Representations of Slave Women in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, 1780-1838
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The University of Hull Representations of Slave Women in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, 1780-1838 A thesis submitted to the Department of Economic and Social History in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Henrice Altink Cardiff, Wales September 2002 :If CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v MAP OF JAMAICA 1834 vii INTRODUCTION 1 PART I. SLAVE WOMEN AS MOTHER INTRODUCTION TO PART I 27 CHAPTER 1 BELLY-WOMEN 34 Incentives to Breed Pregnancy The Delivery The Lying-In Period Conclusions CHAPTER 2 PICKENINY MUMMAS 60 'If [Only] They Were Encouraged As Nurses' 'The Most Essential and Most Important of All the Maternal Duties' Conclusions PART II. SLAVE WOMEN AS COMPANIONS INTRODUCTION TO PART II 85 CHAPTER 3 DEVIANT AND DANGEROUS: ATTITUDES TO SLAVE WOMEN'S SEXUALITY 93 'Rat-Traps Who Have Two Husbands, and Make Love to the Bucicras' 'Naturally. Endowed with Moderate Passions' Conclusions CHAPTER 4 SLAVE MARRIAGE: SOLUTION OR PROBLEM? 130 From an Undesirable to an Acceptable Institution Official Encouragement to Slave Marriage A Beneficial or Harmful Institution? Conclusions CHAPTER 5 SLAVE MARRIAGE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF FREEDOM 158 Marriage as the Preparation for Freedom Marriage as the Blessing of Freedom Conclusions 111 PART III. SLAVE WOMEN AS SUBJECTS TO PLANTATION DISCIPLINE INTRODUCTION TO PART III 184 CHAPTER 6 THE INDECENCY OF THE LASH 192 'An Outrage on All Decency' A Just Punishment for Unruly Women? Conclusions CHAPTER 7 SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME 222 'Repugnant to Every Feeling of Humanity' 'I did Not See Any Cruelty Practised' Conclusions CONCLUSION 260 BIBLIOGRAPHY 273 Manuscript Sources Printed Primary Sources Secondary Sources iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have incurred many debts while researching and writing this thesis. My gratitude goes especially to my supervisors, Professor David Richardson and Dr. Keith Nield, for their guidance as well as enthusiasm and encouragement all the way through. Thanks are due to the University of Hull for providing me with the funds to carry out the study and the Economic and Social History Department for giving me the opportunity to teach a module based on my research. Special thanks goes to Judith Doyle, Neil Wynn, David Turner and Norman La Porte for reading chapters and making suggestions; to Sue Wright, Simon Topping, Martina Kunnecke and Andy Hicks, for talking and listening; to the Gender and the Philosophy reading group at the University of Hull for introducing me to new and useful approaches to my material; and to audiences at various conferences whose comments have been incorporated in this study. I owe great debt to my colleagues in the History Department at the University of Glamorgan. They have not only been extremely encouraging but have also given me time to finish the thesis and have provided me with relevant references and interesting insights into the material. In addition, they have been generous friends.. The staffs of the following libraries and archives have provided much help: the Brynmor Jones Library (University of Hull), the University of London Library, the British Library, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, the Public Record Office, and the Jamaica Archives. Great thanks go to my parents, Jo and Hendrik-Jan Altink, for their support and their trust that the thesis would get finished and also for offering a haven where I could distance myself from my research; to my sisters Johanna, Wilmien and Annet V and their respective families for their supportive phone calls, emails and cards; and to my uncle Gerrit Altink for sharing my interest in the history of social injustice. Finally, I could not have finished this study without the help, criticism and friendship of Judith Spicksley. vi O 0 .c c ... —c) 2. c co c .4 , en z 0 N < 10 0 Z I 2 8 • (NI ] o.4 I E . 0. , f 0 E co • 1.. 1 I le cc , I- 2 O o. u) — >- ....'... 71-- -.-./ Z 0 0 cc " ..."" \ 1.... —0 r-- .5.0 I- / cc /55c(.2:0 '.. ..... g ` o w a CD ,, ctL i r" ' \ Til cn , / z0 s' , , -2 A a •, ,. 1-, • ,:,_8 >- 1- --e fri c CC 4 to lll I i s 'E 3 l'Al , < -I 1 ' u 12 — 2 (- 2 < i (') , Lc, 1-; i 0> F._ U,% i cl) v. ••• • ........-1 1- (I) C.) , ,... ... Y.J.).% x .P" 0 i 0 nOil , 1 u) ....4- • 1.--''' z / >. CO co .00 C • 1 CC / C CI) / CE I e." < I -1 ,...... -, I l % .:. k C..) ....." to - - , 1= Lt . - t IACQ*.91°I' S' i O P' - o 4 cu - 1 ‘.. -- -.- To w Lo 5 u_ cc r r 1 I- /I w 1- ea C,)1.-, i>. ci co In N (13 01 \ CO \ .7.1 \ w \ cu& 4-, , ' C. • 1,7.; /- 1',F, -- - - • O - •-• i 2 1 ,I, 1 0 . 1 z c n, cc . < c to 4, ( _1 ,1 O > I Li/ CO z 0 CC (/) • .;1 Z I 0 4Z I 2 x i I- N u, ) LI' I> Source: G. J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792-1865 (Oxford: Clio Press), xxi. vii INTRODUCTION This study analyses the three main debates about Jamaican slave women in the period 1780-1838: slave motherhood, slave women's domestic lives and the corporal punishment of slave women. 1 The principal aim is to demonstrate how abolitionists and colonialists represented slave women to their audiences. The term 'abolitionists' in this study refers not only to active and committed members of the Abolition Society (or from 1823 onwards the Anti-Slavery Society) but also to a large number of people who were not officially linked to the movement but wrote or spoke in support of its cause, such as members of the Colonial Office, several colonial governors and resident missionaries. The term 'colonialists' refers to an even more diverse social group. It consists not only of those who directly benefited from the system of slavery, such as resident planters and members of the West India Committee (a London-based society of West Indian planters and merchants), but also of non-slaveholding residents, visitors to the island and planter-friendly administrators.2 British abolitionism emerged as a mass movement at the end of the 1780s and reached several peaks before the end in the 1860s. Several campaigns were waged in this period: for the abolition of the slave trade (1787-1807); for emancipation (1823- 1834) and for the end of the Apprenticeship System (1835-38).3 These campaigns used evidence of the corporal punishments inflicted on slave women, the disregard of their domestic lives and the destruction of their natural tendency to be mothers to arouse the sympathy of a seemingly indifferent public and to demonstrate the extreme I Slave women also played a role in the debates about slave religion and material consumption. These debates have been omitted to keep the research within limits. 2 The term 'colonialists is commonly used in studies on Caribbean slavery to denote those in the colonies and at home who defended the slave system. 3 A good introduction to the abolitionist movement and its campaigns is R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1988). 2 moral and social oppressiveness and backwardness of societies based on slavery and the debasement of the elites that maintained and defended it. The centring of slave women within the campaigns was based on the assumption that women were the 'gentler sex' and that the position of women in a society indicated the level of civilisation it had achieved. Or, in the words of the well-known abolitionist William Wilberforce: The grand test of civilisations and refinement has been the respect in which the female sex has been held, or which is much the same thing, their general condition and treatment.4 Slave women were also at the centre of the debate of those who sought to protect and prolong slavery. By the late 1770s slaveholders realised that the fact that women were in a minority in the slave trade and that many had used up some of their fertility potential by the time they arrived, meant that slave populations experienced negative growth. 5 They began to adopt a wide range of reproduction policies, which promoted motherhood, nuclear families and the care of children. These also served to deny abolitionist charges that planters failed to elevate slave women. To rationalise the shift in the labour supply policy from 'buying' to 'breeding', slaveholders changed their representations of slave women. Before 1770, they conceived slave women essentially as non-feminine, that is devoid of all the attributes with which they clothed white women, such as tenderness and graciousness. Thereafter they made them members of the 'gentler sex' and presented them as natural nurturers. 4Wilberforce in a letter to the king of Haiti, 8 October 1818 in R. I. Wilberforce and S. Wilberforce, eds., The Correspondence of William Wilberforce, 2 vols. (London, 1850), 1:377. 5 The average age of female imports was 23. This and the period of 'seasoning', that is the period of adjustment to the plantation regime which lasted from one to three years, explains to a large extent the differences in fertility rates between African-born and locally-born slave women. Richard Dunn's study of the sugar estate Mesopotamia concludes that African-born slave women gave birth to 2.7 children on average, as against 3.7 for locally-born slave women. R. S. Dunn, 'Sugar Production and 3 Concepts and Questions In recent years, the notion 'representation' has emerged in a large number of historical studies.6 In some studies it has a political meaning, denoting the representation, through institutional bodies or pressure groups, of the interests of political subjects.7 The most common meaning is that of the linguistic representation of past events and lives.8 There are also two more nuanced meanings: evaluations and appreciations of social practices, such as prostitution and smoking, and images of social groups, such as witches and Jews.