The English plantation bourgeoisie in the continental colonies and in the Caribbean opted to base their ventures on chattel bond-labor, at first European but – sooner in the Caribbean, later in the continental plantation colonies – mainly African bond-labor. Then, in both cases – sooner in the Caribbean, later in the continental plantation colonies – the ruling class sought to establish social control on the principle of racial oppression of non-Europeans.
In the very beginning, it was theorized that the ranks of European bond-laborers who survived their servitude might furnish the Anglo-American equivalent of the Ulster Scots or English-style yeomen as a middle class, with a vested property interest (as fee-simple smallholders or as secure tenants) and be the middle-class buffer between the plantation bourgeoisie and the bond-labor force. But circumstantial differences between the Ulster plantation and those in English colonies in America produced differences in the degree of dependence upon tenantry. In Ireland the English bourgeoisie was faced with the fact of the unassimilability of the Irish Catholic chieftains allied with Spain and the fact that English land claims were predicated on expropriation of those chieftains’ tribal lands. In Anglo-America the plantation bourgeoisie was practically immune from successful native challenge to its continued possession of the land, and from an imminent overthrow by African bond-laborers “broken from their tribal stems.” The denial of any degree of social mobility of Africans and African-Americans, the hallmark of racial oppression, was an option not rooted in geo-political considerations; rather it was driven simply and directly by the greater rate of profit to be had by the employment of lifetime hereditary bond-laborers – provided a cost-effective system of social control could be established.1 The result was to give the term “plantation” a new meaning, implying monoculture and engrossment of the land by capitalist owners of bond-laborers. This meant that the early prospect for the establishment of an adequate intermediate stratum of European (and European-American), chiefly small freeholders or eviction-proof leaseholders was not to be realized. Consequently, different ways of maintaining ruling-class social control would be required. The class struggle would produce forms of social control in the Anglo-Caribbean colonies, however, that diverged in historically significant ways from that which was adopted in continental Anglo-America.
The Social Control Problem in the British West Indies2
In 1627, the English made Barbados a colony, using a labor force at first made up principally of bond-laborers brought from England, Ireland and Scotland.3 The English also made efforts to reduce natives of the Caribbean to plantation bond-servitude; there are references to such workers in the record.4 The class-undifferentiated Caribbean Indian tribes were not dominated by “casiques” possessing authority to deliver tribe members into European servitude.5 Because of the Indians’ warlike resistance, the English plans in this regard were by and large frustrated before they could be made operational. A pivotal point was reached in the mid-1660s. An English colony established on St Lucia in 1663 was wiped out by the native Indians by 1667. After retaking the island in March 1668, the English concluded an agreement with these Indians under which they were to be English subjects, but with the right to come and to depart at pleasure in the English islands.6 “The Barbadians … held Indian slaves,” writes Richard S. Dunn, “but never very many.”7
Regardless of their nativity, bond-laborers presented the owning class with serious problems of social control. When the Ark, bearing the first Maryland-bound colonists, stopped at Barbados on 3 January 1634, this fact of life was starkly dramatized for the voyagers:
On the very day we arrived there we found the island all in arms, to the number of eight hundred men. The servants on the island had plotted to kill their masters and then handsomely take the first ship that came[,] and go to sea.8
After first being used primarily in tobacco cultivation, Barbados by the 1650s had been transformed into a sugar colony.9 But the switch to sugar had done nothing to sweeten the disposition of the workers. On Barbados by 1648, when around one-fourth of the bond-laborers were Africans, it was reported that “many hundreds of Rebell negro slaves were in the woods.”10 The following year a plot was formed by European chattel bond-laborers to massacre their owners and seize control of the island. Some indication of the extent of the plot may perhaps be inferred from the fact that, after it was betrayed to the authorities, eighteen plotters were executed.11 In 1655, Barbados received no less than 12,000 prisoners of the War of the Three Kingdoms, in addition to felons and vagabonds. Their numbers, combined with the draining away of artisans from Barbados to Jamaica, caused the authorities to be fearful of imminent mass rebellion by the bond-laborers.12 Between 1675 and 1701, there were four major revolt plots in Barbados. In 1686, African and European rebel bond-laborers joined forces.13 In 1692, a “Negro conspiracy” to seize the English fort at Bridgetown was discovered.14
Historican Richard S. Dunn identifies “seven separate slave revolts in the English islands between 1640 and 1713, in which blacks and whites were killed.”15 “Rebellion, or the threat of it, was an almost permanent feature of Jamaican slave society,” writes Orlando Patterson; he concludes that, “[W]ith the possible exception of Brazil, no other slave society in the New World experienced such continuous and intensive servile revolts” as Jamaica. Aside from the Second Maroon War (1795–96) Patterson mentions large-scale revolts, or discovered plots, in 1760, 1776, 1784, 1823 and 1824. “The last and most ambitious of all the slave rebellions of the island broke out two days after Christmas 1831,” he writes; a roughly estimated 20,000 took part, with wide support, and 207 were killed; over 500 more were executed; 14 whites were killed, and property damage mounted to over £1.1 million; over £161,000 was spent in suppressing the revolt.16
The Jamaica maroons
When the Spanish abandoned Jamaica in 1655, some 1,500 Negroes escaped to the mountains. They became the Jamaica maroons who, from that time until 1796, maintained a separate set of independent communities.17 In 1656 the main part of the maroons, under the leadership of Juan de Bolas, “surrendered to the English on terms of pardon and freedom.” The others continued to be a thorn in the side of the English colony, so much so that they “intimidated the whites from venturing to any considerable distance from the coast.” According to the account by the English historian of the West Indies, Bryan Edwards, the English governor offered, “full pardon, twenty acres of land, and freedom from all manner of slavery, to each of them who should surrender. But … they were better pleased with the more ample range they possessed in the woods, where there [their] hunting grounds were not yet encroached upon by settlements.” In 1663 the English sent a black regiment under Juan de Bolas, who was now their colonel, but he was killed and the general effort was a failure.
In this way they continued to distress the island for upwards of forty years, during which time forty-four acts of Assembly were passed, and at least 240,000 1. expended for their suppression. In 1736, they were grown so formidable, under a very able general named Cudjoe, that it was found expedient to strengthen the colony against them by two regiments of regular troops, which were afterwards formed unto independent companies, and employed, with other hired parties, and the whole body of the militia, in their reduction.18
This struggle, known as the First Maroon War, 1725–40, was concluded under terms of a treaty signed at Trelawney Town on 1 March 1738/9. Under its terms, the maroons were guaranteed freedom, and possession of a region of 15,000 acres in which they might cultivate non-sugar crops and raise livestock, and the right to licenses to trade their products with people of the English colony.19 The maroons, for their part, agreed “That if any negroes shall hereafter run away from their masters or owners, and fall into Captain Cudjoe’s hands, they shall immediately be sent back to the chief magistrate of the next parish where they are taken; and those that bring them are to be satisfied for their trouble, as the legislature shall appoint.”20 This latter provision is similar to previously mentioned agreements between the English colonial authorities in Virginia, Maryland and Carolina and various tributary Indian tribes, requiring the Indians to return runaway bond-laborers.
Objective Factors that Shaped Social Control Strategy
In relation to the question of social control and the invention of the white race, the British West Indies differed from the continental plantation colonies in five significant ways.21 First, because of the narrow absolute limits of land area, and the relatively high capital costs of sugar production, the West Indies was especially inhospitable to non-capitalist farmers or tenants. Second, in the West Indies the attempt to establish a “white race” social control system was seriously and critically complicated by the substantial Irish presence. Third, the central role of the English military and naval forces regularly stationed in the West Indies constituted the most important guarantor of social control. Fourth, the predominance of persons of African descent in the population of the West Indies made it impossible to exclude them altogether from the intermediate stratum. Fifth, the reliance upon persons of African descent in the skilled trades and in the conduct of the internal economy of the West Indies colonies led to the emergence of the “free colored” as the predominant element in the middle class. The remainder of this chapter will be mainly an elaboration of these points.
1. Land area limits, capital costs
The plantation system, wherever it existed, was characterized by the engrossment of the land by the bourgeoisie. But the effect of that engrossment on the prospective formation of an intermediate social control stratum was much greater in the island colonies than in continental plantation colonies. In the British West Indies, in addition to the typical economic and political difficulties facing the smallholder in a monocultural economy, the absolute limits of land area played a decisive part. In continental plantation colonies the barrier to the formation of a stable yeoman class was not an absolute scarcity of land, but merely the economic and political disadvantages of competing as non-capitalist entrepreneurs in a monocultural capitalist economy based on bond-labor. At the end of the seventeenth century, some 51,000 people, 88 percent of the total population of Virginia, lived in the Tidewater region, an area of 11,000 miles, representing a population density of 4.6 per square mile.22 Virginia at large, including the transmontane region (not including Kentucky), had an area of some 64,000 miles. The total area of all patented land in Virginia in 1704 was equal to less than 40 percent of the area of the Tidewater region alone.23 Even in the most heavily settled Tidewater area, the farms were so remote from each other as to hinder mustering the militia, and to make it difficult to assure effective collection of import and export duties.24
Barbados, the second-largest of England’s Caribbean colonies, but with an area of only 166 square miles, was inhabited by 70,000 people in 1694 and had a population density of 423 per square mile.25 By 1717, all but 6 percent of that island’s total area was under cultivation; the great houses of the planter estates were not remote from their neighbors but were “within sight of each other.”26
Jamaica was the exception; its 7,400 square miles made up more than half the land area of the British West Indies and had a population density of only 6.5 per square mile in 1698. Most of Jamaica was unoccupied, even in the early nineteenth century.28 Only half its land was under patent, and only half of that was under cultivation.29 At least until the end of the First Maroon War in 1739, the colony’s frontiers were “no longer any Sort of Security [and] must be deserted.”30 But the main and sufficient reason for the limited number of smallholders in Jamaica was one that was common to the British West Indies generally – the relatively capital-intensive technology of the principal economic activity, the production of sugar and rum.
Excessive emigration of freemen
In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, most of the limited-term bond-laborers never succeeded in completing their terms and becoming landowners. Those who did so needed only elementary individual hand-labor implements to engage in the common tobacco economy, poor and indebted though they most likely were destined to be. In the West Indies, the capital requirement for becoming a sugar planter – for buildings, mills, boiling pots, sugar pots, stills and, above all, for bond-labor – were beyond the means of the former bond-laborers.31 The contrast in estate values in the late seventeenth century in Jamaica and Maryland is indicative. The average estate of the sugar planters of Jamaica in the last quarter of the seventeenth century was appraised at nearly £2,000, and the average value of all estates was £531, of which two-thirds to three-fourths might represent investment in bond-labor. In Maryland in the same period there were no estates appraised at as much as £2,000, and fewer than 4 percent of the estates had a value of more than £500.32 Separate findings by highly regarded investigators suggest that in the late seventeenth century the prospect of a bond-laborer in Barbados surviving to become a landholder was only one-half as great as that of a bond-laborer in Virginia.33
From at least as early as the third quarter of the seventeeth century, many of those who survived their limited-term servitude in the English West Indies only to be confronted by this unpromising prospect were opting to leave their respective islands. Between 1660 and 1682, some 16,000 or 17,000 people emgrated from Barbados, most of them “landless freemen and small farmers.”34 In the last forty years of the seventeenth century the total population of Barbados is estimated to have doubled, from 40,000 to 80,000, but emigration was so great that the European population did not increase at all. Many of such emigrants chose initially to pursue their careers in nearby islands,35 but it appears that nowhere in the British West Indies did such European migration reverse the long-range reduction of the European proportion of the population. Richard S. Dunn’s table “Estimated Population of the English Sugar Islands, 1669–1713” shows a steady decade-to-decade decline in the European proportion of the populations of Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands.36
Emigration became a major concern of the West Indies colonial authorities, not on account of the loss of labor-power it represented but because of the difficulty in maintaining the militias for defense against rival colonial powers, particularly the French, and for purposes of social control of the bond-laborers. The European population of Barbados in 1640 was around 25,000; of these more than one-third were proprietors and 10,000 were “servants,” while the non-European bond-laborers, including a few Amerindians, numbered 6,400. By 1680, the total number of Europeans had fallen to 17,000, and because of the cost of capital and land requirements for sugar planting the number of “considerable proprietors” was less than 500, and the number of European bond-laborers in the island had shrunk to 2,000.37 In the 1660s, Barbados had a fighting force of only 7,000 men, of whom only the large landholders were interested in the colony enough to be ready to defend it; the rest were concerned only with emigrating to find better prospects than they could have in Barbados.38 Harlow’s conclusion regarding Barbados was generally applicable to the British West Indies: it was “the concentration of land into large estates which was gradually depriving Barbados of her ‘yeoman’ class, and which eventually put an end to her development as a white community.”
Social control was aimed at bond-laborers, whether of European or African descent. But the limited-term bond-laborers who, in the West Indies, were exclusively European, were prospective enlistees in the social control system as members of the militia, provided they survived their terms of servitude. This was a scheme for class collaboration of Europeans that required a new term of social distinction, namely “white,” that would include not only laborer and capitalist but also bond-labor as well as free labor.39 The alternative or redundant term “Christian,” was sometimes applied to European bond-laborers, despite complications that arose regarding the Christian conversion of African bond-laborers;40 or from the belief that some Europeans, namely the Irish, though Europeans had yet to be made Christians.41 It became customary also to use the term “servants” for the European bond-laborers, potential militiamen, as distinct from African lifetime bond-laborers, called “slaves.”42
A succession of proposals, schemes and laws were proposed, some of them adopted, that were explicitly aimed at increasing the proportion of the militia-producing European population in the English West Indies, or at least maintaining it. Compulsory measures were undertaken of which the most general type imposed fines on plantation owners who failed to keep in their employ a quota of one European, bond or free, for every so many African bond-laborers; these were the so-called “deficiency laws.” The ratio varied from place to place and from time to time. Whatever the particular ratio, the home government constantly expressed its concern that it be met. In 1682 in Jamaica, the quota was one white bond-laborer to the first five lifetime bond-laborers, “for ten slaves two whites, and for every ten slaves over and above the said number one white … on penalty of £5 for every servant that shall be wanting.”43 In 1699, the Governor of the Leeward Islands was instructed “to use his utmost endeavor that each Planter keep such a number of white servants as the law directed.”44 The Nevis Assembly in 1701 passed “An Act for encouraging the Importation of white Servants, and that all Persons shall be obliged to keep one white Servant to every Twenty Negroes.”45 Other compulsory measures were designed to limit emigration. For example, English prisoners who had been sentenced to ten years’ servitude in Barbados for the 1685 rebellion led by the Duke of Monmouth were ordered to be freed from bond-servitude, but they were forbidden to leave the island without royal permission.46
In the 1660s, the usual term of servitude in Barbados was reduced to encourage bond-laborers to come to the island.47 In order to get and keep European craftsmen in Barbados, the island’s Assembly prohibited the employment of Africans and Afro-Barbadians as coopers, smiths, carpenters, tailors, or boatmen.48 In 1695, Governor Russell of Barbados remarked on the deplorable condition of the European former bond-laborers, who were “domineered over and used like dogs.” Such treatment, he believed, would “drive away the commonalty of the white people.” There were hundreds of such unfortunates, he declared, that never enjoyed fresh meat nor a dram of rum. That woeful lack could be made up, he suggested, by reducing the property qualification for voting at the annual elections in the expectation that candidates for the Assembly “would sometimes give the miserable creatures a little rum and fresh provisions and such things as would be of nourishment and make their lives more comfortable, in the hopes of getting their votes.”49 In 1709, a merchant trading to Jamaica proposed to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations the settling of a colony of German Protestants in that island, because the European militia was reduced to 2,500 and there were 40,000 African bond-laborers to be repressed. These settlers were to “be free so soon as they set foot on shore in that island, and enjoy all privileges;” they were to be granted five or six acres of land in fee simple for every member of each family.50 Six years later, the Lords of Trade and Plantations proposed that all Protestant European immigrants be extended those privileges on arrival in Jamaica.51
Suggestions were advanced that, voluntarily or otherwise, the great plantation owners should surrender title to a small portion of their lands to European ex-bond-laborers; but that notion came to naught because of a lack of sufficient support from the prospective donors.52 Ultimately a compromise was reached; the land would remain in the ownership of the capitalist owners, but they would allow a few acres to be occupied by European tenants without any rent or other obligation except that of service in the militia. Properly called “military tenants,” these men represented the ultimate stage in the evolution of “whiteness”; their contribution to the economic life of the colony was neglible to nonexistent, and there was no other rationale for their existence except the political one of serving as a ready reserve for social control over bond-laborers. For especially meritorious service in the war against external or internal enemies, some such men might be given ownership of an African bond-laborer. The result, however, was not an enhancement of their participation in the economic activity of the colony, but merely provided a means of making the “military tenants” more comfortable in their shiftless existence.53
In token of their acquired status as “whites,” even European bond-laborers were by law protected against “excessive correction” by their owners, but by and large such encouragement failed to convince European laborers to come to and remain in the West Indies in the numbers that were necessary for the establishing of a civil regime of racial oppression.54 In time the propertyless majority of the European population of the British West Indies would be assigned to a special category, socially and economically marginalized as “poor whites.”55
2. The Irish complication
The policy designed by the plantation bourgeoisie to enlist laboring-class Europeans, as “whites,” in a social control stratum against Africans occasionally encountered manifestations of the contrary normal tendency of European and African bond-laborers to make common cause against their owners. Such events were a challenge to the establishment of the new all-class, all-European “white” identity.56 It was the behavior of many of the Irish bond-laborers that created the greatest breach in that concept.57
The Caribbean was a cockpit of European colonial rivalry. Over a period of eighty years from 1667 to 1748, the region was involved in four formal wars, in which England was aligned against one or more Catholic powers, primarily France, but also Spain.58 This period coincided with much of the tragic English conquest of Ireland and Ireland’s subjection under the most extreme period of the racial oppression under the “anti-Popery” Penal Laws.59 In this period, Catholic Irish bond-laborers, who constituted a major proportion of the European bond-laborers in the British West Indies, were often disposed to ally their cause with any challenge to British authority, whether that challenge were made by African bond-laborers or by a rival colonial power.
In November 1655, following the Cromwellian conquest, when the “Irish slave trade” was at its fullest, the Barbados Colony Council was apprised that “there are several Irish servants and Negroes out in Rebellion in the Thicketts and thereabouts.”60 Two years later, the Barbados General Assembly warned that Irish men and women were wandering about the island pretending to be free, some of whom had “endeavoured to secure with Armes: and others now forth in Rebellion.”61
During the War of Devolution in which the French captured and held St Kitts for two years, 1666–67, decisive roles were played by “French Negroes,” who burned six strong English forts on the island’s north coast, and by the Irish on the island, who “rose against the English planters and joined the French.”62 In 1667, Governor William Willoughby of Barbados wrote to King Charles II that of a possible fighting force of 4,000, “what with Blacks[,] Irish & servants, I cannot rely upon more then between 2 and 3000 men.”63
In March 1668, it was reported that Barbados had contributed so many men to help retake the Leeward Islands from the French that it was “in an ill Condition, in regard to the multitude of Negros & Irish Servants, which is much superior to the rest of the Planters and Inhabitants.”64
Citing five entries in the Great Britain Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, Gwynne documents Irish insurrections against the English in the battles for the Leeward Islands in 1689.65 Although the law enacted on Nevis forbidding servants and slaves to “company” or to drink together did not specifically mention the Irish,66 it is reasonable to believe they were among the usual suspects. In the 1692 plot to capture the Barbados fort, Irish bond-laborers undertook a special tactical role: by guile or by force, they were to open the doors of the fort to the Negro rebels.67 Two laws were enacted by the Nevis Assembly on 21 December 1701: one “to prevent Papists, and reputed Papists, from Settling in the Island,” and the second “for encouraging the Importation of white Servants.”68 As late as 1731, Governor Hunter of Jamaica was contesting an act of conciliation of the Irish Catholics, “of which our Servants and Lower Rank of People chiefly consists.”69
Just as an eventual rapprochement was begun in Ireland between the Catholic bourgeoisie and the British rulers in the middle of the eighteenth century, so in the West Indies the spirit of Protestant Ascendancy and “anti-popery” directed against the Irish abated.70 But by then it was irrelevant to the solution of the problem of ruling-class social control in the British West Indies. By the end of the seventeenth century “the old system of defence by white servants had broken down,” writes military historian John W. Fortescue.71 What he said with particular reference to defense applies also to the failure of the attempt to establish a system of social control in the Anglo-Caribbean by an English-style yeoman militia of European former bond-laborers.
3. “Sending an army to do it …” – English military and naval enforcement of social control
Contemplating the way in which control over the massive bond-labor population was achieved in the British West Indies, one is reminded of Sir John Davies’s dictum that the conquest cannot be regarded as complete “if the jurisdiction of … ordinary Courts of justice doth not extend” to all parts of the territory “… unlesse he send an Army to do it.”72 Because of the breakdown the system of social control by European bond-laborers and former bond-laborers, a new concept and composition for an intermediate social control stratum that included persons of African ancestry was contrived. Nevertheless, social order depended on the constant presence of English military and naval forces. “[I]t was customary,” writes our historian, “for British troops to police the slave population, in addition to fighting the soldiers of other colonial powers in the West Indies.”73
In 1680, Port Royal, Jamaica, with four forts manned by two regular English army companies, was the most strongly fortified place in all of colonial Anglo-America. “Night and day,” writes Dunn, “one of the Port Royal companies was always on duty, working twelve-hour shifts.” Of the fort’s 110 big guns, 16 were located to face any assault by land.74 Throughout Queen Anne’s War, 1701–13, Jamaica was “a garrison colony.”75 For most of the eighteenth century, at least two regular English army regiments were stationed in Jamaica.76 During the First Maroon War two regiments sent from Gibraltar served effectively to deter bond-laborers from joining the revolt.77 On its frequent calls in Jamaica ports, the British navy was counted on to assist in putting down revolts of African bond-laborers.78 Although in 1788 the Jamaica militia of “whites” and “free Negroes and free persons of color” numbered about 7,000 or 8,000, 2,000 regular troops were maintained on the island – to assure control over one-quarter million Negro bond-laborers and 1,400 maroons.79 A British observer writing in about 1774 believed that the inhabitants of Jamaica relied too much on the protection of the king’s troops.”80 In the final Maroon War, 1796–1797, the number of regular British troops was increased to 3,000.81 In 1793, at the beginning of Britain’s war against revolutionary France, the dispatch of 700 soldiers, more than half the Jamaica garrison, “drained the island of troops that were to protect the inhabitants” just at the moment when the alarming news came that the French Assembly had proclaimed freedom for all slaves in French colonies.82 At that time, “no fewer than nineteen British battalions – out of a total strength of eighty-one – were in the Caribbean or en route.”83
A regiment of the king’s troops was sent from England to protect St Kitts after the island’s recapture from the French in 1697.84 The President of the Council of Barbados in 1738 declared that the emigration from the island had been so great that that island would have to have a naval force to protect it.85 There no doubt seemed to be good imperial reason for the stationing of a 1,200-man regiment on tiny Antigua, where a European population of 5,000 (not half what it had been forty years before), dwelt together with 45,000 “blacks, Mulattos, and mestees.”86
4. Afro-Caribbean majorities in the British West Indies
When former bond-laborers in Virginia tried to start farming on their own, or small planters lost out to creditors, they did not embark for another country; they took their hoes and axes and headed for North Carolina or Maryland, or to the Piedmont, or even farther westward. Whatever the extent of migration may have been, the European-American population of every continental plantation colony, according to present best estimates, grew absolutely decade by decade, from a combined total of 71,847 in 1700 to 734,754 in 1780. Although the European-American proportion of the population of the plantation colonies declined from 84 percent to 59 percent, only in South Carolina had it been reduced to less than half, to 46 percent.87
In the British West Indies, on the other hand, Euro-Caribbeans were a minority population before the end of the seventeenth century. Barbados had a higher proportion of European-descent inhabitants than any other colony in British West Indies. Yet by 1713 in Barbados, and in the Leeward Islands as well, Europeans made up only one-fourth of the population; in Jamaica the ratio was only one in nine.88
In obvious acknowledgement of the absolute impossibility that the militia-providing former bond-laborers would ever become viable yeomen farmers, various laws were enacted to preserve other petit bourgeois opportunities for them, by excluding non-Europeans from engaging in skilled occupations or huckstering.89 But in the end, the purpose of such measures, which were absolutely essential to the meaning of “white,” were nullified by the economic advantage of the use of African bond-laborers in skilled and lower supervisory occupations on the plantations,90 and by the valuable service to the internal market provided by African bond-laborers, particularly the women.91
In time, as a result of emancipation by self-purchase, by testaments of free owner-fathers, and in reward for special service, as well as by natural increase, a population of free persons of some degree of African descent developed throughout the West Indies. The same was true in the continental colonies. There was a critical difference, however, in the resulting proportion of the total free population constituted by persons of some degree of African ancestry. In the continental plantation colonies and in the Upper South and Lower South states of the United States in the period 1700–1860, free African-Americans never constituted as much as 5 percent of the free population. Their proportion reached its high point, 4.8 percent in 1830, but in the two ante-bellum decades it declined appreciably, to 3.1 percent.92 By contrast in Jamaica, which had more than half the total population of the British West Indies, and of the total free population as well, free persons of color were 18 percent of all free persons in 1768, 36 percent in 1789, and 72 percent in 1834.93 The proportion in Barbados was 5 percent in 1786, 12 percent in 1801, and 34 percent in 1833–34.94 In the Leeward Islands toward the end of the eighteenth century, one-fourth of the free population was of some degree of African ancestry.95
By the late 1700s, freedmen throughout the West Indies were working in artisan trades. In Barbados the freedman usually began as a hired unskilled worker, but quickly sought skilled work for which there was greater demand, and which had a “higher prestige value.”96 Professor Sheppard notes that by late in the eighteenth century, European freemen in that colony were able to practice their trades only to a decreasing extent, and as hucksters “they faced severe competition, as in other spheres, from the free coloreds.”97 In Jamaica in the first decades of the nineteenth century, most of the freedmen were in skilled trades, as “carpenters, masons, wheelwrights, plumbers, and other artisans,”98 while the freedwomen in Jamaica usually became shopkeepers and sellers of “provisions, millinery, confectionery, and preserves.” In Barbados in 1830, writes Professor Handler, “the Sunday market was … an institution of fundamental importance to all segments of Barbadian Society”; he cites the contemporary observation that most of the produce sellers were free colored people.99
5. Afro-Caribbeans as the middle class of the British West Indies
It seems to me that nothing could have prevented the development of a normal class differentiation within the African and Afro-Caribbean population of the British West Indies as the freedmen came to constitute a substantial proportion of the free population. That was not the original intention when the sugar planters for reasons of present profit began to recruit their skilled labor force from the ranks of African bond-laborers and, by land engrossment, made the flourishing of a European yeomanry impossible. Although from time to time they made legislative gestures toward reversing the trend, the need to make the highest possible rate of profit emptied such gestures of significance.
Just as the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, disfranchised and barred from owning land, found entrepreneurial outlets for their acquisitive compulsion by becoming graziers and merchants,100 so in the British West Indies freedman enterprise – both petit bourgeois and capitalist – sprouted through the cracks of “white” exclusionism despite the dogged opposition of the “white” diehards who, like the Orange Order in Britain, saw chaos in any concession to the oppressed majority.
In the British West Indies generally, the free coloreds included “shopkeepers, and … owners of land and slaves.” In the trade in non-sugar commodities with the North American colonies, many free colored merchants traded directly with captains of cargo vessels. In Barbados, the energy and initiative of freedmen hucksters in meeting bond-laborers on the way to market and ships just arriving in the harbor enabled them to control the supply of produce and livestock to the general public. They were likewise involved in supplying the sugar estates with essentials that could not be got from England. Indeed, this proved a route to sugar estate ownership by occasional foreclosure on a bankrupt creditor.101 Three years after the repeal of the prohibition on freedmen acting as pilots, they had nearly monopolized Jamaica’s coastal shipping.102
In 1721 the Jamaica Assembly took a positive view of such trends as it turned its attention to the problem of unsettled lands becoming “a receptacle for runaway and rebellious negroes.” It occurred to them to establish a buffer zone between coastal sugar plantation regions and the mountainous (and maroon-infested) interior, by offering free homesteads to laboring-class settlers and their families. Among the beneficiaries were to be “every free mulatto, Indian or negro” who would take up the offer and remain on the land for seven years. Each was to have twenty acres of land for himself, and five acres more for each slave he brought with him.103 Perhaps some of those homesteaders served in the “companies of free Negroes and mulattoes” who were employed effectively in the First Maroon War, ended with the 1739 Treaty of Trelawney Town binding the Maroons to capture and return runaway bond-laborers.104 By the early 1830s, “free blacks and coloreds” owned 70,000 of the total of around 310,000 bond-laborers in Jamaica.105
When the militia system based on the European former bond-laborers proved a failure, the sugar bourgeoisie relied on the British army and navy to guarantee their control, while at the same time recruiting free persons, black and white, into the militias as an auxiliary. In Barbados, as in Jamaica, by the 1720s freedmen were required to serve in the militia, even though they were denied important civil rights.106 The British army and navy, however, were subject to many demands because of the almost constant worldwide round of wars with France that would last for 127 years, from 1688 to 1815. In the decisive moment – the coming of the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution – when all hung in the balance, more extreme measures were required, for then the British in the West Indies were confronted with “blacks inspired by the revolutionary doctrine of French republicanism” and were “forced to conduct operations against large numbers of rebellious slaves in the rugged and largely unknown interiors of their own islands” of Grenada, St Vincent and Jamaica.107
The internal and external dangers were so critical that the British supreme commander in the Caribbean was forced to conclude that “the army of Great Britain is inadequate to … defend these colonies” without an army of black soldiers. Eight West India regiments were formed, composed in small part by freedmen, and partly of slaves purchased by the army from plantation owners; but more were acquired directly from Africa.108 However, “[i]t was clear that the continued existence of the West India Regiments depended upon establishing the black soldier as a freedman”; indeed, in 1807 it was so declared by act of the British Parliament: the bond-laborers who entered the British army by that act became freedmen.109 But the logic of the policy represented a major violation of the principle of denial of social mobility of the oppressed group.110 Many of these soldiers when discharged settled on plantations as free persons.111
In the meantime, thoughtful observers had begun to advocate the advantages to be had from a positive attitude toward freedmen in general. Consider the advice put forward by four authoritative English writers: Edmund Burke, in 1758; Edward Long, in 1774; the Reverend James Ramsay, in 1784, and George Pinckard in 1803.
Indubitably, [said Burke] the security … of every nation consists principally in the number of low and middling men of a free condition, and that beautiful gradation from the highest to the lowest, where the transitions all the way are almost imperceptible … What if in our colonies we should go so far as to find some medium between liberty and absolute slavery, in which we might place all mulattoes … and such blacks, who … their masters … should think proper in some degree to enfranchise. These might have land allotted to them, or where that could not be spared, some sort of fixed employment.… [T]he colony will be strengthened by the addition of so many men, who will have an interest of their own to fight for.112
[Mulattos, said Long,] ought to be held in some distinction [over the blacks]. They would then form the centre of connexion between the two extremes, producing a regular establishment of three ranks of men. [If mulatto children were obliged] to serve a regular apprenticeship to artificers and tradesmen [,that] would make them orderly subjects and defenders of the country.… But even if they were to set up for themselves, no disadvantage would probably accrue to the publick, but the contrary: they would oblidge the white artificers to work at more moderate rates.113
Reverend Ramsay, too, limited his proposal to mulattos. The girls should be declared free from their birth, or from the time the mother became free. Male mulattos should be placed out as apprentices “to such trade or business as may best agree with their inclination and the demands of the colony,” and should be freed at the age of thirty. He was persuaded that, “By these means … a new rank of citizens, placed between the Black and White races, would be established.” They would be an intermediate buffer social control stratum since “they would naturally attach themselves to the White race … and so become a barrier against the designs of the Black.”114
George Pinckard had served several years as a surgeon in the British expeditionary forces in the Caribbean, and looked favorably on the prospect of gradual reform leading to abolition of slavery in the West Indies. What Pinckard suggested anticipated Charles James Fox’s prescription for social control adaptation in Ireland from racial oppression to national oppression: “Make the besiegers part of the garrison.”115 Pinckard argued for the social promotion of a “considerable proportion of the people of colour, between the whites and negroes.” The installation of such a middle class “would save Britain a great expenditure of life and treasure. This middle class would soon become possessed of stores and estates; and the garrison might be safely entrusted to them as the best defenders of their own property.”116
In 1803, John Alleyne Beckles, Anglo-Barbadian member of the Barbados Council, denounced the limitations on property rights of freedmen. Such property ownership, he argued, “will keep them [the free colored] at a greater distance from the slaves, and will keep up that jealousy which seems naturally to exist between them and the slaves …”
… it will tend to our security, for should the slaves at any time attempt a revolt, the free-coloured persons for their own safety and the security of their property, must join the whites and resist them. But if we reduce the free coloured people to a level with the slaves, they must unite with them, and will take every occasion of promoting and encouraging a revolt.117
Such ruling-class insights recognized the link between concessions to the freedmen and the maintenance of control over the bond-laborers, who in the late 1770s outnumbered the total free population of Barbados by nearly three and a half times, and outnumbered by nine times that of Jamaica.118 As members of the militia that quelled the 1816 bond-laborer revolt in Barbados, “the free coloureds were reckoned to have conducted themselves ‘slightly better’ than the whites.”119 In Jamaica in the First and the Second Maroon Wars, the mulatto militia justified the expectation that they would be a “powerful counterpoise … of men dissimilar from [the Maroons] in complexion and manners, but equal in hardiness and vigour,” capable of “scour[ing] the woods on all occasions; a service in which the [British Army] regulars are by no means equal to them.”120 As the struggle to end slavery entered its critical stage, there were freedmen who supported the cause of the bond-laborers, but they were the exceptional few.121
By the late 1770s, in Jamaica 36 percent of the free population was composed of persons of some degree of African ancestry; on the eve of emancipation, in 1833, they were a 72 percent majority. In Barbados in 1786, only 5 percent of free persons were persons of African ancestry; in 1833 they were 34 percent.122 Although this increase in the freedmen population brought added forces to the intermediate social control stratum against the bond-laborers, it conversely became a major factor in the final crisis of the system of chattel bond-servitude, coming as it did in the larger context of the Haitian Revolution (in which the role of the free colored had been decisive) and the rise of the abolitionist movement in England. The “increasing wealth and numbers of the coloreds as well as their importance in the militia made it more difficult for the Assembly to deny them their rights.”123
Of some 5,200 slaveowners in Barbados in 1822, around 3,600 owned no land; of these the majority were freedmen.124 But due to “deficiency law” restrictions, the freedmen owners of bond-laborers for the most part exploited their bond-laborers in non-agricultural occupations. These same laws obstructed the employment of freedmen wage workers. In 1830, two persons of color were members of the Jamaican House of Assembly, but they were still barred from giving testimony in court unless they first produced proof of their baptism.
In 1816, a group of the “coloreds” petitioned for admission of all freemen to the “rights and privileges of white subjects.”125 This demand was the fulcrum by which the combined forces on the side of abolition of slavery – the Haitian example, the example of the West India regiments, the increasing rebelliousness of the plantation bond-laborers (expressed in revolts in Barbados in 1816 and Jamaica in 1831), English religious humanitarianism, and abolitionism – were able to leverage the abolition of slavery by act of Parliament in 1833. At the heart of the matter was the fact that every concession made to the freedmen to strengthen social control over the bond-laborers represented an erosion of the rationale of white supremacy upon which the system of plantation bond-servitude was based. Eventually, the essential politics of the Haitian Revolution had its innings in Jamaica. The plantocracy’s resistance to further concession to the “free coloreds” brought probably a majority of the freedmen to the support of abolition, especially when slaveowners among them were assured of being compensated by the British government for the loss of their human chattels.126
In continental Anglo-America, only the rivalry between the plantation bourgeoisie and the industrial bourgeoisie for national hegemony provided the civil war possibility of emancipation as a measure for preserving the Union. Emancipation in the West Indies, on the other hand, was forced by the struggle of the bond-laborers and by the demands of the “free colored” bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie for full citizenship rights in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.127 The course of their struggles paralleled events that ended religio-racial oppression in Ireland. A century elapsed from the first recruitment of Irish Catholic soldiers for England’s wars with the French for colonial primacy to the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland in 1869.128 As in Ireland, so in the British West Indies, it was by no means a smooth steady evolution, but a procession by vicissitudes: from the recruitment of free Afro-Caribbeans into trades, commerce and professions countered by schemes for bestowing privileges on the “poor whites” to induce them to come and stay; from laws explicitly denying Afro-Caribbeans civil rights, and the obstruction of individual petitions for full rights by members of the Afro-Caribbean petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, to the enactment of the “Brown Privilege Bill” in Barbados in 1831.129 What most distinguishes the story of both the Irish and the Anglo-Caribbean histories, on the one hand, from that of continental Anglo-America, on the other, is that Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, and the admittance of “free colored” to full citizenship rights in the British West Indies were the culmination of the growing economic and political strength of the Catholic bourgeoisie in Ireland, in the one case, and of the “free colored” population of the British West indies, in the other. In the United States, on the other hand, free African-Americans were never acknowledged as a legitimate part of the body politic; quite the contrary, their very right to remain in the United States was officially and unofficially questioned, as, for instance, in the persistent demands for the forced exclusion of free African-Americans from the United States.
What is to explain the dramatic difference in the status achieved by free persons of African descent in the Anglo-Caribbean and in continental Anglo-America? And what larger historical significance is implied in that variation? That question brings us back to the Chesapeake and the problem that faced the plantation bourgeoisie there in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion.