The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  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,25 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 n
egro 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.26

  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?’

  This egalitarian message was deeply unsettling to the majority of the planters, for whom the ‘heathenish, brutish’ state of the Africans constituted a justification for their slavery. Furthermore, as Ligon had discovered, they were unsure about the legality of enslaving Christians. In addition, unlike for the Jesuits, busy converting slaves on the French islands, the Protestant tradition demanded thorough instruction before conversion, which would lead to the slaves mastering English and therefore becoming more able to unite against them, as well as fostering attributes of education and self-respect incompatible with slavery. They also greatly disapproved of the Quakers inviting blacks to their meetings: the occasions would surely be used by the slaves for plotting together.

  Thus Fox and his followers were accused of teaching the slaves to rebel. In fact, the planters, at that time, had little to fear from the Quakers. Fox replied that this was a ‘most false Lye’, and that rebellion was ‘a thing we do utterly abhor and detest in and from our hearts’. Instead, he said, they were teaching them ‘to love their masters and mistresses, and to be faithful and diligent in their masters’ service and business, and that then their masters and overseers will love them and deal kindly and gently with them’. Although a tiny number of Quakers did free their slaves between 1674 and 1720, a great number more were themselves major slave holders and remained so.

  Nonetheless, the Quakers, who railed against the materialistic, gaudy and decadent culture of the island, were intensely disliked and ruthlessly fined and persecuted by the Barbados authorities, mainly on the grounds of disrupting Anglican services, and refusing to bear arms in the militia. By the end of the century, most had recanted or emigrated to Pennsylvania.

  A tiny number of other Christians did take up the challenge laid down by Fox. In 1673, an eminent Puritan theologian, Robert Baxter, published A Christian Directory, in which he called it a ‘cursed crime’ that the planters considered the slaves ‘equal to beasts’. But Baxter never visited the West Indies, and was not so concerned with the treatment of the slaves as with the fact that no one was trying to convert them – ‘reasonable Creatures, as well as you’ – to Christianity. He condemned as ‘one of the worst kinds of Thievery in the world’ the practice of those ‘who go as Pirats and catch up poor Negro’s or people of another Land, that never forfeited Life or Liberty, make them slaves, and sell them’, but allowed slavery for those ‘enemies’ captured in a ‘lawful’ war, those guilty of a crime, and those who, out of extreme necessity, sold themselves. But the ‘chief end’ of anyone buying slaves, he concluded, should be ‘to win them to Christ and save their souls … that they are Redeemed with them by Christ from the slavery of Satan, and may live with them in the liberty of the Saints in Glory’ – a distinction that, perhaps, might have been lost on an enslaved African working in the canefields or boiling-houses of Barbados.

  The Anglican priest Morgan Godwyn lived in Barbados for some years during the late 1670s, and his book, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate, published in 1680, shows far more eye-witness experience of the chilling realities of African slavery in the West Indies. The wealth of the planters was wholly dependent on the labour of the ‘Negroes’, he wrote, but they were starved, ‘tormented and whipt almost (and sometimes quite) to death’, ‘Their Bodies … are worn out in perpetual Toil for them … A Cruelty capable of no Palliation … other Inhumanities’, he went on to describe, ‘as their Emasculating and Beheading them, their choping off their Ears (which they usually cause the Wretches to broyl, and then compel to eat them themselves) their Amputations of Legs, and even Dissecting them alive’. All but the hardiest of their offspring died in infancy, he went on, as their mothers were ordered to leave them and return to work.

  The ‘brutality’ of the ‘Negro’, he wrote, was a ‘fiction’. In fact, the Africans showed more ‘Discretion in managem
ent of Business’ than most of the whites. If the Africans were ‘beasts’, what about ‘those Debauches, that so frequently do make use of them for their unnatural Pleasures and Lusts?’ Indeed, it was the planters who ‘know no other God but Money, nor Religion but Profit’.

  But, as with Fox and Baxter, the answer was not the abolition of slavery, but an improvement in the treatment of the slaves, and, most of all, their conversion to Christianity. Like Ligon before him, Godwyn failed to follow his arguments to their logical conclusion.

  Thus, organised religion, so important to the abolition movement of the next century, failed to properly address, let alone end, the evil of slavery during the seventeenth century. It did not help that religion on the islands was moribund. Father Biet wrote of Barbados: ‘To tell the truth, they have almost no religion.’ At the end of the century, there were only 11 ministers for 20,000 Christians in Barbados, and even fewer in the other islands.