ABSTRACT
Even more than colonists of European descent on the mainland, those who planted in the West Indies were terrified of slave rebellions. In Document 1, excerpted from an anonymous tract proclaiming the failure of a planned slave rebellion in Barbados, we see evidence of both the horrific public punishments meted out to the suspected plotters and the motives that white commentators attributed to them. The slaves, it was thought, hoped to destroy the sugar cane, kill all the whites, and then crown a “king” who would sit in a grand “Chair of State.” Interestingly, there was a difference of opinion as to the plotted fate of English women. While some planters thought the slaves were planning to keep the “handsomest” women to be “converted to their own use,” others believed that all whites were to have been slaughtered indiscriminately. Apparently they could not decide which was more alarming—for the slaves to have coveted white women, a frequently expressed fear in slave societies despite (or more likely because of) the fact that sexual exploitation was perpetrated regularly by white men upon African women—or for the slaves to have wanted to murder all whites with no consideration as to gender. Once Barbadians learned of the existence of the plot from an informer, they acted quickly to identify and punish those who were involved. Of the initial seventeen who were captured and executed, six were burned alive, and eleven beheaded, with the mutilated bodies of the latter afterward paraded through the streets and then burned—spectacles calculated to terrify those who might consider launching future insurrections.
