4 - Stop the Course of these Cruelties

Summary

How many secret evils the eye of the courts is incapable of penetrating!

– Governor and intendant of Saint-Domingue to the French naval minister (1788)

In the spring and summer of 1788, a master was prosecuted for the torture of two female slaves who lived on a coffee plantation near Plaisance, in the northern province of Saint-Domingue. The exceptional nature of the case was immediately obvious to the participants who lived through it. The colony’s governor and intendant, deeply vested in the outcome of the affair, described it as a “unique opportunity to arrest, by means of a single example, the course of so many cruelties.” In 1788, the most recent victims of this long eighteenth-century history of cruelties included two slaves known only as Zabeth and Marie-Rose, who were ostensibly tortured because they were suspected of having administered poison to their master and fellow slaves. This chapter tells the story of the prosecution of the master who tortured them, Nicolas Lejeune.

The violence of slavery took many forms in Saint-Domingue. However, one form was particularly central to the colony’s history, its political culture, and its fate: torture, or the use of coercive means by public or quasi-public actors to induce cooperation or a confession from a criminal suspect. This is not because torture was somehow “worse” than or radically different from the many other forms of violence by which slaves were made to suffer in Saint-Domingue. Indeed, this chapter seeks in part to demonstrate that “torture” in colonial Haiti was not always seen as the legally specialized and distinctive form of state-sanctioned violence that features in the historiography of criminal procedure. Rather, torture was identified as part of a continuum of practices that included cognate forms of brutality. Torture nonetheless occupied a prominent place in the set of techniques by which masters sought to discipline and terrorize their slaves, and this prominence undoubtedly derives in good measure from torture’s close relationship to law and the methods of legal inquiry.