Colonial records document extreme torture methods used on enslaved people

Evidence

Hot peppers, salt, lemon, or ashes were sometimes rubbed into open wounds, which might also be burnt with an open flame to increase the pain. Cases of even more extreme torture appear in the documents. One man wrote in the 1730s about the practice of placing gunpowder in the anus of slaves and lighting it. Another wrote of the castration of male slaves. A master brought to court in the 1750s had tied a slave, suspended, above a fire. Moreau documented cases in which slaves were splashed with burning wax and women’s “shameful parts” were burnt with hot coals, and one in which a master attacked some of his slaves and bit off pieces of their flesh. Another late eighteenth-century writer described slaves being doused with boiling cane juice and others being buried alive after having been forced to dig their own graves. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 182

Categorization

• XREF: This catalogue of colonial torture establishes a baseline of violence that the revolution’s own extremes must be measured against — a useful counterweight to the ‘On Sacrifice’ chapter’s framing.