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of poison in 1773, during the colony’s Spanish period, included depositions that revealed the rituals that lay behind the poison. The accused slaves described a charm called a gris-gris, a word that derives from the Mande word gerregerys.142 The gris-gris was concocted from the heart and gallbladder of a crocodile, and the plotters sought the ritual expertise of a slave who had been born in Africa. The court examined the charm and observed that it was made of a mixture of animal and vegetable substances, although experiments on a dog demonstrated that the contents were not lethal (which was good news both for the alleged poisoners and for the dog).143 The colony’s Superior Council assiduously prosecuted the crime of poisoning, but also wondered about the role of witchcraft, concluding in 1729 that although the council “does not admit the existence of sorcerers, it does punish poisoners, and perhaps it is poisons which do all the damage attributed to sorcery.”144

But in British America, the crime of poisoning was stripped of its connection to religious or ritualistic practices. Sudden sickness or death might prompt a Brazilian planter to accuse a slave of witchcraft or a Louisiana judicial council to speculate about sorcery, but it led the typical British American slaveholder to press charges of poisoning. Intensified fears about increased poisoning led to new laws (see document 14), in the same way that concerns about witchcraft in England generated new and enhanced statutes (see document 6). In 1749, for example, white colonists in South Carolina grew increasingly agitated about what they regarded as a growing number of cases of poisoning. This concern manifested itself in a number of ways. On July 24 of that year, the South Carolina Gazette reprinted a letter about poison in the West Indies originally written for the Royal Society in London and read before that distinguished body in January 1742. Dr. Edward Milward’s letter specifically concerned itself with poisons used by slaves and how to find antidotes for them.145 On October 30, the South Carolina Gazette published a short notice decrying the frequent nature of the crime (see document 15). In the wake of these anxieties, the South Carolina assembly revised its existing statutes in 1651 to expand punishments for slaves (see document 14). Slaveholders, as Milward’s letter suggests, also worried about the technical expertise required to make toxic potions (see documents 14, 15, and 16). For that reason, laws regulated slave doctors.

Is poison, however, witchcraft? It is hard to make the connection with confidence. There are, nonetheless, a number of interesting parallels that make it difficult to dismiss the issue out of hand. Consider the status of witchcraft as crimen exceptum—the exceptional crime for which the normal rules of procedure and evidence were altered to allow torture and testimony by people otherwise regarded as unreliable witnesses. In general, laws directed at slaves in North America followed the same trend—slaves were treated before courts in ways that were not tolerated for free subjects. Punishments for malefactors were draconian; slaves could be dismembered and murdered in especially grisly ways by courts of law. English malefactors suffered terrible torments for crimes such as treason or arson, but slaves routinely endured these barbaric ends.

Poison is a perfect case in point. Slaves believed to have poisoned whites were routinely burned alive (see document 15); only two people were burned alive in the colony of Massachusetts, for example, and one was an enslaved woman named Phyllis found guilty of poison. Convicted of petit treason, she was burned alive in 1755, while her coconspirator, a man, was hanged, not burned, in accordance with the gender distinctions in the English statutes for petit treason. His body was hanged in chains, and there his corpse remained for some twenty years.146 Other poisoners were suspended alive in cages to die slowly, their organs shutting down while their bodies were pecked by impatient carrion. John Bartram, a