History of Goodbye Series: the Latrine Sarcophagus and the Slave Hangman

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1101

I’m not so sure that it was the cold that kept Mathieu Leveille  in hospital for all of those years–as bad as hospitals would’ve been in Quebec in 1730--but I would rather have been there than at his work.       

Leveille (1709-1743) was a slave bought for 800 pounds by the French ministers in New France (Canada), brought to the cold north from Martinique to do the job that they could find no man to do.  Or no competent man.  The history of executioners in New France–nearly from the very beginning of hanging people there beginning in the very early 17th century¹–reads like a bad Italian farce sounds, filled with nothing but drunkards and incompetents, brawlers, muggers, crooks and thieves.  And the condemned–there are several accounts of men awaiting execution who were spared because the executioner had died (some from drunkenness), and there was no one there to kill them.  And so to fill the gap, the authorities offered the condemned the chance to live if they lived so as executioners.  I haven’t read any accounts of anyone turning down the offer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were so.

The executioner in that society for the 1600-1750 period or thereabouts was not happily assimilated into society.  They found themselves–and their families–pariahs, living on the outskirts, or beyond the literal confines, of the city.  They were the last step in their judicial system, the great threat, the punishment with hellfire link to fearful retribution, that no one wanted to live next door to. 

In the decades preceding Leveille’s arrival, there was a succession of horrorshow stories of executioners of drunk and low orders, two  selected from the list of the condemned, including incompetent sons of incompetent and drunken hangman fathers, as well as periods ion which the office simply could not be filled.  One of the executioners in this long list of doomed men was a Halifax hangman named “Tomahawk”, whose own body, after death, was stolen, paraded, and then dumped into the latrine of the old blockhouse where he once worked.  According to Howard Engel, in his Lord High Executioner, an Unashamed Look at Hangman, Headsman, and their Kind (1996), Tomahawk’s “bones could be seen by curious townsfolk for the next seventy years”.  At least the latrine at that time had been abandoned.

Leveille was the beyond-pre-Dickensian solution to the judicial managerial problems in Quebec, the bright idea in a feathered cap of Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas (1701 – 1781), an ascendant French statesman recovering from disgrace.  On the heals of their latest bungle–a drunk imported from France to replace a drunken dead hangman and who maintained his drunkenness and sent back to France drunk–the judicial establishment listened to de Maurepas’ suggestion, and bought and then imported a black slave from Martinique to do the job.

And that’s when Leveille’s story–no matter how bad it was for him in Martinique–gets worse.  He arrived in Quebec in 1733, and was almost immediately sent to the Hotel-Dieu.  (As it turns out, this is the first hospital in North America north of Mexico). I don’t know if he was told what was in store for him, or what he knew of the job, or what he did in Martinique.  It is established though that Leveille was sick on and off for the next ten years, finally dying there in the hospital in 1743.  Engel correctly assumes (I assume) that Leveille probably performed his job adequately for the powers that be to have spent so much attention on him, trying to have him finally recover. They even purchased a bride for Leveille, but he died just as she arrived. 

I could imagine wanting, or needing, to spend as much ill- and off-time as possible, even in the grips of an ancient hospital.  The memory of sea spray  hitting Leveille’s face on the trip north from the Caribbean must’ve seemed like needles.

The slave bride to the dead hangman was renamed Angélique-Denise and sold on the heels of Leveille’s death in 1743.

Notes:

1.  There was evidently an earlier semi-recorded hanging of a 16 year old girl, convicted of petty theft and punished.

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

The unfilled office of hangman ... you'd think it might sink in that the system wasn't working. When nobody wants to execute fellow citizens, it could have occurred to someone to modify the criminal justice system. But that's silly to say--look at America and drugs. A sadder thing is that today, I think, there would be no problem filling the job of executioner.

[John F. Ptak]

Who knows if the thing, murdering murderers, has prevented murder or vast sins or not, though the promise of Hell seems to have not slowed the criminal progressions of millions. On the face of it it looks like a stupid idea, even if only for the getting-things-wrong part of it. I do suspect that the fatal verdict might have a calming effect on executives who ruin thousands of people in committing their unlawful nasties--perhaps if their life was in balance rather than 8 years in medium security you'd have fewer Enrons etc. Just a modest proposal.