UNFREE LABOR AND THE ORIGINS OF EMPIRE
In June 1677, the English Privy Council, in the presence of King Charles II, held a meeting to discuss the state of the Leeward Islands. The Caribbean colony, made up of four islands—Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts), Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat—was in desperate need of laborers to work a growing number of plantations as well as to fill the militia rolls. In response to a number of pleas from the colony’s governor and leading officers, the Privy Council approved a plan to help populate Saint Christopher, which involved sending “malefactors,” or convicted felons, to the colony. According to the report, colonial merchants indicated that three hundred convicts would be “requisite” for the island, “provided they might not bee obliged to pay for them att the Gaols in regard of the great fees demanded by the Keepers.” The report indicated that the sheriffs of London should tell jail keepers to pass along their accounts to the Exchequer, and the merchants were told to “enter into Bond” with the Recorder of London (one of the judges at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey) as a promise that the prisoners would not make their way back to London once out of jail. The case was then forwarded to the Treasury to begin the process of paying the jailers, who would release prisoners to the merchants.1
The plan seemed straightforward. There were a number of problems it intended to solve, especially the need for people in the Leeward Islands. But the plan’s success was far from certain. In April 1678, ten months after the initial proposal, the Lords of Trade indicated to the king that nothing had yet been done to implement the scheme, “yet the way lyes open.” In July 1680, three years after the Privy Council’s approval, the governing council of Saint Christopher wrote that they still awaited the arrival of the prisoners. In March 1682, nearly five years after the original proposal, the Lords of Trade indicated to Sir William Stapleton, the governor of the Leeward Islands, that they were ready to proceed but still needed to find a merchant willing to transport the prisoners to the colony and offer enough security. Although Stapleton suggested a friend of his for the job later that year, in February 1684 the deputy governor of Saint Christopher still wondered when the convicts would be sent to his colony.2
Why were there so many delays and disruptions getting the “300 malefactors” to Saint Christopher? In what ways might this story have been typical? This chapter will show how this episode was indicative of the overall failure of convict transportation and indentured servitude to become reliable sources of coerced labor in the English Caribbean colonies during the seventeenth century. Demand for colonial unfree labor increased throughout the century, growing especially acute in Barbados by the 1640s and 1650s, and in later decades in the Leeward Islands and Jamaica. But the supply of indentured servants and convicts from England was never enough for the West Indies colonies. This chapter explores the multiple reasons why the transatlantic servant market established during the earliest decades of colonial expansion no longer served the needs of the colonies by the second half of the century. This diminishing servant supply reflected both demographic shifts in England as well as changing cultural attitudes about the kinds of people who tended to go to the colonies as servants, especially the poor and criminals. This chapter considers why in the long run neither indentured service nor convict transportation became viable alternatives to slave labor in the West Indies by connecting the issue of unfree colonial labor to contemporary debates over population and political economy. The turn toward African slavery in the Caribbean colonies was not driven entirely by colonial labor demand but was closely tied to political, economic, and social concerns in the metropolis.
ORIGINS OF UNFREE LABOR IN THE ENGLISH COLONIES
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, an overseas colonial empire was promoted as a remedy for England’s perceived population woes. Colonial projectors exploited a widespread fear that there were far too many poor and unemployed people in England and that the country did not have the resources necessary to provide shelter, food, and work for its increasing multitudes. The idle poor were a dangerous group that threatened social stability, and it was widely believed that poverty and unemployment led naturally to vagrancy, begging, and criminality.3 This idea was most famously utilized by the promoters of transatlantic colonial expansion during the late sixteenth century, especially Richard Hakluyt the younger. “The frye of the wandering beggars of England that grow up idly and hurtful and burdenous to this realm,” he wrote in his Discourse of Western Planting, “may there [in New England] be unladen, better bred up, and may people waste countries to the home and foreign benefit, and to their own more happy state.”4 Colonies seemed to provide much needed territory for an expanding population and were promoted as places where the unemployed and vagrant could be put to work for their own good and for the good of the realm.
Pamphlet literature promoting the early settlement of Virginia justified colonial expansion in these terms. “There is nothing more dangerous,” warned one writer in 1609, “for the estate of common-wealths, then when the people do increase to a greater multitude and number then may justly parallel with the largeness of the place and country: for hereupon comes oppression, and diverse kind of wrongs, mutinies, sedition, commotion, rebellion, scarcity, dearth, poverty, and sundry sorts of calamities.” One sermon ominously declared the same year, “Look seriously into the land, and see whether there be not just cause, if not a necessity to seek abroad. The people, blessed be God, do swarm in the land, as young bees in a hive in June, insomuch that there is very hardly room for one man to live by another.” To ease these burdens, Virginia was promoted as a land of opportunity and advertised in utopian terms, “well ordered,” where a family could live “rent free.” Promoters argued that moving poor people to a new colony and to “a harder course of life, wanting pleasures, and subject to some pinching miseries, and to a strict form of government, and severe discipline, [they] do often become new men, even as it were cast in a new mould, and prove good and worthy instruments and members of a Common-wealth.” New transatlantic colonies were also seen as places where England could rid itself of undesirable and dangerous elements of society. According to one contemporary, England was “abounding with swarms of sole persons, which having no means of labour to relieve their misery, do likewise swarm in lewd and naughty practices.” Poverty was understood to be an infectious disease, and by sending the poor and vagrant to the colonies, England would become a healthier nation. “So that you see it no new thing, but most profitable for our State, to rid our multitudes of such as lie at home, pestering the land with pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villainy, worse than the plague itself.”5
During the first half of the seventeenth century the idea that colonies could be used as dumping grounds for prisoners and political and religious troublemakers also gained traction. Colonial convict transportation has often been interpreted in terms of legal transformations in England and changing attitudes about crime and punishment. When considered from a colonial perspective, prisoner transportation is usually presented as a source of class antagonism in colonial American society, or as an extension of English law across the Atlantic.6 But transportation can also be understood as a source of coerced colonial labor and therefore part of a larger imperial project, intimately connected to both indentured servitude and slavery. In the 1580s, Richard Hakluyt lamented the fact that many potential laborers were wasted when petty criminals were executed for their offenses. In 1611, four years after the initial settlement of Jamestown, Governor Thomas Dale of Virginia sent a request to Lord Treasurer Salisbury asking for two thousand men. “On account of the difficulty of procuring men in so short a time,” Dale suggested, “all offenders out the common gaols condemned to die should be sent for three years to the colony.” In 1614, James I granted his Privy Council the power to sentence convicted felons to transportation to the American colonies “as that in their punishment some of them may live and yield a profitable service to the Common wealth in parts abroad.”7
This narrative, of course, has a long history and is a key component of traditional historiographical interpretations of the origins of the English empire. It is not without its critics. In 1960, Mildred Campbell argued that many contemporary thinkers felt that overpopulation in and of itself was not England’s problem, but rather the real crisis was the need for people who could contribute to the commonwealth in meaningful ways. The primary concern, therefore, was “the proper handling of labour.”8 Ted McCormick has argued that contemporaries feared changes in population of certain groups or “multitudes,” not increases in overall population numbers. Enclosures and other disruptive practices seemed to drain entire regions of laborers while creating new populations of unemployed people. Total numbers were not as important as perceptions of various subgroups in this early phase of theorizing about population.9 Sending vagrants and other problematic multitudes to the colonies was an outgrowth of these concerns, regardless of whether or not population actually increased.
The idea of shipping poor and dangerous people to the colonies was not limited to promotional rhetoric. Sending criminals, vagrants, and even potential offenders was officially adopted by the Virginia Company as a means to supply the colony with a labor force. Despite these early efforts, the first decade of Virginia’s settlement was disastrous. Of the approximately six hundred men who came in 1607, barely sixty were alive by 1610. Disease and harsh living conditions combined with the infamous mistakes of the first settlers, who were better prepared for military expeditions than agricultural work, left the colony on the brink of extinction by 1615. The following year, however, the company adopted a “headright” system of land allotment, in which colonists were given fifty acres of land for each person they transported to the colony. This encouraged potential planters to seek their own sources of labor and allowed merchants who were willing to send servants the opportunity to obtain land grants and develop their own plantations.10
Led by its governor, Sir Edwin Sandys, the Virginia Company in 1619 embarked on an ambitious program of transporting servants in order to exploit the profitable possibilities of the crop that flourished in the Virginia soil, tobacco. Under this system, the company contracted with private merchants who took advantage of this new labor market by delivering shiploads of servants and supplies to North America and shipping cargoes of tobacco back to England. The servants were then bound to company lands or sold to individual planters for a certain number of years in exchange for the cost of transportation across the Atlantic. According to Sandys, the combination of an endless labor supply from England and abundant land in Virginia would result in prosperity for all who survived. He promoted the colony by financing the publication of pamphlets and sermons that presented Virginia as a land of opportunity. Sending orphans and children of convicted felons also became Virginia Company policy, and in 1620 the City of London bound one hundred such children to be sent to Virginia. Attuned to popular attitudes of the time, the governor hoped that “in Virginia under severe Masters they may be brought to goodness.”11 As Edmund Morgan has shown, the implementation of Sandys’s program during the 1620s coincided with a “boom” economy in which demand for agricultural labor to grow tobacco reached such heights that this program transformed into a brutal system of involuntary servitude, in which men and women bought and sold others and masters treated servants with levels of violence that would not have been tolerated in England. In further contrast to other forms of servitude in England, such as apprenticeship, colonial servitude tended to last for longer periods of time, often for several years. Sandys’s program delivered nearly four thousand people—children and adults—to Virginia in four short years. Terrifyingly high mortality rates contributed to this insatiable demand for bodies.12
The Virginia Company was never able to raise enough revenue to support itself, however, and in 1624 it was officially dissolved. But this system of indentured servitude laid the foundations for the transatlantic servant trade that lasted with varying degrees of success and intensity for most of the seventeenth century. Although labor was not necessarily cheap on the ground in the colonies, it was widely understood that there were always more servants to be had from England or possibly Scotland and Ireland. This was especially true during the earliest decades of colonial expansion, when it seemed that colonial labor demand could only be met through channeling undesirable subgroups into indentured service. This of course did not always reflect reality. Historian David Souden has pointed out that the perception that the American colonies were peopled by “rogues, whores, and vagabonds,” especially by the mid-1600s, is an inaccurate picture. The typical indentured servant, usually young and male, was far less likely to have had a criminal or vagrant background and instead probably had some experience working as a farm laborer or even a craftsman in a provincial English town. Such servants also tended to be highly mobile and had probably moved within England before departing for the colonies.13
It is worth considering whether popular concerns about England’s multitudes that contributed to the use of indentured servants and convict laborers reflected any demographic reality. Historical demographers have determined that contemporary observers were probably correct that England’s population increased for most of the sixteenth and into the early seventeenth centuries. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield estimate that England’s population grew from roughly 2.8 million in 1541 to about 5.1 million by 1641. Cities and towns expanded rapidly during this period, especially London, which grew from about 70,000 in 1550 to roughly 400,000 in 1650. As Keith Wrightson has demonstrated, overall population growth, shifting domestic migration patterns from rural settings into urban centers, and changes in agricultural practices combined to raise food prices and increase poverty rates over the course of the sixteenth into the seventeenth centuries. There were many more poor people living in close quarters in cities and towns than ever before, which alarmed many contemporaries. London seemed especially susceptible to the disease of poverty, which was extremely troubling to many observers. “Who seeing this City to be mightily increased, and fearing lest the over-flowing multitude of inhabitants should, like too much blood in the body, infect the whole City with plague and poverty.” The cure, this pamphlet continued, was “the transporting of their overflowing multitude into Virginia.”14 Early modern anxieties about limited resources translated into worries over unchecked population growth and the perception that England had too many of the wrong sorts of people. As a result, during the first half of the seventeenth century, few if any people seemed concerned about the prospect of sending large numbers of poor people to the colonies. Even fewer were troubled by the brutal systems of unfree labor that the colonies seemed to require.
THE WEST INDIES, SUGAR, AND INDENTURED SERVITUDE
The establishment of unfree labor systems in the Chesapeake colonies directly influenced similar developments in the English West Indies. Efforts to populate these islands started almost as soon as the earliest English settlements were established on Saint Christopher (1624) and Barbados (1627). The Barbados venture was financed by a private trading company operated by Sir Peter and Sir William Courteen, Anglo-Dutch merchants with experience trading in the Caribbean. Planters were to provide their own labor to clear and cultivate land owned by the Courteen “syndicate,” and in exchange the proprietors provided equipment and wages to the planters. The uncertainty of profit inherent in this system left many hesitant to invest much of their own capital in any significant numbers of servants, however. The Courteens soon lost control over the island to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, who successfully petitioned Charles I for a patent on the “Caribee Islands.” Under Carlisle’s proprietorship, planters were granted large tracts of land in exchange for an annual quit rent to be paid to the earl. Planters increasingly relied on colonial merchants who took advantage of this burgeoning market for indentured servants. The system of sending indentured labor established in Virginia was adapted in Barbados and the Leeward Islands by many of the same colonial merchants who had transported servants to the Chesapeake. Approximately 836 indentured servants were sent to Barbados in 1634, and the following year, at least 985 people, mostly servants, left London for Barbados.15
The transformation of Barbados over the course of the 1630s and 1640s reflected similar developments in Virginia during the 1620s. As in the Chesapeake, the colony’s planters turned their attention to growing staple crops, including tobacco, cotton, indigo, and eventually sugarcane. In other ways, however, the North American and Caribbean experiences were markedly different. One major divergence was land scarcity: Barbados is a small island of approximately 166 square miles, and the four Leeward Islands make up approximately 370 square miles. As a result, from early on, land was much more expensive in the islands and tended to be concentrated relatively quickly in the hands of large planters. Carlisle’s tenure system in Barbados allotted large plots of land (usually over 50 acres) to planters, and frequently such planters were able to receive more than one land grant. As early as 1647, Carlisle proclaimed that “by reason of the great number of people who repaired thither, and who by the blessing of God have multiplied there; the land is now so taken up as there is not any to be had but at great rates too high for the purchase [by] poor servants.” Hilary Beckles has discovered that in the decade from 1628 to 1638, over 74,000 of the island’s approximately 106,000 total acres had been allocated. Almost from the beginning and in stark contrast to Virginia, therefore, there was little opportunity for servants sent to Barbados to establish their own plantations after their terms of service had expired.16
Another major difference from Virginia was the eventual choice of cash crop grown in the Caribbean, sugarcane. Over the course of the middle decades of the 1600s, Barbados planters turned with increasing regularity to growing sugar, largely abandoning other crops. But the successful cultivation of sugarcane necessitated a much larger initial investment of capital than tobacco required, and it needed a much longer time to grow and harvest than tobacco did (approximately eighteen months from start to finish). In the seventeenth century, sugarcane needed to be cared for intensively by a significant number of agricultural laborers. In addition, large plantations were necessary in order for sugarcane to flourish and be successfully processed and for the large capital investment to be worthwhile. The work was extremely tedious and difficult, and parts of the process, such as grinding and boiling the sugarcane, were dangerous. In contrast, tobacco grew much more quickly and needed far fewer people to maintain a healthy crop. As a result, as Caribbean planters embraced cultivating sugar, they required constant supplies of both capital and unfree labor.17
Many of the same merchants who transported servants and tobacco back and forth from England and Virginia also found success shipping servants, slaves, and sugar to and from the West Indies. Men such as Maurice Thomson, William Pennoyer, and Martin Noell made fortunes selling servants and slaves in the West Indies and frequently reinvested their profits into sugar plantations. According to Russell Menard, at least seventy-five English merchants owned land in Barbados by the mid-1600s, and twenty-two of them acquired over 10,000 acres during a nine-month period in 1647. Maurice Thomson and Martin Noell were particularly successful colonial merchant-planters involved in both the servant and slave trades. Thomson settled in Virginia in 1617 and became involved in delivering servants to the colony on behalf of the Virginia Company, eventually becoming an owner of a 150-acre tobacco plantation. By the mid-1630s, Thomson was exporting nearly 25 percent of the colony’s tobacco. He also was intimately involved in the settlement of the Leeward Islands by helping to finance a plantation on Saint Christopher in 1626. That same year he and his partner Thomas Combes transported 60 African slaves to the new colony. Thomson had been connected to the African slave trade as an interloper against the Guinea Company since the 1630s and became a prominent director of the East India Company when its monopoly was disestablished in 1647. Similarly, Martin Noell and his three brothers invested heavily in at least five Barbados plantations during the 1640s, and two brothers, Stephen and Thomas, moved to the colony to handle business affairs. They not only invested in plantations but also imported indentured servants and an increasing number of African slaves to the colony. Merchant-planter families like the Thomsons and the Noells helped transform the English Caribbean colonies into sugar-producing islands dependent upon coerced labor. By 1650, there were approximately 12,800 African slaves in Barbados, and one contemporary source claimed that by 1652, there were 20,000 slaves on the island.18
Despite initial successes, however, these merchants increasingly found it difficult to keep up with colonial labor demand. Just as the Barbados plantation economy transitioned to sugar cultivation in the mid-1600s, colonial merchants were unable to take full advantage of this burgeoning labor market as war broke out in England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1642. Colonial planters attempted to take advantage of the confused political situation at home by trading with foreign merchants. Scholars have traditionally argued that Barbados planters turned especially to Dutch traders, who dominated the carrying trade and transatlantic slave trade by mid-century and supplied Barbados with provisions, capital, and labor in the form of African slaves. Although English merchants had been supplying the English Caribbean colonies with slaves and Barbados’s transition to a “sugar and slave” economy was well under way, the influx of foreign traders increased the number of slaves coming to Barbados by the late 1640s and 1650s. By 1660, the number of slaves on the island had more than doubled in ten years, to 27,000.19
War and political upheaval in England not only disrupted transatlantic trade, but coincided with significant demographic and economic changes that made it far less likely for people to migrate voluntarily as indentured servants. This established a pattern that continued for the remainder of the century. A number of historians have noted that voluntary migration to English colonies peaked during the 1650s, when approximately seventy thousand people migrated. Thereafter, the numbers of English and all European migrants diminished, especially after 1660.20 Other historians have agreed that there was a general decline in the number of people leaving England for the colonies after the Restoration, and especially by the early eighteenth century. In striking contrast, the percentage of Africans arriving in English colonies increased exponentially during these decades. During the 1650s, Africans made up about 65 percent of all migrants into Barbados, and for the remainder of the seventeenth century, Africans always remained above 78 percent of the total. By the eighteenth century, English men and women were not simply forgoing the West Indies colonies where slavery had taken root as the main source of labor; they were also no longer going to the North American colonies in significant numbers, either. Instead, servants settling in the growing mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, East and West Jersey, and New York increasingly came from places like Germany and Ireland.21
This decline in voluntary migration from England was the result of a number of factors, including war as well as accounts of hard work, disease, and death in the tropics, which had made it back across the Atlantic and diminished the appeal of such a voyage. It was also likely related to a slight but tangible downturn in population in England during the mid-1600s. According to Wrigley and Schofield, from 1656 to 1671 England’s population diminished by approximately 400,000 people, from 5.3 million to 4.9 million. Population decline during the middle of the seventeenth century resulted in higher wages for laborers, especially in rapidly growing urban areas. Although population decreased overall, urban centers in England continued to grow significantly. With wages rising, people were less likely to leave the country.22 These factors combined to make it increasingly difficult if not impossible for planters in Barbados to rely entirely on indentured servants from England for their labor needs.
CONVICT TRANSPORTATION, KIDNAPPING, AND SERVANTS’ REGISTRIES
Many scholars have noted that the drop-off in voluntary migration to the colonies during the mid-1600s coincided with a shift in the kinds of unfree labor being delivered to the colonies. Rather than relying on indentured servants, merchants with increasing regularity sent convicted felons sentenced to terms of labor in the colonies by the middle of the 1600s. The direct relationship between the decline in voluntary servant migration and the use of convict labor remains unclear, however. Richard Sheridan has suggested that the English Civil War slowed voluntary migration, and might have contributed to the use of convict labor in the colonies. In his study of forced labor in Barbados, Hillary Beckles argues that a dwindling supply of English servants by the late 1640s contributed not only to the increased use of African slaves but also to the turn toward convict transportation. Russell Menard, on the other hand, has argued that servant migration did not decline significantly during the 1640s, but that colonial labor demand, at least in Barbados, simply outpaced supply by the end of the decade. This in turn contributed to the use of convict labor and the rapid increase in slavery.23
Although convict labor had been part of England’s imperial project since the early 1600s, the widespread use of transportation by the English state did not take place until the 1650s. Many of the same merchants who had been involved in the indentured servant trade were also at the forefront of transporting prisoners across the Atlantic. The Barbados planter and merchant Martin Noell was charged with transporting war prisoners from Ireland and Scotland in 1655, and planters in Barbados claimed to have received thousands of war prisoners from 1649 to 1655. Plans to populate Jamaica frequently included proposals for transporting prisoners. In 1657, Noell and his associate Thomas Povey proposed the formation of a joint-stock West India Company, which would “take aboard such servants, or such as by commissions given to Justices of the Peace [as] shall be collected of vagabonds, beggars or condemned persons, & proceed with them to Jamaica, which is to be a principal rendezvous of all the English interests there.”24 Although this proposal was rejected by the English government, the idea that prisoners could be used as a source of coerced colonial labor had taken root.
After the Restoration there were at least three attempts to pass legislation codifying transportation to the colonies as punishment for certain offenses. In addition, in the aftermath of political uprisings in London in 1661 and in the north of England in 1663, political prisoners were systematically sentenced to transportation. Laws against religious nonconformity, including the Quaker Act of 1662 and the Conventicle Act of 1664, also subject violators to labor sentences in the colonies. Most famously, over eight hundred men captured in the aftermath of Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685 were sentenced to ten years’ labor in Barbados and Jamaica at Judge Jeffreys’s “Bloody Assizes.”25 The increased willingness to use transportation as a form of punishment and as a source of colonial labor reflected a number of social and cultural transformations. In the first instance, it represented the further intertwining of imperialism and violence and the use of the empire as corrective “tool” of the state. Just as important, there seem to have been more convicts available for transportation by the mid-to-late 1600s. Cynthia Herrup has shown that over the course of the seventeenth century, increasing numbers of felons received a pardon of transportation to the colonies rather than a death sentence for certain noncapital crimes. But convict transportation never became a reliable source of coerced colonial labor during the seventeenth century. It has been estimated that only about forty-five hundred prisoners were sent to Virginia and the West Indies colonies between 1655 and 1699. This number does not include prisoners of war, which are much harder to quantify, but it is likely that the number of prisoners of war sent to the colonies during the second half of the seventeenth century did not amount to more than five thousand to ten thousand.26
There were a variety of reasons for the limited numbers of convicts sent to the colonies during the late 1600s, mostly having to do with how the trade was organized and structured. Its failure was also directly related to the increasing reliance on African slaves on the part of West Indies planters, which the English government hoped to exploit. The following case study of one colonial merchant’s attempt to send convicts to Saint Christopher in the 1680s illustrates many of the problems in the convict servant trade and helps to explain why convict labor never became widespread during the seventeenth century. In contrast to Barbados and to a certain extent Jamaica, the Leeward Islands were scarcely populated and underdeveloped by the late 1670s. Only Nevis, the smallest island (thirty-six square miles), had any significant sugar plantations or population.27 Saint Christopher had been the first island settled in the Caribbean by the English in 1624, and its population grew steadily in the middle decades of the century. But it lagged behind its neighbors because it was extremely vulnerable to attacks by the French, who occupied half the island. The colony was devastated by the Dutch and French wars of the 1660s, and after the hostilities, many English chose to leave the colony altogether.
A primary concern for the imperial authorities, then, was maintaining and increasing the English settler population against the threat of French incursions. In addition, the assemblies of the four islands frequently lobbied the Lords of Trade for servants to fill the militias and work the colony’s plantations. Christopher Jeaffreson, a sugar planter on Saint Christopher, wrote in 1677, “wee grow weake by depopulation.” He continued, “Nor is there any great hope of the contrary, seeing soe few white servants are sent hither.” Men with skilled trades were especially coveted, and according to Jeaffreson, those making the journey could expect a life of prosperity at the end of their term of service. That same year he wrote to his agent in London, “I confess all servants are very acceptable here; and if any laborious and industrious men would transporte themselves, I should gladly receive them and allow them the customs of the country, with meate, drink, lodging and clothing, as are necessarie.” But skilled men were extremely hard to come by. William Freeman, a Leeward Islands merchant based in London, indicated in 1678 that although he would do his best to provide the colony with servants, “tradesmen are very scarce. I could not gett one this 2 yeares to send, and those I sent formerly on high wages.”28 The difficulties in attracting skilled laborers to the colony reflected the fact that voluntary servant migration to the English Caribbean colonies had significantly declined by the late 1600s.
In response to a number of letters and reports from the colony’s governor and leading officers, the King-in-Council in June 1677 approved a plan to send “malefactors,” or convicted felons, to the colony. Despite the endorsement of imperial authorities, as outlined at the beginning of this chapter, the case of the “300 malefactors” was beset with repeated obstructions and delays, which illustrate many of the problems related to the trade in convict labor. The scheme awaited a merchant not only willing to deliver the prisoners but to take full legal responsibility for them by paying an up-front security bond that would be forfeited should any of the malefactors escape (these bonds were usually paid by investors, who would get their money back after the convict’s term had ended and if the convict had not escaped). In June 1681, three years after the initial proposal, the deputy governor of Saint Christopher, Colonel Thomas Hill, let the Lords of Trade know he was willing to take the prisoners; the Lords of Trade asked for £10,000 in bonds. Three months later, they were still searching for someone to pay the bonds. In September 1682, the Lords of Trade issued an order that each of the three hundred convicts would require £100 security. It is unclear why what had once been £10,000 now cost a whopping £30,000, but the order did elicit a response. In November 1682, the Lords of Trade heard from Christopher Jeaffreson. The Saint Christopher planter now lived in London, and he petitioned the Lords of Trade requesting that the security bond be lowered, assuring them that planters would keep close watch over the convicts because it was not in their interest to let their laborers escape. He also requested that once in the colony, the convicts serve eight-year terms rather than the customary four. The Lords of Trade agreed to lower the bond to £20 per prisoner and to the increased term of service. Jeaffreson soon reported to his plantation steward that despite “the charge and trouble of sending malefactors over, which are greater than ever I could imagine,” he was hopeful that the scheme would work.29 He was joined in a partnership in the venture with Deputy Governor Hill and a merchant named Mr. Vickers.
Jeaffreson soon ran into a number of difficulties. A few weeks after issuing his petition, he and his associates sent out inquiries to prisons in and around London in search of convicts. That search revealed “very few men, and those not worth sending.” And his prospects for the near term did not look hopeful, because he learned that the order for the “300 malefactors” was restricted to London and Middlesex jails. As a result, he realized, “it will take up some tyme to ship off the full complement, because 300 men are not condemned [to transportation] in one or two counties in two or three years tyme.” In addition, Jeaffreson reported, “The keepers of the prisons oppose us, and must be bribed.” Upon trying to collect some convicts sentenced at the Old Bailey in March 1683, Jeaffreson was stopped by Captain Richardson, the keeper of Newgate Prison, who claimed that “the prisoners were [already] disposed of.” Two days later, the Privy Council heard a petition from some Jamaica merchants offering to take both female and male prisoners to their colony; Jeaffreson had agreed only to take the men. The Old Bailey judges had “disposed” of the prisoners to these merchants, whom Jeaffreson suspected were friends with Richardson. Jeaffreson appealed to the Lords of Trade, but they were “of opinion that the men and women ought to be taken promiscuously out of the gaols in order to be transported.” In the following months, Jeaffreson remained adamant that women and children not be included among the three hundred prisoners sent to Saint Christopher. In the wake of the revelation of the Rye House Plot against Charles II and the Duke of York in the summer of 1683, Jeaffreson hoped that large numbers of plotters would be sentenced to transportation, which “will make the number of men that fall under that sentence, exceed far that of the weomen.”30 But it appears no new groups of prisoners included only men.
Eventually, Jeaffreson relented on the issue of female prisoners, and after presenting imperial authorities with a list of twenty-one prisoners he intended to deliver, in June 1684 the Lords of Trade issued an order, later approved by the king, that all male prisoners condemned to transportation “as shall bee hereafter transported be sent to Saint Christopher till ye number of three hundred be compleated.”31 Almost immediately, however, Jeaffreson ran into further obstructions. Sir Thomas Jenner, Recorder of London, one of the justices at the Old Bailey and a loyal Tory servant to the Crown, seemed uncertain about the new order requiring that all men condemned to transportation be sent only to Saint Christopher until three hundred had been delivered. In addition, he and Jeaffreson squabbled over the “quality” of the convicts to be sent. Jeaffreson wanted to choose the healthiest possible prisoners, but Jenner argued that merchants could not pick and choose. In August, the king issued a letter to the Sheriffs of London, indicating that the convicts should be “transported indifferently & without choice,” and if Jeaffreson continued to “refuse to take them in that manner, Our Will and Pleasure is that they may be delivered to such other Person for their transportation.” Jeaffreson finally relented and on September 8 sent twenty-eight prisoners—twenty-three men and five women—to Saint Christopher. He had to provide his own armed guards to help march the convicts from Newgate to the docks, having been refused assistance by officials “because the soldiers, as the officers say, must not intermeddle with the civil power, unless upon a very special occasion.”32
Jeaffreson’s problems did not end with this shipment of convicts, however, and he continued to have difficulties with London politicians and officers. Captain Richardson, the keeper of Newgate who had obstructed the first batch of prisoners, in early 1685 accused Jeaffreson and his partners of not landing the prisoners at Saint Christopher, because he did not have any confirmation of their arrival. Jeaffreson and his associate Vickers were called before the justices at the Old Bailey, where “the Lord Mayor seemed much dissatisfied with us.” A frustrated Jeaffreson concluded “the whole business is that the persons whose interest it is to oppose us, spare no clamours, raise all objections, and make all interest they possibly can against us, to prevent our taking off the present parcel.” It did appear he faced a fairly united opposition to his plan, but nevertheless in April 1685 he and Vickers sent a further thirty-eight prisoners—thirty-one men and seven women. The merchants had to purchase handcuffs and shackles themselves, and Jeaffreson led the guard marching the prisoners to the ship. Despite “a guard of about thirty men, they committed several thefts, snatching away hats, perrewigs, &c., from several persons, whose curiosity led them into the crowd.” Jeaffreson warned Hill that “they certainly are a parcel of as notorious villaines as any that have been transported in a long tyme.” Adding to Jeaffreson’s woes, it soon became apparent that his business partners in the scheme, Hill and Vickers, had cheated him out of his third of the profits (such as they were) from the sale of the convicts. He still awaited payment from Hill well into 1686.33 Needless to say, this appears to have been Jeaffreson’s final foray into the business of sending convicts to the West Indies. Of the three hundred originally planned in 1677, fifty-six had been delivered by 1685.
There were obviously fairly specific reasons why this scheme to bring three hundred convicts to the Leeward Islands failed, and it is true that Jeaffreson seems to have had more than his share of bad luck. As the work of historian John Beattie has demonstrated, convict transportation as it was organized in the seventeenth century was beset with difficulties, many of which Jeaffreson encountered. Jeaffreson’s experience confirms that merchants could choose the prisoners they thought would yield the highest prices in the colonies, and that they had to pay exorbitant fees to jail keepers in order to get the prisoners they wanted. Merchants were also not paid up front for their services and often had to purchase their own handcuffs and shackles as well as pay private guards to assist delivering convicts from jails to the shipyards. These costs made the trade in convicts expensive and risky. In addition, colonies became less receptive to receiving convicted felons by the late 1600s. For example, Virginia and Maryland passed laws against receiving convicts in 1670 and 1676, respectively.34
It is likely that Jeaffreson’s difficulties were also related to a crackdown by the government on the kidnapping of servants by unscrupulous merchants in the 1680s. Jeaffreson himself was well aware of this problem. In November 1682, he wrote to friends in Saint Christopher expressing concern about a case recently heard at the King’s Bench involving the kidnapping, or “spiriting,” of servants to the colonies. Such people had been either deceived into serving as indentured servants (sometimes while intoxicated), or had been forced to board a ship heading to the colonies. Although instances of outright kidnapping were probably rare, historians have uncovered the existence of complex “spiriting” networks in places like Bristol and London, and the few court cases that resulted gave the servant trade a bad reputation and seem to have hurt business in a number of ways.35 In the wake of the 1682 case, the Lords of Trade issued proposals to try to prevent kidnapping, which included creating a servants’ registry, into which all indentured servants leaving port cities had to be entered. They also suggested requiring servants to be bound in the presence of local magistrates as well as new restrictions on binding children under the age of fourteen. Jeaffreson felt that because of these new regulations it would be even harder for merchants to procure servants. “This is a general discouragement to the merchant,” he wrote, “[and] the procurer, and the masters of ships, who are very scrupulous of how they carry over servants.”36
Although it is perhaps difficult to understand his sympathy with merchants who might have been willing to kidnap unsuspecting young people, often children, to a life of drudgery in the colonies, Jeaffreson did have a point. The presence of servants’ registries seemed to limit the total number of servants leaving England, which might have been why they were implemented. A later effort to revive a servants’ registry illustrates this point. In April 1689, the merchant Edward Thompson, an MP and alderman from the city of York, petitioned the king to hold the patent on an office for registering servants. This agency, versions of which had been established in 1664, 1672, and 1686, existed to ensure that each indentured servant sent to the colonies was sent legally and not under duress. “To that end that neither any of your Majesty’s subjects may be liable to be unduly spirited away from their masters or parents,” his petition read, “nor any persons exposed to undue prosecution, after they shall bind any such as shall be sent over, in the said office, and have their names registered in a book publicly kept in the office for that purpose.” After some legal squabbling with others who claimed to already hold the patent, Thompson was granted a license, which he held until 1699. There is little evidence, however, that, other than holding the patent, Thompson ever accomplished anything with his license.37 Nevertheless, the revival of the servants’ registry indicated a number of interesting developments in the servant trade by the late 1600s.
As Thompson argued in his petition, the registry was supposed to serve as a deterrent to kidnappers who “spirited” servants to the colonies. Stories and rumors of being “spirited” to the colonies had detrimental effects on the servant trade. First, it made people wary of going to the colonies because of the hardships they might face, and it also had the effect of discouraging merchants from participating in the servant trade for fear of being falsely accused of kidnapping. As a result, servants’ registries limited the number of merchants involved in the servant trade, and therefore the number of servants leaving England likewise diminished. David Harris Sacks has shown that the city of Bristol’s Registry of Servants to Foreign Plantations was only ostensibly an attempt to stop kidnappers from “spiriting” servants to the colonies. According to Sacks, the rules surrounding the Registry were revised in 1662 by the Bristol Common Council, dominated by men sympathetic to the generally Anglican and Royalist Society of Merchant Venturers. The Merchant Venturers were an exclusive trading company that had been slow to enter the transatlantic colonial trade and had grown jealous of the success of Bristol’s colonial traders, many of whom were religious nonconformists. The limits that the Bristol Registry’s regulations placed on the servant trade in the form of fees and oaths were designed to exclude these smaller independent merchants, many of whom were Quakers unable to swear oaths. Interestingly, there was a significant drop in the number of servants sent from Bristol after 1662.38 Fewer merchants, it seems, meant fewer opportunities for people to leave and might have contributed to the drop-off in voluntary migration to the colonies during the second half of the 1600s.
Servants’ registries not only discouraged merchant participation but also served as a potential barrier to emigration because they added an extra layer of bureaucracy to the process. In 1690 the colonial merchant Dalby Thomas wrote that the presence of servants’ registries “Occasions new Offices, new Fees, new Methods, for sending Servants thither, all which increases their price in the Indies very considerably, and falls as bad as a Tax on the Industry of the Planter; besides makes Servants so scarce, that a universal languishing of such plantations that are growing happens thereby.” It is also possible that attempting to register servants indicated a certain amount of anxiety on the part of imperial authorities that perhaps too many people were leaving England. By registering servants, officials could keep better track of just how many people were leaving the country. Edward Thompson’s attempt to revive the registry office in 1689 and Jeaffreson’s difficulties sending convicts to the colonies the previous decade were indications that by the late seventeenth century, the English government was not interested in sending its own people to the colonies. In fact, convict transportation did not become systematized and organized by the state until the passage of the Transportation Act of 1718/19. The act allowed certain offenses to be punishable with seven years labor in the colonies and granted an exclusive contract for transporting all prisoners to one merchant, with costs paid directly by the Treasury. The vast majority of British convicts sent to the American colonies, nearly fifty thousand people, came in the aftermath of this legislation. They mostly arrived in the North American colonies rather than the West Indies, where African slavery had become widespread.39
It was also significant that Jeaffreson’s scheme faced problems and obstructions from a number of London Tories, such as Sir Thomas Jenner, the Recorder of London. By the 1680s, for a variety of reasons explored in chapter 6, Tories dominated City politics, including the office of sheriff, a number of judgeships, and the office of Lord Mayor. Jeaffreson’s difficulties with London Tories might have had something to do with their commercial interests, specifically their involvement with the Royal African Company. Shortly after the departure of the first shipment of convicts in 1684, Jeaffreson issued a new proposal to the Commissioners of the Treasury for money to transport another one hundred “malefactors” to Saint Christopher. After “several months,” Jeaffreson reported, the petition was rejected, “By which I am debarred of any hope of expectations to have the prison-fees discharged by the Sheriff, as was proposed.” Jeaffreson had been thwarted by the new Tory Sheriffs of London, Peter Daniel and Sir Samuel Dashwood. Dashwood and his brother Sir Francis were original subscribers to the Royal African Company, and Samuel regularly served on the company’s Court of Assistants. The company, which held a monopoly on all trade to and from Africa, including the slave trade to the colonies, had been founded by royal charter in 1672 and was closely run by its governor, the Duke of York. By the 1680s, the African Company was almost exclusively a Tory commercial bastion.40 It is possible that Samuel Dashwood (who later became Lord Mayor in another Tory ascendancy in 1702), loyal to the company and the Crown, was simply not interested in promoting the servant trade to the West Indies in any form. Servants, even those coming as convicts, could have potentially limited the colonial demand for African slaves.
CHANGES IN POLITICAL-ECONOMIC ATTITUDES
What triggered this apparent anxiety about migration to the colonies in the late 1600s? How did colonial planters and merchants, not to mention the state, address these concerns? The heightened concern with kidnapping, coupled with the general failure of convict transportation as a source of colonial unfree labor in the seventeenth century, was likely related to changes in attitudes about the various “multitudes” that seemed to plague English society in the earlier part of the century. By the mid-1600s, the poor, vagrant, and even criminal populations were not necessarily considered to be threatening to society. Paul Slack has indicated that by the middle of the seventeenth century, concerns about vagrancy decreased and therefore the drive to send the unemployed out of the kingdom diminished. Overall population contraction by the middle of the seventeenth century, outlined above, was a major factor in this generalized shift in thinking about the poorest members of English society. In contrast to the earliest decades of the century, by the mid-1600s the poor were no longer considered a threat to social stability, but rather an economic resource to be better managed and exploited. Therefore, rather than sending convicts and other dangerous elements to the colonies, perhaps they could be rehabilitated into laborers at home. Instead of shipping out its problematic “multitudes,” the English state should instead work to maintain and increase overall population levels and focus on how to best employ the population for England’s economic “improvement.”41
As mentioned above, utilizing servants’ registries and discouraging the widespread adoption of convict transportation might have been attempts to control emigration. John Beattie has traced the failure of convict transportation to take root in the seventeenth century to changing ideas of labor and wealth, and the notion that emigration of any potential workers out of England was increasingly thought to be against the national interest. This was reflected in contemporary political economic literature. Whereas earlier in the century there was widespread concern that England had too many people and that colonies could help relieve these burdens, by the second half of the 1600s a number of political and economic writers grew concerned that England did not have enough people to sustain economic growth. As we have already seen, historical demographers have determined that England’s population declined during the middle decades of the 1600s by as many as four hundred thousand people. A number of writers blamed migration to the colonies for this phenomenon. In 1670, the political writer and economic theorist Roger Coke warned that England’s Atlantic empire was detrimental to the nation’s prosperity. “Though England be the most excellent and convenient place for Trade of all others,” Coke admonished, “yet our practice and ordering it, is contrary to the nature of it.” He continued, “the abundance of our people … are diminished in peopling our Plantations, and in re-peopling Ireland.”42 Colonies, rather than relieving England of its over-abundant multitudes, actually drained England of its most precious economic resource, its people.
Coke was not alone in his criticism of England’s overseas empire. “You find fault because some of our people go to Ireland, and the Plantations,” wrote the pharmacist, economic thinker, and future Royal Society member John Houghton in a fictional dialogue in 1677, “and say we want people at home to fill out Cities and Countrie-towns.” Samuel Fortrey, a place-seeker from a Dutch merchant family, argued in 1663 that those colonies that could enable England to substitute goods it had usually imported from foreign rivals were generally beneficial. But he added the strong caveat that “otherwise it [colonial expansion] is always carefully to be avoided, especially where the charge is greater than the profit, for we want not already a countrey sufficient for double our people, were they rightly employed.” The political and economic writer William Petyt despaired in 1680, “England never was so populous as it might have been, and undeniably must now be far less populous than ever, having so lately peopled our vast American Plantations.” Instead of focusing on acquiring overseas territory to ship excess poor and indigent people, these commentators emphasized the value and importance of keeping a well-managed population at home for England’s economic prosperity. Many writers even urged the state to ease immigration laws and allow legal toleration for all Protestants to encourage people to come and do business in England.43 Colonies, it seemed, directly competed with England for wealth and other resources.
Scholars of early modern natural philosophy and scientific thought have often considered these perspectives as part of a general trend in the literature of “improvement” that emerged in the mid-1600s. Philosophers of the Hartlib Circle, for example, focused on harnessing nature’s infinite potential for improvement by investigating and experimenting with agriculture, husbandry, industry, and credit as ways to increase resources and therefore national wealth. They became interested in gathering accurate information and organizing concrete “facts” in order to better control the natural world. Population was part of this natural world to be harnessed and promoted. By the middle of the seventeenth century, economic literature reflected this shift in opinion in terms of the economic potential of well-managed populations. Many writers and theorists, such as Sir William Petty, who was also skeptical of colonial expansion, no longer concerned themselves with dangerous multitudes and subgroups, but rather with the economic potential of the population as a whole. This desire for accurate data informed writings on trade and wealth creation and represented a turn away from viewing the world’s resources in the realm of human endeavor as naturally limited.44 If properly managed, human labor could improve natural endowments and thus create wealth. The state should therefore do its utmost to promote domestic population growth.
In addition, there was a shift in thinking about the relationship between the economy and the state during the early modern period. In order to successfully compete on the international stage, states needed money, and some argued that governments should focus on promoting the economic welfare of their people. Economic interest, in other words, should be the reason of state, and population should therefore be encouraged. The idea that colonies could be used as dumping grounds for undesirable populations from England did not entirely recede, however. Colonial promoters and officials continued to argue that colonies could benefit the home country by easing domestic population.45 However, as the remainder of this book will show, this argument decidedly diminished over time as the West Indies colonies in particular became increasingly reliant on the labor of enslaved Africans.
Did the colonies contribute to England’s population decline of the mid-1600s, as so many of these contemporaries suspected? Through an analysis of colonial population estimates, Henry Gemery has projected that about 378,000 people left England, Scotland, and Ireland for the American colonies from 1630 to 1700 (the vast majority were from England). More than half, or about 210,000 people, emigrated during the early part of the period, from 1630 to 1660.46 So it is plausible that the critics of empire were reacting to a material reality that there were actually fewer people in England, and it seems equally likely that emigration to the colonies played an important role in these downward demographic trends.
CONCLUSION
The failure of indentured servitude and convict transportation as viable sources of coerced labor in the English Caribbean colonies during the 1600s was the result of a number of factors, including changing domestic demographic and migration patterns, as well as shifting attitudes about the economic possibilities of a well-managed domestic population. Although there is no denying the role of colonial labor demand, these political and cultural changes in England played a significant role in the transition to the widespread use of enslaved Africans as the main source of unfree labor in the West Indies. Just as popular debates over population, labor, and colonial expansion became more heated in the mid-1600s, the English state became increasingly involved in overseas imperial conquest as well as a desire to profit from the slave trade to English and other European colonies. The remainder of the book seeks to answer the question of how and why slavery and English imperialism became so deeply intertwined during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by exploring the competing interests and imperial agendas of colonial planters, merchants, and the English government. It will show that the triumph of African slavery in the colonies had as much to do with political, economic, and social concerns in England as it did with labor demand in the colonies.