White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (24 page)

The next month, the escapees were arraigned in a Virginian court. All were given thirty strokes of the whip. In addition, the 173

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two whites were ordered to serve their full terms with Gwyn, plus an extra year on top. Moreover, after that was served they were to be bound for a further three years as servants of the colony.

For John Punch, the African, the news was even worse. After his whipping, he was to ‘serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere’. John Punch is thus the first recorded case of the lifetime enslavement of an African American.

Two weeks later, another mixed-race group of servant escapees appeared in the same court. They consisted of an African, four Englishmen and two men described as Dutch, though they bore English names. They had taken part in a well-organised attempt to reach Dutch territory by river. They stole a skiff plus ‘shot and guns’ and took off on a Saturday night. When they reached the Elizabeth River, their skiff was spotted and they were caught. The alleged ringleader, one of the ‘Dutchmen’ named as Christopher Miller, was punished with venomous severity. He was to be given thirty strokes of the whip, have the letter R branded on the cheek and spend at least one year wearing a leg iron (‘longer if said master shall see cause’). When he had served out the full contracted period with his master, Miller was to become the property of the colony as its servant for a further seven years. The second Dutchman was to serve those seven extra years, too.

The ‘Englishmen’ were punished slightly less severely. After whipping and branding and serving out their contracted time, one was to serve the colony for three years, and two others for two and a half years. The other Englishman among them was merely put on probation. Perhaps he gave his companions away.

As for the African, who was named as Emanuel, he was to be whipped, branded and shackled. There is no mention in the records of him serving extra time, so it can be assumed that he, like John Punch a few months earlier, was enslaved for life.

Over the next decade, perpetual slavery of Africans evidently became common enough for the extraordinary story of John Casor to be played out. This was something of a test case, in which a black servant claimed his indentured period had expired years before and his master counter-claimed that he was his servant for life. The 174

THE PLANTER FROM ANGOLA

twist in the story is that the master seeking this lifetime sentence was Anthony Johnson.

The case was fought out in the early 1650s. Casor had fled Anthony Johnson’s Angola Plantation and sought refuge with a neighbouring planter. The runaway insisted that he had been held for seven years beyond his indentured term. The neighbour, Robert Parker, believed Casor and kept him on his own plantation.

Johnson was determined to get his property back and went to court. The ensuing legal battle saw Robert Parker representing the runaway Casor in court. The case dragged on for two years, presenting the bewildering sight of a white planter fighting a black planter to save a black servant from perpetual slavery.

At one juncture, Johnson was persuaded by his sons to free Casor but then reneged on the settlement. In the end, Johnson triumphed. The Northampton County Court ruled that Casor had indeed been a slave all along and instructed that he be returned immediately to Johnson, who was to be compensated for the two years Casor had been free. Robert Parker was ordered to pay him damages for sheltering the runaway. Twenty years later, Casor was still owned by Mary Johnson, Anthony Johnson’s widow.8

By then, lifetime black slaves were becoming the norm and all the colonies had passed laws either recognising slavery in principle or specifically legalising it. Massachusetts led the way in 1641, followed by Connecticut in 1650, Virginia in 1661, Maryland in 1663, and New York and New Jersey in 1664. Others followed later.

These laws left black freedmen like the Johnsons still free, but they were no longer treated like other planters. They could still buy black servants but they were barred from buying white servants.

In 1671, another measure made all ‘non-Christian servants’ newly shipped into Virginia slaves for life. Non-Christian meant African.

Two years later, the colonial assembly passed another act validating the enslavement of Indian captives.

Legally, servitude and slavery had been divided and a further move underlined this. Virginia enacted legislation making black slavery hereditary. The relevant act read
:

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Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand Assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held, bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.

That utterly reversed the basic principle in English common law that a child’s status followed that of the father.9

Although there was no abrupt surge of Africans, the racial balance in the tobacco fields was changing. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, white outnumbered black in the Chesapeake by more than twenty to one. By the last quarter of the century, the ratio had narrowed to three to one, with 2,000 black slaves in Virginia and 6,000 white servants. By the end of the century, the gap was closing fast. Estimates put the numbers landing in neighbouring Maryland in 1698 at between 600 and 700 whites and about 450 Africans.

The shift from the time-limited servitude of Englishmen to the lifetime slavery of Africans was prompted by economics as much as racism. The Caribbean plantations were demonstrating the much larger profits that an openly enslaved workforce could produce and the Chesapeake planters took note. More and more, black slavery appeared the better long-term investment. This was especially so when mortality rates began to fall. In the decades when half the workforce died inside five years, it wasn’t good business to purchase men for a life term at twice the price of a time-limited white servant. When mortality rates improved, that calculation changed and lifetime slaves became more worth buying. One might have expected this to be the beginning of the end for the white slave business but there was still much money to be made out of the trade in white labour.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

‘BARBADOSED’

The earliest known reference to sugar cane is in a Hindu love charm from the ancient hymns of the Atharva Veda:

I am sweeter than honey, fuller of sweetness than liquorice.

Mayest thou without fail long for me alone (as a bee) for a branch full of honey.

I have surrounded thee with a clinging sugarcane to remove aversion, so that those shalt not be averse to me.1

The thought of being entwined with sugar cane would have been greeted with hollow laughter by those slaving under the tropical sun in order that sweet palates in England might have their moments of delight with the sugared cakes and tea in vogue in the seventeenth century. Although sugar has been associated with love through the ages, the men and women who cut and refined sugar in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century must have cursed the day the fibrous cane’s sweet heart was ever discovered.

In 1493, Columbus stopped off at La Gomera in the Canary Islands and began a romantic liaison with Beatrice de Bobadilla, the island’s governor. After a month, he remembered his destiny and decided to move on. He carried with him a present of sugarcane cuttings, which he brought to Hispaniola. The Portuguese introduced sugar cane to Brazil, the Dutch brought it to Guyana 177

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and the French to Martinique. Sugar was widely planted as a cash crop in Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and other smaller islands. The English brought it to Barbados – along with servants to grow it.

In this chapter, we shall concentrate on the island of Barbados, so as to avoid countless comparisons. Besides, Barbados rapidly became the most important economic entity in Britain’s new colonies, outstripping the settlements in America in terms of economic importance. It did this by concentrating on the development of a viable cash crop with a constantly replaceable labour force to work it. Any considerations about building a new society were cast aside.

Such ideas could be left to those developing the colonies 2,000

miles to the north in America. Barbados was about commerce and the island became a vast agricultural factory with an enslaved workforce working under a tropical sun. Barbados was different in another way, too. Any hope that labourers might have of setting up their own little farm upon the expiry of their indenture was largely in vain. Economies of scale came into play and small tenant farmers were squeezed out by large plantation owners. In Barbados, people worked for the plantation owners or starved; or they left.

A love of good eating sucked Barbados out of obscurity.

Humanity’s sweet tooth owes its desire to a simple biological need: sugar runs in our blood, darting through our veins. The human chemical plant directs glucose straight into the bloodstream, providing energy like a drug rush. After such a high, blood-sugar levels inevitably dip. A lucky rule of commerce dictates that for every craving there is an equal and opposite rush to supply.

Caribbean islands like Barbados were there to prevent sugar lovers going into withdrawal.

Barbados took its time to reach its pre-eminent position. In the 1620s, Captain John Powell took possession of the island in the name of King James and reported its existence to his employer, the wealthy London merchant Sir William Courteen, who headed a syndicate that established a little colony of eighty or so in 1627.

At the beginning, the English settlement of Barbados nearly faltered due to the problems of finding a workable cash crop.

Captain Powell knew the Dutch governor of Guyana, from whom he purchased cotton and tobacco, along with various edible vegetables 178

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and sugar cane. The cane was to make ‘kill-devil’, or rum. The early planters were optimistic that they could follow where Virginia led and form an economy based on tobacco and cotton. To help them establish such an agrarian economy, Powell brought a group of forty Arawak tribesmen from Guyana as agricultural instructors.

The Arawaks were soon betrayed and enslaved. Shortly afterwards, the enterprising planters kidnapped more Arawaks to work their fields for them. They were simply among the first of many to be betrayed and debased on the island of Barbados.

The English settlers and their backers also squabbled over ownership of the colony. Sir William Courteen’s syndicate, which had borne the initial risk and costs, was shouldered aside by a syndicate headed by the Earl of Carlisle. Influence mattered as much then as it does today, resulting in Carlisle being granted a patent by the King and taking control.

Among the more forceful planters who shortly arrived to make their fortune was James Drax, a larger-than-life figure who later told the memoirist Richard Ligon that he had arrived with £300 in the 1620s and planned not to leave until he could buy a £10,000

estate in England.

As things worked out, Drax, his brother William and their fellow farmers had a ditch or two to cross before they would attain solid economic ground. The decision to grow tobacco was a bad move. A better-quality leaf was being grown in Virginia and so Barbados switched to cotton and indigo. Even then the island was in competition with more established industries and with other nascent English colonies, such as St Christopher and Montserrat.

Right from the very beginning, conditions for indentured servants in Barbados were atrocious. The man appointed by the Earl of Carlisle as governor in 1629, Sir William Tufton, tried to ameliorate the lot of the servants but the planters rebelled. In a placatory gesture, the planters were allotted an extra 10,000 acres to be shared among them. Carlisle sacked Tufton and appointed another governor in his place, one Henry Hawley, who appears to have been a bad lot. Tufton rebelled, and he and his supporters were tried for mutiny and hanged.2 Sir William may have been a compassionate man but perhaps not a wise one.

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In the 1640s, something happened that turned the plantation of the Caribbean into a goal more important for England than even the colonies on mainland America. European sugar prices shot up.

The new Barbadians saw their chance. According to some accounts, the suggestion to move into sugar cane came from Dutch Jewish traders who had been sailing the region long before the British arrived, and who imported the sugar business from Guyana. Others say that James Drax was the hero of the hour, not only bringing sugar cane from Brazil but also setting up the first efficient sugar mills.

In 1640, St Christopher changed over to the cultivation of sugar cane and Barbados quickly followed. By 1642, sugar-cane farming was up and running in Barbados. By 1644, roller mills were in use that could squeeze a piece of cane so hard it could turn fifty per cent of its weight into liquid. The romance was wrung out of sugar; it became an industrial commodity.

Both the crop and the technology were now in place for a revolution that would make men rich at a speed impossible in England. True, there were side effects. Such quantities of high-octane rum became available that in a few years in Connecticut a General Court Order allowed the confiscation of ‘whatsoever Barbados liquors, commonly called rum, Kill Devil or the like’.

One other ingredient was necessary for success: a large, cheap workforce, sugar farming being even more labour intensive than the cultivation of tobacco. In 1630, there were only some 1,800

people in Barbados. This was soon to change rapidly. In 1634, the total number of servants shipped from Britain was 790 males and forty-six females, of whom 246 were aged between ten and nineteen years old.

The first cargo of English convicts arrived in 1642 to work on the new sugar crop. Barbados was on its way to becoming a penal colony in all but name. The transportation of convicts has been described as a ‘deferred death sentence’.3