(This is a review of White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution by Christer Petley which is out now via Oxford University Press.)
It is no surprise that the whip is synonymous
with New World slavery: its continual crack remained an audible threat to
enslaved workers to keep at their work, reminding them that their lives and
bodies were not their own, and that they should maintain (outwardly at least) a
demeanour of dutiful subordination to their overlords. The whip was a cruel and
effective instrument of torture – part of the brutal technology that kept the
productive machine of plantation America at work. Nowhere was this more obvious
than on the islands of the Caribbean. By the middle of the 18th century, these
were the most valuable parts of the British empire, and the large island of
Jamaica, with its huge sugar plantations and brutal slave regime, was the jewel
in the imperial crown.
As elsewhere in the Americas, the right of masters in Jamaica to
punish slaves was enshrined in law, and the violence that sustained slavery
went far beyond whipping. Punishments could include amputation, disfiguring,
branding and more. Slaves could also be put to death – a penalty most often
enforced during the aftermath of rebellions. And they were rarely killed
quickly. The torturous executions meted out to those who led uprisings or who
were accused of collaborating in rebellious plots provide some of the most
lurid examples of human cruelty on record.
But physical abuse alone could not keep the lucrative plantations
of the British Caribbean productive. It is impossible to get large groups of
people to perform sustained labour effectively and consistently for years on
end simply through doling out pain and raw terror. Even the most brutal of
slaveholders were therefore compelled to develop a sophisticated system of
management that exploited the most human aspirations and fears of the people
they dominated.
Creating divisions between slaves was essential to this. Enslaved
people outnumbered free whites in the British Caribbean. In Jamaica the ratio
was higher than 10 to one, and on some big plantations it was about 100 to one.
Managers therefore needed to divide slaves in order to rule over them. The
slave trade from Africa provided them with one opportunity. As a manager of
several large Jamaican sugar estates remarked in 1804, it was a general policy
to ‘have the Negroes on an estate a mixture of nations so as to balance one set
against another, to be sure of having two-thirds join the whites’ (in the event
of an uprising). The theory behind this was that enslaved people from one
African ‘nation’ would refuse to join rebellions plotted by those from others,
or by creole (locally born) slaves, choosing instead to serve their white
masters in the hope of rewards for loyal service.
Privileging some enslaved people above others was another effective means of
sowing discord. Slaveholders encouraged complex social hierarchies on the
plantations that amounted to something like a system of ‘class’. At the top of
plantation slave communities in the sugar colonies of the Caribbean were
skilled men, trained up at the behest of white managers to become sugar
boilers, blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, masons and drivers. Such men were,
in general, materially better-off than field slaves (most of whom were women),
and they tended to live longer.
The most important members of this enslaved elite were the
drivers, responsible for enforcing discipline and work routines among the other
enslaved workers. These men were essential to effective plantation management –
a conduit for orders and, sometimes, for negotiations between white overseers
and the massed ranks of field workers. They were also among the strongest survivors of the system.
The privileges conferred on the enslaved elite came in
several forms: better food, more
food, better clothing, more clothing, better and bigger housing, even the
prospect (in some rare cases) that a master might use his last will and
testament to free them. It could even be demonstrated in a name. For instance,
the head driver on one Jamaican sugar estate is listed in the records of
1813-14 by the name of Emanuel, but also by another name: James Reid. The
reason for this was that Emanuel had been baptised by an Anglican curate, with
the approval of the plantation owner. He was among a minority of enslaved
people on the estate with a Christian name and a surname – people whose baptism
helped to distinguish them from the multitude. The ledgers are dominated by
lists of people identified only by a single diminutive slave name, conferred on
them by plantation managers: page after page of Nancys, Marys, Sallys, Junos,
Eves, and Venuses; of Toms and Joes, Hectors and Hamlets, Londons and Dublins.
The Anglican Church was one of the pillars of the white
establishment in Jamaica, and so being baptised into it conferred prestige.
Reid’s owner certainly understood its reinventive power. He wrote in 1783 that
‘many of the best negroes on almost all estates’ were Christened in this
manner, ‘whenever they deserve it’, and he believed this made them ‘better’
slaves (by which he meant harder-working, more loyal). None of this meant that
the enslaved elite was being invited to live as the equals of their white
masters. Far from it. But slaveholders evidently knew that things such as
smarter clothes, superior nutrition, the occasional drink of ‘port wine’, or
even initiation into the rigidly hierarchical Anglican communion could help to
diminish the prospect of successful open resistance. This, coupled with the
inevitably grisly consequences of a failed rebellion, helped to persuade large
numbers of enslaved people to attempt to survive their ordeal by negotiating
within the system.
The various privileges extended to the enslaved elite helped to
create a conservative attitude among some – keen to protect what they had
gained. They also produced an aspirational culture, of sorts, within the slave
community – a bleak and tragic shadow of the ‘American dream’ of independence
and riches that motivated the slaveholders. Those slaves who lived long enough
and were not physically or psychologically broken by plantation work could aim
to join the ranks of the skilled, privileged plantation elite. And there is
evidence that those who won the favour of white managers and avoided fieldwork
cherished those advantages. One slave in Barbados even killed his successor,
and then committed suicide when a white manager stripped him of his job as a
watchman.
Such stories upset common assumptions about slavery – and about slaves. In the popular imagination and in much historical scholarship, there has been a tendency to perceive enslaved people either as downtrodden victims or as romantic rebels: we often prefer to think of slaves as having been innocent drudges, suffering inescapable torments, or as brave resisters and rebels, taking decisive action against their oppressors. It is a contradictory simplification. The bland confining categories of ‘victim’ or ‘rebel’ (or even ‘collaborator’) cannot properly capture the experiences or choices of enslaved people, including those of drivers, of enslaved Anglican converts, or of a thwarted Barbadian watchman.
Those people show us, instead, that slavery was as complex as it
was cruel. Negotiating its grim realities required determination and skill,
even selfishness; and it was next to impossible to endure without making
compromises of one kind or other. All enslaved people – from newly trafficked
Africans to seasoned field workers; from children forced to work as soon as
they could use a small hoe, to experienced
drivers such as Reid – responded to their predicaments in ordinary ways, albeit
under extraordinary pressures. They did what they could to keep alive and, if
possible, to capitalise on scant opportunities within the system in which they were
trapped.
And their stories remind us that they were all trapped. However
complex and divided the slave community, however many people we find who were
able carve out precarious positions of relative comfort, we find them
struggling to live within a system designed to promote disunity, anxiety and
fear. Even the most valued of drivers could be demoted on a whim. Some brave or
desperate souls chose to flee. But the fine-tuned system of divide and rule
helped to deter all but the most determined of rebels.
Before the late-18th century, the sophisticated and cruel
management strategies of white slaveholders were highly effective: overt
challenges to white authority foundered, and slave-run sugar plantations
prospered. It was only with the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and
the growing influence of humanitarian campaigning that the inner workings of
the British slave system began to buckle and break, as enslaved people in the
Caribbean seized new opportunities to undermine the world
that the slaveholders had made.
