New England Bound by Wendy Warren

Author:Wendy Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2016-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

Cotton Mather, “Rules for the Society of Negroes.” Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

CHAPTER 6

The Law of the Land

If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter.

—Ecclesiastes 5:8

Choosing where and how to die was a grim but effective way for an enslaved person to express autonomy, but not all enslaved people were able to do so as cleanly as did John Whan. In 1661, a jury of inquest in the Massachusetts Bay Colony presented its findings in the matter of the unexplained death of a slave, John, a “negro of Mr. Henry Bartholomew.” The jury members had investigated the place “wheare the neagroe was found lying and a gun lying by him.” They had also heard the testimony of various witnesses from the scene, and then viewed the corpse, observing that a “shot went in to his body being about or Just beneath his short ribs one his leaft side, and came partly through about his shoulder blad behind.” The angle of the bullet led the jurors to agree “that [John] did willingly contrive & was the only acter in his owne death by the shooting of the sayd Gun into his own body.”1 In other words, the man had stood the butt of the gun on the ground, put the muzzle against the bottom of his ribs, and pulled the trigger.

It can’t have been easy to view such a scene. Colonial muskets, notoriously inaccurate from a distance, could at close range make a shredded mess of a human chest. Regular colonists or their servants would have cleaned the body, since medical professionals barely existed in the seventeenth century. And really, there was no need for them, since most denizens of the early modern world were intimately familiar with injury and death—it would take an industrial revolution to distance people from the evident gore of life. Still, that John’s death resulted from suicide certainly made the scene more ominous, more solemn, and also more depraved to any English colonists who viewed the corpse. Someone, or many, had carried the body from the scene of the shooting to a more serene and protected place. Someone, or many, rolled John’s body over and pulled up his clothing to show the jury his bloody chest and back. Everyone present had to deal with the horror of the suicide, an act that Puritans regarded as a grave sin, an affront to God’s plan, a defiant unwillingness to see divine ideas fulfilled.

Or maybe, when the victim was a slave, the suicide’s sinfulness mattered less? Some years later, Wait Winthrop, grandson of John Winthrop and a veteran of King Philip’s War, wrote to his brother Fitz-John about “black Tom,” an enslaved African he had apparently been given or lent, who was of “little servis.” Wait noted caustically that the enslaved man “used to make a show of hanging himselfe before folkes, but I beleive he is not very nimble about it when he is alone.

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