ExecutedToday.com

On this date in 1852, John and Jane Williams hung in Richmond for the hatchet-murder of the wife and infant child of their master.

This one was a sensation for the antebellum crime beat, the “deep brain-cuts” to the heads of Joseph Winston (who survived) and Virginia Winston and nine-month-old child (who, obviously, did not) administered in the small hours July 19th was just the sort of thing to tap white slaveholders’ fears. (Reportedly, they were cruel masters and had recently threatened to sell Jane without also selling her child.)

That the crime was authored by urban slaves assimilated to the money economy connected it directly with broader anxieties about social transformations, as explored by Midori Takagi in Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction:

[U]rban slaves who enjoyed a variety of privileges including hiring out, living apart, socializing without supervision, and cash bonuses. White Richmonders believed these privileges encouraged the slaves to be rebellious …

Although John belonged to the Winston household, he worked at the docks for John Enders during the day. Like most hired slave workers, John could move about the city before and after working hours with no supervision. He also probably received cash from his earnings and could earn extra by performing overtime work. John was not required to live in the Winstons’ house but chose to in order to be with his wife. Janes, on the other hand, was directly owned by the Winstons and most likely did not enjoy the same privileges as her husband. But she was able to move about in the city making trips to the market, did socialize with other slaves and possibly free blacks, and was well aware of the privileges and expectations of hired slaves including her husband.

White residents came to believe that these factors encouraged slaves to act violently by planting within them “the germ of rebellion.” One influential Richmonder, Joseph Mayo (who later became mayor), attributed the “glaring evils” of the slave population to “the system of board money … [and] the assumptions of equality exhibited by the blacks in riding in carriages contrary to law, and in dress and deportment.” Increasingly, white city dwellers began to wonder if they had been — in the words of one resident — “rearing wolves to our own destruction.”

These anxieties, piqued by crimes such as the Williamses’, would lead to a welter of new restrictions on the movement, behavior, and even attire of urban slaves in Richmond in the ensuing years.

But that was for the future. While Richmond had real-life master-murdering miscreants in its clutches, it gave vent to all its opprobrium.

Papers described the crimes as “hardly paralleled in history,” anticipated for Jane (who eventually copped to the crime and unsuccessfully tried to exculpate John) “the fires of her eternal doom,” and her execution “without the smallest particle of sympathy from any human being possessed of the ordinary feelings of justice.” The exhortations of her pastor, the Richmond Daily Dispatch opined, fell upon “unwilling ears. The thick-crowding thoughts of the diabolical murder of two innocent, guileless beings, committed by Janes with the coolness and deliberation of a fiend, rendered unimpressive, cold, and tedious, those ceremonies.”

It is to be hoped [the Dispatch concluded] that her merited and summary execution will operate as a warning to the fractious portion of our negro population.*

In a show of scrupulous regard for the inalienable rights endowed by the Creator, the state of Virginia compensated the convalescing Joseph Winston to the tune of $500 for expropriating and executing his property.

* (Second-hand) sources for the newspaper excerpts: The Penalty is Death: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Women’s Executions by Marlin Shipman; and, “Black Female Executions in Historical Context” by David V. Baker, Criminal Justice Review, vol. 33, no. 1 (March 2008).

Also On This Date

• 1977: Hamida Djandoubi, Madame Guillotine's last kiss

An alarming rumour, meanwhile, … spread throughout the Colonies; a rumour which, whatever of truth or fact, little or none, might be at the foundation, gathering, as it went, size and gloom, and dust of slander, was calculated to make them all feel very unhappy. The report was that a slave insurrection had been discovered, having its centre on the Berbice West Coast, but extending right and left so as to include all the shore from the Corentyne Coast to Mahaica, about eighty miles; that the negroes had chosen a governor and other officers; that it was their intention to murder all the white men, and take possession of all the rest; that some of the Demerara East Coast negroes were leaders in the rebellion, especially Philip, a member of the church on Le Resouvenir; and that instruction of the negroes was to blame.

…

the account which the negroes gave of the matter was, that there had been formed a society in imitation of the Freemasons, they wishing to have, as well as their buckras or masters, a society of that nature; and that the money collected was to support the poor and defray the expense of their dances, &c.; just as it had been formerly very common for them to assume the names of their masters, or of the Governor or Fiscal, and send invitations to friends to supper or a dance, and appoint a captain of their own as president of the feast; sometimes to put feathers in their hats at holiday time and parade the streets. “No one,” as far as Mr. Wray could learn, “had been injured by them, neither was any property destroyed,” yet on 12th April six of the unhappy people apprehended on the West Coast were executed in New Amsterdam as ringleaders, their heads cut off and fixed upon poles on the different estates to which they belonged; one of them white with age, whose master, Mr. Rader, told Mr. Wray that he denied to the last having any bad intentions. Several others were flogged under the gallows, and some were transported.

A proclamation was subsequently issued to the effect that as “the privilege allowed the slaves of the Colony, of publicly or privately dancing on estates and other places at stated periods, had been perverted by them to purposes of the most dangerous nature, all dancing was forbidden until next year, 1815, or the further pleasure of the Court;” … This was followed, late in the year, by another calling upon the colonists to pay their quota of the expenses incurred in crushing the plot and indemnifying the proprietors of the slaves capitally punished … Better still, the law concerning Sunday labour was amended in favour of the slave, forbidding field-work on that day, except in sudden emergencies; and further enactments were issued limiting and regulating the excessive use of the whip, and forbidding the burial of any slave dying suddenly or by suicide, or in consequence of punishment or hurt, without previously acquainting the authorities …

From The Life and Labours of John Wray, Pioneer Missionary in British Guiana.

Also On This Date

• 1966: Christiaan Soumokil, South Moluccan President

(Thanks to Mark Davis of macandal.org for the guest post on a remarkable historical parallel to today’s inauguration of Barack Obama. -ed.)

The world was astounded when Barack Obama was elected to the Presidency in 2008 knowing the cultural barriers minorities have faced for hundreds of years. The date of inauguration, January 20, also happens to be the anniversary of the burning at the stake of a virtually unknown man, Francois Macandal,* whose epic war against cultural barriers has been buried for centuries.

Read some of his story and judge if the historic election of Barack Obama could have occurred without the man they called “Macandal.”

The parallels with Barack Obama’s journey are numerous, but the life of Macandal was perhaps even more remarkable, reaching great heights and falling into the darkest chasms of despair, yet succeeding in spite of staggering odds. Macandal’s travails may be about finding one’s purpose and dreaming of victory even when condemned by a majority, as he was relentlessly pursued by soldiers and hounded by countless naysayers.

251 years ago on January 20, 1758, Macandal was chained to a post on a platform before thousands of slaves brought together to witness his brutal torture and execution. Because of his importance, the French gathered slaves from hundreds of plantations throughout the colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). They believed such a horrific spectacle would quash Macandal’s Revolution, which he began to end French rule and abolish slavery, 12 years before.

Around 1746 Macandal escaped his plantation, united thousands of escaped slaves along with many still enslaved, and proclaimed that he would lead them all to independence and freedom. This declaration, from someone who had only six years before been taken from his home in the Congo, was unprecedented, since no slave colony had ever defeated a European nation. Then Macandal mobilized tens of thousands and may have inspired millions to end slavery and defeat colonial hegemony in the Haitian Revolution consummated decades after his death.

But ironically even the famous, black Marxist writer C.L.R. James, attributed one of the greatest revolutions in history to something akin to ‘spontaneous rioting’ by 500,000 black slaves in 1791. Since 1791 almost every historian has reduced the “Haitian Revolution,” the only successful overthrow of a colonial power by black slaves, to a ‘collective rage,’ inspired by the whites of the “French Revolution.” Yet it may have been Macandal’s Revolution, not the starving peasants of France, that inspired their uprising in 1789.

The true story of Macandal represents obscure but recorded testimonies about his life and explains why the slave revolt of 1791 was in fact, “Macandal’s Revolution,” almost 50 years in the making. Macandal foretold the end of slavery, then planned it, plotted it and began it. His story shatters a myth that has gone unchallenged for over 200 years: that the Haitian Revolution of 1791 was a spontaneous slave uprising inspired by the French peasants who had charged the Bastille Prison in Paris two years earlier.

The Haitian Revolution ultimately ousted the French, defeating Napoleon and numerous French generals. It also succeeded against the vaunted British army and established a new government run by former slaves. It was the first domino in a series of colonial defeats and changes in law that led to the end of institutional slavery; and Macandal started it all.

Correcting the Historical Record

Macandal is rarely the focus of historians and when mentioned only his insignificance is noted. But the popular version of his story was immortalized by the original French writers themselves, in the interest of bolstering a self-image of innate superiority as a nation and a race. To have recognized Macandal’s brilliance would have acknowledged slavery’s illegitimacy, so Macandal’s real story had to be trivialized and buried.

This telling of Macandal’s journey from a free child in Africa to slavery and then revolution, relies less on popular writings and more on a review of all of the records in context. For example French writers claimed Macandal broke free because he was tied with ropes and the post was made of rotted wood that fell apart when he was set ablaze. Historians have repeated this without scrutiny. The French on St. Domingue regularly burned slaves to death at the town square of the capital, “Cap Francais.” At Macandal’s execution they gathered thousands of slaves as witnesses, to insure a humiliating defeat and halt his widely supported rebellion. Yet, despite this grandiose staging, we are supposed to believe Macandal was insignificant. And we must accept that the French military was so inept they forgot how to execute and did not know that ropes burn and untreated, rotted wood is flammable. Many such dubious “facts,” are still repeated blithely about Macandal and few Westerners grant him his bravery, genius or impact.

Interestingly, the U.S. Bill of Rights guaranteeing equality for all was also adopted in 1791, but it would be more than seven decades before slavery was outlawed in the U.S. and almost two centuries before equal opportunity laws were passed and enforced. For one tiny nation, Macandal enabled this to occur over 200 years ago.

Background

I began researching the life of Macandal 20 years ago, startled and inspired by one chapter in Wade Davis’ popular book The Serpent and the Rainbow, which focused on secret societies, Voodoo and Zombification. His version of Macandal’s story was dictated to him by Rachel Bouvoir-Dominique, a Haitian Anthropologist I interviewed in 1997, at her office in Cap Haitien. Working under the tutelage of well-known author and expert on Haitian history Michel Laguerre, a professor at U.C. Berkeley, I received grants for a field study and documentary on the subject of Macandal.

Anthropologists often allocate greater weight to oral history, informal observer accounts, burial remains, maps and gravures, re-evaluating more accepted published works historians rely on, and so this account reflects my perspective and research as an Anthropologist. I examined European gravures (illustrations) and colonial records cited commonly more skeptically, because they were clearly burdened by religious, sexist and racial paradigms of the day. For example illustrations portrayed slaves with happy smiles and sanguine facades, enjoying their lives in idyllic settings on the plantations. Yet slaves faced torture, rape, separation of family and death from over-work, every day. Blacks were often drawn with monkey features (toes, ears etc.) and other demeaning caricatures.

Western writers were fiercely loyal to provincial rhetoric, including the gender and racial bias then considered crucial foundations of Christian theology. Western scholars dehumanized natives and women to rationalize slavery, prejudice and justify the infamous “hierarchy of being,” which granted “white men” a closeness to God that no one else could approach. This endowed them with the right to use others as they saw fit.

There were many reasons colonial authorities destroyed or buried the noteworthy exploits of slaves. Few accounts of courageous acts from among the ranks of millions of Africans during 400 years of slavery were recorded and preserved, primarily to maintain the perception that slavery was justified, necessary and Nubian Africans were not truly human but beasts of burden. There are literally thousands of articles, books and films about individuals among the six million Jews who died during the holocaust but only a scant few from among the 100-200 million indigenous peoples killed during the colonial expansion; all the more reason to re-evaluate slaves like Macandal.

A Brief History of Macandal

During the early 18th century, around the age of 12, Macandal was taken from the west coast of Africa, probably the Loango Kingdom in the Congo. I claim the date of his birth was 1728 primarily because oral historians in Haiti I interviewed believed him to be 30 when he was fastened to a post before thousands and set on fire in 1758.

The French called him Macandal which may derive from a city in the Congo called “Makanda.” The town of Makanda no longer exists due to civil war but could have ancient roots and slaves were often named after the places they came from. His name may have been taken from the term makanda (plural form of “kanda”) referring to African societal groups. Some written accounts report that Macandal claimed to be descended from a ranking societal group and the son of a Chief or King.

Amazingly, Macandal could speak, read and write Arabic fluently. Some believe this is because he was raised Muslim, yet the Congo was Christianized long before Macandal was born. Portuguese mercenaries, missionaries and armies had combed every square inch of the Congo beginning in the late 1400’s, searching for gold, diamonds and slaves, forcing conversion to Christianity. However Macandal’s words and actions reveal a unique knowledge of both Christianity and Islam. His ancestors may have emigrated from the east coast where Muslims and Asians had allied with Swahilis to build beautiful cities and schools before the Portuguese invasion. His family may have then hidden themselves for centuries.

Conversion to Christianity was also a requirement for slaves on colony plantations but Macandal defied the French by learning the underpinnings of Christianity, to understand the roots of slavery and challenge newly acquired doctrines. Despite many influences the adult Macandal claimed no affiliation with Christianity, Islam, Voodoo or Animism.

As a child Macandal was educated and known to be accomplished in both music and art, including painting and sculpture. His dedication to learning was apparent throughout his life. He displayed a vast knowledge of plants, became a doctor on the plantation he was taken to and was sought by even the French themselves for treatment of diseases and ailments. Yet the vegetation on St. Domingue was completely different from that of the Congo; therefore, Macandal had to study his new environment and learn the properties of perhaps hundreds of plants. He secretly taught himself French and became so eloquent that the French aristocrats remarked that he could speak it better than they themselves, though education was strictly forbidden for slaves.

Based on historical records and interviews, it appears that Macandal was first sentenced to death on his plantation, around 1746 at the age of 18, for falling in love with the plantation owner’s favorite lover, a young and beautiful house slave. He underwent a scene of heinous torture intended to culminate in his death in front of many witnesses, but escaped mysteriously and fled into the hills. The French replaced this account with a tale about Macandal becoming handicapped from losing a hand in a sugar mill and then being left unguarded. His escapes were always attributed to poor guard oversight.

Though Macandal probably began his new life of freedom with the intention of bringing vengeance to his former owner Lenormand de Mezy and rescuing his true love, for some reason his objective evolved. Perhaps because of the totality of his traumatic experiences or because of the influence of Maroons (ex-slaves already living in the distant mountains) Macandal met after escaping, he began working for a new goal of freedom for all.

Macandal led a sweeping and unwavering revolution during the 12 years after his escape from the plantation. Unlike other escaped slaves, Macandal actually made the end of slavery his stated mission. He became the first to unite thousands of disparate Maroons who were living free but divided by tribal affiliation and known to be ardently dedicated to the destruction of each other. His uniting of these groups was an extraordinary accomplishment and he is the first known black leader and ex-slave to do so.

He began calling himself the “Black Messiah” and gave rousing speeches in secret locations to recruit slaves. He made dangerous and daring appearances on plantations during the night to urge loyalty and inspire hope. The name “Black Messiah” had great meaning to Macandal as evidenced by one of his famous speeches at a secret recruitment meeting. The words exposed Macandal’s understanding of Islam and Christianity and their link to institutional slavery. The term was a powerful catalyst he used to preempt religious and ethical indoctrination of blacks and free them from the ideological bonds of slavery. He had to usurp the authority of the Church and French government to convince slaves they deserved equality, freedom, family sanctity, education and self-government.

Macandal became a brilliant strategist and had a large, organized camp with lieutenants, captains and other ranks. He led countless attacks and escaped capture mysteriously many times. His tactics were unique and devastating. They were known to be carried on after his disappearance despite the brutal efforts of the French to extinguish illegal grassroots activity. During his reign as a Maroon leader he may have recruited half or more of the 100,000 slaves living on the plantations as secret agents of his revolution.

Maroons and slaves apparently employed his tactics for decades after his disappearance in 1758. During the decade before the final thrust for overthrow in 1791, and despite harsh measures to thwart rebellion, Maroon activity greatly increased. This activity was so secret that virtually nothing is known about this period and is one reason historians assume the war for independence was unplanned, even though the first massive attack was led by Boukman Dutty, formerly a cruel black overseer who was a contemporary of Macandal. His gathering, which launched the war, was convened at a hidden location where Macandal formerly gave his speeches, the symbolism of which cannot be denied.

Generals that followed Boukman used ingenuity and unique strategies to win the 13-year war and Toussaint L’Ouverture is given most of the credit for the victory. But Toussaint refused to support the war until after it had begun; its inevitability certain. He was 13 when Macandal was sentenced to death in 1758. A voracious reader and student of warfare he was well aware of Macandal but content as a slave under a liberal planter.

It is my thesis the “Macandal Revolution” continued through the three decades preceding the Haitian Revolution. No other slave is known to have prophesied and promised the end of slavery yet Macandal predicted that blacks would defeat the French, become free and independent of colonial rule and control the colony of St. Domingue. His rally cry and pronouncement repeatedly rang throughout the colony despite opposition and betrayal from many slaves who greatly feared the French and did not believe victory was possible.

The Haitian Revolution remains the only successful movement by black slaves to defeat a colonial power and achieve complete independence. It stands alone as a towering victory against incalculable odds. Though it is characterized as a ‘riot’ that generated its own momentum, 500,000 slaves and free blacks mysteriously rose up in unison, using sticks and stones, against over 50,000 heavily armed soldiers, landowners and henchmen.

The Fall of Colonialism

As Macandal’s victories mounted I propose that word of his revolution spread to Europe and bolstered many anti-colonial movements. For example one of his closest secret allies was a French Jesuit priest and the Jesuits along with other religious leaders in Europe began fomenting rebellion during this period. Before news of Macandal’s revolt spread, many in Europe believed the slave trade was not only profitable but philanthropic. It had long been heard in the churches that slaves were heathens being brought to Christ and treated well in the process. His uprising no doubt made many Europeans aware that slaves were not being treated well and were desperate. Macandal’s shocking victories may have provoked Europeans to finally condemn colonialism and slavery. His fearless attacks and disregard for colonial might may have also seeded the French Revolution.

What really happened on January 20, 1758? Macandal endured great agony during an intense and excruciating punishment. He did this so that slaves everywhere might become free. The French claim Macandal was burned alive at the town square in Cap Francais.** Admitting he broke free and leaped out of the fire, they wrote that soldiers reclaimed Macandal and threw him back in. However some observers claimed Macandal broke his chains and fled, never to be seen again. How he broke free during any of his escapes despite being surrounded by guards and soldiers, is not known. It is interesting to note that his remains were never found and there is no burial site. Given the French proclivity for making examples of slaves to increase fear and enforce discipline, a successful execution should have been commemorated by another French monument.

For most historians, January 20, 1758, came and went with barely a mention in official memorandums. Yet a detailed search of documents reveals a massive cover-up, confusion and consternation. Macandal’s Revolution was not quashed or even slowed; instead it was impelled and sent wildly rumbling down a path of manifest destiny. Plantation owners later discovered their most trusted slaves were working for the revolution. New restrictions were put on all blacks throughout the colony and 4-5 rebels were burned at the town square every month to strike fear into the rest. Intense interrogation and torture revealed ever more depth to the conspiracy. Macandal’s execution day inflamed slaves and intensified their commitment to him and they became more united and fervently bent on winning freedom. Jesuits were banned from St. Domingue five years later.

As the first U.S. President with African roots is inaugurated on January 20, no one will speak of Macandal or Macandal’s Revolution, which led to equal rights in 1804 for one small nation. January 20, 1758, the day the French sought to secure colonialism and slavery in perpetuity, became a day of victory for Macandal and a watershed event which brought colonialism down. Though Macandal has been denied his place, his actions may have ended slavery and paved the way for people like Barack Obama to make history.

Mark Davis received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from U.C. Berkeley and a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii. He is the foremost authority on Macandal and his one hour documentary The Black Messiah was broadcast on PBS in 1997. He publishes information through his website at www.macandal.org.

* The man’s true name is lost to us; the one he was given by the French can be alternately spelled “Mackandal” or “Makandal” or “Mackendal”.

** Renamed Cap Haitien after Haiti won its independence.

Also On This Date

• Feast Day of St. Sebastian

(Thanks to Caitlin at Vast Public Indifference for the guest post -ed.)

In 1850, 60-year-old Robert Newsom, a prosperous farmer, traveled forty miles from his home in Callaway County, Missouri to neighboring Audrain County to buy a slave. Newsom was the head of a large and complex household that included several of his grown children, grandchildren, and five enslaved boys and men. His wife had died a few years earlier, a consideration that may have influenced his decision to purchase a female slave, a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia.

From the first day, Newsom treated Celia as his concubine. Testimony given before the Missouri Supreme Court in 1855 indicates that Newsom raped Celia for the first time on the journey home from the slave market. He installed her in a small cabin behind his house, where he continued to rape her on a regular basis over the next five years. During that time, she gave birth to two children.

In the spring of 1855, Celia began a relationship with George, another slave on the farm, and soon discovered that she was pregnant again. At George’s urging, Celia approached Newsom’s daughters and pled with them to protect her from their father during her pregnancy. The oldest daughter, Mary, later testified that Celia had threatened to hurt Newsom if he came to her cabin again, but there is no evidence that either she or her sister intervened.

On the night of June 23, 1855, Robert Newsom went to Celia’s cabin, no doubt intent on raping her yet again. He never returned to his own home.

Although Celia was never allowed to testify in her own defense, investigators reconstructed the events of the night through a combination of physical evidence and Celia’s confession. Fearful of Newsom, Celia had hidden a hefty stick in a corner of her cabin. When Newsom attacked her that night, Celia retrieved her weapon and beat him to death with it. She then dismembered the body and burned it to ashes in her fireplace. The next morning, Celia offered Newsom’s eleven-year-old grandson two dozen walnuts in exchange for his help cleaning out the fireplace and spreading the ashes in the yard.

The jury that convicted Celia of murder accepted her confession as fact, but some elements of her tale do not ring true. As Melton McLaurin observes in his book, Celia, A Slave, the task of cutting enough wood and tending the roaring fire necessary to consume a human corpse in a single night “would have taxed the strength of a healthy woman, and Celia was pregnant and sick” (McLaurin, 49). McLaurin implies that George either helped Celia or was primarily responsible for Newsom’s demise and that Celia may have lied to protect him. George disappeared shortly after the murder and was never arrested or charged.

Celia stood trial for Newsom’s murder in October of 1855 (State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave). Her lawyer, John Jameson, argued that Celia was legally entitled to defend herself from a would-be rapist under an 1845 law that made any attempt “to take any woman unlawfully against her will and by force, menace or duress, compel her to be defiled” a felony. He requested that the jury be instructed that

The words “any woman” in the first clause of the 29th section, of second article of laws of Missouri for 1845, concerning crimes & punishments, embrace slave women, as well as free white women.

The judge, William Augustus Hall, refused to honor the defense’s motion. Instead, he instructed the jury that a slave had no right to resist her master, even in the case of sexual assault. The jury found Celia guilty and sentenced her to death. (Celia’s child was delivered stillborn in prison.) The Missouri Supreme Court denied her appeal, and she was hanged on December 21, 1855.

Celia’s story is currently part of the interactive Slavery and the Making of America exhibit at PBS.org.

For more information, please see the following books:

McLaurin, Melton A. Celia, a Slave: A True Story. (University of Georgia Press, 1991). Google Books preview

Gordon-Reed, Annette, ed. Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History. (Oxford University Press, 2002). Google Books preview.

Also On This Date

• 1995: Kimura Shujish

On this date in 1796, insurrectionary Jose Leonardo Chirino was hanged in Caracas for leading a slave revolt in Spain’s oppressive New World sugar plantations.

Nearly all the information readily available online about Chirino is in Spanish, and all the links in this post are to Spanish pages.

The influence of the Haitian Revolution, and the philosophical precepts of the French Revolution that had helped spawn it, sent waves through the Caribbean washing up on every shore it touched.

Most of those lands had a ready audience under the lash of European colonial masters; the eastern Venezuelan city of Coro, home to the sugar aristocracy and the groaning underclass that crop implied, must have had one of the readiest.

On May 10, 1795, Chirino — a Zambo of mixed African and Amerindian blood who was himself a free farmer — led an uprising of the Congolese slaves in the area who worked the sugarcane and declared a Republic under the “Law of the French,” with slavery and white privilege abolished.

Forcibly.

The rebellion’s attempt on Coro itself failed, and it was swiftly put down by the colonial authorities. Though many involved were killed summarily, the Spanish took their sweet time after capturing Chirino in August 1795: only the following year was he transferred to Caracas for execution, after which his body was dismembered and his head set in an iron cage displayed on the road to Coro. (For good measure, they sold his family into slavery.)

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(Video from here)

Of course, Chirino was on the right side of history. The city square in Caracas where Chirino hung is now Plaza Bolivar, named for Latin America’s eponymous liberator.

Coro itself is today served by Jose Leonardo Chirino airport, and for the African diaspora in Venezuela, Chirino is a special inspiration.

Like any worthwhile symbol, he’s also contested territory — claimed as a forerunner (if a questionable one) of socialism by the “Bolivarian Republic” now governed by Hugo Chavez.

Also On This Date

• 1937: Teido Kunizaki

On this date in 1795, the slave whose rebellion had shaken the Dutch Caribbean colony of Curaçao was publicly tortured to death with his chief confederates.

The Landhuis Knip commands the plantation where Tula’s revolt began — the dark history behind the Dutch Antilles’ charming facade.

On August 17, 1795 Tula (English Wikipedia page | Dutch) launched a well-planned insurrection on the island, one of the major transit points in the Atlantic slave trade.

Inspired by the Haitian Revolution — and reasoning that, since France occupied the Netherlands, that whole Declaration of the Rights of Man thing ought to be trickling down to Dutch colonies — the rebels freed slaves plantation to plantation and quickly swelled near 1,000.

Of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau aside, the slaves were also irate that they were damn slaves.

Although the outside forces of international geopolitics played a role in inspiring the 1795 revolt, slaves could find sufficient justification for insurrection in the domestic policies that Dutch planters employed to keep their slaves laboring in Curacao. The planters maintained a harsh regime in which many privileges that had traditionally been bestowed upon slaves had been removed in order to heighten productivity and increase plantation profitability. By 1795, most slaves were being forced to work on Sundays, which had generally been a day of rest in the past, and many planters hired their slaves out to maximize profits by exploiting their labor. It had also become customary for all of the slaves on a plantation to be punished in response to the offense that an individual slave among them had committed. (Source)

A priest was sent as envoy from the worried white community to the rebel encampment, with an offer of amnesty for submission.

Tula (sometimes surnamed as Tula Rigaud) and fellow leaders Bastiaan Karpata (or Carpata), Pedro Wakao (or Wacao) and Louis Mercier received him politely, hosted him overnight, and told him to get lost. This is Tula:

Father, do not all the persons spring from Adam and Eve? Was I wrong in liberating twenty-two of my brothers who were unjustly imprisoned? Father, French liberty was a disaster for us. Each time one of us is punished, we are told: “Are you also looking for your freedom?” One day I was arrested, and I begged mercy for a poor slave; when I was liberated, my mouth was bleeding. I fell on my knees and I cried to God: “O Divine Majesty, O Most Pure Spirit, is it Your will that we are ill-treated? Father, they take better care of an animal.”

And subhuman was the torture Tula, Karpata and Wakao* bore for their insistence on freedom when a fellow slave finally — inevitably? — betrayed them.

At a spot now commemorated by a beachfront monument, the three had their bones systematically shattered with an iron rod, their heads lopped off, and their bodies tossed into the sea. (Despite the metadata on this post, it wasn’t precisely “breaking on the wheel” — but the bone-shattering was pretty much the same idea.)

Curacao remains today a Dutch possession; slavery was abolished there in 1863. August 17, the dawn of these Dutch slaves’ inspiring and fatal revolt for freedom, is now honored on the island — and off it.

* It’s unclear to me whether Mercier, who was captured earlier, was also executed with the others, or whether Mercier’s sentence had already been carried out by this time.

Also On This Date

• 1283: Dafydd ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales

On this date in 1822, white South Carolinians hanged the most terrifying slave insurrectionary who never rose — and breathed a sigh of relief as they clamped the shackles ever tighter upon their groaning servile class.

Inspired by slave revolts shaking the Caribbean, the Denmark Vesey plot was the South’s worst nightmare: Nat Turner, multiplied by about nine thousand.

That’s the size of the slave and free black network Vesey is said to have recruited — ready to undertake a coordinated uprising to seize Charleston, slaughter the white populace, and possibly then to sail for a Haiti whose own slave revolt had recently established it a black-governed republic. The mind boggles at such a scheme’s bravado … but in an age when horseshoes and mizzenmasts could outrun information, Vesey’s plot could have been past any prospect of obstruction before anyone in a position to obstruct it even knew what happened. Had they not flown but defended Charleston, the event would have ignited a conflagration to outshine every other slave uprising.

The weak point, of course, were those 9,000 — or however many — slaves who had to act ruthlessly and in unison, and keep their peace until they struck. It is incredible enough that such a secret kept among so many for up to four years.

The plot finally leaked mere days before it was to have been attempted when a middling player attempted the unnecessary freelance recruitment of a house slave — a class Vesey had intentionally (and rightly, events would prove) excluded for dangerously excessive personal loyalty to their masters’ families.*

Melancholy Dane

A well-educated and well-traveled man on account of his years as the personal property of a slaver — Joseph Vesey, who bequeathed his purchase both a surname and the given name Telemaque, subsequently corrupted into “Denmark” by Charlestonians — the plot’s signature hero/villain had managed to purchase his freedom and establish himself in the anomalous position of free black artisan/entrepreneur in the slaveholding South.

His successful carpentry business (apt choice, for a martyr) had given him the prestige and the werewithal to start an independent African Methodist Episcopal church where he poured out a hatred of chattel slavery undiminished by his own liberty.

For several years before he disclosed his intentions to any one, he appears to have been constantly and assiduously engaged in endeavoring to imbitter [sic] the minds of the colored population against the whites. He rendered himself perfectly familiar with those parts of the Scriptures which he could use to show that slavery was contrary to the laws of God; that slaves were bound to attempt their emancipation, however shocking and bloody might be the consequences … (Source)

His judges were later incredulous that he’d be so hung up about it:

It is difficult to imagine, what infatuation could have prompted you to attempt an enterprise so wild and visionary. You were a free man, comely, wealthy, and enjoyed every comfort compatible with your situation. You had, therefore, much to risk and little to gain.

An American Spartacus?

Denmark Vesey blurs into myth as he approaches his end, together with lieutenants: among them, Peter Poyas, the organizational maven of the operation who was hanged along with Vesey and four others; and Gullah Jack, an African priest among the 29 more who would die in the weeks ahead.

Most of the principals held their tongues before interrogators; the tribunals were held secretly; their records were censored against the apprehension by other slaves of the potential for such designs as “a bottle with poison to put into my master’s pump & into as many pumps he could about town.”

But there was enough known to shatter forever any illusion of paternal congeniality more liberal masters might have fancied. One planter was incredulous that his agreeable charge might be involved in such nefarious doings until he asked the man directly and was astonished to hear from his trusted coachman’s lips the frank intention “to kill you, rip open your belly and throw your guts in your face.” (Both quotes are from this book review.)

Whites were scared. “I have never heard in my life, of more deep laid plots or plots more likely to succeed,” wrote Anna Haynes Johnson, niece to Gov. Thomas Bennett. (Source) Another concluded that “our NEGROES are truly the Jacobins of the country.” (Source)

But as initial panic (and federal troop deployments) gave way to a more pervasive undertow of security paranoia, the affair was self-consciously downplayed and records intentionally destroyed for fear that too-careful documentation of its particulars could map the way for a revival. An 1861 piece in The Atlantic — an excellent read on the progress of the conspiracy — grapples with what was even then a gaping evidentiary vacuum.

The intense avidity which at first grasped at every incident of the great insurrectionary plot was succeeded by a distaste for the memory of the tale; and the official reports which told what slaves had once planned and dared have now come to be among the rarest of American historical documents. In 1841, a friend of the writer, then visiting South Carolina, heard from her hostess for the first time the events which are recounted here. On asking to see the reports of the trials, she was cautiously told that the only copy in the house, after being carefully kept for years under lock and key, had been burnt at last, lest it should reach the dangerous eyes of the slaves. The same thing had happened, it was added, in many other families. This partially accounts for the great difficulty now to be found in obtaining a single copy of either publication; and this is why, to the readers of American history, Denmark Vesey and Peter Poyas have been heretofore but the shadows of names.

Antebellum September 11

Even as a nonstarter, the insurrection was an antebellum 9/11 that spurred a reactionary crackdown on perceived liberalities in the system — most vividly symbolized by the construction of the fortress that became the still-extant military academy The Citadel, but more systematically impinging blacks’ everyday freedom to assemble and worship, and even requiring (until the Supreme Court overruled the law) free black sailors be detained whenever a northern ship called at port. Pro-slavery southerners blamed open disapprobation for slavery voiced in Congress during the recent Missouri Compromise wrangling, and even similar sentiments expressed in the British parliament, for emboldening the terrorists.

All this yielded a rich political harvest from the fruit of the gallows — like Charleston mayor James “there is nothing they are bad enough to do, that we are not powerful enough to punish” Hamilton, who rode his timely suppression of the plot to Congress later that year.

Such political profiteering, combined with the sketchiness of primary sources, has licensed a revisionist take on the orthodox history — that there was never any conspiracy, but that reactionary white elites concocted the plot from a tissue of loose liberation talk, false confessions, and latent white fear in order to win political power. This contested minority interpretation has been a recent topic of academic dispute, since Michael P. Johnson floated it in 2001 (an account is required to read Johnson’s original essay; here’s a synoptic article that appeared subsequently in The Nation).

Markers of historiography around these competing versions of Vesey, bearing directly on the question current in today’s Charleston of whether and how to memorialize this episode, are ripe with controversial modern-day implications.

Consider: if Vesey is a rebel indeed, the silence of (most of) the plotters is a noble acceptance of torture to protect their confederates; if they’re framed, they’re silent because there’s nothing to confess. Either way, the modern reader’s sympathies are likely to lie with the blacks, but Johnson’s interpretation removes the locus of action from them to white elites. If he’s right, would that derogate an entire narrative of black resistance to slavery, drain the martyrdom from their deaths? Or would it correct an overstated romantic mythology of armed resistance, and color this day’s hanging with a different heroism: refusing to purchase their lives with a false accusation?

* For his timely betrayal, Peter Desverneys received his liberty and a state pension; he later became a slaveholder himself. See Black Slaveowners.

Also On This Date

• 1706: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the Kongolese Saint Anthony

(Thanks to Jeff at BrainMortgage for the guest post -ed.)

There are many accounts of Christian martyrs in the annals of Christianity, but none quite like that of Perpetua, thrown to the beasts and put to the sword on March 7, 203, in Carthage.

There is no doing justice to the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity in a brief essay such as this; the fifteen minutes or so it takes to read the original document, which includes the earliest writing we have from a Christian woman (Perpetua herself), will be well spent.

In short, the twenty-two-year-old Perpetua, her slave girl Felicity, their friend Saturninus (whose first-person account is included in the Passion), and two of their companions were arrested for converting to Christianity, Septimius Severus having forbidden conversion on pain of death. As you might suspect, the document recounts their being browbeaten and intimidated, until eventually they are killed in public, as a matter of sport.

But this isn’t what’s really interesting about the story.

Women are common as saints and martyrs, and they often must resist or convert a pagan man, typically a husband. While Perpetua’s husband is peculiarly absent from her story, her pagan father appears repeatedly, pleading with her, begging her for his sake to renounce her Christianity and save her own life. Her retellings of these episodes are striking for the very human sympathy she has for her father, despite, or perhaps in part because of, the spare prose in which she relates it. She insists on maintaining her faith, but grieves for her father’s suffering, and not only when he is beaten before her eyes by the Roman governor.

Children also figure prominently in the Passion. Perpetua nurses her newborn son while in prison. At one point during prayer, she has a vision of her seven-year-old brother, who had previously died a horrible death, and is assured in a second vision that her fervent prayers for him had brought him peace. Felicitas worries that she will not be able to die with Perpetua and the others due to rules against executing pregnant women. Thankfully, the group’s prayers are answered and Felicity gives birth a mere three days before they are to be killed.

The most famous aspect of Perpetua’s account is a dream in which she climbs a ladder, arriving at a garden where a man in shepherd’s clothing, milking sheep, gives her some of the curd he has from the milk. The questions it presents are interesting but also perhaps at once too obvious and too thorny to enter into here.

More interesting for us, perhaps, is the description of the martyr’s death, which (like the account of her comforting her dead brother) does have some controversial elements. Suicide is not martyrdom, and while martyrs will submit to death (like Christ), there is a line (sometimes a blurry one) that divides willingness from desire. It is a key trick of any martyr to be able to persuade us that God could have saved her had God chosen to do so (and this persuasion often involves the failure of initial attempts to kill the martyr), but that God chooses to give the persecutor “victory” of a sort even as God grants greater victory to the martyr. Similarly, the martyr must be willing to die, even happy to die, and at the same time convey that this is only for special people at special times, because God created human beings to live their lives.

Consider the following from the account of Perpetua’s death, when the soldier comes to deliver the coup de grace:

But Perpetua, that she might have some taste of pain, was pierced between the bones and shrieked out; and when the swordsman’s hand wandered still (for he was a novice), herself set it upon her own neck. Perchance so great a woman could not else have been slain (being feared of the unclean spirit) had she not herself so willed it.

This cannot of course be precisely true, or she should have lived. But we are also supposed to understand that it is only through some concession to the weakness of the persecutor that the persecuted is finally slain. In this respect, the editor of the Passion might be said to do his subject a disservice, as she has rendered herself so much more “great a woman” than he (most likely a he) with his martyrologist’s tropes. He has, however, done her and us a tremendous service in preserving and handing down her story as she herself wrote it.

Part of the Themed Set: The Written Word.

Also On This Date

• 1937: Alexander Yulevich Tivel

On this date in 1695, Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of Brazil’s most famous free colony of fugitive slaves, was captured by the Portuguese and summarily beheaded.

From the very beginning of European settlement in the New Wold, Maroon communities of escaped slaves, free-born blacks, Indians, poor whites, and mixed-race outcasts formed at the fringes of slave states.

Colonial power did not welcome their presence.

Consequently, the community of Palmares faced repeated harassment from the Portuguese and the Dutch West Indies Company from the time of its establishment around 1600 — even as it burgeoned into a kingdom of over 30,000 inhabitants.

Zumbi, a black free-born in Palmares, was kidnapped by such a sortie and raised with a missionary priest who taught him Portuguese and Latin. At 15, he escaped and returned to Palmares, quickly rising to prominence and in 1678 overthrowing his adoptive uncle King Ganga Zumba when the latter attempted to accept peace under Portuguese rule.

Zumbi’s skepticism was vindicated when the followers of Zumba who had defected to Portugal were re-enslaved, but free Palmares soon faced intensified Portuguese pressure. In 1694, artillery finally battered its largest settlement into submission — forcing its ruler into the bush, where he long eluded capture.

In Zumbi’s honor, November 20 is a Brazilian celebration of national pride and especially pride for those of African descent … while the king who would not be a slave has lent his name, somewhat paradoxically, to an international airport.

Also On This Date

• 1676: Johan Johansson Griis, the Gävle Boy
• 284: Aper, by Diocletian

On this date in 1831, the slave Nat — remembered to history as Nat Turner after the surname of his original owner — was hanged, flayed and dismembered for leading the most notorious slave rebellion in antebellum America.

A deeply religious man known to other slaves as “The Prophet”, Nat followed what he took to be divine directive to launch a bloody uprising on the night of August 21-22 in Southampton County, Virginia. Using (at first) axes, knives and clubs to avoid attracting attention to gunfire, Nat’s band slaughtered whites from house to house, freeing slaves as they went. At least 55 whites were killed, and a like number of slaves by white militias that mobilized to put down the revolt … and then hundreds more slaves as far away as North Carolina suspected of some tangential involvement or simmering disloyalty.

The uprising was suppressed within two days, but it rooted so deeply in the conscience of the South that it persists to this day.

“I have not slept without anxiety in three months. Our nights are sometimes spent listening to noises.”
-Slaveowner after the rebellion

Nat Turner embodied slaveowners’ terror of the subject population living about them, outnumbering them, resentfully supporting Southern gentility at the end of a whip — the conundrum Jefferson had described barely a decade before as “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Arguably, the revolt hardened southern whites against moderating slavery; some legislatures tightened restrictions against teaching slaves to read, thinking that literate slaves like Nat were more liable to uprisings.

Conversely, he was a powerful martyr of resistance in the slave quarters, a symbol of scores of other lesser-known uprisings and of the countless more that lurked in dreams and fantasies, awaiting some spark of outrage, some sudden opportunity, some wild carelessness of death.

He was a figure of literature even before his death — The Confessions of Nat Turner, dictated to a white interrogator, left Nat’s own riveting testimony from the shadow of the gallows; the Virginia-born white novelist William Styron used the same title for a controversial 1967 historical novel which earned a Pulitzer but drew a critical rebuttal from many black writers. (Nat Turner also stalks the memory of Styron’s semi-autobiographical narrator in Sophie’s Choice.) More recently, Nat has received graphic novel treatment.

Historians of every stripe, meanwhile, have struggled over the meaning of the man’s deeds and — especially — his paradoxical legacy as symbol.

Update: The occasion received a tribute in Alabama about the time this post went up.

Also On This Date

• 1909: Will James, "the Froggie", lynched in Cairo
• 1887: Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel, the Haymarket Martyrs