Sixty articles turn a person into an instrument of cultivation

Stein reads the Code Noir of March 1685 as an inventory of the master's prerogatives dressed as a charter of protection. Louis XIV stated two goals, upholding the discipline of the Catholic Church and regulating the status and quality of the enslaved in the French West Indies. Beyond the opening articles on baptism and religious instruction, the edict concerned servitude. An enslaved person was property governed by the owner's will, needed the master's permission rather than a parent's to marry, could own nothing and could not sell cane. The single right was to complain to the royal administration, which proved illusory. Everything else was framed as the master's duty: feed and clothe, care for the old and infirm, allow rest on Sundays and holidays, keep spouses together, and refrain from torture while retaining the right to bind and flog. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects the reading of the Code Noir as an attempt to humanise slavery, arguing owners took it as the legal ground for rigorous plantation discipline.

By the middle of the seventeenth century there were sizeable black Catholic communities in Brazil, Portugal, Angola and the Kongo, some of them organised into their own lay brotherhoods for prayer and mutual aid. A leader of one in Lisbon, Lourenco da Silva, used the title procurator general for a congregation of blacks and mulattos named after Our Lady of the Rosary, and claimed descent from the royal houses of Kongo and Angola. He was probably born in Brazil. In 1684 he got himself to Rome and protested to the Pope against the perpetual enslavement of black Christians and the cruelties inflicted on them. His case joined the Capuchin protests, convinced Propaganda Fide, and produced a broad condemnation of the slave trade from the Holy Office in 1686. It was blocked by the governments of Portugal and Spain and had no effect. The papacy was in a weak position to press it, since popes were still using purchased slaves in their galleys.

The raiders drove every person of African descent and every Spanish man out to Isla de Sacrificios, an islet off Veracruz where more than four thousand people were crowded with almost no drinking water. On the afternoon of 26 May the buccaneers formed two lines, drew their cutlasses and ordered the captives to strip. The Franciscan Juan de Avila, who watched, wrote that the black and mixed race women were left almost naked and weeping. The raiders then divided the black and mixed race men and women from the Spanish men. Interracial families were broken at that moment, which the friar did not mention. On 29 May a final choice was made and only the young and healthy were put aboard. About five hundred people described as old and sick were abandoned on the islet. On 30 May those left behind watched 1,463 relatives and friends sail away.

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.