Planters, Merchants, and Slaves

Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820

Trevor Burnard

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226286242
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because—to speak bluntly—it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy.

ONE

The Rise of the Large Integrated Plantation

Daniel Defoe and the Plantation System

Daniel Defoe never set foot in the Americas, but he was a prescient observer of the fast-developing plantation societies of the American South and the British West Indies around the turn of the eighteenth century. His most famous novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), is a foundational text about European imperialism and race relations in the Americas. Moll Flanders (1722), a picaresque novel in which the heroine gains redemption for a wicked life in the form of marriage to a wealthy Virginia planter, is also revealing about British impressions of early eighteenth-century America. His less celebrated novel Colonel Jack (1722) is interesting as a guide to important transitions in plantation societies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It deals with the adventures of an English thief who was taken to the Chesapeake in the early years of the eighteenth century to be a servant, was promoted to be an overseer of slaves, and eventually found fame and fortune in armed service.1 One way of reading Colonel Jack is to see it as a commentary on slave-management practices, especially about the difficulty of forcing ethnically alien (to the English, at least) African enslaved men to do what those men did not want to do.

Defoe’s hero was present, fictively at least, at a major transformation in American life. It involved two interrelated developments: the invention of the large integrated plantation and the rise of great planters. Both developments occurred at a particularly difficult period in British American history. Historians have long recognized that the calamitous decades on either side of the eighteenth century saw the evolution of important institutions. For people living through the years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the 1720s, America seemed to have lost its way. In retrospect, however, we can see this period as ushering in a new period of sustained prosperity. It initiated a new, rich ruling elite whose wealth was derived from successful exploitation of slave labor in large integrated plantations.2 Most important, the developing planter elite found an effective means whereby slavery could be made to work. It was on the large plantations of the American South, and even more in the British West Indies, that slavery was most efficient. The fortunate planters who oversaw these developments became immensely powerful. Their slaves, on the other hand, experienced the worst degradation slaves faced in any period in American history.3 The advent of the large integrated plantation was crucial in creating both wealthy planters and also traumatized, degraded enslaved people.

Slow Growth of the Integrated Plantation

But moving to the large integrated plantation took time. The problem, simply stated, is that the emergence of the large integrated plantation in other places of British America besides Barbados, where hundreds of slaves labored and where all the processes of staple production were carried out in a single enterprise, occurred later than one would have expected given the widespread establishment of slavery everywhere in English America by the mid-seventeenth century. Why did the movement to a plantation model based on large-scale African chattel slavery presided over by a wealthy planter class take so long to occur in societies such as Jamaica and Virginia, which were ideally suited to it? Why did it take nearly a hundred years for Virginia to become a plantation society on the Barbadian model? Why did Jamaica, an island larger than Barbados, populated to a large extent by people with experience in Barbados, with land well suited to the production of sugar, and with a populace anxious to make quick and large fortunes, not become a proper plantation society for over thirty years? The obvious counterfactual to what happened in the American South and the British West Indies in the last quarter of the seventeenth century is that canny colonists, aware of what had happened in Barbados, moved as soon as they could to the fully fledged plantation system. The shift should have occurred in the Chesapeake in the 1660s, in the Leeward Islands and Jamaica in the 1670s, and in South Carolina in the 1680s, rather than in the 1700s and 1710s. In each of these societies the preconditions for plantation development were in place decades before the actual shift occurred.

The move to a plantation system was not revolutionary in its speed and implications; rather, the shift to plantation agriculture in British America was surprisingly slow, except in Barbados. Even there the shift to sugar in the 1640s and 1650s was a gradual process that merely sped up and intensified a process already under way. It was not a revolution, but an evolutionary process.4 The introduction of slavery, the move to sugar, and the rise of the large integrated plantation did not produce a “big bang” or a “sugar revolution”—a transformative event in which a previously failed society suddenly became very successful. We used to think that sugar was introduced after the failure of other crops, that Dutch financiers with no previous involvement in Barbados brought knowledge about sugar from Brazil, that the sugar revolution led to the importation of African slaves who displaced white servants, and that small farmers were driven out by avaricious large planters who quickly amassed all available land.5 But the rise of the large integrated plantation occurred when Barbados was enjoying an export boom, and when the planting of tobacco, cotton, and indigo was very profitable. It was not financed by the Dutch, but by London merchants, who had been involved in Barbados for some years before investing directly in the island, and who later transformed regular trade with Barbados into the commission system, which brought planters directly into the Atlantic financial system. Moreover, slaves were there in large numbers before sugar became a principal crop, and the shift occurred while Barbados was still a society of small farmers. These small farmers did not disappear as large planters grew more important, but adjusted themselves to sugar’s growing importance.6

But why was the move to the large integrated plantation so slow elsewhere when it was so quick in Barbados and when poorer whites were not immediately displaced by the rise of a great planter class? Planters in other places were aware of the transformations that had occurred in Barbados. As early as 1649 the London merchant William Bullock alerted Virginia planters to Barbadian success. Barbados, he asserted, five years previously “lay languishing of the disease Virginia now groans under.” Now it was a flourishing place with a hundred ships going there in 1648 and land raised from “almost nothing to be as dear or dearer than in England.” This transformation was due to sugar production, “for their Government is not so good that any wise man should be in love with, nor is this Island so extraordinary pleasant to entice men above other places.”7

One answer for slow transformations elsewhere is farm building: it took a long time everywhere except Barbados to transform semitropical and tropical landscapes into plantation grounds.8 Barbados was exceptional because most of the hard work clearing and cultivating land had been done before sugar production started in earnest. And it was hard work, even in Barbados. When the first settlers arrived in the 1620s and 1630s the land was covered by rain forest, and it took a great deal of work for settlers to cut down the massive trees, many over a hundred feet tall. Richard Ligon’s map of around 1650 shows that the only thoroughly cleared area was along the leeward coast, and the interior was largely uncleared.9 Yet it was easier to develop land in Barbados than in mountainous Jamaica or in Virginia outside the immediate vicinity of the Tidewater. The amount of land that needed to be cleared for a tobacco plantation in Virginia was larger than for a sugar or cotton plantation in Barbados. Settlers were confined for much of the seventeenth century to the fertile and relatively easily cleared land adjacent to the great rivers of the Chesapeake Bay. The hardest land to clear was the swamplands of the Carolinas, which were perfect for growing rice but which needed draining, damming, ditching, and developing. The process was costly, took up the time of a large labor force, and was also technologically complicated.10 Barbados, on the other hand, was by the 1670s as settled as southern England. Governor Jonathan Atkins declared that “there was not a foot of land in Barbados that is not employed even to the very seaside,” and visitors thought that it looked like one continuous green garden.11 By contrast, Jamaica in this period looked barely inhabited. Most of the population was concentrated in a small area of the southeast around the towns of Port Royal and St. Jago de la Vega. The mountainous interior was occupied, to the extent that it was occupied at all, by runaway slaves who were forming Maroon societies.12

Geography was also important. David Eltis argues that transportation costs for shipping sugar from Jamaica and transporting slaves there slowed its move to fully developed plantation agriculture in the late seventeenth century. He claims that Jamaica, and also Saint-Domingue, were beyond the western limits of large-scale sugar production in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Between 1673 and 1690 the price of slaves in Jamaica was higher than in Barbados by more than the cost of transporting slaves between the two islands. Location was thus a problem, especially when Barbados was rich, able to buy almost all the slaves that could be supplied by British traders, and had great comparative advantages for shippers and slave traders. It made sense for the Royal African Company to concentrate its attention on supplying that market. The Chesapeake was similarly disadvantaged in the slave trade before a dramatic expansion in numbers shipped to Virginia in the early eighteenth century. In 1664 the Maryland legislature, enthused by the prospects of widespread slavery in the colony, sought to have the Royal African Company bring a shipment of Africans every year. Only one is known to have come. Maryland planters could not afford the purchase prices, and opportunities for sales of African captives were far better in Barbados. The level of slave imports into the Chesapeake was minimal for several decades after slavery had become well established in the region: only two or three ships came to Virginia in the 1660s and not many more in the 1670s. Shipments slowly increased but were still only 2,000 in the 1680s and 4,000 in the 1690s.13

Nevertheless, Eltis overestimates the difficulties of Jamaica’s location. Jamaica may not have received all of the slaves it wanted from the places it wanted to get them from and at prices it could afford. But Eltis shows that while the different price of prime male slaves in Jamaica compared to that in Barbados was uncompetitively high between 1671 and 1675, at £4.6 per slave, the difference in prices dropped to under £1 a decade later. By the 1690s the price of slaves in Jamaica was actually lower than in Barbados, and it stayed lower until 1707. The majority of slaves going to Jamaica between 1673 and 1700 arrived in the late 1670s and 1680s, when the price differential between slaves sold in the two islands was most pronounced.14

The Problem of Disciplining Slaves

The supply of slaves thus was not that terrible, and the prices of captive Africans were not so high that planters in Jamaica could not buy slaves. The number of planters who bought slaves in the last quarter of the seventeenth century in Jamaica was substantial, and not all buyers were rich. Poorer buyers were able to participate in the market for slaves because slaves were relatively abundant: Jamaica received almost as many slaves in Barbados. In addition, sugar exports grew appreciably, doubling between 1682–83 and 1689–91 before stagnating in the 1690s as Jamaica suffered from natural disasters, yellow fever, and French invasion.15 Moreover, Jamaica had other methods of moneymaking that compensated for Barbados’s early start in plantation agriculture. The wealth obtained from piracy in the 1660s through to the 1680s, and the sizable entrepôt trade with Spanish America could have been employed in planting. But not enough Jamaicans wanted to move from these commercial activities into planting, causing considerable political tension in a society divided between a pro-planting faction and those who saw Jamaica’s future as trading with Spanish America.16

The main reason Jamaica and Virginia were so slow in developing the large integrated plantation was that the logistics of managing large numbers of slaves constrained planters from increasing their slave forces past a certain size. Managing a gang of fifty traumatized, hostile, and potentially violent African slaves was a different proposition from controlling a smaller group. Maintaining discipline over labor forces of hundreds of slaves, as was increasingly the case in the British West Indies by the second decade of the eighteenth century, was more difficult still. That the most problematic concern for large planters was keeping slaves in check leaps out from the admittedly limited literature on master-slave relations in the early days of the large integrated plantation. The shift from small-scale to large-scale slave plantations came about once planters solved the problem of discipline through the application of terror. To terrify slaves, they needed people willing to inflict terror. These people were ordinary white men acting as overseers and bookkeepers on slave plantations: subalterns, using the proper definition of subaltern as a junior officer or a noncommissioned soldier.17

Much of the evidence for this statement is scanty and inconclusive because the records are silent or opaque about the crucial issues that led to the fundamental changes outlined above. There is sufficient circumstantial evidence about the development of the large integrated plantation emerged to argue that this new subaltern class emerged in the last decade of the seventeenth century in such places as Jamaica as a result of three simultaneous developments: the decline in opportunities outside the plantation economy for ordinary white men; the increased presence in plantation America of men who experienced very brutal treatment as soldiers and noncommissioned officers; and the increasingly racialized disposition of labor on large plantations, where white men were promoted out of indentured servitude into managerial positions. What planters needed were men prepared to do whatever it took to control enslaved men and women working in dreadful work and living environments. They found such men among poorer whites, men accustomed to violence, men who were prepared to put up with the hardships of supervising recalcitrant slaves and growing perishable crops in return for good wages and the rewards of white privilege.

Colonel Jack

In making this argument, the plot of Defoe’s Colonel Jack serves a useful purpose. The hero of Colonel Jack is born a gentleman but through a variety of circumstances becomes a pickpocket in London. The internal logic of the novel suggests that Colonel Jack was born in the 1680s and came to the Chesapeake area sometime around 1710 or perhaps a few years earlier, by which date the large integrated plantation was well established. In the novel Jack was kidnapped, sent to Virginia, sold to a rich planter, and consigned to hard labor and rough treatment on a tobacco plantation with fifty servants and two hundred slaves. Before long, however, he had been promoted to overseer. He was given a horse “to ride up and down the Plantation to see the Servants and the Negroes” and a horsewhip “to correct and lash the Slaves or Servants when they proved negligent or quarrelsome, or, in Short, were guilty of any offense.”18

Readings of Colonel Jack usually focus on Jack’s pursuit of gentility.19 It can also be read, however, as a guide to the problem of slave management on large plantations. Defoe confines his discussion of punishment almost entirely to the slave rather than the servant population. He mentions servants mainly to highlight the protosentimentalist theme whereby Jack finds it difficult to overcome the natural empathy he has with other people in bondage, given that he “was but Yesterday a Servant or Slave like them and under the authority of the same Lash.”20 But in Colonel Jack only slaves face punishment. By the time Defoe was writing white indentured servitude was less important than in the seventeenth century. No large plantation in the Chesapeake had a mixture of fifty servants and two hundred slaves—a more likely breakdown was five or ten servants and two hundred slaves if the plantation was in Jamaica, and one or two servants and fifty slaves if the plantation was in Virginia.21 Nevertheless, the modal experience for whites on the plantation might have mirrored Jack’s. Jack was a servant indentured for his passage across the Atlantic who very soon after arrival was moved into wage labor as a plantation operative. Jack’s career path was not uncommon. The situation was more complicated in the Chesapeake, where large importations of convicts meant that there was a sizable body of coerced white laborers in planta...