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Mcdonald-Dissertation-2019 © Copyright by Eric J. McDonald August, 2019 VIOLENT IDENTITY: ELITE MANHOOD AND POWER IN EARLY BARBADOS _______________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By Eric J. McDonald August, 2019 VIOLENT IDENTITY: ELITE MANHOOD AND POWER IN EARLY BARBADOS _________________________ Eric J. McDonald APPROVED: _________________________ Todd Romero, Ph.D. Committee Chair _________________________ Matthew Clavin, Ph.D. _________________________ Catherine Patterson, Ph.D. _________________________ David Ryden, Ph.D. University of Houston-Downtown ______________________ Antonio D. Tillis, Ph.D. Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Department of Hispanic Studies ii VIOLENT IDENTITY: ELITE MANHOOD AND POWER IN EARLY BARBADOS _______________ An Abstract of a Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By Eric J. McDonald August, 2019 ABSTRACT “Violent Identity: Elite Manhood and Power in Early Barbados” demonstrates that gender is essential to understanding Anglo-American colonialism and plantation slavery. Throughout the seventeenth century, manhood shaped and supported Barbadian planters' strategies for achieving and maintaining power. Violence proved key to performing masculinity. It achieved manly ideals like bravery, valor, duty, and fortitude. Possessing such traits buttressed planter superiority over servants, slaves, and women, while justifying the physical tools used to maintain their authority. Elite Barbadian manhood evolved over the first fifty years of settlement. However, violence remained fundamental to masculinity and power throughout the period. It became part of a unique Atlantic identity and permeated island life for all the island's inhabitants. “Violent Identity” broadens our understanding of the way that gender supported Anglo- American slavery. The study builds on a growing scholarship of gender and violence within early American systems of power. Going beyond the master-slave relationship, this work explains how manhood and violence were foundational to the entire colonial project. A violent masculinity guided planter interactions with the metropole and subject groups from Indians to Africans and the Irish. It helped forge colonial legal and economic institutions, including slavery. Scholars have long demonstrated that Barbados was a world of systemic violence. Rather than just an outgrowth of race and economics, however, this dissertation argues that such violence stemmed from an adapted English manhood. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Methodology 9 Historiography 16 Summary of Chapters and Scope 26 CHAPTER ONE: “THE ISLAND OF DISCORD” 31 “A Desolate and Disorderly Show” 33 “Brave Resistance” 37 “Spirited Resistance” 44 “Abuses of Cruelty” 52 Conclusion 62 CHAPTER TWO: “FROM THE WORSE TO THE BETTER, PRAISED BE GOD” 65 “Prodigious Success” 69 “Nothing more Terrible to them” 78 “Power in correcting their Servants” 86 “In Full Force and Power” 92 Conclusion 97 CHAPTER THREE: “OLD HEROIC VIRTUES“ 99 Background on the Wars and Historiography 102 “Men only truly deserving” 107 “Mischievous Designs” 115 “Resolved to sell themselves at a dear rate” 122 Conclusion 129 CHAPTER FOUR: “MAINTAIN US IN OUR FREEDOMS” 131 “Lawful Superiors” 134 v “Their Contempt of Us” 141 “Articles of Agreement” 146 “For its better Government, Regulation, and improvement” 149 Conclusion 159 CHAPTER FIVE: “BEING AT A FEAST AND DRINKING TO EXCESS” 161 “It is not necessary for them to have taverns in the countryside” 163 “Damn the Souls of those who would not drink” 171 “He should not have so good” 175 “The Sins of Egypt, Babylon and Sodom” 187 Conclusion 195 CHAPTER SIX: “MASTERS OF FAMILIES” 198 “Reason and Order” 202 “Punishionary Laws” 213 Conclusion 225 CHAPTER SEVEN: “THOUGH WE PLANT SUGAR YOU MAY SEE WE CAN PLANT OUR CANNONS TOO” 228 “Thy Ship Affords a Rope” 231 “No Punishment too Terrible” 241 “Being in Arms” 248 “Highly Necessary” 252 Conclusion 260 CONCLUSION 261 “Inhumanities to which they are naturally prone” 263 “Coeorians” 266 BIBLIOGRAPHY 271 vi Introduction In the 1650s, Richard Ligon reflected on his time as part-owner of a sugar plantation in Barbados. In his True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, he described the hard, tedious lives of servants and slaves on the island. A “bell” rang them to “work, at six a clock in the morning, with a severe Overseer to Command them.” Five hours later, they “are set to dinner,” a meager affair of local roots and liquor made from sweet potatoes. “At one a clock, they are rung out again to the field, there to work till six.” Living conditions, Ligon continued, were harsh. “If it chance to rain, and wet them through, they have no shift, but must lie so all night. If they be not strong men, this ill lodging will put them into a sicknesse,” he explained. Pitiless disciplinary practices compounded the misery. “If they complain, they are beaten by the Overseer; if they resist, their time is doubled.” Above all, Ligon's account highlights the extraordinary violence that planters in Barbados relied on to subjugate servants and slaves. He professed, for instance, to “have seen an Overseer beat a Servant with a cane about the head, till the blood has followed, for a fault that is not worth the speaking of; and yet he must have patience, or worse will follow.” Ligon struggled to reconcile the excessive use of physical punishments, especially against whites, lamenting “truly, I have seen such cruelty done to Servants, as I did not think one Christian could have done to another.”1 Where Ligon seemed unable to account for the brutality of his countrymen and coreligionists, scholars have long pointed to a cold drive for economic efficiency as the root of the extreme violence that imbued the island. Hilary Beckles recently put it 1 Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (Originally published 1657), ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2011), 94. 1 succinctly, saying that “market thinking and actions transcended pedagogies of social restraint and respect for traditions of human relations.” He added that “the entire legal, moral and social fabric of the colony was forged around quenching a thirst for quick profit without moral reflection.” He echoed other historians of Barbados like Richard Dunn. Wider studies of Atlantic slavery likewise affirm that the particularly violent nature of the practice in Anglo-America stemmed from economic drive and a proto- capitalist mentality, first expressed in Barbados. Distance from the homeland and a desire for wealth forged a place of extraordinary oppression and exploitation. A “petty aristocratic” planter class rose to wealth and power, reaping all the benefit of this society. Once established, they left the island to live on estates in England, abandoning their plantations to be run by often even crueler overseers, described by one observe as “drunken, unreasonable and savage.” Efficiency was their primary concern. In the meantime, the colony came to rely on black slave labor and white supremacist ideas, which further unshackled whatever limits existed on violence.2 2 Hilary Beckles, The First Black Slave Society: Britain's Barbarity Time in Barbados (Cave Hill: The University of West Indies Press, 2016), 5. On the “aristocratic” nature of the planters see Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va. by the University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Natalie Zecek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For histories that emphasize the economics of slavery see Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); David Elits, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds., Slavery in the Development of the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For more economic studies of slavery in the Caribbean see Richard B. Sheridan: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); B.W. Higman, “Population and Labor in the British Caribbean in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, eds. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 605-640; John McCusker and Russell R. Menard, eds. The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). For more recent work that takes up the debates of slavery's connection to the creation of capitalist markets see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (New York: Verso, 1997) and Swelwyn H. Carrington, The Sugar 2 “Violent Identity: Elite Manhood and Power in Early Barbados” argues that masculinity also had a vital role in producing the systemic violence of the island. Planter manhood formed the basis of power in the early colonial period (ca. 1627-1680). It legitimized elite male authority, while
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