Reproducing the British Caribbean

Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery

Juanita De Barros

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781469616056
• eBook ISBN: 9781469616063
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

This innovative book traces the history of ideas and policymaking concerning population growth and infant and maternal welfare in Caribbean colonies wrestling with the aftermath of slavery. Focusing on Jamaica, Guyana, and Barbados from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, when violent labor protests swept the region, Juanita De Barros takes a comparative approach in analyzing the struggles among former slaves and masters attempting to determine the course of their societies after emancipation.

Invested in the success of the "great experiment" of slave emancipation, colonial officials developed new social welfare and health policies. Concerns about the health and size of ex-slave populations were expressed throughout the colonial world during this period. In the Caribbean, an emergent black middle class, rapidly increasing immigration, and new attitudes toward medicine and society were crucial factors. While hemispheric and diasporic trends influenced the new policies, De Barros shows that local physicians, philanthropists, midwives, and the impoverished mothers who were the targets of this official concern helped shape and implement efforts to ensure the health and reproduction of Caribbean populations in the decades before independence.

CHAPTER ONE
Slavery, Emancipation, and Reproducing the Race

Whatever then may be said for West Indian slavery, this damning thing must be said against it, that the slaves were dying of it.
—Charles Buxton, Slavery and Freedom in the British West Indies, 1860

IN 1860, A LITTLE MORE THAN twenty-five years after the end of slavery in the British Caribbean, Charles Buxton published a passionate defense of emancipation. The son of Thomas Fowell Buxton, a leading antislavery activist in Great Britain, the younger Buxton summarized some of the reasons his father’s generation of abolitionists had advanced to support emancipation. It was brutal and immoral as well as being an inefficient use of labor. It was also a killer. To abolitionists, the demographic consequences of slavery were clear and inexorable and could only be reversed if the system was brought to a speedy end. From the perspective of 1860, it was apparent to Charles Buxton that the growing awareness of slavery’s demographic cost had convinced the British Parliament to pass legislation ending slavery; the “population returns” constituted a “death-blow.”¹

For Charles Buxton, emancipation was a moral, economic, and most of all, demographic success.² To many of his contemporaries, population growth in the Caribbean after slavery’s end was a measure of the “mighty experiment.” Ironically, Buxton published his assessment at the very moment when growing numbers of Britons were condemning emancipation as a failure. As former slaves demonstrated their willingness to construct their lives in opposition to British-defined ideas, imperial officials and the British public expressed growing disenchantment with the results of emancipation.³ Much of this disillusionment was rooted in the gap between the goals of British policy makers and those of Caribbean men and women. Former slaves had their own ideas about what freedom would bring. They wanted control over their working lives, access to land, fair wages and working conditions, freedom of movement, and reunification of the families that slavery had torn apart. Imperial officials had their own goals, the most pressing of which was ensuring economic viability and social stability. To them, the survival of plantations worked by reliable workers was the key to achieving both.⁴

Imperial officials’ increasingly negative views about the results of emancipation were also tied to assessments of population growth, which was to be one of freedom’s great accomplishments. The initial optimistic assessments that the end of slavery would naturally result in population growth were replaced gradually with much gloomier views. The high death rates consequent upon the mid-nineteenth-century cholera epidemics helped crystallize these views. To many imperial officials and representatives of the colonial elites, former slaves were unable to cope with the challenges of freedom, and their “savage” responses to the epidemics condemned them and their families to premature death. This view of former slaves was part of a hardening racialized rhetoric in this period that represented people of African descent as immoral and undisciplined and incapable of freedom.

Slave Populations

As the quotation by Charles Buxton that introduced this chapter demonstrates, questions about population size lay at the heart of the abolition debates that roiled Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁵ In marshaling their arguments against the slave trade and slavery, British abolitionists pointed to the immorality and inefficiency of this labor control system. Written and oral accounts by missionaries and by slaves themselves testified to its brutality and corrupting effects on masters and slaves alike. Adam Smith’s arguments had served to convince many that slave labor was less productive and more expensive than that of free workers.⁶ But demographic arguments were central to the case against slavery. In the early nineteenth century, in their efforts to convince the British government to pass legislation ending British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, abolitionists and like-minded government ministers drew on contemporary ideas that populations “naturally” grew and represented the British Caribbean as reflecting this “normal” pattern. This argument had the merit of undermining concerns about the impact of ending the slave trade.⁷ The abolitionist and member of the British House of Lords Lord Grenville, for example, calculated that Jamaica’s “excess of deaths over births” had declined consistently over the past century and that therefore its population was able to reproduce without the slave trade.⁸ As the future prime minister Lord Howick (later Earl Grey) argued, “nature” in the Caribbean would as elsewhere “accomplish her own ends, and . . . the population would maintain itself.”⁹

The passage of legislation ending Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade led to the creation of the “population returns” lauded by Charles Buxton. These were a series of reports detailing the number of slaves in each colony as well as births, deaths, sales, and manumissions. After the end of the slave trade, abolitionists pushed for legislation compelling planters to register their slaves and record all population movements. James Stephen, the undersecretary of state for the colonies and a longtime abolitionist, crafted an order-in-council for Trinidad that required planters to provide yearly enumerations of their slaves as well as any changes in their status. Its slaves were registered in 1813; two years later, a similar order-in-council was put in place for St. Lucia.¹⁰ As both islands were crown colonies, the British government could implement policies more directly than was possible for self-governing colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados with their planter-dominated elected legislatures. The assemblies of these two islands passed registration acts in 1816, and the other colonies followed in 1817, although a few laggards delayed until the 1820s.¹¹

The returns revealed that overall and in most colonies slave populations declined after 1807.¹² They fell most significantly in late-developing sugar colonies such as Trinidad, St. Lucia, Demerara-Essequibo, and Berbice, somewhat less so in Jamaica. The decline was smaller in long-established sugar-producing colonies, and especially in colonies not devoted to plantation agriculture, such as the Bahamas. Only in Barbados did the number of slaves grow, a development that most historians have attributed to its stage of development as a plantation colony.¹³ The population decrease presented an interpretative challenge for abolitionists who had predicted that populations would grow naturally without the slave trade, but they quickly adjusted. They argued that in fact slavery itself prevented the natural growth of the population in opposition to the “law of nature” and used the data to make a case for more humane treatment of slaves and the end of slavery itself.¹⁴ The growth of some slave populations made the population returns less than entirely satisfactory from a propaganda perspective, but abolitionists were adamant about the impact of slavery on population growth.¹⁵ As the abolitionist James Stephen declared, the argument that slavery was “‘unfriendly to the multiplication of our species [could not] admit of a doubt.’”¹⁶

The “amelioration” laws passed in the 1820s were intended to encourage planters to treat slaves more humanely in the hope that the populations would increase.¹⁷ These acts aimed to ameliorate the worst abuses of slavery and prepare slaves for eventual freedom. They encouraged slave marriages and religious instruction, facilitated slave self-purchase, and imposed limits on the imposition of corporal punishment.¹⁸ Although a product of the 1820s, they built on earlier pro-natalist measures. From the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some planters had attempted to encourage population growth by offering new mothers cash or other rewards, including lighter work duties; others freed women who had borne a certain number of living children from performing onerous physical labor. Doing so was an acknowledgment of the deleterious impact of slavery on the health of mothers, a point that even the proslavery writer Edward Long acknowledged. He observed that the workload of pregnant women had a direct impact on the survival of their infants.¹⁹ Planters also built additional slave hospitals (or “hot-houses”) and lying-in facilities and hired more European physicians. A number of Caribbean governments rewarded planters and overseers whose slaves reproduced themselves.²⁰ All wanted to ensure that more children were born and that they survived to adulthood.

Imperial officials hoped that the legal end of slavery itself on August 1, 1834, would accomplish this aim while also ensuring that the population continued to work on the estates.²¹ The Abolition Act gave former slave owners financial compensation for the loss of “their” laborers in the amount of £20 million. Under the apprenticeship system that was to be the transition from slavery to freedom, former slaves older than six years were to provide unpaid labor for their former owners and receive food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Apprentices were allowed to work during their “free” time for wages, which they could use to buy their freedom early if they chose. Children under six were freed outright, with the proviso that they could be indentured until they turned twenty-one if their mothers were unable to care for them. One hundred special magistrates were hired to oversee the system.²² The apprenticeship ended two years early, in 1838, following a series of reports of poor treatment of apprentices and conflicts between masters and apprentices, and a renewed abolitionist campaign calling for immediate freedom.

Ironically, given emancipation’s goal of ensuring population growth especially through the survival of more infants and children, some aspects of the apprenticeship system were decidedly unhealthy. A number of the pro-natalist policies introduced earlier in the century were abandoned during this period. Some planters withdrew the “indulgences” from their female apprentices that they had provided for pregnant and postpartum women during slavery and stopped providing free medical care for young children.²³ James Thome and Horace Kimball, the American abolitionists who visited Barbados, Jamaica, and Antigua in 1837, declared that the treatment of free children in Jamaica especially was “often very deplorable.” Masters did not provide for children, and the parents were unable to. Thome and Kimball maintained that conditions for pregnant and postpartum women had actually deteriorated from what they had been during slavery.²⁴ Many planters also refused to provide food for the free children of their apprentices. In places like Jamaica, apprentices had access to land where they could grow their own food and provide for their children. In Barbados, where most ex-slaves did not have this, the situation was very different and far more dangerous for children who did not receive food from planters.²⁵ The Barbadian planter William Sharpe observed that parents removed their children from the estates and gave them to relatives rather than seeing them bound to the plantations. He believed that many ended up dying “from want of care,” something he attributed to what he saw as their parents’ irresponsible behavior.²⁶ The Jamaican apprentices cited by the British abolitionists Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey had a somewhat different view. They criticized planters’ withdrawal of the slavery-era “privileges” that had enabled parents to look after their children.²⁷ As the apprentices on Oxford Estate noted, “The free children receive[d] nothing from the estate,” a point Sturge and Harvey repeated for Barbados.²⁸

Sturge and Harvey’s book was part of the growing opposition to the apprenticeship system.²⁹ The anti-apprenticeship campaigners in Britain may have been certain that they bore much of the responsibility for the system’s early end in 1838, but the resistance of apprentices also played a role.³⁰ The governor of Barbados, Sir Murray McGreggor, pushed the colony’s planter-controlled assembly to approve its early end to preempt further abolitionist protests and potentially unfavorable (for planters, at any rate) measures by the British government. Legislatures in the rest of the region quickly passed similar measures.³¹

The Mighty Experiment

The “mighty experiment” of slave emancipation began in 1838 with the end of the apprenticeship system.³² British officials hoped that emancipation would show the merits of free labor over coercion and demonstrate that slaves could be transformed into disciplined, hard-working laborers with consumer desires that only wage labor could supply. These aims, noted the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord John Russell, reflected the “religious and benevolent views of the nation at large” as well as more pragmatic concerns. Russell emphasized the importance of economic matters; the colonies should continue to produce the crops “for which the climate [was] adapted” and purchase British manufactured goods. But he also wanted to see whether Caribbean populations would grow once slavery had ended. He hoped that the former slaves who had been “kept down by legal oppression and licentious morals, consequent on a state of slavery” would “advance in numbers under the institution of marriage, and in the enjoyment of property.” He was optimistic about the long term: The “increase in numbers, if accompanied by education and civilised habits [would] lead to increase in industry and be productive of wealth.”³³

Russell made these comments in a letter to Guyana’s governor in the early 1840s, part of an extensive exchange of letters and reports between imperial and colonial officials in the early postemancipation years assessing the results of emancipation. Drawing on regular reports from governors and the stipendiary (special) magistrates appointed during the apprenticeship system, Russell and other offici...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: Slavery, Emancipation, and Reproducing the Race
• CHAPTER TWO: Population Anxieties and Infant Mortality
• CHAPTER THREE: Grannies, Midwives, and Colonial Encounters
• CHAPTER FOUR: Infant Welfare, Maternal Education, and Uplifting the Race
• CHAPTER FIVE: International Public Health and Caribbean Child-Saving
• CONCLUSION: Social Welfare Policies and Population Questions in the 1930s
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index