Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname

Natalie Zemon Davies

by Natalie Zemon Davis

“Two negroes hanged,” John Gabriel Stedman wrote in his Suriname journal for March 9, 1776, and then two days later, among his purchases of“soap, wine, tobacco, [and] rum” and his dinners with an elderly widow, he records, “A negro’s foot cut off.” Stedman expanded on these events in the later Narrative of his years as a Dutch–Scottish soldier fighting against the Suriname Maroons: And now, this being the period of the [court] sessions, another Negro’s leg was cut off for sculking from a task to which he was unable, while two more were condemned to be hang’d for running away altogether. The heroic behavior of one of these men deserves particularly to be quotted, he beg’d only to be heard for a few moments, which, being granted, he proceeded thus––

“I was born in Africa, where defending my prince during an engagement, I was made a captive, and sold for a slave by my own countrimen. One of your countrimen, who is now to be my judge, became then my purchaser, in whose service I was treated so cruelly by his overseer that I deserted and joined the rebels in the woods . . .”

To which his former master, who as he observed was now one of his judges, made the following laconick reply, “Rascal, that is not what we want to know. But the torture this moment shall make you confess crimes as black as yourself, as well as those of your hateful accomplices.” To which the Negroe, who now swel’d in every vain with rage [replied, holding up his hands], “Massera, the verry tigers have trembled for these hands . . .and dare you think to threaten me with your wretched instrument? No, despise the greatest tortures you can now invent, as much as I do the pitiful wrech who is going to inflict them.” Saying which, he threw himself down on the rack, where amidst the most excruci ating tortures he remained with a smile and without they were able to make him utter a syllable. Nor did he ever speak again till he ended his unhappy days at the gallows.

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Three generations of slave mothers in Suriname: The making of Stedman's Joanna

Lecture by Natalie Zemon Davis

Professor Natalie Zemon Davis will present findings from her ongoing researching into the family history of Joanna, a mixed race slave woman who married and had a son with John Gabriel

Stedman, the author of The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). Stedman’s account, with its firsthand depictions of slavery and other aspects of colonization, became an important tool in the early abolitionist cause and has remained enormously influential. Davis’ research investigates the grandmother and the mother of Stedman's Joanna, and focuses on Joanna herself so as to identify a family tradition or ethos informing their behavior and choices. The talk will also illustrate the challenges in finding evidence for the reconstruction of the lives and attitudes of individual slaves in the 18th century.

Natalie Zemon Davis is a leading historian of early modern Europe, a pioneer in feminist studies, and one of the first women to assume a senior position in North American academic life. Her research activity and publications have been in the social and cultural history of sixteenth-century France and in early modern Europe, where she has been especially concerned to get at the lives and values of peasants, artisans, and women, and to analyze their relation to other social groups and to power, property, and authority. Her current work is taking her outside Europe's bounds to colonial Quebec and Suriname. She has written six books, co-authored one and co-edited two. She has also published over seventy articles.

Natalie Zemon Davis was educated at Smith College, Radcliffe College, and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1959). She has taught at Brown University, at the University of Toronto, at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and at Princeton University. Now Professor Emeritus from Princeton, she is affiliated with the University of Toronto.

Date: Tuesday 15 April 2014

Time: 15.30-17.00

Room 005, Lipsius building (across KITLV building),

Leiden University, Cleveringaplaats 1 , 2311 BD  Leiden