or go live in the bush.” Peter
on Agnes and Maria similarly saw the bush as akin to death, declaring that “he does
not care whether the people hang themselves or drown themselves or whether they
run away in the bush.” It was not a preferred option, as Jim of Fklaasson explained :
I do not want to belong to him [my master]; he must sell me. If I go back he
will punish me; and if he does, I will hang myself. I don’t want to go in the
bush. I am not lazy; but he must sell me.
What these words suggest is that slaves sought community over individual freedom
and that what they wanted most of all was some degree of input into what they
considered to be a negotiated relationship between master and slave. If freedom was
the goal of most slaves, they did not mention it in their any complaints, which were
more likely to be over clothes, housing or their dignity. The majority of slaves
concentrated on their day- to- day existence and either accepted enslavement or tried
to oppose certain aspects of slavery where they saw masters abusing their obligations
to them. We cannot gloss over the cruelties inherent in slavery, some of which have
been outlined above. But we do need to remember two things. As David Brion Davis
notes, if resistance was all pervasive, “how could workers relatively free from market
forces produce so much … I suspect that the negotiating and bargaining between
slaves and masters often led to compromises that actually aided productivity.”50
Moreover, as the pre-eminent Caribbean scholar Sidney Mintz reminds us “it is a fact
that during the nearly four centuries that slavery flourished in this hemisphere, only a
50
Lean p14.
tiny fraction of daily life consisted of open resistance. Indeed, most of life then, like
most of life now, was spent living: and most of it was lived in daily, even perfunctory,
association with the holders of power. Hence to limit oneself to the study of violent
resistance is to avert one’s eyes from most of African-American history.”51 I think we
should stop averting our eyes.
51
Mintz, “Slave Life, “ 13.