A sketch of a breaking wheel, a device used to carry out brutal executions from the Middle Ages until the early 1800s.

Louis Congo, who was enslaved in the Louisiana colony in the early 1700s, was set free in November 1725. In exchange for his freedom, however, he was forced to become the public executioner for the colony – a different form of slavery.

According to Black Perspectives, execution was not a desirable career. “The executioner,” Menika Dirkson wrote for the website, “indiscriminately inflicted pain and death on alleged criminals, regularly witnessed the suffering of executed victims, and occasionally experienced public scrutiny and violent physical retaliation from those sentenced to punishment.” 

Congo used various methods to execute prisoners: flogging, hanging, breaking on the wheel, and burning alive at the stake. Based on descriptions, breaking on the wheel was the worst. 

“When Congo executed slaves in this manner,” Black Perspectives states, “he spread the person’s limbs out and tied them to a large wooden cartwheel and repeatedly bludgeoned their limbs with a large hammer or iron bar until their bones were broken and their limbs fell through the gaps of the wheel.” 

Bunk History states that Congo was an executioner for 12 years. During that time, he was beaten at least twice. “He was ensnared in a profession that made him a pawn of a violent carceral system,” Bunk History states, “and offered him a lifetime of ridicule, intimidation and death threats from the public he disciplined.”

Believed to have come to America via the slave ship, la Nereide, Congo arrived sometime in the late 1710s or early 1720s. His birth date is unknown.

With his freedom, Congo received French citizenship, 1.7 acres of land, and the ability to sign his own name on legal documents. 

According to Black Perspectives, “Beyond 1737, accounts of Congo’s life disappear, therefore it is unknown whether Congo retired or was killed for being the ‘black executioner’ of Louisiana.” In any case, as historian Shannon Lee Dawdy has said, French officials used him to “promote resentment within the slave community and antagonism among Afro-Louisianans, Native Americans and Euro-Louisianans.” 

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...