The Sugar Barons (26 page)

The aim was to persuade the poor whites to ally themselves with the planter class, in effect to choose race over class as their defining characteristic. In the ‘Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes’,
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the Africans were described as a ‘heathenish, brutish and an uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people’. The white servants, though still heavily policed in their behaviour, were carefully given better rights than the blacks – to food, clothing, general treatment and legal protection. Slaves who assaulted a white person of whatever status were to be whipped, then, on a second offence whipped some more and have their nose slit and forehead branded. While on paper the Act aimed to protect the slaves from ‘the Arbitrary, cruell and outrageous will of every evill disposed person’, masters could punish slaves in any way they liked, even to death, the only penalty being a fine, and this was easily evaded. Whites’ rights to trial by jury (a fundamental right of English law) were confirmed, while blacks faced a kangaroo court of the master’s local cronies. For whites, differences between men and women were legally recognised, but not for blacks. Black men were to be severely punished if they had sex with a white woman, even if it was consensual, although white men could rape black women with impunity.

This racism was a new departure, as planters, who had recently lumped together African slaves and ‘dissolute English, Scotch and [particularly] Irish’, came to realise the usefulness to their security of ‘whiteness’. A pamphleteer writing at the time felt it necessary to explain to his readers in England that ‘white’ was ‘the general name for Europeans’. And just as the 1661 Acts were copied throughout the English West Indies and in South Carolina,
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so this new ideology of whiteness was spread from Barbados and carried around the empire.
In the 1640s, Richard Ligon had been amazed that Barbados’s enslaved Africans, whose number at that time, interestingly, he wildly overestimated, did not simply use their superior numbers to seize control of the island. He put this down to the Africans’ fear of firearms, their successful ‘de-manning’ by the institution of slavery, the ‘divide-and-rule’ tactic that saw some given privileges (such as wives) in return for loyalty, and their inability – due to the many different languages they spoke – to combine with each other and therefore organise themselves as a united body.

As the balance of numbers shifted inexorably against them, even with the poor whites largely on their side, the planters tried, as much as was practical, to buy slaves for their plantations in small groups from different and previously competing tribes or nations. One commentator wrote that ‘the safety of the plantations depends upon having Negroes from all parts’. But this was only going to succeed for a short time. A visitor from the late 1660s wrote that the slaves were ‘passionate Lovers one of another; and though they are born in different Countries, and sometimes, when at home, Enemies one to another; yet when occasion requires they mutually support and assist one another, as if they were all Brethren’. Scott himself warned in the 1660s that ‘the whole may be endangered, for now there are many thousands of slaves that speak English’.

Henry Drax, in his influential ‘Instructions’, was very careful to single out certain of the Drax Hall slaves for special treatment. Moncky Nocco, ‘who had bene ane Exelentt Slawe and will I hope Continue Soe in the place he is of head owerseer’, was to be given extra food – ‘10 pounds of fish or flesh a week to dispose of to his family’ as well as ‘a new Sarge Suit Every year and A Hatt’. A handful of others were also to be treated differently from the bulk of the workforce.

Most planters aimed, by insisting on continuous overwork and underfeeding, to keep their slaves in a state of exhaustion and physical weakness. This, in fact, took little extra effort. Enslaved Africans who had survived the brutal ‘Middle Passage’, the journey from West Africa to the Caribbean, during which as many as a quarter died from dehydration or
disease, arrived in Barbados so weakened that a further third died within three years. Henry Drax banked on having to replace some 5 to 8 per cent of his workforce per year.

Some, like Drax, came to understand that by starving and mistreating their slaves they were actually provoking rebellion and harming their own interests. After all, a sugar operation’s slaves were by far its most expensive and valuable asset, often accounting for more than half the capital tied up in a plantation. As a governor of Barbados would write, ‘our whole dependence is upon Negroes’. Henry Drax’s approach, as outlined in his ‘Instructions’, was to ensure that ‘there be not too much Severity … the weak hands must not be pressed’. ‘Negroes Must Not by any means Ewer want.’ So that they ‘go through their Work with Cheerfulness’, a wide range of provisions – cassava, plantain, corn and peas – should be grown, and each slave given two quarts of molasses and one pound of fish a week, with overseers and head boilers getting twice that amount. They should also have occasional rations of tobacco, palm oil and salt. Rum was to be doled out in the morning in wet weather and whatever else needed ‘for the Incoragmentt of Ptickler Negros’. Although a doctor was to be employed full time on the plantations, Drax correctly identified adequate food as the most important factor in keeping the workforce healthy: ‘The Kittchin being more usefull in the recovering and Raysing of Negroes then the Appothycaries Shopp.’

Henry Drax’s ‘Instructions’, written as a guide for his overseer, Richard Harwood, are unusually detailed and generous, but his cousin Christopher Codrington, in his will written in 1698, also carefully stipulated the food and clothing that his slaves were to receive. In fact, both men wanted to see themselves as heads of families in the contemporary English paternalistic model. Drax referred to ‘all the members of my family, black and white’. Codrington, who assembled his slave force from the Akan-speaking Coromantee people of the Gold Coast (considered by some to be dangerously warlike), told his son that ‘They are not only the best and most faithful of our slaves but are really all born Heroes … Noe man deserved a Corramante that would not treat him like a Friend rather than a Slave.’ According to his son, after the elder Codrington’s death, his slaves paid regular visits to his tomb, lamenting and making libations, and promising that ‘when they have done working for his son they will come to Him be his faithful slaves in ye other World’.

However far-fetched this story might sound, some enslaved men and women did show great loyalty to their ‘masters’. Nevertheless, we know from the ‘Instructions’ that Drax’s slaves were ‘apt to Lurk and Meech
from their Work’ and constantly stole from him. If it was food taken, then the punishment should be light, he ordered, and his manager should ‘Newer punish Either to Satttisfy your own anger or passin’, the ‘End’ of punishment being the reclamation of the ‘Mallyfactor’. (Drax hinted that he had hired Harwood precisely because he could control his ‘passin’.) But no compassion was to be allowed to get in the way of profit. If they started stealing ‘Sugar, Molasses or Rum, which is our money and the final product of all our endeavours … they must be severely handled being no punishment too terrible on such an occasion as doth not deprive the party of either life or limb’. Such punishments should be promptly applied, he warned, before the slaves ‘when threatened do hang themselves’.

Thus the brutal reality of the plantation seeped through all the talk of ‘cheerful work’ and ‘family’. Indeed, from the earliest days of extensive slavery in Barbados, more than anything else extreme violence underwrote and sustained the slave society. Admittedly, it was a time when in England the smallest felony would see a poor man put to death, and soldiers and sailors were regularly whipped to within an inch of their lives to enforce ‘discipline’. Nonetheless, the brutality of the plantations was perhaps unprecedented in Western history; to be a slave in the Americas was worse even than to be a galley slave for the Turks or Moors. Every plantation had a whipping post, and many overseers excelled themselves with sadistic innovations. Some slaves, having been brutally lashed, would have salt rubbed into their wounds, or molasses poured on them to attract biting flies and ants. Father Biet, in Barbados in the 1650s, was shocked by the ‘severity’ with which the slaves were treated: ‘If some go beyond the limits of the plantation on a Sunday they are given fifty blows with a cudgel; these often bruise them severely’, he wrote. ‘If they commit some other singly more serious offence they are beaten to excess, sometimes up to the point of applying a firebrand all over their bodies, which makes them shriek with despair.’ On one occasion he visited an Irish planter on the eastern side of the island, a man whom he had befriended. As he arrived, he was confronted with the spectacle of a slave in irons in the middle of the courtyard. Apparently he had stolen a pig to eat. ‘Every day, his hands in irons, the overseer had him whipped by the other Negroes until he was all covered with blood’, Biet’s account reads. ‘The overseer, after having had him treated thus for seven or eight days, cut off one of his ears, had it roasted, and forced him to eat it. He wanted to do the same to the other ear and the nose as well.’ Just under 50 years later, another French priest, Father Labat (a fascinating figure who was as much spy and military engineer as man of the cloth), reported from a visit to Barbados that ‘The drunken,
unreasonable and savage overseers … beat [the slaves] mercilessly for the least fault, and they seem to care less for the life of a negro than that of a horse.’

Such cruelty is testament to the growing fear that the whites felt for their slaves, and also to the slaves’ continuing resistance. As the black population swelled and the number of whites dwindled, the ‘masters’ needed to be ever more vigilant; every two weeks, slave quarters would be searched for weapons; movement off the plantation was strictly regulated. A large part of the slave law of 1661 concerned dealing with the problem of runaway slaves. But even so, this level of sadism was extraordinary, a cruelty born perhaps out of the ennui and interminable isolation of the handful of whites on the plantation, fuelled doubtless by alcohol, leading to a loss of any sense that a human life was worth anything. Thus the institution of slavery, as has been written, ‘led to a cycle of deformed human relationships which left all parties morally and aesthetically maimed’.

Few sensitive and intelligent visitors to Barbados in the seventeenth century, whether French or English, failed to be shocked by the severity of the workings of the slave system. But none really questioned the principle of slavery, only the practice. Father Biet conceded that ‘It is true that one must keep these kinds of people obedient.’ Father Labat, having condemned the cruelty of the overseers, explained that they were ‘compelled to exceed the limits of moderation in the punishment of their slaves so as to intimidate the others and to impress fear and dutifulness upon them to prevent them becoming the victims of such men, who being usually ten to one white man, are always ready to rebel and attempt to commit the most terrible crimes to retain their freedom’. The French treated their slaves better, he wrote, but that was only because they were not so numerous, and thus not so great a threat.
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A visitor to the English islands in the 1660s called the slave trade ‘barbarous’, but conceded that the ‘proud and insolent’ blacks had ‘to be kept in awe by threats and blows’. Punishment, he wrote, should be moderate, but this had more to do with practicality than compassion: if they were treated with ‘extream ferocity’, they tended to run away or commit suicide. He even went as far as to say that the Africans ‘prefer
their present slavery before their former liberty, the loss whereof they never afterwards regret’. Another writer who was in Jamaica in the early 1670s complained that the slaves were starved and ill-treated, ‘yet are they well contented with their Conditions; and if their Master is but any thing kind, they think nothing too much to be done for them’.

A threat to the status quo came with the visit to Barbados of the Quaker leader George Fox. During the next century, the Quakers would be at the forefront of the abolitionist movement, and they arrived on the island in 1671 with a potentially revolutionary idea: that the ‘Negroes’ were just as much men, possessing souls, as their masters.

After a difficult journey from England, involving storms, a leaky boat and a narrow escape from pirates, George Fox, together with a small entourage, landed at Bridgetown in October 1671. He spent three months on the island, during which time he addressed hundreds of whites and blacks, and had the opportunity to take a long, hard look at the slave society that had been created there. (He subsequently visited Nevis and Antigua, where Samuel Winthrop, ‘being convinced, he and his Family received the Truth’. He then proceeded to Newport, thus further enhancing the Quaker-based links between that town and the West Indies.)

What emerged were a series of pamphlets published over the subsequent few years. In them, Fox appealed to the planters to ‘deal mildly and gently with their Negroes, and not use cruelty toward them’. Deputy Governor Codrington was warned by Fox that God would require an accounting for the treatment of all Negroes and ‘tawnies’ in Barbados. Towards the end of their lives, the Quaker argued, the slaves should be freed and given the wherewithal to sustain themselves. His most trenchant criticism, however, was reserved for the Anglican clergy on the islands, who had spectacularly failed even to attempt to convert the Africans to Christianity. ‘If you be Ministers of Christ’, he wrote, ‘are you not Teachers of Blacks and Tawnies (to wit, Indians) as well as of Whites? Is not the Gospel to be preached to all Creatures? And are not they Creatures? And did not Christ taste Death for every man? And are they not Men?’