Slaveholders in Jamaica

Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition

Christer Petley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138663794
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317313922
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Explores the social composition of the Jamaican slaveholding class during the era of the British campaign to end slavery, looking at their efforts to maintain control over local society and considering how their economic, cultural and military dependency on the colonial metropole meant that they were unable to avert the ending of British slavery.

1 SLAVEHOLDING AND THE JAMAICAN ECONOMY

In 1802, Maria Nugent went with her husband, the Governor, on a tour of Jamaica. Accompanied by Simon Taylor, they arrived at a property called the Moro in the parish of St Thomas in the East. The Moro was set high on a hill, and the party approached it ‘up a steep road, with a precipice on one side’. Maria wrote that she was ‘almost terrified out of my little wits’ but ‘made up my mind there was no danger’, as she was ‘mounted on an old quiet horse’ that knew the track well. The horse belonged to John Scott, a member of the Jamaican Privy Council and owner of the Hordley sugar estate, to which the Moro was attached. Once they had negotiated the ascent, the Nugents arrived at ‘a good house, situated on the pinnacle of a mountain’, from where they could look out over the Plantain Garden River valley all the way down to the Caribbean Sea. This is how Maria described the view:

In front you see a rich vale, full of sugar estates, the works of which look like so many little villages, and the soft bright green of the canes, from this height, seems like velvet. The guinea-corn fields make a variety in the green, and canes that are cut are of a brownish hue; which, with the cocoa-nut and other trees, make a delightfully varied carpet. Plantain Garden River runs through the whole, and loses itself in the sea at the bottom of the vale. On the other side of the vale, hills rise over hills, some clothed in wood, some in canes, and all have small settlements here and there. Then, the rest of the view, as far as the eye can reach, is all sea; and as there are many shoals and rocks on this part of the coast, you see it constantly foaming over them.¹

Nugent was looking for poetry and the picturesque, but as she looked out from the Moro over the Plantain Garden River valley she was viewing a landscape shaped by the prosaic activity of making money.²

The best land of the ‘rich vale’ created by the river was taken up by expansive sugar estates. Hordley, Wheelerfield, Winchester, Golden Grove, Duckenfield, Amity Hall and Simon Taylor’s own Holland estate were the plantations in the immediate vicinity, and the bright green sugar cane that Nugent described was the reason for their existence. The canes of the fields were being cut by the thousands of enslaved people who lived and worked on the estates. The cut cane was then taken to the works, which might have looked like villages but were in fact industrialized processing plants operated by slave labour. Here the mills squeezed the juice from the cane, and this was then heated and refined by specialist slaves in the boiling houses, creating a sticky brown sugar that was loaded into wooden hogsheads. From the estates enslaved boatmen transported the sugar down the Plantain Garden River and it was loaded onto merchant ships bound for Bristol, London or Liverpool for sale or re-export. As these vessels sailed out of sight of the hills of Jamaica and into the shipping lanes of the open sea, they were joining a transatlantic highway that connected St Thomas in the East with the wider world of trade and commerce.

The process of making sugar and getting it to sweet-toothed European consumers relied on complex networks of services, support and supplies. Men like Taylor and Scott bought enslaved people transported from Africa to replace or supplement their plantation workforces. They also hired labour from the owners of local ‘jobbing gangs’, especially at busy periods like harvest time, and relied on doctors to provide enslaved workers with rudimentary medical care. The estates provided some of the food eaten by enslaved people, and provision grounds, where enslaved people grew crops and raised poultry in their ‘free’ time, were located in the far reaches of the sugar estates. Some estates bred their own livestock, and planters also bought cattle and horses from the owners of local pens. Food as well as clothing was imported from the British Isles and North America. Tools, supplies and other items were traded by merchants and shopkeepers, and skilled craftsmen constructed and maintained the buildings and machinery of the plantation works. Artisans were also kept busy by a constant demand for barrels, fencing, walls and wainage. Sugar production was therefore at the heart of a diverse and complex local economic web.

In 1823, when describing the ‘different classes and professions’ on the island, the author J. Stewart remarked that it was ‘proper to begin with the planters, or proprietors of estates, who are by far the most opulent and important, and without whom, indeed, there would be little employment for any other’. The planters had more slaves than anyone else, and what was more, they had a virtual monopoly of the best and most fertile agricultural land. They were, however, outnumbered by less illustrious neighbours and depended on these neighbours in a variety of ways. As Barry Higman has demonstrated, about half of the enslaved population of pre-emancipation Jamaica lived on properties other than sugar plantations, and small, strongly diversified agricultural units were ‘both common and widely dispersed’. The ‘small settlements’ that Nugent could see ‘here and there’ in the hills on the opposite side of the valley were distant and less visually striking than the fields of cane that occupied the plain, but there were many more such settlements in Jamaica than there were sugar estates.³

Like Nugent, historians have tended to focus their attention on sugar planters and sugar estates. As Verene Shepherd notes, contemporary observers and modern historians have tended to stress the importance of the plantocracy, which means that ‘the study of the sugar planter elite has been considered more socially significant than the study of other producers’. Although there have been some important studies of non-sugar producing whites, the general focus on planters has hidden the social significance of these other groups.⁴ The small plantocratic elite relied on the support of other slaveholders and were bound to them by ties of mutual dependency. The white employees who oversaw daily affairs on the plantations, the craftsmen who helped to maintain the works, and the shopkeepers and merchants of the towns were vital elements of local society. Without these less affluent colonists the plantations could not function. Neither would the planters have been able to maintain white control over local society. Sugar planters like Scott and Taylor were certainly the most opulent and powerful people in Jamaica, but all whites, rich and poor, pulled together to perpetuate the existing economic and social order, and across the island most white colonists had a strong material stake in slavery.

Table 1. Jamaican slave holdings, 1832.

Source: Higman, Slave Population and Economy, pp. 274 – 75.

The planter class dominated Jamaica just as their sugar estates dominated the landscape. As General Nugent and his wife undertook their gubernatorial tour they were welcomed and entertained by a succession of planters. These men were the wealthiest people in their parishes, and they occupied the most important positions of public office, as members of the Assembly and Council or as part of the local magistracy. The planters the Nugents met were not, however, typical slaveholders. At least two thirds of all slaveholdings comprised ten or fewer enslaved people (Table 1). During the eighteenth century, over a third of all those who made purchases from the slave ships that docked in Kingston bought just one enslaved person, and as Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan note, ‘ordinary white Jamaicans were firmly integrated into slave-buying and slave-trading networks’, which gave them ‘a stake in upholding the institution of slavery’. This general pattern was repeated across the British West Indies. As Nick Draper has shown, when former slaveholders claimed compensation for their loss of ‘property’ following emancipation, eight out of every ten claimants were awarded less than £500, indicating that they had owned five or fewer slaves.⁵

This chapter uses detailed evidence from the parish of St James to illuminate the economic dominance of the planter class as well as stressing the importance of non-elite slaveholders to the Jamaican economy. After the middle of the eighteenth century, sugar production expanded rapidly in western Jamaica, and planters established an extensive sugar economy in the region. Although there were only 2,300 enslaved people in St James in 1735 and only a handful of sugar estates, there were nearly 17,000 enslaved people in the parish by the 1770s. The flourishing nature of the western parishes was clear to slave-trading merchants, who occasionally told their captains to avoid the main enrepôt of Kingston and sell in western Jamaica where demand and prices were particularly high. In 1774, Edward Long commented on the ‘rapid augmentation of settlements’ in St James, which he describing it as ‘the most thriving district in the island’. Rapid expansion continued in the area, and by 1817, there were over 25,000 enslaved people in St James, making it one of the most heavily populated parishes in Jamaica.⁶

Table 2. Slave holdings in St James, 1817.

Source: NA, T 71 201 – 204, Returns of Registrations of Slaves, St James, 1817.

Returns of Registrations of Slaves for 1817 show that there were 991 slaveholdings in St James. Holdings of over 100 slaves accounted for two thirds of the enslaved population in the parish. Nevertheless, slaveholdings of fewer than 100 were vastly more common. Sugar plantations required large workforces, and the returns show that the planters owned the majority of slaves. They also indicate that slaveholders from outside the planter class outnumbered the owners of large estates by about ten to one. In fact, holdings of between one and five enslaved people accounted for over half of all slaveholdings in St James (Table 2). Resident owners tended to sign returns relating to smaller holdings of slaves, while the local managers who looked after the affairs of absentee proprietors made the returns for fifty of the seventy-seven largest holdings. Those with smaller holdings of slaves were therefore more likely to reside in Jamaica.⁷

As well as owning about half of the island’s slaves, the owners of sugar estates dominated landownership. Little listed information on the distribution of real estate during the slavery period has survived, but tax records from Westmoreland, a sugar-producing parish adjacent to St James, are a rare and valuable exception. In 1804, the latest date covered by extant returns from the parish, most of the settled land belonged to owners of sugar plantations. Holdings of over 1,000 acres accounted for over 80 per cent of settled land in the parish. Owners of these holdings made up the landed elite, and some owned more than one large property. However, in spite of the dominance of large landowners, there were many owners of smaller holdings. Although small settlements of less than 1,000 acres accounted for just a fifth of the settled land in Westmoreland, there were far more of them than there were sugar estates. Indeed, over half of all the land holdings were smaller than 500 acres (Table 3).⁸

Table 3. Distribution of settled land into holdings in Westmoreland, 1804.

Source: JA 2/7/1/1, Westmoreland Tax Rolls, 1804.

Although most slaveholders and landowners in St James and Westmoreland were male, women also owned land and slaves. In 1804, over 10 per cent of registered land in Westmoreland was held by women, and in 1817, women were responsible for almost 40 per cent of returns in the St James Returns of Registrations of Slaves. The majority of women listed in the returns were owners, holding enslaved people on their own account as sole or, more rarely, as joint owners, and nearly 9 per cent of enslaved people in the parish were owned outright by women. Very few women managed large slave-run properties. Evidence from probate inventories shows that some local women, mostly widows, owned pens and plantations, but such examples were rare. In 1817, only one woman in St James, Eliza Mary Tharpe owned more than 100 slaves. All other female slave owners had holdings of fewer than fifty slaves, and nearly two-thirds of women slave owners in St James held five or fewer slaves. Only four women attorneys appear in the returns, and none of them registered more than five enslaved people. A significant proportion of slaveholders were women, therefore, but the vast majority of enslaved people were held by white men, who were best placed to own and manage substantial rural properties and to acquire large numbers of slaves.⁹

This evidence of women’s involvement in slavery appears to bear out many of Cecily Jones’s observations about white female slaveholders in Barbados. As in Barbados, women in Jamaica were engaged with the slave economy and benefited from the enslavement of others. Nevertheless, as Jones argues, ‘life in slave-based colonial plantation colonies offered white women a range of opportunities and privileges within a power structure ordinarily reserved for white males’. Women could inherit slaves or acquire them by their own means, and they could exploit the labour of these people to secure a degree of personal independence and to promote their own material interests, much as men could. They did not, however, have the same opportunities as male colonists. For example, typical routes to independence and wealth were closed to women. Managerial roles on the plantations were almost exclusively reserved for white men, who aimed to use these as a springboard to slaveholding, landholding and independent wealth. In a society dominated by white male slaveholders, white women were therefore privileged by their colour but faced restrictions on their behaviour that did not apply to men and were ‘second class citizens by virtue of their gender’.¹⁰

The Returns of Registrations of Slaves show some slaveholders, including women, to have been people of colour, although information regarding colour is not always provided, making it impossible to enumerate the incidence of slave-holding among non-whites with any precision. Free-coloured slaveholders were certainly an increasingly significant part of Jamaican slaveholding society. By the early 1830s, an estimated 70,000 slaves were in the hand of propertied people of colour. This figure is unreliable, but it is clear that free people of colour owned a significant percentage of enslaved people in Jamaica by the time the institution was abolished. Because law and custom excluded free people of colour from many areas of the rural economy, most of these enslaved people were held in relatively small holdings, often in towns. There were free non-white land owners, and even some planters, but on the whole, men and women of colour were marginalized in the plantation economy. Female and non-white slaveholders were therefore part of the social landscape of early nineteenth-century Jamaica, but throughout the period before emancipation, the majority of slaveholders and landowners appear to have been white men from outside the planter class.¹¹

Tax data and the Returns of Registrations of Slaves can demonstrate the usage of land and the division of the enslaved population into holdings, but do not give detailed information about the wealth or economic activities of those taxed or making returns. Probate inventories, listing and evaluating the personal estates of deceased free people, can provide evidence on these aspects of people’s lives. Probate inventories were part of the process of dividing and disposing of property after a death. They often ascribe a particular vocation to the deceased and generally listed enslaved people, livestock, household items, personal belongings, cash and any debts owed to the deceased. The following evaluation of wealth distribution among Jamaican whites is therefore based on what Alice Hanson Jones describes as individuals’ ‘gross portable wealth’, which includes slaves, livestock, other physical property and financial assets. Using a triennial sample of 210 inventories from St James between 1807 and 1834, it has been possible to tentatively assess the distribution of wealth among free people in the parish during the early nineteenth century and to provide details of their economic activities.¹²

Inventories are a rich source of information but present five main areas of weakness. First, they do not reveal details of age at death. Second, inventories do not always provide explicit information about the occupat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Maps and Tables
• Introduction
• 1. Slaveholding and the Jamaican Economy
• 2. Colonial Society and Proslavery Culture
• 3. Public Life and Institutions
• 4. Local Challenges
• 5. Imperial Interventions
• 6. Uprising
• 7. Backlash
• 8. Emancipation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index