Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807

Copyright 2013. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Introduction The great majority of slaves in the British Americas began their work days with the rising sun and ended them sometime after sundown. Work was the raison d’etre of the system of slavery. In the eighteenth century, an improvement movement swept through the British Americas, changing how planters conceptualized and managed their plantations. The working world of the plantation was transformed by new management theories, which were in turn shaped by broader Atlantic discourses about moral reform and scientific and agricultural improvement. The Enlightenment conviction that moral and economic progress were compatible led planters to believe that increasing productivity could accompany benevolent management. The new work routines and management systems had a considerable impact on the day-to- day lives of slaves. Work influenced the formation of slaves’ families, their community hierarchies and dynamics, and their morbidity, fertility, and mortality rates. Given the critical role that work played in shaping the lives slaves led, it is striking how often slavery scholars have overlooked the details of slave labor, focusing instead on other aspects of the institution and the lives of the people within it.1 The vast majority of a plantation slave’s waking hours were spent working, and new forms of labor discipline and supervision in the eighteenth century enabled planters to extract more working hours and greater physical efforts on a wider variety of tasks from their slaves. In the last half of the twentieth century, slavery scholars were at the forefront of a paradigm shift in historical studies that made agency and 1 Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, “Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas” in Berlin and Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993) 1–48. 1 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY AN: 545045 ; Roberts, Justin.; Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 17501807 Account: s8921610.main.ehost 2 Introduction resistance central themes in the study of subalterns.2 They began to focus on what slaves did on their own time rather than under the eyes of the master.3 The resistance paradigm helped to dismantle the racist conceptual apparatus that enabled slavery to be described as a benevolent institution.4 It also made it clear that slaves were never simply passive victims or complicit actors in their own tragedy. Nevertheless, a growing number of critics have pointed out that the emphasis on autonomous and successfully resistant slaves and slave cultures has gone too far. In the 1990s, Sidney Mintz was one of many scholars calling for a new approach to studying the lived experience of slavery because, as he explained, on sugar plantations, “only a tiny fraction of daily life consisted of open resistance. Instead most of life then, like most of life now, was spent living.”5 To appreciate the lived experience of enslaved peoples, we need to know more about what kind of work they did and when and how it changed. In the twenty-first century, the resistance paradigm continues to be entrenched in slave studies because it is so intricately interwoven with a particular set of beliefs that scholars have held about the nature of the institution.6 The tendency in the literature on slavery is to stress the chattel principle of slavery and to cast slavery as the polar opposite of freedom; 2 3 4 5 6 For a prominent example see Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); for historiographical overviews see Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989), 154–198, and Robert L. Paquette, “Social History Update: Slave Resistance and Social History, ”Journal of Social History 24.3 (Spring 1991), 681–685. Peter A. Coclanis, “The Captivity of a Generation.” William and Mary Quarterly 61.3 (July 2004), 544–555. For examples of how some of the older literature casts slavery as a benevolent institution, see Ulrich Bonnel Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1952 [1918]; H. J. Eckenrode, “Negroes in Richmond in 1864,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 46.3 (July 1938), 193–200. Sidney Mintz, “Slave Life on Caribbean Sugar Plantations: Some Unanswered Questions,” in Stephen Palmie, ed., Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995),13; Palmie, “Introduction,” in Palmie, ed. Slave Cultures, xviii; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, “Changing Views of Slavery in the United States South: The Role of Eugene D. Genovese,” in Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Ferleger, eds., Slavery, Secession and Southern History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 6; Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 154–198. For recent examples of the continuing emphasis on resistance and cultural survivals as resistance see Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 3 scholars depict the institution as being uniquely different from other forms of coerced labor.7 Slavery has been fetishized as a subject; the institution has been cast as aberrant. By representing slavery as the absolute denial of freedom and as distinctly different from other forms of early modern labor, scholars are led to search for the ways in which slaves resisted total domination and struggled to obtain freedom from their bondage. Within this investigative framework, slaves become political actors more than laboring people, which constrains the kinds of inquiries historians are able to make about the day-to-day experiences of enslaved workers. In slave studies, the scholarly emphasis on resistance and on the quest for freedom makes it a highly politicized subject, given modern concerns with individual freedom, but it also makes the investigation transhistorical, because it fails to contextualize the ways in which either resistance or freedom were both defined and experienced at particular places and points in time. Freedom is an abstract and historically contingent concept. There are a wide range of social conditions and cultural boundaries at any given time that place restrictions on individual freedom, and the ways in which individuals and societies understand, value, and pursue freedom has changed over time.8 Slavery was a brutal and violent institution, and the chattel principle, in some ways, made it distinct from other forms of coerced labor (such as naval impressment or indentured servitude), but it was also one of many forms of dependency in the hierarchical world of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Thus, the violence within slavery must be understood as part of a spectrum of violence in the early modern world.9 In terms of the daily 7 8 9 James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), xiv-xv; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29–35. Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001); Matthew C. Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude in the British Atlantic, 1640–1780,” Ph.D. Dissertation. (Brown University, May 2005); Robert J. Steinfeld, “Changing Legal Conceptions of Free Labor,” in Stanley Engerman, ed., Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 137–167; Stanley L. Engerman, “Slavery at Different Times and Places,” American Historical Review 105.2 (2000), 480–484; Marcel van der Linden, “The Origins, Spread and Normalization of Free Wage Labour,” in Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds. Free and Unfree Labor: The Debate Continues (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 501–524; Robert. J. Steinfeld and Stanley Engerman, “Labor- Free or Coerced? A Historical Reassessment of Differences and Similarities,” in Brass and van der Linden, eds., Free and Unfree Labor, 107–126. Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History (New York, New York University Press, 2001); Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: the Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 4 Introduction experience of the workers, slavery was not altogether different from other systems of forced labor. Freedom was attainable only by degrees for the vast majority of workers in the Atlantic. From apprentices to convict slaves, the early modern Atlantic was an unfree world. Most workers were dependent, bound, or coerced in some way, denied specific bundles of rights and freedoms. The difference between slavery and other forced labor systems is more a matter of degree than kind. The scholarly emphasis on slavery as the complete denial of freedom and as a unique institution has distorted the kinds of questions we have asked about the lived experience of enslavement. By transforming slaves into resistant subalterns battling for freedom, we have made a caricature of them, undermining our ability to understand them as human actors living within a coerced labor system that placed severe constraints on their ability to exercise any kind of opposition to slavery or attain any significant autonomy. Agency is an inadequate concept in the study of plantation slavery. It is unsuitable for discussing forced labor scenarios in which there is a significant asymmetrical power imbalance between masters and slaves.10 What is needed in slave studies is a paradigm shift, a new set of questions altogether. We need to reimagine slaves as much more complex than just politicized actors engaged with their master in an endless contest for freedom. Historians have now long debated the degrees by which each party in this contest proved to be the victor or the vanquished. The history of slavery is more than a history of winners and losers. Thinking about slaves foremost as coerced laborers and about slavery as a kind of labor history allows us to ask questions about these peoples’ experience of particular working worlds.11 To reconceptualize slaves in this way, scholars must avoid fetishizing the violence within slavery or casting the system as unique. They need to recognize it as part of an early modern world in which most laborers (and whole groups of people, such as women or children) experienced some degree of coercion. 10 11 Labor; Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude”; Steinfeld, “Changing Legal Conceptions of Free Labor”; John Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage:’ The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” The American Historical Review 115.4 (2010), 943–974. Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37.1 (Fall 2003), 113–124. For examples of the work now being done on slavery as a kind of labor history, see Frederick C. Knight, Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the AngloAmerican World, 1650–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Stuart Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Berlin and Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 5 In this sense, eighteenth-century slavery was neither aberrant nor peculiar. It was not distinct but rather part of a spectrum of laboring experiences. The story of eighteenth-century slavery in the British Atlantic is more complex than a simple contest between heroically resisting bondsmen and their evil oppressors. Instead, it is a far richer story of a particular group of early modern laborers and their complex and changing worlds. By privileging freedom as an essential element in the transition to a modern and industrialized world, eighteenth-century antislavery activists and generations of subsequent scholars have mischaracterized slavery and underestimated the adaptability of forced labor systems. Since the eighteenth century, stage-based and whiggish theories of human development have represented slavery as a stage of development that was incompatible with progress, capitalism, technological innovation, industrialization, and with the rise of civilized and enlightened nations – indeed, with the rise of modernity.12 Yet slavery is, in some ways, more suitable than most systems of labor for capitalist innovation. The extreme degree of coercion and control in slavery is part of what makes it suitable. Because slavery guarantees a captive labor force, which slaveholders can easily allocate to a variety of labors, the institution reduces the risks inherent in acquiring and maintaining labor. By reducing the risks in labor management, slavery offset the potential risks that came with technological innovation and change. Slavery is an immoral and dehumanizing labor system, but it is also highly adaptable, viable, and flexible, and it is fully consistent with economic progress. It is critical not to conflate arguments about the immorality of slavery with arguments about its efficiency or viability.13 In the eighteenth century, most of the managerial staff and the owners of large slave plantations were convinced that there was nothing backward about plantation slavery. In response to the growing critique of slavery and the slave trade, these planters offered an alternative vision of the relationship between slavery and human progress. They stressed the need to discipline the unenlightened, and they conceptualized work, forced or free, as an innate good because it contributed directly to economic progress and inculcated habits of industry that would be morally redemptive. They measured progress and improvement by the size of their crops and by how much labor 12 13 Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labour Versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, 53. Robert William Fogel, The Slavery Debates: A Retrospective, 1952–1990 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 24–48. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 6 Introduction they could extract from their human capital. Many scholars have stressed how Enlightenment principles of liberty and natural rights created revolutionary fervor throughout the Atlantic and pathways to freedom for slaves. Yet, certain sets of Enlightenment principles also helped to cultivate a series of darker outcomes for slaves, and scholars have underplayed those connections. Planters, driven by the Enlightenment commitment to progress and inspired by Newtonian universalism and Baconian empiricism, developed new management systems geared toward extracting more work from enslaved workers. The Enlightenment gave rise to a new set of moral sensibilities that reduced some of the physical barbarity within slavery and ended the slave trade, and it also advanced ideas about freedom and free labor that helped to dismantle the institution of slavery altogether. Yet, at the same time, there was also a ruthless rationalism to the Enlightenment and a pragmatism and expediency that helped foster industrialization, factory discipline, and, in the plantation Americas, more exhausting plantation work regimes in which planters strove to reduce the workers into depersonalized and interchangeable units of production.14 This was the dark side of the Enlightenment. On large plantations, there was a multilayered hierarchy of white managers. The highest authorities were the people who made long-term decisions about planting, such as the resident plantation owners and the plantation attorneys, who were legally empowered to make decisions for absentee owners. These attorneys were often resident plantation owners who also supervised one or more estates for absentee owners. Sometimes absentee owners were involved regularly in the operations of the plantation, and sometimes they left the management almost entirely to the managerial staff of the plantation. Beneath this executive class of plantation owners and attorneys was the chief overseer, who was sometimes called a manager, 14 Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000); Joel. Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Joel Mokyr, “The European Enlightenment and the Origins of Economic Growth,” in Jeff Horn et al., eds., Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 65–86; Susan Manning and Frances D. Cogliano in “The Enlightenment and the Atlantic,” Manning and Cogliano, eds., Atlantic Enlightenments (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 1–18; Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 61–77; Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 101–174; Lynn Avery Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 70–112, 146–175. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 7 and below him was one or more overseers. These were the men who made day-to-day decisions about planting. In theory, they carried out the orders of their superiors, but this was not always the case and tensions between higher and lower levels of management were common. At the bottom rung among the white planting staff in the Caribbean were the bookkeepers, who served as assistants to the overseer. There were also white staff who were employed either permanently or intermittently on the plantation as doctors or tradesmen. This book uses “planters” as a collective term for the plantation owners and their white managerial staff, but it will draw distinctions between these planters whenever their perspectives or interests differed significantly. For the most part, the discussion of planters’ approaches to plantation management will focus on those people who were involved in developing agricultural strategies or in supervising enslaved labor.15 Slavery and Enlightenment in the British Atlantic operates on three levels. It is a labor history of slaves on large eighteenth-century plantations, a business history of plantation management, and a cultural and intellectual history of the ways in which planters conceptualized the management of a plantation and its laborers. This book examines slaves’ lived experience in detail, focusing on the activity that consumed most of their days: work. It identifies the precise kinds of chores slaves did day to day, the ways in which plantation work routines changed with the season of production, and the relationship between the working world and the slaves’ health, their families, and the communities they formed. It also explores planters’ ideas about work routines and about slaves’ capacities for work, and the operation of those ideas in daily practice. It will argue that work was the key factor in shaping slaves’ lives and their communities, and that work routines on the mainland and in the Caribbean were shaped by dynamic and evolving plantation management schemes that were heavily influenced by the same pan-Atlantic Enlightenment discourses. The dictates of nationalist historiographies, the ways in which modern political divisions shape the boundaries that historians draw around their subjects, and lingering myths about American exceptionalism have encouraged scholars to think of Barbados and Jamaica as part of a Caribbean world that was distinctly different – especially after 1783 – from the thirteen colonies that formed the United States. The movement toward Atlantic history among early Americanists has led to a reconsideration of the discipline’s traditional 15 The best work on the managerial staff of large plantations is B. W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica; Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy, 1750–1850 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005). EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 8 Introduction regional divisions; it has also drawn more scholarly attention to the ways in which areas throughout the Anglo-American world continued to share certain historical trajectories after the American Revolution. The three specific regions under investigation in this study – Virginia, Jamaica, and Barbados – varied significantly in their physical size, climate, and landscapes; their black-to-white and African-to-creole ratios, the demands and intensity of their labor regimes, the degree to which their slave populations were self-reproducing, the number of resident planters, the extent to which their production was diversified, and the proportion of land under cultivation. This study explores these contrasts and the similarities among all three regions, attempting – whenever the evidence allows – to avoid grouping the Caribbean into one region and characterizing it as the polar opposite of the Chesapeake. The one area of mainland North America that most resembled the Caribbean sugar islands was the Lowcountry. Its massive rice and indigo plantations, its climate, its slave majority, and its poor rates of natural reproduction among the slaves make the Lowcountry a more obvious point of comparison with the Caribbean than does the Chesapeake. Yet a comparison of South Carolina, for example, and Jamaica would not reveal findings that would surprise scholars or advance the literature in as meaningful a way. In contrast, the Chesapeake was not a fully integrated part of a greater Caribbean world and, given the significant demographic differences and reproductive rates between enslaved populations in Virginia and most areas of the Caribbean, one would expect there to be sharp contrasts in plantation management and in the work routines of slaves. By using Virginia instead of South Carolina as a point of comparison with Barbados and Jamaica, Slavery and Enlightenment in the British Atlantic seeks to uncover significant and unexplored similarities in the ideas that drove plantation management on large plantations in places that, on a superficial level, appear so strikingly different. Barbados, in the eastern Caribbean, is the oldest of the sugar islands in the British Caribbean. It is unique in the history of the British Caribbean. It is almost 100 miles east of the rest of the Windward Island chain. That distance helped ensure that the island was never invaded or seriously threatened by a foreign power. Without the constant threat of invasion, living and planting in Barbados was always less risky than in other sugar islands. The trade winds also kept the island slightly cooler than most of the Caribbean. By the late eighteenth century, Barbados had the largest proportion of resident planters and the highest proportion of white settlers among the major sugar islands. Many of the resident planters came from EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 9 families that had been on the island since the sugar revolution of the seventeenth century. Despite the constant decline of the enslaved population until the end of the eighteenth century, there were a growing number of enslaved workers whose parents and grandparents were Barbadianborn. Enslaved family lineages began to develop on Barbadian plantations. Sugar planting became part of a family tradition for both whites and their black bondsmen. Resident planters understood well how to cultivate the crop, and Barbadians were the vanguard of the movement to improve sugar planting. Other planters in the sugar islands commonly pointed to the Barbadians as the most skilled and efficient of all planters.16 The second plantation manual in the British Caribbean, published in 1755, was written by a Barbadian, and the first agricultural society devoted to sugar planting appeared in Barbados in 1804.17 There was far more uniformity in the geographical conditions on Barbados than in Jamaica. Barbados is a tiny island (166 square miles) and, compared to most of the other major sugar islands in the British Caribbean, the terrain is generally flat.18 Throughout most of Barbados, the climate, terrain, and soils were ideal for growing sugar. The interior Scotland District is the most rugged and hilly region of Barbados. It comprised about 20 percent of the island but there is no significant elevation in the interior. Sugar cane is a tropical or subtropical grass, which grows best where it receives 1,500–1800 mm of rain a year, but it can tolerate more rain or slightly less.19 Average annual rainfall in Barbados ranges from 1,000 mm on the southeast coast to 2,280 mm in the interior, making most of the island ideal for sugar cultivation. By the end of the seventeenth century, the forest cover had been almost entirely cleared, and sugar was being grown on every tillable square foot of the island.20 The uniformity in climate and geographical conditions made Barbadian plantations excellent sites for experimentation, and it made it easier for planters to share ideas 16 17 18 19 20 Patrick Kein, An Essay upon Pen-Keeping and Plantership (Kingston, Jamaica: His Majesty’s Printing Office, 1796), 26; Samuel Martin, Essay upon Plantership, 4th ed. (London: Samuel Chapman, 1765), 7. William Belgrove, A Treatise upon Husbandry or Planting (Boston: D. Fowle, 1755). Minutes of the Society for the Improvement of Plantership in the Island of Barbados (Liverpool: Thomas Kaye, 1811). Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: The Economic History of the British West Indies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1974), 127. Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 9. Russell Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 10 Introduction about agricultural improvement and compare their results – their plantations became laboratories. Without rugged terrain, the slave’s field work on Barbadian estates was also less arduous than it was on the steeper and mountainous grounds found in many of Jamaica’s parishes. The seventeenth century was the golden age of Barbadian sugar production, but, by the eighteenth century, Barbadians had to grapple with significant cultivation issues and rising competition from other sugar frontiers. A sugar revolution in the late 1640s transformed Barbados, and it became by far the richest of the English colonies in the Americas – a position it held until the early eighteenth century.21 Deforestation and intensive cane agriculture caused the soil quality to decline and created land and fuel shortages. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the Leeward Islands, led by Antigua, took over from Barbados as the primary sugar-producing region in the British Caribbean.22 To maximize their dwindling resources and remain competitive, eighteenth-century Barbadians were forced to hone their skills and innovate. They adopted new methods of cane holing to prevent erosion; they addressed the fuel shortage by using cane trash instead of wood to stoke the fires in the boiling house; they revitalized the soils with extensive manuring.23 Jamaica in the Western Caribbean and Barbados in the Eastern Caribbean were not only more than 1,300 miles from each other, they were at opposite ends of a spectrum of sugar production in the British Caribbean. They had distinctly different histories and landscapes. In contrast to tiny Barbados, Jamaica, in the western Caribbean, was by far the largest of the British Caribbean sugar islands. At more than 4,400 square miles, it is about twenty-five times the size of Barbados.24 Unlike Barbados, the terrain, forest cover, and climate vary greatly across Jamaica, and planters have distinctly different geographical concerns throughout the island. Whereas all of Barbados could be cultivated for sugar, some areas of Jamaica, such as the Blue Mountains, were too steep and rugged to be viable lands for sugar plantations. Remote and often impenetrable mountain terrain fostered the 21 22 23 24 David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 202; B.W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History Review 53.2 (2000): 213–236. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 193–22. David Watts, “Origins of Barbadian Cane Hole Agriculture,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 32.3 (May 1968), 143–151; David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture, and Environmental Change Since 1492 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 382–447. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 208. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 11 development of maroon communities or made it easier for slaves to abscond from work for a period of time. The rough terrain also made the cultivation of sugar on some of the more accessible mountain grounds particularly demanding for the slaves and livestock. Rainfall ranges throughout Jamaica from an annual average of between 900 mm per year around Kingston (too dry to cultivate quality canes) to an average of more than 5,000 mm a year in the mountains of the northeast (so wet that it was difficult to cut and grind canes during the harvest). Eighteenth-century Jamaica may have been wetter than it is today.25 Jamaican geographies and weather patterns created difficulties for planters in that island which Barbadians never faced. If Barbados was king of sugar production in the British Caribbean in the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century belonged to Jamaica. Jamaica was wrested from the Spanish under Oliver Cromwell’s “western design” plans in 1655, in the midst of a sugar revolution sweeping through the Eastern Caribbean, but it was slow to develop as a sugar island.26 Jamaica came to dominate British sugar production at some point before the middle of the eighteenth century.27 Transportation costs for shipping sugar from the island and slaves to it kept Jamaica beyond the frontier of profitable English sugar production until the 1720s, and piracy and buccaneering offered an alternative source of profits, with lower initial investment costs than sugar planting for most seventeenth-century Jamaicans.28 In terms of total output, slaves resident in the colony, and forced immigration of slaves, the Jamaican economy was most fully developed from the 1780s until the end of the slave trade in 1807, but the most consistently high profits probably came in the last two decades before the American Revolution.29 Despite Jamaica’s position as the leading sugar producer in the British Caribbean, the land was never as fully cultivated as the land in Barbados. 25 26 27 28 29 Amanda Thornton, “Coerced Care: Thomas Thistlewood’s Account of Medical Care on Enslaved Populations in Colonial Jamaica, 1751–1786,” Slavery & Abolition 32.4 (Fall 2011), 539. Richard B. Sheridan, “The Formation of Caribbean Plantation Society, 1689–1748,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, vol. II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 395. Verene Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009), 15–16. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 205–206. Roderick McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattel on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 2; Trevor Burnard, “Et in Arcadia Ergo: West Indian Planters in Glory, 1674–1784,” Atlantic Studies 9.1 (March 2012), 19–40. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 12 Introduction Whereas almost every acre in Barbados was under intensive cultivation when that island reached its peak in sugar production, less than a third of Jamaica was under cultivation by the turn of the nineteenth century.30 Sugar reigned in Jamaica but it was far from the only crop. Even at the apex of its sugar production, Jamaica was more economically diverse than Barbados. Livestock farms (or “pens”), often acting as satellite operations for the larger sugar plantations, were spread throughout the island, making Jamaica a land of both ranchers and sugar planters. Planters would send new slaves to the pens as part of the process of “seasoning,” slowly acclimatizing them to the new environment in order to keep death rates at a minimum. Coffee took hold in the mountains of Jamaica at the end of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, planters began to embrace coffee more fully in response to a depression in the sugar market and to the rising cost of slaves.31 Coffee was less labor intensive, and Jamaican planters were chronically land-rich and labor-poor. The acquisition of the Ceded Islands in 1763 brought a rapid expansion of the sugar frontier in the British Caribbean, but both Jamaica and Barbados continued to prosper. Jamaica continued to be the major sugar producer in the British Caribbean, and its own sugar frontiers in areas such as Westmoreland continued to expand in the eighteenth century. But the Barbadian economy had also experienced a renaissance by the end of the century.32 In terms of total sugar production in the Caribbean, the French 30 31 32 Gilbert Farquhar Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica in 1808–1809–1810 (London: J. Stockdale, 1811), 55. Philip D. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth Century Jamaica: Vineyard Pen, 1750–1751,” William and Mary Quarterly 52.1 (1995), 47–76; Verene A. Shepherd, “Livestock and Sugar: Aspects of Jamaica’s Agricultural Development from the Late Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century” Historical Journal, 34. 3 (September 1991), 627–643; S. D. Smith, “Sugar’s Poor Relation: Coffee Planting in the British West Indies, 1720–1833,” Slavery & Abolition 19.3 (December 1998), 68–89; Verene Shepherd, “Diversity in Caribbean Economy and Society from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” Plantation Society in the Americas 5.2–3 (1998), 175–187; Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery. Otis Paul Starkey, The Economic Geography of Barbados: A Study of the Relationships between Environmental Variations and Economic Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 99–112; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 89–90; B. W. Higman, “Economic and Social Development of the British West Indies from Settlement to ca. 1850,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1, The Colonial Era, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 317; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 197–204; J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 61–118; Karl Watson, The Civilised Island, Barbados: A Social History, 1750–1816 (Ellerton, Barbados: Caribbean Graphic Production, 1979), 47. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 13 colony of St. Domingue outstripped Jamaica by far in the 1780s, but the only successful slave revolt in the Americas ended sugar production in St. Domingue in 1791, significantly bolstering the profits of Jamaican and Barbadian sugar planters as they filled the vacuum.33 The 1790s were boom years throughout the British sugar plantations.34 Despite this significant increase in profitability, both Barbadian and Jamaican planters faced considerable challenges to those profits in the last half of the eighteenth century, including competition from other islands for resources, the disruption of the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, a series of severe hurricanes in the 1780s, declining sugar prices, currency inflation, rats, and plagues of other pests. With less woodland, less fertile soil, smaller plantations, smaller revenues, and less available land than Jamaicans, Barbadian planters had more difficulty contending with these challenges to production and profits. This difficulty forced them to become particularly innovative.35 Sugar planters experimented in the late eighteenth century with the cultivation of other cash crops, particularly cotton in Barbados and coffee in Jamaica. Many planters adapted to economic challenges by producing more clayed sugar and rum, keeping more livestock for fertilizer, and becoming more self-sufficient (including growing more of their own provisions) to cut costs.36 To a greater extent than their Jamaican counterparts, Barbadians focused on not only lowering the cost of maintaining their labor force (through amelioration and the growth of onsite provisions) but also on the production of refined sugars and byproducts.37 With a shortage of land, the largest Barbadian estates were never as large as Jamaican estates, and, as a result, the slave population in Barbados was much smaller. Approximately 70 percent of all Barbadian bondsmen 33 34 35 36 37 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); see also Stanley L. Engerman, “France, Britain and the Economic Growth of Colonial North America,” in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, eds., The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 227–249. Burnard, “Et in Arcardia Ego,” 33. John McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 166; Justin Roberts, “Uncertain Business: A Case Study of Barbadian Plantation Management, 1770–1793,” Slavery & Abolition 32.2 (June 2011), 247–268. Starkey, Economic Geography of Barbados, 99–112; Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 61–64; and Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 197–204. McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 165. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 14 Introduction lived on sugar plantations.38 In the late eighteenth century, an estate of 350 acres with 200 slaves was large by Barbadian standards. Only a handful of estates had more than 400 slaves.39 Barbados always had a lower black-towhite ratio than the other major sugar islands and a larger share of resident planters. Even in the late eighteenth century, as many as two-thirds of planters were resident in Barbados. Between 1760 and 1790, in the midst of a Barbadian renaissance, the Barbadian slave population actually decreased from 87,000 slaves to 75,000 slaves.40 Many of the largest and most successful plantations continued to grow in this era, but smaller and less successful plantations contracted or folded. The declining population was caused in part by a loss of life in the 1780 hurricane and by famine on some estates during the American Revolution (although the extent of this famine has been exaggerated by historians). In addition, many slaves were moved to new and more profitable plantation frontiers in the Ceded Islands.41 By switching from cane to a less labor intensive crop, cotton, in the 1780s, some of the estates in Barbados were able to operate with slightly fewer slaves.42 The Barbadian slave population became unique among the sugar islands around the turn of the nineteenth century. Whereas a natural and steady decline in the slave population was the norm on most Caribbean sugar islands, the Barbadian slave population, even though it was growing smaller in the late eighteenth century with outward migration, became selfreproducing in the last quarter to half century before emancipation. This one fact alone makes Barbados exceptional among the sugar islands. There were far more slaves and more massive sugar plantations in Jamaica than there were in Barbados. Approximately 60 percent of late eighteenth-century Jamaican slaves lived on sugar plantations.43 Large 38 39 40 41 42 43 J. R. Ward, “The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies, 1650–1834,” Economic History Review 31.2 (May 1978), 207. Higman, “Economic and Social Development of the British West Indies,” 297–336; Jerome Handler and Frederick W. Lange, Plantation Slavery in Barbados: An Historical and Archaeological Investigation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 38–40. John McCusker, “Economy of the British West Indies, 1763–1790: Growth, Stagnation or Decline,” in J. McCusker, ed. Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (London: Routledge, 1997), 312. Richard Sheridan, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies During and After the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 33.4 (1976), 615–641; British Sessional Papers, Commons, Accounts and Papers, 1789, Part III, as quoted in Michael Craton, James Walvin, and David Wright, eds. Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (London: Longman, 1976), 94. Starkey, Economic Geography of Barbados, 106; British Sessional Papers, Commons, Accounts and Papers, 1789, Part III, 90. Ward, “Profitability of Sugar Planting,” 206. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 15 estates in Jamaica tended to have between 400 and 500 slaves, but the largest had more than 1,000 slaves.44 Unlike Barbados, which had a shrinking slave population, the Jamaican slave population was expanding in the late eighteenth century. New frontiers of the island were opening up, and the island became the leading point of disembarkation in the British Caribbean for slavers selling their cargoes. Between 1760 and 1790, the slave population grew from 173,000 to 276,000 slaves.45 By 1808, immediately after the slave trade ended, the slave population peaked at 354,000, by far the largest slave population of any island in the British Caribbean.46 The growth was due not to natural increase but to massive imports. Between 1750 and 1808, more than 605,000 slaves disembarked in Jamaica, but the population in the same period grew by only 151,000 slaves. Although many of the imported slaves were re-exported from Jamaica, the severity of the labor regime bore the brunt of the responsibility for the difficulties planters faced in maintaining the slave population.47 The number of slaves disembarking in Jamaica was more than four times the number of slaves disembarking in Barbados. No other island in the Caribbean, British or otherwise, had more imports than Jamaica over the same period.48 Whereas Barbados had the lowest black-to-white ratio among the sugar islands, the black-to-white ratio was always a concern in Jamaica, leading the island legislature to create deficiency laws to try to maintain enough whites on each plantation. Only about a third of Jamaican planters were resident. Jamaica’s economy became more diverse in the early nineteenth century and, although the number of slaves on the island was still rapidly expanding, the proportion of Jamaican bondsmen living and working on sugar plantations fell from 60 to 50 percent.49 After the abolition of the slave trade, Jamaican sugar planters, always land-rich and labor-poor, suffered from increasingly severe labor shortages as the slave population continued 44 45 46 47 48 49 Michael Craton, “Jamaican Slavery,” in Stanley Engerman and Eugene Genovese, eds. Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975), 249–284; Higman, “Economic and Social Development of the British West Indies.’” McCusker, “Economy of the British West Indies, 1763–1790,” 312. B. W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 61. Greg O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade, 1619–1807 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2006). David Eltis et al., Voyages: Transatlantic Slave Trade Database http://wilson.library. emory.edu:9090/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom=1501&yearTo=1866 Ward, “Profitability of Sugar Planting,” 206n. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 16 Introduction to decline. Whereas Jamaican planters had more difficulty than Barbadian planters maintaining an adequate labor-to-land ratio, they did not struggle with fuel and land shortages or soil fertility to the same extent.50 Compared to Barbadian sugar plantations, Jamaican estates had a much greater share of their land devoted to pasturage, provision grounds, and woodlands. Virginia, as a staple crop producer, was, with Barbados, the oldest of the major plantation colonies in British America. As a mainland colony, Virginia had ample land resources. In the late eighteenth century, Virginia was more than fifteen times the size of Jamaica and more than 400 times the size of Barbados. It was not nearly as densely cultivated as either of these sugar islands, nor was it as densely settled with slaves. The terrain is generally flat in the Virginian tidewater, with gently sloping hills rising up into the Piedmont. Unlike the Caribbean, which has a rainy season and a dry season each year, there are four distinct seasons in Virginia, and monthly precipitation is more consistent in Virginia, with the greatest amount of rain coming in July and August. Average monthly temperatures vary in the Chesapeake much more than they do in the islands, and the seasons more powerfully shaped the working environment in Virginia than they did in the sugar islands. Much like Jamaica, however, the climate varies significantly throughout Virginia. Tobacco was king in Virginia in the seventeenth century and through much of the eighteenth century. Tobacco depleted the soil in six or seven years, and the land required a twenty-year fallow period to regenerate, which meant that planters “used up” the land rapidly.51 Small tobacco plantations dotted the landscape. These were not capital-intensive properties, and they were transitory, which meant that planters moved their labor forces and their plantations to new lands often, clearing and cultivating an ever growing share of the backcountry. Tobacco was Virginia’s main export crop throughout the colonial era but, by the 1730s, most planters had turned to more diversified production – producing more corn and wheat and investing more in animal husbandry. Some planters began this process as early as the 1680s, adopting the techniques of English farmers.52 50 51 52 Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man, 1–50. Lorena S. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620–1820,” in Morgan and Berlin, eds., Cultivation and Culture, 173. Lorena S. Walsh, “Plantation Management in the Chesapeake, 1620–1820,” The Journal of Economic History 49.2 (June 1989), 397; Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 224. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 17 After the mid-eighteenth century, more than half of the revenues on big Virginian plantations came from grains.53 With the switch to grain, large planters had less need to move around. The cultivation of grains required new capital expenditures (livestock, plows, and grain mills), but it was less labor intensive (meaning smaller investments in labor). The new capital purchases were not easily moveable. The tobacco market was slumping and, like their Barbadian counterparts, Virginians were contending with declining soil quality. Diversifying production allowed large Virginian planters to address these problems. There was significant complementarity in the timing of wheat, corn, tobacco, and meat production, and diversification helped improve the total profits per laborer by avoiding downtime in the annual crop cycle.54 After the mid-eighteenth century, the production of wheat and other grains expanded rapidly throughout the Chesapeake. Crop diversification and the expansion of animal husbandry that accompanied grain production made the landscape seem like a collection of farms rather than plantations.55 The American Revolution had a deleterious impact on the Chesapeake economy.56 With good tobacco prices, however, planters recovered quickly in the decade after the war, but, in the 1790s, another downturn in the price of tobacco caused Chesapeake planters to turn again more fully to the production of wheat and other grains.57 The slave population in Virginia, self-reproducing by the early eighteenth century, was the healthiest in the Americas. Slaves were reproducing rapidly and naturally. Between 1755 and 1782, the number of slaves in Virginia doubled, growing faster than the Jamaican population despite the fact that Jamaican planters were relying on fresh African imports and Chesapeake planters, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, had stopped importing Africans.58 In 1790, there were 293,000 slaves in 53 54 55 56 57 58 Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production,” 180; Walsh, Motives of Honor, 601. James R. Irwin, “Slave Agriculture and Staple Crops in the Virginia Piedmont” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, 1986), v. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 28. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production,” 187; John McCusker, “Economy of the British West Indies,” 329. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production,” 187–191. Richard Dunn, “After Tobacco: The Slave Labour Pattern on a Large Chesapeake Grainand-Livestock Plantation in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Kenneth Morgan and John J. McCusker, eds., The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 344–363, 345; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 61, 85. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 18 Introduction Virginia alone – slightly fewer than there were in Jamaica at the same point and almost four times as many as there were in Barbados. Whereas there was a clear slave majority in Barbados and Jamaica, slaves in the Chesapeake comprised less than half the total population. By 1808, with continued population growth, the Virginian slave population had outgrown the Jamaican population, and Virginian planters began selling surplus slaves to the emerging cotton frontiers of the Deep South.59 In terms of the size of an individual estate’s slave population, the vast majority of Virginian plantations were much smaller than Barbadian or Jamaican estates. Most grain and tobacco planters occupied small estates and worked the land with only a handful of slaves. The majority of Chesapeake plantations at the start of the American Revolution had fewer than twenty slaves and less than 300 acres.60 Whereas Jamaica was an absentee society, virtually all Virginia planters were resident planters. Barbados fell somewhere between these extremes. The largest plantations in Virginia were divided into multiple quarters (smaller units of cultivation). With the switch to grain, more land was cleared and plowed for cultivation and for pasturage for the draft animals needed in grain cultivation. In terms of the size of the slave population, Virginian estates were smaller than sugar plantations, but, in terms of the landholdings, a few of the Virginian estates were much larger than even the largest Jamaican plantations. This book attempts to triangulate Jamaica, Barbados, and Virginia by showing that, in some respects, Barbados shared as much with Virginia as it did with Jamaica. Scholars looking no further than the dominant export crop and the regional category of Caribbean often group Barbados and Jamaica in their analysis. Certainly, there are valid reasons for making generalizations about the two as Caribbean sugar islands. Sugar as a crop had a significant and determinative influence on the formation of a slave society – including everything from the size of plantations and their slave populations to the visual appearance of the landscape and the seasonal rhythms of life. The climate in Barbados is much more like Jamaica than it is like Virginia, and the sugar planters on both islands were equally subject to hurricanes and pests, to the same highs and lows in sugar prices, and to the same pressures from metropolitan abolitionists. Yet, the grouping of Barbados and Jamaica, by privileging the dominant crop as the defining characteristic of a plantation society, overlooks the often significant ways 59 60 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 61, 95, 100–101. Ibid., 41, 44. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 19 in which sugar islands differed. Kingston, Jamaica, is 1,350 miles from Richmond, Virginia. It is also 1,050 miles from Bridgetown, Barbados. Grouping them together as part of one region is artificial and arbitrary – a sign of the less developed scholarship addressing the Caribbean than the mainland. In many ways, Barbados can be positioned along a spectrum between Jamaica and Virginia, including the degree of diversification in daily production, demographics of the slave population, proportion of African-born slaves, ratio of whites to blacks, size of the average plantation, proportion of resident planters, severity of the work regime, and, of course, the reproductive performance of the slave population. Barbados was the only sugar island in which the slaves were reproducing by the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century. After abolition, the Barbadian population grew slightly. Why were Barbadian and Virginian slaves naturally reproducing while the Jamaican slave population declined so rapidly? Jamaica and Virginia were also similar to each other in some ways but less so than Barbados and Virginia. The slave population continued to expand in Jamaica and Virginia in the late eighteenth century, while the Barbadian population shrank. In terms of the available land, the size of the slave population, and the size of some of the largest estates, Jamaica was more like Virginia than Barbados. Given how much of the scholarly literature has tended to generalize about sugar islands while drawing stark contrasts between the Caribbean and the North American colonies, it is important to recognize that Barbadian plantations were, in some ways, more like Virginian than Jamaican plantations. Not only was there significant diversity among the sugar islands but even Jamaica and Virginia shared a few similarities in this era. Detailed case studies of individual plantations – Newton and Seawell in southeastern Barbados, Prospect in northeastern Jamaica, and Mount Vernon in northern Virginia – form the core of Slavery and Enlightenment in the British Atlantic. I have chosen to focus on the estates from which detailed work logs have survived. Work logs offer a strong evidentiary base for the study. They offer richly detailed snapshots of plantation work regimes in the 1780s and 1790s, but this book also relies on a wide variety of other sources to sketch in the preceding and intervening periods. By splicing this material together, this book offers a meaningful moving picture that shows change over time while highlighting the rich data available for particular moments. Although this book focuses on four specific estates in detail, it also draws on considerable supporting evidence from a variety of large EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 20 Introduction plantations. For Jamaica, substantial supporting evidence is also drawn from several estates for which there are partial or less detailed work logs (Pleasant Hill and Phillipsfield, in St. Thomas in the east; Duckensfield, along the Plantain Garden River in St. Thomas in the east; and Somerset Vale, in St. Thomas in the east) and from the correspondence of Simon Taylor, the most prominent attorney in the island at the end of the eighteenth century, who managed several large plantations in St. Thomas in the east. For Barbados, supporting evidence has been drawn from a richly documented estate (Turner’s Hall) in the interior Scotland District, from the minutes of the Barbadian Society for the Improvement of Plantership, and from the correspondence among owners, attorneys, and overseers on the two Codrington estates in St. John parish in the center of the island. For Virginia, the focus is overwhelmingly on Mount Vernon. Comparable records for large Virginian estates are unavailable – in part because there were fewer large plantations than there were in the sugar islands and in part because there were fewer absentee planters for which records had to be made. Wherever possible, supporting evidence has been drawn from Monticello, in Albemarle County in the central Virginia piedmont, and from Mount Airy in Richmond County, and Sabine Hall in Lancaster County – both in the tidewater in the Northern Neck – and from some smaller estates. Overall, this book’s evidence is weighted toward eastern Jamaica and toward northern Virginia but, because it is a small island with largely uniform terrain and climate, plantations from almost all regions of Barbados are represented in this study. Newton and Seawell were in Christ Church Parish, on flat and low-lying terrain in southeastern Barbados. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, they were closely linked estates. In the 1790s, they shared the same manager, Sampson Wood, and the same absentee owners, John and Thomas Lane. The manager compared the two plantations in his reports and explained agricultural techniques at Seawell by referring to Newton. The estates exchanged provisions, distilling equipment, and skilled slaves in times of need and were close enough – less than five miles apart – that the manager, who lived at Newton, traveled back and forth on many mornings. Although closely connected, Newton and Seawell were different units. At 459 acres and 255 slaves, Newton was one of the largest sugar plantations in late eighteenth-century Barbados. It was also one of the oldest. By 1796, when the first work logs were created for the estate, Newton had been operating for a century and a half (it is still a sugar plantation today, in the same basic location). Canes had also been cultivated at Seawell for more than a century at that point. It was a more typical EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 21 late eighteenth-century Barbadian sugar plantation in terms of its slave population (182) and its total plantation acreage (345). Although they were rockier, Seawell’s lands, fields, and topsoil were “pretty much like that at Newton.”61 There was one significant agricultural difference. Some of the lands at Seawell were too close to the sea for quality cane. Longstaple cotton was sometimes cultivated on those fields. Newton had two winddriven sugar mills, whereas Seawell had a single windmill. Despite its smaller size, contemporaries considered Seawell to be a plantation “of greater note” than Newton.62 Indeed Seawell’s profit rate in the 1790s (8.4 percent) was higher than the average Barbadian sugar plantation (6.1 percent), and Newton’s (5.9 percent) was slightly lower.63 Standing in contrast in many ways to Newton and Seawell, Prospect was in Portland Parish in northeastern Jamaica. In was much younger than Newton and Seawell, and it focused almost exclusively on sugar production, along with a small amount of logging. Portland started as a sugar plantation at the beginning of the 1780s, when the Jamaican plantation system was still expanding. There is no evidence to indicate how financially successful the estate was. At its largest, in 1787, there were 162 slaves on the estate and it was close to 500 acres. In terms of its slave population and the size of its land, it was an average Jamaican sugar plantation. Unlike the low and mostly flat lands of Christ Church in Barbados, Portland was rugged and mountainous terrain, which made working conditions for slaves much more demanding. Whereas the planters at Newton and Seawell relied on oxen to transport canes to the mill, the Prospect planters were forced to use the more sure-footed and durable mule. Whereas the conditions for planting sugar in Christ Church tended toward too dry (especially on the southeastern coast around Seawell), Prospect was in an area of Jamaica where the average annual rainfall (about 5,000 mm per year) actually exceeded the ideal amount for sugar, forcing the slaves to work in chronically wet weather and in slippery, muddy, and rugged conditions.64 Whereas African-born slaves were in a tiny minority at Newton and Seawell by the 1790s, the majority of Prospect slaves were 61 62 63 64 “Report on the [Newton] Negroes,” MS 523/288, Newton Family Papers, Senate House Library, University of London Archives. Bryan Edwards, “Map of the Island of Barbados for the History of the West Indies, 1794,” in Tony Campbell, The Printed Maps of Barbados: From the Earliest Times to 1873 (London: Map Collector’s Circle, 1965), plate 19, no. 44. Ward, “Profitability of Sugar Planting,” 204, 210. Edward Long, History of Jamaica vol. 2 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 170). EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 22 Introduction African-born and recent imports. Whereas the Newton and Seawell population were close to being self-reproducing, there was only one year between 1784 and 1793 in which births exceeded deaths at Prospect.65 George Washington’s Mount Vernon, in Fairfax County, in northern Virginia near Alexandria, was an enormous 8,000 acres by the time of his death in 1799 – sixteen times the size of Prospect or Newton and more than half the size of Portland Parish in Jamaica or of Christ Church Parish in Barbados. Washington was aggressively expansionist with the estate. When he acquired it, Mount Vernon was just 2,500 acres.66 The slave population grew with the expanding farm. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the population more than doubled from 135 slaves to 317 slaves. The growth was almost entirely by natural reproduction.67 After 1775, only a handful of the new slaves had been purchased by Washington, and almost all of the slaves Washington purchased in his life were creoles purchased from other planters. The number of slaves per acre at Mount Vernon was low – almost miniscule – compared to the same ratio on a sugar plantation. Nevertheless, Washington’s estate had one of the highest slave-to-acre ratios among the top two dozen largest slave holders in the Chesapeake.68 The top soils at Mount Vernon were poor, and Washington chose to stop growing tobacco in 1766, preferring to focus on corn, wheat, and other grains such as rye, oats, and barley.69 The lands were relatively flat, making work conditions less demanding than they would have been on more rugged terrain and making the plowing necessary for grain cultivation easier. Mount Vernon became a collection of five working farm quarters rather than a single staple-crop plantation, and, Washington, to lower costs, became increasingly intent on using the abundant labor resources to make Mount Vernon entirely self-sufficient. Although slave labor was versatile and flexible, there were ultimately limits to the number of occupations or productive activities that Washington could envision at Mount Vernon for the slaves. By the summer of 1799, the 65 66 67 68 69 S. D. Smith, “An Introduction to the Plantation Journals of the Prospect Sugar Estate,” in Records of the Jamaican Prospect Estate [microform] (Wakefield, Eng.: Microform Academic Publishers, 2003), 1–25; “Report on the [Newton] Negroes,” MS 523/288; and “Report on the Negroes of Seawell Plantation,” MS 523/292, Newton Family Papers. Walsh, “Slavery and Agriculture at Mount Vernon,” in Philip J. Schwarz, ed. Slavery at the Home of George Washington (Mount Vernon: Mount Vernon Ladies Association, 2002), 50. Jean B. Lee, “Mount Vernon: A Model for the Republic,” in Schwarz, ed. Slavery at the Home of George Washington, 17, 36. Walsh, “Slavery and Agriculture,” 48. Ibid., 56. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 23 population had grown so large that Washington complained, “I have more working Negroes . . . than can be employed to any advantage in the farming system.”70 Mount Vernon was exceptionally large for a Chesapeake plantation, but its size and the land and labor resources available to Washington and his managers make the slaves’ work routines and the managerial strategies more comparable to Jamaican and Barbadian estates. Combined, Mount Vernon was much larger than the average Chesapeake plantation but, separated into its constituent parts, the individual farm quarters begin to approximate what might be found on smaller holdings in the region. In this sense, the data from Mount Vernon could be seen as more representative of the region as a whole. Slavery and Enlightenment in the British Atlantic is organized into two sections of three chapters each. The first three chapters address plantation management, labor organization, and agricultural practices and the ideas which shaped plantation management. The first chapter situates new and evolving systems of plantation management and accounting within broader Atlantic contexts. It demonstrates how plantation management strategies were transformed by the ideals of Enlightenment science, the accounting revolution of the Scottish Enlightenment, the rise of numeracy and political arithmetic, new ways of conceptualizing and tracking time, and the growth of an agricultural improvement movement. Scholars have long debated the impact of amelioration on the health of slaves in the Caribbean, focusing the debate on how widespread ameliorative ideas were and on the efficacy of ameliorative legislation. This chapter focuses instead on the shifting and evolving intellectual architecture of amelioration over time and on how amelioration related to other broader Enlightenment-inspired philanthropic projects. The second chapter explores the seasonal rhythms of production in Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia. It stresses the diversification of plantation production in all regions of the Americas, and explores the ways in which the quantity of labor expected from slaves rose throughout the late eighteenth century, particularly because of the elimination of downtime that came with the diversification of production. The seasonality of work and production has not been sufficiently emphasized in Atlantic historiography. Instead of making monolithic statements about the lived experience 70 George Washington to Robert Lewis, August 17, 1799, in John Clement Fitzpatrick, ed. The Writings of George Washington: From the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, vol. 37 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931), 338–339. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 24 Introduction of slavery, this chapter underscores the impact of seasonal changes in work patterns on the enslaved. The third chapter examines the key differences in gang labor organization among Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia, stressing that Caribbean gangs were larger and much more regimented and severe in their labor discipline than were gangs in the Chesapeake. The gang system, this chapter shows, was one of the most significant sites of innovation and improvement in late eighteenth-century plantation management. Some planters saw the organization of labor as the key to extracting greater efforts from the enslaved while ameliorating the conditions of slavery. The last three chapters of this book focus more directly on the lived experience of slavery within particular working environments. The fourth chapter explores the seasonal rhythms of health and work. Seasonality is, once again, a central theme in this chapter. I argue that illnesses and mortality rose among the enslaved in the Caribbean during the most demanding tasks, cane holing and manuring; yet, mortality and morbidity rates in the Chesapeake tended to be highest during the winter, when work was least demanding. The fifth chapter explores the differences between skilled and unskilled work on plantations, suggesting that, in all regions, the boundaries between skilled and unskilled work were often porous and artificial. Tradesmen spent a significant amount of time in menial field labors. What constituted skilled work in the planter’s mind was dependent in part on gendered and racialized ideas about who was capable of skilled work; the skill was in the worker and not the work. The final chapter examines how the occupations held by the enslaved and their seasonal work routines shaped the formation of slave families and communities and their patterns of resistance to the institution. The key argument in this chapter is that a hierarchy existed within the slave community that drew on the occupations slaves held in the working world. Elite slave family groups emerged on plantations, and they tended to hold the most privileged work positions. Slaves who held the most privileged occupations had more opportunity to earn money, acquire wealth, and build and maintain stable families. Slavery and Enlightenment in the British Atlantic contributes to the scholarly literature in several important ways. It offers more detailed evidence on eighteenth-century slave work routines than anything existing in the scholarly literature by closely examining and contextualizing a set of sources – plantation work logs – which have been almost entirely overlooked by scholars. It attempts to blend a business history of EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Introduction 25 plantation management with a history of slave labor, and it forefronts the ways in which work was the most determinative factor in a slave’s life. It broadens our perspective of slavery by bringing the historiography of mainland slavery and the historiography of Caribbean slavery into conversation. It examines a transitional phase that scholars often overlook between colonial and antebellum slavery – bridging the gap between those fields. It explores the ways in which plantation management and slave labor were shaped by Enlightenment-inspired improvement movements that strove to both ameliorate the conditions of slavery and improve profits from land and labor resources. It stresses that the amelioration movement usually gave ground to the planters’ desire to extract more labor from the slaves, and some planters were able to intellectually reconcile the contradictions without being intentionally duplicitous. The key comparative point throughout this book is that triangulating Jamaica, Barbados, and Virginia permits the disaggregation of the regional category of Caribbean and yields a better understanding of the often significant differences between the sugar islands and the similarities between Virginia and Barbados or, to a much lesser extent, between Virginia and Jamaica. This kind of Atlantic history approach transcends the dictates of modern political boundaries and nationalist historiographies and questions the idea that the Caribbean was distinctly different from the U.S. mainland in the decades immediately after the American Revolution. In fact, managerial strategies and the working experiences of slaves in Virginia, Barbados, and Jamaica continued to be shaped by Anglo-American improvement movements from their rise in prominence in the mideighteenth century through the Revolution and into the early nineteenth century. EBSCOhost - printed on 11/25/2021 11:28 AM via DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use