Spirit power in the wars of the Americas: the first-person and eyewitness record

SUMMARYSpirit power in the wars of the Americas: the first-person and eyewitness record (Nov 3, 2026). Extends P155 (Ayiti). Tito: "we need first person accounts."
FIRST PERSON, Frederick Douglass, Narrative (1845), ch. 10: Sandy Jenkins gave him a root; carrying it "always on my right side, would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me." Douglass doubted it, then, after Covey's strange calm that Sunday, was "half inclined to think the root to be something more than I at first had taken it to be." Then he fought Covey and was never whipped again.
FIRST PERSON, Nat Turner, The Confessions (Thomas Gray, 1831): his visions before the 1831 rising: "I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened"; he took the solar eclipse of February 1831 as the sign to begin. (Dictated to a hostile white lawyer: Rule 3.)
COURT RECORD, Gullah Jack (Charleston, sentence July 9, 1822): the court told him "You represented yourself as invulnerable," "that you could neither be taken nor destroyed," and "all who fought under your banners would be invincible"; "Your boasted Charms have not preserved yourself." An Angolan-born conjurer in Denmark Vesey's plan; hanged July 12, 1822.
EYEWITNESS (hostile), Tacky's War, Jamaica 1760: Edward Long, History of Jamaica (1774), vol. 2: obeah priests gave the fighters a powder to rub on their bodies to make them invulnerable, and said Tacky "caught all the bullets fired at him in his hand" and threw them back; an old obeah priest was captured in his ritual dress (feathers, teeth) and hanged "in this attire"; Jamaica then passed its first law against obeah (1760).
RECORD, Holy Ground (Econochaca), Alabama, Dec 23, 1813: Red Stick prophets under Josiah Francis set a spiritual barrier meant to destroy any white man who crossed it; William Weatherford's warriors and African American allies held the town nearly an hour (Encyclopedia of Alabama, K. Braund).
RECORD, more to card in full: Pontiac's speech of 1763 retelling the Delaware Prophet Neolin's vision of the Master of Life; Tenskwatawa, "the Prophet," and his promises at Tippecanoe (1811); the Malê rising in Salvador, Brazil (1835), fighters carrying amulets with Arabic verses; Black Elk's own account of the Ghost Dance shirt at Wounded Knee (1890), told to John Neihardt (Black Elk Speaks, 1932; paraphrase only, under copyright)

PATTERNfrom Jamaica (1760) to Ayiti (1791) to Charleston (1822) to the Red Sticks (1813) to Wounded Knee (1890), the people went to war with spiritual power first: roots, powders, barriers, shirts. Every account that survives was written down by the side that fought them

LENS (WW9)the magic was the people's own technology of courage, and the enemy wrote laws against it (Jamaica's 1760 obeah act, the Code Noir's ban on other faiths). OPEN, needs deep research: the Malê amulet texts (police inventories, João José Reis); the Pontiac manuscript wording; Tippecanoe eyewitnesses (Shabonee's account).