Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica 9780812294057

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Transforming Bodies
1. Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition
2. “The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction
3. When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment
4. “Buckra Doctor No Do You No Good”: Struggles over Maternal Health Care
5. “Dead Before the Ninth Day”: Struggles over Neonatal Care
6. Mothers Know Best? Maternal Authority and Children’s Survival
7. Raising Hardworking Adults: Labor, Punishment, and Slave Childhood
Conclusion: Transforming Slavery
Notes
Sources
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Contested Bodies

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES Series editors Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Contested Bodies Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica

Sasha Turner

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL A DELPHI A

Copyright 䉷 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Turner, Sasha, author. Title: Contested bodies : pregnancy, childrearing, and slavery in Jamaica / Sasha Turner. Other titles: Early American studies. Description: 1st edition. 兩 Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] 兩 Series: Early American studies 兩 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016049308 兩 ISBN 978–0-8122–4918–7 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Slavery—Jamaica—Social conditions—18th century. 兩 Slavery— Jamaica—Social conditions—19th century. 兩 Pregnancy—Jamaica—History—18th century. 兩 Pregnancy—Jamaica—History—19th century. 兩 Motherhood—Jamaica— History—18th century. 兩 Motherhood—Jamaica—History—19th century. 兩 Child slaves—Jamaica—Social conditions—18th century. 兩 Child slaves—Jamaica—Social conditions—19th century. 兩 Antislavery movements—Jamaica—History—18th century. 兩 Antislavery movements—Jamaica—History—19th century. Classification: LCC HT1096 .T875 2017 兩 DDC 306.3/6209729209033—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049308

For my grandmother, Mercella, and to the memory of my grandfather, Lloyd

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Contents

Introduction. Transforming Bodies 1 Chapter 1. Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition 18 Chapter 2. “The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction 44 Chapter 3. When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment 68 Chapter 4. “Buckra Doctor No Do You No Good”: Struggles over Maternal Health Care 112 Chapter 5. “Dead Before the Ninth Day”: Struggles over Neonatal Care 151 Chapter 6. Mothers Know Best? Maternal Authority and Children’s Survival 182 Chapter 7. Raising Hardworking Adults: Labor, Punishment, and Slave Childhood 211 Conclusion. Transforming Slavery 249 Notes

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viii Contents

Sources 299 Index 307 Acknowledgments 313

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Introduction: Transforming Bodies

Suspended midair by one arm tied to a rope draped over a pulley, an unnamed African captive faced her last torment. For three weeks in the month of December 1791, she was flogged repeatedly for refusing to dance for the amusement of her captors. For about half an hour, the young girl, who was about fifteen years old, hung from her limbs, bruised and naked. Repeatedly she was whipped, hoisted, and released, her head falling inches from the ground. Her captors watched, mocked, and laughed. Several times during her ordeal, her tormentors changed her position, hanging her by each wrist, then by both hands, followed by each ankle, and finally by both wrists again. After her punishers satisfied their appetites for cruelty, they released her and instructed her to return to her quarters. From her weakened, terrified state, she collapsed, never to rise again. For three days, the unnamed girl writhed in pain as her now disfigured hands, swollen legs, and battered body trembled.1 The story of this unnamed fifteen-year-old girl was one of several accounts William Wilberforce recounted in his numerous speeches before the British Parliament persuading it to abolish the slave trade. Unlike many of the other cases Wilberforce brought to the attention of the House of Commons, this one drew national interest. Wilberforce narrated a truncated version of the brutal fate of the fifteen-year-old before the Commons on Monday, 2 April 1792, and by Tuesday, several British newspapers published the tale of the girl’s suffering. Almost two months later, on 7 June, Captain John Kimber of Bristol, the orchestrator of the girl’s punishment, faced trial for murder. The court hearing and subsequent not guilty verdict sensationalized the case, drawing further attention to the cruelty of the slave trade and the lack of justice for captive Africans.2 In the version he rendered before Parliament, Wilberforce detailed not just the manner in which the youngster was punished but also the reasons for the sentence she received and what he imagined were her feelings after

2 Introduction

the ordeal. According to Wilberforce, the young girl suffered from a disorder, which he refused to name. (Court testimonies suggested it was gonorrhea.) “Out of modesty,” he explained, she stooped down and tried to conceal her naked, infirmed body. The girl’s actions enraged Kimber, who exacted revenge by ordering her to be tied up naked as he whipped her. From Wilberforce’s account, the humiliation she endured was greater than the physical inflictions she sustained. From “the shame she suffered, she fell into convulsions, and died within three days.”3 In addition to the inhumanity demonstrated by Captain Kimber and his crew, Wilberforce found this case compelling because of the gender and age of the victim. His emphasis on her efforts to conceal her naked body, and that she died from shame rather than from her physical injuries, were keystones in his argument. He used such details to argue that African females embodied feminine virtues, which he and other late eighteenthcentury British reformers promoted as necessary for the unfree inhabitants of the West Indian colonies to possess in order to transition from slavery to freedom. The reproductive bodies of female slaves were the vessels through which abolitionists articulated the pathway to freedom. Modesty and shame became the recurring descriptors that newspaper writers used to describe the unnamed victim. The Evening Mail speculated, for example, that she tried covering a body that was maturing from girlhood to womanhood. The newspaper intimated that she was at the beginning of her menstrual cycle, when it described her as suffering from a condition “incident to women about that age.” Additionally, in an abolitionist cartoon painted by Isaac Cruikshank, the artist extended the portrayal of the girl as a virgin. The running title of his painting, reproduced in Figure 1, described her as being ill treated for her “virjen [sic] modesty.” In both pro- and antiKimber accounts of the trial, witnesses, including Thomas Dowling, the surgeon of the ship who brought the case to Wilberforce’s attention, testified that she suffered from gonorrhea.4 Wilberforce did not disclose what affliction plagued the girl. Exposing a gonorrhea diagnosis could betray his efforts to call attention to slavery’s assault on black women’s virtue and purity. Abolitionists like Wilberforce wanted to prove how slavery assaulted the body and undermined the morals of captive women, with the result that they became barriers to the natural reproduction of West Indian slaves. The victim’s age and sexual innocence were therefore of strategic interest to Wilberforce and fellow campaigners, whose proposals for abolition focused on the reproductive potential of captive women as a means through

Introduction 3

Figure 1. Isaac Cruickshank, The Abolition of the Slave Trade; Or, The Inhumanity of dealers in human flesh exemplified in Captn. Kimber’s treatment of a Young Negro girl of 15 for her Virjen Modesty (London, 1792). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs.

which colonial improvement and eventual freedom could be secured. Descriptions, such as those published by the General Evening Post that focused on her “innocent simplicity,” aimed to do more than elicit sympathy from Parliament or the masses. They were a central pillar in the arguments forwarded by British reformers on how to end slavery. Petitioners who spoke in the parliamentary debates that continued on 23 April 1792 centered their appeals on strategies for abolition. Henry Dundas, secretary of the Committee to Consider Measures for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, stressed the need for gradual, not immediate emancipation. In consideration of the potential financial ruin to West Indian merchants and planters due to the loss of labor, Dundas and other members of his committee argued that time should be given to raise self-reproducing laboring

4 Introduction

populations to carry on the work of the sugar plantations. This plan could succeed only if Parliament allowed the trade to continue for a predetermined period, while stipulating and regulating the age and gender of captive Africans. Importing young females within their childbearing years would generate self-sustaining populations, and over time, it would render the slave trade unnecessary. Dundas’s proposal to extend what he described as a vicious, inhumane system of trade contradicted the humanitarian grounds of abolitionism. Yet Dundas had the support of several members of the committee, including William Wilberforce, who in his writings and speeches offered a similar plan to manage the reproductive lives of captive women as a route to freedom.5 The paradox of abolitionists’ quest to save the hapless victims of the slave trade but not without ensuring that the sugar plantations maintained their productivity is one of the enigmas Contested Bodies examines. Using the body as its conceptual frame, this book explores how abolitionists perceived and represented young, black female bodies, and in particular, how they legitimized and sought to extend colonial rule and the benefits it generated to the mother country by controlling these women’s reproductive lives. By insisting that the imperial government and West Indian planters reform the working and material conditions of female slaves to enable them to reproduce the laboring populations, abolitionists tied abolition to women’s reproductive ability. Boosting slave population growth would not only end colonial dependence on an immoral and inhuman trade. More important, it would also produce children whose undeveloped minds and bodies could be fashioned into subjects that embodied the industriousness needed for the continued success of the colonial economies. In other words, these reforms would make slavery obsolete but improve the moral fiber of the colonies without jeopardizing British colonial goals or the fortunes of its investors. Stimulating population growth was therefore not just about ending slavery; when viewed in the context of British colonialism it was also about cultivating moral and industrious subjects. In following this strategy, abolitionists linked abolition and colonial reform to the reproductive lives of enslaved women. Examining how Europeans used African-descended women to secure their interests is not new to studies of sugar and slavery in the colonial Caribbean. Beginning in the 1970s with the pioneering work of Lucille Mathurin Mair and continuing throughout the 1980s and 1990s historians debated the roles and responsibilities of women during Caribbean slavery.

Introduction 5

These historians have taught us much about the importance of sexual difference in determining the divergent demands and experiences of labor, punishment, resistance, sexual relations, family life, rewards, and privileges during slavery. In this body of work, gendered experiences were rooted in a person’s anatomical sex, but were distinguished further by color, race, and class.6 Although these approaches have revealed much about the divergent experiences of enslavement, the category woman as an analytical framework has not allowed for sufficient consideration of how the perceived abilities and prescribed treatment of the body determined how enslaved subjects were discoursed upon, labored, and disciplined and how they resisted. Thinking of enslaved people as having bodies that could be adorned, experience pain and pleasure, reproduce, and express desire, for example, allows us to access alternative experiences of slavery, even among members of the same sex. Dressing the body, styling the hair, and dancing communicated gender difference that complicated sexual difference.7 Examining slavery through reproductive bodies reveals not only how the lives of women differed from men’s. We also learn about the divergent experiences among women. Most obviously, conceiving and bearing children placed demands on and allowed childbearing women to care for their bodies in ways that infertile women could not. The reproductive body was essential to differences in intimate experiences among enslaved women. In investigating abolitionist insistence that sugar planters promote and manage biological reproduction among their slaves, this book places the body at the center of its analysis. Using the body as the main investigative frame requires probing the representations and competing meanings given to the body and its capacities, the social relations and cultural ideals and expressions people created around the body, and how the body’s abilities and disabilities disrupt assumptions and restructure lives and beliefs. A body-centered approach explores prescriptions made about the body and its functions, its uses, treatment, and care and who benefits from its abilities. It requires recognition that the material body exists as an entity susceptible to illness, infertility, and death, despite human intervention and independent of meanings given to it. A body-centered approach is also concerned with understanding how ideas about the body determined people’s lived experiences.8 More concretely, Contested Bodies examines how abolitionist activists portrayed the bodies of enslaved women and children, and how such representations gave meanings to the body, and created a blueprint for what

6 Introduction

constituted proper treatment for young black women. As conduits for abolition, reform, and black citizenship, the laboring and reproductive bodies of enslaved women and their offspring were vulnerable to new labor and punishment regimes as well as care and medical interventions. In the abolitionist era, fertility and age, in addition to sex, determined the treatment and uses of bodies. On Jamaican sugar plantations where planters implemented “reproductive interventions” or ways of manipulating women’s fertility, the lives of mothers and their children were transformed.9 Transformations in the intimate and working lives of the enslaved, particularly women and children, constitute a second key theme that runs through this book. These transformations were punctuated, however, by conflicts between abolitionists, on one hand, who claimed authority to define the treatment of female slaves and prescribe the uses of their procreative abilities, and slave owners, on the other, whose ownership of slaves invested them with rights to wield power over women’s bodies.10 Abolitionists were only one group among many who were interested in the bodies of enslaved women and their children. Others included the imperial government, the local government in Jamaica, planters, doctors, and enslaved people themselves. A third task of this book, then, is to investigate how abolitionist representations and prescriptions for the reproductive enslaved body conflicted with those of other parties who owned female slaves and were financially invested in fertility and child-rearing practices. Contestations over the portrayals of enslaved women’s bodies, as the book’s title suggests, emerged between Jamaican slaveholders and abolitionists. Abolitionists had humanitarian and colonial concerns, while planters were interested in continued returns on their investments. Representations of the capabilities of black and female bodies further diverged from what estate managers did on a daily basis to manage young enslaved women. Slaveholders depicted female slaves as robust and fertile, and argued that population decline resulted from women’s promiscuity and imbalanced sex ratios instead of overwork and brutal punishment. While these depictions were obstacles to reforming the medical care extended to women and how they were disciplined, masters at times tailored the management of their female workers around the physical manifestations and medical complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Planters revisited their labor practices and methods of disciplining workers because of abolitionist pressure and imperial mandates; but they implemented reforms according to the needs and interests of their property.11 The division of labor observed

Introduction 7

on the plantations was not simply one between males and females, or between African born, Creoles, and coloreds. Rather, workers toiled according to bodily assessments, including reproductive ability and disability as well as physical development, size, shape, and weight. A conceptual approach that focuses on the body is useful in challenging generalizations about the sexual division of labor because it requires us to examine the organization of enslaved people’s lives and labor according to specific bodily functions and the meanings given to them. Examining the womb as vital to the wealth and power of Jamaican slaveholders and future productivity of the sugar estates extends the conversations beyond sexual difference. Viewed from this perspective, the assumption that during the abolitionist era, circa 1780–1834, that women were no more sheltered from hard labor or cruel punishment than their predecessors were, is not selfevident. Rather, field and factory workers labored according to the subjective assessments planters made of female body mass and stages of pregnancy, as well as the physical and mental maturity of young people. Studying slavery through differently abled bodies counters previous conclusions that, with the exception of skilled and elite workers, such as drivers and housekeepers, labor roles were “gender blind.”12 Concerns for biological reproduction during the abolitionist era transformed both planter assessments and women’s experiences of plantation work. In using a body approach, this book builds on the work of historians Deborah Gray White, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Jennifer Morgan, Stephanie Camp, and Deirdre Cooper Owens that explores female biological life cycles as well as the construction and use of the female body as a source and site of pleasure, medical experimentation, and disease during slavery.13 Showing how women’s childbearing ability was essential for creating gendered racial differences under slavery, Morgan’s work has been especially generative of the questions at the center of this study. How and with what outcome did abolitionists use the reproductive and maturing body to construct and legitimize a gradual path to ending slavery? How were these bodies used to determine the position and future of the enslaved within the colonies and the British Empire? How did the links abolitionists made between the reproductive body, abolition, reform, and citizenship shape the intimate and working lives of enslaved women and children as well as their parental, family, and community relationships? In answering these questions, this study draws upon theories and perspectives from anthropology, material feminism, and gender studies.14

8 Introduction

Studies on the reproductive lives of women and concomitant medical interventions and political and labor imperatives of modern Europe help to frame efforts to regulate and control black women’s childbearing ability and practices as part of a widespread conflict between doctors and midwives and childbearing women and workplace managers throughout the Atlantic world. From London and Paris to New York and Boston man midwives gradually displaced women attendants in the birth chambers of the city-dwelling elites. Driven partly by Enlightenment science, the advent of man midwives as the scientific authority over childbirth entangled reproductive concerns with articulations of national identities, gender order, and empire building. Eighteenth-century shifts away from viewing bodily difference between male and female as one of degree rather than absolutes required new theories. Male scientific authority over reproduction cleared a path for defining those differences and articulating them in ways befitting political and cultural needs. The ability of British men of science to explain the mysteries of the female body and reproduction reinforced gender hierarchies of male superiority that had hitherto exerted physical and moral power over women through virginity requirements, whipping for fornication, and limited legal protection for rape and domestic violence. Control over reproduction was another frontier in the quest for male domination over women’s bodies. Unlocking the secrets of women’s bodies also imbued national rhetoric of British progress, pointing out that scientific advances distinguished the practices of modern Britons from crude and superstitious practices of a bygone era and other cultures. Applying these frames to the colonial and slavery context affirms how reproduction was enmeshed in working out power and identity but also raises questions about how reproduction was complicated by the moral imperatives of abolitionism, the proprietary claims of slave ownership, and the resistance of the enslaved. A closer look at benevolent reforms in other colonial settings also teaches us that, despite the criticisms and dissent of reformers, their medical interventions in the treatment of epidemic diseases like leprosy and cholera, for example, were not divorced from colonialism’s preoccupation with bringing subjugated populations culturally in line with the metropole, or refashioning them into workers and bureaucrats suited to fulfill the economic and political goals of the colonies. The colonial state intervened in the representation, regulation, and care of bodies it considered vital for the economic prosperity, political power, and ideological legitimation of colonialism. When applied to British slave colonies like Jamaica, abolitionist representation of enslaved

Introduction 9

women as degenerative people whose sexual perversions and gender aberrations, imputed by slavery, disqualified African captives from immediate freedom and subject citizenship and necessitated long-term reforms and gradual emancipation. Abolitionists envisioned that blacks would become culturally like metropolitan whites: Christian, married, industrious, independent, and responsible. Only then could their men become eligible to become subjectcitizens. British abolitionists grounded their campaigns on behalf of reproductive and growing bodies as fundamental for recasting the status of Africandescended people from slave to free. But despite the humanitarian impulse of their campaigns, abolitionist pronatal interventions created new ways of subjugating the unfree inhabitants of the West Indian colonies. Returning to the unnamed girl in William Wilberforce’s speech, abolitionists found the story useful not only because it illustrated quite graphically the inhumanity of the slave trade but because it also allowed them to argue that modifications in gender roles and gender relations could set in motion political and economic transformations that could better serve British imperial ambitions. Preserving the sexual innocence of enslaved girls, socializing them to become wives, mothers, and homemakers as well as training boys to become fathers, heads of households, and industrious workers who were obedient to colonial authority had the power to transform debased, inefficient slave colonies into productive, well-ordered, and moral ones. According to abolitionist logic, balancing sex ratios, sheltering women from the brunt of field work, protecting pregnancy, improving maternal and neonatal care, and promoting Christian conversion and marriages were the necessary first steps for generating future colonial subjects, albeit in the very distant future. At the abstract level, reproduction was a powerful symbol of the creation of something new. Abolitionists aimed to tap into the transformative power of procreation. Exploring metropolitan goals expressed through their pronatal concerns and proposed interventions in intimate relations, health and healing, reproductive labor management, and child-rearing practices, Contested Bodies argues that the bodies of women and children were important sites of political struggles over slavery, abolition, and colonial reform. At the same time, the conflicting visions of the slave body held by planters and enslaved people shattered the metropole’s romanticized ideals of women as wives, mothers, and homemakers and children as malleable clay, moldable into docile laborers and future subject-citizens. This study is not

10 Introduction

just interested in uncovering how abolitionists and planters projected their moral and economic ambitions onto the bodies of enslaved women and children; it is also concerned with how enslaved people contested the medical, gendered, and parental ideals foisted upon them. Reproductive concerns were not only essential to the social and cultural lives of the enslaved. By controlling childbearing practices, enslaved women had brief and informal access to power that temporarily inverted slavery’s white- and maledominated gender order. Although enslaved people’s interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of the slaving class, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted white medicine and benevolence. Rather, enslaved people insisted on practicing their own birth, healing, and childcare rituals that featured herbal medicine, fostered alliances between new mothers and self-selected caregivers, and preserved the authority of enslaved midwives and healers. The authority, social bonds, and cultural practices created around reproductive health and childbirth countered the imperialist and capitalist purposes abolitionists and slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. By examining the struggles for the control of biological reproduction, this book illustrates how central pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing were to the abolition of slavery, the reorganization of plantation work, the discipline and care of slaves, and the fashioning of resistance, social life, and culture among the enslaved. Contested Bodies therefore centers pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing practices as zones of conflict, in which abolitionists, slaveholders, doctors, the imperial and Jamaican governments, and enslaved people competed to control and regulate biological reproduction and determine who benefited from its rewards. Taking the 1780s era of abolitionism as a transformative moment in the lives of enslaved women and their children, the book examines reproductive interventions proposed by abolitionists and how they transformed, conflicted with, and shaped social customs, medical practices, labor, and punishment, as well as the relationships parents had with their children. The divergent claims on enslaved women’s ability to procreate defined the power struggles in the closing decades of slavery in Jamaica. To understand why the 1780s marked such a major turning point in the lives of enslaved women and children, some knowledge of the earlier practices and material conditions of slavery is necessary. In framing laws that

Introduction 11

governed slave societies, slaveholding legislatures discontinued European practices of linking the status of children to their fathers and transferred it to mothers. Even though all children born to a female slave became her owner’s property, partus sequitur ventrem, slaveholders remained ambivalent about importing women and their attentiveness to childbearing. Over time, men and boys outnumbered women and girls in the transatlantic slave trade. Although scholars disagree on the reasons for and the extent of such fluctuations, most agree that the greater value planters placed on male workers played an important role. Many planters were hostile, ambivalent, and indifferent toward pregnancy and childbirth among slaves because they feared it was a distracting, expensive, and uncertain method of replenishing worn-out and dead workers. Slave owners and plantation managers generally believed it was more cost effective to buy adult males imported via the transatlantic slave trade. Labor shortages and profit-loss calculations made planters reluctant to lose women’s labor during pregnancy and childbirth as well as the ten to sixteen years needed to raise children into capable workers. High infant mortality rates, in which less than half of Jamaica’s enslaved children survived into adulthood, also made investing in biological reproduction a gamble. As a consequence of this unprecedented mortality, and well before the 1807 prohibition of legal slave trading, many Jamaican properties suffered from acute labor shortages. Workers were scarce because warfare and political instability sometimes made West African supplies difficult to procure. Precarious weather and Europe’s intercontinental wars also delayed the arrival of ships in West Indian harbors. Detained ships suffered from increased outbreak of illnesses and death among their already diseased, malnourished, and abused cargo. These trade complications negated gender preferences expressed by planters. Slim pickings also made those appearing healthy more expensive. Scholars estimate that approximately 15 percent of cargo died before they arrived in the Americas. Among the dead captives not accounted for were those who perished during capture, or while traveling from their point of capture to the coast. Others died while they awaited sale and the boarding of slaving ships. At least 5 percent of those surviving the Middle Passage perished shortly after landing in the New World. Living for weeks in cramped quarters, soaked in blood, urine, feces, and pus and fed meagre, nutritionally deficient rations, many African captives arrived in the Americas diseased or debilitated.15 Captive women’s vulnerability to sexual abuse

12 Introduction

also increased the spread of sexually transmitted infections, like gonorrhea, which sometimes caused infertility. Others, like the unnamed fifteen-yearold girl on Captain Kimber’s ship, survived diseases and starvation only to die at the cruel hands of their captors.16 The abuse, neglect, and diseases from which women and girls suffered during capture and transportation meant that females landing in the West Indies were already reproductively challenged. Workers, especially women, felt the burden of labor shortages as taskmasters allocated them to multiple jobs. During periods of extreme labor demands, like the sugar harvest, temporary hired workers or jobbers assisted with nonspecialized work. On some properties, workers had the assistance of labor-saving technology like horse-drawn plows and hoe harrows. Although women were the majority of field workers, they did not benefit from the introduction of new agricultural technology. For the few planters who invested in ploughs and harrows, their views of women as clumsy and incapable of operating machinery meant that male field hands were the main beneficiaries of mechanized agriculture. Hiring extra work hands and investing in expensive agricultural equipment, moreover, were not always compatible with the financial circumstances of estates or Jamaica’s soil and topography. This meant that women, who composed the majority of field workers and unskilled laborers around the sugar factories, had very few opportunities for a relaxation of their work routines. These factors combined to undermine fertility.17 The work rhythms of West Indian sugar estates, which are at the center of this study, were unrelenting. They made conception and pregnancy difficult and child-rearing burdensome. Workers toiled day and night, yearround, because planters feared idle hands made slaves rebellious and insolent. For six months out of the year, typically from January to June, workers kept busy with reaping cane and manufacturing sugar. For another four months they plowed the fields and planted, molded, and fertilized cane suckers. In between planting and harvesting, during the lull from June to September, workers built and repaired factory equipment and houses. If the January-to-June harvest season was quick-paced laborious work, the September-to-December planting season was slow and tedious but no less strenuous. A key difference, however, was that unlike the twenty-four-hour shift system of the harvest period, working days during the planting months more consistently started at sunrise and ended by sundown. Field workers experienced changes in labor demands based on whether planters replanted

Introduction 13

or “ratooned” canes. Fields rotated between the replanting of fresh cane suckers in cleared fields and ratooning, in which cane stumps were left in the fields to sprout the following season. Replanting consumed laborers as well as the financial resources of an estate. Ratoons saved on labor, since it relied on a natural regeneration process, but yielded less than newly planted canes. Labor routines relaxed or intensified according to the overall size and health of the workforce, the state of an estate’s finance, and whether planters replanted or ratooned.18 Under these demanding labor conditions, the vast majority of West Indian planters found it more effective to rely on imported workers and ignored the reproductive needs of women before the 1780s. Work-related accidents and death rates peaked among workers during the January-to-June sugar harvest because sugar mills and boiling houses worked nonstop to prevent spoilage. The multiple and strenuous demands of harvest meant that concessions to workers, like expectant and new mothers, were even more limited. As well as organizing workers into three primary field gangs, some plantations also divided them into task gangs based on their perceived physical abilities and health. The first or great gang, dominated by women, performed the most demanding field tasks, like cutting, bundling, and carrying canes. Second gang workers assisted in tying and carrying cane bundles and fed cane stalks into cattle-drawn, wind, or water mills, which crushed the cane to extract its juice. Third gang workers removed residual trash called bagasse from the milling areas and brought them to the boiling house. Dried bagasse provided fuel for boiling the extracted cane juice. Because the sucrose content of sugarcane deteriorates soon after harvesting, the reaping, milling, and boiling of cane and cane juice had to be closely synchronized. Sugar mills and boilers therefore operated uninterrupted, with workers changing shift throughout the night to prevent canes and juice from fermenting.19 Summing up the intensity of the production process, one contemporary explained, “We keep about the works and the boiling of sugar the whole night, from which circumstance we commonly divide our gang into three spells of boilers, people to attend the mill, and to carry out cane trash.”20 Although female workers and young children played what planters viewed as unskilled, supporting roles as mill feeders and trash carriers in the sugar factory, they were no less affected by strict discipline of the harvest. The unrelenting work regimes of the sugar plantations, combined with inadequate and nutritionally unsound diets, debilitating punishments,

14 Introduction

unsanitary living conditions, and poor medical care had fatal consequences for mothers and children. Enslaved women mothered few sons and daughters because of low fertility and frequent miscarriages. Of the children who survived their precarious gestation, more than one-half died before their second birthday. To secure the survival of their offspring expectant and new mothers had to strike a delicate balance between their physically taxing, quick-paced jobs and the demands of pregnancy and motherhood. Members of enslaved people’s communities helped to deliver babies and attend to the hygiene and medical needs of new mothers and newborns. Despite the precariousness of motherhood, enslaved women and community members eked out a small measure of autonomy by having to fend for themselves with childbearing. Ironically, planter preoccupation with the productive rhythms of their estates freed women and community members from their oversight. Enslaved people therefore cultivated their own approaches to caring for mothers and their children. By the 1780s, when abolitionist activists articulated reform and abolition through women’s reproductive capacities, enslaved mothers and community members had already developed autonomous social networks and customs around maternal and infant care. These practices would become a central point of conflict between enslaved community members, planters, and doctors. The links abolitionists made between emancipation and reproduction not only stimulated changes in how enslaved women and children experienced labor and discipline and gave rise to conflicts over how to care for the bodies of women and children. They also generated documentation that provides insight into enslaved people’s birth and maternal practices that previously had been absent from official records. Responding to abolitionists’ efforts to capture the inhumanity of slavery, the British Parliament created several investigative committees between 1789 and 1792. These committees were tasked with assessing the conditions of the laboring populations of Britain’s West Indian colonies.21 Witnesses were called from various branches of the slaving system and included slave traders, doctors, and planters. While such proslavery witnesses pathologized slaves and exaggerated their own benevolence, their disparagement of what they perceived as the unhygienic, medically unsound, and unsafe birth and child-rearing practices of the enslaved gives us unprecedented insight into enslaved people’s intimate relations, birth, and child-care rituals.

Introduction 15

Witness accounts, however, must be read with great care and in the context of other sources, such as medical records and doctor correspondence. The number of those accounts grew because slaveholder interest in procreation, coupled with the rise of academic medicine, increased the presence of professional doctors in the colonies. Although medical practitioners sometimes aligned themselves with planters, they were also interested in professionalizing medicine in the colonies and published manuals and accounts of their observations and treatments. Physicians who discussed the changing health and treatment of the enslaved offer additional insights into pronatal interventions and help to counterbalance some of the self-serving reports given by parliamentary witnesses. The process of ending British West Indian slavery was a long and tedious affair. Scholars typically divide the process into two phases. The first phase starts with the rise of abolitionism in 1780 and ends in 1807 with the abolition of the slave trade. The antislavery campaigns of the 1820s and the 1833 Emancipation Act mark the beginning and end of the second phase. This division reflects not only the split between activism against the slave trade and antislavery. It also signals differences in the nature of reforms, or amelioration. While the imperial Parliament gathered evidence on the inhumanity and immorality of slavery and the slave trade between 1789 and 1807, West Indian legislatures passed new laws aimed at ameliorating the material conditions of slavery. These laws focused on areas abolitionists singled out in their criticisms of the slave system as well as on matters planters worked out as important to improve slaves’ welfare. The new legislation, for example, required masters to provide slaves with food, clothing, housing, medical care, and religious instruction, as well as reward mothers with more relaxed work routines. The laws also made masters liable for negligence or excessive cruelty toward their slaves. The 1788 Act for “the better Order and Government of Slaves,” or the Consolidated Slave Act, in particular, gave bonded workers the right to seek legal redress by taking their cases to a justice of the peace, who was then required to convene a Council of Protection. This new legislation tasked councils with investigating and bringing enslaved people’s complaints before the Assize Court or Supreme Court.22 Perceived failure of amelioration led to the passage of the 1816 Slave Registration Act, which required planters to record the birth, death, sale, and manumission of their slaves. Although this act was a backdoor method

16 Introduction

of tracking the illegal importation of slaves, the registers it generated are invaluable to the historian for the rich demographic details they provide on fertility, infant and child mortality, and cause of death. Claiming that the situation of mothers and children remained unchanged, abolitionists shifted attention away from slave trading and mounted a more explicit attack against slavery in the 1820s. The British Parliament took a leading role in reforming the law of slavery by sending blueprints of ameliorative legislation to West Indian assemblies for local adoption. The lively debates in the Jamaican Assembly over the adoption of imperially mandated laws of the 1820s illustrate how the colonies worked out the details of amelioration and give us further insight into the perception planters had of enslaved women and children, and their place in the future of the colonies. The expectation that enslaved women would remain in perpetual bondage as brute workers conflicted with abolitionist insistence that reforming the condition of women and children was a stepping stone toward freedom. Difficulties of legal enforcement have led historians to conclude that legislative reforms were ineffective.23 Admittedly, ameliorative laws and councils had very little effect because those charged with enforcing slave laws held investments in slaves and therefore had an interest in limiting enslaved people’s liberties. Moreover, slaveholders’ continued drive for capital gains through agroindustrial output conflicted with the need to relax the demands they placed on women, particularly those who were pregnant and were already mothers. Legislative reforms, however, created a new space in which enslaved parents and community members publicly avowed their social ties and articulated their discontent with continued threats against their friends and family. The limited prerogative enslaved people had to take their masters to court, for example, was a new freedom that many mothers and fathers capitalized on to protect their families. Court records are especially helpful because they bring to light the place of male relatives and friends in parenting and intimate relations. In this regard, they offset the accounts given by planters and doctors, which focused exclusively on women and children. This study also relies on the more traditional sources used to capture the material conditions of slavery. Those include the correspondence of planters, the daily work logs, and inventories of slave populations that list workers’ sex, age, occupation, pregnancies, miscarriages, health conditions, work exemptions, and recent births. Examining these records using a body approach offers insights into how, for example, the physical and sexual

Introduction 17

development of young people and the changing contours, size, and weight of women’s bodies during pregnancy defined their particular experiences of labor and punishment. Studying a wide array of such documents from several sugar estates also shows us that reforms were neither uniform nor consistently implemented across all Jamaican sugar estates. Research into public records, like court cases and newspaper advertisements, also reveals that enslaved fathers and husbands played key roles in helping women to preserve maternal customs and to contest the intrusions slaveholders made upon their intimate and family lives. Taken as a whole, Contested Bodies uses a wide array of sources to examine the struggles for the control, regulation, and rewards of biological reproduction as they played out in the working and intimate lives of enslaved women and children from the rise of British abolitionism in the 1780s to the end of slavery in 1834. Abolitionists, slaveholders, doctors, and the imperial and local governments, as well as enslaved men, women, and children, were locked in ongoing conflicts because they held contrasting views about how the young and female bodies of enslaved Africandescended people fit into their goals. They disagreed on what these bodies represented and how they should be treated, used, and cared for. Studying these conflicts uncovers how the links abolitionists made between biological reproduction, abolition, and reform transformed the experiences of enslavement, and fostered new forms of resistance, social relations, and cultural life among the enslaved.

Chapter 1

Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition

Until the 1780s, female slaves’ reproductive potential was tied to capitalistic ventures and racial ideologies that justified slavery. Slave owners claimed the offspring of their female slaves as natural extensions of their rights of ownership. Rewriting centuries-old European practices in which children took the status of their fathers, colonial legislators wrote new laws that fixed descent upon mothers—partus sequitur ventrem. Yet few slave owners benefited from the capital claims placed on the womb. As noted earlier, brutal punishment, exhausting work regimes, and inadequate diets combined to depress women’s fertility. Of the few women who conceived and gave birth, more than half buried their babies before their second birthdays. Diseases as well as material and medical lack, which plagued the environments into which slave infants were born, made their deaths more likely than their survival. Faced with low birthrates and high mortality rates (for infants as well as adults), planters in the West Indian sugar colonies depended on the slave trade for replacing workers. The slaving ships that traversed the Atlantic from West Africa to the Americas supplied planters with human cargo who barely survived the pestilent Middle Passage. The fact that women who served as replacement laborers were Middle Passage survivors further worked against the calculations buyers made to capitalize on females’ reproductive potential. As victims of physical and sexual abuse who were chained in their own and their fellow captives’ filth, the disease-ridden, malnourished women who landed in the Americas arrived almost incapable of fulfilling their reproductive potential. Moreover, having experienced or

Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects 19

witnessed family loss through sale, premature death, or forceful removal from home, captive women were likely reluctant to birth and raise children destined for shortened, uncertain, and impoverished lives. Appalled by the vicious cycle of destitution, disease, and death that marked slavery and the slave trade, evangelicals and humanitarians in Britain spoke against enslavement. Beginning at first with the singular efforts of evangelicals like John Wesley and the Quakers, abolitionists demanded an immediate end to what they viewed as an immoral and inhumane system. The extreme brutalities of slavery and the denial of liberty “violated all the Laws of Justice, Mercy, and Truth,” Wesley proclaimed, and should be abolished at all cost, even at the collapse of the sugar plantation system.1 Despite these early efforts in the 1760s and 1770s, it would take at least another decade before an identifiable national campaign was firmly under way. What was different in the 1780s was the strategy of campaigners. Abolitionists were up against a deeply rooted and politically well supported economic system that was instrumental in building the naval power and wealth of Britain. Slavery and the slave trade therefore were sanctioned and protected by the imperial Parliament and wealthy influential elites.2 From the previous generation of activists, campaigners in the 1780s learned that a platform of “moral absolutism” alone could not uproot a deeply entrenched, profitable, and politically privileged system.3 A successful abolition campaign needed to avoid radical positions like those taken by earlier lobbyists, such as Wesley, who believed that the economic cost of abolition was immaterial compared to ending the moral evils slavery inflicted. Because due consideration had to be given to the money of investors and viable alternatives to slave labor, a strategic and gradual approach was needed.4 Enslaved women’s reproductive ability offered a way to balance these imperatives. Abolitionist writers of the 1780s proposed improving the material and medical conditions of young enslaved women in order to promote biological reproduction. Balancing sex ratios and encouraging monogamous marriages were also central to the proposed reforms to resolve the problem of female infertility and low birthrates. Additionally, abolitionists promoted educating and socializing children born of such efforts through religious instruction and missionary schools. The socialization of enslaved children would center on Christian values, particularly those relating to marriage and sexuality. It would also include a labor apprenticeship system whereby children would learn to be diligent and obedient workers. Separate training

20 Chapter 1

for boys and girls would further facilitate children’s learning their appropriate gender roles. Promoting biological reproduction by reforming slavery as well as improving the moral and work ethics of enslaved children was not just about abolition. Abolitionists were against slavery, but they were not opposed to the economic, political, and cultural missions of British colonialism. How well enslaved people adapted to British cultural institutions determined their readiness to become civilized, free subjects. The reproductive bodies of young enslaved women linked abolitionist goals for ending slavery and promoting reform and the civilization of blacks. Despite revised strategies, the second generation of abolitionists did not avoid entanglements. The ideological struggles between activists, government officials, the slaving interests, and the enslaved were many and varied. Activists, like William Wilberforce and James Ramsay, conflicted with one another because they had different ideas about how to control women’s reproductive labor. Collectively, reformers clashed with the imperial government, which was concerned about financially ruining the colonies or interfering with rights of governance. Abolitionist visions further contradicted the beliefs of the proslavery vanguard. Slave owners rejected the notion that as an inferior people, Africans and their descendants could ever be fit for freedom or could share the rights and privileges of Englishmen. Plantation owners and agents were also not confident that black people could be productive without the coercion of slavery. Finally, the bodily and moral reforms abolitionist had in mind for enslaved women and their children reflected British cultural values. Such ideals were at odds with what people of African descent living in the West Indies practiced and envisioned for their lives once they obtained freedom. The contests over abolition and reform hinged on competing ideas about how to control reproductive labor and who benefited from women’s reproductive potential.

The Biological Reproduction Argument for Abolition Several abolitionists emphasized how slavery and the slave trade undermined the reproductive potential of captive women, and how best to harness it as a resource for colonial improvement and a path to freedom. By offering proposals for gradual reform, spearheaded by slave owners rather than Parliament, James Ramsay and William Wilberforce gained significant

Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects 21

influence as abolitionists. The still fresh wounds of Parliament’s infringement on the constitutional rights of North American colonists made abolitionists cautious of arousing the disapproval of government ministers who wished to avoid a similar debacle. Although unsuccessful, gradualism with the promise of increased returns seemed best to avoid conflicts and opposition from Parliament, colonial governments, and planters. Ramsay also derived prestige because previously he resided in the West Indies as a vicar, doctor, and slave owner. His rendering of the “facts” he witnessed firsthand in a pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Effects of Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade (1784), and book, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Colonies (1784), received mass support. Subsidizing their reprinting and distribution, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787, distributed these writings across Britain.5 Wilberforce also garnered national attention because his position as member of Parliament uniquely placed him to present petitions and legislation to Parliament. His sheer persistence enhanced his notoriety. In 1790 alone, for instance, Wilberforce submitted at least eight bills to Parliament. Moreover, Wilberforce adjusted his arguments for abolition along the lines of what he thought would gain support from detractors in the government. Rejection by parliamentarians who believed it their duty to defend “traditional imperial interest” forced him, for example, to expand his arguments beyond moral and religious reasons. By 1806, Wilberforce appealed to previously rejected arguments that colonial slavery was a backward, inefficient system.6 He suggested prohibiting the slave trade as a necessary first step to persuade West Indian stakeholders to initiate reforms that would enhance reproduction among enslaved women. As Wilberforce argued, reproducing laborers locally would best allow colonial authorities to nurture the desired habits of the subject population. Abolitionists aligned abolition and colonial reform with the reproductive capacities of female slaves in several ways. However, the most fundamental link they made was through shutting down the slave trade. From an abolitionist perspective, the slave trade encouraged various habits of cruelty, which once removed would secure new generations of laborers. James Ramsay firmly believed that as long as the slave market remained open slaveholders would continue to depend on it as they viewed it as a more expedient measure to maintain productivity. “From their eagerness to push on the cultures of the estates,” he wrote, they would continue to make their

22 Chapter 1

demands for the trade. Under such circumstances, the “question concerning the buying or breeding of slaves” would always yield a preference for buying.7 From his experience as a West Indian resident, Ramsay witnessed how brutally plantation managers and overseers treated enslaved women during pregnancy. Planters believed that pregnancies and young children undermined labor productivity. They therefore did little to alleviate the conditions of pregnant women and mothers, or to ensure the survival of enslaved youths. Moreover, Ramsay explained, plantation managers aimed to secure maximum and immediate profits, and generally, they were unconcerned about the future or morality of the colonies. Unless the slave trade ended and the estate owners and agents developed a sense that their long-term interests relied on women reproducing, Ramsay insisted, no improvement could be guaranteed, and more importantly, their dependence on enslaving Africans would only deepen.8 In order to capitalize on enslaved women’s reproductive potential as a resource for producing potentially free people, abolitionists thought it necessary to ban the slave trade. A slave trade embargo would awaken the inborn, mothering instinct “naturally” found in females. The various stages of the slave trade, from capture in Africa and captivity on the coast to transportation and subsequent sale in the Americas, disrupted communities and separated captives from their families. As buyers and sellers traded Africans like cattle, Wilberforce protested before Parliament, “husbands [were] torn from their wives, wives from their husbands, and parents from their children.”9 Despite captive women’s efforts to retain family ties, traders remained unmoved by scenes of heartbreak as they quickly summoned whips and chains to break apart mothers clinging to their children and wives cleaving to their husbands. Abolitionist and statistical analyst Thomas Cooper, who calculated the mortality of the slave trade as roughly one fifth of the world’s population, stressed, “If these instances of separation should happen, if relations, when they find themselves about to be parted, cling together, if filial, conjugal, or parental affection should detain them a moment longer in each other’s arms, than their second receivers should think fit, the lash instantly severed them.”10 Thus, Cooper concluded, although “Negresses have the maternal character as strongly impressed on them as any [English] woman” the tyrannical experiences they endured extinguished their mothering desires. They became “callous to every natural feeling,” and preferred to “destroy their fruit” than allow it to live.11

Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects 23

Ultimately, captive African women failed and refused to reproduce because of the traumatic experiences and memories of their capture and sale. While these arguments accurately portrayed the disruption of families caused by the slave trade and possible reasons women had for restricting their fertility, they presumed a “natural” desire among women to become mothers. Reformers failed to consider the possibility that enslaved women rejected motherhood not only because of slavery but simply because they had no wish to become mothers. Enslaved women’s desire to bear children seemed irrelevant to activists like Wilberforce, who argued that “Negroes were . . . by nature peculiarly prolific,” and closing the portal of Africa would restore their reproductive ability.12 The difficulties planters encountered with enslaved women, as subsequent chapters show, reflect an ideological conflict between enslaved women and male planters and abolitionists. Male reformers naturalized motherhood, while women understood motherhood as a matter of choice. Both despite and because of the impoverished conditions of bondage, enslaved women persisted in choosing for themselves. The positive comparisons Cooper made between “Negresses” and English women reflect the representational conflicts between abolitionists and proslavery supporters. Abolitionists distanced themselves from proslavery literature that, in defense of slavery, assigned a natural, inferior status to Africans. From the formation of Atlantic world slave societies in the seventeenth century, Europeans distinguished African-descended people as inferior and used biological markers, including skin color, facial features, and hair texture, to mark Africans as uncivilized and naturally suitable for slavery.13 Abolitionists aimed to prove that captive Africans lacked civilization and diverged from so-called higher moral standards because of slavery and the slave trade, and not biology.14 Claiming the possibility of colonial reform as a likely consequence of biological reproduction hinged on abolitionists proving that the conditions of slavery caused certain undesirable qualities in the “Negress.” Activists had to prove that captive Africans would not reproduce negative traits generationally because their brutishness was environmentally induced. Tensions emerged between proslavery and antislavery activists because the former aimed to prove that people of African descent were inherently inferior, incapable of reform, and ultimately unsuitable for freedom and subject-citizenship. Abolitionists solidified the links between reproduction, abolition, and reform by highlighting the particular ways in which the material conditions

24 Chapter 1

of slavery undermined the reproductive potential of women. Abuse, overwork, inadequate diets, and neglect combined to depress women’s fertility. “How can population be favoured where there is a want of food, clothes, and every convenience necessary for its encouragement? Can they rear [children] for him, who demands bricks without straw, that they may be oppressed at his caprice?” Ramsay asked. Masters ignored the proper gendered division of labor by forcing enslaved women to work the same tasks as men, even while pregnant. Writing from personal experience in the colonies, Ramsay recalled that expectant mothers continued in their exhausting labor routines as long as their strengths prevailed, which was usually until their pregnancies terminated by miscarriage or birth, often prematurely.15 While granting expectant mothers time off from work promised to soften some of the harsher elements of slavery, it conflicted with beliefs planters held that the plantations could only remain productive through coercion and strict labor discipline. Relaxed labor routines, antiabolitionists argued, made slaves idle and insubordinate. These conflicting beliefs were at the heart of the struggles between the slaving interests and abolitionists. Even after abolitionists secured a parliamentary ban on slave trading in 1807, they pushed for additional imperial mandates. Their insistence that the British government pass ameliorative laws in the 1820s that limited the whipping of women, for example, reflected the conviction among abolitionists that reforms initiated by planters were inadequate because coercion continued to dominate the working lives of the enslaved in ways that made reproduction nearly impossible. What abolitionists found most shocking was that slave owners and estate agents made little or no special accommodation to receive newborns or to care for mothers even though they profited from the birth of slave children. Ramsay did not exaggerate when he wrote that the neglect of enslaved mothers and children extended to the absence of simple items of care, like rag and cloth to swaddle and cleanse their babies. Women delivered babies in their homes with the aid of their community members. Mothers returned to work less than three weeks after delivery, and they had no choice but to carry along their infants with them. As mothers toiled, Ramsay recalled, infants lay in the “furrow, near [them], generally exposed naked, or almost naked, to the sun and rain, on a kid skin, or such rags as [they] can procure.”16 Under these conditions, one could hardly expect infants to survive, which, as far as abolitionists were concerned, largely explained why West Indian slave populations failed to reproduce.

Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects 25

As a doctor who resided in the West Indies, Ramsay saw firsthand the rudimentary nature of health, maternal, and infant care before the 1780s. Yet he was disinterested in how enslaved women used planter neglect to seize autonomy over childbirth and maternal care. His criticism that the only facility available to the few women who gave birth was “a dark smoky hut” reflected how little he understood how women capitalized on planter disregard for their reproductive needs. These huts were the homes of women where assistance networks and herbal remedies flourished. Ramsay’s belief that an estate hospital staffed with European doctors would best serve the medical needs of reproductive women clashed with how enslaved people approached maternal and neonatal care. Smoking apparatuses and fires were essential to the birth customs that thrived within the private residences of the enslaved, which were relatively free from the oversight of masters. Birth rituals were symbols of autonomy and authority mothers and caregivers claimed over labor and delivery. Abolitionist ideals about reproductive care not only diverged from those held by enslaved women. The proposed reforms also foreshadowed the struggles to come between enslaved mothers and caregivers, on one hand, who fought to retain reproductive autonomy, and doctors, on the other hand, who sought to restructure plantation childbirth practices along the lines of European medicine. Abolitionists believed that slavery’s assault on womanhood and maternity persisted because sugar plantation owners and managers calculated that it was more cost-effective to work their slaves to death and replace them with fresh imports than invest in their long-term care and selfrejuvenation. Given a choice “between the breeding system on the one hand, and the working down and buying system on the other,” Wilberforce explained in a public address, they “deliberately gave in to the latter as the most economical in the full view of all its horrid conditions.”17 The economic drive of West Indian planters made them insensitive to the need for sexual parity among their slaves. Viewing male workers as stronger and more productive workers, planters prioritized them in their purchases. The resulting imbalanced sex ratio in favor of men, Wilberforce argued, limited women’s opportunities to form partnerships and create stable families. Had planters adopted a practice of buying equal proportions of males and females, population increase would have occurred “naturally.”18 Abolitionist exaggeration of the disparity between the sexes conflicted with the supply dynamics of the slave trade and the buying patterns of planters. Despite a stated preference for men, planters readily bought women and tasked

26 Chapter 1

them with some of the most demanding work on the plantation. Enslaved women, for example, dominated field labor, one of the most demanding aspects of plantation work. The central problem was not the sex ratio of captives, but their age. Few abolitionists recognized the links between an aging slave population and low fertility and high mortality rates. In his 1792 speech before Parliament Wilberforce called attention to age as a factor that retarded natural increase. Supporting Wilberforce was Henry Dundas, adviser to the British prime minister. Dundas introduced a bill in Parliament to impose a tax on the importation of Africans above age twenty-five. Given the recent fallout in the American colonies over the right of the imperial Parliament to tax the colonies, the idea of taxing the West Indian colonies was not one welcomed by the British government. The House of Lords therefore rejected Dundas’s proposed tax.19 New tariffs as a method of correcting the negative population growth caused by a surplus old population clashed with what Parliament believed was within the reaches of its power. The contests between reformers and parliamentarians about monitoring reproduction rates reflect not just government ministers wishing to avoid conflicts with the colonies over constitutional rights of governance. The question was also whether the state had the right to scrutinize reproductive patterns, which many in England feared as a step toward intervention in intimate relations. These were viewed as private matters, and Britons in the mid to late eighteenth century were ambivalent about state scrutiny of marriage, sexuality, and family. Parliamentary approval for legislation like the 1762 Act for Keeping Regular, Uniform and Annual Registers of Poor Infants and the 1767 Act for the Better Regulation of Parish Poor Children evidence steps taken by the government to secure the welfare of children in England. The government’s simultaneous rejection of bills calling for a national census and the establishment of mandatory and annual registers of marriages, births, and deaths, however, suggests limitations on parliamentary measures that could lead to intervention in citizens’ reproductive and intimate lives.20 Such limits were class and gender based, however. Elite and middleclass men opposed marriage and birth censuses. However, they were not averse to local parishes registering the birthrate among poor women. Neither were they disinclined to promote motherhood as the natural and patriotic duty of British women. Eighteenth-century male English social commentators and medical practitioners, for instance, disparaged women

Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects 27

who chose not to have children and scorned mothers who did not suckle their children. They deemed such women as profane, abnormal, and in violation of “natural law.” These criticisms partly emerged out of concern for the growing labor needs of Britain’s expanding empire. Reformer Jonas Hanway, for example, made a strong case for how preserving poor children’s lives served British imperial ambitions. Children were invaluable assets for the navy, army, and factories. Thus, in preparation for the Seven Years’ War, the government approved significant funding for the Foundling Hospital, tasked with saving the lives of destitute children who could be repurposed in war roles.21 Mutual gender and class biases made slave owners supporters of similar reforms in the colonies. They shared the views held by British reformers that reproduction was a resource for fulfilling the ambitions of empire, including individual economic drive. Moreover, the property rights whites claimed in the ownership of black bodies invested slaveholders with the liberty to do as they pleased with their slaves. The hesitation over slavery reforms resulted from concerns about profits. While the state absorbed poor relief costs for British mothers and children, individual planters in the colonies would have to withstand all costs associated with ameliorating the conditions of their slaves—their private property. Thus, while colonial legislators rejected what they calculated were costly improvements, like exempting women from field work, they more willingly conceded to low or zero cost interventions. The benefits and low cost of encouraging slave owners to buy younger slaves, for instance, likely drove the Jamaican Assembly to impose a ten-pound tax on the importation of captives above the age of twenty-five.22 The economic cost of amelioration was a major cause of disagreement between the local Jamaican state, still in its infancy, and the moral-minded abolitionist reformers.

The Pronatal Plan of Abolitionists Abolitionists readily agreed on the inhumanity of slavery and the slave trade. They also concurred on the negative effects slavery had on the ability and desire of enslaved women to bear children and to raise families. But beyond general consensus on the need to outlaw the slave trade as an important first step in initiating pronatal reforms, there was much disagreement about the precise changes needed to capitalize on women’s reproductive potential.23 Disputes, for example, emerged over the provision of

28 Chapter 1

material rewards for enslaved mothers and their trustworthiness to assume responsibilities for childcare. The divergent pronatal plans proposed by abolitionists would further clash with the economic goals of planters, the constraints on government powers, and the visions of freedom and bodily autonomy enslaved people held. For William Wilberforce, forging family ties and building communities would best harness the reproductive capabilities of enslaved women. In his pronatal plan, he first encouraged enslaved women and men to marry and settle into independent cottages. He disagreed with other pronatal plans, like those offered by James Ramsay, that stressed giving material incentives to mothers for bringing their pregnancies to term and for rearing children. Nature alone, Wilberforce declared, “would take care of this for them.” It is not by material rewards that women nurture their children, but rather by assurances of the well-being of their families. Furthermore, Wilberforce wrote, “maternal tenderness, domestic sympathy, and paternal interest” will grow and blossom once masters guaranteed slaves a domestic sanctuary. Conception and full-term pregnancies would occur abundantly once enslaved women had a “home” where children were “safely born with a tolerable prospect of happiness.” Wilberforce therefore implored masters to “let mothers be allowed immunities and indulgencies, especially a little time from field work, morning and evening, to attend to their infants.” Such indulgence, he asserted, would encourage “domestic affections [to] spring up and flourish” in women.24 Even as Wilberforce’s plan offered greater opportunities for safeguarding family bonds, enslaved families’ comfort and gratification were not the primary aims of enhancing family security. Instead, it offered a less coercive way of keeping colonial economies intact as they gradually transited from slavery to freedom. Wilberforce was not opposed to the economic benefits of colonialism. He hoped to find a way in which investors’ economic ambitions could coexist with the moral imperatives of reformers. In his widely circulated 1807 Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade Wilberforce advocated the formation of families among the enslaved as a means of assuring masters that if they treated slaves humanely by allowing them family and community security, the enslaved would return loyalty and duty to them. Having experienced the value and rewards of “good character,” enslaved mothers, he posited, would strive to maintain it, out of fear of reaping the displeasure of their masters and losing family privileges. In the final push for abolition in 1807, Wilberforce’s Letter emphasized master paternalism

Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects 29

as indispensable to the future success of the colonies. His definition of success included the amelioration of enslaved women’s conditions, the security of their families, and masters’ realizing that coercion and physical abuse were not necessary to regenerate laborers or maintain labor output. If masters implemented such reforms, he proclaimed, “the slaves will daily grow happier [and] the planters [grow] richer.”25 Despite the fact that Wilberforce gave due consideration to how pronatalism could affect the productivity of the plantations, tensions between the slaving interests and abolitionists persisted because of the attack on slavery and the slave trade. In the minds of slaveholders, the African trade was the lifeblood of colonial economy and they could not envision plantation cultivation without it or the coercive powers slavery gave them. Like Wilberforce, Ramsay articulated a plan for abolition and reform through women’s reproductive ability, but his was radically different and more elaborate. Ramsay encouraged slaveholders to follow the example of the few progressive plantations where owners and managers paid attention to the nutritional and medical needs of their laborers and regulated women’s workloads. Every plantation should have a hospital for enslaved patients, decked with at least two chambers dedicated solely to mothers and children. One chamber, he explained, would serve as a delivery room and the other as a nursery for suckling children. Mothers would leave their infants in the nurseries and for the first six months would work “near the hospital, to be at hand to suckle their children, from time to time.” During this six-month period, Ramsay suggested, masters should refrain from giving new mothers strenuous tasks, assigning them instead to “moderate labour.” Mother-workers should resume the “ordinary work of the plantation” only when they had regained their strength and had weaned their infants. Upon returning to work, “two elderly hand women” would attend their children. Ramsay also suggested that plantation owners and their managers assign nurses to wash and feed infants while their mothers worked. To incentivize mothers further, masters should indulge them with “extraordinary allowance of food both in quality and quantity” and at the time of “presenting” their weaned children to the overseer reward them with a “complete suit of clothes.” Overall, as motivation to birth a greater number of children, all mothers bearing more than three children should receive full exemption from field work. Ramsay concluded that if plantation owners and managers implemented these reforms, birthrates among the enslaved would steadily increase.26

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Ramsay’s experience as vicar, doctor, and slaveholder in the West Indies gave him firsthand knowledge of the challenges of maternal and infant health. The material and medical reforms he proposed were therefore sorely needed. They promised to improve the survival chances of enslaved mothers and babies, as well as help women balance labor demands with caring for their children.27 Imposed hospital accommodations for expectant and new mothers shifted the responsibilities of maternity and neonatal care away from enslaved people’s communities and placed them into the clutches of masters. Instead of advocating public health facilities, operated by state authority and therefore less subject to the arbitrary power of individual slaveholders, Ramsay advocated building private hospitals, owned, funded, and managed by the slaving interests.28 Moreover, in promoting the removal of children from their mothers’ care and enforcing a shortened lactation period of six months, Ramsay’s pronatal plan disrupted mother-child relations and customary maternal practices that had developed in Jamaica. Commonly, enslaved women nursed for eighteen to twenty-four months, but fought to continue nursing for up to thirty-six months.29 Ramsay’s six months weaning timetable reduced what enslaved mothers already thought was a short time to nurse their babies. His proposal neglected to consider the value of child-rearing practices already in place in Jamaica. The conflicts that would evolve on the ground between planters, doctors, and enslaved women throughout the 1780s to 1830s would be over such limits reform-minded planters tried to impose on how long enslaved women nursed their children. Ramsay’s proposal seems even more arbitrary when one considers emergent ideas in late eighteenth-century Britain that encouraged breastfeeding for at least twelve months. British medical opinion had begun to shift away from supporting wet nursing and toward encouraging mothers nursing their own children because doctors deemed it better for infant growth and development.30 Reformers also advocated lactation because, in the words of one medical writer, it stimulated “maternal affection” and it gave the child “a greater sense of security and confidence about the world and increases its attachment to its mother.” The burgeoning British obstetrics community not only urged mothers to nurse their children but also sanctioned their doing so for at least the full first year of their babies’ lives. Ramsay’s proposal for enslaved mothers was half the time advised for British women.31 Briefer lactation periods expedited enslaved women’s return to the sugarcane fields. In this regard, Ramsay’s pronatal plan not only

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offered masters a way to balance their productive goals with reproductive ones, it also reaffirmed the authority masters claimed over slave women’s bodies and maternal customs. Under the plan, male abolitionists and planters would determine the length of breastfeeding, not the mothers themselves. Such affirmation of mastery conflicted with the autonomy women carved out for themselves in the preabolitionist years when masters neglected childbirth and childrearing. But beyond creating a way for enslavers to balance the dual labor demands they placed on enslaved women, there was another, more fundamental effect of Ramsay’s not simply borrowing lactation recommendations for British mothers and applying them to enslaved mothers. His policies inscribed differences between black and white women. The reproductive ability of both sets of women were appropriated in service of the British nation, which needed people to work, sail ships, and defend the empire. English women were not just reproducers, they also were mothers, whose civic duty it was to bear children and raise them to become good, loyal citizens. Conversely, enslaved women were vessels that bore future workers, viewed with only a dim possibility of sharing the same political rights and privileges as whites. As adults corrupted by slavery, captive Africans were not fit to prepare their children for freedom. Ramsay therefore advocated two sets of reforms. One focused on improving the material conditions of slavery that would facilitate and encourage conception and reduce maternal and infant mortality. The second set of reforms centered on preparing children for freedom. Enslaved mothers were to have only a limited role in preparing their children to become free people. Ramsay believed that moral institutions like the church best secured the social conditioning of young people. In his 1784 essay that the Abolition Society reprinted and distributed widely, he argued, “Religion brings conscience in to the aid of social regulations, and fits the man for acting his part in his proper station.” Ramsay believed that soon after weaning, enslaved children should learn Christian teachings that emphasized humility and long suffering. “Begin by drawing their attention particularly to the sufferings and crucifixion of our savior,” he wrote. “When this is found to have an impression on their minds, and filled their hearts of grateful sentiments, make them connect with repentance and a good life, submission to their masters and full obedience to their commands, even to working on the plantations when so ordered.” They should learn these lessons when “their minds are tender” before the “impositions of slavery corrupted them.”32

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Ramsay’s writings reflected the principle of the “conditioned child,” which stressed creating desirable habits in young people for them to become “natural in them” in their adult life. A child was like a “blank slate” upon which adults could write the social actor they desired.33 With the new generation of enslaved people, Ramsay proposed abandoning the system of punishment upon which slavery had been built, and replacing it with Christianity. Christian-based obedience, gratitude, and morality would prove more “powerful incentives to the mind [that would] incline them to the right.”34 Successful emancipation depended on indoctrinating enslaved children from their infancy in the “knowledge of their duty” as obedient, moral subjects.35 Because of the centrality of retaining the purity of enslaved children’s minds, Ramsay did not expect enslaved mothers to socialize their children. British missionaries would have such responsibilities.36 Recalling the challenges one minister faced in proselytizing grown-ups, Ramsay doubted whether enslaved adults could be rescripted sufficiently into new ways of thinking and being in order to train children properly. Imported adults, he insisted, generally resisted change and sulked when persuaded to abandon their old prejudices. Enslaved parents could not be trusted to discard fully their old habits. Ramsay firmly believed that adults were products of their childhood, and as such, enslaved mothers who had converted in their adult years were constantly at risk for relapsing into the habits of their youth. It is for this reason he advocated that enslaved mothers play limited roles in caring for and socializing young people. Early weaning reflected such limitations. As Ramsay promoted lead roles for missionaries in raising enslaved children, parents stood to lose what little rights and liberties they fought to preserve in socializing their sons and daughters before the 1780s era of pronatalist abolitionism.37 For the few children born during slavery, mothers competed with masters for influence and control over them. Ramsay’s proposal magnified the already fraught relationships between enslaver and enslaved over the control and raising of enslaved children.

Amelioration and the Future of Slavery Despite the contrasting views Ramsay and Wilberforce held on the roles enslaved mothers should play in raising their children, they agreed that successful emancipation was contingent upon women’s ability to reproduce and the acculturation of enslaved children to British values. Ramsay and

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Wilberforce were not the first to appropriate women’s reproductive ability in the service of abolition and reform, however. They echoed the writings of other imperial policymakers, especially those of Maurice Morgan, a colonial bureaucrat who, in 1772, had anticipated the end of the slave trade and designed a plan for how the British government could safely liberate the enslaved. Promoting biological reproduction and the resocialization of enslaved children and establishing a date for an embargo on slave trading were the hallmarks of Morgan’s plan. It would be impracticable to “liberate the present race of slaves,” Morgan argued, not because they were “incapable of receiving freedom [but because] their ignorance and their habits effectually forbids it.” He therefore proposed that the British government allow the slave trade to continue for fifteen years (he offered no precise date) during which time plantation owners would buy “a certain number of male and female children annually.” These new young recruits, he explained, would be sent to Britain, where they would attend English “Charity schools” until they turned age fourteen. At the end of their formal education (Morgan was never clear on what the curriculum should include) trainees would receive further practical instruction in the areas of gardening, agriculture, and manufacture.38 Having received the requisite schooling, colonial prote´ge´s should be married at the age of sixteen and then sent to an experimental settlement, which Morgan proposed would be a “district near Pensacola,” a new British settlement in west Florida. Early marriage, he asserted, was important in order to capitalize on black female fecundity. “The black women are mothers at fourteen, and often sooner,” Morgan wrote, and “they continue to breed till six and twenty.” By this calculation, he estimated that these specially trained youths would increase the number of settlers, quickly peopling the “deserts of Florida with freemen.” The British government should grant them land and the same support as had been given to migrants in the seventeenth-century founding of the North American and West Indian colonies. Morgan intended his scheme for the new west Florida settlement, but he urged, “this plan will admit of being greatly varied.” Pensacola could serve as a positive example that people of African descent were capable of improvement and could successfully plant the colonies as free workers.39 Morgan proposed a slight alternative to his Pensacola plan for the West Indies. He suggested a period of ten years instead of fifteen for the importation of children, who should be no older than six years old. Like the children for Pensacola, those purchased for the West Indies would attend school in England. When they returned to the colonies, as married and

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civilized men and women, they would work in lower government positions—“a magistracy of blacks” as Morgan called it, where they would be under “the controul of a Governor.” Most importantly, they would serve as an example to which the enslaved masses could aspire, and would offer a ready confirmation to the planter class that blacks could be trained to become industrious free laborers, and people who could be trusted with political responsibility.40 What distinguishes Maurice Morgan from abolitionists like James Ramsay and William Wilberforce was that he served the imperial government, and that his writings were never widely circulated among the British public. His work was not part of abolitionist propaganda, and it predated the national campaigns to ban the slave trade. It emerged out of a privately distributed imperial policy memorandum, in which Morgan laid out plans on how Britain could fortify control over its North American territories, beginning with west Florida. Morgan had served the British government in various capacities. In 1763 he was secretary-adviser to William Fitzmaurice Petty, president of the Board of Trade and responsible for administering territories gained in North America at the 1763 Peace of Paris. In 1767, Morgan served as emissary to Quebec and executive secretary to Sir Guy Carleton, commander at the British army headquarters in New York. Despite his various posts, he remained consistently responsible for devising measures to strengthen Britain’s control over its territories. One historian has concluded that Morgan “embraced empire” and spent much of his career trying to “make the empire work.”41 The Pensacola proposal for promoting biological reproduction and freeing carefully tutored black children was an important part of such a mission. Morgan’s Plan for abolition was one of several proposed policies aimed at stabilizing Britain’s colonies. Significantly, it also revealed that alternatives to slavery were necessary for the British government to consider abolition. Parliament was concerned about financial losses the slavery interests would incur as well as the political repercussions of a disgruntled merchant and planter class. The publication of Morgan’s plan in 1772 marked a shift in antislavery thought. Breaking with the antislavery writings of the 1760s that had failed to attract support, Morgan’s work extended beyond the condemnation of slavery, and offered alternatives. Envisioning “an empire without slaves,” Morgan proposed that free back men and women, invested with “with certain limited rights and liberties traditionally enjoyed by British subjects” would supply the labor needs of the colonies.42

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In addition to the promotion of reproduction as the key to any successful emancipation plan, a common theme that runs through the writings of 1780s abolitionists is the need to protect British economic interests by taking gradual steps toward freedom. Parliament’s hesitation to act and the conflicts that emerged between the slaving interests and abolitionists hinged on concerns for profit loss. The previously discussed Thomas Cooper, for example, who projected Africa’s population loss due to the slave trade at 180 million, strongly believed it was wrong for “Negroes to be deprived of their liberty, and of everything which belongs to them as human beings and British subjects.” He also thought that due consideration had to be given to the financial interests of investors, because it was equally “wrong” for them to “lose their money.”43 James Ramsay shared these concerns, and despite viewing slavery “as a vile institution” that sank “human nature to the lowest depth of wretchedness,” he hesitated to advocate immediately freeing those held in bondage.44 In his 1784 text Ramsay avoided the question of emancipation. Four years later, however, he offered a more concrete, though long-term, timetable for freedom. He disclaimed that his plan aimed “only at the abolition of the African slave trade.”45 Emancipation, he declared, “is not even suggested till their improvement shall have made it the master’s interest freely to bestow.”46 Concerns that liberty would financially ruin proprietors, investors, and the colonies stopped Ramsay short of fully advocating a plan for immediately freeing those enslaved.47 Although he was an ardent supporter of free trade and wage labor economies, and he agreed that prohibiting the slave trade would lead to new trade patterns and new markets, he strongly believed in a gradualist approach that included reforming the laboring populations of the colonies to advance progressively toward a free labor system.48 The economic and political disputes that demanded a gradual approach to freedom made framing abolition through women’s reproductive ability an effective strategy. Time was needed to conceive, birth, and socialize children fit for freedom. Ramsay therefore emphasized that he did not envision “full emancipation” until some distant point in the future, after a number of conditions were satisfied.49 Primary among such conditions for “improvement” was having a reliable and sustainable population that would not only provide plantations with a stable and abundant supply of laborers but would also contribute to the socioeconomic and cultural advancement of the colonies. In addition to demonstrating that they were “capable of “procur[ing] the

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conveniences and comforts of life, in the same manner as other civilised people,” enslaved people had to exhibit a willingness to yield to the “government of the law.”50 A demonstrated disposition to submit to governmental authority was also a requisite for freedom in Wilberforce’s plans for emancipation. “Our poor degraded Negro Slaves,” he wrote, “are as yet incapable of enjoying freedom,” and to grant them immediate liberty “would be the grossest violation and the merest mockery of justice and humanity, [that] would insure not only their masters’ ruin, but their own.” A training and transitional period was therefore necessary to prepare Africans and their children for the enjoyment of true liberty, which, as Wilberforce underscored, included acceptance of “reason and law,” religious instruction, and moral improvement.51 Although abolitionists used the word citizen loosely in their writings, none of them made a clear case for enslaved people to share equal political rights with whites after emancipation. Instead, they concentrated their arguments on the possibility of the enslaved becoming moral, industrious, and obedient to the rule of law—civilized. The different cultural habits and behaviors of the enslaved, which also justified the marginalization of the poor in other places, including Britain, marked blacks as unprepared for citizenship and justified their unequal status. Abolitionists framed the abolition of the slave trade as a litmus test for masters to wean their dependence on cruelty in their treatment of slaves, thereby giving them an opportunity to reproduce naturally and to adopt British cultural practices. Successful biological reproduction and a reform of slavery as well as the character of the enslaved brought the possibility of freedom, which further constituted the basis for evaluating their readiness to enjoy rights and liberties extended to British subjects. Contingent upon biological reproduction and cultural improvement, subject citizenship remained unattainable for blacks in Britain’s colonies.52 When the 1807 ban on the slave trade failed to stimulate population growth and improve the moral and material conditions of the enslaved, abolitionists in the 1820s insisted on an imperial reform. The Crown’s 1820s amelioration program to create policies and laws for colonial adoption would not only miss the mark in reforming slavery. It would also plunge the colonies into chaos and crises that ignited rebellions among the enslaved across the British Caribbean. By 1833, political instability made slavery untenable. The possibility of reform prevailed with Parliament’s passage of the Emancipation Act, which

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put forth a six-year apprenticeship system designed to train enslaved people to work like free people and masters to hire these newly freed workers. Parliament terminated the apprenticeship system two years ahead of schedule; and the labor conflicts, fears about population decline, rebellion, and brutal reprisals that marked the 1840s to 1860s period convinced the Crown that former slaves were not ready to become subject-citizens. The Jamaican legislature and the British government denounced the formerly enslaved as unfit for freedom and citizenship, and abolished the island’s already limited self-government in 1866. The imposition of Crown colony government (colonial rule from England) suspended the possibility of formerly enslaved people governing themselves until 1944, and the limited constitutional reforms of the 1880s that allowed propertied men the franchise ensured that only an elite minority participated in formal politics.53 Autonomy and citizenship, it seemed, was always beyond the grasp of Africans and their descendants living in the West Indies. This meant that Afro-Caribbean people’s access to power was often informal and ephemeral, and like the struggles over childbirth, infused the ongoing tensions that marked slavery and colonialism. Abolitionist activists of the 1780s concentrated their campaigns on the ability of enslaved people to become moral and productive subject-citizens. As Maurice Morgan explained, for the enslaved to be able to “talk the same language, read the same books, profess the same religion, and be fashioned by the same laws” as Englishmen, abolitionists needed to persuade Parliament that slaves could be reformed.54 Unlike some proslavery advocates, including Edward Long, who asserted inherent African inferiority as a justification for their enslavement, activists and strategists like Morgan, Ramsay, and Wilberforce worked hard to convince the British public that Africans and their descendants were capable of improvement.55 The proposed plan to harness the reproductive potential of women as a pathway to freedom and citizenship could only make sense if abolitionists avoided arguments about the inherent inferiority of African-descended people. Activists had to make the case that mothers would not reproduce their vices in their children. Abolitionist campaigns, therefore, concentrated on amendable external and environmental factors. They decried the works of philosophers like David Hume who argued for the inherent inferiorities of Africans and their descendants and only opposed the system of slavery because he viewed it as inefficient and exemplary of the wastes of imperial expansion.56

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Abolitionists countered arguments like Hume’s by arguing that environmental conditions dictated morals, values, and accomplishments, but inherited bodily differences, like skin color and hair texture, had no bearing on mental capacities or achievements. For example, Morgan argued that “even though our bodies may be varied by colour, or any other corporeal distinction” there is no inherent difference in capabilities.57 He declared that captive Africans and their descendants existed in a state of moral and intellectual void because plantation societies had not stimulated the development of such capacities. Morgan, and later Ramsay and Wilberforce, insisted that freed children sent from the colonies to England improved in intelligence and social aptitude. The difference, they explained, was that such youths had been conditioned and socialized from their infancy to a different way of life. Encouraging births and socializing enslaved children in a manner compatible with the abolitionist goal of creating moral and free colonies would allow planters to capitalize on youths’ capacity for reform. Although abolitionist writers generally avoided the racial inferiority arguments because of their potential to undermine their moralizing project, age introduced an exception to this rule. The writers believed it was far more difficult, if not impossible, for adults to unlearn behaviors of a lifetime. Thus, they proposed two separate Christianization programs: one for adults and another for youths. In their plans, children would be isolated and indoctrinated exclusively by white missionaries, whereas evangelists as well as successful (enslaved) converts would teach adults. Missionaries would create a privileged class of converts who would receive greater rations and finer quarters in exchange for encouraging conversion and virtuous living among their fellow enslaved. This elite group of believers would check against all un-Christian practices and habits that could undermine the work of proselytizers. Privileged disciples would “superintend” fellows of the same sex. Thus, a woman who sinned privately should be “mildly reproved in private” by another person of the same sex. The individual should be brought before the congregation to account for offenses that were more public. However, if the offender “obstinately persist[ed] in the fault” she should be banished from the congregation. Those who remained devout, were obedient to their masters, and kept the Sabbath should be rewarded with such indulgences that will further “encourage them in their work,” betterment, and uprightness.58 The private sins of enslaved people of particular concern to abolitionists were their sexual relations. Abolitionists upheld Christian marriage as

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foundational for preparing future generations of free people. In their misguided assumptions about what constituted intimate relationships between people of African descent, abolitionists echoed slaveholders’ refrain that enslaved people exercised no libidinal restraint and were like “perfect brutes” who engaged in “promiscuous intercourse.” “A man,” Ramsay claimed, “may have what wives he pleased, and either of them may break the yoke of their caprice.” Christian marriage was necessary to eradicate such loose sexual conduct and promote morality. Marriage “is the embryo of society, it contains the principles, and feeds every social virtue. The care of family,” Ramsay stressed, “would make them considerate, sober, frugal, and industrious.” In married men, he wrote, one finds “a more useful and trust worthy citizen than he who is single” (emphasis added).59 In articulating abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of women, these proposals for encouraging marriage were not just about improving morals. The prevalence of venereal diseases in the colonies that undermined conception and birthrates meant that monogamous, Christian marriage also could eradicate what abolitionists thought was another obstacle to population growth. Christian marriages promised to eliminate perceived sexual promiscuity as well as engineer gender relationships. By placing women in the fields and breaking apart families, slavery and the slave trade prevented women from occupying their rightful place within the households of their fathers and husbands. Abolitionist criticism of demographic failure was therefore a critique of slavery’s disruption of the supposed natural gender order in which women related to men as dependents and men ruled over their wives and children. Plans to abolish the slave trade by encouraging biological reproduction were part of a much larger vision for ultimate emancipation that involved placing women in subordinate positions as wives and mothers while elevating men as husbands, fathers, workers, and ultimately citizens. Only by becoming heads of their families could enslaved men share the privileges of Englishmen. In effect, claims of citizenship were beyond women’s reach. The ability to belong and participate in colonial society as citizens relied on embracing British cosmologies and an elite gender order, like those imparted by Christianity and Christian marriages.60 Abolitionist critique of the gender disorder slavery produced extended to masters’ paternalism, which negated the autonomy of males. Like many proslavery writers, abolitionists used children as symbols of primitivism, characterizing male slaves as childlike and not self-reliant because they

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depended on their masters. Paternalism emboldened the power slaveholders held over their bonded laborers precisely because it undermined the masculinity of enslaved men. Enslaved men in Ramsay’s perception were not prepared to assume the full responsibilities of freedom. “Like children,” he argued, “they must be restrained by authority and led to their own good” (emphasis added). In order to partake of the liberties extended to English men, enslaved men had to unlearn their dependence on their masters, marry, and assume authority and responsibility for their own households and families.61 Although these claims perpetuated the infantilized image of captive Africans used to rationalize slavery, abolitionist arguments were very different from those used by slavery defenders. In Ramsay’s postulations, children were “unspoiled by human nature” and consequently possessed the greatest potential for reform.62 Though childlike, enslaved adults lacked the innocence and open-mindedness of children. Missionaries were therefore more hard-pressed to realize their transformation. Tainted by the sociocultural circumstances of slavery and the slave trade, adults were irredeemable. This view reflected a more enlightened (though no less self-serving) view of African-descended people insofar as it avoided the argument that they were inherently inferior.63 Such reasoning was essential to abolitionist articulation of colonial reform through the reproductive capacities of women because this framing reiterated that biological reproduction would not regenerate perceived African inferiority. The image of captive Africans as perpetual children unable to live independent of their masters would contradict a reform agenda elaborated through women’s reproductivity. To strengthen the argument that Africans and their descendants were capable of improvement, Ramsay extolled enslaved people born in the colonies, called “Creoles,” as having higher worth than those who were African born. Africans domesticated for “three or four generations in our colonies or made free three or four generations back were more intelligent than those who were born in Africa and had recently arrived in the colonies.” Creoles, he asserted, were more suited for cultivating the colonies, since they were more “hardy, diligent and trusty” than Africans.64 Using earlier estimates presented by planter Edward Long, Ramsay argued that Creoles were more productive than new captives. According to Long’s estimate, Creoles produced 250,000 hogsheads more sugar than imported captive Africans.65 Although Ramsay denounced the slave trade and slavery as immoral, he praised what in his estimation were improvements among

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African-descended people born in the colonies. “The farther back the negro can trace his Creolism,” he argued, “the more he valued himself and the more he was valued.”66 In commending what he presumed as the more civilized Creoles, Ramsay once more exposed his latent view that slavery was not the only reason he perceived African-descended people as culturally inferior. The African homeland also played a part in shaping its people’s supposed backwardness. Such postulations reiterated his position that reform through biological reproduction would not replicate African vices because they were learned, not inherited. Believing that mixed-race children were even more sophisticated than Creoles, abolitionists advocated for their immediate freedom to the custody of churchwardens. Appointed custodians would act as guardians of colored children and ensure their placement into a “trade or business [in keeping] with their inclination and the demands of the colony.” The white fathers and owners of mixed-race children should bear the expenses of apprenticeship. In cases where the child’s father was not its owner, the father should secure its freedom by paying the mother’s owner the “right pounds sterling, as soon as the child is weaned.” The manumitted colored child should then be apprenticed to an appropriate trade. Fathers who refused to secure their children’s freedom and apprenticeship should be “fined an annuity equal to their [children’s] maintenance.”67 This proposal resembled the eighteenth-century British apprenticeship system in which family members or government ministries apprenticed young people. Private arrangements allowed children to learn the operations of a particular enterprise from a family friend or a business associate. In some cases, apprenticeship was simply girls working alongside their mothers to learn domestic chores, or boys working with their fathers to become carpenters, bricklayers, or farmers. In the more formal arrangements organized by individual parishes, the state placed apprentices with employers who would train them in service, agriculture, or industrial manufacture. The British apprenticeship system aimed to inculcate habits of industry and place children into their proper gender and class roles. Apprenticeships were not just about learning a skill; they also aimed to prepare girls for their life of domesticity and boys for more public roles.68 The heteropatriarchy of the apprenticeship program for mixed-race boys and girls implicitly promoted biological reproduction among the more “advanced” segments of the unfree population, whose freedom ahead of the blacks (meaning no racial intermixing) positioned them as exemplars

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of appropriate gender order. In singling out mixed-race children for immediate freedom and apprenticeship, the proposal promoted the racial hierarchy that built slavery. Enslaved women and their children were essential to abolitionist goals of transforming the colonies from slave to free societies. Having received improved treatment, women were expected to birth a greater number of children, who would then be trained from their infancy to become moral and industrious free people. Children were far more crucial to the project of creating free societies than adults. Although the foundations of creating a free society rested on women’s ability to reproduce, the difficulties of reconditioning the minds of adults made them somewhat of a lost generation to the ultimate project of freedom. Abolitionist pronatal plans made it clear that the question was not simply one of changing status from slave to free. Imperial reformers envisioned enslaved people acculturated to British morality and values that included subordinating women as homemakers and elevating men as heads of their households, which would help to achieve the reformers’ goals for population growth. Abolitionist plans therefore firmly lodged the future of the sugar colonies within enslaved women’s bellies. Once their offspring were “raised up in the knowledge of their duty,” they would become “at last civilized” and capable of being “lifted into equality with Englishmen.”69 The rhetoric and plans of abolitionists gave new meanings and significance to biological reproduction, motherhood, and childhood. Enslaved women could be sources of freedom if their offspring could be groomed to adopt British cultural practices and social organization. The practical steps of achieving such plans—building hospitals and nurseries, enforcing early weaning, rewarding mothers with clothes, food, and labor exemption, and allowing missionaries to proselytize among slaves—established a blueprint for amelioration. The plans remained largely conceptual, however, because their implementation depended on estate owners and agents in the colonies. Ideological differences over the capacity of African-descended people to adopt British habits and values engendered tensions between abolitionists and planters. The slaving interests defined Africans and their descendants as innately inferior and incapable of reform or working without brute force. Abolitionists argued, however, that the enslaved were a people corrupted by slavery. Given the right training and incentives, their children at least could be reformed and fitted for freedom.

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The ideological entanglements between abolitionists and planters stretched beyond the articulation of abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of enslaved women. As the next two chapters show, the contested nature of pronatalism centered on the fact that colonial capitalists were driven not by moral but rather by economic imperatives. The working out of reforms in the colonies was subordinated to planter interests, who prioritized maintaining sugar production and increasing profits. Because concerns for day-to-day productivity and profitability of sugar estates dictated reproductive interventions, abolitionist moral ambitions were subordinated to the economic ambitions of plantation agents and owners.

Chapter 2

“The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction

In 1789, Simon Taylor proposed buying more African women for Golden Grove, one of the six Jamaican sugar plantations he managed.1 “The first good Eboe ship that comes in,” he wrote, “I will endeavour to get ten women out of her.”2 Taylor had dismissed suggestions to increase the female population on the property in 1770, so his proposal surprised his absentee employer, Golden Grove’s proprietor, Chaloner Arcedekne. The transatlantic correspondence between Taylor and Arcedekne about buying more females for Golden Grove was part of a common practice among Jamaican proprietors in which they appointed attorneys to act on their behalf while they returned to live in England. Throughout the eighteenth century, as properties passed from one generation to the next, many heirs never even had to set foot on the island.3 The letter Taylor wrote in 1789 was in response to an earlier one written by Arcedekne discussing the possibility that a slave trading ban would force them to encourage biological reproduction among Jamaica’s bonded workers. In 1770, Taylor dismissed Arcedekne’s proposal to buy more females from the slave trade because he, like many other Jamaican plantation managers, viewed women as incompetent workers. “In regard to purchasing fifteen females to five Negroes,” he wrote, “it can by no means answer at Golden Grove, for you want men infinitely more than women, for there are many things which women cannot do.”4 Planters were reluctant to buy females for their Jamaican sugar estates throughout the seventeenth century and eighteenth century.5 They preferred buying males because they considered them more versatile and capable of performing the variously demanding agroindustrial tasks of the sugar plantations. William Beckford, heir to

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45

his father’s extensive Westmoreland properties where he spent thirteen years as a resident proprietor before becoming an absentee planter and publishing his experiences, explained, “A Negro man is purchased for a trade or cultivation and different process of the cane.” Women, however, could efficiently perform “only two [roles:] the house, with its several departments, and the supposed indulgences, or the field with its exaggerated labours.”6 Despite their repeated assertions that slave women were less capable and less versatile than men, planters willingly exploited them to achieve productivity goals. For example, during the planting season women worked alongside men clearing fields and holing the land for sowing cane. These tasks were among the most physically demanding work on the plantation. Although excluded from artisanal positions as sugar boilers and distillers, women also worked in the factories feeding canes to the mills and supplying fuel for the boilers. During harvest months, women worked in the cane fields from sunrise to sunset, cutting and carrying canes from the fields to the factories for processing into sugar. At night they worked on a shift system to keep apace the processing of sugar. Planters seeking to maintain productivity and profitability viewed pregnancy and child care as distractions. Those who were not outright hostile toward biological reproduction were ambivalent; reproduction brought the possibility of increasing the work force, but it was a costly investment because childbearing women had to miss work to give birth and attend their newborns, many of whom did not survive beyond age two. Slave trader John Barnes noted, “Planters of the West Indies in most Cases prefer Males [because] they lose the labour of a Female in the latter End of pregnancy, and for a little time afterwards.” Furthermore, Barnes asserted, “the Child is some years before it can be put to Labour.”7 Supplies and monies permitting, Governor David Parry noted, planters bought “all males, as they will be more immediately profitable by their Work, whereas Females, above Three parts of their time are taken up breeding and suckling a tedious and precarious Offspring, from which no Profit can be expected for many Years to come.”8 Parry emphasized the suckling of infants as time wasted because “precarious” enslaved children rarely survived the materially deprived and diseased conditions into which they were born. Although Jamaican planters profited from the birth and growth of children into adulthood, they were generally reluctant to prioritize pregnancy and childbirth over field and factory work. With few exceptions, before the rise of

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pronatal abolitionism in the 1780s, planters offered expectant and new mothers only minimal care and relaxation of their labor routines.9 By articulating abolition and reform in terms of women’s reproductive ability, abolitionists pressed planters to reconsider their attitudes toward and the treatment of childbearing women. Slaveholders did not simply adopt metropolitan prescriptions on how best to increase biological reproduction, however. They interpreted and shaped policy according to the needs and wants of their sugar plantations as well as their perceptions of the capabilities and intimate lives of captive Africans. Planters determined that revisions in purchasing patterns, as they pertained to the sex, age, and ethnicity of imported Africans, were needed to reverse population decline. Before the slave trade ended, buyers aimed to stock their plantations with women most likely to reproduce. This attentiveness to the childbearing histories and reproductive potential of women in the closing decades of the slave trade (1780s-1807) shifted the importance of women and reproduction in the plantation economies. It marked a major transformation in the policy and practice of previous decades when planters considered pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing as liabilities. The changing value of the reproductive capacity of female captives brought unwelcome interventions in the intimate lives of enslaved men and women. In addition to stocking their plantations with females they perceived as the “best breeding” people, Jamaican planters intervened in the sexual lives of enslaved men and women to capitalize on the reproductive promise of their purchases. Planters’ reproductive interventions not only contrasted with policies proposed by abolitionists, they also conflicted with enslaved people’s own views about the formation of sexual partnerships. The clash that would erupt between enslaver and enslaved reflected the authority slave owners claimed over the bodies of people they owned and the power enslaved people claimed to control their bodies.

Strategies for Breeding: Sex and Age Preferences Between 1788 and 1807, sugar estate owners and managers aimed to buy females in far greater numbers than in previous decades in order to achieve parity between the sexes or, in some cases, to obtain more women than men. The absentee proprietor of Amity Hall estate, Henry Goulburn, implored his attorney, Thomas Samson, to “purchase [more] women in

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Girls 12% Boys 12% Men 49%

Women 27%

Figure 2a. Sex and Age Ratio, Jamaica, 1769–87. Source: Data compiled from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012).

preference to males until the numbers of each are equal.” This method of buying, Goulburn explained, was the “means alone that we shall be able to keep our stock without diminution.”10 In another planter’s view, a major obstacle to successfully increasing birthrates was that the estates had “a great many more men than women.”11 An examination of the transatlantic slave trade database confirms that males were likely to outnumber females on Jamaican sugar estates because of a greater number of males traded. In the twenty-year period before the start of Britain’s national campaign to shut down the African labor supply (1769–88), males steadily accounted for at least 60 percent of imported workers (Figure 2a). This pattern persisted into the last twenty years of the trade’s legal existence (1788–1808) with some years showing a 60 to 70 percent purchase of males (Figure 2b). While the slave trade database confirms preponderance of males, individual plantation records of annual slave increase and decrease show a narrower, and sometimes nonexistent, gap between males and females. Records for Worthy Park estate, for example, consistently show that males never outnumbered females by more than 5 percent in any given year

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Girls 6% Boys 10%

Women 30%

Men 54%

Figure 2b. Sex and Age Ratio, Jamaica, 1788–1808. Source: Data compiled from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012).

between 1784 and 1796 (Figure 3). Similar patterns emerge for Golden Grove estate that show some years when females outnumbered males and other years when only a few slaves accounted for the sex ratio gap (Figure 4). For example, in 1768, the 50.1 percent females (184) surpassed the 49.8 percent males (183). In June 1792, the period that listed the greatest proportion of males (248), the property needed only a 4.7 percent increase in females (205) to achieve sexual parity. A demographic history of Jamaica’s slave population between 1807 and 1834 not only confirms a small skewed sex ratio in favor of men, it also reveals that in many cases the proportion of women exceeded men on sugar plantations.12 The slave population profile of Jamaica in 1817, the earliest year with comprehensive census data, reveals a ratio of 117.8 males to 100 females among the African-born population, and 91.4 males to 100 females among the island-born population (Creoles). While the overall sex ratio confirms that Jamaican buyers consistently imported more African males than females, the mortality rate among men was higher. An excessive death rate for males was especially true in the parishes where sugar plantations dominated and had the largest concentration of unfree workers. With the

600 500 400 Total Slaves

300

No. of Females 200

No. of Males

100 0 1784

1785

1786

1787

1788

1789

1790

1791

1793

1794

1796

Figure 3. Sex Ratio on Worthy Park Estate, 1784–96. Source: Compiled from Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 81.

500 450 400 350 300 250

Total Population

200

Males

150

Females

100 50 0 1765

1767

1768

1773

Jan. 1792

June 1792

1810

Figure 4. Sex Ratio on Golden Grove Estate, 1765–1810. Source: Compiled from Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765–1810,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99–121.

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exception of only St. Thomas-in-the-East Parish, the female population surpassed the male population in all the sugar-producing parishes, many of which were home to the estates examined in this study, including Trewlany, St. John, and St. James. Males outnumbered females because of lower male mortality rates in other Jamaican parishes such as Manchester, St. Ann, St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, St. Mary, Port Royal, and St. George, where enslaved workers cultivated other crops and were engaged in diverse economic activities, like pimento and coffee growing as well as livestock rearing. Parishes with larger urban centers like St. Catherine and Kingston show the widest gap in sex ratios, with females outnumbering males by almost twenty to one. Urban economies depended on trade, manufacture, and domestic service, in which more women worked than in agriculture, which dominated the rural parishes. The problem plaguing sugar plantations was not so much a lack of women in general, but rather a deficiency of young women of childbearing age. The relatively quick pace at which the gender gap closed on the sugar estates when buying patterns had not shifted radically in favor of females reflects an aging population of women who outlived men. This demographic study further reveals a consistent gap in the age group fifteen to twenty-five across Jamaican parishes. The bulk of the slave population fell between ages twenty-five to forty-four. As one historian noted, “A common feature of the total populations was an erosion of the age pyramid between about 15 and 25 years.”13 Individual estates like Golden Grove reflect this pattern; 5.6 percent of its women were above age seventy, well beyond childbearing age. Girls with greatest reproductive promise, aged nine to seventeen, accounted for another 42 of 204 females at Golden Grove estate. Most women were field workers with “reputed age”14 between thirty and seventy years and therefore had a much lower reproductive potential.15 The age compositions of these properties tell us that the most pressing need was for greater proportions of women capable of bearing children. Francis Graham, attorney for Georgia estate, made this argument to his absentee employer, the owner of the property, Thomas Miller, when he explained why workers failed to reproduce. The estate simply had too many “old Gangs,” Graham wrote, and the only way to stimulate population growth was to buy young women.16 Proprietors and attorneys attempted to alter not just the sex ratio of their populations but also the youth profiles of female slaves. In 1804, Rowland Fearon, the Jamaican-based attorney who managed Lord Penrhyn’s sugar estates, promised to buy “as many young girls,” more specifically,

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“growing women,” for the property.17 Other planters were more precise in defining what constituted young, “growing women.” The planter-historian William Beckford summarized, “age twelve to sixteen is in my opinion, the age group that is most likely to answer the future” reproductive needs.18 Females between ages twelve to sixteen were far “too young” to suit Simon Taylor, because they were more vulnerable to sexual abuse. “If girls are bought too young,” Taylor explained, “the fellows play the very devil with them, but after they are 16 or 18 there is no [sexual] danger.”19 Thomas Barritt, attorney at two estates belonging to Nathaniel Phillips, expressed a similar concern. Men (race unspecified) frequently lured the “young wenches” away from the estates. Unsuspecting young girls inveigled by men into “bad habits” were “being disordered.”20 While sexual activity could increase the conception rate, overindulgence generated diseases with sterilizing effects on female fertility.21 Nothing else, testified Stephen Fuller, Jamaican agent in London reporting to Parliament, “impede[s] the natural increase of the Slaves [more] than” venereal diseases.22 Although Jamaican planters wished to purchase a greater number of younger females than they did prior to 1788, they considered captives between ages twelve and sixteen to approximately age twenty-five to be best suited for fulfilling their reproductive goals. Planter reform was at odds with the more generalized adjustments that abolitionists proposed. Abolitionists like James Ramsay and William Wilberforce insisted on a generally younger female population in order to stimulate population growth. Yet they did not anticipate the difficulties of having a population of females who were too young. Planters who witnessed and participated in the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls understood the vulnerabilities of young girls. Their refusal to buy girls younger than twelve to sixteen reflected these abusive realities of slavery. Planters did not simply attempt to buy young girls, as abolitionists recommended, but specifically purchased girls old enough to defend themselves from unwanted sexual advances. Ironically, planters recognized and welcomed enslaved people’s agency when it suited their needs. At other times when it interfered with planter power and sexual access, they denounced enslaved people’s efforts to exercise autonomy. The demand for younger females in their childbearing years increased not only because individual planters diverted their focus toward biological reproduction but also because new governmental trading regulations provided tax relief for the importation of females below age twenty-five. In

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1792, Henry Dundas, adviser to the British prime minister, proposed a new bill regulating the age and sex of Africans imported to the British colonies. Echoing the pronatal plans of the imperial bureaucrat Maurice Morgan, who as noted earlier in 1772 devised a plan to wean planters from their dependence on the slave trade, Dundas argued that time should be given to “encourage merchants and planters to try fairly the scheme of rearing a sufficient number of native Negroes to answer the purpose of cultivating the plantations.” This proposal required planters to buy greater proportions of young women because they were “more likely to reproduce than were persons of advanced age.”23 Although the House of Lords rejected Dundas’s proposal for an imperial adoption of a tax incentive on the purchase of younger females, colonial governments like the Jamaican Assembly adopted a similar measure. In 1797, the Assembly passed “an Act for laying a duty on all Negro slaves that shall be imported into this island from the coast of Africa who shall be above a certain age.” By this act, women above age twenty-five attracted an additional £10 tax. In communicating the successful adoption of the bill, Assembly members reported that it was “readily adapted” because of its “promised advantages.” Restricting imported Africans to those below age twenty-five, Assembly members iterated, not only promised to boost natural increase but also had the potential to reduce the number of “aged” workers incapable of acquiring “habits of industry.”24 Despite increased planter demands and government incentives, young females continued arriving in Jamaica’s ports in fewer numbers than males. The transatlantic slave trade database shows significant growth in total imported Africans within the last decades of legal slave trading. However, the average percentage of males remained consistently greater than females (except for the years 1798–1806 and 1808, for which we have no data on sex ratios).25 Males accounted for 61.80 percent of the total number of Africans brought into Jamaica for the entire period of legal slave trading (1659–1808) and 63.80 percent during the abolitionist period (1788– 1808).26 The closest approximation of the age of females imported into Jamaica is reached by looking at the ratio of children, crudely defined by slave traders as young people below four feet four inches.27 The average number of children brought into Jamaica shows a downward trend between 1788 and 1808. In 1788, children were 24.90 percent of African imports. These rates declined steadily for the next seven years (to 1795) when the average import was 11.88 percent. By 1796 the number of children imported to Jamaica fell to 7.22 percent; by 1797 it had increased slightly to

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Table 1. Negroes Purchased for Worthy Park Estate, 1784–93

Women

Boys

Girls

Children or Gender Unspecified

3 15 7 6 3 6

3 15 6 6 2 6

25 10 (males) 35 (males)

27 5 (females) 3 (females) 15 (females) 7 (females)

16

16

10 6

Year 1784 1788 1789 1790 n.d 1791 n.d 1791 Jan. 1792 June 1792 n.d 1793 n.d 1793 n.d 1793 n.d 1793

Men

6 (males)

1

Source: Worthy Park Accounts of Increase and Decrease, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, Jamaica Government Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica.

8.27 percent. The following year imported children increased to 16 percent. Broadly speaking, children bought between 1788 and 1808 amounted to just 15.66 percent.28 Of these totals, fewer girls arrived in Jamaica than boys. Over the ten-year period 1788–98, boys arrived in Jamaica at twice the rate of girls for at least four years. In 1789, for the 17.45 percent of slaves who were children landing in Jamaica, there were 8.05 percent who were girls. By 1798, the ratio of boys to girls had more than doubled. Boys approximated 11.5 percent in comparison to 4.5 percent for girls. Purchase patterns for some individual properties, like Worthy Park estate, show some attempt to buy at least equal proportions of women and men throughout the 1780s, and in at least one year (1792) this property made an additional purchase of sixteen boys and sixteen girls plus six children (sex unspecified) (Table 1). The records for other properties, such as Golden Grove estate, show no consistent pattern in gender- or age-specific purchases (Figure 5). In some years, its attorney, Simon Taylor, purchased more men than women, and the reverse in other years. Golden Grove’s purchase accounts inconsistently record age (boys, girls, or children), but its fluctuating buying patterns suggest that uncertainties of the trade could make buying patterns unpredictable. Despite abolitionist insistence and

54 Chapter 2 60 50 40 30

Total Purchase

20

Men Women

10

89 17 90 17 91 17 92 17 94

17

88 17

87 17

84 17

83 17

82 17

1

72 17

–7

7 –6

68 17

66

65 17

17

–6

6

0

Figure 5. New Negroes Known to Have Been Purchased for Golden Grove Estate, 1765–94. Source: Compiled from Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765–1810,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99–121.

government regulations that planters buy more young women, planter purchases did not reflect such gender preferences. The fact that young women did not dominate the number of captive Africans landing in Jamaica suggests that despite preferences planters expressed, the constraints of the slave trade ultimately determined the sex and age of cargo available to Jamaican planters.29 Scholars debate the reasons for the sex and age ratios of Africans imported into the Americas. Some scholars argue that fewer females were available for the transatlantic trade because regional trades in Africa valued women as more important for agricultural production than men.30 Others assert that both women and men were integral to West African agriculture and that other factors such as the type of crop produced, warfare, judicial processes, and strategies of enslavement were important determinants of the slave trade’s age and gendered composition and variation over time.31 Social and political conditions in Africa were also important factors that determined the availability of young women and girls for export into the Americas.32 Market demands also influenced the sex and age of Africans transported into the American markets. Slave traders would buy Africans from dealers

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not just according to what the market offered but also according to what they calculated would yield greatest profits. From the earliest years of the slave trade, West Indian buyers established their sex preferences. Moreover, when traders did not deliver according to market demands in the Americas, their buyers chastised them and paid very little for the undesired cargo. John Barnes, governor of the slave trading fort of Senegal, reported that merchants rejected African captives for several reasons.33 Chief among these was that the expected resale value of Africans did not exceed their original purchase price.34 Merchants refused to trade cargo who they calculated “were not worth their freight” for transportation to the Americas.35 While Caribbean planters made clear their preferences for age and sex they were unwilling to buy slaves who were ailing, maimed, or otherwise disabled, even if such consignment suited the other stated desires of buyers. The overriding concern among Jamaican buyers was obtaining healthy, able-bodied workers who would live long and work hard enough to return their investment. Planters readily purchased healthy women despite stated preferences for men. Buyer and seller interests in this regard aligned. Slave traders aimed to depart the African coast rapidly because delayed departures (even if to secure particular cargo) increased demands on food and supplies and greater likelihood of illness, death, and revolts, which meant that the captives who set sail for the Americas were those most quickly acquired and in the best of health.36 Whether one argues that supply conditions in Africa or profit calculations more significantly affected the disparities in sex and age, it is abundantly clear that planter preferences and their purchases were at odds. After 1788, Jamaican planters had a clear preference for young females. However, import records for Jamaica reveal continued male preponderance. These disparities tell us that the fulfilment of abolitionist-inspired pronatal plans did not depend only on planters working out reforms according to property needs or the capabilities of captive women and girls. The supply constraints and unpredictability of the slave trade also imperiled pronatalism. Reformminded planters, therefore, needed to align their practices to cope with the limitations of the slave trade, placing them further at odds with the proposed policies of abolitionists. While quantitative analyses are important for calculating trends and the magnitude of the slave trade, they sometimes obscure more than they reveal.37 We know that males dominated Jamaica’s slave imports, but it is not clear what the sex and age ratios were for the period 1798 to 1806,

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during the height of abolitionist activism.38 This was the most crucial period when planters were unusually attentive to the sex and age of captive Africans. Beyond the unavailability of data, a purely quantitative approach also does not tell us how estate proprietors, attorneys, and overseers solved their quotidian problems of balancing production and reproduction, nor does it reveal the everyday experiences of enslaved men, women, boys, and girls. Although planters aimed to buy young women below age twenty-five, identifying the age of captive Africans was not an exact science. Buyers and sellers used various idiosyncratic means of telling the age of their cargoes, including the presence or absence of gray hair as well as teeth and skin condition. Testifying to a parliamentary special committee formed to investigate the slave trade, former trader John Fountain revealed that buyers inspected African captives to ensure they had no “defects” that would adversely affect their abilities to labor. “Stamping their foot boldly on the ground and stretching out their arms” would ensure commodities’ soundness. African dealers, Fountain testified, “are very cunning and commit various frauds in their trade with the Europeans.”39 Thus, he reported, buyers spared neither dignity nor humanity as they closely examined the “privies of men and women” to ensure they were “sound in wind and limb [and] to judge their age.”40 When it came to identifying the relative age of young women, or more precisely, those within their childbearing years, buyers worked out peculiar methods of determination.41 Women’s breasts betrayed their childbearing history. Buyers estimated that women with sagging breasts had already given birth or could no longer bear children. One account identified such women as those whose breasts were visible from a distance “hang[ing] down below their Navels.” “Young Negro Virgins,” however, were differentiated by the firmness of their breasts. As planter-historian Richard Ligon explained it, such young women had breasts that were “round, firm, and beautifully shaped.”42 Buyers and sellers in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century thus singled out the breasts of captives to estimate the age and reproductive potential of women in addition to inscribing racial meanings as their seventeenth-century predecessors had done. Captive women’s breasts were continuously imbued with meanings that underpinned the economic and racial edifice of slavery. Yet the shift in language away from sagging breasts primarily meaning African savagery to sagging breasts as prime indicator of childbearing potential marks a crucial transformation in the process of enslavement.

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Before buying new Africans, plantation physician Dr. David Collins advised, “pains should be taken to discover whether they are really what they appear to be, and pains should be taken to discover whether they have any personal defects which impair their value, if they do not render them entirely unfit for your purpose.” Captive women and girls were poked, prodded, and fondled by traders and buyers to ensure they were of “good stature . . . without any long breasts hanging down.” They stood in lines, in pairs, “stark naked” with buyers variously “squeezing their joints & muscles, twisting their arms & legs, and examining teeth, eyes and chest, and pinching [their] breasts without mercy.”43 Auctioneers introduced captives to buyers by emphasizing body parts that bespoke their reproductive promise. This was true in not only the Caribbean but North America as well, where the increased value of the womb shaped the slave market. Attempting to solicit the interest of buyers, one New Orleans trader called out, “There’s a breast for you; good for a round dozen before she’s done child-bearing.”44 Such selling calls appealed to buyers like Simon Taylor, who assured his absentee employer that the cargo he purchased were “fit for breeding” because they were “young women with cuck up bubbies” (understood to mean pert breasts or from Ligon’s more explicit description “round, firm” breasts).45 Thus, bodily traits, particularly the breasts, marked an inclusion of age and reproductive capabilities as determinants of captive women’s value. The emphasis on and examination of women’s breasts further exposed them to gender-specific violence. Such violence was more pronounced because, in the age of pronatal abolitionism, women’s reproductive value was of increasing importance to the system of slavery. The difficulties in determining the specific age of cargo prompted some buyers to consider other methods of determining women’s reproductive potential. When Thomas Miller, the absentee owner of Georgia estate, instructed his local attorney, Francis Graham, to lay out £1,000 to buy “breeding females,” he was mostly concerned with making sure they appeared capable of bearing children. Both the attorney and owner contemplated whether simply buying women with young children might not be a more effective strategy of stocking Georgia estate with women who had proven reproductive potential. The challenge in buying slave families, Graham explained, was that the estate would wind up with a smaller group of capable workers. According to Graham, if he were to use the £1,000 to buy only “females fit to breed,” he would secure about twelve “able bodied

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females,” whereas buying women with children would amount to sixteen or eighteen people, a good proportion of them being children who were unable to work at the more demanding tasks on the plantation.46 Planter concern about the age of newly purchased slaves was not just about girls’ sexual vulnerabilities but also about laboring abilities. Some planters did not buy slaves below a certain age because they could not work. Although Georgia estate aimed to increase the proportion of “breeding females,” Graham was reluctant to spend the limited capital to buy captive Africans who were unproductive. A strategy that would not undermine the profit motive of the estate would be to buy only potentially fertile females with all the available money, and gamble on whether they would actually produce children later. As Graham explained, if he were to buy families, then there would be no money left over to hire jobbers to do the work that slave mothers and young children were unable to do. What concerned Graham was how best to use the estate’s limited financial resources to increase the number of workers capable of reproducing, without undermining the estate’s ability to remain productive. Despite abolitionist concern for the colonies’ economic future and, therefore, their gradual approach to ending slavery, they failed to consider the outcomes pronatal reforms would have for the everyday financial and productive concerns of the estates. Planters who refused to adopt pronatal reform carte blanche were primarily concerned with their estates’ finances and production. In working out the details of amelioration, they tried to balance reform against the financial constraints and labor needs of their properties. The challenges planters faced in the era of pronatal abolitionism not only involved altering the demographic profile of their estates but also calculating how such changes would negatively impact their profit goals. They had to manage the financial risk of investing in children who were too young to work and who might not live into adulthood. The high mortality rates among young people cautioned planters against investing too heavily in slave children. According to the planter-historian Edward Long, it cost planters an average of £12 to maintain a field slave annually (food, clothing, poll tax, and insurance) in the 1780s, and approximately half that amount for children (typically up to about ages six to ten). From these calculations, it was more costly to buy boys and girls because they needed at least eight to ten years to be of significant use as workers.47 In fact, in 1805 Francis Graham traded two children for adults because the children were too young to be useful to the estate. One of the children was only twelve months old

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and Graham feared the boy might not survive into adulthood. Additionally, the labor shortage at Georgia meant that the estate could not invest eight to ten years waiting for these children to become useful workers.48 The financial costs, risk of premature death, and incessantly pressing labor needs of the sugar plantations did not make it cost-effective for reform-minded planters to buy slaves who were younger than ten to twelve years old. Abolitionists had not considered these circumstances. Planters, however, assessed these risks and invested in pronatal reforms according to the needs of their sugar estates, but they failed to consider the implications of trading children away from their mothers. The problem of biological reproduction was not just one of high infant and child mortality rates caused by diseases and nutritional deficiencies. How did these policies shape the family life of the enslaved and the willingness of enslaved women to bear children?

Strategies for Breeding: Ethnic Preferences Jamaican slaveholders had long singled out their preferences for particular ethnic groups whom they thought to be most productive and capable of fulfilling plantation labor needs. Edward Long spent much time explicating the importance of carefully choosing particular ethnic groups according to the “different purposes” for which they were needed on the sugar plantations. Africans, Long wrote, varied in “their passions and bent of mind . . . according to the constitution of their native climate and local manner [and had] a variety of distempers.” A planter looking to maximize his success would be best served by paying “particular attention” to such idiosyncrasies.49 Africans from the Gold Coast, or as buyers and sellers frequently called them “Coromantees,” were highly prized among Jamaican planters, who perceived them as “the only ones fit for Sugar Works.”50 “Negro men of Coromantee country,” one attorney asserted, were the best ones to “establish a fine gang of people for the estate.”51 When it came to buying women for reproductive purposes, their ethnic origin was just as essential.52 “Eboe is the country to buy women off to breed,” Nathaniel Phillips advised. Phillips, an absentee owner of two sugar estates, instructed his local attorney, Thomas Barritt, to allocate all monies owed to his property for buying new “Negroes when good ones come in [and] if Eboes take 20 women.” In 1800, Barritt reported to Phillips that he

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had purchased “14 New Negroes” for the properties of which there were “6 young women [and] 5 women girls.” He assured Phillips, that they were “all fine people, the best kind of Eboes.”53 Simon Taylor similarly reported to his absentee employer, Chaloner Arcedekne, that he “bought the 10 wenches [Arcedekne] desired. [He] sent 5 to G[olden] G[rove] and 5 to B[achelors] H[all]. . . . They are Eboes which we think are the best breeding people.”54 In keeping with buyer preferences, sellers littered colonial newspapers with sale advertisements that announced the arrival of precious cargo. One advertisement in the 1790 Daily Advertiser read, “For Sale On Tuesday 4th January 303 Choice Young Eboe From New Calabar.”55 Planter preoccupation with the ethnic origins of the captives departs from the emphasis abolitionists placed on sex and youthfulness as criteria for demographic changes needed to promote biological reproduction. Planters determined pronatal reforms based to their perceptions of how ethnicity shaped captive women’s reproductive capacities. Whether right or wrong, the conclusion proprietors and attorneys made that Ebo women were most prolific came from their years of perceiving these as having more children than other ethnic groups.56 Estate doctor David Collins asserted, “the African Negroes, being brought from an extensive range of the continent [had] unequal fecundity . . . and possess great varieties of character.” While Collins admitted it was “difficult to ascertain from what country they have been drawn, the history of Jamaica exhibits very sanguinary examples of [their] disposition.” Ebo women, or, as he variously labeled them, “Ebboes, Ebboos-bees or Mocco,” are “hardy” and capable of varieties of labor. They “are superior to any other and very little inferior to men.”57 In the literature, Ebo women reportedly had larger, more stable families and communities because they were generally more attached to the land, their children, and their spouses. A higher number of fugitive women with children and families were listed as Ebo, because they “placed their lives in great peril to keep their families intact.”58 Additionally, Ebo women were arguably more prolific because they formed sexual relationships with males outside their ethnic grouping.59 Planter writings represent their presumptions about African women and their family life; and whether or not these assumptions had basis in fact, they directed buying preferences. Not all planters agreed that Ebo women were most suitable for the “purpose of breeding.” Edward Long believed they were the least fertile of all African women because they were most susceptible to disorders of the

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womb. “Ebo women,” he wrote, “are subject to obstruction of the mestrua[tion], often attended with sterility, and incurable.”60 It is difficult to assess how many planters shared Long’s views that Ebos were the least prolific among captive women. What we do know, however, is that other planters like Simon Taylor held this view about women he presumed belonged to other ethnic groups. Taylor refused “Angola and Mandingo Negroes,” who, in his view were “soft” and “lazy.”61 But more important, Angolan and Mandingo women had an “abominable custom [of] dirt eating,” which he, along with other planters and medical practitioners like Thomas Roughley and Dr. James Thomson, understood as a significant cause of low fertility among captive women.62 Dirt eating allegedly caused women to fall into “dropsy occasioned by obstructions in their liver, consequently . . . there is no chance of the women breeding.”63 Clearly, planters developed particular preferences for specific groups of captive Africans, who they thought were the “best breeding people,” and when available they bought women and girls according to such prescriptions. Even as Taylor sought to increase his holdings of females, on more than one occasion he postponed doing so because only Angolan cargoes were available. “For my part,” he protested, “I would not accept a gang of them for nothing.”64 There are competing interpretations of the meaning of “Ebo” (in planter terminology) or “Igbo” (among historians).65 What did planters mean when they asked for Ebo women? Was the Ebo identity linked to Africans coming from particular ports—Bonny and Calabar (New and Old)—or was it linked to wide geographical regions—Bight of Biafra— which encompassed multiple, changing ethnicities? Did planters really understand the identities of captive Africans? How accurate were the claims of planters and traders that ethnicity correlated with higher or lower levels of fertility? The foundation for these debates is the question of accuracy, both in terms of British identification of their captives’ origins and in terms of Africans asserting and claiming particular identities.66 Some historians have dismissed planter-identified African ethnicities as “imposed taxonomies” and sweeping generalizations with neither credible meanings nor accurate reflections of African nations. Others have argued that over time planters learned the various ethnic markers of Africans and correctly deciphered them.67 This study is primarily concerned with what such labels meant when planters used them to refer to captive women and girls, and how such signifiers provide us a window into planter constructions of femininity for

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the purposes of maintaining slavery. The argument here is that these terminologies of ethnicity were “socially meaningful in the context of enslavement.”68 For the purposes of reproduction, young women identified as Ebo were considered the most fecund, real or imagined. On plantations like Golden Grove, newly purchased Ebo women received special treatment in order to allow them “every chance of breeding.” Even if these markers inaccurately labeled captives, they reveal planter interest in reproduction. Additionally, planter belief that women who were Ebos were the most suited for bearing children created differences in the daily lives of women and girls under slavery.69 The transformations ushered in by pronatalism did not affect all enslaved women evenly, but varied according to perceived ethnic origins of captive women.

Strategies for Breeding: Coerced Sexual Relations The extent to which planters believed that young women they perceived as Ebo were more fecund than others determined specialized treatment. At Golden Grove estate, Ebo women were forced into unions with enslaved men. The property’s attorney, Simon Taylor, said that he intended “for every man to have his wife” (emphasis added). Thus, as soon as “the first good Eboe ship” docked, he promised to buy as many women as needed to “give each man a wife.”70 It is unknown how extensively Taylor paired Ebo women with men on Golden Grove. We do know, however, of at least one occasion in February 1794, when he carried out his matchmaking plans. The men were reportedly “pleased with the wives [he] sent them.”71 Reports from other properties suggest that at least a few planters paired newly purchased women with men already residing on the plantation. In 1805, Rowland Fearon, attorney for Lord Penrhyn’s properties, announced his plans to have the “New Negro Girls at Coates [estate] intermarried [with the] men at the Penn [Bullard].”72 Several Jamaican planters targeted Ebo in their matchmaking efforts (again bearing in mind the conundrums of this marker). Planters paired Ebo women with Coromantee men. Unlike planters and doctors like Taylor, Phillips, and Collins, who emphasized the reproductive promise of Ebo women as a criterion for specialized treatment, the Ebo women in one historian’s account were singled out because of their presumed disposition. Planters coupled Ebo women with Coromantees because they believed

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these ethnic groups had opposing temperaments that complemented one another. Ebo women supposedly had more domestic tendencies that would help tame the more unruly, unsettled Coromantee. In return, the more enterprising and mentally resilient Coromantee men would strengthen the suicidal tendencies in Ebo women.73 Planter emphasis on the ethnic origins of African captives they expected to form into intimate unions not only contrasted with the policies abolitionists promoted, reflecting planter determination of the course of reform. By denying enslaved people autonomy over their own sexual partnerships, such coerced unions were also met with resistance. The likelihood of enslaved people rebelling against the arbitrary sexual partnerships prompted Taylor to put a few contingency measures in place. He allocated additional provision grounds and housing spots for the women in the event that they opposed his plans.74 The lack of further mention of his efforts to control enslaved women’s intimate relations suggests that the people at Golden Grove refused to cooperate and forced Taylor to abandon the scheme as quickly as he proposed it. The fact that Taylor and other planters complained about enslaved women’s nocturnal wanderings suggests that the freedom enslaved people claimed over bodily pleasures made it difficult to impose sexual relationships upon them and impossible to police their intimate lives.75 Attorney Fearon attempted similar interventions at Lord Penrhyn’s properties, but he abandoned the schemes because of enslaved people’s resistance. He reported, “I found it a tiresome and arduous task and gave it up as a bad job.”76 Although forced unions victimized both enslaved men and women, the coupling of newly arrived captive women with men already living on the plantation altered the gendered balance of power. Already seasoned into plantation life, enslaved men had the advantage of familiarity with their environment and being less immediately traumatized from the experience of the Middle Passage. It is not coincidental that planters chose recent arrivals to force into sexual unions. Captive women’s weakened state and lack of familiarity with their new surroundings made them most vulnerable to the control and advances of their purchasers and arbitrarily selected husbands. Reports of enslaved men being pleased with their wives raise further difficult questions that are not easy to answer from these sources. To what extent were enslaved men collaborators in the subordination and the sexual abuse of enslaved women? At other times, black men exerted physical and sexual power over black women through rape and domestic violence. At the

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very least, these records suggest that placing women into men’s households positioned enslaved men as head of household and invoked Europatriarchal standards that granted household heads unrestricted sexual access to their dependents. The occupational hierarchy that privileged men in most statusbearing and leadership roles already promoted black patriarchal power over black women, even though enslaved men were also victims of their masters’ expectations and machinations.77 Although planter assumptions about the reproductive capacities and tendencies of Ebo made these young women more susceptible to interference in their intimate lives, all enslaved women were vulnerable to planters scrutinizing their sexuality. Planters, doctors, and government officials denigrated African captives as being licentious, and despite planter efforts to select the best women “who are fit for breeding,” their exertions yielded few positive results because of women’s so-called promiscuity. Such complaints of sexual impropriety, however, reflected women’s refusal to conform to the sexual mores prescribed by reformers. In 1789, the Jamaica Committee of Council reporting to the British House of Commons noted, “Births are not so frequent amongst Negro Slaves in this Island as among the Peasantry of Great Britain, and it is in great measure attributed to their manners and habits of life. . . . Both sexes [frequently engage in] licentious intercourse.” The report further explained that women patronized “Negro plays or Nocturnal Assemblies, in distant Parts, where they dance immoderately, drink to Excess, sleep on the damp Ground in open Air, and commit such Acts of Sensuality and Intemperance [that] bring on the most fatal distempers.”78 By emphasizing sexual habits, witnesses for the slaving interests shifted attention away from the strenuous labor regimes, cruel punishments, and neglect of enslaved people’s material needs that abolitionists focused on as the leading causes of population decline. Planters and doctors echoed the council’s testimony and added that while the health of men and women suffered immensely from their nocturnal rendezvous, the consequences were far more injurious to female fertility than to male fertility. Fearon noted that “the women [were subject] to cold, obstructions, and other maladies [which are] the enemies to procreation.”79 Estate agent Thomas Barritt noted that such activities left the women “disordered and feeble,” minimizing their chances of bearing children.80 Enslaved women’s alleged promiscuity became an additional justification for planters to coerce them into intimate unions with arbitrarily chosen men on the plantations. Claiming authority over slaves’ bodies and sexuality, Fearon

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“did attempt to persuade all [the enslaved] people to intermarry and do away with the rambling at night.”81 Implicit within these writings is slaveholders’ ignorance of the sociocultural practices of enslaved people. Many Jamaican planters and colonial observers assumed that enslaved women’s late night activities were occasions for overindulgence of their sexual passions “with a multitude of men.” They believed these occasions involved the excessive consumption of alcohol, which they feared caused infertility in women. Plantation doctor William Wright asserted, “There are no causes on a well ordered estate that impede the natural increase of slave Negroes so much so as going to Negroe balls. . . . They [engage in] venery too early and often with a number of men. They [too easily accept] spirituous liquor and above all they conceal venereal complaints from White people.”82 Sharing Wright’s assessments, another estate doctor, Thomas Dancer, emphasized that “the unbound indulgences in venereal pleasures [are] a common cause of sterility” in women. “The parts are left in so morbid a state as to be unfit for impregnation,” he wrote. “The uterine and the vaginal vessels are distended, and a perpetual discharge, or flux albus is the consequence.”83 Enslaved people’s social habits had long been subject to scrutiny and misrepresentation by enslavers across New World slave societies. Several historians have stressed that enslavers constructed stereotypes and images like “Jezebel” in order to legitimize their sexual access to and exploitation of enslaved women and girls.84 Indeed, the enslaved remained subjected to these racist and sexist stereotypes during the abolitionist era.85 However, their socalled promiscuity not only justified enslavers’ sexual assault. Limitations on the sexual liberties of enslaved women were now legitimized under the veneer of promoting biological reproduction. Enslaved people were not subdued so easily, however. These misunderstood late night excursions proved nothing more than that enslaved people had their own views about their sexual practices and social habits and they found clandestine ways to express them. They insisted on pleasuring their bodies in ways of their choosing.86 Although planters acknowledged enslaved men’s nightly excursions had sterilizing effects, they focused mainly on curtailing the activities of women. Of further note, slaveholders were unwilling to acknowledge their own culpability in population failure. Maria Nugent, wife of the governor of Jamaica in 1802, having “amused [her]self with reading Evidence before the House of Commons, on the part of the petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” entered the following assessment in her journal,

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As far as I can see at present . . . there would certainly be no necessity of the Slave Trade, if religion, decency, and good order, were established among the Negroes; if they could be prevailed upon to marry . . . they would increase and render the necessity of the Slave Trade out of the question, provided their masters were attentive to their morals, and established matrimony among them, but White men of all descriptions, married and single, live in a state of licentiousness with their female slaves and until a great reformation takes place on their part, neither decency, nor morality, can be established among the Negroes.87 Although Nugent’s concern for slaveholders’ inattentiveness to the moral reform of enslaved women was a backhanded criticism of their sexuality, she did indict planters as being culpable in Jamaica’s failure to achieve self-sustaining populations. Her views conflicted with those of the maledominated Jamaican planter class who did not see their sexual assault of enslaved women and girls as part of the problem. From the perspective of male planters, the challenge to biological reproduction was women’s inability to exercise libidinal restraint. Ultimately, the question of breeding farms and forced breeding as part of the sugar plantations naturally emerges when we reflect upon planter efforts to buy a greater proportion of young women who were at the beginning of their reproductive cycles, some of whom were arbitrarily coupled with enslaved men. Slavery scholars are at odds on the question of forced breeding on the plantations. Did forced breeding occur? If estate agents coerced enslaved people into sexual relations, how did this occur and how extensive was this practice?88 The possibility that enslavers coerced enslaved men and women into sexual relations for the purposes of boosting slave population unearths the extensive spectrum of the trauma and exploitation captive Africans faced. Slave breeding must be understood not with the “unreasonable literalness” of “stud farms,” but rather as cunning manipulation, wherein planters strategized their purchases and interfered in the sexual relations of the enslaved.89 Enslavers were not interested in the welfare of enslaved people as an end in itself. Estate agents promoted slave couples to secure their own economic interests. Biological reproduction as a means of amelioration exploited enslaved women.

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Jamaican planters took seriously abolitionist threats to cut off their African labor supply. And until 1807, when such threats manifested, they expended a great deal of effort to stock their plantations with young, fertile women they thought could generate future workers. Although planters were at the mercy of the transatlantic slave trade, and experienced limited success in increasing the number of young Ebo women on their properties, it was clear that between 1788 and 1807 a pronatal agenda was firmly in place. Enslaved women’s ability to reproduce therefore shifted away from being viewed as a distraction that diverted mother-workers away from their more important roles in the fields and factories. Planters bought young women with the intention of harnessing their reproductive potential. Although such transformations occurred because abolitionists articulated the end of slavery through the reproductive capacities of women, the details of reforms were worked out in the colonies and their implementation was more in line with planter assessments of the needs and solvency of their estates as well as the assumptions they held about captive women. The difficulties of pronatal reform were further illustrated in women insisting on maintaining autonomy over their intimacies. The authority metropolitan reformers and local plantation agents claimed over slaves’ intimate relations contrasted with the power enslaved people insisted on exercising over their bodies and sexuality.

Chapter 3

When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment

My master flew into a terrible passion, and notwithstanding her pregnancy, ordered the poor creature to be stripped quite naked and to be tied up to a tree in a yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and cowskin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested, and then he beat her again and again. . . . The consequence was that poor Hetty was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labour of a dead child. A few days later, Hetty died of her injuries.1

Abolitionists used stories like Hetty’s to garner support for colonial reform and eventual emancipation. Hetty’s experience illustrated why West Indian slave populations failed to reproduce. Planters were unusually cruel in their treatment of enslaved women. According to abolitionists like James Ramsay, who previously resided in the colonies, masters commonly stripped women of their clothes, exposing their naked bodies as they whipped them. They endangered women’s lives and denied them modesty and decency. The special circumstances of pregnancy, abolitionists argued, did not mitigate planter cruelty. As Hetty’s case vividly demonstrated, expectant mothers were vulnerable to their masters’ caprice, cutting short their own and their babies’ lives. In addition to emphasizing the cruel treatment of women and expectant mothers, abolitionists also singled out strenuous labor regimes as an important factor that negatively affected women’s ability to reproduce. Women

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worked undifferentiated from men in some of the most physically demanding tasks in the field. The few women who conceived received no relaxation of their work responsibilities. An even smaller number of women had successful pregnancies. Many women suffered miscarriages or prematurely delivered stillborn babies because of the physically taxing labor they performed. The harshness of labor and punishment, abolitionists concluded, made it difficult for the plantations to sustain their slave populations by births. Reforming these areas was vital to stimulate population growth, wean planter dependence on the slave trade, and prepare the colonies for a transition from slavery to freedom. Local conditions determined the colonial twofold response to abolitionists’ quest to affect reproduction among enslaved women. First, the local government passed a series of legislation to alleviate the aspects of slavery it thought impeded the growth of slave population. Between the 1780s and 1820s, the Jamaican Assembly passed laws based on its own initiatives as well as in accordance with mandates from the Crown. During the 1820s in particular, and with much wrangling and many amendments, colonial assemblies adopted general ameliorative laws insisted on by the imperial Parliament. Second, estate owners and managers enforced abolitionist reforms and colonial laws according to the needs of their properties. The details of amelioration, worked out in the colonies, reflected planter concerns for profit and maintaining productivity, putting them in conflict with metropolitan and local government reformers. Although planters dominated the Jamaican Assembly, its members were among the most elite and idealistic whose visions for the colony as a whole were sometimes out of step with individual planter goals. Legal reforms promised to alleviate some of the worst aspects of slavery that undermined slave population growth. But their immediate and full-scale adoption could cause the collapse of the sugar plantations and undermine the power of slaveholders. In their daily running of the sugar estates, plantation agents managed such risks. Pronatal policy changes and risk management resulted in multilayered conflicts. One struggle occurred among abolitionists, Parliament, and the local government, over who should control policy relating to women’s reproductive labor. A second struggle took place among abolitionists, who proposed a series of pronatal reforms; the local government, which passed pronatal legislation; and slaveholders, who interpreted and enforced policies according to the need to maintain plantation productivity and protect

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their power. Attorneys who managed estates conflicted with their Englandbased employers who insisted on reforms that were more in line with abstract abolitionist proposals than a true understanding of the everyday labor and production needs of their estates. These contests to control female slaves’ reproductive labor led to the simultaneous contraction and expansion of enslaved people’s liberties. Would-be mothers came more directly under the scrutiny of planters and doctors who tried to regulate labor and punishment according to their views about what best protected fertility. New laws empowered enslaved people to take their masters to courts, while the promised mitigation of punishment and relaxation of work regimes entitled women to claim protection from some of the worst elements of slavery. The claims enslaved men and women made on the liberties pronatalism afforded them extended their ongoing conflicts with their enslavers. A third set of struggles, therefore, occurred between plantation agents and enslaved people, who had conflicting views about appropriate responsibilities and discipline for women during pregnancy. These struggles reflect not just the ways in which pronatal abolitionism transformed enslaved women’s lives; they also reveal the centrality of women’s reproductive labor to the moral and economic ambitions of abolitionists and slaveholders, and reproductive concerns as essential to enslaved people’s resistance.

Pregnancy and Labor Planters knew that field labor negatively affected childbearing but assumed that other tasks not related to sugarcane planting or sugar manufacturing would be more conducive to promoting healthy pregnancies. Planter Edward Long asserted, “Domestic Negroes have more children in proportion to those on the pens; and the latter than those who are employed on the sugar plantation. I will not deny,” Long declared, “Negroes breed the best, whose labour is least or easiest.”2 It is unclear whether the “pen” Long wrote about was a “livestock pen” operated as an independent unit or a “satellite pen” attached to sugar plantations. Although sugar dominated Jamaica’s economy from the late seventeenth century on, many investors capitalized on the need for independent industries, such as livestock farming and manure production. Their chief consumers were sugar planters, who relied on cattle for manure, haulage, transportation, and food. By the

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mid-eighteenth century, sugar planters who had been experimenting with new ways of increasing the efficiency and profitability of their estates invested in producing their own cattle on remote or unproductive parts of their properties. On sugar plantations like Golden Grove, Phillipsfield, and Pleasant Hill that evolved into “dual pen/sugar plantation” units, pens became a convalescent work site for seasoning new workers, recuperating sick workers, and retiring old workers, because planters insisted that penrelated work was lighter. In addition to cultivating pastures, digging watering holes, erecting fences, and collecting fodder, pen workers cultivated food crops like plantains and yams.3 Scholars comparing the labor routines of pens to plantations have argued that it was not “lighter” or “easier” work.4 Digging water holes and planting grass could be just as taxing on the body as digging cane holes and planting cane. The major difference between livestock pens and sugar plantations was that pens had no annual harvest that required workers to work around the clock.5 Planter perception that pen work was “easier” than tasks on the sugar estate, however, influenced how they managed female slaves they purchased for reproductive purposes. In 1789, attorney Simon Taylor promised to place the recently purchased young “wenches” at Bachelor’s Hall pen (attached to Golden Grove estate). There, he related, they “shall do no other work but to clean cocos [and] yams, which is the lightest work . . . and they shall not interfere with the estate’s work and [they] shall have every chance of breeding that is possible.”6 Assessing the estimation of Edward Long and Simon Taylor that women pen workers bore more children than sugar estate workers is more complicated than might be assumed. A demographic study using the register of returns of independent livestock pens reveals higher rates of natural increase, while an analysis of accounts of increase and decrease for dual pen-sugar plantation units suggests that workers on satellite pens had smaller families than women working on sugar estates.7 In comparison to women workers at John Tharp’s sugar estates (including Good Hope and Merrywood), fewer women at the pens (including Windsor, Chippenham Park, Covey, and Top Hill) bore the requisite six children to allow them full reprieve from plantation work in accordance with Jamaica’s ameliorative laws that exempted mothers with large families from field work.8 At Windsor pen in 1818, for example, only one woman, Keatty Ebo, took care of her children on a fulltime basis. We do not know, however, how many children Keatty Ebo mothered, as the records did not list them. Unlike

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estate inventories that more consistently listed women and the number of children they bore, bookkeepers at Windsor pen simply listed Keatty Ebo’s occupation as “minding her children.” The same is true for Top Hill pen, where only one woman, fifty-two-year-old Moll, birthed “many children.” No such mothers existed in the records for Chippenham Park pen, where Diana and Molly bore four children each, but continued working.9 Population size did not always correlate with the number of women with large families, and in some cases, women on sugar estates bore few children. Merrywood estate had 79 women workers, four of whom bore between six and seven children. Windsor pen had a similar number of female workers (76), but only one woman birthed six children. On large properties like Wales and Lansquenet estates, which had at least 127 and 149 females each, there is no record of women bearing six or more children between 1798 and 1818. It is difficult to pinpoint specifically why women working at the sugar estates bore more children than those at the satellite pens. One reason could be the sheer volume of female workers on individual properties. Of Tharp’s seven estates and three pens in 1818, Covey estate had the largest female population, registering 158 women, 12 of whom bore at least seven children. Good Hope estate had the second largest female population (154) and only five women birthed six or more children. Of these seven estates, women working at five of them had large families. Among Tharp’s three pens, only one woman between1708 and 1818 had a family of more than six children. This mother resided at Windsor pen, which had the largest female population of all three pens. Of Windsor pen’s 76 females, only one woman had a large enough family to earn her exemption from hard labor. At Chippenham Park and Top Hill pens, which had the smallest female populations of 26 and 28 women, respectively, only two women at the former property bore four children.10 Myriad reasons exist for the variation in the number of children born on individual properties. Although planter correspondence stressed placing potential mothers at pens, estate inventories showed that workers moved back and forth between pens and estates. During the sugar harvest in particular, planters reassigned pen workers to the estate to meet the excessive work demands. Thus unlike enslaved people who toiled on independent livestock pens those belonging to dual pen-sugar plantation units were not necessarily spared the peak in labor demands during the harvest, since estate mangers rotated workers between estates and pens.11 Age distribution, residential

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arrangements, and the ratio of Jamaican-born (Creole) to African-born workers also informed fertility differences on these properties. From 1824 to 1828, Old Montpelier estate and Shettlewood pen consistently had larger families than New Montpelier estate. The larger proportion of Creoles under age twenty-five at Old Montpelier and Shettlewood pen determined a more steady population growth than New Montpelier estate, which suffered rapid population decline due to its large aging African population.12 Whereas abolitionists had simply emphasized increasing the population of women, the Jamaican Assembly and local planters insisted on importing captive women and girls below age twenty-five because they calculated that the plantations had an excess of workers beyond childbearing years. Abolitionists’ use of slave population growth as an index of slavery reform inevitably led them into conflict with planters because slaveholders could not fully control women’s fertility. Diet, disease, place of birth (Africa versus Jamaica), and women’s attitudes toward childbearing combined with hard work and punishment to determine demographic stability.13 Placing women on pens did not guarantee higher conception and birthrates because this combination of factors determined population growth rather than just the demanding labor of the fields. Ongoing labor shortages plagued Jamaican sugar estates because of high mortality and morbidity rates, delayed arrival of slave ships, and the lack of capital to purchase new workers. These shortages meant that sheltering parturient women from plantation work was not regularly practiced or sustainable.14 By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, enslaved women formed the bulk of field workers on the majority of Jamaican sugar estates. Reassigning them from the fields to the pens en masse would have crippled the economy and potentially forced the plantations to collapse. As described in the Introduction, field work relied on a gang system where laborers worked in three different gangs according to perceived strength and stamina. The first gang was made up of the strongest men and women because they performed the most demanding work, like felling trees to prepare the land for planting, digging cane holes, and cutting, bundling, and carrying canes. The second gang consisted of young people aged fourteen to sixteen and workers weakened by advancing age or illness. The third gang was composed of disabled workers and children from ages five to twelve. Of all three field gangs, the third gang had the least strenuous work, like weeding and picking up foliage from harvested cane. On a typical plantation, women made up the majority of first- and second-gang workers.

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Women not only outnumbered male field workers, the majority of the total female population were field workers. For example, at Mesopotamia estate from 1762 to 1831, at least 84 percent of the total female population were field workers, compared to 55 percent of males.15 Enslaved women dominated field labor because there were fewer specialized roles reserved for them. With the exception of domestic and health-care positions, like housekeepers, cooks, and midwives, women performed few skilled jobs. Men worked in specialized and supervisory roles, including drivers, craft workers, and stock keepers. At Mounthindermost plantation in 1831, for example, men exclusively held at least seven occupational categories.16 Field workers were usually the healthiest, most able-bodied workers ranging from ages fourteen to fifty-one, with a mean age of thirty. This age range overlapped closely with the ages at which women became mothers. The recorded ages of mothers at Worthy Park estate for the years 1784 to 1838, for example, reveal that women birthed children between ages nine and fifty-one, and had the same mean age of thirty as women field workers. Ironically, then, youthfulness, health, and vitality that permitted planters to exploit women as field workers were the same factors that marked their most fertile years. It is therefore unsurprising that the bulk of women who bore children were field workers. At John Tharp’s estates, most, and on some occasions all, mothers worked in field gangs. In 1818, of Covey’s eighty-nine women, ten field hands and only one domestic were pregnant. Similarly, at Wales estate, with the exception of one woman, Molly, all five expectant mothers were field workers. The same is true of Pantre Pant estate, where 14 percent of childbearing women were field workers. Simultaneously reassigning all eight expectant mothers would have slowed the productivity of the plantations, and Pantre Pant estate would have lost eight women workers in addition to the thirty other women who were described as “invalid [and] incapable of working.”17 Records of other Jamaican estates, like those belonging to Nathaniel Phillips, similarly show that pregnant women were typically field gang workers. At Phillips’s Pleasant Hill estate in 1789, of the seventy-seven women, fifty worked in the fields, four of whom were pregnant. Likewise at Phillipsfield estate, of the sixty-nine women, fifty-five labored in the fields, of whom eight were pregnant, one about to give birth.18 Given that the plantations depended on women as field workers and that these were the women most likely to bear children, Jamaican planters had to develop practical working solutions that allowed them to exploit the reproductive

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ability of women while minimizing production loss. The tension between fertility and productivity meant that parturient workers received minimal care to protect their unborn children without it being too costly to the labor needs of an estate.19 Enslaved women’s importance to field work meant that slaveholders adopted abolitionist proposals to relax the labor routines of mother-workers according to predicted consequences for the productivity of their plantations. Field workers were vitally important to the sugar plantations, a status well reflected by their fiscal value. At Good Hope estate in 1804, all nine childbearing women were field workers with values in excess of £100. Expectant mothers attracted a price of £115 to £180, with a mean of £140, which was on par with prices for nonpregnant women laborers (£50-£180 with the same mean of £140).20 Most importantly, pregnant and nonpregnant female field workers had values that compared favorably with those of male field hands, which ranged from £50 to £220 and similarly had a mean value of £140. As was the case for other workers, chronic illness or disability rather than pregnancy reduced the fiscal worth of mother-workers.21 At best planters viewed childbearing as a temporary impediment, distinct from more permanent impairments and disabilities that classified laborers as “invalids,” “superannuated,” and “worthless.”22 Of the workers valued at Tharp’s estates in 1804, Mundingo Juliet’s condition of “breeding constantly” reduced her assessment from £170 to £115.23 While women’s childbearing potential did not necessarily inflate or impair their marketability, their values fell more quickly after birthing many children. Numerous pregnancies were thought to weaken women’s physical stamina and therefore reduce their anticipated productivity and value.24 The importance of reproductively capable women to the sugar estates made it a huge financial liability to remove them from the fields as abolitionists proposed. Planters therefore put expectant mothers to work in less labor-intensive gangs, rather than grant them full exemption from the fields. Estates generally classified bonded workers in six major categories: drivers, domestics, craft workers, field workers, marginal workers, and nonworkers, subdivided further according to particular skill or specific tasks. Craft workers included carpenters, masons, and smiths, while domestics were cooks, washers, and seamstresses.25 With the exception of Green Park estate, which listed “pregnancy” and “lying-in” in the occupation categories of its roll call, most sugar estate inventories listed “pregnancy” as the “condition” of workers, in the same way that they recorded illnesses. At best,

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they considered pregnancy as a factor that impaired the laboring ability of women temporarily. On some properties, planters placed pregnant women in the same gangs as workers suffering from other illnesses.26 One eyewitness, Maria Nugent, the Jamaican governor’s wife, claimed that while touring the island between 1802 and 1804, she saw “women with child work[ing] in the fields till the last six weeks” of their pregnancies (emphasis added).27 Nugent gave her readers no indications of the types of work pregnant women performed in the fields. Planters sometimes reassigned parturient workers to a variety of field-related tasks based on perceived difficulty. The proprietor of Cornwall estate, Matthew Lewis, instructed his attorney to discharge Cubina’s pregnant wife “from all severe labour” (emphasis added).28 Similarly, at Denbigh and Thomas River estates, the moment women were “under the suspicion of being with child” they were removed from the “harder labour of the field and put to light work” (emphasis added). They were reassigned to the “hoeing of fences” and “boiling of oils for the use on the estate.”29 Given that women of childbearing age dominated field work, and were as highly valued as able-bodied men, estate owners and attorneys hesitated to grant mother-workers full labor release. Planters attempted to balance their reproductive goals with their ongoing labor needs and financial investments by placing would-be mothers in work roles presumed to be less strenuous. Reproduction as a value-added commodity singled out childbearing workers from the mass of enslaved women. As plantation owners sought to capitalize on the productive and reproductive capacities of female slaves, enslaved women became more vulnerable to the scrutiny and control of medical practitioners. Plantation physicians attended the general needs of the sick, and to a limited degree, they supervised labor, pregnancy, and delivery. Between 1741 and 1745, Jamaica had just twenty-four doctors and surgeons, which increased to twenty-six between 1771 and 1775. By 1795 the number of doctors doubled to fifty-six and their presence in the island continued expanding throughout the 1800s. With important exceptions, doctors were planter allies in the struggles to harness the reproductive potential of female slaves.30 Physicians like Benjamin Turney, who was contracted by Golden Grove estate, lived on the property and monitored the everyday health and labor of workers. In addition to overseeing work performed by enslaved women and attending to medical emergencies, other doctors, like David Collins and William Sells, published general guidelines on how to regulate the labor

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demands on enslaved women to protect their pregnancies while capitalizing on their full labor potential.31 Sells believed that childbearing women could continue working in their customary roles until they were midway through their pregnancy. He wrote, “no alteration [is needed] in their usual labor until four or five months advanced.” After the fifth month, he recommended “a lighter employment . . . and continued until the lying in.” He did, however, advise planters to grant pregnant women time off from work during illness to give mothers and unborn children the best chance of recovery and survival.32 Sells’s advice published in 1817 might have been borrowed from observations of practices on properties like Lansquenet estate, where in 1804 Bess, a twenty-six-year-old mother-to-be, was allowed to remain home because of ill health.33 There is nothing to suggest that Bess received time off due to pregnancy alone, however. Sick workers commonly received work exemption, particularly when they suffered from contagious illnesses like smallpox. Planters had firsthand knowledge that epidemics could destroy harvests and wipe out populations, both free and enslaved. When the Georgia estate suffered from an influenza outbreak, it lasted from the end of December 1809 to March 1810. The disease was so widespread that the mill ground to a halt, and despite medical aid, the property lost several workers who died shortly after contracting the illness.34 It is quite possible that Bess, also identified as “diseased,” suffered from a highly communicable disease, and quarantining her away from the general laboring population contained its spread.35 The goal of allowing pregnant and sick workers to remain home or in hospitals was nonetheless the same. Planters tried to alleviate conditions thought to undermine demographic stability while maintaining plantation productivity. Collins’s advice to exempt pregnant women from all “kinds of labours which require extraordinary exertions” (emphasis added) had the makings of a truer pronatal reform. In his writings, he stressed that during the early stages of pregnancy women could continue working as before. They should be exempted from tasks likely to cause “external injuries,” “blows, or strains, or sudden falls to the ground,” because they could cause women to miscarry.36 These were very idealistic reforms because they required planters to track and reassign pregnant women. Few planters were willing to make such assessments. Instead, most parturient workers received concessions according to the particular labor demands of planting and harvesting. The January-to-June harvest season was the most intense labor period on

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the sugar plantations. For the first six months of the year, the strongest men and women harvested ripened canes by hand using curved knives (bills), tied them in bundles, and packed them on mule-drawn carts that hauled them to the mills. A second group of workers followed the cane carts from the fields to the factories, where they unloaded and piled the cane into bundles next to the mills for grinding. Gradually, mill feeders extracted juice from canes by passing them back and forth through vertical or horizontal rollers, built from wood and cast iron and spun mostly by cattle, but sometimes by wind, water, and, even more rarely, by steam.37 At King’s Valley estate mostly women who worked in groups of three fed steam-powered mills. Because the attorney for the estate, David Ewart, considered this task to be “hard work,” he assigned “women of stronger constitution” to it. A three-woman work gang allowed for “two feeding and one resting alternately.” The descriptive account Ewart gave of the mill feeding process was in response to a letter from his absentee employer, Lord Penrhyn, who enquired about his approach to managing the labor of pregnant women. Penrhyn wanted to ensure the performance of labor was not “detrimental to their health or injurious to their breeding.” With the mounting abolitionist campaigns, many absentee proprietors became anxious that their attorneys and overseers were not doing enough to reform slavery. The persistent decline of the slave populations continued to fuel abolitionist agitation. Absentee proprietors became more vigilant of how Jamaican agents managed their properties. Using euphemistic language to refer to pregnancy, Lord Penrhyn stressed to his agents that the women “should be humanely treated with tenderness when they are ill and with Humanity and attention, at all times. . . . [T]he women [should] be treated with indulgence at those times especially when their situation calls for it. . . . Humanity, as well as the Interest of the Proprietor, demand that they should be taken care of.”38 Lord Penrhyn was also concerned whether stooping down to pick up the canes from the ground and feeding them to the mill undermined women’s reproductive ability. Ewart assured his employer that mill feeders “do not stoop much, as the canes are thrown to them and laid on a bench, raised a foot or two above [about] the height of the mill.” He further assured Lord Penrhyn that expectant mothers who worked around the mills were in no danger, because he observed a careful division of labor in which men worked “in the more laborious departments,” such as unloading the cane carts, in addition to “making fires, attending the boiling house, distilling house & c.”

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Although mill feeding was physically taxing work, from Ewart’s assessment it was certainly easier than loading and unloading cane carts and stoking fires.39 The tensions between England-based proprietors and Jamaican-based managers reflect the conflict between reform ideology and practical implementation. Like abolitionists and members of the British Parliament, absentee planters could only propose abstract reforms intended to ease the labor of childbearing women. The fact that would-be mothers were vital workers complicated the implementation of reform policies because fertility interests were not always compatible with the demands of sugar production. Alleviating labor conditions thought to reduce fecundity required alternative ways of organizing and assigning tasks as well as supplementing labor loss. Ewart’s letter strongly emphasized a gendered division of labor created against a scale of perceived difficulty in tasks related to harvesting cane and manufacturing sugar. More vulnerable women, “those young” and presumed most fertile, collected the trash (called bagasse) left after the cane had been squeezed of its juice. They packed the bagasse into baskets and transported them on their heads to the trash house for storage.40 As with mill feeders, Ewart asserted that he regulated bagasse carriers to ensure that would-be mothers did not work alone, and that they worked in sufficiently large groups when the harvest was great. He assigned them to work in pairs, so that they “assisted one another stoop[ing] when in the act of taking up the trash basket.” Working in pairs allowed them to alternate between lifting baskets of bagasse and carrying them to the trash house. Ewart was adamant that “the load is not a very heavy one particularly the dry trash for the cooper. I do not consider it hard labour by any means unless there are too few carriers.” He further rationalized that women did not have to travel very far with bagasse baskets since the “trash houses at King’s Valley are within a moderate convenient distance” from the mills. After detailing his approach, Ewart assured Lord Penrhyn that estate work was hardly “injurious to [women’s] breeding.” He claimed that childbearing women were not overworked because he reassigned them to lighter work. Carrying trash was “rather light work” suitable for mothers-to-be.41 In balancing the demands of plantation production against his interests in childbearing, Ewart adjusted labor roles believed to be detrimental to women’s pregnancies. Lightening pregnant women’s workloads by placing them in pairs and larger work gangs or giving them stools to prevent their bending were in keeping with recommendations made by doctors like David Collins. Yet the multiple demands placed on women laborers

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required reform-minded planters to make calculated judgments about which aspects of doctors’ recommendations they would implement and which they would ignore. Ewart, for example, heeded Collins’s warning to avoid placing women in work that required extraordinary exertion, but he ignored his caution to keep expectant mothers from accident-prone worksites.42 Feeding canes was not as physically demanding as other tasks like carrying cane bundles, but it was among the most dangerous aspects of sugar manufacture. It was common for the limbs of feeders to be pulled into the rollers. The improved mill designs of the late eighteenth century that involved mechanical attachments that helped to automate the passing and repassing of canes through the rollers made mill feeders more vulnerable to being pulled into the more powerful grinders. In fact, only a few months prior to Ewart’s August 1807 letter, his predecessor, Samuel Jeffries, reported that the “negroes were awkward” in using the new, more powerful steam mill. In February 1807, Jeffries reported his fear of more accidents in breaking in the new mill.43 Women were also not immune to falling in the factory area. At Worthy Park estate in March 1813 an enslaved woman named Rachel drowned after falling into the open gutters that ported the cane juice to the boiling house cisterns.44 Despite the shortcomings of planter efforts to protect the reproductive ability of enslaved women by altering their labor routines, their piecemeal reforms transformed plantation culture by creating new openings for enslaved workers to bargain for greater allowances. Expectant mothers challenged their masters by bringing them to court on charges of excessive cruelty through overwork during pregnancy. Beginning with the passing of the 1788 Act for the Better Order and Government of Slaves, the Jamaica House of Assembly voluntarily passed legislation to protect and provide for enslaved people. Clause 10 of said act, for example, empowered justices of the peace to convene a council of protection to investigate the mutilation and dismemberment of slaves. The Consolidated Slave Act of 1792 expanded the protective provisions of the 1788 statute, allowing enslaved complainants to report more general cases of ill treatment. These provisions remained intact when the Assembly revised the 1792 law in 1816. The 1816 statute allowed “any slave or slaves [who] shall suffer . . . mutilations, or wanton punishment, or confinement [to make] application to any justice of the peace.” Justices and members of the vestry were then required to convene a council of protection to investigate enslaved people’s complaints and prosecute perpetrators where just cause existed.45

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Empowered by legal protections against misuse and abuse, the enslaved woman Bessy Chambers brought overseer known only as Mr. Prudden before the magistrate to answer charges of overwork and excessive punishment in June 1823. Bessy, along with twenty-four male and female workers from New Layton estate, filed a complaint that Prudden had forced her to work despite her pregnancy. Bessy alleged that she miscarried because she performed hard labor. The magistrate dismissed her case, ruling that there was “no certain proof of Bessy Chambers being in a state of pregnancy and no evidence of her miscarriage.”46 At least three of the men who accompanied her received thirty-nine lashes and imprisonment with hard labor.47 Without the claimants’ voice or records of similar complaints, it is difficult to tell how enslaved people constructed their complaints to fit within the legal regulations that did not define overworking pregnant women as cruel, or miscarriage as evidence of abuse. The 1816 law that was in effect when Bessy brought the overseer to court did not include hard labor as cruel treatment. Bessy’s court case reveals that enslaved people had conflicting views about the appropriate treatment for mothers. By alleging that plantation work caused her to miscarry, Bessy and her supporters took advantage of the modicum of self-protection the new legislation promised. Bessy’s court case also tells us that enslaved people were cognizant of the debates raging over the uses of their bodies. At the time Bessy complained to the magistrate, transatlantic conversations about the treatment of enslaved people were heavily gendered. In May 1823, one month prior to Bessy’s complaints, the House of Commons agreed to a series of “measures for meliorating the condition of the slave population.” The Commons resolutions called for greater distinctions between the treatment of male and female slaves. Women should be protected from field work, the lash, and the exposure of their naked bodies. Reformers in England thought these improvements were necessary to restore the decency and morality of enslaved women, which were important initial steps toward freedom when women could occupy their rightful place in the home as wives and mothers.48 There is no way of knowing for sure that Bessy and her supporters knew of the particular discussions in the metropole. But reports from the Jamaican Assembly committee tasked with investigating the causes of an island-wide rebellion conspiracy in 1824 suggest the possibility of Bessy knowing about abolitionist developments in England. Reading colonial newspapers that reprinted news from England, enslaved freedom fighters

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were inspired by the understanding that the English government and people wished them their freedom, but planters in Jamaica refused to free them.49 If Bessy understood debates among parliamentarians and abolitionists about modesty for women, her court case might have been a claim to a gendered identity that shielded women from violence against their bodies. These assertions conflicted with those of planters who, despite their adjustments to women’s labor roles, rejected reformers’ view that field labor degraded or debilitated women. Bessy Chambers’s case further elucidates shared reproductive concerns among the wider community of enslaved people and the moral support they provided for expectant mothers. The involvement of men appealing to the magistrates on issues like pregnancy, in particular, further opens up discussions about sexual and reproductive exploitation as not just one involving women. That enslaved men intervened on behalf of abused womenfolk and unborn children strongly signals that biological reproduction was understood not only as a matter for planters or the women themselves but also as a communal one. Whereas planters and doctors marginalized enslaved men in their efforts to promote childbearing, enslaved men’s intervention and support for potential mothers, like Bessy, tell us that they were key players in the social networks enslaved people cultivated around bearing and raising children. The social expressions and connections enslaved people constructed around biological reproduction contrasted with the economic reasons that drove planter efforts to control the reproductive labor of women. As Jamaican planters experimented with labor strategies to protect enslaved women’s pregnancies, they had to come to terms with sixteenthand seventeenth-century worldviews that had defined captive African women as “monstrous labor units” who could birth a child at will and soon after resume toiling in the fields. Jennifer Morgan’s work has shown that across New World slave societies, proslavery writers critiqued “civilized” women and their societies for departing too far from nature and naturalized a link between the reproductive ability of African-descended women and slavery by depicting these women as having easy, pain-free childbirth.50 Such views were well reflected in the writings of the planter-historian Edward Long, who asserted that black women could birth multiple children at once “without a shriek or scream.” In addition to being a critique of wealthy European women as weak, the supposed capability of black women to give birth and then return to work “two, or, at most three days”

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afterward evinced their perceived brutishness and natural suitability for both productive and reproductive exploitation.51 Racial slavery required not just the construction of denigrated bodies but also the construction of corporal differences between enslaver and enslaved. In slavery discourses, “whiteness” was linked to physical frailty and “blackness” to brute strength; the fecundity of African-descended women became a way to reproduce slavery, just as women of European descent were defined as “reproducers of freedom.”52 Distinguishing rules about pregnancy fixed such constructed differences between white and black women. Bearing children was viewed as difficult and dangerous for colonial white women. Although poor, widowed white women like pimento farmer Mrs. George Archer who worked the fields did not fit the frail image of whiteness that legitimized enslaving black people, doctors cautioned all white women to “avoid all ‘acts of exertion’ ” even so light as “bending down to pull out a drawer.”53 Ironically, parturient West African women received similar considerations in their homeland. Gold Coast Africans, for example, greeted the announcement of pregnancy with rituals and merrymaking as well as eased labor roles for the expectant mother. Additionally, the belief among various West Africans that women had to observe ritual purification for a period of up to forty days allowed new mothers some reprieve from their usual work responsibilities. West Africans distinguished between women’s domestic labor at home and work outside their homes, as well as the period of uncleanness and the period of purification. Sierra Leoneans and Gold Coast Africans specifically labeled the first two days to one week postpartum as a period of uncleanness and a time of recovery. Being unclean, new mothers were secluded and prohibited from touching other community members, including their husbands, food, and other everyday items. After the seven days of uncleanness, Gold Coast and Sierra Leonean mothers could attend to domestic duties, but they could not work outside the home or participate in religious ceremonies until the purification period of one month to forty days had ended.54 Although some European travelers noted that women resumed their labor roles within days of giving birth, this was not fully the case. Recognition of women’s recovery needs as well as strict rules about body cleanliness and the corrupting potential of unclean bodies limited the occupational roles of new mothers for up to forty days. Racial rhetoric was simply discursive: it did not align with everyday practices of nonelite white women in the colonies or the societies from which enslaved women emerged.

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Nonetheless Europeans charged that black women were accustomed to agricultural work and made erroneous assumptions about the treatment of mothers in West Africa. Moreover West Indian agroindustrial export production was different than communal-based subsistence cultivation in West Africa. Europeans charged that African-descended women could balance the most demanding manual labor alongside bearing children, and therefore needed no similar sheltering from field work. The continued failure of slave population growth, however, required extending vigilance previously reserved for white women in the colonies to black women. Plantation doctors, as noted, warned planters to reassign enslaved women from jobs that required extraordinary exertions. Extending these concessions to African captives did not carry the same meaning as it did with white women, however, because they were differentiated racially and economically from white women. Thus planters did not adjust their views about the hardiness of black women despite their efforts to ease the aspects of plantation life that undermined fertility. This conflict between ideology and practice is visible in planter testimonies before Parliament that avoided acknowledging abolitionist accusations that the harshness of slavery caused infertility and miscarriage. Labor rotations were by no means uniform or universal across Jamaican properties. Inconsistent record keeping, however, makes it difficult to track these practices fully. At Postosi estate, Levisa was simply recorded as “not present” in the field because she was “in childbed.”55 We have no indication that Levisa ever received time off from work prior to going into labor. Similarly, the January 1789 slave registers for Phillipsfield show six field workers as pregnant and one in childbed. Although the records indicate the birth of five children by June 1789, we do not know when these women gave birth or if they ever received any relief from work. Apart from recognizing enslaved women as pregnant, Phillipsfield records do not indicate whether expectant mothers received special attention or treatment.56 On other properties, like Green Park and Braco, pregnant women were simply listed as a number. Between 1795 and 1797, Braco’s roll call consistently retained a category of slaves listed as “in the hothouse,” as hospitals were called in those days. (We will return to the use of hothouse to mean hospital later.) Among the hothouse patients were workers suffering from various illnesses, like yaws and sores, in addition to another group composed of those “pregnant, lying-in and attendants.” The numbers fluctuated from month to month, ranging from as many as seventy-four to as few as four. Without the names of or additional notes about the pregnant and lying-in

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women at Braco, there is no way to trace consistently how long they remained in the hothouse.57 The high possibility of miscarriages among overworked, inadequately fed, and abused enslaved women might explain the haphazard recording of pregnancies in the estate work journals.58 Except for the systematic record of miscarriages for Worthy Park estate in 1795, which revealed that on average 1 in 4.6 known pregnancies failed, reports of miscarriages, like pregnancies, pop up sporadically across fragmented estate ledgers.59 At Harmony Hall estate, plantation agents temporarily recorded pregnancies and miscarriages for parts of 1818 and 1819. The incomplete inventories spanning June to December catalogued the names of women who were pregnant and the occurrence of miscarriages. One of the eight childbearing women listed in the 1818 rolls for Harmony Hall estate miscarried. The records for Worthy Park and Harmony Hall are unique, and beyond these individual years no further account of miscarriage was uncovered.60 Perhaps the high possibility or secrecy of miscarriages made planters unwilling or unable to record them systematically. Nonetheless, the fragmented records for Worthy Park and Harmony Hall demonstrate the negative impact plantation life had on women’s ability to reproduce. Similarly, if miscarriages were intentional abortions, they suggest that women regulated their fertility, and indicate the limits of planter reproductive interventions. Planters could neither track the full extent of miscarriages nor decipher whether miscarriages were intentional or spontaneous abortions because unless pregnancy was physically visible, knowledge of conception and fetal loss relied on women’s disclosure. These archival silences hint at the women’s struggle for control over their reproductive lives and epistemological authority over their reproductivity notwithstanding planter interventions.61 The frequency with which plantation managers described expectant women as “big with child” also suggests that when they finally recorded pregnancies, women were well into the mid to late months of pregnancy when miscarriages were less likely, but stillbirths were more prevalent.62 An 1815 report from the Jamaica House of Assembly detailing some of the island’s ameliorative changes taking place explained that expectant mothers mostly received concessions in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Some received exemption from customary roles as field workers but continued working at lighter work until they gave birth. Planters in the Assembly reasoned that moderate work was necessary to keep women in good health and to prevent their indolence.63

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The more detailed records for Green Park estate from 1822 to 1824 reveal that in some cases full reprieve from labor was granted in the very last days to weeks of pregnancy. Jane Fowler, Beckey Lawrence, Jane Fairclough, Janette Scott, Eliza Myrie, Sarah Gale, and Eliza Jarrett first entered the rolls as “pregnant” during the week of 2–7 March 1824. One week later, 7–11 March, Fowler was removed from work and brought into childbed, birthing her daughter, Margaret, the following week on 25 March. Of the remaining women, Scott and Jarrett gave birth on 15 June 1824, just over three months after the lists recorded them as pregnant.64 Importantly, these unusually meticulous records coincided with renewed abolitionist activism in England, pressure from the British government, and insurrection in the colonies.65 By the end of 1823 abolitionists concluded that prohibiting the slave trade had failed to prompt planters to ameliorate slavery. Forming the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery, antislavery activists like Thomas Fowell Buxton increased pressure on the British Parliament to beef up its reform efforts.66 In at least the new colonies—Trinidad, St. Lucia, and British Guiana— acquired at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and where legislative prerogative rested with the Crown, direct ameliorative initiatives were imposed.67 Representative colonies like Jamaica that had a semiautonomous legislature had greater maneuverability in getting around the Crown’s ameliorative mandate.68 The planter-dominated Jamaican Assembly rejected most of the proposed social reforms. It refused to relax laws governing nuptials among enslaved couples, instead continuing to restrict them by prohibiting enslaved people from marrying without the permission of their enslavers and limiting marriage solemnization to the Anglican clergy.69 Nonconformists like Moravians and Baptists had a more critical view of slavery, while the Anglican Church was more conservative if not supportive. Its acceptance of slavery made planters more trusting of the Anglican Church to preside over granting slaves privileges and rights associated with freedom and humanity. Official recognition of marriage was restricted to free people.70 By rejecting and circumventing key resolutions aimed at protecting and fostering social institutions that supported procreation, the Jamaican planter class reaffirmed its economic motivation for promoting biological reproduction and its commitment to prolonging slavery. The inextricable link between planters’ economic interests and biological reproduction paved the way for piecemeal and uneven reforms because plantation agents granted concessions based on their limited potential to

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undermine labor output. The contest between fertility and production was at odds with the humanitarian platform of abolitionists. As we saw from the Green Park records for 1822 to 1824, parturient workers mostly received full work release in the immediate days before giving birth. The period between removal from the fields and the beginning of labor (not clearly defined in the sources) was far from consistent, however. Some women continued working until the day they gave birth while others went to childbed a few weeks before delivery. On 5 August 1822, Frances Stewart of Green Park estate went to childbed but did not birth her child until 20 August. Stewart had just about fifteen days between leaving work and actually giving birth. Not all women, however, had this much time between being taken from field assignments and delivering their babies. Helene Joseph received five days’ labor reprieve before delivery. Joseph was brought to childbed the week of 3–12 May 1822 and gave birth on 17 May. The experiences of other mothers at Green Park estate mirrored Joseph’s. Elizabeth was released from work the week of 26–31 May and gave birth to her son, Thomas, on 2 June 1822. Likewise, Elizabeth Jarrett and Mary Bailey were taken to childbed the week of 2–9 June 1822, with Jarrett birthing her daughter on 10 June and Bailey birthing her son on 12 June 1822.71 Each of these women delivered her baby within a week of leaving the fields. At first glance, work reprieve one to two weeks before giving birth appears to be an improvement from the practice of the late eighteenth century, when mothers like Amie, who belonged to Nathaniel Phillips, went into labor in the fields. Amie died on 20 March 1790 after thirty hours of labor.72 Similar cases in the nineteenth century tell us that even with improvements in the treatment of pregnant women, their difficult working lives combined with other factors, such as the lack of adequate nutrition, still threatened successful pregnancies. After being removed from the fields and “brought to childbed,” Elizabeth Virgo of Green Park estate delivered a stillborn child in 1821. Similarly, Rosalind McKenzie received no time between working in the fields and delivering her child. After accidentally falling at work, McKenzie prematurely delivered her baby. Neither McKenzie nor her baby survived the trauma. Both mother and child died on 31 October 1823.73 The similar experiences of enslaved pregnant women during the 1790s (before the slave trade ended) and the 1820s (when a clear antislavery agenda was in place) suggest that labor reforms were still not enough to save the lives of enslaved women and their infants. Planters were more attentive to would-be mothers, however. Reflecting the new capital

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claims placed on fertility, nineteenth-century plantation records provide more evidence of unsuccessful pregnancies than the eighteenth-century records in which planters made only occasional references to them. Labor concessions to childbearing enslaved women depended on confirmed knowledge of pregnancy. Medical writers, who also worked as plantation doctors, instructed planters of the early warning signs of pregnancies. Stomach ailments, particularly in the morning, Collins wrote, were telltale conception symptoms. Additional indicators included dizziness, headaches, and engorged breasts.74 Of course, such symptoms could not confirm pregnancy because they were also associated with the mineral deficiencies, gastrointestinal disorders, and exhaustion that plagued enslaved women. Missed periods also did not prove pregnancy. Slaveholders’ recordings of “obstruction of the menses” suggest that enslaved women might not have had regular periods due to malnutrition and hard labor. Enslaved women themselves might not have known of their pregnancies until around the fourth or fifth month when they could feel the child moving (or quicken).75 Mariah and Hillman, two enslaved women at Harmony Hall estate, allegedly deceived the planters about their pregnancy status. In separate cases in 1818 and 1819, the plantation attorney denounced the women as “false deceitful bitch[es],” “had no belly,” “found out to deceive.” Cases like these reveal that planters distrusted enslaved women’s report of pregnancy.76 They waited until they could “see” the physical growth of women’s bellies before they granted concessions.77 As Rowland Fearon, attorney to Lord Penrhyn’s Denbigh and Thomas River estates, remarked, when “I see a woman slave Pregnant, she ceases from the hardest labour of the field and [is] put to light work” (emphasis added).78 Planters distrusting enslaved women to communicate pregnancy and relying on visual confirmation of pregnancy limited the labor concessions available to expectant mothers. The fate of Mariah and Hillman is unknown and there is no way of telling whether they suffered miscarriage. Indeed, as both contemporaries and scholars agree, women were most susceptible to spontaneous abortions in their first few weeks of pregnancies when their conditions were unknown even to them.79 Thus even where reform-minded plantation attorneys and overseers hoped to alleviate women’s working lives, without timely detection of pregnancy enslaved mother-workers continued to experience fetal loss. Planter distrust of enslaved women further undermined their efforts to soften the harsh aspects of slavery that obstructed reproduction. Mariah and Hillman might have been pregnant and reported the conception to

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their enslavers to receive a more relaxed labor routine. At the same time, the women might have feigned pregnancy to obtain respite from work. Both scenarios, however, suggest that women reported pregnancy, real or feigned, to extract a degree of self-protection. Enslaved women were fully aware of the ongoing debates over appropriate treatment for would-be mothers, and sought to use it to their advantage. Visual confirmation of pregnancy was as important in allowing a relaxation of women’s labor routines as the timing of the pregnancies in the sugar production cycle. Time off from work was more likely during the lull months after the cane harvest in June and before the start of a new cane planting season in October. A closer look at women who received at least two weeks’ respite before giving birth compared to those who only received one day or a few hours suggests that in many cases the crop season determined the lenience planters showed toward expectant mothers. At Harmony Hall estate in June 1818, the pregnant women Juanita and Agnes were reported as “sitting down” due to pregnancy.80 At Green Park estate in 1825, Frances Bonny, Catherine Gordon, and Margaret Trumbull each received a week off from work for the period 22–27 August. Frances, Catherine, and Margaret reportedly were “indulged due to pregnancy.” The records provide no indication as to whether these women were ill, which based on the pattern observed in other cases would have warranted labor release. Bonny and Hyatt delivered their babies the following week on 4 and 6 September.81 Overseers at Green Park estate were potentially more generous in granting mothers full time off from work because they were in between the planting and harvesting periods. Because planters needed to balance plantation production goals with their new interest in childbearing, they rejected reform proposals that insisted on a blanket exemption of women from field work and enforced pronatal reforms according to the rhythms of cane cultivation and sugar manufacture. Enslaved women generally worked for longer hours and at more demanding jobs during the harvest period, sometimes called the “grinding season,” which lasted from January to May or June.82 Cutting cane, milling it, and boiling it into sugar was a most carefully synchronized process. Workers needed to harvest all mature canes before the summer rains. Harvested canes had to be milled, their extracted juice boiled almost immediately to prevent fermentation and spoilage. With little rest, inadequate nutrition, and time-pressured, intense work, many more workers died at the climax of the harvest period than at other times of the year.83

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Fragmented records make it difficult to arrive at definitive conclusions about similar patterns in pregnancy losses, maternal deaths, and stillbirths. Even with the haphazard recording that took place, a pattern still emerges that shows that the number of women and infants who died during childbirth in the harvest period were on par with those who died during the planting seasons. The few plantations that recorded maternal and neonatal mortality show that mothers and newborns died with the same relative frequency in the planting and harvesting periods. Records for Worthy Park, Somerset, and Phillips’s estates show mothers and neonates dying each month of the year. Neonatal and maternal mortality spiked for different months on these properties. At Worthy Park the months of February, May, and October (planting and harvesting months) showed a greater preponderance of women dying in childbed and delivering stillborn children. At Worthy Park, births were more successful during the lull period, when workers performed mostly maintenance work and more women workers were listed as “indulged due to pregnancy.” Although the lull months had the lowest record of maternal deaths and stillbirths at Worthy Park, the records are too patchy and inconsistent for definitive and generalizable conclusions. Moreover, while plantations like those belonging to Nathaniel Phillips showed relative consistency regardless of the season, maternal and neonatal deaths at Somerset estate showed the opposite of Worthy Park. More mothers and their babies died in June, July, and August (out-of-crop season), which suggests delayed effects of the harvest on the body.84 The variability of the findings indicates that while crop and out-of-crop seasons shaped fertility patterns, other factors affected the health of mothers and children. A more comprehensive study of general mortality rates in Jamaica indicates plantation location, epidemic, settlement pattern, and population composition as additional causes.85

Pregnancy and Punishment The battle between fertility and productivity was waged not just over the assignment of enslaved women’s labor roles but also over worker discipline. The case cited at the beginning of the chapter, concerning the beating to death of the enslaved woman Hetty and her child, demonstrates how punishment impeded slave population growth. Abolitionists drew attention to

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such cases to prove the sterilizing and lethal effects that slavery had on women and their children. The public displays of nudity, which typically accompanied the flogging of women, were also degrading and offensive to feminine modesty that abolitionists promoted. Abolitionists insisted that planters eliminate corporal punishment for women to shore up their ability to reproduce as well as to allow them to embody modesty befitting their sex. Abolitionist emphasis on women’s modesty placed them in opposition to planters. For slaveholders, the central objectives of worker discipline were to reprimand work failures and insubordination, protect women’s reproductive ability, and encourage reproducing. Planters also clashed with abolitionists over how to measure the mitigation of punishment. Both groups evaluated the severity and effects of punishment in different ways. Testifying before the 1789 House of Commons committee convened to investigate the conditions of slavery and the slave trade, one witness insisted that although pregnant women continued to be flogged even “within a few hours of their delivery,” it was “not so severely as upon the men.” Planter witnesses reasoned that they had begun to exercise greater moderation in flogging enslaved women because their goals of increasing birthrates and turning a profit from sugar production depended on it.86 Accordingly, they developed a unique method of whipping expectant mothers in order to achieve the dual purposes of disciplining them and protecting unborn children. Plantation doctor Robert Jackson assured the committee that by burying women’s bellies in the ground, whipping was performed without “endangering the life of the woman or the child.”87 This method protected women from trauma to the abdomen that whipping sometimes caused. Despite growing pressure from the British Parliament to abolish the flogging of women, Jamaican planters defended and continued the practice, arguing that it was a necessary and most effective way to secure women’s compliance. Such practices defied abolitionist denouncements that flogging women both undermined their reproductive ability and degraded them as women. Having adopted the practice of burying women’s bellies while whipping them, Thomas Samson the attorney at Amity Hall estate, assured its absentee owner, Henry Goulburn, that there was “no want of care [for women] in their pregnancy.”88 The reassurance Samson gave to his England-based employer reflected the ongoing tensions between local agents and absentee proprietors, whose physical distance from their estates prohibited the implementation of their pronatal visions and made them depend on

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Jamaican-based attorneys and overseers to interpret and administer their policies. In 1804, the absentee proprietor Lord Penrhyn similarly raised concerns about the enforcement and effectiveness of pronatal reforms with his attorney, Rowland Fearon, in charge of Denbigh, Coates, and Thomas River estates. A puzzled Penrhyn wrote, “It seems surprising that 38 field women besides the others should have no produce and that 229 field women besides house women and the others should produce only 11 children.” Fearon responded by blaming his subordinate, the overseer named Forbes. Fearon claimed to have seen Forbes’s “dreadful inattention and very culpable conduct . . . in the management of pregnant Women.” Despite Fearon’s extremely vague allegations about what Forbes had done to jeopardize the health of would-be mothers and children, Lord Penrhyn approved his dismissal. “I am glad you dismissed the overseer,” Penrhyn wrote, “I certainly wish attention & kindness to be shewn to them, and I flatter myself you will enforce it.”89 Adjusting whipping to protect enslaved women’s reproductive ability exemplifies how the links abolitionists constructed between reproduction and the ending of slavery transformed enslaved women’s lives. Though the reforms were not as far-reaching as abolitionists insisted on, planters tempered the raw power they exerted over the bodies of slaves. For much of the eighteenth century, the mutilation of slave bodies was a common display of masters’ brute power and the dehumanization of African captives. Removing limbs and displaying them in public or sacred places, like gallows or cotton trees, enslavers terrorized the enslaved and claimed a boundless power over their bodies and lives. These acts of terror waned in the nineteenth century as planters opted for other, less physically damaging methods of punishment.90 Beginning with new legislation in 1788, and subsequent revisions in 1792 and 1816, the Jamaican Assembly criminalized the mutilation and dismemberment of slaves. Under pressure from the Crown and abolitionists, such acts of cruelty became a felony. While there were no legal regulations concerning the punishment of pregnant women, the self-imposed restrictions of whipping by burying women’s bellies and flogging them across the back and buttocks to prevent abdominal trauma, introduced in the late 1780s, betray the finiteness of the physical power masters exercised over slaves. The successful campaigns to shut down their African labor source forced a convergence of planters’ economic interests with women’s ability to bear children.91

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To the extent that burying women’s bellies was ameliorative, would-be mothers gained limited protection for their pregnancies. Even though the planter-dominated Assembly passed several ameliorative laws between 1788 and 1826, and criminalized acts of brutality, like dismembering, mutilating, or willfully killing slaves, the legislature withheld reforms, like prohibiting the use of the whip in the fields, that could undercut the power of the planter class in significant ways.92 Like their fellow planters, local government officials rejected metropolitan insistence to ban flogging.93 The whip, they contended, was a vital instrument of discipline, particularly in the fields. Although planters made concessions and adjusted some of its excesses, flogging persisted because of the perceived disciplinary value. It was not until Parliament imposed emancipation that it became illegal to flog women. The Crown stipulated that confinement to the workhouse with or without hard labor should substitute for whipping.94 Planters also faced opposition to whipping from doctors who migrated to Jamaica in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. British doctors moved to the West Indies for various reasons, not least of which was to reform colonial health practices. Practitioners like Dr. John Williamson cautioned that the abdominal trauma that accompanied flogging caused women to develop reproductive complications such as “prolapses of the uterus or womb.” It also caused miscarriage and stillbirth.95 Doctors proposed that planters substitute confinement for flogging as a form of punishment. The central idea behind incarceration was to restrict freedom and mobility by locking up offenders or affixing their limbs to an immovable object, like a piece of furniture. Doctors advocated restricting the mobility of parturient workers as a better method of punishment because it was less likely to incur physical injuries that could cause miscarriage, premature delivery, or maternal and neonatal death. Estate doctors argued that confinement was not only safer for childbearing women, it also was a more effective method of conditioning the minds of slaves to remain obedient to their masters. David Collins recommended incarcerating offenders for a few hours at noon or for longer periods after work because it would not interfere with their daily work routines, and enslaved people loathed losing their free time. Evening break periods from plantation work offered enslaved people opportunities to prepare meals, work their provision grounds, and bond with family and community members. They “abhor[ed] confinement,” Collins explained, because it “disable[d] them from attending their own little concerns.” Depriving them of

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their comforts, Williamson agreed, “secure[d] their labour,” but without the negative effects of the “stripes.”96 In sum, incarceration presented three times the benefits of whipping. It penalized the offender, deterred repeat offenses, and protected the reproductive capacities of women. Thus on properties that adopted doctor recommendations to substitute confinement for whipping, expectant mothers were protected from corporal punishment. Despite such alterations in punishment, the women were no less subject to exploitation because planters who adopted such disciplinary reforms did so to extract their productive and reproductive labor. They also coincided with the much broader prison reforms taking place in Jamaica, which revised its carceral practices to maintain slavery. Between 1770, when Jamaica had only three penal institutions, and 1820, when the island boasted sixteen “houses of correction,” the slave colony kept pace with the metropolis in developing state-sanctioned punishment. Yet the reasons for implementing a prison system in Jamaica, a slave society where most of its likely inmates were already unfree, were more expansive than in Britain. European prisons aimed to deter and reform offenders, while mobilizing the labor power of prisoners. In addition to controlling resistance among enslaved people, prisons in Jamaica’s slave society reproduced the racial hierarchy in its new attentiveness to building prisons that separated black from white offenders. Empowering the state to incarcerate enslaved rebels further ensured a mechanism for disciplining enslaved people when their masters lacked competence to maintain proper control.97 The interest in boosting biological reproduction among the enslaved added a gendered dimension to the purpose of prison reforms under way in Jamaica. Confining childbearing women promised protection from the threats corporal punishment posed to biological reproduction. At a time when planters insisted that flogging enslaved women was the most effective form of punishment, singling out expectant mothers as targets for incarceration to protect their pregnancy exemplifies how concerns for reproduction reformulated gender difference among the enslaved while transforming plantation culture. Even though incarcerating women appeared to be a safer alternative to whipping, it could be just as taxing and lethal as whipping because some masters detained slaves with as much sadism as flogging. The neck, hands, or feet of offenders, or all of them, were bound to a heavy or fixed object, typically chains or wooden stakes, and were left for hours in a sitting, standing, kneeling, or lying position (Figures 6–8). In extreme cases they were

Figure 6. Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815) after John Gabriel Stedman (1744–97), “A Female Negro Slave, with a Weight chained to her Ancle,” from vol. 1 of Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America, From the Year 1772, to 1777, by John Gabriel Stedman, handcolored stipple engraving (London: J. Johnson and J. Edwards, 1796). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Figure 7. Bed Stocks for Intoxication from Richard Bridgens, West Indian Scenery with Illustration of Negro Character, the Process of Making Sugar & c from Sketches During a Voyage to and Residence of Seven Years in the Island of Trinidad (London, 1840). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

suspended midair by the arms and legs. Women in particular were stripped of their clothing and confined naked. In 1813, an enslaved woman named Rachel was not simply confined by her owner who had a “staple driven over her ankle into a large long wood,” she was also required to go about her daily work encumbered by the plank. On 13 August 1826, another woman named Rebecca Scott died after her owner stripped “all the clothes” she was wearing, and “while naked and uncovered, wantonly and cruelly whipped, [bound], fasten[ed], and chained [her] round her waist.” Witnesses testified that Scott was then “left naked and bound for a long space of time, a space of one hundred days.” The court records did not provide the details of Scott’s one-hundred-day imprisonment, but it was common for masters to release their victims during work hours and detain them again after they completed their day’s tasks. As in the case of Rachel,

Figure 8. Stocks for Hands and Feet from Richard Bridgens, West Indian Scenery with Illustration of Negro Character, the Process of Making Sugar & c from Sketches During a Voyage to and Residence of Seven Years in the Island of Trinidad (London, 1840). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

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masters would attach a heavy object to their legs to limit mobility and to prevent them from fleeing the property.98 Imprisoned for extensive periods, pregnant women were especially vulnerable to colds, fevers, and other health disorders, estate doctors argued. Such effects were evident among Dr. John Williamson’s patients, including one mother-to-be who developed a fever after being “confined to the stocks for misconduct.” She was “liberated a few days before her delivery,” giving birth to a stillborn child. Williamson remarked, “the above case affords an example of the necessity it is to have legislative imposition to secure the attendance to the Negroes.”99 The failure of population growth, he warned, was due to the severity of punishment meted out to enslaved mothers and an overall neglect of their care. Although doctors viewed confinement as a safer alternative to whipping, they opposed incarcerating offenders for lengthy periods and stripping them of their clothing. And while they supported depriving delinquents of spending evening mealtimes with their families, doctors did not favor starving them. In particular, doctors stressed feeding and keeping parturient women clothed and fed to promote a successful and healthy pregnancy.100 Mothers and pregnant women also received special considerations in court sentences. On 6 October 1825 when an enslaved woman named Nancy faced the court to answer to charges of assault, the justices suspended her sentence until after she had given birth. Similarly, justices at the St. George’s Slave Court dismissed Susan Gardner for possessing stolen goods “in consideration” of her having a sick child. Moreover, the magistrates remarked, she recently suffered long imprisonment for an unrelated crime.101 Pregnancy and motherhood therefore created a hierarchy among enslaved women. Mothers and would-be mothers were a semiprotected working group that received some exemption or modification of the punishments to which nonreproductive women were subject. The pronatal practices implemented by the local courts transformed women’s lives by alleviating punishment perceived as dangerous for mothers, and more broadly singled out reproductive women as a special category of workers to be protected. Slaveholders knew that punishment retarded the childbearing ability of women, so some modified disciplinary techniques to protect parturient workers and their unborn children. Planters aimed, however, “not to punish less, but to punish better,” and modifying disciplinary techniques enabled them to achieve their dual objectives.102 To planters, the female

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slave was merely a “fragmented commodity” whose laboring body was separable from the reproductive body. Their wombs functioned like “containers” for replacement workers, and precautions aimed at ensuring safe development and delivery.103 Therefore, by whipping women across the shoulders or burying their bellies in the ground, enslavers compelled them into compliance and still benefited from their reproductive capacity. Mitigated punishment for prospective mothers did not make them immune to exploitation by their masters. Instead, their lives and bodies were more carefully regulated and scrutinized to increase birthrates and to fill targeted sugar quotas. The cases of Rebecca Scott and Rachael further remind us that even when planters moderated punishment by substituting incarceration for whipping, excessive cruelty remained vital to masters’ demonstration of their power. Punishment therefore engendered conflicts between absentee owners, local doctors, and courts who supported greater discretion in disciplining reproductive women and plantation agents who, despite some adjustments, relied on excesses to assert their authority.

Workers as Mothers: Labor and Discipline From granting enslaved mothers opportunities to forge family ties and bond with their children to offering them material and monetary rewards according to the number of children they birthed, abolitionists stressed the importance of incentivizing enslaved women to conceive and raise children. Rewarding mothers with bonding time would further kindle the supposed natural desire in women to raise families. Abolitionists received some support for their pronatal proposals from migrant doctors as well as the Jamaican Assembly, which passed legislation that echoed the measures abolitionists proposed. Yet like the implementation of policies reforming labor and punishment, the adoption of mandated reproductive incentives depended on the will of planters and their assessment of the needs of properties they managed. The struggles over incentives for mother-workers hinged on the labor needs and financial considerations of the sugar estates. Some mothers had the opportunity to nurse their babies before returning to field work. Between 1821 and 1825, mothers at Green Park estate received full time off from work, enabling them to “sit down and nurse” their infants.104 The work journals for Green Park estate give no indication of how long after giving birth women remained home to attend their

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babies. Given the labor-intensive nature of the sugar plantations and the importance of parturient workers to the fields, it is likely that such allowances were for very brief periods. At other properties, mothers remained home with their infants for the first one to two weeks after giving birth. At Potosi estate, for example, an enslaved woman named Sarah gave birth on 13 December 1817 and by 2 January 1818, she returned to the fields. Although “rather weakly” Sarah resumed work just two weeks after giving birth. Enslaved women named Nelly and Molly were also back in the fields within days of delivery, despite being described as “very weakly.”105 These parturient workers’ quick return to work is unsurprising because their December and January deliveries coincided with the start of the harvest, the most demanding phase in the sugar production cycle. Mothers at Green Park estate received some time off during the day to nurse their infants. Daily roll calls highlighted mothers who recently gave birth and women who cared for young children. The overseer for Potosi singled out mothers like Sarah, whose daughter was seventeen days old, and Tamara, who had a three-month-old daughter named Pastora. At other properties like Pantre Pant estate, mothers of very young children were also singled out. Cretia, mother of two-year-old Frank, was noted as having a young child in the same roster as Betty, who had a one-month-old son named Prince. Betty, like Cretia, also had an older child, a three-year-old named Monday.106 Some Jamaican properties in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century built weaning houses where mothers left their infants as they resumed work. Mothers returned at various times in the day to nurse their infants. The times at which mothers fed their babies were determined not according to infant needs, but according to plantation work schedules. Reflecting the prioritization of labor over fertility, feeding took place during meal breaks for the general laboring population.107 While the weaning houses that some properties built to accommodate nursing mothers reflect advancements over the almost nonexistent allowances their predecessors received, planters still had not prioritized the health and welfare of enslaved newborns. Neither did they promote mother-child bonds or welfare of newborns, since as noted their feeding times were restricted to when it was convenient to plantation work routines. Ironically, limitations on lactation aligned with proposals by abolitionists, like James Ramsay, who promoted early weaning and restrictions on mother-child bonds to prevent youngsters from adopting their parents’ vices. Enslaved women, however, rejected such restrictions. As later discussions will show,

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some mothers ran away with their infants while others delayed reporting the birth of their children to secure additional time to bond with and care for their babies.108 In addition to receiving time off during their daily toil to attend to their infants, new mothers worked at specially assigned tasks. At Green Park estate new mothers did not return to the general labor force; rather they toiled in the second or third gang and occasionally in a specially created “mother gang.” All week long, for example, 25–30 August 1823, new mothers at Green Park estate worked in a “mother gang” carrying trash about the sugar factory. On Thursday, 4 September 1823, mothers who had recently returned to the field toiled in the second gang cleaning and molding canes.109 Mothers at Braco estate also worked in their own gangs performing specially assigned tasks. The gang of new mothers at Braco estate worked in a variety of occupations. The work journals for the week of 6–11 July 1795 show that on Thursday the “gang of women having young children” worked “about the mill yard picking up trash.” At other times, the mothers worked with the small gang composed of young children. On 11 July 1795, the gang of “new mothers and young children” filled the cane holes with clay. On some properties like Kings Valley, overseers thought that trash carrying was a rather easy task and therefore was suited for childbearing women.110 Although new mothers benefited from less strenuous labor roles, reduced work responsibilities were granted to women to control their reproductive labor. In keeping with abolitionist proposals, planters rewarded women with comparatively easier work immediately after giving birth in an effort to incentivize them to bear more children. Such incentives were not far-reaching, however. Mother-workers at Braco and Green Park received relaxation of their work routines in the months after the harvest and before the start of the new planting seasons. These limited rewards did not align with the blanket recommendations of abolitionists and were attentive to the plantations’ seasonal demands instead of the needs of mothers. Partially implemented reform attests to the competition between labor and fertility, and illustrates that planters addressed these competing interests in ways that did not promote black motherhood. Plantation labor dynamics, not mandates dictated by abolitionists, determined the nature of pronatal reforms extended to enslaved women. Such constraints included the response to the outbreak of illnesses. The period November 1794 to July 1795 was exceptionally virulent for workers

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in the Plantain Garden River valley area, one of the most fertile plantation districts in Jamaica. Measles spread like “a plague among the Africans,” and one by one, workers at Pleasant Hill estate became infected. After it had thoroughly ravaged neighboring properties, like Stoakes Hall and Winchester estates, the disease claimed eight workers when it first appeared at Pleasant Hill estate in April 1795. By May 13 the number of infected workers rose to twenty-one and then to forty by the end of the month. In order to contain the disease, the overseer quarantined those who were ill at his house. Healthy mothers with children most severely affected received special attention. They received full time off from labor in order to care for their ailing children. At least three mothers lost their children, including one infant described as still at the breast.111 Other properties evinced similar patterns. At Potosi estate, Belinda’s sons, eight-year-old field worker Andrew and one-and-one-third-year-old Toney, as well as Diana’s one-year-old son, Hamlet, suffered from the yaws. Although identified as able workers, Belinda and Diana stayed home to attend to their sick infants. Interestingly, Belinda and Diana received work release to take care of their sick sons even though Potosi estate had at least five nurses specially assigned to care for sick children. It is unclear why Belinda and Diana remained home to care for their children when at least one other child, Charlotte, two and one-half years old, also suffered from the yaws and did not have the benefit of her mother’s attention. Charlotte’s mother, Yabba, who was also pregnant, continued working in the fields.112 Jamaican planters were inconsistent in their practices, and ongoing labor needs only permitted a handful of mothers to remain home temporarily with their ailing children. The decision-making process for determining which mothers could stay home to care for their children is unclear, however. Perhaps only the mothers of extremely sick children received release from work. Likewise, it is possible that the communicable nature of a child’s illness determined which mothers continued working and which ones stayed home. In order to prevent infections, planters might have allowed mothers with prior immunities or preferred old, worn-out women to care for sick children with highly contagious diseases like smallpox and measles. Planters risked the health of mother-workers when they allowed them to care for their sick children. At Pleasant Hill estate, expectant mother Lemin suffered a miscarriage after becoming “dangerously ill” when she contracted measles from her daughter.113 Having to decide between mothers remaining home or returning to work is an example of the tension

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planters faced in balancing their future labor interest in raising children, preserving mothers’ health, and keeping workers in the fields. Enslaved mothers’ lives were defined by such balancing acts, rather than by humanitarian concerns about their and their children’s health and well-being. Jamaican planters were not just up against abolitionist stipulations on how to reform the conditions of slavery believed to undermine population growth; they also faced new legal requirements from their local government. Between 1791 and 1816, the Jamaican legislature passed laws that, in keeping with plans forwarded by abolitionists like William Wilberforce, required masters to keep the families of enslaved people intact as the best means of encouraging women to conceive and raise children. These laws included requirements intended to safeguard family units by preventing the separation of parents and children during sale. Orphans were to be placed in families, and mothers responsible for such children would receive rewards if the additional child expanded the number of children in her household to six or more. One such reward was exemption from work, which was to apply evenly to biological as well as adopted mothers. The Jamaican legislature rewarded planters for enforcing these policies, by stipulating that parish vestries waive the poll tax for proprietors who granted labor release to mothers of six or more children.114 The new legislation passed between 1791 and 1816 had transformative potential for enslaved mothers. In theory, the acts protected families from separation by sale.115 But by offering incentives to women with large families, they marginalized women who had fewer children. Yet privileging women who bore several children was intended to convince women to birth and keep alive as many children as possible. The real benefits of these laws on the lived experiences of women depended on planter implementation. Interpretation and enforcement sometimes conflicted with the legal requirements, but at other times aligned with them. Such inconsistences and conflicts emerged because law enforcement depended on the assessment planters made of their workers and the effects labor modifications had on their estates. Although some planters assigned children of deceased women to households with other mothers, the circumstances under which children were placed in adoptive homes varied. At Good Hope and Potosi estates in 1804, the mothers Lucy and Minerva Cor had orphans added to their households after the children’s mothers died. The four children of the deceased Christina became members of Lucy’s family, while Minerva Cor adopted six

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orphans. Both women received exemption from field work because the total number of children in their care exceeded six. As we have seen, the Jamaican laws stipulated labor exemption for mothers with six or more children, biological or adopted. Importantly, the practice of placing children in the households of women was very different from placing children in the care of nurses. On some estates, planters placed all the children into small work gangs attended by an elderly woman. In the records, mothers and adopted mothers were distinguishable from children’s nurses because planters labeled mother-workers as “exempted from labor” and “minding six children.”116 The placement of children was not arbitrary. The ages of Lucy and Minerva Cor suggest that they were unable to continue field work. The slave registers for Potosi estate listed Lucy as a forty-year-old mother of four. Lucy’s advancing age and her numerous pregnancies weakened her, making her less able to continue working in the fields. Placing the children of the deceased Christina into Lucy’s care ensured that the orphans had a caregiver to attend to their needs and strengthen their survival chances. Also by giving women caring for more than six children exemption from field work, Potosi estate benefited from the poll tax waiver. The strategic placement of children in households offered planters an avenue to claim financial rewards for their estates while capitalizing on the caregiving abilities of mothers who could no longer work in the fields. The legal requirement to exempt mothers with six or more children was not a source of conflict in some circumstances because planters enforced it to their advantage. Scattered among Jamaica’s parish vestry records are the names of many properties that claimed exemption from poll tax because they granted labor release to women who mothered six or more children.117 A closer look at the inventories of such estates shows that planters were intervening in the intimate lives of the enslaved to reconstitute families of at least six children. Thus, in addition to combining dead women’s children with other families to increase their numbers to six children, older siblings and grandmothers were assigned responsibility for orphans. At Pantre Pant, twenty-four-yearold Jenny assumed responsibility for raising her mother’s six children. Sylvia, Jenny’s mother, died of the pleurisy; the youngest of the children were six-year-old Jack and three-year-old Harry. Harry and Jack were still too young to begin working on the plantation. Of Sylvia’s older children, Walter Bonner (who was likely over eighteen as his age was not listed in

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the records) worked in the overseer’s house and thirteen-year-old Siddy worked in the fields. A mulatto girl named Mary with no recorded blood ties to Jenny or the other children also was placed to Jenny’s new household.118 Planters took advantage of the Assembly’s failure to define children in its laws before 1824. At least two of the young people in Jenny’s household were above age twelve and had already assumed full-time labor roles. Planters interpreted the ameliorative laws broadly and defined children according to their own purposes. Grandmothers were also responsible for orphaned children. It is unknown how widespread this practice was, and historians present conflicting views on the extensiveness of grandmother-headed households. Some historians call this a rare phenomenon, while others argue that grandparent households were far more common in Jamaica than might be expected.119 The lack of detailed recording of kin relationships between adults and children makes it difficult to identify blood ties precisely and consistently. In the absence of birth mothers, grandmothers as well as nonblood relatives were considered legally as “adopted mothers,” rather than as part of multigenerational households. Adopted mothers counted in the same way as birth mothers. While these strategies helped maintain family ties, they also offered financial advantages to planters who received the poll tax exemption for women caring for six or more children. As we have seen, tensions between ameliorative laws and practice emerged because planters did not simply adjust their practices in accordance with the legislative requirements—they made decisions that they believed best served their estates as well as secured the health and survival of enslaved infants. While some older orphans were placed in the care of mothers with older children, newborns were placed with mothers who had infants of their own in order to take advantage of their lactation. At Golden Grove, Good Hope, and Lansquenet estates in 1790 and 1804, the mothers Marole, Delia, and Abigail became responsible for newborns with no biological ties to them. All three women had recently given birth. Delia of Good Hope estate, for example, had a two-month-old daughter named Rebecca. The records for Lansquenet estate described Abigail as “nursing [the] children of a deceased mother.”120 To be sure, in these cases, planters did not consider women’s desire to care for children who were not their own. While many of the assumptions and practices planters held contradicted abolitionist proposals, both groups defined motherhood as natural for women. Not all women were defined by

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their biological ability to reproduce; some rejected motherhood. At Golden Grove estate, Marole became responsible for an infant named Mar because Mar’s mother had run away and left her behind.121 Explaining why Mar’s mother abandoned her is complex and speculative, not least because we lack her testimony and that of other enslaved women about motherhood. From women’s subjectivity and sociocultural expectations, such as the revering of motherhood as a spiritual anchor between the ancestors and the living among some West African cultures, to nationalist and political traditions in the British metropolis that defined motherhood as indispensable for imperial expansion and industrial production, motherhood was shaped by a convergence of powerful factors.122 More immediately, if we see black motherhood as one marked by the trauma of family separation, the limited ability of parents to control and protect their children, and the ubiquity of maternal, infant, and child death, these could have demoralizing effects on enslaved women. The vulnerability imposed by the lethal environment of slavery, the racial domination and economic exploitation of the reproductive ability of female slaves, and the elevation of white women as standard-bearers for motherhood could also activate a spirit of defiance among enslaved women. Conversely, loving, providing for, and fighting to protect another human being might have been empowering for women, who through motherhood created an alternative to the deathly, exploitative world of slavery. Because abolitionists singled out field work as particularly detrimental to women’s fertility, planters conceded in exempting mothers of six or more children from working in the fields, a requirement that was twice the amount abolitionists proposed—Ramsay recommended granting mothers of three or more children relief from work. In any event, most mothers qualifying to receive such labor release were too frail to be effective field workers. While the 1816 ameliorative law, for example, required planters to exempt women from “all manner of field or other labour,” planters applied the law only to field work.123 In some cases, women had as many as eight children and continued working because they were not field workers. At Good Hope estate in 1817, the fifty-year-old mother of seven Lucretia continued working as a midwife despite her weak state. The same is true of the thirty-seven-year-old mother of seven Bessy, who was pregnant with her eighth child but continued to work as an assistant midwife.124 Thus, women’s exemption from work after bearing six children depended on the nature of their employment. In the cases of Lucretia and

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Bessy, since they were not field workers, they were already working at tasks planters considered less physically demanding, and therefore they saw no reason to exempt these mothers from work. The typical trend on Jamaican properties was to assign old, frail women to care for children. Planters did not believe health and child-care responsibilities were especially onerous, at least not in comparison to field work, and consistently placed weaker workers in such roles. Although some mothers with as many as eight children continued working with no relaxation of their labor roles, some women who had less than six children received work exemption. At Good Hope estate, Bess, a forty-eight-year-old mother of five was weak so she had no regular field, factory, or household occupation. She was simply listed as attending her five children. Bess’s weak condition and child-care responsibilities could have been the reasons why she received labor exemption. However, this was not typical at Good Hope estate. Ebo Catolina, a field worker, continued in her usual employment despite having five children, of whom one was a newborn and the others were very young and suffering from yaws. Under these circumstances, it would have been humane to allow Catolina, who herself was weak, to be exempt from work to recuperate and to attend her children. However, the debilitated thirty-six-year-old mother of five sick and young children continued working in the cane fields.125 The unevenness with which mothers received labor respite suggests that masters used work concessions as rewards and punishment for mother-workers. Withholding labor release perhaps punished infractions. Despite increased concessions to enslaved mothers, women workers remained vulnerable to the whims of their masters. In addition to their restrictive interpretation of laws regulating labor exemptions, planters stepped outside the legal framework to incentivize reproduction by offering women monetary and material rewards. On several occasions between 1794 and 1798, women at Golden Grove estate received “a quarter of a dollar” for each child successfully brought to term. Such practices persisted into the nineteenth century. In 1804 and 1807, women at Thomas River and Denbigh estates received various sums of money according to the number of children they birthed. For “every child she bore,” attorney Fearon wrote, “the mother of the infant” received payment of three farthings “to buy the little stranger a fowl to commence its little life.”126 Other special gifts included rum and sugar for women’s personal use, protein-rich foods like beans, peas, and pork, and items of care

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like “soap” and “baby linens.”127 “Indulgences,” Collins asserted, will “render them more desirable to become [mothers].”128 Claiming to have abolished whipping on his property, Matthew Lewis boasted, “A little flattery” has a far greater effect on women than the “execrable chart-whip.” Like a “dog that grows attached to the person who feeds and makes much of him” so it was with “my negroes.”129 Although planters could not control women’s willingness to bear and mother children, they certainly tried to manipulate them into compliance by gifting them with money and material goods. By 1816, the customary practice of financially rewarding mothers for bearing children became law. The new laws required parish vestries to compensate planters who reported the birth of children on their estates. Proprietors were to receive a sum of three pounds for every child born on their property. Overseers were required to divide the reward equally between the mother, midwife, and nurse attending the child. The reward funds came in the forms of a tax reduction for proprietors who reported the birth of children on their estates.130 Yet planters were far from consistent in rewarding mothers, midwives, and nurses for the birth of children. The records make only occasional reference to mothers and midwives receiving financial rewards. No records were uncovered of nurses receiving such incentives. Moreover, the rewards distributed to mothers and midwives were less than one pound each. Reward schemes were more elaborate on some properties than others. At Cornwall estate, women received a combination of money, gifts, and “medals of honour” for each successful pregnancy. Following the christening of newborns, Cornwall’s owner, Matthew Lewis, called the mothers “up to the table . . . giving a dollar each, and told them, that for the future they might claim the same sum.” Mothers also received “a present of a scarlet girdle with a silver medal in the centre.” Lewis instructed the mothers to wear the medals at “feasts and [on] holidays, when it should entitle [them] to marks of peculiar respect and attention, such as being one of the first served, and receiving a larger portion than the rest.” Such celebrations included a newly initiated estate “play day” where mothers with “living children” received special recognition. Additionally, new mothers were forgiven their “first fault” upon showing the overseer “this girdle. She should always put [the medal] round her waist, and be assured that on seeing it, the overseer would allow the wearer to be entitled to an additional indulgence and [would] have any favour” she requested. The more children a

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woman conceived and bore, the more “indulgences” she received. “On every additional child an additional medal is to be affixed to the belt, and precedence is to follow the greater number of medals.”131 Significantly, Lewis labeled his practice of awarding mothers with money and medals an “order of honour.” However, beneath the veneer of honor was the psychological manipulation of enslaved mothers. “Medals of honor,” which entitled mothers to greater food allowances, had objectives akin to those of physical violence. Planters used food rations to manipulate women to go along with their reproductive agenda. Enslaved women were therefore vulnerable to new tactics of psychological pressure by planters seeking to control their reproductive labor.132 Rewards were a double-edged sword in that they also allowed enslaved people some protection from the material impoverishment of slavery. Enslaved mothers therefore used these incentives to their advantage. Mothers reported their children’s births to their masters and claimed extra food, soap, and clothing rations. At Cornwall estate, they also accepted Lewis’s offer to act as godparent to their children and feasted at his house in celebration of birth and baptisms. Deciding whether to accept the rewards their masters offered exemplifies the conundrum enslaved mothers faced: preserving the health and well-being of their children also extended the economic interests of slave owners. Yet the resistance mothers would mount against their masters’ prescriptions on how to care for their children reflects enslaved women’s efforts to retain some autonomy over their children’s lives. Mothers accepted rewards their masters offered because it improved the material conditions of their own and their children’s lives. Abolitionists focused on labor and punishment as factors that impeded slave population growth. Successful abolition of the slave trade depended on increasing slave births because biological reproduction would provide an alternate source of labor. It would produce a new generation of people whose childhood innocence provided an opportunity to cultivate free subject-citizens. The implementation of abolitionist ideals was far from smooth or complete because colonial legislators and planters did not share their visions of amelioration and emancipation. Furthermore, planter economic interests did not make it feasible for them to implement most of the reforms abolitionists proposed. The interests of abolitionists, colonial assemblies, and planters converged, however, around the need to promote slave population growth. Abolitionist campaigns had forced a policy shift

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between 1788 and 1807 when the Crown’s investigations into charges of abuse and inhumanity prompted local legislators and planters to initiate reform. Abolitionist success in ending the slave trade in 1807 made planters even more cognizant of how much their proprietary interests depended on women reproducing. Even so, the new importance given to enslaved women’s reproductive potential did not eclipse the importance of their manual labor. The reform of enslaved women’s working lives reflected their masters’ needs and attempts to balance the dual roles of women as producers and reproducers. Planters did not blindly adopt the mandates stipulated by abolitionists, the Crown, or their local government. Instead, they made calculated decisions that would enable them to utilize women as field workers without further undermining their ability to reproduce. Although reforms were insufficient to halt the debilitating effects of sugar production on fertility, motherworkers experienced some transformations in their working lives as they received exemptions from field work, alternative work responsibilities, and placement in larger work gangs that allowed for wider distribution of tasks. Other factors such as illness, stage of pregnancy, and women’s strength further shaped the changes that women experienced. Financial and demographic calculations along with plantation production rhythms also determined the extensiveness of labor reforms for parturient workers. Because reproductive women dominated field work, the planting and harvesting cycles limited work release during pregnancy and childbirth to very few women. Plantation managers paid attention to the needs of their estates as they implemented reforms, which pitted them against abolitionists, who insisted on more immediate and far-reaching changes. Full labor exemptions from the fields and a ban on flogging were reforms planters avoided because they threatened to undermine planter power as well as the productivity of their plantations. Instead, they attempted to alleviate field work and flogging, by shifting mother-workers from hard to easier labor, incarcerating, and burying women’s bellies as they whipped them. The conflict between abolitionists and planters is most accurately viewed as one between reform ideology and practical implementation. As planters worked out the details of amelioration in the colonies pronatal reforms shaped up differently than in abolitionist visions. The clash between ideology and practice also surfaced in the tensions that emerged between Jamaican agents and their England-based employers,

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as well as between members of the Jamaican legislature (most of whom were the wealthiest planters) and estate owners and agents even though they shared the goals of maintaining plantation productivity and profitability. Plantation attorneys and overseers as well as resident owners understood the daily cost and feasibility of reforms. Due to their distance, government officials and absentee owners were not in a position to assess the effects idealistic reforms could have on the plantations. The possibility of mitigating the aspects of women’s working lives thought to hinder conception and successful pregnancy depended on the demographic composition of the plantation labor force as well as on the demands of sugar production. The competing interests of labor and fertility meant that the allowances given to mother-workers fluctuated not according to abstract reform ideology but according to the needs of the sugar plantations. Tensions also emerged between plantation managers and enslaved people because of ideological differences about how childbearing women should be treated. Enslaved people took advantage of legislative changes that promised them protection from abuse and offered them rewards for bearing children. The conflicts between enslaver and enslaved extended to competing ideas about reproduction. Mothering children was a choice for women, which allowed them opportunities to create social ties and family life but invited vulnerabilities. Planter efforts to control reproductive labor were extensions of their proprietary claims over slaves’ bodies, claims that enslaved women themselves rejected. Discipline and punishment further reflected the property rights and power masters claimed over slaves. By linking the abolition of slavery to women’s reproductive ability, abolitionists undermined the power masters claimed over the lives and bodies of their slaves. The plantations’ new dependence on biological reproduction to replenish the labor force, after the 1807 ban on slave trading, required planters to adjust how they punished enslaved women. By burying women’s bellies, substituting incarceration for flogging, and granting labor exemptions, alternative work assignments, and material and monetary rewards, planters punished female offenders while trying to protect their reproductive ability and manipulate them to bear more children. Enslaved women imposed their own limitations on the power of enslavers by taking their masters to court and imposing their own social and cultural meanings on reproduction. These actions were part of the constant struggle by enslaved women not to lose control completely over their reproductive bodies and lives.

Chapter 4

“Buckra Doctor No Do You No Good”: Struggles over Maternal Health Care

For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Jamaica, enslaved women gave birth in their homes, aided by midwives and female companions from their communities. Childbirth was one rare aspect of enslaved women’s lives over which they had relative autonomy and authority. Masters did not regulate the moment of childbearing for various reasons. Pre1780s plantation agents bought replacement laborers supplied by the transatlantic slave trade, and thus managers did not depend on the birth of slave children to restock their labor force. Overworked, abused, and malnourished, enslaved women did not birth enough children to replace the many workers who succumbed to the brutal work and punishment regimes of the plantations. Of the few children born, many did not survive into adulthood because of disease, neglect, and poor nutrition. Additionally, British planters emerged from societies where matters pertaining to giving birth belonged to the private domain of women.1 By linking abolition and reform to women’s reproductive lives, abolitionists forced planters to pay closer attention to maternal and natal health and care after the 1780s. The success of abolitionists in banning the slave trade by 1807 increased the urgency of such attention because the continued productivity of the sugar plantations depended on female slaves conceiving and children surviving. Despite abolitionist prompting, planters worked out the details of pronatal reforms on their own terms. A key tactic was hiring doctors who migrated from England armed with enlightened and scientific techniques for managing childbirth. The widely circulated works of abolitionists like James Ramsay called attention to diseases and medical neglect as major

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factors in the high death rates and low birthrates in the colonies. Colonial reform attracted British doctors seeking to do scientific research as well as those seeking to take advantage of wage-earning and status-building opportunities. Yet the presence of British doctors in the colonies and their efforts to overhaul plantation medicine brought them into multilayered conflicts with planters and enslaved people. At the center of these conflicts was difference in skills and approaches to caring for the bodies of laboring women. Rivalries between doctors, planters, and enslaved women further developed over the meaning of work associated with childbirth. The economic motivations of planters to reform plantation medicine competed with enslaved people’s expressions of independence and social belonging developed around the clinical acts of caring for mothers. Power struggles were also at play. Control over childbirth gave women access to power, even if brief and informal. For doctors, monopolizing plantation health care boosted their professional authority and generated revenue. In conflict similar to the gendered class struggles in England between poor, rural midwives and mostly urban man midwives, doctors and enslaved women in Jamaica further clashed because the social nature of childbirth within enslaved people’s communities contradicted the individualized, scientific approach that doctors believed was necessary to improve plantation medical care. Yet unlike the British conflicts that pivoted around concern by the male-dominated medical establishment about women’s control over childbirth, the conflict in Jamaican included those gendered conflicts in addition to the concern of Jamaican ruling class to maintain slavery by boosting population growth. Rivalries between midwives and doctors over the treatment, care, and healing of enslaved women’s reproductive bodies, or what we may call reproductive body work, politicized black midwifery.2 The child-care work of enslaved women defined how black reproductive bodies ought to be treated and contested slaveholders’ reduction of childbearing to the production of a marketable commodity. In addition, maternal labors of enslaved women affirmed their social connectivity.

At-Home Deliveries Nineteenth-century white medical attendants like David Collins explained that before the end of the eighteenth century few slaveholders found it

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necessary to have midwives present under normal circumstances of childbirth. According to Collins, “a Negro in ordinary travail, was but little more thought of than a cat in the same circumstances.” Nature was its own midwife.3 Although Collins and other doctors disagreed with planter views about the needs of enslaved women during childbirth, his remark sheds light on the disregard for the maternal needs of female slaves. It is also a good example of how proslavery writers caricaturized Africans to construct racial and gendered hierarchies and to justify their negligence and inhumane treatment. By comparing enslaved women to animals, planters justified their neglect of mothers, and more generally justified slavery. Yet the lack of medical attention to childbearing women in the West Indies throughout the eighteenth century resulted from a more complex set of factors than just the belief that the animal-like strength of Africandescended women made giving birth an easy event that required no assistance. British settlers came from a social context in which babies were born with the aid of experienced older women who developed skills and expertise from their own childbirth experiences and aiding others in the travail. Britons who emerged on the other side of the Atlantic as planters carried these attitudes with them; thus they allowed parturient women to care for their own reproductive needs. The comments Collins made draw attention to transatlantic continuities and important differences. While English midwives were esteemed for saving the lives of mothers and children especially during difficult labor, the work of their African and enslaved counterparts in the colonies was regarded as an extension of their role as subordinate workers. From the 1700s onward recognition of women as authorities on childbirth was waning, however. Male practitioners across the Atlantic world became interested in more than just intervening surgically to assist with complicated deliveries; they sought to extend their practice to include routine deliveries as well.4 Even if enslaved mothers had been interested in being treated by white physicians, before the 1780s they had limited opportunities to do so. Very few European medical practitioners immigrated to the West Indies before the end of the eighteenth century because they had a wide range of places abroad to practice, including with the navy and the army and with trading companies like the East India Company, the South Sea Company, and the Royal African Company. These alternatives were more attractive because physicians and surgeons did not have to bear initial start-up and operating

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costs. The West Indies also lacked professional training schools, and enslaved and free inhabitants alike remained skeptical about European doctors whom they deemed improperly trained, and whose medical treatment they thought ineffective. The presence of medical schools in the colonies was unlikely to have advanced health and wellness because Western medicine in the late eighteenth century relied on dangerous treatments that involved purging, bleeding, and cupping patients, which harmed more than cured.5 In reality European colonists relied on unfree black practitioners to treat and cure them, their families, and their slaves. This gave enslaved healers much authority and autonomy over plantation medicine, including maternal care. Black medicine was simultaneously praised and condemned in the writings of white settlers who depended on black doctors. After witnessing the curing of workers on his property, the planter-historian James Knight commended black healers as being very knowledgeable in the “many Secrets in the Art of Physick.”6 Others like Matthew Lewis denounced black medicine because they perceived it as intertwined with witchcraft. In fact, Lewis permitted his slave Bessie to be treated by Ormond, the black doctor, only after Lewis’s investigations confirmed that Ormond was not among those who “pretended to cure by charms or spells.”7 The racial justification for slavery enhanced slaveholder mistrust of enslaved healers; slaveholders doubted their healing skills because they believed that Africans and their descendants were steeped in witchcraft and other magical practices. Midwifery, dominated by black women, evolved as a distinctive branch of care among enslaved women. Its female practitioners and participants generated practices and methods unique to the needs of laboring women and newborns, and presided over the births of black and white babies alike.8 The lack of medical manuals generated by enslaved midwives and their attendants in Jamaica makes it difficult to piece together their birth and postpartum customs. Yet derisive commentary of West Indian planters and doctors and travel narratives about West African societies from which captive women originated offer us glimmers of this much-shielded aspect of enslaved women’s lives. The reproductive body work of enslaved women included cleansing rituals. In a ritual described by white observers as performed “with great care,” expectant mothers were bathed at sea or in a river at the start of labor. Reports from Jamaica offered no definition of the onset of labor. Yet such European travel writers as William Bosman, witnessing similar rituals

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on the West African coast, note that the laboring woman took a sea bath at the moment of greatest unease. Like West Africans on the Gold Coast, laboring women in Jamaica repeated the sea or river bath after delivery. While bathing rituals reassured participants of a safe delivery, they produced conflict with whites whose ideas about washing the body and birth rituals differed. White onlookers mocked enslaved midwives and mothers as being superstitious, chiding that women “are persuaded that the mother, the child or one of the parents, will die during the period of lying-in,” and they believed these baths would protect them.9 Seaside washes and river baths performed by enslaved women were at odds with European bathing practices, and in particular those of the British, who had a checkered relationship with baths. While some medical writers and theorists advocated bathing, including at sea, to cure certain ailments, many British men and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regarded bathing, particularly by fully immersing the body in water, as medically dangerous. Bathing, they believed, disrupted the humoral balance of the body by subjecting it to extreme moisture and temperature. Washing supposedly removed a layer of protection from the skin and one should bathe only after taking precautions to seal the pores and harden the body to protect water from penetrating it. Others had aversions specifically to hot and cold baths. Medical theorists proposed that cold baths subjected the body to dangerous chills, while restricting perspiration. Hot baths opened the pores of the skin, causing excessive sweating. Both conditions weakened the body and made it susceptible to illness.10 Despite the British history of distrusting bathing, by the time of Long’s writing in the late eighteenth century cleanliness for some acquired new symbolism as a marker of gentility and class distinction. Among its advocates was magazine editor Joseph Addison, who defined cleanliness as a virtue. John Wesley, abolitionist and founder of Methodism, insisted that followers embrace cleanliness in their homes, their person, and their clothes. Bathing and cleanliness were not interchangeable but for many members of the upper classes, they closely correlated. Elites’ access to sea resorts and private baths in their homes marked a gradual shift toward washing the body as essential to cleanliness. The dirty bodies of peasants and industrial workers set them apart from the clean, well-groomed bodies of the gentry, aristocratic, and middle classes. Elites viewed working-class folks with contempt because of their slovenly appearance and because they supposedly held on to outdated beliefs that dirtier bodies were healthier.11

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When Edward Long encountered African-descended people in Jamaica, a group of people he considered inferior, he chided their scrupulous attention to cleanliness as superstitious. Long’s remarks helped to distinguish between cultural and class practices enslaved Africans shared with British elites. A closer look at enslaved women’s bathing rituals suggests that cleansing ceremonies reassured women of safe deliveries. Accounts from seventeenthcentury European chroniclers who visited the coast of West Africa, as well as the eighteenth-century account of the formerly enslaved Olaudah Equiano, reveal the contrasting views people of African descent held about washing the body. West Africans performed ritual baths at various points during pregnancy, labor, and postpartum. Of Gold Coast Africans, one European observer reported that as soon as it became apparent that a woman was with child, friends, neighbors, and a priestess, identified as a “Fetishwoman,” bathed her in the sea. The ceremony included covering the expectant mother with dust and mud and concluded with “tumbling her over among the waves” to wash away the smeared substance. The fetishwoman concluded the bath by binding “charms of strings and parrots’ feathers about her wrists, ankles, and neck, muttering a dark spell all the while, to keep away bad luck and evil spirits.” The expectant mother wore the amulets for the entire pregnancy, and in some cases as she approached delivery the priestess, who also daily stroked and examined the growing abdomen, offered more blessings and talismans. Summoning spiritual protection for mother and child, these rituals assured community members of a safe pregnancy and delivery.12 Perinatal bath rituals were also significant for cleansing the body. West Africans believed that mothers and newborns were unclean after birth, and insisted on various purification rituals. Some had beliefs not unlike those about women during menstruation; Gold Coast Africans held that mothers were unclean for seven days postpartum and prohibited them from touching people, including their husbands, or household items. They were also forbidden from participating in religious ceremonies or leaving the house specially built for giving birth. Sierra Leoneans similarly observing seven days of uncleanness punctuated new mothers’ period of seclusion and confinement with ritual baths. On the Bight of Benin seven days postpartum the new mother and child were introduced to the community after participating in consecration and purification ceremonies. Mothers, however, continued ritual washing for a period of one month postpartum.

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Perinatal baths differed from ordinary daily baths in the herbs used. In Sierra Leone, new mothers washed “from head to toe with a warm decoction of the leaves of dundakky in water,” and anointed their bodies with oil. To encourage the expulsion of afterbirth discharge (lochia), women’s ritual baths were accompanied by drinking “a decoction of a species of grass called maylie.” Although the length of time, bath herbs, and purification ceremony content differed among West Africans, they shared the belief that mothers and children were unclean for the first several days after birth and purification baths were necessary.13 While some of the Jamaican rituals and their contents are lost to historians and Jamaican enslaved women likely improvised in reproducing West African birth customs in their new homeland, the similarities suggest shared significance of prenatal and perinatal baths to enslaved women’s practices. Jamaican observer Edward Long commented that women believed that participating in such rituals protected mother and child. These customs became a source of conflict partly because planters believed they were dangerous for new mothers and infants. To limit these practices planters and doctors built hospitals on the plantations and prohibited women from delivering at home. As planters repeatedly remarked in their correspondence, hospitals allowed them to limit the dangerous practices of enslaved midwives and caregivers.14 Interestingly, enslaved women’s birth practices were remarkably similar to European practices that insisted on secluding and churching new mothers before reincorporating them into the community. For some scholars, the required separation and ritual purification of childbearing women was an extension of the moral and physical authority the church and men held over women in early modern Europe. Defining women as impure and polluting, the church and local authority shamed, surveilled, and curtailed women’s activities. By keeping women’s bodies locked away, they made birth a “shameful secret.” Other scholars exploring women’s insistence on seclusion and purification argue that childbirth isolation provided opportunities for a woman to withdraw her “bodily energies” from her husband and his household. During the lying-in, and until women were churched, husbands performed the domestic roles normally done by wives. Such role reversals and women’s authority in the birthing room temporarily empowered women and inverted gendered power relations.15 Retaining control over childbirth similarly gave enslaved women access to informal power. The significance and context in which enslaved women’s

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birth practices emerged differed, however. Enslaved women’s labor roles during lying in did not devolve to husbands; other enslaved people, male and female, took over the work of parturient women during their absence. Lying in therefore did not invert the male-female gender order, but elevated childbearing women as a protected group of workers. Childbirth evolved as the domain of enslaved women not because slave owners and colonial authority insisted on “privacy and secrecy for the female body” like early modern Europeans—they did not; and therefore enslaved women’s empowerment through birth did not result from their ability to draw power from male prescriptions for the concealment of the laboring body.16 The fact that enslaved women’s bodies were mostly in a state of near nudity ensured that the black and enslaved female body was anything but secret and hidden. Birthing in the slave quarters concealed women’s bodies and opposed the nearly nude state in which slaveholders insisted on keeping black women’s bodies. For a brief moment, enslaved women’s bodies were private and shielded from male gaze and mastery. The secrecy and rituals of enslaved women’s childbirth practices evolved from the culture of slavery and the slave trade that devalued and neglected women’s reproductive labor and midwifery before the 1780s. Recall Collins’s remarks on the nonexistence of maternal health care because slaveholding policy dictated that black women’s animal-like nature did not require human intervention. Jamaican birth rituals were an invention of enslaved women that contradicted slaveholding policy and allowed the women themselves to determine the terms and conditions of lying in. Beyond providing reassurances of safety, birth rituals were enslaved women’s domain and for a brief period, inverted race and gender relations that subordinated blacks to whites and women to men. Relegated to the sidelines, slaveholding men lacked control over decision making and black women’s labor and bodies. Hospital births where white male doctors replaced midwives would undermine enslaved women’s power while restoring racial and gender order. Enslaved women’s childbirth rituals were not only sources of dispute over gendered power. The therapies women performed and the social functions they served generated opposition and unsavory ideas about black women’s birth experiences. Details of West African women’s birth experiences reveal that screaming and groaning while giving birth was considered disgraceful. Observers’ reports of Gold Coast women, for example, describe how birth attendants go to varying lengths, including covering the mouth of women in labor, to muffle their cries. Because motherhood was viewed

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as a sacred duty, screaming while giving birth was treated with the same level of disdain and social ostracism as infertility, and to protect the new mother’s social standing, birth attendants used various means of silencing her.17 Without detailed records of Jamaican women’s birth rituals and cosmologies, one can only speculate that planter writings about enslaved women giving birth without a “shriek or scream” because childbirth was pain free misconstrued enslaved women’s attitudes toward childbearing and childbirth rituals. The reported silence among Jamaican enslaved women suggests shared beliefs with West Africans about the dishonor of screaming while giving birth. They also indicate different cultural meanings given to childbirth pains. For English women painful travail denoted God’s curse upon Eve and symbolized membership in the Christian community. The ability to withstand childbirth pain pronounced African women’s worthiness of the sacred duty of motherhood. Women’s presence in the birth room molded the experience to suit social ideals. Thus doctor reports of birth attendants blending rum with warm water and other unknown ingredients to promote sleep and to ease parturition discomforts signaled how women managed the pains of childbirth.18 Doctors, however, had a very different approach to pain management. Some bled patients to improve circulation and to promote sleep and relaxation, while others administered opiates such as opium and laudanum.19 Doctors played an ambiguous role. On one hand, they challenged planter theory of pain-free childbirth for black women and on the other, they rejected enslaved women’s pain-management practices. The presence of friends and family members in the birthing room contradicts the idea that captive Africans were a commodity, disconnected, and socially dead. Birth attendants not only attended the laboring woman but likely traded stories as well. Birth room chatter had important social as well as educational functions. As older, experienced mothers socialized with one another, sharing stories about their own labor and other labors they witnessed and assisted with, younger inexperienced women learned about the rituals and customs of childbirth. Birth observations solidified intergenerational ties and built trust as younger women learned about labor and delivery from their elders.20 Pronatal reforms that included shifting birth away from women’s homes to hospitals threatened enslaved women’s social networks and learning opportunities. Women would adopt various strategies to maintain a degree of control over reproductive health and body work. Birth attendants performed other important functions that communicated the social connectivity of laboring enslaved women. They attended to

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the physical comforts of mothers and newborns, by, for example, keeping a fire going throughout the day, and particularly at night when temperatures dropped. Enslaved people’s huts were often damp and drafty from what estate doctor John Quier described as the “innumerable Crevices and Holes in the Walls” through which cold air passed. Fires kept mothers and neonates warm.21 From the fragmented sources, it is hard to tell whether the fires were purely for comfort or in keeping with some West African customs, like those from the Bight of Biafra, where water ceremonies were followed by fire purification rites. On the Bight of Biafra, fires were lit in the birth space after carefully sweeping the floor of the room where the birth had taken place and just before sacrificing an animal to consecrate the new life.22 Enslaved women in Jamaica perhaps retained such beliefs and practices, and patchy planter reports reflect enslaved women’s ongoing struggle not to lose complete authority over reproductive care by keeping birth practices as a shielded event. The support of female companions included breastfeeding newborns. Doctors and planters, in Jamaica as well as other parts of the Caribbean, chastised enslaved mothers who did not breastfeed their newborns for the first days or week of their lives. Several witnesses before the 1789 and 1790 House of Commons committees to investigate slavery and the slave trade testified that enslaved mothers had the “superstitious notion” that breastfeeding a newborn was injurious to its health, because the “milk is not good.” Instead of nursing their own infants, new mothers “got some of their friends to suckle their children for two or three days.” In some cases, friends nursed other women’s babies for as much as one week.23 Racial and class judgments were implicit within the observations planters made about enslaved women’s use of wet nurses. Enslaved mothers who had access to the milk of other women transgressed the race and class boundaries of Jamaica’s slave society. Wet nursing was the preserve of elite white mothers, like Lady Maria Nugent, wife of the governor of Jamaica from 1802 to 1804. Lady Nugent hired an Irish wet nurse to suckle her two children while she attended her official, public duties.24 Contracting out breastfeeding freed elite mothers from bodily claims of maternity and secured the separation of private and public worlds.25 Thus, when Governor Nugent called upon his wife to entertain well-heeled members of Jamaica’s political circle, Lady Nugent’s nonmaternal body fitted well into the public space. The distinctions planters constructed between black women’s use of wet nurses and white women’s reliance on them placed the former in

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opposition to the latter. Elite white women used wet nurses to shore up their social status and enable them to perform their public roles; conversely, enslaved black women who used wet nurses were dismissed simply as superstitious. Although hiring a wet nurse freed Nugent to perform her public duties as the governor’s wife, perceptions of breastfeeding also carried a racial component. Proslavery writers of the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth used it to inscribe racist ideas upon the bodies of Africandescended women. Breastfeeding and the breast became powerful biological and cultural signifiers of black women as “unwomanly and marked by [their] reproductive value.” Travel writers remarked at the supposed ease with which the so-called long breasted West African women fed their infants over their shoulders, with the babies violently sucking as mothers went about their daily business, unperturbed.26 Such erroneous depictions of the bodies and customs of African women and their descendants legitimized European exploitation of their productive and reproductive capacities. These depictions also yielded a lasting legacy whereby white women remained elevated over blacks. The different meanings given to shared practices of black and white mothers were part of ongoing efforts by proslavery writers to construct differences between masters and slaves. The supposedly fragile bodies of wealthy European women debilitated by the pains of childbirth could ill afford the performance of the unpleasant, difficult, and painful task of nursing. Wet nurses suckled the infants of elite white women, and preserved their racial and class status. By accessing wet nurses, enslaved women disrupted such divisions. Wet nursing was also servile labor, the work of those below the elites.27 Primarily well-to-do white women whose financial standing permitted them the luxury secured its practice. Although wet nursing originated from practical considerations, in time, it demarcated lines between the upper and lower classes.28 Nugent’s decision in 1803 to employ an Irish soldier’s wife, who was socially and politically below the governor and his wife, reflected such class distinctions. Lady Nugent’s ability to contract a white nurse instead of relying on a black female slave further distinguished her from other white women. Despite their elevated racial status as white, a small farmer, overseer, or soldier did not have enough income to enable their wives to pay for the services of a white wet nurse. White wet nurses helped affluent women in colonial Jamaica elevate themselves above other classes of white mothers. Middle- and lower-income white mothers had to suckle

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their own children or make do with enslaved wet nurses, and so claimed access to the breastmilk of female slaves as an extension of their property rights as slave owners. Despite the disdain white male observers expressed for what they defined as the “shameful and savage custom” of black wet nurses suckling white children, the practice persisted in colonial Jamaica. Like their counterparts in England, Jamaican whites ignored claims that their babies would absorb the evil traits of other women who suckled them.29 Wet nursing fixed class and racial boundaries, and white women in Jamaica wishing to display their social status embraced the practice. Wet nursing was the preserve of socially mobile whites and by similarly laying claim to the practice, black women breached Jamaica’s racial and class etiquette. The criticisms of enslaved women’s use of wet nurses ultimately reflect the gendered struggles around class, race, and status making that were at play in Jamaica’s colonial and slave society. Women’s reproductive bodies were essential to these contests. By the turn of the nineteenth century ideas about wet nursing were being transformed. Wet nursing was no longer simply associated with (wealthy, white) female weakness. With the increased entrance of men in the birthing quarters and the emergence of obstetrics as a scientific practice, wet nursing also became linked to universal female credulity. In Britain, rational man midwives distinguished themselves from lay midwives by claiming objective distance from the reproductive process. Man midwives maintained that their academic training in scientific inquiry gave them immunity from the fears and feelings from which “old wives’ tales” emerged. As men of science, they observed, tested, and theorized while midwives imagined and speculated based on their fears and subjective experiences of being pregnant and giving birth. From the 1720s onward, man midwives investigated tales of strange, monstrous births and created their own ideas about how best to save infants and debunk old wives tales.30 British man midwives also drummed up government support for mothers to breastfeed their own babies by arguing that it best preserved infant health. Self-described “men of science” countered the claim that nursing debilitated women because it robbed them of “their own nourishment.” They argued that wealthy white women were immune to debility because they enjoyed abundant access to food. British medical authority approved wet nursing only for the poor, destitute, and abandoned, whose nutritionally unsound bodies made breastfeeding difficult or impossible. The

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scientific man midwives tested and discredited the so-called superstitious beliefs of midwives, and in so doing, they shored up their own authority over childbirth. Women as mothers and midwives struggled to retain some autonomy and epistemological authority over their bodies and the birthing process.31 The British medical establishment similarly threatened the authority of enslaved healers in Jamaica as practitioners migrated and established practices in the colony. Leveling identical criticisms at enslaved mothers and midwives, British doctors sought to overhaul reproductive medicine in Jamaica in the same way that their counterparts were doing in the mother country and other parts of Europe and the British Empire. Male doctors competed with midwives to secure authority over childbirth. The doctors had the support of planters, who, like the British government, were interested in saving the lives of infants because of growing concerns about labor shortages. Yet the concerns in the metropole extended beyond reproducing brute workers. The imperial government wanted to save babies to become citizens who would contribute to home and empire building.32 The fiscal visions planters held for slave babies were at odds with these nationalist ideals. The primary goal of planters was to secure bonded workers for their individual plantations and preserve slavery. Despite the divergent goals of planters who hired physicians because their new science promised more successful slave births; the British government, which supported medical research for its potential to strengthen the empire; and doctors seeking to build their professional authority as medical experts, they all agreed that enslaved women’s control over childbirth gave them access to power, which proved dangerous to their goals. Replacing midwifery with a more rational and scientifically based system of care would stimulate population growth and shore up the medical authority of men. Midwives and birth rituals, both in Britain and in the colonies, were not displaced so easily, however. Retaining control over parturition permitted women to define childbirth on their terms. West Indian planter reports that new mothers delayed nursing their infants echoed the travel narratives Europeans wrote while exploring the West African coast. Accounts from Sierra Leone indicate that new mothers waited three to four days before suckling their babies. Newborns fed from mothers whose milk supply was fully established. Children three or four months old would consume colostrum from new mothers, which the observer explained, was because Sierra Leoneans believed newborns were not strong enough to endure the purgative effects

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of first milk. Prior to nursing their own children, mothers carefully washed their breasts to prevent the child ingesting any leftover colostrum.33 The common reports from Jamaica and West Africa do not just indicate the deep-rootedness of women’s birth rituals that survived the transatlantic journey, and therefore illustrate the depth of enslaved women’s conflict with doctors seeking to establish Western medical practices. By nursing each other’s children, enslaved and West African women also defined motherhood as a practice that depended on the support of a network of women. Community-supported, women-centered childbirth was at odds with the hospitalbased, male-dominated care doctors insisted on that would isolate new mothers. In addition to reflecting cultural beliefs that shaped breastfeeding practices, soliciting the help of friends to breastfeed also might have resolved difficulties some new mothers faced in nursing. The discomfort from breasts that were simply chapped was sufficient to motivate mothers to let their infants suck from one breast only or to use a wet nurse. In other cases, health concerns could pose difficulties for new mothers. Enslaved mothers experienced the same difficulties breastfeeding that other women at different times and places faced, including perinatal illnesses and exhaustion, low milk production, and the hardening of the nipples.34 Sickness, one planter’s wife noted, often prevented enslaved women from nursing their own babies.35 A range of factors caused the infections, illness, and exhaustion that enslaved women suffered postpartum, from poor nutrition and overwork to the filthy and hazardous environment in which they worked. The financial accounts of sugar estates that calculated annual expenditures and documented conditions that undermined the fiscal values and working abilities of slaves confirm that enslaved women faced a series of health complications that could have made nursing difficult. The enslaved woman Celia of Worthy Park estate missed several days of work because she suffered from “debility,” identified as “abscess of the breast.” Although there is no indication that Celia was lactating, if she had recently given birth and she suffered from this condition, breastfeeding would have been difficult. Infection that led to abscesses was common among enslaved women. The anonymous account book of one doctor reveals that on several occasions, he received payment of three to ten shillings for the “surgical attendance for an abscess on the breast.”36 Enslaved mothers also relied on their community healers, who prescribed herbal remedies, including applying oil to women’s breasts. Cataloguing various plant and herb species in

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the Caribbean, Dr. Henry Barham suggests that enslaved women used oil because it “softens and diffuses the coagulated milk and hardness.”37 The medical treatise David Collins wrote confirms that infection of the breasts was more prevalent among enslaved women than planter accounts acknowledged. Many enslaved mothers, he attested, suffered inflammation and soreness of the breasts. As a remedy, he proposed washing the affected nipples with “a very slight infusion of the guava bark, with a third quantity of rum.” He advised blending the mixture in a “wide-mouthed phial” and placing it inverted over the breasts, so that the nipple comes in direct “contact with mixture.” Nurses should repeat this procedure several times a day, particularly before and after mothers attempted breastfeeding. In extreme cases, attendants should blend equal parts of melted spermaceti oil and olive oil and moisten the breasts throughout the day. If none of these remedies worked, and the breasts formed abscesses, Collins suggested compressing the breast, and hiring a surgeon to open and release the abscesses. A surviving Medical Practitioners’ Journal, spanning the years 1829 to 1831, confirms that doctors performed “surgical attendance on the breast” for both enslaved and white women.38 With the exception of surgery and imported oils, doctors hardly proposed remedies that were novel to enslaved healers. Many doctor-scientists, like Henry Barham and Sir Hans Sloane, relied on enslaved informants, and in their published work, like Barham’s Hortus Americanus, they referenced enslaved women’s use of oils as antidotes. Without crediting enslaved informants for therapies, some doctors like Collins borrowed shamelessly from local customs. Women rubbed oil on their breasts to prevent and treat dryness and cracking long before white doctors fought to secure authority over plantation medicine. Denying enslaved healers as medical authorities, white doctors dismissed them as “ignorant,” “careless,” “savage,” and “superstitious,” and recognized treatments as medically sound only when physicians prescribed it in a way that conformed to their standards and measurements.39 Doctors who competed for medical authority in Jamaica refused to yield esteem to enslaved healers. By ridiculing birthing customs of enslaved women, doctors legitimized their own importance in the colonies. In 1798 when John Williamson began his practice in Jamaica, Western medicine was marginal to the sugar and slave culture.40 Medical care rested firmly in the hands of enslaved healers. Williamson hoped to reform plantation medicine by securing new legislation that stipulated providing minimum

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care for sick workers, shifting administrative control of hospitals from overseers and bookkeepers to doctors, and appointing medical superintendents to hold planters accountable for neglecting the sick. Medical reforms also necessitated replacing or at least subordinating black healers to white doctors.41 White doctors’ assumptions about the neglect of enslaved patients were partially based on estates relying on black folk healing, a practice doctors saw as distinct from professional medicine. In late eighteenth-century West Indian societies, professional medicine was idealized as the realm of college-educated men, who had studied physic and surgery, and had one or more of the following qualifications: “a surgeon’s certificate from the London, Dublin, Edinburgh, or Glasgow College; qualifications in practice of midwifery; and of having served for a certain time to an apothecary, or an apprenticeship to a surgeon-apothecary.”42 Doctors failed to control completely the bodies of slaves because enslaved people and planters resisted “professional” interventions. Despite petitions from European doctors who had all the expected credentials, the professionalization of medicine in Jamaica stagnated until 1826, when the Jamaican Assembly approved opening a “medical school or anatomical school and a medical board for the purposes of examining the credentials of medical gentlemen arriving in this island, and giving certificates of qualification.” The professionalization of midwifery lagged further still. It was not until the 1930s that the legislature regulated midwifery. Until then, white doctors in their rhetoric continued to distinguish academic medicine from folk remedies, which in their minds were unscientific because black healers lacked knowledge and training in anatomy, and calculation of “qualities and doses” of pharmaceuticals. Physicians denounced the laws that allowed “hopelessly ignorant, horribly dirty, and appallingly incompetent” midwives to attend mothers and infants.43 Despite white doctors’ efforts to displace black healers and the hiring of doctors on some plantations after the 1780s, everyday plantation medicine remained firmly in the grasp of black medics until the end of slavery. At estates like Thetford, Hope, and Harmony Hall doctors visited the property twice per week to provide services like inoculation against smallpox or surgical operations. Occasionally, they assisted with complicated births and other emergencies. Midwives and laboring women did not welcome the intrusion of white physicians in childbirth, however. In 1796, when Rose, an enslaved woman belonging to Thetford estate, developed complications during childbirth, the doctor was called belatedly to relieve her of the “dead child.”44

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Planters blamed such deaths on midwives because they refused to work under the supervision of white doctors, and only reluctantly sought their help if birth and delivery complications exceeded their expertise. Midwives, the planter-historian Thomas Roughley asserted, were “most obstinately addicted to their own way, [risking] the welfare of mother and child.”45 The fact that planters were absent from the birthing rooms in enslaved women’s residences meant they could only speculate that if doctors were called in sooner complications and death were avoidable. Planter attempts in the 1790s to force women to deliver in estate hospitals aimed to give overseers and doctors greater control over the birthing process. Giving birth in the hospital would allow white personnel opportunities to oversee deliveries and make decisions about whether and when to call a doctor. Plantation hospitals aimed to undercut the autonomy enslaved midwives enjoyed when deliveries took place in their private quarters. Enslaved women refused to relinquish control. The blame planters leveled at midwives for fatal deliveries, and their overall dismissal of black folk medicine as superstitious and savage, contradicts their ongoing dependence on enslaved healers. These contradictions reflect the tensions between the doctoring skills of enslaved women and their subordinate status as slaves.46 Negative outcomes of black medicine offered opportunities for planters to reiterate their claims of midwives’ incompetence. In planters’ view, newborns died because enslaved midwives were superstitious and inept. Such validations of black inferiority were more necessary in an era when abolitionists questioned the rights Europeans had to deprive Africans of their freedom and subordinate them as brute laborers. The negative characterization planters and doctors made about enslaved healers also justified white rejection of subject-citizen status for blacks. Claims of African inferiority, evidenced by their superstition, gained new purchase in proslavery testimonies that blamed natal fatalities, for example, on the inferiority of black medicine. To slaveholders like Edward Long, black healers were but accidental practitioners of medicine because their brutishness aligned them closer to nature than to learned and enlightened Europeans. African people’s knowledge of healing herbs and plants, he quipped, was neither shocking nor unexpected, because the creator “provided all animals with means conducive to their preservation.” Long concluded that remedies were accidental because black healers applied treatments “at random,” and “formed no theory,” to explain symptom, cause, or course of treatment the way whites were beginning to do.47

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Although enslaved women were subjected to scathing criticisms from both planters and doctors, gender rivalries distinguished doctors’ disapproving remarks about black reproductive health practices. Until white doctors began setting up practices in the 1780s, enslaved healers in Jamaica were largely autonomous; their doctoring abilities were the main ones blacks and whites depended on. Enslaved healers were subject only to the general scrutiny of their masters and overseers who managed them as part of the overall administration of estate work rather than as specific regulation of health practices. In claiming medical authority, doctors aimed not just to treat the sick but also to prescribe medical policy. To achieve dominance as medical experts, white doctors arriving in the island needed to displace black healers, most especially women. Enslaved women dominated health occupations, taking on roles as doctresses, midwives, and nurses. On properties belonging to John Tharp, for example, of the fifty-one medical attendants, thirty-four were women and seventeen were men.48 Enslaved women posed the greatest obstacle to white doctors’ claim to medical expertise. White physicians therefore claimed medical superiority by “theorizing” and publishing their findings, even though at times they relied on enslaved women as informants. Publications like Williamson’s Medicinal and Miscellaneous Observations Relative to the West India Islands, among others, detailed tropical diseases and borrowed prescriptions for treating patients.49 The remedies of enslaved healers and midwives had healing values recognized and appropriated by doctors. However, white physicians dismissed their efficacy by alleging women’s ignorance and superstition. Lacking academic training, scientific investigations, and knowledge of anatomy, doctors claimed, enslaved midwives and healers overdosed or under dosed their patients and foolishly pursued complicated deliveries, like breech births. Of course doctors themselves were notorious for overdosing patients in the colonies. They, however, rationalized such treatments by arguing that black people needed greater doses because tropical diseases spread more quickly and blacks were not as sensitive to strong medicine as whites. White doctors valued theoretical learning and surgical abilities over knowledge women developed through experiencing and assisting with childbirth.50 Such qualifications and valuation placed black healing in opposition to white medicine. The contested nature of health practices on the plantations resulted from contrasting approaches to treatment and healing qualifications, as well as from white physicians’ quest to displace black women healers.

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Despite devaluing women’s experience-based knowledge, doctors still craved experience of enslaved women’s deliveries as important for supplementing their theoretical knowledge. Doctors at home and in the colonies devised various strategies to gain access to the bodies of laboring women. British man midwives established infirmaries for poor childbearing women, which gave them and their students the opportunity to assist in childbirth and gain real delivery experiences that furthered their hypotheses. Richard Manningham, for example, who established the Charitable Infirmary for the Relief of Poor Women Labouring of Child in London, described its mission as serving as a “proper and constant Nursery for the future teaching of the Art and Practice of Mid-wifery.” Assisting with deliveries created opportunities to observe and analyze women and theorize best practices.51 British doctors who traveled to the West Indies echoed the disparaging remarks of planters in order to access the laboring bodies of enslaved women. By charging enslaved midwives with callousness and incompetence that increased maternal and neonatal deaths, metropolitan doctors also justified their presence in the colonies and the urgency of shifting birth away from women’s residences to hospitals. Hospital deliveries would give doctors greater access to the bodies of laboring women. Metropolitan doctors also wanted to observe the practices of enslaved midwives since most of the physicians only knew about birth from academic training and had little or no practical experience. Thus while they discouraged home deliveries and promoted hospital births, they also urged planters to include “trusted,” “sensible,” and “prudent” midwives in plantation birthing spaces. Trusted midwives would work as doctor assistants, and in the process, demonstrate delivery techniques. Practitioners like William Smellie, who traveled through continental Europe, the British Isles, and the colonies recording birth customs, not only noted differences but also evaluated effectiveness. French women positioned themselves “half sitting and half lying.” In the West Indies (it is unclear whether these were free or enslaved, black or white women) “the woman is seated on a stool made in the form of a semi-circle . . . [or] placed on a woman’s lap . . . [or she] kneel[s] on a large cushion [to be] delivered backwards.”52 Smellie ultimately argued that the London practice was best suited for ease of labor. London practitioners placed the “patient in bed on one side, the knees being contracted to the belly, and a pillow put between them to keep them asunder.”53 The runner-up status given to Continental and colonial birthing positions affirmed the self-assigned superiority of metropolitan practices, a

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superiority doctors brought to bear in their devaluation of enslaved women’s customs. Thus when the plantation doctor John Williamson proposed placing enslaved midwives under his tutelage, he was seeking to replace Jamaica’s practices with metropolitan ones. David Collins more succinctly expressed the need to train black healers and midwives in scientific medicine. According to Collins, “Pain should be taken to instruct her in the use of the simples of the country, which she will soon acquire; the dressing of sores, and the doses of different purges and vomits.”54 Such efforts aligned with mideighteenth-century training programs for midwives in some rural British towns. These programs sought to replace rural women’s supposed superstitious and ignorant practices with scientific ones developed in major cities like London. Relegating midwives to the position of doctor assistant and subjecting them to male tutelage also had the effect of elevating men to being the authority on pregnancy and childbirth. The contests over reproductive medicine in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in Jamaica were more than outgrowths of efforts to stimulate slave population growth. At stake in these conflicts were the professional reputation and gender identities of British medical men and the profits of sugar investors. Slaveholders’ quest to increase slave birthrates converged with the professional ambitions of doctors. With important limits, planters allowed white doctors to access their slaves because of the promise that professional medicine could increase birthrates. By giving their consent, slave owners claimed their rights to do as they pleased with the bodies of women they owned. A second layer of conflict therefore erupted between enslaver and enslaved on one hand and doctors and the enslaved on the other. Enslaved women and their self-selected caregivers fought to retain some autonomy over their reproductive bodies and reproductive care. These conflicts grew when planters built hospitals in which they forced women to give birth under the care of white doctors.

Doctors Versus Planters Abolitionists sparked parliamentary enquiries into the nature of West Indian health practices. Among the leading questions of the 1789 and 1790 House of Commons committees were: “what care is Taken of the Slaves in Sickness? Are there any Laws or Regulations for that purpose. . . . How are

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female Slaves treated during pregnancy, at their lying-in, and after their delivery?”55 In response, planters boasted that almost every estate had a hospital, staffed by slave medics working under the close supervision of white doctors. Overseers supplied hospitals with food, medicine, and blankets. Although each hospital had its unique features (for example, separate hot or cold baths and private rooms for quarantining patients with highly communicable diseases), planters testified that lying-in rooms were standard features. Individual plantations provided treatment for sick and parturient workers because Jamaica lacked public hospitals catering to the enslaved.56 By framing abolition and amelioration through enslaved women’s reproductive capacities abolitionists created a framework in which migrant doctors became agents of reform. The status of doctors as reformers from the metropole placed them in opposition to slaveholders seeking to change just enough to silence imperial critics and to make biological reproduction possible without jeopardizing profits or productivity. Criticizing plantation hospitals as inadequate to serve the needs of the laboring populations, doctor testimonies before Parliament were often the opposite of what planters claimed. Hospitals, one doctor explained, were simply rudimentary structures accurately called “sick houses” or “hothouses” because they were sites of swarming infestation rather than places for healing. Planters did not invest in maintaining them. In one of the most damning indictments of the poor condition of plantation hospitals, John Williamson testified, “Their hot-houses, or hospitals, are, generally speaking, filthy receptacles, they are very happily styled hot-houses, for they are hot enough; as the hospital is, on most occasion a confined room, very often an earthen floor; in this is a platform of boards, raised two or three feet high . . . on which the sick lie down in their own clothes.” The lack of “hot and cold baths, necessary to keeping patients clean,” Williamson continued, evinced the absence of very basic items of care. “The poor patients have very little medical attention to compensate for their confinement in the sick house.” Their primary caregiver was a “weakly old woman, unfit for ordinary labour.”57 Doctors held contrasting views about what constituted adequate care, which explains the diverging reasons they gave for why enslaved women experienced low birthrates. Unlike planters who singled out the supposedly inept and superstitious practices of enslaved healers and midwives, doctor diagnosis of the situation was more complex. The perceived incompetence and ignorance of black medics was just one factor among many others,

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including the poor physical state of plantation hospitals, their unhygienic conditions, and the absence of full-time professional doctors. The more broad-based evaluation doctors made in assessing the health conditions of the colonies reflected their stance that reform was not solely about the abolition of slavery. Professionalizing colonial health care would align the colonies with the metropole. Metropolitan doctors’ emphasis on hygiene, professional medicine, and hospital reform reflected the changes under way in England. Beginning in the 1750s, civil and religious leaders as well as members of parochial governments and hospital boards in Britain invested in improving the material conditions of poor but respectable laboring women. Improving the lot of the industrious and respectable poor aimed to benefit the British nation. In the words of one hospital reformer, “it is from them we are to supply our fleets and armies—from them we are to be supplied with the ingenious Mechanic, the industrious Manufacturers, and labourer; they are in fact the Riches of the Rich; without whom their Wealth would be of little Use.” British medical practitioners saw their roles in improving maternity care at home and in the colonies as part of their civic duty as nation builders. It was therefore their mission to extend medical reforms from the metropole to the “Remotest parts of the Kingdom,” including the West Indies.58 Blaming midwives, nurses, and mothers, planters refused to admit their neglect as a critical factor that undermined enslaved women’s reproductive potential. Women’s attachment to their birthing “customs,” they testified, hurried many mothers and infants to their graves. Planter Thomas Roughley emphasized, “They are generally egregiously ignorant, yet most obstinately addicted to their own way”; they exercised strict monopoly over childbirth, and only yielded to external intervention when conditions deteriorated. They “cunningly run to the overseer . . . that he should send for a doctor” after “their own tampering” had jeopardized the lives of women and infants.59 Birthing children within their residence had previously given enslaved women a measure of control and authority over birth as well as neonatal and postpartum care. It also shielded them from the gaze and interference of whites. Much of the information from planters as well as doctors about what transpired in women’s homes was therefore fragmentary and anecdotal, offering very little concrete evidence about practices they claimed were harmful to mothers and their babies. Many of their responses vaguely pointed to the “customs” of women without describing precisely what the

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midwives and nurses did to injure their patients. Qualifiers like “superstitious” and “savage” that white planters used to describe women’s “customs” echoed refrains from many other places, including North America and Europe, where the gender and class conflict between physicians and midwives motivated doctors disparaging traditional healing.60 The West Indian colonial context, however, carried a racial and economic component that communicated the belief that practices of black medicine were culturally distinct and inferior. Such distinctions revitalized the racial foundations upon which Europeans constructed slavery, and were important in an age when abolitionists proposed the possibility of racial equality and shared citizenship between Englishmen and African-descended people, once the latter were freed and the material and moral conditions of their lives had improved. Planters, of course, opposed these ideals because they threatened planter power and the stability of the plantations. As free and the equals of whites, blacks would no longer be servile laborers. Doctor criticisms of plantation hospitals combined with the unyieldingly high mortality and low birthrates expose the absurdity of planter indictments that women of African descent were like cats that needed no medical attention or specialized care. In the face of such contradictions planters dug their heels in deeper and defended their preposterous claims. If childbirth was a natural event, and women still did not reproduce, then clearly it was midwives’ “tampering” that frustrated population growth. By charging that enslaved women’s birth customs were the chief cause of maternal and natal fatalities, planters avoided confronting the impossibility of their erroneous claims that women of African descent had extraordinary physical strength and dexterity that made childbirth easy and uneventful. The poor state of plantation hospitals, which doctors highlighted in their testimonies, bolstered imperial condemnation of the colonies as lacking in innovation while allowing doctors to claim the superiority of their interventions.61 Academically trained doctors of the Enlightenment age distanced themselves from lay healers who relied on supernatural and spiritual explanations for the causes of disease and illness. During the mideighteenth century, commentators in England derided midwives’ tales of women giving birth to animals because they imagined such abnormalities. Commentators also analyzed phenomena from other parts of the world, like the Indonesian tale where midwives delivered twins, one human and the other an animal, typically a crocodile. The family of the newborns had to care for the crocodile, brought to the river by the midwife, in order to

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guarantee the human sibling’s health.62 Excepting general claims of superstitious and savage customs, British accounts uncovered were curiously silent on particular beliefs and practices from the West Indies. Birth was a shielded matter for enslaved women concealed from the prying gaze of British travel writers and doctors. As obscure as these criticisms were, they reflected the widening chasm between experience-based and scientific medicine, home remedies, and hospital care. Metropolitan physicians brought their ideas with them to the colonies, and sought to shift plantation practices accordingly. British writers created a gulf between spiritual healing and scientific medicine to symbolize how far Britain had progressed as an enlightened nation beyond the backwardness of a “bygone and cruder age.”63 Slavery not only epitomized the crudity of previous generations, it also hindered continued progress for Britain. Adam Smith’s work influenced a generation of activists who, with important distinctions, used the connections Smith made between free labor, worker productivity, scientific innovation, and the wealth and social improvement of nations to strengthen their arguments against slavery and support for colonial reform. For late eighteenthcentury abolitionists and reformers, progress was enveloped in scientific discoveries, medical advancement, free labor, and free trade. As long as slavery persisted, the colonies would remain backward, socially and morally bankrupt territories that stifled economic growth and innovation.64 The continued wealth and progress of the British nation depended on bringing the colonies closer in line with the mother country. The transfer of British scientific achievements like medical breakthroughs into causes of and cures for diseases could strengthen colonial reforms. The clash between planters and doctors reflected the contrasting visions held by colonial settlers and reformers in the metropole, at the center of which were women’s reproductive bodies. Because British doctors migrating to the colonies held different views about causes of low birthrates, they took wider latitude in assessing the conditions and capacities of enslaved women. Thus while doctors similarly demeaned midwives as superstitious and unskilled in order to warrant male intervention and authority over pregnancy and birth, they also questioned the assumptions planters held about the supposed immunity Africandescended women had to the pains and challenges of childbirth. After conducting several medical experiments, including inoculating enslaved people against the smallpox, John Quier concluded, “whatever hardiness negroes

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may possess, I do not find that the females enjoy that immunity from the evils of childbearing.” In his published reports he explained that enslaved women in Jamaica needed at least two weeks after giving birth before returning to the fields, while mothers who had difficult deliveries needed as much as one month of recuperation. Quier concluded that the difficulties “attendant on childbirth happen fully as often to these people, as to the rustic part of their sex in Europe.”65 Yet doctors were not immune to conjuring mythical distinctions between blacks and whites, especially when they needed to justify painful and dangerous experiments they conducted on enslaved people. Slavery provided academic doctors with access to bodies on which they could experiment.66 Unlike European doctors who exploited poor and homeless women, the privileges of whiteness permitted North American and Caribbean practitioners freer access to black bodies. By operating on the bodies of female slaves Dr. J. Marion Sims in Montgomery, Alabama, for example, rose to notoriety after perfecting surgery to repair tears to the vaginal wall (vesico-vaginal fistula) that caused the uncontrollable leakage of urine. Sims operated on enslaved women without using anesthesia because he did not deem surgery “painful enough to warrant the trouble and risk.” His subsequent use of anesthesia while performing the perfected surgery on white women exposes the glaring contradiction of Sims’s argument, and brings into focus that what he actually meant was that black women had little sensitivity to pain. The emphasis on racial distinctiveness rationalized and legitimized the life-threatening and painful surgeries to which white doctors subjected black women.67 Doctor belief that black people had an extraordinary capacity to handle pain overlapped with the arguments planters used to justify their neglect of enslaved mothers’ health needs. As explained earlier, planters depicted enslaved women as animals who needed no specialized care or recovery time. The overlapping claims of hardiness in blacks served very different, though no less exploitative purposes. After surgery, academic doctors gave enslaved subjects heavy doses of sedatives so they could observe and take notes. Doctors’ medical enquiries were at odds with the goal of planters, who wanted their laborers stitched up and returned to work as quickly as possible. Planter claims that black women were immune to the pains of childbirth and needed no respite from labor justified returning new mothers to the fields soon after giving birth. Although there is no evidence of other experimental gynecological surgeries (like cesarean or vesico-vaginal fistula) performed on the bodies of

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enslaved women in the Caribbean, the more general medical treatments (bleeding, purging, and smallpox inoculation) administered by white doctors that yielded almost identical remarks reveal shared biases toward black bodies throughout the Atlantic world. West Indian doctors’ description of enslaved patients as “robust negroes” who can bear “what few men can endure” and whose “bowels resist the most drastic purges without suffering much inconvenience” are telling of the torture to which black people were subjected in the name of science.68 It is little wonder enslaved people in general, and women in particular, refused white doctors’ treatment. Relying on vomiting, bloodletting, and painful surgeries, white medicine seemed more like torture than healing.69 Colonial doctors also clashed with planters because they, like their counterparts in England, wanted to test theories about bodily differences among races. For planters, blacks’ inherent racial inferiority was a given, but empirically minded doctors wanted to prove racial distinctiveness. Doctors also wanted to understand whether diseases affected white bodies differently from black bodies, and whether differences in childbirth resulted from class differences.70 From the 1720s to the 1750s teaching man midwives Richard Manningham and William Smellie offered charity to poor women in Britain to observe differences between elite and lower-class childbearing women. Observing and attending to female beggars and vagrants (contrasting with Manningham, who focused on the married respectable poor), Smellie revealed that abuses and material lack endangered the lives of mothers and their infants. Smellie’s descriptions did not just expose the horror impoverished women in Britain faced, they also revealed the similarities of their experiences to those enslaved women confronted. The case of one poor British woman who “had been beaten and kicked on the private parts . . . [who] was weak and low, having eaten or drank little” easily applied to enslaved women.71 The Jamaican doctor John Quier’s comparison of enslaved women to poorer women in Britain suggests some doctors’ belief that class not race determined overlapping difficulties of childbirth. Quier concluded that the common experiences of abuse, neglect, and material impoverishment made childbearing precarious for enslaved black and poor white women. Not all doctors shared Quier’s view, however. Many other medical ethnographers explained perceived reproductive commonalities and differences in racial terms. From the length of the menstrual cycle and the volume of blood discharged and the sweetness of breast milk to the size and shape of breasts, genitals, and pelvises, no part of the female body or

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bodily functions was off-limits to physicians determined to prove assumed racial differences. Charles White, surgeon, man midwife, and comparative anatomist, for example, agreed with earlier writers who concluded that non-European women delivered their babies easily and without pain. White argued, however, that the ease black women experienced while giving birth resulted from their hardier physique and wider, more relaxed hips. The smaller heads of black babies also allowed an easier passage through the birth canal. Reflecting craniology and other race “science,” White asserted that “Negresses have larger hips and more capacious pelvises than European women [and since] the heads of adult negroes are smaller than those of the Europeans, we may suppose that the heads of their infants are also smaller.”72 The racial tinge of medical travel writings served a much larger purpose than justifying or perpetuating slavery. Late eighteenth-century doctors and naturalists like Charles White and Peter Templeman constructed differences between Anglo-Saxons and women from other parts of the world like the South Seas, India, and Africa to assert British national superiority and to explain the basis of cultural and national disparities. The smaller heads of non-European infants not only made childbirth easier but also explained the supposed idleness, primitiveness, and irrationality of others, including superstitious birth practices. In the emerging race “science” of the era, large skulls—and Caucasians supposedly had the largest—corresponded with intelligence and cranial capacity. The real effect of White’s work in the evolution of pseudo-scientific racism used to explain the failure of emancipation, for example, would not become apparent until later in the nineteenth century. His writings were part of a new generation of academics and explorers on both sides of the Atlantic searching for evidence of presumed cultural and racial hierarchies, which echoed proslavery justifications.73 Quier’s reports on his inoculation experiments in Jamaica in the late 1770s were also part of a much larger imperial project that would extend into the nineteenth century on the part of doctors who traveled throughout the British Empire to gather scientific data on different kinds of disease. Doctors’ scientific missions clashed with the goal of slaveholders, whose sole interest was in increasing the reproductive and productive labor output of slaves. European doctors flocked to colonies like India, for example, because they believed it offered a tremendous “variety of circumstances” in which they could observe diseases. The writings of exploratory physicians William Twining and James Annesley, for instance, explained that India’s

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“variety of native population with their different pursuits, habits, and modes of life, in regard to food, clothing, and habitation,” allowed them to observe how diseases and cures worked in different environments. Doctors traveled with the British Army because it provided ample opportunities to observe how tropical diseases affected whites. Environmental and demographic diversity offered ripe testing grounds for experimenting with how different populations reacted to treatment.74 The extent to which doctor observations about the black laboring population diverged from those of planters reflected their quest for scientific knowledge. They contrasted with the explanations given by planters seeking to extend forced labor in an era when the British public questioned the continued usefulness of slavery to the larger goals of the British nation and empire.

The Transition to White Medicine and Hospital Deliveries Abolitionists and doctors promoted the removal of deliveries from enslaved women’s residences to plantation hospitals. At Harmony Hall, Golden Grove, Good Hope, Holland, and Cornwall estates, where no hospital existed before the 1780s, proprietors approved new building plans.75 Some hospitals were more elaborate than others. Boasting approximately thirty rooms over two stories, with lying-in rooms and quarters designated for storing medicine, and attending to intensive care patients, Good Hope estate hospital stood unrivaled. Practical considerations determined the scale and grandeur of Good Hope hospital, however. It served over two thousand slaves belonging to several other estates owned by the same proprietor, John Tharp.76 Despite diversity in size and design, new hospitals shared certain commonalities. Unlike the few hothouses of the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth, some hospitals built after the 1780s included lying-in rooms.77 White doctors, who resided on the property or visited it twice weekly or more frequently as conditions demanded and estate finances permitted, superintended hospitals. Enslaved doctors, nurses, and midwives attended to daily medical care, such as nursing bruises, dispensing medicine, and delivering babies. White doctors and overseers closely supervised and monitored black medical attendants to ensure they did not substitute their own remedies. Overseers carefully vetted enslaved healers and permitted only “properly instructed,” “careful,” and “trusted” practitioners to

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work in the plantation hospitals, and only allowed food, clothing, and medicine from plantation stores to enter the hospitals.78 At Golden Grove hospital the estate manager allowed only the laboring woman to check in. Her friends, families, and well-wishers were banned because planters and doctors feared they might secretly introduce their own treatment. These stipulations of hospital deliveries threatened birth as a communal event in which family and supporters participated; and, as discussed later, enslaved women’s resistance to Western medicine ensured a molasses-paced transition from home to hospital deliveries. Building hospitals and contracting white doctors to oversee them marked the early stages of the infiltration of Western healing practices in the West Indies.79 The hiring of midwives was another important marker of such invasion. To qualify as a “trusted” or “trained” midwife women had to work under the guidance of a British doctor. According to Collins a midwife should be “Any elderly, sensible, prudent woman who had borne children, [and] may easily be instructed in the art of delivering others. A few lessons from any gentleman of the faculty or even from one of her own sex, will qualify her sufficiently for your purpose the principal part of what she had to learn being not to attempt too much, and to demand other assistance, when the presentation of the child is not according to nature.”80 The emphasis on assigning only “properly instructed women” to work as midwives in the estate hospitals reflected practices in England from the 1750s onward, which required midwives to be trained by man midwives. British parishes in charge of granting midwifery licenses paid their local midwives, for example, to attend lectures and seminars held by man midwives and doctors. Midwives working in lying-in hospitals in large cities like London were described as “highly experienced,” in addition to “well instructed.”81 Despite the almost undistinguishable phrasing in identifying midwives suited to work in the lying-in hospitals of London and Jamaica, the meaning of “well instructed” and “trained” differed. The circumstances of slavery prevented British doctors from offering official lectures on obstetrics to enslaved midwives, and enslaved people lacked freedom to access anything that resembled a formal education. In the first two decades of the 1800s, hired midwives, considered “properly instructed” and “trustworthy,” figured more prominently in the financial ledgers of the sugar plantations. Employing midwives signaled a shift away from the previous practice of assigning older, enslaved women who had previously given birth, typically to several children, and were no longer

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physically able to work in field or factory. Contracting free women of color, or more commonly enslaved women belonging to other properties, identified within a plantation district as a midwife suggests that planters were interested in hiring women with a public reputation as a midwife. Planters seemed interested in the credentials and reputations of midwives on various properties, and paid them to secure their goodwill in delivering their property. Between 1826 and 1834, the enslaved midwife Sarah Goulbourn of Harmony Hall estate worked alongside Dr. Hamilton Brown and received £1.6s.8d for each baby delivered in the lying-in house. Prior to the arrival of Brown, Harmony Hall hired a midwife belonging to the neighboring Tryall estate.82 Employing and paying enslaved midwives challenged previous meanings of medical assistance rendered to laboring women. Before the 1780s when planters began to take an interest in reforming pronatal care, midwifery recognized by plantation authority was simply menial labor performed by the weakest and least valued elderly woman. Children delivered were not expected to survive and with the success of the slave trade, they were not as important as labor replacements. Paying enslaved midwives altered this previous devaluation of reproductive labor and midwifery. Planters typically rewarded only highly skilled workers, such as drivers, boilers, and artisans to encourage their loyalty and diligence. The budding practice of compensating enslaved midwives signaled the new value planters placed on their work. Rarer still, and perhaps nonexistent, were planters who hired white midwives. At least one Jamaican estate contemplated replacing black midwives with white ones. The proprietor of Hope estate, Anna Eliza Elletson, inquired into the potentially greater benefits of hiring white women to attend the lying-in women on her property. Elletson suspected that white midwives would have greater success in increasing the birthrates than black ones, because Elletson like many other planters feared that enslaved caregivers deliberately harmed their patients. Planters were painfully aware of the irony in having enslaved healers restore and preserve enslaved people’s health only for them to be overworked, maimed, and killed. Planters often accused black midwives of aiding mothers to commit abortions and infanticide.83 Elletson’s attorney, Edward East, quickly dismissed her queries. East claimed that several Jamaican proprietors had previously failed in attempting a similar scheme because enslaved people generally distrusted white

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caregivers, whom they perceived as planters’ allies.84 He believed it was a more effective strategy to hire trustworthy enslaved midwives for the hospitals because they might encourage a following from their friends, relatives, and fellow workers. If planters were to be successful in reforming reproductive care, they needed to elicit compliance, not opposition.85 In addition to the negative reactions of enslaved women to white caregivers, employing white midwives was a costly venture. White midwives charged as much as £20 to attend white mothers, and planters were unwilling to spend that amount to be reassured of the quality of care provided to their female property.86 Hoping to spend as little as possible to reap the highest profits, planters continued to rely on enslaved midwives. As bonded workers who required no payment, slave midwives saved planters financially. The tensions between fertility and plantation profits did not arise only over labor assignment to maintain productivity. The cost of reproductive health care weighed heavily on the decisions plantation agents made about childbearing women. In one extremely rare case at the Newton plantation in Barbados the estate agent successively employed three white midwives. Although historians discussing the Newton plantation hires suggest that white midwives were contracted because no enslaved or free black or colored woman with midwifery skill was available, the culture of distrust between enslaved and enslaver and enslaved women’s resistance were more likely reasons.87 On a plantation where the manager routinely blamed midwives for the deaths of slave babies, perhaps the owner, like Elletson, thought white midwives would fare better; and to escape punishment, enslaved women concealed their midwifery skills. Planters already reluctantly paid white doctors £3 per year to treat their slaves (and an average £5.6s.8d extra for emergency cases, like amputations or cesareans).88 The proprietor of Busy Park estate, William Mitchell, called attention to the steep costs of hiring white practitioners. In 1819, doctors Frederick Charles Crane and Andrew Dawson were called in to deliver the baby of an enslaved woman named Ann. The cost of £15 was an exorbitant one, incurring Mitchell’s query and disapproval. Although we do not know the full details of what transpired in the birth room, the delivery was more difficult than usual, requiring Crane and Dawson to deliver the child “with instruments.” It is further unknown whether the mother and child lived, and therefore would have warranted such an extraordinary expense. The £15 fee for attending to the enslaved woman, Ann, gives us insight into the

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costs associated with investing in increasing slave birthrates, and why some planters reluctantly embraced it and others simply rejected it. Compounding the £15 expense for delivering Ann’s baby were measles and dysentery epidemics in November 1821, which claimed the lives of three infants. Mitchell questioned how lucrative it was to continue investing in sugar and slavery having to spend a “great deal of money” on slave health care. With continued high infant mortality rates he pondered whether abandoning the Jamaican properties in the post-slave-trade era might not be more advantageous to investors.89 The use of instruments to deliver Ann’s baby raised questions about more than its costs. If they saved the lives of distressed mothers and infants, doctors likely gained the esteem of planters and laboring women. The process of extracting babies during a complicated delivery, however, was typically messy, and infants rarely survived. The introduction of the forceps by the 1720s was an advancement over the use of blunt hooks or scissors to extract babies. Yet they still left many mothers tortured and their infants dismembered as doctors dug deep into the birth canal to extract the stuck child. There is no way of knowing whether infants were dead prior to the mechanical intervention, but the diary entries of midwives in other parts of the Atlantic world, like those kept by Martha Ballard, the North American midwife who kept a detailed record of her deliveries, suggest that doctors’ clumsy use of instruments killed infants. Since more often than not doctors who assisted with complicated births delivered mangled and dead babies, their presence in birthing rooms brought an “aura of torture and death.”90 Doctor association with the death of infants discouraged women from trusting them and contributed to the ongoing struggles between doctors, women, and midwives. Enslaved women made up songs that “buckra” “doctor no do you no good,” questioning the efficacy of white medicine. Some planters shared these concerns, which explains why they continued to rely on enslaved midwives despite criticizing their healing methods.91 The contests over childbirth on the sugar plantations revolved around competing approaches to labor and delivery. The surgical interventions of doctors who preferred hospital birthing rooms purged of superstitious participants and their “cursed nostrums” contrasted sharply with the herbal medicine of enslaved healers, who attended birth with the assistance and support of friends and relatives.92 In recounting the birth of her own baby in 1803, the Jamaican governor’s wife, Lady Nugent, glimpsed what childbirth was like among enslaved women. The domestics

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of Nugent’s household busied themselves to prepare for her baby’s arrival. One of the midwives, named Flora, Nugent recalled, “brought a cargo of herbs, and wished to try various charms, to expedite the birth of the child, and she told me so many stories of pinching and tying women to the bed-post to hasten matters.” Nugent’s conversations with Flora suggest that the familiar apprehensions surrounding childbirth had the potential to mute racial bigotry and liberate shared female concerns. Flora’s stories amused Nugent, and temporarily relieved her anxieties. She confessed, “in spite of my pain, I could not help laughing.”93 In general, the social etiquette that governed Jamaica’s slave society stifled cross-racial bonds among women. Well rehearsed in racial protocols, Nugent dispensed with all the “blackies,” as she called enslaved people, who gathered to assist Nugent with the birth of her child. “I was really in a fright,” Nugent recalled, “for fear [Flora] would try some of her experiments upon me. But my [white] maids took all her herbs from her, and made her remove all the smoking apparatus she had prepared for my benefit.”94 Revisiting Nugent’s laughter through her fright suggests her amusement was one of ridicule rather than a temporary moment of cross-racial bonding among women. Nugent’s dismissal of Flora and the black nurses suggests that birth routines performed by black birth attendants were unwelcomed by white women who wanted reassurance of a safe delivery. For Nugent and the white practitioners who attended her deliveries, herbs and stories that were centerpieces of midwifery in enslaved people’s homes were no more than additional evidence of black superstition. Yet these rituals held particular meaning for enslaved women, which were neither shared nor understood by Nugent and her white maids who were outsiders to black women’s communities. Childbirth provided enslaved women with opportunities for creating cultural practices that demarcated circles of belonging and membership by those who participated in them, understood their meaning, and therefore valued their performance. To be sure, laboring black women were as distrustful of white practitioners as Nugent was wary of black healers. Although planters shared Nugent’s skepticism and negative characterization of black midwives, they also believed they had the capacity to help laboring women. In seeking to tap into the valuable skills of midwives, planters rewarded or punished them. For the year 1825, the sixty-year-old enslaved midwife Elizabeth Ellis received regular payments for each child she delivered. There is no indication that her assistant, Bessy, received similar incentives.95 David Ewart, one

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of the attorneys at Lord Penrhyn’s properties, paid midwives two dollars for each successful birth. Increasing birthrates, Ewart reasoned, depended “a good deal upon [their] attention & good visit.” Some masters considered punishing midwives for maternal or neonatal death to dissuade enslaved women from harming their property. Although no recorded punishments for midwives were uncovered for Jamaica, several planters discussed its use as a strategy for coercing black attendants to save slave babies.96 Slavery was as much about power as it was about profit, and financially rewarding midwives was but another means by which planters reasserted their authority. Excluded from women’s birthing quarters, planters attempted to gain entry through rewards and punishment. Slavery required black obedience to white authority, and midwives had to make no such deference when they assumed control and direction over births in enslaved women’s residences. For planters who could not persuade women to deliver in the hospital, terror and rewards reasserted their power. Compensated and frightened midwives reflected the will of planters. Simultaneously, doctors who suggested punishing midwives for neonatal deaths also shored up their access to and authority over childbirth among the enslaved. As long as enslaved midwives monopolized deliveries and mothers refused to use the plantation hospitals, doctors were unable to gather information and make interventions. The conflicts over labor and delivery were simultaneously a quest for increasing birthrates and enhancing white, male mastery of black and female bodies.

Defiance and Rejection Enslaved people refused care from white practitioners by concealing their illnesses, hiding in their homes, or refusing to take medicines prescribed by whites. In a report to Roger Hope Elletson, the absentee proprietor at Hope estate, Dr. Daniel Magneise explained that enslaved people continued heavily afflicted with “ulcers, leprosy, pox, yaws & c” because they refused his care. “I labour under great difficulty,” Magnesie carped, because of the black workers’ “ill grounded suspicion of the white people.” In May 1821, the local attorney for Busy Park, Moreland, St. Jago, Phoenix Park, New Hall, and Windsor estates, John Vidal, replaced Dr. William Smith because enslaved patients refused Smith’s service. Members of the Jamaican Assembly agreed that the main problem facing planters invested in pronatal

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reforms was an island-wide culture of distrust of white medicine. Black people across the island, the Assembly despaired, remained “averse to the Directions of white people.” Plantation doctors were inseparable from the “oppressive system” of slavery.97 Desperation for treatment sometimes led the enslaved to seek assistance from white practitioners. Yet treatment was not guaranteed because planters decided who deserved medical attention based on perceived labor value. Attorney John Vidal reflected this fact in his report on steps taken to reduce health costs on his employer’s properties. Vidal reported that Crane and Dawson attended only workers who had the potential to remain productive after their recovery. Patients who were “too old or disabled,” including one described as “an old thrown up woman,” did not receive medical attention from hired white doctors. The unnamed elderly woman succumbed to her illness after being denied treatment.98 Planters hired doctors to shore up the longevity of their investments, and extending treatment to slaves was an economic decision and not an expression of humanitarian concern. Refusing medical care on the grounds of it being a poor investment in an elderly worker, uncertain to recover, pitted compassionate care against medical intervention as a financial investment. Care within the enslaved people’s communities, however, did not necessarily reflect these economic considerations. Entrusting themselves to the care of plantation hospitals and white practitioners meant surrendering what little control enslaved people had over their bodies and how they should be touched or treated. Many enslaved women refused to give birth in the plantation hospitals, choosing instead to remain within their living quarters under the care of their friends, relatives, and self-selected midwives. Planters complained of the difficulties in encouraging women to abandon at-home deliveries in favor of hospitals. One attorney lamented, “It has been troublesome to make the women go to the lying-in house. They rather choose to skulk in the Negro houses [attended by those] damned old women and their cursed Nostrums and the wenches with their stale milk.”99 Dr. James Chisholme, who served several estates in the parish of Clarendon, attending over four thousand enslaved patients annually, similarly reported that very few women used his services or the hospitals.100 Some planters shared enslaved people’s disdain for and distrust of white doctors. When Vidal fired Smith in 1821 he did so not only because of

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enslaved women’s resistance but also because Smith lacked credibility as a healer. Vidal fired him after Smith performed several controversial treatments (the details of which were not shared in Vidal’s letter to his employer).101 On another property, the attorney Edward East explained to his England-based employer that he was yet to hire a doctor because good doctors were scarce. Most physicians, East explained, were “Young [and] unexperienced [sic]” without “acknowledged abilities.”102 Excepting instrument-assisted deliveries, surgical interventions for difficult labor, and inoculations, not all planters believed that white academic medicine was superior to black herbal, experienced-based healing. Very few proprietors bought wholesale into the idea of replacing black medical attendants with white ones. Even though some planters contracted white doctors and built hospitals, most estates continued to rely on enslaved healers. At best, planters saw white medicine as complementing the proven herbalbased healing skills of enslaved healers. Planters were most impressed with the success of the smallpox vaccine, and many employed white doctors solely for inoculating themselves, their family members, and their enslaved workers. The few physicians who were credible healers spread thinly among several estates. Stephen Fuller, the Jamaican agent in London reporting to Parliament, questioned the quality of care a doctor could give when he serviced more than five thousand patients: “Once, twice, or thrice in a week, [doctors] gallop to a plantation, to take a peep into the hospital . . . bleed this, purge that,’ ‘blister another,’ ‘here give an opiate,’ ‘there the bark.’ ” Such treatment, Fuller remarked, hardly qualified as “taking care of.”103 Beyond the rejection that such marginal care invited from planters and colonial agents, these comments also signal the class conflict between planters and physicians. Practicing medicine was as much a source of income for doctors as cultivating sugar plantations was for planters. Doctors accepted as many jobs as possible in order to make fortunes for themselves. As members of an income-driven profession, doctors clashed with sugar investors seeking to minimize their expenditures while getting quality care. Despite building hospitals after the 1780s, many plantations preferred to employ physicians according to the daily needs of workers. Although contracted doctors were cheaper than residential ones, visiting physicians were less attentive to their patients because multiple properties hired them. The economic factor driving the medical profession further

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explains doctor criticisms of enslaved midwives and healers. Doctors drummed up business for themselves by questioning the safety and effectiveness of folk healing. It was impossible to eradicate black birth customs from plantation hospitals. In 1789, at least one mother gave birth in Golden Grove’s lying-in house. Although elated by the delivery the attorney for the property regretted that the “trusted” healers had not abandoned their birthing traditions. Enslaved women sneaked into the birthing rooms to attend to the new mother. To eradicate this problem, attorney Taylor promised to build a new lying-in house on a site where there were “no negroe houses near it” that could allow women easy access to the hospital.104 If Nugent’s experience proved nothing more, it showed that culture lived within the memories and habits of women and they brought it with them wherever they went.105 The enslaved women in Nugent’s household had reconfigured Nugent’s residence into their own cultural space where they shared stories and blended and dispensed herbal remedies. Enslaved women blurred the “dividing line” between the great house as a space free from enslaved women’s supposedly superstitious customs and the living quarters as a place where women freely ritualized childbirth.106 Several years after building the lying-in house, Taylor was still replacing previous healers with “more careful and well disposed” nurses. Trusted midwives continued to frustrate Taylor’s plans to keep the estate hospital free from black rituals. By 1792, a frustrated Taylor lamented, “As for increasing our numbers by our own internal breeding, I conceive it impossible. I have tried every means I have known of to do it but I have never been able to do it. Every means I can think of I will still try but I really despair [of] success.”107 Given the impossibilities in persuading women to abandon the “long established custom to deliver at home” not all proprietors built hospitals. Some estate owners thought it futile to construct such facilities because mothers refused to use them. Enslaved women consistently communicated their preferences for giving birth at home. The planter John Castles explained, “I have no such place on my estate” because the women continued to deliver at home and call a doctor as needed. Other planters similarly agreed that removing women from their residence to the estate hospital made little or no difference in determining successful deliveries. John Baillie commented that without a doctor constantly attending the women, or a white person overseeing them, it was counterproductive to insist that they deliver in the hospital. Once “left to themselves,” Baillie said, “midwives

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returned to their old practices.” Baillie’s concern was not only about women adhering to their traditions; he also feared that enslaved women might refuse to bear children altogether if they felt threatened by planter pronatal schemes. Baillie reasoned that over time women might be more amenable to their reforms if there were no threats that masters would deprive them of “the little customs peculiar to their habitations.”108 By refusing to use estate hospitals and insisting on being attended to by their own caregivers at home, enslaved women secured significant victories in bodily control and autonomy over birth rites. Birthing babies at home allowed enslaved women some control over labor and delivery. Mothers fought to choose who touched their bodies and how they would be cared for during childbirth. By having their friends and relatives participate in birth and attend to their needs enslaved women cultivated social connections, bonds of trust, and rituals that held cultural significance for them. Enslaved midwives claimed expert status over maternal health and care and rejected white medical imposition. Midwives clashed with plantation doctors who had different ideas on how to clean the body, manage pain, position the body during labor and delivery, and respond to the physical challenges new mothers faced. Midwives and doctors agreed on some medical treatments but they disagreed on dosages and surgical interventions. The conflict between enslaved midwives and metropolitan doctors was not just about the approach to care. These struggles were also over what caring for women’s reproductive bodies and needs meant. Status and claims of expertise were at stake. Enslaved midwives claimed authority as medical practitioners and doctors rivaled them for such recognition. The tension between enslaved mothers, healers, and white doctors was only one layer of the conflict over maternal care. Although doctors and planters allied in exploiting the bodies of the slaves, they also clashed over the efficacy of professional and scientific medical intervention. Doctors were agents of reform as well as students of science, and their presence in the colonies sought to extend reforms already under way in Europe. Migrant doctors also hoped to earn a living, and the more ambitious ones aimed to build their reputations as medical authorities. These visions and ambitions placed migrant doctors in opposition to planters who simply wanted them to save distressed mother-workers and baby-workers who were vital for the immediate and future labor needs of their plantations.

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Planters also were not convinced that the more expensive white physicians were more effective than black folk healing, and continued to rely on black healers (even as they disparaged them). Despite significant challenges, enslaved caregivers remained the central authority on plantation medicine throughout the abolitionist era.

Chapter 5

“Dead Before the Ninth Day”: Struggles over Neonatal Care

In the wake of abolitionist-inspired pronatalism the care of infants and their deaths became a site of struggle. Abolitionists stressed the need to keep infants alive by paying attention to their material and medical needs. At both the imperial and local levels, legislatures wrote new laws to counteract what they perceived as the causes of infant morbidity and mortality. Blaming enslaved healers and mothers as the cause of their children’s illness and death, planters and doctors developed corrective strategies that simultaneously challenged enslaved people’s approach to infant care and asserted the authority of planters and doctors over enslaved people’s reproductive lives. Although enslaved people rightly perceived white doctors as the allies of planters and thus distrusted them, doctors were critical of planters and emphasized their failures and neglect as important reasons why slave populations stagnated. Professional doctors further disagreed with enslaved mothers and lay healers over how infants should be cared for, kept clean, and treated medicinally. The presence of physicians in Jamaica reflected the shift to new medical theories and practices, which they hoped would supplant supposed outdated methods of securing healthy bodies. The contests over policy, prescription, and method of care for infants was about subordinating lay healing to professional medicine, as well as replacing older approaches to health care with emergent ones. Planters and doctors were at a crossroads between old and new theories of care and the experienceand intuition-based lay black healers and academically trained white doctors vying for recognition as medical authorities, while mothers and physicians clashed over instinctive care methods for bodily comfort and their potential for negative health consequences.

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Although enslaved mothers and healers generally rejected interference from planters and doctors in their reproductive practices because it undermined their autonomy and their social and cultural liberties, they sometimes accepted white intervention. When enslaved mothers accepted the material goods their masters parceled out for the care of infants, their desires for healthy children converged with planter goals of securing population growth. Enslaved mothers’ protests over the poor quality of provisions suggest that they were aware of their children’s new importance to planters and took advantage of it to secure the material welfare of their children. Enslaved mothers also continued to rely on their own efforts to acquire items of care for their children. Their struggles to provide materially for their children and to determine how they were comforted, cared for, and medically attended reflected enslaved people’s quest to not lose control completely of their bodily and maternal autonomy.

Contesting the Immediate Care of Newborns Planters were seeking to shift birth and delivery away from enslaved women because they believed women’s child-care customs were responsible for high infant mortality rates. Observers claimed that infants rarely survived beyond the first two weeks of their lives, and for those who lived beyond nine days, another one-half perished before their second birthday.1 Tetanus, cot death (later known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS), venereal diseases, yaws, and worms were just some of many afflictions to which newborns succumbed. Of greatest concern to planters was tetanus, also referred to as “jaw-fall.” From the accounts of doctors and planters, at least onequarter of infants born on their plantations died from tetanus. Some doctors estimated that tetanus claimed as many as 50 percent of newborns on plantations under their care.2 A comprehensive analysis of Jamaica’s register of slave returns suggests that between 1817 and 1834 the total number of children who perished due to tetanus was roughly 25 percent.3 Inconsistent record keeping and underreporting of births, particularly before the ninth day, make it difficult to arrive at a true estimate of the infant mortality rate. Whether the death rate was 25 or 50 percent, planters asserted that neonatal tetanus prevented them from achieving their goal of population growth. Tetanus, which doctors in the Caribbean also referred to as trismus or opisthotonos, was a “kind of Spasm” that caused the contraction of the spine

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and lower jaw.4 Plantation doctors attributed the disease to various causes, including “obstructed perspirations,” the exposure of infants to extreme temperatures, improper treatment of the umbilical cord by midwives, and bowel infections that developed because newborns had not expelled their first feces (meconium). All agreed, however, that it primarily affected newborns, and death came quickly after onset. Per an account given by Dr. Adam Anderson, “the first symptom is an Uneasiness of the Infant, and refusal of the breast. In the course of a few hours, the jaw closes, and a general spasm takes place, and Death commonly ensues in the course of twenty-four Hours.” Typically, infants contracted and died from the disease within the first nine days of their lives.5 Present-day medical research affirms some of these conclusions and sheds light on potential causes of tetanus. Infants, and to a lesser degree adults, develop the disease after infection with the bacillus or clostridium bacteria, which lives in dirt and feces (mostly animal but occasionally human). Patients contract the bacteria through cuts from dirty or rusty objects, dog bites, or simply exposed, open wounds. Muscle spasms and contractions manifest first primarily in the jaw then spread to other parts of the body, particularly the neck, back, and chest, resulting in respiratory paralysis and death.6 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical conclusions were therefore partially correct in attributing neonatal tetanus to umbilicus infections. The extent of enslaved midwives’ and nurses’ culpability is debatable. The unsanitary conditions in which enslaved people lived and worked, as well as the brutal punishments that left cuts and bruises over their bodies, likely exposed mothers to the bacterial infection. Planters and doctors, however, ignored their own treatment of the enslaved as a factor in causing sickness and disease, and exclusively blamed midwives, nurses, and mothers. Doctors like Adam Anderson and James Chisholme further concluded that since only a small fraction of white infants contracted or died from tetanus, enslaved caregivers were at fault.7 Some doctors accused midwives of recklessly infecting infants by using dirty knives to cut the umbilical cord of newborns. Others alleged that women carelessly exposed their babies to the disease by wrapping their navels with dirty rags and coarse cloths, which severely irritated their umbilici and retarded the healing process. Babies, they charged, developed umbilical sepsis after body fluids, such as perspiration, urine, and feces, seeped into the wound left open from cutting the umbilical cord. From these assessments, plantation doctors concluded that

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tetanus was highly preventable, but for women’s inattention to the “dressing and Cleanliness” during the first few days of their babies’ lives.8 Black women’s supposed lack of cleanliness and the absence of the disease among white children were typical aspects of white assessments of neonatal diseases and death. Such conclusions were not value-free medical diagnoses; they were moral indictments, which proved that Africandescended women lacked motherly qualities and could not properly care for their newborns. Etiology further indicates the hierarchy doctors constructed between black and white caregiving. The lower status they assigned to black care was part of a much larger quest to replace the folk healing practices with professional medicine. Doctors like John Williamson submitted several petitions to the Jamaican Assembly to create a board for licensing medical practitioners and to standardize health practices by removing hospitals from the control of plantations, lay healers, and overseers. By a recommendation Williamson made, a medical superintendent and academically trained physicians should oversee and staff hospitals. It was not until 1826 that the Assembly granted approval for a medical school and a medical board for certifying physicians. Certified practitioners would have had training in anatomy, surgery, pharmaceuticals, and midwifery, and would have served some time as an apprentice to a surgeon and apothecary.9 Despite enslaved people’s distrust of whites, plantation hospitals presented a new possibility for preserving and restoring their own and their infants’ health. Pressured by plantation doctors and managers, a few enslaved mothers gave birth in the lying-in houses under white doctors’ supervision. Plantation hospitals supervised by white physicians were presented as providing superior care that better secured the health of mothers and their infants. One resident proprietor, Gilbert Francklyn, boasted some success in “persuad[ing] the women on [his] plantation” to accept provisions made. “I prevailed upon them” that they would receive “superior tenderness, cleanliness, and attention, and that the children [would] not die of the disorders.”10 Similarly, in 1790, the resident doctor of Golden Grove estate, Benjamin Turney, reported that the “lying-in house has answered very well,” the women having now “reconciled perfectly to the regulation. . . . The unwillingness naturally to be expected from the mothers in conforming to the plan, is now pretty well overcome, indeed, every encouragement has been held out to them.”11 Enslaved women’s acceptance of alternative care suggests that their desire to have healthy, live births coincided with their masters’ interests. The kinship ties and social life that the

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survival of enslaved children promised, however, contrasted with planters’ economic interests in the healthy existence of slave babies.12 Not all members of the planter class were convinced that women’s “improper mode of treatment of the infant” caused lockjaw. In a report to the 1790 House of Commons investigative committee on slavery, the Jamaican agent Stephen Fuller asserted that enslaved newborns developed lockjaw in many cases, even when they received the greatest care, and lived in a healthy situation (including when they were born in the estate lying-in houses). A rare recorded voice in this regard, Fuller offered no alternative explanation. He simply cast doubt on planter claims, and argued that they falsely “throw blame on Negroe women.”13 Fuller’s intimation that other factors apart from the ineptitude of enslaved caregivers caused population decline indicates the multidimensional nature of the contests to reform slavery through reproductive interventions. He was part of a London-based group of planters and merchants who organized and formed the Society of West India Planters and Merchants, or the Society. In addition to gathering to socialize, Society members discussed trade, markets, and colonial policy. One of their primary aims was to secure the interests of the West Indies in Parliament. The era of abolition was one of their most active periods because they were in the vanguard of the antiabolition lobby. Petitioning Parliament against proposed resolutions, including Wilberforce’s 1792 motion to abolish the slave trade, the Society argued that enslaved people would construe the abolition of the slave trade as emancipation and would rebel and destabilize the colonies. The London-based Society saw itself as representing West Indian planter interests. Even so, sometimes its agenda and strategies conflicted with those pursued by planters residing in the colonies. The conflicts between absentees (many of whom were members of the Society) and resident planters emerged because of class differences and hierarchies. Although absentees delegated almost all the responsibilities for managing their estates to resident agents, absentees disdained Jamaican whites. Edward Long, who, like Fuller, spent some time in Jamaica but never considered himself a permanent settler, depicted Creole whites as “bad economists” who frequently hurt “their family and fortunes” because of their rustic habits. Because many estate agents were not property owners, they were careless and excessive in their treatment of slaves.14 Fuller’s testimony as an agent of the Society not only made the case for enslaved women’s

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innocence but also reflected class conflicts between England-based proprietors and Jamaican whites. While transients like Fuller believed that the decadence of Creoles retarded slave population growth, local agents, who viewed absentees as out of touch with local realities, disagreed, and passed the blame onto enslaved women and caregivers.15 Agent Fuller was indeed correct in suspecting alternative causes of neonatal deaths not necessarily linked to the tetanus bacteria. A comprehensive study of epidemiology and slavery suggests that many diseases shared symptoms, and doctors had limited ways of identifying illnesses or determining causes of death because they relied largely on crude theories about bodily humors.16 It is conceivable, therefore, that doctors misdiagnosed tetany for tetanus; the former also manifests in muscle spasm, convulsions, and eventual death. Tetany results from calcium and magnesium deficiencies rather than bacterial infections. The fact that enslaved women were underfed and ate nutritionally bankrupt diets suggests that they passed on very few key nutrients to their babies in utero. Facial muscular spasms in babies might have resulted from nutritional deficiencies. Without a full understanding of etiology, white observers attributed all manifestations of lock jaw to tetanus, an illness they could easily blame on caregivers. The racial prejudices and the eagerness of slaveholders to eliminate their own culpability for high infant mortality rates on their plantations encouraged crude and inaccurate diagnoses. Various contemporaries reported on dirt eating or pica as a common habit among enslaved women and children. Dirt eaters unevenly succumbed to several illnesses, including those of the stomach, skin, mind, and respiratory system. Planters blamed dirt eating as the cause of these illnesses rather than understanding it as symptoms of the bigger problem of malnourishment. From a cultural habit peculiar to Africans to a remedy against witchcraft, planters came up with all sorts of explanations but never pointed to the inadequate diets of the enslaved that resulted from their own neglect.17 To be sure, contemporaries had not fully made the link between diet and diseases in the way nutritionists and medical experts have today. At most, doctors thought that diet changed the humors of the body and in this way caused certain diseases. Spicy foods, for example, supposedly caused leprous disease as well as blotches and boils. One English writer, Thomas Tryon, who lived in Barbados in the 1660s, explained this connection between diet, disease, and body humor. Tryon asserted that consuming certain foods, like sugar and spice in the West Indies and East Indies, caused

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the body to heat up “by infecting the Blood with fretting Humour, which in some Complexions and Constitutions causeth Languishing Diseases . . . so that Joynths and Nerves become weak and feeble.”18 Charging that enslaved people’s food allowance was not enough to serve their nutritional needs, abolitionists also singled out diet as a major factor that made population growth impossible because inadequate food distribution caused starvation, sickness, and death. Doctors in the West Indies agreed that changes in bodily humors caused illness in the enslaved, and they highlighted enslaved people’s poor housing conditions as an important cause of ill health. The cracks in their homes forced many mothers and caregivers to light fires at nights to keep their babies warm. Because excessive warmth was believed to cause unnatural perspiration and illness, including tetanus, doctors prescribed flannels to keep babies warm without overheating them. Doctors’ proposed substitute methods of care, along with blaming slaveholders for infants’ illness, brought them into conflicts with planters, who rejected responsibility for slave mortality. Planters, doctors, and enslaved caregivers also clashed over how to clean the bodies of infants. Enslaved women routinely bathed infants in ruminfused warm water, to which they added aromatic and medicinal plants like the broad-leaf broom because they believed herbs cured their children’s ailments and helped them thrive. Enslaved caregivers used the broad-leaf broom to treat sores and scabs.19 When slavery’s defenders were not accusing enslaved mothers of harming their children, as discussed earlier, they disparaged other “savage customs,” such as women bathing in rivers prior to delivery.20 At other times, they criticized the way caregivers performed baths. The planter Matthew Lewis accused women of not paying sufficient attention to infants’ cleanliness and instructed them to substitute cold water for warm water when bathing them. Plunging newborns in “a tub of cold water” (not warm water as the women had done), Lewis argued, “infallibly preserved them from the danger of the tetanus.”21 However, at least a few doctors believed that women’s approach to bathing their babies was more beneficial to infant health. Dr. James Grainger endorsed rum-infused warm baths, and encouraged mothers to wash newborns “in warm spirits” because it more effectively kept them clean and healthy.22 When he wrote in 1764, Grainger’s hot regimen was more in line with West Indian practices that predated abolitionism. British colonists’ use of the term hothouse to refer to plantation hospitals suggests the importance of warmth in treating patients. In European medical and cultural history,

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hothouse (along with stew and sweating house) referred to public bathhouses, in which patrons took warm baths because they believed that steam baths restored health as they cleansed the body.23 Late sixteenth-century advocates, such as author-physician John Jones, encouraged bathing newborns in “a warm water concoction of cow’s milk, ‘mallowes,’ and ‘Sallet’ oil.”24 British migrant doctors to the West Indies recommended the warm regimen for treating enslaved patients. On some properties, estate agents placed weak or ailing young children by the rum stills to steam in the gases given off during fermentation, while others converted old boiling houses into hospitals.25 Planters also appeared to use the natural warmth of the tropics to heat the hothouses. Without mention of fires, critics of plantation hospitals noted how hot the hospitals were. Visitors to the island universally noted the barred windows and padlocked doors of the hothouses, which historians cite as evidence of the dual purposes of hospitals as jails for punishing the enslaved.26 While blocking windows indeed confined patients and prisoners, barring windows and doors also trapped heat inside. One of the reasons the antislavery critic James Stephen cited for enslaved patients refusing care from the hothouses was their extreme heat. Enslaved patients preferred treatment in their own homes where they could also enjoy “relaxation in the open air.” Estate agent John Johnson similarly reported that enslaved people who fled the hothouse “deviat[ed] from the regimen prescribed . . . by taking cold [baths].”27 Matthew Lewis recommended cold instead of warm baths in 1817. By the time Lewis wrote his journal, cold baths found favor with many European physicians who advocated washing the body in cold water because it promoted circulation as it cleaned the body. Advocates also claimed cold baths cured madness, calmed angry people, and healed injuries. Americans and the British alike shared the view that cold baths preserved and restored health. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, recommended bathing in cold water because it allowed people “to wash off impurities of all kinds from the skin . . . thereby promot[ing] a free and equal perspiration.” Cold baths were thought to restore balance in bodily humors and preserve health.28 The conflicts about bathing between physicians, planters, and enslaved women reflect a much wider Atlantic world debate over the efficacy of warm and cold baths. Planters like Lewis held on to older ideas of the seventeenth century and the early to mid-eighteenth century that warm

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baths were dangerous. British physicians, including those migrating to the West Indies at the end of the eighteenth century, shifted away from this idea and embraced the perceived health benefits of warm baths. John Williamson advocated a complete overhaul of colonial medicine and recommended both hot and cold baths according to the ailment of the patient. The bodies of enslaved children became important testing grounds for competing medical theories, as well as sites of struggles between old and new ways of safeguarding health through bathing. The struggle to increase slave birthrates was not just an attempt to secure live births or to keep slave babies alive so that their births would be profitable for their owners, however. Planter power and authority were at stake. The relative autonomy enslaved women exercised over neonatal care was an affront to the culture of slavery. Midwives and nurses had the power of decision making and policy determination—a power that planters claimed as uniquely theirs. Planter stipulations that women wash newborns with cold water instead of warm water allowed planters to exert control over infant care. Dictating to women how to perform the task of bathing infants aimed to restore planter power. Although women “took prejudice against” such interference, and as Lewis lamented, he had no way of “enforcing this regulation,” proposing the correct way of bathing babies was planters’ futile attempt to reinforce their receding authority. Enslaved women were pressed into a new position of subordination and cultivated tactics to preserve their methods for cleansing newborns. Lewis’s lamentation over women’s “obstinacy” and their rejection of his prescribed bathing methods reveal the altered power relationship between enslaver and enslaved, and Lewis’s failure to restore the balance of power.29 In addition to cleansing infants, enslaved midwives and nurses emphasized keeping newborns warm and ensuring that they expelled meconium soon after birth. They lit fires in women’s homes, and kept them going particularly at night. Midwives also blended oil (typically castor oil) and sugar mixtures to help newborns pass their first stool or meconium (a mixture of bile, fetal skin and hair, and amniotic fluid). Administering blended oils to aid a newborn’s bowel movement was also one of the treatments prescribed by white physicians. At least one doctor charged ten shillings for dispensing oil emulsions to infants for the same purposes that enslaved healers had given castor oil to newborns in their care.30 The overlap in remedies prescribed by white doctors and black midwives suggests a more complicated connection between professional medicine and folk healing

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than members of the white ruling class were willing to admit publicly. It also reveals the central, often unacknowledged role of enslaved traditions in developing healing techniques in the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas.31 Overlaps emerged between black and white medicine because physicians relied on enslaved informants in compiling their medical manuals.32 The gendered, racial, and class lens through which white doctors viewed the remedies of lay, black healers, however, prevented open acknowledgment of borrowed techniques. Professionally trained doctors like Sir Hans Sloane, M.D., F.R.S, and Henry Barham, M.D., recognized crude healing values in black medicine, but dismissed the remedies because they supposedly lacked refinement in blending, application, and dosage.33 Black medics, Sloane wrote, used “very few decoctions of Herbs, no distillations, no infusions, but usually take the Herbs in Substance.” In their published work, Sloane, Barham, and others created a new vernacular to talk about treatment they borrowed from black healers. Additionally, physicians published what they believed were the appropriate uses and “proper” dosages of curative plants and herbs.34 Grainger, for example, admitted that castor oil was a safe and useful laxative for newborns. Enslaved women, however, administered it in such a “crude” manner it was not always “capable of procuring such stools [meconium] as wanted.” Grainger argued that the boiling technique women used was insufficient to refine the oil to a level that the bellies of newborns could tolerate. He recommended boiling the ground seed of palma Christi (the botanical name given to castor oil seeds) “over a slow fire for three hours, stirring frequently with a large wooden spatula, now and then adding a little boiling water, as the liquor evaporates. Continue the process till the oil separates and swims on the surface. Let this with the froth be skimmed off, and clarified in a small pot, over a gentle fire. Lastly, strain the oil through a piece of strong linen cloth.” Caregivers should dose infants with a scant teaspoon of this mixture.35 Although castor oil had some emetic value, Grainger believed it was not ideal for newborns, since it was far “too rugged in its passage through their tender bowels.” He advised planters to administer it only when they had no alternatives available to them. Where possible, he recommended pharmaceuticals, like rhubarb and magnesia, instead of botanicals commonly used by enslaved women. He suggested that planters mix “ten grains of the best rhubarb in a fine powder, with four ounces of water; add ten grains of magnesia alba, a common teaspoonful of peppermint water, a teaspoonful

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of spirit of lavender; half a teaspoonful of this mixture, well shook, should be given every two hours, till stools are procured; and the child’s belly should be frequently rubbed with a warm hand before the fire” (emphasis added). Infants should continue to receive this mixture in the prescribed manner until they passed meconium, up to two weeks after their birth.36 Grainger’s careful quantification of medicine to be blended (ten grains, teaspoon, etc.) and administered (half a teaspoon, every two hours) aimed to separate what he defined as lay healers’ crude healing tonics from his scientific, quantifiable preparation. Because of their training in anatomy, their clinical experience, and their experiments in pharmaceuticals and botanicals, white physicians claimed authority and superiority over folk healers who relied on experience and communal knowledge sharing. White physicians published these prescriptions in an attempt to buttress their reputations as healers and gain the trust of slave owners. The professional success of doctors depended on planter patronage as well as on proven healing abilities. Despite doctor recommendations to rub infants’ bellies with a hand, warmed over fire, plantation physicians opposed women keeping fires lit in their homes. Like planters, they believed that fires made “mothers and infants too warm,” which increased their vulnerability to fevers and lockjaw. Furthermore, the extinguishing of the fires at night when all were asleep altered room temperatures dramatically. The “sudden transition from Heat to Cold occasion[ed] peripneumonic fevers,” which, doctors argued, increased maternal and neonatal fatality. Infants’ health, Grainger stressed, was best secured by swaddling them in “warm flannel” to keep them warm. Infants were best kept in a “well aired room, where suitable bedding is provided, and no fires [were] near them.” By these means, mothers “escape puerperal fever (septicemia following childbirth) and their children the locked-jaw.”37 The struggle over infant care between mothers and doctors involved intuitive and traditional practices to secure personal comfort and the rise of medical theories about the effect certain habits had on health. In the eighteenth century, medical advisers believed that indoor fires corrupted the air, limited ventilation, and caused illnesses. Impure air was especially dangerous for children, who should not be confined in poorly ventilated spaces. To purify the air, medical writers of the late 1780s to 1830s suggested simple techniques like opening windows and doors to allow the circulation of fresh outdoor air. Keeping windows and doors open throughout

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the day would further help to remove the stale air that accumulated overnight. While sleeping, they believed, bodies perspire excessively and increase the dampness and foulness of the air. Fresh air, as well as properly ventilated bodies and indoor spaces, best preserved and restored health.38 Fleeing the hothouses to enjoy the outdoor air, enslaved people already embraced fresh air as important for good health. Quier and Gilbert Mathison highlighted the poor standards of cleanliness not just to single out black practices as inferior to whites. Their criticisms indicate class and gender conflicts, as well as the sense of superiority whites visiting Jamaica claimed over those residing on the island. Quier spent more than twenty years practicing as a physician in Jamaica, and had four thousand to five thousand slave patients under his care annually. Despite the fact that he lived in Jamaica for an extended period and his employment depended on planter patronage, Quier never considered himself a permanent resident and was critical of the practices and views of plantation agents. Among his most astringent criticism was his denunciation of planters’ erroneous claim that black women’s hardiness immunized them against the difficulties and dangers of childbirth. Quier believed that these flawed assumptions about the capacities of the black female body imperiled enslaved women, and were partly responsible for demographic failure. Gilbert Mathison similarly criticized his fellow planters. Mathison returned to Jamaica in 1808 after thirteen years as an absentee. He, like many of his counterparts who resided in England and owned properties in Jamaica, viewed the local agents as responsible for slave population decline. Infants wallowed in filthy clothes because of plantation agents’ failings. Both Mathison and Quier testified before the British House of Commons that infants remained in their soiled clothing and bedding because their mothers lacked sufficient garments to allow frequent changing. Quier testified that on properties he visited women lacked “linen and other Necessaries proper for a new-born Infant” because their masters did not provide them with such items.39 It is unclear what Quier meant when he used the term linen. Did he mean a specific type of textile, or did he use it more generally to refer to how fabrics were used for social and intimate functions (such as diapers or nappies, bed linens, or table linens)?40 Quier’s concern that the clothing distribution was insufficient and improper suggests that he meant linen in both senses of the word. Like Mathison, he was critical of the infrequency

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with which women changed their bed linen and explained how that might contribute to infants’ illness and death. European medical writers held that it was necessary to change bed linens frequently because they collected feces, blood, perspiration, and urine, which caused infection. In fact, throughout the seventeenth century and eighteenth century, many Europeans believed that changing linen was a safer and better way to clean the body than washing because it absorbed body waste without subjecting it to extreme temperatures.41 Quier’s claims that infants wallowed in their “filth” for several days suggests that like his contemporaries in England and North America, he made similar connections between illnesses and unchanged clothing and bed linen corrupted by body fluids. Linen, as a specific type of fabric, also had a particular function in helping to clean the body. Its light weight and relative ease in laundering made it ideal for securing health above other textiles like fur, leather, and wool. Unlike linen, which could be washed, dense textiles were simply aired between wearing. Washing linen was viewed as a better way to protect the body from infections because washing purified garments of body fluids. Moreover, unlike wool, which was believed to increase body heat and stimulate unnatural perspiration, the porosity of linen helped to maintain the body’s humoral balance.42 Without explanation about the kinds of fabrics he considered proper and in what quantity, one can only speculate that doctors like Quier shared the views of his contemporaries. His criticism of the inadequacy of linen provided to enslaved mothers suggests his belief that they should have ample bed linen to allow frequent changing and proper garments for their children to encourage good circulation of bodily humors. Both were seen as necessary for preserving and restoring children’s health. The question of whether mothers and children had “sufficient” and “proper” clothing also concerned the House of Commons’ investigative committees. Some of their leading questions were, “Are they provided with cloaths [sic] such as proper for new born infants. . . . Is there a sufficient supply?” (emphasis added).43 Unsurprisingly, planters testified that they regularly distributed clothing material to mothers and their newborns. Indeed, vestry accounts and plantation inventories confirm that mothers received clothes from their masters. Typically, the enslaved received cloths to make their own clothing, blankets, and hats twice per year according to age, gender, and labor roles. The 1816 records for Whitefield Hall plantation, for example, distinguish between garments distributed to drivers, head

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workers, field workers, boys and girls working, and children not working. At Sherwood Forest estate in 1816, women and men received different allocations. Uniquely at Moy Hall in 1820, planters made fine distinctions among young people, including “children gang,” “children weaned,” and “children sucking.” The quantity of clothing enslaved people received notably differed by gender, age, and occupation. Young children received roughly half the amount of oznaburgh, pennistone, and baize (different types of cloth) given to adults, and they received no needle. Childbearing women received extra blankets.44 The 1789 and 1790 investigative committees of the House of Commons and annual vestry reports that recorded the distribution of cloths to slaves allowed masters opportunities to highlight their benevolence. Planters did not just affirm that they took care of their bonded workers; they impressed upon the committees that they were generous and humane in their caregiving. Such claims were important at a time when abolitionists accused planters of being inhumane and neglectful in their treatment of enslaved people. In 1815, the Jamaica House of Assembly reported to Parliament, “no law has ever been passed in this island enforcing due care of Slaves, as from the Humanity exercised towards them by their owners, it has never been found necessary to pass a law for that Purpose.”45 The Assembly report further stated that planters were mindful of the island’s variable weather and temperature that required distinct clothing. Thus, “in damp and low situations, slaves are cloathed with Wollen Clothes, and in dry situation, with lighter stuff they call Oznaburgs.”46 Clothes disbursements preserved social distinction between master and slave. Oznaburg, the most commonly distributed fabric to the enslaved, was made specifically for slave clothing and was of the poorest quality cotton textile in England. Planters preferred oznaburg because it was inexpensive and durable, and Jamaican whites did not wear it. Colonial whites distinguished themselves by wearing refined textiles, such as silks, satins, and linens. Cheap, mediocre cloth not only displayed masters’ frugality, but perhaps more importantly it paraded the downtrodden and lowly status of slaves.47 Slave garments were just enough to cover and protect their bodies from harsh weather. In the best cases, planters increased the quantity of fabrics distributed as rewards to mothers and skilled workers. Enslaved mothers rejected harsh fabrics and demanded better quality. At King’s Valley estate, mothers complained that oznaburgs “were too coarse for infants.”48 Similarly at Phillipsfield and Pleasant Hill estates,

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women complained that they were “not well pleased with” their cloths and that the blankets were too “flimsy” and too “coarse” for their babies.49 In protesting abrasive fabric, women deflected the accusation planters made that infants developed infections because of their neglect. Bristly fabrics irritated and scratched the skin of infants, causing sores. As children grew older, they dramatically communicated their discontent with abrasive textiles. Mrs. A. C. Carmichael, a planter’s wife, recalled, “the child used to tug at her frock which was all I asked her to wear, and when by no strength she could undo it, she would go to the boy’s pantry, and taking a knife, cut it off making her appearance at the door of my room laughing with delight at her adroitness in getting rid of such annoyance and throwing the frock in at the door.”50 Contrasting with earlier historical claims that AfroJamaicans accommodated to European dress styles by wearing European fashion and fabrics, enslaved people claimed bodily autonomy by choosing styles and textiles associated with freedom and elevated social status, rejecting enslavers’ insistence that they wear cheap, mediocre cloth that reflected slaves’ drudge status.51 Enslaved women claimed rights to dress theirs and their children’s bodies in designs and fabrics of their choosing and devised strategies to acquire fineries denied them. From monetary rewards for birthing children, enslaved women had access to money to purchase finer textiles.52 In Figure 9, the travel writer, Richard Bridgens called attention to how black mothers dressed their bodies with “several rows of coral and glass beads, and the ears adorned with immense earrings.” Another travel writer, Cynric Williams, similarly observed in 1823 the purchases of finery by enslaved women “laying down pieces of money I had never thought to see in the hands of slaves . . . gold pieces worth here [in Jamaica] five points, six shillings, and eight pence.” Purchasing fine linens and accessories enabled enslaved women to bring personal expression to their dress and registered their entitlement to adoring their bodies with fine fabrics and jewelry.53 Mothers brought these skills to bear when it came to securing desirable fabrics for their babies. In addition to buying softer blends of cotton and linen from local markets, mothers recycled finely woven “old sheets [and] table cloth” from the great houses to swaddle their babies. At other times, women sold or traded oznaburgs for more refined textiles at the market.54 The approach enslaved healers and mothers adopted to secure the health and material needs of their newborns was at odds with the beliefs held by planters and doctors. Masters singled out the causes of death that

Figure 9. Negro Mode of Nursing from Richard Bridgens, West Indian Scenery with Illustration of Negro Character, the Process of Making Sugar & c from Sketches During a Voyage to and Residence of Seven Years in the Island of Trinidad (London, 1840). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

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they could easily blame on slaves, while doctors offered a more complex set of reasons that sometimes implicated women’s practices, but at other times incriminated planters. Where black and white neonatal care overlapped, white physicians created distinctions by disparaging lay healing practices as superstitious or unscientific. The persistence of these conflicts to the end of slavery tells us that enslaved healers and mothers resisted the power and intrusion of planters and doctors, and strove to maintain their authority over infant care.55

The Contested Meanings of Infant Deaths By linking the futures of the colonies to slave population growth, abolitionists gave planters real reasons to concern themselves with learning why enslaved people did not reproduce naturally. Examining the causes of infant death yielded empirical data on factors that undermined demographic stability. Establishing “cause of death” among enslaved infants was simultaneously important in reshaping and preserving social order. Slavery defenders sought to escape blame by attributing as many as 50 percent of infant deaths to lockjaw, which they subsequently ascribed to enslaved women’s uncleanness, superstitions, and refusal to embrace pronatal reforms. Reporting cause of death was as much a discursive realignment of masters’ power as it was an empirical appraisal of morbidity. Recurring phrases in records kept by slaveholders, like “died by visitation of God,” “overlaid by the mother,” “dead before the ninth day,” and “died, having been unsound from birth,” became interpretative frameworks that communicated the power masters had to define reality in an era of imperial and abolitionist scrutiny.56 Although planters blamed enslaved women, abolitionists and imperial policymakers insisted on masters’ culpability. The following exchange between the 1789 parliamentary committee and a Jamaican witness exemplifies these concerns. The House of Commons committee inquired: “To what Penalties are masters, or those who are under them, subject if they transgress the laws made for the Protection of the Negro Slaves, or in any exercise of cruelty towards them, and to what Courts are they in such Cases amenable?” The Jamaican agent Stephen Fuller replied: “A council has been established in each parish, and a variety of Humane provisions introduced for rendering their Condition, as easy and happy as possible. In every Parish

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of the Island is a Coroner, who is required to take Inquisition upon the Body of every person, slave or Free, coming to an untimely Death, and upon every Slave dying in Gaol, and not certainly known to have died by a natural Death: And he is liable to Fine and Imprisonment, if he should neglect or refuse to attend with his Inquest and make due Inquiry.”57 Indeed, Jamaican statutes required inquests on the bodies of the dead, regardless of color or status. Typically men of the respectable class who shared the desire to safeguard white power, coroners used their office as an “instrument of social control over the enslaved population.” Coroner reports on black corpses commonly used the phrase “died by visitation of God” in cases where planters had a hand in an enslaved person’s death.58 The passage of the 1817 Coroners Act that explicitly required investigations into the death of all slaves potentially increased white attention to black corpses. Criminal trials about enslaved people’s deaths throughout the 1820s were, however, performances of planter power rather than actual inquests into and accountability for the premature death of unfree blacks. Hasty burials and improperly disposed of bodies brought owners and overseers to court on criminal charges. Slaveholding magistrates and jurors generally acquitted planters of wrongdoing. Frequent “not guilty” verdicts and “ignoramus” rulings signaled the extensiveness of white power.59 Masters escaped accountability for an enslaved person’s death when coroners reported the cause of death as “death by visitation of God.” Masters not only claimed the power of life and death over slaves, their alliances with officers of the court also empowered them to define publicly the cause of death, thereby escaping imperial scrutiny.60 When they testified before the House of Commons’ 1789 and 1790 committees, masters wove a narrative of enslaved mothers’ carelessness, creating a record of their benevolence for peering antislavery eyes and imperial watchdogs. Planter witnesses emphasized women’s supposed promiscuity and subsequent venereal diseases as key factors that retarded their abilities to conceive new generations of slaves. The few women who conceived infected their children. The private record of planters that assigned the cause of death to “inward decay from a venereal,” for example, was more than rhetoric, however.61 Called the clap, gonorrhea was particularly rampant on West Indian sugar estates and moved easily between whites and blacks, and from mother to child. Rape by white and black men made enslaved women especially vulnerable to gonorrhea. Yet planter witnesses neglected to mention their use of rape to punish enslaved women, or their

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claims to sexual access as their rightful exercise of property rights.62 Plantation agent testimonies singled out causes of infant death easily attributable to enslaved mothers and caregivers rather than draw attention to the roles of planters in the death of enslaved babies. Regardless of the intricate tales slaveholders wove, the causes of death among enslaved infants were more complicated than simply the neglect of caregivers or planters. Epidemic diseases indigenous to the West Indies and imported from Africa and Europe, “exposure to the elements, teeming insect life, poisonous flora and fauna, accidents, corporal punishment,” poor nutrition, overwork, and ineffective health treatments combined to make the survival of adults, let alone infants, precarious.63 Annual and triennial reports of increase and decrease of slaves submitted to local vestries offer a brief glimpse of astoundingly high slave mortality rates. Although record keepers did not systematically tabulate their data and accounts reflect planters’ limited understanding of nosology as well the racial prejudices that shaped how they viewed diseases, the reports offer some insight into the underlying causes of infant mortality. Fever (which was a catchall term for many diseases, like malaria and yellow fever), influenza, measles, dysentery, and consumption were just some of the myriad illnesses that plagued enslaved infants.64 The private correspondence of planters and journals for sugar estates reveal that attorneys and overseers routinely expected newborns to die before they were two weeks old because of the prevalence of diseases and material impoverishment. Several attorneys and overseers simply listed infants as “dead before the ninth day,” “died within the month,” or “died soon after birth” without a coroner’s inquest. In public records like vestry accounts and the register of returns where attorneys were required to submit annual property censuses, they tabulated death rates without indicating cause of death. Planters had no legal obligation to report cause of death in public records; the 1818 Colonial Office dispatch that stipulated the registration of all slaves in the British colonies was intended primarily to assess population growth rates and determine the legality of slave purchases.65 Private inventories also rarely listed causes of infant death.66 The phrase “dead before the ninth day” reflects the routineness with which enslaved newborns died and the uncertainties surrounding their deaths. It also hints at a degree of personal and cultural autonomy enslaved people carved out. Apart from many children dying within days after birth, the period of nine days itself had ritual significance to enslaved people. Dr.

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Thomas Dancer, who published his medical observations and experiments performed in Jamaica, recorded that “the negro usage, of tying up the cut Navel-string with burnt rag, and never examining it for nine-days, is attended sometimes with bad consequences.” On the ninth day, infants were “exposed to the inclemency of the weather, with a view to render [them] hardy.”67 While fuller details of ritual practices on the ninth day of a child’s birth were hardly forthcoming from West Indian observers, West African birth customs indicate shared ceremonies that exposed the newborn to elements of the earth (rain and other water, fire, wind, or the ground). Late eighteenth-century travel narratives from the Gold Coast reveal that eight days after birth children received a blessing performed by a priestess over whom the parents poured libations to appease and seek good favor. The sprinkling of water over the child then concluded the blessing. More detailed observations of birth practices at Sierra Leone report differences in the timing of ceremonies according to the sex of the child: seven days after birth for girls and nine days for boys. The ceremony entailed washing the infant’s head with water blessed by a priest, who then sprinkled the blessed water over the child’s body by passing it through water that dripped from the roof of its parents’ house. Holding the arms of the child, the priest allowed its feet to touch the ground.68 If the rituals for various West African societies were more intricate than in Jamaica, explanations of their cosmological significance were similarly thin. One can only speculate what these rituals meant, how and why they came about, and why practitioners and participants maintained them. Leaving the navel string unattended for nine days might have been a transitionary period for the newborn and reflects the view that infants were not yet of their parents’ world. Taking the child outdoors after nine days presumably allowed children to pass through the threshold of their former existence and into their new lives. Viewed as a rite of passage, these practices allowed for the incorporation of the newest member of the community. Rituals defined boundaries of belonging and their enactment conferred membership upon participants. Apart from archival silences that make it difficult to understand fully the content and duration of birth ceremonies, there are clear differences among West African societies, as well as distinctions between West Africa and Jamaica. Birth ceremonies, along with other identity markers such as language, political organization, and social values, distinguished one group from another. The common experience of enslavement forced the collapsing of ethnic differences among captive

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Africans; but shared perceptions about the need to allow a seven- to nineday period before incorporating babies into the community provided the foundation for building new boundaries of belonging. These practices distinguished captive Africans from the planter class, which scoffed at how enslaved people ritualized birth.69 West Indian practices that vaguely resembled West African practices tracked the fracturing of West African communities via the transatlantic passage but reveal a mosaic birth ceremony influenced by the past and shaped by ideas and experiences of enslaved Africans’ new homes. Some reports of enslaved women’s birth rituals point to the inclusion of Christian sacraments, such as infant baptism. The enslaved mothers at Cornwall plantation who accepted their owner’s offer to baptize their children likely did so to procure good fortune for their children.70 The persistence of neonatal death among enslaved people would have required mothers and community members to create explanations for, and ways of warding off and coping with, the traumas of bearing children in an environment particularly lethal to infants. Christian baptism and the invoking of earth elements can be considered rites of protection, allowing enslaved mothers to seek good health and wellness for their children. Birth ceremonies in postslavery Jamaica reveal an even greater blending of rituals with undoubtedly the same purpose of guarding against misfortunes. Birth attendants added silver coins and blue indigo to infants’ bath while the midwife offered a special prayer before taking the baby outside.71 A gray zone emerged between the precise date of birth and the nine days that marked the incorporation of a child into the community. Estate attorneys and doctors, responsible for tabulating birth and death on estates under their management, regularly complained of the inaccuracies of their slave registers because women delayed reporting the birth or death of their children. At Golden Grove estate in 1790, Benjamin Turney apologized to his England-based employer for the inaccurate slave list he submitted for the previous year. “The deaths and births,” Turney explained, “are not always known upon the estate when they happen.”72 Similarly, Radnor plantation doctor Edward Crosdale requested a correction to the accounts of increase and decrease submitted to the St. David’s vestry because of the belated reporting of the birth of an infant. The unnamed infant, Crosdale griped, was “one that I never saw.”73 Plantation lists repeatedly show crossed-out infant names, added names, and corrected totals, which indicate changes to registers after bookkeepers compiled their lists.74

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The nine-day rite and its gray zone allowed mothers to extend the time spent with their newborns. Unless women had given birth in the plantation hospital supervised by an overseer or a doctor, plantation agents had no way of knowing precisely when a woman delivered her baby, and in effect, the start of the countdown to the nine days. The effect of fellow enslaved people attending the birthing needs of laboring women briefly prioritized mothering on enslaved women’s terms, however short-lived. The brief period mothers withdrew from the world of white mastery freed enslaved mothers to contemplate what it meant to nurture and care for another person and in the context of slavery. Planters’ futile attempts to persuade women to deliver in the plantation hospital reflected their efforts to increase the surveillance of mothers. Women who refused to deliver in plantation hospitals received a second opportunity to win the masters’ favor by bringing their newborns to them as proof of the success of their birthing customs. Mothers were to bring their babies to the overseer after the nine-day period, at which time they could claim their financial and material rewards. Reward ceremonies, like those held at Cornwall estate, in which its proprietor doled out money, extra clothing, and food rations, were but secondary surveillance through which masters sought to reassert their authority. Leaving their homes to claim their rewards announced children’s birth and proved that women were able to resume normal labor responsibilities on the plantations. Shifting birth from women’s control and the privacy of their homes was not just about controlling productive labor. Plantation hospitals guaranteed against infanticide. As long as midwives dominated childbirth, and planters accepted the first two weeks of infants’ lives as precarious, enslaved women had a space in which they could assert the power of life and death over their children. Without white personnel, planters could not prove stillbirth or infanticide, nor could they tell the health conditions of newborns.75 Although the attorney for Golden Grove estate, Simon Taylor, suspected midwives deliberately infected children, he was unable to distinguish genuine cases of lockjaw from willful infection. Speculating on similar cases among the women he treated in the parish of St. Ann, Dr. Adam Adamson questioned whether women infected their children in order to spend more time with them at home or to free them from their ill-fated existence as slaves.76 At Cornwall estate, two newborns died within moments of being alone in their mothers’ care. On 13 January 1816, an infant died in Cornwall estate hospital after the nurse left it alone with its mother for ten

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minutes. The trusted nurse, planter and novelist Matthew Lewis recounted, left the room but for a brief moment only to return to a dead child. According to the grief-stricken mother, she brought her child to an open window to relieve its perspiration. Within minutes, her baby displayed symptoms of lockjaw and died by the time the nurse returned to the hospital. Reflecting on the incident, Lewis rationalized by flashing back to his earlier conversation with the midwife, who reminded him, “Oh, massa, till nine-days over, we have no hope of them.”77 The midwife’s insistence on the nine-day observation confirms the first few days as a precarious time in the lives of enslaved infants. Lewis’s recounting of the midwife’s reminder seemed to aim at convincing himself and the reader that the child died of natural causes. “This woman was a tender mother,” Lewis affirmed and the lockjaw was truly “common” among “negro children.” Later that same month, a second child died after being in its mother’s care for only a few hours. On 21 January, a mother brought her ten-day-old infant to Lewis in order to claim her rewards for raising her child beyond the ninth day. Within one day of receiving her extra rations of clothes and provisions, she returned to the hospital with a sick child suffering from an unstated illness. The infant died less than twenty-four hours after the mother’s return. In this case, Lewis reported that the mother carelessly left her ten-day-old baby unattended “without food” while she attended “a dance on a neighbouring estate.” Again, Lewis creates doubt in the reader’s mind that this was a case of infanticide by explaining that the infant died due to starvation, and that this woman was generally a good mother who “had taken great care of [her child] till the tenth day.”78 Lewis leaves the reader with many unanswered and unanswerable questions. As an acclaimed novelist, Lewis used literary techniques well to conceal any easy attribution of foul play, and to create uncertainty about whether the mothers intentionally killed their babies. His hyperbolic flashback in the first case to the midwife’s dramatic statement “Oh, massa, till nine-days” compels the reader to view the death of the infant within the context of Jamaica’s high infant mortality, whereby planters, as we have seen, routinely recorded children as “dead before the ninth day.” In both cases, Lewis juxtaposes his critique of the mothers’ failings with their good qualities. Twice in his short paragraph that explains the death of the second infant, he praises the mother’s care for her child. As good mothers, these women could not have harmed their babies deliberately. By also telling

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readers about the child’s premature birth, arriving at seven months, Lewis further framed the infant’s death as the delayed result of birth complications. Entries in which Lewis speaks directly to the reader as well as admissions in his personal correspondence reveal that he intended to publish his journal. Lewis was friendly with William Wilberforce, with whom he dined in 1816 after he briefly returned to England. Over dinner as well as in a subsequent letter to Wilberforce, Lewis argued that emancipation would harm the interests of West Indian planters. Moreover, the premise of emancipation was false because abolitionists misled the British public about the true conditions of slavery. Lewis claimed that the much-exaggerated reports printed by abolitionist periodicals, like The African Reporter, painted a far more terrible picture of the colonies than was actually the case. Because he believed that abolitionists exaggerated their reports on slavery, it is possible that Lewis modified aspects of his narrative to disprove what he viewed as the more outlandish abolition propaganda.79 Antislavery writers centered on self-destructive actions like suicide in their propagandistic essays, poems, novels, and plays because these actions were especially powerful “political condemnation of slavery.” Melancholic poems like William Cowper’s The Negro’s Complaint aimed to hone “the sensibilities of British readers [to] the suffering in slavery.”80 Infanticide told a similarly dramatic tale of suffering peculiar to enslaved women, especially in light of abolitionist concerns that slavery was antithetical to family, womanhood, and motherhood. Lewis’s text conveyed a contradictory message. He portrayed himself as a benevolent master who encouraged family among the enslaved. On the said Sunday morning that the second infant died, Lewis reported that he promised to stand as godfather to the newborns, christened the children, distributed gifts he brought from England, and gave his house over to the new parents to celebrate. Reflecting on his munificence, Lewis exclaimed, “I think no one will be able to accuse me of neglecting . . . my negroes.”81 Elsewhere, Lewis unwittingly exposed a less confident self when he expressed his bemusement over the sudden deaths of the infants in their mothers’ care. In a separate entry, he wrote, “I really believe that the negresses can produce children at pleasure; and where they are barren, it is just as hens will frequently not lay eggs on shipboard, because they do not like their situation. Cubina’s wife is in a family way, and I told him that if the child should live I would christen it for him . . . and said I would be

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the godfather.”82 Harkening back to a pre-nineteenth-century medical view of female fertility, Lewis’s writings suggest his lack of understanding of female bodies and women’s ability to control their reproductive capacities when they were not happy. Hospital births and professional doctors would demystify the secrecies of reproduction and guarantee against infanticide. Additionally, by promising to serve as godfather to Cubina’s children, in addition to his regular practice of giving material and financial gifts to mothers and midwives, Lewis sought to incentivize women to bear children and to keep them alive. By promising Cubina, instead of his wife, Lewis invoked black masculine authority over women. Lewis hoped husbands could control their wives’ bodies in ways that masters could not. Ironically, when it suited the interests of masters they recognized black male authority over their spouses. At other times, masters undermined black masculinity by claiming unrestricted sexual access to wives and daughters of black men.83 There is no way of knowing for sure whether the infants at Cornwall estate died of natural causes. The works of several historians have shown that diseases, inadequate nutrition, and poor health care made life precarious for enslaved children.84 It is equally impossible to rule out women’s role in hastening the death of their children. Archival gaps exist not least because masters’ voices dominate the records, but also because enslaved mothers’ defiance had to be covert. In a repressive environment “the expression of people’s political sympathies was more often oblique, symbolic, and too indefinite to incur prosecution.”85 Mothers who simply allowed their infants to succumb to disease without seeking medical aid obliquely registered their rejection of motherhood and their unwillingness to mother under the conditions of slavery. When the daughter of the enslaved woman named Fanny contracted the flux on 26 February 1775, Fanny neither reported it to her owner nor sought medical attention. She simply watched her daughter die, and “did nothing.” Fanny’s owner, Thomas Thistlewood, was hardly surprised at her apathy. Describing Fanny as always a “rebellious” person, Thistlewood complained that she is constantly “sulky,” “unwilling to work,” “and threatening to make away with herself, very obstinate.”86 Several planters reported the accidental death of infants caused by what the attorney at Hope estate described as the “carelessness of the mother.” Lord Penrhyn’s attorney David Ewart similarly found appalling the accidental death of a healthy infant whose mother simply “let it fall out her arms.”87

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At Long Hill pen in 1830, Rachael Daly brought her dead child to her overseer claiming she accidentally “overlaid it” while she slept. The coroner, however, reported that such “facts could not be ascertained,” and therefore ruled that the infant died “by the visitation of God.” In similar cases involving Benne, Nanava, and Peggy of Braco estate, the corner ruled “cause of death—unknown,” because he had no way of proving whether the children died of accidental suffocation or disease or were killed intentionally by their mothers.88 Planters chronicling infants’ sudden, unexplained deaths retained a degree of skepticism. The Worthy Park accounts of 1796, for example, recorded that “Kelly Marshall died suddenly, being supposed to be killed in the night by the mother sleeping on it.”89 Whether such deaths were truly accidental is open to debate, but the frequency with which women reported unintentional deaths conceivably indicates their disguised rejection of motherhood. Replacing private births and enslaved midwives with hospital births and white doctors promised to unveil the mysteries surrounding the deaths of enslaved infants. The cultural and ideological prism through which planters viewed the death of enslaved infants further conceals women’s defiance from the planter-dominated archives. The planter-historian John Stewart described enslaved women as “generally affectionate towards their friends, kindred, and offspring, the crime of infanticide, so repugnant to nature, is seldom or never heard among the negro tribe.” Commonly planters described enslaved women as good mothers who were very affectionate toward their children. Even in the racist ranting against enslaved people’s child-care practices, the planter-historian Edward Long conceded, “they in general love their children.”90 From enslaved mothers’ perspective, killing and loving one’s child were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Among the more dramatic cases, involving the enslaved women Phelipa in Nueva Granada in 1768 and Margaret Garner in Ohio in 1856, the mothers attested that love drove them to kill their children. “Por el amor,” Phelipa exclaimed when questioned why she killed her children and attempted to kill herself. The brutality and uncertainties of slavery prompted mothers to view death as a kindness for their children. Enslaved mothers experienced significant constraints in their power to protect children in their care, and separation nullified what limited protective abilities they eked out while their sons and daughters were in their presence. Phelipa and Garner testified that they would rather their children were dead than be separated from them.91 Without the spilling of

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blood or the dramatic testimonies from mothers, however, Jamaican planters routinely attributed infant deaths to women’s carelessness rather than mothers deliberately freeing their children from the cruelties of slavery and to avoid the uncertainty of separation. Cultivating theories of women’s negligence, planters refused to concede power to women to direct their own and their children’s lives. To admit that enslaved women killed their own babies would deny slaveholders the singular power of life and death they claimed over people they owned. Even in cases where mothers mortally wounded their children, masters rejected that such actions were an explicit attack against their power by claiming that mothers lost their senses. Officials used insanity to justify an act of infanticide committed by an enslaved woman named Kate. Court officials reported that “she had been reputed Mad for twelve months before she committed the said murder.” Historians wonder whether Kate lost her senses because of the separation by sale of her child.92 Answers were hardly forthcoming from the planter and magistrates concerned with Kate’s case, who were primarily interested in the loss of future labor her actions caused rather than the reasons behind and meaning of her madness and infanticide. By attributing this rare, unambiguous case of infanticide to insanity, enslavers denied enslaved women the possibly rebellious intention of their actions. A mother who had lost her mind and killed her child was not a rebel; she was “radically dysfunctional in any meaningful human context.”93 In most cases enslaved people whom planters declared as insane took their own lives. Dr. Alexander Johnson’s unnamed female patient and another enslaved woman named Belle, both of Spring Garden estate, hanged themselves supposedly “in a fit of insanity.”94 Allegedly suffering from “an aberration of the mind” another enslaved woman named Louisa drowned herself.95 For the reputedly insane who had not committed suicide, slaveholders more commonly abandoned them to estate hospitals, which doubled as prisons.96 Although the Kingston Lunatic Asylum admitted black and enslaved people, it was not accessible to rural patients. More importantly, few slaveholders invested in mental health care for the enslaved. Unlike white patients who received medical attention, however rudimentary, at the Lunatic Asylum, slaves were incarcerated. Enslaved people’s actions did not need to be explicitly defiant but simply threatening in order to be classified as rebellion. Masters viewed madness and infanticide as perilous to slavery’s social order, and incarcerating reputedly insane slaves curbed such threats. Whether insanity was real or

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feigned, it deprived owners of the labor of slaves. Infanticide violated slavery’s ideological tenet that all children born of female slaves belonged to their masters—partus sequitur ventrem; in the era of pronatal abolitionism, it denied planter claims to enslaved women’s children as future, servile workers. Confining insane mothers who committed infanticide neutralized the threat madness and infanticide posed to the stability of slavery. To the present-day observer, houses of confinement within the context of slavery are contradictory, since the “African slave [was] already a prisoner.” To planters, incarceration was a necessity because they contained enslaved people who threatened their power. Dotting the Jamaican landscape with penal institutions therefore created a “network” of surveillance and control that extended beyond the individual and limited power of singular owners. Prisons strengthened planter power by ensuring that “slaves could still be disciplined effectively through the technologies of the state” when individual planters failed.97 Incarcerating insane slaves, planters did not distinguish between “madness” as conscious rebellion against the social order and “madness” as an illness over which its victims were powerless.98 Mary Prince, the only known West Indian enslaved woman to have left a written narrative, unveiled the unspeakable traumas of slavery and offered a powerful critique of slavery’s maddening assault on maternity. In 1831, Prince recounted to her antislavery biographers how, when she was twelve, her owners forcibly separated her and her siblings from their mother. Prince recalled, The black morning at length came; it came too soon for my poor mother and us. Whilst she was putting on us the new oznaburgs in which we were to be sold, she said in a sorrowful voice, (I shall never forget it!) “See, I am shrouding my poor children; what a task for a mother!” Our mother, weeping as she went, called me away with the children Hannah and Dinah and we took the road that led to Hamble Town. . . . We followed my mother to the marketplace where she placed us in a row against a large house with our backs to the wall and our arms folded across our breasts. . . . . I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size

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in like words—as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us. . . . It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing. . . . Oh my mother! My mother! I kept saying to myself, “oh, my mammy, and my sisters and my brothers, shall I never see you again!” A few years later, Prince and her mother crossed paths in a heart-wrenching reunion. Prince recalled, “When I saw my poor mammy my joy was turned to sorrow, for she had gone from her senses. ‘Mammy’ I said, ‘is this you?’ she did not know me.”99 Slavery engendered a terrible fate for mothers and children. How was a mother to cope with the loss of all her children? Was the grief of Prince’s mother too much to bear, that she lost touch with reality? Did she really not remember her daughter? Did she forget her children in order to survive? Bearing children under slavery made mothers and children vulnerable, and rejecting motherhood was perhaps the only way some women could cope. These questions also emerge in reading the patchy reports of the deaths of the enslaved woman Judy and her twins, simply listed in the Green Park estate inventories as “dead.” Without stated cause of death, or any further details about Judy’s life, we have no way of knowing whether mother and children died during childbirth, or if this was a case of infanticide and suicide.100 In another case, one enslaved woman named Rachel who belonged to Worthy Park estate killed herself shortly after birthing twins on 8 January 1813. On 27 March, the overseer recorded that “in a fit” of insanity, Rachel “drowned herself.” At the time of Rachel’s suicide, her twins were still alive.101 Despite Mary Prince’s marriage and sexual encounters, she bore no children, and her narrative is conspicuously silent about Prince’s interest to mother children of her own. Did Prince’s masters and mistresses render her infertile through their neglect and savage beatings? Was Prince psychologically paralyzed by a fear of losing her children the way her mother did? In addition to being separated from her mother, whom Prince subsequently encountered as insane, Prince witnessed her master beat an enslaved woman named Hetty to death, killing her and her unborn child in the process (see Chapter 3). The night of Hetty’s death, Prince recalled, “I sat

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upon my blanket, trembling with terror, like a frightened hound, and thinking that my turn would come next.” Was the thought of mothering too frightful for Prince, causing her to banish all hopes and expel all opportunities to bear children? Mary Prince’s silence on matters of sexuality and reproduction allows only speculation on whether she practiced abstinence, contraception, and abortion, or was simply infertile due to the malnutrition, illness, and physical abuse. Fragmented evidence suggests that enslaved midwives and healers supplied women with peacock flower, wild cassava, contraverya and other herbs to induce abortion.102 Dr. Michael Clare, for example, testified to the House of Commons that he witnessed a midwife administering wild cassava to an enslaved woman, who passed the fetus after much “Cramp and Spasm.” Others were less certain about what women used to induce abortion, but firmly believed that midwives gave them medicine “which makes them Barren.”103 White contemporaries remained convinced that enslaved women aborted fetuses to prevent their children from being born into slavery, especially after the slave trade ended in 1807, causing planters to depend on slave reproduction.104 Benjamin Turney, the resident doctor of Golden Grove estate, complained that women were generally unwilling “to conform to the plan,” and therefore rebelled against planter pronatal efforts.105 At least one case, the testimony of an enslaved woman named Sabrina Park, confirms fertility control as women’s political statement against generating future slaves. Park, who faced criminal prosecution for taking the life of her threemonth-old baby, testified “that she would not be plagued to raise the child . . . to work for white people.”106 Contemporaries further speculated that “young women frequently procured abortion” in order to “preserve their persons [from being] incumbered [sic] with the trouble of giving suck and rearing their children.” Further still, others believed women procured abortion in order to hide unfaithfulness from their husbands.107 Abstinence, lactation, and the use of roots and herbs as abortifacients were attempts at fertility management and they illuminate women’s attitude toward childbearing, even if the ability to reproduce (in the cases where infertility was caused by inadequate diet, disease, overwork, and punishment) were beyond their control. Children complicated the lives of enslaved women. Some women might have avoided pregnancy altogether, while others, unsuccessful in procuring

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an abortion, might have resorted to infanticide and suicide as their only means of securing their own and their children’s escape. Further still, other women might have viewed the challenges of infants’ survival as an opportunity to give their lives meaning and value beyond the daily drudge and brutality of slavery. Keeping a child alive in a barren and hostile world where death quickly followed birth required women to rely on one another, and to be resourceful in providing for the emotional, medical, and material needs of children. While many infants died, the common experience of death and the shared efforts to save the lives of children solidified social ties. Enslaved women created new rites that commemorated birth and death. The struggles with planters and doctors who sought to intervene and control child care reflect enslaved people’s quest to determine the birth and death of their children on their own terms. Even so, enslaved people’s intentions were not always clear. The fragmentary and ambiguous nature of evidence make it difficult to account fully for contraception, abortion, infanticide, and birth and death rituals, particularly those linked to the nine-day observation. Silences in the archives dominated by the enslavers’ voices, however, hint at the nature of enslaved women’s politics; nothing was straightforward and all was crooked. Sometimes women had to be “cryptic and opaque” in order to gain some semblance of control over their lives and bodies, as well as to escape brutal reprisals and unwanted intrusion and interference from masters.108 What is clear is that all enslaved women did not necessarily share the same ideas and responses to having children.

Chapter 6

Mothers Know Best? Maternal Authority and Children’s Survival

Nursing was a most contested area in the lives of enslaved women and infants. Abolitionists were greatly concerned with the age at which enslaved mothers weaned their infants because successfully reproducing a new generation of slaves with the potential to become free people relied on enslaved children adopting British morals and values. Plans like those offered by James Ramsay and William Wilberforce therefore stressed the early weaning of enslaved infants to limit the transmission of cultural vices from parents to children. These proposals amplified ongoing struggles between enslaved caregivers and plantation authority over lactation and other maternal practices. Prior to the 1780s-1830s era of pronatal abolitionism, estate owners and managers were concerned that enslaved women’s breastfeeding practices interfered with their work. Planters maintained these concerns about fertility and labor productivity throughout the pronatal era. But with new policies and laws originating from the metropole and adopted locally, with significant resistance and revision, planters adjusted labor management to accommodate lactation and weaning. Like matters relating to labor, punishment, and pregnancy, planter adjustments depended on their need to balance fertility against planter power and estate labor demands. Planter power struggles and the disputes over fertility and labor further heightened their conflicts with migrant doctors. Although planters hired doctors as their allies in shoring up the longevity and reproduction of their slaves, medical practitioners held contrasting views of their roles in the colonies. Doctor quests to secure professional reputations and to implement the

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medical reforms under way at home were not always compatible with the economic goals and ideas planters held about infant health. Innumerable, multilayered conflicts therefore emerged between planters, doctors, and authorities at home and in the metropole on the approaches to infant care and how best to secure population growth while attending to the needs of slave infants. Contests over infant health also included enslaved mothers and caregivers whose “unscientific” approaches to comforting and caring for their infants diverged from professional medical standards. Not only did women’s methods of care conflict with white authority; their quest for reproductive autonomy and maternal authority also was at odds with abolitionist plans to limit their parental influence, doctor hopes to subordinate lay healers to their professional authority, and planter aims to maximize their returns on the productive and reproductive abilities of their servile laborers. In enslaved women’s struggles to take advantage of new policies regulating their reproductive lives, motherhood and infant health care acquired new meanings as sites of resistance.

Naming Naming was an important area in the lives of enslaved parents and children over which masters attempted to exert strict control. Slave owners mobilized this fundamental aspect of early childhood socialization to integrate children into the world of slavery, not as sons and daughters or members of communities, but as workers and chattel who existed only for the benefit of owners. The specter of infant mortality not only obstructed promised reproductive returns it also shaped new naming rituals. Because many enslaved infants died within the first fourteen days of their births, some estate managers hesitated to register and include them in official plantation records until approximately two weeks after their birth. Planters simply recorded the birth date and sex of slave babies. Birth entries for Braco, Green Park, Pleasant Hill, and Phillipsfield estates commonly appeared as, for example, “Margaret Trumbull delivered a male child February 3 [1822],” “Friday . . . Agnes delivered a male child,” and “Bess delivered a female child, it died 3 hours after birth.” The entries of the biannual accounts of increase and decrease for Worthy Park estate more explicitly listed newborns as unnamed until at least a week after their

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birth. Its registrations frequently listed new births as, for example, “Olive [delivered] a boy not named,” and “Olive’s child not named died from cold and sore throat.”1 At Green Park estate, overseers officially “entered” infants in the slave lists approximately two weeks after birth. Catherine Toms birthed her daughter on 7 January 1831, and the overseer did not enter her into the slave register until 17 January. Similar patterns emerged for several other mothers, including Charlotte Hyatt, Susan Kerr, and Mary Reid, whose children remained nameless in the plantation records until approximately ten days after their birth. Many infants did not survive the nine- to fourteen-day delay in being officially recorded as a birth. Sarah Hibbard’s son, born on 7 January 1831, never entered the register, and as far the plantation records are concerned, he remained nameless. The same is true of many other children born to mothers like Ann Chambers, Milly Holt, Catherine Gordon, and Jenny, as well as countless others whose record of existence was simply “[mother’s name] child not named, dead.”2 In these records, slave children only had ties to their mothers and had no social purpose or identity beyond chattel assigned by their masters. The links between mother and child were but incidental ancestral ties, primarily reflecting the capital claim slaveholders made on women’s wombs in accordance with the practice of partus sequitur ventrem—slave children took their mothers’ status.3 Despite masters’ efforts to reduce slave existence to one that held neither meaning nor value beyond what enslavers assigned, enslaved people fashioned their own naming culture to recreate social identity and kinship. Newspaper advertisements and estate inventories indicate that enslaved children had at least two names: their official name recorded in plantation registers, and a second name given and used by community members. In addition to noting height, color, build, scars, and body marks, fugitive slave advertisements listed runaway children by such names as “Creole Castillo [who] goes by the name Cuffe,” “Ann, alias Letice,” “Bristol, Alias Dublin,” and “Property alias Nanny.”4 These fugitive children, aged eight to sixteen, either were on the run with their mothers and other siblings or were harbored by their relatives. The silence of enslaved people’s voices in the records makes it nearly impossible to tell whether these aliases were nicknames or if mothers also gave their children forenames. The slave inventories also reveal enslaved mothers’ attempts to control what their children were called. The registers for Golden Grove estate for

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January 1790 double counted one boy, “Dichey.” In a clarifying letter to his England-based employer, Benjamin Turney explained that Dichey and Cudjoe were not two separate individuals, but rather, the same child. Dichey was the boy’s “reputed” name, but his mother apparently renamed him Cudjoe.5 It is unknown if the previous cases of double naming and aliases among runaway children were similarly due to mothers’ insistence on naming their sons and daughters. This instance of a mother calling her son by a name she chose adds to the ongoing quest among historians to uncover how frequently mothers named their children and what roles community members played in naming enslaved boys and girls. Other examples in the literature confirm that the common practice was that masters assigned names to slaves, while enslaved mothers and community members used names of their own choosing.6 We but glimpse these names and patterns fortuitously through rebellious acts, and the community names of enslaved people were just that. They were used by community insiders, largely hidden from outsiders and therefore invisible in the archives dominated by slaveholders’ voices. The archives occasionally reveal evidence of parents directly confronting the liberty their enslavers took in naming their children. Matthew Lewis, proprietor of Cornwall estate, recalled his encounter with two parents, including a father who requested name changes for their children. On the morning of 19 February 1817, Neptune requested that Lewis change his son’s name from Oscar to Julius, his grandfather’s name. Neptune said that Oscar remained a “weakly” child due to “his deceased grandfather being displeased because it had not been called after him.” Lewis explained, “They conceive that the ghosts of their ancestors cannot fail to be offended at their abandoning an appellation, either hereditary in the family, or given by themselves.” In reflecting on this encounter, Lewis recalled a previous petition from a mother whose child battled a mysterious illness. The mother appealed to Lewis to change her daughter’s name from Lucia to another more pleasing name. The child “would never do well so long as it should be called Lucia.”7 Enslaved people’s naming cosmologies are largely lost to us because enslavers mediated their voices and expressions. The parents’ pleas, however, indicate the importance of names to incorporate children into the family and community. Ancestral names in particular established kinship affiliation between the living and the dead. The struggle to maintain ancestral ties through naming had implications beyond the social realm of family

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identity. The parents’ emphasis on the chronic illness their children suffered reveals a spiritual dimension to naming. Spiritual imbalance brought on by failing to appease the ancestors manifested in the bodies of the living. Venerating the ancestors through naming afforded descendants some protection from illness. That the living sought protection from their ancestors is borne out in other practices examined in the literature. Burial practices that interred the dead close to home allowed enslaved people to avoid dislocation. To ward off chaos and dislodgment enslaved people insisted that bad consequences would follow if their masters separated them from their homes or prohibited them from allowing land (which included their burial grounds) to remain within their family. By creating a link between slaves’ health and well-being and observing birth and death rites enslaved people maintained family ties, determined informal property claims, and acquired a degree of control over the fate and identity of their children.8 Enslaved parents further strengthened kinship ties by taking advantage of new opportunities created by the moral war abolitionists waged against slavery. Improving sexual morality and strengthening the families of the enslaved were especially important to the schemes Wilberforce and Ramsay formulated that promoted biological reproduction as a pathway to gradually ending slavery. In these plans, they singled out missionaries as key agents to encourage religious instruction, Christian conversion, and monogamous marriage among enslaved adults, and to indoctrinate children of such unions into Christian values. Ramsay in particular stressed the need for the imperial government to fund the founding of free schools throughout the West Indies that would allow enslaved people to become literate and receive instruction in Christianity. Among the ameliorative initiatives enacted by Jamaican officials between the 1780s and the 1820s were new policies and laws that permitted and encouraged religious instruction and baptisms for enslaved people. The Jamaican Assembly encouraged the Anglican Church in particular to use portions of the Sabbath to teach enslaved people the meaning of the catechism and baptism. While the Assembly encouraged the Anglican Church to proselytize among the enslaved, it took a hard line against nonconformist mission groups, like the Baptists, Wesleyans, and Moravians. In 1802, for example, through the initiative of Simon Taylor, who, in addition to being one of the wealthiest men in Jamaica by serving as attorney for several estates and as a plantation owner in his own right, was a member of the Jamaican Assembly, lawmakers proposed a new law prohibiting teaching

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and preaching by nonconformists. Taylor and other Assembly members viewed the work of missionaries with much suspicion and became hostile to their growing numbers. The overzealous work of missionaries among the enslaved and their use of blacks as lay preachers incensed planters and officials, who argued that their teachings corrupted enslaved people’s minds and sowed seeds of rebellion. Planters and the local government embraced the Anglican Church partly because it lacked the evangelical fervor of nonconformists. Even though they were encouraged to preach to and teach the enslaved, very few Anglican clergy had previously done so. The Anglican Church had ignored the black population and in some cases its members were involved in the management and ownership of captive Africans.9 Restricting religious instruction for enslaved people to the Anglican Church conflicted with the metropole’s mandate for colonial reform. Parliament therefore disallowed the 1802 act because it violated the principles of religious tolerance. In 1807, the Jamaican Assembly again used the Anglican Church to reduce imperial pressure to allow religious teaching for the enslaved. In the proposed 1807 Consolidated Slave Act, slave owners were required to permit religious instructions for their bonded workers. Such teachings were restricted, however, to those of the Anglican Church. Parliament once again vetoed the law, and instructed the Jamaican governor to withhold his approval of any subsequent laws dealing with religion that had not first secured parliamentary approval. It was not until 1816 that under pressure from the Crown the Jamaican Assembly reluctantly passed legislation freeing missionaries to preach to and teach among the enslaved. Even though it could no longer legally ban nonconformists the local government used crafty tactics to undermine missionaries. The Assembly funded the salaries of Anglican clergy who taught and baptized enslaved people. Despite the Assembly’s attempts to restrict the work of missionaries, particularly those of the Wesleyan Church because of its public alignment with the antislavery cause, missions grew in Jamaica. By emancipation in 1834, Jamaica boasted sixteen Wesleyan, fourteen Baptist, and eight Moravian stations.10 The contests over religious instruction for captive Africans was one for control over the message enslaved people received. Slave owners acquiesced to and even supported religious instruction as long as it strengthened their cause. The gradual growth of baptisms between 1778, when properties like Golden Grove recorded only two baptisms, to 1817, when more than half of its population was baptized, reflects a degree of openness among planters

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and enslaved people to Christianity.11 Some planters accepted missionaries’ message of obedience, monogamy, and sexual restraint. From planters’ perspective, Christianization had the potential to break the “influence of Obea or witchcraft,” and end “drunken nocturnal funerals,” both of which undermined population growth and bestowed strategic opportunities for plotting rebellions. The planter Richard Barrett said it best in his instructions to a Presbyterian minister who wanted permission to preach to his human property: “I have a bad set of people: they steal enormously, run away, get drunk, fight. . . . The women take no care of their children and there is no increase on the property. Now if you can bring them under the fear of God, or a judgment to come, or something of that sort, you may be doing both them and me a service.”12 Enslaved people converted to Christianity for various reasons, including the opportunities conversion brought for exerting greater control over their own and their families’ lives. Baptism gave enslaved people access to social power to claim and legitimate genealogy and kinship. Naming a child and choosing godparents were two important rituals associated with baptisms that gave parents opportunities to shape their children’s lives. As a backhanded approach to controlling the work of missionaries, some masters insisted on maintaining traditional baptismal rites, hoping enslaved people would view them as incongruous with their cosmologies. While some enslaved people rejected Christian rituals, others incorporated them into their social and cultural lives and claimed the new opportunities they brought.13 The steady increase in baptized enslaved boys and girls between 1817 and 1832 gave rise to a new generation of children with forenames and surnames chosen by their parents at the time of baptism. Parents mainly appropriated the surnames of plantation owners or those of powerful elites within a plantation district. Despite enslaved people’s practice of giving their children the surnames of white people with whom they had no genealogical ties, the ability to name one’s child might have been more empowering than the particular name chosen.14 Moreover, if enslaved parents believed that names had power to determine a person’s fate, then choosing the name of a prominent white person who exemplified affluence, power, and liberty might have been viewed as the best way to harness positive fortune for their sons and daughters. From the 1780s and especially after 1816 when the Jamaican Assembly freed up the work of missionaries among the enslaved, many couples married and baptized. Married couples not only changed their names but also gradually passed on their acquired surnames

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with the birth of their children.15 Even when appropriated surnames had no ancestral ties, baptizing children in their family names liberated enslaved parents to claim their sons and daughters and begin new genealogies in Jamaica.

Breastfeeding and Weaning In the nursing and weaning of infants, enslaved parents faced similar impositions from forces external to their communities. Keeping with medical advice of the late eighteenth century, plantation doctors recommended that planters encourage and permit enslaved women to breastfeed their newborns. Doctors agreed that “mother’s milk is the infant’s best food” to ensure that they were “duly nourished,” and promoted breastfeeding as preventive medicine for common early childhood ailments and diseases from simple indigestion to lockjaw. Not only did doctors deem breastmilk naturally suited for infants’ “tender digestive organs,” they also believed that its mild, laxative effects helped newborns “purge away the matter that has been accumulated in [their] stomach and bowels during the gestation.” Plantation physicians insisted that breastfed infants were the healthiest of all children and the ones most likely to “survive . . . jawfall.”16 Physician recommendations about the health benefits of breastfeeding closely mirrored enslaved mothers’ practices. Planters throughout the seventeenth century and eighteenth century disparaged “negroes [for being fond] of suckling their children.” Enslaved mothers breastfed because they believed nursing would make their “child strong,” and normally nursed from eighteen to twenty-four months and sometimes up to thirty-six months.17 Undoubtedly, enslaved mothers agreed with doctor-outlined health benefits of nursing. The contests that emerged over lactation, however, revolved around questions other than the health and growth of infants. Personal, cultural, and economic considerations were at the center of the struggle between planters, doctors, and enslaved caregivers to shorten lactation. Planters speculated that mothers breastfed in order to slow their return to full-time labor. They also argued that lactation acted as a natural contraceptive, and mothers delayed weaning to limit their fertility.18 Viewing the mothers’ actions in the context of growing anxieties about the future labor supplies for the plantations, planters interpreted many of them as direct assaults on their pronatal plans. Witnesses testifying before the parliamentary

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investigative committees insisted that the slave populations failed to grow because women regulated their fertility. Enslaved women, they testified, seldom had “a second child at less than an interval of two years.”19 Enslaved mothers’ quest to define their own standard of motherhood meant that their efforts to determine the length of lactation extended beyond simply frustrating the pronatal drive of their enslavers. Women had their own ideas about sexuality and maternal obligations, which clearly competed with those of the slaving interests. One study of enslaved women’s cultural practices in the Caribbean emphasized that “women transported from Africa were already heavily immersed in their own cultural traditions and, in the West Indies, they most certainly continued African child-rearing practices.”20 African-descended women’s cosmologies and practices evolved in Jamaica, however, and while some of their beliefs likely had strong links to West Africa, maternal customs did not blindly mirror those of the societies from which women descended. The peculiar impositions of sugar and slave societies along with women’s personal and evolving conception of womanhood and family likely influenced the culture of motherhood that developed in Jamaica. The silence of mothers’ voices in the records and planters’ embellished claims make it difficult to pinpoint precisely enslaved women’s views on lactation, motherhood, and family. Despite planter claims of black women’s exceptionalism, there is no evidence to suggest that colonial white women who nursed their own children had lactation practices that significantly differed from those of enslaved mothers. In her private correspondence with her sister, Sarah Dwarris, the wife of a Kingston-based lawyer, revealed that she suckled her infants for well over twelve months to take advantage of lactation’s contraceptive benefits.21 Breastfeeding allowed women of various class and racial groupings control over their reproductive ability. A key difference between white and black women was that the former mothered free children, while the latter reproduced servile laborers. The choices and attitudes enslaved and free women held toward childbearing reflected divergent claims on their wombs and how whites interpreted the same acts in which women from both racial groups participated. While their slave status was black women’s primary social and legal identity, they were also women who, like whites, had ideas and made decisions about motherhood and family sizes. The unfortunate reality that all children born of female slaves shared their mothers’ fate shaped, but did not always determine, enslaved women’s decisions to mother.

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Caught between their desire to raise healthy replacement slaves and their continued dependence on mother-workers, sugar plantation managers experimented with various strategies to force women to perform both sets of responsibilities. Medical authorities in the metropole and in the colonies affirmed the health benefits of breastfeeding infants, and once the slave trade ended in 1807, planters had good reason to facilitate it among enslaved mothers.22 Proslavery witnesses appearing before the House of Commons’ investigative committees testified that lactating mothers received “an Hour [delay] in turning out to Labour later than the other Negroes, and returning earlier from Labour.” The extra hour mothers received at the start and end of the work day allowed them time to suckle and tend to their babies.23 Continuing with pre-1780s practices, mothers either left their children in their living quarters with elderly women who no longer worked or took their infants with them to the fields. Mothers also continued to strap their infants to their backs while they worked, or left them on makeshift trash cots in the fields. Although some local medical practitioners and planters questioned the safety of such practices, doctors like John Quier believed it was perfectly safe for mothers to carry their infants to the fields.24 By the nineteenth century, some planters allowed field workers to construct crude infant shelters in the fields to prevent babies from excessive exposure to the sun and rain. According to one traveler in 1823, there were “score[s] of children lying on trays beneath a sort of arbour made of boughs. They were all naked and looked like tadpoles, alternately sleeping and bawling till the mothers went and suckled them.” In some cases, superannuated women assigned as nurses monitored infants in the fields while their mothers worked.25 Planters testifying before Parliament in 1789 and 1790 overstated the extensiveness of their reform in an attempt to present themselves to imperial policymakers as accommodating the needs of enslaved mothers and children. Convincing the Crown that they had reformed slavery would avert direct imperial intervention. Planters not only were solicitous of the metropole’s favorable view of them, but also, perhaps more crucially, they devised strategies that kept their future laborers alive without losing the productivity of mother-workers. The concern for boosting population growth became more pressing after legal slave trading ended in 1807. Staggering work hours of mother-workers and building huts to shelter infants actualized planters’ dual objectives of exploiting the productive and reproductive labor of parturient workers.

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As planters policed breastfeeding practices, they were not entirely convinced that keeping infants in the field best served their labor and pronatal interests. Strapping infants to their mothers’ back had proven dangerous. In some cases, infants not properly secured fell and died while others tied too tightly sustained injuries from the “compression” of pressing against their mothers’ backs. Enslaved mothers also supposedly “abused” the privilege of having their children in the fields by spending extra time with them. Not infrequently mothers abandoned their work “under the pretense of giving suck to their children.” Planters complained that new mothers rarely worked as hard as regular field workers because they “step aside from their labour, every now and then, and stay so long” in tending their children.26 Compounding the problem of the reduced productivity of motherworkers was the fact that women could continue breastfeeding their children however long they wished. As long as estate managers balanced women’s work roles alongside nursing, children could remain with their mothers until age seven, when they began working on the plantation. Mothers therefore had relative freedom to determine the age at which to wean their children, since an enforced separation of mother and child would not occur until the child was old enough to work. With such freedom, planters feared that enslaved mothers would continue lactating “for much longer than medical men thought advisable.” Mothers would become idle, weak, and infertile. Moreover, extensive nursing allowed children to develop “too much tenderness [and] fretful longing for [their] mother.” Enslaved children who were attached to their mothers became idle, recalcitrant workers and “incorrigible runaways” when separated.27 The concern plantation agents expressed about how long enslaved women lactated echoed that voiced by abolitionists, albeit with important differences. Shortening lactation was pivotal to abolitionist plans to promote abolition through biological reproduction. Abolitionists agreed with contemporary medical opinion that breastfeeding best preserved infants’ health, but they also feared the strong bonds between mothers and children that nursing promoted. Mother-child bonds facilitated the transmission of parents’ vices to children, and ultimately undermined abolitionist proposal to civilize and free enslaved children. The abolitionist James Ramsay in particular stressed limiting contact between mothers and children. According to Ramsay, enslaved mothers should suckle their children for a maximum of six months, thereby allowing babies to reap the health benefits of lactation. Rather than taking children to the fields, specially assigned and

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trusted nurses should care for them in a nursery. Mothers stationed near the nursery would spoon-feed babies as needed. This practice would make the six-month weaning deadline easier for mothers and children because they would already be accustomed to separation. Doctors, who had their own agendas, also designed policies to shorten lactation. They advocated enslaved mothers nurse their infants for at least a year to ensure that babies received all the health benefits of breastfeeding. Weaning should commence around the fourteenth month. Even though doctors’ recommendations stemmed from a different set of assumptions, as they were employed by planters, their schemes promised “to counteract [mothers’] designs and oblige them to wean their children” earlier than women were willing to accept. Enslaved women insisted on nursing their infants for twenty-four to thirty-six months.28 Writing in 1803, David Collins offered one of the most elaborate schemes to nurse and wean enslaved babies. Collins agreed with contemporary medical opinion that the best “food of infants is that which is yielded by the breast of the mother.”29 But he disagreed with other physicians who believed that infants should be brought to the fields because of the dangers doing so posed to unattended babies. Collins recommended that infants, placed in a nursery, be suckled three times daily, at morning, midday, and evening. In between those feeding times, a nurse would feed the babies with “a little water gruel, or flour pap.” Alternatively, and where available, nurses could turn the powder of the Indian arrowroot into a thin pap. Once weaning age approached, which Collins recommended should be around twelve to fourteen months, planters should gradually taper the children off the breast. Noon and evening feeding should be replaced with gruel. By month fourteen, children would fully transition to pap and soup.30 James Grainger, a strong advocate of breastfeeding, encouraged planters to permit enslaved mothers to nurse their infants. Babies should consume no “other food than milk of the mother” for at least the first six weeks of their lives. Unlike Collins, who remained silent on an exclusive period of nursing and advocated almost immediate separation of mother and child, Grainger saw no reason for separation until infants approached weaning age. Dry nurses should accompany mothers and their infants to work, keeping all nurslings together under a “tent near the field” while their mothers labored. At six weeks, infants would alternate between their mother’s milk and soup. Like Collins, Grainger prescribed twelve to fourteen months as the best age for weaning children (a strong contrast to enslaved women’s

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norm of twenty-four to thirty-six months, and the six months proposed by abolitionists). Planters should initiate gradual weaning at nine months by placing children in the “management of some ancient and sensible Negress, who will take care to have them properly fed.” By the time children could walk, they should be closer to weaning and “should not be allowed to be carried to the field with their mothers” because mobile children endangered themselves. At such time, they were to be cared for by old grannies who would prepare a “mess [good meal] of good soup . . . composed of farinaceous [mealy] roots, a little okra [Abelmoschus esculentus] pods, and a piece of fresh meat.”31 Few planters were as meticulous in their practices as these general guidelines recommended. From 1821 to 1823, new mothers at Green Park estate were recorded as “sitting down and nursing” their infants. It is unclear how long these mothers stayed home and nursed their newborns. A six-week exclusive breastfeeding time, as recommended by Grainger, was unsustainable. By 1824, Green Park’s new mothers left their children in the care of nurses while they worked. In that year, the work journals introduced “nurses” as a separate work category, sometimes combined as a blended group of “nurses, midwives and lying-in” women or as “attending as nurses to young children” or “young and children’s nurses.” It was also this same year that the daily work logs enumerated mothers in the second and third gang and the category “sitting down nursing” disappeared from the journals. These patterns persisted from 1824 to 1831.32 Nurses might have acted in capacities prescribed by Collins and Grainger and tended to infants while their mothers worked. Green Park’s transition to having a nurse supervise children in the fields as their mothers worked was the more common practice across Jamaican properties. In a private correspondence to a Londonbased proprietor, Dr. William Wright explained that dry nurses kept suckling children in close proximity to their mothers’ worksite enabling mothers to nurse their infants as work rhythms permitted. At fourteen months old, infants remained in the daily care of nurses.33 Planter attempts to balance labor with reproductive interests extended beyond their efforts to shorten lactation for enslaved women. Unsupervised children were vulnerable to accidents in the fields and about the sugar works. Plantations lost youngsters to a variety of preventable accidents including dog bites, falls, burns, cuts, and bruises. Unattended children also ingested poisonous plants, and developed what estate managers perceived as “Negroes’ peculiar habit of dirt eating.”34 Nurseries that planters called

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weaning houses served dual purposes: enforcing shortened lactation and keeping enslaved children safe.35 Although planter ideas about the functions and structure of nurseries differed, they collectively echo the planter view of enslaved mothers as incompetent and unfit to care for their children. While Thomas Roughley proposed nurseries to house breastfeeding infants, Gilbert Mathison proposed nurseries as a place to wean infants at about twelve to fourteen months. Both Roughley and Mathison agreed that weaned children would eat all their meals at the nursery. Mathison insisted that parents bring breakfast for their weaned children to the nursery, which would allow plantation agents to inspect and track the foods enslaved children ate. Throughout the day, specially appointed cooks prepared meat-based meals and soups for the children. Mathison required that children eat their dinner at the nursery and not take it with them when they returned home in the evenings. “Good nourishing food, at this tender age,” Mathison asserted, “is of infinite importance in promoting growth and bodily strength.” He distrusted mothers providing for their children, and thought it necessary to require them to consume all meals under the supervision of a trustworthy nurse. Nurses also washed and inspected children daily to ensure they remained free from “diseases” and “vermin.” Nurseries functioned as a “sort of education” for children, who would become “habituated” into routines of cleanliness, which many planters and doctors believed would keep children healthy.36 Critically, nurseries were a kind disciplinary tool planters used to sever bonds between enslaved mothers and their children. Like abolitionists, planters believed that close bonds between parents and children undermined their goal of generating servile laborers. Roughley argued that an enslaved “child who becomes accustomed to too much tenderness, [was] unsuitable to its station” as an obedient and diligent worker. Nursery plans by the proprietors William Beckford and Simon Taylor placed far greater emphasis on limiting mothers’ influence on their children than Roughley’s proposals. In separate plans, Beckford and Taylor restricted mothers from feeding their children by permanently housing all weaned children in nurseries. According to Beckford, “They should not be made to depend upon their mothers for food; but should be daily supplied from the overseer’s house; and he should direct them to be fed three times a day.” Thus unlike Roughley’s scheme that allowed children to return home to their families at nights, Beckford and Taylor thought it necessary for weanlings to remain

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in the nursery “day and night,” under a “prudent old woman” and “under the particular notice of the overseer . . . or that of a bookkeeper.” Weaned children would remain in the nursery until six or seven years old when they assumed labor responsibilities and “there was no great danger of them dying.”37 Nurseries instituted white paternal authority. Daily decision making about the care and nurture of children became the purview of masters, not parents, which also undermined communal input into child care. Child care among the enslaved was not just the responsibility of mothers. Community members aided mothers in birthing and tending to their sons and daughters, and cared for abandoned and orphaned children. In Mathison’s schemes, orphan care no longer defaulted to community members. Instead, planters would permanently place orphans in the nurseries, where trusted nurses, overseen by white plantation agents, would tend to them. Motherless children would receive three meals daily, and like all other children, they were to be inspected and washed every day. Unlike other young people who returned to their families and communities in the evenings, orphans remained in the nurseries.38 The practice of enlarging enslaved women’s households with orphan children to allow estates to qualify for tax waivers, as discussed in chapter three, suggests that these lofty ideals for nurseries never became a general fixture of plantation life. These ideals represented the visions of the wealthiest and most idealistic planters like Simon Taylor and returning proprietors like Gilbert Mathison. Mathison returned to Jamaica in 1808 after spending more than thirteen years living in England. His plans reflected reforms of the mother country, where local parishes provided asylum for orphans and indigent children. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, starting with the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 63), government initiatives promised to save abandoned children and put them to good use in the nations’ industries, fleets, and armies. Through the efforts of British reformers like Jonas Hanway, the government funded foundling hospitals to provide medical attention for destitute children. But before the turn of the nineteenth century, such efforts were largely abandoned because of the exorbitant expenses associated with them.39 This was likely the case in Jamaica as well. Although planters understood and reluctantly embraced the idea that the future of the sugar plantations depended on promoting population growth, they wanted to minimize the costs of undertaking pronatal reforms. Mathison’s ideals were unrealistic to most Jamaican planters, who sought to balance their financial concerns against their reproductive goals.

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Among the plantations that built nurseries, their structures were rudimentary and their functions were very basic. Nurseries accommodated children “when their parents are in the field . . . [because] they run about as they please and eat all the fruits and trash they can pick up and by this means generate worms and other disorders which frequently prove fatal.” In 1788, Hope estate built a nursery next to the overseer’s house and required mothers to bring their weaned children in the mornings before reporting to the fields. This practice allowed the overseer to “check upon ignorant and neglectful parents.” Hope’s nursery in 1788 expanded upon the previously informal custom of offering children one nutritious, cooked meal daily. In the 1770s, mothers brought their children to the overseer, Edward Pool, who examined them for worms, sores, and other illnesses. Under Pool’s supervision, children gathered to eat meals made specially for them, prepared in his kitchen, where he supervised the cooks.40 Whereas Hope estate had advanced to a more sophisticated child-care program from 1772 to 1788, most other properties continued with a less detailed system. At Golden Grove estate, children received a hot meal daily and monthly worm medicine. At Phillipsfield and Pleasant Hill estates, children received cooked meals once weekly, on Sundays. When children reported for meals, the overseer inspected them to determine their state of health and medicate them as needed. Most of them received worm medicines, while weak and undernourished children received cooked meals every day until their health improved.41 The 1826 published account by the travel writer Cynric Williams vividly described these practices. He reported, After we had returned to the overseer’s house, an old woman marched up at the head of another detachment, a phalanx of children, all under seven years of age. They were also naked, each carrying its frock in its arm, and came to show they were washed clean, and were free from all disease. . . . They were helped with their little calabashes, out of a boiler built up against the piazza. Their dinner was cow or ox hide (the hair of which is first singed) boiled to a jelly, with yams, cocos, ochro, and other vegetables; a famous mess, of which the little negroes made a most hearty meal. I wished my poor neighbours in Hampshire might always be assured of such meal once a day; however, I consoled myself with the reflection, that they were not slaves. I wish it would console them for their empty bellies.42

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Despite the clear propaganda quality of Williams’s account, which betrays its intent to persuade the British public that slaves in the West Indies were better off than poor people in England, it echoes the views of planters that enslaved mothers were incompetent and white paternal authority was necessary to secure children’s welfare. In building nurseries, planters were not as much defenders of childhood or maternity as they were enterprising capitalists whose fortunes hinged on securing young people’s health and welfare. Planters distrusted enslaved caregivers to raise strong and healthy boys and girls to become able-bodied workers with high fiscal values. These ideals contrasted with abolitionist vision that stressed the need for religious instruction and missionary schools to prepare enslaved children to become free people. Having nurseries that provided cleansing baths and hearty food for children communicated that enslaved people could not become managers of their households the way abolitionists imagined. Marveling at the nursery’s great “benefit,” the proprietor of Hope estate, Roger Hope Elletson, asserted that it served well the children of “the Negroes who do not take proper care of themselves and family.” With the children “properly looked after and taken care of . . . steady increase is guaranteed.”43 While postweaning child care sometimes created opportunities for fathers to become more involved, planter-proposed and implemented weaning plans did not shift the sexual division of labor toward one that incorporated fathers as caregivers. Planter plans engendered white paternalism, which eroded enslaved fathers’ already marginal role. White males of the lower managerial order, overseers and bookkeepers, became the guardians of enslaved children’s welfare. They delegated key parental roles like feeding and washing, and determined how they were to be performed. Enslaved parents would, however, reject planter imposition, and reassert their parental authority. Although some planters built nurseries for housing weanlings because they distrusted enslaved mothers and nurses, several others distributed food to parents and allowed children to remain in their care. The prescribed food allowance for children under ten years old was half an adult’s portion, which included imported pickled fish, typically herring, flour, and cornmeal, as well as locally produced corn, sugar, and rum.44 With only imprecise legal requirements for masters to provide slaves with “good and ample provisions,” enslaved people received provisions at their discretion of their enslavers.45 In fact, planters frequently categorized food rations, particularly

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imports, as an “extra indulgence,” and used them to reward faithful, industrious workers, or simply withheld them from workers because of perceived poor conduct. Allowances “were not uniform as to the quantity given, or uniform in the quantity received,” William Burge explained. “They were given and withdrawn by the master . . . as a stimulus to good conduct [and] withheld whenever their conduct was not good.”46 Planter witnesses before the House of Commons’ committees testified that allowances supplemented enslaved people’s provision grounds where they grew a variety of vegetables, yam, cocoas, and plantains as well as raised hogs and poultry.47 The inflated testimonies of planters minimized the hardships and vicious malnutrition cycle produced by having enslaved people grow their own food.48 The land-labor distribution was far from one acre per four to ten slaves (as required by the slave law). The 375 enslaved workers at Radnor estate in 1814, for example, needed 37.5 acres to meet the legal requirements, but they received only 20 acres.49 Moreover, bonded workers had very little time to devote to cultivating their own grounds because their labor was diverted to the plantations. The 1788, 1792, and 1816 ameliorative legislation governing provision grounds only required masters to permit enslaved people twenty-six days annually to cultivate their plots. How were they to find the energy to cultivate their grounds, “after the toil and barbarity to which they had been subject by their task-masters for six days out of the seven,” Benjamin McMahon, an antislavery writer, queried.50 The limitations of the provision ground system fostered economic autonomy among the enslaved, however.51 Enslaved people not only cultivated a variety of food crops, they also gathered at local Sunday markets to buy, sell, and exchange food, clothing, and fineries. Writing of his observations of the Kingston Market, Edward Long marveled, The market place is plentifully supplied with butchers’ meat, poultry, fish, fruits, and vegetables of all sorts. Here are found not only a great variety of Americans, but also of European vegetables: such as pease, beans, cabbage, lettuce, cucumbers, French beans, artichokes, potatoes, carrots, turnips, radishes, celery, onions, etc. . . . Here are likewise strawberries, not inferior to the production out of English gardens; grapes, and melons in the utmost perfection; mulberries, figs and apples, exceedingly good. . . . In short the most epicure cannot fail of meeting with sufficient in quality, variety, and

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excellence for the gratification of his appetite the whole year round.52 In 1817, Dr. William Sells echoed Long’s observation. According to Sells, enslaved people bought and sold “vast quantities of provisions, vegetables, and fruits . . . pork, poultry, eggs, corn, pulse, and other articles.”53 If enslaved people received an adequate diet, like one rich in protein, they did so largely from their own efforts. With inconsistencies in planter disbursements of fish and meat, enslaved people raised livestock to supplement the meager rations their enslavers gave them. Evidence from local markets would indicate a well-rounded diet rich in protein, fruits, and vegetables supplied by their own hands.54 Planter efforts to strategize food distribution to mothers and children suggest that food grown by enslaved people was not as abundant as these reports suggest. At Golden Grove and Harmony Hall, the attorneys prioritized women and children when distributing “fish and meat” rations in particular. Similarly, at Hope estate, primacy was given to children whose “parents had nothing to give them.”55 Comprehensive nutritional studies of slavery confirm malnutrition as a real problem enslaved boys and girls faced. An archaeological study of dental remains of enslaved people in Barbados shows evidence of hypoplasia at ages three to four in 55 percent of the skeletal samples. Hypoplasia indicates deficiency in enamel formation because of inadequate nutritional intake. Another extensive nutritional study of enslaved people in the Caribbean concludes that enslaved children had diets high in carbohydrates and low in protein. Planters’ vulgar description of children as having “pot belly,” or suffering from “swelled belly” potentially indicate kwashiorkor—protein deficiency.56

Treating and Preventing Childhood Diseases The need to preserve the health of enslaved children was further evident in planters’ drive to eradicate certain childhood diseases. Although mortality rates were highest among children from birth to about age four, children five to fourteen similarly struggled to survive. The age-specific death profile for Jamaica from 1817 to 1832 generally shows a mortality rate of 10 per 1,000 among children aged ten to fourteen years old, compared to 250 per 1,000 newborns.57 Smallpox, whooping cough, measles, worms, and yaws

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were chief among the many diseases that plagued enslaved children under age ten. Planters across Jamaica and the wider Caribbean invested in various medical interventions to reduce if not eliminate the threat of such diseases among young people. They were concerned especially about smallpox not least because of their fears of losing individual workers, but also because it was a highly contagious disease that could devastate entire populations of enslaved and free people. Beginning in the 1770s, large Jamaican properties like Harmony Hall, Phillipsfield, Golden Grove, and Hope contracted doctors to inoculate their workers. In a single day in 1791, Phillipsfield vaccinated 196 workers. Children were among the first vaccinated because the disease was especially fatal among them. By 1813, a vaccine establishment opened at the Kingston Public Hospital, offering vaccines to free and enslaved people alike. So aggressive was the Jamaican vaccination campaign that by 1820 the disease had been nearly eradicated.58 Planters prioritized vaccinating children because they also lost the labor of mothers during illness. At the risk of punishment, some mothers left work earlier than other laborers or simply remained home to care for their sick children.59 The overseer at Hope estate was more forgiving than he might otherwise have been of an enslaved mother named Psyche who absented herself from work because her son had recently contracted the yaws and apparently needed his mother’s care. Though suspicious of Psyche’s claims of a sick child, Hope’s attorney overlooked her absence. Mothering in the sense of nurturing and caring for children constituted an effective challenge to planter efforts to define and treat enslaved children as mere property or labor units. Although planters disdained the “unavoidable” loss of mother-workers during illness, ironically, they tacitly welcomed the attention enslaved mothers paid to their sick children.60 Given their anxiety about raising healthy workers, planters were not infrequently lax in reprimanding mothers who avoided work when their children were sick. Because late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century doctors neither fully understood nor developed cures or vaccines for whooping cough and measles they experimented with various treatments instead. Experimental bleeding, purging, and administering of the Peruvian bark, sweet oil, and manna were unsuccessful. Whooping cough and measles continued as major killers of enslaved children below age ten. Reporting on one of the worst measles epidemic in Jamaica in the late 1770s, which lasted approximately three months, John Quier noted that no fewer than 150 enslaved

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people died of the measles in any given plantation district. Children were most severely affected. A similar measles outbreak in 1805 dismayed many planters. The disease is “raging with great violence,” attorney Rowland Fearon reported. “Great mortalities have ensued, particularly amongst the children in the parish. Your Lordship has lost two.” Planters despaired because the “disaster appear[ed] to baffle all medical assistance.”61 By promoting the ending of slavery through biological reproduction, abolitionists forced a reconceptualization of motherhood and child care in the world of sugar and slavery. Even more transformative was their success in securing a ban on slave trading in 1807, which compelled planters to shift their worldview from considering captive Africans only as commodities, replaceable in the next shipment, to seeing themselves as responsible for enslaved people’s health, welfare, and survival. As planters worked out the details of amelioration, new attention to enslaved children’s health and food intake and efforts to shorten lactation were the cornerstone of the plantations’ pronatalism. Pronatal reforms had paradoxical effects. Increasing attentiveness to children’s food intake, for example, improved the material conditions of enslaved children. Yet the specific policies put in place to increase fertility and children’s survival chances disrupted parent-child bonds and child care norms. The erosion of enslaved maternal authority did not go unchallenged, however.

The Struggle for Maternal Authority The new importance given to reproduction stimulated a new sense of paternalism on Jamaica’s sugar estates by the end of the eighteenth century. Planters imposed new policies and practices not only to control the working and intimate lives of reproductive women but also to regulate the care of enslaved children. Reproductive interventions, such as shortened lactation and nurseries, however, infringed upon the maternal liberty carved out by the enslaved during the previous era when planters neglected mothers and children. Enslaved caregivers rejected and contested the mandates issued by plantation agents that required them to relinquish parental authority. They defended their conceptualizations and approaches to nurturing, comforting, and caring for children. The mundane rituals of breastfeeding and providing food morphed into resistance, or what we might consider maternal resistance, because of planters’ attempts to appropriate motherhood.

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In attempting to appropriate motherhood, doctors and planters presumed to scrutinize and instruct mothers on how to care for their babies and ultimately removed children from their care.62 Women responded by appealing to traditional methods of resistance, like running away and negotiating. Maternal resistance differed from other forms of resistance because of what women might have intended to accomplish in their pursuits. Women fought to determine the terms on which they mothered their children. Maternal resistance was not coterminous with the commonly used “gynecological resistance”; the latter aimed to politicize a biological (gynecological) process that was not solely constitutive of what motherhood was about. In other words, maternity is a social construct that relies on both the “biological body” and the “material body.” This dual concept of “motherhood” helps us to see women bearing children as biological and cultural entities that others, including those who did not give birth, either supported or ignored. In addition to the biological capacity to reproduce, motherhood also required resources like food, shelter, and clothing, and intangibles like love and emotional support.63 Enslaved caregivers nurtured, clothed, and bonded with children of their communities on their own terms. With the passing of new ameliorative legislation in 1788 and 1817 that empowered enslaved people to report cases of abuse and neglect to local magistrates, mothers waged war against plantation agents who insisted on shortening lactation. In 1820, five women, Dido, Russetta, Lizzy, Augusta, and Yuba, of Orchard estate complained to the Port Royal magistrate that their overseer prematurely took away their children for weaning. The infants, the mothers claimed, were “far too young” and still needed nursing. The women lost their appeal. The magistrate ruled that “the whole of the children were at least twelve months old each” and therefore should be weaned. He reprimanded the women and ordered them to return to work. Similarly, at Friendship estate, nine women refused to work until the overseer permitted them to suckle their babies.64 Women brought their cases to court not only as part of their ongoing quest “for retaining maternal rights,” as one historian has rightly argued;65 court cases allowed women to contest white medical dogma that defined a short lactation period as the new norm. By protesting that their infants were “too young” for weaning, women challenged the efforts of planters and doctors to normalize weaning between ages twelve to fourteen months. As noted earlier, before the linkage of slavery’s reform to women’s ability to reproduce, enslaved mothers nursed their children for twenty-four to

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thirty-six months. Mothers used the courts to reject white prescriptions for the appropriate length of time for nursing. They did so using new legal channels, even though the odds were always stacked against the enslaved gaining victory in courts designed to secure their enslavers’ interests. Yet there was a triumph for these mothers in offering a counterdiscourse on the normal age of weaning. The courts provided women with a medium to voice publicly their definitions of what constituted an appropriate weaning age. Shortened lactation was the problem.66 In addition to contesting planter power using the court, a new technology created by ameliorative legislation, enslaved mothers drew also upon older, established techniques of undercutting their enslavers’ authority by running away. The literature emphasizes gender expectations among the community of enslaved people that imposed limits on women fleeing the plantation. Because of the central roles of women in the black family, particularly in caring for children, women figured less prominently as runaways. A gendered division among runaways emerges in the literature that defines running away as an individualized, male-dominated activity, with women as the pillars of their communities, sheltering and supporting others in flight.67 An examination of newspaper advertisements from the 1780s to the 1820s that described many mothers on the run with their “infant[s] at the breast” shows a more complex reality of how motherly duties shaped women’s flight patterns. Motherly commitments did not prevent women from taking flight; instead, children motivated mothers to flee. Among such women held at the Portland, St. Georges, and Kingston workhouses between July and August 1816 were Sue and her child Nelly of about three months old; Elizabeth Hardy and her child, whose exact age was unknown; Juliet and her child Eliza; Congo Nelly and her child; and Eve and her child, a Creole.68 Other mothers still at large were Sukey, running with her “child at her breasts”; Phyllis, “a negro woman of the Mundingo country [who] carried her infant suckling named LUCY—Also six months old”; and “a Negro woman named AMY, with her Sambo child named MARY.”69 A more comprehensive analysis of the sex distribution among runaways is needed to identify what proportion of runways were women with suckling infants. Indeed reports concerned with sex patterns among runaways confirm a preponderance of males as runaways. One study found that for the period 1829–32 only 13 women were among the 124 fugitives punished with transportation. Even so, the many scattered newspaper advertisements

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of new mothers on the run with their children disrupt traditional assumptions that family commitment tied women to the plantations. Moreover, the presence of new mothers and their suckling babes among runaways calls into question conventional analyses of what motivated runaways.70 Enslaved women were not only protesting work- and punishment-related infractions; running away also allowed new mothers to escape planterimposed limits on lactation. Nursing and weaning had to fit into the plantation work schedules and planter timetables. Running away denied planters the power to discipline enslaved women’s breastfeeding habits and to regulate maternal bonds. It temporarily liberated mothers and children from weaning deadlines and morning, midday, and evening feeding schedules. The literature often distinguishes between runaways who temporarily absented themselves from their plantations (truants) versus those who sought permanent freedom blending in with the free black urban population, seeking shelter in maroon communities, or, in the experience of the American South, fleeing to the North.71 While some fugitive mothers ran to urban centers, assimilating with free(d) blacks, it is not always clear whether these women intended to remain permanently on the run. All these scenarios, however, achieved a similar end. Fugitive mothers defied and taunted their masters with their limited power to enforce completely the restrictions they placed on maternity and mother-child bonds. These taunts motived penal reform in Jamaica, where, as noted earlier, after the 1780s when colonial authorities built several penitentiaries to coopt the power of the state to control slave populations when masters failed.72 Yet even with the knowledge that recapture was imminent, women continued to flee with their children. Like many other runaways, mothers had the support of kin and community. Friends and relatives ran with or harbored fugitive mothers and their sons and daughters. The family networks that supported mothers in flight helped them reject the commodification of their reproductive labor. Far from the chattel to which enslavers tried to reduce enslaved children, they were family and community members whom their parents and elders nurtured and protected. When Olive “stole away her child” from the nursery, she had help and support from her brother and two other women who ran with her. Similarly the fugitive mother Jenny of Magotty Hill had the companionship of Diana and two men, Davy and Douray; one of them was possibly the child’s father.73 Family bonds did not always tie women to the

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plantation, but actually facilitated mothers’ flight. Running away in groups offered security to vulnerable mothers and their babies. Workhouse advertisements reveal orphaned infants whose mothers died while on the run. The child Betty remained unclaimed in jail for one year after the recapture and death of her mother. Caught and imprisoned on 2 July 1790, Jenny died just over a month later, on 20 August, with her surviving child, Betty, remaining unclaimed in the workhouse as late as July 1791.74 Fugitive mothers received shelter from their husbands and children’s fathers. In 1827, Eve and her three children remained at large for an extensive, though unknown, period. Described as an “incorrigible runaway,” Eve had previously remained on the run for three years. Her persistence suggests her quest to free herself and family from slavery. We know very little about the man who concealed her, but it is likely that he fathered her three children. The Kingston Chronicle reported that in 1824, she ran to her “husband,” a free man. At this time, Eve’s eldest daughter, Mary, was only a year old. It is possible that Eve conceived and birthed her last two children while she was a fugitive between 1824 and 1827. Her children were John, two and a half years old, and Sue, two months old. During her three-year absence, Eve reportedly passed herself as a “free woman.”75 Eve was one of several fugitive women with young children who ran to their husbands and passed themselves as free. Susanna Barrett of Shady Spring in St. Thomas-in-the-East ran with her eighteen-month-old child to Spanish Town. Barrett, like Sue, was unbranded, and possibly spoke English well because she passed herself as free, and assimilated among other free black townspeople. Other women like Dinah, who bore her owner’s mark “on her right shoulder, N.F.,” kept a false “work ticket” to conceal her escape.76 The strong presence of male figures in these runaway cases challenged white paternalism that rendered black fathers and other male relatives invisible in planter pronatal efforts. In addition to their key roles as enslaved women’s partners and allies, black men were caregivers in their own right. Maternal flight allowed male kin to assume fatherly roles. While some parents preserved family bonds by running away, others did so by laying claim to land on which they lived. Enslaved people’s family homes were powerful symbols of kinship and belonging and they invoked sacred protection to remain connected. By marking the land with the bodies of their dead relatives or the placenta and umbilical cords of their children, enslaved people insisted that terrible consequences would follow if

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they were separated from their “Old Homes.”77 To reinforce their connection to the residence of their kin, mothers buried their children’s umbilical cord or “navel-string” underneath their houses, beneath particular trees in their yards, or in empty plots near their houses where they would later plant a tree, typically a fruit tree. The “navel-string tree” or “born ground” bound children and their families to the land consecrated by the remains of living and dead loved ones.78 In an extremely rare moment of empathy in 1773, Edward Long wondered how “oppressive and detrimental” it must be for enslaved people to be “torn away” from their friends, families, and homes. “It cannot be imagined,” Long mused. For Long, the haunting specter of separation from home and family explained why “they have a powerful attachment to the spot where they are born; to the place which holds the remains of their deceased friends and kindred.”79 Other planters affirmed enslaved people’s claim of proprietorship over their homes and how they conjured spiritual protection for their families.80 In 1838 James Henry wrote, the “creole negro [is] fond of the place of his birth. . . . He calls it (I have heard them call it so myself) his born ground. . . . The associations of his childhood are all laid there.”81 Observing similar practices on his property, Matthew Lewis was dismissive, curious, and perplexed that “the negroes are always buried in their own gardens [performing] many strange and fantastical ceremonies. . . . The negroes,” he added condescendingly, are “extremely superstitious and very much afraid of ghosts (whom they called duppy).” However, Lewis would learn that “they need only fear the duppies of their enemies, but have nothing to apprehend from those after death, who loved them in their lifetime.”82As long as the living remained nearby, their ancestral spirits protected them. When planters attempted to separate individuals or whole families from their old homes that had their burying grounds, they became dejected and “skulk[ed] themselves into insanity, delirium, and eventual death, in protest of being separated from their ancestors.” After a group of enslaved people said that they were “unwilling to [be] remove[d]” from their homes to newly acquired lands, the planter John Baillie “gave up the purchase and abandoned the removal.” Baillie feared they would fret themselves to death after separation.83 Enslaved people’s burial customs tell us that they were willing to go to various lengths to preserve ties to kin and community. At Friendship and Greenwich estate, one of two nursing mothers threatened to kill her child

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if the attorney did not permit her to wean it according her own time. The estate overseer rejected the mothers’ plea to continue breastfeeding, threatening to remove the children to the nursery if the mothers insisted on suckling the babies. The overseer claimed the children were above twentytwo months old, well in excess of the fourteen-month period permitted for breastfeeding. Despite extra “leisure [time] and other indulgences,” the “nursing mothers” refused to yield, and insisted upon continuing to suckle and wean their children on their own timetable. “Their demands were rejected” and the mothers left the bargaining ground “in high discontent” to complain to the attorney, the overseer’s superior. The attorney agreed with the overseer’s decision not to delay weaning the infants, and instructed him to take the children “to the weaning house against [the mothers’] will.” In response to the attorney’s decision, one of the mothers threatened, he “would see [the child] dead in less than a week” if the overseer took her child away.84 Nurseries had paradoxical effects on pronatal reform; they marginalized women in the decision-making process over their children because planters wanted to restore female fertility and protect children from illnesses and vices they associated with breastfeeding beyond twelve to fourteen months. Simultaneously, nurseries placed infants at the mercy of desperate mothers who would go to any lengths, including filicide, to prevent separation from their sons and daughters. Whether the mother carried out her threat or the attorney and overseer capitulated is unknown, but the new importance of enslaved boys and girls to the future of the plantation strengthened the bargaining power of enslaved mothers. We cannot presume that this mother merely issued an empty threat. In examples discussed earlier, women killed their children to prevent separation. Rather than cower at planters’ coercion, mothers gambled on the lives of their children to gain a modicum of maternal control. Threatening to kill one’s child was one extreme on the continuum of bargaining strategies enslaved mothers deployed. Women also manufactured scenarios that played on masters’ concern for the well-being of children in order to receive food and other “indulgences.” One mother who petitioned her owner at breakfast to feed her starving “piccanney at home” received a large quantity of “bread, butter, plantains and cold ham” directly from his dining table. She returned later that day asking for a “bit to buy tobacco” to sell to buy food at the market to feed her child. Having received more money than she had asked for, she claimed she would buy a fowl

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instead of tobacco. Yet a third time, the woman returned, “well! Here I come to massa again.” On this occasion, she wanted “another bit of cold ham to carry home to her child.”85 Enslaved mothers gambled on their children’s worth to receive material and financial gains. The planter Matthew Lewis reflected upon this reality when he returned to Jamaica in 1817, and mothers brought their children to him, exclaiming, “see massa, and see! Here nice new neger I bring for work for massa.” Mothers who had multiple children “did not fail to boast of the number” and make “greater claim” of indulgences he promised them. “The Negroes in Jamaica” Lewis summed up, “are thoroughly sensible of their intrinsic value in the eyes of the proprietor.”86 The material and spiritual bodies of captive Africans were sites of struggle between reformers in the metropole and planters in the colony, each competing to regulate biological reproduction. Enslaved people took advantage of policy changes and ambiguities to create new traditions that allowed them to strengthen maternal authority and to gain greater control over their intimate lives and bodies. Parents embraced religious reforms that empowered them to exercise some autonomy over naming their children and creating new genealogies. Knowing how valuable children had become to slaveholders also emboldened women. At times, they openly challenged planter-initiated infant feeding and weaning plans because, unlike baptism and marriage reform that potentially offered institutional protection for their family, they saw no similar advantages in shortening lactation. Enslaved women insisted on determining their own approaches to and practices of motherhood or maternal resistance. They claimed authority over their motherhood and rejected the efforts of planters and their medical allies to define what constituted normal child care. A confounding paradox of slavery was that women’s protective efforts to ensure their children’s survival also extended the proprietary interests of slaveholders and the colonial interests of abolitionists. Whereas abolitionists wanted enslaved children to survive to become future wageworkers of a free colony, slaveholders envisioned them as slaves for the forseeable future. These competing claims upon biological reproduction and the question of how best to secure it made maternal resistance possible. What emerged was not simply a clash of ideas about feeding, nurturing, or caring for enslaved children but also a conflict over what such care represented. For abolitionists, pronatal reforms signaled the possibility of creating free

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colonies; for slaveholders reform promised a supply of plantation labor. The social relationships and cultural practices that developed around providing for the material needs of enslaved children challenged the idea that the offspring of African captives existed solely for the purposes of building personal fortunes or extending imperial goals. Maternal resistance affirmed that enslaved people were social beings connected to a community of individuals with shared ideals and practices.

Chapter 7

Raising Hardworking Adults: Labor, Punishment, and Slave Childhood

Children made up a small portion of Jamaica’s slave population between the late 1600s and the late 1700s. Because of children’s numerical minority, precarious existence, and ability to perform only a few tasks, they were marginal to the concerns of plantation owners and agents. Of the few children born to enslaved mothers, as we have seen, many succumbed to diseases in early infancy. Others died later in childhood because they were overworked, underfed, and brutally punished. It is unclear whether the neglect of enslaved children resulted from the availability of replacement workers via the transatlantic slave trade or whether the high infant and child mortality rates made planters reluctant to invest in children’s health and survival. Children’s marginal importance to the plantations gave parents and community members relative freedom to care for their children. Yet as human property, slave children counted in the plantation ledgers, and as long as they lived, planters claimed them as workers and marketable commodities. Children also became members of the slave population via the slave trade. They were, however, the smallest proportion of captive Africans transported because buyers and sellers who demanded able-bodied adults declined to engage in trade for them. It was not unusual to put captive children, especially infants, to death because traders did not view them as worthwhile investments. Even so, contemporaries reported the presence of children on board slaving ships and in the slave markets. An account by William Dove, a sailor in Sierra Leone in 1769, for example, recorded the sightings of several children boarding slaving vessels. On one ship, he

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recalled seeing as many as thirty to forty children, including a few suckling at their mothers’ breasts. Dove also reported that some children were born during the Atlantic crossing.1 Reform proposals insisted on importing younger captives to capitalize on the fecundity youthfulness promised. Precedents for differentiating between captive adults and children were set by slave buyers and sellers, who relied on physical features to make their determination. Captives “below 4 feet 4 inches” were designated as children, and those “above 4 feet 4 inches” were designated as adults. Sometimes, captives had their teeth, breasts, skin, and hair examined to ascertain further evidence of youthfulness. Rarely were slaves checked for gray hair and wrinkled skin to differentiate between adults and children, however. In the slave market, a quick estimate of height was the most common method of distinction.2 Imperial reformers did not adopt these methods of age determination. Despite the importance of children to their pronatal agenda, reformers offered little clarity on how to differentiate children from adults. For reformers in the metropole, age rather than height or physical developments distinguished children from adults. In the writings of Maurice Morgan, the colonial bureaucrat who offered one of the earliest timetables and paths for abolition, age fourteen marked the end of childhood. Morgan singled out fourteen as the age at which black apprentices would discontinue their education, marry, and begin raising families. His plan that proposed keeping the slave trade open for a ten- to fifteen-year period to facilitate stocking the colonies with young Africans also recommended that captives not exceed age six. Six to fourteen was the ideal age range because it was a period when young people were impressionable and malleable. The problem with making strict age specifications was the lack of methods to determine captive Africans’ age. One abolitionist summed up this challenge before Parliament when he asked, “How was their age to be ascertained? What was the baptismal register on the Coast of Africa to which they were to go back and look into for the ages of all these children?”3 The difficulty in determining imported children’s age perhaps accounts for the lack of attention abolitionists paid to definitions of and ways of identifying children. The most consistent age in their proposals was twentyfive, which marked the time when abolitionists believed females began losing their fertility. To promote biological reproduction abolitionists emphasized importing females below age twenty-five. Abolitionist plans for preparing children for freedom were focused on those born in the colonies

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and therefore paid little attention to physical markers of childhood. Activists like Ramsay and Wilberforce were more attentive to the age at which planters began breaking mother-child bonds to prevent them from adopting their parents’ cultural vices. Ramsay stressed that success in preparing enslaved children to become free people depended on conditioning children’s minds from their “infancy.” At six months old, children should be placed in nurseries and weaned. Abolitionist schemes for raising enslaved children for freedom conflicted with the visions planters and the colonial government held. Although the planter-dominated Assembly opposed laws that undercut planter power, the Assembly enacted and, to a more limited degree, enforced new laws that mirrored the reform goals of the metropole in order to avoid direct imperial intervention. Planter investment in child-rearing intended to secure future servile laborers, not to prepare subjects of a free colony as abolitionists intended. Their attempts to work out who children were, how to secure their survival, and how to acculturate them to plantation work reflected their power and proprietary interests. Slaveholders adjusted enslaved children’s working lives because poor labor output reduced plantation productivity. They also eased enslaved children’s transition to work, but used brute force to teach children their subordinate status. Planter discipline conflicted with the authority parents and community members claimed over their children. By resorting to traditional means of protest, such as running away, as well as taking advantage of new opportunities created by colonial reforms, mothers and fathers asserted their parental rights. Enslaved youngsters also laid claims to their personhood by protesting and running away. The bodies of enslaved children became a site of political struggle between the imperial and local governments, which disagreed on legislative changes to protect young people; between magistrates and individual planters who enforced the law to protect planter power; and between enslaved parents and children who wanted protection from the arbitrary power of their masters and freedom to shape their lives and that of their families.

Redefining Slave Childhood The idea that planters’ fortunes depended on the health, survival, and careful training of young people forced plantation agents into a more coherent

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articulation of slave childhood. From the late 1780s to the mid-1830s, planters primarily used young people’s age to determine their readiness for plantation work. Assuming that children matured physically, sexually, and intellectually with age, planters categorized and employed them accordingly. With notable exceptions and overlaps, plantation agents categorized young people into four developmental stages bracketed by age. Infants referred to newborns up to age two, children were three to seven years old, boys and girls were ages seven/eight to sixteen, and men-boys and women-girls were ages eleven/twelve to sixteen/eighteen. These categories shaped and reinforced attitudes and beliefs slaveholders held about slave childhood. Planters viewed slave childhood as a period distinct from adulthood, marked by sequential phases. As children got older, they became more useful and valuable as producers and reproducers in the plantation economy. With the new shift toward reproducing the slave population locally, planters relied more on children’s chronological age than their physical appearance to determine their laboring abilities. The shift toward using a chronological metric marked a major transformation in how masters perceived and valued slaves. Before the slave trade ended in 1807, sellers and buyers had neither birth nor baptismal records for imported Africans and therefore evaluated their cargoes’ height, muscle, teeth, and skin condition to determine their value and usefulness. Tall, taut, flawless bodies symbolized health, strength, and labor power. Gray hair, missing teeth, and loose and scarred skin betrayed old age, debility, and fragility. Pert breasts in women symbolized youthfulness and fecundity. Bodies less than four feet four inches were categorized as those of children.4 Despite planters’ shift away from physical appearance as a tool for determining age, they did not completely dispense with it as a useful variable. Developmental growth played a secondary role in placing young people into work groups, but was primary in determining worker readiness to advance to elite or more challenging occupations. Extraordinary physical and mental abilities in addition to sex functioned as key variables in planter promotion and ranking of enslaved youths. Interestingly, plantation biannual registers and work journals developed no similar elaboration on child sexuality. Until at least 1822, planters estimated young girls’ sexual development according to bodily assessments rather than age grouping. Planters referred to age in passing as they discussed young people’s sexual development; discussions were inherently gendered because boys received no consideration. In the slave trade’s

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closing decades, planters contemplated the ideal age for buying young girls for the purposes of promoting biological reproduction. The planter-historian William Beckford suggested twelve to sixteen years as a good age for buying girls for “breeding.” Attorneys Simon Taylor and Thomas Barritt accorded African-descended girls a semblance of sexual innocence, not generally conferred onto female slaves. Taylor and Barritt saw girls under sixteen as sexually inexperienced, and therefore vulnerable to sexual abuse that retarded their reproductive capacities.5 Age sixteen appears overly generous, however, since at least one observer suggested that white girls in the colonies matured sexually at age twelve. The planter-historian Edward Long suggested that white females in Jamaica married and began bearing children from as early as age twelve. It is likely that Long exaggerated this age in an attempt to prove his points that the colonies had overall negative consequences for white girls’ and women’s virtue, and that hot climates caused English bodies to develop precociously.6 Only in 1826, with the passing of Jamaica’s Consolidated Slave Law, was there any legal pronouncement on the sexual innocence of enslaved girls. “In consequence of the Simpson case,” as the preamble of the 1826 law stated, it became a felony “to unlawfully and carnally know and abuse any female slave under the age of ten.” On penalty of death, the law also prohibited “rape on any female slave.”7 The 1826 law that accorded sexual innocence to enslaved girls emerged from a rape case four years prior. In 1822 the planter Thomas Simpson was found guilty of “rape on the Body of an infant female under ten years of age.” Details of the case are sketchy. But the court documents identify the victim as a nine-year-old enslaved girl named Charlotte of the St. Elizabeth Parish. While Simpson awaited hanging in a Montego Bay jail, his guilty conviction and death sentence were overruled because, as Chief Justice William Scarlett explained, the English statute in place did not extend to slaves.8 The rapist of nine-year-old Charlotte escaped justice because Jamaican laws and officers of the court did not invest enslaved women and girls with legal rights that protected them from sexual violence. The inapplicability of the rape law to enslaved girls reflected the culture of slavery that legally defined slaves as the property of their owners, and therefore entrusted owners with full legal control over and access to the bodies of slaves. The racial system upon which slavery had been built also sanctioned whites’ abuse of black people at will. Charlotte’s rapist, Thomas Simpson, was a white planter, but was not her owner.

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The 1826 Consolidated Slave Law attempted to limit white, male privilege that granted white men access to the bodies of black women and girls. The law invested both enslaved women and girls with legal protection from sexual violence, even if everyday practice changed very little. The statute also demarcated age ten as the end of sexual innocence and the start of sexual maturity for enslaved girls. After age ten, girls were deemed capable of sexual feelings and sexual awareness, and therefore they could knowingly consent to sexual relationships. The beginning of the menstrual cycle, one estate doctor asserted, marked the beginning of sexual maturity.9 Legal protections from rape were short-lived, however. The British Parliament disallowed the 1826 act, citing its failure to protect the enslaved and to consider imperial provisions for improving enslaved people’s conditions.10 Of course, the carnal abuse of nine-year-old Charlotte in 1822 was not the first occurrence of child rape during slavery in Jamaica. Several rape cases are scattered among the court records involving enslaved children as young as five years old. In each case, the accused (typically white) was found not guilty.11 Charlotte’s case was unique because of the changing social and moral landscape in which the institution of slavery continued to operate. The year 1823 was particularly important because it marked the founding of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery and the introduction of petitions and motions to the British Parliament aimed at setting the colonies on a more direct path toward emancipation.12 Charlotte’s case appeared before the Assize Court on 5 May 1823, just a few months before the Jamaican governor received a series of dispatches from Earl Bathurst, the colonial secretary, directing him and the Jamaican legislature to enact new legislation that would “restore female slaves that sense of shame which is at once the ornament and the protection of the sex.” Proposed reforms included encouraging marriage among the enslaved, prohibiting the separation of wives from their husbands, and banning the flogging of women. These reforms intended to confer respectability upon enslaved women.13 The new feminine ideal revolved around containing sexual expression within Christian marriage, women receiving protection and support from husbands, and protecting women from physical and sexual violence from men who were not their husbands. The 1823 imperial resolutions also proposed reforms to protect children. The resolutions forbade masters from selling children under the age of sixteen away from their parents, and proposed freeing infant girls born after a certain date. According to Bathurst, the freeing of female children

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was necessary to “progressively change the character and habits of the slave population.” Echoing the 1770s and 1780s proposals of the colonial bureaucrat Maurice Morgan and abolitionists William Wilberforce and James Ramsay, the 1823 resolutions called for the apprenticeship of young girls for a few years before they were freed.14 These resolutions had a view of childhood innocence that extended beyond the presumed lack of sexual knowledge or desire, and encompassed the Lockean notion of children as tabula rasa or as individuals innocent of all knowledge. British social and moral reformers at the start of the nineteenth century rejected early modern ideas that human actions reflected an ingrained sense of right and wrong. Reformers came to view the human character, especially that of children, as malleable and capable of being trained. The government and the church were especially important and empowered to engineer subjects into the desired habits and character through education, legal reforms, and law enforcement.15 Ultimately, encouraging enslaved females to conceive and preparing youths to become moral and industrious subject-citizens depended on protecting enslaved girls’ innocence and capitalizing on young people’s malleability. Imperial reforms mirrored neither slaveholders’ views about slave childhood nor the actual treatment of enslaved children. Yet by the 1820s, the planter-dominated Jamaican legislature was no longer in a position to dictate fully the pace and nature of legal changes. In addition to the many communications from the imperial government requiring the Assembly to adopt ameliorative policies, the rape of Charlotte attracted the attention of the colonial secretary and other government ministers. Two years after Chief Justice Scarlett declared that the laws against rape did not apply to enslaved women and girls, Bathurst referred Charlotte’s case to British magistrates for an opinion on 24 February 1825.16 When the Jamaican Assembly passed the 1826 law that conferred legal protection against sexual abuse to enslaved women and girls, it was responding to increased pressure from the British government. Criminalizing the rape of black women and girls by white men limited the power and property rights white men claimed over black bodies. It also brought the possibility of increasing population growth by eliminating the sexual assaults that caused venereal diseases and undermined women’s reproductive ability. Protecting enslaved girls from rape also deflected attention from the Jamaican Assembly’s refusal to prohibit the flogging of enslaved women. The Assembly’s defense was that it was impossible to control female slaves

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without the lash.17 Whereas Assembly members believed that no good could come from prohibiting the flogging of females, they saw immediate benefits from restricting sexual access to girls. Planter discussion about the vulnerabilities of enslaved girls to sexual abuse that undermined their reproductive ability predated Charlotte’s 1822/3 rape case.18 During the slave trading era, plantation agents hesitated to buy girls younger than twelve because they were less able to defend themselves from unwanted sexual attention. Sexual abuse generated pathologies that caused infertility. The lack of opposition in the House of Assembly to enacting rape legislation reflected slaveholders’ calculations of how legal protections for enslaved girls’ sexuality enhanced their goals of promoting biological reproduction. Assembly members’ silence on the rape law contrasted with their vociferous opposition to the proposed ban on flogging women.19 The promotion of female modesty and childhood innocence reflected the gender order abolitionists imagined for postslavery Jamaica. Replacing masters, freed men would assume roles as heads of households where their children and wives depended on them.20 In order to establish the foundation for freed men to assume roles as providers and protectors after slavery, the 1823 petitions and resolutions also proposed restricting the separation of children from their families and removing limitations on enslaved people owning or inheriting property. Slaveholders were to be prohibited from separating children sixteen years and younger from their parents. The age of sixteen was a two-year increase over the age at which slave owners were legally required to “clothe, feed, and maintain” children they manumitted.21 From the perspective of emancipationists and the imperial government, the legal support of childhood innocence had the potential to produce different kinds of adults, by creating a type of family life in which fathers provided for and protected their children. The kind of legal protection the Jamaican Assembly extended to children depended on the perceived outcomes for slaveholders. Slaveholders did not view enslaved children as innocent beings whose need for care and protection were the key to unlocking enslaved men’s potential to become subject-citizen. Slave children were commodities who could be bought and sold as it suited planters’ financial, reproductive, and productive goals. The 1826 law that was passed in response to the 1823 House of Commons resolutions restricted the separation of children to only “his or their children,” a revision from the resolutions’ language that restricted the separation of “his, or her, and their children.” The dispatch to the colonies also

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stipulated that children in a family could be any young person under the age of sixteen who was the “reputed” child of a husband or wife, which meant that separation was prohibited, even if such man or woman was simply the child’s adoptive parent with no biological ties. In contrast, the 1826 Consolidated Slave Law defined a family as “a man and his wife, and his or their children.” When the British Parliament disallowed the 1826 law, it cited the family separation clause as inadequate, specifically questioning the phrase “a man and his wife and his or their children.” Parliament wanted a “better definition of family,” which should include the husband’s as well as the wife’s children, and those from the union under the age of sixteen.22 Leaving the law vague in reference to the age of children and protecting only the husband’s and shared children from sale appeased British reformers, but did not limit the liberties enslavers took in separating enslaved children from their families. Slavery’s system of accounting that rested on the principle partus sequitur ventrem meant that plantation ledgers paid attention primarily to enslaved mothers and not fathers. It was rare for plantation inventories to record children’s fathers. If the British government had allowed the 1826 Act, Jamaica’s slave children would have remained vulnerable to separation by sale, unless they were conceived within Christian marriages, recognized by plantation agents. Marriage as a protection against family separation had limited applicability to enslaved people because of legal restrictions imposed by the Jamaican Assembly. The Assembly engaged in legislative battles with the imperial Parliament to determine legal rules governing nuptials among the enslaved. Parliament stipulated that marriages should be encouraged among the enslaved, and insisted on changing the rules of masters’ consent. Enslaved couples should be allowed to marry once they obtained a marriage license from the protector or guardian of slaves, a magistrate appointed by Parliament who was charged with maintaining public order, including overseeing the punishment of slaves and ensuring planters obeyed legislative provisions for slaves’ welfare, including permitting marriage and religious instruction. Enslaved women had to present the protector of their district with a written proof that their masters permitted their marriage. This legal requirement operated on the principle of respecting the property rights owners held in their slaves, which meant that slaves did not own their persons and therefore needed the permission of their masters to enter into a contract. If masters refused to consent to marriages for enslaved couples, they had to justify to the protector of slaves why marriage was not in an

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Figure 10. Protector of Slaves Office from Richard Bridgens, West Indian Scenery with Illustration of Negro Character, the Process of Making Sugar & c from Sketches During a Voyage to and Residence of Seven Years in the Island of Trinidad (London, 1840). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

applicants’ best interest. Placing the onus on women to prove masters’ consent further reflects the principle of partus sequitur ventrem. More broadly, as the illustration of the council of protection at work by the travel writer Richard Bridgens (Figure 10) reveals, amelioration was heavily gendered. Women and children were foremost in representations of slaves needing protection and subjected to regulation. The resolutions also permitted any minister of religion to solemnize unions. In adopting the resolutions, the Assembly authorized only Anglican clergy to perform marriage rites for the enslaved. The law also sidestepped the authority of the protector of slaves, and only required the consent of masters. When the British government disallowed the 1826 act, it singled out the marriage clause as a key reason. Bathurst asserted, “no security is taken against the possible case of unreasonable or capricious refusal by the owner to consent. By confining the power of celebrating marriages to the clergy of the established church, every other class of religious teachers are

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deprived of the means of exercising a salutary influence over the minds of their disciples.”23 Limiting marriage solemnization to the Anglican clergy posed no significant threat to planter power or the system of slavery. Despite the long presence of the church in Jamaica, it had made little or no effort to convert slaves or to interfere with slave ownership. In some cases, clergy members managed and owned slaves. Nonconformists, on the other hand, particularly the Moravians, the Baptists, and the Wesleyans, were viewed with suspicion and treated with contempt by slaveholders. Missionaries’ eagerness to proselytize among the enslaved and use of blacks as lay preachers incensed planters, who pushed to criminalize their missions. Planter hostility toward nonconformists climaxed when some missionary groups expressly forbade slave ownership or marriage to slave owners. Missionaries’ efforts to distance themselves from slave ownership and the slave-owning class made planters distrusting of the message missionaries preached to the enslaved. Planters accused missionaries of provoking mischief among their human property by preaching freedom and rebellion. Thus when the Christmas Rebellion broke out on 27 December 1831, planters dubbed it the Baptist War because they believed enslaved people were brainwashed into rebellion by Baptist missionaries. Planters failed to recognize the rebellion as homegrown and that enslaved people used the church as a political space and cover for plotting the rebellion.24 By limiting the performance of marriage rites to the Anglican Church, which had not vocalized opposition to planter authority or slavery, slave owners reassured themselves that enslaved people would not be exposed to messages that threatened slavery. One of the requirements of marriage was that intendents had “a proper and adequate knowledge of the nature and obligation of [the marriage] contract.”25 Educating enslaved men and women on the obligations of a Christian marriage opened a space for proselytizing among them. Slaveholders wanted to retain control over the message enslaved people received, and ultimately to retain their power. Their efforts to retain control over the lives of the enslaved were reflected further in their refusal to delegate the power of marriage consent to councils of protection as stipulated by imperial orders. By retaining sole power of consent over marriages for enslaved men and women, planters empowered themselves to make or break the families of enslaved people. Denying marriages among the enslaved allowed planters to limit the applicability of laws that prohibited separating children born of or living within Christian marriage unions.26

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Although abolitionists, Parliament, and the Jamaican legislature had overlapping ideas about childhood as a period of innocence and malleability, the legal contests between them reflected their divergent visions for enslaved men, women, and children in Jamaica’s future. Abolitionists and some members of the British government imagined enslaved men as free people managing and providing for their own households comprising innocent children and dependent, submissive, and virtuous wives. Slave owners, in contrast, envisioned enslaved men, women, and children in a perpetual state of servitude; and embraced ideas about children’s innocence and malleability when it served their goal of preparing young people to become biddable, hardworking adults.

Balancing Labor Demands and Young People’s Growth and Development Planters believed that the years leading up to enslaved children’s seventh or eighth birthday were vital training ones. “Under age” children, as the Braco overseer referred to them, spent their days doing odd jobs around the fields and factories, like picking up leaves and trash or pulling weeds.27 Similarly, while most young people at Worthy Park estate between infancy and age eight were identified as “young children doing nothing,” from around ages five or six they worked in comparable odd jobs.28 Because few planters saw these jobs as productive, they labeled children as “unserviceable,” “useless,” “of no use, being very young,” and in their inventories, they left children’s occupational categories blank.29 Others went as far as defining picking up debris around the estates as a form of child’s play with an educational component. Leaving children in the nurseries all day, especially after age four, would only cause them to cultivate “idle, pernicious habits.” The planter Thomas Roughley insisted that organizing them as a “little playful gang” doing minor chores would help them develop “industrious habits,” but without demanding too much of them.30 Like abolitionists, planters insisted on the early separation of mothers and children, in part to prevent children from adopting their parents’ vices. Both groups wanted enslaved children to learn industry and hard work but for different reasons. As we have seen, abolitionists imagined children growing up to become free workers, whereas planters envisioned them as servile laborers. Planters feared that enslaved children’s attachment to their parents would make children rebellious and lazy. Planters also embraced

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the idea that children were malleable characters, and that it was up to them to mold enslaved youths into what they imagined they would become. Mirroring a much broader trend in the late eighteenth- to early nineteenthcentury Atlantic world, planters also believed children had various faculties that they had either to cultivate or suppress. The mandate planters held was deceptively simple: nurture enslaved children’s intellectual and physical talents, encourage affection for and attachment to planters instead of parents, and suppress their passions for sensuality and carefree adventure.31 Some observers took an extreme position on the need to suppress the supposed passions of captive Africans and their descendants. “Africa is the parent of everything monstrous in nature,” Rev. George Wilson Bridges, the Anglican rector for the St. Ann parish, proclaimed. Parents permitted their “children from the most tender age to indulge the basest instincts of their nature . . . to gratify them without fear or shame.” Given such tendencies, planters must discipline every aspect of enslaved children’s lives, including play, from a young age in order to condition their minds and bodies against their nature.32 Believing that hard work too early stripped youngsters of their health, vitality, and ultimately their lives and economic value, planters devised several steps to prepare enslaved youths for their destined roles as sugar cultivators and manufacturers. A few years before the 1807 ban on slave trading John Shickle, attorney for Denbigh, Kupius, and Thomas River estates, purchased twelve men, ten boys, and ten girls. Whereas Shickle made no mention of the labor roles for the adult males, he assigned the boys and girls to lighter tasks to acclimate them to plantation work. Thus, he wrote, the twenty boys and girls would only weed the canes for the next two years.33 The records are silent on the age of the boys and girls Shickle purchased. Generally young people began plantation work at about age eight in the third gang, sometimes called the weeding gang, where they remained until they reached age twelve, when they proceeded to the more challenging work of the second gang until age sixteen. Falling somewhere between boyhood and girlhood and manhood and womanhood, labor roles of women-girls and men-boys in the second gang were not as demanding as first gang work, but not as easy as third gang work. The responsibilities of womengirls and men-boys were a middle ground between the most demanding and least demanding work.34 Although planters idealized muscular adult male bodies as ideal for sugar production, the daily demands of plantation work commanded and reflected a more varied labor force.35 The narrow spaces between growing

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canes made small but sensible boys and girls ideal for maneuvering between cane rows to spread manure. “When the cane holes are dug no cast or carriage can go among the Cane holes to drop it,” the planter Simon Taylor explained. Small, lightweight workers must do such work by hand.36 Planters calculated that the average eight- to twelve-year-old boy or girl weighed no more than half as much as a fully grown adult of twenty to thirty years. “Too heavy a body,” Roughley wrote, compresses the soil “into a hard contexture [causing] great injury to young canes.” Small workers with “supple hands” and “small hoes” could also move more stealthily when plucking weeds and grass from among young plants, resulting in fewer breakages.37 Worthy Park estate made such careful distinctions in the distribution of farm tools to its workers. Young workers were given “children’s hoes,” while adults received “high tempered hoes.”38 The peculiar demands of growing canes prioritized size and body weight as additional important considerations in the assigning of cultivation tasks. Such specifications elevated boys and girls as vital workers in the sugar plantations’ complex agroindustrial machinery. Additionally, varied labor requirements allowed estate managers to assign young people to labor roles that suited their strengths and facilitated their gradual introduction to plantation work. Because of their inexperience and constantly changing bodies, enslaved boys and girls were among the most versatile young workers on the plantations. Fluctuations in their strength required a gradual and flexible approach to preserve young workers’ health and lives. In any given week, enslaved boys and girls worked across estates and cattle pens in numerous roles that sometimes coincided with the work of men-boys and women-girls. At Braco estate, some of these overlapping roles included tying and carrying bundles of grass, planting grass, carrying provisions, and feeding hogs and cattle. Shared roles between boys and girls and men-boys and women-girls were most evident during the May-June to August-September lull season when workers performed mainly maintenance work. Boys and girls whose duties coincided with those of men-boys and women-girls were primarily between ages twelve and sixteen. The inventories for Worthy Park and John Tharp’s estates show that some twelve- to sixteen-year-olds worked in the second gang, and others in the same age group worked in the third gang. The tremendous labor fluidity of twelve- to sixteen-year-old youngsters (who straddled the boys and girls and men-boys and women-girls categories) reveals that while age was the primary method of classifying and allocating young laborers, planters continued to assess physical appearance of their bonded

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workers to determine their laboring abilities. Twelve- to sixteen-year-old boys and girls who demonstrated physical maturity for their age advanced to the second gang to work alongside men-boys and women-girls.39 While the slave trade remained open, many planters viewed men-boys and women-girls as ideal imports because they were neither too young and fragile nor too old and obstinate.40 The shift toward “home-grown slaves” exposes a burgeoning recognition and construction of the ages between twelve and sixteen as a transitional phase for young people.41 Many Western societies define this age group as “adolescence” and describe it as a turbulent time when young people experience rapid but uneven mental, emotional, sexual, and physical growth. Social and cultural understandings of how these biological changes influence young people’s abilities, behavior, and attitudes vary according to economic, social, and cultural norms and expectations of each epoch and society. The example of nineteenth-century North America shows that educators and parents designed academic curricula and extracurricular activities to curb the “psychological volatility” of adolescence and steer adolescents onto the proper path of pending adulthood.42 Although Jamaican slaveholders did not articulate a concept of “adolescence,” there is some indication that they saw young people aged twelve to sixteen as experiencing fluctuations in physical development that resemble Western and contemporary definitions of adolescence. Twelve- to sixteenyear-olds were extremely fluid in their labor placements between the first, second, and third gang and consistently straddled the boys and girls and men-boys and women-girls groupings. Work overlaps varied across properties and did not reflect a premature imposition of adulthood on young people below age fourteen. Planters saw twelve- to sixteen-year-old enslaved youths as existing at a halfway point between childhood and adulthood, and were very elastic in assigning responsibilities. Flexibility was crucial at a time when children needed protection from hard labor to ensure they survived into adulthood. Planters gave enslaved children careful consideration as the result of abolitionists’ linking reform to biological reproduction, but they articulated a more elaborate definition of childhood than abolitionists. Abolitionists’ references to slave childhood as a period of innocence were fixed broadly from age six to fourteen. Reformers expressed limited ideas about children’s developmental stages, and did not account for them in their pronatal reforms. Constructing slave childhood in broad strokes made some

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proposed reforms unworkable and unrealistic. Parsing out plantation work to enslaved youths according to physical development reflected planter understanding that young people experienced transitional phases. The ebb and flow of plantation work also lends clarity to the lack of neat labor categorization and group assignments among young people. During the planting and harvesting seasons, boys and girls continued working in many of the same tasks as they did during the off-season. Men-boys and women-girls shared some of their tasks, like carrying and throwing manure and clay into cane holes, but had added responsibilities, like weeding cane fields and plantain walks.43 In addition to assigning overlapping roles between boys and girls and men-boys and women-girls, overseers across various plantations created task specific groups like “weeding gang,” “grass gang,” and “hogmeat gang,” which had no age specification. Task gangs were typically an assortment of children, both boys and girls, and pregnant and lactating women, as well as injured and weak workers of various ages.44 Although these categories were more long-standing ones that predated the abolitionist era, from when planters simply grouped children together to take advantage of what little labor young people could perform, they persisted throughout the abolitionist era because slaveholders continuously assessed workers’ potential to maximize their labor power. Fifteen- to seventeen-year-old men-boys and women-girls of the second gang were the most vulnerable to overwork because their responsibilities coincided with those of the first gang, typically composed of adult workers. Youths who matured more quickly, physically and sexually, than their peers advanced to the first gang before their eighteenth birthday. Members of the great gang performed some of the most demanding jobs on the plantations, including carrying and throwing stones for buildings, constructing walls, felling trees, tilling land, digging holes, and cutting and carrying canes. Planters, who were aware of the need to preserve their future labor, were cautious about prematurely exposing young people to “the hardest work of the plantation.” Planters carefully assessed children’s “formation and constitution” before promoting them to more challenging roles.45 Gilbert Francklyn testified that planters evaluated youngsters at around age fifteen to test their readiness for the first gang. Because many children suffered from childhood accidents or diseases that “hurt [their] constitution,” Francklyn explained, very few men-boys advanced to the most laborious first gang before turning eighteen. To otherwise place youngsters in adult roles before they were physically able was potentially harmful. In Francklyn’s

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assessment, if few fifteen-year-old men-boys were fit for the challenges of the first gang, such possibilities did not exist for women-girls because females were naturally weaker than males.46 Estate records indicate that the gendered division of labor among young people was far more complicated than the testimonies of planter-witnesses before the British Parliament suggest. Differences in physical strength created fluid labor experiences for young workers. In their responses to one of the House of Commons’ leading question, “Is labour in general proportioned to the age, sex, and strength of the Negroes?” witnesses generally agreed that sex was not an important factor. In the words of one respondent, “Most certainly to the age and strength, but the sex makes no difference that I remember in the field labour.”47 Records for Thetford, Good Hope, Pleasant Hill, and Phillipsfield estates show gender parity among seventeen- and eighteen-year-old workers advancing to the first gangs. In two exceptional cases in 1804, two Creole girls, Binna, aged fourteen and three-quarters, and Hannah (Francis), fourteen, worked in the great gang at Good Hope estate. This was a very rare occurrence, remarked Good Hope’s record keeper, who described Binna as an “able fine girl at this age.”48 Planter-perceived physical maturity pushed young girls more quickly into the more demanding tasks of the field before they turned eighteen. While some planters hoped to preserve the health and vitality of young workers by gradually easing them into demanding estate work, the economic and political constraints of the plantations complicated such efforts. During the slave trading era, circa 1655 to 1807, financial limits and the irregularity of slaving vessels due to warfare and bad weather meant that estate managers could not always buy slaves at the precise time they needed them.49 After the slave trade ended, labor problems were exacerbated because there were few children and they did not grow quickly enough to replace sick and dead workers. Young people did not always escape multitasking, especially during the harvest, when the reaping of sugarcane and the manufacturing of sugar needed careful and timely synchronicity. Menboys and women-girls and boys and girls moved between gangs, tying canes and carrying bundles, feeding the mill, and removing its residual trash. In fact, on some estates, like Phillipsfield and Pleasant Hill, overseers were lax in categorizing workers according to gang. At the height of the harvest in March 1790, the vast majority of workers were simply reduced to “all hands.” With the exception of nurses, midwives, and others involved in

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nonfield or nonfactory work (messengers, fishermen, and seamstresses) neither young workers nor pregnant women were singled out for special treatment. The demanding nature of the harvest required “all hands” at work, suspending age and gender ranks.50 Although night work primarily involved the manufacturing of sugar and mobilized the mostly skilled male laborers, unskilled workers toiled throughout the night as well.51 Young people performed mainly supporting roles, such as loading and unloading mule carts, feeding canes to the mills, and removing and carrying cane trash between the mill, trash, and boiling houses.52 Some contemporaries like William Beckford cautioned against working young people at nights because early exposure to twenty-fourhour work shifts had lethal consequences for them.53 Not all planters were as sensitive to the potential danger in overworking young people, especially during the harvest period of high labor demands. Parliamentary witnesses rationalized that workers performed night labor only during the JanuaryJune harvest period. Young workers had plenty of time to rest during the second half of the year, they asserted, when they worked to maintain estate buildings and parish roads and plant new canes. Moreover, planters argued, young people’s day jobs were not particularly strenuous. “Tying [cane bundles] is very easy labour,” one witness testified, and they did not have to travel very far distances between the mill, boiling, and trash houses.54 Despite young people’s exposure to tasks that exceeded their strength, especially at harvest time, planters sought to counterbalance such vulnerabilities when possible. At properties like Green Park estate, where second and first gang workers toiled at the same tasks, youngsters had smaller work tools than adults. Carpenters and coopers built short-handled, specially wedged hoes proportionate to young people’s height and size. At Worthy Park, resident proprietor Rose Price imported specially made “children’s hoes.” Youngsters also worked with a “small knife,” “small basket,” and “small hoe” befitting their size and strength.55 With “these little implements” plantation agents rationalized that young workers could gradually develop their skills and “progressively [move] from one gang to the other, till they are fully incorporated with the great gang, or the most effective veteran corps of the estate.”56 Distributing small working tools to young workers was not just about gradually adjusting labor responsibilities to match the growing strength of enslaved youth. It was also about protecting sprouting canes. Molding young canes took great skill to prevent damage, and large, heavy tools

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wielded by unskilled hands threatened the already vulnerable plants. Assigning small working tools to inexperienced workers minimized such risks. Undoubtedly slaveholders were brutal taskmasters, but they were also economic strategists who understood quite clearly that the future of their estates depended on unseasoned workers learning and performing their duties with care and proficiency. Masters systematically trained enslaved youths, not for the sake of benevolence or humanity but simply because it met their labor needs and secured their economic interests.57 Planters’ capital interests were at odds with the humanitarian and imperial goals of abolitionists, who stressed enrolling enslaved boys and girls in missionaryoperated schools to prepare them to become to become free people. The ideas planters held about young, growing bodies did not determine young people’s labor assignments alone. Planter understanding of the challenging nature of plantation tasks also shaped the concessions granted to youngsters. When carrying manure into the fields to fertilize growing canes, young workers brought “half a [large] basket,” or where available, they carried “small baskets.” Young people’s baskets were half the carrying capacity of baskets given to adults, which was approximately thirty pounds. To make the task of carrying manure easier, mule carts hauled it from the pens to the fields. Planters rationalized that the most laborious aspect of this job was loading and unloading the baskets, and taking them from the mule carts to the field. However, as Roughley explained, workers did not travel very far with their loads because the mule carts “seldom [parked] above 200 yards at the most to distribute it in the holes.” Moreover, baskets got progressively lighter as workers dropped dung into the cane holes. With these mitigating factors, Roughley concluded, “It is therefore impossible” for any worker young or old to protest that such work “is laborious.” Not only was fertilizing among the “easy works” in the field, it also educated young workers on the process and steps of cultivation. Manure carriers had the ultimate vantage point from which to “observe the mode of planting, and putting the cane in the ground,” and learn the ways of the great gang in which they were destined to work.58 Whereas planters emphasized the “lightness” of estates’ tasks, their writings are silent on the danger some jobs posed to young workers. Mule boys sometimes fell from the carts or were trampled by animals.59 It is difficult to tell how much of Roughley’s published work was a fanciful proposal on reforming plantation labor, and how much was actually implemented. His attention to how easy the tasks were for children

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reflects the ongoing conflict between local labor interests and reformers in the metropole. Reformers believed that children died prematurely because they shouldered labor roles that exceeded their strength. Planters like Roughley agreed and condemned the “gentlemen of the old school” who continued to demand excessive labor from young children. He boasted, however, that many others had reformed their estates to preserve the lives of children, their future workers.60 The labor demands placed on enslaved youths fluctuated according to the plantations on which they lived. There is some indication that the regulation of enslaved people’s labor roles according to perceived age was more common on properties that grew and processed sugarcane than on those cultivating other crops, like coffee and pimento. The categories of menboys and women-girls existed within the records for Spring Vale and Maryland coffee estates, but there was no consistency in how the property managers applied them in allocating labor roles. Young people experienced greater fluidity on coffee estates than on sugar plantations.61 In the inventories for Spring Vale coffee estate from 1791 to 1795, for example, young people were listed generally with their name, age, occupation, and physical condition, without being grouped as boys and girls or men-boys and women-girls. The coffee estate records were dissimilar to the inventories for sugar plantations. Managers at Springvale coffee estate crudely distinguished between child laborers. Fifteen-year-old able-bodied males and females worked in the fields, while others of the same age, with no indicated disability or color privilege, worked in easier roles, such as attending small stock. Likewise, some healthy eight-year-olds “did nothing,” while children as young as five labored as hogmeat carriers.62 While age played a key role in determining the division of labor, the economic activity of the plantations on which enslaved workers resided was also important. Sugar plantations were more industrialized than coffee estates and had greater standardization of labor roles. Workers on coffee plantations moved flexibly between jobs. Planters adjusted enslaved children’s labor roles to suit their cultivation needs.

Young People and the Gendered Division of Labor British reformers advocated removing female slaves from field work, banning the flogging of women, and criminalizing rape in hopes of ushering in

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a new gender order subordinating women to black men as their husbands and fathers. Caribbean slave societies shared these patriarchal ideas in their long-standing practices of relegating women to manual labor and defining skilled and leadership roles as exclusively male domains. Planters, however, rejected the idea of subordinating women to the home because they saw enslaved women as valuable workers. Planter preparation of enslaved children for their future roles as workers reflected these gendered ideals. Planters singled out enslaved boys for highly disciplined and skilled roles. Tending cattle and mules was a specialized position reserved for males. Cattle and mule boys would “lead and yoke cattle, and ride and tackle mules” for open grazing and carrying canes, manure, copperwood, and hogsheads. Mule and cattle boys also were responsible for preventing animals from “trespassing in the canefields” and provision grounds.63 Before the slave trade ended in 1807, planters like Simon Taylor bought young boys specially for tending cattle. Taylor was not too concerned with whether boys were African or Jamaican born, he was interested mainly in their youth. Estates across Jamaica boasted “cattle boys” in their inventories, because young males, particularly those below age twelve, were best suited for training into future roles as “cattle men” and “mule men.”64 It is unclear whether the increased number of boys imported into Jamaica in the final years of legal slave trading reflected the demand for young boys or simply the constraints of African supplies.65 Sellers would find a ready market for boys among Jamaican buyers seeking to groom them to attend livestock. Not all planters were inclined to buy African boys for skills training, however. Thomas Roughley thought that African-born youngsters were heavy weight, “generally stupid, hard to be subdued,” “ungovernable,” and “liable to make the cattle and mules suffer.” Because care for animals required particular tenderness and patience, Roughley believed that “tractable, docile youth of creole birth” were better suited as cattle and mule boys.66 Although Jamaican planters remained divided on whether young Africans or Creoles were best suited for skills training, they shared age and gender biases. Tending cattle was the preserve of male workers, and livestock workers were best introduced to their roles in their youth. For much of the late seventeenth century through to the first decade of the nineteenth century, planters debated whether Africans were superior to Creoles, and which African ethnic group was more intelligent, hardy, and fertile. Young people featured prominently in those debates. The planterhistorian Bryan Edwards extolled “children brought from the Gold Coast

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[who] manifest an evident superiority, both in hardiness of frame and vigour of mind, over all the young people of the same age imported from other parts of Africa” make the best workers. At a very young age, Edwards continued, the boys in particular displayed remarkable firmness and quick learning from both “precept and example.”67 While African-born bonded workers remained a significant, but declining, element of the slave population up to the ending of slavery, the 1807 ban on legal slave trading made planters’ theories of ethnic difference between enslaved people born in Africa and Jamaica irrelevant to their management of plantations. Gender most profoundly defined the skilled occupational pecking order among young people. Male privileging was absent in unskilled jobs that were incidental to plantation production, like tending hogs and fowls. Disproportionately more girls tended chickens and pigs than boys. Tending nonessential animals was a transitional role from which enslaved boys and girls graduated as they aged and became stronger. Because cattle and mule boys were specialized workers they continued working as livestock keepers into adulthood. Cattle and mule boys advanced to the roles of cattle and mule men, or more generally, “livestock keeper,” in turn training young boys to follow a similar path.68 Boys learned to assess how much weight an animal could carry without undue strain or overwork, and when to avoid leading them over steep hills or muddy trails that could cause accidents. They also learned how to whip an animal without abusing it, how to dress bruises and wounds, and how to “rub them down.” Livestock boys memorized the number and names of cattle and mules within their care, which were generally younger and fewer animals than those managed by cattle and mule men. Adult livestock keepers supervised the training and daily work regimes of cattle and mule boys, and ensured that trainees exercised utmost care when dealing with animals.69 Enslaved boys did not merely work in unskilled, nonessential tasks in which observers most often expected to find them and to which historians relegate them.70 Many held highly skilled occupations for which their developing minds and bodies proved advantageous. Like men, enslaved boys had far more skilled and leadership occupations open to them than girls. Domestic work was the main specialized occupation available to girls. Color, rather than a disposition for a particular skill, determined estate agents’ initial assessments of girls’ suitability as domestics. On properties, like those belonging to John Tharp, that had a large colored population and whose records categorized enslaved workers

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according to racial mixing, quadroons (children of a white man and a mulatto woman) and mustees (children of a quadroon woman and a white man) worked in domestic jobs. Sambos (children of black and mulatto parents) and mulattoes (children of a white man and a black woman) were lower down on the color pyramid than quadroons and mustees. Jamaican social customs dictated that girls with a greater mixing of “white blood” received preferential employment as domestic workers over the more degrading labor in the fields.71 Not all property records were as detailed in recording workers’ color. Although estates like Golden Grove and Green Park occasionally singled out quadroons and mustees, they more commonly applied the generic “mulatto” in reference to colored youngsters. Mulatto was a catchall term for colored girls who received preferential employment as domestics. Domestic girls learned from older, more established seamstresses and housekeepers how to “clean house” and “care for house linen” and received instructions in “making and repairing houselinen, shirts, and stocking and making clothes for the slaves.”72 Importantly, preparing colored girls for domestic roles was not an extension of abolitionist plans for preparing young girls to tend the home. Domestic training for enslaved girls, particularly those of color, serviced the plantations. At most planters presumed domestic work a privileged position granted primarily to colored workers. Planters extended these concessions to mixed-race boys, whose white heritage made them unsuitable for degrading labor in the fields. Like colored girls, mixed-race boys initially received preferential positioning within their masters’ households. Colored boys worked about the great house and overseer’s house as “waiting boys,” or more generically as “house boys” or “house negroes.”73 Although color ranked highly in determining enslaved children’s apprenticeship in domestic crafts, becoming proficient was important for colored youths to remain employed in skilled work. Some plantation agents traded mulattoes for black workers because they perceived coloreds as unskilled and poor workers. The attorney at Georgia estate, Francis Graham traded two children on the property because one was “nearly white” and could do nothing except “light work” about the house. Some estates retained colored workers about the house in unskilled tasks, like fanning flies and cleaning tableware. Young workers who developed the requisite skill for domestic tasks were more likely to remain in the position permanently, regardless of color. Color was not necessarily the overriding factor that determined long-term placement. In some cases, when attorneys could

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not sell mulattoes they simply placed them in field work. Even though planters emphasized color as an important criterion in placing workers in privileged occupations, estate inventories show that an aptitude for skilled work was more significant for remaining in such posts.74 Assigning mulattoes to field work was not necessarily punishment, but was simply estate managers’ efforts to optimize their labor resources.75 Planters’ emphasis on worker proficiency put them further at odds with abolitionists’ reform agenda. Abolitionists proposed freeing mixed-race children ahead of general emancipation and apprenticing them to their white fathers or in trades in keeping with the demands of the colony. Churchwardens would act as free children’s guardians. In the postemancipation Jamaica abolitionists envisioned, white heritage would remain a key determinant of social hierarchy. The demotion of colored workers whose skills and work were not up to par was not indicative of planters’ lack of color or race prejudice. Color motivated their allocations in the first place. Plantation labor needs drove planter policies and practices. Planters were also not preparing enslaved children for freedom, they were training them to become diligent workers. Proficiency in skilled and domestic work was important for colored children to remain in privileged positions. For skilled jobs reserved exclusively for males, like boilers, carpenters, masons, smiths, and coopers, color functioned in a different way to determine young boys’ suitability for training. At Hope estate, it disqualified young people from selection as apprentices for skilled jobs in the sugar factories. According to John Cancanon, the attorney for Hope estate, colored “children are Seldom serviceable to an Estate. [They are] universally weak and effeminate persons, and thus their children are difficult to rear.” Cancanon impressed upon his employer to trade all colored children for black ones who were more skilled and industrious.76 Skilled work was essential to sugar manufacture, and planters chose the most skillful workers regardless of color. Ingenious, “industrious[,] and sober” were the qualities that were most important in selecting boys for skilled occupations. Smart boys worked as “junior” boilers or carpenters under the direction of head workers.77 In comparison to field workers commonly listed as “able-bodied,” “healthy,” or “weakly,” descriptors for skilled workers were “intelligent,” “well-disposed,” or “ordinary.”78 Muscular capabilities determined the value of field workers, while artisans were valued because of their skillfulness. The most “intelligent” junior craft boys who had distinguished themselves to the attorney or overseer graduated to

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“superintending mechanic” over “ordinary” skilled workers. In rare cases, enslaved boys whose fathers were skilled workers learned their parents’ trade. Demonstrable proficiency in skilled work determined continued placement, however.79 The role of driver combined physical strength, mental soundness, and deportment, for which boys could not be trained. Drivers were typically middle-aged men, roughly thirty to thirty-five, who had lived and worked on an estate for an extensive period. Planters selected drivers after years of observing “sobriety, readiness, [and] civility” and, most importantly, demonstrated respect for white people. Drivers were “athletic . . . sound and hardy in constitution; of well earned and good character [and] of an age.” Enslaved boys born in Jamaica or Africans brought to the island in their youth became drivers because planters had a longer time to observe their “virtues” and “vices.” Occasionally, men-boys who displayed these qualities worked as “junior drivers” under the command of an older, head driver.80 Midwifery, doctoring, and nursing were not occupations for which overseers prepared young workers. Previously, caregivers had been elderly, weak men and women who could no longer perform the demanding agroindustrial tasks; in the age of pronatal reforms, planters preferred midwives and nurses who mothered children. Doctors required workers who had the mental aptitude to receive instructions in preparing and dispensing pharmaceuticals and bleeding and purging patients. They should be amenable to taking instructions from doctors. Some doctors and planters were especially adamant that children’s nurses mothered children of their own because they feared that childless women were “stern,” “fractious[,] and severe” and were more likely to mistreat youngsters.81 Existing on the margins of caregiving roles were disabled enslaved youths, suffering from infirmities such as “lame” or “sore” hands and feet, “contracted finger,” blindness (typically in one eye), and “bone ache.” Disabled, childless women-girls or “young miss[es]” more frequently worked as “cooks for children” and “hospital cook[s]” while infirmed, elderly mothers worked as nurses for children. Disabled youths also worked in odd jobs around the plantation like attending fowls and hogs and mending fences. Women-girls scarred and disabled by diseases like smallpox or yaws attended children and other patients suffering from the same diseases because they were immune.82 By placing young, disabled workers into nonmanual labor planters took advantage of all their workers. Enslaved

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children learned early that, like age, disabilities did not shield them from plantation work. Their experiences of plantation life depended on their enslaver’s assessments of their physical and mental abilities. Between the 1780s and 1830s, enslaved children became more important to the sugar estates. Planters were under external pressure to pay attention to enslaved youths because they were vital to preparing the colonies to transit from slavery to freedom. British reformers singled out children to prepare them for freedom because of children’s perceived innocence and malleability. Yet planters aimed to raise obedient hardworking adults. Systematic assessments of young people’s age, and physical and sexual development reflected planter hopes that enslaved youths would be fertile enough to reproduce more workers, and strong and smart enough to perform manual and skilled labor. The gradual introduction and careful placement of young people in plantation work reflected slaveholders’ attempts to manage the mortal risks of child labor, at a time when their fortunes depended on enslaved children’s productivity and longevity. Planter assessments and placements allowed enslaved children a degree of protection from premature exposure to adult duties and responsibilities.

Disciplining and Punishing Slave Youths In disciplining and punishing enslaved youths masters were reluctant to ameliorate their approaches to managing enslaved laborers because they feared that undisciplined children could become rebellious and lazy. Coroner inquests performed on the bodies of young people from the 1780s to the 1830s reveal the pervasiveness of planter brutality toward youngsters. On 3 and 7 August 1786, Supreme Court justices heard evidence in the case of King v. John Russell. For unknown reasons, John Russell ordered a group of his strongest drivers to confine and whip a young boy named Daniel, whose age was not recorded. Compelled to carry out the overseer’s instruction, the unnamed men bound Daniel’s arms and legs with “ropes and cord.” According to the court records, “They tied and [bound] him to certain wooden stakes . . . and then fixed it to the ground, prostrate, stretched out and extended to the ground.” After confining Daniel, the punishers flogged him “across the face, neck, shoulders, arms, breasts, stomach, back, belly, sides, until he was cut [and] bruised, causing mortal wounds.” Despite confirmation from the coroner that Daniel died because

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of the wounds inflicted during his punishment, the justices found his owner, John Russell, not guilty.83 Enslaved girls were similarly vulnerable to their masters’ caprice. In a separate case, an enslaved girl named Mary Ann, of an unknown age, died after receiving a most brutal cow skin whipping under the direction of her owner, Daniel Sleater. The coroner concluded that “Whipping and burning” caused Mary Ann’s death. Mary Ann suffered from several deep lacerations and severe burns over “her back, belly, head, face, neck, shoulders, arms, and breasts.” The punishment of young girls typically carried an additional sexual component. The most grotesque of Mary Ann’s wounds was “one particularly large [cut] a little above the private parts of her body.” As happened with many other enslaved youngsters whose cases appeared before the local courts, Mary Ann’s owner was found not guilty.84 The cases involving Daniel and Mary Ann appeared before the courts in accordance with new laws that prohibited the mutilation and dismemberment of slaves. Perpetrators found guilty were fined or imprisoned according to the magistrate’s discretion. The Jamaican Assembly passed the 1781 law in response to the initial antislavery stirrings in England, and intended the law as a preemptive strike to silence critics. The law also communicated to the imperial government that West Indian planters could reform slavery internally.85 The fact that three years later James Ramsay published one of his most influential essays, in which he criticized the absence of statutes and law enforcement to restrain masters’ power, tell us the ineffectiveness of Jamaican planters’ defense strategies.86 The creation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1788 made clearer the failings of planters’ preemptive reform.87 In 1788, the Jamaican Assembly again passed sweeping legislation that offered more protection for the enslaved. Among its key provisions was the creation of a council of protection empowered to investigate cases of cruel treatment, mutilation, or dismemberment of slaves, and to prosecute the accused by filing a suit in the Supreme Court or Assize Court.88 The coincidence of new legislation with key moments in the British campaigns against slavery and the slave trade was the established pattern of change. Subsequent legislation in 1817 and 1826, for example, coincided with metropolitan campaigns for the registration of slaves’ births and deaths, and the formation of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery.89 The many not guilty or ignoramus verdicts issued in cases like those involving Daniel and Mary Ann betray the laws’ limitations. Law enforcement protected planters.

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New legislation, however, offered minimal protection. In 1817 the Kingston Vestry and Common Council fined Madam Richmond for maltreating an unnamed enslaved girl. Richmond paid a fine of £16 to the vestry, which covered Dr. Richard Chamberlain’s expenses for providing medical care to the girl.90 Again in August 1824 the council intervened to defend James, whose owner, Mary Ann Abbott, punished him by burning his hands.91 Because of the middling status of vestry members who composed the council of protection, the council hesitated to intervene in cases involving wealthy planters. Earl Bathurst made this observation in his investigation of court cases that appeared before Jamaican magistrates. According to Bathurst, despite legislative changes enslaved people had very little legal protection because magistrates either owned slaves or had close alliances with influential slave owners. In its 1824 Order in Council the British government prohibited magistrates from owning or managing slaves or sugar plantations.92 Council interventions, however, continued to involve children owned by women and colored proprietors. In reality, since the vast majority of Jamaican enslaved youths lived on large estates owned mostly by white men, the council’s reach was limited. The council of protection occasionally mediated in particularly cruel cases that involved wealthy proprietors. In November 1830, the St. George’s Council heard evidence in a case involving the cruel punishment of Robert Douglas, aged eleven, and John Shaw, twelve, of Golden Grove estate. Witness statements, including those of Shaw’s mother and the owner, doctor, and bookkeeper of Windsor Castle estate (a neighboring property), attested that the overseer, William Ogilvie Chapman, ordered the flogging of the boys because they were late for work on the mornings of 19 and 20 October 1830. Because of their tardiness on Tuesday morning, the first day, Douglas and Shaw received only a “horse whip [ping].” When the boys repeated their offense on Wednesday morning, Chapman ordered them flogged, confined, force-fed, and coerced into fighting one another. One of the boys’ mothers, Louisa Simms, testified that Chapman kept them fighting for several hours, until “near sun down.” Simms and John McKay, the doctor for Golden Grove, gave no details on the extensiveness of the boys’ injuries. Simms testified, however, that her son was so badly beaten he could not speak. Although Douglas and Shaw received no compensation or medical attention for their injuries, the councilors fined the estate’s owner and overseer £50 and £100 pounds respectively. When enforced, ameliorative legislation offered a small window of justice to abused youths and empowered

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their mothers with additional means of protecting them. Louisa Simms’s ability to testify on her son’s behalf was an important milestone for enslaved mothers who sought to protect their sons and daughters.93 Despite the legal rights that enslaved people received, instruments like the council of protection added a second layer to the ongoing contests between parents, youths, and planters for control over young people’s lives. Councils challenged community elders’ discipline. In separate cases in Port Royal in 1834, two enslaved women named Nell and Phyllis faced criminal prosecution for striking two young children. The court records gave no indication whether the “mitigating circumstance” that led to a reduced sentence for Phyllis was that she mothered the girl. Phyllis received ten days’ hard labor. Of course punishment remained subjective. In comparison to Phyllis’s almost two weeks imprisonment with hard labor, Nell’s mitigated sentence was two days confinement.94 In addition to the criminal prosecution of elders who reprimanded young people, enslaved youths were indicted for rough playing or pranks that resulted in injury to chattel or damage to plantation tools. Mule boys faced prosecution for stealing or hiding each other’s ropes and mule pads, as did children who struck each other during play. In 1830, the enslaved girl Grace spent fourteen days confined in the workhouse for striking another enslaved girl. In issuing its sentence, the court did not consider whether the girl was struck maliciously or accidentally through play.95 Ameliorative reforms for enslaved children’s discipline were not as extensive as reforms extended to parturient workers. Planters preferred confinement to whipping for childbearing women because it protected women’s bellies and their unborn children. Despite legal initiatives to limit corporal punishment and planters’ new reliance on enslaved children as replacement laborers, abuses continued. Corporal punishment for children in the pronatal era aimed to create “docile bodies.”96 Contemporaries stressed that “too much tenderness [was] unsuitable to [their] station” as slaves.97 Young people had to learn not just to complete their tasks properly but also respect for and obedience to white authority. Observers in the 1820s like Benjamin McMahon reported that overseers whipped young people who were not sufficiently deferential in their presence. Girls, in particular, received floggings for simply giggling in the overseers’ presence.98 The whip held symbolic and pedagogical value for terrorizing, schooling, and controlling enslaved youths, and enslavers wielded it to demonstrate white power and demand respect.

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Enslaved children living in white households were furthest from the reaches of pronatal reform. Infusing children’s literature with an antislavery message, British campaigners sought to influence and garner support and sympathies from Britain’s young readers.99 No similar efforts to reach white children in colonial households have been uncovered. Described as “little tyrants” by many contemporary observers, white children continued to be teachers for enslaved domestics. White children understood from a young age that their whiteness empowered them to exercise mastery over their black and colored playmates. The bodies and pride of enslaved youths suffered daily at the fists, hands, and feet of their white playfellows, who would “insult, strike and kick them” for sport or in demanding the respect their “whiteness” entitled them.100 Unconcerned about the investment costs or labor output of slaves, white children exercised wide latitude in exerting their power over unfree black children. Having to accord white children the same titles of respect, such as “miss” and “massa,” as they would confer upon adults, enslaved children had neither liberty nor familiarity to call their playmates by their first names. Enslaved children also learned early never to retaliate openly and visibly against white youngsters, even in jest. “Should the little black retaliate the ill usage she meets,” the planterhistorian John Stewart observed, “she is immediately chastised for her impertinence.”101 In 1831 when Mary Prince narrated her biography to antislavery activists, Prince recalled her experiences growing up as an enslaved girl with Miss Betsey, a white girl of a similar age as Prince. Miss Betsey did not see Prince as an equal companion. Rather, she kept Prince as a “pet” and led her about by the hand, calling Prince “her little nigger.” When Miss Betsey’s father decided to sell Prince, Miss Betsey protested his actions, and questioned his rights to dispose of her property. She exclaimed, “you are my slave, and he had no right to sell you . . . you belong to me.”102 Miss Betsey’s rage illuminates the racial and economic distance she created between herself and Prince. Prince as her little nigger and pet existed for her amusement, and Prince as the slave belonging to Betsey’s father exposed conflicts of legal property ownership and rights of sale.103 Even where affection and kindness developed between black and white youngsters, which Prince alluded to in her narrative, enslaved children remained subordinate to their white peers, who used demeaning titles and games to educate them about their unequal status. Children within private households were beyond the reaches of abolitionist reform.

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White households were as much scenes of terror as cane fields and sugar factories. Mistresses punished enslaved children and taught them that the mistresses had just as much authority over slaves as masters.104 From pinching young people’s cheeks to kicking and whipping them, mistresses instructed enslaved youths on the importance of obedience, respect for white women’s authority, and the need to perform their tasks well. Mary Prince gave a vivid example of the kind of power mistresses wielded and their roles in disciplining and punishing domestics. Prince recalled how her mistress taught her “to do all sorts of work; to wash and bake, pick cotton and wool, and wash floors, and cook. And she taught me (how can I forget it!) more things than these; she caused me to know the exact difference between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin, when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand. And there was scarcely any punishment more dreadful than the blows I received on my face and head from her hard heavy fists. She was a fearful woman and a savage mistress to her slaves.” Sharing the experiences of two younger boys living in the same household, Prince also recalled how her mistress “pinch[ed] their cheeks and arms in the most cruel manner” after she had grown weary of whipping them.105 Although enslaved children remained vulnerable to physical punishment, some received alternative discipline from masters who were reassessing old corrective techniques, particularly the whip, and their effectiveness in controlling the bodies and minds of the enslaved. When the planter Thomas Roughley cautioned plantation agents not to allow enslaved children too much “tenderness,” he was not completely in favor of using the horsewhip and cow skin to achieve this aim. Invoking the “language of penal reform” of the era, Roughley advocated confinement as an alternative to whipping.106 Each plantation should have “a small, strong building made in the centre between the hospital and mule-stable, of mason work for such a purpose, about twelve feet by nine, with durable stocks fitted up in it, and well secured with strong hinges, iron bars, staples, and locks. This little place being thus set apart, and separated from other buildings, will make confinement more irksome and dreaded, and perhaps cause less delinquency.”107 Planters believed that for a people who delighted in social and communal gathering, the “dread of isolation” made confinement an effective disciplinary tool.108 Enslaved children were taught from a young age that good behavior and hard work earned rewards, like spending time with their

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friends and families. Building a separate, isolated space for the sole purpose of confinement was vital for planters needing to abandon the practice of imprisoning enslaved people in hospitals, which Roughley explained was a “bad practice” because it exposed offenders to diseases and illness. Some planters avoided confining young people, the most vulnerable members of the population, in the same spaces as those suffering from contagious diseases.109 Despite the perceived greater benefits of confinement, Roughley and several others like William Taylor and John Williamson still viewed moderate whipping for enslaved children as important for teaching enslaved youths their servile position.110 For punishing children, they recommended a light “twig” plied by an “experienced” mother instead of the horsewhip or cow skin wielded by male drivers, as was the case when disciplining adult slaves. A light twig would achieve the same disciplinary effect without physically injuring young workers whose developing bodies were less able to withstand the cow skin and horsewhip.111 Enslaved youths also were disciplined by the court. Jamaican laws allowed planters to use the court of quarter sessions to hear complaints against the enslaved. Under imperial pressure, the state gradually assumed the role of objective arbiter of justice and limited the private power whites had to punish blacks arbitrarily.112 Behaviors for which enslaved people were held criminally liable emphasized perceived attacks against white power, and included “burglary, robbery, burning of houses, cane-pieces, rebellious conspiracies, compassing or imagining the death of any white person or persons.”113 Enslaved youths appeared in the court records on accusations of theft, running away, damaging private property, and threatening white people. Justices showed some consideration for young people’s age in issuing sentences, however. In 1824 when a magistrate found the enslaved girl Clarissa guilty of stealing clothes, he sentenced her to “oneweek confinement to hard labour.” Clarissa received a “light” sentence “in consideration of her [being] young.” Magistrates considered youth in separate cases involving two unnamed young girls belonging to Drs. Alexander and Russell. The magistrates found both girls guilty of throwing dirt, filth, and stones on houses (which likely belonged to white people). Again, because these girls were young, one was “admonished and discharged” while the other received one-day confinement to hard labor.114 Not all enslaved children received reduced sentences, however. Having found a boy named Jimmy guilty of offering “violent and threatening language” to Constable Myer Benjamin, a magistrate sentenced him to four

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weeks’ hard labor in the workhouse.115 The key deciding factor in Jimmy’s case was not age, but the nature of the crime. Magistrates viewed black children’s insult to a white person with greater prejudice than theft. Jimmy directly challenged white power. His sentence was comparable to adult sentences, typically thirty days’ to four months’ imprisonment with hard labor for petty crimes, like theft.116 Enslaved people, young and old, male and female, had equality as legal persons liable for criminal prosecution. The criminal prosecution of children, in particular, taught enslaved youths obedience to white authority. Abolitionists’ vision for preparing young people for freedom included teaching them obedience to the law and the court. Using the court to prosecute the enslaved, however, shows that Jamaican slaveholders acquiesced to the idea that the state was a more powerful agent in shoring up their interests. Beginning in the 1780s, Jamaica’s penal reform was marked by the building of workhouses to which enslaved people found guilty of crimes were sentenced. The increased number of workhouses across Jamaica made it harder for runaways, for example, to remain on the run as extensively as they did previously. Prior to the building of workhouses, individuals held fugitives until their owners located, identified, and claimed them. In the reform era, runaways were held in workhouses until their masters claimed them.117 Sending children to magistrates who sentenced them to confinement in the workhouse taught enslaved youths that they were subordinate not just to approximate white agents but to a wider network of law enforcement.

Contesting Planter Power As much as planters were determined to subordinate enslaved children, enslaved parents resolved to teach their sons and daughters about their increased rights conferred by abolitionism. The Jamaica agent Stephen Fuller attested that by reading colonial newspapers and gossiping, enslaved people kept informed of legislative changes and abolitionist debates. Fuller explained to Lord Hawkesbury in a private correspondence that “Your Lordship may depend on it, that during the time this business is agitated in parliament, the Slaves will be minutely acquainted with all the proceedings; many of the domestic Slaves, born in the Island, & brought up in the dwelling house, read . . . and instantly communicate any intelligence

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respecting themselves to their fellow Slaves employed in the field.”118 Enslaved parents understood that Jamaica’s consolidated slave laws empowered them to file suits against their enslavers, and taught their children to make use of their new legal rights.119 Parents brought their children with them to court. Families not only complained about ill treatment, they also laid claims based on new legal stipulations that enslaved workers were to receive food, clothing, medical care, and time off from plantation work to attend to their provision grounds and prepare meals. In 1825 James, Bob, Adam Primus, and Ebo James as well as their wives and children appeared before the Port Royal magistrate to complain about “being illtreated, by being punished with great severity.” Similarly, in January 1826 Felix and his wife, Sukey, and their children and grandchildren complained of the overseer’s “improper treatment and confinement,” and that the overseer had not allowed them to have provision “grounds sufficient for them to get food.” The magistrates dismissed the complainants, writing off their claims as “frivolous,” “groundless and fallacious.” While the magistrates “admonished” the mothers and children, the fathers received fifty lashes each “in the market place.”120 By bringing their cases before the magistrates, James, Bob, Adam Primus, Ebo James, and Felix were not only teaching their children how to enforce their legal rights. They were also claiming children as belonging to them, and articulating a concept of fatherhood that missionaries circulated in the island.121 Protesting the inadequacies of provision grounds, enslaved fathers assumed breadwinner roles for their families. By seeking justice for their dependents, enslaved fathers also took responsibility for protecting their wives and families. It is unclear whether these fathers shared residence with their wives and children, but fathers’ presence in the court records indicate that they established contact and bonds with their children and retained ties with their children’s mothers. Enslaved children were not fatherless as the slave inventories that primarily listed children with their mothers suggested. Although marginal to planter pronatal reforms, enslaved fathers were active in their families’ lives. Abolitionism complicated relations among Jamaican whites. Some magistrates likely viewed enslaved fathers as threats to planter power, and therefore were tougher in their sentences for men than women. Others who punished fathers more harshly than mothers acquiesced to imperial insistence on gender distinctions in punishment. British reformers insisted that corporal punishment undermined females’ reproductive ability and

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degraded women. In some cases magistrates sentenced fathers to flogging while mothers were confined.122 Appealing to magistrates and councilors allowed enslaved people to lay claims to rights given to them and their children. In an 1831 case involving a woman named Louisa, she rejected the Port Royal magistrate’s dismissal of her case and insisted that she would not “be satisfied until she had a day for her son.” Robert Laing, who accompanied Louisa, also threatened to run away if the court did not grant Louisa time off from work to attend to her son and to work their provision grounds. Robert and Louisa’s case was dismissed, and like countless others, the pair spent “one month [with] hard labour in the workhouse.”123 Enslaved parents and their children who appealed to magistrates were more likely to receive punishment than compensation. Why then did enslaved parents persist and continue to teach their children to appeal their cases before the courts, which were so clearly bastions of planter power? Enslaved people were aware of their new rights and insisted on having them enforced. Beginning in the parish of Hanover in June 1824, enslaved people plotted to overthrow their enslavers because they believed Jamaican authorities withheld freedom granted to them by William Wilberforce and the king. Reports from the Jamaican Assembly’s secret committee investigating the rebellion plot reveal that enslaved people understood the increased momentum of the antislavery campaigns. The committee that interrogated enslaved witnesses revealed that knowledge about the impending rebellion and Parliament’s emancipatory efforts spread through enslaved people’s gossip networks. Rebels also learned of developments in England and Jamaica by reading newspaper reports.124 Testimonies gathered from rebels after the 1831 Emancipation War further confirm that reading newspapers was an important part of how enslaved people organized their struggles against their enslavers. Robert Gardner, a captured resister confessed, “I declare upon my dying words, that I firmly believe that the negroes were free by order of the King and parliament. . . . I believe that we were freed, because I have read the newspapers, and heard other people read, that the people in England wished it, and were on our side. Samuel Sharp read a newspaper to me and to several others, in which it is said that the people in England met together to make us free, and that they said we must fight for it, and they would stand by and help us on.”125 From Gardner’s testimony it is unclear which newspapers he and his fellow rebels read. Jamaican, British, and American newspapers circulated

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on the island. Local newspapers like the Cornwall Chronicle and the Royal Gazette published the latest debates in the Lords and Commons on the slave trade and slavery question, and included reports and observations from individual colonies. From the 1790s reports on the debates pertaining to the abolition of the slave trade to the 1820s emancipation debates, Jamaican newspapers carried stories of the lack “of good accounts” transmitted from the island, and the overwhelming “evidence on the Table” of the “terror and alarm” of slavery. A Royal Gazette account reported the trepidation with which the “gentlemen” of Parliament received the stories of atrocities from the colonies: “They made such impression on all who heard them, that they could scarcely bear to be present when such horrid tales were told.”126 Understanding imperial scrutiny, enslaved people filed suits in order to tell their stories. Enslaved readers perhaps hoped that newspapers would publish their court cases and that their “friends” in England would read and use them to strengthen their freedom quests. Enslaved parents and children who brought their enslavers to court appropriated the judiciary system as a weapon to make their plight visible to British reformers who paid attention to developments in the colonies.

Contesting Planter and Parental Authority When planters separated young people from their families, boys and girls fled to reestablish contact. Planters frequently assumed that mothers “inveigled” and “harboured” fugitive youths. In a 1791 advertisement for the capture of the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Bristol, alias Dublin, his owner speculated that his mother beguiled and concealed him. Similar speculations surfaced in the case involving Richard, a Sambo boy, who ran away after sale separated him from his mother.127 Young fugitives had access to a network visible mainly to fellow enslaved people that made distances “vanish once [runaways] were in flight.” The capture of youths as far as one hundred miles away, almost the entire length of Jamaica, exposes the invisible hand that guided and protected runaways.128 While fugitive youths had supporters along the way, parents or family members did not always orchestrate escape plots. Young people claimed autonomy over their lives and ran away because of personal grievances. When the young Mary Prince failed to secure her master’s cow and did not prevent it from spilling milk, her “enraged” master beat her until she “was

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unable to stand, and till he himself was weary.” Aggrieved by his cruelty, Prince fled the property seeking solace from her mother, who lived nearby. Prince’s mother “was both grieved and glad to see [her]: grieved because [she] had been so ill used, and glad because she had not seen [her] for a long, long while.” Her mother nursed her, fed her, and kept her hidden “in a hole in the rocks near [by].” The reunion was short-lived, however. Prince’s father returned her to her owner, and begged the master “to forgive her for running away.” Prince’s father also pleaded with her owner to “be a kind master to her in the future.”129 Prince’s father’s decision to return Prince to her owner sheds light on the tension between mothers and fathers on how best to secure their children’s welfare. Prince learned a tough lesson of submission to avoid her master’s wrath. Fathers also asserted their paternal authority and claims to fatherhood by appealing to owners on their children’s behalf. Although they were owned by different persons, living in close proximity created a space for Prince’s father to make decisions about his family. Importantly, Prince’s father might have returned her to neutralize perceived threats his parental authority posed to her master’s authority. By returning Prince, her father perhaps prevented future retaliation against Prince, her mother, and himself. Fearing daily truancy and parents’ interference in the master-slave relationship, Prince’s owner had the power to sell her to buyers who lived farther away from her mother and father. Prince realized that parents had limited power to protect their sons and daughters. Sadly, Prince lamented, “mothers could only weep and mourn for their children, they could not save them from cruel masters—from the whip, the rope, and the cow-skin.”130 Recognizing the limits of their parents’ protective power and driven by their own grievances, enslaved youths orchestrated their own rebellion. Young people ran away from home and did not always seek refuge from or reunion with relatives or parents. In 1791, the “Creole Negro Woman-Girl . . . DINAH” forged a work ticket and fled. The womengirls (between ages twelve to eighteen) Fanny and Bessy, who spoke “very good English,” ran away to the local town and passed themselves as free people. Witnesses claimed to have seen Fanny hanging around the docks, implicitly with young mariners, sporting a “Sailor’s Jacket.”131 While some youths seized their destiny by fleeing from parental and planter authority, others attacked symbols of their power by setting fire and throwing stones, filth, and dirt on workshops, homes, and plantation buildings, and using violent, threatening, and indecent language toward adults.132

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The oppressive realities of slavery naturally lead to conclusions that young people who disturbed the peace or ran away were contesting their enslavers’ tyrannical power and their parents’ authority. Such explanations do not sufficiently capture the complexities of growing up in a world where young people did not own their persons, and parents could scarcely protect their children. Enslaved youths pelted stones and filth at the symbols of white power to vent their frustration, resist their captivity, and amuse themselves. When women-girls like Fanny ran away and cozied up to sailors, were they acting out against community, parental, and planter authority, were they cultivating social connections independent of their families, or were they expressing sexual curiosities about young men? The lack of testimony from these young actors means that historians can only speculate on children’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations and what childhood under slavery meant from their perspective. Slave childhood was a deeply contested area because those who claimed authority over the lives and bodies of young people made divergent claims about their future roles. Abolitionists saw them as malleable beings who could become subject-citizens. Imperial resolutions conferred greater protections for enslaved children and limited the raw power enslavers claimed over the enslaved. As the Jamaican Assembly debated and passed imperially mandated legislation that conferred legal recognition of marriages between enslaved men and women, safeguarded families from separation, and protected girls from sexual abuse, the Assembly accorded enslaved people rights that were in line with the status of free subjects. Individual planters, and to a lesser degree law enforcers, however, denied enslaved people’s rights and exercised brute force over enslaved children to teach them their subordinate status. Punishing enslaved youths and systematically placing them into labor roles according to how their bodies matured physically and sexually were especially important to prepare children for their continued servile role in Jamaica. Enslaved parents and children were well aware of the debates that raged over their bodies and fought to define freedom on their own terms. They claimed autonomy over their lives by filing legal suits, running away, and attacking symbols of white power.

Conclusion: Transforming Slavery

Linking biological reproduction to the abolition of slavery and colonial reform provoked a clash of interests among abolitionists, planters, governments, doctors, and enslaved people. Inherent within these conflicts were divergent ideas about how the bodies of female slaves should function, the purpose their reproductive ability should serve, and how their bodies and the bodies of their children should be cared for, punished, and worked. Abolitionists advocated changing the material and moral conditions of slavery and gendered division of labor to prepare enslaved women and children for their new roles as mothers, wives, and free people. Plantation owners and managers opposed abolition and were primarily interested in keeping the plantations productive using servile laborers. But the end of the slave trade and the new importance abolitionism gave to biological reproduction made it impossible for planters to continue neglecting mother-workers and enslaved children. Reforming plantation culture according to capital needs and white power, planters adjusted slave life to facilitate the welfare of mothers and children. British physicians who aided local reform had migrated to Jamaica hoping to professionalize health care and establish themselves as authorities on colonial medicine. They clashed with lay healers and midwives, who throughout the 1600s and 1700s treated black and white, enslaved and free patients and insisted on retaining a monopoly on plantation health and healing. Enslaved mothers and community caregivers nurtured and raised children according to their own desires and in response to their enslavement. The convergence of interest in women’s childbearing capacities and child-rearing practices transformed enslaved people’s intimate relations, resistance, labor, and culture, and altered power relations between enslaver and enslaved. Enslaved women’s reproductive bodies were vital to the reform project abolitionists formulated. Because abolitionists viewed the body as an entity

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subjected to habits, they argued that the inability of female slaves to reproduce naturally resulted from the hardships of slavery. Enslaved women were punished and sexually abused, and performed hard and degrading work. They received inadequate food and housing, and were neglected during illness and pregnancy. Enslaved mothers faced separation from their families and communities. The harsh realities of slavery, abolitionist stressed, reduced enslaved women’s fertility. Abolitionists also believed that the way the body functioned depended on the individual and his or her environment. Enslavers of women, they argued, were key agents in producing unnatural bodies that did not reproduce. From Africans’ capture and enslavement on the coast of West Africa to their transportation and resale in the West Indies, women were separated from their children, husbands, and loved ones. The disease-laden and filthy environment in which enslaved Africans were transported and were forced to live and work meant that they had more dead children and relatives than living ones. To promote reproduction among enslaved women abolitionists insisted on keeping slave families intact, and exempting childbearing women from field work and corporal punishment. Enslaved people should receive Christian teaching and be encouraged to form monogamous Christian marriages. Marriage and motherhood became important markers of the feminine identity enslaved women were expected to embody in a free Jamaica. By concentrating on slavery’s role in corrupting captive Africans, the debates over abolitionism elevated African-descended women’s status. To make the case that Africans and their descendants were capable of reform and that women would not reproduce their vices in their children, abolitionists rejected arguments of blacks’ inherent inferiority. Black vices, abolitionists insisted, were environmentally induced. Concluding that enslaved women could not reproduce due to the arduous labor and brutal punishment to which they were subjected also challenged seventeenth- and eighteenth-century justification of slavery that black women were hardy and could simultaneously work in the fields and bear children without respite or special care. Black bodies contrasted with frail white bodies that made childbirth difficult and dangerous for white women. In the writings of abolitionists who argued that field work endangered black women’s reproductivity, enslaved women received a degree of consideration previously reserved for colonial and elite white women. Yet the limitations abolitionists placed on enslaved women socializing their children inscribed

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new differences between black and white womanhood. White mothers continued to nurture and socialize their children, while black mothers who could pass on their vices to their children were prohibited from raising them. Children and childhood assumed new importance to Jamaica’s politics and economy. Previously neglected by planters who saw them as precarious, long-term investments because of high morbidity and mortality rates, children assumed central roles in pronatal reforms. On the plantations, children were a semiprotected group that received special consideration under the law and in work assignment. Because planters perceived childhood as a period of innocence, they formulated plans to introduce young people to plantation work gradually. Protecting children from demanding work prevented their premature death. Age progression determined young people’s eligibility for labor and promotion. Age therefore acquired a new sense of importance to the plantation economies, and became an important factor in the division of labor. Preparing blacks for freedom expanded class conflicts among whites. Local legislators protested and attempted to block the activities of nonconformist missionaries for fear that they would turn enslaved people against masters. Visitors to and temporary residents of Jamaica distanced themselves from local whites whom they perceived as prone to material excess and financial ineptitude. Colonial whites and migrant whites also held divergent approaches to body care. Newcomers emphasized hot baths and cold baths, professional medicine over lay healing, and confinement over corporal punishment. Professional medicine marked advancements in body discipline and body care in the metropole, which reformers hoped would supplant outdated West Indian methods. Implementing British reforms in Jamaica was uneven because reformers were up against a colonial government and planter class that believed that cruel punishment best cultivated docile bodies. Planters protested the imperial government’s efforts to remove the whips from the fields and to prohibit corporal punishment for women. The whip, planters insisted, was important for maintaining worker productivity, and for teaching enslaved youngsters obedience and respect for white authority. Yet the new importance of mothers and children to the plantations’ future required modifications to flogging. To protect them, mothers’ bellies were buried, and children were flogged with twigs instead of the cow skin and horsewhip. Some planters recognized the limits of corporal punishment, and adopted

252 Conclusion

alternatives. They alternated between confinement and financial and material rewards to coax women to reproduce and to teach children obedience and hard work. The growing presence of white physicians in Jamaica also altered the relationship between whites. Although hired by planters, physicians in Jamaica did not necessarily share planters’ goals of reproducing a servile labor force. Doctors challenged old ideas that planters held about cold baths and black women’s animal-like strength. They hoped to extend medical advances from home to the colony, build reputations for themselves, and earn a living. Through their lobbying of the local government to shift medical care away from plantation personnel and place it under academically trained physicians, doctors aimed to establish a new hierarchy in medical care that elevated professional medicine and suppressed folk healing. The hiring of professional doctors created alternative medical practices that competed with those of black lay healers. White physicians, however, did not displace folk healing because many enslaved people distrusted white medicine and viewed doctors as planters’ allies. Although white doctors had a poor healing record, their treatment rivaled black medicine and some enslaved mothers, desperate to keep their children healthy and alive, admitted themselves to plantation hospitals. Lay healers and midwives lost some of the authority and autonomy they previously held over healing and childbirth. White doctors questioned lay healing methods. Even where there were recognizable values in lay healers’ prescriptions, white practitioners disputed their efficacy because of the unscientific manner in which medicines were prepared and dispensed. White doctors’ reputation as quacks and the exorbitant costs associated with their treatment, however, meant that the plantations continued to rely on black healers and midwives. All the same, black mothers and midwives became easy targets in the blame game planters engaged in to explain why their slave populations failed. Although pronatal reforms changed enslaved women’s experiences of slavery, pronatalism did not affect all female slaves evenly. The importance of women and girls to planters’ reproductive agenda fluctuated according to age and ethnicity. Planters viewed females below age twenty-five as most fertile, but viewed females less than twelve years old as more susceptible to sexual abuse that could mar their reproductive ability. Considered the most fertile of all Africans imported via the slave trade, Ebo women were singled out for close inspection by buyers interested in their childbearing histories. Fertile women were also more susceptible to planter interference in their

Conclusion 253

intimate lives. In planters’ new ranking order, determined not just by sex but also by age, ethnicity, and perceived reproductive ability, childbearing women emerged as a semiprotected working group. Mothers were singled out for rewards and exemptions from which nonreproductive women were excluded. Work exemptions and rewards improved the material conditions of parturient women’s lives, but also subjected them to new exploitation and to new limitations of their sexual and bodily freedoms. The intimate and working lives of enslaved women and children were further transformed by government interventions. The imperial and local governments redrew the concept of enslaved people’s rights. The prohibition of family separation by sale, the criminalization of rape, and the creation of a council of protection to which slaves could bring legal claims against their masters safeguarded enslaved girls’ sexuality in addition to marriages and families among the enslaved. Changes in lives of enslaved women and children were not as far-reaching as the reform legislation and resolutions promised, however. The imperial and local governments were embroiled in conflicts because they could not agree on reforms. Planters opposed reforms that undercut their power, while Parliament disallowed laws that paid only lip service to the goal of reform. Because pronatalism created new threats to enslaved people’s families, it politicized women’s efforts to protect their children. In addition to ongoing threats of sale, mothers were separated from their infants to facilitate early weaning and prevent distractions while they worked. Enslaved people resorted to common techniques like running away, and created new strategies that extended time spent with their children. Unlike the period from the late 1600s to 1780s, when planters did not place significant value on enslaved children because the slave trade provided replacements, abolitionism and the slave trading ban increased enslaved children’s importance to planters. Enslaved mothers understood the importance of their children to planters, and took extreme measures, including infanticide, to prevent separation and premature weaning. The transformations pronatalism ushered in expanded the meanings of women’s maternal practices and motherhood. Motherhood and maternity assumed greater political significance when abolitionists appropriated biological reproduction as a pathway to ending slavery and planters appropriated it as a means of extending slavery. Throughout the seventeenth century and eighteenth century when planters neglected enslaved mothers and ignored women’s childbearing and child-rearing practices, enslaved

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caregivers had relative autonomy to cultivate care networks and customs that fulfilled their social, material, and medical needs. Enslaved women’s childbearing customs and networks contested the idea that enslaved people were mere chattel, disconnected from anything and anyone that gave their lives social meaning and significance. Late eighteenth-century interest in boosting slave population growth that brought impositions on enslaved people’s reproductive body work amplified the political significance of women’s childbearing practices. Enslaved women preserved lay healers’ authority over reproductive health by refusing to give birth under the care of white physicians and in spaces stipulated by masters. Women’s insistence on using midwives from their communities protected community childbearing practices. The use of contraceptives and the practices of abortion and infanticide, albeit obscured within the archives, conveyed women’s rejection of motherhood in addition to their refusal to bear children to extend the proprietary interests of their enslavers. In an age when abolitionists depicted bearing children as natural and fated enslaved women to become mothers when freed, enslaved women’s rejection of motherhood communicated a definition of femininity in which becoming mothers was not inevitable. The struggle to determine motherhood on women’s terms and their efforts to shape the nature of child care constituted maternal resistance. Reform legislation and abolitionist and planter concern over reproductive loss created new outlets for enslaved people’s resistance and bargaining. Women and other community members complained to magistrates about abuse and overwork, and in some cases alleged that ill treatment caused miscarriage. Women manipulated their masters’ anxieties about birthrates and reported their pregnancies to gain respite from work and to receive financial and material rewards. Mothers and caregivers also used to their advantage the high rate of infant mortality to conceal infanticide and extend time spent with their children. Planters and doctors dismissed infanticide because they interpreted it through their own moral lens. Infanticide was a political statement against slavery and motherhood, and along with the less morally judged practices of abortion and contraceptive use, enslaved women used it to control their bodies and lives. The period between the 1780s and 1834 transformed the lives of the enslaved and the culture of slavery. Planters reformed punishment, work, and health practices to facilitate bearing and raising children. Yet Jamaican planters and the government did not simply abandon their old methods of

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coercing labor and neglecting enslaved women and children to adopt pronatal reforms. Planters purchased more females and young captives, adjusted how they deployed mother-workers and children to the fields, punished them, and provided them with medical care, food, and clothes according to estate labor needs, production cycles, and solvency. The pronatal policies and practices of abolitionists, planters, and the imperial and local governments had mixed results for the enslaved. Enslaved people became subjected to British middle-class gendered expectations and experienced limitations on their freedoms to form sexual partnerships and to determine childbearing and child-rearing practices. Pronatal reforms, however, brought much-needed relief from demanding, degrading, and dangerous work; while mitigated punishment for mother-workers boosted the survival chances of enslaved infants and children, and conferred legal rights upon the enslaved. Enslaved people took advantage of these reforms and their associated debates to protect themselves and their children from exploitation and abuse. Pronatalism simultaneously enhanced and undermined the authority and autonomy enslaved women had over their bodies, sexuality, families, and communities. These struggles for the control of biological reproduction reveal the significance of childbearing to the economic and political entanglements of slavery and abolition, and enslaved people’s resistance and social life.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Great Britain Central Criminal Court, The Trial of Captain John Kimber, for the Murder of Two Female Negro Slaves, on Board the Recovery, African Slave Ship: Tried at the Admiralty Sessions, Held at the Old Baily, the 7th of June, 1792 (London: C. Stalker, 1792), 2–7. 2. Great Britain Parliament, The Debate on a Motion for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, in the House of Commons on Monday the Second of April, 1792 (London: W. Woodfall, 1792), 26–27; Norfolk Chronicle, 7 April 1792; Public Advertiser, 3 April 1792; St. James’s Chronicle or British Evening Post, 31 March–3 April 1792; Evening Mail, 2 April–4 April 1792; General Evening Post, 3 April–5 April 1792; London Chronicle, 31 March–3 April 1792; Central Criminal Court, Two Female Negro Slaves. 3. Great Britain Parliament, Debate on a Motion, 26–27. 4. Central Criminal Court, Two Female Negro Slaves, 4; Great Britain Central Criminal Court, The Trial of Captain John Kimber, for the Supposed Murder of an African Girl: At the Admiralty Sessions, before the Hon. Sir James Marriot . . . and Sir William Ashurst . . . on Thursday, June 7, 1792 : Of which He was most Honourably Acquitted, and the Two Evidences for the Prosecution Committed to Newgate to Take to their Trials for Wilful and Corrupt Perjury (London: William Lane, 1792), 11. For similar questions raised about Wilberforce’s decision to conceal the doctor’s diagnosis that the girl suffered from gonorrhea, see Srividhya Swaminathan, “Reporting Atrocities: A Comparison of the Zong and the Trial of Captain John Kimber,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 4 (2010): 483–99. 5. London Chronicle, 21 April-24 April 1792; Morning Chronicle, 24 April 1792. 6. Lucille Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica: 1655–1844 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006); Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the New World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Verene Shepherd, “Gender and Representation in European Accounts in Pre-Emancipation Jamaica,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, 702–11 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000). 7. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 61–63. 8. Three important works on the body have guided this work. I have thought a lot about Susan Bordo’s question “Is pregnancy merely a cultural construction, capable of being shaped

258 Notes to Pages 6–7 into multitudinous social forms? Or does the unique configuration of embodiment presented in pregnancy—the having of an other within oneself, simultaneously both part of oneself and separate from one self—constitute a distinctively female epistemological and ethical resource?” See Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 36; Kathleen Brown’s book Foul Bodies has offered tremendous guidance on the meaning of a body approach to history; and Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom has been illustrative of how to study slavery through bodily experiences. See Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009); Camp, Closer to Freedom. For other influential scholarship that centers on the body, particularly in matters pertaining to reproduction, see Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth Century Britons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Deirdre Cooper Owens, “ ‘Courageous Negro Servitors’ and Laboring Irish Bodies: An Examination of Antebellum-Era Modern American Gynecology” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008); Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 9. On the use of the phrase “reproductive interventions,” see Thomas, Politics of the Womb, 3; Warwick Anderson, “States of Hygiene: Race ‘Improvement’ and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and the Colonial Philippines,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 94–115 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 108. 10. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 1–5. 11. It is important to note that some West Indian planter reforms predated abolitionism. Concern for efficiency and productivity had propelled some planters to experiment with mechanized agriculture for example. John R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Barry Higman, Plantation Jamaica 1750–1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005). 12. Bridget Brereton, “Searching for the Invisible Woman,” Slavery and Abolition 13, no. 2 (1992): 86–96; Mair, Women in Jamaica; Beckles, Natural Rebels; Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World; Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society; Shepherd, “Gender and Representation.” 13. Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1999); Schwartz, Birthing a Slave; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); J. Morgan, Laboring Women; Camp, Closer to Freedom; Cooper Owens, Courageous Negro Servitors. 14. Some influential works include Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–16; Cody, Birthing the Nation, 1–30; Thomas, Politics of the Womb; David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State, Medicine, and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Anderson, “States of Hygiene”; Warwick Anderson, Colonial

Notes to Pages 11–15 259 Pathologies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Brown, Foul Bodies; Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 1–22 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 1–22; Valeria Finucci, introduction to Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, ed. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, 1–13 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 124–25; Camila Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 15. Sowande’ Mustakeem, “ ‘I’ve Never Seen Such a Sickly Ship’: Diet, Disease and Mortality in Eighteenth Century Atlantic Slaving Voyages,” Journal of African American History 93, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 474–96; Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 16. For a more detailed discussion of shipboard conditions and mortality and morbidity rates of the transatlantic slave trade, see Audra Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775–1807 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 8–24. 17. John F. Campbell, “Managing Human Resources on a Jamaican Sugar Estate, 1750– 1834” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1997), 50–52, 53, 261; Richard Follet, “Heat, Sex, and Sugar: Childbearing in the Slave Quarters,” Journal of Family History 67, no. 4 (2003): 510–39; Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 203–4; Verene Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2009), 125; Kenneth Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, ca. 1776–1834,” History 91, no. 302 (2006): 231–53; Diana Paton, “Enslaved Women Before and After 1807,” History in Focus 12 (2007) http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Slavery/articles/paton.html. 18. Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 191–92; Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 15–17. 19. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 191–93. 20. Great Britain House of Commons Sessional Papers, (hereinafter cited as GB.HOC.SP)1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98, Rutgers University Library. 21. For details on parliamentary investigative committees, see Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969), 76. 22. On the phases of amelioration, abolitionism, and slavery, see William A. Green, “Was Emancipation a Success? The Abolitionist Perspective,” in Abolition and Its Aftermath: Historical Context, 1790–1916, ed. David Richardson, 183–202 (London: Frank Cass, 1985); William Law Mathison, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823–1838 (New York: Octagon Books, 1967); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); Heather Cateau, “Management and the Sugar Industry in the British West Indies, 1750–1810” (PhD diss., University of the West Indies, 1994); Dave St. Aubyn Gosse, “The Abolition of the Slave Trade and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1800–1838” (PhD diss., Howard University, 2003); David Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ward, British West Indian

260 Notes to Pages 16–19 Slavery; Elsa V. Goveia, Amelioration and Emancipation (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1977). Consolidated Slave Act 1788, Acts of Assembly passed in the Island of Jamaica (hereinafter cited as Acts of Assembly) 1760–92, Jamaica Government Archives (hereinafter cited as JGA). 23. See Goveia, Amelioration and Emancipation, 7. For scholars who have arrived at similar conclusions in discussing legislative changes, see Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 76–79; Mair, Women in Jamaica, 229–30.

Chapter 1 1. Slavery was troubling for many English men and women for various reasons, ranging from evangelicalism and Christian theology to economic theory and an ethic of benevolence. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford University Press, 1988), 40–83, 386–400; Christopher Brown, “Empire Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 273–306; Jonathan Earle, “The Making of the North’s ‘Stark Mad Abolitionists’: Anti-Slavery Conversion in the United States, 1824–1854,” Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 3 (2004): 59–75. 2. Concern for the slaving system’s contribution to British wealth and how abolition and emancipation would affect Britain have led many scholars to investigate Parliament’s willingness to end the slave trade when it did, and how significant economic factors vis-a`-vis altruism were in such decision making. For discussions and debates, particularly in response to Eric Williams’s 1944 argument that economic decline propelled Britain’s decision to end the slave trade, see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964); Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977). For a historiographical discussion of the debate sparked by Williams’s thesis, see Roger Anstey, “Capitalism and Slavery: A Critique,” Economic History Review 21, no. 2 (August 1968): 307–20; Walter E. Minchinton, “Williams and Drescher: Abolition and Emancipation,” Slavery and Abolition 4, no. 2 (1983): 81–105; Selwyn Carrington, “The State of the Debate on the Role of Capitalism in the Ending of the Slave System,” Journal of Caribbean History 22, no. 1 (December 1988): 20–41; Heather Cateau and Selwyn H. H. Carrington, Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams—a Reassessment of the Man and His Work (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Emma Christopher, “Sign Posts After the Bicentenary: The Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Recent History,” History Today 60, no. 10 (2010): 54. For scholars rejecting the economic arguments for abolition, see Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 3. For the quote “moral absolutism,” see Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 210. Scholars have offered many explanations why an immediate emancipation was untenable. For objections to the abolition of slavery on grounds of violation of Englishmen’s property rights, see Brown, “Empire Without Slaves”; Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 84–89. For discussions and debates on the importance of slavery to Britain’s wealth and industrial and imperial expansion, see Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Drescher, Econocide; Eltis, Economic Growth; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (New York: Verso, 1988), 71; Joseph

Notes to Pages 19–26 261 E. Inikori, “Slavery and the Rise of Capitalism,” in Slavery, Freedom and Gender: The Dynamics of Caribbean Society, ed. Patrick Bryan, Carl Campbell, Barry Higman, and Brian L. Moore, 3–39 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2003). 4. Abolitionists offered various visions of how to maintain the success of the colonies without slavery. See Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 191; Philip Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 4; Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833–1870 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972); Green, “Was British Emancipation a Success?”; Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 47–49; Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 111–18; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 244–47. 5. James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London: James Phillips, 1784), 167–69; Folarin O. Shyllon, James Ramsay: The Unknown Abolitionist (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1977). 6. Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 179; Anstey, Atlantic Slave, 273–82. 7. James Ramsay, Objections to the Abolition of the Slave Trade, with Answers to which are Prefixed, Strictures on a Late Publication, Intitled, “Considerations on the Emancipation of Negroes, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (London: J. Phillips, 1788), 13. 8. Ibid., 13. 9. William Wilberforce, A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire (London: Luke Hansard and Sons, 1807), 101; Jennifer Morgan, “Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulders: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167–92. 10. Thomas Cooper, Letters on the Slave Trade (Manchester: C. Wheeler, 1787), 72–73. For Cooper’s biography and his writings, see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor Versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39–40. 11. Ramsay, Objections, 72–73. 12. Wilberforce, Abolition of the Slave Trade, 105. 13. For an insightful discussion on the construction of the categories blacks and slaves, see J. Morgan, “Over Their Shoulders.” 14. For the idea of abolitionist ambivalence on whether it was slavery or Africans’ own inherent backwardness that accounted for enslaved people’s “perceived divergence from the normative rules of abolitionist morality,” see Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, “Introduction: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World eds. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, 1–34 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 3; Hall, Civilising Subjects, 22. 15. Ramsay, Objections, 38. 16. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 88–89. 17. Wilberforce, Abolition of the Slave Trade, 117–23. 18. Ibid., 109. 19. Great Britain Parliament, Debate on a Motion, 43–44; Richard Sheridan, “Slave Demography in the British West Indies and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” in The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa and the Americas, ed. David Eltis and James Walvin, 259–86 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).

262 Notes to Pages 26–30 20. Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 2 (1991): 204–34. 21. Ruth H. Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815,” Feminist Studies 4, no. 2 (1978): 100–126; Perry, “Colonizing the Breast,” 204–34; Cody, Birthing the Nation, 269–71. 22. An Act for Laying a Duty on all Negroe Slaves that shall be imported into this Island from the Coast of Africa who shall be above a certain Age, and for regulating the manner of ascertaining such Age, Acts of Assembly 1760–92, JGA. 23. Abolitionists’ proposed reforms to ameliorate the conditions of the enslaved took various forms, ranging from plans to improve women’s condition to improving the overall slave population. See Barry Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 303–7; Goveia, Amelioration and Emancipation; Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 190–232; Barbara Bush, “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, 193–217 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Selwyn Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 188–220; Heather Cateau, “Things Fall Apart: Abolition, the Slave Trade and Enslavement,” Arts Journal 3, nos. 1–2 (2007): 105–20. 24. Wilberforce, Abolition of the Slave Trade, 248–49. 25. Ibid., 253. 26. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 90–91. 27. For discussions of the impact of sugar cultivation and the overall material conditions of slavery that had negative consequences for enslaved women’s fecundity and infant survival, see Bush, “Hard Labor”; Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World; Richard Follett, “Heat, Pregnancy and Childbearing in the Slave Quarters,” Journal of Family History 28, (2003): 510–38; K. Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction.” 28. An important part of taking away arbitrary power whites had over blacks was in implementing a penal system, whereby criminal prosecution and punishment were not in the hands of private citizens but executed by the state. For discussion of the importance of penal reforms and the larger point of transferring private power to state power as an important part of the emancipation process, see Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 29. Herbert Klein and Stanley Engerman note an average lactation period of twentyfour months, whereas Higman asserts a customary eighteen-month breastfeeding period. See Herbert Klein and Stanley Engerman, “Fertility Differentials Between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications,” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1978): 357–74; Barry Higman, “The Slave Family and Household in the British West Indies, 1800–1834,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6, no. 2 (1975): 261–87. 30. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 111. 31. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 426–30. For changing discourses on breastfeeding in the eighteenth

Notes to Pages 31–36 263 century, particularly on the need for women to mother their children in preparing them to become healthy citizens, see Perry, Colonizing the Breast, 204–34. See also Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5, no. 1 (1978): 9–66. 32. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 151, 66, 269. 33. For discussion of the Lockean idea of the scripted child, see Patrick J. Ryan, “How New Is the ‘New’ Social Study of Childhood? The Myth of the Paradigm Shift,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, no. 4 (2008): 553–76. For Locke’s original text, see John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 34. Locke, Thoughts, 55. 35. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 269. 36. On the importance of missionaries to abolitionists’ agenda for successful emancipation, see Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Africana, 1975), 42–47; Green, Was Emancipation a Success? 182–202; Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 65–101; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 111; Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 252–53; Emilia Viotti Da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 87–125; Duncan C. Rice, “The Missionary Context of the British Anti-Slavery Movement,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. James Walvin, 150–64 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); David Eltis, “Perceptions of Society After Slavery,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. James Walvin, 195–204 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). 37. On parent-child relationships in Jamaican slavery, see Audra Abbe Diptee, “Imperial Idea, Colonial Realities: Enslaved Children in Jamaica 1775–1834,” in Children in Colonial America, ed. James Alan Marten, 48–60 (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 38. Maurice Morgan, A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies (London: William Griffin, 1772), 13, 19–20. 39. Ibid., 19–20. 40. Ibid., 20. 41. For the quotation and overview of Morgan’s career in imperial government, including his policies under various administrations. See Brown, Moral Capital, 214, 214–17. 42. For the quotations and a discussion of Morgan’s work and influence, see Ibid, 231. 43. Cooper, Letters, iii–iv. 44. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 103. 45. Ramsay, Objections, 8. 46. Ibid., 51. 47. Economic concerns were vital in shaping abolitionist strategies in the 1780s. Seymour Drescher’s work has emphasized the huge effect the estimated profitability of slavery and the slave trade had in putting the brakes on a full-blown attack on slavery in 1788. Abolitionists strategy for slavery’s reforms resulted from concerns that the continued profitability of slavery would make any proposal for immediate freedom untenable and without support. For fuller discussion, see Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 34–53. 48. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 118. 49. Ramsay, Objections, 8. 50. Ibid., 51–52.

264 Notes to Pages 36–40 51. Wilberforce, Abolition of the Slave Trade, 247, 259–63. 52. Juanita de Barros picks up on this theme for the post slavery period, and argues quite convincingly for the continued links between civilization, reproduction, and citizenship. See Juanita De Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics After Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 53. For a good discussion of the question of citizenship for the formerly enslaved and the varying steps toward emancipation as experiments in the possibility of black citizenship, see Thomas Holt, “The Essence of the Contract: The Articulation of Race, Gender, and Political Economy in British Emancipation Policy, 1838–1866,” in Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, ed. Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott, 33–60 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 309; Drescher, Mighty Experiment; Seymour Drescher, “The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of European Scientific Racism,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas and Europe, ed. J. E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, 73–87 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992); Hall, Civilising Subjects, 71–73, 115; Patrick Bryan, Jamaican People, 1880–1902: Race, Class, and Social Control (London: MacMillan Caribbean, 1991), 14–15; Brian L. Moore and Michelle Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 4. For a discussion of the role of reproductive politics in assessing slaves and former slaves’ readiness for citizenship and civilization, see De Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean, 16–39. 54. Morgan, Plan, 6–8. 55. For larger arguments on proslavery advocates’ use of racial justification for extending the Atlantic slaving system and abolitionist avoidance of the racial argument, see Holt, Problem of Freedom, 50; Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 73–81. 56. For Hume’s biography and some of his arguments, see Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 74–75; Brown, Moral Capital, 158–59, 302–3. 57. Morgan, Plan, 5. 58. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 156. 59. Ibid., 284. 60. Hall, Civilising Subjects, 93; Diana Paton, “Decency, Dependence and the Lash: Gender and the British Debate over Slave Emancipation, 1830–1834,” Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (1996): 162–84; Melanie Newton, “ ‘New Ideas of Correctness’: Gender, Amelioration and Emancipation in Barbados, 1810s-1850s,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 3 (2000): 94–124. 61. Ramsay, Objections, 8. 62. Ibid., 228. On the construction of children as blameless, blank slates, see John C. Sommerville, “Bibliographic Note: Toward a History of Childhood and Youth,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no. 2 (1972): 439–47. 63. Phillip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 150; Duncan C. Rice, “Enlightenment, Evangelicalism, and Economics: An Interpretation of the Drive Towards Emancipation in the British West Indies,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 510–35. 64. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 88–89.

Notes to Pages 40–46 265 65. Ramsay, Objections, 23. 66. Ibid., 49. 67. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 288. 68. Katrina Honeyman, Women, Gender, and Industrialisation in England, 1700–1870 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 25–28; see also Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 222–25; Lynn Hunt and Catherine Hall, “The Sweet Delights of Home” in A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 4, 47–94 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 65–66. 69. Ramsay, Objections, 269; Morgan, Plan, 27.

Chapter 2 Sections of this chapter were first published in Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 3 (2011): 39–62. Copyright 䉷 2011 Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. Simon Taylor was not only an attorney for several Jamaican estates, he was also a proprietor in his own right. For full details on Simon Taylor’s extensive attorneyship and proprietorship, see Richard Sheridan, “Simon Taylor, Sugar Tycoon of Jamaica, 1740–1813,” Journal of Agricultural History 45, no. 4 (1971): 285–96. 2. Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedekne, 6 September 1789, Vanneck (Arcedekne) Papers, (hereinafter cited as Vanneck Papers), Cambridge University Library, Cambridge. 3. For a good discussion of the system of absentee proprietorship, see Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 17–40. 4. Taylor to Arcedekne, 23 July 1770, Vanneck Papers. 5. Despite the fact that slaveholders preferred buying males, they bought women in large numbers. A number of factors determined the sex of captive Africans bought for the plantations, including composition of supply, timing of purchase, and availability of credit. For discussions of these and other factors, see David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 110–42; Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 109–12; Ryden, West Indian Slavery, 133–56; Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica, 50–72. 6. William Beckford, Remarks upon the Situation of Negroes in Jamaica, Impartially made from a Local Experience of nearly Thirteen Years in that Island (London: T. and J. Egerton, 1788), 13. For biographic details on William Beckford’s life, see Anne Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 9, 23, 39, 63; Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 23. 7. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence . . . to Consider the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 635–45. 8. Ibid. 9. Few exceptions were evident. For example, Joseph Barham opted to discontinue purchasing new recruits from Africa while experimenting with a reproductive plan on his property. Others introduced ameliorative policies as experiments to reduce production cost. For discussion of Barham’s practices, see Richard S. Dunn, “ ‘Dreadful Idlers’ in the Cane Fields:

266 Notes to Pages 47–52 The Slave Labor Pattern on a Jamaican Sugar Estate, 1762–1831,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 4 (1987): 795–822. For more general amelioration practices, see Ward, British West Indian Slavery. 10. Henry Goulburn’s correspondence with Thomas Samson is cited in Cateau, “Things Fall Apart.” See also Carrington, Sugar Industry, 112, 183. 11. Taylor to Arcedekne, 18 January 1794, Vanneck Papers. Historians have variously discussed the reasons for population decline, including sex imbalances, strenuous workloads, inadequate medical care, and nutritional imbalances. For discussions, see Elsa Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965); Sheridan, “Slave Demography”; Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Richard Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ward, British West Indian Slavery; Stanley Engerman and Barry Higman, “The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies,” in General History of the Caribbean: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, ed. Franklin Knight (London: UNESCO, 1997), 45–104; K. Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction.” 12. Higman, Slave Population and Economy, 18–30, 72–75; Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 37. 13. Higman, Slave Population and Economy, 72–73, 80–98. 14. Ibid., 72–73. 15. Accounts of Increase and Decrease 1792, 1797, Vanneck Papers. 16. Francis Graham to Thomas Miller, 4 April 1810, Georgia Estate Letterbooks and Accounts, (hereinafter cited as Georgia Estate), NLJ. 17. Richard Pennant to Rowland Fearon, 8 January 1805, 25 March 1805, 23 August 1805, GB 0222 PENBRA Penrhyn B.R.A, 1624–1940, University of Wales, Bangor and Microfilm 噛478, 559–562, The Pennant Family and the Penrhyn Castle Manuscripts, 1709–1834, West Indies Collection, University of the West Indies Library, Mona (hereinafter collectively referred to as Penrhyn Papers). For similar discussion of increases in “sex selective” purchases, see Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 130–32; Sheridan, “Slave Demography.” For biographic details on Richard Pennant, or Lord Penrhyn, see Jean Lindsay, “The Pennants and Jamaica, 1665–1808: The Growth and Organisation of the Pennants Estates,” Caernarfonshire Historical Society 43–44 (1982): 37–82, 59–96. 18. Beckford, Remarks, 14. 19. Taylor to Arcedekne, 1 November 1789, Vanneck Papers. 20. Thomas Barritt to Nathaniel Phillips, 1 July 1795, Slebeech Collection (hereinafter Slebeech Mss), National Library of Wales Aberystwyth. 21. Venereal disease was another important factor responsible for low birthrates, which increasingly attracted the attention of planters and doctors. See K. Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction”; Cateau, “Things Fall Apart.” 22. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence . . . to Consider the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 635–45. 23. Great Britain Parliament, Debate on a Motion, 43–44. See also Sheridan, “Slave Demography,” 268.

Notes to Pages 52–54 267 24. Commissioners of Correspondence, 1794–1833, dispatch, 15 August 1796, JGA; House of Assembly Journal, November 1797-November 1798, 281, JGA; The Council Journals, October 1792–97, 280–84, JGA. 25. All data derived from Voyages Database, 2009, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012). The slave trade database confirms earlier conclusions by Richard Sheridan that there was a dramatic increase in the number of Africans purchased in the last decades before the abolition of the slave trade. This was due to the destruction of Saint-Domingue, “the largest and most productive plantation colony,” which allowed the British colonies to capture the “lion’s share of the tropical trades.” See Sheridan, “Slave Demography,” 270. See also figure 1.2 in Drescher, Econocide; Ward, British West Indian Slavery; Ryden, West Indian Slavery. 26. For earlier arguments confirming Jamaica’s uneven sex ratios, see G. W. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica (Cambridge: Conservation Foundation at the University Press, 1957), 70–73; Richard Dunn, “Sugar Production and Slave Women in Jamaica,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, 49–72 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). 27. For definition of children in the slave trade, see Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica, 31. 28. Note that these figures are at the lower end of the estimates. There is no data available for the years 1799–1808. Figures derived from Voyages Database, 2009. For discussions, see Ivana Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic Slave Trade, 1450–1521,” Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (1997): 31–75; David Eltis, “The Volume, Age/Sex Ratios, and African Impact of the Slave Trade: Some Refinements of Paul Lovejoy’s Review of the Literature,” Journal of African History 31, no. 3 (1990): 485–92. 29. Scholars conclude that a number of factors shaped the slave trade’s sex ratio. These factors included a greater absorption of females into regional African trade routes where women were more valuable in local markets than men. See Martin A. Klein, “Women and Slavery in the Western Sudan,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, 67–83 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). See also David Geggus, “Sex Ratio, Age, and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records,” Journal of African History 30, no. 1 (1989): 23–44; Ugo G. Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 47–68; Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Competing Markets for Male and Female Slaves: Prices in the Interior of West Africa, 1780–1850,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 28, no. 2 (1995): 261–93; Paul E. Lovejoy, “Internal Markets or an Atlantic Saharan Divide: How Women Fit into the Slave Trade of West Africa,” in Women and Slavery, African, Indian Ocean World, and Medieval North Atlantic, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Calder Miller, vol. 1, 259–80 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade: New Approaches to the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–63; Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica, 50–72. 30. M. Klein, “Women and Slavery.” See also Geggus, “Sex Ratio, Age, and Ethnicity.” 31. Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender.” 32. Other scholars cite price differentials and the cost of transporting captive men and women from the interior to the coast as important variables that affected the ratio of males to females available for the transatlantic slave trade. For discussions, see Geggus, “Sex Ratio, Age, and Ethnicity”; Lovejoy and Richardson, “Competing Markets”; H. Klein, Atlantic Slave

268 Notes to Pages 55–58 Trade, 161–63; Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender”; Lovejoy, “Internal Markets.” Differences in mortality rates also affected the sex ratio of Africans who eventually arrived in the colonies. Some scholars argue for higher rates of mortality for females and children than for males. See Joseph C. Miller, “Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 3 (1981): 385–423; David Eltis and David Richardson, Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1997); Herbert S. Klein, “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (January 2001): 93–118. 33. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 64. 34. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves, 113; David Eltis and Stanley Engerman, “Fluctuations in Age and Sex Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1663–1864,” Economic History Review 46, no. 2 (May, 1993): 308–23; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 404. 35. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves, 25, 113, 143. 36. Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica, 35. 37. For discussions of the limitations of statistical and clinometric studies, particularly relating to the transatlantic slave trade, see David Henige, “Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic,” Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (1986): 295–313. 38. Voyages Database, 2009. 39. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence . . . to Consider the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 635–45. 40. For fuller discussions of these practices, particularly on the African coast, see Thomas, Slave Trade, 395–400; Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves, 112. 41. For other examples of planters scrutinizing newly arrived Africans before making a purchase to ensure that “rational market choices” were being made see Hilary Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society. (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1998) 61–62. 42. Cited and discussed in J. Morgan, “Over Their Shoulders.” For additional discussions of European depictions of the African body, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986); Shepherd, “Gender and Representation,” 702–3; J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 17–18; Camp, Closer to Freedom. 43. David Collins Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies (London: J. Barfield for Vernor and Hood, 1803), 39. For other examples of body examinations of captives by potential buyers, see Thomas, Slave Trade, 395–400, 925; Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves, 112; Beckles, Centering Woman, 61–62. 44. Frederic Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J. H. Furst, 1931), 112. 45. Taylor to Arcedekne, 1 November 1789, Vanneck Papers. 46. J. Bartlett (on behalf of Thomas Millar) to Graham and Graham to Miller, 10 March 1815, Georgia Estate. 47. For Long’s estimated cost of slave maintenance, see Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 154. For the distinction between slave children, who were seen as young people up to about age ten, versus

Notes to Pages 59–61 269 adults, a stage that started around ages sixteen and eighteen, see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 314–15. 48. Graham to Roden, 20 October 1805, Georgia Estate; Graham to Thomas Miller, 15 May 1807, 10 December 1807, 4 May 1808, Georgia Estate; Miller to Graham, 2 January 1802, Georgia Estate. 49. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica: Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, vol. 2 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002), 403. 50. Taylor to Arcedekne, 20 August 1783, Vanneck Papers. 51. Taylor to Arcedekne, 30 June 1770, Vanneck Papers; Barritt to Phillips, 18 June 1790, Slebeech Mss. 52. This chapter makes no claims on whether these representations of African ethnicities were correct or not. The central argument is not whether Africans were correctly labeled according to their ethnicities but how such labels and ascriptions were meaningful in slave societies. Planters used various spellings for the “Ebo” ethnic group, including “Eboe” or “Ebo” or “Ibo.” For consistency, this chapter uses “Ebo” except in direct quotations. See Douglas Chambers, “Ethnicity and the Diaspora: The Slave Trade and the Creation of African ‘Nations’ in the Americas,” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 3 (2001): 25–39; David Northrup, “Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 3 (2000): 1–20. 53. Phillips to Thomas Hibbert, Esq., and Messrs Thomas Barritt and Robert Logan, n.d., Barritt to Phillips, 18 January 1800, Slebeech Mss. 54. Taylor to Arcedekne, 1 March 1790, 10 October 1783, Vanneck Papers. 55. Daily Advertiser, 25 December 1790, 18 January 1791. 56. On differences in birthrates among ethnic groups and similar use of newspaper records to decipher reproductive patterns, see Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 43. 57. Collins, Practical Rules, 34, 36, 37. 58. Gomez, Country Marks, 122. 59. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 294–301; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 142–43. See also Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 26. It is important to note there were other, less favorable views about enslaved people planters identified as being of Ebo origins. Planters generally considered Ebo as more susceptible to illnesses and more prone to suicide than other groups. See Lorena Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 114–24. 60. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 403. 61. Taylor to Arcedekne, 3 September 1789, Vanneck Papers. 62. See, for example, James Thomson, A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes as They Occur in the Island of Jamaica: With Observations on the Country Remedies (Kingston, Jamaica: Alex.

270 Notes to Pages 61–65 Aikman, 1820); Thomas Roughley, The Jamaican Planters’ Guide; or, A System for Planting and Managing a Sugar Estate (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823). 63. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 July 1789, Vanneck Papers. 64. Ibid., 3 September 1787, 5 July 1789, 27 May 1801. 65. For a select few of these perspectives, see Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Douglas Chambers, “The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave-Trade: A Rejoinder to Northrup’s ‘Myth Igbo’,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 1 (April 2002): 101–20; Chambers, “Ethnicity and the Diaspora”; Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities. 66. Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 184–200. 67. For some of these arguments, see Sidney Wilfred Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976), 8–10, 22–23; Mullin, Africa in America, 27–30; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 192–205; Northrup, “Culture and Ethnicity”; Chambers, “Ethnicity and the Diaspora”; Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 48–50, 55–58, 29–30, 66–67. 68. Chambers, “Ethnicity and the Diaspora,” 27. 69. Additionally, as Michael Gomez noted, these assigned identities were important in informing how enslaved people interpreted the realities of their lives on the sugar plantations, which variously informed their responses to their bondage. See Gomez, Country Marks, 5; Mintz and Price, Anthropological Approach, 12. 70. Taylor to Arcedekne, 4 September 1793, 16 October 1793, Vanneck Papers. 71. Ibid., 4 February 1794, 23 September 1788. 72. Fearon to Lord Richard Penrhyn, 20 January 1805, Penrhyn Papers. 73. Mullin, Africa in America, 26. 74. Taylor to Arcedekne, 18 January 1794, Vanneck Papers. 75. On the idea of dances, for example, as an important expression of bodily freedom, see Camp, Closer to Freedom, 60–61. 76. Fearon to Penrhyn, 20 January 1805, Penrhyn Papers. 77. Merril D. Smith, Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Gowing, Common Bodies. 78. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. For similar arguments among planters, see also Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 412, 436–47; Taylor to Arcedekne, 17 January 1791, Vanneck Papers. 79. Fearon to Penrhyn, 7 January 1805, Penrhyn Papers. 80. Barritt to Phillips, 16 October 1795, Slebeech Mss. 81. Fearon to Penrhyn, 20 January 1805, Penrhyn Papers. 82. William Wright (MD) to Arcedekne, 1 March 1788, Vanneck Papers. 83. Quotations in K. Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction,” 42; See also Thomas Dancer, A Short Dissertation on the Jamaica Bath Waters: To which is Prefixed, an Introduction Concerning Mineral Waters in General, Shewing the Methods of Examining them, and Ascertaining their Contents (Kingston, Jamaica: D. Douglass and Alex. Aikman, 1784), 79–80. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 227.

Notes to Pages 65–66 271 84. See, e.g., White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 29. For discussion of how these images were similarly used to represent enslaved women in the Caribbean, see Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 14–16; Beckles, Centering Woman, 16–17; Shepherd, “Gender and Representation”; Mair, Historical Study, 76–77. 85. This discussion draws on the theoretical insights of Hazel Carby. Carby asserts that stereotypes were never quite representative of realities, but rather created new social relations meant to empower the one stereotyping the other. See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 22. 86. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 60–91. 87. Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 86–87. 88. A lively debate has emerged in the historiography about forced breeding. Some scholars argue for its existence both in extreme forms as stud farms and in milder forms, such as offering enslaved people incentives to bear children. See Eric Williams, “The British West Indian Slave Trade After Its Abolition in 1807, “ in A Structural Analysis of Enslavement in the African Diaspora, ed. James Conyers, 207–22 (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001); Richard Sutch, “The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850–1860,” in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, 285–310 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); Herbert George Gutman and Richard Sutch, “Victorians All? The Sexual Mores and Conduct of Slaves and Their Masters,” in Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery, ed. Paul A. David, 134–64 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 245–51; Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 78–79. Others reject the existence of stud farms and dismiss the argument that incentivized reproduction can be classified as forced breeding because similarities exist in the pronatalist practices of modern governments. See Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 361–62; Higman, Slave Populations, 349; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), 84; Keith R. Aufhauser, “Profitability of Slavery in the British Caribbean,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (1974): 56–59. For a more extensive summary of these debates, see Thelma Jennings, “ ‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Through Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African American Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (1990): 45–74. 89. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 246.

Chapter 3 1. Hetty’s story comes to us through Mary Prince’s recollection of her life, which included horrors experienced by fellow enslaved people. See Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 15–16, and see xxvii for biographical sketch of Hetty. 2. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 437.

272 Notes to Pages 68–75 3. Taylor to Arcedekne, 29 January 1795, Vanneck Papers. For a more comprehensive analysis of the work regimes of cattle pens and the concept “dual pen/sugar plantation”, see Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery, 137; Verene Shepherd and Kathleen Monteith, “PenKeepers and Coffee Farmers in a Sugar-Plantation Society,” in Slavery Without Sugar: Diversity in Caribbean Economy and Society Since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Verene Shepherd, 82–101 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). 4. See, for example, Higman, Population and Economy, 25–26. John Ward agrees with planters’ assessment that pens had a “lighter work regime” than those revolving around sugar production. For this perspective, see Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 87–88. 5. Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery, 137. 6. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 July 1789, 1 November 1789, Vanneck Papers. 7. Higman, Population and Economy, 123. 8. It is important to note that the pens of which Long speaks and that I analyze in this study were small plots of land adjoining estates where planters reared livestock and provisions for estate consumption. Such satellite pens differ vastly from livestock pens held for commercial purposes. Commercial pens raised animals to be slaughtered, cured, and exported. Although smaller in scale and less prestigious than the sugar plantations, livestock pens were also self-sufficient units that placed heavy demands on enslaved labor. See Shepherd and Monteith, “Pen-Keepers and Coffee Farmers.” 9. Quarterly inventories of slaves and stocks on John Tharp’s Estates, 1798–1817, Tharp Papers 1775–1820, MS. R.55.7 (hereinafter Tharp Ms), Cambridgeshire Country Record Office, Cambridge. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid.; Worthy Park Estate, Plantation Book, 1811–17, JGA. 12. Higman, Population and Economy, 327. 13. Craton, Invisible Man, 97; Klein and Engerman, “Fertility Differentials”; Dunn, “Sugar Production,” 66; K. Morgan, “Women and Reproduction.” 14. Graham to Mr. Roden, 20 October 1805, Georgia Estate, NLJ; Graham to Miller, 15 May 1807, 10 December 1807, 4 May 1808, Georgia Estate, NLJ; Miller to Graham, 2 January 1802, Georgia Estate, NLJ. 15. Dunn, “Dreadful Idlers.” 16. Mounthindermost Accounts, Summary of Slave Occupations, 1731–1845, GaleMorant Papers, West Indies Collection, University of the West Indies Library, Mona. 17. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 18. Inventory and Evaluations of Pleasant Hill and Phillipsfield Estates, 1789, Slebeech Mss. 19. Sharla Fett uses the concept of “soundness” to explain a similar approach among southern slaveholders, whose main interest in enslaved people’s healing was limited to securing the bare minimum of care needed for workers to perform their laboring roles. See Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 15–35. 20. Inventory and Appraisement, List of Slaves on Good Hope Plantation, 1804, Tharp Ms. Similar patterns are evident in the inventories for Retreat Estate in 1808. See Valuation of Estates and Memorandum Respecting the Different Properties: Wedderburn Estates in Jamaica 1808, NLJ.

Notes to Pages 75–78 273 21. Financial value of pregnant slaves compare favorably with the values assigned ablebodied slaves in the marketplace. Audra Diptee’s comprehensive analysis of slave market trends indicates that health and vitality remained key variables in determining slave values. Diptee poignantly concludes there was “no market for dead captives and little market for the unhealthy.” See Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica, 32–37. 22. Higman, Slave Populations, 299–300. 23. Inventory and Appraisement, List of Slaves on Good Hope Plantation 1804, Tharp Ms; Valuation of Estates and Memorandum Respecting the Different Properties: Wedderburn Estates in Jamaica, 1808, NLJ. 24. Beckles, Natural Rebels, 33. Marie Jenkins Schwartz argues differently for the American South in the era after the slave trade ended and cotton expanded westward. According to Schwartz having children proved women’s fertility thereby boosting their market price. Schwartz’s arguments confirm Deborah Gray White’s earlier conclusions that mothers were among the most prized enslaved workers on southern properties. While slaveholders eagerly sold apparently barren women, many kept women with proven ability to reproduce. See Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 13; Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? 101. 25. Dunn, “Dreadful Idlers”; Curtin, Two Jamaicas, 18–22. 26. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA. 27. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 69. 28. Matthew G. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 1815–17 (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1929), 108. 29. Pennant (Lord Penrhyn) to R. Fearon, 30 October 1804, Penrhyn Papers; R. Fearon to Pennant, 7 January 1805, Penrhyn Papers. 30. Note that these doctors were only those recorded in Jamaica’s inventories. Many other physicians existed in the island who did not register. For a comprehensive analysis of the role of medical practitioners in Jamaica during slavery, see Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 52. See also Richard Sheridan, “Mortality and the Medical Treatment of Slave in the British West Indies,” in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, eds. Stanley Engerman and Eugene Genovese, 285–310 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 299; Dave Gosse, “Health Conditions on Selected Plantations in Jamaica in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Caribbean History 40, no. 2 (2006): 215–34. Similar patterns are observed in the United States in the late antebellum period; see Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 30. 31. Collins, Practical Rules; Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765–1810,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99–121. 32. William Sells, Remarks on the Condition of the Slaves in the Island of Jamaica (London: J. M. Richardson, Cornhill, and Ridgways, 1823), 17. 33. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 34. Graham to Miller, 8 February 1810, 8 March 1810, Georgia Estate, NLJ. For reports of other epidemics, see John Vidal to William Mitchell, 5 November 1821, Attorney’s Letter Book, JGA. 35. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 36. Collins, Practical Rules, 236, 384. 37. For a good description of the sugar manufacturing process and the mills used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 193–96; Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 99–100.

274 Notes to Pages 78–83 38. David Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 6 August 1807; Lord Penrhyn to Alexander Falconer, n.d., Penrhyn Papers. 39. Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 6 August 1807, Penrhyn Papers. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid.; Collins, Practical Rules, 236, 384. 43. Samuel Jeffries to Lord Penrhyn, 19 February 1807, Penrhyn Papers. 44. Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1811–17, JGA. 45. An Act for the Better Order and Government of Slaves, 1788, The Consolidated Slave Act, 1792, Acts of Assembly 1760–92, JGA; John Lunan, An Abstract of the Laws of Jamaica Relating to Slaves (St. Jago-de-la-Vega, Jamaica: Office at the Gazette, 1819), 114. The House of Commons in its 1823 resolutions retained some of these provisions, including a required examination of the body of alleged victims by justices as proof of abuse. See Resolutions of the House of Commons, 15 May 1823, and British Guiana: Lord Bathurst to Governor John Murray and Lieut.-Governor Henry Beard, 28 May 1823, reprinted in Vincent T. Harlow and A. F. Madden, eds. British Colonial Developments, 1774–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 560–622; Votes of Assembly, 1827, no. 32, 266–80, JGA. 46. The King v. McGibbon, 6 June 1823, St. George General Slave Court, 1822–31,10, JGA. For discussion of this case, see also Mair, Women in Jamaica, 237. 47. The limit of thirty-nine lashes was the new maximum allowable lashes any enslaved individual could receive without the presence of his or her owner. Imprisonment with hard labor was also a relatively new practice, but legislative reform that channeled punishment through government machinery was a further “improvement” in the latter years of slavery. For legal and prison reforms in Jamaica during this period, see Elsa Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century (Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1970); Paton, No Bond but the Law. 48. Resolutions to the House of Commons, 15 May 1823, and British Guiana, Bathurst to Murray and Beard. For a more comprehensive discussion of policies on and representations of the flogging of slave women, see Henrice Altink, “ ‘An Outrage on all Decency’: Abolitionist Reactions to Flogging Jamaican Slave Women, 1780–1834,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 2 (2002): 107–22. 49. Votes of Assembly, 1827, no. 32, 164–68, JGA. For similar reports and discussion, see also Verene Shepherd, “ ‘We All Thought the King Was on Our Side’: Voices of the Enslaved in the Post Slave Trade Era in Jamaica,” Arts Journal 3, nos. 1–2 (2007): 26–46. 50. J. Morgan, “Over Their Shoulders.” See also Beckles, Centering Woman, 10–12. 51. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 380, 385. For fuller discussions of the black woman’s image in white minds, see Barbara Bush, “White Ladies, Coloured Favourites and Black Wenches: Some Considerations on Race, Sex, and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 2, no. 3 (1981): 245–62; Bush, Slave Women, 11–22; J. Morgan, “Over Their Shoulders”; Shepherd, “Gender and Representation.” 52. Cecily Jones, Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 21. For a similar discussion, see Beckles, Centering Woman, 211. 53. Bush, Slave Women, 134; Mair, Women in Jamaica, 117–18, quotation on 129. 54. William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guiana: Divided into the Gold Coast, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 208; Paul

Notes to Pages 84–86 275 Edwards, ed., Equiano’s Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa the African (Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1996), 100; Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, vol. 2 (London: John Hatchard, 1903), 211, 213; Brodie Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, vol. 2 (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 201. 55. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 56. Inventory and Valuation of Phillipsfield Estate, 1789, Slebeech Ms. 57. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA; Braco Estate Journal, 1795–97, JGA. 58. Miscarriages went unrecorded because they most likely occurred within the first weeks of gestation when planters were unaware of women’s conditions. Unless enslaved women reported miscarriages to their masters, and judging from archival silences, many did not, we cannot fully verify such events. Some scholars like John Campbell, however, trace birth patterns among enslaved women and argue that intervals between births reveal some incidence of miscarriage, though minimal. Although Campbell studies Georgia plantations, his work is important for comparing similar patterns in the Caribbean. See John Campbell, “Work, Pregnancy, and Infant Mortality among Southern Slaves, “Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14, no. 4 (1984): 793–812. Richard Follett, however, cautions against definitive conclusions concerning the “seasonality of miscarriages” arguing instead for a “seasonality of conception.” Calculating monthly birth rhythms, Follett, like Barry Higman, found that conception rates peaked during the harvest period despite extreme labor demands. Cooler temperatures between January and April and higher caloric intake during the harvest seasons enhanced the likelihood of conception. For discussion, see Richard Follett, “ ‘Lives of Living Death’: The Reproductive Lives of Slave Women in the Cane World of Louisiana,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 289–304; Higman, Slave Populations, 362–64. 59. Worthy Park Estate Inventories 1795, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783– 1817, JGA. For a quantitative analysis of Worthy Park estate’s miscarriages, see Craton, Invisible Man, 87. 60. Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, 1812–22, NLJ. 61. Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us that historical narratives of the past are as much about surviving documentations as they are about archival silences. Trouillot urges historians to ask questions not just of what remains in the archives but also to interrogate what is left out. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). For discussion of how archival silences particularly affect narratives about the lives of enslaved women, see also Marisa J. Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive,” Gender and History 22, no. 3 (2010): 564–84. 62. In addition to pregnancies discussed in these paragraphs, for fragmented references to pregnancies, miscarriages, and the use of the phrase “big with child,” see Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, 1812–22, NLJ. 63. Votes of Assembly, 1815, no. 20, 146–87, JGA. 64. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA. 65. Some of the key events stimulating a change in emancipation talks were James Stephen’s 1822 damning reports on the inhumanity of Jamaica’s slave laws, the 1823 Demerara Slave Rebellion, and, in that same year, conspiracies among enslaved people in northeastern Jamaica. For discussions of these various events, see Richard Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1980), 28–243; Hilary

276 Notes to Pages 86–88 Beckles, “The Two Hundred Years War: Slave Resistance in the British West Indies: An Overview of the Historiography,” Jamaica Historical Review 13 (1982): 1–10; Da Costa, Crowns of Glory; Russell Smandych, “ ‘To Soften the Extreme Rigor of their Bondage’: James Stephen’s Attempt to Reform the Criminal Slave Laws of the West Indies, 1813–1833,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (2005): 537–88; Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 11; Verene Shepherd, “Women and the Abolition Campaign in the African Atlantic,” Journal of Caribbean History 42, no. 1 (2008): 131–53; Heather Cateau, “Amazing Grace?” Journal of Caribbean History 42, no. 1 (June 2008): 111–30. 66. Kathleen Mary Butler, The Economics of Emancipation: Jamaica and Barbados, 1823– 1843 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 7–8; Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 237. 67. For comparisons between the legal and political systems of newer colonies like Trinidad and British Guiana and the older colonies like Jamaica and Barbados, see F. R. Augier, The Making of the West Indies (London: Longmans, 1967), 131–32; William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 65–95. For more specific discussions of the implementation of amelioration in the Crown Colonies, see Claudius Fergus, “The ‘Siete Partidas’: A Framework for Philanthropy and Coercion During the Amelioration Experiment in Trinidad, 1823–1834,” Caribbean Studies 36, no. 1 (2008): 75–99; Alvin O. Thompson, “Enslaved Children in Berbice with Special Reference to the Government Slaves, 1803–1831,” in In the Shadow of the Plantation: Caribbean History and Legacy, ed. Alvin O. Thompson, 163–95 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002). 68. Augier, Making of the West Indies, 152–54. 69. Votes of Assembly, 1826, no. 31, 266–80, JGA. For discussions relating to the consolidated slave law, see Votes of Assembly, 1826, no. 31, 201, 212, JGA. 70. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Turner, Slaves and Missionaries. 71. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA. 72. Nathaniel Phillips Estate Journals, 15 March 1790, Slebeech Mss. 73. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA. 74. Collins, Practical Rules, 135. For similar instructions to enslaved women in the United States, see Campbell, “Work, Pregnancy, and Infant Mortality.” 75. Worthy Park Estate Inventories, 1830, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783– 1837, JGA. Enslaved people across the Americas suffered from many diseases and disabilities; for causes, symptoms, and diagnoses, see Kenneth F. Kiple and Brian T. Higgins, “Mortality Caused by Dehydration During the Middle Passage,” Social Science History 13, no. 4 (1989): 421–37; Gosse, “Health Conditions”; Jerome A. Handler, “Diseases and Medical Disabilities of Enslaved Barbadians, from the Seventeenth Century to Around 1838, Part II,” West Indian Medical Journal 58, no. 1 (2009): 33–49. On pregnancy proof, see Gowing, Common Bodies, 118–22. 76. Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, 1812–22, NLJ. 77. For similar conclusions, see Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 71. 78. R. Fearon to Lord Penrhyn, 26 January 1805, Penrhyn Papers.

Notes to Pages 88–93 277 79. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 242. 80. Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, 1812–22, NLJ. 81. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA. 82. Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slavery Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1534–75. 83. Higman, Slave Populations, 337. 84. These arguments are based on the slave inventories and accounts of increase and decrease for Worthy Park Estate, Somerset Plantation, Nathaniel Phillips’s Properties (Farm, Phillipsfield, and Pleasant Hill estates), Thetford Estate, Green Park Estate, and Harmony Hall Estate. See Harmony Hall Estate, JGA; Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA; Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1833, JGA, Green Park Journal, 1821–25, JGA; Somerset Plantation, 1782–96, NLJ; Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, 1812–22, NLJ. 85. Higman, Slave Populations, 99–138. 86. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1790 vol. XXIV, no. 745–48. 87. Great Britain Parliament, An Abstract of Evidence Delivered Before the Select Committee of the House of Commons in the years 1790 and 1791 on the Part of the Petitioners of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London: R. Haworth, 1792), 55. 88. Carrington, Sugar Industry, 154. 89. Lord Penrhyn to R. Fearon, 30 October 1804, 20 December 1804, 31 January 1805, Penrhyn Papers; R. Fearon to Lord Penrhyn, 7 January 1805, 26 January 1805, Penrhyn Papers. 90. Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (2001): 923–54. For earlier discussion of how women were victimized by colonial legal practices as a mechanism of social control, see David Vincent Trotman, “Women and Crime in Late Nineteenth Century Trinidad,” Caribbean Quarterly 30, nos. 3–4 (1984): 60–72. 91. For a good discussion of checks on planter authority, see David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 171–84. 92. For some of the key ameliorative legislations see Consolidated Slave Act 1788, Consolidated Slave Act 1792, Acts of Assembly 1760–92, 1792–99, JGA; Lunan, Abstract, 105–44. 93. Scholars disagree on whether abolitionist emphasis on exposed female bodies represented their disgust with slavery’s inversion of proper gender order or revealed their erotic and exotic fantasies. For the former perspective, see Diane Austin-Broos, “Redefining the Moral Order: Interpretations of Christianity in Post-Emancipation Jamaica,” in The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture After Slavery, ed. Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher, 277–79 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). On reformers’ gender ideals, see Catherine Hall, “William Knibb and the Constitution of the New Black Subject,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism, no. 8 (2000): 31–55; Bridget Brereton, “Family Strategies and Gender in the Shift to Wage Labour in the British Caribbean,” in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, ed. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, 143–61 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). For discussions of abolitionist fantasies about pain inflicted on black women’s bodies, see Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995):

278 Notes to Pages 93–101 303–34; Editha Genteel Jacobs, “The Role of Women in the British Anti-Slavery Campaigns,” Journal of Caribbean History 40, no. 2 (2006): 293–307. 94. Henrice Altink, “Slavery by Another Name: Apprenticed Women in Jamaican Workhouses in the Period 1834–81,” Journal of Social History 26, no. 1 (2001): 40–59; Henrice Altink, Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 129–45, 148. For additional discussions of gender ideals promoted by abolitionists, see Blackburn, Colonial Slavery, 33–60; Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (New York: Routledge, 1992) 95–97; Paton, “Decency, Dependence and the Lash”; Newton, “New Ideas of Correctness.” 95. John Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations Relative to the West India Islands, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Smellie, 1817), 205; Collins, Practical Rules, 47. 96. Collins, Practical Rules, 225, 178; Williamson, Miscellaneous Observations, vol. 2, 205. 97. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 19–52. 98. Inquisition on the body of a Negro woman named Rachel, 1813 see Cornwall, Pleas of the Crown, Indictment/Record Book, 1811–30, 89, JGA; The King v. John Cock, 1824 Cornwall, Pleas of the Crown, Indictment/Record Book, 1811–30, 373, JGA; The King v. Surrey, David Lamount, Pleas of the Crown, Surrey, 1821–28, 396–97, JGA; The King v. William Littlejohn, Surrey, Pleas of the Crown, 1821–28, 414–18, JGA. 99. Williamson, Miscellaneous Observations, vol. 1, 191. 100. Ibid., 191, 274; vol. 2, 208. 101. For these cases, see The King v. Nancy, 6 October 1825, St. George General Slave Court, 1822–31, 55, JGA; The King v. Susan Gardner, 15 March 1831, St. George General Slave Court, 1822–31, 126, JGA. 102. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 82. For a discussion of this idea in relation to the establishment of Jamaica’s prison system aimed at reforming freed people into reliable, dependable workers, see Paton, No Bond but the Law, 19–52. For similar discussion concerning the emancipation process in America’s northern states, like Philadelphia and New York, see also Davis, Problem of Slavery, 241–42. 103. Barbara Omolade, The Rising Song of African American Women (New York: Routledge, 1994), 7. For general discussion of the notion of “commodified parts” of black womanhood, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 143. On the notion of women’s wombs as vessels, see Barbara Katz Rothman, “Beyond Mothers and Fathers: Ideology in a Patriarchal Society,” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, 139–60 (New York: Routledge, 1994). 104. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA. 105. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 106. Ibid. 107. Inventory of Irwin Estate, 1820, NLJ; Maryland Estate Book, 1817–25, NLJ; Robert Hibbert to the Duke of Chandos, 24 May 1788, Stowe Manuscripts. Simon Taylor proposed building weaning houses for Golden Grove estate in 1789, but the records are not quite clear on whether this proposal became a reality. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 August 1789, Vanneck Papers. 108. Royal Gazette, 19–26 May 1787, 27 July-3 August 1816; Daily Advertiser, 14 December 1790.

Notes to Pages 101–114 279 109. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA. 110. Braco Estate (Trewlany) Journal, 1795–97, JGA; Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 6 August 1807, Penrhyn Papers. 111. Barritt to Phillips, 14 November 1794, 17 January 1795, 25 February 1795, 28 April 1795, 13 May 1795, 27 May 1795, 1 July 1795, 17 July 1795, Slebeech Mss. 112. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 113. Barritt to Phillips, 14 November 1794, 17 January 1795, 25 February 1795, 28 April 1795, 13 May 1795, 27 May 1795, 1 July 1795, 17 July 1795, Slebeech Mss. 114. An Act for the Better Order and Government of Slaves, 1788, Consolidated Slave Act, 1792, Acts of Assembly passed in the Island of Jamaica 1760–92, 1791–99, JGA; Lunan, Abstract, 105–44. For limitations on solely relying on laws as evidence in change in slave conditions, see Higman, Slave Populations, 350. 115. Higman, Economy in Jamaica, 63. See also Brathwaite, Creole Society, 292. 116. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 117. E.g., St. George Vestry Minutes, 1801–16, JGA. 118. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 119. E.g., see Barry Higman, “Household Structure and Fertility on Jamaican Slave Plantations: A Nineteenth Century Example,” Population Studies 27, no. 3 (Nov. 1973): 527–50; Craton, Invisible Man, 439. 120. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms; List of Slaves on Golden Grove, 30 June 1790, Vanneck Papers. 121. List of Slaves on Golden Grove, 30 June 1790, Vanneck Papers. 122. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994). 123. Lunan, Abstract, 108. 124. Quarterly inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 125. Ibid. 126. R. Fearon to Lord Penrhyn, 7 January 1804, 6 August 1807, Penrhyn Papers. 127. Taylor to Arcedekne, 19 January 1798, 1 November 1798, 4 February 1794, Vanneck Papers. 128. Collins, Practical Rules, 134. 129. Lewis, Journal, 104–5. 130. Lunan, Abstract, 107. 131. Lewis, Journal, 107–8. 132. See Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 1; Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 30.

Chapter 4 1. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98; Votes of Assembly, 1788, JGA, 94; Cody, Birthing the Nation. 2. Reproductive body work draws upon Kathleen Brown’s concept of “body work” that refers to the collective “cleaning, healing, and caring labors” of the body. Reproductive body work focuses explicitly on work associated with caring for women’s childbearing needs. See Brown, Foul Bodies, 5. 3. Collins, Practical Rules, 137.

280 Notes to Pages 114–120 4. Fett, Working Cures, 111–41; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 238–40. 5. Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Empire and Commerce: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Harrison’s work focuses particularly on the work of British Army doctors in the East Indies and West Indies. 6. For discussion of the state of medicine and Western health care practices vis-a`-vis Caribbean folk healing, see Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 80–97. On Lewis’s experience with black medics, see Lewis, Journal, 123–24. 7. Lewis, Journal, 123–24. 8. On midwifery in Jamaican slave society, see Mair, Women in Jamaica, 218. 9. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 380; Bosman, Description of the Coast of Guinea, 122. 10. Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: A Sanitized History (New York: North Point Press, 2007), 101; Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 245, 358; Lawrence Wright and Leon Banov, Jr., Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom, the Water Closet and of Sundry Habits, Fashions, and Accessories of the Toilet, Principally in Great Britain, France and America (New York: Viking, 1960), 56; Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 135–36. 11. For these varying views, see Smith, Clean, 226–45; Brown, Foul Bodies, 118–58. 12. Bosman, Description of the Coast of Guinea, 122; Paul Erdmann Isert, Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade, trans. Selena Axelrod Winsnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 117–18; Edwards, Equiano’s Travels, 11. 13. Bosman, Description of the Coast of Guinea, 209; Winterbottom, Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, vol. 2, 214; A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa: Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Language, etc. (Chicago: Benin Press, 1964), 152. 14. See, for example, Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 August 1789, 6 September 1789, Vanneck Papers. 15. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), 145; Adrian Wilson, Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 153–210; Gowing, Common Bodies, 29–31; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 189. 16. Gowing, Common Bodies, 30. 17. H. C. Monrad, A Description of the Guinea Coast and Its Inhabitants, trans. Selena Axelrod Winsnes (Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan, 2008), 64; Winterbottom, Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, vol. 2, 209; Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, 201. 18. James Grainger, William Wright, Griffith Hughes, Benjamin Moseley, and J. E. Hutson, On the Treatment and Management of the More Common West-India Diseases, 1750–1800 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005), 34. 19. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 380; Collins, Practical Rules, 388. See also Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 330; Tara Inniss, “Any Elderly, Sensible, Prudent Woman: The Practice and Practitioners of Midwifery During Slavery in the British Caribbean,” in Heath and Medicine in the Circum-Caribbean, 1800–1968, ed. Juanita De Barros, Steven Palmer, and David Wright, 40–52 (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Notes to Pages 120–127 281 20. Cody, Birthing the Nation; Elaine Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills and Magic: Healthcare in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 47, 114; Fett, Working Cures, 130. 21. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 22. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, 153. 23. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98, Report of the Lords Committee of Council for Trade and Plantations 1789 vol. XXVI, no. 646a; Votes of Assembly, 1788, no. 2, 97, 98 JGA. 24. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 331, 20; Fildes, Wet Nursing. 25. Perry, “Colonizing the Breast.” 26. J. Morgan, “Over Their Shoulders,” 168. 27. George Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715– 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 2. 28. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, 269–70. 29. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 277. 30. Cody, Birthing the Nation, 120–89. 31. Ibid.; Perry, “Colonizing the Breast”; Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, 119–21. 32. Perry, “Colonizing the Breast.” 33. Winterbottom, Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, vol. 2, 214–15. 34. Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk; Fildes, Wet Nursing. 35. A. C. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies, vol. 2 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 153. 36. Worthy Park Estate, Plantation Book, 1811–17, JGA; Medical Practitioner’s Journal of Charges 1830–35, NLJ. 37. Henry Barham, “Hortus Americanus”: Containing an Account of the Trees, Shrubs, and Other Vegetable Productions, of South-America and the West-India Islands, and Particularly of the Island of Jamaica; Interspersed with Many Curious and Useful Observations, Respecting their Uses in Medicine, Diet, and Mechanics (London: Alexander Aikman, 1794), 120. 38. Collins, Practical Rules, 388–89; Medical Practitioner’s Journal of Charges, 1830–31, NLJ. 39. A similar process unfolded in British India in the treatment of cholera, for example, in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Although British doctors borrowed and employed indigenous drugs to treat cholera patients, they separated their supposed standardized dosages from so-called barbaric application of elixirs, like opium, black pepper, ginger, etc. See Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 179–83. And for examples from the American South, see Fett, Working Cures, 139–40. 40. Barham, “Hortus Americanus.” 41. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 312. 42. Ibid., 48, 50, 55; Inniss, “Prudent Woman,” 43. 43. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 48, 50, 55. For the professionalization of midwifery, see De Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean, 68–93. 44. Edward East to Anna Eliza Elletson, 23 September 1778, Stowe Manuscripts; Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books 1783–1833 (Thetford Estate Accounts) JGA.

282 Notes to Pages 128–136 45. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 96. 46. Fett, Working Cures, 111–41. 47. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 381. 48. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 90–91. 49. Ibid., 292–320. 50. Cody, Birthing the Nation, 134; Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 331. 51. Cody, Birthing the Nation, 172–73. Colonial doctors in India also were keen to discover indigenous practices and separate those that worked from ones that did not. For this discussion, see Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 179–83; Harrison, Medicine, 64–88. 52. Quoted in Cody, Birthing the Nation, 163. Brodie Cruickshank’s travel narrative of his observations of Gold Coast Africans records similar positions during childbirth. Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, 201. 53. Quoted in Cody, Birthing the Nation, 163. 54. Collins, Practical Rules, 222. See also, Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 91. 55. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98. 56. Brathwaite, Creole Society, 128. 57. Quoted in Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 82–83, 290. 58. Quotations and discussion in Cody, Birthing the Nation, 177. See also Perry, “Colonizing the Breast.” 59. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 96. 60. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary (New York: Knopf, 1990); Cody, Birthing the Nation; Juanita De Barros, Steven Palmer, and David Wright, Health and Medicine in the Circum-Caribbean, 1800–1968 (New York: Routledge, 2009); Fett, Working Cures. 61. Doctors traveling to other colonies, like India, made similar remarks that also served to applaud the self-professed superiority of Western medicine over indigenous medicine, which many European doctors denigrated as merely superstitious and primitive. See Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 159–99. 62. For these tales see Cody, Birthing the Nation, 136–42; Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills and Magic, 46–47. 63. Cody, Birthing the Nation, 136. 64. On Smith’s Wealth of Nations and criticism of slavery’s backwardness, see Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 20–33. 65. John Quier, Letters and Essays on the Small-Pox and Inoculation, the Measles, the Dry Belly-Ache, the Yellow, and Remitting, and Intermitting Fevers of the West Indies: To which are Added, Thoughts on the Hydrocephalus Internus, and Observations on Hydatides in the Heads of Cattle (London: Edinburgh: J. Murray and C. Elliot, 1778), 55. 66. Access to bodies was a dilemma that doctors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries faced. Restrictions on dissecting cadavers, for example, had motivated many enquiring doctors to enlist as army physicians, whereby they had limitless access to the bodies of fallen and wounded soldiers. See Harrison, Medicine, 146–72. 67. Fett, Working Cures, 151–53; Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills and Magic, 132–33; Cooper Owens, “Courageous Negro Servitors.” 68. Quotations are from Doctors James Thomson, Thomas Dancer, and John Williamson in Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 330–31.

Notes to Pages 137–143 283 69. Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, 125. 70. Harrison, Medicine, 89–115. 71. For quotation and the work of Smellie and Manningham, see Cody, Birthing the Nation, 172–71. 72. For discussion of the work of White and others, see ibid., 237–68, quotation on 252. 73. For the legacy of White’s work see Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 78–80. For the work of other doctors, particularly those traveling with the British Army and Royal Navy, see Harrison, Medicine, 89–120. On cranial capacity, through the works of Samuel Morton in particular, see Ann Fabian, Skull Collectors: Race Science and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 74. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 11–60; Harrison, Medicine, 64, 88, 128. 75. For other hospitals across Jamaica, see Brathwaite, Creole Society, 290; Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 268–76. 76. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 274. 77. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 August 1789, 15 November 1794, Vanneck Papers. 78. Sells, Remarks, 50. 79. For a good discussion of how smallpox vaccination became a means of promoting Western medicine and a symbol of European medical superiority, see Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 116–58. 80. Collins, Practical Rules, 159. For discussion of the training of midwives in the West Indies, see Inniss, “Prudent Woman,” 42–49. 81. Cody, Birthing the Nation, 156, 171. 82. Financial Accounts, Harmony Hall and Retirement Penn, 1809, 1826–28, 1820–35, 1830–34, Powel Family Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereinafter cited as Powel Family Papers). 83. Elletson’s query about white nurses is inferred from East’s letter. East to Eliza Elletson, 23 September 1778, Stowe Manuscripts. The fear of midwives aiding mothers to control their fertility was common throughout the Atlantic world. For examinations of slave society, see Fett, Working Cures, 159–68; and for Europe see Gowing, Common Bodies, 33–34. 84. East to Eliza Elletson, 23 September 1778, Stowe Manuscripts. 85. For the use of this strategy in other colonial contexts, like India, where colonial officials used influential “natives” to promote smallpox vaccination, see Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 147–50. 86. Mair, Women in Jamaica, 118. 87. Higman, Slave Populations, 263; Inniss, “Prudent Woman,” 44. 88. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 316. 89. Vidal’s letter references Mitchell’s query. Vidal to Mitchell, 7 October 1821, 5 November 1821, 17 December 1821, Attorney’s Letter Book, JGA. 90. For similar cases and similarly expressed views in other parts of the Atlantic world, see Cody, Birthing the Nation, 181–82; Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills and Magic, 117, 119. 91. Lewis, Journal, 253. Note that the woman in this song questioned the healing ability to doctors to treat patients afflicted by the curse of an obeah practitioner. For other examples of women’s songs and their role in challenging and mocking whites, see Mair, Women in Jamaica, 235–37. 92. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 August 1789, 15 November 1794, Vanneck Papers. See also Inniss, “Prudent Woman,” 44.

284 Notes to Pages 143–153 93. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 20. For similar stories from the American South, where white women came into contact with black nurses far more frequently, see V. Lynn Kennedy, Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 70–75; Inniss, “Prudent Woman,” 46–47. 94. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 20, 331. 95. Old Montpelier Estate Account Book, 1824–28, NLJ. 96. Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 6 August 1807, Penrhyn Papers. See also Gilbert F. Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica, in 1808–1809–1810 (London: J. Stockdale, 1811), 91. 97. Dr. Daniel Magneise to Roger Hope Elletson, 1 June 1771, Stowe Manuscripts; Vidal to Mitchell, 7 May 1821, Attorney’s Letter Book, JGA; Votes of Assembly, 1788, no. 2, 94, JGA; Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 121–45; Fett, Working Cures, 144. 98. Vidal to Mitchell, 4 October 1821, Attorney’s Letter Book, JGA. 99. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 August 1789, 15 November 1794, Vanneck Papers. 100. For biographical details on Chisholme, see Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 306. 101. Vidal to Mitchell, 4 October 1821, Attorney’s Letter Book, JGA. 102. Magneise to Hope Elletson, 18 June 1771, Stowe Manuscripts; East to Eliza Elletson, 23 September 1778, Stowe Manuscripts. 103. Stephen Fuller, Notes on the Two Reports from the Committee of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica Appointed to Examine into, and to Report to the House, the Allegations and Charges Contained in the several Petitions which have been Presented to the British House of Commons, on the Subject of the Slave Trade, and the Treatment of the Negroes (London: J. Phillips, 1789), 59–60. 104. Taylor to Arcedekne, 21 March 1789, 1 November 1789, Vanneck Papers. 105. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 16. 106. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 30; Camp, Closer to Freedom, 6. 107. Taylor to Arcedekne, 24 July 1792, 6 October 1792, Vanneck Papers. 108. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98.

Chapter 5 1. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98, 1789, vol. XXVI, no. 646; Votes of Assembly, 1788, no. 2, 94, JGA. 2. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 3. Higman, Population and Economy, 113, 48–49. 4. Grainger et al., Treatment and Management, 132; GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 5. Votes of Assembly, 1788, no. 3, 95, JGA; Grainger et al., Treatment and Management, 132; GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 6. Itzhak Brook, “Current Concepts in the Management of Clostridium Tetani Infection,” Review of Anti-infective Therapy 6, no. 3 (June 2008): 327–36. 7. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646; Votes of Assembly, 1788, no. 2, 94, 95, JGA.

Notes to Pages 153–160 285 8. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646; Fuller, Notes, 56. 9. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 48, 50, 55. 10. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 11. Benjamin Turney to Arcedekne, 21 July 1790, Vanneck Papers. 12. On this idea of making oneself vulnerable for the benefit of kin and relative, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 587–88; Mintz and Price, Anthropological Approach; Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 171; Ben Schiller, “ ‘Selling Themselves’: Slavery, Survival and the Path of Least Resistance,” 49th Parallel 23 (Summer 2009), accessed July 10, 2012, https://fortyninthparalleljournal.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/2-schiller-selling-themselves.pdf. 13. Fuller, Notes, 60. 14. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 265. 15. For the history, function, and lobbying of the Society, see Ryden, West Indian Slavery, 40–82; Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 22–23; Carrington, Sugar Industry, 212–14. 16. Kenneth Kiple and Virginia King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101–4. 17. Ibid., 74–75, 119–22; Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 216–19. 18. Brown, Foul Bodies, 89–90. 19. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 380–81. See also Tara Alana Inniss, “ ‘Fed with the Bread of Slavery’: Children’s Health in Barbados During Slavery and the Apprenticeship Period, 1790–1838” (Ph.D. diss., University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, 2007), 173. 20. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 414; see also Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 80–81. 21. Lewis, Journal, 269. 22. Grainger et al., Treatment and Management, 14. 23. Georges Vigarello and Jean Birrell, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–23; Wright and Banov, Clean and Decent, 46, 58, 60–61; Smith, Clean, 178–79. 24. Brown, Foul Bodies, 22. 25. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 161. 26. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 270. 27. Ibid., 286. 28. Brown, Foul Bodies, 131, 134–35, 150, 192, for Rush’s quotation see, 201. For broader discussions on prescriptive uses of baths see, Smith, Clean, 219–22, 241, 257–59; Vigarello and Birrell, Concepts of Cleanliness, 217–18; Ashenburg, Dirt on Clean, 130–31, 170. 29. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 37. 30. Medical Practitioner’s Journal of Charges, 1830–35, NLJ. 31. For similar discussion of healing practices in North America, see Fett, Working Cures, 139–40. 32. Collins, Practical Rules, 390. 33. For biographical data on doctors in the Caribbean, see Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 64–82. 34. Quotations from Sloane cited in Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 80; Barham, “Hortus Americanus.”

286 Notes to Pages 160–168 35. Grainger et al., Treatment and Management, 14. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid.; GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 38. Brown, Foul Bodies, 234–35. 39. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 40. On the various uses of linen, see Brown, Foul Bodies, 26–27. 41. Ashenburg, Dirt on Clean, 106; Smith, Clean, 193. 42. Brown, Foul Bodies, 105–10. 43. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98. 44. St. David Vestry Minutes, 1785–93, 1806–13, 1814–20, JGA; Worthy Park Estate, Clothing distributed to slaves, Invoice of Sundries consigned to Rose Price for the use of Worthy Park Estate, London, 1795, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA. 45. The council was misleading in its reports on the absence of laws the regulated the distribution of clothing among the enslaved. In 1796, the Jamaican Assembly stipulated that “all slaves shall have clothes, men jackets and drawers: women, jackets and petticoats or frocks once every year, on or before the twenty-fifth day of December, on penalty of five shillings for every slave wanting” (Votes of Assembly, 1815, no. 20, 146–87, JGA). See also Steve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 29–30. 46. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Slave Trade Minutes of Last Session, 1789, vol. XXI, no. 628–46. 47. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 80–82; Buckridge, Language of Dress, 18–19. 48. Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 6 August 1804, Penrhyn Papers. 49. Barritt to Phillips, 25 May 1791, 10 April 1793, Slebeech Mss. 50. Cited in Buckridge, Language of Dress, 36. For the original citation, see Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition, vol. 2, 153. 51. Buckridge, Language of Dress, 135. 52. Worthy Park Plantation Journals, 1792–95, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA; Maryland Estate Book, 1817–25, NLJ; Old Montpelier Estate, St. James Account Books, 1824–28, NLJ. 53. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 80; Buckridge, Language of Dress, 38–39. 54. Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 6 August 1807, Penrhyn Papers; GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 55. For the persistence of midwives-doctors conflicts into postslavery Jamaica, see De Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean, 67–93. 56. See, for example, York Estate records, 1787, 1791, Gale-Morant Family Papers 1731– 1845; Scott, Domination, 52–55; Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 57. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Report of the Lords Committee of Council for Trade and Plantations 1789 vol. XXVI, no. 646a. 58. Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 76–81, quotation on 79.

Notes to Pages 168–175 287 59. For coroners’ inquests and cases with ignoramus and not guilty verdicts, see Cornwall, Pleas of the Crown, Indictment/Record Book, 1811–30, 245, JGA; Surrey, Pleas of the Crown, 1821–28, 6, JGA; Middlesex, Supreme Court Pleas of the Crown, 1783–1811, 1811–30, 24, 267, 316, JGA. 60. Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 77–81. 61. York Estate Account of Negroes, June-September 1787, Gale-Morant Family Papers; St. David Vestry Minutes, 1785–93, Account of Increase and Decrease, 1788, JGA; Radnor Journal of a Negro Labour, 1818, NLJ. 62. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 219–21. 63. For summation and quotation, see Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 42. 64. Higman, Slave Population, 327, 105–15. 65. St. David Vestry Minutes, Mount Sinai Estate, 1800, JGA; Votes of Assembly, 1815, no. 20, 146–87, JGA; For local discussion of Colonial Office dispatches see Dispatches, Jamaica to England, no. 20, 6 August 1819, 6, JGA. 66. See, for example, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, Account of Increase and Decrease, 1784, JGA; Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, 1812–22, vol. 1, NLJ. 67. Quoted in Brathwaite, Creole Society, 214; for similar reports see GB.HOC.SP. 1731– 1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646; Votes of Assembly, 1788, no. 2, 97–98, JGA. 68. Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast, 203; Ellis, Yoruba-Speaking Peoples, 153. 69. Wilson, Social Relations of Childbirth, 153–210; Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 41–49; Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 60–65. 70. Lewis, Journal, 108. 71. Martha Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 57–58. See also Inniss, “Prudent Woman,” 48–49; Brathwaite, Creole Society, 214. 72. Turney to Arcedekne, 29 March 1790, Vanneck Papers. 73. St. David Vestry Minutes, 1804, JGA. 74. Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, 1812–22, vol. 1, NLJ; Inventory of Irwin Estate, 1820, NLJ. 75. For similar concerns behind the move toward public birth in England, see Gowing, Common Bodies, 151–54. 76. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 July 1789, Vanneck Papers; Votes of Assembly, 1788, no. 2, 95, JGA. 77. Lewis, Journal, 86. 78. Ibid., 107. 79. For Lewis’s biography and his meeting with Wilberforce, see the introduction to his journal by Mona Wilson; ibid., 7. 80. Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 177–78. 81. Lewis, Journal, 76. 82. Ibid., 76. 83. For good examples of masters interference in the intimate relations of the enslaved see, Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 216–27.

288 Notes to Pages 175–180 84. For a good overview and critique of the debates around infant mortality and its causes, see Brereton, “Searching for the Invisible Woman.” 85. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 200. 86. Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1999), 213. 87. Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 10 January 1808, Penrhyn Papers. 88. Coroner’s Inquest in St. Elizabeth, Powel Family Papers 1681–1938; Braco Estate (Trewlany) Journal, 1795–97, JGA; GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1790, vol. XXIV, no. 745–48. 89. Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, Decrease of Negroes, 1794, JGA. 90. John Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica; with Remarks on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Slaves, and on the Abolition of Slavery in the Colonies (1823; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 108; Altink, Slave Women, 4–7. See also Hall, Civilising Subjects, 107–15; Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 410–11. 91. Soulodre-La R. France, “ ‘Por El Amor!’: Child Killing in Colonial Nueva Granada,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 1 (2002): 87–100, 91. 92. J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 178. 93. Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71; see also Gary Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 49–73. 94. Powel Family Papers 1681–1938, Daybook of Dr. Alexander Johnson, 1767–77. 95. Powel Family Papers 1681–1938, St. Elizabeth Coroner’s Inquest. 96. Brathwaite, Creole Society, 290; Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 269; Lewis Journal, 280– 81. Todd Savitt makes a similar observation about mentally ill enslaved people in Virginia who were either imprisoned or kept around the property to be cared for by family or master. It was not until 1846 that the state legislature approved admitting slave patients to the public asylum. Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978) 264. 97. Gutting, Cambridge Companion, 55; quotations in Paton, No Bond but the Law, 26, 27; for original quotation, see Christopher R. Adamson, “Punishment After Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865–1890,” Social Problems 30, no. 5 (1983): 555–69. 98. For this critique of Foucault’s discourses on madness, see Gutting, Cambridge Companion, 58–59. 99. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 23. 100. Journal of Account of Green Park and Spring Vale Estate Books, 1790–1815, NLJ. For cases of maternal deaths and stillbirths, see Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783– 1837, JGA. 101. Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, Decrease of Negroes, 1813, 1815, JGA. 102. Hall, In Miserable Slavery, 145, 279. For discussion of other emmenagogues, see Londa L. Schiebinger, “Agnotology and Exotic Abortifacients: The Cultural Production of Ignorance in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149, no. 3 (2005): 316–43; Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World, 108–25; Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 121–42; Brereton, “Searching for the Invisible

Notes to Pages 180–188 289 Woman”; Verene Shepherd, “Petticoat Rebellion? The Black Woman’s Body and Voice in the Struggles for Freedom in Colonial Jamaica,” in In the Shadow of the Plantation: Caribbean History and Legacy, ed. Alvin O. Thompson, 17–39 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002); J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 112. 103. Quotations in Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 244.See also Colleen Vasconcellos, “ ‘And a Child Shall Lead Them?’: Slavery, Childhood, and African Cultural Identity in Jamaica, 1750–1838” (PhD diss., Florida International University, 2004), 71. 104. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Report of the Lords Committee of Council for Trade and Plantations 1789 vol. XXVI, no. 646a.;Votes of Assembly, 1788, no. 2, 97, 98, JGA. 105. Turney to Arcedekne, 29 March 1790, Vanneck Papers. 106. Quoted in Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 106–7. 107. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1790 vol. XXIV, no. 745–48. 108. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 34–36.

Chapter 6 1. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA; Account of Increase and Decrease of Negroes belonging to Pleasant Hill, Phillipsfield and Suffolk Park Estates, December 1788–89, Slebeech Mss.; Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA. 2. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA; Account of Increase and Decrease of Negroes belonging to Pleasant Hill, Phillipsfield, and Suffolk Park Estates, December 1788–89, Slebeech Mss. 3. J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 119, 68–106; see also Suzanne Francis Brown, “Finding Families within the Communities of the Enslaved on the Mona and Papine Estates, 1817– 1832,” Caribbean Quarterly 51, nos. 3–4 (2005): 94–108; Cowling, Conceiving Freedom, 53–56. 4. Royal Gazette, Saturday, 23 June 1781; Royal Gazette, Saturday, 19–26 May 1787; Jamaica Mercury, 17 January 1798; Daily Advertiser, 23 September, 1791, 23 July 1791. 5. Turney to Arcedekne, 19 March 1790, Vanneck Papers. 6. Among the most recent works are Jerome S. Handler and JoAnn Jacoby, “Slave Names and Naming in Barbados, 1650–1830,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 4 (1996): 685–728; Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 132. 7. Lewis, Journal, 290. For additional discussion of Neptune’s case, see Trevor Burnard, “Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no. 3 (2001): 325–46. 8. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 62–63; Marion Kilson, “The Ga Naming Rite,” Anthropos 63–64, nos. 5–6 (1968–69): 904–20; Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 102–21. 9. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 1–30; Rice, “Missionary Context.” For discussion of the efforts by the Anglican Church and its failure to win many converts, see Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 63–79. 10. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 1–30. 11. Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Jamaica’s Struggle for a Self-Perpetuating Slave Population: Demographic, Social and Religious Changes on Golden Grove Plantation, 1812– 1832,” Journal of Caribbean Studies 6, no. 3 (1988): 287–308. 12. Quoted in Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 20.

290 Notes to Pages 188–194 13. Nicholas M. Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650– 1780 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 65, 76–77, 80–81; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 182–208. 14. Burnard, “Slave Naming Patterns”; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 57. 15. For aggregate figures on enslaved people’s baptism, see Wood and Clayton, “SelfPerpetuating Slave Population.” On baptisms and marriages among the enslaved, see Parish Registers, St. Thomas-in-the-East, vols. 1–2, JGA. 16. Grainger et al., Treatment and Management, 15; Collins, Practical Rules, 468; GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98. 17. Collins, Practical Rules, 142–46; Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 411; Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 118; Higman, Slave Populations, 353–54; Klein and Engerman, “Fertility Differentials”; Robert S. Corruccini, Elizabeth M. Brandon, and Jerome S. Handler, “Inferring Fertility from Relative Mortality in Historically Controlled Cemetery Remains from Barbados,” American Antiquity 54, no. 3 (1989): 609–14; K. Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction.” 18. Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 6 August 1807, Penrhyn Papers; Collins, Practical Rules, 146; Grainger et al., Treatment and Management, 15. 19. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98. 20. Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 126. 21. Mair, Women in Jamaica, 118–19, 240. 22. For discussion of European medical opinion on breastfeeding, see Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, 429–32; Perry, “Colonizing the Breast.” For the influence of metropolitan attitudes on breastfeeding on slaveholders and abolitionists, see Altink, Representations of Slave Women, 44–46. 23. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98; Ewart to Lord Penrhyn, 6 August 1807, Penrhyn Papers; GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Report of the Lords Committee of Council for Trade and Plantations 1789 vol. XXVI, no. 646a; Fuller, Notes, 57. 24. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98. 25. Cynric R. Williams, A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica from the Western to the Eastern End, in the Year 1823 (London: C. H. Reynell, 1826), 13–14; Grainger et al., Treatment and Management, 15. 26. Collins, Practical Rules, 142; Fuller, Notes, 62. 27. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98; Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 118; Lewis, Journal, 322. 28. Collins, Practical Rules, 146. 29. Ibid., 142, 397. 30. Ibid., 141–49, 464. 31. Grainger et al., Treatment and Management, 15–16. 32. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA.

Notes to Pages 194–200 291 33. William Wright (MD) to Arcedekne, 1 March 1788, Vanneck Papers. 34. For examples, see Maryland Estate Book, 1817–25 (the death of Richard, a child burned by accident), NLJ; Journal of Account of Green Park and Spring Vale Estate Books, 1790–1815 (the deaths of two children, who fell accidentally) 1 November and 22 December 1812, (King, a young child, died from a fall) 10 August 1821, NLJ; Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, vol. 1, 1812–22, NLJ. 35. Inventory of Irwin Estate, 1820, NLJ; Maryland Estate Book, 1817–-25, NLJ; Hibbert to the Duke of Chandos, 24 May 1788, Stowe Manuscripts; Simon Taylor proposed building weaning houses for Golden Grove estate in 1789, but the records are not quite clear on whether this proposal became a reality. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 August 1789, Vanneck Papers. 36. Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica, 108–10. 37. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 118; Beckford, Remarks, 36–37; Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 August 1789, 6 September 1789, Vanneck Papers. 38. Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica, 92–93, 108–9. 39. Perry, “Colonizing the Breast.” 40. Hibbert to the Duke of Chandos, 24 May 1788, Stowe Manuscripts; Edward Pool and East to Hope Elletson, 23 December 1772, 18 April 1775, 25 April 1775, 19 April 1772, Stowe Manuscripts. 41. Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 August 1789, Vanneck Papers; Phillips to Barritt, 9 June 1789, 26 April 1788, Slebeech Mss. 42. Williams, Tour Through the Island, 14–15, 19. 43. Hope Elletson to East and Pool, 25 April 1775, East to Hope Elletson, 19 August 1772, Stowe Manuscripts. 44. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98, 1789, vol. XXVI, no. 646a; East to Hope Elletson, 19 August 1772, Stowe Manuscripts; Barritt to Phillips, 9 June 1789, Slebeech Mss. 45. Consolidated Slave Act 1788, Acts of Assembly passed in the Island of Jamaica 1760– 92, JGA. 46. Quoted in Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 163. 47. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98. 48. For discussions of the challenges of the provision ground system, see Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 166–69; Higman, Slave Populations, 211–12. 49. St. David Vestry Minutes, 1806–13, JGA. 50. Benjamin McMahon, Jamaica Plantership (London: E. Wilson, 1839), 143. 51. For these arguments and the idea that provision grounds played a vital role in the development of Caribbean peasantries, see Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine, 1974), 111–56. 52. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 105. 53. Sells, Remarks on the Condition of the Slaves, 11–12. 54. Kenneth Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 76–88. 55. Robert Johnson to James Johnson, 5 June 1823, Powel Family Papers 1681–1938; Taylor to Arcedekne, 5 July 1789, Vanneck Papers; East to Eliza Elletson, 31 May 1777, 22 September 1778, Stowe Manuscripts.

292 Notes to Pages 200–206 56. Jerome S. Handler and Robert S. Corruccini, “Weaning Among West Indian Slaves: Historical and Bioanthropological Evidence from Barbados,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 1 (January 1986): 111–17; Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, 129–31. For similar work and findings, see Douglas V. Armstrong, “Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Caribbean Plantation,” in “I, Too, Am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, ed. Theresa A. Singleton, 173–92 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). 57. Higman, Slave Populations, 109. 58. Ibid., 278–79. 59. Barritt to Phillips, 8 September 1791, 18 August, 1796, 17 January 1798, 20 February 1798, Slebeech Mss.; Harmony Hall and Retirement Penn Financial Inventories, 1785–90, 1800–1802, Powel Family Papers 1681–1938; Hope Elletson to East and Pool, 4 September 1775, Stowe Manuscripts; Henry Whiteley, Three Months in Jamaica [in 1832: Comprising a Residence of Seven Weeks on a Sugar Plantation] (London: J. Hatchard, 1833), 15. 60. Joseph Stewart to Hope Elletson, 6 September 1769, Hope Elletson to Pool, 20 May 1770, Stowe Manuscripts. 61. R. Fearon to Lord Penrhyn, 11 September 1805, 17 November 1805, 18 December 1805, Graham to Richard Dawkins Pennant, 18 March 1815, Penrhyn Papers; Quier, Letters and Essays, 113; R. Fearon to Lord Penrhyn, 17 November 1805, Penrhyn Papers. 62. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 16. 63. For reflections on the “material body” and the “biological body” see Jessica R. Johnston, “Introduction” in The American Body: An Anthology, ed. Jessica R. Johnson, xiii–xix (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2001), xv; Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 1–42. 64. Port Royal Summary Slave Trials, 1819–34, 4 December 1820, JGA (for additional discussion of this case, see also Mair, Women in Jamaica, 291); Records of Visitations, Adjudications, and Valuations, etc., by Special Justice Carby in St. James, 1836, JGA. 65. Mair, Women in Jamaica, 237–39. 66. For reflections on the ideological forms of rulership and “resistance as thought,” see Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 39. 67. Bush, Slave Women, 64–65; Beckles, Natural Rebels, 165; Mair, Women in Jamaica, 244–48; Camp, Closer to Freedom, 36–37. 68. Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 27 July-3 August 1816. 69. Royal Gazette, 19–26 May 1787, 27 July-3 August 1816; Daily Advertiser, 14 December 1790. 70. For discussions of the various motivating factors for enslaved women on the run in the Caribbean, see Bush, Slave Women, 64–65; Alvin Thompson, Flight to Freedom African Maroons and Runaways in the Americas (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 72–78; Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 217–21. For North American comparatives, see Camp, Closer to Freedom. 71. Bush, Slave Women, 64–65; Beckles, Natural Rebels, 165; Mair, Women in Jamaica, 244–48; Camp, Closer to Freedom, 36–37. 72. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 27. 73. Daily Advertiser, 8 July 1791, 15 January 1791. 74. Cornwall and Jamaica General Advertiser Chronicle, 2 July 1791. 75. Kingston Chronicle and Jamaica Journal, 27 October 1832.

Notes to Pages 206–217 293 76. Jamaica Courant and Public Advertiser, 5 June 1830; Kingston Daily Advertiser, 27 January 1791. 77. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 78. For discussion of these practices as part of African cultural continuity in Jamaica and the Caribbean, see Brathwaite, Creole Society, 213; Mullin, Africa in America, 163–65; Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 244–51. 79. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 1, 399. See also Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 247. 80. Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 249. 81. Quoted in Mullin, Africa in America, 163. 82. Lewis, Journal, 88. 83. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1789 vol. XXV, no. 646. 84. Note that the reports about the mothers at Friendship and Greenwich estates were recorded by Mathew Lewis; see Lewis, Journal, 277. 85. Ibid., 298. 86. Ibid., 178.

Chapter 7 1. Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica, 58. 2. Ibid., 31. 3. Quoted in ibid., 30. 4. Higman, Population and Economy, 83–95; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 30–31, 164; Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica, 187. 5. Beckford, Remarks; Taylor to Arcedekne, 1 November 1789, Vanneck Papers; Barritt to Phillips, 1 July 1795, Slebeech Mss. 6. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 285. 7. Consolidated Slave Law 1826, Acts of Assembly passed in the Island of Jamaica, 1824– 30, vi, 10, JGA. 8. Cornwall, Pleas of the Crown, Indictment/Record Books, November 1811–30, JGA. For additional discussion of this case, see Mair, Women in Jamaica, 233. 9. Quoted in Beverley Blake, “A History of Children in Nineteenth Century Jamaica” (MPhil diss., University of the West Indies, Mona, 1991), 9. 10. Votes of Assembly, 1826, no. 29, 272–77, JGA. 11. The King Versus John McCanes, Cornwall, Pleas of the Crown, Indictment/Record Book, 1811–30, 140, JGA; The King Versus Rankine McLarty, Surrey, Pleas of the Crown, 1828–36, 165, JGA. 12. For details on the founding of the antislavery society, particularly its criticism of the failure of colonial reform, which prompted its founding, see Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 237. 13. Resolutions of the House of Commons 15 May 1823: Bathurst to Murray and Beard 23 May 1823; Circular Dispatch from Bathurst to Governors; Bathurst to Governors, 9 July 1823, 560–64, 561. 14. Bathurst to Governors 9 July 1823, 562–64, 562. 15. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 4–5; Francis Martin Dodsworth,

294 Notes to Pages 217–225 “Habit, the Criminal Body and the Body Politic in England, c. 1700–1800,” Body and Society 19, nos. 2–3 (2013): 83–106. 16. Dispatches, Jamaica to England, no. 144, 24 February 1825, from Earl Bathurst, 145, no. 31, 5 August 1831, from Earl Bathurst, 13, JGA. (Note that the Jamaica dispatches include transcripts of dispatches that originated in England) 17. Votes of Assembly, 1826, no. 29, 21–31, 191, 201, 212, 272–77, JGA. 18. Note that the rape took place in 1822, but went to trial in 1823. 19. Ibid., 191, 201, 212, 272–77. 20. Hall, Civilising Subjects, 124–25, 251; Scully and Paton, Introduction, 12. 21. Resolutions of the House of Commons 15 May 1823: Bathurst to Murray and Beard 23 May 1823; Circular Dispatch from Bathurst to Governors; Bathurst to Governors, 9 July 1823, 560–64. 22. Votes of Assembly, 1827, no. 32, 266–80, 171–82, JGA. See also Votes of Assembly, 1826, no. 29, 21–31, 272–77, JGA. 23. Ibid., 1826, no. 29, 272–77, 75, JGA. 24. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 1–37, 148. 25. Consolidated Slave Act, 1826, Acts of Assembly 1824–30, JGA. 26. Votes of Assembly, 1827, no. 32, 266–80, 1826, No. 29, 272–77, JGA; Consolidated Slave Act 1826, Acts of Assembly, 1824–30, JGA. 27. Braco Estate (Trewlany) Journal, 1795–97, JGA; York Estate Inventories, 1785, GaleMorant Family Papers 1731–1845. 28. Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, Inventories, JGA. For similar listings of young children see Inventory of Irwin Estate, 1820, NLJ. 29. Slave Inventories, 1787, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA. 30. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 105, 121–22. 31. For discussions of children’s nature and similar experiences of enslaved children in the American South, see Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 104–5; Jan Lewis, “Mother’s Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth Century America,” in Social History and Issues in Human Consciousness: Some Interdisciplinary Connections, ed. Andrew E. Barnes and Peter Stearns, 210–12 (New York: New York University Press, 1989). 32. George Wilson Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica, vol. 2 (London: Cass, 1968), 430. 33. John Shickle to Pennant, 21 December 1772, Penrhyn Papers. 34. Braco Estate (Trewlany) Journal, 1795–97, JGA; Inventories, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA; Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821–25, JGA; Weekly Journal, Green Park Estate, 1829–31, JGA; Estate Inventories, 1785, Gale-Morant Family Papers 1731–1845; Golden Grove Estate Inventories, Vanneck Papers. 35. For discussion of this idea of “ideal bodies,” see Johnston, American Body, xvii. 36. Taylor to Arcedekne, 1 May 1788, Vanneck Papers. 37. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 105–6. See also Frank Wesley Pitman, “The Organization of Slave Labor,” Journal of Negro History 11, no. 4: 595–609. 38. 1837 Invoices of Sundries consigned to Rose Park for the use of Worthy Park estate, 1794, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA. 39. Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA; Quarterly Inventories 1798– 1817, Tharp Ms.

Notes to Pages 225–229 295 40. Audra Diptee, “Imperial Idea, Colonial Realities.” See also Sheila Aird, The Forgotten Ones: Enslaved Children in Caribbean Societies, 1673–1838 (Frankfurt, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Mu¨ller Aktiengesellschaft, 2008), 21. 41. Schwartz used the term “home-grown” slaves to call attention to the shift toward the local reproduction of slaves after the closing of the slave trade. See Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 6. For elaboration and application of this concept to the Jamaican context, see Sasha Turner, “Home-Grown Slaves: Women, Reproduction, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Jamaica, 1788–1807,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 3 (2011): 39–62. 42. For theoretical explications on adolescence and application to varying historical contexts, see John Demos and Virginia Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Marriage and Family 31, no. 4 (1969): 632–38; James A. Schultz, “Medieval Adolescence: The Claims of History and the Silence of German Narrative,” Speculum 66, no. 3 (1991): 519–39; Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 196–99. 43. Braco Estate (Trewlany) Journal, 1795–97, JGA; Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821– 25, JGA; Weekly Journal, Green Park Estate, 1829–31, JGA. 44. Braco Estate (Trewlany) Journal, 1795–97, JGA; Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1821– 25, JGA; Weekly Journal, Green Park Estate, 1829–31, JGA; Estate Inventories, 1785, GaleMorant Family Papers 1731–1845; Golden Grove Estate Inventories, Vanneck Papers. 45. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1790 vol. XXIV, no. 745–48. 46. Ibid., 1790, vol. XXIX, no. 697–98. 47. Ibid. 48. Slave Inventories, 1804, Tharp Ms. 49. Campbell, “Managing Human Resources on a Jamaican Sugar Estate,” 52–55; Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 198–99; Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery, 125. 50. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98; Nathaniel Phillips’ Estates, Plantation Journals, 1790 Slebeech Mss.; Weekly Journal, Green Park Estate, 1829–31, JGA. 51. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 191–93. 52. Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837 (see inventories for 1830–37), JGA. 53. Beckford, Remarks, 36. 54. GB.HOC.SP. 1731–1800, Evidence of Select Committee on the Slave Trade and Minutes of Evidence 1790 vol. XXIX, no. 697–98. 55. Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837 (see inventories for 1830–37), JGA. 56. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 109. 57. For similar arguments, see Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, Children in Slavery Through the Ages (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 13. Marie Jenkins Schwartz makes a similar argument about planters in the American South who emphasized the gradual education of enslaved children to secure their survival. See Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 134–35. 58. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 107. 59. For accidental deaths involving children, see, for example, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, JGA; Harmony Hall Estate, Account Book, vol. 1, NLJ. 60. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 108. See also Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 157.

296 Notes to Pages 230–235 61. Maryland Estate Book, 1817–25, NLJ; A List of Negroes at Springvale Penn, 1791, 1794, 1795, Journal of Account of Green Park and Spring Vale Estate Books, 1790–1815, NLJ. 62. A List of Negroes at Springvale Penn, 1791, 1794, 1795 Journal of Account of Green Park and Spring Vale Estate Books, 1790–1815, NLJ. 63. Barritt to Phillips, 1 January 1796, Slebeech Mss. 64. Taylor to Arcedekne, 17 November 1786, Vanneck Papers. 65. For the most recent discussion of gender and age disparity in Jamaican slave imports, see Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica, 50–72. See also Vasconcellos, “And a Child Shall Lead Them?” 23–41. 66. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 81–82. 67. Bryan Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, vol. 2 (London: B. Crosby, 1798), 83. 68. Inventory and Evaluation of Pleasant Hill and Phillipsfield Estate, 1789, Slebeech Mss.; Valuation of Slaves, 1804, Tharp Ms. 69. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 110–11. 70. For the argument that slave children worked in skilled and diverse labor roles see Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Children in Slavery, 8. 71. For classification and definition of colors in Jamaica’s slave society, see Brathwaite, Creole Society, 167–68. 72. Green Park Trewlany Journal, 1825–30, JGA. 73. Ibid. 74. Francis Graham to Mr. Roden, 20 October 1805, Graham to Thomas Miller, 15 May 1807, 10 December 1807, 4 May 1808, Miller to Graham, 2 January 1802, Georgia Estate, NLJ. 75. Blake, “History of Children.” 76. John Concannon to Eliza Elletson, 20 March 1779, Stowe Manuscripts; For similar assessments of colored youths see Lewis, Journal, 107. 77. Quarterly Inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms. 78. Ibid.; Telford List of Slaves, 1822, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1833 (Thetford Estate Accounts), JGA. 79. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 86–87. 80. Ibid., 81–82. 81. Ibid., 106–7; Collins, Practical Rules. 82. Quarterly Inventories, 1798–1817, Tharp Ms; Telford List of Slaves, 1822, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1833 (Thetford Estate Accounts), JGA. 83. Inquisition August Grand Court 1786, The King Versus John Russell, 3 August 1786, Middlesex Supreme Court, Pleas of the Crown, 1783–1804, 61, 62, JGA. 84. Inquisition Grand Court 1778, The King Versus Daniel Sleater 1 November 1778, 213, 214, Surrey, Pleas of the Crown 1770–1783, JGA. For similar cases, see Cornwall, Pleas of the Crown, Indictment/Record Book, 1811–30, JGA. 85. Members of the Jamaican Assembly closely followed the debates in Parliament as well as the activities of the abolitionist movement. Throughout the 1780s, the Assembly created several committees to investigate allegations against West Indian planters concerning the treatment of slaves in the sugar colonies. New legislation was passed based on what the committees reported were the main concerns of abolitionists. For reports and discussions, see Votes of Assembly, no. 2, 9 October 1788, 25, 16 October 1788, 33–37, 12 November 1788, 80–89, JGA. 86. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion, 86, 91.

Notes to Pages 235–243 297 87. Goveia, Amelioration and Emancipation, 4–5. 88. Consolidated Slave Act 1788, Consolidated Slave Law, 1826, Acts of Assembly, 1760– 92, 1824–30, JGA. 89. See, for example, Jamaican Assembly committees and discussion about the slave registry bill, the 1824 House of Commons Resolutions, and the Order in Council. Votes of Assembly, 1824, no. 29, 40, 41, 1826, no. 31,191, 201, 212, 272–77, 1827, no. 32, 171–82, JGA. 90. Kingston Vestry Minutes, 1819–21, 18 September 1817, JGA. 91. Ibid., 1820–34, 30 August 1824, JGA. 92. Dispatches, Jamaica to England, 8 March 1822, no. 20, 9, JGA. See also Dispatches, Jamaica to England, 16 June 1824, No. 96, 91, JGA; Votes of Assembly, 1827, no. 32, 266–80, JGA. 93. St. George Vestry Minutes, 1829–35, 12 November 1830, JGA. 94. Port Royal Summary Slave Trials, 1819–34, 1 May 1828, 27 February 1830, JGA. 95. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 108, 112; Port Royal Summary Slave Trials 1819–34, 20 April 1830, JGA. 96. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. See also Gutting, Foucault, 82. 97. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 118. 98. McMahon, Jamaica Plantership, 33–34. 99. J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 142–48; Richard B. Allen, “A Traffic Repugnant to Humanity: Children, the Mascarene Slave Trade and British Abolitionism,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 2 (2006): 219–36. 100. John Riland, Memoirs of a West-India Planter (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1827), 3. 101. Stewart, Past and Present, 74. 102. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 45. 103. For interpretations of some of these referents, see John F. Campbell, “Textualising Slavery: From Slave to Enslaved People in Colonial Caribbean Historiography,” in Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana, ed. Sandra Courtman, 34–48 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2004). 104. Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 35–36. 105. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 14. See also Whiteley, Three Months in Jamaica, 8–9. 106. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 50. 107. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 187. 108. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 50. 109. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 187, 126. 110. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 201–2. 111. Roughley, Jamaican Planters’ Guide, 79–80, quotation on 106. 112. Paton, No Bond but the Law. 113. Consolidated Slave Act, 1788, Acts of Assembly, 1760–92, JGA. 114. Port Royal Summary Slave Trials, 1819–34, 19 May 1824, JGA. 115. Ibid., 23 July 1823, 21 February 1823, 19 May 1824, 26 October 1826. 116. Mair, Women in Jamaica, 235. 117. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 27. 118. Quoted in Ryden, West Indian Slavery, 208.

298 Notes to Pages 243–247 119. Consolidated Slave Law, 1826, Acts of Assembly, 1824–30, JGA. 120. Port Royal Summary Slave Trials, 1819–34, 26 January 1826, 8 February 1825, JGA. 121. Hall, Civilising Subjects, 124–25. 122. For sample cases, see Port Royal Summary Slave Trials, 1819–34, 10 January 1820, 10 May 1821, JGA; St. George General Court of Quarter Sessions, 1799–1834, 27 October 1813, JGA; St. George General Slave Court, 1822–31, 6 June 1823, JGA; Manchester Vestry Minutes, 1825–28, 16 January 1827; Westmoreland Vestry Minutes, 12 October 1818, JGA. 123. Port Royal Summary Slave Trials, 1819–34, 1 October 1831, JGA. 124. Votes of Assembly, 1827, no. 32, 164–68, 1807, no. 13, 59–62, 158, JGA. 125. Shepherd, “We All Thought the King Was on Our Side.” 126. Cornwall Chronicle and Jamaican General Advertiser, 2 July 1791; Royal Gazette, 24 August 1816. 127. Daily Advertiser, 23 September 1791; Jamaica Courant, 18 April 1818. 128. Mair, Women in Jamaica, 248. 129. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 124. 130. Ibid. 131. Daily Advertiser, 26 January 1791; Cornwall Chronicle and Jamaican General Advertiser, 18 October 1781. 132. Port Royal Summary Slave Trials, 1819–34, JGA.

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Sources 305 Morgan, Maurice. A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies. London: William Griffin, 1772. Nugent, Maria. Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Quier, John. Letters and Essays on the Small-Pox and Inoculation, the Measles, the Dry BellyAche, the Yellow, and Remitting, and Intermitting Fevers of the West Indies: To which are Added, Thoughts on the Hydrocephalus Internus, and Observations on Hydatides in the Heads of Cattle. London: Edinburgh: J. Murray and C. Elliot, 1778. Ramsay, James. An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. London: James Phillips, George-Yard, Lombard-Street, 1784. ———. A Letter from a Gentleman, to a Member of Parliament; Concerning Toleration. Edinburgh: 1703. ———. Objections to the Abolition of the Slave Trade, with Answers to which are Prefixed, Strictures on a Late Publication, Intitled, “Considerations on the Emancipation of Negroes, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade. London: J. Phillips, 1788. Riland, John. Memoirs of a West-India Planter. London: Hamilton, Adams, 1827. Roughley, Thomas. The Jamaican Planters’ Guide; or, A System for Planting and Managing a Sugar Estate. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823. Sells, William. Remarks on the Condition of the Slaves in the Island of Jamaica. London: J. M. Richardson, Cornhill, and Ridgways, 1823. Stewart, John. A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica; with Remarks on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Slaves, and on the Abolition of Slavery in the Colonies. 1823. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Thomson, James. A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes as they Occur in the Island of Jamaica: With Observations on the Country Remedies. Kingston, Jamaica: Alex. Aikman, 1820. Whiteley, Henry. Three Months in Jamaica [in 1832: Comprising a Residence of Seven Weeks on a Sugar Plantation]. London: J. Hatchard, 1833. Wilberforce, William. An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1823. ———. A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire. London: Luke Hansard and Sons, 1807. ———. A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, Contrasted with Real Christianity. London: J. Davis, 1799. Williams, Cynric R. A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica from the Western to the Eastern End, in the Year 1823. London: C. H. Reynell, 1826. Williamson, John. Medical and Miscellaneous Observations Relative to the West India Islands. Vols. 1–2. Edinburgh: Smellie, 1817. Winterbottom, Thomas. An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, vol. 2. London: John Hatchard, 1903.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations Abbott, Mary Ann, 238 abolition movement, 1–4, 8–10; Dundas on, 3–4; Fuller on, 243–44; organizations in, 21, 86, 216, 237; parliamentary committees on, 3, 14–15; Wesley on, 19; Wilberforce on, 1–2, 4, 9, 20–23, 28–29. See also pronatal plans for abolition abortion, 85, 253; by midwives, 141, 180; spontaneous, 88 Adamson, Adam, 172 Addison, Joseph, 116 adolescents, 225. See also slave children amelioration of slave laws, 15, 46n9, 220 Anderson, Adam, 153 Angolan slaves, 61 Annesley, James, 138–39 Anstey, Roger, 260n2 Arcedekne, Chaloner, 44, 265n2 Bailey, Mary, 87 Baillie, John, 148–49, 207 Ballard, Martha, 143 Baptists, 86, 186, 187, 221 Barham, Henry, 126, 160 Barham, Joseph, 265n9 Barnes, John, 45, 55 Barrett, Richard, 188 Barritt, Thomas, 51; on ethnic preferences, 59–60; on sexual relations, 64, 215 bathing practices, 116–18, 132, 157–59, 251 Bathurst, Earl, 216–17, 238 Beckford, William, 44–45, 228, 265n6; on reproductive age group, 51, 215; on slave nurseries, 195 Benjamin, Myer, 242–43

Bonner, Walter, 105 Bonny, Frances, 89 Bordo, Susan, 257n8 Bosman, William, 115–16 breastfeeding, 121, 123–26, 207–8; mastitis and, 125–26; Ramsay’s pronatal plan and, 30–31; weaning and, 30, 100–101, 189–200, 262n29; wet nurses for, 121–23, 125 Bridgens, Richard, 165, 166, 220 Bridges, George Wilson, 223 Brown, Hamilton, 141 Brown, Kathleen, 258n8, 279n2 Burge, William, 199 burial customs, 207–8 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 86 Camp, Stephanie, 7, 258n8 Campbell, John, 275n58 Cancanon, John, 234 Carby, Hazel V., 271n85 Carleton, Guy, 34 Carmichael, A. C., 165 Castles, John, 148 castor oil, 159, 160 census records, 26, 48, 169 Chamberlain, Richard, 238 Chambers, Ann, 184 Chambers, Bessy, 81–82 Chapman, William Ogilvie, 238 Charitable Infirmary for the Relief of Poor Women Labouring of Child (London), 130 children. See slave children Chisholme, James, 146, 153

308 Index cholera, 8, 281n39 citizenship of black subjects, 36–37, 128, 134, 218; women excluded from, 39 “civilizing mission,” 36–37 Clare, Michael, 180 cloth, 162–65; distribution of, 162–64; preferences of, 164–65 coffee estates, 50, 230 Collins, David, 57; on ethnic differences, 60; on incarcerating slaves, 93; on mastitis, 126; on midwives, 113–14, 119, 131, 140; pregnant worker guidelines of, 76–77, 79; on slave mothers, 88, 108; on weaning infants, 193 Committee to Consider Measures for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 3 Consolidated Slave Act: of 1788, 15, 80; of 1792, 80; of 1807, 187; of 1826, 215, 219 Cooper, Thomas, 22, 23, 35 Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 7 Cor, Lucy, 103–4 Cor, Minerva, 103–4 Coromantee slaves, 59, 62–63 Coroners Act (1817), 168 Cowper, William, 174 Crane, Frederick Charles, 142, 146 Creoles, 48, 73, 207; attributes of, 40–41, 155–56; jobs suitable for, 231 Crosdale, Edward, 171 Cruickshank, Isaac, 2, 3 Daly, Rachael, 176 Dancer, Thomas, 65, 170 Dawson, Andrew, 142, 146 De Barros, Juanita, 264nn52–53 Demarara Slave Rebellion (1823), 275n65 Diptee, Audra, 273n21 division of labor: among slave children, 230–36; on sugar plantations, 13, 39, 44–45, 77–80 domestic training, 233 domestic violence, 8, 63–64 Douglas, Robert, 238 Dove, William, 211–12 Dowling, Thomas, 2 Drescher, Seymour, 263n47 Dundas, Henry, 3–4, 26, 52 Dwaris, Sarah, 190 dysentery, 143, 163

East, Edward, 14, 147 Ebo, Keatty, 71 Ebo women, 59–63, 252, 269n52 Edwards, Bryan, 231 Elletson, Anna Eliza, 141–42 Elletson, Roger Hope, 145, 198 Emancipation Act (1833), 15, 36–37 Engerman, Stanley, 262n29 ethnic differences, 59–63, 170–71, 253, 269n52. See also race Ewart, David, 78–80, 144–45, 175 families. See slave marriages Fearon, Rowland, 202; on pregnant women, 88, 92; on sexual relations, 62–65 fertility, 14, 18, 73, 250, 273n24; ethnic differences and, 59–62, 83; Long on, 70, 71; Middle Passage hazards to, 18–19; venereal disease and, 12, 266n21; Wilberforce on, 23 Fett, Sharla, 272n19 flogging. See whipping folk healers, 25, 125, 151, 249; Lewis on, 115; Long on, 128; physicians versus, 252. See also medical care Follett, Richard, 275n58 Foucault, Michel, 278n102 Fountain, John, 56 Francklyn, Gilbert, 154, 226–27 Fuller, Stephen, 147, 155–56; on abolition debates, 243–44; on coroners, 167–68 funeral customs, 207–8 Gardner, Robert, 245 Gardner, Susan, 98 Garner, Margaret, 176 gender differences, 5, 9, 11; and age ratios, 46–59, 47–49, 53, 54, 74; in children’s labor, 19–20, 230–36; among Creoles, 48, 73; in division of labor, 13, 39, 44–45, 77–80 ghosts, ancestral spirits and, 185, 207 Gomez, Michael, 270n69 gonorrhea, 2, 12, 168, 257n4 Gordon, Catherine, 89, 184 Goulbourn, Sarah, 141 Goulburn, Henry, 46–47, 91 Graham, Francis, 57–59, 233 Grainger, James, 157, 160, 193

Index 309 Hanway, Jonas, 27, 196 Hawkesbury, Lord, 243–44 healers. See folk healers health care, 29–30, 84–85, 132; need for ventilation in, 161–62; need for warmth in, 157–58. See also folk healers; medical care Hibbard, Sarah, 141 Higman, Barry, 275n58 Holt, Milly, 184 “hothouses” (hospitals). See health care Hume, David, 37 humoral medicine, 116, 156–58, 163 Hyatt, Charlotte, 184 Igbo. See Ebo women infant mortality, 11, 14, 152, 251; contested meanings of, 167–80; rate of, 18 infanticide, 172–78, 253; by midwives, 141; as political statement, 253; suicide and, 176–77, 179, 181 influenza, 77, 169 insanity, 177–79, 207; treatment of, 158 Jackson, Robert, 91 Jarrett, Elizabeth, 87 Jeffries, Samuel, 80 “Jezebel” stereotype, 65 Johnson, Alexander, 177 Johnson, John, 158 Jones, John, 158 Joseph, Helene, 87 Kerr, Susan, 184 Kimber, John, 1–2, 3, 12 King v. John Russell (1786), 236–37 Klein, Herbert, 262n29 Knight, James, 115 kwashiorkor, 200 Laing, Robert, 245 leprosy, 8, 145, 156 Lewis, Matthew, 76, 108–9, 207; on cold baths, 158–59; on enslaved healers, 115; on infanticide, 173–75; on naming practices, 185; and Wilberforce, 174 Ligon, Richard, 56 Locke, John, 32, 217, 263n33 Long, Edward, 37, 40, 155, 272n8; on cleanliness, 117; on enslaved healers, 128; on

enslaved mothers, 176; on ethnic differences, 59, 60–61; on fertility rates, 70, 71; on Kingston Market, 199–200; on postpartum customs, 118; on sexual development, 215; on women in labor, 82–83 madness. See insanity Mair, Lucille Mathurin, 4–5 malaria, 169 man midwives, 8, 113, 123–24, 130, 137–38, 140. See also midwives Mandingo slaves, 61 Manningham, Richard, 130, 137 marriages. See slave marriages mastitis, 125–26 maternal descent. See partus sequitur ventrem Mathison, Gilbert, 162–63, 195, 196 McKenzie, Rosalind, 87 McMahon, Benjamin, 199, 239 measles, 102, 143, 169, 200–202 meconium, 153, 159–61 medical care, 8, 10, 76, 235; lay healers versus, 252; plantation hospitals for, 29–30, 84–85, 132, 139, 157–58, 162; professionalization of, 15, 127, 249, 251; quarantines and, 77, 102, 132. See also health care; midwives menarche, 216 Methodists, 19, 186, 187, 221 midwives, 25, 106, 112, 128, 135, 249; abortion by, 141, 180; doctors versus, 148–50; fees of, 141; man, 8, 113, 123–24, 130, 137–38, 140; professionalization of, 127, 140. See also folk healers Miller, Thomas, 57 miscarriages, 14, 254, 275n58; from harsh labor, 69, 81–82, 85; from whipping, 68 missionaries, 40, 42, 186–89, 263n36; as inciters of rebellion, 187, 188, 221; planter hostility toward, 221, 251; schools of, 19–20, 31–32, 38, 198, 229 Mitchell, William, 142–43 Moravians, 86, 186, 187, 221 Morgan, Jennifer, 7, 82 Morgan, Maurice, 37–38; pronatal plan of, 33–34, 52; on slave children, 212 naming practices, 183–89 “Negro balls,” 65

310 Index Nugent, Maria, 65–66, 76, 121; on childbirth, 143–44 orphaned children, 103–5, 196, 206. See also slave children Park, Sabrina, 180 Parry, David, 45 partus sequitur ventrem, 11, 18, 178, 184; enslaved fathers and, 244; separating slave families and, 219–20 Penrhyn, Lord (Richard Pennant), 62, 78–79, 88, 92, 266n17 Petty, William Fitzmaurice, 34 Phillips, Nathaniel, 87; on ethnic differences, 59–60; pregnant workers of, 74 pica, 61 Pool, Edward, 197 postpartum customs, 83, 117–18 pregnancy: Bordo on, 257n8; punishment and, 68, 69, 81, 90–99, 111; work duties during, 69–90, 101; work hazards to, 13–14 Price, Rose, 228 Prince, Mary, 178–80, 240–41, 246–47 prison reforms, 94, 178, 237, 241–43, 274n47 pronatal plans for abolition, 9–11, 14, 19, 27–32, 42–44; of Graham, 57–59; of Morgan, 33–34, 52; of Ramsay, 28–33, 37; of Taylor, 53–54, 54, 57, 63, 71; of Wilberforce, 28–29, 37. See also abolition movement Protector of Slaves Office, 220 provision grounds, 63, 93–94, 199, 231, 244–45, 272n8 puerperal fever, 161 purification. See bathing practices Quakers, 19 quarantines, 77, 102, 132 Quier, John, 121, 135–38, 162–63, 191; on measles, 201–2 race, 23, 38, 83; categories of, 233. See also ethnic differences Ramsay, James, 24–25; on creoles, 40–41; on emancipation, 20–22, 35–36, 38; on missionary schools, 31–32; on mortality rate, 112–13; on mother-child bonding, 100; pronatal plan of, 28–33, 37; on reproductive age group, 51; on restraining

planters’ power, 237; on slave marriages, 39–40; on slave nurseries, 213; writings by, 21 rape. See sexual abuse Reid, Mary, 184 Roughley, Thomas, 128, 195; on children’s work, 222, 229, 231; on disciplining children, 241–42; on fertility rate, 61 Rush, Benjamin, 158 Russell, John, 236–37 Samson, Thomas, 91 Savitt, Todd, 288n96 Scarlett, William, 215 Schwartz, Marie Jenkins, 7, 273n24, 295n41, 295n57 Scott, Janette, 86 Scott, Rebecca, 96, 99 Sells, William, 200; pregnant worker guidelines of, 76–77 Seven Years’ War (1756–63), 27, 34, 196 sexual abuse, 8, 11–12; of girls, 51, 215–18; legislation on, 215–18, 253; as punishment, 168–69; in slave marriages, 63–64 Shaw, John, 238 Sheridan, Richard, 267n25 Shickle, John, 223 Simms, Louisa, 238–39 Simpson, Thomas, 215 Sims, J. Marion, 136 slave children, 47, 48, 211–48, 251; adolescent, 225; baptism of, 171, 187–88; categories of, 214, 216, 233; disciplining of, 236–43, 251; legal reforms for, 215–22; living expenses of, 27, 45–46, 58–59; manumission of, 216–17; missionary schools for, 19–20, 31–32, 38, 198, 229; mixed-race, 233; mortality of, 11, 14, 18, 152, 167–80; nurseries for, 30, 195, 196, 213, 222; orphaned, 103–5, 196, 206; runaway, 184–85; selling of, 216, 218–19, 221; sexual abuse of, 51, 215–18; sexual development of, 213–17; on slaving ships, 211–12; as symbol of primitivism, 39–40; white children’s mastery of, 240; work of, 222–36 slave marriages, 8–10, 220–22, 255; domestic violence in, 63–64; forced, 62–64, 271n88;

Index 311 Nugent on, 65–66; Ramsay on, 39–40; selling members of, 22, 103, 178–79 slave prices, 57–58, 75 slave rebellions, 36, 37, 82; Christmas, 221; Demarara, 275n65; insanity and, 177–78; missionaries’ incitement of, 187, 188, 221 Slave Registration Act (1816), 15–16 slave resistance, by mothers, 202–3, 209–10, 254 slave trade, 11, 15, 18–19, 29; gender differences in, 11, 46–59, 47–49, 53, 54; mortality rate in, 11–12; Voyages Database of, 47, 47–52, 48, 267n25 Sleater, Daniel, 237 Sloane, Hans, 126, 160 smallpox, 77, 102, 127, 147, 200–201 Smellie, William, 130, 137 Smith, Adam, 135 Smith, William, 145–47 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 21, 237 Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 86, 216, 237 Society of West India Planters and Merchants, 155 Stephen, James, 158, 275n65 Stewart, Frances, 87 Stewart, John, 176, 240 suicide, 63, 176–77, 179, 181 Taylor, Simon, 44, 148, 265n1; on children’s work, 224, 231; on ethnic differences, 60, 61; on forced slave marriages, 63; on infanticide, 172; on missionaries, 186; pronatal plan of, 53–54, 54, 57, 63, 71; on sexual abuse, 215; on slave marriages, 62; on slave nurseries, 195, 196 Taylor, William, 242 Templeman, Peter, 138 tetanus, 152–57; breastfeeding and, 189; infant mortality from, 152–53, 156, 173; infanticide and, 172 tetany, 156 Tharp, John, 71, 74, 129, 139–40, 224 Thistlewood, Thomas, 175

Toms, Catherine, 184 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 275n61 Trumbull, Margaret, 89, 183 Tryon, Thomas, 156–57 tuberculosis, 169 Turney, Benjamin, 154, 171, 180, 185 Twining, William, 138–39 venereal disease, 2, 168, 257n4; fertility and, 12, 266n21 vesico-vaginal fistula, 136–37 Vidal, John, 145–47 Virgo, Elizabeth, 87 Voyages Database, 47, 47–52, 48, 267n25 Wesleyan Church, 19, 186, 187, 221 wet nurses, 121–23, 125. See also breastfeeding whipping, 1–2, 3; confinement versus, 93–98, 95–97, 241–42, 251; legislation on, 81, 93, 217–18, 274n47; of pregnant slaves, 68, 90–94, 179 White, Charles, 138 White, Deborah Gray, 7, 273n24 whooping cough, 200–201 Wilberforce, William, 1–2, 9, 155; Henry Dundas and, 4; on gradual emancipation, 20–23, 33, 36, 38; on keeping slave families intact, 22, 28, 103; Matthew Lewis and, 174; pronatal plan of, 28–29, 37; on reproductive age group, 51; on slave nurseries, 213 Williams, Cynric, 165, 197–98 Williams, Eric, 260n2 Williamson, John, 93–94, 98, 159; on medical care of slaves, 126–27; medical reforms of, 154; on midwives, 131; on plantation hospitals, 132; on tropical diseases, 129; on whipping children, 242 workhouses, 243 Wright, William: on breastfeeding, 194; on sexual relations, 65 yaws, 84, 102, 145, 200–201 yellow fever, 169

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Acknowledgments

My closest friends and family often heard me say “the ancestors chose me to write this story.” I did not set out to write a book on the childbearing experiences of enslaved women: the chapters simply came to me in the archives and through the inspiring support of flesh and blood and spiritual ancestors. The intellectual grounding and passion for Caribbean history and women history came through many ancestors from the University of the West Indies History Department. Verene Shepherd ignited my passion for telling women’s stories and continues to guide, challenge, and inspire me. Along with John Campbell, Verene set me on my path to Cambridge University, where Betty Wood, Trevor Burnard, Richard Drayton, and Gad Heuman sowed the seeds for this work. The critical eye and guidance of Brian Moore, John Campbell, and Roy Augier have made me a better historian. Their insistence on rigorous archival research has saved me from myself. I am especially indebted to Brian, whose guidance on the profession and detailed comments on early chapter drafts and the final manuscript have been encouraging and transformative. I am grateful to Verene Shepherd, Hilary Beckles, James Robertson, John Campbell, and Shani Roper for reading chapters and offering guidance on sources and directions for research. Special thanks to Shani for her friendship, being a voice of calm, and checking on sources when a research trip to Jamaica was impossible for me. The most challenging part of this project has been its rewriting, and I have many people to thank for helping me to find clarity beyond the fog of my hazy ideas. The late Stephanie M.H Camp was foundational in developing this book. Her work and my conversations with her were instrumental in pushing me to think about what it means to examine slavery through the lens of the body and in coining the book’s title Contested Bodies. Camp’s

314 Acknowledgments

penetrating critiques of early chapter drafts, especially her caution not to conflate women with the body, offered clarity needed in formulating the book’s framing. David Eltis’s queries about slave trading patterns and sex ratios helped to frame the work in a broader demographic context. Several university fellowships provided intellectual and financial support. I am grateful for the funding support from Cambridge’s Center for History and Economics, Newnham College, Smuts Memorial Trust, Holland Rose Grant, and Ellen McArthur Grant. I also wish to thank the History Department, the Institute for Research on Women, and the Center for Race and Ethnic Studies at Rutgers University for their generous funding and support in the early stages of this book. From my Rutgers family I would like to single out Deborah Gray White, a living ancestor whose sage advice shaped my academic path and grounded me in untold ways. Her work, our conversations, and her continued support inspire and sustain me. Nancy Hewitt, Seth Koven, Beth Hutchinson, and Dorothy Hodgson generously shared their time in reading sections and pointing to U.S.-based sources. My fellowship at Washington University in Louis was timely in providing funding and a network of friends and supportive colleagues. The warm welcome, enthusiastic interest, and wise counsel of Jean Allman, Iver Bernstein, Peter Kastor, Derek Hirst, Andrea Freidman, David Konig, Margaret Garb, John Baugh, Adrienne Davis, Shanti Parikh, Shefali Chandra, and Rafia Zafar enriched me personally and intellectually. Tim Parsons, a model mentor, colleague, and friend provided me with encouragement, wisdom, and candor that pushed me to find my voice. Although a historian of East Africa (of which he always reminded me), Tim read closely everything I wrote and offered the clarifying questions one needs from a non-specialist reader. Thanks, Tim, for introducing my work to Dane Kennedy and Judith Byfield, whose advice gave me well-needed direction on sources, publishing, and the book’s narrative arc. Sowande’ Mustakeem, I know will laugh out loud when I call her an ancestor; but Sowande’ has been a venerable friend, colleague, and cheerleader. Her immeasurable friendship, criticism, and work ethic gave me the can-do confidence needed when I veered from the path of revising my dissertation into book and took on the risk of starting a new project. Offering comments on my work, setting goals together, sharing resources, and above all introducing me to sister-scholar-friends relieved the isolation of academic work. Sharing laughs and cries, joys and disappointments with

Acknowledgments 315

Deirdre Cooper Owens, Talitha LeFlouria, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Katrina Thompson, and LaShawn Harris gave me the courage to face bravely the challenges of being black, woman, and immigrant in the academy and America. Daina Ramey Berry “adopted” me as one of her own (graduate students transitioning into a junior scholar). Daina generously gives, guides, and cares in a way only an ancestor knows. Special thanks to the fellowship from the Richards Civil War Era Center and Africana Research Center, at Penn State University, which generously funded my research. At Penn, Moya Bailey, AnneMarie Mingo, and Jessica Marie Johnson provided me with “kinship” and the spiritual sustenance needed in the latter stages of the book by being a sounding board, breaking bread with me, and reading chapters. The fellowship at Penn State also brought well-needed clarity in pulling the chapters together. I benefitted tremendously from Penn’s unique manuscript workshop where Thavolia Glymph and Melanie Newton rigorously engaged with the work, offering incisive comments and suggestions that strengthened the book’s structure and arguments. William Blair, Nan Woodruff, Anthony Kaye, Surya Parekh, Michael Woldemariam, Antwain Hunter, and Gabeba Baderoon were gracious in their comments, advice, and encouragement. At Quinnipiac University, I benefitted tremendously from financial support provided by the College of Arts and Sciences and the collegiality of fellow history department members. My former Dean Hans Bergman is a model of institutional support for scholarly pursuits. Hans’s retirement truly leaves an unfillable void. Nita Prasad, Jill Fehleison, and I have had many corridor conversations, which not only led me to discover new resources, but have vitalized me more than they know. Kathy Cooke’s generosity in reading the final manuscript provided a critical eye at a most needed time. Thanks to David Valone for helping me with footnotes and bibliography. Along the way, I have met generous colleagues and mentors whose encouragement, commentary, and invitation to present at conferences and seminars have helped to improve this book. I wish to thank Randy Sparks, Emily Clark, Sharla Fett, Stephanie Smallwood, Jennifer Morgan, Stephanie Camp, Rosanne Adderley, Barbara Krauthamer, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Sharon Harley, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Ann Little, Cecily Jones, Gabriel Rocha, Susan Pennybacker, Celia Naylor, and participants at the various conferences I have presented (too many to name) for their support, comments, and clarifying questions. I owe a debt of gratitude to Diana

316 Acknowledgments

Paton, who added my manuscript to her overflowing pile and provided me with insightful comments just before the editing stage. Her thoughtful and detailed feedback helped me to clarify and rethink sections of my argument. This book would not be possible without the dedicated work and assistance of the archivists and librarians at the American Antiquarian Society, Cambridgeshire County Record Office, Cambridge University Library, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Jamaica Government Archives, National Library of Jamaica, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Rutgers University Library, Archives and Special Collections, Sterling Memorial Library, University of Wales, Bangor, and University of the West Indies Library, West Indies Collection. The team at the University of Pennsylvania Press has been wonderful to work with. The penetrating questions and detailed comments from the readers pulled the arguments and theoretical grounding of the book together. I appreciate Jennifer Morgan and Kathleen Brown for their support and direction even after the official review process. It was a delight to work with Robert Lockhart, who shepherded the book with great transparency and efficiency. Thank you to Noreen O’Connor-Abel and Robert Milks for their expert editing. I am especially thankful for the encouraging presence of my friends and family whose love and support center and calm me. Above all, I am grateful to Howard and Zaria who remind me to be present in each moment and whose grace and vivacity sustain my toil.