Slave and Maroon Violence

Violence by slaves took multiple forms and was directed towards various actors. First, enslaved men and women could escape the slave system by turning the violence against themselves.

Violence was also widespread among the enslaved. Brutal confrontations frequently erupted on and between plantations. The reverse would have been surprising as there is no reason why slave communities should have operated differently from any other collectivity, including those confronted by harsh oppression and domination. It is impossible to know, however, if the level of violence between slaves was particularly high because of the peculiarities of the slave system. The destitution of their daily lives and the scarcity of women certainly provoked multiple incidents over property (related to theft, the exchange of commodities and services, and the repay­ment of debt) and family (the control of women's sexuality prompted domestic abuse and acts of violence against potential or actual rivals).

When they tried to directly confront their enslavement, most slaves chose desertion. In fact, running away constituted the most common mode of slave resistance and violence was usually not involved. Most slaves escaped for a short period of time before going back to their plantations. However, on some islands - Jamaica, Dominica and Grenada - runaways succeeded in forming long-lasting communities of Maroons, which came to occupy a liminal place between freedom and subordination within planta­tion societies. To maintain their population, Jamaican Maroons, for instance, welcomed runaways and raided plantations to obtain women and children. They succeeded in terrorising settlers with their repeated attacks and techniques of guerrilla warfare, especially during the First Maroon War, which lasted from 1729 to 1739. Unable to defeat them, the British authorities signed a series of treaties in 1739. These treaties granted the Maroons land and limited rights as British subjects, including the right to bear arms and administer justice for non-capital crimes. In return, Maroons pledged to serve as runaway catchers, to support colonists against slaves in every rebellion, and to defend the island in the event of invasion. Yet, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century the relationship between the Maroons and the colonial authorities progressively deteriorated, as Maroons were increasingly reluctant to fulfil their role of colonial police force and sided, on occasion, with the enslaved.

In contrast with desertion, which was widespread, slaves only very rarely struck back against their masters, assaulting or murdering them, as they were sure to be sentenced to the death penalty in the case of homicide.

Finally, violence by slaves also took the form of revolt. Rebellions were sporadic because slaves usually did not rise up unless they believed they could succeed. The only slave conspiracy that was allegedly organised in French Louisiana, for instance, took place at the time of the Natchez Wars in June 1731. The frequency and magnitude of rebellions depended on multiple factors, including the size of the slave population, the demographic imbal­ance between whites and blacks, the conditions of the slave trade, the size of plantations and their degree of isolation, the presence or absence of a large Native American population, the existence of a military culture among the enslaved, the strength of the militias and garrisoned troops, and, finally, the existence of favourable circumstances such as epidemics and colonial or international wars that weakened the white population. In contrast, the possibility for slaves to form families and cultivate market gardens consti­tuted deterrent factors, as slaves sought to protect their relatives' lives and preserve their property. The impact of religion is more difficult to assess.

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In English and French America, as well as in the rest of the western hemisphere, violence played a crucial role in explaining how slave societies succeeded in perpetuating themselves for such a long time. It was not the sole factor, but it was certainly the most decisive one. A culture of terror deeply shaped these slave societies and affected all sides, although slaves suffered the most. The centrality of violence within slave societies was not only related to its frequency and harshness and to the fact that it involved all social and institutional actors, but also to the specific forms it took. Corporal punishments always constitute a symbolic language. The forms of physical violence are never chosen randomly and always mean something as they serve to justify and legitimise the system of domination, exploitation and oppression. The specific modalities of violence in slave societies aimed at dehumanising slaves; conversely, the dehumanisation of slaves facilitated this regime of pervasive and brutal violence because it eased the way both public justice and masters resorted to cruelty as slaves were not considered as human beings entitled to the same rights. In that regard, slave societies under British and French sovereignties operated in the same manner. They differed, however, in the way in which the debate over slavery in relation to violence developed through a parliamentary commission or the justice arena in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

What happened during the Revolutionary era also distinguished the two empires. In world history, no slave revolt ever succeeded, with a single exception: the Saint-Domingue slave insurrection, which broke out in August 1791. Only the political turmoil brought on by the French Revolution and international war explain this remarkable outcome. The French and Haitian Revolutions prompted a cycle of extreme violence. A series of genuine wars opposed whites, free people of colour and slaves. Refugees who fled Saint-Domingue wrote and published many accounts of the events. They exported a fear that spread and reverberated through the whole Atlantic world. For all American slave societies, not only for Saint- Domingue, the Haitian Revolution, and more generally the Age of Revolutions, marked a rupture. From then on, slaves started to fight not only to obtain their own freedom but the overthrow of slavery globally.

At the same time, one can argue that there was considerable continuity between the periods before and after the Revolutionary era in the British and French Caribbean. As the painting of the punishment of the four stakes by Verdier demonstrates, extreme violence continued to be prevalent in the slave societies of the British West Indies and French Antilles in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Yet, the abolition of the international slave trade in 1807-15, the creolisation of slave populations, the rise of humanitarianism and abolitionism, and the expansion of movements to reform or ameliorate slavery might all have had an impact on the interplay between violence, slavery and race before the abolition of slavery in 1833-8 in the British Empire and in 1848 in the French Empire.