Disability and Slavery in England and the Caribbean, 1500-1834

‘Remembered in the Body’: Disability and Slavery in England and the Caribbean, 1500-1834

Stefanie Dawn Kennedy

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of History

University of Toronto

‘Remembered in the Body’: Disability and Slavery in England and the Caribbean, 1500-1834

Stefanie Dawn Kennedy

Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of History

University of Toronto

2015

Abstract

This dissertation explores the constitutive relationship between disability, anti-black racism, and slavery in the English Atlantic World, from the early stages of colonization to the abolition of the slavery in 1834. It argues that Atlantic slavery, specifically the sugar- producing colonies of the English Caribbean, were key to the development of modern understandings of disability and the disabled body. It was in the specific historical context of the establishment of England’s American colonies, the introduction of sugar to the European economy, and the rapid expansion of the slave trade that the English began increasingly to argue that blackness was an inheritable and racial form of monstrosity. This argument eventually served to normalize and mute opposition to African dispossession in the English

Atlantic World. Plantation slavery in the English Caribbean was a disabling system of human exploitation and degradation. The processes of capture, forced march, imprisonment, and forced migration that characterized the slave trade, together with the hostile labour and living conditions of Caribbean sugar plantations, often resulted in emotional, psychological, sensory, and physical impairment. The slave laws of the English Atlantic World deliberately constructed the enslaved as both human and animal, and yet not fully either. By not resolving

ii this tension between the human and the animal, lawmakers and slaveowners could recognize the humanity of the enslaved but effectively disable it by treating the enslaved like animals.

The very real spectre of revolutionary emancipation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World is key to understanding the place of disability in both anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric.

Abolitionist representations of the supplicant, disabled bondsperson contrasted with whites’ fear of the threatening, able-bodied, armed, black male revolutionary and anti-slavery rebel.

These two images embodied different paths to emancipation – the choice between revolutionary and armed rebellion on the one hand, exemplified by the Haitian Revolution, and emancipation as a process of imperial and legislated reform on the other. This thesis attempts to retrieve a history of disability in the colonial Caribbean from the archive of

English Atlantic slavery and demonstrate that concepts of monstrosity, race, disability, and enslaveability were inextricably linked during the colonial period.

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Acknowledgments

Researching and writing a doctoral dissertation is not an individual pursuit. It is, I have learned, a collaborative effort of friends, family, and colleagues. I am most indebted to my supervisor, Melanie J. Newton. I began my graduate studies as a historian of eighteenth- century England, but I came to question many of the silences about the empire. Partway through my first year of doctoral studies, with very little knowledge of colonial history, I met with Melanie for the first time. When I told her about my idea to explore the relationship between disability and slavery in the English Caribbean, Melanie expressed enthusiasm.

From our very first meeting, she continued to support this project and have faith in my scholarly abilities. With the heart of a true mentor, Melanie deepened my understanding of the larger processes and movements of history and refined my skills as a scholar as she read each chapter with an eye sharpened by her deep engagement with Caribbean scholarship.

This thesis has benefited enormously from Melanie’s intellectual generosity and unceasing kindnesses. She has been a wonderful teacher, colleague, and friend through the good and the bad.

I would also like to thank the members of my committee and professors at the

University of Toronto for their support and invaluable feedback. Nick Terpstra read my dissertation with lightening speed and provided challenging and engaging feedback. Over the years he has given me sound advice on my research and on the job market and, most importantly, he has offered his friendship. Madhavi Kale joined my committee in the latter years of my PhD and jumped in without hesitation. She has been a generous and supportive third reader, who read my work with a theoretical eye and with insight gained from her own work. Thank you to Anne McGuire, my go-to disability scholar, for her intellectual support

iv and for believing in the importance of my work. To Sean Hawkins, who served on my comprehensive exam committee, thank you for challenging me to think deeper about the question of the human/animal as it related to the histories of race and disability.

I have had the good fortune to receive financial assistance over the past six years, for which I am very grateful. The Ontario Graduate Scholarship provided me with enough funding to take two consecutive years off from teaching to focus on research and writing.

Thank you to the University of Toronto Funding Package, the Kathleen Coburn Graduate

Admission Award, the Jerome Samuel Rotenberg Memorial Graduate Scholarship, and the

New College Senior Doctoral Fellowship for their generosity.

I am indebted to the many archives and archivists who helped me discover disability in their archives, which at times felt like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Thank you to the staff at the British Library, the Library of the Religious Society of Friends, the

Royal College of Surgeons, the National Archives at Kew, Faculty of Law Library and the

Main Library at the University of West Indies at Cave Hill, the Barbados Museum and

Historical Society, the Bridgetown Public Library, the Barbados Department of Archives, the

National Library of Jamaica, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the John Carter

Brown Library (especially Kimberly Nuscoe).

A special thank you to Velma Newton for showing my husband and me the sights in

Barbados, for having us to her home for lunch, and for taking us to Oistins for a night out on the town.

My gratitude goes out to my close friends and colleagues who added much needed laughter and perspective when the pressures of the “Ivory Tower” became too much to bear.

To Jennifer Evans, Frances Timbers, Kirsten James, and Benjamin Landsee, thanks for your

v companionship, intellectual feedback, and encouragement. Thank you to Kathryn Segesser, my travel companion in the UK and US, for providing me a home-away-from-home on nights when I needed a place to crash in Toronto. Thank you to my dear friend and fellow

PhD mama, Sarah Kastner, who shared her experiences of motherhood and academia with me and offered sound advice and a listening ear when I, too, became a mother. Thank you to

Emma Malcolm for reading earlier drafts of my chapters and for great conversation, laughter, and wine. Thank you to Benjamin St. Louis for his friendship, love, and prayers. Most especially, I want to thank my best friend, Tristana Martin-Rubio, who has walked alongside me in academia since our undergrad. Thank you, Tristana, for your friendship, practical advice, good humour, intellectual comradeship, and steadfast support.

My extended family and in-laws are too many and support me in ways too numerous to mention here, but they are always in my thoughts. I am grateful for their sustained interest in my studies and their prayers. To my immediate family, who I suspect are as happy as I am that I have finished this dissertation. In spite of never fully understanding the world of academia, you always put in a solid effort to ‘get it.’ Thanks to my siblings – Jessica, Linz,

Kyle, Abbie, Ali, Brit, Andy, and Blue – for providing a lively, loud, and loving distraction from the often isolated world of dissertating. Thank you to Ali for volunteering to listen to my conference papers. Thank you to Jessica for singing my praises. Thank you to Linz for her professional advice and countless library trips to Toronto (disguised as shopping trips).

Her optimism and constant faith in me as a scholar and teacher has made an otherwise daunting PhD surmountable.

To my biggest fans: my parents, David and Ellen. During my PhD studies, when I wasn’t immersed in secondary or primary literature, I could often be found reading historical

vi fiction about slavery. Both my parents read these novels alongside me and, in this way, they entered the world in which I study. We had long conversations about Atlantic World slavery and shared in the joys of the fictions that brought this world to life. Thank you, Dad, for listening to and being captivated by the histories I have told you over the years of researching and writing this thesis. Your passion for history rekindles my own. Mom, when I was 19 years old, I suffered an identity crisis and planned to enroll in jewelry-making school. You foresaw an inevitable waste of money and a soiled passion. You whispered in my ear that what I really wanted to do was teach in academia. I sincerely thank you for that. Thanks for providing grocery bags of food when graduate funding wasn’t cutting it, and for driving me to and from bus and train stations. Thanks for the pride I hear in your voice when you tell someone that your daughter is doing her doctorate. I also want to thank you, Mom, for introducing me, by way of example, to the politics of disability and the need to change societal perceptions of people with disabilities.

The writing of this dissertation will be bookended by the births of my two children. I started writing my dissertation after the birth of my daughter, Elouise. She has been a source of overwhelming joy over the past year and a half and has shown me what life is all about.

My second child is due three weeks following my defense. While I have yet to meet this baby, I thank it as well for lighting a fire under me and making me finish this thing once and for all.

To my husband, Graeme, whose love sustains me and who has looked forward to this day as much as I have. Over the years, you have listened patiently (and sometimes captively) to my ideas and have willingly shared me with a project whose relevance to real life was not always apparent. Thank you, Graeme, for attending me on two research trips to the

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Caribbean – although I think you benefited quite a bit on that exchange. Thanks for the many hours you have tended to our daughter, cleaned the dishes, and cooked meals, while I sat at my desk writing. You have been an incredibly loving and supportive partner and this work is as much attributable to you as it is to me and my pen.

I am grateful for God’s provisions of joys, challenges, and grace for growth. Thank you for inspiring and shaping my understandings of human dignity and justice.

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For Marmie

Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgments iv

List of Tables xi

List of Figures xii

Introduction ...... 1

1. Imagining Africa: Monstrosity, Blackness, and Capitalism in Early Colonial England .... 33

2. “A Field of Pain and Death”: The Disabling Power of Slave Law ...... 90

3. ‘States of Injury’: The Slave Trade, the Market, and Plantation Labour ...... 134

4. ‘Incorrigible’ Runaways: Disability, Display, and Fugitive Bodies ...... 172

5. “The Monster is Dying….The Monster is Dead”; Disability Rhetoric and the Challenge of

Revolutionary Emancipation ...... 225

Conclusion: ‘Black Lives Matter’ ...... 279

Bibliography ...... 290

List of Tables

Table 1 – Chart of identifying marks in runaway advertisements, 1718-1743 202

Table 2 – Chart of identifying marks in runaway advertisements, 1744-1769 202

Table 3 – Chart of identifying marks in runaway advertisements, 1770-1795 203

Table 4 – Chart of identifying marks in runaway advertisements, 1796-1815 203

List of Figures

Figure 1 – Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 26 May to 2 June, 1781. American Antiquarian Society 187

Figure 2 – John Kay, Toussaint Louverture, etching, in A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings. With Biographical Sketches and Illustrative Anecdotes. Edinburgh: A & C Black, 1877. 250

Figure 3 – J. Barlow, Toussaint Louverture, engraving, in Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. 1805. 251

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Introduction

My dissertation explores the constitutive relationship between disability, anti-black racism, and slavery in the English Atlantic World, from the early stages of colonization to the abolition of slavery in 1834. I pay particular attention to Barbados and Jamaica, arguing that Atlantic slavery and specifically the slaveholding colonies of the English Caribbean, were key to the development of modern understandings of disability and the disabled body.

My analysis is based on archival and published primary sources in the Caribbean, the United

Kingdom, and the United States, which I have read through the historical and theoretical lens of disability. European travelogues, slave law, planation records and management guides, runaway advertisements, and pro- and anti-slavery texts form the empirical basis of this study. My analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery is three-fold. First, I explore representations of disability in connection with enslavement and the development of an English anti-black racism from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Second, I move between the realms of representation and reality in order to examine the embodied, physical, emotional, and psychological impairments, which the institution of slavery produced and the enslaved endured. Third, I examine slave law as an institutionally driven system of enforced disablement. The project of my thesis is to retrieve a history of disability in the colonial

Caribbean from the archives and analyze how concepts of monstrosity, race, disability, and enslaveability intersected in the development of modern understandings of blackness and disability in the English-Afro Atlantic World.

My project contributes to the scholarship on disability, race, and slavery in its discussion of the overlapping histories of monstrosity, blackness, and Atlantic slavery.

British and African diaspora scholarship has noted, but generally passed quickly over, the intersections between slavery and disability, discussing European views of Africans in isolation from wider discussions of the ‘monstrous,’ ‘deformed,’ and disabled body.1 I argue that early modern conceptions of monstrosity, deformity, and the corporeal as physical signs of an inner goodness or sin greatly influenced colonial understandings of Africa and the New

World. The term disability was not in common use until the mid-nineteenth century. In the early modern period, many of the physical conditions that would be defined as disabilities in modern times were categorized as deformities or monstrosities. As Chapter One will explain in more detail, deformity in the early modern period referred to functional impairments as well as ugliness and physical anomalies that were deemed ‘unnatural.’2 Physical deformity was a key defining feature of monsters, however, the corporeality of monsters also signaled an inner monstrosity. Monstrosity contained a more fanciful element than deformity and was often used in reference to ‘deformed’ births, which Europeans believed were a sign of God’s disfavour toward the infant’s mother, community, or nation.3 In the medieval and early

1 See for instance Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science & Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996). 2 David M. Turner, “Introduction,” in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, eds. Kevin Stagg and David M. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 5. 3 Margrit Shildrick, “Maternal Imagination: Reconceiving First Impressions,” Rethinking History 4, no. 3 (2000), 244.

3 modern periods, the categories of deformity and monstrosity overlapped in several ways and neither was a fixed category. The concept of monstrosity contained elements that anticipated more explicitly racist thinking. In the specific historical context of the establishment of

England’s Caribbean colonies, the introduction of sugar to the European economy, as well as the expansion of the slave trade, English elites began increasingly to explain black skin colour as a monstrosity. Thus, the development of modern understandings of raced and disabled bodies were inextricably bound together during the colonial period.

My dissertation makes key interventions to several different but overlapping fields of scholarly inquiry. First, I demonstrate the importance of a disability framework for the study of slave law. Using ‘disability’ as an analytic tool, I argue that English Caribbean slave law – from the earliest comprehensive codes of the mid-seventeenth century to the amelioration laws of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – deliberately constructed the enslaved as somehow both human and animal, and yet not fully either. This anthropological ambiguity is crucial to understanding the disabling forms of slavery. Lawmakers did not want to distinguish between the human and the animal because the intersection between these two categories was the space of the monster, which was human but a suspect form of humanity. By not resolving the tension between the human and the animal, lawmakers and slaveowners could recognize the humanity of the enslaved but effectively disable it by treating the enslaved like animals. This is crucially different from the idea that slave law dehumanized the enslaved. There is a widespread assumption that systems of mass human slaughter and exploitation, like slavery, were systems of dehumanization.4 I argue, in

4 See for instance, David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age

4 contrast, that in order to justify the systematic exploitation, persecution, and murder of an entire group of people (blacks, for instance) the perpetrators of systematized racist violence tend to construct a danger based on anthropological uncertainty. According to such an ideology, the monster is dangerous because of the potential to reproduce their own ‘race’ among themselves and with other ‘normal’ humans, turning all of humanity into a ‘race’ of monsters. Enslavement, violence, and forced labour were the means of controlling and punishing the monster, as well as the method of exploiting the monster’s only useful human quality – a capacity for hard labour. Slave law and racial ideology, thus, created a disabled legal category of abject humanity in order to exploit enslaved Africans and grant their owners the power to destroy them through disabling punishments and brutal labour regimes.

My focus on the racialized history of labour and Atlantic World disability leads me to rethink a key trend among disability historians. Disability scholars posit mid-nineteenth century Europe and North America as the locations and era in which physical impairment took on new meanings due to the onset of industrialization.5 The colonial Caribbean confounds this chronology of disability history, and undoes teleological distinctions between the early modern and modern. Caribbean sugar production was an industrial enterprise and

of Emancipation 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Joan Dayan, “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies,” Nepantla: Views from South 2, no. 1 (2001), 3-39; Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 5 Vic Finkelstein, Attitudes and Disabled People: Issues of Disablement (New York: World Rehabilitation Fund, 1980); Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: MacMillan, 1990); Colin Barnes, Cabbage Syndrome: The Social Construction of Dependence (Lewes: Falmer Press, 1990); Brendan Gleeson, Geographies of Disability (London: Routledge, 1999); Anne Borsay, Disability and Social Policy in Britain since 1750: A History of Exclusion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

5 enslaved labourers were in many ways the first ‘factory’ workers, the first ‘modern’ subjects.6 My project argues that the precociously industrial setting of Caribbean sugar production and the frequency of impairment among bondspeople demonstrates that slavery was a necessary precondition for the emergence of ‘modern’ concepts of embodied disability.7

Scholars of slavery have long discussed premature, painful and often violent death as an integral aspect of Atlantic slavery. My research, however, is concerned with the space between fitness and death, a space of physical debilitation resulting not from a natural process of illness or aging but from the intrinsic violence of enslavement itself. Plantation slavery in the English Caribbean was an extremely disabling system of human exploitation and degradation. The processes of capture, forced march, imprisonment, and forced migration that characterized the slave trade, together with the hostile labour and living conditions of Caribbean sugar plantations, often resulted in long-term emotional, psychological, sensory, and physical impairment.

My project engages in the complicated task of understanding the damaging material effects of disablement, while refusing to foreclose the possibility that disability was a site of refusal of the dominant normative order of the English Atlantic World. For instance, in certain contexts disability came to be revalued among bondspeople as a form of resistance to the institution of slavery. There is potential to see the disabled enslaved body as a site of

6 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Saint Domingo Revolution ([1963] New York: Random House, Inc., 1989), 392; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). 7 For a discussion of the precociously industrial development of seventeenth-century Caribbean sugar production see Mintz, Chapter Two “Production,” in Sweetness and Power, 19-73.

6 resistance to the commodification of human beings and a form of protest against one’s status as commercial object and labour power. The punished body was, on the one hand, a display and reproduction of an owner’s mastery and power, and on the other hand, a living and moving text that told of a captive’s refusal to accept her or his enslavement. Thus, the study of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery engenders possibilities to read disability among the enslaved in multiple ways, not only as a sign of victimization and ‘lack,’ but of power and possibility.

The overlapping histories of race, disability, and slavery in the Atlantic World offer a transnational and comparative basis for seeing the global intersections between colonialism and disability. Disability studies scholars have argued that disability is a universal human condition.8 By this they mean that it is likely we will all acquire disabilities at some time in our lives. What is more, the claim that disability is universal suggests that all human beings have physical and intellectual variations that can become a disadvantage in certain contexts.

And yet, although disability may be the most universal of human conditions, disability must be understood within specific historical contexts. Colonialism changes the way we think about disability. Histories of disability and colonialism must remain attentive to different patterns of colonial exploitation and racialization and the distinct legacies of disablement that they have produced. There are specificities to the history of disability and African enslavement that cannot simply be transferred to all other colonized contexts. My project argues that blackness, in particular, has a very historically significant relationship to

8 Lennard J. Davis, “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies,” American Literary History 11, no. 3 (1999), 502; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies,” Signs 30, no. 2 (2005), 1568; Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

7 disability. My analysis of the historical context of Caribbean slavery demonstrates that disability, colonialism, and anti-black racism came into existence and relation to one another throughout the Atlantic period in complex and sometimes contradictory ways.

Historiography and Literature Review

My project draws from two main bodies of scholarly analysis: the scholarship on

Atlantic slavery (particularly Anglophone Caribbean) and the field of disability studies.

Traditionally, slavery and disability have been treated as two disparate topics, however they have overlapped in various ways in both the historiography of slavery and the scholarly literature on disability studies. This section will discuss disability in the historiography of slavery and demonstrate that, although “’Remembered in the Body’” is the first book-length study of Caribbean slavery to make disability its primary focus, historians of the Caribbean have shown that disability abounds in the primary records. This section will also discuss the emergence of disability studies as an interdisciplinary field and its relevance to understanding disability in specific historical and geographic contexts.

Even without a specific focus on disability, many historians of Atlantic slavery have contributed to an incipient scholarly tradition that acknowledges the historical intersections between disability, race, and slavery. In some ways, studies of slavery simply cannot be divorced from disability, since the violence at the crux of Atlantic slavery produced disfigurement and impairment on an almost unprecedented scale. Since the 1970s there have been many important studies of slavery in the English Atlantic World that mention

8 impairment in relation to the violence of colonization, the slave trade, and slavery.9

Disability caused by malnutrition, disease, labour accidents, and punishments are present in the literature on slavery in the Caribbean, however, most authors only mention them in passing. The scholarship on Caribbean slavery implicitly illustrates how the colonial production of impairments and disabilities were expressions of English racism and colonial power. Furthermore, I will build on this tradition of scholarship in order to show that the pervasiveness of deformity, disability, and disfigurement among the enslaved shaped English understandings of blackness and expressed the logic of English capitalism that black bodies were made to be destroyed. Within the extensive scholarship on the English Atlantic World, there are particular topics that lend themselves to insights into the historical intersections between disability and slavery, namely the histories of race and racialization and the histories of health and medicine in the world of Atlantic slavery.

Decades before the history of race became an independent and significant topic of historical inquiry, Winthrop Jordan’s 1968 study White over Black: American Attitudes

Toward the Negro, 1550-1800, explored the origins and lasting influence of English

9 See for instance, Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly 30 (1973): 575-598; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University 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); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007); Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (2001), 923-954; Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

9 impressions of Africans before slavery took hold in America.10 Jordan’s work, although subject to a number of critiques since its publication, provides invaluable insight into the overlapping discourses of race and disability during England’s New World expansion.11

Jordan’s analysis of the origins of English and American anti-black racism revealed a long and complicated cultural legacy that was permeated with the belief in the sub-humanity of

Africans and their descendants. For instance, Jordan noted that sixteenth-century English writers argued that Africans “had sprung from the generation of ape-kind,” however, even writers who advanced such argument “did not suggest that the Negro himself was now a beast.”12 Thus, Jordan illustrated that the English perceived Africans as not fully human but not quite as animal either. Jordan noted that this space between the animal and the human made Africans “monsters” in the eyes of the English and had a lasting impact on English colonists’ treatment of Africans in the Caribbean and the American South.13 Jordan demonstrated that the conflation between Africans and animals in English thought served a variety of purposes and interests, all of which worked to reinforce “the social distance between the Negro and the white man.”14

Jordan set the terms of the debate on the history of race in the English Atlantic World by arguing that English people possessed anti-black attitudes from the very first moment of

10 Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 43. 11 Critiques include Kathleen Brown, “Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race,” 79-100 in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600- 1850, eds. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Karl E. Westhauser, “Revisiting the Jordan Thesis: ‘White over Black’ in Seventeenth- Century England and America,” Journal of Negro History 85, no. 3 (2000): 112-122. 12 Jordan, 30-31. 13 Ibid., 232. 14 Ibid., 239.

10 contact with Africans in the sixteenth century. Historians such as Ivan Hannaford and

Roxann Wheeler, among others, have argued against Jordan’s assertion, claiming that conceptions of race and racism did not emerge until the late Enlightenment and nineteenth century.15 In Wheeler’s 2000 study of race in eighteenth-century Britain, the author argues that although British culture utilized a “physical typology” of human differences, such differences were not seen as innate facts but products of environment and climate.16 Wheeler argues that more important than physical differences were a range of “proto-racial,” socio- cultural discourses that distinguished Christian Europeans from heathen savages.17 For

Wheeler and others, the “racializing” idioms of eighteenth-century Britain should not be confused with the “racist” ideologies of the nineteenth century.18

The emergence of gender history in the 1980s intervened in the scholarship on race and offered rich and complex new insights into the linkages between race and gender in the

English Atlantic World.19 In particular, gender historians have demonstrated that English

15 Hannaford, Race; Wheeler, Complexion of Race. See also, Anthony Kwame Appiah, “Race,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 274-287; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 154-172; Brian Niro, Race (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2007); Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 16 Wheeler, 301. 17 Ibid., 9. 18 Ibid., 10-11, 271. 19 Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Peter Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism 35, no. 4. (1993), 499-528; Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” The American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April, 1993), 382-411; Hall, Things of Darkness; Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, Empire in Eighteenth-Century English

11 notions of race intersected with concepts of gender and monstrosity in very particular ways.

These intersections reveal that, although expressed differently than nineteenth-century racism, early English anti-black racism had emerged long before the late Enlightenment. In her exploration of gender and race in early modern England Kim F. Hall asserts that

“descriptions of dark and light, rather than being mere indications of Elizabethan beauty standards or markers of moral categories, became in the early modern period the conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ so well known in Anglo-American racial discourses.”20 Jennifer L. Morgan’s work on gender and the development of colour and racial prejudice demonstrates that in the early modern period,

European understandings of race and skin colour were greatly influenced by pre-existing

European notions of monstrosity and deformity. For instance, Morgan argues that, “black women’s monstrous bodies symbolized their sole utility – the ability to produce both crops and other laborers.”21 Gender, sexed bodies, and monstrosity were at the centre of

Europeans’ anxieties and struggles to understand Africans and their place within the emerging Atlantic World. Morgan demonstrates that although notions of race “rooted firmly in biology” emerged in the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, “the fact that a biologically driven explanation for differences borne on the body owes considerable debt to

Narratives (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995); Morgan, Laboring Women. 20 Hall, 2. 21 Morgan, 14.

12 the science of the Enlightenment should not erase the connection between the body and socially inscribed categories of difference in the early modern period.”22

Particularly useful to historians of disability is Catherine Molineux’s recent discussion of debates about “human variety” in late seventeenth-century London. Molineux’s research demonstrates that these pre-abolitionist debates about the origin of black skin colour were greatly influenced by medieval and early modern notions of deformity and maternal imagination – the belief that a mother’s imagination could imprint onto her developing fetus and determine the infant’s appearance. Molineux analyzes the late seventeenth-century

London periodical, the Athenian Mercury, which argued that black skin was a product of maternal imagination and like other ‘defects,’ such as lameness and blindness, it would be

‘cured’ at the resurrection. Molineux argues that “the journal’s grappling with variety replicated the late seventeenth-century curiosity cabinet in which variety was meant to inspire wonder and lead to a reaffirmation of God, but rationalist interpretations of variety did not inevitably generate acceptance of it.”23 All of this changed, argues Molineux, with the expansion of the slave trade, which “ruptured the division that sustained the Athenian

Mercury’s relativist stance toward foreign peoples.”24

Other scholars have focused on the intersections between race and science and have demonstrated that discourses around race, deformity, and gender often intersected.25 Felicity

22 Ibid., 13. See also Jenny Shaw’s analysis of seventeenth-century English descriptions of Irish women in Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). 23 Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 100. 24 Ibid., 109. 25 Wheeler; Nussbaum.

Nussbaum’s 2003 study explores the literary and cultural representations of human difference in the British Empire during the long-eighteenth century. Nussbaum focuses primarily on how gender intersected with notions of race and deformity. “It is not simply that each of these differences [race, gender, and anomaly] transmogrifies into one or the other clearly identifiable form,” she writes, “but rather that the various kinds of difference interrelate to complicate prevailing ideas about the cultural meanings of normalcy and of humankind.”26 In her analysis of these overlapping categories of difference, Nussbaum concludes that, “natural anomalies, man-made monsters, and imaginary beings often serve as the test case for the racial and sexual limits of the human as national identity takes shape.”27

Studies that examine health, medicine, and disease on Caribbean plantations provide a window, albeit narrow, onto how illness, disease, and impairments among the enslaved were experienced, treated, and understood in the English Atlantic World. Scholars such as

Diana Paton, Randy M. Browne, and Jerome S. Handler have examined the use of Obeah among the enslaved to ‘cure’ particular health issues. Their work demonstrates that enslaved communities developed a rich healing culture for diseases, illnesses, and impairments that served as a means of resistance to plantation authorities.28 Barry Higman’s 1984 Slave

Populations of the British Caribbean focuses on the period from 1807 to 1834 and examines

26 Nussbaum, 1. 27 Ibid., 3. 28 Diana Paton, “Obeah Acts: Producing and Policing the Boundaries of Religion in the Caribbean,” Small Axe 13, no. 1 (2009), 1-18; Diana Paton and Maarit Forde eds., Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2012); Randy M. Browne, “The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority, and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011), 451-480; Jerome S. Handler, “Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados, circa 1650-1834,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids-New West Indian Guide 74 (2000); 57-60; Kenneth M. Bilby and Jerome S. Handler, “Obeah: Healing and Protection in West Indian Slave Life,” Journal of Caribbean History 38 (2004), 153-183.

14 the Slave Registration and Compensation Records. These records, which the Imperial government demanded after the abolition of the slave trade in order to monitor and to curtail the illegal importation of African captives in the British colonies, effectively created a census of the British Caribbean enslaved population. Occasionally the physical condition of bondspeople was recorded, particularly if the individual’s body prevented them from labour because of disease, pregnancy, illness, or impairment. Higman provides brief but useful contextual information about the prevalence and probable cause of amputations and other impairments among the enslaved.

Published a year after Higman’s demographic study Richard Sheridan’s Doctors and

Slaves (1985) explores “the catastrophic health and welfare costs of slavery” and analyzes the incidence of various diseases and how medical and plantation authorities perceived and treated them. Sheridan’s study of the medical history of the colonial Caribbean provides essential information about the kinds of diseases endured by the enslaved and how they impacted their daily lives. Higman and Sheridan’s studies provide interested scholars with meticulous calculations of the diseases and impairments endured by the enslaved and how such physical conditions impacted the labour stratification on sugar plantations. In his 2002 bio-history of enslaved populations in the Caribbean, Kenneth Kiple explored the rapidly changing disease environment of the Caribbean after its initial colonization and the ways in which patterns of nutrition and disease in Sub-Saharan Africa shaped the biological make-up of captive Africans brought to the New World. Using a similar biomedical approach, Jerome

S. Handler has examined impairment and disease among the enslaved in colonial Barbados.29

29 Barry W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984); Jerome S. Handler, “Diseases and

Taken together these studies by Higman, Sheridan, Kiple, and Handler provide important insight into disability history in the Caribbean by exploring the bio-medical history of enslaved populations. However, these studies approach disability primarily as a medical pathology, which treats disability as an individual characteristic and not a category for exploring power itself.

My project offers an intervention into this historiography by exploring not only the embodiment of disability but also the social and legal factors that characterized a disabled existence for the enslaved. This approach differs from previous scholarship by demonstrating that disability was a factor that shaped the lives of the enslaved and meanings of enslavement. I show that disability was a defining feature of slavery’s violence. Lawmakers and planters frequently sanctioned the impairment of the enslaved as well as imposed legal disabilities onto bondspeople. My work contributes to the above scholarship by demonstrating not only that the archive of English Caribbean slavery contains ample evidence of disability among the enslaved, but by exploring the embodied reality of disability and its relationship to anti-black racism and colonial violence.

In recent years a handful of historians of African American slavery have approached disability as a key factor that shaped the lives of enslaved individuals in the Antebellum

South. In particular, Dea H. Boster and Jenifer Barclay have illustrated the ways in which

Medical Disabilities of Enslaved Barbadians, From the Seventeenth Century to around 1838, Part I,” Journal of Caribbean History 40 (2006), 1-38; Jerome S. Handler, “Diseases and Medical Disabilities of Enslaved Barbadians, From the Seventeenth Century to around 1838, Part II,” Journal of Caribbean History 40 (2006), 177-214.

16 disability intersected with slavery in the Antebellum South.30 Boster’s work discusses the dual marginalization of blackness and disability in the nineteenth-century American South, mental and physical disabilities among the enslaved, and the ways in which whites and blacks responded to disabilities at slave markets, in court, and on plantations. Boster demonstrates that notions of disability, in particular concepts of ‘mental backwardness,’ greatly influenced American anti-black racism and anti-abolitionist arguments during the nineteenth century. Barclay’s work explores not only the real physical impairments among the enslaved but also how slavery served to enforce metaphoric disabilities onto bondspeople. For instance, she argues that the slave laws from the colonial era through antebellum years “imposed metaphorical ‘handicaps’ onto enslaved people, limiting them in was similar to people living with disabilities in a predominantly nondisabled world,” and

“restricted enslaved people’s mobility, denied them the right to testify in court, and criminalized their access to literacy and education among many other things.”31 Barclay’s work, furthermore, considers how the social relations of disability impacted enslaved mothers whose children lived with disabilities. Her analysis of this gendered aspect of disability demonstrates that slaveholders and enslaved mothers assigned value to children with disabilities in divergent ways. Disability among enslaved children could be both an advantage and challenge to mothers and caregivers. On the one hand, a disabled child

30 Dea H. Boster, African American slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860 (New York: Routledge. 2013); Jenifer Barclay, “Mothering the ‘Useless’: Black Motherhood, Disability and Slavery,” in Women, Gender, and Families of Color 2, no. 2 (Fall 2014), 115-140 and “’The Greatest Degree of Perfection’: Disability and the Construction of Race in American Slave Law,” South Carolina Review Special Issue: Locating African American Literature, eds. Rhonda Thomas and Angela Naimou 46, no. 2 (Spring 2014) 27-43. 31 Barclay, “’The Greatest Degree of Perfection,’” 36.

17 reduced the chances that the mother and child would be separated from one another through sale because planters recognized that a disabled child held little ‘value’ on the open market and that the mother’s role as caregiver was integral. On the other hand, the challenge of caring for a child with a disability was an added demand on enslaved women’s already challenging lives. Together Boster and Barclay’s analyses of disability, as both a concept that impacted American understandings of race and citizenship and as a condition common among the enslaved population, mark a watershed in the historiographies of both disability and New World slavery.

Other historians of the U.S. South have contributed to our understanding of disability, slavery, and emancipation. Douglas Baynton explored the concept of disability in three major

‘human rights’ movements in American history: the abolitionist movement, the suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement.32 Baynton’s research demonstrates that “disability has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled peoples themselves, but also for women and minority groups.”33 Baynton’s discussion of slavery illustrates how pro-slavery advocates used the concept of disability to justify the bondage of African Americans during the long struggle for abolition in the United States. More recently, Jim Downs examined the period of emancipation in America, arguing that disease, illness, and disability significantly

32 Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American history" in The New Disability History, eds. Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33-57; Douglas Baynton, “Slaves, immigrants, and suffragists: the uses of disability in citizenship debates,” PMLA, 120, (2005), 562–567. 33 Baynton, “Disability and the Justification,” 33.

18 shaped African Americans’ concepts and experiences of ‘freedom’ following the American

Civil War.34

Despite such important work on the U.S. South, the existing historical scholarship on disability continues to be dominated by analyses of white American and European experiences. In disability studies generally, scholars have focused too narrowly on modern industrial Europe and North America in conceptualizing a historical timeline of disability and have consequently engaged in “a form of scholarly colonialism.”35 As Shaun Grech argues,

“disability studies remains...monopolised by western theorists, focused on western industrialised settings and imbued with ideological, theoretical, cultural and historical assumptions.”36 Recently, a handful of scholars whose work focuses on the global South have begun to challenge the Eurocentric focus of disability studies and, in particular, to question Northern disability scholars’ assumptions regarding the universality of the Euro-

Atlantic experience.37

34 Jim Downs, Sick from freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 35 Helen Meekosha, “Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally,” Disability and Society 26, no. 6 (2011), 668. 36 Shaun Grech, “Disability, Poverty and Development: Critical Reflections on the Majority World Debate,” Disability and Society 24, no. 6 (2009), 771. 37 See for instance, Shaun Grech, “Disability, Poverty and Development,” 771–784; Shaun Grech, “Recolonising Debates or Perpetuated Coloniality? Decentring the Spaces of Disability, Development and Community in the global South,” International Journal of Inclusive Education 15 (2011), 87–100; Shaun Grech, “Colonialism is not a metaphor! Disability, the global South and Decolonising Eurocentric Disability Studies,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture 21, no. 1 (2015), 6-21; Helen Meekosha, “Decolonising Disability,” 667–682; Anita Ghai, (Dis)embodied Form: Issues of Disabled Women (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2003); Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Susan Burch and Michael Rembis eds., Disability Histories (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

At the centre of debates between scholars of disability in the North and global South is the usefulness of certain theoretical models of disability, particularly the social model. The social model of disability reads disability not as an individual physical state-of-being (i.e. impairment) but a social state of being (a process of disablement). Activists in the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) developed the social model of disability in Britain during the 1970s. In academic scholarship, Vic Finkelstein (who came to disability studies following his exile from South Africa for anti-apartheid activities), Colin

Barnes, and Michael Oliver produced the first academic discussions of the social model of disability theory.38 The social model of disability distinguishes between impairment and disability. Affiliated scholars argue that people with impairments are disabled by the fact that they are excluded from participation in mainstream society as a result of environmental, attitudinal, and organizational barriers. These barriers prevent people with impairments from having equal access to education, employment, public transport, housing, and social/recreational opportunities. Thus, the social model offered people with disabilities an empowering new definition of disability, and recognized them as a distinct social group.

The social model provided an alternative to the established moral and medical models of disability. The moral model views disability as a sin and a punishment from God and has historically dominated understandings of disability in the West from the ancient to early modern period.39 The medical model of disability – also known as the ‘personal tragedy

38 Finkelstein, Attitudes and Disabled People; Colin Barnes, “Disability Studies: New or Not-So-New Directions,” Disability & Society 4, no. 4 (1999), 577-580; and Michal Oliver, “Conductive Education: If it wasn’t so bad it would be funny,” Disability, Handicap and Society 4, no. 2 (1989), 197-200 and The Politics of Disablement. 39 Dan Goodley, Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (London: SAGE, 2011), 6, 22.

20 model’ – interprets disability as a form of pathology and explains the difficulties that people with disabilities face as a result of not having ‘normal’ bodies.40 One of the legacies of

European colonization has been the spread of the moral and medical models across the world. As Grech argues, “[t]he medical and charity models of disability…were only instituted in developing countries through colonial humanitarian models that brought church organisations and western medical professionals to the fore. These frequently segregated disabled people from their families and communities, inflicted much suffering and destroyed traditional ways of caring for disabled people.”41

The moral model arguably remains the most prevalent understanding of disability in

Western societies today and continues to influence public policy.42 The moral and medical approaches to disability may well make it less likely that disabled people would challenge their exclusion from society because these models present disability as an individual, rather than a societal, problem. Disability studies has attempted to displace both the moral and medical positions, arguing that they “reduce the problem of disability to the flawed tragedy of individual personhood.”43 While scholars of slavery mentioned previously – Higman,

Sheridan, Kiple, and Handler – tend to pathologize disability and approach it through a more

40 Tom Shakespeare, “The Social Model of Disability,” in The Disability Studies Reader 4th ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 216. 41 Grech, “Disability, Poverty, and Development,” 772. See also Grech, “Recolonising Debates or Perpetual Coloniality”; Helen Meekosha and Leanne Dowse, “Enabling Citizenship: Gender, Disability and Citizenship in Australia,” Citizenship: Pushing the Boundaries Feminist Review no. 57 (Autumn, 1997), 49-72; Helen Meekosha and Karen Soldatic, “Human Rights and the Global South: the Case of Disability,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 8 (2011), 1383-1398; Meekosha, “Decolonising Disability.” 42 Colin Barnes and Michael Oliver, The New Politics of Disablement (Tavistock: Palgrave Macmillan Press 2012), 14. 43 Goodley, 6.

21 medical perspective, their analyses do recognize slavery itself as the cause of disabling conditions and, therefore, do not fully accord with the medical model approach to disability.

Even as the social model was becoming popular among British academics, American scholars and activists were also developing new analytic approaches to the study of disability. The ‘minority group model’ developed in the 1970s when the African-American civil rights movement was still reverberating, queer politics were gathering momentum, and thousands of disabled and traumatized Vietnam veterans were returning to America.44

Following in the political footsteps of the civil rights movement, a number of scholars and activist groups demanded raised social status and asserted a positive minority identity for people with disabilities.45 The minority model challenged notions of ableism and the social biases against people whose bodies appear and function differently from those bodies considered ‘normal.’46 The minority model coined what advocates called People First language – that is, people with disabilities as opposed to disabled people – in order to recognize humanity before the label.47 Whereas the social model contained neo-Marxist leanings – in terms of emphasizing structural factors in explaining the social exclusion of

44 Helen Meekosha and A. Jakubowicz, “Disability, Participation, Representation, and Social Justice,” in Disability and the Dilemmas of Education and Justice, eds. Carol Christensen and Fazal Rizvi (Open University Press, 1996), 79-95. 45 Scholars contributing to the formation of the minority model include Irving Kenneth Zola, Missing Pieces: A Chronicle of Living with a Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Paul K. Longman and Lauri Umansky eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001). Activist groups include American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities and Not Dead Yet. 46 Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996). 47 S. Gabel and S. Peters, “Presage of a Paradigm Shift? Beyond the Social Model of Disability Toward Resistance Theories of Disability,” Disability & Society 9, no. 6. (October, 2004), 585-600.

22 disabled people – the minority model took what we might term an ‘intersectional’ approach to disability and emphasized the common marginalization of people with disabilities,

African, Indigenous, and Hispanic American groups.48

More recently the ‘cultural model’ of disability was put forth by scholars of North

American disability studies whose work engages in interdisciplinary approaches across the social sciences and humanities. Writers such as Lennard J. Davis, Simi Linton, Paul K.

Longman and Lauri Umansky, David T. Snyder and Sharon L. Mitchell, Rob McRuer, Rod

Michalko, and Tanya Tichkosky have connected analyses of disability with feminist and queer theory and critical race studies. Scholars who adhere to the cultural model of disability reject the distinction between impairment and disability promoted by the social model

“because they view biology and culture as impinging upon one another.”49 The cultural model acknowledges that disabled bodies are everywhere in culture and that representations of disability and impairment reveal a great deal about a society’s valuation of bodies and

48 Robert McRuer and Abby .L. Wilkerson, “Introduction,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Special Issue: Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies, eds. Robert McRuer and Abby L. Wilkerson 9, no. 1-2 (2003), 6. The Term ‘intersectionality’ was coined in 1989 by African-American feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the way that gender, race, and class oppression are experienced simultaneously. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989), 139-167. She writes: Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination…But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which drive caused the harm.” (See Crenshaw, 149). 49 Goodley, 14.

23 concepts of normality. For scholars of the cultural model, disability is a cultural construction and must be understood in relation to notions of normalcy and ableism and as a site of resistance to ‘the normate.’50 Disability studies has categorized these different approaches to the study of disability, however, the models do overlap and scholars often draw on more than one model in their analyses of disability in history, literature, art, and culture.

Methodology

In this thesis I draw upon both the social and cultural models of disability in order to analyze the disabling impacts of enslavement and the intersections between race and disability in European and English representations of Africans and blackness. I also historicize the place of race within the moral and medical models, and illustrate that these models were constitutive of both the pro- and anti-slavery movements. I have used the social model of disability, particularly in Chapter Two, to distinguish between the physical impairing of the enslaved and the social, legal, and political forms of disablement caused by slavery. By drawing on the social model, I argue that slavery not only produced physical impairments but was a system of disablement that denied enslaved African many of the benefits associated with being human. My engagement with the social model, however, extends only so far because when placed in colonial contexts the social model’s firm binary between physical impairment and disability is significantly challenged. As some scholars have argued, the distinction between impairment and disability is neither always possible nor

50 Ibid., 17.

24 beneficial to people with disabilities.51 The social model often collapses in contexts outside of Western Europe and North America, because it “remains a product of a specific space and time, articulating the concerns of white, middle class, educated, Western, disabled academics.”52

Historically specific understandings of disability change over time and in different geographic spaces. For instance, as Chapter Three of this thesis will demonstrate, it was common on English Caribbean plantations for visually impaired captives to be employed as watchmen – bondspeople who kept guard of plantation grounds at night for runaways, thieves, arsonists, and other forms of enslaved ‘criminality.’ Plantation records demonstrate that bondspeople with disabilities continued to labour on the plantations, even though many of them were categorized as ‘useless.’ From the perspective of plantations management, therefore, blindness was not necessarily considered a disability.53 Disability like other socially constructed categories involves intimately connected yet precarious cultural, economic and political locations.54 As useful as the social model has been to disability studies and the activism of people with disabilities, it is not universally or trans-historically applicable.

51 Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson, “The Social Model of Disability: An Outdated Ideology?,” Research in Social Science and Disability 2 (2002), 9-28; and Gareth Williams, “Representing Disability: Some Questions of Phenomenology and Politics,” in Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, eds. Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer (Leeds: The Disability Press, 1996), 1194-212. 52 Shaun Grech, “Disability, Poverty and Development,” 771. 53 See also Boster Chapter 3 “Labor and Expectations in the Lives of Slaves with Disabilities,” in African American Slavery, 55-73. 54 Susan Burch and Michael Rembis, “Remembering the Past: Reflections on Disability Histories,” in Disability Histories, 2-3.

The cultural model is also limiting when considering the embodied reality of impairment. To perceive the body as entirely a cultural construction threatens to erase the biological reality of disability as lived experience. It has been important for disability studies scholars and activists to demonstrate that people with disabilities are not individual victims of tragic circumstances who should ‘overcome’ their disabilities. However, disability among the enslaved was tragic, on an epic scale, for it was a product of colonization, forced migration and labour, and involved systematic and widespread violence. Disability in the context of Atlantic slavery, therefore, demands analytic tools and methodologies that are at once different from those applied to non-colonized geographies and populations, as well as specific to the history of Atlantic World slavery. Disability scholar Helen Meekosha suggests that perhaps “[t]he horrors of invasions, such as torture, rape and mutilations [that constituted colonialism]…[are] so great that scholars of disability avoid discussion of what happened to those who survived.”55 Pain and suffering as well as hope and resistance inform the historical intersection of disability and slavery, further demonstrating the diversity of the disabled experience in history. Nirmala Erevelles argues that "[t]here is danger in associating becoming disabled with a violent and oppressive history, because disability is already conceived of as 'abject'.”56 While this is true, colonial contexts demand that we confront the violence that accompanied disability without foreclosing disability as a site of possibility. As

Stephanie E. Smallwood reminds scholars, although the role of violence in slavery is well known, understanding the experiences of enslavement, “requires us to ask precisely what

55 Helen Meekosha, “Contextualizing Disability: Developing Southern/Global Theory,” Keynote given to 4th Biennial Disability Studies Conference, Lancaster University, UK, September 2-4 (September, 2008), 11. 56 Erevelles, 26.

26 kind of violence it required to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into

Atlantic commodities.”57

My project aims to demonstrate that disability is key to understanding the violence of

Atlantic slavery. My dissertation engages with a number of scholars whose theories of suffering and pain provide insight into the intersections between slavery and disability. I engage primarily with Giorgio Agamben, Julia Kristeva, Robert Cover, Nirmala Erevelles,

Achilles Mbembe, and Orlando Patterson whose theories of pain, suffering, and alienation are extremely useful for understanding disability in the context of Atlantic slavery. The work of Agamben, Kristeva, and Cover is marked by the absence of any engagement with blackness or Atlantic slavery. This absence does not invalidate these theories or make them irrelevant to the study of slavery and disability, but it demonstrates the ways in which histories of slavery have conditioned blackness as a space of ambivalence and ambiguity in

European thought. Modern social and political theories have themselves been constituted “in a field of pain and death”58 that re-enacts slavery’s violence through a refusal to engage with blackness as a form of humanity. This silencing of blackness and slavery in modern theory is reflective of the relationship between history, the archive, and power.59

The absence of slavery and blackness in these theories became very distressingly clear to me while researching and writing this dissertation. My research prompted me to reflect in hindsight on a seminar on cultural history and theory in the first year of my doctoral studies, when we were assigned Agamben’s Homer Sacer. During discussion, our

57 Smallwood, 36. 58 Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” The Yale Law Journal 95, no. 8 (July, 1986), 1601. 59 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

27 professor asked us who else in history – aside from the example given by Agamben of Jews in the Holocaust – constituted ‘bare life.’ At the time, I had yet to become a historian of

Atlantic slavery and along with my classmates I sat quietly, unable to think of any other historical experience that fit the description of ‘bare life.’ When I think back to that day, I regret not speaking about what I now see as historically relevant: modern theory’s reluctance or unwillingness to acknowledge slavery as the basis for theorizing about wider human experience.

It is necessary for a study of disability in the English Atlantic World to address terminology and nomenclature. I employ the words ‘disablism’ and ‘disablement’ to recognize the psychological, cultural, and structural discrimination against disabled people and the consequences of such oppressive behaviour.60 Terms and descriptions current in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries have been utilized when it is necessary to communicate the contemporary understandings of disability, race, and enslaveability in the

English Atlantic World. The term ‘disability’ was not common language until the mid- nineteenth century, however, historians have applied the concept of disability to ancient, medieval, and early modern studies in order to reveal the discourses that revolved around physical signs of defect, deformity, and monstrosity. Thus, in certain discussions I have considered the words ‘monstrous’ and ‘deformed’ that were in use during the medieval and early modern periods to be more appropriate than possible modern variants such as

‘disabled’ or ‘impaired.’ In Chapter Five, I use the culturally loaded term ‘cripple’ to argue that abolitionists envisioned black citizenship as a ‘crippled’ form of citizenship. I use this

60 Carol Thomas, Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

28 term to reflect the coarse parlance of the day, meaning deprived and wholly dependent.61 In relation to race and ethnicity, I have used the term ‘black’ in reference to Africans and their descendants – dated terminology like ‘mulatto’ and ‘negro’ appears only when I quote directly from primary sources. I have used the term ‘white’ to refer to people of European descent. In this thesis, I have avoided using the term ‘slave’ in reference to enslaved individuals wherever possible. I have chosen to do so to emphasize that enslavement was an abject and disabling practice, whereas the term ‘slave(s)’ can imply a state of being or essential category of personhood.62 The term ‘slave’ places the debased legal category before the person and thus acts as a form of disablement against the individual.

With regard to the geographic perametres of my study, I refer to England, the English

Caribbean/Atlantic World, and the English people as opposed to Britain, the British

Caribbean/Atlantic World, and Britons/the British. I do so because, during the colonial period, the English attempted to distinguish themselves from Scots, Irish, and Welsh people, institutions, and cultural practices in similar ways as they did Africans. Before English imperialists distinguished themselves from their colonial subjects in Africa and the New

World, they defined themselves against the supposed barbarism of the Scots and the Irish. As

Jenny Shaw notes: “There were more divisions among and between colonial subjects than simply black and white.”63 Throughout this dissertation I do occasionally refer to the British

Empire but only when making a specific argument about empire. In this dissertation I focus

61 “cripple, v.” OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/44530 (accessed May 29, 2015). 62 See John F. Campbell, “Textualizing Slavery: From ‘Slave’ to ‘Enslaved People’ in Caribbean Historiography,” in Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana, ed. Sandra Courtman (Kingston, Jamaica, and Miami: Ian Randle, 2004), 34-45. 63 Shaw, 5.

29 on the relationship between disability and slavery in the English Afro-Atlantic World.64 I do acknowledge the importance of indigenous enslavement, however, I do not theorize a place of indigenous enslavement as it relates to disability because to do so would be to write a different thesis entirely. The historical overlaps and divergences between European notions of ‘Indian’ and African ‘ability’ and ‘disability’ are in need of scholarly attention and would make for a fascinating study. However, it is not the intention of my dissertation to cover this ground. Lastly, I use the terms pre-colonial and colonial in reference to what is traditionally termed the late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods in English and European scholarship. I use these terms for both the metropole and the colonies – colonial England and the colonial Caribbean – to make the point that the societies and histories of the colonizers were no less remade by colonialism than the societies and histories of the colonized. In other words, colonial expansion had different but equally profound effects on the colonizers.

My work focuses on how slavery produced disability and gave its own meaning and context to both acquired and congenital disabilities, which were determined by the reality of enslavement. Disability was pervasive among the enslaved populations of the Caribbean and shaped their daily lives and interactions with each other and with slaveowners. Slavery in

Barbados and Jamaica encompassed a variety of different forms of enslavement – urban, domestic, and plantation, to name a few. My thesis focuses particularly on plantation labourers who worked in sugar production, whether in the field, the mill, or the boiling

64 I do acknowledge the importance of indigenous enslavement, however, I focus primarily on African enslavement as it relates to disability, recognizing that the histories of African and indigenous enslavement overlap, but also diverge. European notions of ‘Indian’ ‘disability,’ and indigenous histories of enslavement in the Caribbean are in need to scholarly attention and I hope this study will contribute to such conversation. However, it is not the intention of my dissertation to cover this ground.

30 house. Bondspeople who worked in urban or domestic spaces surely experienced disability, deformity, and disfigurement, however, as Chapter Three will explain further, sugar production was a particularly physically destructive enterprise. Thus, I have chosen to focus on the sugar plantation as an ultimate site of disability in the English Caribbean.

The majority of voices in the colonial archives belong to free white men. Finding the voice of the disabled in the early modern period is difficult under the best circumstances, and even more so when that disabled individual was enslaved. As such, the majority of my sources were written by English or Creole whites. Whenever possible, I draw on works written by former captives during the abolitionist period, such as Mary Prince’s narrative, while still recognizing that even these sources were filtered by white abolitionists. I use sources that are not from Barbados or Jamaica, such as Mary Prince, when such sources arguably offer a slightly less mediated form of expression from the enslaved and disabled themselves. I do so because such sources are rare and precious and should be incorporated as often as possible.

Chapter Overview

Chapter One of my dissertation explores the place of the monster and of monstrosity in the emergence of Atlantic slavery and early anti-black racism. It argues that even before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, pre-colonial and early colonial European writing about

Africans often equated Africans and their descendants with animality and monstrosity. In the seventeenth century, pre-existing ideas of a particularly ‘African’ form of monstrosity served to normalize and mute opposition to African dispossession in the English Atlantic World.

My analysis of English understandings of blackness as an inheritable and racial form of monstrosity leads me to an exploration of the slave laws of Barbados and Jamaica from the earliest comprehensive slave codes to the consolidated acts of the amelioration period.

Chapter Two argues that the slave laws constructed a disabled legal category that suspended

Africans between the human and the animal as a means to contain and profit from racial monstrosity. In this chapter I draw on the theories of Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben,

Orlando Patterson and Robert Cover to demonstrate that the physical or intellectual impairment of the enslaved was frequently a direct result of legal forms of discrimination.

In Chapter Three I take a closer look at the sugar plantation as an ultimate site of disability. Caribbean sugar production was an industrial enterprise, which was precociously modern for its time. It was also physically debilitating. My exploration of the prevalence of impairment, disfigurement, and deformity on Barbadian and Jamaican sugar plantations demonstrates that the colonial Caribbean challenges Eurocentric traditional timelines of disability history, which maintain that ‘disability’ in its modern sense emerged with the onset of industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Drawing on what

Achilles Mbembe calls ‘a state of injury’ I explore Atlantic slavery’s production of impairment, which I argue is key to understanding the commodification of enslaved Africans in the English Atlantic World.65

The representation of disability, deformity, disfigurement, and blackness is the focus of Chapter Four. In this chapter I analyze runaway advertisements published in Barbadian and Jamaican newspapers from 1718-1815. The advertisements, which were written by

65 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meinties, Public Culture 15, no. 1, (2003), 11-40.

32 plantation owners or managers, relied on descriptions of burns, sores, amputated limbs and extremities, marks of punishment, and marks of disease as identifying marks to aid in the apprehension of fugitive bondspeople. Runaway advertisements worked to perpetuate the longstanding European notion that Africans and their descendants were deformed and disfigured beings, while at the same time they disabled the enslaved by extending the power of the law and of slaveholders to limit bondspeople’s movement.

Chapter Five explores the relationship between disability, amelioration, and abolition in the period from the 1770s to the abolition of slavery in the British slave trade in 1807. In this chapter I argue that the very real spectre of revolutionary emancipation in the eighteenth- century Atlantic World, from Tacky’s War in Jamaica (1760) to the Haitian Revolution

(1791-1804), is key to understanding the place of disability in both anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric. In abolitionist propaganda, writers argued that whites’ brutal treatment of the enslaved provoked the black majority to rebel and commit atrocities against white men, women, and children. These writers placed the figure of the beaten and broken enslaved individual at the centre of their works to counteract the figure of the ‘strong,’ armed, and threatening black rebel as a way of envisioning a potentially free black subject who was not a threat to the British Empire. Pro-slavery writers, in contrast, argued that abolitionists’ revolutionary ideas of emancipation were the catalysts of slave uprisings. Pro-slavery advocates increasingly used sophisticated scientific arguments in their claim that Africans were, in fact, more animal than human, which made them supposedly incapable of freedom.

Chapter 1

Imagining Africa: Monstrosity, Blackness, and Capitalism in Early Colonial England

“English racism was born of greed.”1

“This is some monster of the isle, with four/ legs, who hath got, as I take it, an argue. Where the/ devil should he learn our language? I will give him/ some relief, if it be but for that. If I can recover/ him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples with/ him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather.”2

Introduction

This chapter explores the place of the monster, and of monstrosity, in the emergence of Atlantic World slavery and early anti-black racism. The notion of the monster is inextricably intertwined with that of disability for, in the early modern period, the concept of disability was absorbed under the categories of ‘deformity’ and ‘monstrosity.’3 As will be explained further in this chapter, deformity referred to both physical abnormalities (such as a spine curvature) as well as ‘ugliness’ (such as pock marked skin) and functional impairments that today would be defined as disabilities (such as a club foot or ‘crooked’ legs).4 Corporeal anomalies were key to defining monsters, however, in contrast to deformity, monstrosity contained a fanciful element and was interpreted as a sign of divine judgment.5 Throughout

1 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 8. 2 William Shakespeare, The Tempest ([1623] New York: Signet Classics, 1998), 2:2: 65-70. 3 David M. Turner, “Introduction,” in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, eds. Kevin Stagg and David M. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 4 Turner, 5. 5 Kathryn M. Brammall, "Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England," The Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 1 (Spring, 1996), 12.

34 the medieval and early modern periods, both deformity and monstrosity were associated with sin and inner deviance. This chapter demonstrates that, even before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, pre-colonial and colonial European writing about Africans often equated

Africans and their descendants with animality and monstrosity. These notions did not by themselves lead to African enslavement, but this chapter argues that, in the seventeenth century, these incipient ideas of a particularly ‘African’ form of monstrosity served to naturalize and defuse moral doubts about African enslavement and dispossession in the

English Atlantic World.

My analysis begins with travelogues published in English during the sixteenth century, which helped to diffuse imperial consciousness in the emerging Atlantic World.

Sixteenth-century European travelogues reveal that Europeans drew upon concepts of monstrosity in order to determine what made them different from and supposedly better than

Africans. Influenced by ancient texts and biblical forms, early travelogues presented Africans as monstrous beings who belonged more to the realm of the fantastic than the human.

Sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese travel writings, which portrayed Africans with missing body parts and animal-like characteristics, circulated among the English elite and impacted English perceptions of black and African peoples. The placing of Africans within the realm of the fantastic served as a means of discouraging Europeans from deeper engagement with them. The belief in the fantastic was, in a very important way, an acceptance of difference in the world, and, in an even more surprising way, a form of humility. European proto-racism was not enough, in and of itself, to justify African enslavement. It was only in the context of a new institutional, economic, and political set of relationships and interests in the seventeenth century that these ideas were transformed from

35 vague notions of difference – and an acceptance of a world of difference – into an ideology of systematized, racist, and violent subjugation.

The figure of the monster that informed the ‘imagined’ African of early English accounts facilitated the transition towards the more concrete violence of the supposedly

‘known’ African of later seventeenth-century accounts, which were based on first-hand encounters between the English and Africans. Beginning in the seventeenth century English travellers who went to Africa seeking economic gain placed a new emphasis on ethnographic

‘detail,’ claiming to portray bodies, land, flora and fauna in the Caribbean and Africa in geographically and anthropologically ‘accurate’ ways. The involvement of metropolitan political figures in colonial affairs and the rise of English capitalism are key to understanding the relationship between monstrosity, English racism, and slavery. The political activities of certain mid-seventeenth-century English individuals greatly shaped the making of a

‘metropole,’ a colonial England. That metropole emerged in the context of black slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Its racialized, geographic boundaries came to define the difference between freedom and enslaveability, making clear who was on deck and who was in the hold.

The new opportunities for the English to accumulate capital in the industries associated with the slave trade created a novel context in which generations of sailors, captains, investors, planters, and writers from the 1640s to the turn of the eighteenth century became implicated in slavery. It was in the specific historical context of the latter half of the seventeenth century that English elites began to use the language of monstrosity to express racist sentiments of a distinctly ‘modern’ cast that increasingly placed black skin at the center of arguments for the supposed inferiority of Africans and their descendants. Implicit in such

36 notions was a utilitarian argument claiming that Africans’ supposed monstrosity made them better suited than other humans to enslavement and hard labour. English writers’ consistent emphasis on the supposed monstrosity of Africans mirrored legal justifications of enslavement as an inheritable status in the English Atlantic World.

The establishment of England’s American colonies and the introduction of sugar to the European economy, as well as the subsequent expansion of the slave trade, expedited this shift in European discussions about black and African bodies. An influential and socially diverse group of English people – shipbuilders, sailors, planters, lawmakers, and intellectuals

– who encountered Africans more frequently due to the slave trade, became interested in blackness and its origins. This new generation of writers drew on earlier notions of monstrosity and deformity to make arguments for the supposedly inherent monstrosity of

Africans and their apparent kinship to animals. These individuals did not represent a ‘popular consciousness’ but their views dominated English writing about how bodies should be organized in the world. Their writings marked the emergence of a new, urgent and ongoing discourse about African bodies, one that emphasized blackness as a "brand which God or nature impressed upon an inferior people."6

The link between blackness and monstrosity in English debates about the origins of black skin colour became explicitly gendered by the second half of the seventeenth century.

English thinkers began to explain the origin of black skin colour using the medieval and early modern concept of maternal impression. The notion of maternal impression maintained

“that the disordered thoughts and sensations” of a pregnant woman were transmitted to her

6 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 49.

37 fetus “such that at birth the child’s body, and sometimes its mind, was marked by corresponding signs…[including] the grossly disordered morphology of what were known as monstrous births.”7 English conceptualizations of black skin colour as a monstrosity inherited from mothers was inextricably intertwined with the legal principle of maternal inheritance, which was applied to the English Caribbean colonies and held that the status of the mother determined the status of the child. According to this logic, black women passed on their supposed monstrosity, and therefore enslaveability, to their children. The English notion that blackness was an inheritable and racial form of monstrosity served to construct

Africans as a disabled legal category in the English Atlantic World. Thus, the fanciful and

‘monstrous’ remained a feature of seventeenth-century English conceptualizations of

Africans and their descendants, as a timely and advantageous justification for African subjection in the Atlantic World economy.

Monstrosity and Monstrous Races in Pre-Colonial English Experience

In the early modern period, the concept of monstrosity did not apply to one particular physical abnormality; rather, as Kevin Stagg explains, English people used it to describe a variety of phenomena, all of which were strange or striking enough to evoke an offense against God.8 The term monster derives from the Latin word monstrare, meaning to show or

7 Margrit Shildrick, “Maternal Imagination: Reconceiving First Impressions,” Rethinking History 4, no. 3 (2000), 244. 8 Kevin Stagg, “Representing Physical Difference: the materiality of the monstrous,” in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, eds. Kevin Stagg and David M. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 23.

38 demonstrate, and the French word monere, meaning to warn.9 Historians have referred to medieval and early modern monsters as “mixtures,” “prerogative instances,” and a

“confusion of categories.”10 The scholarship on monsters and monstrosity demonstrates that the category was not fixed and that there were multiple ways to look at monsters in medieval and early modern England. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston argue that European understandings of monsters changed over the early modern period from divine prodigies, to natural wonders, and ultimately to a modern and scientific understanding in the late eighteenth century.11 The scholarship on medieval and early modern understandings of monsters demonstrates, however, that these three stages of historical understanding of monsters overlapped significantly. Monsters were of ambiguous status and “a long-standing source of fear and horror” in medieval and early modern Europe “since they contravened the natural order.”12

The ‘deformed’ body was key to defining the monster in pre-colonial and colonial

England. In his study of monstrosity and early modern English law, Andrew N. Sharpe argues that “deformity marks the limit of human being [and] charts the degrees of imperfection beyond which lies the absolutely other.”13 Margrit Shildrick defines monstrous bodies as “those which in their gross failure to approximate corporeal norms are radically

9 Andrew N. Sharpe, “England’s Legal Monsters,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 5 (2009), 110. 10 Anna Dunthorne, “How to Approach a Monster: A Comparison of Different Approaches in the Historiography of Early Modern Monster Literature,” History Compass 6, no. 4 (July 2008), 1113; Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 11 Park and Daston. 12 Dunthorne, 111. 13 Sharpe, 106.

39 excluded.”14 Influential sixteenth-century writers such as Thomas Raynalde, Edward Fenton, and J.Phillips drew on classical authors to define for themselves what was unnatural and deviant.15 Humans “possessing features or appendages which were either of unknown origin, were rightfully the marks of another species, or were simply too large” met the criteria of the monstrous.16 In the early modern period, the bestial human lay at the crux of English understandings of monstrosity.17 A physical and visible deformity or ‘mark’ of a different species was the determining factor in monster identification.

In the early modern period there was no clear boundary between monstrosity and deformity. Deformity was an element of monstrosity and referred to both perceived ugliness and physical anomalies that were deemed ‘unnatural’ as well as functional impairments such as a crooked spine, clubfoot, or amputation.18 Both deformity and monstrosity reflected early modern anxieties about gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity and carried with them negative stereotypes of a connection between bodily deformation and moral depravity.19 For instance, monstrous births were a sign of God’s wrath and a warning to his people of the consequences of transgressions against divine law.20 As late as the mid-seventeenth century, the birth of a deformed child might be interpreted as a sign that something calamitous was likely to happen. Tales of monstrous births often deployed extensive descriptions of the monster’s physical appearance in order to sensationalize the account and prepare the reader for the

14 Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 2. 15 Brammall, 6 & 7. Brammall suggests that the author known as J.P was J. Phillips. 16 Ibid., 7. 17 Sharpe, 116. 18 Turner, 5. 19 Stagg, 20, 25. 20 Brammall, 3.

40 moral lesson.21 In pamphlets and broadsides, descriptions of monsters were extremely detailed, in contrast to the moral ‘warning,’ which could be quite general and formulaic.

“Rather than prescribing final meaning to monsters,” writes Anne Dunthorne, “these warnings may work as demonstration or interpretation – showing the right way to look at monsters, rather than the right answer.”22 By the last decades of the sixteenth century, a shift occurred in European understandings of monsters and monstrosities, whereby accusations of monstrosity came to signify inner deviance and sin.23 Thus monsters were not only a

“confusion of categories” but also of moral ambiguity and paradox.

In the early modern period, Europeans distinguished between individual and

‘accidental’ monstrous births on the one hand, and monstrous races on the other. This distinction would prove crucial to the consolidation of anti-black thought and the justification of African enslavement. According to Keith Thomas, one of the reasons why monstrous births caused such fear and horror among English people “was that they threatened the firm dividing-line between men and animals.”24 What is more, in the pre-colonial and colonial period the line between human and animal was not firm and was in fact policed, which was precisely what made monstrous births, as evidence of the overlaps between human and animal, so threatening.

Monstrous races were often understood as the descendants of the divinely cursed, most notably Canaan “whose notorious mark was interpreted as some deformity transmitted

21 Stagg, 33. 22 Dunthorne, 111. 23 Brammall, 12. 24 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1984), 39.

41 with subsequent variations to his progeny.”25 Europeans associated monstrosity with the supposed animality of peoples from distant lands, those who inhabited “regions situated at the outermost limits of geographical knowledge and hence well beyond the margins of the civilized world.”26 In pre-colonial Europe, monstrous races reflected “an imaginary world”

– Europeans spoke of monstrous races without actually having seen them.27 Drawing heavily on classical texts, medieval and pre-colonial writers told fanciful tales of races whose body parts were organized differently than those of ‘normal’ human beings: some lacked necessary organs, whereas others were half-man, half-animal.28 Although monstrous races demonstrated the diversity of God’s creation, their physical similarities with ‘proper’ humans perpetually challenged European notions of what it meant to be human.29 The reproduction of monstrous races meant the proliferation of deviance and deformity.

While few English people in the sixteenth century had much contact with Africans, as

Cecily Jones argues, they “already employed a grammar of racial difference to attach racialised meanings to the oppositional categories of 'white' and 'black.'”30 The European belief in African monstrosity placed Africans on the outer limits of humanity and testified to their supposed moral deficiency. As a supposedly monstrous race, Africans differed from

25 Paul Freedman, “The Medieval Other: The Middle Ages as Other,” in Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, eds. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002), 2. 26 Robert Garland, The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World 2nd ed. (London: Bristol Classic Press, 2010), 160. 27 Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 92. 28 Garland, 159. 29 Freedman, 2. 30 Cecily Jones, Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627-1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 20.

42 individual monsters and required a different response from ‘normal’ Europeans. Large numbers of English people were first introduced to the dispositions, customs, and appearances of Africans and their descendants through English translations of fifteenth and sixteenth-century travelogues about Africa and the New World. These works date from the era before English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and they drew heavily on classical authors whose discussions of Africa and other foreign lands combined matter-of-fact descriptions of African domestic life, manners, and dress with fanciful tales of monsters and savages. These travelogues promoted curiosity, exploration, and investment in foreign affairs and in so doing, “seduce[d] the reader into imperialism”31 and inspired some men – like

Thomas More’s fictional Raphael Hythloday – to set out on their own sea-faring adventures.32

By the time English voyagers landed on African shores in the 1550s, their imaginations were already full of images of Africans taken from ancient texts and translations of European travel accounts about Africa and the New World. One of the most influential ancient texts was Pliny the Elder’s The Historie of the World (ca. 77 CE), which was translated into English by Thomas Hacket in 1566 and remained influential well into the seventeenth century. Pliny wrote of hybrid races and monsters – men and women with missing body parts and beast-like characteristics. Ethiopians, he wrote, had no noses or nostrils and spoke in sign with no upper lips or tongues “but a little hole to take their breath at.” In the West were “a people called Arimaspi, that hath but one eye in their foreheads.”

31 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), 59. 32 Thomas More, Utopia ([1516] New York: Penguin Books, 1965).

The Cinamolgi were described as having heads like dogs and the people called Blemmyis as having no heads, “but…their mouth and their eyes in their breastes.”33

Pliny’s depictions of Africans were repeated in several other works, including the most widely read travel narrative of the medieval and early modern world, The Voyages and travailes of Sir John Mandevile knight (ca. 1366), which was translated into English in 1496.

The account, attributed to one John Mandeville (who never actually existed), contained information from a variety of earlier travel narratives and encyclopedias. By 1500 The

Voyages and travailes had been translated from French into German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish,

Irish, Danish, Czech, and Latin. Drawing on Pliny’s texts, Mandeville described the

Blemmye and the Anthropophagi as missing essential body parts:

…And in one of the Iles are men that have but one eye, and that is in the middest of

their front…And in another Ile dwell men that have no heads, and their eyes are in their

shoulders, and their mouth is on their breast. In another Ile are men that have no head

no eyes, & their mouth is in their shoulders. And in another Ile are men that have flat

faces without nose, and without eyes, but they have two small round holes in stead of

eyes, and they have a flat mouth without lips. And in that Ile are men also that have

their faces all flat without eyes, without mouth, and without nose, but they have their

eyes & their mouth behind on their shoulders.34

Although Mandeville’s descriptions of monstrous races were used by a variety of writers to elaborate their own fantastic adventure tales, more ‘reputable’ explorers like Christopher

33 Thomas Hacket, A Summarie of the Antiquities, and wonders of the Worlde, abstracted out of the sixteen first bookes of the excellente historiographer Plinie, wherein may be seene the wonderful workes of God in his creatures (London, 1566), n.p. 34 Cited in Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness, 26.

Columbus and Martin Frobisher also relied on them for the “practical geographic information” they contained.35 The perpetuation of these African mythologies demonstrates how swiftly proto-ethnography about Africans moved across “permeable borders” into fact- based travelogues.36

Negative European depictions of Africans were certainly not the only ones that circulated in England during the sixteenth century, but they were by far the most common.

On occasion, Renaissance painters depicted enslaved Africans in Europe wearing gold and expensive jewelry but such images reflected the status of the slaveowner and not the individual African. Enslaved Africans were used by Europeans “as markers of the richness of the continent, and as embodiments of their [Africans’] inferiority in a European context.”37

Europeans, especially Italians, gave Africans of high-ranking or noble status “greatly superior treatment to non-royals, even if not always treatment equal to European royalty, and not always the same treatment as earlier princely ambassadors.”38 These circumstances, however, were extremely rare; European depictions and treatments of Africans in the early modern period were overwhelmingly negative.39

Race prejudice against Africans was especially prominent in England where unlike other European countries – particularly southern European states such as Portugal, Spain, and

35 Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, eds., Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 70. 36 Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2011), 7. 37 Kate Lowe, “The stereotyping of black Africans in Renaissance Europe,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds. Thomas F. Earle and Kate Lowe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 23-24. Quotation on p. 24. 38 Ibid., 43. 39 Ibid., 31-32, 47.

Italy – a reciprocal trade relationship with Northern Africa did not exist during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.40 In England, long before the English came into sustained contact with people who had black skin colour, ‘black’ was associated with evil, death, baseness, and danger and ‘white’ was associated with purity, virginity, beauty, and good magic.41 Peter

Fryer argues that England was ripe for the development of racist attitudes toward Africans:

But race prejudice…is specially persistent in communities that are ethnically

homogenous, geographically isolated, technologically backward, or socially

conservative, with knowledge and political power concentrated in the hands of an elite.

Such communities feel threatened by national or racial differences, and their prejudices

serve to reassure them, to minimize their sense of insecurity, to enhance group

cohesion. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a classic instance of

such a community – though its geographical isolation was rapidly being overcome and

its technology was about to leap forward.42

This specific historical context abetted an English understanding of Africa and Africans as geographical and corporeal transgressions. The English notion that Africans were monstrous served as a foil for the development of England’s own identity, which included the ability to dominate the threat posed by the so-called monstrous races of Africa.

A growing number of Spanish and Portuguese exploration accounts of the New

World and Africa were translated into English during the latter half of the sixteenth century and fostered a new kind of cosmopolitan and incipiently imperial consciousness in England.

Peter Martyr’s The decades of the newe world of West India (translated into English by

40 Hall, 11. 41 Ibid., 9. 42 Cited in Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness, 3.

Richard Eden in 1555) represented a collection of writings of European travelers to the New

World, including Columbus, Balboa, Cortes, Magellan, and others. In addition to adding more recent Spanish accounts, Eden’s translation criticized the English for their failure to emulate Spain’s colonization of the Americas.43 Eden’s censure reflected an increased desire among some English elites to become involved in both American colonization and trading

Africans to the Americas. The translation of Bartolomé de las Casas’s The Spanish colonie, or Briefe chronicle of the acts and gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies, called the new world (1583) had a similar impact, in that las Casas’s accusations of Spanish cruelty toward the indigenous people of Hispaniola created ‘the Black Legend.’ This propaganda campaign was used especially by Protestants to argue in favour of their own supposedly more humanitarian forms of colonialism.44 Individual Englishmen were involved in these early colonial efforts, in the employ of the Spanish and Portuguese. Such experience, together with the publication of European travel accounts in England, increased elite Englishmen’s interest and confidence in their own potential to explore and trade in Africa and the Americas.

The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a small, but historically important, increase in English exploration and trade with Africa. The pursuit of wealth drove John Lok, son of a prominent London merchant and alderman, to bring five Africans from what is now

Ghana to England. These individuals were to be instructed in English so they could return to

Africa as interpreters to English traders interested in gold, ivory, and spices. The first

Englishman to trade in African slaves was John Hawkyns. On his first voyage (1562-1563),

Hawkyns acquired at least 300 Africans and sold them to the Spaniards on Hispaniola for

43 Curran, 83. 44 Ibid., 111.

£10,000 worth of hides, pearls, sugar, and ginger. Queen Elizabeth I supported his second voyage (1564-1565) and lent him a 600-ton vessel with 300 men to help in his trading pursuits. Hawkyns’ sporadic trading brought Africans to England from the 1570s onwards as servants, prostitutes, and court entertainers. Despite Elizabeth’s support of this trading venture, in 1601 the Queen renewed the 1596 Caspar van Senden license to expel “negroes and blackamoors” from the English realm, on the spurious grounds that the growing population of African slaves in England was contributing to the country’s food shortage.

Despite her efforts, England’s black population remained, only to grow in numbers starting in the 1650s with the expansion of the slave trade and the growing demand for sugar, which brought black people to England as household servants for wealthy English families. 45

Sixteenth-century European writers continued to reproduce fanciful tales of African monstrosity, animality, and deformity. For instance, the works of writers such as Thomas

Hacket (1566), Sir Walter Raleigh (1596), Duarte Lopes (1597), and George Abbot (1599) contained marvelous depictions of nature, history, and mythology, much like previous

European travelogues. For instance, during his travels to Guiana, Raleigh heard of “a nation of people whose heads appear not above their shoulders…called Ewaipanoma; they are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, and that a long train of hair growth between their shoulders…” Raleigh admitted that although Mandeville wrote of similar people in the East Indies and his “reports were holden for fables many years…since the East Indies were discovered, we find his relations true of such things as heretofore were held incredible…” “[F]or mine own part,” Raleigh wrote, “I

45 Fryer, 5, 8, 10-12, 14.

48 saw them not, but I am resolved that so many people did not all combine or forethink to make the report.”46 Stephen Greenblatt argues that:

the marvelous is a central feature…in the whole system of representation, verbal and

visual, philosophical and aesthetic, intellectual and emotional, through which people in

the late Middle Ages and Renaissance apprehended and thence possessed or discarded,

the unfamiliar, the alien, the terrible, the desirable, and the hateful.47

A small number of works published in the latter half of the sixteenth century foreshadowed an interest in the more ethnographically detailed depictions of Africans that would come to be the norm a century later. A few writers began discussing the physical differences between Europeans and Africans in a way that anticipated future discussions of race and biology. Johannes ab Indagine’s Brief introductions…unto the art of chiromancy, or manuel divination, and physiognomy with circumstances upon the faces of the signed

(translated from German into English by John Daye in 1558), offered physiognomic justifications, as well as instructions, for using outer appearance to surmise the ‘nature’ of character. Indagine’s work went through seven editions in England before the end of the seventeenth century and influenced Edward Topsell’s comparison of men and primates, thus preparing “the ground for nineteenth-century comparative anatomy and racial craniometry."48 Some scholars regard French jurist, political philosopher, economist, and cosmologist Jean Bodin (1566) as the first writer to articulate modern categories of race,

46 Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of Guiana, and The Journal of the Second Voyage thereto by Sir Walter Raleigh ([1595] London, Paris, New York & Melbourne, 1887), 110- 111. 47 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 22-23. 48 Burton and Loomba, 89.

49 which he used to support Aristotle’s claim that some people were born natural slaves.49 Still, writers who discussed African corporeality in less fanciful terms and whose works pointed to eighteenth and nineteenth-century discourses on race and biology remained rare in the sixteenth century. Fanciful and mythologically-derived descriptions still dominated European tales of African monstrosity and animality in Africa and the New World. Thus, although

European knowledge about Africans was increasing during this period, European writers

“disposed to make ethnocentric generalizations about dark-complexioned people from over the sea found the persistent myths a convenient quarry.”50

Seventeenth-century writers continued to draw on medieval and Renaissance texts for information about Africa and, in doing so, perpetuated the notion that the continent was full of strange and monstrous things. Nevertheless, the most extravagant perceptions of African bodies began to disappear from seventeenth-century European writings.51 Joannes Leo

Africanus’s A geographical historie of Africa, which was translated into English in 1600, signaled the arrival of a new era in terms of what kinds of knowledge about Africans were available to Europeans. Authors supplemented their own reading of classic forms of travel writing with ethnographically based efforts to understand and explain the physical differences between Africans and Europeans.52 One of the ways English writers accomplished this was by suggesting a correlation between Africans and animals, an argument that anticipated late eighteenth-century works by Philip Thicknesse, Oliver

Goldsmith, and Edward Long by almost two centuries. Perhaps one of the most influential

49 Ibid., 94. 50 Fryer, 17. 51 Curran, 43. 52 Burton and Loomba, 46.

50 texts in this regard was Edward Topsell’s The historie of foure-footed beastes (1607), which was the first major zoological work printed in England in the English language.53 Topsell compared the physical and sexual characteristics of African primates to black people.54 His link between Africans and animals reflected an emerging intellectual climate in which the

English no longer perceived Africans as distant, mythical monsters – yet neither did they see them as fully human. African bodies ‘moved’ conceptually for English people into the realm of the ‘known,’ the categorizable and the potentially controllable.

Other key English writers contributed to the early development of this supposedly more empirically-based discourse about Africans and human variety, with texts that focused specifically on explaining the link between gender, geography and the origin of black skin colour. The presence of Africans in late sixteenth-century England called into question dominant theories that tied skin colour to climate. At the same time, the birth of dark- complexioned children born to white fathers in England unsettled gendered discourses of inheritance that viewed the female body as merely a passive recipient and the male seed as the ultimate influence in the process of generation. Yet English writing from this period betrayed a reluctance to accept that mothers might influence the skin colour of their children.

George Best’s A True Discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya by the Northweast…(1578) refuted the popular climatological theory on the origin of blackness, which claimed that one’s proximity to the sun determined the colour of one’s skin. He argued that blackness “proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, an so all the whole progenie of them descended, are still

53 Gordon L. Miller, “The Fowls of Heaven and the Fate of the Earth: Assessing the Early Modern Revolution in Natural History,” Worldviews 9, no. 1 (2005), 58. 54 Burton and Loomba, 166.

51 polluted with some plot of infected, by a lineall discent they have hitherto continued thus blacke.”55 Best drew on the growing presence of Africans in England in order to provide a case study as evidence for his claim, telling of an Ethiopian “as blacke as cole” who with “a faire English woman” had a son who was “in all respects as blacke as the father was, although England were his native countrey, and an English woman his mother.”56 Best then told the Biblical story of Noah’s disobedient son Cham. After Cham sees his father naked,

Noah curses Cham’s own son, Canaan, as “a servant of servants.”57 According to European interpretations of the Biblical story, Canaan and his descendants were marked with blackness as a sign of their servitude. As Lynda E. Boose argues, Best’s retelling of this story demonstrates Best’s avoidance in acknowledging the possibility of a black son fathered by a white man, a circumstance that European theorists of race consistently tried to avoid.58

European men fathered children of black women in Africa and the New World, but in those instances Europeans could ascribe the darkness of the child’s skin to the climate, for “the black child was not on hand to betray the secret.”59

By the early seventeenth century the perceived link between monstrosity, deformity, gender, race, and enslavement was growing stronger in English writing. Shakespeare’s The

55 George Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie for finding of a passage to Cathaya, by the North-Weast, Under the Conduct of Martin Frobisher General. Devided into three Bookes…(London, 1578), 55. 56 Ibid., 54. 57 For a discussion of the ‘Curse of Ham’ theory and Puritanism in the Anglo-Atlantic World, see David Whitford, “A Calvinist Heritage to the ‘Curse of Ham’: Assessing the Accuracy of a Claim about Racial Subordination,” Church History and Religious Culture 90, no. 1 (2010), 25-45. 58 Lynda E. Boose, “The Getting of a Lawful Race” in Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 44. 59 Ibid.

Tempest can be seen as a transitional text between sixteenth-century fantastic literature and seventeenth-century texts, which placed more emphasis on empirical accuracy.

Shakespeare’s portrayal of Caliban reflects the development of an imperial discourse that sought to create a gradation of ‘men’ based on physical appearance by borrowing from pre- existing notions of deformity and monstrosity. Yet, in its emphasis on Caliban’s poisoned inheritance from his mother, Sycorax, The Tempest was a harbinger of a future in which freedom and enslavement would become hereditary through the mother’s line as a way to perpetuate slavery and safeguard white planters’ essentially unfettered access to the bodies of enslaved women.

Caliban is referred to as many things throughout the play, all of which raise doubts about his humanity and cast him as both an ethnic ‘other’ and a deformed/disabled person.

He is called “a strange fish,” a “monster,” a “strange beast,” a “devil,” “a mooncalf,” and an

“abhorred slave.” The ambiguity of Caliban’s humanity foreshadows the indeterminate status of Africans in the English Caribbean. As Melanie J. Newton argues, everything Caliban inherits from his absent father and his mother, Sycorax, a witch “blurs the boundary between human and animal and fits him for enslavement (a deformed and possibly animal shape, lack of honour and civility, a servile yet violent nature, and unnatural sexual desires).”60 Before the audience even meets Caliban, we are told he is a “savage and deformed slave.”61 As

‘savage,’ Caliban is affiliated with the wild and therefore animal kingdom, and as ‘slave’ he is defined in relation to his master – Sycorax, Prospero, or Stephano. According to Trinculo,

Caliban’s abnormal body could secure an eager market in the metropole as a curiosity. When

60 Melanie J. Newton, “Returns to a Native Land: Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean,” Small Axe 17, no. 2 (July 2013, No. 41), 115. 61 Shakespeare, ‘Name of Actors,’ p. 2.

Trinculo first sees Caliban, he considers the profit he could gain in displaying Caliban in the cabinets of curiosity in England: “Were I in England now, as once I was, and had this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver. There / would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a / man.”62 Trinculo thus suspects that by displaying Caliban as an aberration he can be made a ‘man.’

Caliban’s condemnation to slavery and to hard labour reflects the notion that in the colonial period not all deformities were imagined along the same conceptual lines, nor treated the same. The Tempest treats slavery and forced physical labour as punishments fitting only for certain kinds of deformities and monstrosities. Caliban declares that had

Prospero not prevented him he would have “peopled else This isle with Calibans.” With these words he gives voice to his greatest crime: he threatens the Europeans of the play with an inheritable and reproductive monstrosity – a collective, racial, and national difference. It is this racial monstrosity that poses Caliban as a threat and thus activates his enslavement. As punishment for his monstrosity and deformity, Caliban is made to labour, carrying logs for

Prospero. Caliban’s geographic location on an ‘uninhabited’ island sets his monstrosity apart from individual monsters in Europe who do not pose a similar racial threat. Geography, the inheritance of racial difference, and the ability to reproduce that difference (“people this isle with Calibans”) are essential to understanding why forced labour and the loss of freedom could serve as a management strategy for some deformed and monstrous bodies, but not for others.

The portrayal of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest reflects several of the components that made up English ideas of Africanness in the pre-colonial and early colonial

62 Shakespeare, 2.2.28-32.

54 eras. Due to the difficulty of classifying Caliban, he is placed in a category where the distinctions between human and animal are blurred and where the physical descriptions of his body serve also as indications of his moral character. Yet, despite his perceived deformity, and perhaps because of it, Caliban is made to labour. Shakespeare’s depiction of

Caliban encapsulates the intersections between pre-colonial England’s preoccupation with monstrosity, supernatural creatures, and foreign lands, as well as the emerging conceptions of race in the English Atlantic World. The Tempest reflects a growing sense among some

English people of distant places and strange, foreign bodies that represented a ‘race of monsters’ that needed to be put to use, lest they get out of control. As the Dutch and English began making advances in sub-Saharan Africa, more and more English people gained first- hand experience with people of African descent, which ultimately influenced the English shift toward ethnographic and anthropological accuracy.63 England’s increasingly central role in the slave trade and the establishment of its American colonies shaped English perceptions of black and African bodies. The growing popularity of scientific arguments concerning the supposed connections between Africans and animals, combined with repeated tales of monstrous and beast-like Africans, “helped ease English consciences about enslaving

Africans and thereby encouraged the slave trade.” 64

By the early seventeenth century, English traders began to make advances along the

African coast and a growing number of members of the House of Commons became involved in colonial projects. At the same time, England’s predominately peaceful relationship with Islam began to breakdown and Englishmen themselves became enslaved in

63 Curran, 42. 64 Fryer, 7.

55 the Mediterranean. For most of the sixteenth century, England was removed from the disputes in the Mediterranean and the battle between Ottoman Turkey and Hapsburg Spain.

Elizabeth I’s war with Spain and England’s virtually no trade relationship with the Turks helped secure a friendly relationship between England and the Sublime Porte. However, when Elizabeth’s successor James I made peace with Spain in 1604, England became an enemy of the Algerians and the two countries began preying on each other’s ships in the

Mediterranean waters. During the seventeenth century, Algerians enslaved the English,

Iberians, French, and Dutch while at the same time they themselves began enslaving

Africans. Mediterranean slavery was faith based and, unlike Atlantic slavery, had nothing to do with race. Still, whether Christian or Muslim, enslaved individuals in the Mediterranean were considered commodities that could be bought and sold. Mediterranean and Atlantic slavery share some historical overlaps, however, Atlantic slavery signaled an entirely new kind of slavery. Robert C. Davis’ argument that “[f]or the Mediterranean galeotti [enslaved oarsmen], slavery could be as permanent as it was for any African sent to cut cane in the

Caribbean,” ignores the fact that Atlantic slavery was inheritable.65 As Chapter Two will discuss further, there was little to no chance of manumission in the British Caribbean unlike in the Mediterranean and Iberian Atlantic. Although Algerian masters were under no obligation to free their European captives, Christians were far more likely to be ransomed from Mediterranean slavery than Africans manumitted (voluntarily freed) in the Atlantic.

Mediterranean slavery may have been the first kind of slavery with which early modern

65 Robert C. Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009), 16.

England was familiar but it was far from the “historical twin” of Atlantic slavery.66 Faith slaving in the Mediterranean began to decline in the latter seventeenth century at the same time when England’s trade in African bondspeople dramatically increased. Atlantic slavery was altogether something new and involved systematic and racist violence on a scale never seen before in the Mediterranean-Atlantic World.

As England’s role in African trade grew, so too did its presence in the Americas. The establishment of early colonies such as of Virginia (1607), St Kitts (1625) and Barbados

(1627) received very little material support from James I or Charles I. Despite the monarchy’s lack of enthusiasm in these early years, English colonialism in the Americas developed rapidly over the course of the seventeenth century, including the colonization of

Jamaica in 1655. From the very beginning, the West Indian islands were inextricably tied to elite metropolitan political figures, whose writings about the relationship between white and black bodies served to defend the institution of slavery and make blackness a sign of inheritable and legally codified disablement.

Sugar, Capital, and the Making of an Enslaveable Monstrosity

In mid-seventeenth century discussions about Africans, English writers increasingly sought to define themselves as intellectually, culturally, spiritually, and physically superior to

Africans. Their texts expressed an increasingly coherent English anti-black racism and often evoked concepts of the monstrous and monstrosity. In order to understand how the supposed monstrosity of Africans became part of the logic of English capitalism, we must first place

66 Ibid., 25.

57 the development of this English anti-black racism in the historical context of England’s expanding empire and economic growth.67

Before the introduction of sugar cane to the English Caribbean islands, enslaved

Africans worked alongside English indentured labourers. Black and white labourers worked to clear Barbados’ rainforests to make room for plantations, and in turn produced timber, one of the island’s first commercial crops.68 For most of the seventeenth century, indentured servants could be purchased for half the price of an African captive. Yet a servant’s period of indenture was limited to three to ten years, whereas enslaved Africans were forced into a life of hard labour with little to no chance of freedom. The rise of sugar cultivation in Barbados, which began in the 1640s, required larger work forces than the supply of free and indentured servants could fulfill, and although African captives were more expensive to purchase than indentured servants, planters quickly realized that a predominately enslaved African labour force provided them with the best chances of gaining considerable profit.69

Even with the sugar boom, planters continued to purchase English servants along with African captives, and both groups endured brutal violence at the hands of planters.

White and black labourers experienced severe beatings, mutilation, and branding, in addition

67 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 68 Hilary Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627-1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many- Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 44. 69 Hilary Beckles, “Plantation Production and White ‘Proto-Slavery’: White Indentured Servants and the Consolidation of the English West Indies, 1624-1645,” The Americas 41, no. 3 (Jan., 1985), 44.

58 to receiving very minimal care for diseases and illnesses, such as yellow fever.70 Indeed, so brutal were the conditions that in the seventeenth century the term ‘to Barbados someone’ meant to send a servant to the West Indies to die on a plantation.71 Africans were, however, worked harder and granted fewer essential provisions like food, clothing, and shelter. Black and white inhabitants of the English Caribbean commonly repeated that, “The Devel was in the English-man, that he makes everything work; he makes the Negro work, the Horse work, the Ass work, the Wood work, the Water work, and the Winde work.”72 The reiteration of this statement by members of the white community revealed that the whites “took considerable pride in their exploitative abilities.”73 During the first half of the seventeenth century, race, gender, and physical ability became key components of political ‘fitness’ and fitness for freedom in the English Caribbean colonies. Racialized categories of ‘fitness’ were defined in these early years of settlement, and the only suitable political actor “even in the most liberal of times” was an able-bodied, Christian “white male of at least sixteen years of age possessing ten acres of freehold in order to vote.”74

During the 1650s and 1660s, Barbados was a nodal point for wider transformations in the relationship between English capital, sugar production, and enslaved Africans. With the

70 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (New York: Verso, 1997), 240-141. 71 Stephan Palmié, “Toward Sugar and Slavery,” in The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, eds. Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 139. 72 Cited in Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627-1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 77. 73 Jack P. Greene “Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados a Case Study,” in Colonial identity in the Atlantic World 1500-1800, eds. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 222. 74 Puckrein, 23; Greene, 233.

59 outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, colonists in Barbados took full advantage of the metropole’s upheaval, focusing their attention on securing supplies and access to markets through Dutch and English shipping.75 The promise of sugar production enticed a class of important Royalist émigrés who retreated to Barbados after the execution of the King. A group of influential planters in Barbados had political ties to the ‘new merchants’ of the metropole, as well as to leading members of the Parliamentary cause. These London merchants included Maurice Thompson, a Member of the Commons Committee on Trade and Plantations with several planter clients in Barbados, who helped shape the

Commonwealth’s colonial and commercial policy; Martin Noel, whose brothers were planters on the island; James Drax, likely the first planter to produce sugar in the English

Caribbean; and Thomas Kendall, a London grocer who owned a third of a plantation in

Barbados. Also influential were Sir Anthony Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, a mentor to

John Locke and an absentee planter in Barbados with a dynamic interest in colonial affairs;

William and Thomas Povey, merchants and office-holders; and Lord Francis Willoughby, twice governor of Barbados, who originally fought against the King but later became “the standard-bearer of the Royalist cause in the Caribbean.”76 The English monarchy demonstrated its approval of sugar production in Barbados by knighting five planters between 1658 and 1665; a dozen more were similarly honoured later in the century. In this way, the West Indian sugar plantocracy reached the status of English gentry.77

75 David Smith, Brief Introduction to A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, by Richard Ligon, ed. David Smith ([1657] repr. with introduction and notes by David Smith, e- text, 2012, 3rd Ed.), xii. 76 Puckrein, 65; Blackburn, 244-245. 77 Richard S. 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), 81.

Jamaica had a more tumultuous relationship with the home government than

Barbados and the Leeward Islands during the first few decades of its establishment. Jamaica gained a reputation as England’s most disorderly colony in large part due to the presence of privateers, who used Jamaica, especially the town of Port Royal, as their base to attack Cuba,

Hispaniola, and Central America. Planters and pirates fought over Jamaican land until the planters triumphed with the Glorious Revolution (1688), and privateers rapidly became a marginal presence in Jamaica. The planter mode of colonization achieved its ultimate victory over privateering in 1692, when an earthquake destroyed Port Royal, the center of privateering wealth in the island, and a new capital, dominated by big planters and merchants, was established at Kingston. By this time, the majority of small planters had left the island, and large planters, many of whom were absentee estate owners resident in the metropole, subsequently dominated Jamaica. The predominance of absentee planters in

Jamaica came to reflect “the sugar and slave system in its starkest and most exploitive form."

Despite its rocky start, Jamaica soon won the favour of the home government and white

Jamaicans, like their Barbadian counterparts, made strong political and monarchial connections that helped secure their fortunes in sugar production and their almost sovereign power over enslaved Africans.78

In the hopes of persuading leading Barbados planters to join him in Jamaica, the new

Jamaican Governor, Thomas Modyford (1664-1671) – formerly Governor of Barbados

(1660) – urged Charles II to grant the first million acres of Jamaican land and to issue special tax concessions for Jamaican migrants to the island. Charles II agreed with Modyford’s strategy, excusing Jamaica from the 4.5 percent duty and excluding Jamaican produce

78 Ibid., 154-165. Quotation on p. 151.

61 temporarily from customs payments in England. Even after Modyford’s term as Governor,

Jamaican planters continued to find ways to gain power in metropolitan politics. During the revolutionary crisis of 1688-1689, many large planters fled to England and formed a powerful lobby in London, claiming that Governor Christopher Monk had subverted the

Jamaican constitution.79 Due to Jamaica’s boisterous start, sugar production was slow to take form but by the end of the century, sugar had become Jamaica’s monoculture crop and a planter elite had emerged.

The richest people in England supported the slave trade by investing in England’s first company to trade exclusively in African slaves. The Company of Royal Adventurers to

Africa was established in 1663 and its subscribers included the King and Queen, the queen mother, the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, and other members of the Royal family.80 Due to mismanagement, the company was replaced in 1672 by the Royal African Company, which likewise received financial backing and supports from the Royal family, which in turn helped ease any remaining doubts about the validity of the trade in slaves. Along with the Royal family, powerful shareholders including the Earl of Shaftsbury and his long-time protégé

John Locke, who also became the secretary of the Committee of Plantations, backed the

Royal African Company. Other shareholders included Sir Peter Colleton, a Barbadian planter; and Thomas Povey, the colonial merchant. Over the course of some forty years, the company established several forts and factories along the coasts of Africa, exported goods worth £1.5 million and transported 125,000 slaves to the English West Indies for sale.81

79 Ibid., 154, 162. 80 Fryer, 21; Blackburn, 254. 81 Blackburn, 255.

Early visitors to Barbados remarked on the peculiar acquisitiveness of the English colonists, as white Barbadians gained a reputation for luxury that lasted throughout the colonial period. This extravagance reflected a new mentality that emerged out of the disorder of Stuart England, one that was individualistic, materialistic, and ruthlessly ambitious.

Barbadians were not alone in their desire for riches and self-governance. Jamaican migrants also came to the island chiefly to make money. James Ramsay, an early English abolitionist, criticized Jamaica as being “a land devoted to 'the Kingdom of I.'”82 Jamaicans “spent their money on lavish feasting, copious drinking, and all manner of sexual and sensuous delights…Everything was sacrificed on the altar of getting rich quickly.”83 Of course, not everyone who migrated to the Caribbean with the hopes of improvement reaped such rewards. The Barbadian and Jamaican political communities, for instance, were dominated by the heads of the largest households, who formed a small plantocracy that controlled most of the land and labour on both islands.

White Barbadians and Jamaicans sought to transform their respective islands into settled, improved, and ‘civilized’ societies, which reflected England and not the so-called

‘barbarism’ of the tropics. The maturation of the sugar industry helped restore the reputation of Barbados from a “formidable wilderness into a ‘spacious and profitable garden.’”84

During the sugar revolution the term garden was increasingly used to describe Barbados, as an island that stood apart from the mainland colonies for its natural and improved beauty.

Individual gardens on plantation grounds came to symbolize Barbados’s unique refinement,

82 Cited in Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2004), 19. 83 Ibid. 84 Greene, 228-229.

63 while they simultaneously evoked the wealth and luxury that the plantocracy acquired through sugar and slaves. All over the island, planters took considerable care of their gardens and landscape to the extent that travelers to the island often remarked at the attention given to aesthetics.85 Even the slave quarters were carefully manicured and given decorative gardens.

Often referred to as “the jewel of the English crown,” Barbados came to be known as an improved island, “one that was not wild, barbaric, irregular, rustic, or crude, but, like

England itself, was settled, civilized, orderly, developed, and polite.”86 White Jamaicans, likewise, longed for an improved society that reflected English values. Jamaica’s landscape began to resemble those of England by the mid-eighteenth century.87 The emphasis on aesthetics heightened the colonies’ reputation for luxury and excess and testified to the subordination of land, resources, and Africans to English capital. The growth of English capital and the expansion of the slave trade greatly shaped English perceptions of Africans and their descendants, such that, by mid-century, the English were expressing for themselves

“a more or less coherent racist ideology.”88 It was during this period of colonial establishment and economic growth, from roughly the 1620s-1660s, that English discussions of black bodies began to shift from ‘fanciful’ to ‘real.’

Monstrous Mothers: Bodies and Inheritance

As the English were increasingly imbricated in trade and exploration in Africa, the enslavement of Africans, and colonization in the Caribbean, literary conventions that shaped

85 Ibid., 131. 86 Ibid., 228. 87 Burnard, 17-18. 88 Fryer, 7.

64 writing about Africans began to change. For early seventeenth-century English elites, monstrosity remained a key characterization of Africans and their descendants. Nevertheless the concept of monstrosity was ever more intertwined with emerging scientific debates about blackness, heredity, and maternal impression (also called maternal imagination). The notion of maternal impression – that a mother’s imagination could imprint upon her developing fetus and determine the baby’s appearance – came to be associated with English notions of blackness and laws regulating enslaveability. Beginning in the seventeenth century, writers were also more inclined to describe the real phenotypic characteristics of Africans instead of the fanciful creatures portrayed in previous accounts. Seventeenth-century writers utilized images of monstrous races in reference to Africans and their descendants in ways distinct from earlier discussions of monstrosity. New standards of ‘truth’ began to emerge for travel writing about Africans, according to which ‘eyewitnesses’ had to provide anatomical details about, and expose parts of the African body that, by convention in England, would not normally be displayed in public. The language used to describe Africans became more graphically sexual, blending the fantastic, fanciful and downright false with anatomical and obscene eyewitness details that emphasized African men and women’s supposedly monstrous sexual organs and their abnormal reproductive practices.

Gendered descriptions of monstrous sexual and reproductive organs served to construct Africans as a monstrous race whose reproductive activities, and whose tendency to inherit monstrosity from their mothers, confounded and violated distinctions between human and animal. Deploying images of African racial monstrosity allowed English writers and lawmakers alike to recognize the humanity of Africans and their descendants when it suited their purpose. At the same time, enslaved Africans, like animals, could be treated as the

65 private, chattel property of their owner, with no agency over their own bodies or those of their offspring. For instance, the recognition of female slaves as humans enabled planters to strategically exploit their reproductive freedom, whereas the denial of their full humanity allowed planters and lawmakers to exercise rules of animal husbandry over the enslaved population.89 As Chapter Two of this dissertation will discuss further, one of the hallmarks of slaveholding sovereignty was the power of lawmakers and slaveholders to move legally between the categories of human and animal in their treatment of the enslaved. This enabled colonial authorities to exploit the humanity of Africans by imposing social, political, and legal forms of disablement onto the enslaved, strategically denying them the benefits associated with being human.

Richard Jobson’s The Golden Trade (1622) chronicled his trading ventures along the

Gambia River from 1620 to 1621 and epitomized the crucial ways in which English slave traders deployed sex, gender, and monstrosity in order to construct a racial image of Africans that perpetually slipped between human and animal. Jobson’s narrative focused much attention on the reproductive organs of Africans, both female and male. For example, Jobson tended to describe African women’s breasts as monstrous, and seized on black men’s supposedly distended sexual organs as evidence that Africans had collectively inherited the curse of Cham. According to Jobson, Cham’s discovery of Noah’s “secrets” led to the curse such that, “in laying hold upon the same place where the original curse began, whereof these people are witnesse, who are furnisht with such members as are after a sort burthensome unto them, whereby their women being once conceived with child…accompanies the man no

89 Camille A. Nelson, "American Husbandry: Legal Norms Impacting the Production of (Re)Productivity," Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 19, no. 1 (2007-2008), 8-11.

66 longer, because he shall not destroy what is conceived.”90 On the one hand, the claim that the supposedly abhorrent size of black men’s penises caused fatal consequences to black women’s reproductive bodies associated African men’s sexual organs with a danger that affiliated black men with the savagery of the animal kingdom and cast them as absent and deficient fathers. On the other hand, Jobson’s claim also implied that black men suffered from a physical deformity that hindered their sexual activities and expressions of masculinity. This accusation conveniently placed white men in a position of potentially privileged access and authority over black women’s bodies and reproductive abilities.

Common among these Atlantic World travel narratives was a tendency on the part of

English travelers to comment on the breasts of African women, as well as their breastfeeding practices. As Jennifer L. Morgan has shown, the image of the long-breasted wild woman is part of a tradition that dates back to classical accounts of monstrous races.91 Yet, as Morgan also illustrates, English travellers and enslavers used graphic and demeaning depictions of black women’s monstrously deformed organs, both in Africa and in the early colonial

Caribbean, for a new purpose and in a new context. The writings of men like Jobson,

Thomas Herbert, and Richard Ligon are chilling reminders of the fact that the New World of

Atlantic slavery more closely and directly connected such discursively violent depictions of black women to actual violence against real-world African bodies. Thomas Herbert had

90 Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade, or, A Discovery of the River Gambia and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians: Also, the commerce with a great blacke merchant, called Buckor Sano, and his report of the houses covered with gold, and other strange observations for the good of our owne countrey; set down as they were collected in travelling, part of the yeares, 1620 and 1621 (London, 1623), 52. 91 Jennifer L. Morgan, “’Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder:’ Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series 54, no. 1, (Jan. 1997), 170.

67 significant connections to powerful individuals in England, who helped finance slavery and the trade. In 1647 he was the attendant to captive Charles I; he was knighted by Cromwell in

1658; and he became baronet under Charles II.92 Herbert, like many other writers of his generation, frequently commented on black women’s bodies and in particular their role in child bearing and rearing. In the second edition (1638) of Herbert’s Some yeares of travels into divers parts of Asia and Afrique, the author claimed that women in the Cape of Good

Hope “give their Infants sucke as they hang on their backes, the uberous dugge stretched over her shoulder.”93

Richard Ligon likewise had personal investments in Caribbean slavery and emphasized a sexual grotesquerie among women of African descent that demonstrated their

‘natural’ ability to be both producers of hard labour and reproducers of slaves. Ligon went to the Caribbean in the hopes that he could escape his marginalization and restore his finances after backing the losing side in the civil wars.94 His True and Exact History of the Island of

Barbadoes (1657) reflected the crude materialism of the time in that it frequently emphasized the potential wealth generated through investments in slavery and the slave trade and

“explicitly prompt[ed] its readers to consider how they could benefit from the plantation

92 Ronald H. Fritze, ‘Herbert, Sir Thomas, first baronet (1606–1682),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/13049, accessed 2 Nov 2014] 93 Sir Thomas Herbert, Some yeares travels into divers parts of Asia and Afrique. Describing especially the two famous empires, the Persian and Great Mogull: weaved with the history of these later times. As also, many…kingdoms in the Orientall India, and other parts of Asia; together with the adjacent Iles…With a revival of the first discoverer of America (London, 1638), 18. In the early modern period, “dugge” was a word for a woman’s breast, used most often in reference to suckling. 94 Smith, ii.

68 economy.”95 Ligon traveled to Barbados with Thomas Modyford, a fellow royalist who received a commission as colonel under Charles I and later became Governor of Barbados and Jamaica, respectively. Modyford and Ligon landed in Barbados near the beginning of the sugar revolution, when Barbados was transitioning into a highly racialized labour force.

Unlike translations of Spanish, French, and Portuguese accounts of the Caribbean, Ligon’s

History gained authority among English elites as a first-hand English account of Barbados and its black inhabitants. Ligon never questioned the legitimacy of slavery; instead, he attempted, often in highly subtle ways, to naturalize the position of blacks as bondspeople.

Scholars know Ligon as a man whose discussions of Africans, and in particular

African women, oscillated between flattery and racial prejudice. Both explicitly and implicitly, Ligon repeated racial stereotypes of African peoples that had existed long before the English came to the Caribbean. His use of the Spanish and Portuguese terms “negro” and

“black” to describe Africans illustrates how Ligon viewed the multi-ethnic population of

Africans in Barbados as a single group defined by their skin colour. He described enslaved

Africans as a simple people who responded better to violence than reasoning and whose bodies “have none of the sweetest savours.”96 And yet, in his first encounter with an African woman, Ligon described her as

a Negro of the greatest beautie and majestie together; that ever I saw in one woman.

Her stature large, and excellently shap’t, well-favour’d, full eye’d, & admirably

95 Ibid., xxiii. 96 Ligon, 60, 62, 64. Quotation from p. 52.

grac’t… her eyes were her riches Iewells [jewels]: for they were the largest, and most

oriental, that I have ever seene.97

Ligon’s complimentary description was, however, isolated to this particular woman and throughout his History the author made distinctions between individual Africans and

Africans as a collective. Ligon’s unquestioned assumption about the group inferiority of all

Africans, therefore, abetted the sexual exploitation of individual bondswomen.

Later in his work, Ligon depicted a very different image of African women’s physical appearances, one that summoned sixteenth-century travel narratives’ tendency to describe the black body as deformed and monstrous. He prefaced his description of African women’s bodies by claiming that the black male body adhered to Albrecht Dürer’s rules of proportion.98 Men of African descent, he argued, were “well timber’d,” “full breasted, well filleted and clean leg’d.” For Ligon, black women did not meet such standards:

But the women not; for the same great Master of Proportions, allowes to each woman,

twice the length of the face to the breadth of the shoulders, and twice the length of her

own head to the breadth of the hipps. And in that, these women are faulty; for I have

seen very few of them, whose hipps have been broader than their shoulders, unlesse

they have been very fat. The young Maides have ordinarily very large breasts, which

stand strutting out so hard and firm, as no leaping, jumping, or stirring will cause them

to shake any more, then the brawnes of their arms. But when they come to be old, and

97 Ibid., 29. 98 Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was a German painter, printmaker, mathematician and art theorist. His Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion (Four Books on Human Proportion), published posthumously in October 1528, greatly influenced Renaissance aesthetic discourse. See Peter Parshall, “Great Knowledge: Albercht Dürer and the Imagination,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (Sept., 2013), 393-410.

have had five or six Children, their breasts hang down below their navells, so that when

they stoop at their common work of weeding, they hang almost down to the ground,

that at a distance, you would think they had six legs.99

In Ligon’s account, African women’s bodies are presented as monstrous but interchangeable oddities, with disproportionalities regarding the length and shape of extremities, unwomanly hips, and hyper-sexualized and animalized breasts. Ligon’s description of African women’s bodies signified the seemingly contradictory English perception of African women’s bodies as deformed and misshapen, yet somehow most suitable and able to perform hard labour.

Locating deformity and monstrosity in the female body had a long tradition in

England. Based on ancient texts, medieval and early modern discussions of the sexes situated monstrosity and deformity in the female body and established the male as the yardstick against which all other individuals were measured. The construction of the female as monstrous perhaps has biblical roots, in Eve’s formation from Adam’s ‘crooked’ rib.

Throughout the early modern period, Eve exemplified the monstrosity and deceit that all women possessed due to the fall from grace/innocence as is shown in a misogynist satire entitled The Female Monster (1705):

This Venom spreads thro’ all the Female-kind;

Shew me a Woman, I’ll a Monster a find,

They’re false by Nature, and by Nature taught,

The Treachery that Eve so dearly brought.100

99 Ligon, 81. 100 Anon. The Female Monster or, The second part of the world turn’d topsy turvey. A satyr (London, 1705), 7.

The belief that all women were naturally monstrous greatly impacted male travelers’ perceptions of black women. However the displacement of tropes of monstrosity onto black women as a means of marking out the collective monstrosity of Africans went hand in hand with efforts to racialize the difference between white and black women. As racial slavery became a more significant component of English imperialism, contrasts between “the fair female body [which] represented sexuality morality and at the lower end of the scale the darker black female body [which] symbolized a debased sexuality” became more frequent in

English writings.101 A sexualized racial opposition emerged in which women of English descent embodied the privileges and virtues of womanhood while women of African descent shouldered the burden of women’s inherent evil and sexual lust.

This perception of African women served to align them with a beastly licentiousness in order to justify the matrilineal inheritance of enslaved status. As Camille A. Nelson explains:

In property law, the owner of an animal owns the offspring. So too, the owner of a

female slave owns her offspring. Therefore, the conception of slaves as personal

property created a legal bridge by which techniques of animal husbandry could gain a

foothold [in slave societies], given the complete agency exercised by the master/owner

over his slave property.102

The enslaved, thus, existed in an uncertain space between being recognized as human, yet being monstrous, and therefore somehow deserving of treatment as animals. In the English

Atlantic World, the enslaved were forced to occupy this space of potentially limitless

101 Jones, 21. 102 Nelson, 8.

72 violence and disablement. In Richard Ligon’s unsympathetic description of a slave sale,

Africans appear as “neer beasts,” displayed for potential buyers who inspected them “as they do Horses in a Market.”103 The repeated portrayal and treatment of Africans as beasts helped legitimize and naturalize their enslaved status in the Atlantic World. The emphasis on the sexual organs of black and African peoples thus served a legal end as well, in that it aligned

Africans and their descendants with monstrosity and animality and, in so doing, justified slavery as a condition that African children inherited from their mothers. At the same time it served to constantly reinscribe how close Africans were to whites, how human they were.

This proximity was both the source of their usefulness and the source of the danger they supposedly posed to the English people.

During the second half of the seventeenth century monstrosity and deformity were increasingly employed by English politicians and lawmakers in order “to clarify and define who deserved, and who was deservedly excluded from, citizenship.”104 The institutions governing England’s growing empire emerged in the mid-seventeenth century, creating a legal edifice that marked the limits of citizenship, subjecthood, enslavement, and abjection in the English Atlantic World. As abject, the enslaved occupied a state in between subject and object, “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”105 As will be shown, the Navigation

Acts (1660 and 1663), the Elizabeth Keys case of 1662, and the passage of the first comprehensive slave laws of the Anglo-Atlantic worked together to define enslaveability and

103 Ligon, 75. 104 Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American history,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York Press, 2001), 33. 105 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

73 freedom in the English colonial world. Although the slave laws of the English Caribbean did not explicitly refer to black skin as the basis of Africans’ legal dispossession, they drew implicit connections between blackness and both moral and physical deficiency. It was within this wider context of imperial law and the exertion of power over black bodies that

English discussions of Africans moved from a discourse that was merely derogatory to one that was completely disabling.

The Navigation Acts were first passed in 1651 and renewed by the Restoration Acts in 1660 and 1663. This national legislation was the basis of the English system of mercantilism. The Navigation Acts protected English ships from European competitors and ensured that only English-owned ships, staffed by English subjects, could carry products from English America across the Atlantic to England and later as re-exports from England to the rest of Europe. Likewise, imports from Europe destined for English America had to be transported in English ships, staffed by an English crew. The Acts, furthermore, encouraged the growth of shipbuilding in England by maintaining that, by law, only ships built in

England or in the English colonies could be used for carrying English trade, with the exception of ships gained in war. They contained a host of statutes that fostered English merchant shipping and the development of the English Navy. Slavery and the slave trade were the key reasons why these acts were formed. The interest in sugar and sugar production led to new understandings of what it meant to be English. The Navigation Acts are an example of the impact of sugar production and slavery in the English metropole and the

74 growing investment in warfare in order to defend these colonies from foreign attack.106 The

Navigation Acts served to increase production and trade in the English Atlantic while simultaneously defining English citizenship against the backdrop of Atlantic slavery.

In 1656, Elizabeth Keys, an indentured servant of African descent living in Virginia, sued for freedom “after the overseers’ of her late master’s estate classified her and her son as negroes (Africans or descendants of Africans) rather than an indentured servant with a freeborn child.”107 Keys and her attorney William Grinstead gave three interrelated legal arguments in court: one, Keys was a baptized Christian; two, Keys’ father was an

Englishman; and three, her father had bound her as an indentured servant for nine years, which period had passed.108 Keys and Grinstead’s argument concerning Keys’ mixed

African and English ancestry was based on English Common Law, which mandated that a child inherited her father’s condition.109 Following the Keys freedom suit, in December

1662 the General Assembly of Virginia corrected the inconsistencies related to the use of the word slave in Virginia by declaring that the freedom or servitude of a child of mixed ancestry was conditional upon the mother’s status.110 By the end of the seventeenth century the principle that the status of the child was determined by the status of the mother was adopted

106 Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study of International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 279-280. 107 Taunya Lovell Banks, “Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key’s Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth-Century Colonial Virginia,” Akron Law Review 41 (2008), 799. 108 Ibid., 800. 109 Warren M. Billings, “The Case of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 30, no. 3 (Jul., 1973), 472. 110 Ibid.

75 as a legal principle throughout the English Americas, including Barbados and Jamaica. In the eighteenth century the term partus sequitur ventrem, which took its root in both Roman Law and common law, came to be used to define this principle in the English Atlantic World.111

The principle of maternal inheritance, however, served as a silent but salient explanation for

African dispossession in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic World. The law’s purpose was to expand and sustain slavery by making all children born of bondswomen the property of the mother’s owner.

The principle that connected matrilineality to the inheritance of enslaved status was also expressed in the Castilian concept of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and the emerging sistema de castas (society of castes) in which access to economic resources and political rights was dependent on both bloodline and status of purity in colonial Mexico.

According to the Siete Partidas, the thirteenth-century legal code and juridical foundation of the Castilian monarchy, enslavement was an unnatural condition reserved only for three categories of people: enemies of Christianity who were captured in ‘just wars,’ individuals who sold themselves under particular circumstances, and children of enslaved women. With the consolidation of the slave trade in the sixteenth century, Spanish writers, like their

European and English counterparts, began to associate black skin colour with the curse of

Cham. By the end of the century, the Spanish began to explicitly connect the notion that blackness was a sign of divine punishment to the concept of limpieza de sangre. Spanish

111 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1766), 390. Blackstone wrote: “Of all tame and domestic animals, the brood belongs to the owner of the dam or mother; the English law agreeing with the civil, that “partus sequitur ventrem” in the brute creation, though for the most part in the human species it disallows the maxim. And therefore in the laws of England, as well as Roman, “si equam meam equus tuus praegnantem fecerit, non est tuum sed meum natum est.” [If my mare be in foal by your horse, it is not your foal but mine]. (See Blackstone, 390).

76 fears and anxieties over the limpieza de sangre and slavery were cast onto women’s reproductive sexuality as a means to contain genealogical contamination and maintain the racialized social order of the Iberian Atlantic World. According to this logic, sexual unions between Spanish men and indigenous women were less threatening than those between

Spanish men and black women because over the course of a few generations Spanish purity would prevail and indigenous blood would be assimilated. Apparently, black blood, like that of Jews and Muslims, however, could not be ‘purified.’ “As other naturalizing discourses,” writes Maria Elena Martínez, “the sistema de castas held sex as a productive act that could pollute or dilute blood, which in turn could generate sick and degenerate beings, or at the very least pose classifactory problems within the hierarchy of allegedly natural categories.”

The notion of limpieza de sangre was inextricably intertwined, therefore, with the concept of maternal inheritance and served to ensure the ‘natural’ enslavement of African women’s descendants in colonial Mexico.112

The English espoused a similar logic with the legal principle of maternal inheritance and the notion that African monstrosity/enslaveability was inherited from women. The maternal inheritance principle was never documented in any of the Anglo-Caribbean’s slave codes yet it was universally adopted in the English Atlantic World. Black female bodies were used as a means of accumulating wealth and property, which made enslaved women particularly vulnerable to white men’s coercion and manipulation of their sexual and reproductive agency. This gendered form of legal disablement robbed enslaved women of all

112 Maria Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 158-162. Quotation from p. 162.

77 liberties regarding their reproduction.113 The intersection of race, gender, reproduction, and disability that was inscribed onto black bodies and in the name of legally protected property interests led to what Orlando Patterson has termed ‘natal alienation’ – the denial of socially acknowledged kin, a past and future, and membership in the legitimate social order.114 An institutionally driven process of enforced disabling brought about this complete loss of liberty.

The Monstrosity of Blackness: Skin Colour and Maternal Imagination

Blackness entered English public discussion as a matter of debate in the historical context of the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, and the rapid expansion of the English slave trade. During the second half of the seventeenth century, a variety of English writers contributed to the notion that black women passed on their supposed monstrosity – and, therefore, enslaveability – to their children. After 1660, at which time English law applied the principle of maternal inheritance to the Americas, maternal imagination emerged as a leading explanation for the so-called monstrosity of blackness. The association of black skin colour with monstrosity in the latter half of the seventeenth century suggested that monstrous

113 As a form of legal disablement, the maternal inheritance principle could not rob women of knowledge about how to control their own reproduction. African women, especially widwives, knew and used knowledge of contraception and plants as abortifacients. See Richard Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 225- 228; Barbara Bush, “Hard Labour: Women, Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies,” History Workshop Journal 36 (1993), 83-99. 114 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7.

78 races were monstrous because they inherited their characteristics from women rather than men.

The political and financial ties between the metropole and the colonies were vigorously asserted after the restoration of King Charles II (1660-1685), which “confirmed and accentuated the colonial and commercial policy of the Commonwealth…[and] discarded any lingering reservations about slavery or slave trading.”115 The Glorious Revolution

(1688) ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly on trade and created a competitive market in which independent traders participated in the lucrative slave trade. England’s success in the slave trade and slave labour production led English investors and supporters of slavery to a more ardent attempt at legitimizing the enslavement of blacks. The events of

1688 reaffirmed English freedoms and reinforced African servitude in the English Atlantic

World. The Revolution led to several changes that transformed the institution of slavery and how Africans and their descendants were treated in the English West Indies. Among these was the establishment of the Bank of England (1694); the expansion of the marine insurance industry; the demise of the Royal African Company (1698) and the emergence of free trade in slaves; the rise of commercial newspapers; and the increasing importance of manufacture and re-export trades.116

Seventeenth-century debates about human variety suggest that English writers perceived black skin as the most prominent signifier of monstrosity among Africans and a sign of their inner ‘difference.’117 Many believed that “if the cause of human blackness could

115 Blackburn, 250. 116 Linebaugh and Rediker 148-149. 117 My findings in this regard differ somewhat from those of Roxann Wheeler, who argues that skin colour was not the primary mark of human difference until the last quarter of the

79 be explained, then its nature and significance would follow.”118 Some writers perceived skin colour as susceptible to particular climates, however, debates in this period reveal a growing concern over the inheritability of blackness as a permanent ‘defect.’ Black skin raised fundamental questions about the peopling of the earth and the precise interpretation of the

Scriptures.119 The ‘Curse of Cham’ theory as well as the notion that black skin was a form of monstrosity or deformity allowed English elites to adhere to theories of monogenesis while maintaining that “blacks had degenerated from their common ancestor, Adam, while the whites had stayed constant or even improved.”120 Thus, although the English concluded that the same God created Africans, a hierarchy of man still existed and it was expressed through skin colour. In this way portrayals of black skin as a sign of African monstrosity also worked to support a system of slavery that would position Africans as suspended in perpetuity between the human and the animal.

The most popular theories on the origin of blackness – climatological theory, Biblical story, and maternal imagination – all posited an original whiteness for all humans and suggested that blackness was a deformity, a collective aberration from an original norm. In one of the earliest detailed writings on race and the origin of the human species, entitled “Of

eighteenth century. See Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 2; 7. 118 Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 11. 119 According to monogenism (the most widely held belief during the colonial period about the origins of humanity) all human kind originated from the same Christian God. Polygenism, the belief that the certain humans did not have the same Biblical origin as Europeans, was promoted by only the most unorthodox of thinkers. See Thomas, 135. 120 Ibid.

80 the Blacknesse of Negroes” in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) (which went into six editions by 1672), Sir Thomas Browne described blackness as a “Riddle.” Like other writers of the time, Browne couched his thoughts on blackness in religious terminology and attempted to explain the origin of black skin as a biological and biblical issue. He argued against popular theories of the time, namely that the sun caused black skin and that it was the result of God’s curse upon the descendants of Cham. At first glance Browne seemed to argue that blackness was not a deformity and that it did not offend the classical canons of beauty set out by

Aristotle and Galen.121 Closer reading reveals that, despite his seeming cultural relativism,

Browne maintained that blackness was an accident, a deviation from the norm, and speculated that it was the result of a hereditary disease, something in the air, water, or land, a compound in the blood or perhaps the result of cannibalism.122

By the late seventeenth century, the editors of the Athenian Mercury, a popular

London periodical, began to explicitly refer to blackness as an ‘accidental monstrosity’ and attempted to assimilate blackness into familiar categories of difference.123 The “Athenian

Society” was a pen name for the four Whig editors of the Athenian Mercury: John Dunton, a bookseller and publisher; Richard Sault, a mathematician and writer; Samuel Wesley, an

Anglican clergyman, who went to school with Daniel Defoe and was the father of abolitionists John and Charles Wesley; and John Norris, a Neo-Platonist. With the exception of John Dunton, who traveled to New England in 1685, none of the contributors to the

121 Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67-68. 122 Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries into very many received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths (London, 1646), 462-468, 466, 477-478. 123 My discussion of the Athenian Mercury builds on Catherine Molineux’s analysis in her book Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

81 journal had any first-hand knowledge of the colonies or slavery in the Americas.

Nonetheless, these writers dealt with numerous queries relating to black skin colour. In the seven-year run of the journal, these writers tackled questions relating to sex, marriage, politics, trade, and the supernatural, ranging from the existence of unicorns, to the morality of wife-beating, to whether ‘deformed’ people and blacks would ascend to heaven on judgment day. The Whig editors viewed “curiosity” as “a part of nature” and believed in the education of the common people. The double-sided folio half-sheet was distributed twice a week to local coffeehouses, free for the reading public. Each issue of the journal contained anywhere from two to twenty questions submitted by male and female readers through the penny post to Will’s Coffee in Covent Garden. London coffeehouses also acquired copies of the bound volume of issues that appeared every few months under the title The Athenian

Gazette, or Causistical mercury: resolving all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious of either sex. The journal reached provincial markets and the readership grew into the thousands, making the Athenian Mercury a great success, with editions available well into the eighteenth century.124

The journal’s question and answer forum reflected the increased popularity of curiosity cabinets and coffeehouse-type knowledge in late-seventeenth century England. As

Catherine Molineux argues, the rise of popular curiosity had significant consequences for

English understandings of human variety and “for how Britons located themselves within this expanded world.”125 Although the collections displayed in seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets and eighteenth-century museums were primarily elite property, the expansion of

124 Ibid., 90. 125 Ibid.

82 print culture and the rise of small-scale collectors gave the general English public access to curiosities, including those from Africa and from the plantation-based colonies of the New

World, where large and rapidly increasing populations of Africans were held in slavery.126

The kinds of questions raised by readers of the Athenian Mercury reflected the increased visibility and display of curiosities associated with African enslavement. In between questions about love, marriage, and religion were queries regarding the origin of black skin and the salvation of people of African descent.

In their conceptualization of black skin, the editors of the Athenian Mercury tried to emphasize its similarities with other so-called deformities, such as blindness or ‘lameness,’ while at the same time suggesting that, even within the categories of deformity and monstrosity, blackness was still fundamentally different from other non-racial ‘defects.’ The editors more or less dismissed the climatological theory and the curse of Cham theory and instead revived an ancient classical and medieval theory, arguing that, like all other ‘defects,’ blackness was caused by the mother’s maternal imagination. They employed colonial references and explained that:

the Featus in the womb is sort of a vegetable, joyn’d to the Mother as a Branch to the

Root, or rather as the Plants of the Indian Figg-tree to one another by a small string or

ligament...For to speak Truth, the Mother seems to have as much power over the

Child's Body, nay, more than she has over her own.127

The editors held mothers solely responsible for the appearance of their children. Kevin Stagg argues that, in the seventeenth century, “the imagination made reproduction and its errors a

126 Ibid., 91. 127 Athenian Mercury (May 11, 1691).

83 human concern, as the monstrous child now reflected the maternal environment over the bitter judgment of a wrathful God.”128 According to the Athenian’s editors, the mother’s soul, “its passions, its joys and pains...and accordingly, any object being strongly fix’d on the

Mother’s fancy, 'tis thence transferr'd to the Childs Body.”129 The casting of blackness as a monstrosity caused by a woman’s imagination indicated a relationship between racism, gender, disability, and the inheritance of legal status in the English Atlantic World.

By contrast, other writers of the time suggested that African phenotypic characteristics were caused not by the mother’s imagination, but by her perverse and animal- like maternal practices. According to the English bookseller and writer Nathaniel Crouch

(pseudonym Robert or Richard Burton), the African mother was to blame for black phenotypic features, which Crouch perceived as deformities caused by deviant mothering.

Crouch is not known to have travelled to Africa or the East Indies, however, in 1686, he wrote a text entitled, A View of the English Acquisitions in Guinea, and the East-Indies, with

An Account of the Religion, Government, Wars, Strange Customs, Beasts, Serpents,

Monsters, and other Observables in those Countries. The work was a great success and deployed many of the prejudiced depictions of African women as deformed that were circulating in England during the late-seventeenth century.130 Of black women’s breastfeeding practices, Crouch speculated that:

128 Stagg, 35. 129 Athenian Mercury (May 11, 1691). 130 Jason Mc Elligott, ‘Crouch, Nathaniel [Robert Burton] (c.1640–1725?),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/52645, accessed 2 Nov 2014]

…this may be the reason of the flatness of their noses by their knocking continually

against the back and shoulders of the mother while she is walking or at work; for it is

observed that the children of their gentry whose mothers do not labour, nor carry their

infants about them, have very comely noses.131

Casting racial features as deformities caused by maternal incompetence had serious implications for Africans and their descendants. Crouch suggested that the African body had degenerated into an unnatural physical state due to the African mothers’ perceived maternal inefficiency, which the author implied was innate to Africans. Crouch’s speculation, moreover, contains a class statement about the enslaveability of ‘ordinary’ Africans.

According to Crouch, elite African children, whose mothers did not labour, did not possess the supposedly deformed physical features of their common counterparts. Physical appearance visibly demonstrated one’s class status and, therefore, suitability or unsuitability for enslavement. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave, published two years after

Crouch’s work, also yoked African phenotype to class status and disability. In the novella,

Behn described the prince Oroonoko as possessing a noble variety of blackness that placed him close to European whiteness and allowed him to transcend his ‘uncivilized’ African origins:

His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth the finest

shaped that could be seen; far from those great lips which are so natural to the rest of

the negroes. The whole proportion and air of his face was so nobly and exactly formed

131 Richard Burton, A View of the English Acquisitions in Guinea, and the East-Indies, with An Account of the Religion, Government, Wars, Strange Customs, Beasts, Serpents, Monsters, and other Observables in those Countries: together with a description of the Isle of St. Helena and the Bay of Sculdania where the English usually refresh in their voyages to the Indies: intermixt with pleasant relations and enlivened with picture (London, 1686), n.p.

that, bating his color, there could do nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable, and

handsome.132

Behn condemned Oroonoko’s enslavement precisely because he was an aristocrat and a man of honour, while she endorsed the enslavement of the other Africans on the plantation, in part because of their implicit deformity when compared with a noble figure like Oroonoko.

The editors of The Athenian Mercury argued that black skin originated as a monstrosity caused by a mother’s wayward imagination, however, its continuation through lineage was explained through the principle of heredity. The question nevertheless remained whether the mother or the father had more influence on intergenerational resemblance. In their answer to whether a “natural defect in the parent” is “communicated to the child by the particles of the semen or otherwise,” the editors answered:

Fancy may have a great share here, as well as in the former Cases, and the Defect of

the Father be so strongly fixed on the Mothers Mind, as to impress it on the Child.

Natural defect seem an unphilosophical term, for all Defects are monstrous, and as

such unnatural. Accidental Defects indeed there may be, and we find daily are, but if

this proceeds from the Male Parent, by the Particles of the Semen, such Defects are

only in Quality, not Quantity…Stuttering parents, have, it's true, had Children troubled

with the same Defect; but this we look upon rather to proceed from Imitation, than any

other case.133

The male role in producing supposedly deformed children was, therefore, accidental, resulting in individual rather than collective and racial defects. According to the editors, the

132 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave A True History [1688] in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 81. 133 Athenian Mercury (May 23, 1691).

86 innately monstrous mother most often passed deformity to the child, even if the deformity was in fact the father’s in the first place. In arguing that, “all Defects are monstrous, and as such unnatural,”134 the editors fostered the dichotomy between the natural and the monstrous as “fundamental ways of constructing social reality.”135 Indeed, the pre-modern notion of

‘natural’ was a precursor to modern understandings of ‘normal’ and, as Douglas Baynton has shown, both were ways of establishing hierarchies and justifying the denial of rights and legitimacy to particular groups and individuals.136

According to the Mercury enslavement was the conduit through which Africans could

‘cure’ their legacy of so-called monstrosity, inherited from their mothers. In 1693, the editors addressed the question of whether Africans would “rise to the last day.” Would Africans and blacks ascend to heaven on judgment day? If they did, would their blackness ascend as well?

According to the Athenian Mercury, it was necessary for supposedly imperfect bodies – black, female, or deformed – to be restored to a perfect heavenly state upon resurrection in order to “maintain the homogeneity of God’s plan.”137 The editors asserted that the question of whether Africans would “rise to the last day” was really a question of “whether white or black is better colour?” 138Although the editors claimed that notions of beauty were somewhat relative, in the end they maintained that the meanings behind black and white were not subjective, but rather natural and in contrast to one another. They explained that:

134 Ibid. 135 Baynton, 35. 136 Ibid. 137 Molineux, 97. 138 Athenian Mercury (May 23, 1691). Emphasis original.

Black is the colour of Night, frightful, dark and horrid, but White of the Day and Light

refreshing and lovely. Taking then this blackness of the Negro to be an accidental

Imperfection (the Cause whereof see before) we conclude then, that he shall not arise

with that Complexion, but leave it behind him in the darkness of the Grave, exchanging

it for a brighter and a better at his return agen into the World.139

God’s ‘merciful’ correction of imperfect bodies was not only reserved for people of African descent. Other supposedly ‘deformed’ and ‘monstrous’ individuals such as giants, dwarfs, or those “born with six fingers or one less than he ought” would ascend to heaven “at the greatest perfection of their natures.”140

In their support of the institution of slavery the editors of the Mercury argued that enslavement was “the greatest kindness…since otherwise [Africans] must either be killed or eaten, or both, by their barbarous conquering Enemy – Besides, it might be a means to save their souls as well as Lives…”141 According to the editors, slavery generated salvation and salvation cured blackness. Such argument was certainly not the only rhetoric in defense of slavery, however, it further illustrates that blackness, monstrosity and enslaveability were inextricably linked in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic World. The Athenian

Mercury was published at the height of the metropolitan debate about the Royal African

Company’s monopoly on the slave trade and what emerged out of such debates was a new understanding among English people of the slave trade and slavery’s significance to

England’s economy. The Mercury’s discussion of blackness as a collective, inheritable, and

139 Athenian Mercury (September 26, 1691). 140 Ibid. Emphasis original. 141 Ibid. Emphasis original.

88 racial monstrosity, with slavery as its cure, reflected a turning point in how English elites understood their relationship to Africans, slavery and empire.

English conceptualizations of blackness and the legal and social arguments for

Atlantic World slavery were formed relationally in the colonial period. To the extent that blackness was perceived as a deformity, slavery became understood as its ‘cure’; to the extent that blackness was understood as physical sign of moral depravity, slavery was framed as a punishment. The African woman was key to such formulations. The English figured the black female body, in its heritability and ‘monstrosity’/’deformity,’ as excessive, as essentially ‘out of control’ and a threat in need of containment and discipline. The business of controlling bodies (as opposed to eliminating or completely ‘curing’ them) worked to the advantage of the colonial economic system that was dependent on slave labour.

Conclusion

This chapter has traced the intellectual, legal, and anthropological processes by which the English conceptually transformed African blackness into a collective, inheritable, and racial monstrosity, a category of being that made Africans supposedly ‘fit’ for servitude. It has demonstrated that the link between blackness and monstrosity came into existence and relation to one another in the early colonial period. The linking of deformity and monstrosity with African peoples allowed those invested in slavery and the slave trade to give different values to human life in order to legitimize enslavement and procure the wealth it generated.

Monstrosity is, therefore, key to understanding the historical intersections between English racism, capitalism, and slavery. During the seventeenth century, England became a nationally organized mercantilist enterprise and its capital grew at the expense of black

89 bodies. The wealth generated from the slave trade and slavery, as well as the support granted by monarchy and parliament in this endeavor, helped ease any moral doubts about the legitimacy of the institution and its devastating consequences for Africans and their descendants.

The notion that blackness was an inheritable and racial form of monstrosity was inextricably linked to the legal principle of maternal inheritance, which had disabling consequences for the enslaved and, in particular, enslaved women. As Chapter Two will explain further, the legal principle exposed enslaved women to sexual violence and refused them any protection over their bodies or the bodies of their children. It was a form of legal disablement that denied enslaved persons complete access to their pasts and futures through ancestors and children and seriously threatened their ontological lives. The legal disablement of the enslaved, coupled with the legally sanctioned disfiguring and disabling of enslaved bodies made slavery a preeminent site of disability. Disability among the enslaved became the ultimate expression of English racism. Emerging notions of race in the seventeenth century fostered and validated such violence against African bodies as the limits of ‘worthy’ humanity were set against or defined by the backdrop of English capitalism.

Chapter 2

“A Field of Pain and Death”: The Disabling Power of Slave Law

Introduction

This chapter explores the slave laws of Barbados and Jamaica from the earliest comprehensive slave codes to the late eighteenth-century consolidated acts of the amelioration period, in order to demonstrate that colonial slave laws impaired and disabled the enslaved. As Chapter One demonstrated, anti-black and pro-slavery English racism created a space of abjection that suspended captive Africans and their descendants between the categories of human and animal. Slavery relied on, and the enslaved lived in, a space between the endless violence of slave law and the complex possibilities of the corporeal. In this chapter, I map out a dialectic of disablement by exploring the relationship between the disabling force of the law and the law as a force enabling the brutalization and marking of enslaved bodies.

Using ‘disability’ as an analytic tool, I argue that the law’s deliberate construction of the enslaved as neither fully human nor animal is key to understanding the disabling force of slavery. The animalization of enslaved Africans was not an ontological or a priori assumption on which slave law was based, but rather a form of punishment, a means to force

Africans and their descendants into a perpetual labour that was justified as a way to both contain and profit from racial monstrosity. Thus, the slave laws of Barbados and Jamaica recognized the humanity of the enslaved but treated it as a suspect and exploitable form of humanity that was a foil for the monstrous link between human and animal.

English slave law’s construction of the enslaved as monstrous had precedents in medieval and early modern English law. Beginning in the thirteenth and surviving until the mid-nineteenth century, English law defined the legal category monster as a human/animal hybrid and the body as “the ultimate bedrock of what it means to be human.”1 According to

English law, monsters were not admissible to any inheritance, whereas deformed children were. As this chapter will demonstrate, the English legal category of the monster is key to understanding English lawmakers’ construction of Africans as human and animal. In English slave law, the only form of inheritance associated with the enslaved was their legal status.

Thus, slavery’s purpose was not to destroy the monster, but to perpetually reveal and exploit the only ‘fit’ use of the racial monster, which was as a unit of labour and profit for others.

Reducing African humanity to the legal status of a domestic animal made it possible to exploit the monster’s human potential and contain the danger posed by monstrosity. Colonial rule turned a world of potentially infinite monstrosity into a world of potentially limitless capitalist gain.

In my analysis of slave law and disability, I draw from the social model of disability theory, which reads disability not as an individual physical state-of-being (i.e. impairment) but a social state of being (a process of disablement).2 On the one hand, the slave codes collectively disabled enslaved Africans by limiting their mobility, their freedom, and their

1 Andrew N. Sharpe, “England’s Legal Monsters,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 5 (2009), 101. Sharpe notes that references to monsters can be found in Henry de Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England 1240-1260 vols 1-4, trans. S.E. Thorne (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968), vol. 2, 21, 203-204; vol. 3, 151, 221 and vol. 4, 198, 227, 361 and 362. (See Sharpe, 101, fn. 14). 2 The social model distinguishes between the biological impairment and the social disability. For further details on the social model of disability please see the Introduction of this dissertation.

92 autonomy, and divesting them of political status. On the other hand, the slave laws encouraged the physical impairment and disfigurement of captives by sanctioning punishments that disabled and disfigured – such as flogging, amputations, and branding – as well as by establishing a slaveowner culture in which masters, mistresses, and overseers were granted almost sovereign power to punish captives however they desired and with impunity.

In this way, disability functioned not only as an individual biological condition or impairment, but also as a social, political and economic process of oppression in slave society. My analysis of disability and law goes further than this to suggest that slave law and racial ideology created enslaved Africans as a disabled legal category in order to exploit them and enable slaveowners to destroy them through disabling punishments.

This chapter places disability theory in conversation with the theories of Julia

Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, Orlando Patterson, and Robert Cover, in order to map a space of disablement created by Atlantic slavery. With the exception of Patterson, these theorists do not themselves address blackness or slavery, nor do they engage with notions of disability.

Their concepts of abjection, sovereign power, alienation, and violence, however, are useful in rethinking the relationship between disability, race, and African enslavement in the

English Atlantic World. Drawing on Kristeva, I argue that the slave laws of Barbados and

Jamaica viewed the enslaved as human, but theirs was an abject form of humanity, monstrous enough to be “unassimilable.”3 This abject space of debased and exploitable humanity was a fixed form of disablement, not in the process of becoming something else, like childhood, for instance. The enslaved inhabited this space of disablement, or ‘state of

3 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

93 exception,’ as ‘bare life.’4 ‘Bare life,’ according to Agamben, is a wounded, expendable, and endangered life – “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast.”5 Agamben does not articulate his concept of ‘bare life’ in connection with race and gender, however, the concept of ‘bare life’ can open new opportunities to rethink the linkages between gender, race, and disability in the historical context of Atlantic slavery.

Similarly, Patterson’s theory of ‘social death’ lends itself to a gendered analysis of disability and the law, despite the fact that Patterson’s writing appears to assume a universal male subject. Patterson argues that the enslaved suffered from a social death and ‘natal alienation’ from all family ties and all groups and localities except those chosen by slaveowners.6 This chapter draws on and engages with Patterson as part of a discussion of the maternal inheritance principle – the idea that the status of the mother determines the status of the child

– as an institutionally driven process of enforced and gendered disablement.

‘An Uncertaine Kinde of People’: African Humanity in Seventeenth-Century Slave Law

From the mid-seventeenth century to the abolition of slavery, the lives of enslaved individuals in the English Caribbean, from birth and infancy, to marriage, leisure, punishment, rest, and death were regulated in theory by a vast array of positive laws. Slave laws offer a crucial – though admittedly narrow and untrustworthy – window into the emergence of slave society. “Conclusions can be drawn about one society from its legal

4 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 5 Ibid., 109. 6 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Boston: Harvard University, 1982), 7.

94 rules,” argues Alan Watson, “only after one has studied the setting, including the cultural setting, in which the rules were devised.”7 In the early years of slavery in the English West

Indies, there were enslaved people but no slave law. Slavery as a social institution existed for decades before a comprehensive slave code was written to govern the enslaved, their treatment and their interactions with free people. The slave codes as well as other laws of

Barbados and Jamaica were formed piecemeal in local legislatures and not in England.8

Slave laws did not mirror everyday practices, and were often adhered to in the breach, implemented in ways that diverged from the written statute. The legal system of English plantation colonies was based, in the final analysis, on one principle: the slaveowner was sovereign within his or her own realm. This meant, for instance, that although slave laws clearly defined punishments for particular crimes committed by enslaved individuals, ultimately the slaveowner had the power to punish captives however he or she saw fit.9

The first comprehensive slave law of Anglo-America was issued in Barbados in

1661, during the expansion of the English slave trade. The law was reenacted with minor changes in 1676, 1682, and 1688. This founding law was the model used for the 1664 slave laws of Jamaica, South Carolina’s 1696 slave code, and Antigua’s 1702 laws.10 While these early comprehensive slave laws do not explicitly speak about skin colour as the basis for

7 Alan Watson, Slave Laws in the Americas (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), Xii. 8 Richard S. 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), 227. 9 Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 2. 10 David Barry Gaspar, “With a Rod of Iron: Barbados Slave Laws as a Model for Jamaica, South Carolina, and Antigua, 1661-1697,” in Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora, eds. Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), 352.

95 slavery, they nevertheless reflected a nascent racism against Africans and their descendants in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic World. The laws institutionalized English notions of African and ‘Indian’ depravity and consolidated Atlantic slavery’s main principles

– racial hierarchy, tyrannical social control, and the incorporation of slavery into England’s political economy.

Although colonial lawmakers drew on English law, it was of no assistance to colonists in trying to define the social relations between captive and master or the race relations between black and white.11 The law statutes in the English colonies reflected elements of both English and Roman law. Watson suggests that various societies were regulated historically by laws that were either borrowed from within the system or from a revered outside system, written in a different country, at a different time, and sometimes for a different culture.12 English settlers had a considerable degree of autonomy from English

Parliament in creating colonial law. They retained aspects of English law they found useful to the Caribbean. However, they were not accountable to English legislation “unless it was specifically framed for them by Parliament on special occasion, by the crown before a local assembly had convened, or by their own assembly.”13 In England, no law existed that defined the status of slaves and there had been no custom of using Roman law for legal development. Colonists could not, therefore, easily take Roman slave law and apply it to the

11 Dunn, 227. 12 Alan Watson, Roman Law and Comparative Law (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 268. 13 Mindie Lazarus-Black, “John Grant's Jamaica: Notes Towards a Reassessment of Courts in the Slave Era,” The Journal of Caribbean History 27, no. 2 (January 1, 1994), 156. See also Neville Hall, “The Judicial System of Plantation Society: Barbados on the Eve of Emancipation,” in Le passage de la société esclavagiste à la société post-esclavagiste au 19e siècle Vol. 1 (Colloque d’histoire antillaise, Point-à-Pitre, Guadaloupe, 1971), 38-70.

96 colonies. This accounted for one of the fundamental differences between the Portuguese and

Spanish colonies and the English colonies.14 English slave law, therefore, had to be written from the beginning. Slavery was first addressed in 1636, nearly a decade after the establishment of Barbados, in an act declaring that, “Negroes and Indians, that came here to be sold, should serve for life, unless a contract was before made to the contrary.”15

On September 27 1661, the Barbados assembly passed a series of laws to deal specifically with the underclasses of the island. Along with the slave code, the assembly passed two other acts: a servant act and a militia act.16 Written by the planter elite, the slave codes of the English Caribbean reflected an “immediate reaction to what the slaveowner conceived to be the necessities of the slave system.”17 It is historically relevant that already by 1661 and 1664, Africans were being constructed in law as the only enslaveable people, even though indigenous people were enslaved in Barbados and Jamaica in this period.18

Thus, at the same moment that blackness was constructed as a monstrosity ‘fit’ for enslavement, the ‘Indian’ vanished from slave law. References to ‘Indian’ enslavement resurfaced in later seventeenth and eighteenth century laws. However, the primary concern of lawmakers was not Indian enslavement, but rather an Indian slave trade that was unsettling

14 Watson, Slave Laws in the Americas, 63. 15 Cited in Dunn, 228. 16 Gaspar, 346. 17 Elsa Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century (Caribbean Universities Press, 1970), 19. 18 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661) on microfilm at the Faculty of Law Library at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados; An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negro Slaves (Jamaica 1664) on microfilm at the Faculty of Law Library at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados.

97 trade relations between with mainland indigenous nations.19 In English North America,

Virginia was the only southern colony to prohibit Indian enslavement, however, “the recurring confirmation of the law, originally passed in 1691 and reenacted in 1705 and again in 1777, suggests that it was not effective.”20

According to the preamble of the 1661 law, previous laws were flawed and unsuccessful in establishing control over Africans:

Wee have therefore upon nature and serious consideration of the punishes thought

good to renewe whatsoever wee have found necessary & useful in the former Lawes of

this Island concerning the order and governing of negroes and to add there unto such

farther Lawes & ordinances as at this tyme wee thinke absolutely needfull for the

publique safety and may prove to the future beehoofeful to the pease and utility of this

Island by this act repealing and dissolving all other former Lawes made concerning the

said Negroes.21

The use of the term ‘Negroes’ in the 1661 preamble is significant. The words ‘negro’ or

‘negroes’ was relatively new to the English language, used in the mid-sixteenth century to refer to peoples originally native to sub-Saharan Africa. By the seventeenth century, the term took on an additional meaning, as it was applied specifically to enslaved Africans.22 The

19 Linford D. Fisher, “Atlantic Indian Slavery and Indian Middle Passages,” (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians, Nassau, Bahamas, May 19 2015). My thanks to Linford Fisher for sharing this work with me. 20 Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 78. 21 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Preamble. 22 “Negro, n. and adj.” OED Online. (Oxford University Press, September 2014), http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/125898?redirectedFrom=negr oe& (accessed May 5, 2014).

1661 law’s use of the term reflects this shift in meaning and demonstrates that Atlantic slavery came to be based on the principle of ‘black slavery’ and ‘white freedom.’ The

Barbados slave code, the servant act and the militia act of 1661 set a precedent for other

English slave societies and sharply divided island society into three classes: white masters, white servants, and black captives.

While Jamaica’s legislature was based on the 1661 Barbados code, it quickly came to reflect the island’s unique sociopolitical concerns. After seizing Jamaica from Spain, English colonists spent several years in conflict with African maroons who had been Spanish captives, which significantly shaped the creation of the 1664 and 1696 Jamaica slave acts.

The seventeenth-century laws of Jamaica reflected the island’s most pressing problems: slave rebellion and maroon resistance.23 Jamaican planters were notoriously brutal in their punishment of enslaved people. In 1774, Jamaica planter Edward Long described the founding laws of the English Caribbean as “rigid and inclement, even to a degree of inhumanity.”24 According to Trevor Burnard, Jamaican whites “frowned on overseers and planters who were deemed to be lenient toward their slaves.”25 In cases of slave uprisings or group crimes, however, lawmakers in Jamaica ordered the execution of only one criminal as an example to others, due to a shortage of bondspeople in seventeenth-century Jamaica.26

This decision was based on the slaveowners’ interests in profits and not the wellbeing of the

23 Gaspar, 344. 24 Edward Long, History of Jamaica. Or, general survey of the antient and modern state of that island: with reflections on its situation, settlements, inhabitants,…In three volumes, vol. 2 (London, 1774), 497. 25 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2004), 150. 26 Dunn, 243.

99 enslaved. Additionally, in an attempt to secure future labourers, the Jamaican assembly forbade the execution of pregnant women.27 Even so, if a pregnant woman died during or shortly after punishment no one was held accountable. Of Jamaica, Charles Leslie wrote:

“No country excels them in a barbarous Treatment of Slaves, or in the cruel Methods they put them to Death.”28

The Barbadian and Jamaican slave laws of the 1660s and 1670s constructed a legal slave whose humanity was recognized in order to facilitate its legal disablement. In the early decades of sugar production, lawmakers socially and legally differentiated servant from slave, offering the former protections against violence and defining the latter as absolute private property, subject to her or his owner’s will. Colonists would find a legitimate defense of private property in persons in Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England (1628), which greatly reflected the jus gentium of Roman law.29 Coke invoked theories of servitude and ‘race’ in his observation that, “bondage or servitude was first inflicted for dishonouring of parents: for Cham the father of Canaan (of whom issued the Canaanites) seeing the nakedness of his father Noah, and shewing it in derision to his Brethren, was therefore punished in his son Canaan with bondage.”30 Nation, lineage, and inheritance were key components of the racist ideology Coke expressed with the ‘Curse of Cham’ theory. The

27 Gaspar, 354. 28 Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica, from the Earliest Accounts, to the Taking of Porto Bello by Vice-Admiral Vernon in thirteen letters from a gentleman to his friend…in which are briefly interspersed, the characters of its governors and lieutenant governors (London, 1739), 42. 29 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1998), 236. 30 Sir Edward Coke, The First part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, or, A commentary upon Littleton: not the author only, but of the law itself. Tenth Edition (London, 1703), n.p.

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Canaanites suffered perpetually inheritable enslavement for the sin of their nation’s founding father, Cham. Skin colour and phenotype were not the components that made Coke’s theory racial; it was, rather, the biblical sanction for the enslavement of a race/nation of people, defined as such by their descent from a common, disinherited and dishonoured ancestor.

Even so, Coke’s justification for the enslavement of an entire ‘race’ of people was still missing one of the key components of Atlantic World slavery. In his defense of property in persons, as in the biblical story, enslavement is passed through the paternal line, unlike the principle of maternal inheritance that would come to define the Atlantic World.

In Roman law, slaves were legally property of their owners. However, for certain purposes a slave was considered human, for other purposes a thing.31 Similarly, in the early laws of Barbados and Jamaica, captives were most commonly regarded as chattel and treated like animals. In 1668, the Assembly of Barbados changed the classification of Africans from chattel to real estate “to prevent executors from dismantling plantations in probate settlements…[and] keep the island plantations as viable working units.”32 This shift in legal terminology changed enslaved status from moveable to immoveable property and, in theory, placed more emphasis on the enslaved as persona instead of res. In practice, however, this law only protected planters as property owners; the enslaved enjoyed no new freedom.33

Whether chattel or real property, enslaved legal status affirmed the disabling anthropological uncertainty of “Negroes” as a basic condition of existence.

Based on the legal principle that bondspeople were the private property of slaveowners, it was the legal right of owners whether and when to manumit enslaved

31 Watson, Slave Laws in the Americas, 22. 32 Dunn, 241. 33 Goveia, 28.

101 individuals. In the English colonies, there were three means through which one could be manumitted: through legislative and court action, deed conveyances, and wills.34 In 1692, after the discovery of a slave plot in Barbados, an act was passed which manumitted bondspeople who informed on fellow captives planning to “commit or abet any insurrection or rebellion.”35 This law was not used until after the Barbados slave rebellion of 1816, in which four enslaved individuals were manumitted.36 Manumission in the English Caribbean was very rare; the majority of the enslaved had little chance of gaining freedom during the slave period. In other contemporary slave systems such as the Iberian Atlantic and the

Mediterranean, there was a greater prospect and reality of manumission. In the Iberian

Atlantic colonies gradual manumission, or coartación, was practiced and “had its roots in the medieval legal principle that enslavement was an ‘unnatural’ and transitional human condition through which outsiders and their descendants could be integrated into society.”37

In the Mediterranean, bondspeople laboured in brutal conditions and were subjected to harsh physical punishments and sexual abuse and then often set free.38 This differed quite markedly from slavery in the Atlantic, and in particular in the English Atlantic World. “So far as the overwhelming majority was concerned,” writes Robin Blackburn “New World

34 Jerome S. Handler, The Unappropriated People: Freedman in the Slave Society of Barbados (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2009), 34-39. Handler notes that self-purchase was recognized in custom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, never in law. (see Handler, The Unappropriated People, 34). 35 Richard Hall, Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados From 1643-1762, Inclusive...(London, 1764). Cited in Jerome S. Handler, The Unappropriated People, 30. 36 Handler, 30. 37 Melanie J. Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 36. 38 Robert C. Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2009), 40-41.

102 slavery was a curse that even the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original African captive found it exceedingly difficult to escape.”39

Although law clearly established the slave as ‘mere’ property, the actual regulation of slaves on English plantations proved more difficult. Enslaved Africans were defined as property within the legal system; like land and other goods, captives were considered commodities that could be sold and bought, bartered and bargained, and made private property.40 But the enslaved were a special kind of property: human property. Lawmakers had no choice but to order laws that dealt directly with African humanity. As “property in persons,” Africans possessed volition – they could steal goods, run away, and plot and rebel against their owners.41 Thus, the slave laws obscured the humanity of Africans but did not deny it outright. Lawmakers’ ability to make the humanity of the enslaved harder to see increased the power of slaveowners to exploit their ‘property.’ African humanity was the fundamental problem of slave law as well as what made slavery possible and profitable.

From the outset, English Caribbean slave law recognized the humanity of Africans but sought to reduce its legal significance in order to exploit it more effectively. The 1661 and 1688 laws of Barbados reflect the consolidation of slavery as the legal punishment for a monstrous race and the use of monstrous races as enslaved labour in the interest of capital.

The notion that Africans somehow suffered from a moral depravity was expressed in the opening lines of the 1661 Barbados slave code:

…Negroes an heathenish brutish and an unsertaine kinde of people to whom if surely

in any thing wee may extend the legislative power given us of punishinary Lawes for

39 Blackburn, 4. 40 Goveia, 21. 41 Ibid.

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the benefit and good of this plantacon not being contradictory to the Lawes of England

there being in all the body of that Lawe noe tract to guide us where to walk nor any

rule sett as how to governe such slaves. Yett wee well know by the right rule of reason

and order wee are not to leave them to the Arbitrary cruell and outragious wills of

every evill disposed person but soe far to protect them as wee doo many other goods

and chattles and alsoe so somewhat farther as being treated Men though without the

knowledge of God in the world…42

Lawmakers in Jamaica replicated this passage with minor revisions. In their description of

Africans, Jamaican lawmakers claimed that Africans were “an heathenish brutish & an uncertain & dangerous kind of people.”43 Lawmakers, thus, conceived of Africans as people but of an uncertain kind. As an uncertain kind of people, the enslaved needed the protection of their masters from “evill disposed” people. According to this line of logic, enslavement was the conduit through which to ‘protect’ Africans from the errors into which they would be led as a result of their undetermined humanity. The law equated enslaved Africans with

“other goods and chattles” but somewhat more “as being treated [like] Men.” Thus, the preamble demonstrates a legal, moral, and anthropological theory of enslaveable humanity.

As Achille Mbembe writes, “because the slave’s life is like a ‘thing,’ possessed by another person, the slave existence appears a perfect figure of a shadow.”44 English Caribbean slave law always recognized the humanity of the slave, and its power derived from the ability to see that humanity and effectively disable it, to take the slave apart as a whole legal being.

42 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Preamble. 43 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negro Slaves (Jamaica, 1664), Preamble. Emphasis added. 44 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meinties, Public Culture 15, no. 1, (2003), 22.

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In contrast to the 1661 Act, the 1688 Barbados slave act was framed less in terms of protecting Africans’ uncertain humanity, and more in terms of punishment for the crime of racial monstrosity. The 1688 law was passed after the Barbados plantocracy uncovered a rebellion plot earlier that year.45 The preamble to the law claimed that Africans’ “barbarous, wild and savage nature,” made them ‘unfit’ to be governed by English law:

Negroes and other Slaves brought unto the People of this Island for that purpose, are of

barbarous, wild and savage nature, and such as renders them wholly unqualified to be

governed by the Laws, Customs, and Practices of our nation: It is therefore becoming

absolutely necessary, that such other Constitutions, Laws and Orders, should be in this

Island framed and enacted for the good regulating or ordering of them, as may both

restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanities to which they are naturally prone and

inclined...46

The figure of the monster haunted both the 1661 and 1688 laws, but in ways that reflected the rapid shifts in English Atlantic thought and policy described in Chapter One.

Already, in the 1661 law statute, the ‘fantastic’ African whose monstrous difference was accepted as a fact beyond the control of ordinary Englishmen was giving way to the

‘knowable,’ controllable and improveable African. In the 1661 law slavery was the means for the human to triumph over the monster. By contrast, the Barbados slave act of 1688 emphasized slavery as the punishment for Africans’ monstrous form of humanity, and legally

45 John Poyer, The History of Barbados, from the First Discovery of the Island, in the year 1605, till the Accession of Lord Seaforth, 1801 (London, 1808), 128-129. 46 “An Act for the Governing of Negroes” (Barbados, 1688) in Acts of Assembly, passed in the Island of Barbadoes, From 1648, to 1718 (London, 1732), 137.

105 sanctioned forced labour and extreme violence became the only means of exploiting

Africans’ otherwise useless reserves of humanity.

The Barbados slave act of 1688 served as the island’s fundamental slave legislation until the Consolidated Slave Act of 1826.47 New to the 1688 code was a clause that prohibited captives from meeting in groups, beating drums, blowing horns, or using any other loud instruments.48 In the 1688 code, enslaved individuals continued to be apprehended and tried by the same process for “heinous and grievous crimes, as Murders, Burglaries,

Robbing in the High-ways, Rapes, Burning of Houses or Canes” but for the first time the law stipulated why summary trial was used. The enslaved “being brutish…deserve not, for the

Baseness of their condition, to be tried by the Legal Tryal of Twelve Men of their Peers or

Neighbourhood, which neither truly can be rightly done as the Subjects of England are, nor is Execution to be delayed towards them, in case of such horrid Crimes committed.” The law advised judges to use “violent circumstances” to gather incriminating testimonies from bondspeople and compensated owners of executed captives a maximum of £25 sterling.49

The founding slave laws of Barbados and Jamaica obligated owners to provide bondspeople with clothing “to cover their nakedness once every yeare.” Men were to be given drawers and caps, and women petticoats.50 The Barbados and Jamaica assemblies, however, mentioned no need to supply bondspeople with food, except when incarcerated.

For instance, in the 1661 Barbados slave law and repeated in the laws of both Barbados and

47 Gaspar, 350. 48 “An Act for the Governing of Negroes” (Barbados, 1688), 138. 49 Ibid., 141. 50 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Clause III; An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negro Slaves (Jamaica, 1664), Clause III.

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Jamaica well into the eighteenth century, the provost Marshall was responsible for providing detained runaways “with sufficient food and drink.” If any runaways should die under the care of the Marshall “for want of foode or dry or convenient lodgeing the provost Marshall shall bee responsible for them to the owners.”51 Such statutes implied that food deprivation was a reality for the enslaved living on plantation grounds. Only when imprisoned was a bondsperson guaranteed, at least in theory, sufficient nourishment. Barry Gaspar argues that the “inclusion of protective legislation…was based, arguably not so much on the recognition that as humans slaves should not be abused, but on the self-interest of owners and the welfare of the state.”52 What is more, such protective legislation demonstrates the power of lawmakers to deliberately, and out of self-interest, position African humanity as a legal ambiguity.

In Barbados and Jamaica, laws that dealt with the death of a bondsperson deliberately blurred the boundaries between “unfortunately” dying and being “wantonly” killed. Both the

1661 and 1664 laws distinguished, between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ killing and ordered whites to pay a fine for the intentional killing of an enslaved individual:

And it is further enacted & ordeyned by the authority aforesaid that if any slaves under

punishment by his Master or his order for running away or any other crime or

51 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Clause VIII. The law is repeated, in slightly different language in the following slave codes: An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negro Slaves (Jamaica, 1664), Clause VII; “The Acts of Assembly and Laws of Jamaica, Abridg'd under Proper Heads,” (1684) in An Abridgement of the Laws in Force and Use in Her Majesty's Plantations; (Viz.) Of Virginia, Jamaica, Barbadoes, Maryland, New-England, New-York, Carolina, &c. (London, 1704), Clause VI; “An Act for the Governing of Negroes” (Barbados, 1688), 139; The Laws of Jamaica, pass'd by the governours, council and assembly in that island, and confirm'd by the Crown (London, 1716), 228. 52 Gaspar, 348.

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misdemeanor towards his said Master shall suffer in life or in member noe person

whatsoever shall bee accountable to any Law therefore but if any Man shall of

wantonness or only bloody minded & cruell intencon wilfully kill a slave if his owne

hee shall pay unto the King his heiries & successors thirty pounds sterl. But if hee shall

soe kill another Mans hee shall soe pay to the owner of the slave double the vallue &

unto our Sovereigne Lord the King his heires & successors fifty pounds sterl. And hee

shall further…not bee lyable to any other punishment or forfeiture for the same neither

shall hee that kills another mans slave by accydent bee lyable to any other penalty by

the owners account at Law but if any poore man small free holder or other person shall

kill a slave by night out of the road or comon path or steailng his…swine or other

goods hee shall not bee accountable for it And Law statute or ordinance to the contrary

notwithstanding.53

The Lords of Trade were not satisfied with this law and felt that those convicted of

‘wantonly’ killing an unfree person should be more than fined. In 1696 Jamaica responded to such complaint by adding a three months period of incarceration for a second offense.

Barbados continued to merely fine such criminals.54 Statutes that governed the death of an enslaved individual during punishment illustrate that law did not view the enslaved as animals. Rather, the law conferred the power of slaveowners to reduce people to the status

53 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negro Slaves (Jamaica, 1664), Clause XVIII. Very similar language was used in An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), the difference being that owners convicted of such crime were expected to pay to the “publique treasury three thousand pounds of Musso Sugar but if hee shall kill another mans hee shall pay unto the owner of the Negro double the vallue and unto the publique Treasury five thousand pounds of Musso sugar.” See An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Clause XX. “Musso” was probably short for Muscovado sugar. 54 Dunn, 245.

108 and material existence of animals. Slave law expressed no delusions over the actual biology of Africans – it viewed them as people. However, according to seventeenth-century slave law, a white person could not be tried or convicted of murdering an enslaved individual, regardless of whether or not she or he owned the said bondsperson. Slave law, thus, imagined the enslaved as inhabiting a disabled form of humanity.

Despite the charges against ‘wantonly’ killing captives, the law’s loose definition of slave ‘misdemeanors’ in fact empowered masters to kill without penalty.55 A master could physically harm an enslaved person’s body on account of any “misdemeanor” and proof of the “misdemeanor” – however so manipulated – was the only evidence needed for a master to escape any culpability for the death of her or his captive. The homo sacer, according to

Agamben, is one “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed…[whose] human life is included in the judicial order [ordinamento] solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)…”56 Without the legal or social protection of the law, bondspeople were reduced to a mere naked, or bare life (vita nuda). Mbembe explicitly extends Agamben’s analysis to the plantation context, noting that, “In many respects the very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.”57 Denied equal membership in society and reduced to property, bondspeople were exploited outside common English law. The bondsperson of the English

Caribbean was excommunicated from society and denied the safeguards offered to its white members, so that her or his life could be taken by anyone with impunity. As Vincent Brown argues, “[r]ather than trying to instill in slaves the idea of a uniform system of justice, slave

55 Ibid., 239. 56 Agamben, 8. Emphasis original. 57 Mbembe, 21.

109 courts demonstrated to the enslaved that in most cases the will of their masters and the law were one and the same.”58

‘Unfit’ to be tried by English law, African bondspeople were tried by a system of slave courts specific to the management and punishment of black bodies. These courts consisted of two magistrates – who were almost always major planters – and three freeholders; there was no jury and no opportunity for appeal for the enslaved.59 In these slave courts, evidence given by unfree persons was not permitted for or against free persons; individual courts in the English islands determined whether or not enslaved persons could be witnesses for or against fellow unfree individuals. The enslaved individual was thus,

“exposed to detection for his own crimes, [and]...deprived of protection against the crimes of all but his fellow slaves. He had no legal redress against those very abuses of power to which his inferior position already exposed him.”60

In 1721, Barbados issued a law that denied free people of colour the right to benefit from their citizenship. Unlike previous laws, the 1721 law stipulated that to testify in court or participate in other legal proceedings involving whites, the freeperson could not have African ancestry.61 Nonwhites, including the enslaved, could testify in court only when an enslaved individual was on trial. Over time, the 1721 law came to be interpreted as preventing free people of colour from testifying in courts, even against each other.62 The statutes that denied

58 Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 140. 59 Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 34, no.4, (Summer, 2001), 927. 60 Goveia, 34 61 Handler, Unappropriated People, 67-68. 62 Ibid., 68.

110 free people of colour from participating in the judicial system demonstrate that it was not legal status alone that confirmed black noncitizenship. Multiple pieces of legislation were required in order to legally disable Africans and their descendants, even when free, denying them legal protection and ensuring that black bodies were fully exposed to actual impairment or even death due to physical, emotional, and psychological violence.

Kristeva defines abjection as something that “disturbs identities, systems and orders.

Something that does not respect limits, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the mixed up.”63 The founding laws of Barbados and Jamaica established enslaved people as belonging to a world of abjection. Neither object nor subject, the bondsperson was rejected, expelled, and disposed of – considered neither fully human nor merely chattel in slave law and society. According to Judith Butler, the abject signifies “those ‘unlivable’ and

‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.”64 The enslaved were a part of the

English legal system, but were unfit to be protected as human agents under common law. As abject, the enslaved African “lies there, quite close, but cannot be assimilated” into the political economy of plantation slavery but remains outside civil society.65

Monstrosity and Maternal Inheritance in Slave Law

63 Kristeva, 4. 64 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 3. 65 Kristeva, 1.

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The root of this abjection was the principle of maternal inheritance, a principle that sustained slavery by extending the status of the mother to the status of the child, irrespective of the status of the father. The principle of maternal inheritance was a rule of Roman civil law and contradicted traditional English common law, which did not recognize chattel slavery and stipulated that the child inherited the status of the father.66 This disabling legal principle was never documented in the written statues but adopted as a legal principle in the

1660s throughout the Anglophone Caribbean. 67 In fact, the principle of maternal inheritance was applied in the Spanish Caribbean as well and although colonists never confirmed or explained the legal principle in the written statute, it became a prevailing legal practice that was so widespread it was taken for granted.68 It “confirmed humanity” for children born of free women and “reduced the children of enslaved mothers to the status of cows and horses.”69 Black women were conceived as breeders and white women, subsequently, as key to the continuation of white supremacy.70 The principle of maternal inheritance positioned the enslaved woman’s womb as a site of abjection’s (re)production by enslaving it as property and producer. It made enslaved women particularly vulnerable to white men’s

66 William E. Moore, “Slave Law and the Social Structure,” The Journal of Negro History 26, no. 2 (April, 1941), 185. 67 Melanie J. Newton, "Returns to a Native Land: Indigeniety and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean," Small Axe 17, no. 2, 41 (July 2013), 115. 68 Joseph C. Dorsey, “Women without History: Slavery and the International Politics of Partus Sequitur Ventrem in the Spanish Caribbean," Journal of Caribbean History 28, no. 2 (1994), 166. 69 Newton, “Returns,” 115. 70 Cecily Jones, Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627-1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 159.

112 coercion and manipulation of their sexual and reproductive agency. Enslaved women

“occupied the sui generic status of racially sexualized property.”71

The principle of maternal inheritance and the place of the monster in English

Caribbean slave law links to, yet also diverges from the English legal category of the monster. The principle of maternal inheritance rested on the anthropological assumption that black women suffered from an inherent monstrosity. For English colonists, it was “black women’s monstrous bodies,” that “symbolized their sole utility – the ability to produce both crops and other laborers.”72 In slave law, therefore, the enslaved were disinherited of all things except their so-called monstrosity, their blackness and their enslaveability. In English law, monsters were denied inheritance because they were viewed as not fully human. The first English legal texts to refer to monsters were the thirteenth-century works by Henry de

Bracton and an author known only as Britton, respectively.73 Bracton defined monsters as

“those procreated perversely, against the way of human kind, as where a woman brings forth a monster or a prodigy.” Both Bracton and Britton claimed that monsters were produced through bestiality. English lawmakers stipulated that such offspring were “not reckoned

71 Camille A. Nelson, "American Husbandry: Legal Norms Impacting the Production of (Re)Productivity," Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 19, no. 1 (2007-2008), 13. 72 Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 14. 73 Andrew N. Sharpe notes that “there is some uncertainty regarding the authorship of this text. According to the Harvard Law School Library online it would seem that the bulk of the work was written during the 1220s and 1230s by persons other than Bracton. However, it was probably Bracton who made the later additions. Henry de Bracton was a judge of the court known as Coran Rege (later known as the King’s Bench), from 1247-1250 and 1253- 1257 during the reign of Henry III. He was also a clergyman and in 1264 became Archdeacon of Barnstaple and Chancelor of Exter Cathedral.” Of Britton, Sharpe writes that “[t]here is considerably more uncertainty regarding the identity of Britton. However, it would seem that the Britton text was published around 1291 in the reign of Edward I and with the King’s express authority.” See Sharpe, p. 104 fn. 14 and 15.

113 among children” and, therefore, were not entitled to the inheritance laws of English people.74

The English, therefore, rejected the Roman legal principle that stipulated that “where childlessness precluded inheritance the birth of a monster counted as a child” because they considered it incompatible with English legal tradition.75 In the English Caribbean, conversely, lawmakers adopted the principle of maternal inheritance to ensure that monstrosity and enslaveability were perpetually inherited among the enslaved populations.

English law distinguished between deformity and monstrosity by mandating that a child born with “larger number of members, as one who has six fingers, or if he has but four

[or only one], will be included among children,” and so too if she or he is “crooked or humpbacked or has twisted limbs or otherwise has its members useless.’”76 Therefore, according to thirteenth-century English law, deformed persons were human, whereas monsters were not. Unlike later laws, the thirteenth-century law about monsters did not describe the physical appearance of monsters, although by suggesting that monsters were a product of bestiality, the authors implied that monsters resembled both human and animal.77

The category of the monster disappeared from English law until the late-sixteenth century when the first piece of canon law to appear in English was published in 1590.78 In A

Brief Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills, lawyer and part-time judge Henry Swinburne defined the legal ‘monster’ as:

74 Bracton cited in Sharpe, “England’s Legal Monsters,” 104. 75 Sharpe, 108. 76 Bracton cited in Sharpe, 104. 77 Sharpe, 106, 112. 78 Ibid., 114.

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Where a wife do bring forth a monster, or misshapen creature having peradventure a

head like unto a dogs head, or to the head of an ass, or of a raven, or duck, or of some

other beast, or bird: such monstrous creature, though it should live (as commonly none

do) yet it is not accounted amongst the testators children, for the law doth not presume

that creature to have the soul of man, which hath a form and shape so strange and

different from the shape of a man…But if the creature brought forth, do not vary in

shape from a man or woman, but have somewhat more than God by the ordinary

course of nature alloweth, as having six fingers on either hand, or one foot; such

creature is not excluded, but is to be accounted for the testator’s child.79

By the late-sixteenth century, therefore, monstrosity was defined by resemblance to an animal/human hybrid. In the eighteenth century, William Blackstone, whose definition lasted until the mid-nineteenth century, reinforced this emphasis on the bodies of monsters. For

Blackstone the human/animal hybrid was “the exclusive locus of legal monstrosity” and “a more absolute form of difference from humanness.”80 The (re)construction of monsters in

English law, over the course of the late-sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as human/animal creatures that were disinherited from the benefits of humanity parallels English travelers’ and lawmakers’ construction of Africans as not fully human or animal and whose monstrosity and enslaveability was inherited from enslaved mothers.

Similar to other laws that governed the enslaved, the principle of maternal inheritance recognized bondswomen as persons but treated them as animals. Colonists imposed rules of animal husbandry onto female captives through the principle of maternal inheritance, thereby

79 Swinburne cited in Sharpe, 115. 80 Sharpe, 128, 125.

115 relegating them to the status of mere livestock. As property, enslaved women were legally denied all rights or control over their reproduction. For instance, it was a legal impossibility to rape a female captive, whether the assaulter was a fellow captive, or a free black or white man because in such cases the law placed its accent on the woman as property. The diaries of

Jamaica overseer and planter Thomas Thistlewood are best known for detailing his sexual exploits with enslaved women. Over thirty-seven years, Thistlewood engaged in nearly 4,000 acts of sexual intercourse with 138 women, of whom the large majority were his own or neighbouring bondswomen. Only the very young and the very old were exempt from

Thistlewood’s sexual terrorism. Thistlewood raped his female captives even when they were heavily pregnant. He sexually assaulted his female captive Abba twice when she was over eight months pregnant – once a month before she gave birth and another time two days before she gave birth to a daughter – whom Thistlewood suspected was his. The infant died one week later. He similarly had sex with Franke on March 16 1776; eight days later Franke miscarried.81 Pregnancy was not an impairment or disability in slave society, however, it was a ‘limiting’ and tenuous condition, especially for field labourers. Thistlewood’s sovereign power over women’s bodies demonstrates that the principle of maternal inheritance transformed the bondswoman’s body into “a site where the flesh became the prime commodity of exchange in the violent conflation of both profit and pleasure.”82 Thistlewood also used rape as a punishment for female captives’ misdemeanors. His acts of sexual terrorism against female captives testify to the psychological and physical impairments enslaved women suffered, in large part due to the sovereign power bestowed upon

81 Burnard, 156-158. 82 Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 26.

116 slaveowners to do what they wanted to their human property. The principle of maternal inheritance functioned to disable the enslaved by denying them forms of protection over their bodies and the bodies of their offspring, which undoubtedly led to high rates of physical, emotional, and psychological impairments.

The principle of maternal inheritance, moreover, positioned enslaved women as legally equivalent to animals and implied that Africans somehow lacked the ability to form and maintain kinship ties.83 English slave law did not recognize marriage between captives because such familial ties would have undermined the institution of slavery by providing enslaved individuals with some protection over their families and children. The principle of maternal inheritance “made your mother into a myth, banished your father's name, and exiled your siblings to the far corners of the earth."84 Orlando Patterson describes this as “natal alienation”:

Not only was the slave denied all claims on, and obligations to, his parents and living

blood relations but, by extension, all such claims and obligations on his more remote

ancestors and on his descendants. He was truly a genealogical isolate. Formally

isolated in his social relations with those who lived, he also was culturally isolated

from the social heritage of his ancestors. He had a past, to be sure. But a past is not a

heritage…Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely

to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their

83 Ibid., 55-56. 84 Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 103.

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understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or

to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.85

When brought into conversation with gender analysis Patterson’s theory demonstrates that the female body was the primary vehicle for this alienation. Thus, women’s wombs became the corporeal location for this form of dispossession in the English Atlantic World.

Plantation records demonstrate that owners and managers rarely recognized fathers of enslaved children because such admittance provided potential economic or social inheritance and an unwelcome economic challenge to the institution of slavery.86 The absence of fathers in plantation records reflected the disabling consequence of a rape regime where paternity might be in doubt, but maternity was not. What is more, slaveowners’ denial of enslaved fathers could reflect the notion that a dishonoured and enslaveable ‘race’ descended from women, while a ‘free’ race descended from men. “Slave women,” writes Saidiya Hartman,

“extended the owner's lineage without enjoying the privileges or protection entitled to wives supported by their families. Inequality suffused the idiom of kinship.... Slaves were the ghosts in the machine of kinship."87 Breaking kinship ties and denying Africans historical belonging or the ability to create a lineage was a form of disablement against the enslaved.

The enforced, deliberate and violent form of ‘kinlessness’ created by the principle of maternal inheritance made it a form of institutionalized disablement that targeted an entire group of people – African women and their descendants. As a result enslaved kinlessness was different from other forms of kinlessness that could befall free people, such as being an orphan, or losing one’s family. Slave law had the ability to deny the enslaved of their family

85 Patterson, 5. 86 Erevelles, 55. 87 Hartman, 194.

118 relations, to violate those ties, and to make it so that enslaved individuals could have parents, children, and other kin and yet not have them at the same time. The principle of maternal inheritance made the reproduction of “Negroes” a sort of technology of power that excluded the enslaved from the benefits of being human. Perhaps more than any other legal principle, the principle of maternal inheritance demonstrates lawmakers’ ability to deliberately recognize the humanity of the enslaved and then systematically disable it. Atlantic enslavement created a legally lesser and destructible form of humanity that mothers passed on to their children.

Disability, Disfigurement, and Punishment in Slave Law

Legally sanctioned punishments inflicted onto enslaved bodies constituted the most distinctive form of disablement that they endured. The wounds inflicted onto enslaved bodies created a visual world in which bodily mutilation worked alongside dark skin and African phenotypic features as marks of enslaved status. Through physical punishment, lawmakers attempted to define individual captives through signs on her or his body. Scars, amputations, and brands acted as a means of identification, permanently signifying enslaved status, while creating a visible testament to the bearer’s transgressions against the rules of servitude. As

Chapter Three will discuss further, brands that identified the enslaved as property by scarring slaveowners’ and traders’ initials into the flesh were visible indications of enslaved individuals’ commercial status. Brands that served as punishments, for running away for instance, made visible the individuals’ inner ‘flaws’ that would otherwise be invisible.

Lawmakers violently mapped physical mutilations onto enslaved bodies and in doing so

119 reestablished the notion that Africans’ supposed inner degeneracy was manifested onto their skin.

Although spectacle was a key element of penal practice in both England and the

Caribbean, its purpose and effect differed in each respective geographic and socio-political locale. In seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, public forms of punishment were meant to shame the individual criminal and her or his family and deter others from criminal activity. Branding, whipping, slitting of nostrils, and death sentences were administered in both the metropole and the colonies. In England, punishing criminals was a communal practice, in which crowds of men, women, and children joined the spectacle and together shamed the individual while watching the torture. English punishments were communally shared but with a fixed temporality.88 Colonial punishments, however, did not have a fixed place or time, allowing the slaveowner to prolong the event for as long as she or he wished.

In the Caribbean the spectacle of public punishment was not about community, solidarity, and shame but rather, power and difference.89 The slave laws served to mark only captive bodies with signs of criminality, creating a visually striking divide between free and unfree society.

Facial disfiguration was a physical sign of recidivism and served to make the enslaved individual’s criminal past immediately visible. The meaning of disfigurement was

88 In England criminals were whipped and paraded through the streets as a spectacle. Until the end of the eighteenth century, both men and women were stripped naked from the waist up when whipped. Punishments common to England but not the Caribbean included the pillory and stocks. See Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 89 See Brown, The Reaper’s Garden and Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves,” 923-954.

120 heightened by the fact that, as a form of punishment on living bodies, it was an unfamiliar practice in most African societies.90 Lawmakers in the English Caribbean devoted attention to the challenge of making disfigurement enduring. Barbados’s 1688 Act for the Governing of Negroes ordered that captives convicted twice of “petty larcenies” should have their nose slit and be “branded in the Forehead with a hot Iron, that the Mark thereof may remain.”91

Branding had the power to identify particular individuals as ‘rebellious’ captives who had repeatedly committed crimes against their owners. In later Barbados law, branding served as punishment for one’s third offense of running away. The 1731 law ordered that the individual receive thirty-nine lashes on her or his bare back and “be branded in the right cheek with a hot Iron, marked with the letter R...”92 Branding the letter ‘R’ on one’s cheek ensured that the brand could be read by people looking at the criminal and regulated the bondsperson’s mobility. The captive, thus, wore proof of her criminal past on her face and thus embodied the crime herself. 93 It made legible the already ‘hyper-visible’ black body and served as a form of surveillance by publicizing the individual’s relationship to slavery both on and off the plantation.

In both Barbados and Jamaica facial disfigurement was most commonly administered for the crime of violence against Christians. The 1661 and 1664 comprehensive slave codes of Barbados and Jamaica, respectively, ruled against “offer[ing] any violence to any

90 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname,” Law and History Review 29, Special Issue 04 (November 2011), 937. 91 “An Act for the Governing of Negroes” (Barbados, 1688). Emphasis original. 92 Hall, Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados From 1643-1762, 139. 93 Simone Browne, "Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics," Critical Sociology 36, no. 1 (January 2010), 139.

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Christian as by strikeing or the like.”94 In the Barbados act, lawmakers moved beyond the generic term ‘slave’ and instead applied the law to “any Negro Man or Woman.”95 This shift in terminology demonstrates that, in the mid-seventeenth century English Atlantic World, blackness had become synonymous with enslavement. Although the founding laws dealt specifically with violence against Christians, the significance of skin colour to Jamaica’s socio-political and legal order became paramount very quickly. By 1674 the law changed to include “any white Christian,”96 thereby excluding converted blacks and Jews. In 1678 the law was amended once more, this time against “any white person,”97 and therefore made the law explicitly racial. Only whites were afforded such protections against violence for the remainder of the colonial period. Individuals convicted of violence against whites were to be

“severely whipped” for the first offense; “severely whipped…nose slitt and bee burned in face” for the second offense; and for the third offense the individual “shall receive by order of the Governor and Councill such greater corporeal punishments as they shall thinke meete to inflict…”98 These punishments persisted until the amelioration period, when the punishments were simplified whilst, at the same time, made more severe. For instance, in

1788 the Jamaica Assembly declared that for their first offense convicted captives suffer death or life-sentences of hard labour, “or otherwise, as the said justices and freeholders shall

94 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661) Clause II; An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negro Slaves (Jamaica 1664), Clause II. 95 Gaspar, 348; An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661) Clause II. 96 Laws Enacted by Sir Thomas Lynch at Jamaica in February 1673-1674 on microfilm at the Faculty of Law Library at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. 97 Laws Transmitted to Jamaica in 1678 on microfilm at the Faculty of Law Library at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. 98 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Clause II.

122 in their discretion think proper to inflict.”99 Thus, as part of amelioration, Jamaican authorities removed any direct reference to forms of torture that led to permanent disfigurement and disability, replacing these punishments with hard labour or death as somehow less brutal. Throughout the colonial period, the Barbados and Jamaica statutes clarified that bondspeople were excused of such criminal offense if they were found to have acted violently in defense of their owners.

In 1716 the Jamaican Assembly echoed English treason laws by stipulating that any unfree individual who “imagine[s] the Death of any White Person”100 be sentenced to death.

Colonial treason laws thus equated ‘whiteness’ with sovereignty. In 1352, Edward III changed the definition of treason “from behavior to thought, from a physical to a mental action, and from an overt into a covert violation of royal prerogative, extending his control over even the ‘imaginings’ of subjects.”101 This redefinition meant that any words spoken or written about the king, even without intent to bring about his death, could be interpreted as malicious and, therefore, treasonous.102 Jamaican law raised all whites to sovereign status and, in doing so, contributed to the abjection of the enslaved. Kristeva explains that “any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility.”103 For the enslaved, all crimes could be defined by the state or slaveholder as

99 The Act of Assembly of the Island of Jamaica...The Consolidated Act...(London, 1788), 13- 14. 100 The Laws of Jamaica, pass'd by the governours (1716), 243. 101 Karen Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press 2011), 7. 102 Ibid., 8. 103 Kristeva, 2.

123 treachery, and thus, a premeditated criminal act against the order of slave society.104 As

Goveia noted, slave law, inherently criminalized the enslaved.105 The majority of slave law dealt with crimes only an enslaved person could commit. For instance, only a captive could run away. The criminalization of the enslaved in slave law reflected the tension in Atlantic slavery between bondspeople as human, sentient and acting beings and as property. The slave codes of the English Caribbean were primarily concerned with defining on what grounds bondspeople were allowed to enact their humanity. Slave law was, therefore intrinsically disabling for the enslaved, for the site of criminality in English slave law was located not in the act but in the person.

The slave laws ordered punishments that were debilitating as well as physically visible and permanent. In 1717 the Jamaica assembly made it illegal for masters to dismember captives on their own property, yet very little measure was taken to limit the power of owners to damage their human property.106 Although it was illegal for slaveowners to dismember enslaved people on plantation grounds, authorities continued to order dismemberment as a punishment for more serious crimes that were brought to slave court. In

1738 the Jamaica Assembly ordered that “all Runaway Slaves may have a Foot cut off, by

Order of two Justices and three Freeholders, or other corporal Punishment as they think fit.”107 Diana Paton’s (2001) study of court trials in eighteenth-century Jamaica reveals that convicts were frequently sentenced to have their ears cut off close to their heads, to have a

104 Paton, 939-940. 105 Goveia, 19-35. 106 Ibid., 29. 107 An Abridgement of the Acts of assembly, passed in the island of Jamaica: from 1681, to 1737, inclusive (London, 1743).

124 foot removed, and to have their nostrils slit for crimes such as theft and running away.108 In

1783 a Jamaica planter described his runaway captive, Dan, as having “a wooden leg” because “he had his leg cut off for robbing the late Mr. John McDonald, then overseer of

Drax Hall.”109 Another Jamaica planter John Tharp described his runaway Cuffee as “a desperate villain…[who] had his nose cropt for being formerly runaway.”110 A Mr.

Drummon told Olaudah Equiano that he cut off a bondsperson’s leg for running away, which he said served its purpose – “it cured that man and some others of running away.”111 Others found more inventive ways to impair bondspeople. For instance, in 1780 the Gentleman’s

Magazine published an anti-slavery letter, penned anonymously, that reported on the physical disabling of the enslaved in the Caribbean. The author wrote that slaveowners had found “new and ingenious means of tormenting [enslaved Africans] without divesting them of life, which is held valuable, and worth preserving, by no other tenure than the interest of the oppressor who calls himself their master.” According to the author, in the French islands an owner took his fugitive and tied “up the leg by a chain or rope to the back part of the neck, and fixing a wooden leg to the knee, as a surgeon would do to the stump of an amputated leg.” The author explained that in time, “the joint of the knee becomes contracted, and the negro cannot run away, though he can work with this artificial leg.” 112

It is impossible to estimate how often such punishments were administered, for planters did not keep detailed records and, as Barry Higman argues, drivers’ and overseers’

108 Paton, 937-941. 109 Cornwall Chronicle 12 July 1783 (Jamaica). 110 Cornwall Chronicle 26 March 1786 (Jamaica). 111 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Or, Gustavus Vassa, The African, ed. Shelly Eversley ([1789] New York: Random House, 2004), 95. 112 The Gentleman’s Magazine October 1780. MS3248, Wellcome Library.

125 authority to punish bondspeople in the absence of the owner meant that any such records would be incomplete.113 What is more, although slave courts were supposed to keep record of their proceedings, prior to the late-eighteenth century amelioration reforms “very little evidence of their day-today operation survives, quite likely because many of the magistrates involved failed to observe this legal requirement.”114 Still, historians have found sources that provide insight into how the slave codes operated in daily life and have demonstrated that punishments that disfigured and impaired the enslaved were not just legal threats but reality in the world of Atlantic slavery.115 These brutal punishments were performed at the cost of reducing the captive’s ability to labour productively and at the risk of devaluing her or his worth on the open market, for punitive marks on the enslaved body testified to the supposedly ‘rebellious’ nature of the individual.

In Barbados and Jamaica slaveowners were granted a significant amount of power to interpret slave law with regard to punishing the enslaved. In his analysis of the American judicial system, Robert Cover argues that, “legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.”116 Legal interpretation is a violent act and this act of interpretative violence produces physical violence in the world. According to Cover, “[j]udges deal pain and

113 Barry W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies, 1995), 201. 114 Paton, 923. 115 See for instance, Brown, Reaper’s Garden; Elsa V. Elsa Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965); Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Mary Turner, “The 11 O’clock Flog: Women, Work, and Labour Law in the British Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 20, no. 1 (1999), 38-58; Lazarus-Black, 144-159. 116 Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” The Yale Law Journal 95, no. 8 (July, 1986) 1601.

126 death.”117 English Caribbean slave law granted slaveowners the power of judges to interpret the law and, therefore, “restrain, hurt, render helpless, even kill” the enslaved individual.118

And yet, in slave law there was essentially no room for interpretation. Slaveowners were given the power to mete out draconian punishments however they saw fit. In this sense the slave laws themselves were a “field of pain and death.” Indeed, the Barbados slave code of

1661 and the Jamaica slave code of 1664 granted slaveowners almost unlimited power to punish the enslaved privately and, thus, entrusted them with sovereign power to punish captives at their own discretion. Subsequent laws did not explicitly delegate such sovereignty, however, the founding laws established a slaveowning culture, which sanctioned the owner’s right to govern and punish her or his property to the point of causing lasting impairment, if she or he saw fit.119 Several of the laws of Barbados and Jamaica ordered bondspeople to “suffer such punishment as the court shall think proper to inflict, not exceeding life or limb.”120 Slave law, thus, allowed for any kind of violence inflicted onto the enslaved including that which dismembered or killed them, for it operated in a field of assumption that the laws which held whites accountable for “exceeding life or limb” would not be enforced.

Planters were encouraged to punish bondspeople harshly and swiftly. According to

Jamaica planter and pro-slavery advocate Edward Long, Africans’ “intractable and ferocious

117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 1609. 119 Paton, 927. 120 The Act of Assembly of the Island of Jamaica...The Consolidated Act (1788). Both Barbados and Jamaica’s founding slave codes (1661 & 1664) contained such wording, which remained in the slave laws throughout the colonial period.

127 tempers naturally provoked their masters to rule them with a rod of iron.”121 For instance,

Jamaica slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood described whipping a returned fugitive and then rubbing pepper, salt, and limejuice into the individual’s wounds.122 One eighteenth-century plantation management directed planters to gather captives together to witness the punishment of individuals who transgressed, and “to proceed slowly – let the hand of correction be heavy when it falls.”123 Many of these punishments resulted in, and were meant to result in, long-term impairment and disfigurement. “A legal world,” argues Cover,

“is built only to the extent that there are commitments that place bodies on the line…[and] the interpretative commitments of officials are realized, indeed, in the flesh.”124 The power of slaveowners to interpret the law and punish captives with impunity reflected the notion that in slave societies very particular forms of violence were reserved for very particular kinds of people.

The castration of bondsmen was a common punishment ordered by planters.

Castration of male captives demonstrated “the ease with which white men slipped over into treating their [captives] like their bulls and stallions whose ‘spirit’ could be subdued by emasculation.”125 Unlike animals, the enslaved were castrated as punishment. Natalie

Zemon-Davis’s study of slave law and punishment in colonial Suriname, demonstrates that emasculation was practiced on the royal eunuch of the kingdom of Oyo for immoral sexual acts, such as adultery, incest, and bestiality. Castration, however, had no precedent in

121 Long, Vol. 2, 497. 122 Burnard, 3. 123 Dovaston, 62. 124 Cover, 1605. 125 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), 156.

128

English law.126 Slaveowners manipulated the knowledge they had about customary practices and law in African societies as a means of making physical debilitation into spiritual and psychologically permanent scars.

Although, castration was not written into the laws of Barbados and Jamaica, records show that it was commonly practiced against male captives.127 A physician by trade, Hans

Sloane travelled to Barbados in 1687 as the personal doctor to the Governor, the Duke of

Albermarle.128 In his travel account, he described the seventeenth-century punishment for

“rebellious” slaves:

The punishment for crimes of slaves, are usually for Rebellions burning them, by

nailing them down on the ground with crooked Sticks on every Limb, and then

applying the Fire by degrees from the Feet and Hands, burning them gradually up to

the Head, whereby their pains are extravagant. For Crimes of a lesser nature Gelding,

or chopping off half of the Foot with an Ax.129

Sloane’s use of the term ‘gelding’ – an act reserved for horses – further demonstrates the animalization of the enslaved in English Caribbean colonies. According to Sloane, castration

126 Zemon-Davis, 937; Jordan, 155. Jordan notes that castration was a lawful punishment in Antigua, the Carolinas, Bermuda, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. See Jordan, 154. 127 Dunn, 240. 128 Arthur MacGregor, “Sloane, Sir Hans, baronet (1660-1753),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/25730, accessed 5 April 2014] 129 Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural history of the Herbs and Trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, &c. of the last of those islands; to which is prefix’d, an introduction, wherein is an account of the inhabitants, air, waters, diseases, trade, &c. of that place, with some relations concerning the neighbouring continent, and islands of America. Illustrated with figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved. In large copper-plates as big as the life Vol. 1 of 2 (London, 1707-1725), lvii

129 of male slaves was a punishment equal to the dismemberment of one’s foot, reserved for crimes “of a lesser nature” than rebellion.

Morgan Godwyn, who traveled to Barbados in the 1670s as a missionary described, with distaste, the treatment of bondspeople, although he himself offered no opposition to slavery.130 In his The Negro’s & Indian’s advocate (1680), Godwyn wrote that bondspeople often went hungry and were subject to extreme violence by white authorities, which included flogging, amputation, and castration of male captives.131 In the aftermath of a slave conspiracy in 1692, the Barbados Assembly paid one Alice Mills ten guineas for the castration of forty-three rebels.132 This suggests that there were people – in this case a white woman – who were skilled in the art of castrating people without killing them. Such a technology of violence testifies to disability’s function as a penal tool in English Caribbean slave societies. Jamaica also castrated unfree men following slave-uprisings.133 In

Montserrat, Equiano saw an enslaved man “staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly

[castrated], and then his ears cut off bit by bit, because he had been connected with a white woman who was a common prostitute…”134 Castration was a method of bestializing

130 Betty Wood, “Godwyn, Morgan (bap. 1640, d. 1685x1709),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/10894, accessed 5 April 2014] 131 Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s & Indians advocate, suing for their admission to the church, or, A persuasive to the instructing and baptizing of the Negro’s and Indians in our plantations shewing that as the compliance therewith can prejudice no mans just interest, so the willful neglecting and opposing of it, is no less than a manifest apostacy from the Christian faith: to which is added, a brief account of religion in Virginia (London, 1680). 132 Jordan, 156. 133 David Buisseret, ed., Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the National Library of Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008), 274-279. 134 Equiano, 94-95.

130 bondsmen and preventing them from having sex – the “privileged domain of ability”135 – and biologically fathering children. In Behn’s novella, Oroonoko is tied to a whipping post, flogged, castrated, and dismembered, all the while smoking a pipe and showing no sign of recognition of what is being done to his body. In her exploration of pain and language, Elaine

Scarry writes that, “the person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony,” which leads the victim to experience his self as something divorced from the body.136 Oroonoko dies “without a groan or a reproach.”137 In the act of dismemberment, the black male body became a repository for white male anxiety about black men as potential heteropatriarchal rivals.

Runaway and ‘rebellious’ bondspeople were subject to some of the most brutal corporeal punishments in the statutes of Barbados and Jamaica. The law stipulated that if during punishment for running away, a captive “suffer in Life or Limb, none shall be Liable to the Law for the same.”138 In Jamaica, where marronage posed a serious threat to whites, captives who revealed the whereabouts of runaways were rewarded by their owners, “forty shillings per Head for all Slaves taken and brought in alive, and Twenty shillings per Head for every Slave killed or driven Home.”139 The same reward system applied to rebellious captives. Jamaican law specified that freemen or servants who “kill or take any rebellious

135 Tobin Siebers, “A Sexual Culture for Disabled People,” in Sex and Disability, eds. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 40. 136 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 47. 137 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave A True History [1688] in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin Books), 140. 138 “The Acts of Assembly and Laws of Jamaica,” (1684), Clause XXIII. This law was based on the 1661 Barbados law, which stipulated the same. See An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Clause XX. 139 The Laws of Jamaica (1716), 239.

131 slave or slaves…shall forthwith receive as a reward five pounds currant money.”140 If, however, a bondsperson captured or killed a “rebellious slave,” she or he was awarded forty shillings and “a serge coat with a red cross on the right shoulder.”141 This “blue coat with a red cross,” identified the individual as a turncoat – someone who deserts a cause or party for another – to both whites and blacks. At the same time it offered informants the opportunity to conceal their bodies, which contrasted with the exposure of runaway individuals’ bodies. The coat also worked as a form of surveillance among the enslaved population, a policing measure that constantly reminded bondspeople that their actions were on display. When a bondsperson committed an offense, her or his body was criminalized through violent inflictions that attempted to shame and identify the individual as a threat to white society.

The same logic was at play when an enslaved individual captured or killed a rebellious captive. The black body, when it betrayed other black bodies, went unscathed; instead it was adorned with a coat of ‘honour’ that visually identified the bondsperson’s so-called loyalty to whites. Clothing, thus, served as a mark of loyalty that distinguished the traitor from the disfigured, disabled, and exposed body of the rebel.

The visual world created by the punishments administered onto bondspeople continued even in death. During and after execution the enslaved body’s materiality could be essential to its symbolic power. For “heinous” crimes such as robbery, murder, killing or maiming of cattle, and rape bondspeople were sentenced to death in both Jamaica and

Barbados. In slave societies, public executions in which the corpse was displayed thereafter were often carried out in significant places – under a cotton tree, at the scene of the crime,

140 Ibid., 235. 141 Ibid. and The Act of Assembly of the Island of Jamaica...The Consolidated Act (1788), 7.

132 outside the slave’s residence – creating a concreteness that nonetheless transcended time, making the past immediately present to those who remained in slavery.142 Arriving in

Savanna la Mar in 1750, Thomas Thistlewood described how his host, William Dorrill, ordered the corpse of a runaway dug up and beheaded, the head fixed on a pole and the body reduced to ashes.143 In October 1752, Thistlewood emulated this practice, as he took the head of a runaway, “put it upon a pole and stuck it up just at the angle of the road in the home pasture.”144 But the practice was almost less important than the memories it left. As Brown argues, “the recycling of these kinds of stories re-introduced past evidence of white power to the present and fastened it to particular places through the bodies of the dead.”145 The dismembered corpse, like the dismembered living body, held significant power in slave society. It served to create a visual grotesquerie out of the black body – a monster that haunted slave society.

Conclusion

The power to cause disability as a means of manipulating the boundary between humanity and enslavement was a hallmark of slaveowning power. This chapter has aimed to demonstrate the law’s role in producing a relationship between blackness and disability. The racial prejudice that upheld Atlantic slavery gave little reason to view the deliberate disabling of captives as problematic, for based on developing notions of ‘race,’ the institution of

142 Brown, 144. 143 “Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, 2 October 1750,” cited in Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 39. 144 Ibid., 30. 145 Brown, 28.

133 slavery was merely disabling the ‘already disabled.’ Thus, black bodies were physically or intellectually impaired as a direct result of legal forms of discrimination. The enslaved existed in a state of exception – “an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law (which therefore should be written force of law).”146 Excluded from citizenship and reduced to property, excommunicated from society and removed from the protections offered to free members of society, the enslaved lived in a space of abjection. The slave laws worked to position bondspeople in naked exploitation. And yet, captives’ acts of autonomy and volition continuously demonstrated the limits of the dehumanization of Africans by

English Caribbean slave law. Through legally sanctioned punishments, the black body became codified; it became a form of text, a living reminder to both whites and blacks of slaveowners’ arbitrary sovereignty over enslaved bodies, as well as of bondspeoples’ refusal to accept the terms of their enslavement.

146 Agamben, 39. Strikethrough original.

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Chapter 3

‘States of Injury’: The Slave Trade, the Market, and Plantation Labour

Introduction

Scholars of slavery often analyze mortality statistics as ultimate indicators of the well being of the enslaved population and death as the exemplary image of the brutality of human bondage.1 While premature, painful and often violent death was an integral aspect of slavery, this chapter is concerned with the space between fitness and death, a space of physical debilitation resulting not from a natural process but from enslavement itself. This abject space of physical destruction was created by a system based on the legal disablement, punishment, and enslavement of the monster. This space of disablement placed bondspeople in a ‘state of exception’ and reduced them to ‘bare life.’ “As an instrument of labour,” writes

Achille Mmembe, “the slave has a price. His or her labour is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity.”2 In this chapter, I explore this ‘state of injury,’ drawing on Nirmala

Erevelles’s argument that “race and disability are imbricated in their collective formation of the black disabled body that” in enslavement “becomes a commodity that has economic,

1 Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973); Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Kingston: The Press, UWI, 1995); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 2 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no.1 (Winter 2003), 21. Emphasis original.

135 social, cultural, and linguistic implications for transnational subjectivities.”3 The ‘state of injury’ produced by Atlantic slavery is key to understanding these connections.

This chapter emphasizes that although disability may be the most universal of human conditions4 it must be understood within specific historical contexts. Disability is a not a

“condition of being but of becoming, and this becoming is a historical event, and further, it is its material context that is critical in the theorizing of disabled bodies/subjectivities.”5 This chapter examines the historical linkages and divergences between the figure of the free, wage-earning metropolitan worker and the enslaved, non-wage earning Caribbean labourer in order to demonstrate that colonialism, race, and specifically slavery are key to understanding the intersections between the commodification of the labouring body and disability. The chapter concludes with evidence that disability came to be revalued by the enslaved themselves as a tool against slavery and as a sign of resistance among unfree peoples in the colonial Caribbean.6 Bondspeople’s revaluing of disability can be seen as a

“counterculture of modernity.”7 Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman, Paul Gilroy describes a

“counterculture of modernity” as the way in which enslaved Africans responded to and resisted the yoking of racism and modernity in the Atlantic World. The revaluing of

3 Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 39. 4 Lennard J. Davis, “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies,” American Literary History 11, no. 3 (1999), 502; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs 30, no. 2 (2005), 1568; Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 5 Erevelles, 26. 6 A discussion about the revaluing of disability among the enslaved is further taken up in Chapter Four of this dissertation. 7 This phrase is drawn from Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 1-40.

136 disability among the enslaved, therefore, can be seen as a form of resistance to modernity and able-bodiedness.

According to disability scholars, physical impairments and anomalies took on new significations with the onset of industrialization in mid-nineteenth Europe and North

America, when ‘disability’ in its modern sense emerged.8 David M. Turner notes that many of the features of an industrial capitalist work ethic existed in pre-industrial societies, which meant that individuals with physical impairments could face negative social stereotyping of physical difference in the early modern work economy.9 Still, the intensification of economic logic that characterized nineteenth and twentieth-century industrial capitalism changed the perception of physical impairment, whereby “the body an sich had become the body für sich and the impaired body had become disabled – unable to be part of the productive economy, confined to institutions, shaped to contours defined by society at large.”10

The colonial Caribbean confounds this chronology and the implicitly Eurocentric geography of disability history, and undoes distinctions between the premodern and the modern.11 Caribbean sugar production developed in the seventeenth century as an industrial enterprise, and the enslaved body was defined by its relationship to an economy driven by

8 Vic Finkelstein, Attitudes and Disabled People: Issues for Discussion (New York: World Rehabilitation Fund, 1980); Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: MacMillan, 1990); Colin Barnes, Cabbage Syndrome: The Social Construction of Dependence (Lewes: Falmer Press, 1990). 9 David M. Turner, “Introduction,” in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, eds. Kevin Stagg and David M. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6. 10 Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995), 74. 11 For a complementary critique of how slavery reveals the Western-centric bias of the premodern v. modern distinction see Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) and Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

137 production and profit.12 Trinidadian scholar C.L.R. James argued, “from the very start [the enslaved] lived a life that was in its essence a modern life.”13 As a “synthesis of field and factory,” sugar plantations were dependent on field labour and the technical mastery and skilled artisanal knowledge of workers.14 The division of labour by skill, age, gender, and physical condition that characterized Caribbean plantations, together with the emphasis on discipline, organization, and timekeeping made sugar a precociously industrial and modern undertaking. Nevertheless, the Caribbean and the enslaved continue to be “expunged from the figurative time-space of ‘Western modernity.’”15 When disability is placed at the center of an analysis of Atlantic slavery, it demands that we rethink timelines of disability history, not only in terms of temporality but also of material and conceptual borders between the metropole and the colony, and between free/white and enslaved/black working bodies.

Plantation slavery was a necessary precondition for both industrialization and the emergence of ‘modern’ concepts and embodiments of disability.

At every level, Atlantic slavery inserted black and African bodies into the emerging racialized world of transnational and imperial relationships as ‘disabled bodies’ – supposedly unfit for anything other than the most brutal forms of labour. The logic of Atlantic capitalism created a wage economy in metropolitan England, and exactly the same capitalist logic determined that it was economically more efficient to work enslaved labourers to death than to treat them well so that they could survive. The economy of industrial England came to

12 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution ([1963] New York: Random House, Inc., 1989); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). 13 James, 392. 14 Mintz, 46. 15 Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge, 2003), 107.

138 incorporate the principle that it was important to ensure that factory workers had the wages to purchase commodities that fostered their continued participation in the capitalist economy as workers. These commodities – the sugar that extended working hours, the cotton for work clothes, and the coffee and tobacco for leisure time – were produced by enslaved labourers.16

The Middle Passage: Producing Impairment

From the moment of their seizure in Sub-Saharan Africa, Africans were “transformed slowly into commodities for the international market.”17 The traumas of capture, forced march, and incarceration demonstrated that the commodification of Africans required a particular kind of violence, one that kept the enslaved in a state of injury. Disability and disfigurement were essential to that process of transformation. Coffles travelled hundreds of miles before reaching the coastal trading factories, and, by the time they reached the coast,

“[b]ruises covered their arms and legs, which had been cut and pricked on branches and thorns in narrow forest paths that admitted only one person at a time.”18 Bondspeople disappeared along the way – those who could not keep up with the strenuous journey,

16 Mintz, 143-149. Mintz divides the history of sugar consumption into two periods: 1750- 1850 and 1850-1950. He explains that “[d]uring the first, sugar – particularly in combination with tea – did not make a significant caloric contribution to English working-class diet, though it did sweeten the tea while adding a small number of easily assimilated calories. More important, sweetened tea probably increased the worker’s readiness to consume quantities of otherwise unadorned complex carbohydrates, particularly breads, while saving time for working wives and expenditures on cooking fuels…During the second period, the caloric contribution of sugar rose, for it now appeared not only in tea and cereal but in many other foods as well and in ever-larger quantities…Cheap sugar, the single most important addition to the British working-class diet during the nineteenth century, now became paramount, even calorically.” See Sweetness and Power, 148-49. 17 Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 7. 18 Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 119.

139 including pregnant women, were left behind or died en route; others were sold at internal markets; and the lucky ones escaped.19 Iron abraded their wrists, ankles, and necks, causing open sores and contusions. Captives were given very little food or water, which caused

“sunken cheeks and distended bellies.”20 All of these disfigurements heightened individuals’ captive status, thereby making it extremely difficult for the enslaved to escape without recognition. A variety of circumstances led to the enslavement of Africans but “the outcome of theft and exchange was identical: the slave was born.”21

Upon reaching the coasts, Africans were imprisoned in the dungeons of trading factories while they awaited transportation to the Americas. They slept, ate, and defecated on the same floor, which facilitated the spread of diseases. Dysentery, or the ‘bloody flux,’ was the leading cause of death in the factories and was caused by overcrowding and contaminated food and water supplies. “The disease attacked the stomach and bowels,” explains

Smallwood, and caused “pains in the abdomen, infected intestines, inflamed mucous membranes, and ulcerated tissues.”22 While incarcerated, captives were fed a diet of nutritionally empty calories – corn and a grain prepared following local custom called cankey.23

Branding served as one of the first physical manifestations of the newly commodified enslaved body and gave corporeal permanence to the belief that Africans could be treated

19 Ibid.; Smallwood, 180. 20 Hartman, 119. 21 Ibid., 31. 22 Smallwood, 120. 23 Ibid., 44.

140 like domestic animals.24 As one of the key technologies of the transatlantic slave trade, branding marked a “theft of the body – a willful and violent…severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire.”25 Traders and planters used hot irons to sear the flesh and mark the bondsperson with signs of sovereign ownership – either the trader or planter’s initials. The brand was a mark of bondage that made visible the body’s relationship to its owner, serving as a form of identification and surveillance. Erving Goffman’s concept of

“stigmatization” is useful here. Goffman traces the term ‘stigma’ back to the branding of

Greek slaves where it referred to “bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier.”26 In the Christian era, stigma referred to both

“bodily signs of holy grace” and “bodily signs of physical disorder.”27 Goffman argues that the term has come to apply more to the “disgrace” itself than to the bodily markings.

According to Edward Wheatley, “disgrace constructs the disability, regardless of the impairment, and the kind of disgrace caused by particular ‘bodily evidence’ changes over time, as do the disabilities relating to a particular impairment.”28 Applied to the world of

Atlantic slavery, stigma reflects the myriad forms of disfigurement and impairment that marked black bodies as ‘slaves.’ Branding and marks of punishment had a ‘shaming’ element and worked to permanently inscribe black bodies with criminality and chattel status. In

24 Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial America 1619-1776 (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2005), 129. 25 Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206. 26 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Canada: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 1. 27 Ibid. 28 Edward Wheatley, “Medieval Constructions of Blindness in France and England,” in The Disability Studies Reader 3rd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (Chicago: University of Illinois Chicago, 2010), 68.

141 particular, disfigurements caused by punishment and impairment carried a stigma that disabled the enslaved by decreasing an individual’s ‘worth’ on the open market.

Captives, suggests Saidiya Hartman, revalued brands as a means to establish kinship ties. “The mark of property,” she writes, “provides the emblem of kinship in the wake of defacement. It acquires the character of a personal trait, as though it were a birthmark.”29

Hartman uses Toni Morrison’s Beloved to demonstrate this point. Sethe’s mother points to the brand mark on her rib and says to her daughter, “This is your ma’am…If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.”30 Hartman harrowingly draws the connections between Sethe’s mother’s brand and the principle of maternal inheritance. She writes:

The stamp of the commodity haunts the maternal line and is transferred from one

generation to the next. The daughter, Sethe, will carry the burden of her mother’s

dispossession and inherit her dishonored condition, and she will have her own mark

soon enough, as will her daughter Beloved.31

Hartman’s analysis of Morrison’s text explores how survivors of slavery might have revalued physical stigma. The brand’s acquisition of value as a sign of kinship and love, however, could not displace its value as a sign of property. The brand, therefore, tied kinship inextricably to pain and loss.

The next stage, the Middle Passage, constituted an important moment in the commodification of enslaved Africans. Enslavement denied Africans’ kinship ties and

29 Hartman, 80. 30 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume , 1987), 61. Cited in Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 80. 31 Hartman, 80.

142

“robbed them of the markers of their social existence.”32 This ‘social death’ gave rise to psychological pain and trauma that disabled the enslaved by alienating them from the meanings associated with the human experience. Through violence and terror, the ‘ship- factory’ served to produce the labour power of plantations: the commodity called ‘slave’ to be sold on the open market once reaching the Americas.33 It was in this precise historical context, argues Nirmala Erevelles, that “black bodies became disabled and disabled bodies became black.”34

Whereas buyers in the Americas desired enslaved bodies capable of hard labour, traders on the African coasts desired individuals who they estimated might survive the horrors of forced migration.35 So hostile were the conditions on board ship that in the eighteenth century slave traders referred to slave-ships as tumbeiros, translated as ‘floating tombs’ or ‘undertakers.’36 Disease and sickness caused debilitating conditions on board the slave ship. In the seventeenth century, an average of more than 300 captives were forced into the hold of a ship bound to the Americas. Enslaved bodies were “mere physical units that could be arranged and molded at will – whether folded together spoonlike in rows or flattened side by side in a plane.”37 Like the dungeons of the trading factories, overcrowding, poor hygiene, and contaminated food and water supplies in the slave ship’s lower decks

32 Smallwood, 60. 33 Rediker, 10. 34 Erevelles, 40. 35 Smallwood, 81-82. 36 Ibid., 137. 37 Ibid., 68.

143 made for a breeding ground of diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, bacillary, dysentery, and the yaws.38

In the 1792 medical log of the slaver the “Lord Stanley,” the ship’s physician,

Christopher Bowes, recorded daily the various pains, distempers, and deaths of captives on board. Bowes’ medical journal consisted of five months of data. The most common

‘disorders’ he recorded were “attacks of the stomach” and “pains in the bowels with diarrhea,” “difficulty breathing” and “pains in the breast.” The majority of the victims of such conditions died. Others were recorded as suffering from delirium, tremors, sweating, and quick pulses.39 Bowes, like all other slave ship physicians, dispensed various medicines and herbs to preserve captives’ lives in an attempt to safeguard the economic investments of

European traders and slaveowners. Bowes identified the sick not by their names but a number: “the man No. 14 senseless in the morning.”40 And yet his log illustrates that the humanity of bondspeople consistently interrupted processes of human commodification. In spite of Bowe’s attempt to turn captives into commodities, Africans’ need for basic medical care testified to his selective recognition of a particularly exploitable African humanity.

The illnesses and diseases that the enslaved suffered from during the Middle Passage did not necessarily constitute disabilities but they were essential to the production of impairment among bondspeople in the English Atlantic World. The Middle Passage marked the beginning of a ‘social suffering’ experienced by the enslaved. The concept of ‘social suffering’ refers to the “political, economic, and institutional power” which regulate the lives

38 Ibid., 136. 39 Medical log of slaver the "Lord Stanley" 1792 by Christoper Bowes. RC MS0003, Royal College of Surgeons. Hereafter referred to as RC MS0003. 40 Ibid.

144 of “people and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.”41 Collectively, captives on board ship suffered “burdens, troubles and serious wounds to the body and the spirit.”42 As captives on board ship, enslaved individuals were not yet labouring bodies, as they would become on the plantation. And yet, the malnutrition and harsh living conditions that characterized the Middle Passage were essential to the process of turning captives into commodities, by which impairment was produced.

“The violence exercised in the service of human commodification,” writes Smallwood,

“relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas.”43 Sickness and disease weakened the body and spirit of captives and made them more vulnerable to other kinds of illnesses and impairments on the plantation. The conditions of the Middle Passage were, thus, part of a process of production of impairment, as well as part of the enforced disablement, both physically and psychologically, of the enslaved in the English Atlantic World.

On the auction blocks of Jamaica and in the port-towns of Barbados, traders attempted to disguise the physical and psychological traumas of the Middle Passage in order to secure the highest offer.44 While gender was a factor in establishing prices within the slave market, “ultimately, it was the health and condition of captives that had the largest influence

41 Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ix. 42 Ibid., 101. 43 Smallwood, 35. 44 Ibid., 160-161.

145 on trading prices and patterns.”45 Enslaved bodies were bathed and oiled, heads were shaved to remove lice-infested hair, and medicines were administered to “perk up a sad lot.”46 The market placed value on bodies that appeared fit for the hard labour involved in sugar production. For planters, an impaired or severely ill bondsperson was worth less, both in terms of cost and labour efficiency, than an individual who appeared ‘healthy.’ Unlike in some other capitalist contexts, however, impairment did not exclude the enslaved from production, for enslaved bodies were, first and foremost, expendable and exploitable. Marks of punishment – such as marks from the whip or missing ears – testified to the supposed

‘rebellious’ nature of the individual and consequently averted potential buyers. The ravages of the Atlantic voyage worked to double the price of captives who survived, however, in a seeming contradiction such damaging effects also considerably diminished the quality of labourers. The healthiest cargoes were sold immediately to eager planters, whereas the sick and disabled lingered sometimes for months and were eventually sold for the lowest prices.

This economic reality made the purposeful disabling of captives on plantations more paradoxical and demonstrates that practices of disabling within Atlantic slavery were not simply or fundamentally economic. Enslaved individuals whom planters deemed too

‘defective’ to purchase due to physical or mental impairments were abandoned in the

Americas and the traders returned home.47 Atlantic slavery was a capitalistic system of exploitation and power with unquantifiable forms of value. Slaveowners and merchants calculated that the debilitation of enslaved bodies might cause them immediate losses in their

45 Audra Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775- 1807 (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2012), 4-5. 46 Hartman, 184-85; Smallwood, 160. Quotation from Smallwood, 160. 47 Hartman, 184-85.

146 labour force but such losses were temporary, whereas the power and racial privilege they gained through the deliberate and systematic disabling of captives lasted a lifetime.

The Slave Market: Bodies, Value, and Disability

For captives who survived the passage and years of ‘seasoning,’ the space between fitness and death constituted the majority of one’s life in enslavement and was characterized by a methodical disfiguring and disabling of the body. The slave market determined levels of fitness based primarily on the physical appearance of Africans, which was indicative of not just physical fitness but also of supposed moral and intellectual fitness. The slave trade served to forge one ‘race’ out of a multi-ethnic collection of Africans by homogenizing Sub-

Saharan Africa in terms of culture, religion, physical appearance, and supposed aptness to servitude.48 Yet it also employed specific geographic and ancestral origins of captives in order to commodify captives, turning African ethnicities into categories of monetary value, and creating the ‘ideal’ enslaved labourer as a tradeable commodity with a price. Planters were encouraged to make certain that their captives “come from a good part of that coast for the temper and dispositions, manners and complexions of negroes differ much according to the different parts of the coast of Africa where they are bought.”49 For planters, such qualities ensured efficient production and helped curb any threats to the social order of plantation society.

48 Rediker, 10. 49 John Dovaston, Agricultura Americana or improvements in West-India husbandry Considered. Wherein the present system of Husbandry used in England is Applied to the Cultivation or growing of Sugar Canes to advantage (Vols. 1 & 2 [N.P., 1774]), Codex Eng 60 John Carter Brown Library, 245.

147

In tandem, captives whose bodies bore the scars of smallpox and the yaws were marketed at a higher price, for they gave evidence of the individual’s immunity to such illnesses.50 The hostile environment of slavery was a form of disablement that predisposed bondspeople to diseases, which caused temporary and permanent impairments and the marks left in the wake of such diseases increased an individual’s economic value as property. Yet, because captives were ‘socially dead’51 people, the effects of disablement did not socially enable them, but rather worked to socially and economically enable slaveowners.

Like manufacturers in industrial England, the profit-hungry Caribbean planter desired a labour force that was both physically and intellectually able to perform industrial labour.

One plantation management guide asserted:

the tokens of a sound and good negroe are let them be young and stoutly set in limbs,

strait a full open eye, the tongue red, a broad large chest wide shoulders; their belly

small, not large and watery, clean and strong bodys, large thighs and legs, and strain

and of equal length; and be careful that they are not foolish, which you may judge by

their looks and attention on you.52

Such criteria reflected a capitalist necessity for a physically and intellectually able and pliant work force. According to plantation management, Africans from the Congo were more

“refined” in their senses and “well featured, straight limb'd, and more tractable and easily taught to labour.” Ibo and Gold Coast Africans were supposedly the best field labourers

50 Handler, Part I, 5. 51 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Boston: Harvard University, 1982). 52 Dovaston, 249.

148 because “their disposition is dull and stupid and only fit for labour.”53 Perceived intellectual disability has played a substantive role in justifying the inferior status of African descent peoples at different times in history.54 In the context of slavery, the attribution of intellectual disability to Africanness was inscribed in legislative acts, travel narratives, bills of sale, plantation accounts, and management guides. Such claims served to make disability a more

‘real’ and degrading ‘defect’ and worked as a powerful tool to deprive Africans and their descendants of political and social status and transform their bodies into commodities of exchange for the open market.

The eighteenth century was “an era where the colonial space was increasingly and effectively used as a laboratory within which the ‘liabilities’ or ‘advantages’ of given African ethnicities could be observed, categorized, and subsequently given a relative value.”55

Writing in the late-eighteenth century, Equiano recalled planters’ taste for particular African ethnicities:

The West Indian planters prefer the slaves of Benin or Eboe to those of any other part

of Guinea, for their hardiness, intelligence, integrity, and zeal. Those benefits are felt

by us in the general healthiness of the people, and in their vigour and activity; I might

have added too in their comeliness. Deformity is indeed unknown amongst us, I mean

that of shape…Our women too were, in my eyes at least, uncommonly graceful, alert,

53 Ibid., 246. 54 Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History, eds. Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 55 Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2011), 55.

149

and modest to a degree of bashfulness…They are also remarkably cheerful. Indeed

cheerfulness and affability are two of the leading characteristics of our nation.56

Equiano’s description of Benin and Eboe ethnicities must be analyzed in the context of the the role of disability rhetoric in the politics of abolition.57 His claim that ‘deformity’ did not exist among his people rebuked anti-abolitionist claims that the supposed physical and intellectual defects of Africans made them ‘fit’ for servitude and counters the European stereotype of the subservient Ibo. Moreover, his remark on the so-called cheerfulness of

African women counters pro-slavery arguments that slavery ‘saved’ Africans from the supposed brutalities of Africa and testifies to the psychological wounds of enslavement.

Creoles were the most sought after labourers because, according to plantation management, “they understand the language you discourse in…and being born with you and his parents with him, he doth not think his labour slavery, and having never known any other goes with cheerfulness about it.”58Andrew Curran argues that instead of negating European generalizations of Africans, such designations “buttressed – through circular reasoning – the ultimate rationality of slavery itself. Here, after all, was a category of human that was literally defined according to its ability to serve.”59

While acquiescent workers were important in creating an efficient labour force in both the Caribbean and metropolitan England, planters’ fear of enslaved insurrections and the intense racial division of plantation societies made the slave trade’s desire for ‘non- rebellious’ captives of utmost necessity. Planters were to steer clear of “the most vicious and

56 Equiano, 12. 57 See Chapter Five of this dissertation. 58 Dovaston, 280-281. 59 Curran, 55.

150 desperate slaves,” from Coromantee, who “if young their disposition is so ill suited to slavery and if old they will die before they will submit.”60 The singling out of Coromantee captives reflected the widespread fear among planters and white society of enslaved revolts and rebellions in the English Caribbean, especially in Jamaica. Both Orlando Patterson and

Jerome S. Handler have shown that, in Jamaica and Barbados, ‘Coromantee’ or Gold Coast captives led the majority of revolts, conspiracies, and insurrections during the first century of

English Caribbean slavery.61 Such ethnic labels do not necessarily reflect where African-born captives were from – they might often refer to the location from which they left Africa. The representations of ‘Coromantees’ demonstrate the historical linkages between perceived disability and enslaveability. According to this logic, the “vicious and desperate” natures of

‘Coromantees’ made them more difficult to enslave than other Africans. Their refusal to accept enslavement was viewed as a disability – an incapacity based on a desire for freedom.

Vincent Brown has argued that African regional designations made by Europeans, “were merely product labels, meant to effect the reduction of humanity to the status of commodity.”62 In comparing and evaluating the supposed aptness of particular African ethnicities to servitude, these designations created a competitive market in which traders and planters vied and paid premium prices for the most desirable commodities. The power of traders and planters to pick and choose the ‘fittest’ human commodities, which they then forced into a system of enslavement that routinely disabled human bodies, reconfirmed

60 Dovaston, 246. 61 Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War Jamaica, 1655-1740 Part 1,” Social and Economic Studies 19, no. 3 (1970), 289-325; Jerome S. Handler, “Slave Revolts and Conspiracies in Seventeenth-century Barbados,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids-New West Indian Guide 56, no. 1 & 2 (1982), 5-42. 62 Brown, 28.

151 whites’ dominion over blacks and the abject condition of Africans in the Atlantic World economy.

Physically and intellectually impaired enslaved labourers were systematically devalued on the open market. The plantation records of the Newton and Seawell estates in the parish of Christ Church in Barbados, list large numbers of bondspeople categorized as diseased, infirm, superannuated, crippled, or otherwise physically or mentally

‘incapacitated.’ Among the sick or disabled, an individual’s worth as a marketable commodity was determined by whether she or he was still a productive body, able to contribute to plantation production. This can be seen by the fact that on the Newton plantation in 1803 fifteen individuals were listed under the category “infirm but useful” with an average market value of £23. In contrast, out of fourteen individuals listed in the same year under “old, useless, and diseased,” nine were listed as having no monetary value, while the remaining five were worth £5 each. For both the Newton and Seawell plantations, severely disabled individuals were given no monetary value, whereas those with physical limitations retained some market value. In the Newton records of 1784, John Sayres, a

“cripple” was valued at £0, in contrast to Bristol with a “lame hand,” who was valued at £25.

These numbers compare to able-bodied and healthy workers whose monetary value ranged from £42 to £165.63 The making of modern categories of labour was, thus, predicated on the valuation of impairments. For both free and unfree workers the labour was alienated, given a

‘value,’ and the majority of the profit from that labour accrued to someone else. In the case of the enslaved plantation worker, nothing accrued to the producer (the worker), and the worker’s entire being was alienated, not just the labour and its produce.

63 Newton Papers MS523/288. University of West Indies – Cave Hill Campus.

152

In the Newton plantation accounts, the manager of the plantation in 1796, Sampson

Wood, proudly asserted that, “all who can be of any service in the plantation are put to some occupation or other.” In the records of the Seawell plantation, several first gang labourers were described as ‘infirm’ and the head boiler and watchman, “very old and weak with one eye.” Whereas these individuals remained in their occupations, other impaired labourers were reassigned to less disciplined tasks such as gardening and carrying water to the field labourers. In the 1796 Newton accounts, severely diseased individuals were categorized together, although their productive labour capacities varied. Those given no occupational description include four individuals afflicted with leprosy; Quaco Sam who was listed as

“dumb and has fits;” Glascow “a cripple, walks on all fours;” and Mary Ann who “does nothing, weak and sickly.” However, Dublin who had “lost a thumb” was said to work, while

Esther Rose was listed as “diseased but does some work.” 64 In the History of Mary Prince

(1831), Mary Prince recounted having to labour after being severely flogged by her owner.

“The next morning,” she wrote, “I was forced by my master to rise and go about my usual work, though my body and limbs were so stiff and sore, that I could not move without the greatest pain.”65 Prince’s narrative demonstrates the long-term disabling consequences of repeated episodic incapacitation.

Unlike enslaved labourers, disabled, metropolitan industrial workers were increasingly excluded from modes of production and, subsequently, wages. For these workers, ‘worth’ was calculated in wages that tied them economically and ideologically to an expanding capitalist economy that both exploited and remunerated them. The industrial

64 Ibid. 65 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, ed. Sara Salih ([1831] London: Penguin Books, 2000), 17.

153 workspaces of nineteenth-century England were extremely dangerous; accidents that caused permanent injury, impairment, and death were common in the coalmines, textile mills, and on railroads.66 Excluded from modes of production and consequently wages – which had become symbols of human worth in the modern capitalist economy – disabled workers were stigmatized for their so-called inability to ‘contribute’ to society.67 For the wage labourer, therefore, disability was an individual problem. By contrast, in plantation economy, disability among the enslaved not only harmed the individual worker but also, economically speaking, the slaveowner. As unpaid workers, enslaved labourers’ ‘worth’ did not correspond to wages, but to what they would be worth if they were being sold as commodities on the open market. Although disabled labourers were less valuable as marketable commodities, they still possessed ‘worth’ as productive bodies on the plantation.

As commodities in a transnational market, Africans were utilized for English capital in several different geo-political locations. African bodies were not only commodified in terms of commercial object and labour power but as curiosities of humankind. Beginning in the sixteenth century, African and indigenous American bodies were displayed as curios alongside other so-called anomalies such as bearded women and conjoined twins in

European fairs and exhibitions. Even in death, black bodies were displayed as curios for metropolitan audiences.68 Alive, dead, and dismembered, African bodies became spectacles for English audiences and marketable commodities in the transatlantic economy.

66 Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (New York: J.W. Lovell Co., 1887), 101-113. 67 Finkelstein, 8-11. 68 Fryer, 25.

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Hans Sloane’s collection of Jamaican artifacts demonstrates that politics and capital were inextricably bound to curiosity in this age. Despite being “neither a crude apologist for empire nor a theorist of racial superiority as a physical fact,”69 Sloane was still heavily influenced by the racist ideologies of his day. Like other colonial writers, Sloane homogenized various African ethnicities into the category “black” or “negro,” emphasizing skin colour as the mark of freedom and enslavement. Borrowing from Herbert and others,

Sloane argued that African women’s practice of carrying their infants on their backs caused

African phenotypic characteristics and stressed that skin colour could change in particular climates.70 He also reproduced the bestial image of African women’s breasts claiming that they “hang very lank ever after, like those of goats.”71

Sloane’s collection helped make him one of the most famous naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as a very wealthy man. Sloane’s fortune, however, had a more explicit connection to Jamaica, and in particular the destruction of enslaved bodies, than his collection of curiosities implied. Sloane lived in Jamaica from 1687 to 1689 as physician to the newly-appointed governor, Thomas Monck, who died ten months after Sloane’s arrival. It was during this period that Sloane began piecing together his enduring collection of curiosities in Jamaica, gathering plant specimens and artifacts relating

69 James Delbourgo, “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities: Hans Sloane’s Atlantic World,” (2007) http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/delbourgo%20essay.pdf. Accessed January 2013, 7. 70 Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural history of the Herbs and Trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, &c. of the last of those islands; to which is prefix’d, an introduction, wherein is an account of the inhabitants, air, waters, diseases, trade, &c. of that place, with some relations concerning the neighbouring continent, and islands of America. Illustrated with figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved. In large copper-plates as big as the life, vol. 1 (London, 1707), lii. 71 Ibid., vol. 1, iii.

155 to slavery. Such curiosities included a “barbary Scourge with which the slaves are beaten made…[from] a palm tree;” a “noose made of cane splitt for catching game or hanging runaway negros”; a “bullet used by the runaway Negros in Jamaica”; a “coat of the runaway rebellious negros who lived in the woods of that Island”; and, a manatee strap “for whipping the Negro Slaves in the Hott W. India plantations.”72 In 1695, Sloane married Elizabeth

Rose, widow of Dr. Fulke Rose, one of Jamaica’s preeminent slaveowners, who consistently received cargoes of Africans from the Royal African Company during the 1670s. In marrying

Rose, Sloane gained access to one-third of the income from her late husband’s estates, which included plantations.73

Sloan’s collection of slave artifacts gave credence to the idea that African bodies were exploitable, expendable commodities consumed as instruments of production and spectacle. Sloane profited from the display of weapons used to punish the enslaved as well as the dismembered body parts of individual bondspeople. Under the category “Humana” with the specific classification “black,” Sloane contained “part of the Skin of the arm of a black injected wt. red wax & mercury;” “the Skin of a Negro wt. the black corpus mucosum partly taken off from the true skin & partly sticking to it”; and “the foetus of a negro from

Virginia.”74 Sloane’s sub-category, ‘black,’ implied that Africans were humans but of a different kind than Europeans. What is more, his display of skin and unborn babies reflected what the English perceived to be the fundamental locations of physical and innate differences between Europeans and Africans: skin colour and sexual organs. In displaying such body parts detached from whole bodies and, therefore, persons, Sloan’s collection enabled English

72 Cited in Delbourgo, 2. 73 Ibid., 6. 74 Cited in Delbourgo, 6; 11.

156 audiences to observe what made Africans enslaveable without any regard to the moral implications of racial slavery.

Sloane’s collection and Natural History not only implied that black bodies were meant to be destroyed; it also served as living proof that the destruction of African bodies led to the accumulation of English wealth. Scholars have typically regarded Sloane’s collection and Natural History as work that did not engage with the political or moral concerns of slavery. James Delbourgo, for example, writes that, “although Sloane profited from slavery, and enjoyed relationships with those involved in the trade, his description of slaves in the

Natural History of Jamaica is far from a coherent attempt to defend the institution.”75 Yet,

Sloane’s display of dismembered black bodies for profit demonstrates that curiosity was not merely an innocent and objective thirst for knowledge in colonial England. Like Trinculo,

Sloane saw the potential income that could be generated through the exhibition of black bodies in the metropolitan marketplace. Sloane’s collection of slave articles was funded by the capital garnered from slavery itself. The naturalist was greatly implicated in the business of slavery in Jamaica, a reality that fundamentally shaped his relationship to black bodies.

His display of dismembered black body parts and the violence it implied glorified the institution of slavery and its ability to systematically impair enslaved people with impunity.

Sloane’s collection illustrated that not even death interrupted whites’ ownership of black bodies.

75 Ibid., 7.

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The Plantation: Disability, Disease, and Labour

Commodified labour and disability became racialized in the English Caribbean when

Africans replaced European servants as the primary labourers of the islands. Historians have noted that the metropolitan fear of a miserable death and life of hard labour in the tropics led to the decline of indentureship.76 The physically debilitating nature of plantation labour fed this fear. The replacement of white for black labourers indicated that white bodies were somehow unfit and black bodies fit for the frequency of impairment and disease involved in plantation labour. The ‘state of injury’ became an emerging marker of difference between whiteness and blackness.

Disability shaped the workforce in Barbados and Jamaica. In the English Caribbean, the average sugar plantation consisted of fifty to three hundred unfree labourers, who were organized into gangs based on age, gender, and physical condition. The process of sugar cultivation and production, land preparation, planting, weeding, and cutting were teamed with grinding canes, boiling the cane juice, curing and refining the sugar, and distilling the molasses into rum. Because of the perishability of the crop, sugarcane had to be milled within 24 hours.77 Field labour, which was the most labour intensive aspect of sugar-making, consisted of hoeing the soil, planting and cutting canes, and working in the mill. This “first gang” of labourers consisted of the strongest able-bodied male and female captives, between

18 and 45 years of age. The “second gang” weeded and trashed canes. The “third gang,” or the “grass gang,” was made up of small children who performed weeding and light

76 Dunn, 67-74; Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 42-44 and 119-127; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1998), 254. 77 Dunn, 60.

158 gardening. Divisions of labour based on gangs were “affected by short or long-term illness or physical disability.”78 Planters were advised “to examine individually the state and condition of every negro; and then to assort them in such manner, that they may never be employed upon any work to which their powers are not equal.”79 Despite English cultural meanings of work that increasingly defined women – particularly those of the middle and upper classes – as unsuited to hard labour, most enslaved women found themselves in the fields – the most physically demanding and disabling of labour positions – rather than in the great houses of

Barbados and Jamaica.

The physical suffering faced by metropolitan workers in industrial England was predicated on an earlier suffering endured by enslaved labourers on Caribbean plantations.

Jamie L. Bronstein’s claim that British workers were the first to experience the physical consequences of industrialization is misleading, for enslaved labourers were regularly dismembered, burned, and maimed in sugar production.80 The boiling house – the architectural feature and work environment of the plantation that most resembled the factory

– required the technical mastery of sugar boilers, who worked in extremely hot, loud, and dangerous conditions. So common was dismemberment among boilers that plantation management guides gave advice to overseers on how to avoid such accidents:

Care must be had by your negroes in the feeding or supplying the rollers with canes,

that their hand does not get betwixt the rollers; which if it happen will draw the whole

arm in and tear it from the body, unless the limb be immediately chopped off: the water

78 Higman, 615-617. 79 Cited in Higman, Slave Populations, 614. 80 Jamie L. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (California: Stanford University Press, 2008), 3.

159

wheele be stopped; or the wind mill be put to the wing. These accidents sometimes

happen in the night when the negroes are drowsy, which often proves fatal. If it

happens that the member is caught in the roller of a cattle mill, the cattle are

immediately stopped, and the loss is no more a finger or two.81

The trivializing of dismembered fingers demonstrates that disability functioned – and thus

‘worked’ – in the plantation economy of violence to produce bodies that were transposable units of labour. Boilers were also susceptible to burns, which sometimes caused death, in the process of making rum. In his True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, Richard

Ligon described the dangers of making and transporting rum. “We lost an excellent Negre” he wrote, “who bringing a Jar of this Spirit [rum], from the Still-house, to the Drink- room…not knowing the force of the liquor he carried, brought the candle somewhat nearer than he ought…and burnt the poor Niger to death, who was an excellent servant.”82

Although bondswomen did not occupy artisanal positions such as sugar boilers and distillers, they performed a range of crucial roles in the process of sugar production, including supplying fuel for boilers, feeding canes to the mills, and of course, working in the cane fields.83 Bondswomen suffered from a psychologically taxing and physically destructive work regime, inadequate diet, disease, and debilitating punishments. Such hostile conditions had a physiological effect on female captives’ ability to conceive and deliver children.84

Enslaved women suffered from both ‘emotional amenorrhea,’ caused by psychological

81 Dovaston, 125. 82 Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, ed. David Smith ([1657] repr. with an introduction and notes by David Smith, e-text, 2012, 3rd Ed.), 144. 83 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, (Fall 2011), 40. 84 Richard Follet, "Heat, Sex, and Sugar: Pregnancy and Childbearing in the Slave Quarters" Journal of Family History 28, no. 4 (October 2003), 512.

160 trauma, and ‘secondary amenorrhea’ caused by illness. Both forms of amenorrhea persisted during the Middle Passage and seasoning process. The disorder contributed to low fertility rates among African-born bondswomen.85 For women who did conceive, pregnancy and birth constituted extremely hazardous conditions. The gynecological problems faced by bondswomen during the colonial period were more dangerous and life threatening than in non-plantation societies.86

Despite it being a ‘limiting’ physical condition, pregnancy did not exempt women from hard labour. Jamaican and Barbadian planters were generally unwilling to lose female labourers to pregnancy and complained about the costs of rearing children.87 Although babies carried to term by enslaved mothers could grow up to be future bondspeople, capitalistic planters felt that pregnancy and childcare interfered with the rigor of plantation production.

Congenital deformities and disabilities could also contribute to planters’ indifference to natural reproduction. In the 1795 records of the Somerset Vale plantation in Jamaica, eight of the forty-eight female field labourers were recorded as pregnant but still at work.88 Not until after 1788, when the abolitionist movement threatened the Atlantic slave trade, were planters concerned with the reproductive capacities of enslaved women as a means of securing a viable labour force.89 Planters’ efforts to increase the slave labour force through births rather than trade during the last few decades of the slave trade failed miserably. The conditions of enslavement proved debilitating to women’s bodies and reproductive abilities. For those who

85 Barbara Bush, "African Caribbean Slave Mothers and Children: Traumas of Dislocation and Enslavement Across the Atlantic World," Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (March-June, 2010), 79. 86 Ibid., 73. 87 Ibid., 82. 88 Journal of Somerset plantation 1782-1796, MS 229 National Library of Jamaica. 89 Turner, 41.

161 did conceive, the intensive labour regime of sugar production combined with the hostile living conditions and excessive physical punishments often contributed to miscarriage and maternal and infant mortality.90

Mothers and female caregivers played significant roles in taking care of disabled children on sugar plantations. In the Newton plantation records from 1776 to 1783, an enslaved woman named Esther Sayres is listed as the caregiver for her relation, John Sayres,

“a cripple.” Esther is not listed as having any other occupation but “to take care” of John. In the 1783 records, Esther and John’s names are followed by “Sally a little girl a cripple.” The records do not indicate who cared for Sally but it is possible that Esther was her caregiver as well.91 In her study of motherhood and disability in nineteenth-century America, Jenifer

Barclay has found that enslaved children with congenital disabilities or acquired disabilities

“often enabled mothers and children to remain together when profit-driven slaveholders and traders otherwise would have separated them.”92 Barclay has discovered that women with disabilities, whom Southern planters viewed as ‘useless,’ were often assigned caregiving roles to children.93 In the 1791 Newton accounts, Phoebe and Nanny who were “old and infirm” occupied the position of sick nurse in the dwelling house. In this case, disability enabled Phoebe and Nanny to take up important community-building roles by taking care of their ill fellow captives.

The enslaved lived in a hostile environment where individuals would likely be frequently affected by malnutrition, sickness, and disease. According to a late-eighteenth

90 Follet, 511. 91 Newton Papers MS523/275, University of the West Indies – Cave Hill Campus. 92 Jenifer L. Barclay, “Mothering the ‘Useless’: Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 2, no. 2 (Fall, 2014), 137. 93 Ibid., 135.

162 century plantation management guide, providing forced labourers with rum “will lunge their labour foreward much better than strikes and blows,” when they begin to languish in the hot weather, “a convincing proof that humanity works better than terror.”94 The author’s insistence on providing rum to enslaved labourers reveals a great deal in terms of the actual health of the enslaved. His suggestion that planters should provide bondspeople with rum instead of food reflects the material reality of enslaved disablement in the plantation zone: it was not just the labour that destroyed African bodies; the cheap availability of sugar’s nutrition-poor by-products also served to foster the ‘bare life’ experience of the enslaved.

Unsanitary water and extremely tight living quarters were among the many factors that caused and helped spread a variety of illnesses and diseases including scabies, leprosy, yaws, parasites and worms, smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps, and influenza. Disease and illness affected whites, however, the enslaved were more susceptible because of the hostile environment of slavery.95 A common infection among the enslaved was transmitted by the chigger and caused festering sores and sometimes long-term impairment of the feet.96 The yaws, which rarely affected whites, could lead to permanent physical disability and was highly contagious among the enslaved due to congested living conditions.97 One eighteenth-century plantation management guide cautioned planters about the kinds of illnesses to which the enslaved were prone. The author described the yaws as:

94 Dovaston, 270. Emphasis added. 95 Richard Ligon wrote that in the seventeenth century illnesses in Barbados were “more grievous, and mortality greater by far than in England, and these diseases many times contagious.” According to Ligon the “black ribbon for mourning…is much worn there.” See Ligon, A True and Exact History, 173. 96 Handler, Part I, 22. 97 Ibid., 12.

163

great ulcers that break out in various parts of the body, but chiefly on the arms, and

hips; the wounds yield very little matter, nor are they very painfull; but if not cured in

time will spread in hard knots all over the body, and infect the whole mass of blood;

the mussels will be contracted and the features deformed; the face swell'd with large

blotches, and death the consequence—unless skillfull application be had. When any

negroe is soon to have this disorder, he must be taken from amongst your other slaves,

or he will infect the whole.98

Other illnesses included worms which caused an individual to appear “as tho he was mad, and run about with desperate and ghastly looks, at other times the slaves will be taken with shakes and fitts like those of an ague.”99 These diseases of unfreedom were an everyday reality for enslaved individuals and constituted a silent but powerful and highly visible debilitation of the body.

Illness could temporarily impair an enslaved individual but repeated sickness, like repeated punishment, could lead to long-term disability. Among unfree labourers in the

English colonial Caribbean, the distinction between chronic illness, impairment, and disability was not clearly demarcated.100 As enslaved labourers, bondspeoples’ condition of life demanded physical and mental fitness and illness, disease, and physical impairment could disable them from meeting the standards of plantation labour, which were based on able-bodied norms. Disease and severe illness, however, did not necessarily exempt captives from labour. When Mary Prince became sick with rheumatism and Saint Anthony’s fire she

98 Dovaston, 253. 99 Ibid., 256. 100 Helen Meekosha has made a similar argument about indigenous people in Australia. See Helen Meekosha, “Decolonising disability: thinking and acting globally,” Disability & Society 26, no. 6 (October, 2011), 667-682.

164

“grew so very lame that [she] was forced to walk with a stick…and became quite a cripple.”101 After a short period of quarantine, Prince returned to work, still sick. Masters’ control over enslaved labour was the ultimate symbol of slaveowner hegemony.

The ‘inefficient’ labour of severely ill and impaired bondspeople was often met with cruel treatment from owners. Prince described a fellow bondswoman named Sarah, as

“nearly past work...who was subject to several bodily infirmities, and was not quite right in the head.” Sarah endured sadistic punishments from her overseer, Master Dickey, because she “did not wheel the barrow fast enough to please him” and died a few days after she received her punishment.102 Prince herself was forced to labour despite boils and sores on her feet from working in the salt water; she described being chastised for not being able to move as swiftly as her master demanded.103 Prince’s narrative demonstrates the unremitting violence the enslaved endured and suggests that individuals whose bodies had become antithetical to the industrial work regime of plantation labour suffered greater violence at the hands of overseers and owners than able-bodied and ‘compliant’ labourers. Impaired individuals, who were both ‘unproductive’ and less immediately physically threatening to plantation authority, occupied a precarious place in the economy of slavery, which was driven by profit and violence.

By the late-eighteenth century, as part of amelioration, laws were put in force to ensure that owners, and not the state, had the responsibility to provide for their disabled

101 Prince, 25. Saint Anthony’s Fire, or erysipelas, was a highly contagious disease characterized by intense inflammation of the skin and mucous membranes and high fever. See Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 93-97. 102 Prince, 22. 103 Ibid., 20.

165 labourers and keep them from ‘wandering’ the island. Jamaica’s Consolidated Act of 1788 declared that:

no master, owner, or possessor of any slave or slaves…shall discard or turn away any

such slave or slaves, on account or by reason of such slave or slaves being rendered

incapable of labour or service to such master, owner, or possessor, by means of

sickness, age, or infirmity; but every such master, owner, or possessor, as aforesaid,

shall be, and he is hereby obliged, to keep all such slave or slaves upon his, her, or their

properties, and to find and provide them with wholesome necessaries of life, and not

suffer such slave or slaves as aforesaid to be in want thereof, or to wander about, or

become burdensome to others for sustenance, under the penalty of ten pounds for every

such offence.104

The 1788 law further mandated that “wandering sick, aged, and infirm” bondspeople be held

“in the nearest workhouse, there to be fed, but not worked, at the expence of the master, owner, or possessor” until the end of the court trial.105 Such laws demonstrate that whites considered disabled and ill bondspeople a threat to the social order of plantation society and a burden on poor relief.106 The emphasis on the private responsibility of the slaveowner to care for disabled bondspeople did not favour the enslaved individual. Elsa Goveia explains that the private responsibility “led to severe laws providing life-sentences of hard labour for destitute slaves whose masters could not be found, and to a reluctance on the part of the legislatures to permit the manumission even of able-bodied slaves unless the public was

104 The Act of Assembly of the Island of Jamaica...The Consolidated Act...(London, 1788). 105 Ibid., 106 Elsa Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century (Caribbean Universities Press, 1970), 27.

166 indemnified beforehand against the possibility that the new freeman might become destitute.”107

The treatment of disabled bondspeople in the English Caribbean connects and diverges with the English Parliament’s treatment of the disabled poor in English poor law.

The history of the poor laws can be divided into the Old Poor Law – crystallized in the 1601

Act for the Relief of the Poor under Queen Elizabeth I – and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The Old Poor Law established a legal obligation for parishes to deal with two broad categories of applicants for poor relief: the ‘impotent’ poor – the disabled, the sick, the elderly, orphans, and widows – and the ‘able-bodied’ poor – those capable of work. The Old

Poor Law was decentralized – local parishes were responsible to raise and administer relief directly to the ‘deserving poor’ and to provide work for those who were able.108 Because the poor laws were parish-based, they were generally implemented irregularly and unevenly and policy varied from locality to locality.109 The poor laws were “neither uniformly harsh nor benign”; some English poor benefited from state welfare, whereas others found it prejudicial and punitive. For the disabled, who were classified under the ‘deserving’ poor, the English poor laws were ‘enabling’ in the sense that individuals with impairments that prevented them from work were provided with pensions and supports through the poor laws.110 By the late- seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, parishes across the country began to set up workhouses to lodge and employ the poor. Most workhouse inmates were children, the

107 Ibid. 108 Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 23 109 Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19. 110 Samantha Williamson, Poverty, Gender and Life Cycle under the English Poor Law, 1760-1834 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 2.

167 elderly, and the disabled.111 Thus, like late-eighteenth century slave laws, English poor laws forbade the disabled to wander and beg in the streets, however, in the English Caribbean it was the responsibility of the owner and not the state to curb such ‘disorder.’ The housing of the disabled in workhouses during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to reflect a much wider trend in the Atlantic World of a fear of idleness and an attempt to remove the

‘destitute’ from public streets.

The presence of severely ill or impaired bondspeople on the plantation caused indignation among some owners and overseers. For instance, Sampson Wood, commented that on the Newton plantation:

All have something to do, except diseased people and cripples, or those who have a

kind of right to be idle, as it were, by prescription & long (I must say bad) habit, for it

is an ill example to the other people on the estate & indeed a hardship for whilst they

are labouring, those are at their… leisure, & have the same daily food, cloathing, and

allowed them & more than the labourers. I wish they would take themselves off to a

distance, as Becky did, I am sure I should not hinder them.112

Wood’s complaint that the presence of impaired and diseased captives on plantation grounds caused contempt among the able-bodied might most appropriately be interpreted as a projection of his own aversion to impaired bondspeople. It should not be seen as a transparent reflection of what enslaved people thought of the disabled in their midst. The legal ownership of human bodies caused repercussions for planters, whose proprietorship

111 Lees, 63. 112 Newton Papers MS523/288, University of the West Indies – Cave Hill Campus. The Newton manuscripts do not detail who Becky was or where she went. The passage implies that Becky was impaired and left the plantation but it is unclear under what circumstances she did so.

168 included bodies that were once labouring bodies. In his 1774 plantation management guide,

John Dovaston encouraged Jamaican planters to care for old and sick bondspeople. He wrote:

Let conscience and humanity, teach you to employ your old slaves, both men and

women as watches or doctors, assistants…with the care of the sick; or let them live in

ease on the estate and be fed carefully, as long as nature will hold out, after you have

had their strength and youthful labour; rather than (as I am sorry to say is too often

practised) charge them with crimes they are innocent of and hang them for the sake of

the reward; when they are old past labour, and of no value. Such money received is the

price of blood and will to a curse on the receiver of the same.113

According to Dovaston Jamaica planters exercised their proprietary ‘rights’ to end the lives of bondspeople who no longer contributed to plantation production. This implies that, for slaveowners, physically impaired captives were most economically useful in death, closing the space between ‘bare life’ and death.

Revaluing Disability

It is difficult to assess how bondspeople themselves perceived the reality of slavery’s physical destructiveness. It is suggested here that the understanding and treatment of disability among enslaved communities differed markedly from how they were interpreted among free societies. Mary Prince’s narrative provides some indication of how the enslaved responded to those who became impaired in enslavement. She described an enslaved man named Daniel, who was “lame in the hip, and could not keep up with the rest of the slaves” and was subjected to his master’s sadistic punishments, which further incapacitated him. “He

113 Dovaston, 286-287.

169 was an object of pity and terror to the whole gang of slaves,” Prince wrote, “and in his wretched case we saw, each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be so old.”114 Prince suggested that the enslaved viewed such physical conditions as a direct result of enslavement, not as a personal tragedy but rather a condition to which they were all susceptible as forced labourers.

Among the enslaved, disability was revalued as a spiritual gift for Obeah doctors, for the degree of trust in an Obeah practitioner was often tied to her or him having a physical disability. A clubfoot, deformed hand, or a blind eye, for instance, was interpreted as a sign that nature had compensated the Obeah man or woman with a higher degree of supernatural ability.115 In this context, disability functioned as a community-building tool and a condition of power and authority. Captives also feigned disability or exaggerated their ailments in order to negotiate the terms of their bondage.116 Impairment or the masquerade of disability could provide bondspeople some control over the kinds of labour they performed on the plantation and whether they would be sold to potential buyers.117

Disability may have been revalued in ways that were unique to the context of Atlantic slavery. For instance, there is potential to see the disabled enslaved body as a site of opposition to the commodification of human beings and a form of protest against one’s status

114 Prince, 21. 115 M.F. Olmos and L. Paravisini-Gerbert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Senteria to Obeah and Espiritismo (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 161. 116 Runaway advertisements, in particular, point to bondspeople’s masquerading of disability to escape detection from owners and the rest of white society. See Chapter Four of this dissertation. 117 Dea H. Boster argues that in the Antebellum South, the enslaved exaggerated and feigned disability to discourage their purchase and to avoid performing particular forms of labour. See Dea H. Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 42, 89, 115.

170 as commercial object and labour power. In this way, disability among bondspeople could be interpreted as a site of resistance to what made people modern – able, productive, and inextricably bound to an industrial capitalist economy.118 The punished body was, on the one hand, a display and reproduction of an owner’s mastery and power and, on the other hand, a living and moving text that told of a captive’s refusal to accept her or his enslavement. Thus, the study of the disablement of black bodies in the context of Atlantic slavery engenders possibilities to read disability among the enslaved in multiple ways, not only as a sign of victimization but of protest and personhood.

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated that not only do the histories of disability and slavery overlap in significant ways but that Caribbean bondspeople form an integral aspect of wider disability history. The colonial Caribbean challenges traditional timelines of disability history, and undoes teleological distinctions between the early modern and modern. The precociously industrial setting of Caribbean sugar making and the frequency of impairment among enslaved labourers reveals that certain ‘modern’ understandings of disability emerged at an earlier date in the Caribbean than in Europe. The racial prejudice that upheld Atlantic slavery gave little reason to view the deliberate disabling of captives as problematic, for, based on developing notions of race, the institution of slavery was merely disabling the

‘already disabled.’ For both the metropolitan worker and the enslaved labourer, physical ability was a measure of human worth and calculated in pounds sterling – but the money

118 Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic as a “counterculture of modernity” might be usefully applied here. (See Gilroy, 1-40).

171 translated into wages paid to free European factory workers, and, by contrast, the price of one’s body and soul on the slave market for the enslaved.

This chapter has demonstrated the place of disability in the commodification of

African captives. Atlantic slavery ‘produced’ disability among the enslaved and enforced bondspeople into a ‘state of injury.’ Enslaved individuals with impairments often faced unique conditions in their evaluation as property on English Caribbean plantations. Disabled labourers, moreover, posed challenges for slaveowners who often viewed them as burdens to the estate but recognized the practical need to incorporate them into the labour scheme.

Disability and commodification intersected not only in the experiences of the enslaved but also in representations of them. As Chapter Four will explain further, black people whose bodies bore the marks of their servitude in the form of scars, burns, and impairments were displayed in colonial newspapers, which served to promulgate the English notion that black bodies gave evidence of the supposedly savage and depraved dispositions of African decent peoples. Descriptions of enslaved bodies in runaway advertisements offer a window, albeit limited, into the lives of individual runaways. These representations of race and disability saturated the material world with meaning and served to structure rather than simply reflect reality in slave societies.119

119 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Disability and Representation,” Modern Language Association 120, no. 2 (March, 2005), 523.

172

Chapter 4

‘Incorrigible’ Runaways: Disability, Display, and Fugitive Bodies

“At the seam where body joins culture, every construction of the body begins and ends.”1

“…it is precisely within the ordinary and everyday that racialization has been most effective, where it makes race.”2

Introduction

This chapter explores the display of the bodies of enslaved people in Barbadian and

Jamaican runaway advertisements from 1718 to 1815. It is based on an analysis of over

1,000 paid runaway notices, which describe over 2,000 individual fugitives.3 In English

Caribbean slave societies, running away from one’s owner was the gravest non-violent crime an enslaved person could commit. By the eighteenth century, Barbadian and Jamaican law required that owners advertise each week in the press, “the height, names, marks, sex, and

1 Mark Jeffreys, “The Visible Cripple (Scars and Other Disfiguring Displays Included),” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggermann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: Modern Language Associations, 2001), 33. 2 Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (Feb., 1995), 14. 3 The majority of newspapers that have survived are from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I have included only paid advertisements, submitted to the newspapers by plantations owners or overseers and not those submitted by gaolers and workhouse administrators. All of the runaway advertisements are original; I have not counted repeat notices as part of this collection.

173 country…of each runaway in their custody.”4 These ‘peculiar’ marks, meant to aid in the identification and apprehension of the said runaway, consisted of phenotypic characteristics and the seemingly more distinct marks of scars, impairments, dismembered limbs and extremities, and other physical anomalies. Of the thousands of individual runaways recorded in my dataset, over seventy per cent were described as having a ‘mark of servitude.’ I define

‘mark of servitude’ as a corporeal mark that was produced by slavery. For instance, runaway notices record scars from the whip, brands, marks of disease, burns, sores, and amputated limbs and extremities (see Table 1). These bodily marks – whether transient, permanent, natural, or inflicted – provide a narrative and testimony of individuals’ lives, of suffering and survival.

Many of the physical afflictions detailed by owners in order to distinguish their fugitives in fact described the majority of enslaved individuals, who had acquired similar marks due to their shared experiences in slavery. In this way, one of the paradoxes of runaway notices is that, although they advertised for the return of individual fugitives, they also provided evidence of scars resulting from violence that were so widespread as to be almost mundane, rendering the individual anonymous and implying the interchangeability of black people. Runaway advertisements published in the English Caribbean press read as catalogues of recognizable forms of abuse inflicted onto the enslaved body and sanctioned by the institution of slavery. In the eighteenth-century English Atlantic World, “the bodies of the powerful and the socially weak…were presented differently and were available for

4 An Abridgement of the Laws in Force and Use in Her Majesty’s Plantations (Viz.) Of Virginia, Jamaica, Barbadoes, Maryland, New England, New-York, Carolina &c. (London, 1704), 145.

174 scrutiny in contrasting ways.”5 In colonial Barbados and Jamaica black bodies were repeatedly and publicly displayed in newsprint in ways that white bodies were not.

Newspapers were an important feature of the English Caribbean. The first newspaper in the islands was the Weekly Jamaica Courant, published in 1718. The first newspaper in

Barbados was the Barbados Gazette, published in 1731. During the period covered by this chapter (1718-1815) both Barbados and Jamaica had several newspapers circulating at one time.6 English Caribbean newspapers “present a detailed record of the life and concerns of the colonists of the region.”7 Runaway advertisements formed a large and significant portion of these newspapers; rarely did an issue of a Barbadian or Jamaican newspaper issue fail to advertise for a fugitive bondsperson during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Scholars of Caribbean slavery know about fugitive bondspeople precisely because they were

5 Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, “Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (2005), 41. 6 The following newspapers were in circulation in Barbados during this period: Barbados Gazettte (1731-?; 1783-1792); Barbados Mercury and later Barbados Mercury and Bridge Town Gazette (1762-1849); Barbados Chronicle or Caribbean Courier (1807-1809); Barbados Times (1814); Barbados Globe, Official Gazette and Colonial Advocate (1819- 1925?). The following newspapers were in circulation in Jamaica during this period: Weekly Jamaica Courant (1718-1755); Jamaica Gazette (1744/1745-1788?); St. Jago de la Vega Gazette (1755?-1840?); Saint Jago Intelligencer (1756?-1768?); Kingston Journal and later Kingston Journal and Jamaica Universal Museum (1756-1789); Cornwall Chronicle or Country Gazette (1773-1776) and later Cornwall Chronicle and General Advertiser (1776- 1781) and later Cornwall Chronicle and Jamaica General Advertiser (1781-1861?); Jamaica Mercury and Kingston Weekly Advertiser (1779-1780) and later Royal Gazette (1780-1838); Cornwall Mercury and Savanna-la-Mar Weekly Advertiser (1782-1791); Kingston Morning Post (1787?-?); Savanna-la-Mar Gazette (1788); Daily Advertiser (1790-1795?); Diary and Kingston Daily Advertiser (1795?-1806?); Jamaica Mercury and Trelawny Advertiser (1791?-1798?); Times (1792?); St. Jago Intelligencer (1799?); Kingston Mercantile Advertiser (1801?-1802?); Jamaica Courant (1805-1813) and later Jamaica Courant and Public Advertiser (1813-1828); Kingston Chronicle and City Advertiser (1805-1837) and later Kingston Chronicle (1814-1833); Jamaica Journal and Kingston Chronicle (1823- 1830). See Howard S. Practor, Colonial British Caribbean Newspapers: A Bibliography and Directory (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990). 7 Ibid., x.

175 advertised in colonial newspapers and the circulation of newspapers in the islands was reflective of the much wider expansion of internal and imperial trade in the Atlantic World.8

Runaway advertisements were written by owners or overseers and read by the free public, in particular the white free public who shared an invested interested in defeating the threat runaways posed to the order of plantation society.

Runaway advertisements in English Caribbean newspapers were not reserved for one particular page but rather were placed on any of the newspaper’s four pages. Many advertisements were repeated in several different newspapers and over months and years, which indicated that the runaway had found some success in her or his escape. It was common, although not the rule, for new advertisements to be placed on the front page of the newspaper. Written in small paragraphs and often grouped together among other paid advertisements, runaway notices demonstrate “the vital visual dimension of eighteenth- century culture.”9 All runaway advertisements were written in a similar fashion – they contained similar language and sequence of information. The first piece of information provided by advertisements was the location from which the captive fled. The descriptive information of the advertisements began with “RUN AWAY” or “ABSCONDED,” followed by the name and description of the fugitive. The descriptive information included detail about the fugitive’s physical and behavioural characteristics, her or his possible whereabouts and familial connections on neighbouring plantations, and other instances in which the bondsperson had run away. Almost all advertisements ended with monetary rewards offered

8 Wald, 247. 9 Jonathan Prude, “To Look Upon the ‘Lower Sort’: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800,” Journal of American History 78 (June 1991), 126.

176 by owners to anyone who apprehended the individual and concluded with a warning to ship captains to not take runaways on board. For instance:

Hanover, Spring-House April 19 1795

RANAWAY from this property, about two years since, a Coromantee negro wench

slave named STELLA. She is supposed to be 25 years of age, has none of her country

marks, but is generally know from having only one eye and a small leg. Whoever will

lodge her in a workhouse, giving notice thereof, or deliver her to Mr. John Connor,

near the Court-House, in Harbour Street, Kingston, or to the subscriber at the place

above-mentioned, shall be handsomely rewarded. CHAS. CONNOR. N.B All persons

are hereby cautioned against harbouring the said slave, and Captains of vessels from

taking her off the island.10

In Jamaica owners often offered different monetary rewards to whites and free people of colour. For instance, an advertisement from Westmoreland stated that “any person who will bring to conviction such person or persons detaining or harbouring the said slave, shall be entitled to the above reward of Twenty Pounds if the offender be a White Person, and Ten

Pounds if a Person of Colour, by applying as above, or to the subscriber.”11 Such rewards reflected the social and racial hierarchies of slave societies.

By the last half of the eighteenth century, runaway advertisements in the English

Caribbean press had become artifacts of everyday life. The disfigured, deformed, and disabled black body was made hyper-visible, not as something spectacular, but something routine, ordinary and unremarkable. Thomas C. Holt’s concept of ‘marking’ is useful here.

10 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 26 April 1795 (Jamaica). 11 The Cornwall Chronicle, and Jamaica General Advertiser, 14 June 1795 (Jamaica).

177

Holt uses ‘marking’ “in a doubled sense – as the act of representation that is the marking of race and as the act of inscription that is the marking of history.”12 Runaway advertisements demonstrate this double sense of marking: they illustrate white slaveowners’ representations of black bodies in the slave societies of Barbados and Jamaica, while they simultaneously reflect a much wider, historically rooted, anti-black racism in the English Atlantic World.

Drawing on French sociologist Henri Lefebvre and his critique of the ‘everyday,’ Holt argues:

power can only be realized at the level of the everyday practice, and it is dependent –

ultimately and inherently – on the reproduction of the relations, idioms, and the world-

view that are its means of action. In short, the everyday is where macro-level

phenomena – politics, economics, and ideologies – are lived.13

As materials of the everyday, runaway advertisements demonstrate how “the large and

‘important’ are articulated and expressed through the small and ‘unimportant’ and vice versa.”14 Runaway notices served an everyday purpose, which was to notify free society of fugitive bondspeople in order to apprehend them. And yet, runaway advertisements also reflect much wider phenomena. The descriptions of maimed, dismembered, malnourished, and deformed bondspeople reflected a “system of signs, symbols, and layered racial codes”15 in the making of race in the English Atlantic World.

The display of the black body in colonial newspapers reflected and engendered a multitude of English anti-black racist ideologies. For Frantz Fanon, the ‘marking’ of

12 Holt, 3. 13 Ibid., 10. 14 Ibid., 8. 15 Ibid., 16.

178 blackness made him “an object in the midst of other objects.”16 Fanon described an experience wherein through the “liberating gaze” of others, he was taken out of the world and put back into the world as a sealed ‘nonbeing.’ A moment of public humiliation, when a white child points at him and says, “Mama, look at the Negro! I’m frightened!” leads Fanon to the realization that his skin colour and other ‘black’ phenotypic characteristics have been alienated from and turned against him. He becomes a trope of dangerous difference, “all at once responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.” 17 It was this moment of shame that led Fanon to “discover” his blackness as inextricably intertwined with notions of disability: “Looking objectively at myself, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and my eardrums were assaulted by cannibalism, mental backwardness, fetishism, racial defects, slavery and the slave-ship, and above all else: ‘Dat is some good hot chocolate!’” For Fanon, the link between race and disability is not simply metaphorical.

Rather, Fanon posits that racist stereotypes about “mental backwardness” and “racial defects” rooted in the histories of black enslavement in the Caribbean continue to haunt and damage black people and their bodies.

Runaway advertisements reflect, enunciate, and catalogue English anti-black racism and the damage it inflicted onto the enslaved in the colonial Caribbean. In publishing the impaired, deformed, and disfigured black body in newspapers, slaveowners simultaneously highlighted and dismissed the danger posed by the figure of the fugitive, using an everyday

16 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks ([1952] London: Pluto Press, 1986), 82. 17 Ibid., 90. The following discussion of Fanon and disability first appeared in Stefanie Kennedy and Melanie J. Newton, “The Hauntings of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body,” in Disability and the Global South: the Critical Handbook, eds. Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic (New York: Springer Publishing Company, forthcoming 2015). Translations of Fanon are by Newton.

179 medium of communication in order to reproduce, naturalize, and render quotidian the routinized violence of colonial slavery and, as Chapters One and Two discussed, the pretexts for its infliction. What is more, as reminders that they were under the constant threat of surveillance and brutal violence by whites, the advertisements would also have kept black people in a state of terror. The display of the injured black body in fugitive notices worked to interlock blackness and disability as a social “uniform”18 that functioned as a means to set apart blacks, including free people of colour, from whites. This chapter argues that the power of owners to display the black body in runaway advertisements was a key part of the logic of enslavement and of emerging conceptions of racial difference in the early modern Atlantic

World.

Slave Flight and Runaway Advertisements

It is impossible to know precisely how many captives fled English Caribbean plantations during the colonial period. However, runaway notices indicate that marronage was common in both Barbados and Jamaica. Runaways explicitly challenged the institution of slavery by their unsanctioned absence from their owners. As noted in Chapters Two and

Three, they deprived owners of labourers, and could potentially reduce plantation production.

Fugitive bondspeople also threatened owners’ remaining workforce, for they could entice other captives to run away.19 As a mountainous, heavily forested, and comparatively large island Jamaica offered captives more opportunities for concealment and permanent self-

18 Fanon, 86. 19 Jerome S. Handler, "Escaping Slavery in a Caribbean Plantation Society: Maronage in Barbados, 1650s-1830s,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids-New West Indian Guide 71, no. 3/4 (1997), 184.

180 emancipation in the form of maroon communities. Barbados was a small, comparatively flat, and densely populated island, making it more difficult for runaways to go undiscovered by authorities.20 Still, enslaved individuals took flight in Jamaica and Barbados, as both a single but temporary act of resistance and as an effort to escape the system permanently.

The laws of Barbados and Jamaica testify to the gravity of the ‘crime’ of running away. Lawmakers claimed that it was Africans’ “brutish and barbarous nature,” which caused them to run away and “committ felonies and other enormities, not only to the terror and affrightment of the neighbourhood, but the danger of the Island in general.”21 Prior to

1655 at least eleven Barbadian laws dealt with marronage and sixteen of the 1661 Barbados slave code’s twenty-three clauses pertained directly to runaways.22 According to the 1661 law, the enslaved were not permitted leave on the Sabbath or any other day unless accompanied by a Christian or with a written consent of the owner or overseer. Anyone in possession of a runaway was required to return the individual to the proper owner or to the provost Marshall within six days after the publication of the act and pay a fine for “damage unto the owner.” Any Christian servant in possession of a fugitive received thirty-nine lashes. Any person who took up a runaway was expected to return the runaway within forty- eight hours or be fined. If a servant informed the courts that a runaway was being harboured, that servant was manumitted. Anyone free person who brought a runaway to the Marshall

20 Gad Heuman, “Runaway slaves in nineteenth-century Barbados,” Slavery & Abolition Special Issue: Out of the House of Bondage 6, no. 3 (1985), 95; Jerome Handler, “Diseases and Medical Disabilities of Enslaved Barbadians, From the Seventeenth Century to around 1838: Part 2,” The Journal of Caribbean History 40, no. 1 (2006), 183-84. 21 “An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” (1692) in Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados From 1643-1762, Inclusive…(London, 1764). 22 Handler, “Escaping Slavery,” 185.

181 received a reward of one hundred pounds of “Musso” sugar.23 Anyone who apprehended a fugitive who had been absent for one year or more was to receive five hundred pounds of sugar. Owners were to encourage bondspeople to apprehend fugitive captives. Owners were required to search the houses of captives twice a month for runaways. The law stipulated that the Marshall could detain and keep all runaways until owners paid him one hundred and ten pounds of “Musso” sugar and an additional four pounds for every 24 hours the fugitive had been in the Marshall’s custody. If any runaway died for want of food or dry lodging while under the Marshall’s care, the Marshall was responsible for paying the owner the value of the captive. Anyone who persuaded a captive to flee with the intention of carrying them away from the island was fined five hundred pounds of sugar. The law further declared that a group of “any number of men not exceeding twenty” may form “to apprehend or take them

[runaways] either alive or dead.”24 If the runaway was killed during her or his apprehension, the owner was financially compensated for loss of property. If any fugitive under punishment for running away die, no one was accountable. Lastly, within ten days after the publication of the act, all owners were to provide the Secretary a list of all their fugitive bondspeople.25 The

Jamaica slave code of 1664 also reflected the security issues raised by enslaved flight.

In the Barbados 1661 law, runaways missing for more than thirty days were sentenced to death for crimes against their owners. This law, however, was amended soon

23 “Musso” was probably short for Muscovado sugar. 24 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Clause XIV, on microfilm at the Faculty of Law Library at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. Similar wording can be found in An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negro Slaves (Jamaica, 1664), Clause XVII, on microfilm at the Faculty of Law Library at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. 25 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Clauses 1, 4-21 (excepting clause 17). Similar wording can be found in An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negro Slaves (Jamaica, 1664), Clauses 4-12, 17-19.

182 hereafter and by the eighteenth century punishments for runaways were dealt with privately.

If an enslaved fugitive returned to her or his owner’s plantation, either willingly or by force, she or he was most often punished by the owner, as opposed to tried in court.26 It was common for planters to cut off one’s foot, especially if the individual had escaped on more than one occasion.27 The 1684 Jamaican law stated that “if any Slave by punishment from his Owner for running-away, or other Offence, suffer in Life or Limb, none shall be Liable to the Law for the same.”28 This clause legally exonerated slaveowners who injured their apprehended fugitives, even if such injury involved dismemberment or death. Such laws confirmed the almost sovereign power of slaveowners to punish runaway bondspeople to whatever degree they wished.

Policing had yet to become a professional occupation in the early modern world and authorities in the metropole and colonies struggled with how exactly to detect and index wanted criminals and share this information with ‘respectable’ society.29 The rise of the newspaper press provided the answer. English colonial newspapers were a part of a transatlantic ‘news revolution’ and advertisements for criminals and missing people were immediately incorporated into the newspaper genre. By the mid-eighteenth century, newspapers were a central feature of everyday life in metropolitan as well as colonial cities,

26 Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-86 (Barbados: University of West Indies Press, 1999), 144. 27 For comparison see Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family 3rd Anniversary ed. ([1963] New York: Vanguard Books, 2007), 313. In Roots Kunta Kinte is still a teenager when slavecatchers chop off half of his foot in order to make it impossible for him to ever run away again. 28 “The Acts of Assembly and Laws of Jamaica, Abridg'd under Proper Heads,” (1684) in An Abridgement of the Laws in Force and Use in Her Majesty's Plantations; (Viz.) Of Virginia, Jamaica, Barbadoes, Maryland, New-England, New-York, Carolina, &c. (London, 1704). 29 Ibid., 278.

183 with advertisements seeking criminals, fugitives, and missing persons through detailed descriptions of individuals’ appearances.30 Through runaway advertisements, lawmakers and slaveowners used the newspaper press to put criminal justice in action.

As one of the only widespread sources of written descriptions of bondspeople in the

English Caribbean (some sale advertisements also provided detailed depictions) runaway advertisements are an invaluable starting place for examining the appearances of the enslaved, their kin and community relations, their interactions with plantation authority, and their desperation to escape slavery. The information gleaned from fugitive notices, however, has its limits and must be read ‘against the grain.’ Gad Heuman’s claim that runaway advertisements are an “unbiased” source for the study of runaways and the nature of slavery in the Caribbean seems to dismiss the significance of the fact that depictions of runaways reflected owners’ and overseers’ perceptions of the individual fugitive, which were likely influenced by longstanding racist ideologies about black and African bodies and minds. As will be discussed later in this chapter, this is especially true with regard to descriptions of

African phenotype, which owners often portrayed as corporeal abnormalities.

David Waldstreicher offers an alternative perspective, arguing that “runaway advertisements, in effect, were the first slave narratives – the first published stories about slaves and their seizure of freedom.”31 Waldstreicher’s argument highlights the narrative aspect of runaway advertisements but does not critically examine the practical and

30 Mark S. Dawson, “First Impressions: Newspaper Advertisements and Early Modern English Body Imaging, 1651-1750,” Journal of British Studies 50, no. 2 (April 2011), 278. 31 David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly Special Issue: African and American Atlantic Worlds, Third Series 56, no. 2, (April 1999), 247.

184 ideological purposes that the advertisements served. Ex-slave narratives were influenced by the politics of abolition, whereas runaway advertisements were influenced by slaveowners’ racism and capitalist self-interest in regaining their human property. While runaway advertisements offer perhaps a more candid insight into the abuses of slavery, the volition of the enslaved, and their relationships to kin, runaway notices were written for drastically different purposes than abolitionist publications.

Fugitive notices reveal a great deal about the nature of marronage in the English

Caribbean, including the time of year when a bondsperson fled, the length of time a fugitive had been absent, and the value and skill of the particular captive. The majority of runaways were skilled males and generally more African-born fugitives were apprehended than creoles. Both field and skilled labourers ran away and owners advertised for both, however, it was more common for skilled bondspeople to flee successfully.32 Runaway advertisements reveal that owners who resided closer to cities with access to the local newspapers advertised more frequently than those who lived in the more rural outskirts. Thus, the presence of skilled and domestic fugitives in runaway advertisements was also a reflection of the greater tendency for such advertisements to be placed by owners who lived in or near to towns, since non-agricultural and domestic labour strongly characterized enslavement in urban or other non-rural contexts.33

Enslaved individuals of mixed black and white descent could more easily pass as free if they were fortunate enough to make it to a town and find means of supporting

32 Heuman. 5. 33 Ibid., 4.

185 themselves.34 Escaping slavery altogether “required good luck, good sense, audacity, and the connivance of friends and relatives.”35 Sometimes the subscribers speculated on the fugitives’ destinations and fellow conspirators. Other times, owners expressed anger toward the runaway and denied there was any reason to warrant escape. Many runaway advertisements targeted particular readers, including “masters of vessels” and neighbouring plantations. Runaways who made it to the ports could find work on trading vessels or join a captain’s crew and be taken abroad.36 Barry Higman and Gad Heuman have shown that runaways in the sugar colonies tended to escape at particular times in the year, usually in

July and August when the crop had been harvested and food supplies from the plantation and provision grounds were scarce. The majority of the hard labour needed for sugar production was completed by this time of year, which meant that slaveholders were not in dire need of labourers and were, therefore, not as inclined to pay to advertise for their fugitive captives.37

Thus, not every runaway warranted an advertisement.

The physical detail provided in the advertisements reflected the degree to which the enslaved were watched and physically inspected by slaveholding authorities.38 Owners, managers, and overseers subjected bondspeople to physical inspection before purchasing them, whenever they claimed illness, or at any time owners or plantation management saw fit. Drivers watched field labourers with close supervision and were, therefore, likely privy to

34 Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society 1787-1834 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 48. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Gad Heuman, “Introduction” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies Special Issue: Out of the House of Bondage 6, no. 3 (1985), 5. 38 Morgan and Rushton, 40.

186 individuals’ injuries and illnesses. The enslaved were, moreover, often stripped naked for punishments, their bodies exposed to plantation authorities as well as to their fellow bondspeople.39 Power and surveillance worked together as a means to reduce the supposed danger and threat of the enslaved. As Michel Foucault argued, confining and observing individuals are key means for the exercise and acquisition of power and knowledge.40 Yet for modern power to be effective it must involve more than violence and include mechanisms of confinement and observation. Close physical scrutiny by owners, overseers, and managers afforded masters knowledge about areas of enslaved people’s bodies that would otherwise be concealed by clothing. The enslaved were property and, by detailing marks inflicted onto their bodies, runaway advertisements confirmed this very fact.41

Runaway notices were often accompanied by one or two stock images of a fugitive bondsperson (see Figure 1). The circulation of this able-bodied image must be understood both in relation to, and separately from, the text of runaway advertisements. The image of an able-bodied black runaway man embodied all the fears of whites about the potential for black violence and retribution. Moreover the illustrations deployed in runaway advertisements contradict the written descriptions of individual fugitives that followed. The illustrations depict able-bodied individuals in-flight, however, the descriptions more often than not reveal individuals in injurious physical states, with limps, amputations, scars and various

39 For instance, in reference to the cruel punishments ordered by her mistress, Mary Prince wrote: “To strip me naked – to hang me up by the wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow- skin, was an ordinary punishment for even a slight offence.” See Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, ed. Sara Salih ([1831] London: Penguin Books, 2000), 15. 40 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 41 Prude, 137.

187 impairments. The walking sticks that were often portrayed in these illustrations reflected the length of the runaway’s travels and not that the individual had difficulty walking.

Figure 1 (American Antiquarian Society)

188

As a genre, runaway advertisements from Barbados and Jamaica resemble other advertisements popular in the English press, most notably those for deserted sailors, absented apprentices and metropolitan fugitives from slavery. Like colonial runaway notices, metropolitan advertisements for enslaved runaways describe fugitives as having scars and other involuntary physical marks caused by disease. Runaway James Teernon was described in the English press as having “a scar on his forehead.”42 Other metropolitan fugitives were described as bearing the visible physical effects of disease. For instance, a runaway notice in the London newspaper the Public Advertiser on December 20 1766, described an enslaved fugitive as:

a Negro Man slave, named Jack, and who calls himself John Dixon…aged about thirty

two years, and is about 5 feet 7 inches high; he is rather wide between the knees, and

his ankles bend inward; he is of a lusty form, very upright, has a very steady settled

countenance and has had the small pox, his visage used to be roundish, but a certain

disorder of three months continuance has reduced him, and made his cheeks look very

hollow and changed his complexion to a yellow hue. He speaks English freely, in as

good a manner as any English servant.

It was more common, however, for metropolitan advertisements to rely on the clothing of the enslaved as opposed to marks on the flesh as an identifying mark. According to Gwenda

Morgan and Peter Rushton, absent in English runaway advertisements are “comments on brands or whipping marks inflicted by judicial process or private discipline.”43 An enslaved fugitive named Theodore was described by his owner as “about 5 feet 6 inches high, had on

42 Public Advertiser, 13 November 1761 (London). 43 Morgan and Rushton, 47.

189 when he run away a blue jacket, and a green one under, wearing a hat and wig.”44 The dependency on clothing as an identifying mark speaks to the widespread presence of domestic slaves in the metropole. Metropolitan slaveowners, moreover, dressed their bondspeople in expensive garments as a sign of prestige and wealth.45 In England, “the higher up the social scale the owner was, the less did the slave have to fear physical violence, if only because the rich paid good money for their slaves and were careful to protect their investment.”46 By contrast Barbadian and Jamaican runaway advertisements reflect the fact that English Caribbean slaveowners viewed bondspeople as expendable and exploitable.

Enslaved individuals in the colonies were, therefore, bereft of such ‘protection.’ The brutality of sugar production coupled with the malnutrition and disease among the enslaved populations and the heightened racist tension of slave societies made slavery in the English

Caribbean more physically destructive to the enslaved body than enslavement in the metropole.

Metropolitan advertisements for absconded apprentices differ most significantly from

Caribbean runaway advertisements. Although apprentice advertisements similarly describe the missing subject’s appearance, the clothing of the apprentice serves as the key distinguishing factor and not her or his body. If peculiar scars or blemishes are mentioned in notices for runaway apprentices they almost always concern physical marks located on the individual’s face or hands. Unlike notices seeking enslaved fugitives in the colonies, metropolitan advertisements for both absconded apprentices and enslaved domestics exclude

44 Public Advertiser, 14 February 1759 (London). 45 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain ([1984] London: Pluto Press, 2010), 25. 46 Ibid., 24.

190 body parts that were typically concealed by clothing – breasts, stomach, back, thighs etc. For instance, in 1755 an English notice for an absconded apprentice read:

...William Cooper, Apprentice to John Shillitoe...absented himself from his Master on

Sunday last without Provocation...He is a tall thin Lad, nineteen years of age, pitted

with the small-pox, two or three moles upon his face; had on when he went away an

Olive colour’d thicket Frock and Waistcoat, with silver vellum holes, and a pair of

black leather breeches.47

Like the physical marks of the enslaved body, the clothing of apprentices was detailed with a considerable degree of precision. An English advertisement from The Daily Advertiser described a missing apprentice as having worn “a dark striped green coat, blue under coat with yellow buttons, striped waistcoat, black breeches, and new boots.”48 In contrast, enslaved individuals in the colonies were rarely recorded as having worn anything apart from

‘osnaburg’ clothing, which by law owners were to provide captives with once per year.

By not offering monetary rewards for apprehending the apprentice, the advertisements demonstrate that the apprentice’s labour, not her or his person was commodified in the metropolitan economy. In contrast, bondspeople were commodities incorporated into a transnational economy and, as such, monetary rewards were always offered for runaway captives in both the metropolitan and colonial presses. In the colonies, such monetary rewards augmented the power of slave law, which required all inhabitants to apprehend runaways and return them to their owners. It also served to criminalize the

47 London Evening Post 23-25, January 1755 (London). 48 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 16 October 1788 (London).

191 enslaved, making these runaway notices more akin to ‘wanted’ notices for criminals than to advertisements seeking information about ‘missing’ persons.

Runaway advertisements offer more evidence of the significance of visible and invisible afflictions in determining how slaveholding authorities calculated a bondsperson’s

‘worth.’ Concepts of ‘worth’ and ‘value’ would have likely impacted plantation management’s decision whether or not to advertise for impaired, diseased, or permanently injured fugitives. How many impaired, permanently injured, or diseased runaways were unaccounted for in the Barbadian and Jamaican press? Here the archive reveals, through what it is missing, the taxonomies of bodily value that extended to human ‘worth.’ The rewards offered in runaway advertisements for apprehending and returning fugitives can be read as a reflection of this economy of ‘worth.’ For instance, an advertisement in the

Jamaican press in 1780 read:

RUN AWAY, about 15 months ago, a Negro Man of the Mungola country, named

JAMAICA, of a black complexion, about five feet three inches high, pretty stout made,

his forehead very much wrinkled, and marked with the letter R or R.S. on one or both

cheeks, about forty five years of age, was formerly the property of Richard Simmons,

deceased, and has been used to the brick making and fishing business. Also, about two

months ago, two negro men, named JAMES and SAMBO. James of the Congo

country, of a vey black complexion, about about [sic] 50 or 55 years of age, walks very

lame, by trade a bricklayer, he was formerly the property of Richard Reeder, deceased.

Sambo, a creole, very old, his head quite white, pretends to be blind; he is supposed to

be harboured by his son, who lives to windward, he was formerly the property of John

Coughlan, deceased; a reward of ten pounds, for Jamaica, and a half Joe each for James

192

and Sambo, will be given, by the subscriber, to any person or persons, that apprehends

and lodges them in any of the gaols of this island, so that the proprietor may get them

again, and any person proving by whom they are harboured or concealed, so as the

person or persons so harbouring or concealing said negroes be convicted, shall receive

TEN POUNDS for each….RICHARD LATIMER49

All three bondsmen were skilled labourers, however, Jamaica’s younger age and physical health and abilities likely placed his value as a labourer higher than James and Sambo, who were both older and had physical limitations.

For slave ship sailors, like the enslaved, desertion was an act of rebellion against their poor treatment and the tyrannical rule of the ship’s captain. Like the enslaved, deserted sailors withheld labour and were often provoked to runaway due to their brutal treatment at the hands of ship captains and the harsh living conditions of the Middle Passage. Captains were more inclined to search and apprehend deserters before the start of the voyage than after the cargo had been sold in the Caribbean. As they approached the Caribbean, slave ship captains could abuse sailors with impunity, knowing that the sailors stood little chance of eliciting sympathy from a Caribbean magistrate.50 Like the enslaved, many sailors deserted when no escape route was obvious. It was also common for sailors to escape in geographic locations that Europeans typically found hostile, like Africa and the Caribbean.51 In this way, deserted sailors and runaway captives shared comparable experiences of coerced labour and of a master’s physical control over their bodies.

49 Supplement to the Royal Gazette Saturday, 1-8 July 1780 (Jamaica). 50 Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes 1730-1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 209. 51 Ibid., 114.

193

The display of wounds in Caribbean fugitive notices was part of a long history of staging both race and disability for visual consumption. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that, “the history of disabled people in the Western world is in part the history of being on display, of being conspicuous while being politically and socially erased.”52 Perhaps more than other kinds of advertisements, runaway notices reflect the overlapping histories of race and disability on display. What distinguishes them from other forms of display such as freak shows and curiosity cabinets is the terror that they engendered. Runaway advertisements did not spark wonder like depictions of black bodies in earlier travelogues. Rather, fugitive notices reflected the fear among white society of the supposedly dangerous and disorderly enslaved population. The advertisements were a reflection of the plantocracy’s anxiety over sustaining the institution of slavery.

Freedom on the Move: Surveillance and Restrained Mobility

In the English Caribbean, the desire to run away and escape enslavement was cast as an incurable disability that was, therefore, criminal. The label ‘incorrigible’ runaway – used by whites to describe enslaved persons who perpetually ran away – suggested that the desire to self-emancipate was a reflection of the supposed inner defectiveness of Africans. Jenifer

Barclay argues in her study of slavery and disability in Antebellum America that running away and drunkenness were ‘vices’ that “paralleled wider discussions of amorphous, ill-

52 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Staring at the Other,” Disability Studies Quarterly 25, no. 4 (Fall 2005), np.

194 defined disabilities such as insanity, feeble-mindedness, and epilepsy in American society.”53

Similarly, in the English Caribbean colonies, plantation records demonstrate that owners categorized perpetual runaways among the ‘infirm’ and as ‘useless’ to the estate. In the 1791 plantation records from the Seawell plantation in Christ Church Barbados, two bondsmen,

Tom and Jack, are listed among the ‘old’ and ‘infirm’ and given the description, “always absent except when confined.”54 Tom and Jack’s supposed disposition to runaway rendered them ‘useless’ even when present on the plantation. A similar description can be found in the

1772 plantation records of Melville Hall Estate in Dominica. Four enslaved individuals –

Cudgo, Quaco, Wattie, and Blair – are described as being “useless upon the Estate, constantly running away, and returning when they’re sickly and being recovered takes the same course again and use every method to destroy themselves.”55 The repeated flight of these men led to their categorization as ‘useless,’ along with captives who did not contribute to plantation production due to physical impairments, debilitating disease, mental health issues, or old age. Together the Seawell and Melville Hall plantation records demonstrate that, in the English Caribbean, planters and overseers viewed the desire for freedom as a disability with no cure. Whites’ construction of running away as an infirmity served to reinforce an imagined connection between blackness and disability. “When the imbrication of blackness and disability produce violent markings on enslaved bodies,” writes Nirmala

53 Jenifer Barclay, “The Greatest Degree of Perfection: Disability and Constructions of Race in American Slave Law,” The South Carolina Review 46, no. 2 (Spring 2014), 35. 54 Newton Papers MS523/276, University of West Indies – Cave Hill Campus. 55 Melville Hall Estate Papers 25th March 1772. ADD. 35155 a.5, British Library.

195

Erevelles, “the assault on enslaved subjectivities is profound.”56 Runaway advertisements worked to pathologize enslaved resistance and construct enslaved individuals’ desire for freedom as a sign of racial deficiency and disability.

The casting of running away as the outward sign of an inner deficiency served to stigmatize Africans and their descendants with disability and produce a set of practices that disabled apprehended fugitives via a system of violent discipline and punishment. In

Barbados apprehended fugitives were imprisoned in the ‘cage’ at the centre of Bridgetown until slaveowners claimed them. By mid-eighteenth century, other towns in Barbados had cages, where fugitives were kept temporarily, before being transferred to the main cage in

Bridgetown.57 Described as a “small, low, dirty-looking building, with grated doors and windows,” the cage was a prison designed specifically for fugitives.58 The cage, which was maintained by the government and occasionally inspected by legislative committees, was

“even by the standards of the period, dingy, cramped, and unsanitary.”59 Several Barbadian runaway advertisements requested that, if apprehended, fugitives be ‘secured’ or ‘lodged’ in the cage. By the early nineteenth century, whites began complaining to government authorities about the cage, arguing that it was vile, disease-infested, and emanated an awful odor. According to white residents, the cage was also loud and noisy at night and, therefore, not suitable for Bridgetown’s most populous street.60 In 1817, the white residents of

Barbados petitioned that caged runaways be removed from Bridgetown; a few months later a

56 Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 41. 57 Handler, “Escaping Slavery,” 205. 58 Cited in Handler, “Escaping Slavery,” 205. 59 Ibid., 205-206. 60 Ibid., 206.

196 new cage was built away from the main streets of Bridgetown.61 The cage was a visually striking form of discipline that reflected slaveowners’ obsession with eliminating all expressions of freedom by disabling enslaved individual’s bodies from moving freely.

Slaveowners often secured apprehended runaways in iron shackles to further restrict a bondsperson’s ability to physically move. Runaways were made to wear iron collars with projecting spikes around their necks and iron chains around their legs. The 1708 slave laws of Barbados mandated that the enslaved was legally obliged to wear “a metaled Collar locked about his, her or their Neck or Necks, Leg or Legs.”62 These collars, marked with the slaveowner’s name, attempted to render the bondsperson mere chattel by testifying, in a deliberately visible way, to black commodification. Iron restraints served to both categorize and name captives and were meant to make the process of distinguishing and returning runaways significantly easier for island inhabitants. Some masters made their bondspeople wear collars on a daily basis, whereas others used them as a form of punishment for running away. During his trip to Jamaica (1707-1725), Hans Sloane explained that “for Running away they [masters] put Iron Rings of great weight on their [slaves’] ankles, or Pottocks about their necks, which are Iron Rings with two long Necks rivetted to them, or a spur in the mouth.”63 The use of a spur or other manacle caused severe pain and prevented the sufferer

61 Ibid., 106 62 “An Act to prohibit the Inhabitants of this island from employing, their Negroes or other Slaves, in selling or bartering (1708) in Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados From 1643- 1762, Inclusive...(London, 1764), 185. 63 Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural history of the Herbs and Trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, &c. of the last of those islands; to which is prefix’d, an introduction, wherein is an account of the inhabitants, air, waters, diseases, trade, &c. of that place, with some relations concerning the neighbouring continent, and islands of America. Illustrated

197 from speaking, eating, and even swallowing.64 Such disciplining measures served to make metaphoric mutes of bondspeople, whereas, the use of bodily chains attempted to make individuals metaphoric cripples.65 In the runaway notices studied herein, several individuals are noted to have been in chains when they left their owners’ property. Collars and chains had both temporary and lasting effects on the body’s freedom of movement. Chains were obviously material restraints that augmented chattel status and disabled the enslaved by limiting the body’s potential for movement. Both collars and chains abraded the skin and caused open sores and infection, which could limit the body’s ability to move freely long after the shackles were removed. The physical impact of wearing a collar everyday would have been undoubtedly physically debilitating. Collars and chains also left scars, which disfigured the skin, leaving a permanent corporeal reminder of enslavement.

Lawmakers enforced forms of brutalization that were less physically damaging than iron restraints and the cage but that continued to impose metaphoric disabilities onto the enslaved by limiting their freedom of movement. Before there was a culture of advertising in the English Caribbean, there was a culture of surveillance. The first comprehensive slave codes of Barbados and Jamaica required that captives carry a ‘ticket,’ a written document that was authorized by the subject’s owner or overseer, which permitted the bondsperson to

with figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved. In large copper-plates as big as the life Vol. 1 of 2 (London, 1707-1725), vii. 64 Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant; or, slave trader reformed Second Edition (New York, 1807), 271. 65 For a discussion of American slave law and metaphoric disabilities see Jenifer Barclay, “’The Greatest Degree of Perfection’: Disability and the Construction of Race in American Slave Law,” in South Carolina Review Special Issue: Locating African American Literature, eds. Rhonda Thomas and Angela Naimou 46, no. 2 (Spring 2014) 27-43.

198 be temporarily absent from the plantation on “necessary business.”66 As Barclay argues, tickets “reflected slaveholders’ desire to imagine and construct enslaved blacks as wholly dependent and limited cripples.”67 In slave societies, ‘tickets’ were an attempt to prevent the enslaved from passing as a free person. In this way, ‘tickets’ were similar to ‘identity’ papers popular in early modern Europe, which described people for passport and were an attempt to establish methods of description, recording, and surveillance as reliable means of identification.68 ‘Tickets,’ or authorization papers, were an essential feature of the Barbadian and Jamaican law, however, “it is unknown to what extent [they were] enforced and how effectively [they] helped to inhibit slaves from unauthorized absences.”69 Still, the legal requirement of a ticket endured in Barbadian and Jamaican law throughout much of the colonial period. Outside of law, the enslaved were under constant surveillance – or at least threat – from drivers, watchmen and slavecatchers and endured the culture of fear that all of white society was constantly on-guard, watching and monitoring the island. Indeed, the language of runaway notices contains a Foucauldian element; it gives the sense that owners and overseers wrote to one another and other concerned whites out of a shared interest in preying on fugitive bondspeople.

An analysis of tickets as imposing metaphoric disabilities on the enslaved runs the risk of interpreting disability as nothing but limitations. And yet, as Tanya Tichkosky argues, disability as limit without possibility “is, of course, impossible since limit is always

66 An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes (Barbados, 1661), Clause I. 67 Barclay, 36. 68 Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Renaissance Imposters and Proofs of Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13. 69 Handler, “Escaping Slavery,” 185.

199 potentiated by possibility.”70 The increase in literacy among the enslaved in the early nineteenth century made forgery of written authorization more common and likely influenced the Barbadian Assembly’s exclusion of tickets from the 1826 Barbados slave code and its decision to make forgery a capital offence, punishable by death.71 Thus, authorization papers offered a fiction of control and authenticity and it was precisely this effectiveness – the promise of controlled mobility and identification – that also led to their being used as a means of undermining surveillance. Whereas the legal enforcement of tickets was an attempt to limit bondspeople’s freedom and make metaphoric cripples of them, bondspeople’s consistent pursuit of freedom demonstrates that the ways in which the enslaved used limit, and therefore disability, as meaningful forms of resistance in Atlantic slavery.

Disability and Masquerade in Runaway Advertisements

Runaway advertisements are an invaluable source for the study of physical, intellectual, and emotional disabilities among the enslaved in the English Caribbean.

Fugitives were not an isolated group but rather represented the larger enslaved population.72

The pervasiveness of impairment described in runaway advertisements, therefore, illustrates the degree to which impairment and disability affected all bondspeople and shaped experiences of enslavement. Some of the impairments endured by the enslaved were quite disabling in that they significantly limited their physical mobility in the environment of

Barbados and Jamaica. Still, individuals dared to run away, despite their physical limitations.

70 Tanya Titchkosky, Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 123. 71 Handler, “Escaping Slavery,” 185. 72 Heuman, “Introduction,” 5.

200

A variety of different physical, intellectual, and emotional impairments can be found in runaway advertisements. The runaway advertisements analyzed herein suggest some possibilities about the presence of ‘marks of servitude’ over time (see Tables 1-4). The information collected and displayed in these tables covers approximately one hundred years of fugitive notices and is grouped into twenty-five year intervals and reflects the percentage of individuals described as having a ‘mark of servitude.’73 Such marks have been categorized into six groupings: brands, deformities, impairments, disfigurements, amputations, and marks of punishment. Brands include only those who have been branded with signs of ownership – often with the slaveowners’ initials. Punishment brands, such as ‘R’ for runaway have been included in the ‘punishment’ category. Deformities include individuals described as ‘knock- kneed,’ ‘parrot-toed,’ ‘crooked,’ or ‘deformed,’ among other descriptors. Impairments include both physical and sensory impairments. Classified as disfigurements are scars, burns, sores, and wounds. I have chosen not to include small pox among disfigurements because both free and enslaved were susceptible to this disease and, therefore, it does not constitute a

‘mark of servitude.’ Amputations include individuals described as having missing limbs or extremities. The ‘punishment’ category refers only to cases where owners have indicated that the fugitive had ‘marks of the whip’ or ‘marks of punishment.’ While these identifying marks have been placed in separate categories, it is important to note that several of them overlap. For instance, as Chapter 3 discussed, the yaws was a disease common among the enslaved and one that could disfigure, deform, and impair an individual’s feet.

73 The information displayed in these pie charts is derived from my entire dataset of runaway advertisements. See the bibliography of this dissertation for the specific newspaper dates.

201

The information collected demonstrates that over a period of ninety-seven years, deformities, impairments, disfigurements, amputations, and marks of punishment all increased, whereas branding significantly declined over the last nineteen-year period (1796-

1815). Such information may not map onto the wider enslaved population in this exact way, however it suggests important changes with regard to identifying marks and the violence inflicted onto enslaved bodies. Many of the marks described in runaway advertisements insinuate violence, however, in the first fifty years of this dataset, owners did not identify particular scars or wounds as being marks of punishment. The information further demonstrates that disfigurements, deformities, and impairments replaced branding as the most pervasive identifying mark in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century runaway advertisements. Thus, at the very moment when amelioration efforts to lessen the frequency of impairment and disfigurement among the enslaved came into effect, runaway advertisements indicate a sharp increase of deformities, disfigurements, impairments, amputations, and marks of punishment among fugitive bondspeople.

202

Table 1

1718-1743

BRANDS DEFORMITIES IMPAIRMENT DISFIGUREMENT AMPUTATION PUNISHMENT

Table 2

1744-1769

BRANDS DEFORMITIES IMPAIRMENT DISFIGUREMENT AMPUTATION PUNISHMENT

203

Table 3

1770-1795

BRANDS DEFORMITIES IMPAIRMENT DISFIGUREMENT AMPUTATION PUNISHMENT

Table 4

1796-1815

BRANDS DEFORMITIES IMPAIRMENT DISFIGUREMENT AMPUTATION PUNISHMENT

204

Owners most frequently described physical impairments as distinguishing characteristics, however, intellectual and emotional impairments were also described in advertisements and were equally powerful as identifying marks. For instance, the speech of fugitive captives was a common trait used by owners to identify their missing bondsperson.

Runaways were often described as having speech impediments, stammers, and stutters.74

Fugitive notices are not the kind of primary source to indicate the origin of speech disorders, however, it seems reasonable to speculate that speech impediments among the enslaved were a result of trauma caused by slavery’s culture of fear and terror. The term ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek word ‘τραύµα,’ meaning ‘wound’ and refers to a traumatic experience or the memory of that experience as imprinted in the individual’s mind.75 This ‘psychic wounding’ can be a result of individual or collective trauma. Trauma affects language and speech defects are sometimes the result of “a special kind of individual trauma that blurs the distinction between these two basic types [individual and collective trauma].”76 Stammers and stutters can develop when the individual experiences repeated trauma not just through memory but in “everyday contact with his or her social environment.”77 Bondspeople experienced repeated psychological and physical violence in their everyday lives. The pervasiveness of speech peculiarities among runaway bondspeople might indicate that

74 For instance, The Royal Gazette, 1-8 April 1780 (Jamaica); Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 4-11 1780 (Jamaica); The Daily Advertiser, Monday January 3 1791 (Jamaica); The Kingston Journal, 24 October 1761; 21-28 July 1781; 11 March 1780 (Jamaica); Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette, 21 May 1806 (Barbados). 75 Patrick Müller, “The impediment that cannot say its name’: Stammering and Trauma in Selected American and British Texts,” Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 130, no. 1 (April 2012), 57. 76 Ibid., 58. 77 Ibid., 59.

205 individuals’ everyday contact with overseers, owners, and drivers and the routinized violence of slavery in general, may have caused trauma-induced speak blocks. The speech differences described by owners could have also been tactics used by the enslaved to deflect owners’ and overseers’ demands by enacting disability.

Owners did not always indicate the cause of bodily afflictions, however, the marks described in runaway advertisements are often suggestive of violence. An advertisement in the Jamaica Courant, on August 5, 1718, described a runaway whose nose had been partly cut off, a legally sanctioned punishment for crimes only the enslaved could commit.78

Dismembered limbs and extremities were also frequently mentioned in runaway advertisements and although toes, feet, legs, hands, and arms were sometimes amputated or cut off because of sores, such amputations could also be evidence of punishments, particularly of runaways.79 To deter running away, owners sadistically punished the enslaved and meted out “all kinds of abominations…such as deliberately crippling them and even sawing off their offending legs.”80 An advertisement published in the Barbados Gazette and

General Intelligencer in 1788 read: “Absented from the subscriber, a negro man named Joe, formerly the property of Thomas Burton, Esq. deceased. He is about six feet high, one of his legs has been taken off above the knee, and he speaks very good English...”81

Dismemberments could be the result of punishment or labour accident – in the mill, the field, or the great house. Whether punishment or labour ‘accident,’ such disabilities were still produced by Atlantic slavery. A notice from Jamaica in July, the following year described a

78 Jamaican Courant, 5 August 1718 (Jamaica). 79 Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (University of the West Indies Press, 1995), 294. 80 Shyllon, 12. 81 Barbados Gazette and General Intelligencer, 2-5 July 1788 (Barbados).

206 female fugitive, Liddy, who had “lost her right hand above the wrist, and had an iron collar round her neck.”82 The iron collar on Liddy suggests that she had previously run away from her owner; her amputated right hand may be indicative of a punishment for a criminal offence or of a labour accident.

Physical impairments described in runaway advertisements poignantly demonstrate how disability among the enslaved was quite literally produced by slaveholder power. On

September 9 1788 the following advertisement was published:

Ran away about four weeks since FROM SMITHFIELD, A Negro Man-Boy, ABOUT

five feet high, has two scars on the back of his head, a hole in each ear, large features,

walks lame from a hurt in one of his hips, several marks of a whip in his body, legs,

and arms, and has the crab-yaws on one of his feet. Whoever will bring him to the

Subscriber shall be handsomely rewarded. THOMAS PRICE.83

Descriptions of physical impairments hint at the extreme difficulty that some labourers must have faced in the time-sensitive and demanding work regime of sugar production. Several individuals were described as being “defective in walking,” “crippled,” “crooked,” “walks a little lame from a hurt on one of his legs,” and “in a debilitated state.” One advertisement recorded that a fugitive man named August had “his right leg and foot much decayed, being born so, and walks lame.”84 A “mulatto” man, Samuel Millar was described as “afflicted to have the rheumatism in his arm.”85 In 1806, an enslaved girl named Clarissa was described as having “the third finger on her right hand crippled, a mark under her right eye, and has

82 The Royal Gazette, 8 July 1789 (Jamaica). 83 The Savanna La Mar Gazette, 9 September 1788 (Jamaica). 84 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 23-30 September 1780 (Jamaica). 85 Ibid.

207 also the marks of punishment.”86 ‘Lameness,’ ‘crippled’ limbs, and ‘abnormal’ gaits were some of the most common forms of physical impairment displayed and described in

Barbadian and Jamaica runaway notices.

Blindness was also a very common identifying mark recorded in runaway advertisements; however, it did not necessarily constitute a disability in slave society.

Blindness among the enslaved could be congenital, however, it was more common for bondspeople to experience a loss of vision due to environmental conditions. Blindness or

‘sore eyes’ could be caused by a vitamin A deficiency, infections, allergies, accident or punishment.87 Enslaved individuals who became blind would have had to learn how to navigate blindness amidst a seeing world, while keeping up with the demands of plantation labour. Slaveholders still put blind captives to work on the plantation. For instance, a runaway advertisement from Jamaica in 1791 read:

Ran away from the subscriber on Sunday the 27th, a stout able negro man, named Bob,

he is of the Congo country, and marked on one shoulder G.G. blind of the left eye, has

a large scar across his left cheek, which he got about sixteen years ago by the kick of a

Mule, by which accident he came to lose his eye; the above fellow is most excellent

swimmer and diver, has been occasionally employed as a fisherman and sailor negro.88

Despite his disability, Bob continued to be a productive labourer, who was valued by his owner for his skills as a swimmer, diver, and fisherman. Jack and Sawney were both

86 Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette, 3 June 1806 (Barbados). 87 Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 90. 88 The Daily Advertiser, 15 December 1791 (Jamaica).

208 fugitives sailors and described as “blind of one eye.”89 Impaired sight was common among watchmen, who were often old and infirm bondsmen whose disabilities made them ‘unfit’ for field labour. Watchmen provided surveillance over the plantation grounds, looking for runaways and other ‘criminal’ behaviour. In the night, explained one plantation management guide, “runaway negroes…are subject and too prone to rob and plunder the grounds of your negroes. Let therefore proper watch houses be built at due distances around the same, and the watch be prepared with a gun and watch dogs to give notice if any approach to commit their…robberys.”90 In 1776 all three watchmen on the Newton plantation of Christ Church

Barbados were defined as “old,” while on the Seawell plantation the head boiler and watchman, Obo, was described as “very old and weak with one eye.”91 A notice for a female runaway, Sarah, mentioned that she had been “employed as a watch,” and described her as

“dim-sighted.”92 According to the author of an eighteenth-century plantation management guide, “old negroes that are past labour are fittest for such watchers, as they are not so subject to sleep as young and labouring negroes.”93

Runaway advertisements reveal that blindness was among other disabilities, injuries, and illnesses feigned by the enslaved as a way to negotiate the terms of their enslavement. As discussed in Chapter Three, masquerading a disability or severe injury provided bondspeople

89 The Gazette of St. Jago de la Vega, 27 September – 4 October 1781 (Jamaica); Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 16 June 1780 (Jamaica). 90 John Dovaston, Agricultura Americana: or improvements in West-India Husbandry Considered. Wherein the present system of Husbandry used in England is Applied to the Cultivation or growing of Sugar Canes to advantage. (Vols. 1 & 2 [N.P., 1774], Codex Eng 60). John Carter Brown Library, 278-279. 91 Newton Papers 523/276 University of the West Indies – Cave Hill Campus. 92 Ibid. 93 Dovaston, 279.

209 opportunities to move into less physically taxing labour positions. As fugitives, bondspeople could use the masquerade of disability to their advantage. On July 8th 1780, the runaway man

Sambo was recorded as “a creole, very old, his head quite white, pretends to be blind.”94

Another advertisement in the same year recorded the following: “RUNAWAY, the following

Negro Slaves…ABRAHAM, an old man of a yellow complexion, of the Eboe country, stout made; has a wife at Mr. Price’s Estate at Luidas, named JUBA; a sawyer; sometimes pretends to be sick with the physick.”95 Such advertisements suggests that as fugitives these individuals would strategically not use such masquerade, knowing that owners likely described them as such in hopes of identifying and apprehending them. Disability and illness as masquerade depended on a shared understanding among white authority and bondspeople of blacks’ bodies and health. When successful, donning a mask of disability allowed fugitives to perpetually transform their bodies “generating identities beyond recognition.”96

Feigning a disability or illness enabled captives to gain some amount of control over their bodies and resist slaveholder authority. If an enslaved person could “pass” as disabled and be excused from work, she or he might become invisible to authorities and could then plan their flight. Once escaped, the fugitive could then use disability as camouflage.

All information provided in runaway advertisements was, of course, liable to change.

Once a fugitive’s appearance was committed to writing, she or he had to change as much as possible.97 Fugitives most likely attempted to remove collars and chains. Owners suspected

94 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 1-8 July 1780 (Jamaica). 95 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 1-8 1780 (Jamaica). 96 Valentin Groeber, Who are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 90. 97 Ibid.

210 the removal of material identifiers and, thus, always supplemented their descriptions with corporeal information. For instance, Rachael G. Silvia stated that her missing captive Cinthia

“had on a Chain, which it is supposed is taken off,” followed by information about her bodily appearance. Prudence’s owner warned that she might have changed her clothing in an attempt to disguise herself while a fugitive. Runaway bondsman Greenwhich tried to conceal the elephantiasis on his foot by wearing long trousers, whereas, Lorain wore a handkerchief around his head to disguise “part of his right ear cut off.”98 Clothing could, thus, serve to identify as well as camouflage the “distinguishing marks” that fugitive captives bore.

Disability as masquerade elicits questions with regard to disability and ‘passing.’ As the above examples demonstrate, there were times when white authority knew that certain individuals feigned illness or impairment. In her study of disability among the enslaved in nineteenth-century America, Dea H. Boster has found that owners often suspected that bondspeople malingered, and were, therefore skeptical of injuries and illnesses among the enslaved.99 Masquerading as disabled, whether on or off the plantation, provided bondspeople opportunities to self-consciously shape their appearance. Erving Goffman’s definition of passing as “stigma management,” has been very useful to scholars of disability who discuss passing as a strategy to conceal disability and pass as able-bodied.100 The

98 The Royal Gazette, 31 January - 7 February 1789 (Jamaica); Supplement to The Royal Gazette, 27 October - 3 November 1781 (Jamaica). 99 Dea H. Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 114-115. 100 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963). For discussions of passing and disability, see Brenda Jo Brueggmann, “It’s So Hard to Believe That You Pass’: A Hearing-Impaired Student Writing on the Borders of Language” and “On (Almost) Passing,” in Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999), 50-99; Georgina Kleege, “Disabled Students Come Out: Questions without Answers,” in Disability

211 secrets individuals harbor in an attempt to alter their identity and public appearance are historically specific.101 For instance, whereas passing as able-bodied in the contemporary

West is an attempt to escape stigmatization and negative social stereotyping in an able- bodied world, passing as disabled in slave society could offer enslaved individuals a certain amount of freedom. Feigning disability allowed fugitives to use the changing physical and environmental context of freedom to adjust and renew their bodies. Runaway advertisements depict fugitive captives not only being but also becoming in the world, “pretending to be something else, and, in doing so, becoming something else.”102

Marks on the Flesh: Africanness, Deformities, and Disfigurement

Newspaper subscribers described African phenotypic characteristics and distinguishing blemishes in ways that implicitly degraded the individual fugitive and confirmed prevailing racial hierarchies in the English Atlantic World. Slaveholders recorded universal social characteristics, such as ethnicity, age, and height, but often emphasized variations to make individuals more recognizable.103 Common descriptions of phenotype included “very black,” “coal black,” as well as late eighteenth-century racial categories such

Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), 308-316; Rod Michalko, The Difference that Disability Makes (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002) and The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); and Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Literature and Medicine 23, no. 1 (Spring, 2004), 1-22. 101 See Tobin Siebers’ discussion of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on closeting in “Disability as Masquerade,” 2. 102 Waldstreicher, 244. 103 Prude, 140.

212 as “mulatto,” “mustee,” “sambo,” and “quadroon.”104 The language of ‘race’ in Caribbean newspapers reflected the racialized hierarchy of the colonies and differed from that of the metropole. In the English press, slaveowners used the standard phrase “of a black complexion” to describe fugitive bondspeople.105 What is more, Caribbean owners reproduced the language of early travel accounts by exaggerating phenotypic characteristics and commenting on racial features as extraordinary. Enslaved Africans were described as having “big” mouths; “remarkable thick lips”; “flat,” large,” and “sunken” noses; and being

“full eyed.” Slaveowners’ descriptions of fugitives as having distinguishing features such as

“remarkable thick lips” were vital to note and publicize for these marks were difficult for the runaway to hide.106 Depictions of African phenotype often implied that such physical characteristics were deformities and, therefore, stigmatized all blacks with disability.

Runaway notices described African phenotype as excessive, ugly, and abnormal and evoked ideas of physical deformity as reflective of inner monstrosity.

Descriptions of Africans with missing or excessive extremities, uncommon bodily shapes, and facial features of supposedly anomalous size worked to reinscribe sixteenth and seventeenth-century English perceptions of Africans as uncertain humans. Some advertisements described congenital abnormalities of enslaved individuals. W. Armstrong described Romeo as “without any marks only a natural one, which is, never having more

104 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 1-8 April 1780 (Jamaica); Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 22-29 September 1781 (Jamaica); Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 18-25 April 1795 (Jamaica). 105 Morgan and Rushton, 46. 106 Ibid.

213 than four toes on one of his feet.”107 Toby and Blackwall were both described as

“remarkable” for having six fingers on each hand.108 In February 1789, George was distinguished as having “a full mouth, uncommonly made, being much longer over the breast than the belly, broad thick feet; he must have been born with twelve fingers, and one being taken off from each hand, leaves a scar by the side of each finger.”109 The description for

George leaves unanswered questions, namely under what circumstances were his fingers cut off. The amputation of two of his fingers suggests that being born with twelve fingers was an aberration in need of correction. Descriptions of black bodies with congenital abnormalities were likely accurate, however, they did more than merely identify a specific runaway. Such descriptions contributed to the long-standing English notion that African bodies were innately deviant and deficient. The widespread display of African deformities in fugitive notices served to link blackness to a host of beliefs about Africans that extended to the body and mind. Such descriptions, conversely, implied that whiteness was whole, able, rational, and not only ‘normal’ but ‘perfect.’

The bodies of female runaways were depicted in runaway advertisements as recognizable but deformed and imperfect. Slaveowners described their bodies as female but of a deformed kind. In 1787 a Barbadian runaway referred to as “a black skin negro girl,” was described by her owner as having “slim legs, a round belly, small or no breasts, round faced, silly looking, and her hair growing almost to her eyebrow; squints a little; and limps

107 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 24 June – 1 July 1780 (Jamaica). 108 The Daily Advertiser, 29 January 1791 (Jamaica); Barbados Gazette and General Intelligencer, 25-29 October 1788 (Barbados). 109 Barbados Gazette and General Intelligencer, 11-14 February 1789 (Barbados).

214 much, and has a crooked great toe, all on the right side.”110 This description, although written for purposes of identification and apprehension of the said runaway, nonetheless reflected English racist perceptions of African bodies as grotesque, deficient and abnormal.

Similarly, on December 30, 1788 Philip Hackett from Mox Hall estate Barbados advertised for his missing captive and evoked images of African women as possessing an abnormal femininity. According to Hackett, Rosetta was: “...four feet eleven inches high and seventeen inches over the shoulders, has a drowsy countenance, large thick lips, small fallen breasts, a round belly with her country marks cut in diamond, large buttocks, small legs, a very small foot, a small hand but somewhat hard from working with the hoe.”111 The exposure of

Rosetta’s body, and particularly the description of her “fallen breasts,” echoed sixteenth and seventeenth century European travel accounts that associated African women’s nakedness to savagery. Moreover, the emphasis on her oddities of size –”large thick lips”; “small fallen breasts”; “round belly”; “large buttocks”; “small legs”; “a very small foot”; “a small hand” – imprinted her body with abnormalities, while the mention of her hand being “somewhat hard from working with the hoe” reinforced her body’s supposed suitability to hard labour.

Runaway notices also conflated African phenotypic characteristics with physical abnormalities caused by malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies. For instance, some of the most common distinguishing marks used by slaveowners to identify bondspeople described their legs and feet. Runaways were described as “bow-legged,” “knock-kneed,” “splaw footed,” “parrot toed,” and “crooked in both knees.” These physical conditions manifested themselves most often in enslaved children and were a result of rickets, a disease caused by

110 Barbados Mercury, 12 April 1788 (Barbados). 111 Barbados Mercury, 30 December 1788 (Barbados).

215 calcium and Vitamin D deficiencies.112 Plantation owners fed their bondspeople foods very high in starch, such as corn, rice, sugar, and plantain, which caused severe vitamin deficiencies and consequently often permanent physical deformities.113 The repeated reproduction of such descriptions in English Caribbean newspapers suggested that Africans and their descendants were biologically, indeed racially, prone to these physical deformities.

In fact, in 1774 the Anglo-Irish naturalist Oliver Goldsmith depicted African phenotypic characteristics and physical abnormalities caused by disease as racially specific deformities that defied the effects of geography and climate. According to Goldsmith:

In the Negro children born in European countries, the same deformities are seen to

prevail; the same flatness in the nose, and the same prominence of the lips. They are, in

general, said to be well shaped; but of such as I have seen, I never found one that might

be justly called so; their legs being mostly ill formed, and commonly bending outward

on the shinbone.114

Goldsmith’s comment on the “ill formed” legs of Africans is likely a reference to the physical consequences of the ‘rickets,’ however, in associating these deformities with

African phenotypic characteristics, Goldsmith suggested that they were ‘natural’ deformities.

He refuted the climatology theory of race in suggesting that not even European acclimatization could change the supposed deformities of Africans and their descendants.

Goldsmith’s racialization of this deformity reflects the conflation of African phenotype with deformities caused by the brutal living conditions of the enslaved.

112 Handler, “Diseases and Medical Disabilities, Part 2,” 183. 113 Ibid. 114 Oliver Goldsmith, History of the Earth and Animated Nature in Eight Volumes vol. 2 (Dublin, 1776-1777), 86.

216

Slaveowners also relied on distinguishing marks inflicted onto the skin such as brands, floggings, African ‘country marks,’ and scars. These permanent marks on the flesh evoked power that held claim to the past, present, and future. The bodies of African-born captives bore marks that testified to a past life of freedom. Runaway advertisements turned these visible signs of a previous freedom into ‘scars’ that stigmatized African past and degraded the memories that they represented. Common in runaway notices are individuals recorded as having ‘country marks’ – scarification practiced among some sub-Saharan

African groups. To readers of the Barbadian and Jamaican press, country marks signaled derisive European stereotypes of certain African ethnicities and the supposed rebelliousness of African-born captives. For the enslaved, however, such marks were a form of memory of their lives in freedom and their past ownership of their own bodies. The scars of country marks juxtaposed the scars of brands. Runaway advertisements demonstrate that many

African-born bodies were “engraved with cultural signs that bestow[ed] meaning, identity, and belonging” in the form of country marks and were then “reinscribed with new ‘marks of civilization’” in the form of branding and punishment.115 As discussed in Chapter Three, merchants and slaveowners branded enslaved individuals in Africa and the Caribbean.

Runaway advertisements demonstrate that brands of ownership were most often inflicted onto the shoulders and chests of captives, however, it was not uncommon for bondspeople to be branded on the face. Enslaved individuals’ faces were, thus, violently remarked with

“scars of pain, loss, and exclusion.”116

115 Anna Cole and Anna Haebich, “Corporal Colonialism and Corporeal Punishment: A Cross-cultural Perspective on Body Mortification,” in Social Semiotics Special Issue: Body Modification, eds. Jessica Cadwallader and Samantha Murray 17, no. 3 (2007), 294. 116 Ibid., 295.

217

Disfiguring marks on the flesh did not physically impair captives, however, they could disable the enslaved by marking individuals as rebellious. Disability, writes Lennard J.

Davis, presents itself “through two main modalities – function and appearance.”117 In this way, marks of punishment, including brands, had the potential to disable the enslaved by marking the individual as ‘troublesome’ and making her or his ‘disobedience’ salient in slave society. Marks of punishment could discourage a bondsperson’s purchase, which depending on the specific circumstances could be detrimental or beneficial for the enslaved. Such marks, especially those meted out onto a person’s face, could also be read as aesthetically displeasing and function to disable the individual from relationships with other bondspeople.

Disfiguring marks carried different implications for enslaved and free people. For instance, the disfiguring marks of smallpox had disabling social effects on free women and could ruin their chances of marriage.118 Marks of smallpox on the enslaved, in contrast, testified to their immunity to the disease and, thus, made them more valuable on the open market but also more vulnerable to detection if they absconded.119 “The notion of disfigurement,” writes art historian Ann Millet-Gallant, “destabilizes concepts of ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ and

‘nondisabled’ versus ‘disabled bodies, for disfigurement, to even a larger degree than

117 Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), 11. 118 Michael Bennett, “Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France, ed. Anne M. Scott (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), np. 119 Jerome Handler, “Diseases and Medical Disabilities of Enslaved Barbadians, From the Seventeenth Century to around 1838: Part 1,” The Journal of Caribbean History 40, no. 1 (2006), 5.

218 corporeal disability, exists on a continuum and may be determined subjectively.”120 Thus, disfigurement is both aligned with and different from disability and the representational work of physical disfigurement provides a unique frame for analyzing runaway advertisements as in and of themselves disabling.

As the aftermath of private punishments, marks of violence in runaway advertisements activate one’s imagination for they depict that which is absent – the act of violence itself.121 Some advertisements specified that punishment occasioned such identifying marks. The Barbados Gazette and General Intelligencer ran an advertisement in

October 1787 that described the fugitive, Mary, as having marks of the whip on her cheek.122

Ned was described as having a small scar on his cheek “by accident of a whip lash,”123 whereas, George had “very large scars on his shoulders, from some former severe whipping.”124 Others were simply said to have had “marks of punishment” on their bodies.125 Free and unfree society, both in the metropole and the islands, were subjected to flogging as a punishment, however, in the English Caribbean, marks from the whip became specifically associated with the captive population and with blackness.126 The human skin, argues Valentin Groebner, “can be understood as a document, record, or archive,” onto

120 Ann Millet-Gallant, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 13. 121 Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 28. 122 Barbados Gazette and General Intelligencer, 3-6 October 1787 (Barbados). 123 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 23-30 May 1795 (Jamaica). 124 Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette, 17 December 1808 (Barbados). 125 Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette, 3 June 1806 (Barbados). 126 Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (2001), 939.

219 which “all is exteriorized and made fully visible.”127 By disfiguring the flesh of bondspeople, lawmakers and planters attempted to make black skin a living and moving memorial of imperial and slaveholding power. The scarred body permanently memorialized individuals’ experiences in freedom and slavery for “what is remembered in the body is well remembered.”128

The diaries of Jamaica planter Thomas Thistlewood demonstrate the various ways enslaved bodies, and in particular the bodies of ‘incorrigible’ runaways, were violently marked with signs of servitude and dispossession. Coobah, an enslaved woman who constantly ran away from Thistlewood’s plantation starting in 1769 received “severe floggings and was kept in the stocks overnight. She was branded on the forehead and forced to wear a collar and chain for months at a time.”129 Coobah had become a liability to

Thistlewood. Her absence deprived him of more than just one enslaved labourer for

Thistlewood ordered other captives to search for her. In 1774 Thistlewood sold Coobah to a planter in Georgia. She did not succeed in escaping slavery, however, her constant acts of running away took her away from sugar production to what may have been a less hostile labour environment in Georgia.130 Burnard notes that Coobah entered this new place with

“marks of her insubordination on her body: pocked by smallpox, debilitated by repeated

127 Groebner, Who are You?, 97. 128 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 112. 129 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2004), 217. 130 The labour and material conditions of enslavement in North America were generally less physically taxing than in the Caribbean, however, much of this depended on what kind of crop was grown. For instance, rice cultivation was as, if not more, physically destructive to enslaved bodies as sugar production. See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1998) 459-483.

220 bouts of venereal disease, lacerated by numerous floggings, and branded on the forehead as a troublemaker.”131 Coobah’s entire body bore the marks of her servitude and displayed a fragmented personal history of her experiences in enslavement and attempts to self- emancipate.

Runaway advertisements that detailed marks of punishments such as a brand, slit nose, or cropped ears made the otherwise invisible criminal act visible to the reading audience. On February 10, 1780, Dorothy Peake advertised for several runaways, including

Kent, “a cooper by trade…[with] a piece taken off one of his ears, of middle age, is a well set fellow, rather bow-legged, and about 5 feet 7 inches.”132 The use of branding on ‘raced’ bodies was not isolated to the colonial Caribbean. Across the British Empire, branding of colonial subjects served as a form of punishment, deterrence, and as a means of registering an individual a criminal. Clare Anderson’s study of penal practices in British India shows that techniques such as godna, a type of brand or tattoo on the criminal’s forehead that detailed the bearer’s crimes, characteristics, and sentence, was administered by colonial authorities in the first half of the nineteenth century. In colonial India, branding served as a means to render the colonial subject’s body legible and fix their identity as criminal, which according to Anderson was “central to the process of centralized state building.”133 Thus, the use of disabling punishments was a key tool of British imperial rule.

131 Burnard, 218. 132 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 1-8 April 1780 (Jamaica). 133 Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (New York: Berg, 2004), 2.

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Scars proved useful as identifying marks because they were immutable – they could be supplemented but never entirely removed.134 In his study of identification practices in the late Middle Ages, Groebner notes that the scarring of the skin represents “as signa rememorativa, an open book of all those interventions and reconstructions to which an individual’s skin has been subjected.”135 And yet, some fugitive bondspeople altered the scars and marks on their flesh in an attempt to evade identification. In 1794, a fifteen dollar reward was offered for the apprehension of Nimrod, a fugitive bondsman suspected of

“endeavor[ing] to obliterate” the mark ‘WT,’ branded on both his shoulders and breast.136 By defacing enslaved individuals with brands, owners inscribed “a complex story of sin and sanction onto the body of someone defenseless” but bondspeople still tried to remove their markings.137 The scarring of the enslaved and the subsequent display of such marks in the

Barbadian and Jamaican presses reflects disciplinary technologies of a particularly modern cast. Unlike early modern European ‘wanted’ advertisements, which targeted individuals, colonial runaway notices advertised for individuals but also reflected a much wider attempt by free society to survey, control, and discipline the entire enslaved population.

Some of the marks of violence described in runaway advertisements hinted at the psychological wounds of enslavement. For instance, runaway notices identify marks of attempted suicide, which was indicative of the psychological impairment caused by slavery.

Piere, a runaway from the Oxford Plantation in the Jamaican parish of St. Mary, was

134 Groebner, Who are You?, 97. 135 Ibid. 136 The Royal Gazette, 3-10 January 1795 (Jamaica). 137 Groebner, Defaced, 87.

222 described by his owner as having “a scar on his throat, where he formerly cut it.”138 On

August 15, 1795 Henry Skerrett advertised in The Royal Gazette for his captive “Cuffee, a very black fellow, with three or four cuts in his throat; in the attempts he made to cut it through, he either willingly or wittingly failed.”139 Runaway Solomon was described as having “some scars on his throat, having attempted different times to cut it.”140 In the same year, young man named Charles escaped from his owner, Isaac Bernal Junior. The notice placed in the Cornwall Chronicle recorded that Charles’ previous owner, Mr. Jackson, told

Bernal that Charles said “He would cut his own throat sooner than return to his Master.”141

In the collection of runaway advertisements studied herein, no bondswomen were described as having marks of attempted suicide. Historians of slavery have shown that both enslaved men and women killed themselves to escape slavery, however, cutting one’s throat might have been a particularly gendered manner of trying to kill one’s self.

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated that disease, deformity, disfigurement, and impairment

– in a word, disability – were widely displayed in newspapers across Barbados and Jamaica during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Runaway notices reveal that the enslaved were kept alive but in a “state of injury.”142 The enslaved African who is the title character of English-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips’s novel Cambridge is horrified by the

138 Supplement to the Royal Gazette, 8-16 April 1780 (Jamaica). 139 Supplement to the Royal Gazette Saturday, 8-15 August 1795 (Jamaica). 140 Supplement to The Royal Gazette Saturday, 4-11 April 1795 (Jamaica). 141 Cornwall Chronicle, 22 January 1795 (Jamaica). 142 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003), 21.

223 casual and disfiguring brutality revealed in newspaper advertisements that offered for sale, or sought the return of, enslaved blacks in England: “To be sold, a handsome creole wench named HARMONY alias AMY. Fourteen years of age, she reads but a little. She has a scar on her breast occasioned by a burn, and a toe cut off each foot. Any person who may have a mind to the said girl, is desired to apply before the 30th.”143 By depicting the scars, burns, and amputations of the individual, Phillips’ fictional sale advertisement more closely resembles runaway advertisements than sale advertisements. Sale advertisements give little detail about the individual captives but emphasize the ‘desireable’ characteristics of those for sale, using terms such as ‘young,’ ‘choice,’ and ‘lusty.’144 Runaway advertisements offer more than evidence of the presence of disability among the enslaved; they are a reflection of a system of oppression that did the work of disablement. Runaway advertisements themselves functioned to disable, in the sense that they were an institutionally driven method of reactive and precautionary control, which aimed to limit bondspeople’s movement. The advertisements, moreover, perpetuated the longstanding European notion that Africans and their descendants were deformed and disfigured beings, whose corporeality reflected their supposed inner degeneracy.

143 Caryl Phillips, Cambridge ([1991] New York: Vintage International, 1993), 148. Literary discussions of Cambridge appear in Stefanie Kennedy and Melanie J. Newton, “The Hauntings of Slavery: Colonial and the Disabled Body in the Caribbean,” forthcoming in Disability and the Global South: The Critical Handbook, eds. Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic (New York: Springer Publishing Company, forthcoming 2015). 144 For instance, an advertisement from Jamaica for the sale of captives from the ship Loretta described the enslaved as “CHOICE EBOE SLAVES which have had the small pox,” Jamaican Gazette, 3 January 1765 (Jamaica); another notice from 1791 advertised for the sale of “Fourteen able seasoned FIELD NEGROES; who have had the yaws and smallpox; nine men and five women,” The Daily Advertiser, 7 July 1791 (Jamaica).

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Lennard J. Davis argues that, “by narrativizing impairment, one tends to sentimentalize it and link it to the bourgeois sensibility of individualism and the drama of the individual story.”145 Yet the violently marked fugitives whose experiences were recorded in runaway advertisements reveal personal stories of freedom and enslavement. In the context of slavery, however, the image of the black and African body was never just individual – it was simultaneously emblematic of a collective body. The marks recorded in runaway notices likely held different meanings to readers, for what signs on the body “actually meant was…evidently a matter of power relations.”146 For the slaveholding reading public, marks of punishment may have signaled not cruel violence meted out onto defenseless bodies but rather the triumph over violence through judicial order.147 For others, such marks of violence may not have signaled such a single-defining narrative of slavery, but rather a multi-layered story of an individual’s endurance of slavery and struggle for autonomy and self- emancipation.

145 Davis, 3-4. 146 Groebner, Who are You?, 111. 147 Ibid., 30.

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Chapter 5

“The Monster is Dying….The Monster is Dead”; Disability Rhetoric and the Challenge of Revolutionary Emancipation

Introduction

This chapter explores the relationship between disability, amelioration, and abolition in the period from the 1770s to the end of the British slave trade in 1807. I argue that both opponents and supporters of slavery utilized notions of disability and invoked concepts of monstrosity to maintain the social and racial hierarchies of the eighteenth-century English

Atlantic World.1 This chapter begins with an analysis of early anti-slavery sentiment that circulated in England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, before abolition had become an organized movement. In contrast to late eighteenth-century abolitionist discourses, the enslaved body was present more as a metaphor than corporeal reality. On the surface, such writers did not engage with notions of disability, however, I argue that the moral and medical models of disability were constitutive of early opponents’ discussions of slavery in the English Atlantic World.2

In this chapter I argue that revolutionary emancipation in the eighteenth-century

Atlantic World, from Tacky’s War in Jamaica (1760) to the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), is key to understanding the place of disability in both anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric in the age of abolition. Revolutionary emancipation gave rise to the gendered image of the armed, able- bodied, dangerous, and revolutionary black man, which circulated throughout the Atlantic

1 David M. Turner, Disability in Eighteenth Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (New York: Routledge, 2012), 147. 2 See the Introduction of this dissertation for definitions of these models.

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World and haunted both pro- and anti-slavery discourse. Abolitionists were simultaneously drawn to and repelled by this image. They emphasized the figure of the broken, beaten enslaved person as a way of envisioning a potentially free subject who was neither armed nor a physical threat to the British Empire. Tacky’s War and the Haitian Revolution were two events that framed the timing of pro-slavery amelioration efforts to alleviate pain among the enslaved. Abolitionists promoted a process of amelioration that encouraged enslaved women, on the one hand to have children so that the enslaved population could reproduce itself naturally. On the other hand, the suppression of the slave trade would decrease planters’ reliance on the slave trade as a means of reproducing a commodified labour force.3 What haunted this effort to suppress slavery was a fear that the slave trade only brought future revolutionaries into English colonies. The pro- and anti-slavery effort to suppress the intra-

Caribbean slave trade, especially after the Haitian Revolution, was motivated by the same fear of black Haitian revolutionaries. This is not to reify being able-bodied as being in reality more capable of auto-emancipation but rather to demonstrate that the idea of black citizenship was framed in gendered and ableist terms. Planters continued to propagate the long-standing pro-slavery argument that African women did not feel pain in childbirth, which gave testimony to their supposed animality. In abolitionist propaganda, in contrast, the figure of the pained female body, in need of protection from long term damage so that it might give birth and raise children, became a key means of displacing the figure of the

3 See Melanie J. Newton, Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008) and Ada Ferrar, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

227 enslaved, armed, male rebel. At the same time, abolitionists took up the rhetoric of monstrosity, long used by pro-slavery advocates to justify African enslavement, and argued conversely that the real monster was the institution of slavery itself.

By the 1770s and 1780s, an organized abolitionist campaign had formed in England and so too had a pro-slavery defense. Both groups relied on notions of disability in the battle over slavery’s existence. Pro-slavery advocates argued that enslaved Africans were intellectually incapable of freedom and increasingly claimed that Africans were a different species than human. This argument differed from earlier claims that Africans represented a

‘race of monsters,’ and was reflective of the growing philosophical and scientific interest in species difference in the late-eighteenth century.4 And yet, as we will see, the ‘monster’ continued to inform both pro- and anti-slavery discussions of Africans and their descendants.

Anti-slavery writers, in contrast, relied on the image of the beaten, disfigured, and impaired enslaved person to evoke moral outrage and sympathy in their predominantly white, metropolitan audience. Abolitionists took advantage of the ‘culture of sympathy’ and used disability to imagine a way to incorporate the black enslaved into the ‘English’ body politic as free, but non-threatening, subjects. Disability was, thus, a crucial way to facilitate the possibility of incorporation while blunting its radical potential.

Pro-slavery writers emphasized the gendered image of the rebel – an able-bodied, armed, threatening black male – whereas abolitionists envisioned a black, suffering but supplicant, black bondsperson.5 This figure was most often female. Indeed, abolitionists

4 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain ([1984] London: Pluto Press, 2010), 261. 5 Sarah Salih, “Putting down Rebellion: Witnessing the Body of the Condemned in Abolition-era Narratives,” in Slavery and The Culture of Abolition: Essays Marking the

228 placed great emphasis on implying the sexualized violence against and display of women’s bodies. The place of supposedly ‘disabled’ and ‘able’ bodies as the basis for competing modern ideas about citizenship was rooted in a sharp distinction between two models of emancipation: imperial humanitarianism and subjecthood on one hand, and revolutionary human rights and citizenship on the other. Abolitionists offered humanitarian ideas of inclusion to the enslaved, while they implicitly rejected the idea of human rights.6 Jenny

Martinez argues that: “Using tools of civic activism that would be familiar to modern human rights activists, the early abolitionists relied on petitions, pamphlets, sugar boycotts, and speaking tours to generate popular support for their cause.”7 While this is true, the British abolitionist movement was fraught with hypocrisy. Abolitionists heralded the notion that the slave trade was a moral crime, however, they never espoused the idea that enslaved Africans were equal to or deserved the same ‘rights’ of Britons. Martinez rightly asserts that the seeds of international human rights law were planted during the abolitionist era, particularly from the 1820s-1860s when the first anti-slavery courts were established in Freetown, Havana, Rio

Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, eds. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2007), 64-86; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (New York: Routledge Inc., 2000), 21- 23. 6 Claudius Fergus, “’Dread of Insurrection”: Abolitionism, Security, and Labor in Britain’s West Indian Colonies, 1760-1823,” The William and Mary Quarterly Special Issue: Abolishing the Slave Trades: Ironies and Reverberations, Third Series 66, no.4, (Oct. 2009), 757-780. 7 Jenny S. Martinez, “The Slave Trade on Trial: Lessons of a great human-rights law success,” Boston Review (September/October 2007), 12.

229 de Janeiro, Surinam, Capetown, Loanda, and New York.8 However, the rhetoric of the abolitionist campaign to end the British slave trade demonstrates how histories of disability and emancipation came to be severed, until quite recently, from histories of human rights.

Until the late colonial era historians of English abolition portrayed a pro-imperial myth of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade as “an expression of humanity’s slowly awakening conscience.”9 The first historian of the British slave trade abolition to promote

Christian philanthropy as the sole influence of abolition was leading abolitionist Thomas

Clarkson, who in 1808 published his commemorative History of the Rise, Progress, and

Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, By the British Parliament.10 Not until

1938, when Trinidadian historian, activist, and theorist C.L.R James wrote The Black

Jacobins, his seminal study of the Haitian Revolution, did a scholar challenge, albeit indirectly, the humanitarian explanation for British abolition. The first book to directly attack the humanitarian myth that English abolitionists had constructed for themselves and receive scholarly attention was Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Williams argued that the British slave trade was abolished not because of a new found humanitarianism but because it became economically expedient for Parliament to do so.11 The Williams ‘decline thesis’ forever changed the historiography of British abolition, however, in the 1960s and

1970s, a number of historians attacked Williams’s work and made a case for the recovery of

8 Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85. 9 Fryer, 207. 10 Claudius Fergus, “The Bicentential Commemorations: The Dilemma of Abolitionism in the Shadow of the Haitian Revolution," Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 56 no. ½ (March-June 2010), 140. 11 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 13.

230 the English economy after the American War of Independence. This chapter does not intend to intervene in the discussion about the “decline thesis.” Rather, it is concerned particularly with the crucial part that discourses of disability played in abolitionist debates. I am less concerned with why abolition happened when it did and for what reasons, than I am with how the debate was framed, why it was framed in that way, and what kinds of emancipatory futures were enabled and foreclosed by the mobilization of disability rhetoric as part of the debate over the abolition of the slave trade and slavery.

Early Anti-slavery Sentiment and the Absence of Bodies, 1670-1770

The anti-slavery sentiment that circulated prior to the 1770s, before the formation of an organized abolitionist movement, is key to understanding the place of ‘disabled’ and

‘able’ bodies in the fight over slavery’s existence. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, most English people enjoyed the fruits of Caribbean slavery without having to face its social and cultural costs.12 Thus, during this early period, the moral injustices of slavery were not a matter of debate for “early reservation made no practical difference when set against the far more powerful forces of inertia and interest that conspired to keep the slave system secure.”13 Still, a handful of individuals voiced their concern over the state of West

Indian slavery.

Unlike works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, disabled bodies did not feature in early anti-slavery sentiment; in fact, the majority of early anti-slavery rhetoric was marked by an absence of real bodies altogether. Throughout the English

12 Ibid., 51. 13 Ibid., 55.

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Atlantic World, early anti-slavery discourse emphasized the religious immorality of slavery and argued that religion would provide both colonists and their captives the means to transform slavery into a ‘redeemable’ institution.14 Thus, they sought to make slavery more

‘humane’ or limit its expansion in order to save the souls of Africans and quell the prospect of insurrection or revolution.15 And yet, the language of saving souls encompassed an imperative to preserve the bodies of the enslaved from abuse and violence. For instance, in his Chapters from a Christian Directory (1673) English theologian Richard Baxter strongly admonished the institution of slavery, arguing that slave trading was “one of the worst kinds of thievery in the world,” and that slave-traders and owners were “fitter to be called incarnate devils than Christians, though they be no Christians whom they so abuse.”16 Even with this powerful condemnation of the trade in humans, Baxter urged slaveowners to “make it your chief end in buying and using slaves, to win them to Christ, and save their souls…and let their salvation be far more valued by you than their service.”17

In early modern England, the physical and moral were mutually constitutive, and religious and medical thinkers believed that to ‘cure’ the physically deformed or disabled body, one had to start with the soul.18 As discussed in Chapter One, the English perceived both blackness and disability as outward signs of inner immorality. “The notion that the

14 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550-1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), 195. 15 Brown, 55. 16 Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory, or, A sum of practical theologie and cases of conscience directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith, how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties, how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortifie every sin: in all four parts (London, 1673), 559. 17 Ibid., 560. 18 D. Turner, 58.

232 misshapen body was the index of inner moral failings,” explains David M. Turner

“…remained a powerful theme in writing about the body well into the eighteenth century.”19

Anglican minster Morgan Godwyn (1680) also stressed the Christian necessity of leading enslaved Africans to the Lord. He argued that to refrain from providing bondspeople

“ordinary necessaries, as food…How much more Barbarous and Inhumane must it be to withhold from them the exercise of religion, and the knowledge of God, equally needful for the preservation of their Souls?”20 Early opponents’ concern for the souls of Africans demonstrates that the moral and medical models of disability were at work in debates over slavery. The suffering soul was intimately connected to the suffering body. The absence of bodies, therefore, does not preclude a concern for the physical state of Africans.

Unlike most of their contemporaries, English Behmenist Thomas Tryon and Tory writer Aphra Behn depicted the physical and psychological disabilities endured by the enslaved in a way that foreshadowed organized anti-slavery writings of the late-eighteenth century. Tryon and Behn, like Morgan Godwyn and George Fox, based their works on their experiences in the English Atlantic colonies. Tryon lived in Barbados in the 1660s as a hatter and after several years returned to London. Tryon’s Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-

Planters of the East and West Indies (1684) was part travel narrative and part social critique

19 Ibid., 36. 20 Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s & Indians advocate, suing for their admission to the church, or, A persuasive to the instructing and baptizing of the Negro’s and Indians in our plantations shewing that as the compliance therewith can prejudice not mans just interest, so the willful neglecting and opposing of it, is no less than a manifest apostacy from the Christian faith: to which is added, a brief account of religion in Virginia (London, 1680), 78-79.

233 of the institution of slavery.21 In the second part of his book, Tryon sought to expose the corporeal destructiveness of slavery by framing his critique as a slave narrative and writing from the perspective of a fictitious bondsman. Tryon paid great attention to the corporeal realities and physical consequences of slavery, including violence, starvation, and injury.

Through the first-person narration of the enslaved, Tryon depicted the brutalities of the

Middle Passage and the violence inflicted onto bondspeople by their masters in the English

Caribbean. The narrator explains that upon reaching the coasts of the New World the enslaved,

have suffered so many violent Miseries and sore Oppressions, that we are thereby as

poor, weak and feeble as Death, so that we can hardly either stand or go, which

rendring [sic] us not capable to answer the Covetous ends of our new Masters, our

Affliction are thereby doubled; for when our strength fails us, the inconsiderate and

unmerciful Overseers make nothing to Whip and Beat us…22

Tryon’s description illustrated one of the paradoxes of Atlantic slavery – that colonists purposefully debilitated enslaved bodies and then punished bondspeople for not meeting their labour expectations by administering more disabling violence. Of plantation labour,

Tryon narrated that English colonists “slave us on in continual drudgery, till our Heart- strings crack, and our Nerves are enfeebled, and our Marrow is exhausted, and our Bones fall under their Burthens, and [we]…wish for Death rather than Life.”23 Tryon also described the dismemberment of bondspeople who laboured in the mill and severe burns and fatalities of

21 Thomas W. Krise, ed., Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657-1777 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 51. 22 Thomas Tryon, Friendly advice to the gentlemen-planters of the East and West Indies In Three Parts (London, 1684), 85. 23 Ibid., 88

234 those who worked in the boiling house.24 The narrator explains that masters “beat and whip us, and hang us up by the Hands, Feet, and the link and so Bastinado us till our Bodies become like a piece of raw Flesh, and we are just ready to give up the Ghost.”25 Page by page, Tryon described the physical consequences of slavery in a way that was unique for its time.

Behn’s work differed from Tryon’s in its description of so-called vindicated acts of violence toward the enslaved. In Oroonko, Behn depicted the bodily consequences of enslaved transgressions in slave society. Prior to Oroonoko’s execution, he kills his wife,

Imoinda, and unborn child in a suicide pact. Behn portrayed Oroonoko as grief-stricken after

Imoinda’s death and suffering from psychological torture. Oroonoko “found his Brains turn round, and his Eyes were dizzy; and Objects appear’d not the same to him they were wont to do; his Breath was short; and all his Limbs surprised with a Faintness he had never felt before.”26 This depiction of psychological pain is followed by Oroonoko’s gruesome torture and death. Behn’s focus on the enslaved body and the spectacle of disablement foreshadowed many elements of the anti-slavery writings of the late-eighteenth century.

During the first few decades of the eighteenth century, anti-slavery writing was largely ineffective, “sufficient to raise moral doubts but unable to stimulate political action.”27 By mid-eighteenth century, however, religious convictions led Quakers to become

24 Ibid., 89-90 25 Ibid., 109 26 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave A True History [1688] in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 137. 27 Brown, 40.

235 the first group in the English Atlantic World to publicly oppose slavery.28 These early objections to African dispossession “derived not from ideas about earthly equality but from the concept of equality before God.”29 American Quakers and English evangelicals almost always included in their opposition to slavery arguments that moved beyond religious considerations to include the danger slavery posed to white society.30 In addition to religious teachings and conversion, early polemicists were also devoted to convincing “a more circumscribed audience of the aristocracy, Parliamentarians and the clergy” that the state of

West Indian slavery was detrimental to the wellbeing of the colonists and Great Britain’s economy.31 For instance, in 1746, long-time Jamaican governor, Edward Trelawny, expressed concern over the security of Jamaica’s white colonists. Trelawny’s intention was to encourage parliament to cut off the slave trade to the English colonies and to persuade

Jamaican planters to treat their captives better and perhaps implement measures that would lead to their eventual emancipation.

Early opponents of slavery shared many of the same concerns as later abolitionists.

They worried about the debased morals of English colonists and their refusal to teach and convert the enslaved to Christianity. They condemned slavery not only on ethical grounds

28 In America, the Quakers Anthony Benezet and John Woolman preached to their fellow Friends that slavery was blasphemous and implored them to abandon slavery or suffer damnation. The anti-slavery pamphlets of the American Quakers were extremely influential on the other side of the Atlantic, as British evangelical Christians experienced their own religious revivalism that emphasized the New Testament teachings of equalitarianism. See David Beck Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783-1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158. 29 Jordan, 194. 30 Ibid., 196. 31 Srividhya Swaminathan, “Developing the West Indian Pro-slavery Position after the Somerset Decision,” Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 3 (2003), 41.

236 but also out of fear that the enslaved population might rise against whites. The majority of early opponents of slavery may not have focused on the corporeal realities of slavery but neither did their works silence or deny such realities. In emphasizing the saving of enslaved souls, early anti-slavery writers deployed a moral approach to the physical devastations of slavery by insinuating that ‘saving’ bondspeople’s souls (and ‘recovering’ colonists’ souls) ultimately resulted in saving enslaved bodies from the atrocities of slavery. By the eighteenth century, the prevalence of slave rebellions in the English Atlantic combined with the development of a metropolitan culture of sympathy toward people with disabilities, greatly shaped debates about slavery and the place of ‘disabled’ and ‘able’ bodies in anti- and pro- slavery literature.

Abolitionist Rhetoric and the Broken, Black Body

The English anti-slavery movement to abolish the slave trade was framed by two major slave rebellions: Tacky’s War in Jamaica and the Haitian Revolution. The figure of the rebel was impossible to ignore in the eighteenth-century English Atlantic World because it was a real threat to white society and imperial power. Jamaica had a long history of enslaved and maroon insurrections and resistance, which led up to the abolitionist period. From 1655-

1740, a series of revolts reached a climax in which planters sued for peace and granted the rebels their freedom.32 The last decade of this period (1730-1740) is known as the first

Maroon War, which saw the successful escape of many bondspeople into the mountainous

32 Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-historical Analysis of the First Maroon War Jamaica, 1655-1740,” Social and Economic Studies 19, no. 3 (September, 1970), 289.

237 and largely inaccessible regions of Jamaica.33 The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) stimulated the enslaved uprising known as Tacky’s War, which accounted for the deaths of sixty whites and loss of property estimated at £100,000, in addition to the cost of building new military defenses.34 A string of revolts followed Tacky’s in 1761, 1765, and 1766.

The end of the American War of Independence meant that slave ships could sail freely once again in the British Empire while the loss of the American colonies provided an environment ripe for the reception of abolition among the English. As a consequence, the

1780s marked the beginning of a rapid increase in abolitionist publishing that coincided with a boom in the British slave trade. In the wake of England’s loss in the American War of

Independence, the abolitionist movement provided many English people a unifying moral conviction in which they could feel superior to America and continental Europe.35 The

American Revolution may have encouraged the growth of abolitionist sentiment in England however it also posed a challenge for abolitionists who hoped to depict a non-threatening image of ameliorative reform, as a process that would serve the interests of the West Indian colonies, maintain the socio-economic status quo, and protect the wealth that black colonial labour generated for England.

33 Clare Taylor, “Planter comment upon Slave Revolts in 18th century Jamaica,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 3, no. 3 (1982), 244. 34 Taylor, 145; Fergus “‘Dread of Insurrection,’” 758. 35 Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (London: PanMacmillan Press, 2007), 130.

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The American Revolution led to the arming of more bondspeople in the English

Caribbean than anywhere else in the Americas.36 During the revolutionary war, England faced a severe shortage of English soldiers and sailors but possessed a very large enslaved population in the Caribbean, which served as an impetus to arm bondspeople in the fight against the American colonies. Many planters, however, refused to recruit enslaved individuals for military service, for the threat that armed bondspeople posed to the safety of white society. The imperial government went ahead with its plans and recruited enslaved individuals from Africa. In 1807, black soldiers were manumitted, although they were retained in the ranks on lifetime service.37 The creation of the West India Regiments, which formed the largest army of enslaved people of any European empire between 1794 and 1833, helped spread the image of the armed black soldier fighting for empire. “Although the reasons for using slaves as soldiers were compelling,” writes Philip D. Morgan, “their employment raised fundamental problems for the plantation system. The very conditions that made the arming of slaves necessary, in particular acute shortages of white manpower, also made it a dangerous expedient in the perception of slaveowners.”38 For instance, some

Caribbean planters saw the revolutionary ideas of America and the arming of black captives in the revolutionary war as catalysts in the major slave rebellion in Jamaica in 1776.39 Thus, tensions in Jamaica and throughout the Caribbean between planters and bondspeople

36 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, eds. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2006), 180. 37 Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 38 P. Morgan, 181. 39 Ibid., 182.

239 increased with the American Revolution (1776-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-

1799) and reached a climax with the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, which transformed Saint Domingue, the richest colony in the Caribbean, into the independent state of Haiti and was an epic example of self-liberation and enslaved resistance.

The solution to the problem of how to frame abolition and amelioration was found in the form of the disabled, tortured enslaved body. In both written discourse and public speeches, abolitionists gave detailed accounts of enslaved individuals who had endured physical debilitation as a result of bondage. Opponents of the slave trade and slavery emphasized the human suffering involved in the Middle Passage and in the colonies through mortality statistics as well as stories of individual pain.40 Abolitionists consistently relied on depictions of the suffering enslaved individual, particularly the female, “to the point where

[pain] appears as the defining aspect of their existence often the only aspect of it that is mentioned at all.”41 Anti-slavery writers sought to convince a largely free, white population, who were unfamiliar with the experiences of the enslaved, of the brutality of West Indian slavery. Writers relied on disability to make the unfamiliarity of plantation slavery familiar to a English audience. The majority of English people had little direct knowledge of plantation slavery in the Caribbean, however, they did understand the effects of impaired limbs, blindness, and disfiguring scars. Abolitionists used portrayals of enslaved disability to stir up moral indignation in their audiences over the physical impairment that accompanied West

Indian slavery. Echoing the descriptions of African bodies in early European travelogues and

40Amanda T. Perry, “A Traffic in Numbers: The Ethics, Effects, and Affect of Mortality Statistics in the British Abolition Debates,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2012), 85. 41 Ibid., 96–97.

240 in colonial runaway advertisements, abolitionist depictions of mutilated, disfigured, and impaired bondspeople invited audiences to read the black body as a spectacular text and disability as the ultimate tale of enslavement.

The use of disability in anti-slavery writings became a propaganda strategy and reflected wider cultural shifts regarding ideas of pain, suffering, and sensibility. In eighteenth-century England, there was a growing emphasis on sensibility and humanitarianism that promoted attitudinal changes toward the disabled. People with disabilities or severe illnesses “occupied a significant position in the conscience of eighteenth-century commercial society, being cast as ‘objects of compassion’ on whom the wealthy might offset their worldly gains by charitable good works.”42 During the eighteenth century, a growing number of workhouses and infirmaries offered new institutional provision for the care of the disabled, while schools for deaf and blind children were established by the end of the century.43 English Quaker Joseph Woods, the author of Thoughts on the Slavery of the Negroes (1784), understood the linkages between the disabled and the enslaved in eighteenth-century humanitarian thought. “The humanity of the present age,” he wrote, “has established a great variety of institutions for the relief of…the sick, the lame, the blind the insane; those whom disease or accident, united with poverty, have rendered helpless, become the objects of compassion and assistance to their more fortunate neighbours.”44 For most

English people the plight of Caribbean bondspeople was out of mind because it was largely out of sight, which consequently led the English to feel only “temporary sympathy” which was “soon dispersed by cares or pleasure, which press for more immediate attention.” In

42 D. Turner, 43. 43 Ibid., 7. 44 Joseph Woods, Thoughts on the slavery of the negroes (London, 1784), 5.

241 contrast, the disabled poor in England were more likely to receive “the excitement and the application of…benevolence” because, according to the author, they were an everyday sight for most city-goers. 45

In the late-eighteenth century, the language of “social rescue” was common in discussions of both disability and race. It is historically relevant that efforts to relieve the sufferings of disabled and enslaved people were not framed in terms of human rights but humanitarianism. Abolitionist writers would have been aware of the longer continental

Enlightenment tradition that would crystalize into human rights discourse with Rousseau. A supposedly ‘English’ tradition of anti-slavery was part of the longer war against ‘French’ forms of thought and politics. As will be discussed later in this chapter, the distinction between human rights and humanitarianism significantly shaped English conceptualizations of black citizenship in the world of the Haitian Revolution. Humanitarians and abolitionists treated both the disabled poor and the enslaved as though “restoration to physical health was a key means to restoring spiritual values.”46 The treatment of people with physical and sensory impairments in eighteenth-century England consisted of moral treatment as well.

Infirmaries and hospitals that cared for the ‘sick and lame’ sought not just to recover the bodies of the admitted but also to save their souls. What is more, supporters of provisional care for the disabled argued that once relieved of their physical burdens, the ‘sick and lame’ would return to the workforce and England would have fewer vagrants.47

Abolitionists made similar arguments, claiming that emancipation would free the enslaved from the devastating impairments of human bondage and lead to intellectual and

45 Ibid. 46 D. Turner, 43. 47 Ibid., 43-44, 6-7.

242 moral improvement among Africans and their descendants. Thus, reforms made with regard to people with disabilities shared with abolition a commitment to Enlightenment ideas of advancement and the free labour system. An anonymous article published in the Gentleman’s

Magazine in 1780 claimed that if given the opportunity to “reap the fruits of their labour” the enslaved would no longer suffer the psychological and emotional disabilities accompanied by slavery, “their kind affections hav[ing] been animated, and their exertions of labour augmented.”48 If freed from slavery, abolitionists argued, Africans and their descendants could become independent, industrious, and, by implication, able-bodied yet obedient subjects. Couched in such arguments was the notion that able-bodiedness was a requisite for citizenship and social progress.

While kept in a state of slavery, however, Africans would remain physically debilitated and dependent. In Thomas Clarkson’s Essay on Slavery and Commerce, the author described the physical devastation of enslavement from the moment of capture in sub-

Saharan Africa to sugar production in the Caribbean. In an ‘imaginary scene’ in Africa,

Clarkson portrayed an “unhappy man,” who could hardly keep up with the rest of the coffle because “[h]is feet seemed to have suffered so much, either from the fetters, which had confined them in the canoe, or from long and constant travelling, for he was limping painfully along.”49 Clarkson linked able-bodiedness to ‘worth’ and disability with helplessness and, in doing so, played to eighteenth-century fears of disability as a form of

48 “Cruelty attending the Slave Trade as at present practiced on Negro Slavery,” Gentleman's Magazine October 1780 Vol. pay. MS3248, Wellcome Library. 49 Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin dissertation, which was honoured with the first prize in the University of Cambridge, for the year 1785, With Additions (London, 1786), 42.

243 weakness and dependency. The Middle Passage was so physically destructive that once the human cargo reached the auction blocks of the Caribbean, many individuals carried little value as commodities on the open market. Clarkson hinted darkly that disabled people were simply killed or left to die at the end of a slave trading voyage:

Some of the wretched Africans are in so debilitated and hopeless a state, that no

purchaser can be found. Others approach so near to these on the scale of sickness, that

but little is offered for them: in such a case, it is not the interest of the officers to sell

them, as they would diminish the value of their own privileges…From these

considerations, they are left on hand, and become a burthen to the vessels when they

are about to depart. What becomes of them, the reader must be left to imagine. It is

certain that they are not sold in the colonies, and it equally certain that they are not

taken home.50

According to one abolitionist writer, many of the punishments inflicted onto the enslaved “render[ed] [them] unprofitable, worthless, and deserving of [more] punishment.”

Some slaveholders purposefully chose punishments that did not impair, as “an auxiliary to the lash.”51 The slaveowner’s self-interest in profiting from enslaved labourers was the only protection offered to enslaved bodies “till sickness or age render[s] [them] incapable of labour, but allows none of those comforts which alleviate the miseries of life.”52 The enslaved labourer “can neither refresh, or indulge his wearied body. He is subjected by it to injury. He is placed in the jaws of trespass, and unavoidably made obnoxious to oppression,

50 Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce, 60. 51 James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of the African Slaves in the British sugar colonies (Dublin, 1784), 62. 52 Woods, 8-9

244 and stripes.”53 In detailing the production of disability in Atlantic slavery, abolitionists demonstrated that planters treated bondspeople as interchangeable units of labour.

Anti-slavery writers focused their attention on depicting the sugar plantations of the

English Caribbean as the most hostile and physically debilitating of environments. One of the most influential abolitionists to make such arguments was James Ramsay, who in 1784 condemned the institution of slavery for causing disability and dependency among enslaved

Africans. Ramsay, a former English naval surgeon turned ordained Anglican priest in 1761, served as a pastor in St. Christopher (present-day St. Kitts) where he preached about the equitable treatment of all human beings to his black and white congregation. Ramsay’s insistence on equality made him unpopular in the Caribbean, especially among planters and pro-slavery proponents. After three years of activism for the better treatment of the enslaved in the English Caribbean, Ramsay resigned his position as pastor and returned home to

England, where he continued his struggle. Ramsay differed from most other abolitionists in the early years of organized anti-slavery in that he based his findings on first-hand accounts of English Caribbean slavery.54 In 1784 he wrote two influential abolitionist works that emphasized the physical and psychological disabilities caused by enslavement in order to expose the realities of African slavery in the West Indies.

Field labour, Ramsay argued, was the “greatest hardship” bondspeople endured and led them to run away, which, if they were apprehended, caused more physical destruction by way of punishment. In reference to the boiling house, Ramsay first appealed to England’s

53 Ramsay, 62. 54 Mary-Antoinette Smith ed., Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano: Essays on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (Peterborough On: Broadview Press, 2010) 31- 32.

245 self-interest by arguing that the over-work of unfree labourers produced poor quality sugar.

Workers in the boiling house, Ramsay described, often laboured through the night, which made the sugar “ill tempered, burnt in the boiler; and improperly struck.” Ramsay concluded this argument with the shock and lasting visual spectacle of disability. The mill, he described, “every now and then grinds off an hand, or an arm, of those drowsy, worn down creatures that fed it.”55 Clarkson also accounted for the dismemberment of limbs in the boiling house and mill. These enslaved individuals, Clarkson wrote, “in this manner…go on, with little or no respite from their work, till the crop season is over, when the year…is completed.”56

Perhaps the most powerful portrayal of enslaved disability was abolitionists’ depictions of the punishments meted out onto captive bodies. In abolitionist propaganda the whip became the ultimate symbol of deliberate and calculated disablement. Ramsay argued that it could “effectively disable [the enslaved] for weeks.”57 The author of Thoughts on the

Slavery of the Negroes went even further to depict the sadistic kinds of torture bondspeople suffered for minimal offenses. For crimes such as “inattention” and “negligence” captives endured “dismemberment, or severe flagellations, with pepper and salt scattered on the wounds, for the purpose of increasing pain.”58 Ramsay described the punishment for bondspeople who committed “common crimes of neglect, absence from work, eating the sugarcane, [and] theft.” According to the author, such punishments included:

55 Ramsay, 64. 56 Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce, 143. 57 Ramsay, 71. 58 Woods, 8.

246

cart whipping, beating with a stick, sometimes to the breaking of bones, the chain, an

iron crook about the neck, a large pudding or ring about the ancle, and confinement in

the dungeon. There have been instances of slitting of ears, breaking of limbs, so as to

make amputation necessary, beating out of eyes, and castration…[T]wo chief judges

have been celebrated for cutting off or mashing (so as to make amputation necessary)

the limbs of their slaves.59

Thomas Clarkson’s Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a select committee of the House of Commons (1790), also portrayed the legally sanctioned and disabling punishments of the English Caribbean colonies. Unlike other abolitionists who relied on tales and second-hand news of slavery’s ills, Clarkson used only statistics and sworn testimonies of military officers, planters, and captains, as well as runaway advertisements as evidence of the mutilation of bondspeople. For instance, Clarkson quoted a 1784 St. Kitts law “to prevent the cutting off or depriving any slave in this island of any of their limbs or members, or otherwise disabling them.” Clarkson noted that this law was enacted in the first place because “some persons have of late been guilty of cutting off and depriving slaves of their ears.”60

These depictions, although intended to prove the humanity of the enslaved and garner

English support of the abolitionist cause, echoed the much older tradition of European travellers’ portrayals of ‘monstrous’ Africans with missing limbs, eyes, and appendages.

Depictions of monstrosity are, thus, a key element of the continuities and discontinuities of racist thought that facilitate the shift from an emphasis on violence towards an emphasis on

59 Ramsay, 73-74. 60 Thomas Clarkson, An Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in the Years 1790, and 1791…(London, 1791), vii. Emphasis original.

247 paternalism in European writings about slavery. Ramsay and Clarkson deployed vivid descriptions of brutal punishments for ‘minor’ crimes to victimize the enslaved and detract from the figure of the rebel. Indeed, in emphasizing the debilitated and suffering bondsperson, abolitionists located the impetus for black rebellion in the feeling and reactive body rather than the thinking, planning, and politically conscious mind. Thus, abolitionists framed rebellion as a form of non-politics, deploying a new and ‘modern’ language of disability in their representations of the tortured bodies of enslaved people to elicit Christian sympathy and divert English attention away from the ‘threat’ of revolutionary emancipation.

Abolitionist images in particular demonstrate anti-slavery’s representation of the enslaved as physically broken and, by implication, physically non-threatening. The famous

‘slave medallion’ made by potter Josiah Wedgwood in 1787 for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade depicts a black, muscular, male enchained and on bended knee, his hands raised in supplication. Below the image are the words ‘AM I NOT A MAN AND A

BROTHER?’61 The Wedgwood image was extremely popular during the 1780s and 1790s and appeared in stationary, books, prints, paintings, newspapers, and as a ceramic figure.62 In her analysis of the seal, scholar Mary Guyatt, argues that “since supplication demands that a hierarchy of power is established, the [enslaved] is clearly the submissive party, a non- threatening object whose purpose is to arouse pity in the hearts of potential converts to the abolitionists’ cause.”63 The enslaved figure is undeniably muscular, but his muscular frame reflects his body’s purpose to labour and not his militarization, as evidenced by the chains.

61 Mary Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion: Values in Eighteenth-Century Design,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 2 (2000), 93. 62 Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (New York: Routledge Inc., 2000), 22. 63 Guyatt, 99-100.

248

He asks or begs for his freedom “from the safe position of his knees” so that “bestowing freedom upon [the enslaved] seemed…purely an act of humanity and will.”64 As Marcus

Wood argues, in the Wedgwood image, the black person becomes a “cultural absentee…a blank page for white guilt to inscribe.”65 The image exemplifies abolitionists’ depiction of black citizenship as a ‘crippled’ form of citizenship, achieved not through self-liberation, but as a humanitarian gift from the English people. Because the figure is on bended knee and in chains we do not know if he could walk with a limp or run. Whether the enslaved body was part of a narrative of collective or individual suffering, it remained a nameless and voiceless body, “an object afflicted, not ... a subject capable of describing his or her affliction” in abolitionist rhetoric.66 The power of abolitionists rested in their ability to display the black body as disabled, abject and in need of white support in order to rise, thereby, reinforcing the racist paternalism that established and sustained the institution of slavery in the first place.

In addition to the hobbled, black captive, abolitionists offered an oppositional narrative of black citizenship and of the Haitian Revolution in their depiction of Toussaint

Louverture, the former captive turned leader of the Haitian Revolution. England became involved in the Haitian Revolution in 1793, when they invaded Saint Domingue in the hopes of profiting from the civil war in the French colony only to be defeated in 1798 by the troops of the black general Toussaint Louverture. When the English withdrew from Santo Domingo, they offered to make Louverture king of Hispaniola and help defend the island from the

French. Louverture refused the offer, however the English never ceased in depicting

64 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (Vintage: 1996), 376. 65 Wood, 22. 66 Ibid., 216.

249

Louverture as an English ally in the war against the French.67 In the last years of his life and especially after his death in 1803, English abolitionists mobilized Louverture “as an embodiment of the black republic, a symbol of the character and potential of the black race.”68 Abolitionists celebrated Louverture as an individual, militarized figure who embodied masculinity and valour and symbolized the tragedy of slavery. Anti-slavery writers marginalized rebel leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the black masses and instead centred their attention on a sentimentalized and (after 1803) conveniently deceased Louverture in order to erase the Haitian Revolution from English history and defuse the threat that black military success represented in the Atlantic World.69 Thus, the figure of Louverture was only possible in the English abolitionist campaign because he was an antagonist of the French and not an obvious threat to England. Unlike the Wedgwood image and the countless depictions of broken and supplicating captives in abolitionist writings, Louverture was always shown standing, strong, and armed. Through Louverture, anti-slavery writers engaged with and romanticized the figure of the able-bodied, former captive who rises to lead an army to emancipation. Ultimately, however, the figure of the Wedgwood seal remained at the crux of their campaign.

67 Grégory Pierrot, “’Our Hero’: Toussaint Loverture in British Representations,” Criticism 50, no. 4 (Fall, 2008), 583. 68 Matt Clavin, “Race, Rebellion, and the Gothic: Inventing the Haitian Revolution,” Early American Studies (Spring 2007), 2-3. 69 Pierrot, 582, 596.

250

(Figure 2) John Kay, Toussaint Louverture, etching, in A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings. With Biographical Sketches and Illustrative Anecdotes (Edinburgh: A & C Black, 1877).

251

(Figure 3) J. Barlow, Toussaint Louverture, engraving, in Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805).

252

Pro-slavery Writing and Constructions of African Intellectual Deficiency

In addition to focusing on the physical sufferings endured by the enslaved, anti- slavery writers paid a great deal of attention to refuting pro-slavery arguments regarding the so-called intellectual limitations of Africans. In his seventy-two-point “Sketch of a Negro

Code,” originally drafted in 1780 for Home Secretary Henry Dundas and published in 1792,

Edmund Burke argued that, in slavery “the minds of men [are] crippled with…restraint [and] can do nothing for themselves.” He advised planters to “at once restrain and support…control, at the same time that you ease, the servant.”70 Similarly, Ramsay offered a rebuttal to pro-slavery arguments that Africans were intellectually deficient by arguing that there was no “essential difference between European and African mental powers” and that if the enslaved appeared intellectually stunted it was because they were crippled by their bondage.71 “Oppression,” Ramsay wrote “makes wretches stupid, and their stupidity becomes their crime, and provokes their farther punishment.” According to Ramsay, pro- slavery depictions of the enslaved as inherently criminal – liars, thieves, murderers – was a reflection of the fact that the legal disabilities imposed on the enslaved debilitated their minds to the extent that criminal behaviour was their only opportunity for self-determination.

“The truth is,” he wrote, “a depth of cunning that enables them [the enslaved] to over-reach, conceal, deceive, is the only province of the mind left for them…to occupy.”72 In the final section of his work, “Natural Capacities of Slaves Vindicated,” Ramsay responded to the

70 Edmund Burke, Sketch of a Negro Code [1792] in Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period vol. 2, ed. Peter J. Kitson (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 173. 71 Ramsay, 195. 72 Ibid., 209.

253 arguments made by Edward Long in his History of Jamaica. Ramsay’s explicit rebuke of

Long’s work began by addressing the pro-slavery argument that Africans were a distinct species:

The ingenious author of a late History of Jamaica…appears to have formed, from his

own observation, the same opinion as Hume’s, or negroes being a distinct race. To

suppose them only a distinct race, will not immediately affect our arguments for their

humane treatment and mental improvement; but the consequences usually drawn from

it shock humanity, and check every hope of their advancement: for if allowed to be a

distinct race, European pride immediately concludes them as an inferior race, and then

it follows, of course, that nature formed them to be slaves to their superiors. And the

master having established these premises generally, and complimented himself with a

place among the superior beings, fairly concludes himself loosed from all obligations,

but these of interest, in his conduct towards them.73

Ramsay skilfully pointed out the connection between the perceived intellectual disability of enslaved Africans as cause and justification for the real physical, emotional, and psychological disabilities they endured in enslavement. For Ramsay, Long’s assertion that the skin colour and corporeality of Africans testified to their supposed intellectual and moral inferiority was “a precarious foundation for genius.” If Africans did have “less capacious skulls, calves of the legs less fleshy, and elevated more towards the hams,” it was because

“climate, diet, and various modes of life have great power over the features, form, and stature of man.”74

73 Ibid., 197. 74 Ibid., 212.

254

Despite framing the supposed intellectual deficiencies of the enslaved as produced and not innate, Ramsay maintained that Africans’ intellect prevented them from successfully entering into immediate emancipation. Freedom could offer the enslaved able-bodiedness only if “gentle [and] slow in its progress.” The enslaved, Ramsay argued, were not intellectually capable of freedom, being “ignorant” and in such a “helpless condition…that full liberty would be no blessing to them.” Ramsay’s racist and class-based paternalism toward bondspeople would become a hallmark of white abolitionist writings. The enslaved, he argued, “need a master to provide and care for them” while they transition into freedom.

Liberty must keep “pace with the opening of their minds,” and look “forward for its completion to a distant period.”75 Thus gradual rather than immediate emancipation, as a work in progress, would free the enslaved from the devastating impairments of bondage and slowly give the ‘gift’ of able-bodiedness.

Ramsay’s writing exemplifies the fact that assumptions about the so-called intellectual incapacities of Africans did not solely emanate from pro-slavery writings. Poet

Hannah More also used concepts of disability to further her anti-slavery stance but in a way that linked blackness to disability as defect and limit. In reference to enslaved Africans, More wrote: “Tho’ dark and savage, ignorant and blind/ They claim the common privilege of kind;/ Let Malice strip them of each other plea,/ They still are men, and men shou’d still be free.”76 Despite her anti-slavery stance, More did not escape the racial prejudices of her time and associated blackness with savagery and equated intellectual and sensory impairments with deficiencies.

75 Ibid., 118. 76 Hannah More, Slavery, a Poem. By Hannah More (London, 1788), 10; lines 137-140.

255

It is profoundly ironic that, during the abolitionist movement, the evidence of

Africans’ intellectual equality was everywhere in the Atlantic World, in the form of rebellions, black survival in England, and perhaps most powerfully, successful publications by ex-slave abolitionists. The number of anti-slavery tracts written by blacks was very small, however, more than any other form of anti-slavery propaganda, ex-slave narratives challenged pro-slavery claims that Africans were incapable of learning and intellectual advancement. When it came to black testimonies the majority of white abolitionists demonstrated that they were deeply implicated in the racist ideologies championed by supporters of slavery. English abolitionists were in constant need of witnesses to advance their political campaign against the slave trade, however, Clarkson and other white abolitionists had little interest in the testimonies of thousands of ex-slaves in England.

Abolitionists did not use the testimonies of former captives, although they knew and worked alongside black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano and other ex-captives in London.77 As Adam

Hochschild argues, “[i]n valuing British voices over African ones, the all-white committee was loath to challenge the racial attitudes of its time.” 78 Still, literary contributions by blacks were a significant rebuke of racist assumptions about African intellectual capacities.

During the 1770s and 1780s, the writings of Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho,

Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano figured greatly in the ongoing anti-slavery debate in

England. The writings of Wheatley and Sancho served as interventions in the debates regarding the intellectual abilities of Africans, however, they were less influential in shaping

77 Hochschild, 133. 78 Ibid.

256 the politics of abolition.79 Equiano and Cugoano, on the other hand, were much more successful. Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the evil of Slavery (1787) drew heavily on earlier abolitionist works by Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, and Thomas Clarkson.

And yet, Cugoano’s criticism of slavery went far beyond what was typically expressed by opponents of slavery. Cugoano saw slavery as indicative of the larger crimes that accompanied imperial power and expansion.80 Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the

Life of Oloudah Equiano or, Gustavas Vassa, the African (1789) was written in popular form and reached a wide reading public. Peter Fryer has argued that Equiano’s autobiography was

“the most important single literary contribution to the campaign for abolition.” It went through eight editions by 1797 and six more followed in the 22 years after the author’s death.81

Like other abolitionist works, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative contains numerous stories of owners and overseers beating and torturing bondspeople, including Equiano himself. By the late 1780s, when Equiano wrote his autobiography, the abolitionist strategy of printing tales depicting the physical violence inflicted onto enslaved bodies was well- established. “The punishments of the slaves,” Equiano wrote “on every trifling occasion, are so frequent, and so well known, together with the different instruments with which they are tortured, that it cannot any longer afford novelty to recite them; and they are too shocking to

79 Brown, 288. 80 Ibid., 296-97. 81 Fryer, 107. In Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005), Vincent Carretta claims that Equiano was a fraud and that his account of his early life is “probably ficticious” (xvi). His argument and ‘proof’ has been widely discredited by scholars of Atlantic slavery.

257 yield delight either to the writer or the reader.”82 Yet, Equiano still drew heavily on stories of bondspeople being tortured, dismembered, raped, and killed in the most sadistic ways. For instance, Equiano reported that slaveowner, Mr. Drummond, once dismembered a bondsman for running away.83 He recalled witnessing and experiencing for himself torture and floggings during his years in the Caribbean. Equiano also argued that the institution of slavery was itself disabling: He wrote, in a powerful passage worth quoting in full, that:

When you make men slaves, you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your

own conduct, an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with

you in a state of war; and yet you complain that they are not honest or faithful! You

stupefy them with stripes, and think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance;

and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren

soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them; and that they come from a climate,

where nature…has left man alone scant and unfinished, and incapable of enjoying the

treasures she hath poured out for him!84

The emphasis placed on refuting pro-slavery arguments about the supposed intellectual deficiencies of Africans demonstrates that the command of language and intellectual ability became a mark of humanity during debates over slavery’s existence.85 The narratives of

82 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, ed. Shelly Eversley ([1784] New York: Modern Library Paperback, 2004), 106. 83 Ibid., 95. 84 Ibid., 104. 85 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 132.

258 former bondspeople suggest, for instance, that only through the acquisition of writing in a

European language could one ‘prove’ one’s subjectivity.86

The Rebel, Disability, and Degeneracy in Pro-slavery Writings

Prior to the 1770s, pro-slavery advocates saw no reason to organize a systematic defense of slavery, for they were “comfortable in their belief that the status quo would be maintained [and therefore] produced reactive rather than proactive arguments to anti-slavery accusations.”87 The Somerset case of 1772 propelled pro-slavery writers into a concerted defence of the institution and led to a decades-long debate over slavery and abolition in the

English Atlantic World. Lord Mansfield’s decision to free James Somerset had a very restricted intention, however, anti-slavery activists advertised it as a ‘triumph’ for their cause and in doing so significantly expanded its implications. Mansfield’s ruling ultimately overturned two previous opinions regarding the legality of slavery in England and although it had little immediate effect on the practice of slavery in the British Empire, “the anti-slavery interpretation of the decision questioned slave-traders’ and slave-holders’ ability to reconcile their practices with the ideals of mainland Britons.”88 As a response to the first legal decision against the institution of slavery, a more cohesive pro-slavery position began to form. This systematic pro-slavery activism primarily originated from English Caribbean planters and

86 Sarah Salih, “Introduction” in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, ed. Sarah Salih ([1831] Toronto: Penguin Books, 2000), xiv-xv. 87 Swaminathan, 41. 88 Ibid., 45.

259 merchants who published their works in London to reach a wider audience and who came to dominate the abolitionist debates in the British Empire.89

By the late-eighteenth century, the political power of West Indian planters had reached its height and a number of absentee planters played a significant role in defending slavery and the interest of English Caribbean planters. The Society of West Indian Merchants responded to the anti-slavery movement only when it became obvious that Prime Minister

William Pitt was paying particular attention to the arguments put forth by William

Wilberforce and that Pitt approved of a parliamentary inquiry into the slave trade.90 In

February 1788, absentee Jamaican planters and merchants such as Edward Long, Beeston

Long, and John Ellis became part of a special subcommittee of the Society to address ‘the negro question.’ Several other Caribbean colonial representatives joined such as George

Baillie (Lesser Antilles), Stephen Fuller (Jamaica), Charles Spooner (Lesser Antilles), John

Braithwaite (Barbados), and John Stanley (Nevis).91 The subcommittee was authorized to use the Society’s funds to form a defense of slavery and in 1792-1793, the committee spent twice as much defending the institution as the Abolition Committee spent attacking it.92

Anti-abolitionists were never interested in winning the support of everyday English folk; rather, their goal was to convince the Lords and other elites of the dangers that would flow from interfering with the imperial system and racial and social hierarchies. The Society and its supporters never attempted to justify the conditions on board English slave ships

89 Ibid., 46. 90 Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 5-6. 91 Ryden, 191. 92 Ibid.

260 because the horrors the enslaved were forced to endure were impossible to defend “leaving planters to pause and even condemn the trade both publicly and privately.”93 Instead, pro- slavery propagandists argued that the Middle Passage was justified by the wealth generated through African labour on the plantations, without which both planters and English citizens would suffer. Even the enslaved benefited from plantation slavery, argued anti-abolitionists, for life in the sugar colonies was much better than the ‘barbarous’ African societies from which they came.94

In their defense of the institution of slavery, pro-slavery writers argued that Africans were a threat to the British Empire and expressed their fear of the black, male, able-bodied rebel most explicitly in their discussions of slave revolts in the Atlantic World. On the one hand, writers romanticized self-enfranchisement and the possibility of black citizenship. On the other hand, they condemned the black rebel through depictions of torture and the restoration of colonial authority. As mentioned previously, in Aphra Behn’s novella,

Oroonoko suffers a gruesome torture and death for leading an insurrection. During his dismemberment, Oroonoko does not cry out or even wince but instead is shown to have an extraordinary endurance to pain, which troubles the sentimental connection with the reader.95

Oroonoko’s death then restores order and slaveholder power in Suriname. Like late eighteenth-century anti-slavery writers, Behn depicted the revolutionary, able-bodied black person as a threat that needs to be contained. Behn seemed to ultimately sympathize with

Oroonoko the captured prince but not with Oroonoko the rebel. In Jamaican planter Bryan

Edwards’s 1793 The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West

93 Ibid., 195. 94 Ibid., 195-96. 95 Behn, 138-141.

261

Indies, the author described the torture and execution of rebels in the aftermath of Tacky’s

War.96 Despite being burnt and “hung up alive in irons and left to perish in this dreadful situation,” one rebel “uttered not a groan, and saw his legs reduced to ashes with the utmost firmness and composure.” Likewise, the other rebels “never uttered the least complaint.”97

Both Behn and Edwards depicted the aftermaths of slave revolts in which order is restored to plantation society only once rebels were ‘broken’ and ‘disobedient’ bodies were tortured and executed.

The last three decades of the eighteenth century marked a new phase in the history of slavery’s relationship to monstrosity as pro-slavery polemicists moved away from older arguments about the supposed ‘monstrosity’ of Africans and toward developing scientific arguments that more explicitly distanced Africans from humans and linked them to Africa’s animals. Connected to the animalization of Africans was the pro-slavery argument that

Africans were intellectually deficient. These arguments attempted to dismiss enslaved

Africans’ ability to self-govern at a time when slave rebellions peaked in the Caribbean. Pro- slavery advocates responded to the threat of black auto-emancipation by evacuating blacks of any vestiges of human, and therefore self-governing, possibility. For instance, Philip

Thicknesse spent time in the English Atlantic colonies and based his perception of Africans and slavery on eyewitness accounts. His first experience in the colonies was in Georgia in

1735, where he lived “a true Robinson Crusoe line of life.”98 The following year he returned to England and was given a job in the offices for Georgia colonists but was soon fired for his

96 See also Sarah Salih’s discussion of the depiction of rebellions in anti-slavery writings in “Putting down Rebellion.” 97 Bryan Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. In two volumes (Dublin, 1793) 2: 61. 98 Thicknesse, 31.

262 candid account of settler life. He then became captain of an independent company in

Jamaica, thanks to his friend, and first Prime Minister of Great Britain, Sir Robert Walpole.99

In his A Year’s Journey, Thicknesse wrote of Africans that, “Their face is scarce what we call human, their legs without any inner calf, and their broad, flat foot, and long toes (which they can use as well as we do our fingers) have much the resemblance of the Orang Outang, or Jacko, and other quadrupeds of their own climate.”100 Such arguments worked to undermine the political relevance of Africans, while justifying their enslavement in the

Atlantic World. What is more, these arguments abandoned much of the earlier anthropological uncertainty that the English associated with Africans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the late-eighteenth century, pro-slavery arguments came down clearly on the side of claiming that geographic and biological scientific evidence affirmed that Africans were animals rather than humans.

According to pro-slavery writers, the so-called intellectual incapacities of Africans prevented them from transgressing their so-called savage and animal nature and entering the realm of self-government. Africans, according to Long, possessed a “bareness of Genius and in general a weakness of intellect, little disposition to industry, nor genius of ye fine arts; the brute appearing to predominate and efface the human rational being.”101 According to Long,

Africans could not govern or even imagine self-liberation because their minds were ruled by

99 “Thicknesse, Philip (1719-1792),” Katherine Turner in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/27181 (accessed February 23, 2015). 100 Philip Thicknesse, A Year’s Journey through France, and part of Spain 2nd ed. (London, 1778), 2: 102. 101 Long’s Collection for The History of Jamaica. Add 18270, 41. British Library.

263 beastliness. The supposed cognitive deficiencies of Africans caused them to suffer from a kind of ‘social death’ in which they have no memory or concept of a future. Africans from

Guinea possessed “a very confined intellect [and] many appear perfectly stupid…They never think, have no memory, of what is past is just as unknown to them as what is to come.”102

Such arguments about the supposed intellectual deficiencies of Africans were ultimately arguments for African disenfranchisement and disablement. Long suggested that all Africans had degenerated into the ‘brute’ rebel figure, controlled by violence, mischief, and treachery.

Of Africa, he argued that:

Whatever great personages this country might anciently have produced, and concerning

whom we have no information, they are now every where degenerated into a brutish,

ignorant, idle, crafty, treacherous, bloody, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious

people even in those states where we might expect to find them more polished,

humane, docile, and industrious.103

When analyzed from the standpoint of disability, pro-slavery writers’ claims were far more scientifically sophisticated than they are often understood to be by scholars. Here, Long accepted the possibility of an ancient past of possible greatness in Africa, marked by “great personages.” In claiming degeneracy Long opened up the scientific possibility that the opposite of degeneracy – the path taken by Europeans – was evolution. Thus, in pro-slavery writing, there was a clear effort to draw on scientific evidence that human life in Africa was

102 Ibid., 44. 103 Edward Long, History of Jamaica. Or, general survey of the antient and modern state of that island: with reflections on its situation, settlements, inhabitants,…In three volumes (London, 1774), 2: 354.

264 of great antiquity, however, supporters of slavery like Long twisted that scientific evidence into a racist narrative of degeneracy.

Supporters of slavery suggested that Africans and their descendants were biologically, indeed racially, prone to physical deformities, denying that widespread forms of black impairment were caused by enslavement. As Chapter Three discussed, rickets was a common disease among the enslaved, especially children, and caused deformity of the legs and feet. Supporters of slavery often described physical abnormalities caused by illness as racially specific deformities.104 The racialization of deformity reinforced the disparity between white and black bodies and, subsequently, of their supposed divergent human natures. At the same time, it took the onus off of slaveowners and the institution itself for physical deformities resulting from malnutrition, overwork, punishment and hostile living conditions among the enslaved.

In the 1780s, Edward Long began revisions for a second edition of his History, in which he attempted to demonstrate that Africans were biologically different from Europeans, not only in physical appearance, but ‘biological’ make-up. The second edition never came to fruition,105 however, Long’s manuscript notes demonstrate the development of a particularly modern anti-black racism. Long argued that the physical differences between Africans and

Europeans were not superficial but based on immutable biology. He wrote:

104 See quotation from Oliver Goldsmith in Chapter Four of this dissertation, p. 215: A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature (By Oliver Goldsmith, In Eight Volumes) vol. 2 (Dublin, 1776-1777), 228. 105 Historians do not know why Long’s second edition was never completed, only that he spent much time revising it for a subsequent edition. See Kenneth Morgan, ‘Long, Edward (1734-1813),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., May 2014 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/16964, accessed 17 May 2015].

265

I may add too that I am informed by a…physician who has resided many years in Jam.

And anatomised several bodies of negroes, that the substance of their brain is covered

with a dusty coloured membrane, impregnated no doubt from the same source of their

more internal cuticulam [sic] membrane, which…in contestably proves their

complection is not caused by the action of the solar rays, but by a peculiar liquor which

their internal organs are formed to secrete which agrees with the assertions of other

anatomists.106

These arguments demonstrate the development of Long’s racism in the context of the emergence of scientific racism in the late-eighteenth century. The perceived biological deviations of Africans were evidence of their natural enslaved status. Africans, he argued,

“seem to be of all making the…servant of Aristotle – Some men there are says he who are born to be slaves that is seem adapted and intended by nature for servitude.”107

Pro-slavery writers argued that the African body and mind were biologically defective and posed a threat to the ‘civilized’ English culture. Philip Thicknesse expressed disgust at the mix-raced population in England and argued that the so-called defects of

Africans could spread and infect the English population. He claimed that, “a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkeys, and infinitely more dangerous” had spread across all of

England. The inner defectiveness of Africans, Thicknesse argued, contaminated the white population through reproduction to produce the vilest animal on earth. He argued that,

“[t]here is not on earth so mischievous and vicious an animal as a mule, nor in any humble

106 Long’s Collection for The History of Jamaica. Add 18270. British Library. 107 Ibid.

266 opinion a worse race of men than the negroes of Africa.”108 In direct response to the

Somerset ruling, Thicknesse argued that Africans should not be allowed free in England, where they would be “permitted to propagate their mischievous race among us. We have wicked streams, and streamers of human blood among us already.”109

Both Thicknesse and Long linked the supposed deviance of Africans to intellectual disability in arguing that Africans were a different species than human. Thickness claimed that “[n]ot one [African] was ever born with solid sense; yet all have a degree of monkey cunning, and even monkey mischief, which often stands them in better stead than sense.”110

According to Long, African “genius (if it can be so called) consists along in trick and cunning, enabling them, like monkies and apes, to be thievish and mischievous, with a particular dexterity.”111 Pro-slavery writers expressed the same fear of the monster as pre and early colonial writers, however, for these writers the ‘nature’ of what was once written of as a monster was now deemed an animal. The emphasis on the ape as an example of the supposed similarities between Africans and orangutans emerged in the late-eighteenth century and was part of natural historians’ effort to fix the border between human and animal.112 For Thicknesse and Long, notions of race emerged alongside and were mutually constitutive of notions of the human and the animal. Sarah Salih argues that, “it is impossible to discuss the history of race and racism without taking account of formulations of species

108 Thicknesse, 110. 109 Ibid., 112. 110 Ibid., 103. 111 Long, Vol. 2, 377. 112 Sarah Salih, “Filling Up the Space Between Mankind and Ape: Racism, Speciesism and the Androphilic Ape,” ARIEL 38, no. 1 (2007), 96-97; Thomas, 19, 47, 57, 112, 125-144, 289.

267 distinction in which the putative boundaries between animal and human were (and continue to be) asserted with varying degrees of emphasis.”113 Both Long and Thicknesse depicted

Africans as animal-like – savage, wild, and sub-intelligent. And yet, they also demonstrated an acceptance of the similarities between human and animal and the possibility of evolution as an explanation for the indistinct categories of human and animal.114

Pro- and anti-slavery writers arrived at different conclusions about what to do with the supposed threat of a free black population in England, however, supporters of both sides relied on linkages between race and disability. Pro-slavery propaganda during the abolitionist movement demonstrates that the histories of race and disability overlap not just in language or metaphor, but rather in real parallel ways. For instance, in his manuscript notes, Edward

Long suggested a violent alternative solution to African slavery. The so-called inner and outer deficiencies of Africans, he argued, “deforms the beauty of this globe” so much so that

Africans “deserve to be exterminated from the…earth.” 115 Opponents of slavery did not go as far to suggest a proto-eugenics solution to the ‘problem’ of blacks in the metropole.

Abolitionists desired freedom for the enslaved but did not necessarily believe in their equality to whites. Granville Sharp, one of the first and most influential abolitionists in

England, opposed the slave trade and slavery, but his writings reveal that he had reservations, which were partly motivated by unease over the presence of a large population of black people in England. One of Sharp’s main issues with the slave trade and slavery was that it brought people of African descent to England, a place that Sharp felt they did not belong. In

113 Salih, 96. 114 See also Salih’s discussion of Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Edward Long in “Filling Up the Space Between Mankind and Ape.” 115 Long’s Collection for The History of Jamaica. Add 18270, 44. British Library.

268 the late 1780s and 1790s, Sharp and Olaudah Equiano were among a small group of abolitionists to establish the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone, as a free black territory.

Thousands of former slaves – black loyalists from Nova Scotia, Jamaican maroons, the

‘Black poor’ of London, and those eventually liberated from the slave trade – travelled to

Sierra Leone. This abolitionist effort was a form of “social engineering” and reflected

Sharp’s belief that whether free or enslaved, blacks were fundamentally different than whites.116 Of the over 10,000 black people living in London at the time (most of them servants), the English parliament succeeded in sending roughly 350 of them to Sierra

Leone.117 Freetown, although couched in notions of humanitarianism, was a violent scheme developed to rid blacks from England. Both supporters and opponents of slavery found the black presence in England a threat to the English and implicit in their arguments was a fear that the black rebel figure of the colonies might come ‘home.’

Amelioration, Gender, and the Changing Rhetoric of Monstrosity

In addition to written propaganda, planters and lawmakers responded to anti-slavery attacks by implementing new laws intended to make slavery more ‘humane.’ Between 1788 and 1807, the Parliament of London passed a series of acts, collectively known as the

Consolidated Slave Acts, intended to ameliorate the condition and limit disability among the enslaved and promote creolization by encouraging enslaved women of childbearing years to have children. Passed over several years, the laws responded to the growing anti-slavery lobby in England and resolved to regulate and improve the social conditions of bondspeople,

116 Fryer, 196. 117 Ibid., 203.

269 however, “the degree to which they were actually implemented is dubious at best.”118 The

Slave Amelioration Act of 1824 repealed former slave laws and consolidated all slave laws into one act. It abolished previous laws that were particularly brutal and issued new laws that offered degrees of protections to bondspeople.119

During the amelioration era, planters increasingly paid attention to bondswomen, not to the benefit of the health and well being of the enslaved but the economic interest of planters and traders. Foreseeing that the slave trade might very well end, planters focused their efforts on reproducing the enslaved population naturally. While pro-slavery advocates claimed that African women were immune to childbirth pain, abolitionists acknowledged that enslaved women did, in fact, feel pain during childbirth. Thus, pain in childbirth became a crucial sign of humanity, and immunity to pain a defining feature of the animal. The figure of the pained, prostrate female giving birth became a key means, in abolitionist discourse, of displacing the black, male, rebel. During this time, the rhetoric of the monster shifted; abolitionists argued that the monster was not Africans but the institution of slavery itself.

The Jamaica Assembly, which represented the wealthiest sugar producers of the

English Atlantic, instituted their own reforms to the Jamaica slave codes in 1787, 1789, and

1792. The Assembly issued several new laws offering bondspeople protection from sadistic punishments that impaired and disfigured their bodies. These laws formed the basis of several English Caribbean colonies’ amelioration acts.120 The 1788 law made it a crime for any person to “at his, her, or their own will and pleasure, or by his, her, or their direction, or

118 Melanie J. Newton, “The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender, and British Slave Ameliorations, 1823-1834,” Abolition 33, no. 1 (2012), 591. 119 Ibid., 593 120 Long, vol. 2, 270-271.

270 with his, her, or their knowledge, sufferance, privity, or consent, mutilate or dismember any slave or slaves,” the punishment for which was a “fine, not exceeding one hundred pounds, and imprisonment not exceeding twelve months, for each and every slave so mutilated or dismembered.” Additionally, enslaved individuals who suffered such mutilation were, according to the 1788 law, manumitted “for [their] future protection.” Any person who

“wantonly or cruelly, whip, beat, bruise, wound, or imprison, or keep in confinement without sufficient support, any slave or slaves, not being his, her, or their own property, or not being under his, her, or their management, care, or employ…shall suffer such punishments by fine or imprisonment…”121 The sanctions did not apply if owners inflicted such violence onto their own captives, which demonstrates that what the laws sought to protect in the first instance was property, not people.

The new policies of the amelioration period made the principle of maternal inheritance important in novel ways. As it became clear that the slave trade’s days were numbered enslaved women’s reproductive abilities became essential to slavery’s future profitable survival. Trading patterns changed significantly in the late-eighteenth century in part because of planters’ increased emphasis on reproduction, but also because of a new tax relief provided for the importation of bondswomen under the age of twenty-five. In tandem, in 1797 the Jamaican House of Assembly passed an act that added an additional ten pounds for the importation of women over twenty-five.122 Both defenders and opponents of slavery attempted to capitalize on black women’s fertility – for slaveowners it “symbolized

121 The act of assembly of the island of Jamaica, to repeal several acts, and clauses of acts, respecting slaves, and for the better Order and Government of Slaves, and for other Purposes; commonly called the Consolidation Act… (London, 1788.) 122 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 (Fall 2011), 41, 44.

271 hereditary slavery, for abolitionists it symbolized the conduit through which a free laboring population could be propagated.” In their efforts to abolish the slave trade, anti-slavery writers argued that if slaveowners provided better physical and emotional care of their captives, bondspeople’s overall health would improve and, therefore, lead to the birth of new generations of blacks, who would, overtime, “acquire habits of free people, thereby naturally eliminating the continued need for bonded laborers.”123 The abolitionist emphasis on the failure of natural increase among the enslaved – low birth rates and high death rates – was in many ways a logical response to the gendered logic of slavery, based as it was on the principle of maternal inheritance.

In an effort to exploit the reproductive abilities of bondswomen, planters set in motion a number of measures to increase the overall health of women who were still in their childbearing years. The 1792 slave code of Jamaica officially intended to “obviate the causes which impeded the natural increase of the negroes gradually to diminish the necessary of the slave trade; and ultimately to lead to its complete termination.”124 In Jamaica, women within childbearing years were exempt from field labour and often relocated to work environments that planters perceived as less threatening to women’s prenatal health, such as the cattle pen or great house as domestic labourers.125 Women who birthed a certain number of children were entitled to greater food allowances. These “medals of honour” could cause psychological disabilities among bondswomen and “functioned akin to physical violence.”126

123 Ibid., 42. 124 Quoted in Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 6-7. 125 S. Turner, 45. 126 Ibid., 53-54.

272

Planters even hired medical practitioners to regularly care for pregnant women.127 Despite these changes, planters still viewed punishment, even of pregnant women, as necessary for enslaved management. For instance, by “whipping across the shoulders or burying their wombs in the ground, slaveholders roused bondswomen into submission and still benefited from their reproductive capacity.”128 Many of these reforms were not administered in any practical way, however, the Jamaica Assembly’s cooperation to reform slavery, at least on paper, consistently subverted abolitionist criticism in England, which prolonged the struggle for the abolition of the slave trade.129

Supporters of slavery interpreted the failure of bondswomen to reproduce as an innate deficiency in Africans. They claimed that African women’s fertility was stifled by unruly licentiousness, which lead to widespread venereal disease and subsequent infertility.130 Dr.

Jesse Foot, whose work was paid for by the Society’s anti-abolition subcommittee, argued that it was impossible to thwart “the libidinous practices of negroes” for “a young negro man will have an many wives as his will prescribes, or his fancy in succession suggests” and

“[t]he women who entertain promiscuous connections are never fruitful.”131 Planter Bryan

Edwards expressed similar beliefs that the enslaved “hold chastity in so little estimation, that bareness and frequent abortions, the usual effects of a promiscuous intercourse, are very

127 Ibid., 47. 128 Ibid., 52-53. 129 M. Turner, 6-7. 130 Ryden, 199. 131 Jesse Foot, A Defence of the planters of the West-Indies; compromised in four arguments…(London, 1792), 96-97, 101.

273 generally prevalent among them.”132 Connected to the notion that Africans were

‘abnormally’ sexual was the pro-slavery argument that enslaved women were immune to childbirth pain, which served to naturalize the link between blackness and enslavement.

Enslaved women were depicted as “’monstrous labour units’ who could just as easily drop a child at will and soon after return to toil at the most arduous field tasks.”133 For instance,

Edward Long claimed that enslaved women could birth multiple babies at once “without a shriek or scream.”134 According to planters, white women’s extreme pain in childbirth was evidence of their humanity and their supposed unfitness for servitude, whereas, black women’s painless childbirth was evidence of their animality. As Sasha Turner argues,

“[e]nslavement required not just the construction of denigrated bodies, but also the construction of corporeal differences between enslaver and enslaved.”135

Anti-slavery Writings and the Changing Rhetoric of Monstrosity

At the same time that pro-slavery writers moved away from older arguments about the so-called monstrosity of Africans and toward the notion that Africans were more akin to animals than humans, abolitionists took up the language of monstrosity in their attack of slavery and its supporters. Abolitionists argued that monstrosity was located not within the individual African, but the institution of slavery itself. The metaphor of monstrosity was extremely powerful during the late-eighteenth century, and anti-slavery propagandists found

132 William Preston, A Letter to Bryan Edwards, Esquire, containing observations on some passages of his History of the West Indies (London, 1795), 16. 133 S. Turner, 49. 134 Long, vol. 2, 380. Cited in S. Turner, “Home Grown Slaves,” 49. 135 S. Turner, 49.

274 it especially useful as an attack on slaveholders and merchants. In his work on the first Afro-

American autobiographies, scholar William L. Andrews argues that, “metaphors do not simply adorn arguments for persuasive purposes. Metaphors are arguments. Their success depends greatly on the capacity of the reader to accept and explore the creative dialectic of the semantic clash until new meanings emerge from the debris of old presuppositions.”136 In referring to slavery as a monstrosity, abolitionists relied on older notions of disability in a way that evoked evil, deformity, and depravity. For instance, Thomas Clarkson described the

Dolben Act (1788) – an amelioration reform that limited the number of captives one could carry on English slave ships and required each ship to have a doctor to keep a register of captive and crew sicknesses and deaths – 137 as “the first bill that ever put fetters on that barbarous and destructive monster, the Slave-trade.”138 In a letter to Thomas Clarkson, fellow abolitionist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote in reference to slavery that “[n]o evil more monstrous has existed upon earth.”139 Others referred to slavery as a “cruel monster” and the slave trade as “the monstrous trade.”140 Anti-slavery writers also used the metaphor of monstrosity as a direct attack against slaveowners, overseers, and merchants. For instance,

James Ramsay wrote in reference to Captain Collingwood and the Zong massacre: “Can humanity imagine that it was meant, in any possible circumstances, to submit the fate of such

136 William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 1986), 11. 137 Hochschild, 154. 138 Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, By the British Parliament, vol. 1, (London, 1808), 560. 139 Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, [February 1808], in Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (London, 1932), I, 395. 140 William Dickson, Mitigation of Slavery in Two Parts – marginal inscriptions Codex Eng 209 3 – Size Flat John Carter Brown Library; Letter from John Dun on slavery Feb. 15 1792. MS.2227 Boston Public Library.

275 numbers of reasonable creatures to the reveries of a sick monster?”141 Abolitionists’ utilization of the concept of the monster turned accusations of monstrosity against those very people who espoused it in the first place.

Writers also employed notions of disability to construct a national ideology and foster a patriotic conviction among their readers that slavery contradicted what it meant to be

English. For instance, one anti-slavery writer argued that when the act for abolishing slavery is finally passed “it should be followed up with an impeachment of those monsters of cruelty that the national Honour may be vindicated & that posterity may not think that even in the eighteenth century we were a nation of savages.”142 For this author, monstrosity and savagery defined slavers and not the enslaved. In his Essay on Slavery and Commerce,

Thomas Clarkson drew on two notions of disability to play on a national sense of pride. He distinguished between true English citizens, who exhibited charity toward the disabled, and those who claimed English citizenship but whose involvement in slavery, in Clarkson’s opinion, made them monsters and negated their English citizenship.143 Clarkson, in conversation with the ‘unhappy African,’ explained to the man that men involved in slavery

“are not Christians. They are infidels. They are monsters. They are out of the common course of nature.” In contrast, “[t]heir countrymen at home…support the sick, the lame, and the blind. They fly to the succour of the distressed. They have noble and stately buildings for the sole purpose of benevolence. They are in short, of all nations, the most remarkable for

141 Ramsay, 35. 142 Letter from John Dun on slavery Feb. 15 1792. MS.2227, Boston Public Library. 143 For more on how abolitionists drew on concepts of national ideology to condemn slavery and those involved see Ryden, 158-159.

276 humanity and justice.”144 According to Clarkson, care for the disabled was the sign of

Englishness; violence against the enslaved was the sign of the monster. By calling slaveowners and merchants monsters, Clarkson not only suggested that they were evil and morally depraved but that they did not belong in England. In Clarkson’s text the dominant culture’s dispensation of charity, sympathy and kindness to the disabled came to define the moral character of what it meant to be English in the late-eighteenth century. Clarkson linked the social, economic, and political oppression of the disabled to that of the enslaved and, in doing so, yoked humanitarianism to Englishness but remained silent on, and implicitly rejected, the idea of human rights. For abolitionists, revolutionary able-bodies fought for human rights and equal citizenship and English abolitionists effectively rejected those after the American Revolution. Humanitarian ideas of citizenship were what abolitionists offered to the enslaved, predicated on the assumption that theirs was a ‘crippled’ form of citizenship.

The rhetoric of monstrosity continued in anti-slavery campaigns until 1838, when nearly 800,000 men, women, and children throughout the British Empire officially became free.145 In a church service on July 31st, 1838, Jamaican missionary and abolitionist

Reverend William Knibb celebrated the emancipation of the enslaved with his church members in Falmouth, Jamaica. Members placed an iron collar, a whip, and chains in a coffin, inscribed “Colonial Slavery, died July 31st, 1838, aged 276 years” and sang:

The death-blow is struck – see the monster is dying,

He cannot survive till the dawn streaks the sky;

In one single hour, he will prostrate be lying,

144 Clarkson, Essay on the Slavery and Commerce, 43-44. 145 Hochschild, 348.

277

Come, shoutt o'er the grave where so soon he will lie.

When midnight struck, Knibb shouted, “The monster is dead; the Negro is free.”146

Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that representations of disability were key to both anti- and pro-slavery propagandists in the first wave of British abolition. Anti-slavery writers used notions of disability in various ways to relay the horrors of Atlantic slavery to their readers and detract from the competing figure of the black, armed, able-bodied male rebel. Racialized disability rhetoric was a key means through which abolitionists reconciled anti-slavery and racism, and calls for reform with opposition to revolution. Supporters of slavery claimed that Africans were intellectually disabled and more akin to animals than humans. Such arguments served to, on the one hand, deny the political relevance of blacks in the Atlantic World and, on the other hand, promote the notion that the enslaved were a threat that needed to be contained and controlled through enslavement. Both anti- and pro-slavery writers, therefore, used disability to advance their arguments, however, arrived at different conclusions. The different ways in which they utilized notions of disability reflect the attitudinal changes toward race, slavery, and disability in late eighteenth-century England.

The ghost of the rebel body haunted both anti- and pro-slavery writings and was a real threat and possibility in the Atlantic World. In the world of the Haitian Revolution, the figure of the black male rebel, in the circulation of writings and images, shaped representations of freedom and possible routes of freedom. The contrast between the supplicant, disabled bondsperson and the threatening, able-bodied, black male represented different forms of

146 Quoted in Ibid.

278 emancipation – the choice between revolutionary and armed rebellion, exemplified by the

Haitian Revolution, and the emancipation as a process of imperial and legislated reform.

279

Conclusion

‘Black Lives Matter’

This dissertation has sought to demonstrate that disability was integral to slavery in the English Atlantic World. English notions of disability and blackness helped justify and sustain the enslavement of Africans from the earliest years of English colonization to the final abolition of slavery in the British Empire and beyond. Medieval and early modern beliefs in monstrous births and monstrous races were inextricably intertwined with the development of an anti-black racism in the English Atlantic. The English understanding that

Africans were a race of monsters, whose monstrosity was inheritable through their mothers, served to justify the legal enslavement and, by extension, the legalized disabling of black bodies. Notions of disability were, thus, seminal to the expression of English racism in the colonial period.

My dissertation goes further than this, to fully examine the implications of plantation slavery in the English Caribbean as one of history’s most disabling systems of human exploitation and degradation. Plantation slavery, which expanded rapidly during this period due to sugar production in the Caribbean, became one of the most traumatizing forms of human bondage. The dismemberment, scarring, and mutilation that was a routine part of the experience of enslavement marked the enslaved body with symbolic power of the slave- master relationship; the punished body became a kind of text that told a story of both blacks’ supposed rebellious nature and of a refusal to accept one’s enslavement. The intersections between the commodification of the labouring body and disability are central to histories of colonialism, race, and specifically slavery.

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My dissertation deepens our understanding of disability by arguing that the enslaved also suffered from legal disability. At the crux of slave law was the disabled legal category in which Africans were placed. According to slave law, Africans were neither human nor animal – they were monsters, who needed to be enslaved in order to be controlled. By not resolving the tension between the human and the animal, lawmakers and slaveowners were able to recognize the humanity of the enslaved only when it served colonists’ interests. The slave codes not only physically impaired and disfigured the enslaved through legally sanctioned punishments but disabled the bodies of the enslaved by limiting their mobility, their freedom, and their autonomy, and by divesting them of political status. Slave law and the slave-owner culture it helped foster played an intrinsic part in Atlantic slavery’s process of enforced disabling.

The marks of punishment, disease, forced labour, and chance brutality that constituted the slave trade and slavery in the English Atlantic were made visible and publishable in runaway advertisements. Runaway notices demonstrate, perhaps more than any other source available to scholars of English Caribbean slavery, the breadth of disabilities, disfigurements, and deformities endured by the enslaved. The display of the disfigured and disabled body in colonial runaway advertisements reinscribed black bodies individually and collectively as a vehicle for the representation of racial difference and reinforced the perceived depravity of the rest of the enslaved population. Yet runaway advertisements only provide part of the story, for enslaved individuals suffered abuses that did not manifest visibly on the skin – high infertility rates among female captives and psychological and emotional disabilities are just a few examples of the inconspicuous afflictions of enslavement.

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The figure of the broken, black body became a propaganda strategy for abolitionists in the late-eighteenth century. Anti-slavery writers emphasized stories of suffering, pain and, in particular, disability as the ultimate symbols of the tragedy of Atlantic slavery. The image of the disabled bondsperson appealed to English Christian sympathies and a growing charitable culture toward the disabled in metropolitan England. It also served to curtail the other competing image of black slavery – the armed, able-bodied, and threatening rebel of the Haitian Revolution. Pro-slavery writers provided increasingly sophisticated arguments that Africans were animal-like, intellectually deficient, and with base instincts for violence.

The disabled black body, thus, haunted both anti- and pro-slavery writings and was a significant theme in debates over slavery’s end.

The historical legacies of slavery can still be seen today in the Caribbean and the global South and in the relationship between the North and formerly colonized countries.

“Diaspora Africans” writes Hershini Bhana Young “are both inside and constitutive of modernity and outside and negated by modernity: both haunted and haunting.”1 The ghostliness of slavery permeates the Americas today – in US prisons where there is an incarceration of both intellectual disabilities and non-white people; and in the Caribbean where social and political forms of disablement continue to create inequitable access to healthcare, which has caused high rates of impairment in already marginalized (racialized, poor, indigenous, etc.) communities.2 Indeed, slavery haunts the modern world as, in Avery

1 Hershini Bhana Young, Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body (Lebanon, NH: The University Press of New England, 2005), 47. 2 Liet Ben-Moshe, “Disabling Incarceration: Correcting Disability to Divergent Confinements in the US,” Critical Sociology 39, no. 3 (2011), 385-403; Bhana Young; Soham Al Snih et al. “Obesity and Disability: Relation Among Older Adults Living in Latin America and the Caribbean, American Journal of Epidemiology 17, no. 12 (2010), 1282-

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Gordon’s terms, a “ghost,” one of “the unhallowed dead of the modern project [dragging] in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains….” Tracking the ghostly history of enslavement as enforced disability helps to make

“a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look”3 According to Gordon, “[t]he presence of the ghost informs us that the over and done with ‘extremity’ of a domestic and international slavery has not entirely gone away, even if it seems to have passed into the register of history and symbol.”4 Disability is key to how slavery and the unfinished work of emancipation continue to haunt former slave societies. The prevalence of disability caused by poor nutrition and inadequate access to health care is one key manifestation of slavery’s ghost. The rate of diabetes in the Caribbean islands is consistently high and imposes a very high economic burden on Caribbean citizens.

Many people with diabetes have limited access to health care, which can lead to temporary and permanent impairments.5

Rates of incarceration among people of African descent and people with disabilities are another sign that slavery’s unquiet ghost haunts the African diaspora. Although the majority of research on incarceration, race, and disability focuses on the US, such research

1288; Alberto Barceló et al., “The Cost of Diabetes in Latin America and the Caribbean,” The Bulletin of the World Health Organization 81, no. 1 (2003), 19-29. 3 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 2. 4 Ibid., 168. 5 Barcelo et. al.,19; International Diabetes Federation, North America and Caribbean at a Glance. In IDF Diabetes Atlas 6th ed. (2013) http://www.idf.org/sites/default/files/DA6_Regional_factsheets.pdf Accessed 24 May 2014.

283 has relevance to and across the African diaspora, including the Caribbean. The institutionalization of black impaired bodies in the Caribbean is inextricably bound to histories of slavery. By the late eighteenth century, laws were put in force in Barbados and

Jamaica to ensure that owners, and not the state, had the responsibility to provide for their disabled labourers and keep them from ‘wandering’ the island.6 Prisons and workhouses in the Caribbean were a relatively new phenomenon in the late-eighteenth century and reflected the modern continuum between state penal power and slave-owner sovereignty. The lodging of disabled captives in workhouses testifies to the growing problem of public displays of impaired bodies in the islands.

Today capitalism has found alternative ways to generate profit from bodies perceived as disabled by incarcerating them in total institutions such as nursing homes and prisons. Liat

Ben-Moshe explains that “disablement has become big business…[f]rom the point of view of the institution-industrial complex, disabled people are worth more to the gross domestic product when occupying institutional ‘beds’ than they are in their own homes.”7 Race also plays a key role in rates of institutionalization in former slave societies. Research on the US has shown that in 2006, Latinos and African-Americans were incarcerated at a rate of 1038 per 100,000 residents and 2468 per 100,000 residents respectively compared to whites, who were imprisoned at a rate of 409 per 100,000 residents. What is more, nearly a quarter of prison and jail inmates who had a mental health problem had served three or more prior incarcerations.8 “The black body” argues Bhana Young “continues to be the site into which the state displaces its own violent crimes, externalizing its culpability and binding the black

6 The Act of Assembly of the Island of Jamaica...The Consolidated Act...(London, 1788). 7 Ben-Moshe, 393. 8 Ibid., 387.

284 body.”9 Thus, the development of modern notions of disability and race that Atlantic slavery and the slave trade set in motion can be seen today in the widespread institutionalization of black and disabled bodies.

A similar pattern takes place in Canada, where there are five times more indigenous boys and twenty times more black boys in Ontario’s youth jails than white boys and boys of other ethnicities.10 Indigenous girls make up 49% and indigenous boys make up 36% of the youth admitted into the criminal justice system in Canada.11 Indigenous children are also disproportionately represented in child-welfare agencies. In 2011 Statistics Canada found that 14, 225 or 2.6% of all Frist Nations children fourteen years of age and under were in foster-care. Disability is inextricably bound to the issue of incarceration among indigenous and black communities in Canada. Roughly 1% of Canadian infants are born with Fetal

Alcohol Spectrum Disorder12 “but estimates from Canada and the United States suggest that

9 Hershini Bhana-Young, “Inheriting the Criminalized Black Body: Race, Gender, and Slavery in Eva’s Man,” African American Review 39, no. 3 (Fall 2005), 389. 10 Jim Rankin and Patty Winsa Hidy Ng. “Unequal justice: Aboriginal and black inmates disproportionately fill Ontario jails.” The Star (March 1, 2013). [http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/03/01/unequal_justice_aboriginal_and_black_in mates_disproportionately_fill_ontario_jails.html accessed 10 June 2015]. 11 Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRC], 224. 12 Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder is an umbrella term that covers a range of different disabilities and mental diagnoses caused by prenatal alcohol exposure, which include: fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), partial fetal alcohol syndrome (pFAS), alcohol-related neurological disorder (ARND), and alcohol-related birth defects (ARBD). A recent study in the Canadian Journal of Public Health researchers explained the connection between FASD and incarceration: …FASD is associated with organic brain damage that has a detrimental impact on abstracting abilities, memory skills, information processing, the comprehension of social rules and expectations, the ability to connect cause and effect relationships, and the ability to learn from past experiences. People with FASD often display characteristics such as hyperactivity, impulsivity, aggressiveness and poor judgment. Given these factors, if

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15% to 20% of prisoners have FASD.”13 Individuals with FASD are nineteen times more likely to be incarcerated.14 In Canada and the US, FASD is disproportionately higher in indigenous and black families than in families of other ethnicities.15 In a recent study by the

Aboriginal Healing Foundation, researchers found that the “intergenerational trauma of residential schools” was inextricably linked to alcohol addictions and FASD among First

Nations populations.16

The violence against indigenous girls and women in Canada is particularly disturbing.

Between 1980 and 2012, 1,017 indigenous women and girls were murdered and 164 went missing in Canada. Over two hundred of these cases remain unsolved.17 Indigenous women have been treated in Canada as though their lives can be taken with impunity. These statistics are rooted in the institutional racist violence of residential schools, in which over 150,000

First Nations children were forcibly taken from their homes and sent to residential schools across Canada and the US, where, according to Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A

appropriate diagnosis, interventions and support services are not put in place early in life and maintained throughout the life-course, many people with FASD are at high risk for becoming involved in the legal system, either as offenders or as victims. See Svetlana Popova et al., “Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Prevalence Estimates in Correctional Systems: A Systematic Literature Review,” Canadian Journal of Public Health/Revue Canadienne de Sante’e Publique 102, no. 5 (September/October 2011), 336. 13 TRC, 221. 14 Popova, et. al, 339. 15 Maria Ospina and Liz Dennett, “Systematic Review on the Prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders,” Institute of Health Economics (Alberta, Canada, 2013), 30. 16 TRC, 221. 17 Ibid., 227.

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Macdonald, they were to be removed from their “savage” parents and “acquire habits and modes of thought of white men.”18

Racial minorities and people with disabilities are still being constrained by the prejudiced and racist societal forces of capital today. In prisons across the Americas, a racialized and disabled work force labours for capitalistic means yet under different structural forms of violence. Individuals labeled as ‘mad,’ ‘foolish,’ or ‘idiots’ as well as people of African descent have long been associated with notions of social danger and perceived as being prone to violent crimes.19 Like the structures of slavery, the incarceration and institutionalization of black and disabled peoples today demonstrates that such individuals are too often seen as criminal and in need of punishment by way of constraint.

Disability today in the Caribbean and global South bears traces of its early modern legacy and, thus, opens a space for further thinking about bodies as texts and how history manifests itself on the bodies of the present.

Twentieth-century Afro-Atlantic fiction writers have registered the fact that there has never been anything “accidental” about the physically destructive consequences of slavery and its legacies for people of African descent. The canonical literature of the Anglophone

Black Atlantic world has produced a poignant catalogue of the ways in which enslavement routinely resulted in humiliating, painful and physically disabling conditions. At the beginning of Marlon James’ novel The Book of Night Women, set on a Jamaican plantation in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we meet Lilith – the green-eyed daughter of overseer Jack Wilkins and a thirteen-year-old bondswoman whom Wilkins raped. In a

18 House of Commons Debates, Canada (9 May 1883), 1107-1108. Cited in TRC, 2. 19 N. Hahn-Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Bhana-Young, “Inheriting the Criminalized Black Body.”

287 bloody scene that portends the role of blood in the story Lilith is born “as a baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red.”20

Lilith is orphaned when her mother dies in childbirth and later in the novel she joins a sisterhood of six women, her half-sisters, who throughout the novel plot an island-wide overthrow of white power. These six women’s bodies bear ‘marks of servitude’ in the form of violence inflicted onto them by white owners and overseers. Of the six women, one has been shot blind in one eye, another had her throat slit as a child and has lived as a ‘mute,’ another is scarred head to toe from the deliberate sprinkling of hot coals by an overseer.21

The group’s leader, named Homer, has breasts mutilated into nubs and whip marks on her stomach that suggest she was pregnant when the whipping occurred.22 Lilith herself comes to be known as “the woman with the quilt on her back” from repeated whippings.23 James demonstrates that the horrors of slavery were often made manifest on the skin of bondspeople. In James’s novel, these permanent marks haunted bondspeople daily, in their relationships with one another, with their owners, and most tragically with their inner selves as they try to cope with the psychological and emotional wounds left by enslavement.

Five times throughout the novel the narrator begins a chapter with the saying: “Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will.”24 The life for the enslaved in the Atlantic World was a vicious circle of terrorized violence. Disfigurement and physical,

20 Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 3. 21 Ibid., 348. 22 Ibid., 26. 23 Ibid., 170. For a similar fictional depiction of whipping’s disfigurement of women’s bodies see Toni Morrison’s description of the scars on Sethe’s back resembling a choke cherry tree in Beloved ([1987] New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 24 James, 33, 122, 223, 313, 421.

288 psychological, and emotional disabilities were key means through which whites routinely and methodically tried to assert their power over the enslaved. The two sentences repeated in

James’ novel suggests a circularity of existence and of confinement and also, paradoxically, movement, ability, and progression. Circularity means not only the institutionalization of slavery and its violence but also the ways in which the enslaved continuously resisted such circularity.

James’s use of the word ‘negro’ instead of ‘slave’ gives a trans-historicalness to the repeated motto. The protests that have erupted with the unprosecuted deaths of Oscar Grant,

Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and countless others, demonstrate a circularity in the commodification of black people by the state. The campaign slogan “Black Lives

Matter” is reflective of a long history that dates back to Atlantic slavery in which slaveowners could murder bondspeople with impunity. The abolition of slavery throughout the Atlantic promised a world in which the capitalist and racist marketplace would no longer determine black life. And yet, today we continue to see the reverberations of slavery and the circularity of the devaluation of black life. Life that was once bought and sold continues to be treated as though it can be reduced to surplus and disposed of. The “Black Lives Matter” campaign focuses on the taking of black lives by police. But what of those who survived such state violence but whose bodies and psychologies are permanently marked? The lives of the murdered and the lives of survivors are intimately connected, as James writes: “Lilith have a quilt on her back, but there be a bigger quilt, a patchwork of negro bones that reach from Africa to the West Indies.”25 Slavery’s racialized and disabling legacy continues to haunt because of the modern world’s refusal to exhume the ghost that remembering brings.

25 Ibid., 262.

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When we are willing to place our feet in another’s shoes, we see more clearly their experiences and the echoes of such experiences. However, if we are unwilling to do so, those echoes go unheard and unnoticed. As Toni Morison’s Beloved aptly demonstrates: “Should a child, or an adult place his feet in them [Beloved’s footprints], they will fit. Take they out and they disappear as if nobody ever walked there.”26

26 Morrison, 315.

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