Note: This is one of several cases of a female slave who repeatedly poisoned their owners or other members of the master’s household.
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EXCERPT: Eleazer Fletcher Flagg … was born in Conway, 8 Jan.
1800. He went South with his brother Chandler, and Otis Presbrey, afterward his
brother-in-law, and traveled from place to place selling merchandise; he seems
to have resided permanently in the South after 1823, and eventually bought and
cleared a plantation, “Deerfield,” in Caroline Co., Va. Though known to have
been uniformly kind to his slaves, he was poisoned by his cook, who put pounded
glass in some food. It was afterward ascertained that she had poisoned three
previous masters. His wife, who was away for the day at the adjacent plantation
of her father, “Poplargrove,” escaped, as also his child William C, who refused
to touch the food offered; but he himself died from the effects, 4 Sept. 1831.
[Charles Alcott Flagg, The
descendants of Eleazer Flagg and his wife Huldah Chandler of Grafton, Mass.,
Boston, David Clapp & Son, 1903, p. 49]
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For more cases of this category, see: Female Serial Killers of 19th Century America
More cases, see: Female Serial Killers of Africa & the African Diaspora
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[1718-12/27/20]
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In here case, she may well have done it because of anger at being a slave?
ReplyDeleteQuite true. On the other hand she might be like those men and women who would poison any person who they had a resentment towards or who just enjoyed killing people. There's no way to know. There are cases, of course, such as the sadistic Darya Saltykova, where slaves (serfs) were murdered by their mistress, and of African queens who murdered underlings and husbands for various motives. In the case at hand, being a slave of a master "known to have been uniformly kind to his slaves" was a better station than many free people had, regardless of race, so it was not a very clever freedom-loving tactic to not only commit a murder against such a master and to do it in such a fashion as to take a big risk of getting caught and sent to prison.
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