A Collective Regime of Violence and the Debate about the Abuse of Slaves

Violence against the enslaved not only involved masters but also non­slaveholders and the authorities. It permeated every social sphere. At the same time, the pervasive and extreme character of violence in slave societies fuelled a debate on the need to regulate it.

Consequently, some masters openly committed atrocities, including cold­blooded murder in the cruellest way, with impunity. During his stay in Saint- Domingue on his way to Louisiana, military officer Jean Bernard Bossu reported that he had

seen a settler, named Chaperon, who forced one of his slaves to enter a hot furnace where the unfortunate man expired; and as his jaws had fallen open, the barbarous Chaperon said: I believe he is still laughing, and poked him with a fork.

Such torturers were socially condemned - Bossu described Chaperon as barbarous - but they were tolerated as their presence meant other slave­holders did not to have to commit cruel acts themselves. Thus, the issue of violence within slavery cannot be reduced to the master-slave relationship within one household: it was collectively managed.

However, even in the most brutal slave societies, where settlers were accustomed to extreme violence in everyday life, the question of legitimate, fair and efficient ways of punishing slaves continued to be debated among the authorities and settlers. Some saw abusive violence as morally degrading for slaveholders. According to the Saint-Domingue lawyer Michel-Rene Hilliard d'Auberteuil, ‘the habit of being obeyed makes the master proud, swift, rough, choleric, unjust, cruel, and imperceptibly makes him abandon all the moral virtues'. 11 Others believed that excessive violence could incite slaves to run away or revolt: it imperilled rather than sustained the slave order. Everywhere, the limits to violence remained a social, political and moral issue.

Interpersonal violence was not restricted to masters and slaves but also involved non-slaveholders, and it combined with judicial violence. Not only did states give masters the right to punish, within limits, their slaves; they also involved the whole of white civilian society in their efforts to curb slave unrest. They required all whites, including non-slaveholders, to keep an eye on slaves and to police them in the public space under certain circumstances. Slave laws allowed or ordered white private individuals to arrest slaves who circulated, congregated, bore arms or traded without any note from their masters authorising them to do so. Public authorities were also more or less involved in the development of police forces operating against runaway slaves.

According to Hilliard d’Auberteuil, the consequence of this slave legisla­tion was that ‘in Saint-Domingue, anyone who is White mistreats the Blacks with impunity. Their situation is such that they are slaves to their masters and the public.’^[65] In cases of conflict, whites felt justified and powerful in using physical violence as slaves could not strike back without risking a great deal. Hence, in urban slave societies such as French New Orleans the streets remained sites of frequent physical confrontations over status and race, most often initiated by whites. This violence helped low-ranking non­slaveholders such as soldiers to publicly distinguish themselves from and to assert their racial pre-eminence over slaves. Contrary to what Hilliard d’Auberteuil claimed for Saint-Domingue, however, those men were some­times prosecuted for having harmed or killed a slave who belonged to someone else, but the procedure could be either civil or criminal, and, in the case of a criminal trial, they were rarely sentenced to death.

Indeed, in every slave society public justice served to consolidate the slave system and the enforcement of a strict racial order. Although masters were, to a large extent, supposed to govern and discipline their slaves within their own households, some offences were deemed too serious to be left to private justice. Slave laws provided for the possibility for slaves to be tried and specified the kind of sentences according to the nature of the crimes. The Georgia Act of 1755, for instance, provided for the death penalty for slaves convicted of insurrection, attempted insurrection, murder, attempted mur­der, assault, arson and, in some instances, striking a white person. Slave laws and courts mostly sought to criminalise and prosecute slave resistance; in contrast, they were not interested in dealing with violent confrontations among the enslaved.

The judicial systems sustained the production and reproduction of the slave order through the organisation of separate courts for slaves (this was the case in the British Empire but not the in French Empire) and restrictions on slaves’ testimony, the social identity of criminals (the targeting of slaves and the sparing of whites), the crimes for which they were convicted (mostly theft and running away), the punishments to which they were sentenced (flogging, branding, mutilation, the death penalty by burning, breaking their arms and legs on the wheel, or hanging, transportation and hard labour in a workhouse), the status and background of the executioner (a slave or freedman was most often chosen), and, lastly, through the organisation of public executions and the exhibition of corpses and body parts. Decapitating and placing heads on poles or burning corpses after hanging assimilated slaves to traitors. Any ‘crime' committed by slaves was interpreted as an act of treachery against the slave order.

The need to sustain the slave system explains the divergence in the way metropolitan and colonial judicial machineries evolved over time. While the debate about the necessity of reforming criminal justice that developed in Europe over the eighteenth century in the context of the Enlightenment was apparently not based on what was happening overseas, it had an impact in some slave societies. On the one hand, colonial authorities continued to resort to torture in judicial procedures and to sentence slaves to terrible corporal punishments which were being phased out on the other side of the Atlantic. On the other hand, after the Seven Years War, the debate about the need to curb masters' domestic sovereignty intensified. During the war slave revolts had spread in the Caribbean and, after peace was signed, the slave trade rapidly expanded. In such a dangerous context, the state, in both the French and British Empires, felt the need to intervene in order to prevent slave unrest.

This phenomenon was sustained by the development of interconnected abolitionist movements in the Atlantic world. The denunciation of inhuman cruelty and degrading violence was a central argument of abolitionist dis­course, especially in England. As a result of the abolitionist campaign, which was widely supported, Prime Minister William Pitt commissioned a report on the slave trade and the treatment of slaves in the West Indies in February 1788. The parliamentary debate encouraged some colonial assemblies to pass new slave laws, including provisions protecting slaves. These laws were also inspired by the amelioration movement that had started to develop in the islands from the mid-century and which expanded in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Planters in favour of amelioration supported slavery and mostly sought to reduce the mortality of their enslaved labourers at a time when they had difficulties acquiring slaves whose prices were rising in an era of political turmoil and of international wars.