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Totalitarianism and Slavery
29
grave offences (Arrom and García Arévalo 1986, 82–83). Though the penalties
were sometimes very harsh by modern standards, they were no more brutal
than those that the slaveholding state inflicted, sometimes for far more
trivial offences. Of course, in eighteenth-century Europe people could also
be hanged for trivial offences such as stealing a sheep.
It was common for contemporary (and many modern) records to refer to
the killing of Whites by insurgent Blacks, including Maroons, as “murder”,
“slaughter”, “massacre” or the like, while similar acts by Whites against Blacks
were usually referred to as “killing”, “execution” or a less evocative term
(Bowser 1974, 188; Campbell 1990, 22, 31; Atwood 1971, 242–43). Stedman
(1988, 126), who often showed great sympathy for the Maroon cause, once
referred to an instance where the Maroons had killed a number of soldiers
sent against them as murder. Dr George Pinckard (1806, 2:240–41), who was
at best ambivalent on the subject of Black freedom, wrote in 1806 that the
Maroons lived in the worst circumstances of savagery and were nothing but
brigands or marauders. He went on to say that they were Blacks of the meanest
sort – cruel, bloodthirsty and revengeful – and that their crimes would
have merited death in European and all other civilized countries. Many of
them had murdered White people, massacred their overlords and staged
group insurrections in order to take over the colony. Having failed to do so,
they sought refuge from punishment by flying into the deep forests, from
which they ventured forth to carry out their depredations. Mendoza, a government
official in Mexico, felt that Blacks were a bloodthirsty lot: in 1553 he
commented that they all wished to purchase their freedom with the lives of
their overlords (Davidson 1979, 91).
The use of such pejorative language emphasizes the fact that although, at
times, the Whites spoke of their military actions as waging war against the
Maroons, 3 they did not perceive – or, rather, accept – the Maroons’ quest for
freedom as legitimate action or proper warfare; they considered it banditry or
roguery. While unquestionably many small groups, especially operating close
to the urban areas, practised and lived mainly by banditry, it is a gross exaggeration
to suggest, as Carlos Aguirre (1993, 244) does, that marronage and
banditry were inextricably linked. Though the large Maroon communities
engaged in robbery both to obtain vitally needed supplies and as a form of
reprisal against the slaveholders, this was not their main way of obtaining a
living (see chapter 8).
Moreover, Maroons were not bloodthirsty killers, as their White antago-