Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (64 page)

On the North American mainland the differing characteristics of the Chesapeake region and the southern Lowcountry led to marked divergences in the development of their slave societies and of society as a whole.145 The tobacco culture of Virginia and Maryland146 created a rhythm of work and patterns of labour organization different from those to be found in South Carolina, where the discovery in the late seventeenth century of the potential of the wetlands for rice production set in motion an economic revolution. Once rice was established as the colony's staple crop, its production and export from Charles Town became the predominant preoccupation of the emerging planter class (fig. 36).

Labour in the Carolina rice fields was intensive, and the length of the growing season of rice as compared with that of the tobacco plant left little or no time for the pursuit of other activities, and the consequent diversification of labour, as in Virginia. Tobacco in the Chesapeake could be cultivated by a planter working on his own, or with only one or two slaves to help him, whereas profitable rice production required large plantations with labour forces at least thirty strong. More slaves, therefore, lived on large plantations in Carolina than in Virginia. As a result, personal relationships with masters were liable to be less close than in Virginia, where the great planters developed patriarchal attitudes to the slaves born and bred on their estates; and the constant need for slaves newly imported from Africa to replenish a black population less healthy and less fertile than that of Virginia made it more difficult for Carolina slaves to develop the kinship and community ties that were gradually being woven by their counterparts in the Chesapeake.

Yet if, as seems likely, Carolina slaves were treated with greater brutality than those of Virginia, the relative proximity of Spanish territory meant that Carolinian slave-owners still needed to take care that they did not drive their slaves to desperation. In 1693 black fugitives from Carolina who managed to reach St Augustine were offered their freedom by the Spanish crown on condition that they converted to Catholicism. From then onwards Carolina's growing black slave population glimpsed a beacon of hope shining away to the south.147 Following two abortive revolts, many Carolina slaves joined the Yamasee Indians in 1715 in their war against the English settlers, and during the 1720s and 1730s increasing numbers of runaways made their escape to Florida. These included Portuguese-speaking slaves from the central African Christian monarchy of Kongo. In 1738 the governor of Florida gave them permission to establish an autonomous black Catholic settlement, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, two miles north of St Augustine. As news of the foundation of Mose spread through the South Carolina plantations, groups of slaves broke loose and tried to make for Florida, among them a group of Angolans who revolted near Stono in 1739. After killing more than twenty whites most of them were themselves killed as they headed south for Mose.

For all the degradation and horrors of life on the Carolina plantations, the very size of the plantations meant that the slaves lived in a world that was overwhelmingly black, and in which they were able to preserve customs and traditions they had brought from Africa (fig. 37). Unlike the often absentee West Indian planters, their masters maintained a direct personal interest in their plantations, and they were less inclined than the Virginia planters to break up slave families by selling surplus slaves, or giving them away. There were opportunities, too, to escape from rural servitude. The planters' desire to escape the malaria season on their plantations by spending much of the year in the handsome mansions they built for themselves in Charles Town led to the emergence of a class of urban slaves in domestic service. Like the black slaves to be found in Mexico City and Lima, many of them became skilled carpenters, cabinet-makers and silversmiths, and their accumulated earnings allowed them, like their Spanish American counterparts, to enjoy a fair level of prosperity, copying the life-styles and clothing fashions of the white elite.148

The lines of racial division, however, remained brutally sharp in these southern colonies, and the number of free blacks was small in comparison with those to be found in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. Eighteenth-century New Spain had the largest free population of African descent in the Americas, and although it was subject to specific restrictions and obligations it enjoyed a recognized status within the casta system. One consequence of this was that, since the early seventeenth century, Mexican free blacks had been allowed to form their own militia units. The survival of these units until the later eighteenth century not only provided them with valuable corporate privileges but also tended to reinforce their sense of racial identity"' In Virginia, by contrast, gun ownership for free blacks was banned after Bacon's rebellion, although it was only in 1723 that the colony's legislature formally prevented them from joining the militias."" There was a world of difference between arming a black population that constituted under a tenth of the total population, and one that ranged from a quarter to a half.

`It appears absolutely necessary to get a sufficient Number of white Persons into this Province,' asserted a committee of the South Carolina Assembly in 1739, as it proposed legislation to compel large landowners to import and maintain white soldiers in proportion to the acreage that they held."' In societies where blacks constituted such a large portion of the total population, the spectre of slave rebellion haunted the whites. It also worked, however, to generate among them a sense of solidarity that helped in the Chesapeake region to bridge the social divide between the great planters on the one hand and the middling planters, small landowners and tenant-farmers on the other.

Yet although white and black stood in sharp contradistinction to each other, they were also connected by an intricate web of visible and invisible ties. For all the depth of the divide between the status of master and that of slave, they were bound together in a relationship from which neither could escape. Slavery and freedom coexisted in close symbiosis, with liberty itself becoming the most precious of commodities in a society based on servitude. 1'2

If this led the planter elite of Virginia to develop a political culture with liberty at its heart, it also encouraged the slaves to make the most of every chink and crack in the carapace of constriction that contained their lives. They held fast to ancestral rituals and practices that linked them to a world that whites could not enter; they fostered, as best they could, the new bonds of kinship and community that the circumstances of their lives had allowed them to establish; and they exploited the needs and the weaknesses of the white society around them in order to gain access to some of the opportunities and advantages which that society had to offer. In doing so they reached out to a world that had become dependent on their services, shaping that world even as it, in turn, shaped their own.

As the eighteenth century progressed, this mutual interaction of black and white, stronger in some parts than others of the Chesapeake and the Lower South, led to the construction of a new world of shared experiences and shared patterns of behaviour.153 Just as, in post-conquest Mexico, the presence of indigenous servants in conquistador households came to exercise a deep influence on the life-styles of subsequent generation S,154 so the presence of black nursemaids and domestic servants produced a comparable process of acculturation in the planter households of Virginia. `I have none but negroes to tend my children - nor can I get anyone else - ,' wrote the Virginian planter, Landon Carter, in his diary for 1757, `and they use [accustom] their own children to such loads of Gross food that they are not judges when a child not so used to be exposed to different weathers - and not so inured to exercise - comes to eat. They let them [Carter's children] press their appetites as their own children did and thus they are constantly sick.'155

Yet the often close personal relationships could not bridge the vast gap dividing master from slave, nor do much to mitigate the brutality and sheer savagery that constituted the daily fare of plantation slaves. 116 Dissatisfied with the work of the men deputed to thresh the oats, Landon Carter, who prided himself on his paternalist concern for the slaves on his Sabine Hall plantation, noted in his diary, as if it were a simple matter of routine, `They have been severely whipd day by day. 1117 Sexual exploitation of women slaves, too, was a commonplace of plantation life, although there is no evidence that Carter himself indulged in this. Casual sex and long-term sexual relationships between planters and slaves were taken for granted in the great houses and on the plantations, although Lowcountry planters seem to have been more willing than their Chesapeake counterparts to recognize and provide for their mulatto children, even if they remained generally unwilling to free them.158 No distinctive mulatto caste developed here, as it did in the corporate society of Spanish America and, to a lesser extent, in the British Caribbean. Instead, the mulattoes were simply absorbed into the slave population.

While the eighteenth-century plantation complex shaped slave and white society in the Chesapeake and the Lower South in ways that were to set a permanent imprint on the entire region, slavery was also becoming more common in the north, in response to the fluctuating labour requirements of an eastern seaboard caught up in the rapidly expanding Atlantic economy.159 Even New England, whose population was expanding faster than the capacity of the land to offer productive employment, looked to unfree labour in the form of black slaves or indentured servants to meet the deficit in its labour needs. Boston's slave population rose from 300 to 400 in 1710 to over 1,300 in 1742; by 1750, blacks constituted a tenth of the population of Rhode Island, where Newport was emerging as a major centre of the shipbuilding industry.160

The port towns of the Middle Colonies were still more reliant than those of New England on unfree labour. By 1746, 21 per cent of the population of the city of New York consisted of black slaves, and weekly slave auctions were held at various points in the city.161 Philadelphia, too, had a sizeable black population. Here, as in other seaboard cities, the upper ranks of society acquired blacks as household servants. At the same time, slavery was also spreading to the countryside.

Yet there were also potential constraints, both voluntary and natural, on the growth of slavery in this central region. A wave of slave unrest, accompanied by arson, moved up the eastern seaboard, hitting New York in 1741, and creating a general sense of unease. This could only encourage a preference for white labour, free or indentured, although the ultimate decision was likely to turn on its availability and relative cost. There was, too, a diffused, if still weak, anti-slavery sentiment in some parts of white society, and during the 1750s Philadelphia Quakers began to campaign actively against slave ownership. Practical considerations also came into play. In spite of the growth of rural slavery in the Middle Colonies, the absence of a labour-intensive staple crop - sugar, tobacco or rice - militated against the development of the kind of plantation economies that institutionalized black slavery in the West Indies and the southern colonies. Perhaps most important of all, the sheer flood of white immigrants, coupled with natural population increase on a remarkable scale, meant that, even if localized shortfalls in times of economic boom created a temporary demand for imported labour, the upward surge of population proved sufficient to respond to ordinary needs and was even beginning to create a labour surplus.162

A similar phenomenon was visible in those parts of the Spanish American mainland where, by the mid-eighteenth century, the irregular recovery of the Indian population and the rapid growth of a racially mixed population was tilting the balance in favour of a home-grown `free' labour force. This was happening, for instance, in the obrajes, or textile workshops, the nearest the Spanish American colonial economy came to possessing a factory system. These workshops, employing anything from twenty to 200 workers apiece, and operating either in, or on the outskirts of, cities and towns, were a response to the clothing requirements of a population which could not afford the high prices of textiles imported from Europe. Dependent on Indian labour when they were first set up in the sixteenth century, the obrajes of New Spain subsequently resorted to African slave labour to supplement a diminishing indigenous labour force. In the eighteenth century, however, they turned increasingly to Indian or mixed-race workers, who were forced to labour in conditions that made them little better off than slaves. 163

All the societies of the Americas had in fact to weigh the relative costs of African slaves and of the alternative sources of labour available. The calculation had to include not only the price demanded at the auction block by slave-traders and merchants, as set against that of free labour or other forms of unfree labour currently on offer, but also the estimated profitability, reliability and productivity of slaves over the term of their lives when compared with the alternatives. It also had to take into account the type of occupation for which they were required. An African slave might be better than an Indian for overseeing workers on a Mexican hacienda, but unsuited for labour in the mines.

On this basis, the terms of the equation seem to have swung against the acquisition of black slave labour over significant areas of the Spanish American mainland during the eighteenth century. This was certainly true of New Spain, where the slave population, which stood at 35,000 in the mid-seventeenth century,164 had dwindled to no more than 10,000 in a population of almost 6 million by the last years of the eighteenth. A high rate of manumission, which is likely to have been influenced by assessments of profitability at least as much as by religious considerations, helped to swell Mexico's already large free black population, and with it the domestic - and multi-ethnic - pool of free labour. On the other hand, demand for African labour remained high in the coastal regions of Peru, and, to a lesser extent, on the cacao plantations of Venezuela. Both had African populations of around 90,000 at the end of the eighteenth century, of whom 40,000 in Peru and 64,000 in Venezuela were slaves. 161