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By Claire Gherini Between 1749 and 1754 in South Carolina, the South Carolina Colonial Assembly (the governmental body of the British colony) freed two enslaved healers, Caesar, and Sampson, in exchange for their willingness to publicize the ingredients in their antidotes for rattlesnake bites and poisons. This was not the first time that antidotes for snakebites and botanical poisons appeared in the colony. In 1743, a peripatetic Frenchman, Mr. Bonnetheau, set up in Charleston and boasted of his ability to cure “bites of the most venomous serpents, scorpions, and mad dogs,” with the use of “Rattle-snake-stones.” [1]   In 1749, the colony’s newspaper and journal of record, The South Carolina Gazette, reprinted an article from Britain on an herb known as the Sensible Weed, which the article claimed an “extraordinary specific antidote against the Indian or Negro poison” in South Carolina.[2] The prevalence of colonists' fears about African botanical knowledge in societies like South Carolina where enslaved Africans formed a black majority certainly added to the credibility given to the therapeutic claims proffered by enslaved healers. But snakebites, this post shows, also formed an unrecognized feature of enslaved people's work in plantation South Carolina, one that made antidotes for venomous bites part of enslaved people's therapeutic armamentarium. These two features of plantation agriculture in the colony, this post argues, augmented the value of antidotes that functioned as specifics in the cure of snakebites and poisons and goes far to explain why lawmakers panted after Sampson’s and Caesar’s cures specifically. Sampson and Caesar, in turn, manipulated the environmental and social circumstances of colonial South Carolina for their own ends to augment the value of their cures and acquire manumissions from slavery.[caption id="attachment_6472" align="alignleft" width="300"] Rattle-snake with section of rattle and tooth, from Mark Catsby, (1731) The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands.Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images[/caption]For enslaved people, encounters with venomous snakes formed a significant occupational hazard of tidal rice cultivation, one that often terminated in death. Far too often, the fangs of Cottonmouths (water moccasins), Copperheads, as well as Pigmy, Eastern Diamondback and Timber Rattlesnakes pierced the legs and arms of the slaves as they tramped out into maritime grasslands and tidal pine forests, pulled weeds and hunched down to plant rice at the behest of their owners. Whites probably suffered less from actual cases of poisoning than they imagined. But colonists’ fear of enslaved people’s motivations and loyalties made them wary of the botanical knowledge possessed by many slaves even as they acknowledged their skill in this area of medicine. “The negro slaves here seem to be but too well acquainted with the vegetable poisons… which they make use of to take away the lives of their masters who they think uses them ill, or indeed the life of any person for whom they conceive any hatred or by whom they imagine themselves injured,” the South Carolina naturalist Alexander Garden complained in a letter to the Edinburgh botanist Charles Alston. [3] The idea that enslaved people were exceptionally skilled with botanical poisons and their antidotes enhanced the epistemological weight of the medical claims made by enslaved healers like Caesar and Sampson.The members learned about Caesar and his cure before hearing of Sampson’s. In November of 1749, “another member,” of the Assembly “acquainted the house that there is a negro man named Caesar belonging to Mr. John Norman of Beach Hill, who had cured several of the inhabitants of this province who had been poisoned by snakes.”[4] Caesar leveraged the urgency for an antidote to snakebites in his dealings with the Assembly. Caesar “expected his freedom and a moderate competence for life, which he hoped the committee would be of opinion deserved one hundred pounds currency per annum,” in exchange for “the satisfactory discovery of his antidotes against poison.”[5] Yet as a slave, the value of Caesar’s knowledge was not legally his to claim, it belonged to his owner, John Norman. The Assembly resolved to manumit Caesar and to compensate Norman for the loss of “all the advantages the said Negro Slave Caesar (aged nearly sixty-seven years) might be to the owner of his knowledge and skill,” which they set at £500 Carolina Sterling.Caesar had been unknown to the colony’s lawmakers. Sampson, in contrast, cut a striking figure in Charleston as a snake-handler, one who “used frequently to go about with rattle-snakes in Calabashes, and who would handle them, put them into his pockets or bosom, and sometimes their heads into his mouth, without being bitten.”[6] In January of 1754, a motion passed in the Assembly to form a committee in order to find “the most effectual way to procure a discovery of the cure for the bites of rattle snakes from Sampson, a negro fellow belonging to Mr. Robert Hume.”[7] Sampson’s pension and valuation were considerably less than Caesar’s.  Sampson was paid less, I think, because he only offered an antidote for rattlesnake bites whereas Caesar's cure could alleviate both poisons and venomous bites. In exchange for his cure, the Assembly decreed that “the said Sampson be from thenceforth manumitted and delivered from the yoke of slavery,” and the members resolved to provide a lifetime annuity “for the said negro Sampson,” which amounted to £50 per year.[8] The Assembly paid to Mr. Robert Hume £300 Carolina Sterling to compensate Hume for the loss of Sampson's earnings.[9]Part I of this series on the “discovery” and publication of Caesar’s and Sampson’s poison antidotes examined why the South Carolina Colonial Assembly was so keen to get their hands on the two enslaved people’s medical secrets as well as lawmakers'  struggles to determine the monetary compensation the two enslaved men would receive in exchange for their cures. In their negotiations with the Colonial Assembly, Caesar and Sampson exerted a strong hand in determining the value of their antidotes: by deliberately leveraging their familiarity with the destruction that poisons wrought on the social fabric of white colonists as well as their intimate knowledge of the havoc that venomous snakebites visited on the fortunes of slaveholders (and, by implication, the economy of the colony), the two healers put manumissions from slavery and annual annuities on the bargaining table and won these compensations from the colonial government.[1] Mr. Bonnetheau’s adverstisement for Rattle-snake-stones in South Carolina Gazette, November 21, 1743 and September 10, 1744.[2] South Carolina Gazette, July 24, 1749.[3] Alexander Garden to Charles Alston, January 21, 1753, Laing MSS. III University of Edinburgh Special Collections Library.[4] Journal of the Commons House of the Assembly, (March 28, 1749-March 19, 1750), Vol. 9, Edited by J. Easterby, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 293.[5] Journal of the Commons House of the Assembly, (March 28, 1749-March 19, 1750), Vol. 9, Edited by J. Easterby, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 303-04.[6] South Carolina Gazette, April 8, 1756.[7]  Journal of the Commons House of Assembly (November 21, 1752-September 6, 1754), Vol. 15, Edited by Terry. W. Lipscomb (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 313.[8] Ibid, 333.[9] Ibid, 513.[1] Journal of the Commons House of the Assembly, (March 28, 1749-March 19, 1750), Vol. 9, Edited by J. Easterby, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 293.[2] Alexander Garden to Charles Alston, January 21, 1753, Laing MSS. III University of Edinburgh Special Collections Library.[3] Alexander Garden to Charles Alston, February 18, 1756, Laing MSS. III University of Edinburgh Special Collections Library.[4] Journal of the Commons House of the Assembly, (March 28, 1749-March 19, 1750), Vol. 9, Edited by J. Easterby, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 303-04.