Tag Archives: slavery

1776: Jamaican slave rebels

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In our late constant disputes at our tables (where by the by every Person has his own waiting man behind him) we have I am afraid been too careless of Expressions, especially when the topic of American rebellion has been by the Disaffected amongst us, dwelt upon and brandished of with strains of Virtuous Heroism.

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what mind of a Slave will not recoil and burn into Resentment; when he shall have been the frequent witness of Sedition and Ingratitude in the Conduct of his Master — when he shall hear the Obligation of a subject to his Lord spurn’d at — the Blood spilt by Rebells extoll’d … Obedience to Laws and Authority upon all these Occasions mentioned with a strong Idea of Slavery. And Men toasted into Immortal Honours for Encountering Death in every form, rather than submit to Slavery let its Chains be ever so gilded.

Dear Liberty has rang in the heart of every House-bred Slave, in one form or other, for these Ten years past — While we only talk’d about it, they went no farther than their private reflections upon us & it: but as soon as we came to blows, we find them fast at our heels. Such has been the seeds sown in the minds of our Domestics by our Wise-Acre Patriots.

–Rev. John Lindsay, Hanover Parish, Jamaica

On July 3, 1776, as tensions between the North American colonies and England came to a head, the garrison at Hanover, Jamaica sailed from Lucea to reinforce General William Howe.

The departure of this regiment was the pre-arranged signal for the parish’s slaves — both imported Coromantee and, more ominously for the slaveholder, the generally less-rebellious Creoles — to mount a general rising.

The only reason it didn’t happen was because it was sniffed out — after the regiment left, but before the date planned out by slaves passing word from estate to estate.

For a century or so, lucrative sugar and coffee cultivation on the island (and elsewhere around the thought to have been imported to Jamaica before the slave trade was abolished in 1808.

Planters reaped stupendous profits from this harvest of misery, but perpetually stood in danger of reaping the whirlwind, too. At the time of the intended rebellion, there were 20 or more slaves for every white around Hanover. A Hanover militia officer said in the days after the plot was uncovered that he was “deeply Concerned in the Intended Insurrection, the Number of the Troop is small and the Duty severe, Our apprehensions are great upon the occasion as we know not where it will end.” As the number of implicated slaves mounted past 100, a planter lamented that “there appears to be no end to this horrid affair.”

As jumpy as they were, the authorities managed to keep a lid on this situation through the usual methods, which gives this site its excuse to notice the affair.

We have try’d — found Guilty and Executed Yesterday the following Conspirators, Blue Hole Harry, and Leander of the Spring Estate, Charles of the Baulk, Peter of Batchelors Hall, Prince belonging to John Priest of Lucea, and Quamino to Sir Simon Clarke, these are the Chief Ring-leaders and the most Active in Promoting the Intended Insurrection and We propose proceeding tomorrow in trying the Other Chiefs.

-Report to Sir Basil Keith from the magistrates of Hanover, Jamaica, July 20, 1776

Slavery persisted in Jamaica, dogged by regular rebellions, for another 57 years, until Samuel Sharpe’s revolt helped finally convince Parliament to ban it. Whether that past is really past … that’s another question.

For more, see Richard B. Sheridan, “The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the American Revolution,” The Journal of Negro History July, 1976, which is the source of the quotes in this article.

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1790: Thomas Bird, the first federal execution under the U.S. constitution

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This date in 1790 saw the first federal execution under the auspices of the recently ratified U.S. Constitution, when English mariner Thomas Bird hanged in Portland, Maine. (At the time, still part of Massachusetts.)

This book is also available here, and via the author’s Portland, Me., History Blog, or on order from any bookstore.

Today, we’re pleased to interview author Jerry Genesio, whose Portland Neck: The Hanging of Thomas Bird compellingly reconstructs this once-forgotten story — a small British slave ship making landfall in a North American city only recently torched by the British, where it is found that its violent captain has been murdered at sea in unclear circumstances.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the one man to pay life for John Connor’s life was the one British sailor aboard the ship.

Besides a captivating account of an 18th century American capital trial, Portland Neck features biographies of all the principal characters. Portlanders will also especially enjoy a 25-page appendix on the topography of the town at the dawn of the American Republic.

This was a British subject who killed a British victim on a British ship in international waters. Was there any question of whether a U.S. court had jurisdiction?

The people who were on the vessel when it was captured — one was British, one was Norwegian, one was American, and there was a 12- or 14-year-old African boy named Cuffey.

They came under U.S. jurisdiction because in the constitutional convention (article 3, section 2), the federal courts were given jurisdiction of admiralty and maritime cases.

The Supreme judicial court in Massachusetts — Maine was part of Massachusetts then — apparently considered bringing the case before its judges, but then the constitution overruled that when it was ratified.

And then they had to wait for the federal courts to be organized, because they didn’t exist yet. They languished in jail for almost a year while the courts were being organized.

In Chapter II, you describe Thomas Bird’s ship, the Mary, operating on the Guinea coast. It’s a small ship basically working the coast and rivers, making small sales of one or two slaves to the large slavers waiting to cross the Atlantic. There must have been whole niches of the slavery industry occupied by these sorts of small-timers.

Oh, yes. The large slave ships that carried several hundred, three, four hundred in their hold — they were too large to get too close to the coast of Africa. So they would anchor perhaps a mile offshore, and they would wait for these smaller ships, like the sloop Mary — Captain Connor was in business with people in London who sent him down there just to go up the rivers to various villages where they knew there were wars going on, and when there were wars, the captives would be sold to slavers. (They also traded ivory and gold.)

When they got slaves, crews like the Mary‘s would go to the ships who had been there the longest, because they knew they would get the best price. They were known to have been there as long as a year trying to fill their cargo, and the slaves they held were liable to die while they waited. Slave ships couldn’t even allow the slaves topside because they would jump overboard if they could and try to swim for shore.

Incidentally, the Google book project has many slave captain logs online. I was able to read about the ports that Captain Connor and Thomas Bird actually visited, and it gave me such a wealth of information, and I could practically see where they were.

Ed. note: here are a few from Genesio’s bibliography, all free at Google books:

You’ve compiled this book despite a paucity of primary trial data, and there are some spots where you’re clearly reading between the lines. How difficult was the historiography on Portland Neck?

There’s not a complete trial record. Even the examination before the court — the scribe tried, apparently, to write down all of their answers, but he did not write down the questions.

My concern is more around the scribe. Was the scribe hearing these answers properly? Was the scribe hard of hearing? One of them was replaced in the process. Was the scribe able to keep up? He was writing with a quill pen, after all.

And then, on top of all of that, they did not indicate on the court record who was the scribe, who did the questioning, and who wrote the answers down. And the prisoner never signed it!

And you felt that at some level, they targeted the Englishman out of this multinational crew.

I believe that people are so influenced by the events of their times — look at World War II and how we viewed the Japanese and the Germans, or the people involved in the war in Vietnam.

These people on the jury, the foreman on the grand jury, many of them were Portland residents whose homes had been burned by the British just 14 years earlier. The war had just ended seven years earlier.

Every one of the court officials on the prosecutors’ side were all officers in the Revolutionary War. [Notably, the U.S. marshal who actually carried out Bird’s hanging, Henry Dearborn. He took part in the decisive Battle of Yorktown and would go on to become Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of War, as well as the namesake of the city of Dearborn, Michigan. -ed.]

All of these things influence what was going on. And the fact that they acquitted the Norwegian kid and executed the Englishman makes me feel, certainly, that there was a strong influence there that was hostile to Thomas Bird. But what actually happened and how people felt, we’re just too far away — but I suspect that played a role.

Thomas Bird claimed in his dying statement, knowing that he was to be hung in a couple of hours, that he did not kill John Connor. The lawyers desperately tried to get then-President Washington to give him a commutation, and Washington refused to do it.


Information wants to be free, y’all. The newspaper editor tried to sell a broadside with the condemned man’s final narrative, but public pressure eventually forced him to put it in the July 26, 1790 Cumberland Gazette.

How did you come by this story?

When I was working at Portland Public Library and I ran into a couple of lines referring to a Thomas Bird in books by William Willis and William Goold.

In Goold’s book, Portland in the Past, he actually interviewed a fellow named Charles Motley who was in his 90s, and this interview took place in the 1880s. Motley was the youngest child of the jailer who held Thomas Bird, and Charles Motley, and he describes being five years old and being allowed into the cell where Thomas Bird would carve them little toy boats. With a knife! Then when Thomas Bird was executed, there was a note about the jailer’s wife, Emma Motley, taking all seven children away, to the other side of the land from Portland, so that they wouldn’t know what was going on. They were probably playing with Thomas’s boats as he was being hanged. So it was obvious that the Motley family held this Thomas Bird in high regard, and I got to thinking, I want to know more about this guy.

He (Motley) was five years old at the time, and, with his older brother Edward, at the request of Bird, was often admitted by his father to the cell and spent much time there. The prisoner made them toy ships and boats … At the time of the execution, Mrs. Motley, the mother of the boys, took them over back of the Neck to be out of sight of the gallows, as the whole family had become interested in the fate of Bird.

–Goold

For a couple of years, I couldn’t find much of anything. Finally, I took the time to go down to the federal archives in Waltham, Mass., I found a little manila folder that was like a bar of gold. It had 12 little sheets written in quill, and it’s as much of a record of the trial as exists.

The other question in my mind is, why has nobody written about this before? I think maybe it’s because it’s something of an embarrassment, which reinforces my belief that maybe this hanging should not have taken place.

Thomas Bird, if they really suspected he was a participant, should have been punished, but probably shouldn’t have been hung. Unfortunately in those days, captains were like gods on their little wooden worlds. Even though, based on the testimony, [the victim] John Connor was a brutal drunk who beat his men mercilessly. Connor murdered his first mate on that voyage.

It’s sad because Bird probably saw America as some sort of refuge — he probably didn’t expect that he might be hanged for this crime. He’d been at sea since age eight, and all through the [American] Revolution he had been on both American and British ships. The British navy kept impressing him and making him serve on British warships, and he kept deserting and signing up for American ships instead.

One other interesting aspect of this story is that when Thomas Bird was looking for a ship to sign on with and signed on with the Mary, he might just have signed up on the HMS Bounty, because the Bounty was tied up at Wapping before its voyage to Tahiti. Had he signed on with the Bounty, he wouldn’t have fallen into American hands, but he might not have fared any better.

How thick on the ground were slaves and slavers in New England at this time?

There were a lot of slave captains, a lot of owners. Their home ports were in Boston or in Portland. Normally, when they came back to their home port, the product they were carrying was rum and molasses. Slaves would be delivered in the South or in the West Indies, separate legs in the triangle trade.

What’s your next project?

I’m working on a family genealogy.

After that, maybe something about Captain John Lovewell. He was a bounty hunter who went hunting for Indian scalps. In 1725 he was living in Massachusetts, and he got the court to authorize 10 pounds per scalp, and he recruited a small army and took off looking for Indians and found the Pequawket here in Fryeburg, Maine. They were not warriors, they were farmers.

Lovewell and a Scaticook named Paugus ended up killing each other at a battle at a pond now called Lovewell’s Pond.

Lovewell is the namesake of the town of Lovell. A couple of people have written Lovewell’s story, but I wanted to write it from the perspective of the Indians. And not only the Indians, but the true perspective — because John Lovewell was a bounty hunter, not a hero. He was willing to kill farmers who hadn’t killed anyone for their scalps.

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1516 and 1530: Autos de fe in the Spanish Canary Islands

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From The Inquisition in Spanish Dependencies, available free from Google books here:

That Columbus, on his first voyage, took his departure from Gomera indicates the importance assumed by the Canaries in the development of trade with the New World and this, conjoined with their productiveness, as they became settled and cultivated, rendered them a centre of commerce frequented by the ships of all maritime nations, as well as an object of buccaneering raids, in an age when trade and piracy were sometimes indistinguishable. Their proximity to Morocco and the Guinea coast moreover exposed them to attacks from the Moors and gave them an opportunity of accumulating Moorish and negro slaves, whom the piety of the age sought to convert to Christians by the water of baptism. In various ways, therefore, there came to be abundant material for inquisitorial activity, although the Judaizing New Christians, who furnished the Spanish tribunals with their principal business, appear to have been singularly few.

There was no haste in extending the Spanish Inquisition to the Canaries … It is not until the time of Diego de Muros [Spanish link], who was consecrated in 1496, that we have any evidence of such action … [and even then] every act, from the preliminary arrest to the final decision, was regulated from Seville …

Irregular and imperfect as may have been the organization of the tribunal, it yet managed to accomplish some convictions. In 1510 there was held an auto de fe in which there were three reconciliations for Judaism and one, of a Moorish slave, for reincidence in Mahometan error, while a fifth culprit was penanced for Judaism. Then in 1513 occurred the first relaxation, that of Alonso Fatima, a native Morisco, who had fled to Barbary. This was always deemed sufficient evidence of relapse to former errors, and he was duly burned in effigy. It was probably also to 1516* that may be attributed the first relaxation in person — that of Juan de Xeres of Seville, for Judaism. It shows that the tribunal was indifferently equipped that, when he was sentenced to torture, the physician whose presence was obligatory on such occasions, Doctor Juan Meneses de Gallegas, was required personally to administer it. It was exceedingly severe, extending to eleven jars of water; the accused was unable to endure it; he confessed his faith, was sentenced to relaxation as a relapsed and for fictitious confession, and was executed on Wednesday, June 4th. …

on June 4, 1530, another oblation was offered to God, in an auto celebrated with the same ostentation as the previous one [in 1526, with seven executions]. This time there were no relaxations in person, but there were six effigies burnt of as many Moorish slaves, who had escaped and were drowned in their infidelity while on their way to Africa and liberty. There were also the effigy and bones of Juan de Tarifa, the husband of the Ynes de Tarifa who had denounced herself in 1524; he was of Converso descent and had committed suicide in prison, which was equivalent to self-condemnation. There were three reconciliations, of which two were for Judaism and one for Islam and five penitents for minor offences.

This use of religious terror in service of slavery — the burning of those effigies who had been “drowned in their infidelity on their way to Africa and liberty” — was an overt policy of the tribunal.

Pious zeal for the salvation of these poor savages led to their baptism after capture; they could not be intelligent converts or throw off their native superstitions, and no one seemed able to realize the grim absurdity of adding the terrors of the Inquisition to the horrors of their enslaved existence. When a negro slave-girl was bemoaning her condition, she was kindly consoled with the assurance that baptism preserved her and her children from hell, to which she innocently replied that doing evil and not lack of baptism led to hell. This was heresy, for which she was duly prosecuted.

Under the inquisitorial code the attempt to escape from slavery thus was apostasy, punishable as such if unsuccessful, and expiated if successful by concremation in effigy. This is illustrated in an auto, held by Zayas and Funez, June 24, 1576, in which among sixteen effigies of absentees were those of eight slaves, seven negroes and one Moor. They had undergone baptism, had been bougt by Dona Catalina de la Cuevas and were worked on her sugar plantation. They seized a boat at Orotava and escaped to Morocco, for which they were duly prosecuted as apostates and their effigies were delivered to the flames — a ghastly mockery which does not seem to have produced the desired impression in preventing other misguided beings from flying from their salvation.

Related: Jews in the Canary Islands: Being a calendar of Jewish Cases extracted from the records of the Canariote inquisition in the collection of the Marquess of Bute.

* A footnote in the text of our source notes that “in the record concerning Juan de Xeres, the year is omitted, but as Wednesday fell on June 4 in 1511, 1516, 1533 and 1539, the probable date is 1516.”

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1783: Philip, a negro slave of Henry Garrett

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From the Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish settlement in Virginia

Called Court on Philip, a negro slave of Henry Garrett, and formerly property of Major Thomas Johnston, of Louisa County, charged with murdering Alexander Hunter, of Augusta County, and wounding the wife of Samuel Henry.–Guilty and to be hanged on 16th April next at 10 o’clock a. m. His value is fixed at £65.

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1733: John Julian, pirate and slave

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On this date in 1733, a rebellious slave named Julian the Indian was hanged for murdering a bounty hunter who pursued his escape.

Julian the Indian is generally believed to be John Julian (or Julien), a mixed-race African-descended Mosquito Indian from central America who was among the crew of the egalitarian pirate Samuel Bellamy. Julian appears to be the first recorded black pirate in the New World.

Julian was one of only two pirates who survived the wreck of Bellamy’s Whydah off Cape Cod in 1717 (Bellamy himself was lost in the incident), and was jailed in Massachusetts. There, he apparently becomes the “Julian the Indian” purchased that same year by colonial pol John Quincy.

The “unruly” Julian gave his owner no end of escape attempts and was sold on to another owner, from whom he made one escape attempt too many.

There’s a gallows pamphlet, “The last speech and dying advice of poor Julian: who was executed the 22d of March, 1733. for the murder of Mr. John Rogers of Pembroke,” but there’s no juicy buccaneer adventure in it, or even slave escape adventure — just a lot of generic pabulum about having forsaken God, not unlike the generic woodcut illustrating it.

You’d have to say, a sad end for a multinational swashbuckler left over from the vanished Golden Age of Piracy who had seen things these New Englanders wouldn’t believe, and shattered his own life hurling it against his fetters.

A noble soul, as we may reckon, destined to wind up meat for some wet-behind-the-ears colonial physician.

According to the (factual) epilogue of the (historical novel) Master of the Sweet Trade: A Story of the Pirate Samuel Bellamy, Mariah Hallett, and the Whydah,

It was common for the unclaimed bodies of executed prisoners to be given to medical students for dissection, and according to an article in The Boston Newsletter, on March 30, 1733 John’s corpse was used for this purpose. The article goes on to tell us that, “The Bones are preserv’d in order to be fram’d into a Skeleton”. This may be the source of the idea that the skeleton is in the collection of the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Current research at the museum says this is untrue, and that neither the skeleton, nor the bag made from the skin of a pirate, also in the collection, are believed to belong to John Julian.

John Quincy’s great-grandson, the American President John Quincy Adams, became a staunch slavery abolitionist.

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1714: Various rebel slaves in the Cape Colony

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This site has previously noticed a milestone 1714 execution in the Dutch Cape Colony of South Africa.

That execution of a black slave and his white lover was exceptional — and, of course, the chronicles of the Cape are replete with less exceptional fare, the humdrum penal brutality of an 18th century colony disposed of in a sentence of two between reports of smallpox outbreaks, price fluctuations, the transit of slave ships, and all the other business of frontier life.

A slave condemned to be burnt alive for arson; another to be hanged for theft … Two white men hanged for desertion, sheep-stealing, and attempt to murder … A Javanese “Guru” sentenced to death for instigating slaves to run away, harbouring and arming them … Matthys of Ternate punished for running away and cattle theft, &c. Sentenced to be hanged … A slave hanged for breaking into the house of Lieutenant Captain Slotsboo … Five slaves sentenced to be broken, and a female slave to be scourged … Two soldiers sentenced to run the gantlope …

And so on.

This date marks a number of such executions for a minor slave revolt (incidents of slave insubordination also pepper the Colony records). At three full entries in the chronicle, 16 implicated slaves, and some spectacularly savage punishments, it must have been one of the more noteworthy of its day; what the colonial register leaves us is just enough to suggest the forgotten suffering and resistance of the half-nameless chattel of yesteryear.

1714.

January 7 — Some 16 fugitive slaves who had conspired, armed themselves, and did much mischief. They resisted the officers of justice, shot a soldier, and murdered a Hottentot woman. They were now brought up for examination.

February 7 — The sentences passed on the fugitive slaves, and the whole history of the case. “Tromp” to be empaled alive, and to remain in that position till he dies. “Cupido” to be put on a cross, his right hand to be cut off, and with “Neptunus” to be broken on the wheel, and then to be left on a hurdle until dead. “Titus” to be broken with the coup de grace. Jeroon and Thomas to be hanged; three others to be scourged and have their right heels cut off. The eleventh prisoner is merely to look on, and afterwards to be sent home; paying the costs however.

February 8 — The empaled convict found strangled in the morning. He had received some linen from a kind friend during the night for the purpose. He would otherwise have been still alive.

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1800: Prosser’s Gabriel, slave rebel

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On this date* in 1800,** the Virginia slave Gabriel — sometimes remembered as Gabriel Prosser after his owner’s surname, although that wasn’t what his contemporaries called him — was hanged in Richmond, along with a number of his confederates in a planned slave rising.

Decades before Virginia’s more famed Nat Turner rebellion, Gabriel was plenty frightening for the growing little burg of Richmond in 1800. (The incident would result in a clampdown on education and mobility for slave and free blacks alike.)

Gabriel and company conceived a daring revolution to seize the city of Richmond, take hostage Governor (and future U.S. President) James Monroe, and rearrange the state’s power structure.

This scheme, in which the rebels actually stay in Virginia, depended on an optimistic assessment for the prospects of a multiracial alliance — with Richmond’s own poor whites, and also, according to testimony given by conspirators, with Indians and with the French in opposition to a pro-British American policy tilt.

But if ever the time might have been right for such a plot, it was in 1800. A bitter presidential contest adjudicating the Republic’s most fundamental issues was unfolding; there were rumors that the governing Federalists would not voluntarily relinquish power, and the matter might fall to civil war between by the factions.

Gabriel unabashedly attempted to leverage this division between whites; working as he and many other urban blacks did side-by-side with white Republican laborers — whose own interests vis-a-vis Federalist merchants were being so bitterly contested — he must have had a good vibe about the situation on the ground to gamble his life on it. Though the hope was that the white working class would join the revolt after it broke out, there were at least a few whites already initiated into the conspiracy beforehand.

Alas, what broke out was not rebellion but a storm: a downpour that rained out the first planned rising, washing out bridges and roads that the conspirators were counting on to assemble. Before the makeup date could be scheduled, some slaves taking a care for their own necks had betrayed it.

The public mind has been much involved in dangerous apprehensions, concerning an insurrection of the negroes in several of the adjacent counties. Such a thing has been in agitation among the blacks, principally instigated by an ambitious and insidious fellow, a slave, by the name of GABRIEL, the property of Mr. Thomas Prosser, of the county of Henrico. This villain, assuming to himself the appellation of General, through his artfulness, has caused some disturbance, having induced many poor, ignorant, and unfortunate creatures to share in his nefarious and horrid design.

The plot has been entirely exploded, which was shallow; and had the attempt even been made to carry it into execution, but little resistance would have been required, to render their scheme entirely abortive. Thirty or forty of the party have been arrested and confined in jail for trial. Yesterday a called court was held for that purpose, at the court house in this city when six of them were convicted and condemned to suffer death this day at 12 o’clock. It is said that the evidence which has been procured, will go to prove nearly this whole of them guilty. To-day the court will proceed to go thro’ with the rest of the trials.

[The Governor has issued his Proclamation, offering a reward of THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS† for the apprehension of the above “GENERAL,” who has thought proper to take himself off. Exclusive of this sum, he likewise promises “to any number not exceeding five of the said accomplices, who shall apprehend the said GABRIEL, and deliver him up so that he be brought to justice, a FULL PARDON for their offences.” ]

–Columbian Mirror, Tuesday, Sep. 16, 1800, quoting “a Richmond paper”

It would be interesting counterfactual history to know the world in which the insurrection was actually launched — whether “but little resistance” would have sufficed to put it down. Gabriel might have reckoned naively on the prospective balance of forces,‡ but his read of the fractious alliance against him was spot-on. Maybe with a modern communications infrastructure, the affair could have become a full-blown October Surprise.

The Jeffersonian party, desperate not to give its plantation supporters cause to rethink its partisan alignment, took pains to downplay what was really quite a bold conspiracy. Not for the last time, wealthy merchants (here backing the Federalists) sought their own advantage pressing the racial wedge issue — for the slaves’ prospective lower-class white allies were also part of Jefferson’s coalition.

“If any thing will correct & bring to repentance old hardened sinners in Jacobinism, it must be an insurrection of their slaves,” editorialized the Boston Gazette — ex cathedra, as it were, from 18th century America’s very temple of Mammon. (The quote comes from this tome.)

One thing all right-thinking whites could agree on was a heaping serving of scorn for “General” Gabriel.


Columbian Mirror, Saturday, October 4, 1800.

But then, that personal interview with Monroe also gives a lie to Gabriel’s insignificance. (Gabriel told Monroe nothing of any use to the latter; Monroe sent him away with orders to keep him nearly incommunicado from the sort of working stiffs who would figure to be his jailers.)

A few years later, an English visitor captured at second hand this indefatigable portrait of the doomed slave in his masters’ courts.

I passed by a field in which several poor slaves had lately been executed, on the charge of having an intention to rise against their masters. A lawyer who was present at their trials at Richmond, informed me that on one of them being asked, what he had to say to the court in his defence, he replied, in a manly tone of voice: “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice to their cause: and I beg, as a favour, that I may be immediately led to execution. I know that you have pre-determined to shed my blood, why then all this mockery of a trial?”

In 2007, James Monroe’s (distant) successor as governor of the Old Dominion (informally) posthumously pardoned Prosser’s Gabriel. Gov. Tim Kaine’s statement on the occasion validated Gabriel’s own defense of himself.

“Gabriel and his colleagues were freedom fighters and deserve their rightful place in history as women and men of integrity who fought for freedom.”

And the site of his martyrdom? Well, it’s … a good place to park.

* Some sources give Oct. 7 as the date of execution; this apparently was the initial sentence of the court but delayed a few days to hang the ringleader along with others in a variety of spots around town.


Virginia Argus, Tuesday, Oct. 14, 1800.

** A pregnant year in the history of slave rebellion: Denmark Vesey bought his freedom in 1800; Nat Turner and John Brown were both born in 1800. (Noted here.)

† It was a slave who eventually turned in Prosser’s Gabriel … but Virginia stiffed him on the reward, handing over only $50 instead of the promised $300.

‡ Or maybe that’s just hindsight talking. In 1800, the Haitian Revolution was underway — so who could blame slaves for thinking big?

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1635: Francisco de Nava, precipitating a church-state conflict

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[S]trife* [between Manila archbishop Hernando Guerrero and the Spanish governor Don Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera] being greatly inflamed … became entangled with one of the most memorable disputes that have occurred in the islands — a necessary occasion for the sharpest encounter between the two jurisdictions, and one from which Don Fray Hernando Guerrero could not excuse himself, as it concerned the most sacred part of the ecclesiastical immunity. That was a matter in which the archbishop could not neglect to sally out with all his might, in order to comply with the obligation of a true prelate. The case was as follows: There was an artilleryman in Manila, named Francisco de Nava, who had a female slave with whom he had illicit communication, as came to the ears of the archbishop. The archbishop ordered him to remove from himself this occasion [for sin] by selling the slave-girl to another person; and had the latter placed, for that purpose, in the house of a lady who was related to Doña María de Francia, who became fond of her and arranged to buy her from the artilleryman. The latter was so beside himself over the loss of the said slave that he refused to sell her at any price, saying that he wished, on the contrary, to marry her. But Doña María de Francia so arranged matters that the slave was sold, and came into her possession with very slight effort. The artilleryman, grieved and regretful for what had happened, almost became mad, and, it having been given out that he was mad, certain violence was shown him; and on one occasion he had received a sound beating at the house of Doña María de Francia, because he had gone there to request that they should give him the slave, as he had resolved to make her his wife.

Aggrieved and rendered desperate in this way, he saw the girl pass one day in a carriage with Doña María de Francia. Going to her he asked her whether she knew him, who was her master. The slave answered him with some independence, whereupon he, blind with anger, drew his dagger in the middle of the street and killed her by stabbing her, before anyone could prevent it. All the people, both those in the carriage and those in the street, ran tumultuously [after him]; but the artilleryman escaped them all, and took refuge in the church of our convent in Manila. The governor heard of what had happened, and ordered Don Pedro de Corcuera, his nephew (who was then sargento-mayor of the camp), to take the artilleryman from the church, saying that he could not avail himself of the sanctuary of the church, as he had committed a treacherous act — although it was only a homicide, and the settlement of this question did not concern the governor. However, his action arose mainly from the anger that he felt that what had happened was in the presence of his nephew, Don Pedro de Corcuera — who, also being angered at what concerned his wife, made use of his commission with less prudence than he ought to exercise in executing such orders from his superiors. He caused the church and convent to be surrounded; and, going inside, examined everything, not excepting even the sacristy; and it is even said that he declared that, if he found the artilleryman there, he would take him out a prisoner. But not having been able to find him then, Don Pedro left the church and convent surrounded by a double guard. The governor added to that that he would not allow the religious to enter or leave, until he had hold of the refugee. The latter was finally found, and taken from the sacristy, and surrendered to the commander of artillery, in order that he might proceed with the trial as his competent judge; and he, either carried away by flattery, or in obedience to the commands of the governor, proceeded so hastily that in a very short time he condemned the artilleryman to death.

The archbishop’s provisor, Don Pedro Monroy,** bore himself on this occasion with the prudence that was fitting, and proceeded against the commander of artillery, requesting him to deliver his prisoner and return him to the church. Having been informed that the commander of artillery was a mere instrument, and that all his actions were according to the impulses of the governor, he sent three lay priests to the palace to intimate to the latter that the judge should deliver the refugee to him. The priests entered, without anyone hindering them; and finding that the governor had already retired, as it was then an advanced hour of the night, they started to withdraw in order to return next morning; but the soldiers of the guard would not permit them to leave, saying that such was the order of the governor.

The sentence against the artilleryman having been given — which it is said that the governor sent ready made out to the judge, to sign — they proceeded to execute it,† notwithstanding that the provisor proceeded to threaten censures, and to impose an interdict and suspension from religious functions [cessatio de divinis]. The governor ordered a gallows to be erected in front of the very church of St. Augustine, and the criminal was hanged thereon — to the contempt of the ecclesiastical immunity, for the [proper] place assigned for such punishments was very distant from there. The governor, seeing that the sentence was already executed, and that he had now obtained the chief object of his desire, wrote to the archbishop, requesting him to have the censures removed and the interdict raised, and the churches opened on the day of the nativity of our Lady. The archbishop, recognizing the duplicity of the governor, refused to answer that letter without first consulting the orders; and, after consulting with some of them, decided that he would not raise the interdict, since there was less inconvenience in having it imposed [even] on so festive a day, than there would be in his yielding on an occasion so inimical to the ecclesiastical immunity. However, the requests of the Recollect fathers of our father St. Augustine, who had charge of the advocacy of the nativity, had so much influence that the archbishop ordered the interdict to be removed, and it was done.


Manila’s historic St. Augustine church. (cc) image from Jun Acullador

The commander of artillery was condemned to some pecuniary fines, from which he appealed to the judge of appeals, who was the bishop of Camarines. The ecclesiastical judge refusing to admit the appeal, he threatened the royal aid of fuerza; and this question having been examined in the royal Audiencia (which at that time consisted of but the governor and only one auditor, Don Marcos Zapata), it was declared in his favor, and the appeal went to the bishop of Camarines. The latter — namely, Don Francisco Zamudio, of the order of our father St. Augustine, and a son of the province of Méjico — declared the commander of artillery to be free from the sentence given by the ecclesiastical judge. The trial of the commander of artillery had its second hearing. On that account there did not fail to result certain charges against the governor, such as his having ordered the secular priests to be detained in the guard-house; his declaration that he could not be excommunicated by anyone except the pope; and that if an order were given to him to arrest the pontiff, he would arrest him, and even drag him along by one foot (which he was proved to have said by several persons). The governor freed himself from all these charges by excuses in a manifesto which he published; but as it is not a part of my duty to examine their adequacy, I shall not do so. I shall refer the reader to the reply made to him by a learned ecclesiastic of the university of Méjico; for there is no liberty in Filipinas to enable any one to complain, or to speak his mind against what the government manipulates

–The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 — Volume 25 of 55

* “The underlying reason for this public dissension was racial,” says this source.

The rivalry between Spaniards born in the peninsula and those born in the colonies, the creoles or americanos, affected not only the clergy but also the lay population. The Augustinians, and the Hospitaller Orders of San Juan de Ojos, San Hipolito and Guadalupe, whose members were creoles, were opposed by the Carmelites and the apostolic colleges in that country. “While legally they [both factions] were on complete equality,” writes Dr. Domingo Abella, Philippine ecclesiastical historian, “class distinctions were apparently encouraged as much as possible by the Spanish colonial policy, because the principle of divide et impera of every aristocratic system was the leading idea for the permanent subjection of the colonies.”

The rivalry reached such an extent that in 1627 the Dominican Order in Mexico refused to admit creoles into its ranks, an act which the Spanish king disapproved. In the Philippines the situation had not openly reached that extreme. The insular hierarchy managed to keep the number of creoles, mestizos and indios who were embracing the religious life down to a minimum. But the racial discrimination rankled among those born in the colonies. Archbishop Guerrero and Bishop Zamudio were both Augustinians, but the former was a peninsular, while the latter was a creole, and this was probably the reason for their taking opposite sides.

** Later exiled to Formosa.

† A letter quoted elsewhere in the same text confirms “the execution of the sentence on the night of Thursday, September six”

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1714: Maria Mouton and her slave Titus, lovers

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On this date in 1714, a slave and his mistress — “mistress” in both senses of the word — were put to death in the Dutch Cape Colony for murdering her husband.

Marie or Maria Mouton had arrived in South Africa in 1699 as a nine-year-old with a refugee Huguenot family.

A decade and a half’s passage finds her a young woman wed to one Franz or Frans Joost/Jooste/Joostens, to whom she bore two sons … and, evidently, a homicidal grudge.

Early in 1714, Maria and her lover, a slave named Titus Bengale, murdered Frans, in consequence of which crime,

[s]he [Maria] is sentenced to be half strangled, after that to be scorched,* and after that strangled unto death. Titus to be empaled and to remain so, until death. After that his head and right hand are to be cut off and fixed on a pole, beyond the limits of his late master’s property. Fortuin, an accomplice, is also to have his right hand cut off, and without receiving the coup de grace, is to be broken on the wheel. After that he is to be placed on a grating until death takes place. After that his head is to be cut off, and with his hand placed on a pole, together with the head and hand of Titus. After that the bodies are to be taken to the outside place of execution, and there left exposed to the air and the vultures.

She’s the only white woman to be executed in 18th century South Africa.

Our Precise of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope** notices that Titus, despite enduring his grotesque execution for two full days before succumbing, remained terribly jocund amid his public torture. (Not unlike other slaves tortured to death in Dutch colonies):

September 3 — The slave Titus, above mentioned, died about midday, having lived in his misery about 48 hours; something horrible to think of, to say nothing of personally beholding the misery. It is said that 4 hours after his empalement he received a bottle of arrack from which he drank freely and heartily. When advised not to take too much, lest he should get drunk, he answered that it did not matter, as he sat fast enough, and that there was no fear of his falling. It is true that whilst sitting in that deplorable state, he often joked, and scoffingly said that he would never again believe a woman. A way of dying, lauded by the Romans, but damnable among the Christians.

This case is discussed in more detail by Nigel Penn in “The wife, the farmer and the farmer’s slaves: adultery and murder on a frontier farm in the early eighteenth century Cape,” Kronos, vol. 28 (2002) — here’s an excerpt — and by the same author in Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth-Century Cape Characters.

* Literally, blaker. “To ‘blaker’ someone,” notes Nigel Penn in “The wife, the farmer and the farmer’s slaves: adultery and murder on a frontier farm in the early eighteenth century Cape,” Kronos, vol. 28 (2002), “was to hold burning straw to their face and to blacken it … a reference to the earlier practice of burning at the stake victims found guilty of heresy, witchcraft and sodomy. Surely we may also see, in the case of the blackening of Maria Mouton, a reference to her crime of cohabiting with slaves.”

** After another slaveowner was murdered later in the year, the chronicle laments that “crime is rapidly assuming large dimensions, in spite of the means used to prevent or suppress it. A clear proof that this Colony mainly consists of evil disposed, head-strong slaves and the refuse of convicts.”

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1775: Thomas Jeremiah, Charleston’s wealthiest free black

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 1775, Thomas Jeremiah, a free black man in the then-colony of South Carolina, was hung after being convicted of attempting to a slave insurrection.

The case against him was extremely weak, but he was tried/framed under the Negro Act of 1740 (in a slave court, although he was not a slave), wherein the defendant was considered guilty until proven innocent. South Carolina’s own royal governor, William Campbell, called it a case of “judicial murder.”

Very little is known about Jeremiah. He left no diary or letters behind, and most of his trial records have been lost. We know he was married but we know nothing about his wife, whether she was a slave or a free black like himself, or whether they had any children. We don’t know how he became free or how he learned his trade. He is, in fact, so obscure that he doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia entry.

What little we do know, however, suggests that he was a most extraordinary man: a fisherman and ship’s pilot, one of less than 500 free blacks in the city of Charles Town (now called Charleston), Jeremiah had somehow managed to claw his way up and amassed a net worth of £1,000, or about $200,000 in today’s money. He was one of the wealthiest free black men in North America, and certainly the wealthiest self-made one.

Himself a slaveowner, he had no reason to start a slave rebellion, but this didn’t matter to those who convicted him. Jeremiah’s life, trial and death are discussed in detail in J. William Harris’s 2009 book, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty. (This book review provides a good summary.)

2010 saw the publication of a second book, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution.

Jeremiah was basically a victim of his own success. He had risen too high; he made the local white elites uncomfortable. As Harris noted, Jeremiah “did not need to gather arms or preach revolution to undermine slavery, because his whole life was a refutation of whites’ basic justification for slavery.”

Henry Laurens, a wealthy businessman, future Continental Congressman, slaveowner, and contemporary of Jeremiah’s, stated he was “a forward fellow, puffed up by prosperity, ruined by Luxury & debauchery & grown to amazing pitch of vanity & ambition.” He needed to be smacked down and he was, most severely.

In the spring and summer of 1775, revolution was fomenting everywhere. White “Patriots” wanted an opportunity to get out from under England, but they feared their slaves would use the conflict to try and get out from under them.

Nat Turner and Charleston’s own Denmark Vesey — these immortal rebels lay years into the future, but their very prospect made slave rebellions an omnipresent fear among the white populace. It was jumpy. And when two slaves accused Jeremiah of trying to persuade them to rebel, it jumped.

Only a few months passed between Jeremiah’s arrest and his execution. By that time he was a broken man, welcoming death. After he was hung, his body was cut down and burned to ashes.

Books about Thomas Jeremiah

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