By: Cecilia A. Green
| This article revisits the debates on the question of slave marriage that were carried on for roughly two centuries, both back and forth across the Atlantic and on the local terrain of the British West Indian plantation colonies. These debates came into critical focus during the fifty-year showdown over “amelioration,” which ended—though only in a manner of speaking—with the British Abolition Act of 1833. For a long time the lines were starkly drawn, but, in the context of laissez-faire political imperium or “indirect rule,” seldom tested. The metropolitan authorities felt some obligation to uphold the grand moral and civilizational integrity of the as-yet imperfectly imagined British Empire, as well as of Western Christendom. They, therefore, were inclined to see the slave as a species of imperial subject, still vaguely conceived within the emerging terms of reference of their global trusteeship and presumptive legal jurisdiction. They felt that, to honor the dignity of the latter, and sustain and nurture its moral legitimacy, the slaves—their subjects, ultimately—should be encouraged to marry, and their marriages should be formally marked, if only symbolically or by summary Christian rite. The planters, for their part, were unshaken in their certitude that the slaves were a species of property, their property no less, and that the idea of any kind of formal marriage among them was preposterous, a great impertinence, an attack on their authority and rights of property, a threat to public safety, and a dangerous intrusion upon the sacrosanctity of European racial exclusivity and superiority. | 1 |
| The metropolitan authorities, both civil and religious, periodically urged them to reconsider this position. The planter-legislators refused, amidst great remonstrations of outrage at this unholy threat to their property rights, their property values, and their self-legislating privileges. For well over a hundred years, the metropolitan authorities declined to press their case, yielding before the sovereignty of those property rights and the chartered constitutional authority of self-governing “free-born Britons” in the colonies. The truth is, they were primarily concerned with the enforcement of the Navigation Acts, which gave Britain exclusive control of West Indian trade, shipping, financing, and markets; and they rested secure in the knowledge that the West Indians, for all their bravado, were incapable of extricating themselves from this dependency. In the meantime, the sexual, household, and family practices of both settlers and enslaved defied all pious injunctions and wishful thinking about respectability, moral propriety, and Christian monogamy—but, they did so for very different, albeit mutually constituted, reasons. | 2 |
| What were the issues involved in this question of slave marriage, with respect to both public discourse and material interests? Who were the interested parties or stakeholders weighing in on the conversation? Where were they located in the complex web of empire and colony? What arguments, what regimes of truth, what discursive practices did these various parties employ and deploy? What was the nature of the disjuncture between discourse and practice, and, as with all such disjunctures, what was the hidden sub-text, the unspoken dimension, that occupied the gap and provided the key integrating principle “in the final instance”? What changes occurred in the terms of debate and the policies regarding slave marriage over those last fifty or so years, and what shifts in political economy and imperial interests were responsible for these changes? Finally, what impact did all of this have on the enslaved themselves, the subject matter of the debate but entirely excluded as participants from its deliberations? | 3 |
| This article addresses all these questions through the presentation of a particularly relevant historical case. I use this case as a platform from which to consider the larger picture of contending worldviews and material interests, socio-spatial relations, legal and statutory developments, de facto socio-sexual regimes and practices, and historical and political-economic context and change. The foregrounded question is the one that inquires into and interrogates the nature of the arguments, regimes of truth, and discursive practices that were mobilized and produced in the longstanding debates over slave marriage. These were debates that took place among the powerful, and so this article privileges their voices as the primary object of study. However, it considers these discourses as both reflective and constitutive, in part, of the mutual statuses and identities of the enunciators and the “other” of their enunciations. Moreover, it attempts, tentatively, to suggest some modalities through which the “other” may have talked back on this question, to both pro- and anti-slavery elites. | 4 |
| The historical instance that leads to the wider discussion is a series of pointed epistolary communications on slave marriage initiated by Rev. John Stephen, an Anglican rector in the British colony of the Bahamas. From 1814 to 1817 the communication between Stephen and local officials took a weighty philosophical and jurisprudential turn when Stephen felt compelled to respectfully challenge the policies, practices, and legal rationale regarding slave marriage in the Bahamas and the rest of the British West Indies and to offer as counterpoint a lengthy, erudite, rhetorically contentious, and wide-ranging opinion on the matter. | 5 |
| The letter in which Stephen pleads his case is a remarkable and important historical document.1 Despite carrying no official weight and ultimately having only academic import, it elicited solemn legal interpretations and pronouncements from the highest local and metropolitan authorities, among them Attorney General of the Bahamas, William Wylly, and Secretary of State Earl Bathurst of Downing Street.2 These responses add greatly to its historical significance, since they demonstrate the unsettled nature of relations between metropole and colony, the tenuousness of the project of empire with regard to statutory and executory terms of reference, the contradictions among law, policy, and practice, and the gap between the rarefied field of official discourse, particularly as conveyed through transatlantic circuits, and the viscerally lived reality of resident master/mistress-enslaved relations. | 6 |
| Indeed, absent from the three-way conversation among local Established Church ministers, local state officials, and metropolitan authorities were the central parties to the relation under scrutiny, that between master and slave (not to speak of the absence of white women, which had its own complications). Slave-owning interests were not entirely absent, but they did not have explicit representation in this particular discussion, which, after all, was calling into question traditional proscriptions to which they were sworn, in a space away from the charged arena of local politics. This was a conversation among “officials” or “functionaries” of church and state, representing a dimension of colonial governance that was becoming increasingly important in the period.3 | 7 |
| There is no mention of Rev. John Stephen in any of the major recent histories of the Bahamas, and his personal biography remains a mystery.4 However, he has left us a fascinating bricolage of his thinking on the question of slave marriage and related matters. His contribution to this article lies in his detailed and revealing representation of a particular worldview, one that saw no immanent contradiction between slavery and Christianity, and indeed saw their historical coincidence as a divine opportunity for the tutelage of savage heathens. It was on this basis and on his faith in the disciplinary regime of the patriarchal family, conceived as a hierarchical and orderly chain of relations beginning with the master as supreme but benign paterfamilias, that he supported marriage rights for the enslaved. He blamed the licentiousness of the social order in the West Indies on the failure of the slaveowners to allow and encourage Christian marriage among their slaves, which alone would provide the necessary social restraints, on women and blacks, for the development of a moral society. Stephen greatly admired the late Dr. Beilby Porteus, a rare upper-rank Anglican evangelical widely credited with enlightened views (thereby earning the respect of some and the animus of others), who had been appointed Bishop of London in 1787 and had actively promoted Christianization of the “Empire’s negroes” and humanitarian missionary work among them. Porteus urged an expansion of the sphere of entitlements and rights of the enslaved, among them marriage and biblical instruction, and in turn enjoined the latter—including those owned by the church’s missionary wing in Barbados—to obey their masters. | 8 |
| Stephen’s times were dominated by the emerging prominence of the humanitarian movement and the Colonial Office’s amelioration campaign. In 1814, when he wrote his first appeal regarding slave marriage, serious missionary work had barely taken root in most islands of the West Indies. The belated project of mass Christianization of the slaves was almost single-handedly undertaken by the dissenting or nonconformist missionaries in the period after 1790.5 Throughout the era of slavery, the Anglican Church had remained firmly politically allied with the planter class, at whose pleasure they officiated, and its ministers engaged freely in both slaveholding and politics as assemblymen or officials. | 9 |
| Things heated up considerably from the year 1823, which was a turning point in the struggle for amelioration and toward abolition. That year, the abolitionists, under their parliamentary leadership, launched their campaign for the gradual abolition of slavery. The imperial government, in consultation with the London-based West India Committee who supported amelioration out of enlightened self-interest, submitted their own amelioration proposals for the consideration of the West Indian assemblies. The slaveowners regarded this as a declaration of war, especially since the stated goal of the program, meant as a preemptive strike against the abolitionist cause, was to prepare the enslaved for the “civil rights and privileges which are enjoyed by other classes of His Majesty’s subjects.”6 They were also under assault from another front: armed rebellion by the enslaved. Within fifteen years of Stephen’s grand disquisition on slave marriage there would be three major slave rebellions in Britain’s most important Caribbean sugar colonies: in 1816 in Barbados, in 1823 in Demerara, and in 1831 in Jamaica. | 10 |
| Also in 1823, the Baptist and Wesleyan parent bodies in London voted to support the abolitionist campaign. At first, the missionaries in the field balked at the pressure to adopt an anti-slavery agenda under which they felt this decision placed them.7 Despite the mandate of neutrality officially maintained by the missionary wings of both churches, the Wesleyan missionaries in Jamaica felt sufficiently intimidated (and sufficiently anxious to ingratiate themselves with the planters) to sign a public repudiation of the anti-slavery cause. Outrage at headquarters regarding this unprincipled and defiant move prompted a change in missions policy. Missionaries sent out after 1825 were armed with a new mandate that unequivocally confirmed the incompatibility between Christianity and slavery. In the acrimonious and sometimes bloody struggle over the religious rights of the missionaries and the enslaved that ensued, the missionaries were facilitated by the support of their parent organizations as well as by the officially declared metropolitan policy of amelioration and the laws of religious toleration.8 In Jamaica, the anti-sectarian, pro-slavery faction was led by a fanatical Anglican clergyman, Rev. George Wilson Bridges, rector of the parish of St. Ann. Everywhere in the West Indies, the final struggle over amelioration, which was also a struggle to determine how much longer slavery should be allowed to continue, featured some of the most unmitigated and vitriolic verbal attacks on the humanity of the enslaved Africans that have come to light. | 11 |
| Understanding the Context of the Debate Discursively | |
| In following Stephen’s ruminations below, it is necessary to bear in mind the fundamental precepts binding the analysis offered in this article, and through which these ruminations are being read. I argue that the question of “slave marriage” was central to the question of “slave status” and that the question of the status of the enslaved depended on three sets of interlinked relations and their mediated outcomes: (a) the relation between colony and metropole, or relations of empire and colonial rule, (b) the relation between (European) master and (African) slave, or relations of (racialized) slavery, and (c) relations of patriarchy, both familial and extra-familial, private and public, religious and secular. These relations ultimately determined the answer to the following question: What kind of “other” was the enslaved and/or colonized African going to be—an incorporated but differently subjectified other or an excluded and objectified other? | 12 |
| It is by refocusing interstitially on the submerged dimensions of race/nation, class, and gender that we are able to see beyond and read through the voices of elite white men locked in struggle with one another and to do so without trivializing their differences or underestimating their impact on and relation to those whose warm bodies were absent from the ring. In focusing largely on the hegemonic publics that constituted the space of the “ring,” this article also delimits that space and attempts to sound the echoes of voices coming from beyond, from those other spaces, which remained an integral part of the de facto British empire, but were never represented in its public accounting of itself except as the unspeakable other or the masked, mimetic other. | 13 |
| Beyond various degrees of anti-slavery, there was still colonialism, ethnocentrism/racism, and patriarchy, the rule of white European men, white European spaces, and white European institutions. Moreover, the abolitionist struggle was coincident with, indeed reflective of, the growing ascendancy of an industrial bourgeoisie and the new class regime connected with it at home. Simply put, the abolitionist crusaders were against slavery; they were not against empire or patriarchy, especially in its new and “progressive” bourgeois forms. So, in the debate on slave marriage, the grand assumptions of these intersecting systems remained largely unquestioned. Not unexpectedly, the contradictions they represented were upstaged by the shriller questions coming from the slaveowners regarding the basic humanity of the enslaved and their capacity to uphold the dignity of the rights being proposed for them or perform the obligations attached to those rights. In any event, the missionaries and abolitionists were becoming irresistible to growing numbers of the enslaved, in their strange and glorious assertion of the brotherhood of man and the universal perfectibility of the human personality through self-willed spiritual and moral redemption and manly individualism and self-reliance. Still, the tension in nonconformist and abolitionist missionary discourse and practice between an emancipationist ontology and a peculiarly Euro-Christian/bourgeois/patriarchal theology and morality erupted time and time again in actual dealings with the enslaved. For the latter, the encounter with Euro-Christianity, which condemned their own practices as heathenish and sinful, was both profoundly attractive and profoundly repulsive. | 14 |
| To make sense of the arguments, regimes of truth, and discursive strategies employed by the sparring protagonists in the “official” struggle over slave marriage, it is necessary to place them in relational context. Increasingly, “first world” scholarship is coming to understand this principle that has nurtured Caribbean scholarship from its inception, that is, “[t]he imperative of placing colony and metropole in one analytic frame.”9 | 15 |
| Metropolitans and colonists were divided from each other not just by the politics of (embodied) property and remote governance, but also by the politics of spatial identity and racial demography. In the metropole-colony connection, white West Indians saw themselves in a relation of settler to motherland, essentially comprising a relation of family, genealogical heritage, and political birthright. But while metropolitans may have accepted some notion of the settlers as extensions of themselves, they also saw the colonies as whole social formations that were essentially dependencies and that were marked by difference, indelibly so in the case of the overwhelming African majorities of the West Indian territories. As noted above, they regarded the latter as potential subjects and not, like the slaveowners, as merely production and sexual tools. Metropolitans were in the business of building an empire and, in and through that very process, defining a new liberal bourgeois nation, with increasing middle-class inclusion and influence. Besides, for the metropolitan authorities the project of empire was always under construction, tenuous, unpredictable, and threatening to slip out of their grasp. It was bombarded with challenges from several fronts, requiring their constant vigilance—European rivals, unruly settlers, megalomaniacal officials, dangerous natives, and restless classes at home. Increasingly, there was far more to occupy their minds than recalcitrant minority settler groups in one corner of the globe whose longstanding colonial preeminence was on the decline. Furthermore, they had a responsibility to the ascendant global empire that the narrowly narcissistic, self-serving West Indian planters did not. | 16 |
| The unfolding projects of empire abroad and nation at home were at once mutually constitutive and mutually repellent (as the intellectual shifts from mercantilism to physiocratic nostalgia and free trade futurism suggest). In fashioning and refashioning the colonial other, metropolitans were continually defining, redefining, and refining themselves. They aimed to make their imperial subjects as much like them as possible and, thus, to reproduce themselves anew as the most advanced standard-bearers of Western and human civilization. The authorities saw promiscuous concubinage and unreconstructed heathenism as a threat to imperial order. Ultimately the question of marriage rights for their (would-be) subjects was bound to clash with their own developing self-image. | 17 |
| The colonists (on the other hand) saw themselves as bearing the birthright of their eternal Britishness in their persons and in their skins, and they saw Britain as the womb to which they were attached by an umbilical cord, whether they had ever set foot on its shores or not. Of course the Britain to which they referred was an imagined one; and they were both puzzled and infuriated by the betrayal they felt to be inherent in the new demands that were being imposed on them. And whether they were West Indian-born or not, the West Indies was for them an offshore facility where enslaved Africans labored to produce tropical commodities for their profit and for the palates of metropolitan consumers (and, particularly in the case of sugar, coffee, and cotton, to satisfy the caloric and clothing requirements of the new industrial proletariat). It was also a facility where the enslaved were forced to render domestic and sexual service for their resident white masters. | 18 |
| Thus, the same norms simply did not apply to both spaces or to both classes of persons—or, rather, to “persons and subpersons,” to borrow the terms by which Charles Mills designates the unequal parties to what he calls the “racial contract” (the European social contract with its invisible racial underpinnings).10 Indeed, the peculiarities of the race-gender demographic structure of the West Indian colonies, featuring a great majority of Africans of both sexes and a white minority in which males tended to predominate (two to one in Jamaica), meant that the space was both “raced” and sexualized, to follow Mills further.11 Up to the eve of emancipation, visitors to the Caribbean were still remarking on the absence or dearth of white women, married couples, and practiced religion in most of these territories. Testimonials about the irreligiousness of the planters were legion and extended to the conduct of Anglican clerics, many of whom shared the planters’ lifestyles. Arriving in Jamaica in 1829 (after more than three decades of nonconformist missionary activity), the Presbyterian missionary, Hope Masterton Waddell, sized up the society he saw before him through both worldly and other-worldly lenses: The proprietors or island nobility were for the most part absent, and their “great houses” unoccupied, and going to decay, except where a planting attorney resided and kept everything in good order. These attorneys formed the squirearchy of the island. One might have several properties under his care, some had many, and were very great men indeed. Every estate had its own overseer, who had “book-keepers,” carpenter, and mason under him. From the attorney down all were unmarried, yet all had families. A married lady was rarely seen. Some planters had not seen one since they left home. Others knew not how to address one when they met her. The “housekeeper” [live-in black mistress] system had become a colonial institution…. Planters have owned to me that they were shocked at first by the style of living, but were laughed at and insnared, and became in the end used to it as unavoidable. Others never got over it. Troubled by pangs of conscience, they drank to excess, and died in despair; “since good gospel come buckra die hard.”12 | 19 |
| As Catherine Hall summarily concludes, “England was for families, Jamaica was for sex.”13 It was quite literally the “racing” of marriage and of space that defined the difference. This division has also been captured in R. T. Smith’s more fuzzy terminology of the “dual marriage system,” in which he is referring to the duality of the black concubine and the white wife, structurally connected by the person and agency of the white master but allocated to different, and acutely unequal, social and legal spaces.14 Many spoke of the out-of-placeness of those white wives that were resident on the plantations. In fact, few West Indian plantations could boast of resident white wives/mistresses, though there were notable exceptions.15 The prevalence of absentee ownership in nearly all the West Indian colonies meant that the plantations were essentially run by surrogates and underlings. Moreover, the rather rigid preference for unmarried male recruits as overseers and other lower-level personnel skewed the white population on the plantations toward bachelor subalterns. White wives therefore tended to be both demographically and socially unavailable to these subalterns (as much as black women formed a readily available and exploitable sexual labor force at their behest). Marriage effectively presented itself in West Indian society as a rarity and as a privilege of the upper class, especially those directly connected to Europe, the most abundant source of properly pedigreed white wives. As R. T. Smith’s concept of “dual marriage system” implies, resident white males, who were in a position to, maintained both a white wife, co-resident or securely established at “home” in Britain, and one or more favored black or “colored” mistresses, enslaved or free. | 20 |
| Marriage, then, was a white/elite institution that did not belong in the West Indies, a black/subaltern space. It was denied to the category of subpersons that mostly occupied this space, infusing it with its racial character. The mutually constituted institutional and spatial opposition of white marriage/black concubinage and England/West Indies is well captured in Mills’s observation that the “Racial Contract norms (and races) space, demarcating civil and wild spaces.” And he continues: The norming of space is partially done in terms of the racing of space, the depiction of space as dominated by individuals (whether persons or subpersons) of a certain race. At the same time, the norming of the individual is partially achieved by spacing it, that is, representing it as imprinted with the characteristics of a certain kind of space. So this is a mutually supporting characterization that, for subpersons, becomes a circular indictment: “You are what you are in part because you originate from a certain kind of space, and that space has those properties in part because it is inhabited by creatures like yourself.”16 | 21 |
| Mills argues that the “slavery contract” and the “colonial contract” are both forms of the racial contract, one more nakedly so than the other. In the debate over amelioration and slave marriage both sides disposed of, by projecting onto others—other spaces, other bodies—the refuse of their own culpability, persisting in different forms of amnesic denial. Metropolitans argued in the end that slavery was alien to the free soil and pure air of Britain, repugnant to the spirit and genius of the British Constitution and the Christian religion; the slaveowners, that licentiousness and immorality inhered in the enslaved African savages, through whom alone they were contaminated. | 22 |
| Some planter ideologues like the historian Edward Long tried to argue in favor of reclaiming the space of the West Indies for white civility and respectability by cultivating marriage eligibility, including the appropriate racial-ethnic and social qualities of genteel wifeliness, among the less than stellar caste of white women on hand locally. Long was the most important planter moralist/intellectual of his day, the author—through his various speeches, pronouncements, and writings—of the most ambitious attempt to “systematise the world view of the planter class of the period.”17 As such, he considered the enslaved Africans to be “more like beasts than men,” and Africa to be “the parent of everything that is monstrous in nature.”18 His proposal for improving the caliber of white women in the West Indies included provisions for their thorough de-Africanization, requiring the rooting out of those habits—of speech, dress, cuisine, bodily posture, and gesture—into which they had ineluctably fallen from too close an association with their numerous and ubiquitous enslaved attendants. He proposed: To allure men from these illicit connexions, we ought to remove the principal obstacles which deter them from marriage. This will be chiefly effected by rendering women of their own complexion more agreeable companions, more frugal, trusty, and faithful friends, than can be met with among the African ladies…. Much, indeed, depends on the ladies themselves to rescue this truly honourable union from that fashionable detestation in which it seems to be held; and one would suppose it no very arduous task to make themselves more companionable, useful, and esteemable, as wives, than the Negresses and Mulattas are as mistresses….19 | 23 |
| The ameliorationist metropolitans and missionaries were conversely preoccupied with fashioning the moral and Christian Negro subject and transforming West Indian society into an industrious and as-civilized-as-possible space, as befitting station and function. They were greatly concerned with stamping out illicit interracial sexual coupling and the heathenish practice of polygamy and with promoting chastity and monogamous and endogamous marriage among the slaves and ex-slaves. This meant advocating sex-role differentiation, mutuality, and complementarity; protecting the modesty of women and emphasizing their virtuousness and respectability; and promoting the sober, disciplined, and independent masculine subject and head of household. This was among their first tests in the assertion of middle-class Christian values beyond Britain’s shores and in the exercise of their growing mandate of moral imperialism. | 24 |
| The majority of the enslaved had ideas of their own regarding marriage and their own gendered subjectivity, which of course differed from both those of Edward Long and those of the missionaries. These ideas, and the forms to which they gave rise, reflected a combination of pragmatic adaptation to the extreme conditions of plantation slavery, deployment of cultural modalities of African origin, rejection of planter-class hypocrisy and double standards, the struggle between the sexes, and, under certain circumstances, aspiration to hegemonic forms rewarded by the social system. Expressions of cynicism on the part of the enslaved toward apparent European-style marriage and sanctimonious exhortations urged upon them to practice faithful monogamy abound in the testimonial literature. In response to one such exhortation, coming from a Mr. Shirley, “a Member of the Assembly … and a profligate character,” an African-Caribbean skeptic is reported to have exclaimed, “Hi, Massa, you telly me marry one wife, which is good! You no tinky I see you buckra no content wid one, two, tree, or four wifes; no more poor negro.”20 | 25 |
| In the debate over slave marriage, however, neither side among whites placed any value on the preferences of the enslaved, or seriously credited their capacity for rational, ethical, or creative response to their life conditions. This is patently glaring in the case argued by Stephen. Broadly speaking, he occupies a position somewhere between the unreconstructed pro-chattel slavery and racism of an Edward Long and the more radical humanitarian movement in the metropole. In the correspondence he initiates we already detect the gathering storm of abolitionism in the shadow of James Stephen Jr. hovering over the Bathurst minute of which he was the probable author.21 Certainly Stephen was closer in spirit to the planters than to the abolitionists. However, it is important to bear in mind that before Thomas Fowell Buxton, Wilberforce’s chosen successor as parliamentary leader of the abolitionist cause, threw down the gauntlet in 1823 in the House of Commons with the declaration that “the state of Slavery is repugnant to the principles of the British Constitution and the Christian Religion; and that it should be gradually abolished,” there was much equivocation about the humanitarian mandate and what should be the focus of its reform efforts: the body-and-soul conditions of the enslaved or the idea and institution of slavery itself? Conservative humanitarians like Stephen and Wylly focused on the Christianization of the enslaved and their paternalistic integration, as slaves, into regularized and reformed white plantocratic societies. More progressive or “aggressive” humanitarians, who more easily morphed into gradual abolitionists, advocated the Christianization and “civilization” of the enslaved to render them increasingly eligible for and worthy of free status, which should be made available to them on an orderly and non-disruptive basis. In 1816, outright abolitionism, which stressed the inherent inhumanity of slavery and the inherent humanity and natural right to freedom of the enslaved, was still the purview of a few radicals among whites, including some liberal intellectuals, political firebrands, and religious groups like the Quakers, who, since 1761, had taken a principled stance against the trafficking in human flesh. | 26 |
| Rev. Stephen’s letter alights on a number of issues already placed, at least suggestively, in context above: the differential conceptions, and their implications for the condition of slavery, of marriage as natural right and religious sacrament and marriage as civil institution; the sustainability of marriage as an instrument of hegemonic morality and respectability in a society based on relations of coercive sexual service and informal concubinage, and the practical promise of marriage as a medium of stable economic reproduction and political quiescence. In showcasing Stephen as (Anglican) clergyman/philosopher, reform-minded pro-slavery moralist, and armchair jurisprudent, we can analyze the arguments, regimes of truth, and discursive strategies mobilized by him against those utilized by the major parties to the debate over slave marriage, slave status and amelioration, and, further, to consider them critically against the historical and material backdrop of relations between colony and metropole, relations between (white) master and (black) slave, and relations of patriarchy and gender. To state the latter much more broadly: I will consider the imperial/local race, class, and gender implications of Stephen’s arguments during the period of amelioration. | 27 |
| The Dilemma of Rev. John Stephen: On the Question of Slave Marriage | |
| In 1816, Rev. John Stephen, rector of the parish of Christ Church in the Bahamas, was moved to weigh in at great length on the question of slave marriage in the British West Indian colonies. Two years earlier, alarmed by a slaveowner’s rescinding the permission he had originally granted a male slave to formally marry a free woman, Stephen had sought in writing the legal opinion of “His Majesty’s Attorney and Solicitor General” regarding the rights of slaves to marry and the attendant legal implications (Stephen to Cameron, 217–26). The slaveowner’s change of mind had been prompted by the fear, propagated by an interlocutor “of the legal profession,” that such permission might invoke a presumption of freedom, “a virtual emancipation,” on the part of the slave. In light of this, Stephen’s inquiry was twofold: “Whether the marriage of slaves is, or is not, conformable to the principles of our laws? And, whether a slave, if married with his master’s consent, could, on proof of that circumstance, ground a claim for his liberty?” (Stephen to Cameron, 217) These questions had been urgently rekindled by a more recent instance of withdrawal of previously granted consent for the marriage of a female slave to a free man by another slaveowner, based on similar apprehensions of unwitting and unintentional manumission. | 28 |
| From the protracted treatise discussed below, it is clear that what he had been hoping to hear in response to his inquiry was that, yes, slave marriage was legally allowed, and, no, the right to marry—either another slave or a free person—in no way presumed the right to liberty or sanctioned a claim for freedom. | 29 |
| He was deeply troubled by the response that he did receive. On January 18, 1814, William Wylly, the attorney general of the Bahamas, supported by J. Armstrong, the solicitor general, had issued the following legal opinion: Marriages are considered in our law as merely civil contracts. To make any contract valid, the party contracting must be of sufficient legal ability. But from the very nature of slavery, it is evident that no slave can enter into a valid contract. It follows, that a marriage between a slave and a free person is a mere nullity. But the consent of the owner would materially alter the case; and if sufficiently evidenced, may probably be considered as amounting to an emancipation. (Stephen to Cameron, 218) | 30 |
| This line of thinking concerned him on many grounds but principally on two. First, he thought it was against natural law and the law of God to “restrict any class of human beings from the use and enjoyment of” the institution of marriage. Second, he rejected the idea that the use and enjoyment of this natural and God-given right by slaves, provided it received the sanction of the master, interfered with the institution of slavery or the proprietary rights of the slaveowner. Stephen was unambiguous in his anxiety to preserve both institutions, marriage and slavery, and the set of rights attached to each. To make his argument, he drew upon theological, legal, historical, and practical justifications in favor of slave marriage and its fundamental compatibility with the institution of slavery and with the long-term security of the slave system. | 31 |
| The final set of responses to Stephen’s ponderous 1816 missive, which will be discussed at length below, are highly instructive. In the Bahamian government’s response, the attorney general affirmed his previous position, while the new solicitor general, in support, focused on the fact that marriages contracted by slaves without the consent of their master would be void, given the slaves’ legal incapacity to enter into contracts on their own behalf. The dissenting imperial response, from Earl Bathurst (on the probable advice of James Stephen Jr.), was more than Stephen might have hoped for or been willing to concede, flying, as it did, in the face of nearly two hundred years of implacable colonial practice. Despite its dubious practicality, it immediately claimed for the Colonial Office the moral high ground: I have to acquaint you that, having referred the point to the consideration of His Majesty’s law servants, it is their opinion that the ecclesiastical law has always held without distinction as to the consent of the owner, that slaves were not to be excluded from marriage either with free persons or slaves, and that their owners’ claim to their services would not be effected thereby….22 | 32 |
| Bathurst goes on to say that unless the opinion advanced by Wylly, the attorney general, was based either on positively enacted law or judicially sanctioned custom in the Bahamas, “this provision of the ecclesiastical law, which was adopted generally in Europe, may justly be applicable to the Bahamas.”23 He seeks, however, “a statement of the existing laws on the subject in the Bahamas as derived from legislative or judicial authorities.” Three months later the requested information is dispatched from Wylly and a trio of judges: “Our colonial laws are silent upon the subject of marriages of slaves, and there being no spiritual court in the Colonies, we are of course but little versant in the ecclesiastical law, except so far as it has been adopted by statute.”24 The judges confirm that there is neither legislatively enacted nor judicially sanctioned prohibition against slave marriage in the Bahamas.25 In default of a relevant colonial law, the marriage law in force in the Bahamas, under the authority of the “General Declaratory Act,” is an enacted statute from the era of Henry VIII.26 In an unlikely twist, it turns out that Stephen’s earlier reference to this very act as a basis for making marriage rights claims on behalf of the enslaved might not have been so fanciful after all. | 33 |
| Stephen argues his case in favor of slave marriage on four main grounds: those of theological and religious precepts, civil jurisprudence and common-law precedent, practical economic and security interests, and moral principles. The first two themes are interrelated and of a more philosophical nature, while the third and fourth form part of more practical political-economic and everyday concerns. The discussion will reflect this. | 34 |
| On the first ground, it is worth quoting him at length: Marriage was instituted by God himself, as early as the creation of the first human pair, and while man was yet in a state of innocence. It has been confirmed by every subsequent dispensation of religion, and more particularly so by the christian. Although, therefore, human laws may, and indeed must regulate many things respecting it, in order to prevent disorder and confusion in society, yet it is impossible that they can have any right to set it aside, or to restrict any class of human beings from the use and enjoyment of it. It has been recommended, encouraged, and enforced, and the rights of it have been protected by law in every civilized nation since the earliest accounts of history. (Stephen to Cameron, 218) | 35 |
| For Stephen, therefore, marriage is a natural right, a God-given right, confirmed and solemnized by religion, recognized and regulated by law, and encouraged by the moral exigencies of civilized society. As a natural right, conferred by God upon all (classes of) human beings, it preceded religion, civil law, and political authority, all of which could only sanctify, institutionally mediate, and regulate it, but could not deny it. Moreover, Stephen gives virtually equal political and legal weight to religious and civil sanction of marriage, particularly, presumably, in the case of England, where Church and State were integrated. He appears to seize upon the mutual requirements of religious and civil authorizations in British marriage law to argue (at first) for their inseparability in principle. Very few metropolitan authorities of the Established Church, traditionally more flexible on these questions than their colonial counterparts, had ever been willing to make that claim, being happy to separate the two conditions and offer exclusively religious marriage as a form appropriate to the status of slaves. Stephen states: “Marriage is more than a civil contract, it is also a religious contract, founded on an institution of God. The matrimonial law also, which takes cognizance of marriage, is as much a part of the law of England as the civil law. It follows, therefore, that the civil law alone cannot determine the question in hand.” Stephen sees religious law in general and ecclesiastical law in particular as closer to and a more direct expression of the authority of God, in which ultimately rests the dispensation of the right to marry of all human beings. And, clearly, Christianity is the most direct expression of God’s authority: “Though they are our slaves, they are God’s free-men, and are entitled to all the benefits of common salvation, which the Saviour of the human race has purchased for them as well as for us” (Stephen to Cameron, 220). | 36 |
| Stephen is no less unwilling to cede the grounds of the civil law argument. But, he asks, is marriage forbidden the slaves, even under civil law (“taking marriage merely in a civil light, it may perhaps be found, that the principles of the civil law are not so decidedly against the marriage of slaves, as at first sight appears”)? Here he enters into a digression upon the letter and spirit of the law, according to Blackstone and directly cited common and enacted law statutes, as well as according to historical precedent in the British feudal system. This foray into comparative jurisprudence is fascinating because it bypasses the peculiar legal codes and informal practices of West Indian slavery (glossing over its “differentness”) and establishes homegrown English common law and social relations as its reference point, thereby placing the West Indian slaves on an existential and politico-legal continuum with unfree or semi-free white Britons, and, moreover, within the same overarching system of direct political accountability (albeit respecting different time periods). | 37 |
| The very establishment of referential comparability or fungibility is controversial. It appears to place Stephen closer to the spirit, if not the letter, of the metropolitan camp (i.e., the officials). Indeed, not the letter. One of the counsels in the famous 1772 Somerset case had been scrupulous in arguing that villeinage had become naturally extinct in England and that, even if it were not extinct, it would require for its authentication proof that it had “always been in the blood and family,” and that it was “immemorial,” i.e., that it had commenced on English soil “beyond the time of memory”: The law of England then excludes every slavery not commencing in England, every slavery though commencing there not being ancient and immemorial. Villenage is the only slavery which can possibly answer to such a description, and that has been long expired by the deaths and emancipations of all those who were the objects of it. Consequently, there is now no slavery, which can be lawful in England, until the Legislature shall interpose its authority to make it so.27 | 38 |
| Francis Hargrave, the jurist in question, points out that “in our American colonies and other countries slavery may be by captivity or contract as well as by birth…. Therefore the law of England is not applicable to the slavery of our American colonies, or of other countries.”28 In light of this and other modes of thought, it is doubtful that any metropolitan would have argued for continuity or applicability of English common law on the grounds that villeins and slaves shared a legal and historical identity. At the same time it is important to note in Hargrave’s legalese a longstanding metropolitan characteristic which Stephen, as a West Indian resident, could be expected to avoid—that is, the deeply embedded denial and hypocrisy implied in the positing of an absolute irreconcilability and estrangement between British freedom and American slavery. At the time of the Somerset ruling, the right of Englishmen to traffic in (other) human beings was not under dispute.29 Indeed, the following typical response to Bathurst’s 1823 amelioration proposals, repeated almost word for word across the West Indian island assemblies, exposes this hypocrisy while reproducing elements of its own: But it is not these Colonies on whom rests the guilt of the original sin. The traf[f]ic was of the Mother Country’s fostering. Parliamentary enactments and Royal Proclamations and Charters, alike held out to the settlers of these islands, as an acknowledged right, the power of cultivating the waste lands purchased from the Crown, by the labour of African negroes, brought to these shores by thousands under the cover of the British fleet, a branch of its commerce protected by bounties, and every immunity which the most anxious care could dictate; a signal proof of which if the Council are not mistaken, is exhibited by the very instructions of the crown to the Governor of these colonies, in which forgetful of the change of policy which Great Britain has lately adopted, there still continues to be inserted an earnest recommendation to encourage the slave trade. The Council refer to this and they might lengthen their address to your Excellency by referring to a thousand other sources to shew the fact (which indeed is undeniable) that to Britain alone is the establishment of slavery in these colonies owing. The ancestors of the present Colonists confiding in the good faith of their country and under the sanction of these Parliamentary and Royal Authorities, became the purchasers at high rates of the lands belonging to the crown. Trusting to the permanency of the system they found established, they not only expended their own capital and many of them sacrificed their lives in laying the foundations of another colony appendant to the British Empire in these seas, but the greater number borrowed large sums of money from the merchants of the United Kingdom (which are still due) for the purpose of still further extending the cultivation of the soil. Such was the trust and the system upon which this colony was founded[,] cultivated and brought to the advanced state in which it lately existed.30 | 39 |
| Seemingly oblivious to all these larger political and jurisprudential controversies that attended the struggle for slave rights, Stephen’s positions are confidently asserted. They can be summed up in the following points, which will then be considered in turn: | 40 |
| (a) Marriage was a natural right, a common human right based on natural law. It was also a Christian “right,” a benefit of common salvation to which the slaves were entitled as “God’s free-men,” along with the rest of humanity, all of whom enjoyed co-equal spiritual freedom as actual or potential converts to Christianity. | 41 |
| (b) Notwithstanding Wylly’s assertions to the contrary, the slaves were also entitled to marriage as a civil right. This was so on the basis of common and enacted law in place during English villeinage, under whose terms unfree persons had both the right and the obligation to marry. Villeins were the statutory equivalent of West Indian slaves and hence a justifiable basis for establishing legal precedent applicable to the latter under British dominion common to both groups. | 42 |
| (c) As a corollary of the above points: The enjoyment by slaves of the right of marriage was (or should be) contingent on the consent of the master (“the consent of the owner would supply the want of legal capacity in the slave to contract”) (Stephen to Cameron, 218). | 43 |
| No Marriage or a Certain Kind of Marriage? Religious Implications | |
| As Stephen’s outrage indicates, even in the Bahamas where slavery was known to be milder than in the sugar islands,31 the planters as a class strongly resisted marriage rights for the enslaved on both religious and civil grounds. Since the mid-seventeenth century, when sugar plantation slavery first became ascendant in the sub-region, civil and religious authorities in the metropole had repeatedly called upon the planters to christianize the slaves and consequently recognize their matrimonial rights.32 The planters’ intransigence held firm until the mid-1820s when they were finally forced to make some limited but important concessions. So obdurate was the resistance in some quarters that, according to one historian, “[o]nly one marriage of slaves was performed in Barbados before 1825, and that by a minister who was later subjected to persecution by his own parishioners.”33 | 44 |
| Authorities in the metropole explicitly disagreed with the planter-class position that conversion of the slaves would directly threaten the power and property of the masters. In 1680 the Lord Bishop of London formally advised the Council of Trade and Plantations that the “apprehensions of the planters that the conversion of slaves may deprive the owners of their present power and disposal” were groundless.34 The powerful West India Committee, a lobbying group for West Indian sugar interests in London, later worked closely with officials of the Established Church to try to convince their hard-headed provincial constituents to expand the sphere of slave entitlements in favor of Church-sanctioned marriage and family preservation, as a way of averting the demographic crises of slave reproduction and the ever-present prospect of slave rebellion. Metropolitan demands to christianize the slaves did not posit any challenges to their negative civil status or explicitly call for changes in the latter. Indeed, since the official Church of England’s authority was subsumed under that of the State, it stood to reason that any ecclesiastical ministering to non-citizens and civil non-persons would carry only spiritual and moral sanctions and, as Stephen so forcefully remonstrated, would incur no “civil inconvenience.” | 45 |
| The planters remained unconvinced. The 1798 Leeward Islands Amelioration Act asserted unequivocally that it was “unnecessary and even improper to enforce the Celebration of any religious Rites among the Slaves in order to sanctify Contracts.” In their minds, the two dimensions of authority were too closely intertwined. On the very eve of emancipation the form of religious marriage that was eventually sanctioned for slaves was a specially abbreviated one that dispensed with some of the requirements considered pivotal in British marriage laws and that, in open defiance of Colonial Office, required the consent of the master. In addition, the planters insisted that for the slaves’ marriages to be recognized they had to be performed by Anglican ministers. Even during the post-slavery Apprenticeship period, when the ex-slaves enjoyed semi-contractual semi-freedom, there were several instances of managers, overseers, and even Anglican parish rectors illegally but successfully refusing to give their permission, or halting official applications already in the pipeline, for the marriage of apprentices on charges that they constituted “an impertinent interference with the management of the estate” or “a most gratuitous and unprecedented interference with the internal regulations of the property…. “35 Many apprentices were thus forced to contract marriages at “dissenting places of worship,” which, while the spiritual and social preference of many, were still not legally valid in most West Indian territories. | 46 |
| Manyoni, in his important article on the struggle over slave marriage rights, argues that conversion to Christianity, literacy, and formal marriage for the slaves were the “three closely intertwined” bogeymen that haunted West Indian slave regimes. Despite metropolitan pledges to respect the property rights of the owner, eighteenth and early nineteenth-century planters were deeply apprehensive of any project meant to elevate and refine the spiritual, intellectual, and moral sensibilities of the slaves, which they felt christianization, literacy, and marriage were likely to do. Not only would such a project “impair their [slaves’] value and price,” it would also interfere with the masters’ freedom to economically and sexually exploit them in the enjoyment of absolute and unmediated rights of ownership. Whites found the idea of converted, literate, and “properly” married slaves to be offensive and dangerous. It eroded and contaminated the exclusivity and sacrosanctity of European privilege and identity by allowing slaves to partake of them, if only distantly and symbolically; it weakened the availability of the slaves as objects of unmitigated exploitation and of the murky colonial underside of European civilization and fantasy; and it potentially threatened the physical security of the whites and their property by inciting the slaves to visions of total freedom. Manyoni cites a contemporary observation that “when coloured concubines adopted christianity, ‘their renunciation of base connections gave the greatest offence to the white community.'”36 It occurred to whites that “uppity” black people who went to the great lengths required to become literate, convert to Christianity, or obtain a clerical marriage, might have pretensions to being something other than their sexual and production tools. In the overwhelming black majority situations of the Caribbean, such pretensions were extremely threatening to the planters’ race/class niche. | 47 |
| Strictly speaking, it could be argued that conversion, so feared by the planters, was necessary for marriage because of English laws requiring religious sanction and, specifically, Church of England solemnization of marriage. For centuries there had been incremental moves to incorporate the common-law marriage practices of ordinary English folk into the institutional rubric of the elite religious establishment in order to control their family and inheritance systems as well as their moral habits. A Council of Trent ruling in 1536 required the presence of a priest to formalize a marriage, where none had been required before. As a result, all officially recognized marriages in England were administered by canon law and by the Anglican Church. The Marriage Act of 1753, or Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, laid down yet stricter rules, requiring marriage to be performed by formal church ceremony and to be officially publicized, witnessed, and recorded. These rules effectively nullified common-law marriage. The act also required parental consent if both parties to the marriage were under twenty-one years of age. Children of marriages that did not meet these requirements could not inherit property and were considered “base.” Church of England-sanctioned marriage was the requirement until 1836, when the British Marriage Act finally gave official approval to marriages performed by civil authorities and registered ministers of other denominations. | 48 |
| Indeed, the inclusion of the slaves in the religion of the whites had such powerful connotations of freedom that, even before Lord Mansfield’s 1772 ruling in the Somerset case, abolitionist sympathizers in England repeatedly tried to argue that the baptism of sojourning slaves accompanying their masters and mistresses on British soil constituted grounds for their freedom and against their forced deportation.37 The same arguments were later made with regard to proper Christian marriage. Stephen refers to this mistaken belief as the unfortunate basis for longstanding resistance by owners to the baptism of their slaves. He states that the “absurd prejudice against the baptism of slaves has now happily ceased,” and hopes that similar prejudices against their marriages will meet the same fate (Stephen to Cameron, 223–24). | 49 |
| Over the course of several decades, the planters introduced a cumulative number of piecemeal and finely discriminating caveats every time they felt pressured to make reforms, but, to the end, they refused to concede full-fledged Christian marriage after the metropolitan model. They finally allowed mass baptismal rites without formal conversion or religious instruction; oral religious instruction only; training to recite bible verses by rote rather than instruction in their meanings or teaching to read; teaching to read but not to write; the reading of the bible only; baptismal rites administered by Church of England officials only; proactive encouragement of and rewards for cohabitation without formal rites of marriage (known as faithful concubinage); (a version of) religious marriage as permitted by the master and officiated by Anglican ministers exclusively, and so on. The two main conditions on which they refused to compromise were the consent of the master and officiation by Established Church clergy exclusively. This, of course, does not deny the fact that individual owners had always reserved the private-property right to act according to their own consciences, while avoiding any clash with the public law dimension of the slave code or more generally causing public offense. | 50 |
| In the British West Indies, marriage among slaves had not been the subject of law or of the slave codes because, slaves being legal non-entities, the possibility had no conception in law. In dealing with slaves—who were property—only civil considerations had import. There had been some early laws prohibiting free persons from marrying slaves, with heavy penalties imposed on ministers and free persons violating the rules.38 But such laws were presumably directed at the parties possessing juridical liability, not at the slaves, who had none. Stephen’s discussion of the Bahamian cases, which prompted his inquiry in the first place, makes no mention of such explicit legal prohibitions. Thus it is not clear if they were peculiar to certain islands or had simply fallen into disuse from lack of circumstantial relevance. Most scholars agree that the West Indians by and large did not pass laws against miscegenation (a different matter, admittedly), unlike their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas.39 One exception has been found in an early Antiguan law passed in 1644 and reissued in 1672.40 But such laws would have too deeply implicated the lifestyles of the majority of white men in the West Indian colonies and would not have been worth their weight in ink. | 51 |
| In her masterly comparative study of Caribbean slave laws of the eighteenth century, Guyanese historian Elsa Goveia has noted that the “basic conception of the English law in relation to slaves was not, as with the Spaniards, that they were an inferior kind of subject;” rather, it was that “they were a special kind of property—that is, property in persons.”41 The British West Indian slave codes—once sugar became king—chattelized the slave in no uncertain terms. Strictly speaking, the slaves were seen in part as chattel and in part as real estate, but always as the object of absolute and alienable private property. This legal reification of the entirety of the slave’s person and personality was unambiguously spelled out in enacted law, such as the Barbados acts passed in the years 1674 and 1688 declaring the “slaves to be ‘Real Estate’ and absolute property of their owners.”42 During the amelioration debates these “absolute property” rights that the owners had in their slaves were constantly being invoked. | 52 |
| This kind of legal conception posited a fundamental incompatibility between the slaves’ civil (non-)status and expressions of their spiritual humanity. Other slave codes did not assume such incompatibility (since they were not devised solely on civil grounds). Neither, as we have seen, did Stephen or leading metropolitan authorities in Britain. It is clear therefore that one major reason for the inflexibility of British West Indian slave laws had to do with the very liberties enjoyed by the “self-legislating freeborn Britons” in the colonies.43 | 53 |
| The Spanish slave code, at the opposite end of the continuum of colonial legal norms, originated in pre-existing metropolitan law governing slavery as a (still extant but declining) domestic institution within Spain itself. Colonial government and the administration of the law were centralized in the metropole; and the law explicitly embraced the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, which integrated the enslaved into its spiritual community as co-religionists and children of God alongside whites. The code recognized the shared innate humanity, the spiritual personhood, the religious rights, and (Roman Catholic) church membership of the enslaved, and consequently their right to marry and to have their marriages duly solemnized.44 | 54 |
| Slavery in the British system, despite all appearances to the contrary, was based on strong presumptions of those “advanced” principles around which an emerging capitalist ethos had accreted. Those were the principles of liberty, contract, and absolute rights in property, as vested in the free-standing individual and liberal juridical subject/person, with devastating winner-take-all consequences when combined with a system in which the human “other” was the object of property and property rights. By contrast, Spanish slavery was initially based on a semi-feudal order steeped in continuous status hierarchies, relative rights in property, and monarchical and theological absolutism. Cottrol, among others, recognizes precisely the contradictory consequences of this contrast in normative legal systems, while rejecting Tannenbaum’s conclusions about its causality in determining the degree of severity of slavery.45 In his scheme, which, like so many others, would have been greatly enhanced by consideration of the British West Indian case, the postcolonial American South represents the peculiar, mutually constitutive duality of “advanced” liberalism and strict racial dichotomy/apartheid, while the Latin systems adhere more closely to a combination of pervasive and “backward” class/status hierarchy and racial continuum/flexibility. | 55 |
| It is ironic but not surprising that the British amelioration movement advocated a number of principles that were integral to the original conceptions of the Spanish and, to a lesser extent, the French slave codes. Among those principles were metropolitan precedence over local oligarchies (especially in the matter of protection of the enslaved, since there was never any doubt about their precedence in the matter of the Navigation Acts), religious and marriage rights for the enslaved, and manumission and post-manumission citizenship (or common subjects’) rights. Implicitly, amelioration aimed to undermine the British concept of the slave as res and promote the original Spanish principle of the slave as persona, albeit of an inferior kind. As Goveia has pointed out, “[t]he myth of ‘inevitable progress’ has prevented for long an appreciation of the fact that humaneness pre-dates humanitarianism.”46 For example, George Smith—a trained English lawyer sent out in 1809 by the Colonial Office to the newly acquired colony of Trinidad, with an appointment to a Spanish position roughly equivalent to that of Chief Judge—was counting on this humaneness when he argued against the transfer of the British Constitution and institutions of representative government. Instead he sought the retention of the Spanish legal and governance system. In a telling declaration, Smith, who was wholeheartedly supported in this view by James Stephen Sr., warned: If you mean to ruin the colony you will give us the British Constitution, a form of government whose foundations resting on the general liberty becomes an absolute caricature in a community where four-fifths of the whole population are slaves; and in which of course the rights of humanity can only be guarded by an executive government holding over the masters an authority bearing some proportion to that which he claims over his slaves, and the want of which in the other English colonies is the true cause why in those the slaves are treated with less humanity than in those of France and Spain.47 | 56 |
| It is, however, generally agreed that with somewhat different starting points in law and conception, the British and Spanish slave systems eventually converged in practice and in their treatment of the slaves, driven by the imperatives of a shared colonial export slave mode of production, dependence on the slave trade, and denial of the slave’s legal personality, a principle derived from Roman law but sealed with American-origin racial signifiers. The British system was forced to incrementally provide more protections for their slaves, while the economics of intensified export production impelled the Spanish colonial slave toward a more chattel-like status. Watson, in his work on comparative slavery, notes that the normative differences mattered little in the face of the ultimate legal incapacity of the Spanish, as other American, slaves. Slaves were simply not juridical persons but were economic (and sexual) objects and so were vulnerable to the circumstantially motivated shifts in attitude to protections that ultimately relied on the indulgence of the master. As he reminds us of the Spanish case, “[s]lave marriage was legally recognized, but it had few legal consequences.”48 In making this important point, perhaps Watson has unnecessarily downplayed the symbolic and cultural (including religious) consequences.49 Indeed, one might well interpret the post-1760 Spanish legislative obsession with racial and class endogamy—where the British system required no such laws—as an ex post facto attempt to curb the too-liberal translation of the universal right to marry into a right to marry anyone.50 | 57 |
| When Wylly prioritized the civil contractual dimension of marriage in British colonial law, he was affirming a very important principle that also characterized the spirit of the British West Indian slave codes, that is, the emphasis on pure and absolute contractarian principles enabling the division of the population into those with and those without the power of contract. This was indeed a caricature of the English legal tradition, whose body of common law, evolved over centuries, accommodated a wider variety of legal situations and normative rules. Accordingly, there was a record of discord between visiting metropolitan jurists and the colonists on the question of the application of English common law. The colonists for the most part insisted that the “common law of England [was] not applicable to the slavery of the West Indies” and that, in dealing with slaves, only locally enacted law mattered.51 The visiting metropolitan jurists, of course, disagreed. But, again, this is not to say that the ambiguity in the law rested exclusively with the colonists. As Mills reminds us, the slavery contract and the colonial contract were both variations of the racial contract. | 58 |
| A similar dispute was evoked with respect to ecclesiastical law in Bathurst’s reference to marriage rights provisions for the enslaved contained in “the ecclesiastical law, which was adopted generally in Europe,” and which “may justly be applicable to the Bahamas.”52 Here the gesture is made both to metropolitan precedence and to the religious rights conceded the enslaved in (other) European colonial constitutions. This kind of legal play and discursive eclecticism was typical of the early forms of ammunition being developed for the humanitarian legal arsenal. The matter-of-fact rejoinder from Wylly was equally typical of the colonial response: there was no practiced ecclesiastical law in these islands, and so there was little knowledge of their provisions. | 59 |
| There were no ecclesiastical courts in the West Indies that could potentially act as a countervailing or at least a complicating factor in matters that might be construed as pertinent to the realm of religion. This situation Bathurst soon set out to change. The West Indies had traditionally fallen under the authority of the Bishop of London, who rubberstamped ministers bound for West Indian assignments, but had little control over them once they arrived at their destination. When Bathurst first proposed the establishment of an episcopal see (or bishopric) for the West Indies, the Jamaican assembly vehemently opposed it, fearing the presence of a parallel or rival authority.53 Bathurst took his usual approach of waiting for them to come around, and, eventually, in 1825, two bishoprics were established by Letters Patent, one including Jamaica, Honduras and the Bahamas, and the other comprising the islands of the Lesser Antilles.54 Thus to the urgent, if accommodating, voices of metropolitan civil authority were added those of domiciled Church of England authority. | 60 |
| No “Civil Inconvenience”? The Civil Implications | |
| According to Stephen, the marriage laws of England were in force before slavery was abolished there, and they did not apply exclusively to free persons. As we have seen, he implicitly equates English villeinage and serfdom with West Indian slavery, or sees them as a historical and political continuum under the terms of a unitary British state. These assumptions about the fundamental continuity or congruity between metropolitan villeinage and colonial slavery resonated more with Spanish than with British circumstances. “In the Siete Partidas, the slave [was] considered as part of the ‘familia,’ and the distinction between slaves and serfs [was] not clearcut.”55 Moreover, as we have also seen, the planters explicitly denied any continuity in status, historical or contemporary, between British subjects at home and abroad and their slaves. Again, it is not clear that Stephen understood the full extent or implications of his disagreement with the planters in this regard. | 61 |
| As late as the reign of Henry VIII, he asserts, feudal villeins “were slaves to all intents and purposes, as much as ours now are,” based on a system where “they were either regardant, that is, annexed to the manor or the land; or they were in gross, or at large, that is annexed to the person of the lord, and transferable by deed from one owner to another” (Stephen to Cameron, 222). Other statutory conditions confirmed that they were slaves. They could not leave their lord without his permission and if they either ran away or “were purloined from him,” they “might be claimed or recovered by action, like beasts or other chattels.” They could acquire no property in lands or goods, except on a subsistence basis “at the mere will of the lord, who might dispossess them whenever he pleased.” Indeed, if they deemed to purchase either land or goods, “the lord might enter upon them, oust the villain (sic), and seize them to his own use.” And they were compelled to provide “villain services” at the pleasure and whim of the lord. Stephen’s argument, in a nutshell, is this: Villains then were certainly slaves, as much so as in the very worst times, except that the lord of the manor had not the power of life and death over them. But that they were allowed to marry, and that their marriages were held good in law, without exposing their proprietors to any risk of losing their property by giving their consent to such marriages, will appear, I think, beyond dispute, from the brief account that is given of laws respecting them.56 | 62 |
| He is at pains to show that where a villein marriage had not received the proper sanction from the lord, feudal law (manorial custom and common law) sought restitution, from the father and/or husband, in a way that upheld both the proprietary rights of the lord and the ex post facto matrimonial rights of the couple. Stephen, the amateur jurist, is convinced: “It is clear, I think, from this, that the marriage was good in law, though contracted without the consent of the lord; otherwise it would have been declared null at once without subjecting the parties to a fine…. ” Other statutory principles that confirm for him the inviolability of the villein’s right to marry are the transmission of filial status—at issue in the case of mixed marriages (between a “freeman and a niefe” or a “villain and a freewoman”)—through the father, and the maxim that “no bastard could be born a villain, because … he is nullius filius; and as he could gain nothing by inheritance, it was hard that he should lose his natural freedom by it” (Stephen to Cameron, 222). Given the requirement of formally established paternity for the transmission of villein status and therefore the lord’s proprietary rights, it was in the lord’s interest “to encourage, and even enforce marriage among his villains” (Stephen to Cameron, 222). Moreover, emancipation was effected only through specific and strict rules of manumission and was by no means implied in the granting of consent to marry. While Stephen does mention situations where manumission was implied rather than express, he is adamant that permission to marry was not one of those. His examples of implied manumission included the transfer of property rights or annuities to the villein, a master placing himself in debt bondage to his servant, and a legal action (“except it was for felony”) brought by the lord against his villein, conveying within it a presumptive recognition of the latter’s independent juridical personhood and therefore free status (Stephen to Cameron, 222). | 63 |
| Stephen uses his historical examples to establish jural precedence for the immanent or self-evident right of the West Indian slaves to marry and the lack of risk to the slaveowner posed by such right, and he does so without a trace of irony. Here, then, it plainly appears, that there is nothing in our law (which is indeed the common law of England, except where it is otherwise provided by our own municipal statute,) to oppose the marriage of slaves; nor is there any ground for that apprehension, which now very generally prevails, namely, that a slave may ground a claim of implied manumission, on proof of his owner’s consent to his marriage. (Stephen to Cameron, 222–23) | 64 |
| The fact is, neither the determination of the status of the offspring through the father, which legitimized the conjugal tie and the presumption of a family group in addition to privileging the father, nor the “natural freedom” of the “bastard” in default of an acknowledged father, which also established the father and the (heterosexual) conjugal tie as the exclusive or privileged medium for the transmission of jural and social status within the grid of property relations, had any direct bearing on the case of West Indian slavery. In that system, and in the logic of patriarchy, the enslaved were reduced to a state of enforced universal bastardy (they all had the status of nullius filius); paternity and the conjugal tie had no standing in law; and “partus sequitur ventrem” (the offspring followed the condition of the mother).57 | 65 |
| The situation of enslaved women differed quite dramatically from that of Stephen’s female villeins in that their relationship to the master was not mediated, however tenuously, through a private patriarchal family: it was an “immediate” and fused class/patriarchal relation of forced re/production and sexuality, with no intervening paterfamilial rights reposited in slave men. Indeed, the master’s absolute “third party” rights abrogated or significantly decreased the potential for the formation of an intervening and (at least partly) preemptive conjugal community of entitlement.58 “[T]he father of a slave is unknown to our law,” but no parental rights resided in the fact that “[s]lavery was inherited in the female line” for the slave mother either, except by indulgence of the absolute owner/patriarch of the entire slave “family.”59 While one might concede that denial of paterfamilial rights constituted no great tragedy for women and children, the assault on the general rights to be or have a social father and to form and sustain families and sexual/spousal partnerships of one’s choosing surely was. | 66 |
| Despite his location in the heart of slaveowning territory, Stephen fails to register an awareness of this longstanding and intractable legal and political reality or the bitter ongoing struggles surrounding it. Moreover, it is clear that he, an armchair jurisprudent, does not represent feudal law correctly in the full amplitude of its gendered permutations and patriarchal underpinnings. Attorney General Wylly, in his later contribution to the stream of correspondence on the subject, explained that the basis for his previous legal opinion was a finding in Littleton, Coke, and Blackstone “that while villanage prevailed in England, if a freeman married a niefe without consent of her lord, she became free by operation of law; and that her lord might maintain an action against the husband for the loss of his slave or niefe.”60 Wylly himself seems oblivious to the fact that, even if one were to entertain the dubious possibility of its applicability to West Indian slavery, this feudal common law statute would not necessarily have had pertinence in the first-mentioned case in question, of a male slave marrying a free woman, since statutory properties or rights under feudalism were deeply gender-differentiated and unequal. | 67 |
| Indeed, it seems that, under certain conditions, marriage, by virtue of the (free) status and male-gender rights of the husband, did imply emancipation for a female villein (“niefe”). Both Stephen and Wylly appear to have missed the essential point that villeinage and serfdom were institutionally mediated throughout the entire system by the paterfamilial rights of the husband and father and that the institution of marriage was both imposed upon the villein class and women and shared (unevenly, of course) across the spectrum of class, as well as by male and female conjugal partners and kin. This kind of (unequally) shared and mutually limiting institutional matrix had no place in the West Indian version of slave society, where the enslaved were defined as permanent outsiders and racial “others” with respect to European institutions of property, marriage, church, and political community. | 68 |
| The contrast with slavery is, however, instructive. Villeins were embedded in a continuous chain of hierarchical relations bound together by unequally shared landed property, institutional homology, and remote historical ethno-national community. Institutions such as partible and impartible inheritance, primogeniture, dowry, dower rights, and so on were indices of this internally continuous ethno-national hierarchy of agrarian class and property relations. Marriage here (as elsewhere) was a key institutional instrument in the execution of the mode of re/production and in the social distribution of persons and goods. It was much more than an instrument for ensuring the stability of sexual, conjugal, and parental relations and the integrity of the moral and spiritual order. It was a class and patriarchal device that conferred both benefits and liabilities in relation to rights in persons and rights in things, depending on one’s position in the class and gender order. As such it was a profoundly “mixed bag” for villeins, and differently so for different class and gender subjects, but slaves were altogether excluded from it, and therefore from both its benefits and its liabilities. | 69 |
| In the end, Stephen shows himself ready to compromise to preserve both marriage and slavery—if forced to concede the civil case—by accepting a reduced and exclusively religious form of marriage for the slaves (like his metropolitan counterparts): [O]r if it shall still be found that the present obstruction to their marriages has a real foundation in law, that obstruction may be easily removed by a declaratory law allowing them to marry with consent of their masters, but securing the owner’s property in them as well after marriage as before. And then, let the marriage of slaves be ever so great a nullity in the eye of the civil law—let it be granted to be in their case no civil contract; yet it will remain as much a religious contract, and be as binding on the parties in the eye of the Supreme Lawgiver as the marriage of freemen, whether white or black. (Stephen to Cameron, 224) | 70 |
| What are the key relevant features of this marriage principle, which included (most classes of) villeins but excluded slaves, and the specter of which so threatened the planter class? | 71 |
| The fact that slaves, unlike villeins, were outside of the ownership system, outside of the institutional matrix, and outside of the race and the nation provides an easy clue. But it is fair to note that the case was not entirely limited to the condition of slavery. The marriage rights of white indentured servants in the West Indies were also severely restricted, on pain of punishment and exaction of compensation in monetary fines or labor services.61 White indentured servants shared features with the sub-category of propertyless and unmarried servants incorporated as dependants into agrarian and artisanal households in the feudal and proto-industrial eras in England on the one hand, and with colonial slaves as (what I choose to call) deracinated isolates on the other.62 But here the conditions of transportation and labor were formally voluntary (excluding considerations of involuntarily transported convicts and penal labor). Colonial indentures were time-limited contracts that were supposedly freely entered into. Indeed, it was freedom of contract that allowed single white servants to voluntarily enter into contracts that transmitted extensive property rights in their labor services to the master or mistress (and temporarily suspended their power to freely dispose of their own persons and services).63 | 72 |
| Indentures were typically contracted with unattached singles, male or female. Under the terms of the service indenture, marriage interfered with the master’s or mistress’s property rights in the labor services of the servant. To marry, the servant had to leave service having fulfilled the contract, or, if s/he married in defiance of the master or mistress, s/he had to pay restitution in money or in service for the loss of or damage to those property rights. Marriages between free persons and indentured servants were similarly criminalized, with the former subject to similar pecuniary and nonpecuniary penalties. Illicit sexual unions resulting in the pregnancy of a servant incurred fines or extension of labor services.64 Lazarus-Black points out that in Antigua, where one out of five whites was a servant in 1720, a “fair number of the colonists, therefore, could not marry unless they could obtain permission from their employers, buy out their contracts, or pay heavy fines.”65 | 73 |
| Once the terms of the contract were fulfilled, the (gender-specific) rights of the servant as a freeborn Englishman or woman, for example, were restored (and often amplified by small grants of land). Indentured service was characterized by a combination of medieval concepts of relative property in persons, freedom of contract (of single persons) and conditions of transportation and colonialism. Under the latter conditions the individually contracted servants to some extent shared with the slaves the fate of deracinated isolates, albeit temporarily and within a more welcoming racial and cultural landscape. It is therefore not surprising that in Thomas Thistlewood’s thirty-six-year log of eighteenth-century Jamaican plantation life we find, scattered among the daily compendia of slave offenses, occasional references to white servants running away and even to white servants staging uprisings alongside enslaved blacks.66 | 74 |
| Another, and related, shared condition of these two categories of deracinated isolates (as a purely legal condition) was the lack or minimalist nature of statutory gender differentiation with regard to roles, rights, and responsibilities. For example, an Antiguan law originally enacted in 1698 imposed equal penalties on the parties to an illegitimate impregnation of a fellow servant by another: “If any servant shall get another with Childe, they shall each of them serve twelve months, or pay six pounds Money to the Master or Mistress of the woman servant…. “67 The language in the rest of this law, covering marriage prohibitions and penalties, is likewise startlingly gender-neutral. Penalties imposed on free persons incurring, through marriage, loss of or damage to property rights in a servant’s labor had no regard to the gender of the servant (and therefore of the defendant).68 The unusually high level of female-headed households among whites, despite the smaller numbers of women, might also be attributed to certain shared features in the condition of deracinated isolates.69 | 75 |
| The discursive suppression of gender differentiation and the gender-neutral juridical treatment of all parties as atomized and standard units of labor—except in the case of biological reproduction—found its highest expression in the pre-amelioration slave codes. Indeed, one of the main “concessions” of amelioration was the explicit recognition of gender-role difference in the form of various maternal protections and rewards and encouragement of intact heterosexual conjugal families. Gaspar makes a similar point when he says in reference to the late eighteenth-century amelioration initiative in the Leeward Islands, “[t]he subject of natural increase of the slave population naturally raised questions about the treatment of slave women, who, for the first time in the history of the Leeward Islands, emerged in the laws related to slaves with an identity separate from slave men.”70 The 1820s legislation proposals were even more preoccupied with the process of gender differentiation. One of the proposals, meant to protect the modesty and privacy of women, and against which the planters vigorously protested, was a ban on the flogging of women. The planters objected that such a ban would only increase the insubordination of the female slaves, who, according to the Grenadian legislators, were “the worst subjects upon an Estate,” and, according to the Barbadians, “evince[d], at all times, a greater disregard to the authority of their owners than the male slaves.”71 The Grenadians promised, however, that “when flogging [became] necessary, every care should be taken to avoid the indecent exposure of the Person.” | 76 |
| The kind of marriage that white servants were free to contract once they fulfilled the terms of their indenture and from which slaves were permanently excluded was, of course, premised on a monogamous conjugal community constituted through a sexual division of labor, property, and attendant mutual rights and responsibilities. As noted earlier, Euro-Christian marriage did not confer equilateral rights on spousal partners but gave men superior rights over women and the family patrimony. In marriage, adult women were inducted as dependants of roughly same-generation men, thereby losing their “rights of person.” By English law, “the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything…. “72 In keeping with this, the medieval peasant wife has been described as “the subordinate partner in a cotenancy where the conjugal property has been placed under the guardianship and control of her husband.”73 Marriage was part of an institutional nexus by which adult men came into social, political, and juridical independence, property ownership, and patriarchal power, proportionate to their standing in the society. It established lineage and filiation, settled the devolution of property, and instituted a form of household government over dependants—women, children, and servants—that was homologous with the wider polity, “organized according to the same fundamental principles and along similar lines.”74 Marriage was both an inner-sanctum purveyor of patriarchy and, for better or for worse, the institutional medium of class reproduction (including reproduction of labor power and peasant property, ensuring continued surplus production). | 77 |
| So, intimately bound up with the withholding of both civil and religious marital rights from the enslaved was the desire to avoid having to endow black male heads—perceived through patriarchal lenses as the chief potential rivals of ruling class men—with an independent and communal base of authority and property, that might, moreover, mediate, limit, and generally interfere with exploitative planter-class access to their women and children. The slaves were seen as vastly unfit for and undeserving of an institution that turned all classes of women in England into respectable Mistresses (and some into genteel drawing-room hostesses) and men into proper household patriarchs and responsible citizens and trustees of the nation. | 78 |
| Later on, the emancipationist missionaries had an opposite concern—how to convince the ex-slaves that the obligations of freedom required a regrouping into proper male-headed families. Unlike Stephen who saw no incompatibility between marriage and slavery, the missionaries saw marriage as an indispensable condition of freedom, and of its proper enjoyment and execution. In their leadership or facilitation of the “free village movement,” which established independent settlements of ex-slaves in the post-emancipation period, the missionaries urged that church, family, and school (the old planter class’s bogeymen) form the cornerstone of the new era and an exorcising bulwark against the old. Marriage at last “restored” men to their proper and rightful places as heads of the family, the community, and ultimately the race and nation under the tutelage of the British Empire. In this they drew not only upon the biblical injunction on wives to obey their husbands, but also on longstanding British common law traditions that saw marriage as coterminous with adult male status, economic independence (through farm property, artisanal skills, or self-disposing labor), and political freedom and/or subjecthood. Moreover, in their mentoring of the ex-slaves the missionaries emphasized to them the equation between freedom and having a wife at home.75 Being a full-time wife and mother was seen as a prerogative of male freedom and evidence of accession to a “better class” of producer. It marked the distinction between the “protected” woman whose labor belonged to her husband and family (and God); and the “unprotected” woman whose labor still belonged directly to the estate owners and employers. During this period it was deemed, well beyond the purview of West Indian reality, that “only ‘barbaric men’ made their women work.”76 | 79 |
| Slave Marriage as Guarantor of Systemic Reproduction and Stability? | |
| Next, Stephen makes a case for the political, economic, and social expediency of slave marriage in relation to the long-term security of the system. Here, he is on more solid and well-traveled practical political ground. His first remarks about the benefits of marriage seamlessly blend pragmatic and moral concerns. He taps into a line of thinking long resonant in certain translocal circles of the time that the enduring failure of West Indian slaves to reproduce and “increase the species” was directly related to the absence of the institution of marriage, or its “moral” equivalent, among them. These circles were indeed deeply divided as to the ultimate cause of this absence. Some blamed the plantocratic state and society for their withholding of this basic human right as well as for their own opportunistically cultivated licentiousness (of which the slaves were hapless victims). Others blamed the alleged absence of faithful monogamy among the slaves on the natural licentiousness and moral incapacity of a savage or backward race. | 80 |
| Stephen is characteristically equivocal on the question. According to him, “nothing can be more destructive of the peace and harmony of society, nothing more injurious to the increase in population, nothing more preventive of civilization and moral improvement, nothing in short, can tend more to enervate the body, to enfeeble the powers of the mind, and render a man less fit for all the duties of life, (luxury and drunkenness alone excepted,) than that promiscuous and licentious intercourse, which always takes place between the sexes where marriage is discountenanced or by any other means obstructed” (Stephen to Cameron, 219). For support, he quotes a letter published in 1808, addressed by Dr. Porteus, the late Bishop of London, to the “Governors, Legislatures, and Proprietors of Plantations in the British West India Islands.” On becoming Bishop of London in 1787, Dr. Porteus had automatically assumed the titular charge of diocesan of the Established Church in the West Indies. As a reformer and promoter of activist evangelism—an extremely rare phenomenon in the upper echelons of the Anglican Church—he had taken his responsibilities more seriously than most. Even so, in the following lines of his epistolary plea for marriage rights for the slaves, he, too, reflects mainly worldly concerns and earthbound interests: In that large and valuable body of evidence, ‘the Report of the Committee of the Privy Council appointed in the year 1788 to examine into the nature of the Slave Trade,’ you will find it asserted by a great number of most respectable West India Proprietors, and in a variety of official letters and papers laid by them before the committee, that one of the greatest and most fatal obstructions to the natural increase of the negro slaves in the British islands, is the promiscuous and unbounded illicit commerce of the two sexes, in which the negro slaves are permitted to indulge themselves without check or restraint. This is a fact … universally admitted, that unless an effectual stop is put to this licentiousness of manners, the increase of the native negroes by births will never be sufficient to keep up that stock of negroes which the cultivation of the Islands requires. (Stephen to Cameron, 219)Porteus should have known. The church owned plantations and slaves in Barbados through its missionary wing, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which, in 1710, had inherited three fully operational sugar plantations, with a total of eight hundred acres and three hundred slaves, from Christopher Codrington III, one of the wealthiest sugar planters in West Indian history. The Society had generally and conveniently adhered to the view that slavery and Christianity were reconcilable. Some churchmen, though opposed to slavery and the slave trade in principle, felt that as “‘innocent’ recipients of Christopher Codrington’s legacy,” they had been granted an opportunity to produce good out of evil.77 The Society’s best-laid plans for its enslaved workforce included conversion, religious instruction, marriage, improved physical welfare, self-subsistence, and “civilization.” However, despite repeated instructions to its local agents and its own missionary emissaries to arrange for the baptism and elementary religious instruction of its negroes, the Society failed to challenge or prevail against the prejudice expressed by its local attorneys that “after all those who know them best must allow that they are a most inconsiderate and thoughtless race of mortals.”78 This failure essentially jettisoned the Society’s remote experimental mission of making more than nominal or lip-syncing Christians of its would-be model slaves. In 1793, some eighty years after it had taken possession of the Codrington properties, it received a report that “[o]nly three slaves could read, ‘& that very imperfectly, one of them between 70 & 80, & the two others elderly.'”79 | 81 |
| Bishop Porteus, for his part, had seized upon the opportunity presented by the Codrington operation to advocate for a glorious evangelical experiment that would serve as a global model for the Christian conversion of the empire’s heathen subjects. To that general end, he founded the Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves in 1793, with the help of sympathetic absentee West Indian owners. He proposed a policy of transforming the slaves into a serf-like peasantry, attached to the soil, with statutory rights and privileges, and defined opportunities for gradualist manumission. It was a model, of slowly replicating an English yeomanry in colonial blackface, that was to surface again and again in the missionary imagination. At the heart of the model were the enjoyment of legal marriage and the cultivation of a domestic sphere, with its appropriate gender roles and civilizing influences. Porteus had advised: We must as far as possible, attach them, and their families inseparably to the soil, must give them a little interest in it; must indulge them with a few rights and privileges to be anxious for; must secure them by fixed laws from injury and insult; must inform their minds, correct their morals, accustom them to the restraints of legal marriage, to the care of a family and the comforts of domestic life; must improve and advance their condition gradually, as they are able to bear it; and even allow a certain number of the most deserving to work out their freedom by degrees….80 | 82 |
| While Porteus’s general “design” was approved by the Society, his specific recommendations were rejected by a committee charged with considering them. The zeal he professed went beyond a concern for mere “amelioration” and flirted with “aggressive humanitarianism,” although it fell short of abolitionism. In differentiating support for amelioration from a support for “civilization,” Bennett points out: “It is important to stress the difference of meaning that these phrases held for some West Indians. One connoted only the mature perfection of slavery; the other smacked of advancing status, growing civil rights, and eventual freedom for the Negroes.”81 The first set of amelioration policies to which all the major planters ultimately acquiesced, though mostly unsuccessfully, were chiefly concerned with stemming the inexorable tide of demographic failure that had been a longstanding structural feature of the plantation system, particularly in view of the imminence and, later, the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade. Adherence to a policy of amelioration did not require any essential belief in the humanity or spiritual worthiness of the slaves; it was primarily a system of good husbandry, a system for “making the Negroes healthier and happier and inducing them to breed.”82 Ultimately, the Codrington experiment was more successful in providing a mediocre model of “amelioration” than it was in providing a proactive model of christianization or “civilization.” | 83 |
| Stephen’s own concern is at once ideological and practical. He wants the institution of slavery to be regulated and administered along the principles of reason and Christianity, as befitting “an enlightened age” and a civilized Europe, not modeled after the practices of the barbarian Goths and Vandals or the pagan Romans. Even among Arabs, he observes, the slaves have the right to marry. The failure to uphold the slaves’ access to “an institution of God” is simply unbecoming of an advanced civilization and introduces a dangerous moral canker into its core. But even more to the point, marriage serves the practical purposes of domesticating the slaves into an acceptance of their roles, persuading them to serve their masters’ interest, and providing them with an incentive to maintain law and order and conditions of social peace. Those who marry will set an example to the other slaves and provide a stabilizing and civilizing influence within their community. Again, it is worth quoting him at length: A married slave feels a greater respect for himself, and is looked up to with greater deference by his fellow slaves; of course he has a strong inducement to behave himself well; he also feels himself more interested in having his master’s approbation, is more afraid of being sold for any delinquency, and must be for that reason more desirous and assiduous to please him. On these, and on a variety of other accounts, he will become more steady, more sober, more industrious, more civilized in his manners, and more disposed to the practice of all good morals. And from this view of the subject it may be safely concluded that if regular marriages were more encouraged among them, and more pains taken to instruct them in the principles and doctrines of the Christian religion, we might reasonably hope to see a very important change for the better in their manners and conduct. Their obedience would be more voluntary, and more the effect of principle, and consequently more advantageous to the interest of their masters, than any that could be extorted from them by the fear of punishment. (Stephen to Cameron, 221) | 84 |
| Stephen is aware of the argument, made by many plantation owners, that faithful concubinage was sufficient to secure the reproductive and hegemonic benefits of stable monogamy. Indeed, this was a critical component of the program of improved husbandry promoted by the policies of amelioration and even encoded in the earlier amelioration laws. In keeping with the distinction made by Bennett mentioned above, the encouragement of faithful concubinage was a bid for improved fertility and increased rates of live births and infant survival, and did not typically extend to support for formally solemnized Christian slave marriage. As we have seen, Stephen has rejected the presumption that Christian marriage poses a threat to the security of the system and has argued quite the contrary. Moreover, for him, “concubinage” or cohabitation without marriage defeated the purpose of encouraging monogamy because it failed to provide restraints or sanctions against promiscuous sexual intercourse, “the most licentious and illicit intercourse with one another, to which their own depraved lusts, and the prevalence of bad example, may prompt or impel them … ” (Stephen to Cameron, 219). Since faithful concubinage did not entail law-sanctioned contractual obligations, and the slaves could not enter into a civil contract, a church-sanctioned marriage would bind them to a religious contract and have the desired salubrious effect, both spiritually and morally. | 85 |
| Stephen’s recommendations for systemic stability rest completely on assumptions of paterfamilial rights and responsibilities being entrusted to enslaved men (with the sponsorship of the owner-patron) and on the gender-exclusive agency of these accordingly empowered men. Enslaved women are dependent variables in this equation. Again, the structural imperatives of actually existing slavery remain unexamined, so that for him the solution was a simple one of imposing Euro-Christian order upon disorder. In fact, the system had evolved its own stabilities, based on a structural predisposition to matrifocality as well as informal, and far from genteel, systems of patriarchy in which male field slaves were at the bottom of the pecking order of male privilege and were themselves among the most severely affected victims of White Patriarchy. Women, of course, were by far its worst casualties. | 86 |
| Before the abolition of the slave trade placed a premium on their reproductive capacity, enslaved African women (like their menfolk) were brought in predominantly as estate workhorses or productive laborers. In addition to their well-documented prominence, indeed predominance, in the field gangs, this was demonstrated by the facts that (a) for most of the period of slavery, the renewal of the labor force was based more on the purchase of new stocks of slaves than on local slave reproduction and (b) the provision of reproductive care was socialized to a significant degree, to free up the time and energy of able-bodied mothers and others for field work. Childcare, food provision and preparation, clothing, medical care, even childbearing, were “socialized” to one extent or another and only residually organized through families. While women and children were deprived of socially mandated and juridically vested male spousal and parental co-responsibility, the potential and actual strain of the sexual division of labor in the slave cottage was partly relieved by the collectivization of reproductive services. The practice of allotting provision grounds to adult slaves, particularly in the “home-fed” islands, on an individual, gender-neutral basis rather than by putative families further reduced the likelihood that a woman might have to “depend on a man.”83 Allotment of provision plots was individualized, but, even here, field-cooks and watchmen for the slaves’ provision grounds were centrally provided by the estates.84 | 87 |
| It is not that there were no families. Enslaved individuals had a healthy propensity to fall in love with each other, and they often went to great lengths and sacrifice to spend time in each other’s company. Moreover, abundant evidence has been unearthed that shows various likely patterns of nucleated and extended slave families. Stories of male and female slaves who absconded for shorter or longer periods, depending on distance, to visit loved ones on other plantations can be found in most of the testimonial literature mentioned so far.85 In doing so they risked severe punishment, since planters—especially the owners of the male partners who did not stand to benefit from resulting pregnancies—were wary of these inter-plantation liaisons and sometimes tried to legislate against them.86 | 88 |
| The point is, rather, that there were strong structural imperatives toward matrifocality and an accompanying vacuum with regard to incentives, pressures and obligations of paternity and male family (co-)leadership. Briefly, I would note three hegemonic practices that reinforced the tendency toward the kind of truncated and kinship-denying matrifocality to which I am referring here: the coding of slave populations, the method of allotting provision grounds, and the “dual marriage system.” But first I want to interpose a two-sided caveat, to establish that I allude to “kinship-denying” as part of a system of hegemonic intent and not necessarily as an achieved effect (since effect is not solely determined by hegemonic intent). | 89 |
| Matrifocality has been attributed to African cultural modes rather than the pressures of slavery. I agree with Sudarkasa’s response to this.87 She has rejected either/or explanations (Africa or slavery) and embraced a complex, interactive, historical causality that accounts for both and more. She argues most sensibly, “The data on family organization among enslaved Blacks show that the African institutional heritage, the Euro-American family codes and practices that were promoted by the whites, and the conditions of enslavement must all be taken into account when explaining the patterns that emerged among African Americans.”88 There is nothing particularly African (or European) about female-headed households. Slave maternity was regarded as a “naturalistic” and practical phenomenon that then becomes the reinterpretive anchor or cornerstone of de facto institutions of Afro-Caribbean kinship. However, while the maternal relationship may bear some resemblances to overseas ancestral traditions, particularly those relating to maternal units in multi-cell polygynous compounds, it is uprooted from its anchor in elaborate systems of extended or corporate kinship like those from which many, perhaps most, of the African-born enslaved came. In these (like most) systems, motherhood could not be defined outside of fatherhood, and filiation was instituted only through mutual relations of maternity and paternity. Moreover, marriage itself was governed by an agreement between male affines (typically symbolized by transfer of bridewealth). In sum, marriage, male-dominant or not, organized the sexual division of labor domestically as well as extra-domestically, established lineage, and secured socially responsible paternity and shared parenthood.89 This is clearly denied in conditions of enslavement. | 90 |
| At the same time, proactive and more positive forms of matrifocality might be attributed to an optimized accommodation (on the part of the enslaved) between the requirements of the system and the cultural repertoires that the enslaved brought with them from West and Central Africa, such as the strong traditions of female self-reliance and economic autonomy on which the slave plantation in turn so brutally depended.90 In addition, African continuities and reinterpretations were to be found in the significantly greater emphasis placed on consanguineous and extended kinship vis-à-vis conjugality and nuclear families among African Americans as a whole. | 91 |
| On West Indian plantations, the coding practices used by the planters and managers for their account books routinely recorded domestic units as defined by a mother and her children, regardless of the (usually duly noted) presence of a co-resident male and his biological relationship to the children.91 Despite his elaborate extrapolations about stable nuclear families, Higman admits that the 1825 estate reports that he uses for his Jamaican case study (from three commonly owned adjoining properties with a total of 814 slaves) “contain no information about kinship.” In addition, the slave registration returns give only the mother’s name (and that, only when she lived on the property) and “say nothing about paternity.”92 According to West Indian-wide tables provided elsewhere by Higman, the returns did not provide slave family data for the great majority of the sugar islands. They included the mother’s name, sometimes irregularly, for about half the territories, and never included the father’s name (except “sometimes” for the Crown-administered island of Trinidad).93 | 92 |
| The allotment of provision grounds, the slaves’ peculium or quasi-patrimonium, took place on a similarly individuated basis, with mother-child/ren combinations being the only family groupings recognized. Mrs. Carmichael, speaking of St. Vincent, noted that “[e]very individual has his own ground, and every mother has a fixed portion more for each child.”94 The slave laws, like the indentured service laws, are never so careless in their use of the masculine pronoun or its possessive form. Indeed, one encounters in too many discussions of slave labor and economy the supreme irony that the only gender-distinguishing language present speaks to us directly from the text of the slave laws of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Late eighteenth-century legislation in Grenada directed that each adult slave (over fourteen years) should receive “his or her proper ground.”95 An 1831 law in Dominica stipulated the allotment of “not … less than half an acre for each individual slave.”96 The Abolition Act of 1834 provided individually for “ground adequate, both in quality and quantity, for his or her support, and within a reasonable distance from his or her usual place of abode…. “97 Parallel provisions existed in the French islands: 1784 and 1786 revisions of the Code Noir in Martinique decreed that each adult slave was to receive a small plot of land to cultivate on his or her own account.98 Sometimes the assumptions of amorphous atomization seem extreme. An 1824 Dominica act required “every owner, renter or director, or the attorney, agent or other representative of such owner, renter or director, of any slave or slaves attached to the plantations … to allot to each and every such slave or slaves a sufficient portion of land, not less than half an acre for each slave of whatever age…. “99 | 93 |
| It seems clear that the slavemasters individuated the adult status of the slaves across gender in the allocation of means of reproduction. They endowed women directly as individuals “of age” and as mothers partly responsible for the welfare of their children, not through male heads. This did not mean that pooling of provision grounds by conjugal partners did not occur and come to comprise a de facto, socially recognized family enterprise; it meant rather that the allocation of provision land was not premised on or preconditioned by the male-headed or conjugal family as a communal entity or as the corporate object of endowment. Indeed, in the system’s twisted logic, this individual entitlement was seen as fit only for uncivilized females without kinship status. It was also a way of minimizing the costs of feeding the enslaved labor force at no great sacrifice of plantation land and time; it was a way, too, of giving them a stake in the system. | 94 |
| Third, a small section of the enslaved female population was incorporated into sustained relations of concubinage with members or surrogates of the master class. This produced Smith’s “dual marriage system,” involving a two-sided hierarchy of white wife and black concubine.100 The so-called “dual marriage system” potentially or actually generates two race/class lines—one legitimate, the other illegitimate—with the white master as common genitor, reproducing white paterfamilial propriety and property on the one hand and subordinate Afro-creole matrifocality on the other. Just as marriage came to be a mechanism for the transnational reproduction of the Euro-creole upper class, cross-racial concubinage came to be the means by which a “bastard” intermediate class was bequeathed to the societies of the West Indies by the planters and their surrogates as the social superiors of the slaves and, later, of the black working class. Indeed, it is out of such subversive couplings that the West Indian “colored middle class” is born and its “myth of origins” (involving the white male rape of the black woman/mother) mnemonically inscribed in class identity.101 Obviously, even those “lesser white” men—like Thomas Thistlewood—whose circumstances precluded access to white wives and who settled into long-term co-residential consensual unions with a slave “housekeeper,” in “the custom of the country,” played limited paternal roles. Although Thistlewood eventually becomes a more active father-disciplinarian, all his early references to his son, Mulatto John, are as “Phibbah’s child.”102 | 95 |
| Furthermore, truncated matrifocality was most inevitable in the context of routine relations of enforced anonymous sex and short-lived liaisons with highly peripatetic and transient lower-level white plantation staffers. Altink notes that in 1817 in Jamaica, 36,000 slaves were listed as “colored.” “As there were only 30,000 whites (predominantly men) on a total slave population of 300,000 at the time, it has been argued that there was a very high degree of sex across the racial boundaries.”103 It is almost certain that most, though not all, of this sex took place in conditions of relative coercion and functional semi-anonymity. | 96 |
| It is important to disabuse ourselves once and for all of the notion that “matrifocality,” as understood here or most other places, in either its more proactive or its more passive, top-down connotations, has anything to do with “matriarchy” or female supremacy. Systemic patriarchy was not just about a brutal yet abstract “law of the father” wielded over all by a distant and unfathomable White Patriarch. It was not just about unattainable institutions that nonetheless held the enslaved to ransom. Despite the lack of institutional homology or the non-correspondence between (the forbidden) Euro-Christian forms of marriage and the concrescence of Afro-Caribbean conjugal and family forms, the enslaved were nonetheless subject to an intrusive disciplinary regime in their own domestic lives that promulgated strict rules of a rough but intense everyday patriarchy. This bastard-western, frontier-style regime flourished particularly in the pre-amelioration period. Again, the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, eighteenth-century overseer and pen-keeper, have been unusually illuminating in this regard. By his own accounts, Thistlewood wields the ultimate power of patriarchal arbitration over both the white underlings and the male and female slaves of the properties he manages. It is clear that he makes up the rules as he goes along, but the thrust of his rough justice bears the unmistakable marks of British domestic patriarchal traditions (adapted to different conditions). Thistlewood aggressively intervenes to uphold the exclusive sexual and conjugal claims (to particular women) of particular male slaves against the pretensions of others, all the while reserving to himself the absolute right of access to any female slave on the plantation. In many of these informally adjudicated situations of rival claims or unauthorized sexual relations, the woman is both denied human agency or independent personhood and punished as the transgressor.104 | 97 |
| Elite male slaves were allowed a wider range of patriarchal prerogatives, particularly in the indulgence of polygyny.105 This was an integral part of the invented tradition of extemporaneous West Indian systems of patriarchy. In exchange, whites expected their sub-hegemonic complicity and conservative influence in the rest of the slave community. This was something Stephen also hoped to achieve with the offer of male-headed lifelong Christian monogamy, but the self-abnegation and delayed gratification involved in the latter clearly did not hold the same appeal for this class of enslaved workers. A report on the condition of the slaves published in 1824 remarked that “[a] more effectual way of giving them a distaste for Christianity, could not well be devised, than to tell them in the first instance, that it required a surrender of this their highly valued privilege [i.e., polygamy].”106 | 98 |
| The discipline demanded by the nonconformist sects turned out to be even tougher than the requirements of belated Anglican initiatives, and it took a while for their message of spiritual, and then human, freedom and dignity to permeate through the wariness of the small, but growing, number of likely converts. | 99 |
| Marriage as an Instrument of Morality | |
| There is one more concern that Stephen anticipates and addresses with his characteristic vigor: that of black women’s alleged low moral character. Having completely ignored the suspension of women’s legal personality in marriage under the common law to which he has appealed in the matter of slave matrimonial rights, he turns to the obstacle supposedly posed by black women’s “licentious manners” to marital success among the enslaved. He considers the popular argument that blacks, especially black women, would inevitably violate the sanctity of marriage, due to the low value they placed on chastity. It was widely predicted that this would lead to a worsening of the moral state of society, especially since divorce would not be available to them. Stephen does not question the prevailing opinion that black women’s “want of chastity” and the need to control their sexuality lay at the heart of the matter. Indeed, it was women in general who were the chief vectors of the moral chaos for which the West Indies was well known: After all, could the above objection to the marriage of slaves be admitted to have any weight, it must be allowed to have equal weight against marriage of free people in this part of the world; for it is well known, that infidelity to their husbands is by no means unexampled among females of that condition, white as well as black, to whose husbands the remedy by divorce is equally impossible, and in case of a separation, the alternative of an adulterous connection in both sides is equally probable. (Stephen to Cameron, 224) | 100 |
| In the absence of proper controls, blacks were responsible for corrupting whites and women were responsible for corrupting men. The chain of corruption started with black women and ended with white men. It was the “circumstance … of the licentious manners of the female negroes” that constituted the grand instrument of corrupting the manners of the white population, by affording the male part of them the ready means of gratifying their most depraved appetites, without much degrading their character in the opinion of their fellow-citizens, and the natural consequence is, that marriages are thereby rendered less frequent, and the sanctity of marriage is less strictly regarded, even among them, than they would otherwise be. (Stephen to Cameron, 225) | 101 |
| The precise logic of John Stephen’s argumentation deserves greater scrutiny to be appreciated. While blacks, and especially black females—given their naturally barbaric inclinations—were the source of licentiousness, they were not the willful instrument of its permeation throughout the society. They did not bear responsibility for the absence of institutional restraints or the withholding of the means to moral temperance and spiritual salvation (though, certainly, the imperative of controlling both blacks and women comprised the core of any civilizing mandate, the White Man’s Burden). Nonetheless, Stephen refuses to go along with the widespread tendency to blame the condition or system of slavery itself. Rather, “the present licentiousness of their manners … arises from two causes, neither of them necessarily connected with their condition; the discouragement of lawful marriage among them, and their ignorance of the principles and duties of the christian religion” (Stephen to Cameron, 225). The absurd idea that slavery is to blame is ultimately the result of the unfortunate modeling of West Indian slavery after the systems that existed “among the barbarous nations of the north of Europe, and under the government of Pagan Rome.” Instead, the models should have been provided by “the Mosaic code, under which slavery was permitted,” and “the law and practice of England after the Norman Conquest, when villanage, which is but another name for slavery, universally prevailed,” and under which the villeins were allowed to marry (Stephen to Cameron, 225). | 102 |
| Stephen ends on a note that upholds the mutual compatibility of slavery, English common law, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and marriage. He is confident that once the mental adjustment is made and a declaratory law, if indeed required, passed, white men will see that “slavery may subsist, and answer every useful purpose for which it was designed, without denying to those who were the subjects of it the privilege of lawful marriage” (Stephen to Cameron, 225). | 103 |
| Generally, therefore, the case against legally and socially entitling the slaves in their family relations was based on the double-sided principle that (i) the slaves had no civil existence and, therefore, could not assume “the civil benefits and burdens of husband and wife,” and (ii) they were “naturally” immoral and could not be expected to adhere or be held by others to a code of sexual morality: “they were therefore exempt from the natural moral strictures of marriage and family.”107 | 104 |
| The morality argument was conducted at two levels. At one level, blacks were seen as lacking in moral capacity or as simply incapable of appreciating and adopting civilized models of Christian monogamy due to their innate brutishness or their being inextricably mired in barbaric customs. Enslaved African women were seen as sexually promiscuous and incapable of chastity, while the men were seen as having an irrepressible preference for polygamy. In 1741, Codrington manager Abel Alleyne reported to the Society’s officials in London that even baptized male slaves practiced polygamy, which was “as impossible to prevent as any one thing in the World.”108 Mrs. Carmichael, a planter-class wife in St. Vincent and Trinidad in the 1820s and a consummate apologist for slavery, strenuously denied that “the planters discourage negro marriages,—than which nothing could be more false;” she added, it was “the negroes themselves [who] very often object to it.”109 She presents several anecdotes and much commentary, in her two-volume sojourner’s compendium, about conjugal and parental practices among the enslaved, including the pervasiveness of polygamy. While most of her anecdotes regarding slave conjugality provide colorful and often infantilizing accounts of polygynous men, they include among their protagonists enslaved women who flatly declared themselves against marriage of any sort.110 Indeed, both enslaved men and enslaved women were known to reject—usually, though not always, for very different reasons—the idea of “proper” European marriage.111 | 105 |
| For their part, the Christian churches differed in their approach to the question of polygamy.112 The Moravians and some individual Anglican ministers took what seemed to be a more liberal approach, but it was partly out of fear of offending whites by offering to blacks the European “privilege” of proper Christian monogamy. The Wesleyans, Baptists, and Presbyterians insisted on premarital chastity and strict monogamy for fully inducted members of their congregations, both male and female. | 106 |
| Rev. John Hothersall Pinder, who was appointed chaplain, catechist, and director of the Negro schools at Codrington in 1819, was given a mandate to promote marriage among the slaves, but was reluctant to comply with the new regulation. He remained cautious in the face of disapproving whites and resistant blacks: “There is no such thing, as far as I can find, as promiscuous concubinage among them. The slaves marry by agreement; sometimes alas! the men have two & even three wives, but these are considered in the light of wives, till an actual separation takes place.”113 In a similar vein, the Moravians were willing to both avoid confrontation with whites and adapt the requirements for entry into the Christian faith to the polygamous kinship practices widespread among the enslaved as well as to the forced marital disruptions of slavery. Thus one of the regulations adopted for conversion procedures among Jamaican slaves addressed the situation of polygamous men: “1st. That they should not compel a man, who had, before his conversion, taken more than one wife, to put away one or more of them, without her or their consent.”114 While polygyny (male polygamy) was thus countenanced, re-marriage was seen as permissible for converted women (and men in parallel circumstances) who had been “torn from their husbands” by force.115 The gendered implications should not be missed here, but neither should the fact that the dominant ruling discourse brooked no such compromise between civilized monogamy and heathenish polygamy.116 Their preference was for the encouragement of “faithful concubinage” as a way of slowly preparing ignorant African slaves for the rights and responsibilities of European-type matrimony.117 | 107 |
| At the second level, whites argued that allowing blacks to partake of the hallowed sacrament of marriage would unleash an epidemic of immorality because they would inevitably break their sacred vows, and this indiscriminate violation would pollute the morals and institutions of white society. The Leeward Islands Amelioration Act of 1798 declared it improper to sanctify marriage contracts through religious rites, “lest the Violation of sacred Vows be too often added to the Crime of Infidelity.”118 And it was not only the slaves whose natural lasciviousness was seen as a grave danger to the moral order. On December 5, 1790, Kean Osborn, a Jamaican planter, wrote his friend Nathaniel Phillips to recount, among other things, news of a petition that had been laid before the House by “free people of Colour … complaining of Grievances they labor under & claiming the rights of natural free born subjects of Great Britain….”119 Osborn mulls over the option of granting some members of that population “privileges they now have upon paying the fees upon private Bills” if they would agree to “certain Regulations & Restrictions such as Matrimony, Certificates from the Vestries of good conduct for so many years….”120 However, he is wary: “To be sure to encourage Matrimony among them would have the effect of encouraging and promoting Adultery instead of the Sin of simple fornication & therefore tend to render our own Morals more corrupt than they are.” Thus, better to suffer the simple fornicating habits of a barbaric people within their own domain than to expose whites’ higher social institutions to their corrupting influences. Blacks sharing white institutions would contaminate those institutions. | 108 |
| These views were always gendered (as we have seen, even with regard to attitudes toward polygamy), in addition to being raced. Black men were uncivilized polygamists and potential violators of white women. Black women were natural prostitutes, legally inviolable as the sexual slaves of white men, and scheming seducers and corrupters of white men and morals. Thus, enslaved blacks were both naturalized and primitive beings devoid of moral capacity and willful perpetrators of an assault on white civilization, despite being enslaved and available for use at will by the bearers of that civilization. | 109 |
| Women bore the brunt of this multiple jeopardy. Burnham notes that the slave woman in the American South, in a situation representative of all American slave societies, was considered legally inviolable, i.e., she could not legally be raped (for some time by either a black or a white man), since she had no virtue or moral personality to be offended or legally defended; indeed, her “natural lasciviousness” invited what might constitute “rape” for white women, but not for her.121 Beckles has confirmed this as the case for Barbados as well, at least before the amelioration initiatives. Here too “[r]ape was considered a private matter.”122 In 1826 in Jamaica, an era of total impunity came to a partial end when the House of Assembly introduced the death penalty for the rape of female slaves.123 | 110 |
| Denied family rights and the conditions for self-sustaining family life, the enslaved were nonetheless condemned for being innately incapable of the finer sensibilities, commitments, and competencies of parenthood. The low fertility among enslaved women was regularly and matter-of-factly blamed on their immorality.124 Slave women were said to lack a maternal instinct and slave men to be brutal and indifferent fathers. Both, repudiated for their lack of parental solicitude and aptitude, were themselves equivalently reduced to Slave Children of the White Master/Father or White Patriarch. The persistent ideological infantilization of the slaves—their relegation to a state of perpetual childhood—was a critical element in the process of dehumanization and deculturation. | 111 |
| The argument of moral incapacity was especially convenient for the rationalization of sexual exploitation of enslaved women, but it was also sustained in a different way by conservative reformers and moralists like Stephen. The argument was similarly attacked on two very different fronts: by the women themselves and by the abolitionists, who used moral outrage among the British middle and working classes at the treatment of women as one of the main weapons in their campaign for emancipation. Enslaved women had fought all along, but in their own ways. They often ignored or rejected the indulged presumption of ownership over them by enslaved men. On a whole, they were not under any rigid sanction of (in-group) monogamy and many of them left unsatisfactory relationships for more desirable ones. They also fought to preserve desirable ones. And there was sometimes fierce resistance from both assaulted female slaves and wronged male conjugal partners or kin to the resident master’s arbitrary exercise of at-large droit de seigneur rights.125 | 112 |
| However, missionaries in the field were surprised to find that the solution was not simply rescuing women, perceived as helpless victims, and putting them on the path to righteous and respectable womanhood, based on submissive wifehood. Women were reportedly their most difficult and reluctant converts and most tenaciously attached to many of the African practices and beliefs that the missionaries were determined to stamp out. In 1829, the chaplain at Codrington regretted to report that it was not only the men who were unwilling to give up polygyny: “the women also object to Christian matrimony, thinking that it gives them, as it were, a second master, and ties them for life to a man who may neglect or ill use them.”126 | 113 |
| By the end of slavery, the majority of women still saw serial monogamy, certain forms of polygyny, ties of consanguineous kinship, and ancestor-worshipping African rituals as components of a moral system that could work to their benefit in a white- and male-dominated world. Increasingly, Afro-Caribbean women embraced Christianity, but rejected the assumptions of the mutual incompatibility or exclusiveness of the two ontological, moral, and ethical systems. | 114 |
| Conclusion | |
| In this article I have set out to examine, in historical and political context, the ideological, legal, and discursive idiosyncrasies and contradictions that belabored the official debate over slave marriage, using as an anchor the correspondence of Rev. John Stephen, an Anglican rector in the Bahamas and a pro-slavery reformist, who, beginning in 1814, sought the legal opinions of the authorities and also expounded at great length and with great erudition on the matter. Stephen’s statements and ideas have been set in dialogue with other statements and ideas, reflecting the positions taken by the major parties to the debate, including the metropolitan authorities (secular and religious), the humanitarians, abolitionists and their missionary counterparts in the field, the planters, and, away from center stage, the enslaved themselves. To interpret the debates, the various positions have been broadly (historically and politically) located in the context of three sets of relations, the colonial relation, the slavery relation, and the patriarchy relation (which might be termed, adapting Mills, the colonial contract, the slavery contract, and the patriarchy contract, all of them visibly or invisibly racialized).127 | 115 |
| The historical debate raised a veritable cacophony of questions, some never answered. Was the slave persona or res? Was the slave the absolute and private property of the slaveowner or a colonial subject of Great Britain? Did the common law of England and the British Parliament have precedence over the slave codes and the planter-legislators, freeborn Britons all? Did marriage rights posit freedom of contract in a society based nakedly on principles of contract and property above all else? Was it possible to define a special form of marriage appropriate to the status of the slave? Were expressions of spiritual personality and equality compatible with civil nonentity? In the absence of power of contract, could a marriage sanctified by the power of religion gain respect and legitimacy in the society? Would Christianization embolden the slave or render her submissive? Were marriage and Christianity tenable for slaves who were objectified for purposes of economic profit and sexual service? Would conferring upon enslaved men rights of paterfamilias clash with the absolute patriarchal authority of the master? Would the enslaved woman be agreeable to submitting to her husband as head of household and God’s familial representative in the Christian marriage model? Would she be willing to temper her relative sexual and economic independence in favor of conjugal indivisibility under the husband’s authority? Could enslaved men and women be persuaded to forego the practices of modified polygamy, serial monogamy, and African-derived religion, ritual, and spiritual power? | 116 |
| The evidence shows that the question of slave marriage involved multiple intersecting dimensions and social relations that went far beyond the simple standoff between metropolitans and colonists over the slaves’ right to marry. Stephen’s imagined Christian slave community, based on a hierarchical and orderly chain of continuous patriarchal relations beginning with the master as supreme but benign paterfamilias, wholly assumed such a right, but was an anachronistic pipedream at best, a nightmare at worst. West Indian slavery simply did not concede the level of (shared) humanity to the enslaved that would be required to make this—dubious—vision come true. | 117 |
| In the end, full marriage rights were legally conceded only after full emancipation in 1838, but in many ways the struggle for marital and family sustainability had just begun. The end of the slavery contract brought more clearly to the forefront the colonial and patriarchal contracts. The colonial contract entailed above all a continuation of extremely exploitative plantation systems and the lack of political rights for the newly emancipated, conditions that militated strongly against sustainable spousal partnerships and families. In Jamaica and wherever the plantation system did not monopolize all the physical and economic space available, missionaries pinned their hopes on “mountain negroes,” in distinction from “estate negroes,” because of the prospects they held out for a rural middle class of yeomen and cottagers with a stake in property, stable wage labor, and Afro-Saxon respectability, buttressed by the church, proper marriage, and the spirit of self-reliance.128 Not surprisingly, it was among the peasantry, increasingly incorporated into colonial land settlement schemes and new types of marketing contracts, that the “patriarchal contract” was most formally enunciated, with respect to the laboring classes. Elsewhere, on the estates and in the urban areas, informal and societally unsanctioned systems of private patriarchy confronted working-class Afro-Caribbean women with all of the latter’s dangers and few, if any, of its protections. At the state level, colonial and Eurocentric forms of public patriarchy continued unabated. And everywhere, it was from sustained traditions of economic independence, extended kinship, and female-friendly religions that these embattled women drew the strength to practice sturdy, if societally unheralded, forms of communal leadership.129 | 118 |
Cecilia A. Green is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh <[email protected]>. She gratefully acknowledges the three following fellowships or grants that allowed her to work on this and other essays related to a larger project entitled, “Between Respectability and Self-Respect: Colonialism, Moral Regimes and Afro-Caribbean Subalternity”: 2000–2001 NEH-Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship, New York; 2001–2002 Henry Charles Chapman Research Fellowship, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London; and a 2002–2003 Faculty Research Grant from the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), University of Pittsburgh. She also thanks the four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, in particular the two who saw the author through the second round with their sharp and nuanced attention to detail. Many thanks are due also to Law and History Review editor, David Tanenhaus, for his consummate professionalism in steering the author through the review process. Colleagues Veronica Gregg and Gloria Rudolf kindly agreed to read and comment on an earlier draft of the article. Notes1. Rev. John Stephen to Governor Charles Cameron, 2 May 1816, enclosed in Cameron to Earl Bathurst, 12 July 1816, British Parliamentary Papers: Slavery and the West Indies 1818–1823, Correspondence—Marriage of Slaves, 217–26. All subsequent quotes from Stephen are taken from this letter and pages will be identified accordingly. Emphases are in the original unless noted otherwise.2. Attorney General Wylly, a key principal in the Stephen correspondence, was himself a slaveowner. In delivering his professional opinion he spoke in his official capacity and not as a planter. But, while by no means anti-slavery, he was not a typical planter. A reformist, he had incurred the enduring wrath of the slave-owning classes in the Bahamas by prosecuting some of the biggest owners among them for violations of the protective clauses of the 1797 ameliorated slave code of the Bahamas and the 1807 imperial statute abolishing the slave trade. He was a convert to Methodism and had adopted a policy of “paternalistic humanitarianism” with respect to his own slaves, designing for their benefit “a set of regulations which included more generous allotments than those provided by law, inducements and penalties to promote marriage and family life, and provision for baptism, regular church services, and Sunday schooling.” Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992), 222. Earl Bathurst was Secretary of State during a period of unprecedented shifts in the conduct of relations between British metropole and West Indian colony. These were primarily occasioned by the growing agitation for the amelioration of the status and living conditions of the enslaved and the debate over who should legislate and oversee the process. For two centuries what some took for granted as the “transcendent power of parliament to make laws for every part of the British empire” had lain dormant, partly because its exercise was regarded as impolitic with respect to duly vested British settlers and not conducive to the maintenance of trade and profit flows from the colonies, and partly because others, not least among them the colonists themselves, denied that such a power existed at all. D. J. Murray, The West Indies and the Development of Colonial Government, 1801–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2. In fact, Parliament had played little role in colonial administration. Laws passed by colonial legislatures were subject to royal assent and veto, but even those had often languished unexercised. In reviewing all the Antiguan legislation sent to Colonial Office between 1672 and 1900, one historian found fewer than a dozen bills disallowed by Great Britain. Mindie Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 20. See also Frederick G. Spurdle, Early West Indian Government (Palmerston North, N.Z.: 1962) for a general account of the system of colonial governance. 3. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the laissez-faire policy of the past one hundred and fifty years was being reconsidered, and a new activist and interventionist approach to colonial governance was beginning to emerge. Bathurst’s stewardship (1812–1827) of the relatively new institution of Colonial Office charted a careful course between the status quo with regard to the ancient prerogatives of planter assemblies and the growing pressure from the more radical abolitionist evangelicals in favor of direct intervention by Parliament and more activist oversight by the Crown on behalf of the enslaved. Bathurst rejected both the notion of West Indian legislative parity with the British Parliament, and hence immunity from the latter’s interference (a conceit of the planter class), and abolitionist crusader James Stephen Sr.’s push for direct rule, or at least the imposition of metropolitan decisions on unwilling colonial legislatures. Bathurst’s approach (and that of most British parliamentarians), one of reformist gradualism, was to try to persuade the West Indians to do the right thing and to act rationally in their own best interest. To that end, he continued to forward proposals, amendments, and orders-in-council for their legislative consideration and reconsideration in the hopes of a satisfactory amelioration settlement. He was satisfied that his way was the right way when he successfully persuaded the West Indian assemblies to pass slave registration and, later, a second round of amelioration laws of their own. But they did so kicking and screaming, always under the most vigorous protest, and, as far as they could, on their own terms. See Murray, West Indies, esp. 89–108.4. Craton and Saunders, Islanders in the Stream; Gail Saunders, Slavery in the Bahamas, 1648–1838 (Nassau, Bahamas: The Nassau Guardian, 1985); Howard Johnson, The Bahamas in Slavery and Freedom (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers; London: James Currey Publishers, 1991).5. For a solid account of the slave-missionary connection, see Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).6. The amelioration resolution was also careful to state that the proposals were to be carried out “with a fair and equitable consideration of the interests of private property” (Murray, West Indies, 129).7. See Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 102–31.8. The 1812 English Toleration Act, in line with earlier initiatives and “popularly known as the Grand Charter of the Dissenters,” guaranteed Dissenters the right to preach (Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 19).9. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9.10. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).11. Mills’s work is concerned exclusively with the category of “race,” but it can easily accommodate sexualization and sexual differentiation as a dimension that is integral to the process of racialization or “racing,” as he prefers. Males predominated in the earlier stages of slavery, reflecting preferences of the planters in the slave trade. However, as enslaved populations became “creolized,” the sex ratio gradually evened out, and in mature creole populations, like those of Barbados and the Bahamas, women came to outnumber men. See B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1838 (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1995), 115–21.12. H. M. Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa, 1829–1858 (1863; reprint, London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1970), 21 (page citations are to the reprint edition).13. Hall, Civilising Subjects, 72.14. Raymond T. Smith, “Hierarchy and the Dual Marriage System in West Indian Society,” in Gender and Kinship, ed. J. F. Collier and S. Yanagisako (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).15. Barbados and Antigua were widely reputed to have more resident plantation owners than the other sugar islands, and whites outnumbered blacks in some of the Bahamian islands where the main plantation crop, cotton, was not grown. In 1810, whites comprised an estimated 16.7 and 22.8 percent of the populations of Barbados and the Bahamas respectively, while in most of the sugar islands they made up no more than 4–6 percent (Higman, Slave Populations, table 4.2, 77). In Antigua, although the numbers were in keeping with the general profile, residential ownership was observed to be higher than elsewhere (Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 97).16. Mills, Racial Contract, 41–42.17. Denis Benn, The Caribbean: An Intellectual History, 1774–2003 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004), 1.18. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of That Island (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 2:336, 382–83.19. Ibid., 330–31.20. Narrated and quoted in Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, ed. P. Wright (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, 1966), 118.21. Bathurst’s strong and unequivocal pronouncement on the right of slaves to marry, made in the safe venue of non-binding consultative inter-office correspondence, was probably based on the proffered legal expertise of James Stephen Jr., Stephen Sr.’s son (and, later, drafter of the emancipation bill), whom Bathurst had appointed in 1813 as legal advisor to the Colonial Office. Stephen was an ardent abolitionist, several steps ahead of his superiors, who had already become an indispensable expert on and unrelenting critic of colonial, especially West Indian, legislation. The pronouncement was very much in keeping with the Stephen father-son—or liberal-imperial—tradition, one which argued for both direct colonial rule, as part of an unquestioning faith in the righteous global stewardship of Great Britain and Western Christendom, and the application of the same (superlatively rational) civil and ecclesiastical laws, in equal measure to all classes of colonial subject, as applied to freeborn Britons at home. The minute signed by Bathurst was a pronouncement by stealth, which, had it seen the light of day, would never have gone unchallenged by local planter classes, who felt that the enjoyment of British civil (or related ecclesiastical) law was their exclusive birthright and that they alone, as owners, could determine the status of their slaves. After all, they repeatedly protested, they had been led to believe these very things by the words and acts of Great Britain herself. See Russell Smandych, “To Soften the Extreme Rigor of Their Bondage: James Stephen’s Attempt to Reform the Criminal Slave Laws of the West Indies, 1813–1833,” Law and History Review 23 (2006): 538–88.22. Earl Bathurst to Governor Cameron, 31 November 1816, Brit. Parl. Papers, 1818–1823, 227, emphasis added.23. Bathurst to Cameron, 227.24. Wylly to Cameron, 10 March 1817, enclosed in Cameron to Earl Bathurst, 10 March 1817, 228.25. William Vesey Munnings, Peter Edwards, and John McCartney to Cameron, 6 March 1817, enclosed in Cameron to Bathurst, 10 March 1817.26. Stephen had made reference to 32d Henry VIII. chap. 38, where it is declared that “all persons may lawfully marry, but such as are forbidden by God’s law, &c.; and that nothing (God’s law excepted) shall impeach any marriage but within the Levitical degrees.” His point was to show that this ruling applied at a time when “slavery” (villeinage) had not yet been abolished in England. Stephen to Cameron, 221.27. Emphases in original. Francis Hargrave, An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett, a Negro, lately determined by the Court of King’s Bench [etc] (London: Printed for the Author, and sold by W. Otridge, 1772), 32–33. See the recent book by Steven M. Wise, giving a lively and well-researched account of the case. Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2005).28. Hargrave, An Argument, 32.29. Even after the abolition of the slave trade, the colonial contract, symbolized by the Navigation Acts, directly implicated Britons in the slavery of their colonies; and even after the abolition of slavery in their colonies, free trade (which they claimed to be anti-colonial) allowed them to buy and sell the slave-cultivated and -processed produce of the colonies of others. Always, between British freedom and West Indian post/slavery was the colonial contract. See Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall, for a dramatic illustration of the contradictory implications and ramifications of the Somerset ruling.30. Address of the Legislative Council of Tobago to His Excellency Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson (October 28, 1825). The Chronicle (Roseau, Dominica), December 28, 1825.31. The reasons have to do with the prevalence of non-plantation slavery, the smaller scale, milder conditions, and early decline of cotton plantation slavery, the circumstances of the Loyalist influx, and, although patterns differed from island to island, the demographic structure, featuring an overall black-to-white ratio that was considerably lower than the British Caribbean average. See Craton and Saunders, Islanders in the Stream, esp. 258–96.32. Manyoni refers to the Stephen correspondence as well. In fact, it was my own encounter with that correspondence in its entirety while doing research at the Public Record Office in London in 2002 that led me to return to Manyoni’s article, which I had read earlier. Joseph R. Manyoni, “Extra-Marital Mating Patterns in Caribbean Family Studies: A Methodological Excursus,” Anthropologica 22.1 (1980): 85–118, esp. 93–94.33. J. Harry Bennett, Jr., Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantations of Barbados, 1710–1838 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958), 116.34. Quoted in Manyoni, “Extra-Marital Mating Patterns,” 95.35. Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 (1838; reprint, London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1968), appendix, section XII, lxxxviii (page citations are to the reprint edition).36. Manyoni, “Extra-Marital Mating Patterns,” 99.37. Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 11–14; Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall, 157–59, passim.38. Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 62–63.39. See Fernando Henriques, Children of Caliban: Miscegenation (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), 93–94; David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 167; Winthrop Jordan, “Fruits of Passion,” in Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, ed. J. E. Friedman and W. G. Shade (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath & Co., 1982), 156.40. Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 61.41. Elsa V. Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century, Chapters in Caribbean History, 2 (Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1970), 9–53.42. Quoted in Manyoni, “Extra-Marital Mating Patterns,” 100.43. It is seldom appreciated that Adam Smith made a closely related observation. He said that “the freer the people the more miserable are the slaves; in a democracy they are more miserable than in any other. The greater the freedom of the free, the more intollerable is the slavery of the slaves.” Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurispriudence, ed. Ronald L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and Peter G. Stein (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 111. See also Robert J. Cottrol, “The Long Lingering Shadow: Law, Liberalism, and Cultures of Racial Hierarchy and Identity in the Americas,” Tulane Law Review 76.1 (2001): 11–79.44. See Goveia, “West Indian Slave Laws,” and Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).45. Cottrol, “Long Lingering Shadow,” esp. 40–61. The reference here is to the well-known classic, Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage Books, 1946).46. Goveia, “West Indian Slave Laws,” 12.47. Quoted in Murray, West Indies, 77.48. Watson, Slave Law, 121.49. For a comparative perspective that is sensitive to the cultural dimension, see Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (New York: Columbia University Press, [1974] 1989); also Cottrol, “Long Lingering Shadow,” esp. 25–61.50. See Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, [1974] 1989).51. Goveia, “West Indian Slave Laws, 33.52. Bathurst to Cameron. Emphasis added.53. Murray, West Indies, 99.54. Ibid., 131.55. Goveia, “West Indian Slave Laws,” 11.56. Was Stephen once more technically correct in this view? In fact, villeins were not slaves, though their condition may have evolved remotely from the vastly eroded legacy of Roman slavery. The strata that made up the oppressed polarity of this seigneurial system were thus subject to personal bondage, epitomized by serfdom, and/or alien paramount “ownership” of the land which they held and worked, as tenants, in the form of family estates, a customary relation of tenure known as villeinage. Strictly speaking the two principles were not necessarily coterminous: not all villeins or tenant-farmers were serfs or bondmen/women in a formal, juridical sense. Furthermore, not all peasants were villeins; a few were allodial landholders or free-holders, enjoying outright and independent ownership of their plots. Indeed, allodial landholders counted serfs among their numbers. A major difference between freeholders or quasi-freeholders and villeins was that the former were not subject to the obligations of labor service generally owed the lord by the latter as a condition of land tenure. They could, however, be subject to various dues and taxes in cash or in kind. By 1300 in England, villeinage had come to unitarily incorporate the characteristics of serfdom so that the terms “villein” and “serf” were used interchangeably, and the richer peasants who held land in villeinage but did not owe labor-services ceased, as befitted their status, to be regarded as villeins. See Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 270–73; Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe, trans. J. E. Anderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 59–61; Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 91. According to Bloch, the obligations of serfdom “were, in one sense, at the opposite pole from slavery, since they were based on the assumption that the person liable to them possessed a genuine patrimony” (Feudal Society, 263). He states elsewhere, “Within certain limits he [sic] was the master of his person and property. In principle he could marry within his own group according to his wish … ” (Slavery and Serfdom, 61). We can safely agree then that villeins were not free (neither were they slaves), but they enjoyed many aspects of concrete relative freedom, in the British and European sense, that later becomes transmogrified and fictionalized into an absolute but abstract juridical property of free-standing individuals. Those aspects of concrete relative freedom included possession or ownership of patrimonium or real property, patriarchal power or its protection, and relative marital, reproductive, and family autonomy. Stephen to Cameron, 222.57. In English common law, a “person who could claim only mother’s blood was classified with two other groups of outcast persons … who also lacked ‘inheritable blood’: aliens and felons” (Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 60).58. See Cecilia Green, “Gender and Re/production in British West Indian Slave Societies,” Against the Current 7.4 (Sept./Oct. 1992): 31–38; 7.5 (Nov./Dec. 1992), 26–31; 7.6 (Jan./Feb. 1993), 29–36. The concept of “re/production” used in this earlier examination of enslaved women’s historically constructed status in British West Indian formations is an elliptical and combined rendering of (goods) production and (human) reproduction as the key sites of social practices and relations upon which this construction takes place.59. Margaret A. Burnham, “An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family Law,” Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 5 (1987): 187–225, esp. citation on 187; and Winifred M. Cousins, “Slave Family Life in the British Colonies: 1800–1834,” The Sociological Review 27.1 (1935), 35–55, esp. 37.60. Attorney General William Wylly to Governor Cameron, 10 March 1817, enclosed in Cameron to Earl Bathurst, 10 March 1817, Brit. Parl. Papers, 1818–1823, 228.61. Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 55–66.62. See Hilary McD. Beckles, “Plantation Production and White ‘Proto-Slavery’: White Indentured Servants and the Colonisation of the English West Indies, 1624–1645,” The Americas 41.3 (Jan. 1985): 21–45. Beckles points out that in the period before the full development of African slavery in Barbados, white indentured servants were “proto-slaves.” He says: “[P]rior to the 1661 Masters and Servants Act, and especially in the period before 1647, both servants and slaves were used as property, though the slaves were seen, unlike servants, as permanent and self-reproductive, thus of higher value” (44).63. As Steinfeld put it, “Wage and contract labor were merely variations on a common regime of contract,” so that “[f]reedom of contract implied that workers should not be constrained to enter only revocable agreements but should be free to bind their labor irrevocably as well.” Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9. Thus freedom of contract gave white servants the right to sign contracts which were not terminable at will. It should be noted that villeinage had ceased to exist as a system in England by the time colonial settlement of the West Indies and North America took off in the first half of the seventeenth century. However, various kinds of property rights in (other white) persons, not technically incompatible with freedom of contract, persisted and continued to be deployed in both Britain and the colonies. See also Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).64. Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 60–67.65. Ibid., 64.66. For example, on Sunday, September 29, 1752, Thistlewood recorded news of an apparently unsuccessful local uprising: “Heard of a white man and the Negroes rising upon Capt. Leister. He afterwards told me the story himself.” Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86 (Kingston, Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, 1999), 31.67. Quoted in Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 63.68. A direct quote might help readers to understand: ” … And also [if] any free person intermarry with a servant without consent of his or her Master, or Mistress, shall pay twenty pounds current Money to the Owner of such Servant for his or her freedom, or serve two years time to the said Master or Mistress. And if the Servant married be a tradesman, then the penalty herein required to be double, or the time, and that at the election of the Master or Mistress of the Servant.” Quoted in Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 63.69. Ibid., 37.70. David Barry Gaspar, “Ameliorating Slavery: The Leeward Islands Slave Act of 1798,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 253.71. Report of the Select Committee of the [Grenada] House of Assembly on the Despatch of Earl Bathurst etc, printed in The Chronicle (Roseau, Dominica), April 6, 1825; and “Report of the House of Assembly on the Subject of the Slave Laws,” Barbados Globe (Bridgetown, Barbados), December 4, 1826.72. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 430 (page citations are to the reprint edition).73. C. Middleton, “Peasants, Patriarchy, and the Feudal Mode of Production in England: A Marxist Appraisal. 1. Property and Patriarchal Relations Within the Peasantry,” Sociological Review, n.s. 29, no. 1 (1981): 105–35, esp. 121.74. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor, 57.75. See Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 77–78; and Catherine Hall, “Gender Politics and Imperial Politics: Rethinking the Histories of Empire,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, ed. V. Shepherd, B. Brereton, B. Bailey (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995), 48–59.76. Verene Shepherd, “Gender, Migration and Settlement: The Indentureship and Post-indentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica, 1845–1943,” in Engendering History, 233–57, esp. 236.77. J. Harry Bennett, Jr., Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantations of Barbados, 1710–1838 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 89–90.78. Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops, 91.79. Ibid., 98–99.80. Quoted in ibid., 94.81. Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops, 91.82. Ibid.83. Jamaica and the Windward Island group were the most prominent “home-fed” and “slave-fed” islands. Barbadian planters were unusual in adopting the (unevenly applied) strategy of centralized plantation-grown domestic food crops, while Antigua was more clearly a “foreign-fed” island. It depended primarily on the topography of the island, but even where there was a scarcity of non-plantation land slaves cultivated small kitchen gardens around their cottages. See Higman, Slave Populations, 204–18.84. In the post-emancipation period, a new system of oppression emerges when these plantation-based socialized services are withdrawn, and (a) the state fails to take up the slack, and (b) truncated family structures prove particularly incapable of absorbing the additional, unremunerated labor services called for, especially as most women are forced to prioritize paid work to support themselves and their children. See Holt, The Problem of Freedom; Bridget Brereton, “Family Strategies, Gender, and the Shift to Wage Labour in the British Caribbean,” in The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on Postemancipation Social and Cultural History, ed. Bridget Brereton and Kevin A. Yelvington (Kingston, Jamaica: Press University of the West Indies; Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 77–107.85. But for details of the punishments incurred by such slaves, Thomas Thistlewood’s eighteenth-century diary is probably the best source. See Hall, In Miserable Slavery, passim.86. See Manyoni, “Extra-Marital Mating Patterns,” 102.87. See Niara Sudarkasa, The Strength of Our Mothers: African & African American Women & Families: Essays and Speeches (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996), esp. 77–87, 123–141. See also the two main protagonists of the Africa/slavery debate: Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958); and Franklin E. Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1939; rev. and abridged ed., 1968).88. Sudarkasa, The Strength of Our Mothers, 85.89. See Niara Sudarkasa, “The ‘Status of Women’ in Indigenous African Societies,” in Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. R. Terborg-Penn, S. Harley, and A. Benton Rushing (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987).90. Both monogamy and polygamy were modified by conditions of slavery and African retentions. For example, the conditions of plantation slavery, helped by the ease of divorce in many West African cultures, facilitated new traditions of serial monogamy. Also, cut off from the context of corporate kinship in which it was embedded in many parts of West Africa—with its carefully and collectively organized senior/junior relations, paced “exchange of women,” relations of co-wifehood and co-motherhood, and so on—polygyny seemed to have radically contracted and shifted into an “elite” and individualized mode, especially in the earlier conditions of scarcity of women and general male disempowerment among the enslaved.91. See Green, “Gender and Re/production,” 7.6, esp. 29–32.92. B. W. Higman, “Household Structure and Fertility on Jamaican Slave Plantations: A Nineteenth-century Example,” Population Studies 27.3 (1973), 527–50, esp. 528; also, “The Slave Family and Household in the British West Indies, 1800–1834,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6.2 (1975): 261–87.93. See Higman, Slave Populations, tables 2.2 and 2.3, 12–13.94. Mrs. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies (1833; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 1:174 (page citations are to the reprint edition).95. Quoted in Woodville K. Marshall, “Provision Ground and Plantation Labour in Four Windward Islands: Competition for Resources during Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 12.1 (1991): 48–67, esp. 52.96. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 74.97. Ibid., 75.98. Dale W. Tomich, “The Other Face of Slave Labor: Provision Grounds and Internal Marketing in Martinique,” in Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, ed. H. Beckles and V. Shepherd (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers; London: James Currey Publishers, 1991), 72.99. Emphasis added. Dominica, “An Act for regulating the government and conduct of Slaves, and for their more effectual protection, encouragement, and the general amelioration of their condition. 2d June 1821,” in Slaves: Treatment of Slaves in the Colonies, House of Commons, 23 March 1834.100. Smith, “Hierarchy and the Dual Marriage System.”101. See Jack Alexander, “Love, Race, Slavery, and Sexuality in Jamaican Images of the Family,” in Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America, ed. R. T. Smith (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Raymond T. Smith, Kinship and Class in the West Indies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Diane J. Austin, “History and Symbols in Ideology: A Jamaican Example,” Man, n.s. 14 (1979): 497–514.102. Phibbah was Thistlewood’s slave “wife.” See Hall, In Miserable Slavery; and Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).103. Henrice Altink, “‘To Wed or Not to Wed?’: The Struggle to Define Afro-Jamaican Relationships, 1834–1838,” Journal of Social History 38 (Fall 2004): 81–111, esp. 86–7.104. See Hall, In Miserable Slavery, passim; and Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 137–240.105. “Elite” male slaves included skilled artisans and drivers or headmen.106. Quoted in Melanie Newton, “‘New Ideas of Correctness’: Gender, Amelioration and Emancipation in Barbados, 1810s–50s,” Slavery and Abolition 21.3 (December 2000): 94–124, esp. 111.107. Burnham’s is, in my opinion, the single best article on the legal and moral conundrums surrounding slave marriage in the U.S. I have been much indebted to her for my earlier conceptualizations of the British West Indian case. Burnham, “An Impossible Marriage,” 212, 222. See also excellent books by Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Hilary McD. Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourse in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers; Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers; Oxford: James Currey Publishers, 1999).108. Quoted in Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops, 35.109. Mrs. Carmichael, Domestic Manners, 2:237.110. See Carmichael, Domestic Manners, esp. 2:181–86. Mrs. Carmichael presents herself as both an unreconstructed apologist for slavery and the planter class and a keen observer of plantation society and the lives of the enslaved.111. See M. G. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor; Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, with an introduction and notes by Judith Terry, editor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; originally published London: J. Murray, 1834); Carmichael, Domestic Manners; Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years.112. See Turner, Slaves and Missionaries; J. H. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica (1854; reprint, Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971); Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years; Hall, Civilising Subjects.113. Quoted in Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops, 117.114. Buchner, Moravians in Jamaica, 45 (page citations are to the reprint edition). However, the second regulation forbade them to “appoint such a man to be a helper or servant in the church” (ibid.).115. Marriages performed by dissenting ministers were seen as binding within the church but had no standing in the law of the land, on the basis of both the slaves’ own legal incapacity and the dissenting ministers’ lack of legal authority to perform marriages. Buchner, Moravians in Jamaica, 45.116. The special sanctioning of the polygynous households of elite male slaves was a somewhat different matter.117. See Altink, “‘To Wed or Not to Wed.'”118. Leeward Islands Act No. 36, vol. 1., The Laws of the Island of Antigua Consisting of the Acts of the Leeward Islands, 1690–1798, and Acts of Antigua, 1668–1845 (London: Samuel Bagster, 1805–46).119. Kean Osborn, Spanish Town, Jamaica, to Nathaniel Phillips, London, 5 December 1790, MS. 1966, Clare Taylor Collection: Slebech Papers, National Library of Jamaica.120. This is a reference to a special statute in Jamaica by which free colored individuals were allowed to petition the Assembly (or to have someone petition the Assembly on their behalf) for “special privileges” that would render them legally white, thereby conferring upon them an approximation of the whole bundle of rights and obligations that came with free white status. This “special privileges” statute was peculiar to Jamaica among the British islands. See Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 6.121. Burnham, “An Impossible Marriage,” 221–22.122. Beckles, Natural Rebels, 142–43.123. Altink, “‘To Wed or Not to Wed,'” 87.124. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the demographic disaster of slavery had been completely reversed, the high birthrate was accompanied by a high infant mortality rate, which was again blamed on black women’s immorality. See Bonham C. Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900–1920 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 77–80.125. See Hall, In Miserable Slavery, 50.126. Quoted in Newton, “‘New Ideas of Correctness,'” 113.127. Mills, The Racial Contract.128. See Sydney Olivier, Jamaica, the Blessed Island (1936; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1971); and James M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970).129. Jean Besson, “Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered: A New Perspective on Afro-Caribbean Peasant Women,” in Women and Change in the Caribbean, ed. J. H. Momsen (Kingston: Ian Randle; Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1993), 15–37. | |
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