60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

Totalitarianism and Slavery
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Figure 2. Branding an enslaved person. From The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade,
Ancient, Ancient and Modern, by William O. Blake (Columbus, OH: J. and H. Miller, 1857).
served as part of their name (for instance, Francisco Angola, Francisco Jolofo
and Pedro Mina).
In several jurisdictions the enslaver’s power over the life and death of his
servile charges was very real, and lasted until almost the end of slavery. Even
where the law reserved the power of death to the authoritarian state, it was
common for overlords to take the law into their own hands and execute their
charges, and then not be charged themselves, or get off scot-free because of
lack of acceptable evidence (since in many jurisdictions slave testimony
against White people was inadmissible in court), or sometimes pay a small
fine. In Berbice, for instance, the killing of an enslaved person by a White
person was not deemed a capital offence until the early nineteenth century
(Thompson 2002a, 28). While the French Code Noir (1685) prohibited it, in
practice it was not rigidly enforced until the last days of slavery. According to
Fouchard (1972, 114), protected by the state’s failure to execute the law, Saint
Martin l’Arada assassinated two hundred of his Blacks, and Caradeux buried
several enslaved persons alive.
Fouchard (1972, 116–17) goes on to list several other enslavers who gained
notoriety for their cruelty and adds a long list of punishments meted out to
enslaved persons in Haiti, some of which, in his view, indicated sadism that
surpassed the imagination. After reading his list and other evidence of the