Sally Bassett

Who is Sally Bassett?

Sally Bassett was an elderly enslaved woman in Bermuda who was tried and executed in 1730 after being convicted of conspiring to poison her granddaughter's enslaver and another local enslaver using poisonous plants. She was burned at the stake, a punishment reserved for the era's harshest verdicts, and her death became one of the most notorious episodes in Bermuda's history of slavery. For more than two centuries her story survived mainly through oral memory and colonial court records, but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries she was reclaimed as a symbol of enslaved people's resistance and endurance rather than simply a convicted criminal. In 2009 the Bermuda government unveiled a bronze memorial statue titled "Spirit of Freedom," depicting a woman rising from flames, outside the Cabinet Building in Hamilton in her honor. Bassett is now widely commemorated in Bermudian public history, education, and civic ceremony as an emblem of the courage and suffering endured by the island's enslaved population.

Sources: Bermuda National Trust, historical records on the 1730 trial of Sally Bassett · Government of Bermuda, Cabinet Office records on the Sally Bassett memorial (unveiled 2009) · Cyril O. Packwood, Chained on the Rock: Slavery in Bermuda (1975)