American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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The early career of the island of Barbados gives a striking instance of
a farming colony captured by the plantation system. Founded in 1624 by a
group of unprosperous English emigrants, it pursued an even and commonplace
tenor until the Civil War in England sent a crowd of royalist refugees
thither, together with some thousands of Scottish and Irish prisoners
converted into indentured servants. Negro slaves were also imported to work
alongside the redemptioners in the tobacco, cotton, ginger, and indigo
crops, and soon proved their superiority in that climate, especially when
yellow fever, to which the Africans are largely immune, decimated the white
population. In 1643, as compared with some five thousand negroes of all
sorts, there were about eighteen thousand white men capable of bearing
arms; and in the little island's area of 166 square miles there were nearly
ten thousand separate landholdings. Then came the introduction of
sugar culture, which brought the beginning of the end of the island's
transformation. A fairly typical plantation in the transition period was
described by a contemporary. Of its five hundred acres about two hundred
were planted in sugar-cane, twenty in tobacco, five in cotton, five in
ginger and seventy in provision crops; several acres were devoted to
pineapples, bananas, oranges and the like; eighty acres were in pasturage,
and one hundred and twenty in woodland. There were a sugar mill, a boiling
house, a curing house, a distillery, the master's residence, laborers'
cabins, and barns and stables. The livestock numbered forty-five oxen,
eight cows, twelve horses and sixteen asses; and the labor force comprised
ninety-eight "Christians," ninety-six negroes and three Indian women
with their children. In general, this writer said, "The slaves and their
posterity, being subject to their masters forever, are kept and preserved
with greater care than the (Christian) servants, who are theirs for but
five years according to the laws of the island.[1] So that for the time
being the servants have the worser lives, for they are put to very hard
labor, ill lodging and their dyet very light."

[Footnote 1: Richard Ligon, _History of Barbados_ (London, 1657).]

As early as 1645 George Downing, then a young Puritan preacher recently
graduated from Harvard College but later a distinguished English diplomat,
wrote to his cousin John Winthrop, Jr., after a voyage in the West Indies:
"If you go to Barbados, you shal see a flourishing Iland, many able men. I
beleive they have bought this year no lesse than a thousand Negroes, and
the more they buie the better they are able to buye, for in a yeare and
halfe they will earne (with God's blessing) as much as they cost."[2]
Ten years later, with bonanza prices prevailing in the sugar market, the
Barbadian planters declared their colony to be "the most envyed of the
world" and estimated the value of its annual crops at a million pounds
sterling.[3] But in the early sixties a severe fall in sugar prices put an
end to the boom period and brought the realization that while sugar was the
rich man's opportunity it was the poor man's ruin. By 1666 emigration to
other colonies had halved the white population; but the slave trade had
increased the negroes to forty thousand, most of whom were employed on the
eight hundred sugar estates.[4] For the rest of the century Barbados held
her place as the leading producer of British sugar and the most esteemed
of the British colonies; but as the decades passed the fertility of her
limited fields became depleted, and her importance gradually fell secondary
to that of the growing Jamaica.

[Footnote 2: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, series 4, vol.
6, p. 536.]

[Footnote 3: G.L. Beer, _Origins of the British Colonial System_ (New York,
1908), P. 413.]

[Footnote 4: G.L. Beer, _The Old Colonial System_, part I, vol. 2, pp. 9,
10.]

The Barbadian estates were generally much smaller than those of Jamaica
came to be. The planters nevertheless not only controlled their community
wholly in their interest but long maintained a unique "planters' committee"
at London to make representations to the English government on behalf of
their class. They pleaded for the colony's freedom of trade, for example,
with no more vigor than they insisted that England should not interfere
with the Barbadian law to prohibit Quakers from admitting negroes to their
meetings. An item significant of their attitude upon race relations is
the following from the journal of the Crown's committee of trade and
plantations, Oct. 8, 1680: "The gentlemen of Barbados attend, ... who
declare that the conversion of their slaves to Christianity would not only
destroy their property but endanger the island, inasmuch as converted
negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others, and hence of less
value for labour or sale. The disproportion of blacks to white being great,
the whites have no greater security than the diversity of the negroes'
languages, which would be destroyed by conversion in that it would be
necessary to teach them all English. The negroes are a sort of people so
averse to learning that they will rather hang themselves or run away than
submit to it." The Lords of Trade were enough impressed by this argument to
resolve that the question be left to the Barbadian government.[5]

[Footnote 5: _Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West
Indies_, 1677-1680, p. 611.]

As illustrating the plantation regime in the island in the period of its
full industrial development, elaborate instructions are extant which were
issued about 1690 to Richard Harwood, manager or overseer of the Drax Hall
and Hope plantations belonging to the Codrington family. These included
directions for planting, fertilizing and cultivating the cane, for the
operation of the wind-driven sugar mill, the boiling and curing houses and
the distillery, and for the care of the live stock; but the main concern
was with the slaves. The number in the gangs was not stated, but the
expectation was expressed that in ordinary years from ten to twenty new
negroes would have to be bought to keep the ranks full, and it was advised
that Coromantees be preferred, since they had been found best for the work
on these estates. Plenty was urged in provision crops with emphasis upon
plantains and cassava,--the latter because of the certainty of its
harvest, the former because of the abundance of their yield in years of no
hurricanes and because the negroes especially delighted in them and
found them particularly wholesome as a dysentery diet. The services of a
physician had been arranged for, but the manager was directed to take great
care of the negroes' health and pay special attention to the sick. The
clothing was not definitely stated as to periods. For food each was
to receive weekly a pound of fish and two quarts of molasses, tobacco
occasionally, salt as needed, palm oil once a year, and home-grown
provisions in abundance. Offenses committed by the slaves were to be
punished immediately, "many of them being of the houmer of avoiding
punishment when threatened: to hang themselves." For drunkenness the stocks
were recommended. As to theft, recognized as especially hard to repress,
the manager was directed to let hunger give no occasion for it.[6]

[Footnote 6: Original MS. in the Bodleian Library, A. 248, 3. Copy used
through the courtesy of Dr. F.W. Pitman of Yale University.]

Jamaica, which lies a thousand miles west of Barbados and has twenty-five
times her area, was captured by the English in 1655 when its few hundreds
of Spaniards had developed nothing but cacao and cattle raising. English
settlement began after the Restoration, with Roundhead exiles supplemented
by immigrants from the Lesser Antilles and by buccaneers turned farmers.
Lands were granted on a lavish scale on the south side of the island where
an abundance of savannahs facilitated tillage; but the development of
sugar culture proved slow by reason of the paucity of slaves and the
unfamiliarity of the settlers with the peculiarities of the soil and
climate. With the increase of prosperity, and by the aid of managers
brought from Barbados, sugar plantations gradually came to prevail
all round the coast and in favorable mountain valleys, while smaller
establishments here and there throve more moderately in the production of
cotton, pimento, ginger, provisions and live stock. For many years the
legislature, prodded by occasional slave revolts, tried to stimulate the
increase of whites by requiring the planters to keep a fixed proportion of
indentured servants; but in the early eighteenth century this policy proved
futile, and thereafter the whites numbered barely one-tenth as many as
the negroes. The slaves were reported at 86,546 in 1734; 112,428 in 1744;
166,914 in 1768; and 210,894 in 1787. In addition there were at the last
date some 10,000 negroes legally free, and 1400 maroons or escaped slaves
dwelling permanently in the mountain fastnesses. The number of sugar
plantations was 651 in 1768, and 767 in 1791; and they contained about
three-fifths of all the slaves on the island. Throughout this latter part
of the century the average holding on the sugar estates was about 180
slaves of all ages.[7]

[Footnote 7: Edward Long, _History of Jamaica_, I, 494, Bryan Edwards,
_History of the British Colonies in the West Indies_, book II, appendix.]

When the final enumeration of slaves in the British possessions was made
in the eighteen-thirties there were no single Jamaica holdings reported as
large as that of 1598 slaves held by James Blair in Guiana; but occasional
items were of a scale ranging from five to eight hundred each, and hundreds
numbered above one hundred each. In many of these instances the same
persons are listed as possessing several holdings, with Sir Edward Hyde
East particularly notable for the large number of his great squads. The
degree of absenteeism is indicated by the frequency of English nobles,
knights and gentlemen among the large proprietors. Thus the Earl of
Balcarres had 474 slaves; the Earl of Harwood 232; the Earl and Countess of
Airlie 59; Earl Talbot and Lord Shelborne jointly 79; Lord Seaford 70; Lord
Hatherton jointly with Francis Downing, John Benbow and the Right Reverend
H. Philpots, Lord Bishop of Exeter, two holdings of 304 and 236 slaves
each; and the three Gladstones, Thomas, William and Robert 468 slaves
jointly.[8]

[Footnote 8: "Accounts of Slave Compensation Claims," in the British
official _Account: and Papers, 1837-1838_, vol. XLVIII.]

Such an average scale and such a prevalence of absenteeism never prevailed
in any other Anglo-American plantation community, largely because none of
the other staples required so much manufacturing as sugar did in preparing
the crops for market. As Bryan Edwards wrote in 1793: "the business of
sugar planting is a sort of adventure in which the man that engages must
engage deeply.... It requires a capital of no less than thirty thousand
pounds sterling to embark in this employment with a fair prospect of
success." Such an investment, he particularized, would procure and
establish as a going concern a plantation of 300 acres in cane and 100
acres each in provision crops, forage and woodland, together with the
appropriate buildings and apparatus, and a working force of 80 steers, 60
mules and 250 slaves, at the current price for these last of L50 sterling
a head.[9] So distinctly were the plantations regarded as capitalistic
ventures that they came to be among the chief speculations of their time
for absentee investors.

[Footnote 9: Bryan Edwards, _History of the West Indies_, book 5, chap. 3.]

When Lord Chesterfield tried in 1767 to buy his son a seat in Parliament he
learned "that there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for that
the rich East and West Indians had secured them all at the rate of three
thousand pounds at the least."[10] And an Englishman after traveling in the
French and British Antilles in 1825 wrote: "The French colonists, whether
Creoles or Europeans, consider the West Indies as their country; they cast
no wistful looks toward France.... In our colonies it is quite different;
... every one regards the colony as a temporary lodging place where they
must sojourn in sugar and molasses till their mortgages will let them live
elsewhere. They call England their home though many of them have never
been there.... The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself; the
Englishman never."[11] Absenteeism was throughout a serious detriment. Many
and perhaps most of the Jamaica proprietors were living luxuriously in
England instead of industriously on their estates. One of them, the
talented author "Monk" Lewis, when he visited his own plantation in
1815-1817, near the end of his life, found as much novelty in the doings of
his slaves as if he had been drawing his income from shares in the Banc of
England; but even he, while noting their clamorous good nature was chiefly
impressed by their indolence and perversity.[12] It was left for an invalid
traveling for his health to remark most vividly the human equation: "The
negroes cannot be silent; they talk in spite of themselves. Every passion
acts upon them with strange intensity, their anger is sudden and furious,
their mirth clamorous and excessive, their curiosity audacious, and their
love the sheer demand for gratification of an ardent animal desire. Yet
by their nature they are good-humored in the highest degree, and I know
nothing more delightful than to be met by a group of negro girls and to be
saluted with their kind 'How d'ye massa? how d'ye massa?'"[13]

[Footnote 10: Lord Chesterfield, _Letters to his Son_ (London, 1774), II,
525.]

[Footnote 11: H.N. Coleridge, _Six Months in the West Indies_, 4th ed.
(London, 1832), pp. 131, 132.]

[Footnote 12: Matthew G. Lewis, _Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, kept
during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica_ (London, 1834).]

[Footnote 13: H.N. Coleridge, p. 76.]

On the generality of the plantations the tone of the management was too
much like that in most modern factories. The laborers were considered more
as work-units than as men, women and children. Kindliness and comfort,
cruelty and hardship, were rated at balance-sheet value; births and deaths
were reckoned in profit and loss, and the expense of rearing children was
balanced against the cost of new Africans. These things were true in some
degree in the North American slaveholding communities, but in the West
Indies they excelled.

In buying new negroes a practical planter having a preference for those of
some particular tribal stock might make sure of getting them only by taking
with him to the slave ships or the "Guinea yards" in the island ports a
slave of the stock wanted and having him interrogate those for sale in
his native language to learn whether they were in fact what the dealers
declared them to be. Shrewdness was even more necessary to circumvent other
tricks of the trade, especially that of fattening up, shaving and oiling
the skins of adult slaves to pass them off as youthful. The ages most
desired in purchasing were between fifteen and twenty-five years. If these
were not to be had well grown children were preferable to the middle-aged,
since they were much less apt to die in the "seasoning," they would learn
English readily, and their service would increase instead of decreasing
after the lapse of the first few years.

The conversion of new negroes into plantation laborers, a process called
"breaking in," required always a mingling of delicacy and firmness. Some
planters distributed their new purchases among the seasoned households,
thus delegating the task largely to the veteran slaves. Others housed and
tended them separately under the charge of a select staff of nurses and
guardians and with frequent inspection from headquarters. The mortality
rate was generally high under either plan, ranging usually from twenty to
thirty per cent, in the seasoning period of three or four years. The deaths
came from diseases brought from Africa, such as the yaws which was similar
to syphilis; from debilities and maladies acquired on the voyage; from the
change of climate and food; from exposure incurred in running away; from
morbid habits such as dirt-eating; and from accident, manslaughter and
suicide.[14]

[Footnote 14: Long, _Jamaica_, II, 435; Edwards, _West Indies_, book
4, chap. 5; A Professional Planter, _Rules_, chap. 2; Thomas Roughley,
_Jamaica Planter's Guide_ (London, 1823), pp. 118-120.]

The seasoned slaves were housed by families in separate huts grouped into
"quarters," and were generally assigned small tracts on the outskirts of
the plantation on which to raise their own provision crops. Allowances of
clothing, dried fish, molasses, rum, salt, etc., were issued them from the
commissary, together with any other provisions needed to supplement their
own produce. The field force of men and women, boys and girls was generally
divided according to strength into three gangs, with special details for
the mill, the coppers and the still when needed; and permanent corps were
assigned to the handicrafts, to domestic service and to various incidental
functions. The larger the plantation, of course, the greater the
opportunity of differentiating tasks and assigning individual slaves to
employments fitted to their special aptitudes.

The planters put such emphasis upon the regularity and vigor of the routine
that they generally neglected other equally vital things. They ignored the
value of labor-saving devices, most of them even shunning so obviously
desirable an implement as the plough and using the hoe alone in breaking
the land and cultivating the crops. But still more serious was the passive
acquiescence in the depletion of their slaves by excess of deaths over
births. This decrease amounted to a veritable decimation, requiring the
frequent importation of recruits to keep the ranks full. Long estimated
this loss at about two per cent. annually, while Edwards reckoned that in
his day there were surviving in Jamaica little more than one-third as many
negroes as had been imported in the preceding career of the colony.[15] The
staggering mortality rate among the new negroes goes far toward accounting
for this; but even the seasoned groups generally failed to keep up their
numbers. The birth rate was notoriously small; but the chief secret of the
situation appears to have lain in the poor care of the newborn children. A
surgeon of long experience said that a third of the babies died in their
first month, and that few of the imported women bore children; and another
veteran resident said that commonly more than a quarter of the babies died
within the first nine days, of "jaw-fall," and nearly another fourth before
they passed their second year.[16] At least one public-spirited planter
advocated in 1801 the heroic measure of closing the slave trade in order
to raise the price of labor and coerce the planters into saving it both by
improving their apparatus and by diminishing the death rate.[17] But his
fellows would have none of his policy.

[Footnote 15: Long, III, 432; Edwards, book 4, chap. 2.]

[Footnote 16: _Abridgement of the evidence taken before a committee of the
whole House: The Slave Trade_, no. 2 (London, 1790), pp. 48, 80.]

[Footnote 17: Clement Caines, _Letters on the Cultivation of the Otaheite
Cane_ (London, 1801), pp. 274-281.]

While in the other plantation staples the crop was planted and reaped in
a single year, sugar cane had a cycle extending through several years. A
typical field in southside Jamaica would be "holed" or laid off in furrows
between March and June, planted in the height of the rainy season between
July and September, cultivated for fifteen months, and harvested in the
first half of the second year after its planting. Then when the rains
returned new shoots, "rattoons," would sprout from the old roots to yield
a second though diminished harvest in the following spring, and so on for
several years more until the rattoon or "stubble" yield became too small to
be worth while. The period of profitable rattooning ran in some specially
favorable districts as high as fourteen years, but in general a field was
replanted after the fourth crop. In such case the cycles of the several
fields were so arranged on any well managed estate that one-fifth of the
area in cane was replanted each year and four-fifths harvested.

This cooerdination of cycles brought it about that oftentimes almost every
sort of work on the plantation was going on simultaneously. Thus on the
Lodge and Grange plantations which were apparently operated as a single
unit, the extant journal of work during the harvest month of May, 1801,[18]
shows a distribution of the total of 314 slaves as follows: ninety of the
"big gang" and fourteen of the "big gang feeble" together with fifty of
the "little gang" were stumping a new clearing, "holing" or laying off a
stubble field for replanting, weeding and filling the gaps in the field of
young first-year or "plant" cane, and heaping the manure in the ox-lot;
ten slaves were cutting, ten tying and ten more hauling the cane from
the fields in harvest; fifteen were in a "top heap" squad whose work was
conjecturally the saving of the green cane tops for forage and fertilizer;
nine were tending the cane mill, seven were in the boiling house, producing
a hogshead and a half of sugar daily, and two were at the two stills making
a puncheon of rum every four days; six watchmen and fence menders, twelve
artisans, eight stockminders, two hunters, four domestics, and two sick
nurses were at their appointed tasks; and eighteen invalids and pregnant
women, four disabled with sores, forty infants and one runaway were doing
no work. There were listed thirty horses, forty mules and a hundred oxen
and other cattle; but no item indicates that a single plow was in use.

[Footnote 18: Printed by Clement Caines in a table facing p. 246 of his
_Letters_.]

The cane-mill in the eighteenth century consisted merely of three
iron-sheathed cylinders, two of them set against the third, turned by
wind, water or cattle. The canes, tied into small bundles for greater
compression, were given a double squeezing while passing through the mill.
The juice expressed found its way through a trough into the boiling house
while the flattened stalks, called mill trash or megass in the British
colonies and bagasse in Louisiana, were carried to sheds and left to dry
for later use as fuel under the coppers and stills.

In the boiling house the cane-juice flowed first into a large receptacle,
the clarifier, where by treatment with lime and moderate heat it was
separated from its grosser impurities. It then passed into the first
or great copper, where evaporation by boiling began and some further
impurities, rising in scum, were taken off. After further evaporation in
smaller coppers the thickened fluid was ladled into a final copper, the
teache, for a last boiling and concentration; and when the product of the
teache was ready for crystallization it was carried away for the curing. In
Louisiana the successive caldrons were called the grande, the propre, the
flambeau and the batterie, the last of these corresponding to the Jamaican
teache.

The curing house was merely a timber framework with a roof above and a
great shallow sloping vat below. The sugary syrup from the teache was
generally potted directly into hogsheads resting on the timbers, and
allowed to cool with occasional stirrings. Most of the sugar stayed in the
hogsheads, while some of it trickled with the mother liquor, molasses,
through perforations in the bottoms into the vat beneath. When the
hogsheads were full of the crudely cured, moist, and impure "muscovado"
sugar, they were headed up and sent to port. The molasses, the scum, and
the juice of the canes tainted by damage from rats and hurricanes were
carried to vats in the distillery where, with yeast and water added, the
mixture fermented and when distilled yielded rum.

The harvest was a time of special activity, of good feeling, and even of a
certain degree of pageantry. Lafcadio Hearn, many years after the slaves
were freed, described the scene in Martinique as viewed from the slopes
of Mont Pelee: "We look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of
cane-fields, and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding
beyond an opening to the west.... Far down we can distinguish a line of
field-hands--the whole _atelier_, as it is called, of a plantation--slowly
descending a slope, hewing the canes as they go. There is a woman to every
two men, a binder (amarreuse): she gathers the canes as they are cut down,
binds them with their own tough long leaves into a sort of sheaf,
and carries them away on her head;--the men wield their cutlasses so
beautifully that it is a delight to watch them. One cannot often enjoy such
a spectacle nowadays; for the introduction of the piece-work system has
destroyed the picturesqueness of plantation labor throughout the islands,
with rare exceptions. Formerly the work of cane-cutting resembled the march
of an army;--first advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist;
then the amarreuses, the women who tied and carried; and behind these the
_ka_, the drum,--with a paid _crieur_ or _crieuse_ to lead the song;--and
lastly the black Commandeur, for general."[19]