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Poisoned Relations: Medicine, Sorcery, and Poison Trials in the Contested Atlantic, 1680-1850

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Poisoned Relations: Medicine, Sorcery, and Poison Trials in the Contested Atlantic, 1680-1850 POISONED RELATIONS: MEDICINE, SORCERY, AND POISON TRIALS IN THE CONTESTED ATLANTIC, 1680-1850 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Chelsea L. Berry, B.A. Washington, DC March 25, 2019 Copyright 2019 by Chelsea L. Berry All Rights Reserved ii POISONED RELATIONS: MEDICINE, SORCERY, AND POISON TRIALS IN THE CONTESTED ATLANTIC, 1680-1850 Chelsea L. Berry, B.A. Thesis Advisor: Alison Games, Ph.D. ABSTRACT From 1680 to 1850, courts in the slave societies of the western Atlantic tried hundreds of free and enslaved people of African descent for poisoning others, often through sorcery. As events, poison accusations were active sites for the contestation of ideas about health, healing, and malevolent powers. Many of these cases centered on the activities of black medical practitioners. This thesis explores changes in ideas about poison through the wave of poison cases over this 170-year period and the many different people who made these changes and were bound up these cases. It analyzes over five hundred investigations and trials in Virginia, Bahia, Martinique, and the Dutch Guianas—each vastly different slave societies that varied widely in their conditions of enslaved labor, legal systems, and histories. It is these differences that make the shared patterns in the emergence, growth, and decline of poison cases, and of the relative importance of African medical practitioners within them, so intriguing. Across these four locations, there was a specific, temporally bounded, and widely shared relationship between poison, medicine, and sorcery in this period. This relationship centered on medical practitioners of African descent involved in poison cases where the affliction, cure, or both were made with sorcery. My quantitative analysis of these cases also reveals a shared cluster of cases in the mid- eighteenth century—before the age of revolutions—and a heavily male gender ratio among the accused. These findings complicate the focus historians have placed on famous cases occurring in the context of wars and highlight a significant change from contemporary European associations between poison and women. These poison cases were central to a long interaction iii and transformation of ideas about the causes of and solutions to illness, which were among the most formative and fundamental challenges faced by people in the Atlantic World. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No graduate student is an island. I could not have done this work or even conceived of undertaking it without an enormous amount of help and encouragement. My dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support of CLIR, The McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the SSRC, The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Huntington Foundation, The Cosmos Club Foundation, and The Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. A special thank you to Ryan Kashanipour and the rest of the crew at CLIR for mentoring us fellows throughout our research year and guiding us into the transition from researching to writing. The McNeil Center has not only been the perfect place to finish writing, but also to be part of a truly amazing community. I feel lucky to have spent time with such a lively, intellectually curious, and enthusiastic group of scholars. To my advisors at Georgetown, “thank you” doesn’t begin to cover it. To Father David Collins, for presiding over the birth of this project as a term paper; to Adam Rothman, for his helpful comments and suggestions; to Kate de Luna, for shepherding me through my training in historical linguistics. Above all, I want to thank Alison Games for her tireless reading, insightful advice, and constant encouragement from my first proposal through each chapter of the dissertation. Commentators on pieces of this project at different stages greatly helped my revisions. I particularly want to thank the Georgetown Early Modern Global History Seminar, the McNeil Center, and the Summer Academy of Atlantic History for extensive workshopping. The first time in an archive can be a bewildering experience, and I am also grateful to a number of scholars and archivists who were generous with their time in helping me navigate each brave new world. v It’s not possible to complete a dissertation without moral support from friends and family. At Georgetown, Finn Macartney, Chad Frazier, and Kate Steir were fonts of mutual solidarity and celebration. Thank you as well to Team Atlantic, Writing Group, and the 2014-15 Transregional Seminar crew. In far-flung archives and centers, Alix Rivière, Jaime Andreson, Joe la Hausse de Lalouvière, and Casey Schmitt have all been great interlocutors and great friends. I want to thank my parents and all of my extended family members who have cheered me on at every step of my academic career, from grade school to the PhD. Paisley the cat has provided not only constant companionship, but also a generous service keeping my proofreading skills sharp by periodically walking across the keyboard. Finally, I could not have gone on this adventure without Nick in my life. It’s been quite a trip. vi CONTENTS Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Poisoning Cultures in the Eastern Atlantic, c. 0 C.E. – 1850 ......................................21 Chapter 2: A Topography of Poison Cases in the Western Atlantic, 1680-1850 ..........................93 Chapter 3: Power and Common Knowledge: Slaveholders in Poison Cases ..............................152 Chapter 4: Afflicted Communities: Slaves as Clients, Witnesses, Patients, and Accusers .........206 Chapter 5: Reputation and Risk: Black Medical Practitioners and Poison Cases .......................248 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................293 Appendix A: Historical Linguistics .............................................................................................300 Appendix B: Data on the Transatlantic Slave Trade ...................................................................307 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................310 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Map of West Africa, c. 1500 .......................................................................................51 Figure 1.2: Map of Divergences and Approximate Locations of Njila Family Proto-languages ..70 Figure 1.3: Map of West Central Africa, c. 1600 ..........................................................................82 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1: Total Poison Cases and Cases with Medical Practitioners, 1680-1849 ........................94 Table 2.2: Demographics in Suriname Poison Cases, 1740-1779 ...............................................124 Table 2.3: Demographics of Slaves Accused in Virginia Poison Cases, Brunswick & Cumberland Counties, 1740-1779 ...............................................................................................125 Table 2.4: Demographics in Martinique Poison Cases, 1742-1769 .............................................125 Table 2.5: Demographics in Bahia Feitiçaria Cases, 1740-1769 ................................................125 Table 3.1: Slave Owners and Other Whites as Targets in Poison Cases, 1680-1849 ..................163 Table 3.2: Poisoning Cases with Enslaved Drivers as Targets vs. Accused, 1725-1849 ............197 Table 4.1: Poison Cases with Enslaved Targets, 1680-1849 .......................................................215 Table 4.2: Named Individuals as Targets in Poison Cases, 1730-1849 .......................................216 Table 5.1: Demographics of Black Medical Practitioners in Bahia Poison Cases, 1680-1849 ....................................................................................................................................252 Table 5.2: Demographics of Black Medical Practitioners in Suriname Poison Cases, 1720-1829 ....................................................................................................................................254 Table 5.3: Demographics of Black Medical Practitioners Brunswick & Cumberland Counties, VA, 1740-1849 ............................................................................................................256 Table 5.4: Demographics of Black Medical Practitioners in Martinique Poison Cases, 1730-1848 ....................................................................................................................................258 Table B.1: Number of Africans Disembarked, 1580-1850 ..........................................................307 Table B.2: Number of Africans Disembarked from Bight of Benin, 1680-1750 ........................308 Table B.3: Number of Africans Disembarked from West Central Africa, 1680-1750 ................308 Table B.4: Number of Africans Disembarked from Gold Coast, 1680-1750 ..............................308 Table B.5: Number of Africans Disembarked from Bight of Biafra, 1680-1750 ........................309 ix INTRODUCTION Whether one moves away from oneself in cultural space or in historical times, one does not go far before one is in a world where the taken-for-granted must cease to be so. - Rhys Isaac1 Consider the following:
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