Kees tells the court his confession was beaten out of him

In 1735 an enslaved man named Kees told the Suriname criminal court what had happened before he reached it. His overseer had smelled something bad in the water and suspected him of poisoning it. His owner, Jon Kramer, tied him to a plank, beat him, and withheld food and water until he confessed and named accomplices. In court Kees withdrew the confession. The court found the account troubling enough that the case closed without a clear outcome or a recorded punishment. Seven years later the same court handled the same complaint very differently. Sambo, interrogated on his plantation by his owner and a group of neighbouring owners until he confessed, tried to withdraw the statement in court and was ordered to be tortured at Fort Zelandia until he affirmed it, then branded, pinched with hot tongs and beheaded. What had changed in between was the volume of accusations.

In 1735 Antonio de Salas, the Spanish governor of New Granada, wrote to his crown to complain that English merchants of the South Sea Company were bringing black Christians of the Congo into Cartagena. The complaint identifies who those people were. Two states in central Africa were Christian: the kingdom of Kongo and the Portuguese colony of Angola. Angola shipped its captives on Portuguese and Brazilian vessels to Brazil, and its Christian captives came from districts under the tightest Portuguese control, so a Christian in English hands almost certainly came from Kongo. The English trade on that coast worked out of Kabinda, just north of the mouth of the Zaire river; company records show every central African voyage of the 1720s heading there. The same merchants supplied South Carolina. Kongo had been Catholic since the 1490s and treated its Christianity as the thing that made it a distinct people, which is why offers of religious freedom from Spanish agents carried weight with Kongolese captives in the Americas.

Ambrose Madison finished building the plantation Montpelier in Spotsylvania County, Virginia in 1732, and shortly afterwards three enslaved Africans were accused of poisoning him. He suffered a long wasting illness and died. Their conviction was the first in Virginia of enslaved people for murdering an owner and the first conviction for poisoning. The documentation is thin, but one detail carries weight. The three had help from a man on another property who was said to know about poisons, which points to a relationship between a client and a practitioner. The case set the shape of Virginian poison talk for the rest of the century, in which an enslaved poisoner kills the owner slowly. Elsewhere in the Atlantic the accusations more often concerned other enslaved people. Virginia stood apart in this respect, and of the cases from Brunswick and Cumberland counties between 1740 and 1799, 44 per cent had white targets.

The Code Noir gave enslaved people in the French Caribbean almost no standing in law. One article allowed them to denounce a master who abused them. Another barred their testimony outright, and colonial courts had been ignoring the ban when no better witness existed. On 15 July 1738 the Conseil d'Etat in France settled the question by ruling that enslaved people could give evidence, with one exception written into the ruling: they could say nothing against the person who owned them. The exception protected the only relationship that mattered. A planter could be accused by his neighbour's slaves and never by his own. Magistrates in the colonies routinely destroyed the case files that involved enslaved litigants and witnesses, so the number of surviving records is small. Historians reading colonial criminal papers for the voices of enslaved people are working with what a system designed to silence them happened to leave behind.