Discovering Slave Conspiracies: New Fears of Rebellion and Old Paradigms of Plotting in Seventeenth-Century Barbados

Abstract

IN OCTOBER 1692, FOUR MILITIA OFFICERS in the English sugar colony of Barbados believed that they had discovered a "slave conspiracy," a secret plan for coordinated insurrection, exactly one day before it would have engulfed the island in revolution. They developed this idea through unequal collaboration with an enslaved man named Ben, an accused conspirator who turned king's evidence after he was found guilty, hung up in chains, and starved almost to death. The officers expanded the investigation with Ben's testimony, describing it as "altogether the meanes of the farther discovery" of many new suspects. They transposed that information into a distinctly European projection in a table appended to a report of four manuscript pages. Demonstrating English fears more than African goals, it arranged the conspirators into militia units of a rebel army that exactly mirrored the colony's regiments of horse and foot. The table also represented the alleged "disposeall of the Government" among the conspirators, with Ben accepting the position of governor. At the same time, it spelled out the conspirators' claims on gentlemen's very identities with a series of horizontal lines connecting the name of each enslaved man to that of the gentleman he intended to supplant. (See Figure 1.) The essence of the "discovery" of a slave conspiracy-that is, the creation of official knowledge about an alleged plan for insurrection-is best captured in this cross-cultural reframing and intimate but imbalanced negotiation between a desperate informant and fearful investigators. Magistrates turned English ears to African voices, but heard them imperfectly. They evaluated informants' ideas and recorded aspects of them that aligned with their own notions of possible forms of insurrection. Accordingly, the court determined on slim evidence that slaves planned to seize their masters' arms in the dead of night, meet at the principal settlement of Bridgetown, set fires around town to lure sleepy men outside into a slaughter, and then supplant them as the heads of existing households and the government. The