The Brutal Punishments of Black Slaves

One man was such a threat to British rule that they cooked him for 10 hours straight.

 

The Brutal Punishments of Black Slaves

'Barbarities in the West Indias [Indies]'
April 23, 1791
Artist: Hannah Humphrey
(Source: UK National Portrait Gallery)

The picture above is a caricature depicting a scene in a British island colony, described in shocking detail during a debate before the British parliament on the abolition of the slave trade. The motion before the floor was presented by the abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759-1833). An excerpt of a speech from the debate is written at the bottom of the print.

Mr Frances [sic] relates 'Among numberless other acts of cruelty daily practised, an English Negro driver, because a young Negro through sickness was unable to work, threw him into a copper of boiling sugar juice, and after keeping him steeped over head and ears for above three quarters of an hour in the boiling liquid whipt him with such severity, that it was near six months before he recover'd of his wounds and scalding.'

[From] Mr Frances' Speech, corroborated by Mr Fox, Mr Wilberforce &c &c.' 

23 April 1791

Contrary to what was written by the artist, Wilberforce was actually recorded saying, on April 18, 1791 that the slave 'died in four days.' 

As for the overseer...

He was not punished otherwise than by replacing the slave and being dismissed from service.

The incident described above was just one of many miseries which African people were made to suffer at the hands of racist Europeans, their privileged progeny, and their fanatical followers.

What follows next is not for the faint of heart. This article is an exploration of the various ways that enslaved persons were punished during the 300-year history of chattel slavery in the Americas.

Introduction

On April 28, 1736, a group of 32 African men and women were punished for instigating a rebellion of enslaved Africans in the Dutch colony of Berbice (located in modern-day Guyana).

Portrait of Jan Jacob Hartsinck
1779-1780
Jacob Houbraken, after Hendrik Pothoven
(Source: Rijksmuseum)

The earliest published account of this rebellion is Beschryving van Guiana, of de Wilde Kust in Zuid-America (Description of Guiana, or the Wild Coast in South America), written by Jan Jacob Hartsinck (1716-1779) seven years after the events described. In the following excerpt from his book, Hartsnick describes the brutal punishments of the rebels.

 

 

On the 27th of April, the Court entered the Dagerart byëen to [deliver a] Verdict...to the Negroes who were imprisoned there, of whom thirty-two of the main heads of the rebels; were sentenced to death, six burned to death (including Atta), eight broken [on the wheel], (among whom was a Negress called Miss Margeriet, who had caused some Christian women to be murdered in the most gallant manner, and had drunk their blood for revenge.) without the stroke of grace, and eighteen to be hanged.

The execution commenced the next day, on the Dawn, at eight o'clock in the morning, and was quite accomplished just after noon, of which we shall cite some circumstances.

A separate woodpile had been made for Atta, in the midst of which stood a Pole, to which he was fastened with a chain, in joints that he could walk round the Pole. The Justice, beginning with him, [he] was first fastened to the Pole, and a piece of Flesh was torn from his body in four places with glowing Tongs; and this was then done to him at the end of every half-quarter of an hour, until noon at noon.

After he had been treated for the first time, eight of his accomplices were briskly broken including the aforementioned Female. This beast lived on the wheel for more than two hours, after all its bones had been smashed to pieces. The Negro Hercules, after he had been broken with his wheel, and seeing his Master the Director Dell, he began to scold him, reproaching him that he was the cause of his misfortune, as he always mistreated his Negroes, and drove [them into] mutinying.

This having been accomplished, eighteen were hanged, where in the next rare instance occurred, viz., one of the Negroes being repelled, fell from the Gallows, because the Noose broke, and after lying for a few minutes he arose; Looking round about him, he saw one of the shattered Negroes lying near to him on the wheel, on which he ran, and kicked him with all his might three or four kicks on the belly, crying out these words, 'Damn…… Dog, it's your fault that I have to hang;' having done this, he himself went up the ladder again, and willingly had himself hanged a second time.

Then five were burned with [a] little Fire, or rather roasted, and continually squished with Tongs, and another stood on the Woodpile and was [instantly] dead; where after the Fire around Atta was slowly kindled, that his sorrows should last the longer; by which it happened that, although the fire was lit about eleven o'clock, he still lived until half past one. It was astonishing in this that they all allowed themselves to be burned, broke, hanged, etc. without screaming or moaning.

All that Atta spoke was to the Governor, crying often in his Negro tongue, 'My God, what have I done? The Governor is right, I suffered what I have earned, I thank him.' This was the end of that infamous Monster, whose bloodlust and cruelty has brought death to so many Christians, and the almost irreparable corruption of this Colony.

I have provided the image below to demonstrate how Atta's execution might have looked.
The man portrayed here was chained to a stake and burned alive. He was punished for playing a leading role during a massive rebellion of peasants and farmers in early 16th century Germany.

The execution of peasant leader Jakob Rohrbach in Neckargartach, Germany in 1525
From Beschreibung des Bauernkriegs (Description of the Peasants' War) (1551) by Peter Harrer
(Source: Von Helibrunna nach Heilbronn by Christard Schrenk et al. (1998) via Wikipedia Commons)

There's enough evidence in Hartsnick's account to suggest that Atta was given the worst punishment that the White establishment of his day could possibly imagine.

First, there is the fact that he was the only one out of the 124 executed rebels to be treated this way.

The distribution of the punishments is also very telling: 18 were hanged, 8 were broken on the wheel (meaning they had their hands and feet stretched out across a wooden wheel and then had their naked body struck repeatedly with a club or a thick rod), and 6 were burned to death.

In a previous execution of participants from that same rebellion, 22 were hanged, 16 were broken on the wheel, and 15 were burned.

There is clearly a pattern here. In slave-holding societies throughout the Americas, hanging was a common form of execution and, as such, it was applied liberally in group sentencing. Burnings, on the other hand, were reserved for a few, more "dangerous" persons like Atta.

Dying To Die

In a 2013 article for the Smithsonian, Welsh historian Mike Dash asserted that 'breaking on the wheel was the most horrific punishment ever visited on a convicted criminal.' But, in Dutch colonial society, getting grilled to death was clearly considered to be more painful than having one's bones broken or being suffocated with a noose around the neck. Breaking some bones was not nearly enough to discourage these 'beasts.' This was, after all, the most violent rebellion of slaves in Dutch colonial history and, as such, required a response that was equal or exceeding in measure.

If Hartsnick's account is to be believed, the punishment of the rebel Atta was enough to force an admission of regret. But of course, anyone in such a predicament will agree to say just about anything if they believe it will bring an end to their suffering or at least grant them some temporary relief. Furthermore, the reliability of this account is in question when we consider that the author, Hartsnick, served as a director of the West India Company, the primary supplier of African slaves to Dutch plantations. He later served as a financial authority for the Admiralty of Amsterdam.

This account is even more controversial in the context of the movement for abolition. As early as 1688, German and Dutch Quakers organized a protest against slavery in Germantown, Pennsylvania - one of the earliest agitations on behalf of enslaved African people in the English colonies of North America. By the 19th century, the Abolitionist Movement became a prominent feature in the politics of Western Europe with plenty of powerful opponents. 

As we can see from his writings, Hartsnick was a defender of slavery. He would have wanted to see more of it. Hartsnick saw people like Atta not as victims but, in his words, as 'monsters.' By using such strong language to define the leaders of the resistance, he was absolving himself of any guilt and positioning himself as a victim in the very system that he was actively working to perpetuate.

His attitude reflected the psychology of most slaveholders, who felt justified in hurting and even killing the slaves who resisted them, as seen in these illustrations from an American anti-slavery almanac, published in 1840:

All of these depictions were based on real events. The burning of Francis McIntosh happened in St. Louis, Missouri on April 28, 1836. At the time of this mob lynching, McIntosh was actually a free man. Isaac Johnson (1844-1905), a survivor of slavery in Kentucky, told of how he tried to escape to Canada with another man, who had lived there in freedom before being falsely arrested and sold as a slave. When they were caught, Isaac's friend was whipped simultaneously by four men who then poured flaming coals on his swollen back and slit his throat, 'cutting just enough so he would die gradually in torture.'

Slave-masters used anything in their reach to punish slaves.

Left: 'Torturing American Citizens'
Right: 'The Peculiar Domestic Institutions of Our Southern Brethren'
From Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (1834) and the Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840
(Sources: New York Public Library, Library of Congress)

One particularly grueling torment involved the use of a feral cat. An eye-witness described the procedure as follows:

The citizen-slayer caught a large cat, and so fastened the animal, that in endeavouring to get loose, the cat's talons continually tore the slave's already gory back, until the villain's vengeance was glutted; when he released the cat, administered the usual plaster, salt, pepper, vinegar &c., and ordered the son of anguish to resume his labour.

Other isolated incidents of brutality involved crushing the bones of the fingers between two slabs of metal (using a device called a thumbscrew), rubbing a heated brand across the body, splitting the nose in half, boring a hole in the tongue, forcing slaves to wear heavy facemasks or spiked collars, and sawing the legs off of persistent runaways (it was more common to cut the hamstrings in French colonies). 

More rarely, as a plantation doctor in St. Kitts noted, slave-holders castrated slaves (literally chopped off the testicles) and bashed out their eyes. Castration was also a favorite form of punishment in Barbados. 

All across the U.S. South, Blacks were stabbed, shot, strangled, and scorched. The subjugation of slaves was central to the survival of the Southern economy; "independent" Americans were depending on it.

Sometimes, the ears were tacked to a pillory (a wooden trap which forced them to stand in a hunch for a long time) and then torn off (this punishment was given to Whites convicted of theft as well).

Left: Wilson Chinn, a former slave from Louisiana
with the initials of his owner, Volsey B. Marmillion,
branded into his forehead, wearing a
punishment collar and posing with
other equipment used to punish slaves
1863
Right: A slave at work with a head frame and
mouth piece to prevent his eating,
collar, spurs, &c with a 56 pound weight
fastened to his body to prevent his absconding
From An Accurate Account of That
Horrible and Inhuman Traffic, the Slave Trade
1816?
(Sources: Library of Congress, Countway Library of Medicine)

These are two of the most disturbing punishments I have encountered in my research: the second one was a slave-breaker in Louisiana nailing a man's penis to a bed post and then whipping him 'until he broke loose'; the first was a slave-holder in Jamaica forcing his slaves to urinate into the eyes of their peers or to defecate inside their mouths and then to 'wire' the victims' mouths shut. 

While an average sampling of Homo sapiens should find either of these scenarios deeply disturbing regardless of the place, the culture or the time period, we must acknowledge that in these cases, there was still a possibility of survival.

But what could be worse than a slow torture, ending in death? 

Certainly not those two cases I just mentioned. Punishments to those extremes went largely unnoticed by the general public, even though the perpetrators freely admitted to these horrors themselves. In fact, one of them kept a logbook in which he bragged about the thrill of his conquests. As if that wasn't bad enough, he never missed an opportunity to share these stories with his friends. Another master in Virginia made a slave drink 'a pint of piss' (presumably the slave's own urine) after the second time the slave wet his bed. That master - a long-time member of the governor's Council - also kept a careful record of his exploits in a secret diary.

It is reasonable to assume that slaves who suffered the most were also the most likely to be heard and to receive a judicial hearing.

But justice was partial even in the event of a slave's death.

There was a master in the Virgin Islands who forced two women's mouths open and poured scalding-hot water down their throats. Then he whipped them, chained them, and sent them to work in the field completely naked. Needless to say, both of his victims died in excruciating pain. At other times, the same master had several children waterboarded upside-down (held under water until they lost consciousness, then revived, over and over again). In one instance, he had a 10-year-old boy dipped inside a pot of 'boiling liquor' until the skin fell 'entirely off.' In another, he struck a young girl in the head with a stick and kicked her 'several feet off the ground.' Apparently, this girl - a "Mulatto" - was also his own daughter. For these and other crimes against his slaves, the master, a prominent legislator and councilman, was "recommended to mercy" by a jury, but sentenced by the governor to hang.

There was another master in Louisiana who stuck a slave inside a cotton gin and left him there until 'rats and vermin' ate him alive. The remains of this slave were buried with no questions asked and 'with less feeling than would have been manifested for an old house dog.'

A couple in Maryland tied and torched a 13-year-old girl. Not only did they escape charges, but they were only ordered to pay a reimbursement to the family of the original "owner."

Just as we are surprised to learn of these stories today, they would have been quite unexpected to most Whites in those days, who were not living or working on slave plantations. For this majority, the torture of slaves was not understood to be a regular feature of plantation life. After all, slave laws usually stipulated that punishments should follow a very particular format. The British and American system recommended the use of a whip. These was usually made from the skin of a cow. The French Code Noir required that slaves deserving of punishment be chained, then beaten with ropes or canes. It also allowed for a 'leather thong, switch or small stick.' Still, masters did not always stick to the script. In fact, it only encouraged them to test the limits of these laws. 

Two methods of whipping slaves involved "cart-whipping" (lashing the body from a distance) and "whipping at short-quarters" (applying the whip so that each lashing wrapped it around the front of the body.) If a master thought the slave deserved something worse, they might strap the body to a whipping post and either tie weights to the feet to keep the slave from flailing around or stick a sharp stake into the ground to tempt the slave into another episode of pain. After the whipping, lime, pepper, brine (concentrated salt water), and (on occasion) melted wax were applied to the wounds. A full recovery could take months or even years (one man reported that he still felt the effects of a single thrashing 14 years later*). Meanwhile, the victim was expected to produce the same level of work as they had done before. Thus, we find cases of whippings in which the victim died as a result of their injuries. 

Left: A 60-year-old man named Gordon or "Whipped Peter" who was beat by an overseer in Louisiana
1863
Right: A 16-year-old unnamed girl who was burned by her mistress in Virginia
1866
(Sources: Library of Congress, Slavery Images)

The courts were just as crooked in their dealings with rebel slaves.

Minor infringements against White persons (ex: escape and theft under a shilling's worth) warranted a whipping - typically not less than 30 lashes.

Other times - such as in cases of alleged rapes, arsons, assaults or plots of murder, punishments were intended to kill. This was especially so if the actions of a Black offender resulted in the death of a White person. In Portuguese Brazil, two years before emancipation, two slaves who had been given 300 lashes each through a court mandate were subsequently whipped to death by their appointed guides on their way back to the plantation. Masters and overseers were also known to administer this treatment of 300 lashes in British and French colonies (but who was keeping count anyways?).** 

There were differing levels of cruelty in these punishments and the effects varied with such factors as the duration of the victim's suffering, the severity of their pain, their prior fitness, and the overall humiliation.

As I indicated before, masters were sometimes punished themselves for "cruel and unusual" punishments against their slaves. But such cases were rare because in most places, the testimony of slaves was inadmissible in court. The torture of slaves was not officially sanctioned under the law, except in cases where a slave was convicted of a crime. For these reasons, it must then be understood that the worst punishments inflicted on slaves were entrusted to, and were in fact carried out by, agents of government.

Scenes of Slavery
February 18, 1886
Artist: Angelo Agostino
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Revista Ilustrada (Illustrated Magazine) n. 427
(Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Translation:

Horrors are told about the atrocities of the barbarous masters. Slaves have been put in burning ovens; others are dropped in boilers of hot water inside the sugar mills; others are buried alive.

In the island colonies, the executions of rebels were done rather sparingly. They were usually reserved for slaves against whom prosecutors could produce the most damming evidence of violence.

Robert Hunter, the governor of New York and New Jersey from 1710 to 1719, noted:

I am informed that in the West Indies where their laws against their slaves are most severe, that in case of a conspiracy in which any are engaged, a few only are executed for an example.

After a 1736 uprising of enslaved Africans in Antigua, 132 were convicted, and of this number, 88 (66.7%) were executed; 77 were burned at the stake, 6 were gibbetted (publicly suspended in the air by chains within a tight cage until starvation and thirst took over), and 5 were broken on the wheel, including the leader. Nearly 50 others (~35%) were deported from the colony.

Following a 1760 rebellion in Jamaica - dubbed "Tacky's War," about a thousand former slaves were convicted; 600 (~60%) were sentenced to hard labor in other islands and 100 (~10%) were executed. The manner of the leaders' executions were more detailed in the records. One was hanged, another burned, and two more were gibbetted. 

Of those who were gibbetted, one lived 7 days and the other survived for 9, suffering convulsions all over his body on the final day. They were supposed to be in pain but were observed in good spirits, facing the taunts of their accusers with stern resolve. Both engaged in conversations with local Blacks who had gathered to see them each day. On day seven, they were laughing hysterically at a joke they heard. When an autopsy was conducted on the second victim, it was discovered that his lungs had collapsed and were stuck very tightly to his back. 

The rebel who was burned had his body chained to an iron stake after being forced into a seated position. His feet were then set on fire and he was forced to watch them burn to ashes. Remarkably, he managed to free a hand and capitalized on the opportunity to reach into the fire and hurl a glowing 'brand' into the executioner's face.

The burnings of chained rebels were nothing new.

Two decades earlier, in 1739, this mode of punishment was alternately described by the Barbadian traveler Charles Leslie, who wrote that it was customary for rebels to be punished this way in Jamaica.

A rebellious Negroe or he that twice strikes a White Man is condemned to the Flames; he is carried to the Place of Execution and chain'd flat on his Belly, his Arms and Legs extended, then Fire is set to his feet, and so he is burnt gradually up: Others they starve to Death, with a Loaf hanging before their Mouths; I have seen these unfortunate Wretches gnaw the Flesh off their own Shoulders, and expire in all the frightful Agonies of one under the most horrid Tortures. 

Convicts were singled out carefully for these punishments because, in the words of English parliamentarian Bryan Edwards (1743-1800), it was 'thought necessary to make a few terrible examples of some of the most guilty of the captives.' But, as the Jamaican colonial secretary Edward Long (1734-1813) noted, those executed were relatively few. Leslie attributed this generally conservative approach in the West Indies to the great prevalence of slaves, who outnumbered colonists 10 to 1.

British policy on the executions of rebels in the colonies of North America, where Whites held the overall majority, was far more brutal. Governor Hunter noted that all (100%) of the slaves captured after the New York Slave Revolt of 1712 who did not first kill themselves, were executed. 

Some were burnt, others handed, one broke on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town, so that there has been the most exemplary punishment inflicted that could be possibly thought of.

The imagination of government officials was such that one slave named Tom was sentenced to be roasted slowly over a closely-tended fire for eight to ten hours.

Perhaps the only rebel who suffered a worse indecency was Nat Turner, who was hanged (suffocated with a noose), drawn (dissected and peeled apart to expose the guts), quartered (cut into four sections), flayed (skinned), castrated, and beheaded in Virginia. To the disappointment of many Southerners, Turner had died long before he was cut open.

It did not matter whether plans of revolt actually materialized or not. Anyone who could be connected to a rebellion was punished.

Decades after the first uprising in New York, another series of fires prompted an investigation, which was purported to have unraveled a planned takeover of the city by dozens of enslaved Blacks and a few poor Whites. In reality, the entire debacle was basically a witch hunt, spurned on by a 16-year-old Irish indentured servant woman who was promised her freedom along with a large sum of money. The aftermath, says Harvard scholar Jill Lepore, was far worse than what was documented during the Salem Witch trials. When deliberations were over, nearly 200 people were arrested. Half of them (~50%) were given sentences: 70 were banished to serve as slaves in various islands and 34 were executed. Of those executed: 13 Black men were burned; 17 Black men, 2 White men, and 2 White women were hanged.

Other conspiracies of revolt among American slaves were pursued with similar zeal, most notably those identified with Gabriel Prosser in Virginia (where 70 were arrested, 25 hanged, 8 deported, 25 acquitted, and 13 pardoned) and Denmark Vesey in South Carolina (where 131 were arrested, 67 convicted, 35 hanged, 31 deported, 27 acquitted, and 38 released).

Regional differences in the approach to punishing slaves who participated in mass rebellions is a significant part of the reason why we find far less cases of these rebellions in the mainland colonies of the Americas in comparison with those in the islands. 

Left: 'A Negro Hung By His Ribs From a Gallows'
Middle: 'The Execution of Breaking on the Rack'
Right: 'A Female Negro Slave With a Weight Chained To Her Ankle'
From The Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition; Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796)
(Sources: The British Library, Wikipedia Commons)

Dying To Live

Any discussion on the punishment of slaves is incomplete without us acknowledging the agency of African rebels in the face of these injustices. 

No matter where their suffering occurred, African people responded in ways that confounded even the most learned men of Europe. 

Many took their own lives, denying their oppressors any validation of their judgements. 

It was commonly believed that when when an African died in the diaspora, their spirit would return to the land of their ancestors where they would be safe beyond the reach of their oppressors. Thus, the act of suicide was a reclamation of freedom. 

During the New York City Uprising of 1712, one of the rebels killed his wife before taking his own life.

As the White soldiers and their Maroon allies closed in on Tacky's rebels, some of them - both men and women - killed their own children, then hanged themselves. Knowing full well the welcome that awaited them, they thought it best to spare their families from what they considered a most dishonorable fate. They also took the time to dispatch with any hostages. Soldiers reported finding the bodies of White and Black captives bunched together in the trees. Given the circumstances, the executions carried out by these recalcitrant rebels were not simply a desperate attempt to retain their power, but those bodies stood as an enduring symbol of the justice they were seeking to establish. Their revolutionary actions went beyond challenging the system of White Supremacy and projecting a new social order; in the executions of their prisoners, they had already begun a reorganization of society in which the first became the last and the last came first.

Windows for resistance were not confined to outbreaks of mass rebellion.

The daily rigors of plantation society presented plenty of opportunities.

We see resistance to unjust punishment in the person of rebels like the future abolitionist Henry Bibb (1815-1854), who refused to flog a young girl when the whip was placed in his hand (his master proceeded to lash her 200 times). We see that resistance on a plantation in the French colony of St. Domingue, three years before the greatest revolution in history, when 14 enslaved Africans called on the authorities to intervene in the savage torching of two innocent women for conspiring to poison their master (they later died of their injuries).

Of the many peoples who occupied a space in slave societies, it was the most downtrodden of slaves who best exemplified the impulses of reason and justice. Thus, we find that in every corner of the Americas, where injustice was law, resistance was duty.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there were a myriad of ways in which enslaved African people were punished all over the Americas under American, British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese rule.

Due to the widespread suppression of African perspectives during the entirety of this period, there is no way for us to know all of them. But, while we must view the surviving accounts of rebel punishments with caution, we can see the extent to which the colonial establishment had gone in order to suppress African resistance to racial oppression.

Evidently, the British and American colonists thought that being publicly disemboweled and dismembered or being starved to death were the worst punishments that any person could suffer.***

The French (pre-Revolution) believed the breaking of bones to be a fitting sentence.

The Dutch thought that a combination of stabbing, maiming, and burning were the ultimate solution for slave uprisings.

Slave-holding historians like Hartsnick, Edwards, and Long all wrote in defense of it.

If you ask me, I think these racists and all who agreed with them were sick and twisted creatures - the true monstrous beasts - who deserved every taste of justice that they got.

The revelation of these tortures are sure to evoke any choice of these emotions: surprise, anger, sorrow, and most of all, disgust. I know it did for me.

But it is also good to know that African people were not hapless victims during these trying times. The record shows that even in the midst of the most insidious treatment - whether it came to them by sadistic enslavers or under the auspices of unjust governments - these were a strong and resilient people who met their fate with pride and courage.

In their stories, we can find inspiration as we fight our own battles against the same forces of political, economic, and social oppression. We can rest assured, knowing that with all that they endured, we too, shall overcome.

- Omri C.

Left: The convicted murderer and Virgin Islands councilman Arthur William Hodge
1811 or after
Right: The socialite and Virginia councilman William Byrd II
c. 1724
(Sources: UK National Portrait Gallery via Wikipedia, Virginia Historical Society via Wikipedia)

*This was Francis Fedric, who was enslaved for 50 years in Virginia and Kentucky until he escaped to England. Fedric's master had threatened numerous times to give him 1,000 hard lashes for running away, but was utterly exhausted by the time he reached 107. 

**Two examples of British and French masters who whipped their slaves 300 times are Jean-Baptiste Labat and Thomas Thistlewood, respectively. Labat documented his punishments while in Martinique and Thistlewood in Jamaica. Labat did this to a slave to convert them from their traditional religion. Thistlewood did this to an enslaved Mulatto overseer to reinforce his own authority.

***It should be noted here that gibbeting, in particular, was more brutal when applied in cases of rebellion because, while White subjects were usually gibbetted after death, Black men and Black women were gibbetted while they were still breathing.  

Hartsinck's book is available online through The Digital Library of Dutch Literature here.

For more on the subjects of slave rebellions and punishments, check out the books Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (1982) by Michael Craton, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020) by Vincent Brown, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2007) by Jill Lepore, Black Bondage in the North (2001) by Edgar J. McManus, and Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004) by Trevor Burnard.