Atlantic Bodies: Health, Race, and the Environment in the British Greater Caribbean Katherine Johnston Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Katherine Johnston All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Atlantic Bodies: Health, Race, and the Environment in the British Greater Caribbean Katherine Johnston This dissertation examines the relationship between race and bodily health in the British West Indies and the Carolina/Georgia Lowcountry from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, planters often justified African slavery by claiming that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to labor in warm climates. Historians have tended to take these claims as evidence of a growing sense of biological race in plantation societies. Much of this work, though, relies on published sources. This dissertation examines these public sources, including medical manuals, natural histories, and political pamphlets, alongside private sources, particularly the personal correspondence of planters and slaveholders to uncover a different story of race and slavery. These two source types reveal significant discrepancies between planters’ public rhetoric and private beliefs about health, race, and the environment in plantation societies. First, correspondence between the Greater Caribbean and Britain demonstrates that health and disease did not contribute to the development of racial slavery in the Atlantic. Second, these sources show how and why planters manipulated public conceptions of climate and health to justify and maintain a system of racial slavery. Planters insisted on climate-based arguments for slavery in spite of their experiences in the Americas, rather than because of them. Slaveholders contributed to the construction of a biological concept of race by making arguments about health differences between Africans and Europeans that they neither experienced nor believed. Nevertheless, their arguments entered the public record and consciousness, and the resultant development of racial thinking had profound consequences that continue to the present day. This dissertation demonstrates the critical importance of the environment to the history of race. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .......................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................ iii INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE The Experience of Hot Climates ............................................................................33 CHAPTER TWO Laboring Bodies: Climate, Race, and the Georgia Myth, 1732-1750 ...................79 CHAPTER THREE “The fever in every feature”: Healthy Places and Colonial Settlement ...............130 CHAPTER FOUR A “great risque in seasoning”: The Unsettling Nature of Bodily Change ...........179 CHAPTER FIVE A Climatic Debate ................................................................................................219 CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................................271 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..........................................................................................................285 i ABBREVIATIONS APS American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA BL British Library, London Bod. Bodleian Library, Oxford GHS Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, GA HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA ICS Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library, London MHS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA NLJ National Library of Jamaica, Kingston NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh NRS National Record Office of Scotland, Edinburgh TNA The National Archives, Kew, London ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is with great pleasure and gratitude that I write these acknowledgements. I hope they reflect, at least on some level, the tremendous joy I found in having supportive friends and colleagues over the years. So many people have contributed in various ways to the production of this work, and I owe sincere thanks for a mixture of insightful comments, encouragement, financial support, practical assistance, and much-needed reprieves. For funding that allowed me to conduct research in international as well as in domestic archives, I am grateful to the history department at Columbia University and to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Many thanks also to the Harvard Atlantic History Seminar for a research grant, and to the Institute of Historical Research for a pre-dissertation fellowship. I am grateful for research fellowships from several libraries; thanks to the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, as well as to the truly fantastic librarians and staff at each one. I visited many other libraries on my travels, and want to extend special thanks to Bernadette Worrell and Michael Thomas-Hannibal of the National Library of Jamaica, as well as to Sheila Sedgwick, archivist at the Farquharson of Invercauld estate in Braemar. For providing me with access to family papers in Scotland, I thank Simon Blackett of Invercauld Estate, Archie Orr Ewing of Cardross House, and Jamie Stormonth-Darling of Lednathie. I also wish to thank the tireless staff at Columbia University’s Butler Library, particularly Mayra Melendez and Catherine Parker, for their friendly faces even as the mountains of books I checked out grew ever taller. In the history department, my thanks go to Sharee Nash for ensuring my well-being. Readers and audience members at various venues provided thoughtful feedback on different pieces of this dissertation. For the opportunity to present my work, I am thankful to the iii McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Boston Environmental History Seminar, the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, and particularly to the members of the Breakfast Club. I have been fortunate to have several excellent teachers and role models along the way. For their guidance and encouragement, I thank Eileen Findlay, Alison Games, Karen Kupperman, Natasha Lightfoot, and especially Kate Haulman and Katharine Norris. Thanks also to Pamela Smith and Philip Stern for thoughtful conversations and helpful insights. Most of all, I am grateful to Christopher Brown for his sage advice and unflagging support. Chris, thank you for challenging and encouraging me all the way through this process and beyond. Your counsel, as well as your faith in me, has meant a great deal. For supporting my itinerant lifestyle during years of research, I am grateful to Dick Norris, Rogers Smith and Mary Summers, Chris and Laura Dennis, Liz and Dave Newton, and Becky and Charles Amis. All were gracious hosts, and made my time in Boston, Oxford, and Philadelphia both comfortable and sociable. Sincere thanks also to Simon Sleight and Hayley Maher for their generosity and friendship, and for infusing London visits with cheer. I am fortunate to have supportive family in England, and my thanks in particular go to Gillian and Adrian Dawson for taking me cycling in Dorset and walking in Dartmoor. Above all, I thank Julia, Julian, and Sancha Markson for making me feel so welcome in London, and for providing me with a home for so many summers. Closer to (my current) home, I am most grateful to those friends who have sustained me through this process in various ways. My thanks to Zara Anishanslin, Kyoungjin Bae, Nicole Longpre, Weiwei Luo, Lisa Maguire, Melissa Morris, Jordan Smith, and Peter Walker. Maria John has been a long-term ally and friend all the way through. Thank you, Maria, for vastly iv improving my time in New York. For even longer, Mary E. Mendoza has offered unwavering support every step of the way, and I offer my deepest thanks, both for her brilliant insights and for the adventures that sustained me away from work. Finally, I thank my sister Victoria and my parents, Wendy and David Johnston. Victoria provided much-needed breaks in the form of hikes in Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Maine, and Colorado, as well as a keen eye and helpful instruction in legal terminology. As for my parents, I cannot thank them enough. They have been more supportive than I could ever have hoped, in so many ways. No matter what challenges I threw their way over the years, they have always been in my corner, and they always will be. My most profound thanks to them both. v Introduction The lush green hills of St. Vincent, sloping away from the sea on a bright April day in 1791, provided a stark contrast to the bleak windswept hills of Scotland. As a ship made its way into the Caribbean island port, most of its Scottish passengers would have noticed the difference between the landscape they had left behind and the vibrant environment of their new home. Unlike the gentle inclines of the Highlands, where sheep dotted a terrain of exposed rock and grass, St. Vincent’s peaks rose sharply out of the ocean. Thick forests covered some of the slopes, and rows of coffee plants grew along the sides of others. Instead of the misty winter and occasional thin sunlight the travelers had left, the air in St. Vincent was heavy with heat and the steam of spring rains. Greenery stretched for miles in the warmth,