France writes African worship out of the law for its colonies

Hurbon treats the French slave code of 1685 as the founding legal act behind two centuries of hostility to Haitian popular religion. The code, he argues, did two things at once: it anchored slavery in race, and it installed Catholicism as the ideological justification for the whole arrangement. Enslaved people were legally goods rather than bearers of rights, and their inherited African rites were classed as barbarism or devil worship to be put down with severity. Masters and missionaries, Catholic and Protestant alike, understood early that letting African cults operate openly would undermine the plantation. The mechanism Hurbon wants readers to see is that clandestinity was imposed rather than chosen, and that the enslaved responded by entering churches in numbers and annexing Catholic symbols to their own religious grammar. Vodou therefore develops as a space lived outside the master's gaze, permanently available for subversion. Where this account departs from the standard one: Hurbon states that the English Caribbean islands took over the 1685 Code noir with no significant reworking, a claim of direct legal transfer that most legal historians of the British colonies do not make.

The San Antonio made port at Veracruz on 24 May 1687 with 580 enslaved Africans in its hold. Margarita de Robles, Paula Matias and Maria de Pares came ashore quietly from the captain's cabin. They had been taken in the raid of 1683, held at Petit-Goave, and had worked their way back through Baracoa in eastern Cuba and Havana. On the last leg they travelled as free women and Spanish subjects, seasick and dependent on other passengers for food, but with their status unquestioned. The people below them were about to be branded, quarantined and measured. Matias later gave her age as twenty two and called herself a free mulata. She said the pirate Lorenco had taken her prisoner with other women and carried her to Petit-Goave, where she remained. She named no owner, no husband and no companion, and said nothing of how she had survived four years among the French.

A denunciation made to the inquisitorial commissioner in Salvador in March 1686 described slaveholders buying an enslaved couple precisely because they were known for curing afflictions caused by poison and charms, and hoping to profit from their practice. It sits inside a cluster. Across the two full trials and twenty one investigations from 1686 to 1707, ten cases involved fifteen medical practitioners, and all but one of the fifteen were of African descent. Some stood accused of causing afflictions and some of curing them, and the same people often did both. The knowledge that an illness came from sorcery, and frequently the accusation itself, came from the enslaved, and owners gradually adopted it. Church law had nothing yet to say about any of this, and the Inquisition did not much want the cases. The link between poison, sorcery and African healers was made on plantations and in city streets long before a statute described it.

Eric Williams, the Trinidadian historian and politician, put the point in a sentence. The English settlement of 1688 gave a decisive push to the doctrine of open commerce, and the traffic in captive Africans was then opened on exactly the terms every other line of business was opened on, with a single difference, which lay in the nature of the goods. The goods were people. That settlement is normally taught as the moment parliamentary liberty was secured in England. In the same decades the Royal African Company lost its monopoly and English shipping was opened to any merchant who wanted to fit out a slaver, and the volume carried across the Atlantic rose sharply in consequence. The expansion of liberty at home and the expansion of the traffic in human beings abroad were produced by the same act. Saint-Domingue was reaching its first sugar boom while this was happening on the other side of the Channel.