Physical and Symbolic Violence, or Slavery and Race

Abolitionist literature as well as all other primary sources produced by historical actors on all sides - slave narratives, interrogatories and testimonies of slaves in judicial archives, travel accounts, histories of colonies, masters' diaries, correspondence between slave owners and overseers, planter manuals, administrative correspondence, parliamentary investigations, pro­slavery pamphlets, etc.

Primary sources create two opposite impressions, each reflecting one dimension of a complex reality: violence against slaves remained arbitrary, but at the same time tended to become normalised. A large part of the documentation produced at the time, either by advocates or opponents of slavery, insisted on the boundless imagination masters deployed to invent new instruments and forms of punishing slaves. They listed a dreadful variety of ways used by masters to chastise, torture or even kill their enslaved labourers, and conveyed the idea that they resorted to violence impulsively, erratically and unpredictably - in short, irrationally. These descriptions emphasised the mutilations and murders of slaves, which could be viewed as particularly irrational as these casualties went against the best interests of the slave owners who thereby lost or damaged part of their workforce and financial capital. Arbitrary violence expressed the absolute power masters had over their slaves. Behind the apparent lack of rationale, the variety of forms of atrocities communicated the belief that no rules applied to slaves as they did not belong to the civic community and were not tied or protected by any social contract.

On the other hand, some sources, generally produced by planters or other proponents of slavery, opposed the idea that extreme violence in slavery was an evil by-product of a system that could not be controlled and regulated. They presented violence as an acceptable and necessary social-engineering tool in the hands of slaveholders. Masters needed to learn how to use and modulate physical violence in a calculated and controlled way in order to impose their authority and extract as much work as possible from their enslaved labourers at the lowest human and financial cost. It was a question of efficiency, but also a way of preserving the morality of owners themselves, whether this morality was inspired by religious and/or humani­tarian ideas.

The pedagogical role these masters attributed to violence explains why punishments were most often administered in public in order to deter other slaves from disobeying or rebelling. For the same reason, they carefully decided the kind of punishment they would inflict accord­ing to circumstances. Likewise, many masters experimented and dis­cussed their policies of punishment among themselves. In his travel account, Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpffen explicitly recounted how he made an ‘experiment', doubling, tripling, quadrupling, etc. the number of lashes of the whip from one day to the next until his slaves stopped failing to meet their quota of coffee beans at the time of harvest on a Saint-Domingue plantation in 1790.^[67] Some considered that masters administered justice on their estate: they believed they needed to reduce the arbitrary dimension of punishments in order for slaves to more easily accept them, and fixed their own personal legal code.

The controlled dimension of violence also appeared through the choice of person actually inflicting the corporal punishment. That was a crucial issue: at stake were acceptance of the master's authority and the construction of a chain of command. When they were not absentee planters but lived with their enslaved workforce, masters could chastise their slaves themselves or order a white overseer or a black driver to do so. Some slaveholders also asked the public executioner or common whipman (in Jamaica someone employed by the parish whose service could be purchased by masters) to punish their slaves on their behalf.

While both enslaved men and women were mistreated, it was men who were, most of the time, in charge of punishing slaves, as it was not considered proper for women to inflict violence. Yet, while there is no known case of a white woman serving as an overseer and black women were never chosen as drivers except to handle other women and children, white women could be involved in the chastisement of slaves. This phenomenon questioned their gender position within white society. The Martinique planter and lawyer Jean-Baptiste Thibault de Chanvalon described ‘the great severity they [American women] employed to get served; a severity that seems to exceed that of men'.^[68] For this reason and others, tropical colonies appeared in his writings as the site of the inversion of social norms.

The use of violence in slave societies distinguished colonies from the metropole in many other ways. Indeed, violence within private households, by masters on servants in particular, existed and was accepted in early modern Europe. In slave societies, however, this violence was amplified, intensified and systematised; it also took on a new meaning as it came to express not only class but also racial hierarchy. Specific forms of corporal punishment were chosen to enforce and display a racial divide.

Race and Violence in Early English and French America commonly used various instruments and resorted to all sorts of corporal punishment (flogging attached or suspended in all kinds of positions; tying a slave's neck to his heel for hours, etc.) in combination with imprisonment (jails were built on large plantations). The goal was not only to punish and teach a lesson by inflicting pain, to impede desertion by restricting mobility, and to identify unruly slaves and prevent recidivism by marking the flesh with branding, mutilation and scars from lashes of the whip; corporal punish­ments also served to humiliate, terrorise and demoralise. That humiliation was sought is clear in both what seems to have been uncommon atrocities, when slaves were forced to drink urine or eat excrement, and in a regular mode of punishment such as the four stakes. Instruments and methods of chastisement were intended to animalise enslaved men and women. When an overseer sent their annual report to their absentee plantation owner, they often listed and counted slaves and cattle in the same document. When they punished slaves or when they branded them with the name of their owner, they also tried to make them internalise their condition of living chattel.

The same instruments and modes of punishment were used indiscrimi­nately against enslaved men and women. Women, however, were appar­ently punished less frequently and as intensively as men, although they were not spared. Indeed, the denunciation of the flogging of women did not become central to British abolitionist literature until the 1820s. Moreover, in addition to the corporal punishment common to both genders, women had to endure systemic sexual violence. Coerced sex (either rape or sex to which women only consented because they felt they had no choice even though physical violence was not involved), as illustrated by Thomas Thistlewood's diary, was used by whites as a weapon of social control on plantations. Men were not subjected to the same policy of sexual violence, but the whole system of corporal punishment, the sexual appropriation of enslaved women by whites, and the fact that enslaved men could not protect their wives from sexual and physical abuse by their owners combined to impair their manhood and make them feel inferior - on occasion their virility was not only challenged symbolically but also physically, as castration occurred. Gender thus played a crucial role in the intersection between violence and race that tended to strengthen over time. It is remarkable how, confronted with such a regime of systematic violence and terror, enslaved women and men fought hard to preserve their dignity. While such a process of dehumanisation may have taken a heavy psychological and moral toll on slaves, it did not impede them from violently reacting against their enslavement.